Simple Living 2

What's Bush up to? It was March 20th when the Bush administration shocked the world with its announcement that the US was to abandon plans to implement the Kyoto agreement, signed by President Clinton in 1997. In an astounding step backwards, the US announced an energy plan to focus on the further exploitation of US natural gas reserves and to reverse the Clinton administration's banning of oil exploration in the Arctic Nature reserve. Responding to international criticism surrounding the increased carbon emissions resulting from such a plan, Vice President Dick Cheney, who has been leading the debate on energy issues, has set up a committee to look into the further utilisation of nuclear power. In an interview for US television, Cheney argued that the US needed to build 65 new power stations per year for the next twenty years, some of which should be nuclear, which he believes to be the 'environmentally sound way to go.' This is a reversal of twenty years of energy policy thinking for the US, which has not licensed any new nuclear power stations since the Three Mile Island accident in 1979. NGO campaigns begin The response from environmental Non Governmental Organisations and consumer groups in Europe was swift. Friends of the Earth organised the sending of over 50,000 emails to the White House within five days of the announcement. The Green Group of Members of the European Parliament and the Free Alliance called for sanctions against the US, including a consumer boycott of the US oil companies Texaco, Exxon (Esso) and Chevron. In the US, polls showed that three quarters of the population were unhappy with President Bush's stance on climate change. US Greenpeace wrote to the top 100 US corporations, demanding that they state their support for resuming Kyoto negotiations or 'face the consequences.' Consumer boycotts Very early on, unsuccessful visits to the USA by European environment ministers showed how little the Bush administration was interested in dialogue or debate. To the Republican Party it was an issue of power and, as the Greenpeace Director (quoted below) explained, this left campaigners with little alternative but to use their power as purchasers.
"The American public can register their opinions at the ballot box, but for the rest of the world, all we can do is register our opinions via the marketplace." Gerd Leipold, Greenpeace International Executive Director
George Bush had raised a $193,088,650 war chest for the election, only just beating Al Gore's $132,900,252. Campaigners against political donations in the USA have developed highly sophisticated websites detailing how and where each dollar of donation had come from.2 It soon became clear that the link between corporate political donors and the Bush administration would gave consumer campaigners the lever they needed. On April 7th more than 30 UK MPs, supported by the National Union of Students, called for a boycott of Coca Cola - a key Republican donor.3 And on April 12th Ethical Consumer launched the Boycott Bush website detailing initially a list of the 'Top twenty Republican donors with global consumer brands.' The ECRA website also began to document and chart campaigns elsewhere.

Boycott Esso With a public stance critical of the science of climate change, and donations of more than $1million to the Bush campaign, Esso's US parent Exxon Corp., was always going to be a campaign target. Only days before the launch of the Friends of the Earth/Greenpeace Esso boycott on May 8th, Esso had been singled out for boycott calls by more than sixty cross-party MPs, including the former Conservative Environment Minister John Gummer. Consumer campaigning is showing an astonishing new confidence in taking on some of the most powerful industrial and political groupings in the world. ECRA urges all EC readers who are concerned about global warming to support the Esso boycott and also to look for regular purchases in ECRA's longer boycott list. This is only the beginning of a story which will run and run. Technical Details The information used to compile these tables has been derived from the 'open secrets' website (www.opensecrets.org). This US-compiled site includes numerous details relating to political donations in the USA since the 1980s. The lists here are solely of Republican donations calculated by ECRA. The figures are complex totals which include cash as well as donations in kind, and individual contributions from Directors. Figures for donations in the top thirty all refer to the 2000 financial year, except for News Corp, Revlon Group and Coca Cola. These three all appeared in a top twenty list for Republican Donors from 1996-1999. Alternatives Alternative brands have been listed where appropriate, and have been taken from previously published reports in Ethical Consumer magazine. These lists were then checked to make sure there are no Republican donors within them. The references such as (ec57) show that the information came from issue 57 of Ethical Consumer magazine. Not all the brands of very large consumer product companies like Philip Morris have been listed here for reasons of simplicity. Bush Donors 2000 This is a listing of all the Republican Party's biggest donors for the year to Dec 31st 2000, excluding those from trade bodies or associations.
MBNA $3.0m Philip Morris $2.9m Microsoft $2.4m AT&T $2.4m UPS $2.3m Bristol Myers Squibb $2.1m Verizon $2.0m Pfizer $1.9m SBC $1.9m Enron $1.8m Citigroup $1.8m Federal Express $1.7m Time Warner/AOL $1.6m Credit Suisse $1.6m Ernst & Young $1.5m UST $1.5m Morgan Stanley Dean Witter $1.5m Lockheed Martin $1.5m Union Pacific $1.5m Freddie Mac $1.4m Bell South $1.4m Glaxo Wellcome $1.3m Amway $1.3m	Price W'house Coopers $1.3m Deloite & Touche $1.3m Eli Lily $1.3m Goldman Sachs $1.2m Anderson W'wide $1.2m Merrill Lynch $1.2m Exxon Mobil $1.2m WorldCom Inc $1.2m Lehman Brothers $1.1m International Paper $1.1m General Electric $1.1m Global Crossing $1.1m MGM Mirage $1.1m Koch $1.0m Aflac $1.0m Paine Webber $1.0m American $1.0m Financial Gp Boeing $1.0m Southern Co $1.0m Ltd Inc $950k BP Amoco $950k KPMG $900k Am'can Airlines $900k Schering Plough $900k	Brown & Williamson $880k Bank Pharmacia/Upjohn $850k One $850k Qwest $850k Anheuser Busch $850k Cintas Corp $828k MandalayResort Gp $810k Lehman Bros $810k Reynolds Tobacco $810k Fannie Mae $800k Bank of America $800k American Int Gp $800k GAF $800k Chevron Texaco $800k Paso $790k CSX $770k Burlington North $770k General Dynamics $750k American $740k Home Prods Joseph Seagram $740k PepsiCo $720k Chase Manhatten $700k FPL Group $685k	Dominion Resources $680k Prudential $900k USX Corp $650k Northwest Airlines $650k Aventis $650k First Energy $640k Reliant Energy $640k Walt Disney $640k WalMart $630k Cisco Systems $630k Texas Utilities $630k AEI Resources $630k Westwood One $620k Amgen $600k K Mart $590k UAL Corp $570k Home Depot $560k Duchossois Inds $550k Archer Daniels Midland $530k Edison Int'l $530k Ford $510k General Motors $510k Daimler Chrysler $500k

"I don't feel anti-American, just reasonably intelligent"

(Morrissey)