Published on Friday, January 3, 2002 by CommonDreams.org
The 10 Worst Corporations of 2002
by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

2002 will forever be remembered as the year of corporate crime, the year even President George Bush embraced the notion of "corporate responsibility."

While the Bush White House has now downgraded its "corporate responsibility portal" to a mere link to uninspiring content on the White House webpage, and although the prospect of war has largely bumped the issue off the front pages, the cascade of corporate financial and accounting scandals continues.

We easily could have filled Multinational Monitor's list of the 10 Worst Corporations of the Year with some of the dozens of companies embroiled in the financial scandals.

But we decided against that course.

As extraordinary as the financial misconduct has been, we didn't want to contribute to the perception that corporate wrongdoing in 2002 was limited to the financial misdeeds arena.

For Multinational Monitor's 10 Worst Corporations of 2002 list, we included only Andersen from the ranks of the financial criminals and miscreants. Andersen's assembly line document destruction certainly merits a place on the list. (Citigroup appears on the list as well, but primarily for a subsidiary's involvement in predatory lending, as well as the company's funding of environmentally destructive projects around the world.)

As for the rest, we present a collection of polluters, dangerous pill peddlers, modern-day mercenaries, enablers of human rights abuses, merchants of death, and beneficiaries of rural destruction and misery.

Multinational Monitor has named Arthur Andersen, British American Tobacco (BAT), Caterpillar, Citigroup, DynCorp, M&M/Mars, Procter & Gamble, Schering Plough, Shell and Wyeth as the 10 Worst Corporations of 2002.

Find out why these are the 10 worst, by reading the rest of the article here:

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0103