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Multinational Monitor

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File:Multinational Monitor logo-red.gif
25th Anniversary Cover


The Multinational Monitor is a non-profit magazine founded by Ralph Nader in 1980. It is published by Essential Information. Although the Multinational Monitor’s primary focus is on news analysis of the activities of world corporations; it also prints articles having to do with labor issues, the environment, globalization, privatization multilateral banks, economic issues, and developing nations.

Features

The Top Ten Worst Corporations

Officially named in 1992, it has since become an annual issue detailing the top ten culprits of corporate crime, negligence and dastardly behavior out of the major corporations. Usually released in December it has become the most recognized and publicized feature of the Multinational Monitor. The 2005 list was: BP - Delphi - Dupont - ExxonMobil - Ford - Halliburton - KPMG - Roche - Suez - W.R. Grace [1]

The Lawrence Summers Memorial Award

In satirical honor of the former treasury secretary under Bill Clinton and Harvard president, the Lawrence Summers Memorial Award is a bi-monthly award given to companies that take extraordinary leaps to justify unethical practices. When Lawrence Summers was an economist for the World Bank, he wrote a memorandum in 1991 which advocated transferring waste and dirty industries from industrialized to developing countries. Summers argued that economic logic supported the dumping of toxic waste in the countries with the lowest wages. Summers stated that the "...underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly under polluted; their air quality is vastly inefficiently low [sic] compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City.” Summers later stated the memo was meant to be ironic.Summers eventually became Treasury Secretary during the Clinton administration and then president of Harvard University. [2]

Most recently the May/June award went to British American Tobacco who presented the argument, to the parliament of New South Wales that a smoking ban in pubs would lead to an increase in the drugging of smoker’s drink when they would leave for a cigarette.

References

  1. ^ The 10 Worst Corporations of 2005 "Multinational Monitor Nov./Dec. issue"
  2. ^ Lawrence Summers Memorial Award “Multinationalmonitor.org”