Corporate crime wave: Australia's epidemic of corporate criminality

“As crimes pile up they become invisible”

Bertolt Brecht

“Corporate crime poses a significant threat to the welfare of the community. Given the pervasive presence of corporations in a wide range of activities in our society, and the impact of their actions on a much wider group of people than are affected by individual action, the potential for both economic and physical harm caused by a corporation is great.”

Law Reform Commission of New South Wales

In two recent submissions, I argue that Australia is in the wake of a global and national epidemic of corporate and business malfeasance, lawlessness and criminality, and has become a haven for corporate and white collar crime.

Crimes committed by those at the top of the corporate (and political) hierarchy are routinely ignored or brushed under the carpet and Australia governments and the various regulatory authorities have failed to take action against increasingly egregious and escalating levels of unlawful and criminal conduct by corporations and business.

One submission was to an Australian Senate Inquiry into Penalties for White Collar Crime (which has since lapsed because of the government's dissolution of both houses.) My submission is available here as Submission No 18 under the banner of the Nemesis Project which I coordinate.

The second submission was to the Federal Attorney's General's public consultation on Deferred Prosecution Agreements for corporate and business crime (submission is not yet publicly available but will be here).

In the submission to the Senate Inquiry into Penalties for White Collar Crime, I argue that:

• Over recent decades legal and regulatory systems have been dismantled or loosened to remove constraints against corporate and investor profit-making and profit-taking.
• Corporate and white-collar crime is traceable to a gross failure of the law. Legal constraints have been cast aside or not applied to their fullest. Corporations and business groups have worked to limit the effectiveness of efforts to stamp out corporate crime. They make it more difficult to prosecute crimes.
• Corporations and business have actively subverted the law, as well as government regulation and ethical standards, in order to maximize their profits and ensure that resources flow to them. There has been a pervasive legal and political failure to control unlawful conduct by corporations and business.
• For decades, the regulatory authorities have failed to investigate and take action against corporate and white collar crimes.  Governments, corporate regulators and law enforcement authorities and politicians have been unwilling to take serious action against corporate criminals who knowingly swindle and harm ordinary Australians.
• The dominant response to corporate and business offending has been regulation rooted in co-operation. These strategies work predominantly to the advantage of powerful corporate and business interests.

These views were supported by numerous other submissions to the Senate Inquiry, as well as a recent report by the Australia Institute.

A submission to the Senate Inquiry by the the Economic Consultancy LF Economics provides a damming indictment of corporate criminality and control fraud within the FIRE sector (finance, insurance and real estate).

They contend that systemic criminal activity exists in the FIRE sector, with the full knowledge of all the regulatory authorities and State and Federal governments, and  places consumers at grave risk of having their finances and livelihoods destroyed.

LF Economics calls for much greater enforcement and prosecution of corporate and financial criminality:

Australians have been betrayed by the regulatory agencies’ neglect and continual siding with lenders and corporate management, despite their full knowledge of the catastrophic pain endured by many who have lost their homes, assets and life savings. ….. A strict focus on rules, regulations, standards, codes and penalties will have a negligible effect on control frauds because these crimes are simply ignored in reality. Two decades of fruitless inquiries and tweaking of innumerable rules and regulations has merely contributed to the losses endured by typical ‘mum and dad’ investors, now into many tens (perhaps hundreds) of billions of dollars. The nation already has an abundance of appropriate laws and regulations to contain and dismantle these control frauds, yet regulators are averse to enforcement, rendering these powers null and void.

The Australia Institute report Corporate Malfeasance in Australia shows that corporate malfeasance is endemic and widespread in Australia. Its findings include:

• Budget cuts enacted by the current government have compromised the ability to investigate corporate wrongdoing.
• There are hundreds of cases against corporations and business being pursued by Australian regulators each year, however progress is seriously impaired by the lack of staffing and resources.
•  There are fewer regulators ‘patrolling the corporate beat’ in Australia with government agencies responsible for monitoring corporate wrongdoing and malfeasance having their staffing cut between 14-16% since the 2013-14 Budget.

Despite this corporate crime wave, the Abbott/Turnbull Government is considering introducing a Deferred Prosecution Agreements (DPA) Scheme to give corporations accused of wrongdoing and criminality the opportunity to defer prosecution in exchange for a monetary payment and compliance with a range of conditions. DPAs involve a shift from prosecution to compliance.

A DPA is a contractual agreement between government and a corporate entity that allows government to impose sanctions and set up and monitor institutional changes, in exchange for an agreement that government forego further investigation and corporate criminal indictment.

Governments and regulatory authorities (particularly in the USA and UK) have relied primarily on deferred prosecution agreements, however corporations and business continue to engage in unlawful and criminal conduct. Indeed, the criminality has intensified and become more brazen.

In the US, despite an epidemic of criminality, the authorities have been unwilling to charge and prosecute corporate criminals and one consequence of the adoption of DPA’s, is that Federal prosecutions of corporate and white collar crime is at a 20 year low.

In my submission, I argue that Deferred Prosecution Agreements are no solution to the epidemic of serious corporate malfeasance and criminality that has made Australia a haven for corporate crime.

There is no evidence that DPAs deter corporate and white collar crime and they may, in fact, encourage crime by reducing the threats of prosecution and incarceration. As the number of DPAs rise, the number of prosecutions decline.

My submission opposed the adoption of a DPA scheme in Australia.

Corporate executive found guilty faces a jail sentence

"Don Blankenship's conviction doesn't feel like victory but in the grand scope of more than a century of the coal industry's abuse of the people of Appalachia, it may mark a starting place....My heart aches for all those who suffered and died under Blankenship's avaricious lash. The jury showed him more mercy than he has ever shown anyone in his entire existence on this planet. Even if he serves his one year slap-on-the-wrist, we know already that justice will not be done His legacy of poisoning Appalachia will persist long after his name has been forgotten."
Bob Kincaid, president of the Coal River Mountain Watch

Recently, I wrote a blog piece Holding corporate executives criminally responsible for the deaths and harms they cause crimes about the trial of Don Blankenship, the coal baron and CEO of  Massey Energy who was on trial for criminal charges over a coal mine explosion that killed 29 miners at the Massey Energy Upper Big Branch mine in 2010. 

The Upper Big Branch explosion was the worst US mining disaster in nearly fifty years. Blankenship was on trial for violating numerous safety regulations and conspiring to hide violations which ultimately led to the underground mine explosion and the disaster.

Blankenship was a poster boy for 'crony malevolent capitalism' and ran Massey Energy as a lawless enterprise protected by the politicians, public official and lawyers he paid off.

Well, Blankenship has been found guilty by a jury of conspiracy to violate US safety laws. He was cleared of the lesser charges of lying to the Federal Government.

Sadly, he only faces only 1 year in jail, but activists and law enforcement officials praised the decision. U.S. Attorney Booth Goodwin called the verdict "a landmark day for the safety of coal workers."
 

Journalist and historian Jeff Biggers wrote that Blankenship's conviction was a "historic first step in holding mining outlaws accountable for their reckless operations." Biggers continued;

 

"For the first time in memory for those of us with friends, family, miners and loved ones living amid the toxic fallout of the coal industry, this conviction may only serve as a tiny reckoning of our nation's complacency with a continual state of violations, but it could begin a new era of justice and reconciliation in the devastated coal mining communities in Appalachia and around the nation."

The Corporate Crime Reporter quotes University of Maryland Law Professor Rena Steinzor, the author of Why Not Jail?: Industrial Catastrophes, Corporate Malfeasance, and Government Inaction, who has argued for more aggressive prosecution of corporate executives:

“This conspiracy was the primary cause of an enormous explosion that killed 29 men in the worst mine disaster in 40 years. Although the jury was not presented with the question whether Blankenship was directly responsible for the explosion, it did decide that he played Russian roulette with his miners’ lives.  By underfunding efforts to comply, harassing employees to ignore safety rules so they could “dig coal” faster, and threatening managers with dismissal if they worked to solve ventilation and other problems at the mine, Blankenship made an already hazardous workplace into a horror show that made men fear for their lives every time they journeyed thousands of feet underground.”
 

The Corporate Crime Reporter quotes Rob Weissman from Public Citizen:

“Today’s guilty verdict should send the message to coal company executives that society will no longer tolerate this trade of miners’ lives for coal and profit. Indeed, it should send a message to CEOs across the country: No more recklessly endangering workers’ lives, and you will be held criminally liable if your actions – and inaction – cost lives.”

Articles about the decision are here and here.

Honoring Sheldon Wolin (1922-2015)

Sadly, the distinguished political theorist and philosopher Sheldon Wolin has died in Salem Oregon. Wolin was 93.

 

Wolin was one of the US's leading political philosophers and someone who enlivened leftist and radical political philosophy, whilst retaining a commitment to the radical possibilities of democracy.

 

Sheldon Wolin's final book Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Spectre of Inverted Totalitarianism is without doubt the most important book I have read in the last decade.

 

In that book, Wolin describes inverted totalitarianism as the fusion of corporate and political power. Wolin makes clear that inverted totalitarianism is in no way morally or politically comparable to totalitarian states like Nazi Germany. 

 

Wolin argues that contemporary democracies and corporate capitalism have inverted the ways that authoritarian regimes politicize all spheres of life.  State and corporate power are increasingly enmeshed. He warns that the combination of state power and unchecked economic and corporate power now verge on total power and has created its own pathologies.

 

Wolin argues that political and corporate forces don't necessarily seek to replace democratic structures. Rather, they claim to honour democracy, electoral politics, freedom of speech and the right to assembly, whilst all the while capturing, manipulating and corrupting the levers of power to serve  political, economic, corporate and business interests.  

 

Wolin also examines the myths and mythmaking used  to justify this interlocking of corporate and state power, including the claim of a failing economy, the quest for an ever-expanding economy, privatisation and the never-ending war on terror.

Wolin warns that corporate power no longer answers to state or citizen control. The institutions of government, economy, civil society and society no longer play the role they were intended for. They primarily serve the interests of the political, corporate and business classes.

 

For Wolin,  corporate power and political power are now so closely intertwined and the much of the citizenry so demobilised, that genuine democracy is a remote possibility, expressed in what he described as  rare “fugitive” expressions of the popular will. 

 

Wolin argues that inverted totalitarianism destroys democracy, politically demobilises citizens, projects power and wealth upwards and creates instability, passivity and precarious existence for the majority of citizens.

 

Wolin writes that inverted totalitarianism:

 

'is not expressly conceptualised as an ideology of objectified in public policy but is furthered by decision makers, power holders and citizens who unaware of or blind to the deeper consequences of their actions or actions'

 

Chris Hedges, who is a passionate supporter of Wolin's work has written this piece in memory of his friend and colleague. A series of interviews with Sheldon Wolin by Chris Hedges are here and here.

 

Other pieces written in memory of Sheldon Wolin are here, here, here, here, here and here

Who are the teachers and educators who inspired us?

This photo from 1953 shows four-year-old Ross Munro and his neighbour Phillip Noble playing in an asbestos sandpit in a residential backyard in Wittenoom in WA's northwest. Residents purchased the deadly tailings which were commonly used as sandpits in backyards for the purposes of children's play and also to reduce dust around houses.

When I read Chris Hedges latest piece about inspiring teachers and educators I thought of Ross Munro.

Chris Hedges, the American journalist, writer, war correspondent and political activist and campaigner has written a moving eulogy to one of his educational mentors and inspirations- the Reverend Coleman Brown who taught Hedges at Colgate University. Hedges writes that Coleman:

had the most profound impact of all my teachers on my education. I took seven courses as an undergraduate in religion. He taught six of them. But his teaching extended far beyond the classroom. The classroom was where he lit the spark.

Hedges describes how Coleman Brown used poetry to highlight the powerful sacred forces that writers and poets struggle to express:

"Coleman would read poems and cherished prose passages out loud as I met with him in his office. It was about the musicality of language. His sonorous voice rose and dipped with intonations and emphasis. To this day I still hear his recitation in pieces of writing and poems......... Poetry, he taught me, is alive. It must be felt. It has a hypnotic power that, as Shakespeare understood, is a kind of witchcraft. And poetry, along with all other writing, is just a spent, dead force if you do not surrender to its spell."

In thinking about the influence of his educational mentor, Hedges has written a beautiful summation of the significance and value of education:

"Education is not only about knowledge. It is about inspiration. It is about passion. It is about the belief that what we do in life matters. It is about moral choice. It is about taking nothing for granted. It is about challenging assumptions and suppositions. It is about truth and justice. It is about learning how to think. It is about, as James Baldwin wrote, the ability to drive “to the heart of every matter and expose the question the answer hides.” And, as Baldwin further noted, it is about making the world “a more human dwelling place.”

Many of us have had or known teachers and educators who paved the way for such inspiration and passion, either in ourselves or in others.

At both secondary school and university I had teachers- sadly too few- who managed to create and light a spark like that which Hedges describes. One was  John Croft, a secondary school teacher of history who bought to life the study of history and triggered my lifelong passion for the power and relevance of historical understanding and analysis as the basis for social thinking and action.

As  a young secondary school teacher I worked with an English teacher named Ross Munro, who brought alive the power of the written and spoken (and sung)  word to his students. Each day outside his classroom would be a quote, extract or lyrics from a text- a book, a play, a song, a poem- which was designed to engage, to provoke, to encourage thinking. 

Ross was  a man much loved by his students. Even now, some of those students still speak about his influence and legacy.  

Ross died young, aged just 38, a victim of the horrors and indiscriminate cruelty of asbestos and the neglect of mining corporations and government agencies. Ross was a victim of perhaps the greatest industrial and corporate crime in Australian history.

Ross was one of the 'Wittenoom kids' who spent their childhoods exposed to asbestos in the town of Wittenoom  in north-west of Western Australia who have gone on to develop a range of cancers and are dying at a rate well above the average population of mesothelioma.

Ross became the first non-mine worker to win a mesothelioma claim against CSR in January 1989, just before his death. His appalling treatment is documented in Ben Hills book Blue Murder.

More on Ross and events and the human cost of asbestos are  here and here

(1) Mining of the deadly blue asbestos at Wittenoom, 1106km north of Perth, commenced in the 1940's and ceased in 1966 and the town was later closed after airborne fibres in dust from mining operations were found to cause malignant mesothelioma, lung cancer, asbestosis and other serious diseases

Esperance WA: Sacrifice zone for the profits of the uranium industry?

A mining industry media outlet has reported that the uranium industry in WA is keen to establish Esperance on WA's southern coast, as a port export hub for radioactive uranium material mined in Western Australia.

 

The Canadian uranium miner Cameco, whose Yeeleerie uranium project is billed as the largest in WA, is located near Wiluna in WA's Northern Goldfields,  however, Wiluna is considerable distance from Port Adelaide and Darwin, the only two ports in Australia approved for shipping uranium. Esperance is the port closest to Wiluna.

 

The other uranium miner active in WA is Toro Energy who plan to ship product from its Wiluna mine through Port Adelaide, a 2700km journey by truck.

 

The Managing Director of Cameco Brian Reilly was quoted as saying:

 

“This is a region that needs the next wave of projects and the uranium sector can deliver four, five, six projects down the track and make a significant difference to WA. The product we ship is a high-value, low-volume product and as it sits today most uranium goes to the port of Adelaide. Why wouldn't we contemplate a WA port when we get a business case and a number of other projects up and running?"

 

A weekend article in the Kalgoorlie Miner describes the community's response to the disclosure and notes that the Esperance community is exceedingly vigilant about the environmental risks from products coming through Esperance, largely as a result of the Magellan Lead Scandal of 2005-2008.

 

This vigilance and likely public opposition from the people of Esperance is a consequence of  serious harm suffered by the people and environment of Esperance as a result of that earlier lead contamination scandal at the Port of Esperance.

 

Over 2 years (2005- 2007) Magellan Metals and the Esperance Port Authority allowed lethal lead dust to escape from storage facilities at the port and contaminate the town of Esperance and surrounds. Over 9500 birds died of lead poisoning and hundreds of children suffered lead poisoning from elevated lead levels.

A Western Australian Parliamentary Inquiry found that the Esperance Port Authority and Magellan Metals (and 2 other government agencies) were guilty of "critical failings" in their handling of toxic material in allowing lead carbonate particles to escape during Port operation.

 

The Inquiry concluded that the deaths of 9500 native birds in December 2006 and March 2007 resulted from lead poisoning from Magellan Metals lead carbonate concentrate which had been handled by the Esperance Port Authority from April 2005 until March 2007. A quarter of the children under 5 years of age who were tested showed a blood lead level over 5 µg/dL.

 

The Committee concluded that the exposure of the Esperance community to lead was a result of:

• the ongoing transport to, and inloading practices at, the Esperance Port which occurred almost every second day over some 23 months;
• the escape of lead dust during the usual out loading practices at the Esperance Port, which occurred on 22 occasions; and
• a number of key dust incidents occurring during ship-loading of the Magellan lead concentrate at the Esperance Port, which released significant lead pollution into the environment, and in the absence of any containment or clean up, caused on-going exposures to lead.”

The Report found that the Esperance community had been let down by the actions of the Esperance Port Authority, Magellan Metals and the WA Department of Environment (DEC).

The Esperance Port Authority was fined over half a million dollars after admitting responsibility for the lead poisoning. Magellan Metals escaped without any serious penalty after agreeing to a $9 million settlement to clean up the town. As part of the agreement the State Government agreed not to pursue any criminal or legal charges against the company.

 

A State Government report released  in 2010 claimed that three years after the crises the poisonous lead dust still present in the town  remained a major threat to bird life and animal life but claimed no "serious threat to human health". Locals were not convinced

 

Research in 2010 by the Conservation Council of WA showed that local insect eating birds have lead levels in their feathers about 8 times background lead levels. The birds are at threshold level for lead pollution in birds.
 

So why should the people of Esperance have any faith they will be protected this time around by those with responsibility to regulate mining companies and protect the community, when they failed so badly last time?

 

During the Esperance lead crises, Government agencies continually downplayed the seriousness of the problem and denied any serious risk to human health.

 

The inability of WA Government agencies to effectively regulate and monitor the operations and performance of multinational corporations whose rationale is profit maximization was confirmed in a recent WA Auditor General’s Report.

 

The Auditor General found that corporations were failing to meet their environmental and social obligations and Government agencies were unable to effectively regulate and enforce the social and environmental activities of private corporations.

A recent Corruption and Crime Commission Report identified that large government agencies  who oversee large contracts with corporations do not have the necessary skills controls and governance systems in place to manage these contractors and identified the risk of corruption.

It is patently clear that regulation and monitoring of corporations is largely ineffective and government agencies and statutory authorities responsible for monitoring them have not proved themselves up to the job

Like many other places in WA, Esperance has become  what US author Steve Lerner calls a "Sacrifice Zone"- communities forced to live with the harmful social and environmental impacts of poorly regulated mining and industrial activity.
 

Martin Bruckner's remarkable book Under Corporate Skies tells the shocking story of another Western Australian "Sacrifice Zone"- this time the struggle between the community of Wagerup and the multinational mining corporation Alcoa and its ally over three decades- the WA Government.

 

 Brueckner tells a story consigned to the dustbin of Western Australian history. His book describes the the same pattern of denial, protection of mining and industrial interests, collusion by State Government agencies and  dismissal and trivialization of community concerns that was evident in the Esperance scandal.
 

These "sacrifice zones" exist all over WA, in towns and communities where mining and industrial activity are dominant.  These are places and people sacrificed on the alter of corporate profit and economic growth. 

 

The harms caused by poorly regulated mining and industrial activity- ill health and death, scarred land, polluted, air and water, despoiled environment and human landscape and a fraying social fabric- are trivialized, and denied, and when proven, they are simply dismissed as a cost of economic prosperity or considered not serious enough to warrant attention. 

Oxfam shines the light on the sham of corporate sopcial responsibility

Oxfam's latest report and campaign  Behind the Brands confirms what many of us have argued for years- that corporate social responsibility is a sham; a ruse to conceal and detract attention away from the destructive practice of corporations.

Oxfam's report analyses the practices of the world's 10 most powerful food corporations and shows their destructive impact, despite the corporations deployment of the rhetroic and practice of corporate social responsibility. The report is a damning indictment of the practices of the world's major food corporations and the sham of corporate social responsibility.

The report delves below the surface of corporate responsibility rhetoric to show that the practices of the food corporations destroy not only the natural resources that support a global food system but the lives of food suppliers, employees and their customers.

Articles about the report are here, here and here.

The CEO of Oxfam, Barbara Stocking said:

"It is time the veil of secrecy shrouding this multi-billion dollar industry was lifted. Consumers have the right to know how their food has been produced and the impact this has on the world's poorest people who are growing the ingredients. The hundreds of brands lining supermarket shelves are predominantly owned by just 10 huge companies, which have combined revenues of more than $1bn a day while one-in-eight people go to bed hungry every night."

 The Oxfam Report shows that the major food corporations:

• are overly secretive
• rely on cheap labour
• fail to meet their own ethical standards
• ignore injustices occurring within their own supply chain
• fund and support programmes that are typically tightly focused around publicly appealing issues which fail to address the root causes of hunger and poverty
• conceal sourcing practices and routinely engage in sophisticated marketing and public relations campaigns in order to shape public opinion about food and how it is made.
• lack adequate policies to guide their own supply chain operations.
•  have failed to use their enormous power to create a more just system for farmers and local communities.
• have allowed land to be unjustly seized from poor farmers and rural communities over the last decade
• make claims of sustainability and social responsibility difficult to verify on the ground.

Criminality and excessive executive salaries

 

Excellent article by Raewyn Connell on the need to expose and challenge the theft and plunder perpetrated by corporate executives. Connell writes:

"The very top corporate managers now sit on top of a tall tree of bonuses and incentives, which have become an institutionalised and expected part of income. (Board remuneration committees scrutinise “comparators,” and executive search firms compile the data.) Inside this world, it seems common sense that the top managers’ bonuses and incentives should be higher than all the rest. How could it be otherwise? That would be an insult to the most excellent.

There is also an effect of the “financialisation” of modern capitalism – the growth of finance capital, and its hegemony over the industrial and agricultural capital that ruled the roost in other eras.

The mind-boggling scale and reach of contemporary financial markets hasn’t exactly replaced other forms of economic activity – we still produce the goods and services. But it has changed the frame of reference for corporate elites. They now live in a world where gigantic profits are often made without any commitment to productive investment, and where financial operations constantly impinge on industrial, mining and trading corporations. Even inside corporations, the separation of control from operations has grown. The new head of Rio Tinto, Sam Walsh, made his mark by automating the firm’s iron ore operations in the Pilbara, locating the control rooms down in Perth. (And happily eliminating part of the Pilbara workforce.)

Inevitably the point of comparison for corporate managers shifts from their own businesses to the world of international finance. At the same time, the financialisation of the business world makes the elite packages, of which the larger part is almost always the bonuses and incentives rather than the simple salary, easier to pay and more normal in appearance.

These trends are not the whole explanation of the great rise in executive incomes, but they are a considerable part of it. The neoliberal era, almost everywhere in the world, has seen rising levels of economic inequality. In the developing world, neoliberalism has meant increased unemployment and massive growth in the informal economy. In rich countries there is some informalisation but also a sustained squeeze on welfare incomes (the removal of sole parents’ benefit is a recent Australian example). There are growing gaps in the wage structure, and a much less progressive tax system than a generation ago. Corporate executives are among the most spectacular beneficiaries of this society-wide process.

To put it in a nutshell, the corporate managers are not earning wages. Markets have little to do with it. They are building fortunes. Their organisational power enables them to claim a share of the expanding financialised capital in the modern economy, and convert part of that share into extremely high incomes. Within an environment of privilege, this claim becomes a matter of common sense and routine. And though there are many critics of the result – the anti-globalisation movement, the Occupy movement, and some of the unions – there is not at present any social force that has been able to reverse it.

Connell's arguments remind me of those of criminologist David Friederich who argues that the corporate culture and practices that provide for and justify excessive executive compensation for corporate executives not only creates what he calls "crimogenic conditions" but are likely to lead to the taking of money that belongs to others.

In a paper titled "Exorbitant CEO compensation: Just reward or grand theft" in the Journal Crime, Law and Social Change  David Friedrichs argues that executive compensation packages should be considered as a form of white collar crime.

For Friederichs it is time to criminalize this behaviour. He calls it a form of robbery:

""Walking into a bank with a gun and demanding money from a teller is one way to steal money... Walking into a corporate boardroom and securing from the board's compensation committee, made up of cronies, paid consultants, and even relatives, compensation of millions sometimes tens of millions or hundreds of millions is another way to steal money. The principal differences are that the second way of stealing money pays much better, is all too often legal, and does not result in criminal prosecution and imprisonment. This needs to change"

The practices of excessive compensation have come to be viewed as standard business practice rather than as part of a spectrum of corporate criminal behaviour that goes unrecognized and unpunished. That is how corporate power works. It redefines reality to serve corporate and private interests.

As both Connell and Friederichs argue its time to challenge that.

Wal Mart and the death of 120 Bangladeshi factory workers

The death of 120 garment workers in a fire at a Bangladesh factory that supplied U.S. retail giant Wal-Mart (the largest buyer of garments from Bangladesh) as well as Ikea and other major retailers,  is likely to lead to a global push for genuine reform of the labor practices of big brands and retailers. 

Scott Nova from the Workers Rights Consortium is quoted on Democracy Now  

 “It really is an extraordinary achievement, in an ironic sense, that  the U.S. apparel industry has managed to replicate early 20th century  conditions that were so brutal and cruel to workers now again here in  2012 in factories in places like Bangladesh. It is a shameful record for the U.S. apparel industry. which has a  notoriously poor fire-safety record and has long suppressed worker’s  attempts to improve their conditions'

The factory where the workers died is operated by Tazreen Fashions, a subsidiary of the Tuba Group, which  supplies Wal-Mart, Ikea and other major retailers in the United States  and Europe. The factory made polo shirts, fleece jackets and t-shirts.

On Monday,  2 days after the fire Walmart claimed it did not have a current relationship with the Tazreen factory in Bangladesh. Only after  labor activist Kalpona Akter produced a picture of herself holding up clothing with Walmart's exclusive "Faded Glory" label found at the factory did Walmart admit that the factory was still a supplier; claiming it didn't know that was the case.

 Scott Nova from the Workers Rights Consortium is quoted as saying:

"Walmart’s foundational corporate principle, one they prosecute with religious fervor, is cost reduction through absolute control of their supply chain and production system.  Today, however, they want us to believe that they have so little control over their supply chain that they do not even know which factories are manufacturing their clothes. The bottom line is that Walmart was making goods at the Tazreen factory, but failed to protect the rights and safety of the workers making those clothes. Retroactively blaming this on 'unauthorized' subcontracting is not going to fly.

   "The Triangle Shirtwaist fire [in New York City in 1911] galvanized a reform movement in the U.S. that transformed an industry of dangerous sweatshops into one defined by safe workplaces and decent wages. Now, global outsourcing has allowed retailers like Gap and Walmart to turn back the clock to 1911, recreating in places like Bangladesh the brutal conditions and rock-bottom production costs that prevailed in the U.S. at the time of the Triangle fire.
 
    "Wages of 18 cents an hour and cruel working conditions have led to waves of mass protest and unrest among Bangladeshi apparel workers. The government and the industry there cannot acknowledge that the unrest is a product of their own policies of low wages and lax regulation, so they must find scapegoats. Unsurprisingly, they chose to target labor rights advocates, branding them subversives, accusing them of fomenting the violence, and in the worst cases attacking them physically. 

Gerry Georgatos on Serco's prisoner transport contract

Gerry Georgatos is a West Australian journalist who combines investigative reporting with a powerful commitment  to campaigning on social justice and human rights issues.

Gerry is  a Western Australian based reporter for the National Indigenous Times for whom he writes important stories about Indigenous and social justice issues that few other journalists are willing to cover.

Gerry is also the Principal and Convener of the Human Rights Alliance through which he has initiated  and led groundbreaking social justice campaigns in WA. Gerry is also a Phd researcher  on Aboriginal Deaths in custody.

It is this combination of investigative journalism, social and political research and social justice campaigning that has resulted in Gerry exposing injustices ignored by the mainstream media and politicians, including the illegal imprisonment of Indonesian youths in adult prisons in WA, Police violence inflicted on a young Aboriginal man in Albany and the appalling state of Aboriginal homelessness in the Kimberley region.

As well as the National Indigenous Gerry's articles also appear in many other places including Indy Media, Indy Media Brisbane, Green Left Weekly and the Donnybrook-Bridgetown Mail.

Gerry's article below is about the decision by the UK multinational corporation Serco and the WA Department of Corrective Services to deny Aboriginal prisoners access to prisoner transport to attend family funerals. 

The article will appear in the National Indigenous Times this week. 

Gerry Georgatos on Aboriginal Funeral outrage

The National Indigenous Times has been contacted by two sources during the last couple of weeks, one within the Department of Corrective Services (DCS) Western Australia and another within SERCO, that Aboriginal inmates will no longer be transported to funerals. Instead they may be left with the option of paying their respects to loved ones by either viewing a recorded or where possible live screening of the funeral and the procession while alone in a prison wing room. This has been slammed as inhumane, and culturally inappopriate by most Aboriginal Elders.

Both sources said that this initiative was flagged allegedly due to SERCO's reluctance to transport prisoners to funerals. The multinational which has the contract to much of the State's prisoner transport, and manages Acacia Prison, on the outskirts of Perth, and the lucrative Immigration Detention Centre network Australia-wide, is allegedly reluctant to provide compulsory funeral attendances for Aboriginal inmates - it has been alleged that SERCO management claimed high prison officer risk issues at funerals and also allegedly cost benefit issues. SERCO is one of the world's wealthiest companies.

UWA law student and Nyoongar rights activist Marianne Mackay the former chairperson of the Deaths in Custody WA contacted the National Indigenous Times a few days ago to confirm that she had also been advised that an Aboriginal prisoner was refused transport to a funeral last Friday. "This is a first, it doesn't happen that one of our people is not allowed to attend a funeral. Apparently SERCO refused to transport him and this has stunned us considering how everybody knows how important it is for our people to attend funerals. It attacks our cultural integrity."

SERCO communications spokesman Tim Evans said, “The issue was discussed at length at WA Estimates hearing in July when the decision was made by the Department of Corrections.” There was no other comment.

The WA Estimates did not discuss some of the allegations raised by the whistleblowers. Questions will be tabled next week in State Parliament in response to the claims by whistleblowers in this article.

At the WA Estimates the WA Commissioner of Corrective Services Ian Johnson said the State Government had asked him to make a two per cent saving in their budget. “We had spent around $1.1 million to transport people to funerals. We certainly recognise there is an importance in doing that. There is significance, obviously, for all people to attend funerals, but particularly for Indigenous people in terms of their family relationships. However, how long is a piece of string? It becomes a situation where you cannot control the expenditure in continuing to provide the opportunity for people to attend funerals,” said Commissioner Johnson.

He said that Skpye had been successfully trialled for prisoners who could not be transported to funerals. Aboriginal rights advocates described this as an outrage for their people.

Another Nyoongar rights activist, Iva Jackson-Hayward has responded with a call for the State Government to ensure that the DCS and SERCO ensure Aboriginal inmates do not have their cultural rights eroded. "The DCS and SERCO are dutibound to protect the rights of our people. Aboriginal women and men in prison cannot break their customary duty to attend funerals. It's outrageous what is happening, and it's a human rights abuse. This is all about money, and SERCO trying to make more of it by abusing the rights of our people. It is the Government's duty to pull SERCO into line."

Ms Mackay said the Inspector of Custodial Services, Neil Morgan was contacted on Friday.

The WA Prison Officers Union (WAPOU) said the State Government should scrap SERCO's prisoner transport contract. WAPOU Secretary John Welch made this call following another whistleblower's leaking of serious allegations.

The whistleblower said SERCO transported prisoners to wrong prisons, was late in bringing prisoners to their Court appearances, transported seriously ill prisoners in prison vans instead of ambulances. It was only a couple of months ago a prisoner who had open-heart surgery was returned to the prison in a van instead of an ambulance and arrived with serious injuries which the DCS tried to play down however CCTV footage proved otherwise.

All three whistleblowers said SERCO was not turning up to transport Aboriginal prisoners to family funerals, and that SERCO made no effort to account for its failure.

Mr Welch said SERCO's failure to ensure contracted prisoner transports gave rise to stress and tensions in prisons.

"These latest allegations are so serious that the Barnett Government should cancel SERCO's contract and bring these services back for the Department of Corrective Services to run so that we can be confident the community is being kept safe."

Australia has one of the world's worst prison suicide rates, with privately run prisons, according to the Australian Institute of Criminology, enduring proportionately more deaths in custody than Government run prisons.

Other serious allegations were made by the whisteblowers to the National Indigenous Times and we will follow these through.

Serco: profiting from failure, lack of accountability and a disregard for human life

Here are the results of privatization and Serco running public services. A complete lack of accountability for public funds, extreme profit gouging from the public purse, an obsession with secrecy, unauthorized use of force, poorly trained and under prepared staff and a disregard for human life that leads to self  harm, suicide and death of those in Serco's care.

Each day there are more exposures of Serco's shocking record in running Australia's immigration detention centres.

Detainees in Villawood  were forced to use a cigarette lighter to try to burn through a rope used by a detainee to take his own life. Serco staff were ill prepared and untrained to respond to attempted suicide. according to ABC Online which reports:

Detainees say they tried to burn through the rope 41-year-old Ahmed Al Akabi had used to take his own life.

They say they have borne witness to a string of suicides at the centre in the past year, including that of Iraqi-born teacher Mr Akabi.

The detainees, mostly of Kurdish origin, relayed numerous concerns over their indefinite detention, with several afflicted by illnesses related to stress and depression.
Tensions at the centre came to a head last month when riot police were called in during a night of rioting that saw several buildings destroyed by fire.

One of the men who found Mr Akabi says guards employed by Villawood's privately owned operator, Serco, were ill-equipped and not adequately trained to respond appropriately to the suicide attempt.

The man says the guards did not have a sharp instrument available to cut Mr Akabi down and did not know how to respond.

The detainee, who did not want to be identified, says he and others tried to hold Mr Akabi aloft in a bid to save him from suffocation until help arrived.

He says they were forced to use the cigarette lighter to try to save the father of three, but were too late; he was pronounced dead a short time later.

Serco declined to comment on specific allegations, but in a statement to the ABC said it runs a comprehensive staff training program that goes beyond its contractual obligations.

"Serco is committed to doing everything we can to prevent those in our care from coming to harm," the statement said.

"Our staff take this commitment extremely seriously and work hard to keep those in our care safe and secure."

The amount of public funds paid to Serco was secretly doubled by the Federal Government and is expected to reach $1 billion within months. This is despite the Federal Government claiming that Serco was only paid $370 million. This windfall has massively boosted Serco's Australian revenue by 30%:

Serco originally signed a five-year contract worth $370 million to run the facilities, including the Maribyrnong Detention Centre, until mid-2014.

But immigration industry experts said this figure was now likely to burst through the billion-dollar barrier.

Figures obtained from government tender records show the total size of Serco's contracts in relation to asylum-seekers was quietly doubled in November to more than $756 million.

But immigration industry sources are saying the latest contract amount for Serco is already six months out of date, and it stands to make hundreds of millions more from the taxpayers with continued boat arrivals.

One source said the asylum-seeker boom since November had already added up to $200 million to the total value of Serco's detention contracts. That would value them at up to $950 million as of this month.

Industry experts said Serco's bonanza was set to easily crack the $1 billion barrier if the Government's new "Malaysia Solution" does not work and refugee boats keep coming.
An Immigration Department spokesman refused to speculate on the Serco bonanza. A Serco spokeswoman said these were "questions for the Government".

 Serco is so fearful of exposure of its activities that it considers the unauthorized presence of media near a detention centre to be a critical safety threat- the highest possible threat level. This report found that:

The company running the country's immigration detention centres has upgraded how seriously it takes the unauthorised presence of media, putting it on par with a bomb threat or an escape.

The Serco document says "unauthorised" media presence at a detention centre is now considered "critical" - the highest possible threat level.

Accounts of events from within Christmas Island detention centres show that Serco's use of force, its under-staffing and ill preparedness and poor management were major contributors to recent riots and protests on Christmas Island. A full account of the claims can be read here.