Corporate Watch: A dedicated website for tracking corporations!

Corporations have gained a power out of all proportion to their original purpose. We are a research group supporting the campaigns which are increasingly successful in forcing corporations to back down. Corporate Watch is part of the growing anti-corporate movement springing up around the world.
 
Why watch corporations?

In the conventional economic view corporations are simply neutral providers of the goods and services that people want. They exist to serve society's needs (and make a tidy profit in the process). This view dismisses corporate crimes as mere accidents, at worst errors of judgement, which will ultimately be corrected, since market forces have everyone's best interests at heart. Don't they?There is another view – increasingly developed by alternative media, the more courageous radical thinkers and grassroots groups around the world. In this view, corporations have gained a power out of all proportion to their original purpose; the servant and useful goods-providing machine has become the master and the only true citizen. The rights of corporations – disguised as 'encouraging foreign investment', 'promoting free trade', 'protecting the national interest' now take precedence over human rights, community interests, and the interests of the planet itself. Corporate Watch is part of the growing anti-corporate movement springing up around the world. We are a research group supporting the campaigns which are increasingly successfully forcing corporations to back down from environmentally destructive or socially divisive projects and dragging the corrupt links between business and power, economics and politics into the spotlight, against the resistance of the complacent, corporate-led mainstream media.

What is Corporate Watch?

From Corporate Watch's beginnings looking at PFI roadbuilding, we have broadened out to examine the oil industry, globalistion, genetic engineering, food, toxic chemicals, privatisation and many other areas, to build up a picture of almost every type of corporate crime and the nature and mechanisms of corporate power, both economic and political. We have worked with and provided information to empower peace campaigners, environmentalists, and trade unionists; large NGOs and small autonomous groups; journalists, MPs, and members of the public.Over nine years we have transformed a loose association of activists and researchers into a respected professional research and campaigning organisation, run effectively as a workers' co-operative. We are currently supported mainly by donations from individuals and those few independent trusts and foundations willing to support an organisation such as ours. We do not take money from corporations or government.

What Corporate Watch does...

Website and news
Our website, providing detailed profiles of some of the world's largest corporations and overviews of each major industry sector, constitutes not just a resource for campaigners and journalists but also aims to provide a comprehensive picture of the reality of our corporate age.

Information and outreach
We regularly give talks and workshops on all areas of our work. We also advise campaigners on corporate issues and try to make our work as accessible and useful as possible.

Food and Farming project
This project aims to raise awareness of the unchecked consolidation of corporate control of food production and its negative impact on society and the environment. It aims to support activists, farmers and the general public in resisting corporate control of the food industry and and creating sustainable local food systems.

Corporate Structures project
This new project aims to look into the legal basis of corporate structures, rights and duties, in order to analyse how legal rights and obligations influence corporate behaviour and what changes must be made to corporate structures (or what structures must replace corporations) in order for corporate social responsibility to become a reality instead of a PR buzzword.

Public Relations Industry project
PR campaigns reinforce corporate power and work against democracy. Through deception and deceit the public relations industry reduces society's capacity to respond effectively to key social, environmental and political challenges. This new project aims to deepen understanding of this little known industry, how it operates, and how to combat it.

For more details please explore:www.corporatewatch.org

THE CORPORATION: A DOCUMENTARY - Synopsis

THE CORPORATION:A DOCUMENTARY - Synopsis

 Among the 40 interview subjects are CEOs and top-level executives from a range of industries: oil, pharmaceutical, computer, tire, manufacturing, public relations, branding, advertising and undercover marketing; in addition, a Nobel-prize winning economist, the first management guru, a corporate spy, and a range of academics, critics, historians and thinkers are also interviewed.

A LEGAL "PERSON"

In the mid-1800s the corporation emerged as a legal "person." Imbued with a "personality" of pure self-interest, the next 100 years saw the corporation's rise to dominance. The corporation created unprecedented wealth but at what cost? The remorseless rationale of "externalities" (as Milton Friedman explains, the unintended consequences of a transaction between two parties on a third) is responsible for countless cases of illness, death, poverty, pollution, exploitation and lies.

THE PATHOLOGY OF COMMERCE: CASE HISTORIES

To assess the "personality" of the corporate "person," a checklist is employed, using diagnostic criteria of the World Health Organization and the standard diagnostic tool of psychiatrists and psychologists. The operational principles of the corporation give it a highly anti-social "personality": it is self-interested, inherently amoral, callous and deceitful; it breaches social and legal standards to get its way; it does not suffer from guilt, yet it can mimic the human qualities of empathy, caring and altruism. Four case studies, drawn from a universe of corporate activity, clearly demonstrate harm to workers, human health, animals and the biosphere. Concluding this point-by-point analysis, a disturbing diagnosis is delivered: the institutional embodiment of laissez-faire capitalism fully meets the diagnostic criteria of a "psychopath."

MINDSET

But what is the ethical mindset of corporate players? Should the institution or the individuals within it be held responsible? The people who work for corporations may be good people, upstanding citizens in their communities, but none of that matters when they enter the corporation's world. As Sam Gibara, Former CEO and Chairman of Goodyear Tire, explains, "If you really had a free hand, if you really did what you wanted to do that suited your personal thoughts and your personal priorities, you'd act differently."

Ray Anderson, CEO of Interface, the world's largest commercial carpet manufacturer, had an environmental epiphany and re-organized his $1.4 billion company on sustainable principles. His company may be a beacon of corporate hope, but is it an exception to the rule?

MONSTROUS OBLIGATIONS

A case in point: Sir Mark Moody-Stuart recounts an exchange between himself (at the time Chairman of Royal Dutch Shell), his wife, and a motley crew of Earth First activists who arrived on the doorstep of their country home. The protesters chanted and stretched a banner over their roof that read, "MURDERERS." The response of the surprised couple was not to call the police, but to engage their uninvited guests in a civil dialogue, share concerns about human rights and the environment and eventually serve them tea on their front lawn. Yet, as the Moody-Stuarts apologize for not being able to provide soy milk for their vegan critics' tea, Shell Nigeria is flaring unrivaled amounts of gas, making it one of the world's single worst sources of pollution. And all the professed concerns about the environment do not spare Ken Saro Wiwa and eight other activists from being hanged for opposing Shell's environmental practices in the Niger Delta.

The Corporation exists to create wealth, and even world disasters can be profit centers. Carlton Brown, a commodities trader, recounts with unabashed honesty the mindset of gold traders while the twin towers crushed their occupants. The first thing that came to their minds, he tells us, was: "How much is gold up?"

PLANET INC.
You'd think that things like disasters, or the purity of childhood, or even milk, let alone water or air, would be sacred. But no. Corporations have no built-in limits on what, who, or how much they can exploit for profit. In the fifteenth century, the enclosure movement began to put fences around public grazing lands so that they might be privately owned and exploited. Today, every molecule on the planet is up for grabs. In a bid to own it all, corporations are patenting animals, plants, even your DNA.

Around things too precious, vulnerable, sacred or important to the public interest, governments have, in the past, drawn protective boundaries against corporate exploitation. Today, governments are inviting corporations into domains from which they were previously barred.

PERCEPTION MANAGEMENT

The Initiative Corporation spends $22 billion worldwide placing its clients' advertising in every imaginable - and some unimaginable - media. One new medium: very young children. Their "Nag Factor" study dropped jaws in the world of child psychiatry. It was designed not to help parents cope with their children's nagging, but to help corporations formulate their ads and promotions so that children would nag for their products more effectively. Initiative Vice President Lucy Hughes elaborates: "You can manipulate consumers into wanting, and therefore buying your products. It's a game."

Today people can become brands (Martha Stewart). And brands can build cities (Celebration, Florida). And university students can pay for their educations by shilling on national television for a credit card company (Chris and Luke). And a corporation even owns the rights to the popular song "Happy Birthday" (a division of AOL-Time-Warner). Do you ever get the feeling it's all a bit much?

Corporations have invested billions to shape public and political opinion. When they own everything, who will stand for the public good?

THE PRICE OF WHISTLEBLOWING

It turns out that standing for the public good is an expensive proposition. Ask Jane Akre and Steve Wilson, two investigative reporters fired by Fox News after they refused to water down a story on rBGH, a controversial synthetic hormone widely used in the United States (but banned in Europe and Canada) to rev up cows' metabolism and boost their milk production. Because of the increased production, the cows suffer from mastitis, a painful infection of the udders. Antibiotics must then be injected, which find their way into the milk, and ultimately reduce people's resistance to disease.

Fox demanded that they rewrite the story, and ultimately fired Akre and Wilson. Akre and Wilson subsequently sued Fox under Florida's whistle-blower statute. They proved to a jury that the version of the story Fox would have had them put on the air was false, distorted or slanted. Akre was awarded $425,000. Then Fox appealed, the verdict was overturned on a technicality, and Akre lost her award. [For an update on the case see Disc 2 where we learn that at one point, Jane and Steve became liable for Fox's $1.8 million court costs, later to be reduced to $200,000.]

DEMOCRACY LTD.

Democracy is a value that the corporation just doesn't understand. In fact, corporations have often tried to undo democracy if it is an obstacle to their single-minded drive for profit. From a 1934 business-backed plot to install a military dictator in the White House (undone by the integrity of one U.S. Marine Corps General, Smedley Darlington Butler) to present-day law-drafting, corporations have bought military might, political muscle and public opinion.

And corporations do not hesitate to take advantage of democracy's absence either. One of the most shocking stories of the twentieth century is Edwin Black's recounting IBM's strategic alliance with Nazi Germany-one that began in 1933 in the first weeks that Hitler came to power and continued well into World War II.

FISSURES

The corporation may be trying to render governments impotent, but since the landmark WTO protest in Seattle, a rising wave of networked individuals and groups have decided to make their voices heard. Movements to challenge the very foundations of the corporation are afoot: The corporate charter revocation movement tried to bring down oil giant Unocal; a groundbreaking ballot initiative in Arcata, California, put the corporate agenda in the public spotlight in a series of town hall meetings; in Bolivia, the population fought and won a battle against a huge transnational corporation brought in by their government to privatize the water system; in India nearly 99% of the basmati patent of RiceTek was overturned; and W. R. Grace and the U.S. government's patent on Neem was revoked.

As global individuals take back local power, a growing re-invigoration of the concept of citizenship is taking root. It has the power to not only strip the corporation of its seeming omnipotence, but to create a feeling and an ideology of democracy that is much more than its mere institutional version.

(Source: http://www.thecorporation.com/index.cfm?page_id=312 )

 Watch the entire documentary on YouTube at:

A must read book challenging the "Corporate Control of Society"

Global capitalism is not democratic and it systematically violates every principle of a market economy. Which sets up an interesting juxtaposition because it points to the possibility that there really is an alternative.[1]

Living capital, which has the special capacity to continuously regenerate itself, is ultimately the source of all real wealth. To destroy it for money, a simple number with no intrinsic value, is an act of collective insanity -- which makes capitalism a mental, as well as a physical pathology.[2]

To create a world in which life can flourish and prosper we must replace the values and institutions of capitalism with values and institutions that honor life, serve life’s needs, and restore money to its proper role as servant. I believe we are in fact being called to take a step to a new level of species consciousness and function.[3]


--David C. Korten, Life After Capitalism,
from a presentation in Canada, 11/98

A detailed review of David C. Korten's path breaking book "THE POST-CORPORATE WORLD: LIFE AFTER CAPITALISM" is available at http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/seeingPCW.pdf