March 9, 2006

INTERVIEW

This is What Corpocracy Looks Like
Investivative journalist Pratap Chatterjee keeps his eye out for corporate misconduct

Interview by Tom Cogbill
Contributing Writer

Pratap Chatterjee is an investigative journalist who has been Executive Director of California-based CorpWatch since 2004. CorpWatch is a small, non-profit watchdog that scrutinizes the behavior of corporations around the world, focusing on issues of corporate profiteering, accountability, corruption, and environmental responsibility. A British citizen, Pratap started out as a reporter for the Financial Times, eventually ending up in Iraq. He later moved to the United States, where he worked with Amy Goodman at WBAI and earned a Master’s degree in Urban Design. In 2002, he traveled to Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban to investigate corporate privatization of the military. The flagrant abuses of public trust he uncovered there led him to pursue examination of the corporate-military relationship in Iraq in the wake of the U.S.-led invasion. His 2004 reportage resulted in the book Iraq, Inc., which details the avarice, fraud, corruption, and incompetence of security and construction companies in the rebuilding of Iraq. A similar report on the situation in Afghanistan, Afghanistan, Inc., is due out shortly. Pratap travels frequently around the United States and abroad, speaking out on the threats of globalization, war-profiteering, and corporate misbehavior. He spoke with Real Change on a recent trip to Seattle.

Real Change: Give us a little background on yourself.

Pratap Chatterjee: My father is Bengali and my mother, Sri Lankan. We lived in Britain till I was five, then moved to Calcutta, where I finished school. I studied chemistry as an undergrad, but did badly in it. I liked writing ,though, so I decided to try making a living at that. I went to journalism school in England, specializing at first in religion. When I saw I’d have trouble getting a job as a religion reporter, I switched to finance because not only will people pay you for that, but I could travel, too. I had to learn economics as I went along, since I had no background in it.

RC: Where did your career as an investigative reporter go from there?

Chatterjee: In the late eighties the environmental movement was really coming into the forefront. Because of my undergrad studies, I understood the relevance of science, and as a working financial journalist, I also understood companies. I was in a somewhat unique position, because here was someone who could examine institutions like the World Bank or companies like Weyerhauser, Boeing, or whoever, and could also understand environmental issues, like the devastation caused by logging, dams, and so on. So I became an environmental journalist. By then I was living in California. I took time off to do a book on the California Gold Rush, and while researching it, I discovered that a lot of the mining and oil industry used private security. Those same companies eventually evolved into the ones now providing security in Iraq. I started writing about the mining and oil industry and their relationship with these para-military companies. When Sept. 11 happened, it occurred to me those companies were going to make a killing off all the craziness and paranoia, which I found to be true in the course of my travels to Afghanistan and the Middle East.

RC: CorpWatch is almost ten years old. How did you get involved with it?

Chatterjee: I started out writing occasional stories for them, but after the dot-com bust, a lot of foundations lost money, there was less money for non-profits, and CorpWatch just about went under. Staff was cut to one. At the same time, their web traffic kept doubling and tripling, so I went to the Board with a plan. I told them people were obviously interested in the war-profiteering issue and it was crucial to keep pursuing it. I had a little experience setting up a non-profit and agreed to take over fundraising. So, as Executive Director, I now do that, as well as my journalism, talking to the media, and meeting with policy-makers in Congress. Our latest plan is to look more systematically at the world of business by creating a wiki.

RC: Explain what that is.

Chatterjee: It’s web-based, open-source citizen journalism where anyone can contribute. We want to follow the Fortune 500 and allow people to report on what’s happening in their backyard. What we want to do is a little different from Wikipedia, which is totally open-source, not edited. In our case, we’re going to do a little editing to make sure the information is accurate.

RC: You want to make the CorpWatch website a kind of information clearinghouse then?

Chatterjee: Yes. Wiki technology allows everybody to participate in one place. I can put up a website and you can put up a website, but if nobody links up or knows about them it really doesn’t matter how good our information is — it’s got to rise in the Google rankings. Wikis, because of their peculiar nature, tend to get ranked a lot higher. But they are also places where everybody can publish. That’s citizen journalism.

RC: What prompted you to investigate the reconstruction effort in Afghanistan and Iraq?

Chatterjee: Some friends of mine, protesting oil exploration in Texas [in the ’90s], dropped a banner off a crane. They got arrested and bail was set at a million dollars. It was crazy, bail that high! Turns out it was a Halliburton crane. They called me up and asked what I knew about Halliburton. All I knew, was it was run by former Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, but their predicament piqued my interest in the company. Turns out, they were the main service providers for the oil industry. Whether you’re Exxon, Chevron, or Shell, you have to buy your equipment from Halliburton — they are the only supplier, having invented or, in some cases, stolen, the technologies used to drill for oil, cap wells, etc. Anyway, I guess I’m just naturally suspicious, but after the United States invaded Afghanistan, I went there on a hunch that Halliburton would be involved. They started setting up operations in May 2002. As I continued traveling about the region, I began to realize how much of the military had been handed over wholesale to the private sector. So I started wondering what kind of job these people were doing.

RC: And?

Chatterjee: It turns out they were doing a terrible job, especially at serving the people in whose countries they were operating. They import workers who often lack the necessary job and cultural experience. In Afghanistan, they built a hospital that collapsed and roads that broke up before they could even be used. In Iraq, three years after the invasion, sewage, water, and electricity are still big problems, and Iraqis are very angry that so much money has been spent — much of it actually stolen from Iraq’s own oil assets after the fall of Baghdad — but so little has been fixed.

RC: Is this fueling the insurgency?

Chatterjee: Absolutely. Nearly everyone was in favor of ousting Saddam, but today they still see American soldiers shooting at people, breaking into houses, and so on. Iraqis are acutely aware they have a much better chance of being kidnapped or killed by common criminals today than under Saddam. Furthermore, unemployment ranges from 25 to 75 percent. The multinationals bring in a lot of outsiders — not just Americans, but East Indians, South Africans, and others. If an Iraqi gets hired at all, it is generally for the most menial, dangerous jobs, and then only at sweatshop wages. The average Iraqi is paid only $100 a month, not nearly enough to live on in Baghdad, but better than no job at all. So they take the jobs, but resentment runs high. Various surveys done by the U.S. and British military — the military, mind you, not the media or war protestors — indicate that, depending where you are in Iraq, between 40 and 90 percent of Iraqis say the Americans are occupiers of our country who need to leave and it’s OK to attack them.

RC: With the advent of an all-volunteer military, most of the non-fighting tasks traditionally part of military life have been farmed out to private companies. Do you see this as being a problem?

Chatterjee: It’s a huge problem. The government wanted to save money by not keeping a large standing army and just hiring outside providers as needed. That may have worked for a two-week intervention in Panama or Granada or wherever, but they weren’t anticipating a years-long occupation. Private contractors work on what’s known as a “cost-plus” basis, getting paid for costs plus a small profit. On top of that they can receive a bonus based on a percent of the contract’s total value. The more a company spends, the more it makes, which creates a natural incentive to overcharge. Private contractors aren’t being held accountable for either their spending or their work quality. They can’t be court-martialed, obviously, nor has any company yet been prosecuted—only a few individuals for really blatant fraud. I question how cost-effective privatization is, too, when you consider that a basically unskilled American employee makes at least $80,000 a year compared to a soldier making between $13,500 and $30,700.

RC: You’ve also been looking into the rebuilding of the New Orleans area after Katrina.

Chatterjee: Yes. A lot of the same contractors from the war are there — Blackwater, Halliburton, Bechtel — sometimes the very same individuals. Fluor’s staff in Baghdad, for example, flew directly to New Orleans after Katrina because they knew there would be lucrative new contracts. And the same thing’s happening — companies are getting no-bid contracts, overcharging for them, and getting away with shoddy work. CorpWatch plans on publishing a report about it we’re calling The Big Easy to come out on the hurricane’s one-year anniversary.

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You can learn more about CorpWatch at their website, www.corpwatch.org