People regularly get sent to prison by their governments, in the United States over one millions people are in prison. In Australia there are about 17,000 people in prison. Whilst the media is whipping up hysteria about crime, the real criminals large corporations and the people who own them, get ignored. Here is a list of corporate criminals and their crimes. The list is by no means exhaustive, it merely provides a small amount of examples of some of the mischief business is up to today.

Various sources of information were used to write this article. If you want to find out more about nasty corporate shenannigans then there are some useful internet sites including:

Multinational monitor: http://www.essential.org/monitor/monitor.html

McSpotlight: http://www.mcspotlight.org/

Ford

In 1970, Ford released a car onto the market called the Pinto. The Pinto had an unfortunate problem that if hit suffered from a rear end collision, the fuel tank would rupture and this would often burn the occupants to death. Pinto crashes have caused over 500 burn deaths in people who would have otherwise survived, It was no until 8 years later in 1977 that ford changed the car to make it safer.

Even before the car was put into production, Ford management realized there was a problem. Internal company documents reveal that Ford crashed tested the Pinto over 40 times and every rear end collision at over 40 kmph without changes being made to the car resulted in a ruptured fuel tank. Ford decided not to change the car because assembly line machinery had already been produced and the lucrative small car market was highly competitive.

Ford justified this decision not to change the vehicle for 8 years by doing a "cost-benefit" analysis. After a bit of corporate lobbying the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration decided that a human life was worth $200,725. Ford then worked out the yearly cost of not fixing the cars, and the yearly cost of fixing cars. Ford estimated that the cost to fix the cars was higher and so did not bother to make the changes.

The calculations Ford made are as follows:

YEARLY COST OF NOT MAKING THE FORD PINTO SAFER:

180 burn deaths, 180 serious burn injuries, 2,100 burned vehicles.
$200,000 per burn death, $67,000 per injury, $700 per vehicle.
Total Cost: $49.5 million.

YEARLY COST OS MAKING THE PINTO SAFER:

11 million cars, 1.5 million light trucks.
$11 per car, $11 per truck.
Total cost: $137 million.

Because the Department of Transportation officials had been sufficiently indoctrinated, government approval was not a problem. This is not the only time governments and corporations have put a value on human life, Victoria s private prisons are allows to have one death per year without there being a problem with their contract.

Ford has not stopped being irresponsible with respect to car safety. It is currently being sued by an insurance company State Farm Insurance for covering up fire hazards in 26 million Ford vehicles sold between 1983 and 1993. State Farm wanted Ford to pay over 4200 million for insurance claims related to ignition switches that short-circuited and caused 64,000 fires. The insurance company also alleges that Ford concealed this fire hazard from the public and government safety officials until April 1996, when evidence of widespread fires caused Ford to recall 8.7 million vehicles.

Elf Aquitane

The French oil company Elf Aquitane was frustrated by the Republic of Congo President Pascal Lissouba, now it has been accused of supporting a rebel movement to overthrow him. The Republic of Congo is a former French colony, not the former Belgian colony recently known as Zaire.

Elf Aquitane is responsible for more than a two thirds of Congo s oil production. Lissouba angered Elf by negotiating contracts with the American company Occidental Petroleum. Occidental isn t a very nice company either. More than 5,000 U wa Indians from Columbia are planning to jump off a cliff if Occidental goes forward with its plans to drill for oil on their sacred land.

President Lissouba s government was overthrown in October 1997 by former president Denis Sassou Nguesso. Sassou Nguesso has a reputation as a "Pierre Cardin Marxist" due to his expensive tastes. He was defeated to Congo s first election in 1992, in which Lissouba was brought to power.

Lissouba is sueing Elf in French courts, and is accusing Elf Aquitane of providing up to $250 million to Sassou Nguesso s forces, and shipping arms from Angola. The four month civil war which brought Sassou Nguesso to power left thousands dead and hundreds of thousands displaced from their homes.

CRA/RTZ

In 1969 the Australian mining company CRA, a subsidiary of the world s largest mining company RTZ, established the copper min Panguna on the island of Bougainville. The company did not ask the people who lived there for permission and 800 were left homeless. 220 hectares of forest were poisoned, felled and burnt, the bulldozed into the river, along with the topsoil. The company dug a hole 6 kilometers long, 4 kilometers wide, and half a kilometer deep. Over a billion tones of poisonous waste were dumped into the river system.

The people who lived in Bougainville have always been opposed to the mine, when the mine was established people lay down in front of the bulldozers and resisted police. After 20 years of protests, petitions and lobbying, people decided to take direct action, and forcible closed the mine in 1988.

The PNG government, with the support of Australia, responded by sending in riot police and then the military. Australia has been supporting a war by PNG on Bougainville in order to reopen the mine. There has also been a blockade on the island. The war and blockade have killed over 10,000 people. Australia the PNG Defense Force $32 million each year in direct military aid.

PNG tried to get another friendly multinational, Sandline International to send in mercenaries to recapture the island. The people of PNG were outraged at the prospect or mercenaries being used, and there was much civil unrest, resulting in the deal with Sandline being cancelled. Sandline personnel have a motto "leave no trace", which means that if they kill a civilian they would go after the whole village so that there is nobody to report the murder.

The Bougainville incident is not the only mine RTZ has been involved in which has resulted in abuses of human rights. A government commission revealed that at the Elliot Lake uranium mine, workers were laboring under radioactive exposures seven times hired than is legally safe. RTZ also operated a uranium mine in Namibia called the Rossing uranium mine. South Africa researches Gillian and Suzanne Cronje found that the conditions the workers were in were "akin to slavery". This mine also violated the United Nations Decree on Namibia s Natural Resources.

RTZ operated the Weipa mine in north Queensland, which is on land seized from its Aboriginal inhabitants who have never been compensated for this theft. When Comalco, the CRA/RTZ subsidiary which operated the mine was floated in 1970, only 10% was offered to the public. A large portion of the other 90% was secretly offered the day before to people such as the Queensland Treasurer, state ministers for Aboriginal Affairs, Industrial Development, Local government and Electricity, the Premiere of Western Australia. RTZ has a significant capacity to influence domestic power brokers in the areas that it operates.