The 100 Worst Corporate Citizens

Damn it!

These huge-ass institutional thugs are not "citizens!"

The sooner we get that through our thick skulls the better.

Corporations are made up of citizens; they are not, as institutions, citizens deserving of individual rights, such as those which have been granted to them.

The sooner we change that loony law the better

AlterNet: WorkPlace: The 100 Worst Corporate Citizens:

"Business Ethics compiles its list using data on corporate social performance in eight categories -- community, diversity, employee relations, environment, etc. -- from the Socrates database produced by KLD Research & Analytics. That information is then processed quantitatively using methodology developed by Sandra Waddock and Samuel Graves of the Carroll School of Management at Boston College. Unfortunately, the magazine says nothing about that methodology, so the reader is confronted with a statistical black box. An article accompanying the list provides scanty details. Thus, one must essentially take the rankings at face value.

The first thing that stands out is that the list is top heavy with high-tech firms, including Hewlett-Packard (No. 2), Advanced Micro Devices (No. 3), Motorola (No. 4), Cisco Systems (No. 8), Dell Inc. (No. 9), Texas Instruments (No. 10), and Intel (No. 11). The magazine says this is, in part, because 'most top tech companies do well on environmental issues.' That claim would come as a surprise to groups such as the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition (SVTC), which has for years been pointing out that high-tech industry is far dirtier than its clean image.

The electronics industry is a heavy user of toxic chemicals, which have a way of seeping out into the environment, resulting in a proliferation of Superfund toxic waste sites in places such as Silicon Valley. (Read On ^)