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WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM: Disgraceful Distinctions

Gustavo Capdevila

DAVOS, Switzerland, Jan 25 2006 (IPS) - While the corporate world élite hold their traditional annual meeting in this Swiss alpine resort, civil society organisations again did their best to spoil the party, pointing a symbolic finger at corporate environmental and social irresponsibility. The targets this time were Chevron, Walt Disney and Citigroup.

Pro Natura, the Swiss branch of Friends of the Earth, and The Berne Declaration, a non-governmental organisation that promotes justice and equality in North-South relations, awarded their sarcastic prizes known as the Public Eye awards on Tuesday.

Their announcement took place on the opening day of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, an annual meeting that brings together CEOs of transnational corporations, political leaders and prominent neoliberal economists.

Sonja Ribi of Pro Natura told IPS that Public Eye award recipients are nominated by civil society organisations all over the world. Held at the same time as the WEF, the ceremony has become a tradition, and represents “the only true alternative” to the Davos meeting, she said.

The organisers of The Public Eye on Davos – Pro Natura and The Berne Declaration – offer a public platform at which “the dark side of a uniquely profit oriented globalisation is illuminated,” Ribi explained.

The prizes for corporate irresponsibility were awarded this year to the oil giant Chevron, in environmental affairs, for polluting forests in Ecuador; to Walt Disney, in the social domain, for violating workers’ and human rights in China; and to Citigroup, for enabling tax evasion and money laundering by corporations, individuals and dictators.

This year, for the first time, a positive prize was presented to “citizen activists” who organised a campaign against irresponsible corporate behaviour, “and who won,” said Oliver Classen, of The Berne Declaration.

The positive prize went to the National Revolutionary Union of Workers at the Euzkadi Rubber Company in El Salto, Mexico (SNRTE), for its successful fight to reopen the factory which had been closed by the new owners, Continental Tire, a German company.

The positive award was shared with two German civil society organisations, Germanwatch and the Food First Information and Action Network, which backed the Mexican trade union in its struggle.

“We hope that this great experience can benefit other workers and be useful in other similarly important conflicts involving the defence of human rights, the environment and culture. Together we can change the world and counteract the impudence of those who run today’s world economy,” Jesús Torres Nuño of the SNRTE commented to IPS.

The Public Eye on Davos is aimed at reminding “WEF members and other corporations that the public expects more environmental responsibility, demands respect for human and labor rights, and does not accept tax avoidance,” said Ribi.

In Chevron’s case, the Public Eye award was proposed by Amazon Watch, a conservation organisation based in the U.S. state of California, for pollution caused by the Texaco oil company. Between 1964 and 1992, Texaco spilled 70 billion litres of toxic waste on land, rivers and wetlands in Ecuador’s Amazon jungle region.

This human and ecological catastrophe became Chevron’s responsibility in 2001, when it acquired Texaco in a 45 billion dollar merger, Amazon Watch director Jennifer DeLury Ciplet pointed out this Wednesday in Davos.

“Unfortunately, the case of Texaco and now Chevron in Ecuador is only one of many examples where transnational corporations have taken advantage of weak governments, vulnerable populations and the voiceless environment to bolster their bottom line,” the U.S. activist declared.

A study titled “Looking for Mickey Mouse’s Conscience: A Survey of the Working Conditions in Disney’s Supplier Factories in China,” led to the U.S. Walt Disney company receiving its “award” for social irresponsibility. The study was carried out by a non-governmental organisation in Hong Kong, Students and Scholars against Corporate Misbehaviour (SACOM), which is concerned with the working conditions of the poor.

SACOM found that workers’ rights were being violated in four factories in Guangdong province in southern China, where books and other products are manufactured for Disney. Employees work 60-90 hours a week, and in one place up to 12 workers were crammed into a single dorm room.

Parry Leung, a representative of SACOM, said “The collusion between the corrupted state and transnational capital has brought miserable conditions to workers in China and other developing countries. Pro-active measures must be taken to rectify the current situation at the workplace level. Our understanding is that the Chinese workers are not powerless or submissive. They are capable of resisting global capitalism.”

Citigroup was nominated for its Public Eye award by the Tax Justice Network, a non-aligned coalition of researchers and activists with shared concerns about the harmful effects of tax evasion, tax competition and tax havens.

Lucy Komisar, a New York journalist, said that Citigroup had engaged “in tax evasion and had facilitated tax evasion by its clients. By these actions, Citigroup has violated both tax laws in many countries and the standards of corporate responsibility and ethics,” she stated.

In October 2004, Chilean authorities brought a suit for tax evasion against former dictator Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990). One of the banks that laundered Pinochet’s money was Citibank, a member of Citigroup, Komisar told IPS.

A report by the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations said that Citibank laundered at least five million dollars for Pinochet, “and perhaps millions more.”

The list of questionable characters who engaged in similar shady deals with Citibank includes Raúl Salinas, brother of former Mexican president Carlos Salinas (1988-1994); Asif Ali Zardari, husband of deposed Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto (1988-1990); and the dictator of Gabon, Omar Bongo, who has held power since 1967.

Citigroup clients also include the three grown children of Nigeria’s late dictator, general Sani Abacha (1993-1998); former Venezuelan president Jaime Lusinchi (1984-1989); two daughters of former Indonesian dictator Suharto (1967-1998); and former dictator of Paraguay, general Alfredo Stroessner (1954-1989).

U.S. Senator Carl Levin, who aired the list of names, added “and these are just the clients we know,” Komisar recalled.

“Tax evasion by corporations and the very rich impoverishes people of all countries, increases the gaping divide between rich and poor, and shifts tax bills to the middle class and small businesses,” she noted.

Capital flight, which goes hand-in-hand with tax evasion, “beggars the economies of developing countries, transferring the wealth of the poor to the industrialised world,” said Komisar.