The 10 Worst Corporations Of 2005

Delphi: In October, Delphi CEO Steve Miller took his company into bankruptcy, with the explicit purpose of trashing the social contract between unionized auto workers in the United States and the auto industry. He proposed slashing worker wages from $27 an hour to a mere 10 bucks. And, in a fit of staggering arrogance, Miller and Delphi simultaneously proposed huge bonuses for company executives. DuPont: Deadly chemicals from DuPont's perfluorinated, chemical-based coatings and related sources are now in the blood of 95 percent of people in the United States. DuPont has claimed that it does not know how the chemicals got there. But Glenn Evers, formerly one of the company's top technical experts, says that DuPont hid for decades that it was polluting people's blood with a hyper-persistent chemical associated with the grease-resistant coatings on paper food packaging. (For a complete history, see www.ewg.org.) In December, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency agreed to settle claims against DuPont for a paltry $16.5 million. On a happier note, the agency and DuPont announced that the chemicals will be phased out by 2015. ExxonMobil: In the face of a virtually complete scientific consensus that global warming is real and happening -- and considerable agreement that it is happening faster than expected just a few years ago -- ExxonMobil continues to insist that "scientific evidence remains inconclusive." So far, the cynical, profit-motivated, short-term and self-interested views of ExxonMobil have mattered more than the evidence-based perspective of the world's climatologists. That's because the most profitable corporation on earth has lots of political power and is skilled at amplifying its views (see ExposeExxon.org for details), and the climatologists do not and are not. While the world burns, ExxonMobil is raking in record profits -- more than $36 billion in 2005, the highest ever earned for a single company in one year. This article is posted at: http://lists.essential.org/pipermail/corp-focus/2006/000238.html _

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