[Mb-civic] Crush Corporate Crime

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

Folks--at the end of this short important article is a call to action.  I have 
pasted the short email letter that I sent to the Galveston County D.A., and you 
are welcome to use it with your own name and contact info. --Mha Atma


Crush Corporate Crime
By Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

Last week, we attended a press conference.

It was held by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which
identifies itself as "an international learned society composed of the
world's leading scientists, scholars, artists, business people, and public
leaders."

The Academy held the press conference to draw attention to a new study it
was releasing: "Restoring Trust in American Business."

The idea for the study came from three corporate insiders -- securities
lawyer powerbrokers Martin Lipton and Larry Sonsini, and Harvard Business
School Professor and Computer Associates board member Jay Lorsch -- the
same Computer Associates that was recently criminally charged in a massive
corporate fraud, and was granted a deferred prosecution agreement, which
let the company off the hook for the consequences of the crime.

These corporate insiders said that they found a "disturbing breakdown of
values in corporate America."

But search as we would through the 184 pages of "Restoring Trust in
American Business," we found nary a suggestion that one way to restore
trust and deter corporate criminal wrongdoing would be to criminally
prosecute felonious corporations or their executives.

No, in their book, the power brokers talk on and on about ethics, and
gatekeepers, and stronger professional standards, lack of judgment, and
independence -- but nothing about prosecuting corporate crime.

And so at the press conference, we asked -- why didn't you address this
issue in your study?

Damon Silvers, a lawyer at the AFL-CIO, and a friend of ours, rose to
answer.

Silvers says that he attended business school.

And he said that on his first day at business school, he attended a
mandatory ethics class.

The question addressed on the first day of class was -- do you take a
factory overseas where you are certain to benefit from child labor?

Half the class, mostly Americans said -- if it is value maximizing in the
short term, do it.

The other half of the class, mostly non-Americans said -- of course not,
that is dangerous, bad things will happen to your corporation in the long
run if you do it.

Nobody in the class -- no student, nor the teacher -- suggested that
there might be things that would be value maximizing but would be wrong to
do, short term or long term.

"There are a lot of bad apples," Silvers said. "Maybe there are some
sociopaths out there. But when you have a culture where people who are
given control of most of the resources of our society believe there are in
fact no moral limits, none, that every moral question can be answered on a
spreadsheet, then what we have essentially seen in the last few years is
doomed to repeat itself. But the solution to that cannot be putting
sociopaths in jail. Because that is not the problem. The problem is
systemic structures that encourage people to behavior in really
destructive ways. It is not about good people and bad people, which is how
President Bush framed it. It is about how we channel ordinary people.
That's why I think the criminal issue, while important, is necessarily and
unavoidably a limited solution."

Well, if the people who are "given control of most of the resources of our
society believe there are in fact no moral limits, none," as Silvers puts
it, then we have a nation of corporate sociopaths.

And all the informed business ethics courses and codes of professional
responsibility are not going to make a dent in corporate crime.

But criminal prosecution might actually do the trick.

Criminal prosecution is not just about catching and holding accountable a
few bad apples. It is about society drawing clear lines of right and
wrong, and then enforcing those social norms seriously.

Had the academy added even one or two citizen activists, or one or two
academics who have studied corporate and white-collar crime, they might
have added this to their list of remedies.

Just to name one, they might have talked with University of Tennessee
criminologist Neal Shover, who has written a book titled Choosing White
Collar Crime.

It will be published by Cambridge University Press in September 2005.

Shover argues that the choice to commit corporate and white-collar crime
is a far more careful, prudent and protracted process than it is for
street crime.

Therefore, criminal prosecution will have a greater deterrent impact
with white collar crime than with street crime.

Translated: Shover wants to crack down hard on corporate crime.

We were thinking about all of this the other day when we pulled over to a
rest stop in Virginia.

The Virginia State Police had posters up at the rest stop encouraging the
citizenry to join with the police to "crush crime."

According to the poster, the Virginia State Police are seeking to curb
"escalating crime" with "112 specially trained state troopers who work
with citizens, civic groups, and governmental agencies on crime prevention
issues."

To which we counter today with our "Crush Corporate Crime" campaign.

Our "Crush Corporate Crime" campaign will seek to curb escalating
corporate crime with the millions of Americans who recognize that
corporate crime and violence inflicts far more damage than all street
crime combined -- yet receives far less attention from the corporate
political, media, academic and law enforcement establishments.

Our first item on the agenda:

Get the District Attorney in Galveston County, Texas to open a criminal
homicide and reckless endangerment investigation of BP and its executives.

Last week, 15 workers were incinerated, and more than 70 injured,
following an explosion at BP's sprawling refinery in Texas City, Texas.

It was the third fatal accident at the Texas City BP facility in the
last four years.

In September 2004, two workers were burned to death and another was
seriously injured.

In 2001, a maintenance worker at the facility died after falling into a
tank that had been shut down.

Nationwide, BP's facilities have had more than 3,565 accidents since
1990, ranking first in the nation, according to a 2004 report by the
Texas Public Interest Research Group (TexPIRG).

To charge BP or its executives with reckless homicide, or involuntary
manslaughter, the DA would have to find that BP and its executives
consciously disregarded "a substantial and unjustifiable risk that a death
will occur."

We believe that the families of the dead deserve a full-blown reckless
homicide investigation by the District Attorney in Galveston County.

Ira Reiner, when he was district attorney of Los Angeles County in the
early 1990s, would open a criminal investigation any time there was a
worker death in his jurisdiction.

But Mohamed Ibrahim, the first assistant district attorney in Galveston
County, told us that his office had opened no such criminal investigation
into the BP matter.

"We have no reason to believe at this point that it was anything but an
unfortunate industrial accident," Ibrahim said. "If OSHA (Occupational
Safety and Health Administration) came to us and said it was a result of
criminal recklessness, we would look at an investigation."

But OSHA has proven that it can't be trusted with worker safety
investigations.

Why not an independent homicide investigation?

"We don't have the resources or expertise," Ibrahim said.

Well, it's time to ramp up.

We call on all citizens of conscience to take a moment now and write to
Kurt Sistrunk, the district attorney in Galveston County, and call on him
to open a criminal investigation of BP and its executives in connection
with the blast that killed at least 15 and injured more than 70.

Opening a criminal investigation doesn't mean a crime has been committed.

It means only that there are 15 dead human beings -- may they rest in
peace -- and the need for an all-out criminal investigation.

The District Attorney can be reached at kurt.sistrunk at co.galveston.tx.us
-- or give him a call (409) 766-2355.


Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime
Reporter, <http://www.corporatecrimereporter.com>. Robert Weissman is
editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor,
http://www.multinationalmonitor.org. Mokhiber and Weissman are co-authors
of On the Rampage: Corporate Predators and the Destruction of Democracy
(Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 2005).

(c) Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

This article is posted at:
<http://lists.essential.org/pipermail/corp-focus/2005/000200.html>

_______________________________________________

Kurt Sistrunk
Galveston County District Attorney 

Dear Mr. Sistrunk,

As concerned Americans we are interested in justice and we believe, as we are 
sure you do,  that criminal wrongdoing, especially that which results in the 
deaths of innocent people, should be investigated and punished.

We therefore strongly urge you to open a criminal investigation of BP and its 
executives in connection with the blast that killed at least 15 and injured more 
than 70.

We will join millions of Americans in closely following your actions in this 
case, and we hope that you will do your job and seek justice.

Most sincerely,

Martha Oaklander
Dr. Mha Atma S Khalsa
1536 Crest Dr.
Los Angeles, CA 90035


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"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
   ---   George Orwell


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