Corporations

The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) is calling for bioethics institutions and journals to disclose their financial relationships with the biotech industry. So far, the request has mostly fallen on deaf ears. "The industry's increasing recruitment of bioethicists has been widely debated, as has the scope of the contributions," notes Hal Cohen. "Most bioethics institutions don't publish such statistics, leaving the public to draw its own conclusions about conflicts of interest.

"Investors who have watched their nest eggs melt away would be shocked to know that former executives of companies involved in some of the USA's largest cases of corporate malfeasance -- Xerox, Waste Management and Sunbeam -- still serve as senior executives and directors at public companies," writes Matt Krantz. "Some even sit on audit committees, acting as watchdogs against accounting deceit. In one case, an ex-president's involvement with alleged fraud isn't even disclosed in his current employer's regulatory filings."

If you think corporations are doing a bad job of disclosing their internal finances, what kind of job do you think they're doing of reporting on their public health, social and environmental impacts?

According to Harold Evans, the real mystery surrounding the president's shady stock dealings with Harken Energy is "why the watchdog media didn't bark during the 2000 presidential election, when new unflattering evidence emerged in the month before the vote. ... During the presidential election, a more thorough investigation was carried out by a group of journalists at a time when Bush was saying he would run the White House like a business corporation.