The New Business Watergate: Prosecution of International Corporate Bribery is on the Rise

Posted by Philip Mattera on December 18th, 2007

Philip Mattera is director of The Corporate Research Project, an affiliate of Good Jobs First. The Project is a non-profit center that assists community, environmental and labor organizations in researching and analyzing companies and industries. Philip is also author of The Corporate Research E-Letter, and this blog is a re-posting of the November-December 2007 edition.

Chevron has recently been spending heavily on a public relations campaign titled “the Power of Human Energy” to depict itself as a leader in environmental and social responsibility. This image-burnishing effort faced a setback last month when the company was forced to pay $30 million to settle federal charges that it made illegal kickback payments to prewar Iraq in connection with crude oil purchases under the United Nations Oil-for-Food Program.

Chevron is just one of dozens of corporations that have been caught up in a move by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice to step up enforcement of a law prohibiting overseas bribery by U.S.-based corporations. The law—the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act or FCPA—can also be applied to foreign companies with a substantial presence in the United States. There have been reports that electronic and engineering giant Siemens, which recently paid a fine of around $300 million in a global bribery investigation by a German court, may soon be hit with FCPA charges as well.

The rise in FCPA enforcement emerged just as the prosecution of the wave of accounting scandals starting with Enron was winding down. In fact, the limited reforms enacted in response to those scandals—especially the Sarbanes-Oxley Act—have helped bring to light much of the information on which the recent FCPA cases are based. Business apologists who hoped that the public was forgetting about corporate crime now have to deal with new reminders of the sleazy aspects of commerce.

THE “BUSINESS WATERGATE”

It is often forgotten that the Watergate scandal of the 1970s was not only about the misdeeds of the Nixon Administration. Investigations by the Senate and the Watergate Special Prosecutor forced companies such as 3M, American Airlines and Goodyear Tire & Rubber to admit that they or their executives had made illegal contributions to the infamous Committee to Re-Elect the President.

Subsequent inquiries into illegal payments of all kinds led to revelations that companies such as Lockheed, Northrop and Gulf Oil had engaged in widespread foreign bribery. Under pressure from the SEC, more than 150 publicly traded companies admitted that they had been involved in questionable overseas payments or outright bribes to obtain contracts from foreign governments. A 1976 tally by the Council on Economic Priorities found that more than $300 million in such payments had been disclosed in what some were calling “the Business Watergate.”

While some observers insisted that a certain amount of baksheesh was necessary to making deals in many parts of the world, Congress responded to the revelations by enacting the FCPA in late 1977. For the first time, bribery of foreign government officials was a criminal offense under U.S. law, with fines up to $1 million and prison sentences of up to five years.

The ink was barely dry on the FCPA when U.S. corporations began to complain that it was putting them at a competitive disadvantage. The Carter Administration’s Justice Department responded by signaling that it would not be enforcing the FCPA too vigorously. That was one Carter policy that the Reagan Administration was willing to adopt. In fact, Reagan’s trade representative Bill Brock led an effort to get Congress to weaken the law, but the initiative failed.

The Clinton Administration took a different approach—trying to get other countries to adopt rules similar to the FCPA. In 1997 the industrial countries belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development reached agreement on an anti-bribery convention. In subsequent years, the number of FCPA cases remained at a miniscule level—only a handful a year. Optimists were claiming this was because the law was having a remarkable deterrent effect. Skeptics said that companies were being more careful to conceal their bribes, and prosecutors were focused elsewhere.

Any illusion that commercial bribery was a rarity was dispelled in 2005, when former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker released the final results of the investigation he had been asked to conduct of the Oil-for-Food Program. Volcker’s group found that more than half of the 4,500 companies participating in the program—which was supposed to ease the impact of Western sanctions on Iraq—had paid illegal surcharges and kickbacks to the government of Saddam Hussein. Among those companies were Siemens, DaimlerChrysler and the French bank BNP Paribas.

THE REBIRTH OF FCPA PROSECUTIONS

The Volcker investigation, the OECD convention, the Sarbanes-Oxley law and other factors together breathed new life into FCPA enforcement. Stricter internal controls mandated by Sarbanes-Oxley have made it more difficult for improper payments to be concealed, prompting numerous companies to self-report FCPA violations in the hope of receiving more lenient treatment.

In 2005 the number of FCPA prosecutions started to pick up and reached double digits the following year. This year the number of investigations has reportedly been in the dozens, and the resolved cases have gained higher visibility. Among these have been the following:

    * Three subsidiaries of British oil services company Vetco International  pleaded guilty to FCPA violations in Nigeria and agreed to pay a total of $26 million in criminal fines. This was the largest criminal penalty the Justice Department had ever obtained in an FCPA case.

    * Oil & gas distributor El Paso Corporation settled FCPA charges in connection with the Oil-for-Food Program and agreed to disgorge $5.5 million in profits and pay a civil penalty of $2.2 million.

    * Dow Chemical paid a $325,000 civil penalty to settle FCPA charges relating to improper payments made by an Indian subsidiary in the late 1990s.

    * A subsidiary of oil services company Baker Hughes pleaded guilty to FCPA charges involving bribery in Kazakhstan and paid a criminal fine of $11 million. In related SEC charges, Baker Hughes agreed to pay more than $44 million in criminal fines, civil penalties and disgorgement of profits. This became the new record for FCPA-related penalties.

    * Textron Inc. paid more than $3.5 million to settle FCPA charges relating to kickback payments made by a subsidiary to obtain contracts for the sale of humanitarian goods to Iraq under the Oil-for-Food Program.

    * Industrial equipment company Ingersoll-Rand agreed to pay more than $4.2 million to settle FCPA charges that four of its subsidiaries made kickback payments in connection with the Oil-for-Food Program sale of humanitarian goods.

FOREIGN COMPANIES IN THE FCPA NET

While the recent rash of FCPA cases has drawn little attention in the United States, the Siemens case has generated a major scandal in Europe. Last year, more than 200 police officers participated in a raid of company offices and homes of managers. Prosecutors in Italy and Switzerland joined in the investigation, which focused on suspicious transactions at the company’s telecommunications equipment unit reportedly totaling more than $2 billion.

The outcry over the bribery charges (and separate controversies over matters such as price-fixing) forced both the chief executive of Siemens and the chairman of its supervisory board to announce their resignation. In October the company agreed to a $300 million fine, hoping that the controversy would die down. But in November the Wall Street Journal gained access to the unpublished court ruling in the case, which provided embarrassing details about the payment of bribes in Nigeria, Libya and Russia. Subsequently, Business Week Online reported that FCPA charges in the United States could generate penalties for Siemens much harsher than what it experienced at home.

Siemens is not the only European company whose bribery problems are becoming an issue in the United States. Earlier this year there were reports that U.S. prosecutors have been investigating improper payments by major military contractor BAE Systems (formerly British Aerospace), including some reportedly involving Prince Bandar bin Sultan, former Saudi ambassador to the United States and a close ally of the Bush Administration, as well as other members of the Saudi royal family.

A quarter century after the Watergate investigation revealed a culture of corruption in the foreign dealings of major corporations, the new wave of FCPA prosecutions suggests that little has changed. There is one difference, however. Whereas the bribery revelations of the 1970s elicited a public outcry, the recent cases have generated little comment in the United States. Companies like Chevron pay their fine and go right on using their ad campaigns to present themselves as paragons of virtue. It took years for the reputation of Richard Nixon to recover from the taint of Watergate in the eyes of mainstream observers. Corporate America seems to be able to purchase instantaneous redemption.

Turning Ethnic Pride into Sales

Posted by Amelia Hight

Listen to this as you read . . . "Air Force Ones" by rappers Nelly, Murphy Lee, Ali, and Kyjuan, 2002

According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, Nike is tapping into the sway of cultural “influencers” to attract new types of consumers. Traditionally, celebrity athletes have worn Nike shoes in return for lucrative endorsement deals. However, recent charges brought against famous Nike-sporting athletes like NFL star and criminal dog-fighter, Michael Vick, and more recently, track heroine and self-admitted steroid user, Marion Jones, have dirtied this image of the hard-working athlete and further urged Nike to look beyond the sweat-drenched athlete for culturally influential people to wear their shoes. While still focusing on the athlete as the main consumer, Nike is turning to “under the radar” influencers for inspiration. In many cases, this leads to Nike’s white sneaker being painted, embroidered or dyed the colors of a Latin American flag or taking on “cultural signifiers,” often stereotyped symbols meant to represent a certain heritage or ethnicity.

Nike’s most stylistic shoe, the Air Force 1, provides an excellent case in point. A new series of the shoe, called the “Cultura” collection consists of shoes like The Los Angeles Cortez, inspired by “the traditional images of LA street life,” the Handball Aztec Cortez designed to capture “our Aztec heritage,” and the green, white and red Mexican Airforce, which “pays homage to the Motherland.” Nike designers hired well-known graffiti and tattoo artists to create each shoe’s aesthetic appeal. Each year, Nike releases a new Chinese New Year AF1 (check out the Year of the Dog here). And, in previous years, Nike has introduced a series of West Indies Air Force 1s in time for West Indies Pride Days in New York City. Each shoe has the flag of a different West Indies country on its insole. There are also Jamaica, Philippines, and Puerto Rico Air Force 1s. Deemed “ethnic pride sneakers” by bloggers, these shoes bring up interesting issues about identity and consumerism. Through these shoes Nike present a pre-packaged narrative of identity. They tell consumers that it is possible to express ethnic pride by wearing Nike tennis shoes. Effectively, commodifying ethnicity has become a sales strategy for Nike.

However, according to Nike, developing shoes for certain ethnicities is not only about ethnic pride, but also about promoting health. Earlier this year, Nike introduced the Air Native N7, a shoe designed specifically for Native Americans. In addition to its signature swoosh, the shoe features “heritage callouts,” including sunrise and sunset patterns on the tongue and heel, arrowheads and feathers. Nike claims the new shoe is “an effort aiming at promoting physical fitness in a population with high obesity rates.” As one self-described Native American blogger, David Yeagley, summarizes, “American Indians are fat and have funny-shaped feet.” He continues: “Our own Nikes! What an achievement!” and asks, “A shoe designed especially for Indians is going to make us walk more? A national company name lent to Indians is going to inspire us to better health?” Another critic, Sherman Alexie, a Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Indian had the following to say, “The day it was announced, I thought: ‘Are they going to have dream catchers on them? Are they going to be beaded? Will they have native bumper stickers on them that say, ‘Custer had it coming’?”

Apparently the idea behind these specialized shoes is that they will create a buzz that will spread to consumers closer to the mainstream. That's right, Nike is attempting to attract attention from "under the radar" consumers in order to appeal to the mainstream. Buying "ethnic pride" sneakers from Nike might allow someone to feel like they're expressing their ties to a certain culture or identity, but in the end, they're still just products designed to make profits for the biggest footwear company in the world.

One has to wonder if Nike's switch from risky celebrity endorsements to ethnic pride, is really just about creating a positive spin on its image, which has historically also been sullied by accusations of worker abuse in poor country sweatshops.

Book Review: Stolen Without a Gun

By Ian Elwood

Stolen Without a Gun reads like an Anarchist's Cookbook of Corporate
Crime and illustrates well how an international money laundering scheme
works (including how to nest embezzled funds in a series of quazi-legal
Cayman Island bank accounts) while telling the personal tale of Walter
Pavlo, Jr., a convicted white-collar criminal who was busted for
embezzling $6 million while working at MCI Telecommunications in the
mid-1990s.

Pavlo, who served his time is jail and now gives lectures and advice on
the subject of ethics and white-collar crime, is portrayed in the book
as an everyman, without any particular bent to stealing money.

The narrative gives an inside perspective of how a business person could
get wrangled into a high stakes game of money laundering. Pavlo, good at
his job, notices the graft and corruption all around him and sees people
hiding debt in accounts that he knows will never be repaid. Millions of
dollars are being thrown away all around him. All the myths that he
learned in business school, "The corporation as a community run by
thoughtful innovators striving to do good while doing well," are
shattered before him. As he is being groomed by his superiors in the
company and his rise to power begins, he realizes the upper limits of
just how much money he will make in his career at MCI. And it isn't
enough. Plus, his company is being ripped off by delinquent customers
everyday and he is the one responsible when they don't pay up. They are
all getting away with it, why can't he?

The entire scheme is viewed by the perpetrators as nothing more than a
college prank, they justify it by telling themselves that no one will
miss the money, and for a while no one does. They get increasingly bold
and sloppy with their methods and start to go after larger customers
with higher levels of oversight. It is fun to watch the dizzying high
come crashing down as Pavlo realizes that he cannot keep control of all
of the accounts he has been siphoning, and he is running out of shells
to shuffle money under.

The book does a good job of giving a frank perspective on how the
culture of graft and corruption works. The demands to collect money from
his clients are so unrealistically high that Pavlo has no choice but to
bend the rules to make his quota. Corporate won't tell him explicitly to
shirk regulations, but it is understood. Once he sees how easy it is to
break the rules, and that everyone is doing it, there isn't much ground
to cover for him and his buddies to come to the realization that he
could be making money for himself instead of chucking it away into
delinquent accounts.

Stolen Without a Gun is a "How-To" guide for students of the U.S
Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) Act and shows
that too often a white collar criminal pushes externalities on their
families and friends; Pavlo loses his wife and two children and his
coworkers end up in jail. In the end the protagonist goes to jail also,
as the cover suggests, and presumably has a change of heart about his
life of crime. But a quote from the last pages of the book suggests
otherwise, "Bottom line, we are...getting what we deserve. We had our
eyes wide open. Our only real regret is that we got caught. Case closed."

Made in the U.S.A.

Posted by Amelia Hight

In a recent decision reported in the Guardian, a federal appeals court ruled that Caterpillar Inc. could not be sued over the death of an American peace activist who was crushed under bulldozers sold to the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). The story of Rachel Corrie, the activist who was crushed by a 60-ton Caterpillar D9 Bulldozer in Rafah, Gaza in 2003 while trying to prevent the razing of a Palestinian home by the Israeli army, achieved widespread media attention. Reports of the IDF’s razing of homes in Rafah were issued by numerous human rights watchdog organizations, including Human Rights Watch. Corrie’s family, along with four Palestinian families of victims killed while their houses were bulldozed, began legal proceedings against Caterpillar in 2005 for selling machines to Israel. Lawyers arguing for the families insisted that the company sold the bulldozers to the Israeli government on a commercial basis and knew, or should have known, that they would be used to demolish homes and kill innocent victims in violation of international law.

Explaining its decision, the court claimed that it could not rule in favor of the bereaved families "without implicitly questioning, and even condemning, United States foreign policy towards Israel." Of course, this is not the first time that U.S. companies have been implicated in mass human rights abuse and not had to answer for their participation. Indeed, U.S. companies have been intimately connected to the human rights abuses of regimes throughout modern history. Near the turn of the millennium, pressure from Jewish organizations finally forced the U.S. to begin looking at the use of slave labor by U.S. corporations (and their subsidiaries) in Nazi Germany.

A court case brought against Ford Motor Co. was dismissed, but Ford admitted that its German subsidiary, Ford-Werke AG, used labor at the Buchenwald concentration camp to build vehicles. Other major U.S. corporations that continued to operate in Nazi-occupied Europe and used slave labor include General Motors, Chase Manhattan Bank and JP Morgan. ''There are things that have to be faced up to,'' alleged Elan Steinberg, World Jewish Congress executive director, ''American companies were collaborating with Nazi Germany at a time when we were at war, because there was an ethos that demanded huge profits at the expense of everything else.''

Modern history is peppered with examples of corporations seeking profit during periods of mass human rights abuse: In the 1970s, the U.S. manufacturing giant, ITT, and others helped overthrow democracy and install the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile (to listen to the Nixon Whitehouse tape that acknowledges this relationship visit GWU’s website, The National SecurityArchive). Numerous companies supported South African apartheid, including U.S. giants IBM, General Motors, ExxonMobil, J.P Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Caltex Petroleum Corporation, Ford Motor Company and the Fluor Corporation. In 2002 a group of South Africans unsuccessfully sued 20 banks and corporations that did business in South Africa during apartheid. The list goes on and on.

Even if these corporations are not held accountable for their role in mass human rights abuse and economic activities are allowed to take legal precedence over human rights, it is of vital importance to recognize the role that corporations play in this abuse. It appears to be the responsibility of the public to put pressure on corporations to consider where they do business and with whom.

Outsourcing Fear

Posted by Robert Young Pelton on October 2nd, 2007

Robert Young Pelton is the author of "Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror " and the "Guide to the World's Most Dangerous Places." He is also co-founder of http://www.iraqslogger.com . This blog item is about his experiences attending the Congressional hearing into the Blackwater shootings in Iraq written on October 2nd, 2007.

Standing in line to get into Tuesday's hearing, I found myself in a strange position. In front of me, dark-suited and staid Blackwater executives stood waiting to show moral support for their boss, Erik Prince, while the colorful and animated Pink Ladies behind me ticked off reasons he and his industry should be feared.

The two extremes represent the bookends of public debate on the private security industry. The former military men who run Blackwater view their supporting role in the war on terror as both necessary and good, while human rights activists believe there is something deeply wrong with authorizing private citizens to kill other private citizens.

One of the women waiting in line asked me, "How can we find out what these people are doing?" I suggested she could go to any neighborhood in Baghdad and just ask the locals.

Or better yet--spend a week driving through Baghdad in an unmarked car to see how often convoys blast through intersections, guns bristling from every door, pointed directly at you, giving you mere seconds to get out of the way before the bullets start flying. Feel your own pulse racing as you realize how easily you could have been killed if you'd had your radio a little louder, or hadn't noticed their approach, or hadn't swerved to a stop fast enough.

Companies like Blackwater wield a life-and-death power in Iraq, creating an arrogant misuse of force the United States has put into civilians hands.

I spent time in Sadr City and other areas interviewing the victims of Blackwater and other security companies. Terrified Iraqis, many who did not want to be identified or publicly quoted, told of sudden unexpected encounters with fast moving convoys of SUVs--then death, destruction, or permanent life change as family members were crushed, maimed, killed, or traumatized.

During the time I spent researching my book Licensed to Kill, I realized there were thousands of stories waiting to be heard about excessive force being used on civilians in the name of "security". Not surprisingly, many victims look to a militia to seek some revenge for the transgression in the form of an ambush or IED.

Security companies are reviled; the Iraqis that work for these companies have to cover their faces because they know militias or their neighbors will kill them and or their families.

Military commanders understand that a non-state actor on the battlefield is a wild card--whether death squad, militia or security company. Iraqis know that the undermanned military must rely on contractors to deliver 16 flavors of ice cream, frozen lobster and bullets to the war effort.

The normally timid State Dept, known more for issuing warnings and shutting down embassies when things get rough, has decided that its people must travel the mean streets of Baghdad rather than give in to intimidation. Security contractors are literally the grease that makes our forward-leaning foreign policy in Iraq work.

So when Prince pretends like he is defending the US--justifying violent acts by categorizing it as fighting bad guys--he does it with the support of the State Department, though to the direct determent of the Iraqi civilians those actions terrify and kill.

When Prince testified that his people "acted appropriately at all times," it made me wonder how many killings he investigated from the Iraqi viewpoint. He has a blind spot towards the damage he causes if he thinks that firing a contractor who just murdered someone somehow fixes the problem. "Window or Aisle" instead of "guilty or not guilty" does not enforce any accountability

It is no coincidence that BW has been involved in shootouts with the Iraqi police. They too have seen the destructive force Blackwater has been authorized to unleash on their citizens.

When Prince rattles off the various legal umbrellas he operates under, he conveniently ignores that none of his hired guns have been brought up on any charges for anything-despite clear incidents of malfeasance. Blackwater itself faces no ill consequence for deploying unstable men into the war zone.

"Anytime a contractor is abroad, he can be brought up on charges," is the equivalent of saying speeding is illegal while cars whip by at 80 mph without a cop in sight.

Blackwater is the personification of war as a business, violence as a service, and chaos as a product. Prince recognized the lack of sufficient available US troops and provided a privatized solution. He cannot be faulted for that.

Any corporate master would take the position, like Prince did in front of Congress Tuesday, that his people are perfect, his conduct perfect.

Exposed deceit or corruption at most companies would lead to its own downfall. If it's a monster like Enron, it could conceivably flutter Wall Street for a few days.

But the conduct of companies like Blackwater directly impact US strategic interests.

The obvious polarization of politicians addressing Prince during the hearing indicates that Republicans are willing to bless the use of lethal force by a private individual against the people they are trying to pacify, while Democrats have yet to quite capture what it is about the industry that makes people so nervous.

I say again: Go to Iraq. Talk to the people. Drive in an unmarked car. When an armed convoy pushes you off the road with guns drawn, you'll understand the naked fear that Blackwater sells.

2008 Greenwash Awards

Posted by Pratap Chatterjee on September 27th, 2007

Which are the world's worst multinationals? Which are the best? These are questions CorpWatch gets asked practically everyday. Just to clarify, we do not rank good corporations or endorse any of them, for several reasons: today's idols sometimes turn out to have feet of clay. And we see our job as investigators of malfeasance. For those who want to do the opposite, there are plenty of groups out there who promote "socially responsible" businesses, and we encourage you to look them up. (We don't have a list of these groups for the aforementioned reasons, but we do have a guide to the principles that we believe good businesses should follow -- and we leave it to you, our gentle readers, to apply this criteria to evaluate corporations.)

But we strongly believe that it is very important not to take corporate claims at face value, because sometimes these companies are not telling the whole truth. This is known as "greenwash" and to see a history of this phenomenon, we urge you to check out our short history of the subject, in this handy guide written by Josh Karliner, the founder of CorpWatch.

Today, there is an opportunity for you to get your favorite (or maybe, least favorite) multinational nominated for a "Greenwash" award -- Friends of the Earth Switzerland is holding its fourth annual award ceremony in January 2008, to coincide with the annual gathering of Fortune 500 chieftains in Davos. You can take part in this contest by clicking here. 

(Previous winners from 2005, 2006 and 2007 are available online.)

If you have questions, contact Oliver Classen who is coordinating the awards ceremony.

In case you are wondering, how do you find out which companies are claiming to be sustainable? Well, here's a tip -- there's a group in the Netherlands that collects these reports: the Global Reporting Intitiative. You can even search their database to look up your favorite/least favorite company. GRI is about to launch a tool on October 1st, 2007 that will allow you to rank these reports -- if you are so inclined.

Read the reports, search our website and that of Multinational Monitor, and then contact groups on the ground to see if these companies are telling the truth or not.

Remember the deadline to nominate a company for the Public Eye on Davos award is September 30th, 2007!

Contractor Rock Bands Jam with Military

Posted by Pratap Chatterjee on September 27th, 2007

You've heard of golf junkets for politicians and pay-offs for disc jockeys who help get artists into the Top 40. But government bureaucrats invited to play Grateful Dead-style music and rock music covers from the Clash with military contractors looking for work? Welcome to GitRockin, a fund-raiser to be held in Washington DC on October 18th.

Ken Sandler of the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), a division of U.S. Central Command, will play the drums with Jim Ittenbach, a Verizon engineer under contract with DISA. The pair belong to a band called Troubled Spirit. They play songs like Rolling Stones' Sympathy For The Devil and REM's End Of The World As We Know It.

For the October 18th event, Troubled Spirit has renamed itself the DISA-Peering Act, after the agency that they both work at. Our question is will they play one of their classic covers: the Rolling Stones Can't Always Get What You Want or will it be the Beatles Come Together?

Then there is an all contractor band composed of a vocalist from Perot Systems and a guitarist from AT&T. Songs on their previous play lists include The Clash's I Fought the Law and English Beat's Save it for Later.

CorpWatch asked a former senior government official how ethical this was. (Sorry, we can't tell you who, but he goes way to the top) His response: "There is an Office of Government Ethics regulations at 5 CFR 2635 that talks about "impartiality" in performing a Federal employee's duties, but that was about the closest thing I could find. I suppose that one could argue that a Federal employee participating in this sort of thing loses his/her "impartiality", but that's about it."

The event, which is being held at the State Theater in Falls Church, Virginia, is a benefit for the United Service Organizations (USO) that provides charity to the United States Armed Forces personnel and their families. Iraqis waiting for handouts may just have to suffer in silence while Tacocat belts out REM's Fables of the Reconstruction.

Who's Really Paying the High Prices for Your Pharmaceuticals

Posted by Stan Cox

Hazardous imports have been the top story on the evening news for weeks now. But the poor quality of some foreign-made products is only half the story. Before we ever see those products, manufacturing plants in the countries of origin can pose an even greater danger to human and ecological health.

Take India, which is now our biggest foreign source of pharmaceuticals. A just-published study by Sweden's Goteborg University shows that, whatever the quality of the drugs being shipped out of India, they are leaving behind a toxic mess. Even after days in a water-treatment plant, effluents discharged into streams and rivers in one Indian region show concentrations of antibiotics and other drugs at 100 to 30,000 times the levels considered safe.

In a 2005 visit to villages in that area near Patancheru, in the state of Andhra Pradesh, I spoke with people who’d broken out in rashes from bathing in water from their own wells; farmers who’d left rice paddies unsown because their irrigation water was ruined; and herders whose water buffalo had dropped dead while grazing -- damage they attributed to pollution from the 90 or more bulk-drug factories in the vicinity. Health surveys have shown higher rates of cancer and other illnesses in villages around Patancheru’s "special economic zone" than in more distant villages.

State law says that the factories must haul their toxic wastes to an effluent treatment plant run by Patancheru Enviro Tech, Ltd. (PETL) on a tributary of the Nakkavagu rivulet. The treatment plant’s outflow into the Nakkavagu (which waters a valley dotted with 14 villages) has often been found to carry industrial pollutants at many times the statutory limits.

Now the Swedish study, recently published online by the Journal of Hazardous Materials (abstract here free) has found record-breaking concentrations of eleven drugs – antibiotics and treatments for high blood pressure, ulcers and allergies – in wastes flowing from the PETL plant.

Noting that "to the best of our knowledge, the concentrations of these 11 drugs were all above the previously highest values [ever] reported in any sewage effluent", the authors singled out the antibiotic Ciprofloxacin (Cipro), which flows out of the plant at the rate of 100 pounds of active ingredient per day. That, say the authors, "is equivalent to the total amount consumed in Sweden (population nine million) over an average 5-day period"! Concentrations of five other antibiotics were found at levels that are toxic to plants, blue-green algae, and a range of bacteria. And before it leaves the facility, the stew of drugs is mixed with human sewage, creating perfect conditions for breeding dangerous, antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

In June, a front-page story by Washington Post reporter Marc Kaufman revealed that there are virtually no controls on the quality of drugs being imported from India. He wrote that India and China together supply as much as 20 percent of the US market for generic and over-the-counter drugs and 40 percent of all bulk drugs used here and that the two nations' share may rise to 80 percent by 2022. India’s share of the US market in 2006 was $800 million, exceeding China’s.

According to Kaufmann, the FDA conducted 1222 quality-assurance inspections of domestic drug-manufacturing plants in 2006. That same year, the agency carried out only 32 inspections of Indian drug plants, mostly to check on new import applications, not for quality control by existing suppliers. And "on-the-ground inspections of Indian and Chinese plants remain rare and relatively brief and are always scheduled in advance, unlike the surprise visits that FDA inspectors pay to domestic manufacturers." There is no indication that FDA inspectors pay any attention to environmental impacts of the plants.

The Swedish researchers calculated that if the quantities of pharmaceuticals they detected being released from the Patancheru treatment facility in a single 24-hour period could be collected and sold in Sweden, they would fetch an amount approaching $200,000, even in generic form. But, they wrote, because the production costs are so much lower than the eventual retail price, it is cheaper for companies to waste the drugs than to invest in pollution control.

When I returned to India earlier this year and checked on the current state of pollution in Patancheru, I was told that burgeoning export-drug production is putting more pressure than ever on the system. Meteorologist Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy -- a former chief technical advisor to the United Nations and now a campaigner for tougher policies on pollution in the Patancheru area -- told me that the sheer quantity of drugs that plants are producing means that they pump out far more waste water than the treatment plant can handle.

The state permits each company to dispose of only a certain amount of water per day, and if its chemical concentration is too high, the company is fined. But, said Dr. Reddy, "The fines are peanuts to them." And, of course, the effluent is not even tested for presence of pharmaceuticals. The bulk-drug plants are often producing at two, three, sometimes ten times the permitted capacity. Reddy has watched as tanker trucks full of effluent from drug factories are turned away by the water treatment plant because their company's daily quota has been exceeded. He says that rather than returning to the factory, the trucks will often head out into the countryside to dump their load. Those wastes would contain, if anything, higher concentrations of pharmaceuticals than seen in the Swedish study.

So when the alarm is raised over hazardous toys, food, and drugs imported from China, India, or other countries, it may be that people living and working downstream or downwind from the foreign factories who could well be paying the highest price of all for our insatiable demand.

Accounting for Errant Auditors

Posted by Pratap Chatterjee on September 14th, 2007

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) brought charges against 69 accountants for failing to register with the Public Company Accounting Board (PCAB) earlier this week. This somewhat obscure action is the latest ripple in the wave of crackdowns that followed the Enron accounting scandals in 2001 -- to break up the all too cozy relationship between auditors and the multinationals that they are supposed to be policing.

Governments allow companies to close their financial books at the end of the fiscal year, if a qualified accountant has signed off on it. The problem is that both the companies and the auditors are private entities whose ultimate motive is to make a profit, so there is potential for one or both of the two not to report any cooking of the books, unless they know that a regulator might catch them and discipline them. And in the last two decades, as favored accountants have been rewarded with multi-million dollar non auditing consulting gigs (such as tax planning or management consulting), the worry was that they were looking the other way in order to win more business.

Following the Enron scandal, which showed that Arthur Andersen, the company's auditor, had failed in its public duty, the U.S. Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley law in 2002 that replaced the accounting industry's own regulators with the Public Company Accounting Board with subpoena and disciplinary powers. Auditors are supposed to register with the board, but clearly not everyone took this seriously.

The SEC's enforcement director, Linda Chatman Thomsen, said that Thursday's action showed that the agency "is committed to ensuring compliance with the regulatory framework Congress established for auditors of public companies." A total of 50 of the errant accountants settled the charges with the federal agency the very same day.

This action is an important warning shot across the bows to let the auditors know that the SEC is checking up on them. But the jury is still out as to whether the SEC will go one step further and prosecute auditors who fail to report companies that are cooking their books.

In related news, a new study from the University of Nebraska suggests the whistle-blowers who report violations of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act to agencies like the PCAB are not properly protected. The study looked at 700 cases where employees experienced retaliation from companies for whistle-blowing and found that a mere 3.6 per cent of cases were won by employees.

Richard Moberly, the study's author, argues the findings "challenge the hope of scholars and whistle-blower advocates that Sarbanes-Oxley's legal boundaries and burden of proof would often result in favourable outcomes for whistle-blowers."

The Financial Times reports that Louis Clark, president of the Government Accountability Project, a non-profit organization that lobbies for whistle-blowers, calls the law "a disaster." Jason Zuckerman, a lawyer at the Employment Law Group, a law firm that represents Sarbanes-Oxley whistle-blowers, says: "Part of the problem is that investigators misunderstand the relevant legal standards and believe that a complainant must have a smoking gun -- that is, unequivocal evidence proving retaliation."

The debate is still on over whether Sarbanes-Oxley is effective five years after the law was passed, although all appear to agree it was a step in the right direction. The proof of the pudding, they say, will be in the eating, so we eagerly await the day that SEC puts errant accountants behind bars.

Will the Pope tell Gucci and Prada to please pay their taxes? (Mick Jagger and Microsoft too!)

Posted by Tonya Hennessey on August 14th, 2007

In the next few days Pope Benedict plans to issue his second encyclical – the most authoritative statement a pope can issue – which apparently will focus on social and economic inequity in a globalized economy. In the statement, he is expected to denounce the use of tax havens as socially-unjust and immoral in cheating the greater well-being of society.

According to the Times (UK) newspaper, the statement may have been inspired by a recent request to the Vatican by Romano Prodi, the Italian prime minister, who urged church leaders to speak out on tax evasion.

Prodi’s government plans to seek taxes on undeclared earnings of €60 million ($84 million) by Valentino Rossi, the world motorcycling champion. How about also asking Gucci and Prada, some of Italy’s best known fashion designers, to move their tax headquarters back to home turf (from the tax-saving Netherlands, see below) and contribute to Italy’s budget deficit?

As global capital has progressively unbound itself from traditional national constraints, excessive off-shore wealth seemingly knows no shame, with wealthy individuals and corporations setting up front companies abroad to avoid paying taxes, supported by a new class of financial services specialists.

While Caribbean island resorts are often assumed to be the places where the wealthy stash their money away for retirement, some European countries (and I don't mean Lichtenstein) have also newly seen the light.

A favored location is the Netherlands -- check out the November 2006 report by Dutch-based SOMO, "The Netherlands: A Tax Haven?" The report is the first comprehensive analysis of the complex system of double tax treaties, tax incentives, the relationship with the Netherlands Antilles and the now 20,000 and counting mailbox corporations operating within the borders of this small European nation. According to SOMO, "examples of companies with tax-induced headquarters in the Netherlands are Volkswagen, IKEA, Gucci, Pirelli, Prada, Fujitsu-Siemens, Mittal Steel, and Trafigura."

The issue has been in the news, mostly because big name musical artists (like Bono and Mick Jagger) and famous athletes (think David Beckham) have also been getting in on the act. When it comes to evading taxes on lucrative licensing and royalties, the Netherlands is fast emerging as the hip tax haven of choice because Holland levies no tax on earnings royalties.

In an article titled “Gimme Tax Shelter”, the New York Times reported on this in February 2007 as newly public documentation surrounding the assets and wealth-transfer plans of the Rolling Stones demonstrated that the wily rockers have paid a mere 1.5% (as opposed to the British tax rate of 40%), or $7.2. million, on $450 million in earnings routed through the land of tulips with the help of their company Promogroup.

'The Caribbeans are thinking about trading profits, not royalties, so the smaller European countries like Holland have had to be creative, tax-wise,'' David Pullman, an investment banker in New York who caters to entertainers and athletes told the New York Times. ''They are going for the high-end stuff and don't want to be seen as shady like some Caribbean haven.''

More scandalous was the 2006 revelation that super-rockers U2 had transferred their song-publishing catalog from Ireland to Holland's Promogroup, in order to avoid a change in Irish tax law introducing taxes on royalties earned in excess of 250,000 Euros per year. Much ado was made of Bono's unwillingness to pony up his share of the tax obligation in service of the global debt relief and poverty eradication for which he so famously advocates.

Another European country that has figured they can make money out of tax evasion is Ireland -- whose “Celtic Tiger” growth is largely the product of charming huge corporations like Dell, Google, Microsoft and Sun Systems to move much of their intellectual property patents over to subsidiaries in the land of Eire -- where the corporate tax rate is 12.5%, but no taxes are charged on royalties.

Microsoft has been a major beneficiary of this scheme for the last four or so years -- it slashed billions in tax receipts to the U.S. Treasury -- by setting up subsidiaries Round Island One and Flat Island Company in Dublin. Recently Microsoft took things a step further by re-registering the two patent-holding entities as unlimited liability companies which have no obligation to file their accounts publicly.

Indeed, the Sunday Independent (Ireland) reports that Ireland was the most profitable location for U.S. multinationals between 1998-2002, during which the “the profits of US companies with Irish facilities doubled.”

The Irish law exempting patent income from taxes also provides a sweet loophole for corporate executive pay. In November 2005 it was reported that Dell Ireland’s top executives were reaping the fruits of sumptuous pay, and saving the company taxes: between them the senior management shared nearly $3.8 million in tax-free dividends since 2003.

These corporate tax breaks have earned Ireland the distinction of being hailed “the world’s 7th freest economy” in 2007 by the conservative, DC-based Heritage Foundation, which says that “Ireland’s economy is 81.3 percent free.”

Most of this tax evasion, is sadly, quite legal. But ordinary citizens around the world who think that Microsoft and Mick Jagger should pay taxes, can take heart from the fact that some members of the global elite have been punished -- take the recent conviction of media mogul Conrad Black of Hollinger International. In July, Canadian and U.S. press reported on the lawsuits, corporate and civil, that are following his conviction for obstruction of justice and mail fraud, seeking remuneration from assets, including purported millions stashed in the Caribbean:

…"Not satisfied with receiving $20 to $40 million a year in excessive management fees, Black and the Ravelston insiders then directed significant portions of those fees to Moffat Management and Black-Amiel Management, which were empty shell companies registered in Barbados," a special report from Hollinger’s board stated.

"Even though these entities did nothing to earn fees, and did not have either employees or real operations, paying management fees to them on the pretense that they performed services allowed the recipients the prospect of transforming a portion of the enormous management fees that would otherwise most likely have been taxable in Canada (where the payments were received), or possibly the U.S. (where services were largely performed), into dividends received in Barbados (where nothing occurred)," the report stated.

NOTE: For more good examples of what tax journalist Lucy Komisar calls the “corporate bag of tricks called profit laundering,” check out the Tax Justice Network, and the Komisar Scoop -- who just revealed where did Rupert Murdoch get $5 billion to buy up the Wall St. Journal? (Answer: A collection of 800 offshore companies that helped him cut corporate taxes to 6%!)

CorpWatch stories on Iraq & New Mexico get mainstream coverage

by Pratap Chatterjee

We're gratified to see that the U.S. Congress and the mainstream media are picking up on some of the issues that CorpWatch has been digging into over the last couple of years. For example, there was a hearing on July 26th, 2007 in Representive Waxman's committee (the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee) on a topic that CorpWatch broke a year ago February: the use of trafficked Asian labor to build the US Embassy in Baghdad. Our original story can be seen here: Baghdad Embassy Bonanza Kuwait Company's Secret Contract & Low-Wage Labor by David Phinney, Special to CorpWatch February 12th, 2006 The two witnesses who testified yesterday were first featured in an extensive CorpWatch article in October 2006. See A U.S. Fortress Rises in Baghdad: Asian Workers Trafficked to Build World's Largest Embassy by David Phinney, Special to CorpWatch October 17th, 2006 To read the article from today's Washington Post about yesterday's hearing, go here: Foreign Workers Abused at Embassy, Panel Told By William Branigin, Washington Post Friday, July 27th, 2007 In related matters, we're also pleased to see that the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) has been looking into why Bechtel did such a bad job in Iraq. (Answer: the fault lies quite heavily with the way that the U.S. government managed the contract.) Good coverage of the SIGIR report can be found in yesterday's New York Times. IRAQ: Bechtel Meets Goals on Fewer Than Half of Its Iraq Rebuilding Projects, U.S. Study Finds By James Glanz, New York Times July 26, 2007 But one thing: we'd like to note that SIGIR only looked at the second phase of Bechtel's work, what about the first phase? We ran a story on this some 40 months ago: Bechtel Fails Reconstruction of Iraq's Schools by Karim El-Gawhary, Special to CorpWatch December 2nd, 2003 Back on the U.S. home front we are also glad to see that the New York Times is following the story of the Sithe Global Power's proposed coal-fired power plant at Desert Rock in New Mexico on Diné lands: Navajos and Environmentalists Split on Power Plant By Felicity Barringer, New York Times July 27th, 2007 To get a better feel for how the company has divided the traditional Diné community, do read our story from April of this year: Speaking Diné to Dirty Power: Navajo Challenge New Coal-Fired Plant by Jeff Conant, Special to CorpWatch April 3rd, 2007

Digging for Dirt in the DRC?

Posted by Amelia Hight

Billy Rautenbach, a South African mining kingpin, was deported from Lubumbashi airport in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) on July 18th. “He was accused of fraud, theft, corruption and violating commercial law [the expulsion document] said. He was persona non grata. He would have to leave,” writes Ben Laurence in the Sunday Times (UK).

Best known in South Africa and Botswana for his activities in assembling Hyundai cars, Rautenbach faces hundreds of charges of fraud, corruption and other crimes in his home country of South Africa (the reasons cited in the documents prepared for his deportation last week). South Africa is currently considering asking Zimbabwe to extradite him to stand trial.

But Rautenbach was also once a powerful man in the DRC. He ran Gecamines, the DRC’s state-owned copper mining company, from 1998 to 2000. At the time he was accused of under-reporting exports of sales of huge quantities of DRC cobalt when he was in charge – and diverting the profits to a company he controlled in the British Virgin Islands.

Although Rautenbach lost his job, he continues to play an important role in the mining sector, as he also happens to be a major shareholder of Central African Mining & Exploration Company (CAMEC), which won major contracts in the DRC a couple of years later.

CAMEC’s contracts were the result of an investor-friendly mining code introduced by the World Bank in July 2002. (An informative analysis of this code was done by the Bank Information Center.) While the code calls for a much-needed regulatory framework and environmental protection, it hands the responsibility for mining development to private companies.

However, it is doubtful that the Congolese public institutions charged with regulating the mining sector have the resources to carry through with it, and the World Bank certainly has not been successful in providing oversight. A memo leaked to the Financial Times in November 2006 details the World Bank’s failure to provide sufficient oversight in three major contracts made between Gecamines and international mining groups like CAMEC. Worth billions of dollars, these contracts reportedly gave these groups control over 75% of Gecamines mineral reserves. (In May 2007, the Financial Times also revealed that the World Bank withheld the findings of an inquiry into alleged mismanagement of funds in the Democratic Republic of Congo.)

More details on the business dealings of Rautenbach and CAMEC may emerge from a DRC commission that recently began a three-month review of mining contracts signed in the last decade. The commission is the first attempt of a new “democratically elected” government to investigate ongoing corruption in the DRC’s valuable mining sector. The new commission follows a string of attempts by previous governments and international financial institutions to investigate the exploitation of natural resources in the DRC.

If the commission hopes to be successful it must take a look at whose interests are being promoted/protected in the Congo and how. This would include an investigation into local elites, regional influences, international financial institutions and the powers they represent, and international corporations along with the relationships between these different actors.

History has shown that the more resources a nation or region possess, the more conflict and poverty the people of that nation are forced to endure. The DRC is the third largest country in Africa and is rich in natural resources, particularly cobalt, copper, diamonds and gold. It is home to one third of the world’s cassiterite, the most important source of the metallic element tin and holds 64-80% of the world’s coltan reserves, an ore that is the source of the metal tantalum, which is used in cell phones and other devices.

In an article for Alternet, Stan Cox quotes a miner responsible for digging the valuable cassiterite: "As you crawl through the tiny hole, using your arms and fingers to scratch, there's not enough space to dig properly and you get badly grazed all over. And then, when you do finally come back out with the cassiterite, the soldiers are waiting to grab it at gunpoint. Which means you have nothing to buy food with. So we're always hungry." This cassiterite will inevitably end up in cheap cell phones and laptops laying abandoned in American landfills.

Despite (or indeed because of) its abundance of resources, the DRC has been plagued by conflict, famine and political instability since its independence in the 1960s. Following the end of the 30-year dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko (who was brought to power by the U.S. in the 1960s), the greed of neighboring countries for natural resources forced the DRC into the center of what organizations like Human Rights Watch have deemed, “Africa’s first world war.” The war resulted in the death of three to five million people, many from famine, exposure and disease.

A cease-fire ended the war in 1999, but the DRC has continued to suffer the extraction of resources and wealth through corrupt deals between local elites and international companies. A 2006 report from the London-based watchdog organization, Global Witness, describes how copper and cobalt are mined informally and illicitly exported, robbing the Congolese people of any opportunity to reduce poverty.

The new commission’s plan to revisit mining contracts between the state and private companies is a response to years of domestic and international pressure. Hopefully, once the review is completed (assuming that it is a transparent and non-corrupt process), the international companies involved will be willing to re-negotiate contracts in a way that is more beneficial to the Congolese state and its citizens. An interesting precedent was established last year in Liberia when Mittal Steel, the world’s largest steel company, agreed to step down from an unbalanced concessionary agreement made with a corrupt transitional government once a democratically elected government was in place.

Web Sanctions Tool Backfires on SEC

By Pratap Chatterjee

Boycotts and sanctions are two key tools that activists and governments use to target corporations who do business with "unsavory" regimes. There is a long history of progressive activists calling for boycotts, for example, against companies doing business in South Africa in the 1980s, Burma and Nigeria in the 1990s, and most recently Sudan in an attempt to topple or change regimes with a history of human rights abuse.

In the old days, activists created boycott flyers to target companies that were wheat-pasted on walls, they picketed stores that sold goods from the offending companies, and most recently many activist groups have created websites created to encourage consumers to vote with their dollars: such as Ethical Consumer in the UK or tools to track companies in specific countries such as the Sudan Divestment Network.

The U.S. government has followed a similar but more heavy-handed tactic to enforce its anger against other governments, by passing laws forbidding companies from doing business in countries ranging from Cuba in the 1960s, South Africa in the 1980s, Iraq in the 1990s and most recently in Syria. (A State Department official suggest that sanctions have been imposed on foreign countries well over 100 times since the First World War.) Of course, unlike activists, the U.S. government has the power to prosecute companies who fail to comply.

Some of the targets of boycotts and sanctions have been one and the same: South Africa being a notable example.

How successful have these boycotts and sanctions been? Activists argue that the South African apartheid regime was felled by such pressure, undertaken in solidarity with local movements, although one might argue that anti-apartheid protests within South Africa itself played an even more significant role. A variety of think-tanks (mostly conservative) have argued that sanctions don't work.

In May, Christopher Dodd, a Democrat from Connecticut and the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, called on the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to make it easier for "shareholders to access reliable information regarding publicly traded companies' business transactions involving Iran and Sudan."

In June, the SEC decided to copy activist tactics by putting up a Web tool that tracks corporations with investments in countries considered by the U.S. to sponsor terrorism -- specifically Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan and Syria. "No investor should ever have to wonder whether his or her investments or retirement savings are indirectly subsidizing a terrorist haven or genocidal state," Christopher Cox, the SEC chairman, said. In three weeks the site got "exceptional public interest," with more than 150,000 hits.

The tool generated some odd results: Reuters, the media company, had reported news-gathering activities in Cuba, Iran and Syria, so it made all three lists!

Not surprisingly, the Web tool provoked a storm of protest. "The list was fraught with distortions that could have actually harmed investors instead of informing them," Todd Malan, the president of the Organization for International Investment, which represents such companies, told reporters. "It was basically just a word search with no context, scale or reference."

Barney Frank, a Democrat from Massachusetts, called the list "unfair and perhaps counterproductive." He said some companies "apparently have investments that are so negligible they could not be considered material either to investors or the economy of the terrorist-financing state.

On Friday the SEC took the web page down and promised to rethink the idea -- either to return with a new, more sophisticated, tool or to figure out another way to achieve the same results.

"Our role is to make that information readily accessible to the investing public, and we will continue to work to find better ways to accomplish that objective," says the SEC. We await the results eagerly -- will the SEC try picketing the listed companies or dropping protest banners? If so, we just might know some folks who might be able to help.

Frequent Toxic Miles

By Pratap Chatterjee

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article today about how toxics in the United States that are dumped in other countries may come back to haunt U.S. consumers. Toxics have been found in jewelry ranging from "Best Friends Forever" necklaces sold at a chainstore called Claire's Stores Inc. to necklace and earring sets with plastic "birthstones" sold by Kmart, another major retail chain.

Many of these products are made in China – which is probably the leading exporter to the U.S. But not many know that the reason for this is that the country also is a major importer of U.S. electronic waste, despite the fact that the country's laws essentially ban imports of such waste.

Reporter Gordon Fairclough writes: “For lead, the trip to China from the U.S. typically goes something like this: U.S. consumers and businesses send their old electronics to recycling firms -- often by way of innocuous recycling drives. Some of those firms then sell the electronics to dealers in the U.S., who sell them to dealers in China. Chinese companies buy the e-waste and strip lead and other re-sellable materials from it -- often discarding harmful materials along the way, adding to local pollution. The lead makes its way -- sometimes at toxic levels -- into trinkets sold to consumers in the U.S.”

The article is based on studies by Jeffrey Weidenhamer and Michael Clement, chemists at Ashland University in Ohio, who examined the composition of children's highly leaded jewelry and key chains and determined that some also contained levels of copper and tin that suggested the source was lead solder used in electronic circuit boards. Other jewelry samples were also found to contain antimony, a toxic metalloid element used to harden lead used in batteries.

Our friends at Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition have a great animated film showing how this works. (Full disclosure here: Aditi Vaidya, SVTC program director, is on CorpWatch’s advisory board) The video was created by Ben Goldhirsch’s Good magazine.

Two other good films can be obtained from the Basel Action Network, which has a film on e-waste in Asia as well as one on similar schemes to dump e-waste in Africa.

Says Jim Puckett, coordinator of BAN. “In a globalized world, pollution knows no borders so the US government’s policy of allowing a free trade in hazardous waste has come back to haunt and hurt us.”

None of this should be legal. Under the Basel convention, as of 1 January 1998, all forms of hazardous waste exports from the 29 wealthiest most industrialized countries of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to all non-OECD countries. Unfortunately although China has ratified the treaty, the United States has not, so the trade continues.

For U.S. consumers, SVTC has guides about less harmful ways to dispose of electronic waste and how to buy electronics more responsibly.

The European Union is way ahead of the U.S. here – it requires companies to cover the costs of recovery and recycling under the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive. Last week, Britain become the latest country to enforce that law. For another fun way to learn about this issue, check out the WEEE man: a huge robotic figure made of scrap electrical and electronic equipment. It weighs 3.3 tonnes and stands seven meters tall – representing the average amount of e-products every single British citizen throws away over a lifetime.

Is Big Business Buying Out The Environmental Movement?

Philip Mattera, Good Jobs First

In the business world these days, it appears that just about everything is for sale. Multi-billion-dollar deals are commonplace, and even venerable institutions such as the Wall Street Journal find themselves put into play. Yet companies are not the only things being acquired. This may turn out to be the year that big business bought a substantial part of the environmental movement.

That’s one way of interpreting the remarkable level of cooperation that is emerging between some prominent environmental groups and some of the world’s largest corporations. What was once an arena of fierce antagonism has become a veritable love fest as companies profess to be going green and get lavishly honored for doing so. Earlier this year, for instance, the World Resources Institute gave one of its “Courage to Lead” awards to the chief executive of General Electric.

Every day seems to bring another announcement from a large corporation that it is taking steps to protect the planet. IBM, informally known as Big Blue, launched its Project Big Green to help customers slash their data center energy usage. Newmont Mining Co., the world’s largest gold digger, endorsed a shareholder resolution calling for a review of its environmental impact. Home Depot introduced an Eco Options label for thousands of green products. General Motors and oil major ConocoPhillips joined the list of corporate giants that have come out in support of a mandatory ceiling on greenhouse gas emissions. Bank of America said it would invest $20 billion in sustainable projects over the next decade.

Many of the new initiatives are being pursued in direct collaboration with environmental groups. Wal-Mart is working closely with Conservation International on its efforts to cut energy usage and switch to renewable sources of power. McDonald’s has teamed up with Greenpeace to discourage deforestation caused by the growth of soybean farming in Brazil. When buyout firms Texas Pacific Group and KKR were negotiating the takeover of utility company TXU earlier this year, they asked Environmental Defense to join the talks so that the deal, which ended up including a rollback of plans for 11 new coal-fired plants, could be assured a green seal of approval.

Observing this trend, Business Week detects “a remarkable evolution in the dynamic between corporate executives and activists. Once fractious and antagonistic, it has moved toward accommodation and even mutual dependence.” The question is: who is accommodating whom? Are these developments a sign that environmental campaigns have prevailed and are setting the corporate agenda? Or have enviros been duped into endorsing what my be little more than a new wave of corporate greenwash?

An Epiphany About The Environment?

The first thing to keep in mind is that Corporate America’s purported embrace of environmental principles is nothing new. Something very similar happened, for example, in early 1990 around the time of the 20^th anniversary of Earth Day. Fortune announced then that “trend spotters and forward thinkers agree that the Nineties will be the Earth Decade and that environmentalism will be a movement of massive worldwide force.” Business Week published a story titled “The Greening of Corporate America.”

The magazines cited a slew of large companies that were said to be embarking on significant green initiatives, among them DuPont, General Electric, McDonald’s, 3M, Union Carbide and Procter & Gamble. Corporations such as these put on their own Earth Tech environmental technology fair on the National Mall and endorsed Earth Day events and promotions.

A difference between then and now is that there was a lot more skepticism about Corporate America’s claim of having had an epiphany about the environment. It was obvious to many that business was trying to undo the damage caused by environmental disasters such as Union Carbide’s deadly Bhopal chemical leak, the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska and the deterioration of the ozone layer. Activist groups charged that corporations were engaging in a bogus public relations effort which they branded “greenwash.” Greenpeace staged a protest at DuPont’s Earth Tech exhibit, leading to a number of arrests.

Misgivings about corporate environmentalism grew as it was discovered that many of the claims about green products were misleading, false or irrelevant. Mobil Chemical, for instance, was challenged for calling its new Hefty trash bags biodegradable, since that required extended exposure to light rather than their usual fate of being buried in landfills. Procter & Gamble was taken to task for labeling its Pampers and Luvs disposable diapers “compostable” when only a handful of facilities in the entire country were equipped to do such processing. Various companies bragged that their products in aerosol cans were now safe for the environment when all they had done was comply with a ban on the use of chlorofluorocarbons. Some of the self-proclaimed green producers found themselves being investigated by state attorneys general for false advertising and other offenses against the consumer.

The insistence that companies actually substantiate their claims put a damper on the entire green product movement. Yet some companies continued to see advantages in being associated with environmental principles. In one of the more brazen moves, DuPont ran TV ads in the late 1990s depicting sea lions applauding a passing oil tanker (accompanied by Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”) to take credit for the fact that its Conoco subsidiary had begun using double hulls in its ships, conveniently failing to mention that it was one of the last oil companies to take that step.

At the same time, some companies began to infiltrate the environmental movement itself by contributing to the more moderate groups and getting spots on their boards. They also joined organizations such as CERES, which encourages green groups and corporations to endorse a common set of principles. By the early 2000s, some companies sought to depict themselves as being not merely in step with the environmental movement but at the forefront of a green transformation. British Petroleum started publicizing its investments in renewable energy and saying that its initials really stood for Beyond Petroleum—all despite the fact that its operations continued to be dominated by fossil fuels.

This paved the way for General Electric’s “ecomagination” public relations blitz, which it pursued even while dragging its feet in the cleanup of PCB contamination in New York’s Hudson River. GE was followed by Wal-Mart, which in October 2005 sought to transform its image as a leading cause of pollution-generating sprawl by announcing a program to move toward zero waste and maximum use of renewable energy. In recent months the floodgates have opened, with more and more large companies calling for federal caps on greenhouse gas emissions. In January ten major corporations—including Alcoa, Caterpillar, DuPont and General Electric—joined with the Natural Resources Defense Council and other enviro groups in forming the U.S. Climate Action Partnership. A few months later, General Motors, arguably one of the companies that has done the most to exacerbate global warming, signed on as well.

A Cause for Celebration or Dismay?

Today the term “greenwash” is rarely uttered, and differences in positions between corporate giants and mainstream environmental groups are increasingly difficult to discern. Everywhere one looks, enviros and executives have locked arms and are marching together to save the planet. Is this a cause for celebration or dismay?

Answering this question begins with the recognition that companies do not all enter the environmental fold in the same way. Here are some of their different paths:

Defeat. Some companies did not embrace green principles on their own—they were forced to do so after being successfully targeted by aggressive environmental campaigns. Home Depot abandoned the sale of lumber harvested in old-growth forests several years ago after being pummeled by groups such as Rainforest Action Network. Responding to similar campaign pressure, Boise Cascade also agreed to stop sourcing from endangered forests and J.P. Morgan Chase agreed to take environmental impacts into account in its international lending activities. Dell started taking computer recycling seriously only after it was pressed to do so by groups such as the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition.

Diversion. It is apparent that Wal-Mart is using its newfound green consciousness as a means of diverting public attention away from its dismal record in other areas, especially the treatment of workers. In doing so, it hopes to peel environmentalists away from the broad anti-Wal-Mart movement. BP’s emphasis on the environment was no doubt made more urgent by the need to repair an image damaged by allegations that a 2005 refinery fire in Texas that killed 15 people was the fault of management. To varying degrees, many other companies that have jumped on the green bandwagon have sins they want to public to forget.

Opportunism. There is so much hype these days about protecting the environment that many companies are going green simply to earn more green. There are some market moves, such as Toyota’s push on hybrids, that also appear to have some environmental legitimacy. Yet there are also instances of sheer opportunism, such as the effort by Nuclear Energy Institute to depict nukes as an environmentally desirable alternative to fossil fuels. Not to mention surreal cases such as the decision by Britain’s BAE Systems to develop environmentally friendly munitions, including low-toxin rockets and lead-free bullets.

In other words, the suggestion that the new business environmentalism flows simply from a heightened concern for the planet is far from the truth. Corporations always act in their own self-interest and one way or another are always seeking to maximize profits. It used to be that they had to hide that fact. Today they flaunt it, because there is a widespread notion that eco-friendly policies are totally consistent with cutting costs and fattening the bottom line.

When GE’s “ecomagination” campaign was launched, CEO Jeffrey Immelt insisted “it’s no longer a zero-sum game—things that are good for the environment are also good for business.” This was echoed by Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott, who said in a speech announcing his company’s green initiative that “being a good steward of the environment and in our communities, and being an efficient and profitable business, are not mutually exclusive. In fact they are one in the same.” That’s probably because Scott sees environmentalism as merely an extension of the company’s legendary penny-pinching, as glorified efficiency measures.

Chevron Wants to Lead

Many environmental activists seem to welcome the notion of a convergence of business interests and green interests, but it all seems too good to be true. If eco-friendly policies are entirely “win-win,” then why did corporations resist them for so long? It is hard to believe that the conflict between profit maximization and environmental protection, which characterized the entire history of the ecological movement, has suddenly evaporated.

Either corporations are fooling themselves, in which case they will eventually realize there is no environmental free lunch and renege on their green promises. Or they are fooling us and are perpetrating a massive public relations hoax. A third interpretation is that companies are taking voluntary steps that are genuine but inadequate to solve the problems at hand and are mainly meant to prevent stricter, enforceable regulation.

In any event, it would behoove enviros to be more skeptical of corporate green claims and less eager to jump into bed with business. It certainly makes sense to seek specific concessions from corporations and to offer moderate praise when they comply, but activists should maintain an arm’s-length relationship to business and not see themselves as partners. After all, the real purpose of the environmental movement is not simply to make technical adjustments to the way business operates (that’s the job of consultants) but rather to push for fundamental and systemic changes.

Moreover, there is a risk that the heightened level of collaboration will undermine the justification for an independent environmental movement. Why pay dues to a green group if its agenda is virtually identical to that of GE and DuPont? Already there are hints that business views itself, not activist groups, as the real green vanguard. Chevron, for instance, has been running a series of environmental ads with the tagline “Will you join us?”

Join them? Wasn’t it Chevron and the other oil giants that played a major role in creating global warming? Wasn’t it Chevron that used the repressive regime in Nigeria to protect its environmentally destructive operations in the Niger Delta? Wasn’t it Chevron’s Texaco unit that dumped more than 18 billion gallons of toxic waste in Ecuador? And wasn’t it Chevron that was accused of systematically underpaying royalties to the federal government for natural gas extracted from the Gulf of Mexico? That is not the kind of track record that confers the mantle of environmental leadership.

In fact, we shouldn’t be joining any company’s environmental initiative. Human activists should be leading the effort to clean up the planet, and corporations should be made to follow our lead.

Alcan pulls out of Utkal project in India

by Franocis Meloche

Alcan, a Canadian company, has decided to sell its 45 percent stake in Utkal Alumina International Limited, a company aiming to produce alumina in the state of Orissa in India. Alcan had been under pressure for years to withdraw or at least ensure the project had obtained the free prior and informed consent of local communities.

Community members, mostly "scheduled tribes" Adivasis, have opposed the Utkal project, to protect their right to control local resources and avoid environmental damage. The project, which is in its "engineering phase" has already started to displace the 200 or so families living on the site of the future alumina plant. Herders and others would also be affected by the mining operation. It is unclear how many people would be affected but some critics have estimated that over 10,000 people would suffer. At least 23 villages would be affected by the project.

In December, 2000, police in Kashipur opened fire on protesters opposed to the Utkal mine and smelter, killing three people. One of the partner at that time, Norsk Hydro of Norway, immediately pulled out and sold its share to Alcan.

Activists from Alcan't in India, a solidarity group based in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, are pressuring Alcan to compensate people whose "lives have been ruined through jailings, beatings, displacement, and even death due to Alcan’s involvement."

Last year, Alcan promised it would provide an answer to shareholder activists by March 2007 on its involvement in the project. Shareholders had filed a proposal (see 'Tis the Season for Shareholder Activism) asking for an independent study on the consent of the community, a proposal that received a surprisingly high 37 percent. (Similar resolutions typically get between zero and ten percent. Any resolution that scores in the higher end of that range is taken seriously by management)

The Indian partner in the Utkal project, Hindalco, the industrial division of the Indian conglomerate Aditya Birla group, which owns 55% of the project, has not given any indication that it will change its plans.

Alcan, on the other hand, invests a lot of money in public relations to promote its sustainability strategy, has portrayed itself as a minority partner that does not participate in the real decision making around this project.

“We have carefully weighed the opportunity and risk presented by the Utkal Project, and, given constraints within the governance structure that limit Alcan's ability to participate in key decisions, believe that we have acted in the best interests of all our stakeholders,” Jacynthe Côté, president and chief executive officer of Alcan Bauxite and Alumina, said in a statement.

Alcan says it will keep a commercial interest in the project by continuing to "benefit from an Alcan technology supply agreement", according to the Alcan press release, but it does not give further details.

Editor's note: The decision of Alcan to pull out of the Utkal smelter reflects similar dissatisfaction over aluminum smelters around the world. Sujatha Fernandes reported for us from Trinidad on a similar project in the Chatham/Cap-de-Ville area (see “Smelter Struggle: Trinidad Fishing Community Fights Aluminum Project") that was canceled in January 2007 although the Alcoa is now hoping to get permission to relocate the project to Otaheite Bay, which also serves as a nesting ground for the scarlet ibis, one of Trinidad and Tobago's national birds, as well as 36 other avian species.

And communities in Iceland have also been battling a proposed Alcoa smelter, for which the gigantic $3 billion Karahnjukar dam, north of Vatnajokull, Europe's biggest glacier, is being built. The Guardian did a great story ("Power Driven") on this in 2003, and the New York Times recently did a feature on what it called the angriest and most divisive battle in recent Icelandic history. Updates can be found at the Saving Iceland website.

Alcan pulls out of Utkal project in India

by Franocis Meloche

Alcan, a Canadian company, has decided to sell its 45 percent stake in Utkal Alumina International Limited, a company aiming to produce alumina in the state of Orissa in India. Alcan had been under pressure for years to withdraw or at least ensure the project had obtained the free prior and informed consent of local communities.

Community members, mostly "scheduled tribes" Adivasis, have opposed the Utkal project, to protect their right to control local resources and avoid environmental damage. The project, which is in its "engineering phase" has already started to displace the 200 or so families living on the site of the future alumina plant. Herders and others would also be affected by the mining operation. It is unclear how many people would be affected but some critics have estimated that over 10,000 people would suffer. At least 23 villages would be affected by the project.

In December, 2000, police in Kashipur opened fire on protesters opposed to the Utkal mine and smelter, killing three people. One of the partner at that time, Norsk Hydro of Norway, immediately pulled out and sold its share to Alcan.

Activists from Alcan't in India, a solidarity group based in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, are pressuring Alcan to compensate people whose "lives have been ruined through jailings, beatings, displacement, and even death due to Alcan’s involvement."

Last year, Alcan promised it would provide an answer to shareholder activists by March 2007 on its involvement in the project. Shareholders had filed a proposal (see 'Tis the Season for Shareholder Activism) asking for an independent study on the consent of the community, a proposal that received a surprisingly high 37 percent. (Similar resolutions typically get between zero and ten percent. Any resolution that scores in the higher end of that range is taken seriously by management)

The Indian partner in the Utkal project, Hindalco, the industrial division of the Indian conglomerate Aditya Birla group, which owns 55% of the project, has not given any indication that it will change its plans.

Alcan, on the other hand, invests a lot of money in public relations to promote its sustainability strategy, has portrayed itself as a minority partner that does not participate in the real decision making around this project.

“We have carefully weighed the opportunity and risk presented by the Utkal Project, and, given constraints within the governance structure that limit Alcan's ability to participate in key decisions, believe that we have acted in the best interests of all our stakeholders,” Jacynthe Côté, president and chief executive officer of Alcan Bauxite and Alumina, said in a statement.

Alcan says it will keep a commercial interest in the project by continuing to "benefit from an Alcan technology supply agreement", according to the Alcan press release, but it does not give further details.

Editor's note: The decision of Alcan to pull out of the Utkal smelter reflects similar dissatisfaction over aluminum smelters around the world. Sujatha Fernandes reported for us from Trinidad on a similar project in the Chatham/Cap-de-Ville area (see “Smelter Struggle: Trinidad Fishing Community Fights Aluminum Project") that was canceled in January 2007 although the Alcoa is now hoping to get permission to relocate the project to Otaheite Bay, which also serves as a nesting ground for the scarlet ibis, one of Trinidad and Tobago's national birds, as well as 36 other avian species.

And communities in Iceland have also been battling a proposed Alcoa smelter, for which the gigantic $3 billion Karahnjukar dam, north of Vatnajokull, Europe's biggest glacier, is being built. The Guardian did a great story ("Power Driven") on this in 2003, and the New York Times recently did a feature on what it called the angriest and most divisive battle in recent Icelandic history. Updates can be found at the Saving Iceland website.