The Ten Worst Corporations of 2004...

[Liberty Belle]

The Ten Worst Corporations of 2004

by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

It is never easy choosing the 10 Worst Corporations of the Year — there are always more deserving nominees than we can possibly recognize.

One of the greatest challenges facing the Multinational Monitor judges is the directive not to select repeat recipients of the 10 Worst designation.

There’s no way we could keep off companies that have ever appeared on the 10 Worst list — what is one to do with the likes of ExxonMobil, Philip Morris or General Electric? — but we do try to stick to the rule of not naming companies to the list who appeared on the previous year’s list. That’s not so easy.

Last year, for example, Bayer appeared on the list, for, among other things, bilking Medicaid of hundreds of millions of dollars, paying students to consume pesticides as a test, keeping its anti-cholesterol drug Baycol on the market despite reportedly possessing evidence of its hazards, and dumping tainted blood-clotting medicines in developing country markets. This year, as the German group Coalition against Bayer Dangers relentlessly documents, Bayer’s wrongdoing continues: Bayer agreed to pay $66 million to U.S. authorities to settle price-fixing charges related to chemicals used to make rubber, faced demands for compensation from the families of two dozen Peruvian children accidentally poisoned and killed in 1999 by a Bayer pesticide, pushed for import of genetically modified rice into the European Union, polluted water in a South African town with the carcinogen hexavalent chromium, suffered from new accusations and evidence that it concealed dangers of Baycol, and was hit with evidence that its pain medication Aleve (naproxen) increases the risk of heart attack. . .



http://www.multinationalmonitor.org/mm2004/122004/mokhiber.html

[Pepperbelly]

1. criminals ...

they REALLY need to change the laws regard individual responsibility for corporate crimes.

[Liberty Belle]

3. We need to get rid of the concept of corporate personhood.

People should be more important than padding corporate coffers.

[blondeatlast]

2. Pretty much the usual suspects. Note the amount of big drug companies.

Three out of ten of the worst companies in the world?

May God have mercy on the ill.