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Federal regulators have accused BP of price gouging. Its corroded pipelines have been leaking in Alaska. A BP oil spill has polluted the coast of California. Civil rights activists are picketing its petrol stations.

"If you drew up a list of companies that Americans are most disappointed in, BP would definitely feature," said James Hoopes, professor of business ethics at Babson College, Massachusetts.

For a while, he says, BP's talk of ethics and sustainability overcame a grand old American tradition of hating big oil companies.

"Expectations had been raised so high that people's feelings have been crushed," said Prof Hoopes. "The predominant feeling about BP is, 'Oh no, fooled again.'" Others take a blunter line. Athan Manuel, director of lands protection at the Sierra Club, a North American environmental network, said: "Their reputation is pretty much in the toilet."

It is difficult to identify the point at which things began to fall apart for BP in the US. But the day when a problem became obvious to the world was March 23 last year, when workers overfilled a 50-year-old blowdown drum with chemicals at the Texas City refinery, causing a huge blast in which flaming liquid showered nearby accommodation trailers.

It was the worst US industrial accident for a decade. Safety officials found that antiquated equipment was on site, that trailers were too close to flammable materials, that eight previous incidents had happened at the blowdown drum and that a cost-cutting culture permitted "catastrophic safety risks".

BP's reaction to the disaster drew criticism. Ms Rowe says she got a letter a few days later apologising for the death of her father, James. But it appeared to be a form letter intended for a bereaved wife, rather than for a daughter who had also lost her mother. "It was hurtful," she said. "Those were my parents - my mum and dad. It wasn't just anybody."

Although tragic, a single incident could have been seen as a one-off caused by rogue management at a refinery. But at the other end of America, cracks began to appear in the BP facade. On March 2 this year, a worker driving along a gravel road in Alaska smelt oil. He discovered the largest leak on Alaska's North Slope, as the equivalent of more than 200,000 barrels of oil gushed into the snow. BP's automated leak detection system had failed.

Worse was to follow as the company discovered worrying signs of corrosion, forcing it to shut much of its Prudhoe Bay oilfield, which produces 400,000 barrels of oil a day.

A congressional inquiry established that the company had failed to perform routine inspections by sending a maintenance "pig" through the pipe. In a hearing in September, Joe Barton, chairman of the House energy and commerce committee, thundered: "This comes from a company which prides itself in their ads on protecting the environment. Shame! Shame! Shame!"

Washington is taking a sharp interest in BP. Over the summer, the Justice Department said it had begun criminal and civil investigations into whether BP traders manipulated crude oil and unleaded petrol markets. During 2003 and 2004, the company's staff are alleged to have bought huge quantities of propane to establish a dominant market position.

That scandal has attracted the attention of the civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, whose Rainbow/Push Coalition is targeting BP's filling stations, accusing the company of ripping off the public and failing to employ any black senior executives.

Butch Wing, director of the coalition, says BP is guilty of price gouging, safety lapses, environmental crimes and racial discrimination. "We want a dialogue with them," he said. "BP has a major, major problem in the US."

Other issues have added to the impression of an organisation in crisis. In the Gulf of Mexico, BP's Thunder Horse platform, damaged during Hurricane Katrina, is proving very difficult to repair. In California, pipeline experts are looking at how BP managed to spill 1,000 barrels of a refined petroleum product in the port of Long Beach.

BP's official line is that there is nothing to link any of the individual setbacks it has suffered in America. A spokesman, Ronnie Chappell, says: "These are all very different in terms of the nature of the incidents and the circumstances that surround them. While we see no direct connection between them, we can understand why people would connect the dots in the way you have."

However, questions are being asked about whether BP took a firm enough grip on its US management after mergers with Amoco in 1998 and Arco in 2000.

The Sierra Club's Athan Manuel says: "It's hard not to come to the conclusion that it's systemic. I think the folks at the top are enlightened and understand where the company should be. They want to make it progressive. But from an operations point of view, that hasn't filtered down to the people on the ground."

BP has responded with a slew of changes. A veteran BP troubleshooter, Robert Malone, was appointed in June to a new post chairing BP solely in the US. The top executives in Texas City and Alaska have been replaced. The company has asked a retired judge, Stanley Sporkin, to act as an independent ombudsman for any whistleblowers. BP has also called in the former US secretary of state, James Baker, to chair a panel examining its safety culture.

BP's spokesman says its commitment to renewable energy is unchanged. The company has invested heavily in solar and wind power, while a carbon sequestration project is under way in California to generate electricity from petroleum coke. "You'd have a hard time finding another company making a similar level of commitment," he said.

However, scepticism about BP runs deep in America and the company may never recapture the optimism inspired by its environmentally aware makeover. Pratap Chatterjee, director of California-based CorpWatch, says: "This is a company that says it cares about the community and society, but it's not repairing its own pipelines and refineries."

Yet there is a degree of sympathy, even in unlikely quarters. Lois Epstein, senior engineer at Cook Inletkeeper, an Anchorage organisation monitoring the Alaska oil industry, says: "I give them some credit for apologising and saying they were wrong. It takes some guts, some realisation to do so. It's unusual to see that in America. Maybe they did it because they're a British company."

Expansion in US

· America represents 40% of BP's overall business. After a series of mergers with Amoco, Arco, Burmah Castrol and Vastar, by 2001 BP had become the largest oil and gas producer in the United States and one of the largest petrol retailers.

· The company has 37,000 employees in the US.

· It sells 15bn gallons of fuel every year to motorists at 14,000 petrol stations.

· BP's five US refineries produce 1.5m barrels of crude oil per day.

· The company holds a fifth of all proven oil and gas reserves in the country.

Andrew Clark

Published on 16th November 2006, By The Guardian 

The White House is lobbying British ministers to allow the world's main drug companies unrestricted access to the NHS as part of a package of free market reforms for the service. The US government is positioning itself behind the giant pharmaceutical firms, predominantly based in America, which have been piling pressure on the body that approves drugs for use in hospitals and for prescription by GPs.

The drug companies claim that they are being held back by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence and have separately lobbied for it to be reformed.

— Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

The drug companies are our friends. Making drugs that make us well is not all they do. They use part of their profits to make sure that the very best people are elected to the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. The very best people are Republicans.

Through September 2006 drug companies had given $8.7 million to political campaigns. If both Democrats and Republicans were equally good, those funds would be distributed evenly between the two parties. Democrats and Republicans are not equally good-Republicans are better. That’s why 69% of drug company contributions have gone to Republican candidates. (In fairness it must be noted that although Pfizer sent 67% of its contributions to Republicans before October, its most recent disclosures show that it has had some sort of epiphany and during October gave only 41% of its contributions to Republicans and 59% to Democrats. There is no logical explanation for this change of heart.)

The New York Times reported on its front page today that US-based corporations are fighting a proposed Chinese law that seeks to protect workers’ rights. The law is “setting off a battle with American and other foreign corporations that have lobbied against it by hinting that they may build fewer factories here.”

The Times reports that Global Labor Strategies, a group that supports labor rights policies, is releasing a report in New York and Boston “denouncing American corporations for opposing legislation that would give Chinese workers stronger rights.”

“‘You have big corporations opposing basically modest reforms,” said Tim Costello, an official of the group and a longtime labor union advocate. “This flies in the face of the idea that globalization and corporations will raise standards around the world.’”

The Times article drew heavily on the Global Labor Strategies report (.pdf), Beyond the Great Wall: U.S. Corporations Opposing New Rights for Chinese Workers which was released today. (The Spanish translation is available here.)

According to the report, US-based global corporations like Wal-Mart, Google, UPS, Microsoft, Nike, AT&T, and Intel, acting through US business organizations like the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai and the US-China Business Council, are actively lobbying against the new labor legislation. They are also threatening that foreign corporations will withdraw from China if it is passed.

China’s Draft Labor Contract Law would provide minimal standards that are commonplace in many other countries, such as enforceable labor contracts, severance pay regulations, and negotiations over workplace policies and procedures. The Chinese government is supporting these reforms in part as a response to rising labor discontent.

Corporate opposition to the law is designed to maintain the status quo in Chinese labor relations. This includes low wages, extreme poverty, denial of basic rights and minimum standards, lack of health and safety protections, and an absence of any legal contract for many employees.

According to Beyond the Great Wall, the proposed legislation will not eliminate Chinese labor problems. It will not provide Chinese workers with the right to independent trade unions with leaders of their own choosing and the right to strike. But foreign corporations are attacking the legislation not because it provides workers too little protection, but because it provides them too much. Indeed, the proposed law may well encourage workers to organize to demand the enforcement of the rights it offers.

This corporate campaign contradicts the justifications that have been given for public policies that encourage corporations to invest in China. US based corporations have repeatedly argued that they are raising human and labor rights standards abroad. For example, the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong asserts among its “universal principles” that “American business plays an important role as a catalyst for positive social change by promoting human welfare and guaranteeing to uphold the dignity of the worker and set positive examples for their remuneration, treatment, health and safety.” But US based corporations are trying to block legislation designed to improve the remuneration, treatment, health and safety, and other standards of Chinese workers.

At a time when China exerts a growing impact on the global economy, efforts to improve the conditions of Chinese workers are profoundly important for workers everywhere. As U.S. wages stagnate, many Americans worry that low wages and labor standards in China are driving down those in America. Improving labor conditions in China can help workers in the rest of the world resist a “race to the bottom” that threatens to bring wages and conditions worldwide down to the level of the least protected. The opposition of corporations to minimum standards for Chinese workers should be of concern to workers and their political and trade union representatives throughout the world.

Jeremy Brecher, Tim Costello and Brendan Smith

Published on Friday, October 13, 2006 by CommonDreams.org 

Tim Costello, Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith are the co-founders of Global Labor Strategies, a resource center providing research and analysis on globalization, trade and labor issues. GLS staff have published many previous reports on a variety of labor-related issues, including Outsource This! American Workers, the Jobs Deficit, and the Fair Globalization Solution, Contingent Workers Fight For Fairness, and Fight Where You Stand!: Why Globalization Matters in Your Community and Workplace. They have also written and produced the Emmy-nominated PBS documentary Global Village or Global Pillage? GLS has offices in New York, Boston, and Montevideo, Uruguay. For more on GLS visit: www.laborstrategies.blogs.com or email This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .

There are many opinions a coporation must keep to itself, that is if it's insterested in keeping a squeaky clean, or a squeaky "green" image. Sometimes, though, a corporation feels compelled to inject something unsavory into the public debate in order to protect the bottom-line - and the best way to do this is through the age-old art of ventriloquism.

When it comes to the issue of climate change, no corporation has done better with this tricky little PR technique than ExxonMobil, which was castigated this week by the UK's prestigious Royal Society for funding organizations that work to spread doubt about the scientific consensus on climate change.

Of course, this type of ventriloquism is not without precedent. The classic example is The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC), a front group that the PR firm APCO-Worldwide founded in 1993 on behalf of tobacco giant Philip Morris, specifically to question the health risks of Environmental Tobacco Smoke (ETS). TASSC then engaged experts to write papers in the industry’s defence.