Articles by Pratap Chatterjee

Source: CorpWatch Blog

President Barack Obama personally helped Shell obtain authorization to drill for oil in Alaska, according to a 4,678 word front page article in the New York Times. This is a startling break from decades long U.S. policy which regarded the environment in the Arctic region too fragile to tamper with.

“(T)he president concluded that the reward was worth the risk, and created an unusual interagency group, overseen by a midlevel White House aide, to clear Shell’s path through the often fractious federal regulatory bureaucracy,” write John Broder and Clifford Krauss. read more

Source: CorpWatch Blog

Is Walmart going green? Mike Duke, the company’s CEO, says in a new 126 page report that the company is becoming more sustainable and responsible while “building meaningful, long-term change.” Activists disagree. Walmart’s “environmental impact has only grown over the last seven years” they say in a counter-report. Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price movie poster

Walmart, based in Bentonville, Arkansas, runs giant discount retail stores that sell consumer goods at rock bottom prices. It has grown to become the world’s largest private employer with 2011 sales of $421.85 billion. The company has been a major target for union activists like United Food and Commercial Workers which started the Wake Up Wal-Mart campaign and the Service Employees International Union which started Walmart Watch (The two unions have since merged and so has the campaign) It was also the subject of a critical film: “The High Cost of Low Price” produced by Robert Greenwald in 2005. read more

Source: IPS News

One billion dollars and just over four years after Boeing won a contract to build a “virtual fence” on the Arizona-Mexico border, the high-tech project was canceled last week by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) amid widespread recognition that it has been a failure.

The Secure Border Initiative Network (also known as SBInet) was created by the administration of George W. Bush in November 2005 to track down undocumented migrants crossing the 3,200-kilometre land border between the U.S. and Mexico. Estimates of the number of people that make it across range from 400,000 to one million a year, many of whom hike miles of uncharted northbound trails and roads through steep ravines and hills of the desert to evade border patrols. read more