As many as 51 of the world's biggest 100 economies are corporations, not countries. The multinational corporation is one of the most powerful institutions of our times which dominates not only global economics, but also politics and culture. The mechanisms of corporate control over public life have remained largely obscured from public perception. That is, until now.

Citizens have little to say or do in a scenario where the mainstream media lauds Wall Street's record profits while turning a blind eye to big businesses callously wrecking the lives of people. Investigative journalists Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman do not belong to the mainstream media. They not only take names, they also attempt to answer certain questions: Where is this "profit" coming from? If working Americans' incomes have plummeted since 1980, while salaries of corporate CEOs have risen 500 per cent, can the US economy really be booming? Mokhiber and Weissman set out to explode these myths.

Is there anything called corporate crime. Jeffrey Parker, a professor of law at George Mason University feels "Crime exists only in the mind of the individual." Therefore, he argues, "since a corporation has no mind, it can commit no crime." Parker's assertion is refuted by Columbia University Law professor and corporate criminologist, John Coffee, who contends that while in theory large civil penalties could work well as criminal penalties in combating corporate wrongdoing, in reality they do not work because the civil justice system is very slow and much more favourable to defendants than the criminal justice system.

The two authors supplement Coffee's contention by enlisting the 10 worst corporations of 1998:
(1) Chevron, for continuing to do business with a brutal dictatorship in Nigeria and for alleged complicity in the killing of civilian protestors.
(2) Coca-Cola, for hooking America's kids on sugar and soda water to the point where teenage boys and girls now drink twice as much soda pop as milk, the reverse of what it was twenty years ago.
(3) General Motors, for becoming an integral part of the Nazi war machine, and then years later denying it, even when documentary proof emerged.
(4) Loral, who donated $2.2 million to the Clinton/Gore campaign, then benefited from a technology transfer to China after Clinton cleared the way with a waiver on human rights violations.
(5) Mobil, for supporting the Indonesian military in crushing an indigenous uprising in Aceh province and allegedly allowing the military to use company machinery to dig mass graves.
(6) Monsanto, for exposing consumers to unknown risks in genetically modified foods.
(7) Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, for pleading guilty to felony crimes of dumping oil in the Atlantic Ocean and then lying to the Coast Guard about it.
(8) Unocal, for engaging in numerous acts of pollution and law violations to such a degree that citizens in California petitioned the state's attorney general to revoke the company's charter.
(9) Wal-Mart, for crushing small town America, paying low wages such that a huge percentage of employees are eligible for food stamps, and for using Asian child labour.
(10) And Warner-Lambert, for marketing a hazardous diabetes drug, Rezulin, which has been linked to at least thirty-three deaths due to liver injuries.
This, Mokhiber and Weissman say is not the work of a scattered bunch of individuals. These they add up to a particular form of lawbreaking: corporate crime.

This crime transcends international boundaries as well. The Cincinnati Enquirer recently found out that Chiquita Brands International Inc, the world's largest banana company, was engaged in a range of questionable business practices. It controlled dozens of supposedly independent banana companies. It did so through elaborate business structures designed to avoid restrictions on land ownership and national security laws in Central American countries. The structures also aimed at limiting unions on its farms. Chiquita and its subsidiaries were also engaged in pesticide practices that threatened the health of workers and nearby residents.

But what about corporate criminology? At its 50^th annual meeting, the American Society of Criminology listed more than 500 sessions. Less than 10 of these dealt with white-collar and corporate crime. Laureen Snider, a professor of sociology, aptly titled her paper: 'The Sociology of Corporate crime: An Obituary'. Snider's argument was that while corporate crime itself might be increasing around the globe, the study of corporate crime by academics is on a steady decline. "If academics study in the field of white collar crimes not the crimes committed by corporations, but crimes against corporations. Instead of focusing on criminal pollution, or the manufacture of hazardous pharmaceuticals that kill, or illegal union-busting by major corporations, the few researchers studying white collar crime only look at how employees steal from employers. The studies, it is evident, are lopsided.

Equally lopsided are portrayals in the media. Mokhiber and Weissman provide reasons why not to watch television anymore. Corporate media conglomerates are getting rid of the few remaining aggressive television investigative journalists. Jane Akre and Steve Wilson were fired by WTVT Fox Television when they refused to broadcast lies about Monsanto's controversial bovine growth hormone. Their four-part series on BGH in the Florida milk supply had alleged that supermarkets in the city were selling milk from cows injected with BGH, despite promises by the supermarkets that they would not buy milk from treated cows.

The more one reads the 60 essays classified in eight categories, the more it leaves one depressed. Life in a corporate world can really be depressing. Provided, of course, you do not suffer from the ostrich syndrome.


The introduction by Ralph Nader

For the past twenty years, after a decade and a half of populist resurgence against corporate abuses by consumer, environmental, women's rights and civil rights forces, big business has been on a rampage to control our society. Whether these business supremacies are called corporatisation, commercialism, monopolies or the corporate state, the overall concentration of power and wealth in ever fewer multinational corporate centres is a matter of record.

In arena after arena -- government, workplace, marketplace, media, environment, education, science, technology-- the dominant players are large corporations. What countervailing forces that our society used to depend upon for some balance are not in retreat against the aggressive expansion of corporate influence far beyond its traditional mercantile boundaries?

The enlarged power that corporations deploy to further increase their revenues and socialise their costs comes from many sources -- old and new. Roughly eighty percent of the money contributed to federal candidates come from business interests. The mobility to export capital has given transnational companies major leverage against local, state and federal officials, not to mention against organised and unorganised labour. The swell of corporate welfare handouts has reached new depths. The contrived complexity of many financial and other services serves to confuse, deplete and daunt consumers who lose significant portions of their income in a manipulative marketplace. Alliances, joint ventures and other complex collaborations between should-be competitors have made a mockery of what is left of antitrust enforcement. The opportunities to control or defeat governmental attempts for corporate accountability that flow from transcending national jurisdictions into globalised strategies to escape taxation and pit countries and their workers against one another appear to be endless. The autocratic systems of governance called GATT and NAFTA reflect to the smallest detail ways that giant corporations wish to control the world. These firms are on a collision course against democratic processes, and the merging of states and businesses, to the latter's advantage, weakens relentlessly both the restraints of the law and the willingness of legislators to do anything about it.

Taken together, the world is witnessing its subjugation to the large corporate model of economic development, the large corporate model of technology and the large corporate model of culture itself. These accelerating trendlines invite accelerating comprehension and response. History demonstrates that commercialism knows few boundaries that are not externally imposed. All the major religions have warned their adherents against the excesses of commercial value systems, albeit with different languages, images and metaphors.

Specific descriptions of corporate misbehaviour do nourish proper generalisations that in turn lead to more just movements and practices. Here, columnists Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman provide a distinct service in Corporate Predators. It is not just the versatility of their writings -- covering bribery, pollution, corporate crime, fraud and abuse, failure of law enforcement, union-busting, the mayhem inflicted by product defects and toxics, the deep gap between the rich and the rest of America, corporate front groups, the media censorship and self-censorship, the profiteering, the pillaging overseas and more-- but it is also the impact on the reader that comes from aggregating evidence. Our country does not collect statistics on corporate crime e way it does on street crime. For it to do so would begin to highlight a little-attended agenda for law enforcement and other corporate reforms. Neither Congress nor the White House and its Justice Department have made any moves over the years to assemble from around the country the abuses of corporations in quantifiable format so as to drive policy.

So, description -- accurate, representational description -- must now suffice. As the editor of the Corporate Crime Reporter (Mokhiber)and the editor of the Multinational Monitor (Weissman), the authors know well the difference between anecdotes that are illustrative and that are idiosyncratic. This volume of their weekly columns carries the evidence that illustrates patterns of continuing corporate derelictions, not lonely deviations from a more congenial norm.

The authors' experience over the years with the impact of disclosures has led them to the conclusion that the facts must be linked to civic engagement and democratic activity for change. If disclosure produced its own dynamic imperatives for change, the recurrent exposure of corporate abuses in such mainstream publications as the Wall Street Journal, Business Week and some national television programs like Sixty Minutes would have caused these changes. Such, unfortunately has not been the case. The linkages between knowledge and action have not been sufficient. But readers of Common Courage Press published books tend towards citizen activism. They want to know because they want to do. Some may even agree with the ancient Chinese saying that "To know and not to do is not to know."

So, go forward readers who wish to be leaders in the advancement of justice -- what Daniel Webster once called "the great work of men on Earth"-- and savour the writings that will motivate more and more women and men to band together in organisations that build a more just democracy.