In his small but powerful role in “Boiler Room,” Ben Affleck uttered the best line in cinema to describe corporations: They exist for one reason, “to become filthy rich, that’s all. We’re not saving the f—-ing manatees.” Profit is the bottom line.
I was quite surprised when I discovered an article in The New York Times’ business section detailing Google’s devotion to philanthropy. The e-giant has set aside $1 billion to fund Google.org, a for-profit branch designed to use venture capitalism to promote altruistic endeavors, such as producing an incredibly fuel efficient car. Corporations and the wealthy are becoming more involved in philanthropy — a more focused, long-term approach to aid than one-time monetary donations. It comes in the form of Bill Gates leaving active control of Microsoft to co-chair his wife’s charity, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to which billionaire Warren Buffett is donating the majority of his fortune. But philanthropic profit-spending doesn’t excuse unethical profit-making.
Wal-Mart, at the top of the Fortune 500 with about $351 billion in profits, has a ticker on its home page citing “the amount of money Wal-Mart has saved Americans since (Jan. 1).” The number I saw was $40 billion and rising at $90,000 per second. Wal-Mart’s owners, the Walton family, became the top philanthropists in education reform in 2004. But the company outsourced much of its employment to sweatshops abroad and pays its U.S. employees unlivable wages and paltry benefits. It’s also embattled in the largest civil discrimination lawsuit in history and touted its “green” initiatives after paying millions in fines for environmental violations.
According to watchdog group walmartwatch.com, the company is under scrutiny for everything from swiping more than $1 billion in taxpayer-funded subsidies to using its political influence to relax border security.
On its Web site, The Dow Chemical Company says it’s devoted to sustainability, human rights and water shortage, among other things. A press release from The Corporate Social Responsibility Newswire from last December said the company planned to fund a Mexican nonprofit organization that would directly or indirectly benefit 150,000 children and families affected by floods.
A short time earlier, Dow sold Nemagon, a pesticide banned in the U.S. since 1977, to African and Latin American countries for use on banana plantations, prompting at least a dozen workers to file a multimillion-dollar lawsuit. In Bhopal, India, a plant owned by a Dow subsidiary killed thousands in 1984 and today stands derelict, its chemicals still dirtying groundwater and making it unfit for drinking, though citizens are still using it.
In Michigan, Dow is responsible for cleaning a 50-mile stretch of watershed it contaminated with highly toxic dioxins, arguably the highest level spill of its kind in U.S. rivers. But let’s not forget about those 150,000 Mexican families and children! Who knows — not counting Dow’s sale of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War that likely still causes birth defects, maybe they broke even.
The epitome of cleaning a mess with marketing whilst practicing bottom-dollar economics is energy superpower, known for its tearjerking commercials about renewable energy, aimed at assuaging the guilt yuppies may feel from their Porsche Cayenne Turbo. A group of shareholders said BP spent more money on its “eco-friendly” logo last year than on renewable energy.
The Coca-Cola Company was honored for its corporate social responsibility in helping with education and HIV/AIDS prevention in China. It’s also been singled out for pollution in Nigeria and India, and using paramilitary forces to kill, kidnap and torture union organizers in its South American bottling plants, made famous at MSU by the Students for Economic Justice and the “Killer Coke” campaign.
Corporations aid one part of the world while destroying another, with the latter often in more grandiose proportion. Businesses (and individuals) with any sense of humanity must have a bottom line that’s more than profit at any cost. This septic wretchedness is fueled by the backward notion that one can build their fortune from unethical business and cleanse their ghastly offenses by spending some money to rebuild what they’ve devoted a lifetime to destroy. That’s not philanthropy, that’s chopping them in half with a machine gun and handing them a Band-Aid.
Drew Robert Winter is a State News columnist and an English senior. Reach him at winterdr@msu.edu.
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