Pax Americana (was Re: Defining Fascism)

[Rob Schaap]

                 Kyoto resolve leaves US a leper


                         By PAUL BROWN
                         LONDON
                         Sunday 1 July 2001

                         The complete isolation of the United States on the
issue of climate change moved a step closer on Friday when Europe, Japan
and Russia ended a meeting in The Hague saying they wanted to complete the
deal to cut greenhouse-gas emissions.

                         Talks on the Kyoto Protocol are due to resume in
Bonn on July 16, with some difficult details still to be hammered out. The
purpose of the private Hague meeting was to test whether the rest of the
developed world was prepared to go it alone with action on climate change,
effectively making the Bush administration an environmental leper.

                         The only doubt remains Japan, partly because
Japan's Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi, was meeting George Bush on his
first visit to Washington yesterday with the avowed intent of trying to
persuade him to come back into the fold. Since the President has repeatedly
stated that the US has ditched the Kyoto Protocol with its demand for a 7
per cent reduction in US greenhouse-gas emissions, a change of heart seems
unlikely.

                         Assuming that Mr Koizumi fails, then Japan is
likely to honor its promise to ratify because it was negotiated in Kyoto
and because of an investment in new technologies to which the protocol will
give a boost.

                         So having established that there is sufficient
political will to go ahead without Mr Bush, the tricky issues of detail
that caused the original collapse of the talks in The Hague last November
still have to be worked out. Japan wants to be able to claim credit against
its 6 per cent target of greenhouse-gas emissions for planting trees and
helping the developing
world to industrialise with clean technologies. It was the US insistence on
huge credits for planting trees that scuppered the talks. Such is the
anxiety to save Kyoto and alarm at the alternative, no international
progress for years on tackling climate change, that optimists believe a
deal can be done.

                         The original Kyoto agreement was to cut the
developed world's emissions by 5.5 per cent by 2010 from a 1990 baseline.
This is more difficult than it sounds because emissions have risen
dramatically since 1990, particularly in the US.

                         The Prime Minister, Mr John Howard is on the
record as saying that there was no point ratifying the Kyoto Protocol
without the US.

                         - GUARDIAN


            Why they think they're God at global HQ


                         By JULIE LEWIS
                         WASHINGTON
                         Sunday 1 July 2001

                         To describe the culture at Exxon Mobil, American
activist Peter Altman can think of no better example than the God Box.

                         That's the name he says the company gives to the
room in its global headquarters in Dallas, Texas, where oil men cast their
eyes over banks of screens lining the walls beaming in pictures from Exxon
Mobil sites around the world. The name says it all, Mr Altman believes. "In
their view they are God and they are playing God as they move energy
resources around the world."

                         The mighty US behemoth, parent company of
Australia's disgraced Esso, has powerful reasons for feeling omnipotent.
The product of the 1999 merger between Exxon and Mobil, it is the
reunification of two companies broken apart when trust-busting President
Theodore Roosevelt outlawed John D. Rockefeller's oil monopoly in 1911.

                         Its lobbyists can expect to be greeted warmly in
Washington DC, where it spent $US1.3 million ($A2.5 million) in campaign
contributions last year, 90 per cent of that on Republicans.

                         It is the largest publicly listed company in the
world, its reach extends to more than 100 countries, and its business in
oil, gas, chemicals, coal and plastics earnt it $US17.7 billion last year.

                         It has also earnt fierce enemies among
environmentalists on its home turf, and turned many in the communities that
surround its US plants against it.

                         Juanita Stewart is firmly in the second group.
Nothing can convince her that the three Exxon Mobil plants that encircle
her neighborhood near Baton Rouge, in Louisiana, are safe. "We had an
explosion the day before Thanksgiving last year," she recalls. "They say it
wasn't an explosion, it was an air emission." She laughs. "We've got a
crack in the
ceiling, we've got cracked foundations, a cracked driveway. You mean to
tell me that wasn't an explosion?"

                         In 1989, six employees were injured and two were
killed when a vapor cloud ignited and exploded at the Exxon refinery near
her home. In 1993 three employees burnt to death in a hydrocarbon fire in
the same plant. Earlier this year, a plume of inky black smoke drifted out
from another. She is still not sure what that was from, but just thanked
the Lord that this time it did not drift over her impoverished, solidly
African-American community where too many children suffer from asthma,
headaches and ear aches.

                         Ms Stewart has a rare inflammatory disease that
affected her brain as well as other parts of her body when she first came
down with it a decade ago, although she cannot prove any link to the
chemical and oil facilities nearby. "I lost my memory. I lost my hair. I
couldn't talk. I was like a child," she says.

                         In Texas, where the company has refineries and
chemical plants, there are complaints and suspicions as well. A former
worker, who refused to be named for fear of retribution, says children in
his area are regularly put into hospital with breathing problems.

                         He is highly critical of health and safety in the
plants, alleging the company frequently delays repairs. "They don't want to
take the time to shut these units down and make proper repairs because to
shut a unit down you're talking about weeks to months. That's money gone,
so what they do is they run and run and run and run."

                         That is a charge that John Miles from the Texas
office of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration rejects.
"They've been a pretty safe company," he says of Exxon Mobil. "Actually the
petrochemical industry in the US is much better in the last few years than
they used to be."

                         A number of explosions in the late 1980s prompted
Congress to beef up safety standards in 1991, according to Mr Miles. It
required companies to analyse their safety practices more thoroughly. "I
think that has helped and they have reduced the number of accidents
considerably," he said.

                         Exxon Mobil had also participated in a voluntary
program to lift its safety record 50 per cent above the industry average,
and was well above that level, Mr Miles said.

                         Company spokesman Tom Cirigliano backed up Mr
Miles with a slew of statistics on reduced emission levels and safety
awards won by the company in the United States, Australia and elsewhere.
Safety was the number one priority of the company, he said, although
"accidents, unfortunately, in this very dangerous business, are going to
happen occasionally".

                         "That doesn't mean we accept that. Our goal is to
reduce it to zero," Mr Cirigliano said."

                         Still, the company responsible for the Exxon
Valdez shipping disaster off the coast of Alaska has an uphill battle
convincing the US public of its bona fides. In 1999, a study found it had
one of the worst reputations in corporate America, ranking it along with
Philip Morris. And for environmental activists such as Mr Altman, that
reputation is well deserved. Mr Altman, who works for Campaign Exxon Mobil,
and his colleagues at other
environment groups accuse the company of using its money and political
influence to scuttle the Kyoto treaty and to promote opposition to action
on global warming.

                         President George W. Bush formed a warm
relationship with the company while he was governor in Texas, Mr Altman
says, pointing to evidence that Exxon Mobil was the architect of Mr Bush's
inadequate legislation on ageing refineries in the state. Mr Altman sees
the oil giant's hand in the President's determination to open the Arctic
Wildlife Sanctuary to exploration and to backpedal on global warming.

                         On July 11, green groups will hold the Exxon Mobil
international day of action, holding 100 protests worldwide to draw
attention to the company's policies. Says Ms Stewart: "To me, Exxon don't
care about nothing but making money."



                  Exxon a 'profit-driven' tiger


                          By ROGER FRANKLIN
                          Sunday 1 July 2001

                          When Business Week devoted a recent cover story
to Exxon Mobil, Esso's United States parent, it wasn't the staggering size
of the world's largest energy outfit that inspired the greatest awe.

                          True, a $US17.7 billion ($A34.7 billion) profit
last year was pretty darn impressive. But, what really captured the
magazine's imagination were the same things that have inspired juries to
sock the oil company with some of the largest fines ever imposed in the
United States: Exxon's immense power and its arrogant willingness to abuse
it.

                          It is an attitude that begins at the top, in the
office of chairman Lee Raymond, whose desk is watched over by a wall-sized
oil painting of an attacking tiger, the company's snarling symbol. "If he
gives his word, which he is reluctant to do, he will keep it," an executive
who has negotiated with Mr Raymond told Business Week. "But he is very
difficult to
deal with."

                          How difficult?

                          The lawyers in the Alabama Attorney-General's
department found out several years ago, when they informed Exxon that it
owed the state $US88 million in unpaid royalties on oil and gas extracted
from beneath the Gulf of Mexico.

                          A pittance in comparison with the oil giant's
cash flow, the company nevertheless decided to contest the demand in court.
That turned out to be a bad move because the lawyers for the state gained
access to mountains of confidential - and embarrassing - corporate
documents.

                          What they found - in the words of Southern
Methodist University Business School's John Slocum, who recently compiled a
detailed study of Exxon's corporate culture - was a management philosophy
that respects nothing but the bottom line.

                          "It is the ultimate cold, calculating, analytical
and bureaucratic organisation," Professor Slocum told The Sunday Age last
week.

                          "In Alabama, they did what they always do:
conducted a cost-benefit analysis of what it would cost to honor the
contract ... Obviously, ignoring it made greater financial sense at the
time, so it appears they decided to withhold payments."

                          As documents submitted during the trial made
clear, Exxon did indeed weigh right and wrong - and concluded that breaking
the law was more profitable.

                          Even its chief in-house lawyer recommended
withholding the royalties because, "our exposure is 12 per cent interest on
underpayments. Plus the cost of litigation". In other words, the money to
be made by breaking its word outweighed the potential fines.

                          What Exxon did not figure on was the sense of
outrage that inflamed 12 Alabama jurors, who decided that such a flagrant
disdain for honesty deserved special punishment.

                          In January, the panel brought down a $US3.5
billion judgment against the company, with jury foreman Shae Fillingim
later explaining that Exxon needed to be taught that the law applied to
everyone, not just to the "little people".

                          A similar case unfolded last year in Miami, where
a group of service station owners sued Exxon for price gouging. Once again,
at least according to lawyer Eugene Stearns, who won a $US1 billion
judgment in the case, the company chose to do wrong in pursuit of profit.

                          They "don't have much respect for the civil
justice system. They fight over everything. They don't concede the
obvious," said Stearns.

                          If that observation chills Melbourne lawyers
preparing to sue Esso for the financial losses that followed the Longford
explosion, the legal aftermath of the infamous Exxon Valdez oil spill in
Alaska may well give them even more reason to expect a drawn-out legal
battle.

                          Let this excerpt from an August, 1998, editorial
in the Anchorage Daily News explain what happened in the wake of a 1994
jury decision that hit Exxon with $US5 billion in punitive damages:

                          "Apparently delay pays," the paper wrote. "Exxon
is earning $US90,000 an hour, about $US2 million a day ... As it stands
now, if the appeal lingers a couple more years, Exxon will have earned
enough interest alone to pay the $US5 billion, plus the accrued interest."