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July 2, 2002
Leah Wells
The Wedding
Was a Bomb
CounterPunch Wire
Trial of
the SOA 37
Edward Hammond
Bombing
the Mind:
The Pentagon's Drug Warfare
Sam Bahour
Ramallah
Occupied:
Uninvited Guests Become Neighbors
July 1, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Brazil's
Triumph
June 28/30, 2002
Kathleen Christison
The True Story of Resolution
242 or How the US Sold Out
the Palestinians
Cockburn / St. Clair
Death,
Juries and Scalia
Tarif Abboushi
Bush's
Double Standard
on Israel
N.D. Jayaprakash
Seething
with Rage:
The Palestinian Saga
Michael Yates
Taking
the Pledge:
Teachers and the Flag
Stephen Zunes
Bush's
Speech a Setback
for Peace
Walt Brasch
The Pledge
v. The Constitution
Cockburn / St. Clair
Strikers
as Terrorists?
Tom Ridge Calls Longshoremen
June 27, 2002
Ralph Nader
Reclaiming
Our Commons
Neve Gordon
Jerusalem
Under Attack
Robert Jensen
Alternative
Futures
David Vest
Darryl Kile's
Great Day
Gary Leupp
The Loya
Jirga Joke
Rahul Mahajan
Arafat
Says US Needs New Leadership; Calls for Fair Elections
June 26, 2002
Robert Fisk
Sharon as
Bush Speechwriter
Mokhiber / Weissman
Brokerman
June 25, 2002
Dave Marsh
The RIAA,
Library of Congress and the Web Pirates
Uri Avnery
Reform
Now!
Bahour / Dahan
Bush:
Off with Arafat's Head
Walt Brasch
Bush:
the Compassionate Exerciser
June 24, 2002
Bernard Weiner
Talkin'
About the F-Word
David Bates
Portland
Gets Dicked:
Cheney Does Oregon
Jo Freeman
Will
the War on Terror Follow the Path of the Cold War?
Tom Gorman
The Only
Thing "Generous" is the Propaganda
Bezhad Yaghmaian
Caught
Between Borders
in a Borderless World
Ben Sonnenberg
Ted
Hughes' Spell
June 22/23, 2002
Douglas Valentine
Sex,
Drugs & the CIA
June 21, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Brazil
Over England:
The Gaucho's Wild Ride
John Borowski
Stossel
and Disney's Crimes Against Nature
Chris Floyd
Southern
Cross: The US Takes Aim at Brazil
David Martin
Of Lies
and Oil: an interview with Rahul Mahajan
James T. Phillips
Serbian
Reservations:
Kosovo 2002
June 20, 2002
Chris Kromm
The South
at War: a Tour of the US Military/Industrial Complex
Jacob Levich
The War
on Terror is
Not a Suicide Pact
Mark Weisbrot
What
are They Doing to Argentina?
Jeffrey St. Clair
and Alexander Cockburn
Fire
Walk With Me:
Terry Lynn Barton and the Flames of Colorado
June 19, 2002
Gary Leupp
Red Targets in Terror War
Lenni Brenner
The Road
Forward for the
Palestinian Movement
Bernard Weiner
Inside
Cheney's Diary:
Cakewalking Through Minefields
Alexander Cockburn
The
Incredible Shrinking President
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
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By Alexander
Cockburn
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Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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Reviews of Gore:
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July
3, 2002
Cracking
Down on Corporate Crime, Really
by Russell Mokhiber
and Robert Weissman
Here is one of the most remarkable aspects of
the still-unfolding financial scandals swirling around Worldcom,
Xerox, Global Crossing, Enron, Arthur Andersen, Tyco and a growing
number of other companies: The fraud occurred in the most heavily
regulated and monitored area of corporate activity.
If an epidemic of corporate malfeasance
could occur in the financial arena, how serious is the more general
problem of corporate crime?
Consider the checks and balances in place
that should have stemmed the wave of corporate wrongdoing which
has reportedly angered even American CEO George Bush:
* Disclosure requirements for corporate
financial performance are extensive, and by far the most detailed
for any element of corporate activity.
* There is a distinct industry -- made
up of accounting firms -- whose function is to review the financial
numbers, audit corporate books and certify the validity of financial
statements.
* There is another distinct industry,
separate from the accountants -- this is the Wall Street investment
firms -- whose function is to scrutinize the corporate reports,
interview corporate executives, analyze market performance and
provide investors with independent evaluations of company prospects.
* There is a legal duty for corporate
executives to advance the interest of an important and powerful
class of people -- shareholders -- and significant numbers of
these shareholders are increasingly organized and assertive of
their rights (including through pension funds). There is no comparable
legal duty for corporate executives to serve consumer or worker
interests, say.
* An array of Securities and Exchange
Commission regulations establish rules for financial reporting,
and are backed by the enforcement power of the agency, as well
as the threat of private litigation from shareholders in case
of violation.
Other aspects of corporate activity are
simply not subject to such robust scrutiny and control.
Given what is now the apparent blatant
corporate disregard for the law, even in areas where executives
are most closely watched, what should we expect is occurring
elsewhere? What's happening with consumer rip-offs, sales of
unsafe  products, endangerment of
workers, pollution of the environment?
Even with inadequate law enforcement,
reporting requirements or organized countervailing institutions,
we know enough to know that the epidemic of corporate crime,
fraud and abuse is at least as severe outside of the financial
arena as within.
To take just two examples from recent
months: In May, drug maker Schering-Plough signed a consent decree
with the Food and Drug Administration, agreeing to pay a record
$500 million in connection with charges that over a three-year
period it produced about 125 different prescription and over-the-counter
drugs in factories that failed to comply with good manufacturing
practice. And in April, the Justice Department announced that
it collected more than $1.3 billion in 2001 in connection with
enforcement actions related to health care fraud, and that last
year 465 defendants were convicted for health-care fraud crimes.
This kind of revelation occurs regularly, but news accounts rarely
combine them -- as they are now doing with the financial scandals
-- to make clear the breadth and depth of the problem.
With the most recent round of disclosures
of financial wrongdoing at Worldcom and other companies, it no
longer appears that Big Business's Congressional allies are going
to be able to block all meaningful remedial measures, and the
Bush administration is now preparing a reform package.
If those reforms are limited to addressing
financial fraud, however, the biggest and most serious corporate
criminal activity will be able to flourish.
What we need is a full set of restraints
on corporate crime. But even small steps could significantly
reduce the toll of corporate crime and violence. Here are three
measures that should be adopted this year, before Congress recesses
and momentum for corporate reform slows:
First, the Federal Bureau of Investigation
should be required to compile an annual report on corporate crime
in American, to accompany its current Crime in the United States
report, which is unfortunately confined to street crime.
Second, the federal government should
refuse to do business with companies that are serious and/or
repeat law breakers, as well as deny other privileges (for example,
granting broadcasting licenses) to corporate criminals. This
would involve some new or strengthened laws and regulations,
as well more stringent enforcement of debarment, contractor responsibility
and good character laws now on the books. States and local governments
should adopt similar measures.
Third, whistleblowers and private citizens
should be able to enforce laws regulating corporate conduct.
One way to facilitate this enforcement approach would be to expand
and creatively adapt the False Claims Act, which currently enables
whistleblowers to initiate lawsuits against entities which have
defrauded the government, and which reclaims for the government
every year hundreds of millions of dollars stolen by unethical
contractors.
"Cracking down on corporate crime"
-- the mantra of the moment -- cannot be limited just to financial
crime, already the most policed form of corporate wrongdoing.
Russell Mokhiber
is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime Reporter.
Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based
Multinational
Monitor, and co-director of Essential Action. They are
co-authors of Corporate
Predators: The Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy
(Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1999.
Today's
Feature
Robert Jensen
Lynne
Cheney's Primer
Behzad Yaghmaian
An Alternative
to the G-8s Africa Initiative
Toward a Global AIDS Fund and a Living Wage
John Borowski
Public
Schools Under Seige
Norman Madarasz
Brazil,
the Workers' Party and the Financial Times
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