Dow Chemical
On being named chief of Trump’s National Manufacturing Council, Dow Chemical CEO Andrew Liveris said, “the U.S. is not a red tape country, but a red carpet country for businesses.”
Dow Chemical is a massive transnational monopoly—the second largest producer of chemicals in the world.
For much of its history, Dow has profited from the U.S. warfare state at the expense of hundreds of thousands of lives. Most infamously, Dow manufactured napalm for the U.S. military. Hundreds of thousands of tons of napalm were dropped on Vietnam, and tens of thousands of people were burned alive as a result. With Monsanto, they also produced Agent Orange, a chemical defoliant estimated to have resulted in the deaths of 400,000 Vietnamese men, women, and children as well as 500,000 birth defects. Thousands of U.S. soldiers were also affected.
In 1984, a toxic gas leak at a Union Carbide (a subsidiary of Dow) plant in Bhopal, India poisoned more than 600,000 people, killing 16,000 people.
In 2009, a Dow plant in St. Charles Parish leaked 26,720 pounds of vaporized ethyl acrylate (EA), a Class II toxic air pollutant, into the atmosphere. Dow has faced no penalties for this action.
Since 2008 Dow has received $230,028,546 in subsidies from the State of Louisiana.
For cutting safety costs and for shielding the company from lawsuits, shareholders at Dow awarded Andrew Liveris $65.7 million in salary and benefits in 2017.
Monsanto
Like many of the giant monopolies in charge of the global capitalist economy, Monsanto—which was acquired by Bayer in 2018—came to dominate production by war profiteering. Monsanto was a key player in the development of atomic bombs for the Manhattan project which produced the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, incinerating hundreds of thousands of people and poisoning many more. They also profited from the production of Agent Orange.
In 2018 the German pharmaceutical company Bayer purchased Monsanto for $60 billion. Bayer descends from the industrial monopoly IG Farben, which among other things, produced poison gas for Nazi concentration camps. Bayer-Monsanto now controls more than a quarter of the world’s seed and pesticides market.
Monsanto is among a handful of companies that dictate global agricultural production. For example, Monsanto controls more share of the global production of soy and corn seeds than any other company. These seeds are patented by the company and engineered as “Roundup Ready” crops which are intended to be grown in conjunction with Monsanto’s glyphosate-based herbicide. The UN International Agency of Research on Cancer has recognized an increased risk of cancer among farmworkers who are routinely exposed to glyphosate.
By enforcing its patents on corn, soybean, and cotton seeds, Monsanto has consolidated its market while driving many peasant farmers into destitution. In the past 20 years since the introduction of Monsanto-patented cotton into India, 290,000 farmers have committed suicide due to the loss of their livelihoods.
Since 2008, the State of Louisiana has awarded Monsanto $215,074,865 in tax subsidies.
Nestlé
“Water is, of course, the most important raw material we have today in the world. It’s a question of whether we should privatize the normal water supply for the population. And there are two different opinions on the matter. The one opinion, which I think is extreme, is represented by the NGOs, who bang on about declaring water a public right. That means that as a human being you should have a right to water. That’s an extreme solution. The other view says that water is a foodstuff like any other, and like any other foodstuff it should have a market value.” —Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, CEO Nestlé
The United Nations predicts that by 2025, 1.8 billion people will live with dire water shortages, and two-thirds of the world’s population could be living under “stressed” water conditions. According to Nestlé, this will only increase the market value of its commodities.
Nestlé is the largest food company on the planet and the world’s biggest bottler of water. Across the world, Nestlé steals precious natural resources from the Earth’s Indigenous inhabitants in order to turn a profit. For example, Nestlé extracts up to 3.6 million liters of water daily from Six Nations treaty land (near the North American Great Lakes) without paying the people of the Six Nations a dime. Meanwhile, at least 63,000 Indigenous people in the region haven’t had drinkable water for at least a year. Similarly, in order to profit from cocoa production, Nestlé has illegally deforested much of West Africa. In the Ivory Coast, the rainforest cover has been reduced by more than 80%.
Nestlé paid Peter Brabeck-Letmathe 5.93 million Euros a year to steal from and enslave workers across the world.
Lockheed Martin
Lockheed Martin is the largest arms manufacturer in the world and chief supplier of fighter jets to the U.S. Air Force, which is responsible for more than half of the emissions from the Pentagon. The U.S. military consumes more fuel than most countries on the planet, totaling almost 270,000 barrels of oil bought every day as of 2017. Lockheed’s F-4 Phantom Fighter burns more than 1,600 gallons of jet fuel per hour.
In addition, Lockheed profits from the development and stockpiling of nuclear weapons. The company gets an annual $2.4 billion in tax-payer money to run nuclear weapons complexes in Albuquerque and Livermore for the Department of Energy.
Their F-35 jet program will cost U.S. tax-payers at least $406 billion.
Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson was paid $21,516,545 last year to supply weapons to the capitalists’ largest private army, the U.S. military.
ExxonMobil
A descendant of Rockefeller’s monopoly Standard Oil, ExxonMobil is the second largest company in the United States. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, ExxonMobil is among the 5 privately held companies that have alone produced 12.5% of all industrial carbon pollution since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.
Since 1998, Exxon has given tens of millions of dollars to organizations, ’think-tanks’ and politicians to promote climate change denial in contradiction to the scientific evidence that the company has had since at least the 1970’s. A 1980 corporate report states that the company had “no doubt” of the link between fossil fuel emissions and climate change and yet the company has doubled its production of oil and gas in years since. A senior researcher for Exxon even reported in 1992 that “potential global warming can only help lower exploration and development costs” in the melting Arctic Sea.
Rex Tillerson retired as CEO of ExxonMobil to become U.S. Secretary of State for Trump from 2017 to 2018. Tillerson never stopped working for Exxon, attempting to impose an oil embargo on Venezuela with the hopes of ousting the democratically elected government of President Nicolas Maduro. He had orders to regain for Exxon the massive oil reserves that it lost when the Venezuelan government nationalized its oil. Like any other U.S. Secretary of State, Tillerson was only looking out for his fellow capitalists. He made no effort to conceal this.
As of 2019, Tillerson has amassed $350 million from the labor of the thousands of workers that he has exploited.
Since 2012 Exxon Mobil has received $443,892,345 in tax subsidies from the state of Louisiana alone. Since 2000 they’ve received nearly 4 billion dollars in federal awards.
BlackRock, Inc.
BlackRock is the “world’s largest asset manager” according to the big business newspaper, the Economist. This corporation is heavily invested in fossil fuel companies, arms manufacturers, private prisons and others to the tune of more than $6 trillion. The firm is among the top three investors in BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, and ConocoPhillips. The company holds a 6.72% stake in Lockheed Martin and a more than 10% stake in private prisons corporations GEO Group and CoreCivic.
BlackRock stands to gain from deforestation efforts around the world, most notably in Brazil where Amazonian rainforests are being burned to benefit companies like JBS, the largest animal protein company in the world.
BlackRock is the largest shareholder in JBS who with the help of Brazilian President Bolsonaro has egged on the theft and clearing of land for pasture.
