The 10 Worst Corporations of 2008

“We can’t let little countries screW around With big companies like this—companies that have made big investments around the World,” a chevron lobbyist said to neWsWeek in august.

What a year for corporate criminality and malfeasance! As the Multinational Monitor compiled its annual list of the 10 Worst Corporations, it would have been easy to restrict the 2008 awardees to Wall Street firms.

But the rest of the corporate sector was not on good behavior during 2008 either, and didn’t deserve to escape justified scrutiny.

So, in keeping with the tradition of highlighting diverse forms of corporate wrongdoing, the list includes only one financial company out of the 10 worst.

Here, presented in alphabetical order, are the 10 Worst Corporations of 2008.

AIG: Money for Nothing

There’s surely no one party responsible for the ongoing global financial crisis. But if you had to pick a single responsible corporation, there’s a very strong case to make for American International Group (AIG), which has already sucked up more than $150 billion in taxpayer support. Through “credit default swaps,” AIG basically collected insurance premiums while making the ridiculous assumption that it would never pay out on a failure—let alone a collapse of the entire market it was insuring. When reality set in, the roof caved in.

Cargill: Food Profiteers

When food prices spiked in late 2007 and through the beginning of 2008, countries and poor consumers found themselves at the mercy of the global market and the giant trading companies that dominate it. As hunger rose and food riots broke out around the world, Cargill saw profits soar, tallying more than $1 billion in the second quarter of 2008 alone.

In a competitive market, a grain-trading middleman would not make super-profits. In fact, rising prices would crimp the middleman’s profit margin. But the global grain trade is not competitive, and the legal rules of the global economy—devised at the behest of Cargill and friends—ensure that poor countries will be dependent on, and at the mercy of, the global grain traders.

Chevron: “We Can’t Let Little Countries Screw Around With Big Companies”

In 2001, Chevron swallowed up Texaco. It was happy to absorb Texaco’s revenue streams. It has been less willing to take responsibility for Texaco’s ecological and human-rights abuses.

In 1993, 30,000 indigenous Ecuadorians filed a class-action suit in U.S. courts, alleging that over a 20-year period Texaco had poisoned the land where they live and the waterways on which they rely, allowing billions of gallons of waste to spill and leaving hundreds of waste pits unlined and uncovered. Chevron had the case thrown out of U.S. courts on the grounds that it should be litigated in Ecuador, closer to where the alleged harms occurred. But now the case is going badly for Chevron in Ecuador—Chevron may be liable for more than $7 billion. So, the company is lobbying the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to impose trade sanctions on Ecuador if the Ecuadorian government does not make the case go away. “We can’t let little countries screw around with big companies like this—companies that have made big investments around the world,” a Chevron lobbyist said to Newsweek in August. (Chevron subsequently stated that the comments were not approved.)

CNPC: Fueling Violence in Darfur

Sudan has been able to laugh off existing and threatened sanctions for the slaughter it has perpetrated in Darfur because of the huge support it receives from China, channeled above all through the Sudanese relationship with the China National Petroleum Corp. (CNPC).

CorporatIons continued on page 8 >>