Corporations

Major media have been remarkably quiet about the Carlyle Group, "one of the most powerful, well-connected, and secretive companies in the world," which brought together high-powered former politicians including George Bush seniors with Saudi financial moguls and even members of the Bin Laden family. "The Bush administration isn't afraid to mix business and politics, and no other firm embodies that penchant better than the Carlyle Group," reports Red Herring magazine. "Walking that fine line is what Carlyle does best.

Washington Post reporter Michael Grunwald uncovers a decades-long campaign by Monsanto to hide its extremely toxic PCB pollution in Anniston, Alabama. Monsanto held a monopoly on PCB production in the United States until they stopped making them in 1977. For nearly 40 years while producing PCBs at the Anniston plant, Grunwald reports, Monsanto knew that the PCBs they were dumping into an Anniston creek and open-pit landfills were toxic and they concealed that knowledge.

PR trade publication O'Dwyer's PR Daily reports: "Robert Monks, Chairman of LENS Investment Management and Ram Trust Services, has filed a resolution calling for the separation of the Chairman and CEO positions at ExxonMobil because he believes the current holder of the posts, Lee Raymond, and his denial of the global warming problem is destroying the reputation of the energy giant. Monks says Raymond's 'extreme position' and negative public image is the reason that ExxonMobil's stock is 'undervalued compared to its peer group when it should be at a premium.'"

"If there was no Afghanistan story," writes Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz, "the press would be going nuts over Enron. It's the biggest corporate collapse ever, the firm employed some top administration officials and the CEO was a Dubya pal. Enron has been a big business story, but hasn't drawn the kind of daily-drumbeat political treatment that often surrounds corporate chicanery with a strong whiff of scandal."