Latest corporate research

Dole Food

Ian Elwood — Fri, 02 May 2008 15:53:11 -0400

Company Snapshot:

Dole Food Company, Inc. is the world's largest producer of fruits and vegetables such as bananas and pineapples, and also produces cut flowers and nuts. Dole has a history of operating plantations in the US and across the globe, often creating poor working conditions and unsafe environmental conditions such as pesticide use, soil erosion and deforestation.

Occidental Petroleum

Charlie Cray — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 12:56:31 -0500

Company Snapshot:

Occidental Petroleum Corporation's principal activity is sell crude oil and natural gas. The company's operations are carried out through many subsidiaries and affiliates. Two major subsidiaries are Occidental Chemical Corporation and Occidental Oil and Gas Corporation. The company also owns 76% of OxyVinyls, the primary maker of PVC in North America.

L-3

crocodyl — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 18:22:07 -0400

Review:

The report provides a critical overview of L-3's (also known as Titan) contracts in Iraq. From the description, " When U.S. troops or embassy officials want to investigate Iraqis - such as interrogating prisoners, the principal intermediary is a Manhattan based-company named L-3. The company has just lost its biggest contract for failing to recruit qualified translators, and is also being investigated for human rights abuses."

Greenpeace Publishes Archive of Past Investigations

Ian Elwood — Wed, 07 May 2008 19:49:04 -0400

Greenpeace recently launched a website called Greenpeace Investigations that they will be using to archive their source materials from past research projects. The site includes scanned Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, fact sheets, reports and materials contributed by whistleblowers. They are currently scanning all of the Greenpeace magazines between 1980-1990 to add to the archive, which will be a great resource for people researching all types of corporations.

Each item has an HTML text version on its resource page, presumably for better searchability via search engines. They also offer the original PDF, which is great from a journalistic perspective, considering the need for source materials in any type of news writing. The website is ordered by "collections" so you can look at all of the relevant documents that relate to a specific investigation that Greenpeace has done.

I anticipate that this body of work will expose many more corporate crimes by bolstering existing corporate accountability research, allowing citizen journalists to mine these sources, creating follow up investigations and teasing out more details from the great work that Greenpeace has done, if it delivers on its promise:

"Greenpeace Investigations is a searchable library that contains investigative campaign research conducted by Greenpeace worldwide. It consists of thousands of documents that were obtained through our campaign efforts, FOIA requests, legal proceedings and whistleblowers. We believe that our investigative efforts and campaign documents should be made public as part of our ongoing effort to expose environmental crimes and their perpetrators."

Johnson & Johnson

Phil Mattera — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 13:04:30 -0500

Review:

Undocumented authorized company history.

Atlas Group

minhaaj — Mon, 05 May 2008 05:55:05 -0400

Company Snapshot:

The Atlas Group established Atlas Investment Bank in 1990 as a joint venture between Atlas Group and the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, Japan. With an associated company, Atlas Lease Limited formed in 1989 as a joint venture between the Atlas Group, the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, Japan and the National Investment Trust, Pakistan was merged into the Bank in February, 2002. After the merger, the shares of the joint venture partners were taken over by the Group. The head office of the Bank is situated in Karachi with branch offices in Lahore, Islamabad and Faisalabad.

Company of the Week

Ian Elwood — Fri, 02 May 2008 21:56:17 -0400

The next company of the week is Dole Food. From the snapshot:

"Dole Food Company, Inc. is the world's largest producer of fruits and vegetables such as bananas and pineapples, and also produces cut flowersand nuts. Dole has a history of operating plantations in the US across the globe, often creating poor working conditions and unsafeenvironmental conditions such as pesticide use, soil erosion anddeforestation."

A lot of great research has been done by many nonprofit and publicinterest groups on Dole, so I am sure lots of interesting things willturn up this week.

Cargill Inc.

Phil Mattera — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 00:00:23 -0400

Company Snapshot:

Cargill is one of the world's agribusiness giants and one of the largest privately held companies based in the United States. It began as a grain trader and has expanded into many forms of food processing and other industries such as steel and coal. Amid soaring commodity prices, Cargill's profits have been growing at an astounding rate.

Chevron

crocodyl — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 18:51:25 -0500

Company Snapshot:

Chevron is the world's fifth largest global energy company and engages in oil exploration and production; refining, marketing and transport; chemicals manufacturing and sales; and power generation. The company is implicated in corruption regarding the "Food for Oil" program in Iraq, agreeing to over 25 Million USD in fines.

URS

Phil Mattera — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 17:50:04 -0400

Company Snapshot:

URS Corporation has used a series of acquisitions—most recently Washington Group International—to propel itself to the top tier of international engineering firms, joining the likes of Bechtel and Fluor. The company is also a major contractor to the U.S. federal government (the source of 41% of revenues in 2007) in the areas of systems engineering, technical assistance, operations and maintenance. Much of the federal work flows through URS’s EG&G Division.

United Technologies

Ian Elwood — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 15:44:01 -0500

Company Snapshot:

One of the last remaining powerful U.S. conglomerates, United Technologies Corporation (UTC) is the parent company of Pratt & Whitney, one of the most famous names in jet engines; Sikorsky, a leader in helicopter production, including the famous (or infamous) Black Hawks; Carrier Corp., the largest supplier of heating and air conditioning systems; Otis, the world’s largest elevator company; and Hamilton Sundstrand, a leading producer of aerospace products. UTC also has a large fire-safety products business based on its acquisition of British firms Chubb PLC and Kidde PLC.

Stanley Inc.

Phil Mattera — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 17:51:24 -0400

Company Snapshot:

Stanley Inc. (also known by the name of its subsidiary Stanley Associates) is a rising star among providers of information technology and business process outsourcing services to the U.S. federal government, particularly the Department of Defense, from which it gets about two-thirds of its revenues. The rest comes from civilian agencies ranging from the Department of Justice to the Library of Congress. At the end of its last fiscal year, the company had a contract backlog worth about $975 million.

IAP Worldwide Services

Phil Mattera — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 12:23:54 -0500

Company Snapshot:

In two decades, IAP Worldwide Services has grown from an obscure start-up in South Carolina to one of the U.S. largest military contractors providing services in Iraq and Afghanistan. Taking advantage of the Pentagon’s embrace of outsourcing, IAP has focused on providing the armed forces with such mundane necessities as food, water, power, medical supplies and shelter.

Honeywell International

Aman Sidhu — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 14:38:51 -0500

Company Snapshot:

The Honeywell name is most often associated with thermostats, but the company known today as Honeywell International is the result of the takeover of Honeywell Inc. by the conglomerate AlliedSignal in 1999. The old Honeywell was a frequent target of antiwar protests during and after the Vietnam War because of its role in making deadly munitions such as fragmentation bombs. Responding to those pressures as well as financial problems within its defense segment, Honeywell announced in 1990 that it was spinning off most of its military operations into a new company called Alliant TechSystems.

General Dynamics

Charlie Cray — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 04:57:52 -0500

Company Snapshot:

General Dynamics has long been one of the largest military contractors for the Pentagon and many foreign governments. The company’s roots go back to the pioneering work on military submarines by the Electric Boat Company, but it later expanded into surface ships, aircraft, tanks and, most recently, military information technology. It became best known for deadly products such as the Trident nuclear submarine, the F-16 fighter jet, the M-1 tank and the Tomahawk cruise missile.

DynCorp International

Phil Mattera — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 12:25:45 -0400

Company Snapshot:

DynCorp does not like to be compared to controversial contractors such as Blackwater and KBR, but the company does exactly what they do. It performs a wide range of functions for U.S. government agencies, including security and support services in war zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan. While DynCorp is not quite as well known as those other private military companies, it has had its share of scandals.

CACI International Inc.

Phil Mattera — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 16:19:47 -0400

Company Snapshot:

CACI, founded in the early 1960s as California Analysis Center Inc., is almost entirely a Beltway Bandit—some 94 percent of its revenue is derived from contracts with the U.S. government. About two-thirds of that revenue comes from the Pentagon, but CACI also enjoys the patronage of the Departments of Homeland Security, State, Commerce, Justice and Transportation. At the end of its last fiscal year, CACI had a contract backlog worth some $6.4 billion.

Abbott Laboratories

Ian Elwood — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 01:41:04 -0500

Company Snapshot:

Abbott is a health care products manufacturer whose products extend from nutritional products and laboratory diagnostics to medical devices and pharmaceuticals. The company conducts business in at least 130 countries around the world.

L-3 Communications

Charlie Cray — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 05:03:46 -0500

Company Snapshot:

L-3 has grown from a motley collection of businesses spun off from Lockheed Martin in 1997 to a $14 billion company that is one of the largest military contractors. It provides a wide range of high-tech electronics and communications services not only to the Pentagon but also to U.S. intelligence agencies. Not all its services are high-tech: the company’s MPRI subsidiary, acquired in 2000, is among the providers of controversial private security services in places such as Iraq. With its 2005 acquisition of Titan Corp., L-3 got into the business of providing translators to assist U.S.

Northrop Grumman

Ian Elwood — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 14:49:12 -0500

Company Snapshot:

Northrop Grumman, the third largest U.S. military contractor behind Lockheed Martin and Boeing, was recently chosen—along with its European partner EADS—to supply the U.S. Air Force with aerial refueling tankers worth some $35 billion, though Boeing is challenging the award. Northrop is best known as the producer of the hugely expensive B-2 Stealth bomber, fighter jets such as the F-14 Tomcat featured in the Tom Cruise movie Top Gun, and nuclear-powered submarines and aircraft carriers.