Tag Archives: CWR

Sudan Divestment

Eric ReevesBill Baue speaks with Eric Reeves, professor of English at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts and host of SudanReeves.org, about the campaign he helped initiate to divest from international companies doing business with the genocidal regime in Sudan.

Peter Kinder, founding president of socially responsible investing research firm KLD Research & Analytics, compares and contrasts Sudan divestment with South Africa divestment, and KLD research expert on Sudan Claire Moroni discusses KLD’s new Sudan Divestment Tool modeled on the Illinois State divestment legislation.

SudanReeves.org

SocialFunds.com article: KLD and ISS Offer Research Tools for Divesting from Sudanese Genocide and Terrorism

SocialFunds.com article: Divesting From Genocide: A Conversation with Eric Reeves of the Divest Sudan Campaign

SocialFunds.com article: Divesting from Genocide: More Conversation with Eric Reeves of the Divest Sudan Campaign

Redesigning the Corporation – Part II

MarjorieKellyGuests Marjorie Kelly and Allen White go into more depth on their efforts in Corporation2020 to redesign the corporation. They discuss the need to realign the purpose of the corporation so that it does not undermine societal well-being, and how to ensure that corporations do not undermine human rights — ending the fiction of “corporate personhood” that has enabled corporations to undermine politics and public policy. The show also includes recent success stories in Humboldt County, CA and Franklin County, PA.

Redesigning the Corporation

MarjorieKellyMarjorie Kelly, former editor of Business Ethics, and Allen White, a founder and former director of the Global Reporting Initiative, have organized an effort to redesign the corporation. Their new organization, Corporation 2020,brings together business people, experts, academics, investors and stakeholders to reconfigure the corporate form — one in which private interests would be harnessed for, and subservient to, the public good.

Links

Corporation 2020

Music by Justin Bianco, available from Magnatune

Environment and Human Rights: Chevron in Ecuador

Chevron’s accountability for the legacy of environmental destruction and health impacts from oil exploitation by subsidiary Texaco in the Oriente region of Ecuador from 1964-1992. We speak with Cristobal Bonifaz, lead attorney in the Maria Aguinda Salazar v. ChevronTexaco class-action lawsuit filed in Lago Agrio, Ecuador (after navigating US courts for a decade) in May 2003 by 88 Ecuadorians representing 30,000 indigenous community members and settlers, and currently in the inspection phase visiting the 627 unlined pits where toxic “formation waters” (which accompany oil when extracted) were dumped.

We also speak with leslieloweLeslie Lowe, director of the Energy and Environment program for the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR), a coalition of 275 faith-based institutional investors with more than $110 billion in assets whose members filed 3 shareholder resolutions this year at Chevron related directly or indirectly to the Ecuador environmental and human rights problems. Ms. Lowe visited the affected regions in March of this year as a member of a delegation of Chevron shareholders–including the California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS–the largest US pension fund) on a fact-finding mission.

Finally, Corporate Watchdog Radio correspondent David Poritz, who runs a nongovernmental organization (NGO) in Ecuador called Esperanza that brings shoes to the affected communities as well as bringing students to the region to give them a first hand experience seeing the contamination, speaks with ethnobiologist Dr. Estella de la Torre in the Secoya community of San Pablo, where she does research.

Links:

Oil Spread Upon the Waters of Ecuador May Return Harm for ChevronTexaco Shareholders
(pic) (part 1 of 3-part article)

Asphalt Jungle: Did Oil Drilling by Texaco Create Environmental and Social Harm in Ecuador? (part 2 of 3-part article)

Ecuadorian Attorney General Tells ChevronTexaco Shareholders Remediation Agreement May Be Invalid (part 3 of 3-part article)

New Document Alleges Tie Between Chevron and Human Rights Abuses in Nigeria
(part 1 of 2-part article)

Lack of Human Rights Policy Concerns Chevron Shareowners in Light of Unocal Merger
(part 2 of 2-part article)