COLUMN: Human Rights vs. Corporations
In a prior column, I picked on Weyerhaeuser as an example of how students and professors can unwittingly contribute to ecological genocide through unwise purchases. Last week, however, offered hope that some of the more menacing corporations may eventually be brought to justice. A federal court held that, under the Alien Tort Claims Act, the Royal Dutch/Shell oil company could be brought to trial by the survivors of its activities in Nigeria, and is liable if shown complicit in human rights abuses committed by the Nigerian military against environmental activists who opposed Royal Dutch/Shell operations, including several extra-judicial executions. If this ruling stands, many of the Fortune 500 will be forced to open their wallets considerably to account for past and present atrocities. The modern corporation has grown from a narrowly defined construct, chartered to achieve a distinct purpose, to a freewheeling entity with virtually unrestrained power. This is due partly to a decades-old, bizarrely subversive court ruling on a railroad case that declared corporations “natural persons” under the 14th Amendment. It is due also to the interlocking system that has emerged between corporate America and government, with interchangeable parts, resources and personnel. Corporate governance has achieved new prominence in the Bush administration, with most of his political appointees tapped directly from major corporations, and most regulatory agencies, from the FCC to the EPA to the SEC, are now headed by people from the industry to be regulated. (There is scarcely a figure in the Bush administration who hasn’t worked for, or on behalf of Enron). Despite the rather meager Shays-Meehan campaign finance reform victory, little threat exists to these super-entities in the near future without a concerted and united assertion of power by consumers and grassroots activists. The United States has also provided the major springboard for the projection of corporate power worldwide, but failed to establish the necessary safeguards to ensure that corporations operate with even the minimal standards present at home. In fact, so-called “investor-protection” provisions of NAFTA and WTO rules all but prevent governments from establishing minimum codes of conduct, lest they be sued in closed-door tribunals for “interfering” with foreign investment. This shift of power, combined with the lack of human-rights review by the alphabet-soup of publicly owned U.S. and international finance institutions has spawned disaster for people and ecosystems across the globe. In Burma, the ruling military junta is well-known for its human rights abuses against people protesting oil development by Premier Oil, a company 25 percent owned by Ameranda Hess with a U.S. presence. In Ecuador, the OCP oil pipeline will ensure the swift destruction disaster of the richest cloud rain forest left in the nation. Ecuador President Gustavo Noboa felt compelled, however to declare “war” on environmentalists to make way for OCP, led by Occidental Petroleum, a California-based company. “Oxy,” as we call it, is loved by politicians everywhere – President Bush has recently asked for $98 million in military assistance to protect its Cano Limon pipeline in Columbia (our “anti-insurgency” activity in Columbia has always had everything to do with oil and nothing to do with coca eradication; President Bush is simply the first president to drop the false pretense.) With this move, the U’we tribe, which has fought to keep Oxy off its land for several years, can write its obituary. International Paper, Mitsubishi and other companies have hammered the forests of Chile with no small amount of U.S. government help, starting with the U.S. backed 1973 coup against its prior government. The beneficiary, Augusto Pinochet, eagerly embraced U.S. corporations. After Boise Cascade took up business in the Sierra Madre range of Mexico, farmers Rodolfo Montiel and Teodoro Cabrera organized their community in opposition and soon found themselves in prison. Only after their lawyer was killed and they narrowly survived several attempts on their life by thugs widely understood to be hit men for timber owners, did President Fox grant them amnesty (while carefully avoiding a declaration of innocence on trumped-up charges of drug trafficking.) Finally, lest we believe corporate and political human rights abuses are limited to foreign nations, I saw living proof otherwise last week in Washington, D.C. I saw a young woman from the Gwitch’in, an Athabascan tribe of the far northern Arctic, describe the lethal threat to their culture from calls to drill the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. I would give my left arm to see Senator Frank Murkowski of Alaska (or either of Utah’s senators, for that matter, who have indicated support for drilling) look this woman in the eye, and say, “It’s fine by me if your culture dies.” Perhaps it’s because a culture of only 7,000 people stands with a gun to its head? Or do we consider them human at all? Are we, at Utah State University, any better than those who wiped out the Mayans for more gold or those who wiped out the Plains Indians for more land? Has our history of war and genocide taught us anything? The Senate will answer this question any day now. Stay tuned.