Global Cabals in the Air
UK - Globalization promotes corporate mergers, but regulatory hurdles and national pride have forced the world's airlines to settle for strategic alliances - at least for now. Two alliances dominate world jet travel: the Star Alliance (Germany's Lufthansa, United Airlines, Air Canada, Thai Airlines, Brazil's Varig, All-Nippon Airlines, Scandinavian Airlines, Air New Zealand) and Oneworld (British Airways, American Airlines, Qantas, Cathay Pacific, Canadian Airlines, Finnair, Aer Lingus and Iberia). Delta, Swissair and Air France have banded together with Japan Airlines, Aeromexico and Korean Airlines. Holland's KLM has linked with Alitalia and Northwest Airlines. Swissair is exchanging fares with Air Portugal, Austrian Airlines, Turkish Airways and Belgium's Sabena Airlines. Even Richard Branson's maverick Virgin Airlines is now going steady with Singapore Airlines. These anti-competitive cabals allow the companies to cut workforce and marketing costs. The Air Barons promise that these shadow mergers will mean lower prices for passengers, but David Learmont of Flight International insists that "airline alliances are not about helping the consumer ... but protecting member airlines from spiraling competition in an increasingly deregulated marketplace." Oneworld's fleet of 1,800 aircraft flies 200 million passengers to 650 destinations in 135 countries.

Economic Booms: Economic Bums
US - In 1989 there were 66 billionaires in the US and 31.5 million people living in poverty. In 1999, after a decade of "booming economic growth," the US boasted 268 billionaires and 34.5 million poor. (The official "poverty line" is an annual income of less than about $13,000 for a family of three.) According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), Wall Street's bull markets have not benefited average Americans. The EPI found that 86 percent of the market's gains from 1989 to 1997 wound up in the pockets of the country's richest 10 percent. While earnings for the poorest fifth of Americans inched up less than 1 percent between 1988 and 1998, the richest fifth of the population saw their wealth increase by 15 percent. "This economy is one that has rewarded asset owning rather than work," notes Betsy Leondar-Wright of United for a Fair Economy. Daniel S. Levine, publisher of Disgruntled: The Business Magazine for People Who Work for a Living [www.disgruntled.com], notes that the richest 1 percent of Americans now control more wealth than the bottom 95 percent. "With a national election on the horizon," Levine sighs, "it would be nice to see the issue of the widening wealth gap enter the public policy debate."

Evil Genes R Us
INDIA -- The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) has attempted to introduce genetically altered crops (GACs) into India by promoting them as "organic." On February 8 UNDP hosted a pro-GAC conference on "Sustainable Development" that included India's Commerce Ministry officials but excluded members of the Agriculture Ministry. In December 1998, Indian farmers destroyed fields of Monsanto GACs. India's Supreme Court has been asked to ban future planting of GACs as a violation of the country's biosafety laws. According to Anuradha Mittal of the Institute for Policy Studies [Oakland, CA ], last year, Monsanto purchased Mahyco, an Indian seed company, to serve as a Trojan Horse for the introduction of Monsanto's Franken-seeds. Monsanto's cynical attempt to promote test-tube seeds as "organic" failed in the US. Mittal warns that "unleashing of [GACs] in India will undermine [true] organic agriculture by creating genetic pollution."

Corporate Winners and Losers
US - Is corporate wealth really "trickling down"? The Council on Economic Priorities [30 Irving Place, New York, NY 10003, (800) 729-4CEP, www.cepnye.org] has compiled a list of the country's "Most Generous Companies." The top ten corporate charity-givers were: Champion International, Humana, Owens-Corning, Dole Food, Times Mirror, Dayton Hudson, General Mills, Monsanto, Corning, Temple-Inland. All gave at least 2.7 percent of their earnings to charity. Champion International was on top with 6.61 percent. Dropping big bucks doesn't necessarily mean a corporation is benign. Charitable contributions also win tax benefits and public relations karma. In terms of pure cash, then, the top ten donors were Bank of America ($91.5 million), General Motors, Philip Morris, SBC Communications, General Electric, Exxon, Dayton Hudson, Citigroup, Johnson & Johnson, Chase Manhattan ($49.7 million). The Bottom Ten: Chubb, Computer Associates, Ford Motor, GPU, Interpublic Group, Knight-Ridder, PNC Bank Corp., Silicon Graphics, Texas Instruments, Thermos Electron. Among the firms who refused to participate in the CEP survey: Albertsons, Black & Decker, Federal Express, Gap, Hershey Foods, IBM, Microsoft, Oxford Health Plans, Procter & Gamble and Southwest Airlines.

A Rich-Poor, Smart-Dumb Gap?
UK - Prime Minister Tony Blair's Labour Party promised to put an end to the growing "rich-poor gap" in England. The good news is that unemployment has declined to a 19-year low. The bad news comes from a Royal Economic Society report that found "the most striking phenomenon in the British labor market over the last couple of decades has been the massive rise in wage inequality." The gulf between rich and poor is now "higher than at any time over the last century." The Labour Party's "New Deal" program has provided subsidies to encourage companies to hire more than 170,000 young workers over the past two years. Unfortunately, Reuters reports, the program's success has been compromised by the fact that four in ten of the new hires "could not read well enough to understand something as simple as the instructions on a medicine bottle."

Poor, Rich Gap
US - On January 13, 1999 the Gap clothing chain and 17 other companies were hit with a $1 billion lawsuit for operating sweatshops in the US and on the Pacific island of Saipan. One year later, nine of the firms had agreed to "an unparalleled system for guaranteeing workers' basic rights." Unfortunately, reports Global Exchange [2017 Mission St., No. 303, San Francisco, CA 94110, (415) 255-7296, www.globalexchange.org] "the Gap, which buys far more garments from Saipan than any other defendant, still shows no signs of settling." According to Europe's Clean Clothes Campaign, Gap workers in Russia "earn only 11 cents an hour, a wage which keeps them in conditions close to serfdom." The New-York based National Labor Committee reports that Gap's women workers in Honduras earn only $4 a day, are forced to work overtime and are required to take pregnancy tests as a pre-condition of employment.

Ten Worst Corporations
US - The Multinational Monitor's annual list of the Ten Worst Corporations salutes the following companies: Avonale (anti-union), Citigroup (lobbied to destroy banking safety laws), Del Monte (Guatemalan subsidiary's armed goons threatened to kill union organizers), Guardian Posacute (nursing home clients abused), Hoffman La Roche ($500 million fine for trying to control the world vitamin market), Tosco Oil (four workers burned to death during a risky repair job), Tyson Foods (seven poultry workers died on the job in the US last year, all in Tyson plants), US Bank (secretly sold customers' personal data to a telemarketing firm), Whirlpool ($581 million fine for selling $199 satellite dishes to poor and elderly for $1,100 plus 22 percent interest), W. R. Grace ("harmless" asbestos dust from a company mine in Montana killed at least 192 people over the past 30 years and crippled another 375). For more details, visit www.corporatepredators.org.

Corporate Take-Over at NASA

US -- In January, NASA announced plans to "collaborate in planning future joint research and development" with Lockheed Martin, a major US weapons contractor. NASA Ames Research Center Director Henry McDonald stated he was "delighted to form this planning partnership." Following in the boot steps of Hitler's Third Reich, NASA will now turn to war-profiteering businessmen for guidance on how to spend taxpayers dollars on "cutting-edge technologies and… new ideas to improve the nation's education infrastructure." Lockheed Martin's Jay Honeycutt explained that such "research collaborations with government agencies, academic institutions and nonprofit organizations are a crucial component of our business strategy for the future." Among the goals of this unprecedented federal-multinational merger: biotechnology, technology commercialization, astrobiology and workforce development.

Colonialism Goes Organic
GRENADA - Sainsbury's, the British food titan, is quietly chatting-up the Caribbean governments of Grenada, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and Dominica to supply its European markets with organic bananas, passionfruit, coconuts and mangoes grown in the Windward Islands. Local farmers - who were encouraged to adopt chemical fertilizers and pesticides over the past decades - will be out of luck. According to The Guardian, Sainsbury plans "to take over the agriculture of the entire island and make it organic." Small farmers "would lose their livelihoods for several years during the transition" to farming on soils cleansed of chemicals. The Windward Islands National Farmers Association has called for "Fairtrade" policies that would guarantee sustainable produce prices and remove intermediary markups so that even the smallest farmers could survive. Sainsbury's could more quickly attain its goal, the Guardian notes, if it traded with "Cuba, where most crops are now organic."

Talking the Walk
US - Corporations are getting good PR these days by sponsoring "good-cause" fundraisers. Tanqueray gin sponsors AIDS Rides, and Avon (which markets cosmetics containing carcinogenic ingredients) sponsors Avon 3-Day walks for breast cancer. San Francisco-based Breast Cancer Action (BCA) charges that, of the $7.78 million raised in a 1999 Avon walk in Los Angeles, "only $5.02 million went to breast cancer organizations." The rest covered administrative and marketing expenses. Ultimately, "for every dollar a walker receives in pledges, less than 65 cents gets anywhere near a breast cancer organization." (In LA, walkers had to raise $1,800 each for the privilege of enduring a three-day, 75 mile hike.) Avon donates funds to the National Alliance of Breast Cancer Organizations. After the NABCO collects an "undisclosed fee," it sends the balance to "educational" programs that merely "encourage women to get [cancer] screening." Incredibly, BCA reports, "none of the funds may be used for actual [cancer] screening." The next time you are inspired to walk for a cause, BCA recommends that you just walk straight to your charity of choice and write out a personal check.

Climate Change Is "Greatest Challenge"
SWITZERLAND - At the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, five of the world's leading visionaries presented their forecasts for the future. Afterwards, the hundreds of assembled world leaders, politicians and businessfolk were asked to vote electronically to determine the most pressing threat facing humanity. "The surprise verdict," reports Rhys Roth of EII's Climate Solutions, was that "the greatest challenge facing the world at the beginning of the century is climate change." The vote confirmed that the business community has accepted the reality of global warming. The only impediment to action is "the impotency of international institutions whose members often place national considerations above global concerns." The next most critical issues identified were "an end to traditional ethics" and "an ineffective international system."

Privatization Is Uneconomical
AUSTRALIA - Sydney University Physicists Christopher Dey and Manfred Lensen have used computer models to demonstrate that reducing greenhouse gases can boost economies and create jobs. But for the transition to succeed, the models showed, these bold new policies must be "community-based and - owned rather than privatized." If people abandoned their cars for public transit, the computer studies indicated, greenhouse gases would drop 41 percent, with a 75 percent increase in jobs. Halving meat consumption and reducing dairy production by one-third could cut greenhouse gases by 21 percent. (On the downside, solar thermal power would cut greenhouse gases 74 percent but would mean 24 percent fewer jobs.)

Less Gas: More Jobs
US - A joint report from the Tellus Institute and the Worldwide Fund for Nature argues that programs designed to cut greenhouse gases would save the US $48 billion a year while generating 879,000 new jobs. Among the recommended strategies: increasing efficiencies for transportation and housing and removing subsidies to polluting industries. More evidence: In 1998, greenhouse emissions fell 3.7 percent in China while the country's economy grew 7.2 percent. In 1998 and 1999 the world's carbon emissions remained constant while the world economy grew by 7.2 percent.

Holy Smokes BAT-man
UK - In recent years, three managers of the British American Tobacco company have been jailed for tobacco smuggling. In each case, BAT insisted that the managers were running "rogue" operations. On February 2, The Guardian and the Center for Public Integrity exposed the existence of internal BAT documents that revealed smuggling to be an "integral part of the company's business operations." Meanwhile in North America, the Canadian government is considering suing US tobacco giant RJ Reynolds for directing "a smuggling operation on the US-Canadian border."

Privatizing the Pentagon's Security
UK -- According to the October 18 issue of the Intelligence newsletter, the US Defense Department has awarded a multimillion contract for Pentagon security to Group 4 Securitas BV, a self-described "world leader in access control." Group 4 will oversee the computerized "smart cards" that grant Pentagon access to more than 23,000 civilian and military personnel. Group 4 is headquartered in Curaçao, a tax haven in the Dutch Antilles. In 1990, Group 4 was in charge of security at a British conference hall in 1990 when the IRA managed to hide a lunchbox filled with high explosives inside a speaker's lectern. The conference (which was called to discuss how to combat terrorism) drew representatives from British intelligence, the FBI and the CIA.

Money Makes the World Go Down
The world's 450 billionaires alone have combined financial assets greater than the combined annual incomes of half of humanity. The problem arises from a predatory global financial system, driven by the single imperative of making ever more money for those who already have lots of it. This is rapidly depleting the real capital - the human, social, natural, and even physical capital - on which our well-being depends. (From "Money as a Social Disease," by David C. Korten.)