Our Mission

CorpWatch's vision is to promote human, environmental and worker rights at the local, national and global levels by making corporate practices more transparent and holding corporations accountable for their actions. As independent investigative journalists, we provide critical information to foster a more informed public and an effective democracy.

CorpWatch is part of a diverse global movement for human rights, social justice, environmental sustainability, peace, corporate transparency and accountability.

We believe that all people deserve:

• The power to make decisions over their own resources, environment and working conditions
• Fair and sustainable trade that rewards workers with just wages and a clean, sustainable environment
• Public services such as education, healthcare, water or electricity available at an affordable price. No institution should be allowed to profit unjustly out of the provision of such basic services
• Access to local jobs and services 

We oppose:

• Violations of human rights such as torture, discrimination, political repression, or union-busting
• Ecologically unsustainable business practices, including those that have an adverse impact on local communities or the global environment
• Secret and unaccountable corporate and government activities
• Economic rules that adversely impact communities, national governments and entire regions of the world, such as free trade, privatization and outsourcing of local jobs.

Finally, we support the right of people, communities and countries to be compensated for human rights violations, and environmental and economic impacts caused by damaging corporate, government or multi-lateral institutional behavior. Corporations must abide by international law and be directly accountable to those directly impacted, whether a local community or a national government to redress damage.

In September 2007, we launched the Wiki project Crocodyl.org, in partnership with the Center for Corporate Policy and the Corporate Research Project. Crocodyl is an acronym for Collaborative Research On Corporations.

The purpose of Crocodyl.org is to stimulate collaborative research among NGOs, journalists, activists, unions, whistleblowers and academics from both the global South and North in order to develop publicly available profiles of the world's most powerful corporations, particularly multinationals. The result is an evolving compendium of critical research, posted to the public domain as an aid to activist campaigns and anyone working to hold corporations increasingly accountable.

Crocodyl’s goal is to create social change through democratizing often hard to find and disparate information on corporations and the impacts of their operations.

Cartoon by Khalil Bendib

Organizational History

Since 1996, San Francisco Bay Area-based CorpWatch has been educating and mobilizing people through the CorpWatch.org website and various campaigns. We were initially known as TRAC--Transnational Resource & Action Center--and our website was called Corporate Watch. In March 2001 we simplified the situation by bringing TRAC together with our Internet presence under one name, one logo and a matching website address: CorpWatch.

Our staff currently consists of three experienced and diverse people supported by a network of outstanding investigative researchers, journalists, editors, volunteers and our resident political cartoonist, Khalil Bendib.  The organization is a project of the Tides Center and it is guided by a six-member Executive Committee of our Advisory Board. Throughout its history CorpWatch has provided journalists, activists, policy makers, students and teachers with key informational resources on issues related to corporate accountability.

The foundation from which the organization emerged and evolved was the book, The Corporate Planet: Ecology and Politics in the Age of Globalization, written by CorpWatch's founder Joshua Karliner, and published by Sierra Club Books in 1997.

That same year CorpWatch blew the whistle on working conditions in Nike’s operations in Vietnam, ultimately leading to greater oversight of their factories and changes in their corporate practices. In 1998, CorpWatch started investigating the Enron Corporation, three years before the company’s collapse. The Climate Justice Initiative, organized from 1999-2002 around the CorpWatch report, Greenhouse Gangsters vs. Climate Justice, successfully redefined climate change as an environmental justice and human rights issue, and helped mobilize communities already adversely impacted by the fossil fuel industry.

In 1999, we broke the story of the United Nations growing entanglement with corporations, known as the UN Global Compact. We published "Earth Summit.biz: The Corporate Takeover of Sustainable Development," in collaboration with Food First Books in 2002.

We also co-produced five live one-hour radio broadcasts from the WTO Ministerial meeting and protests in Seattle in 1999 and from Cancun in 2003.

In the spring of 2002 and 2003, CorpWatch began to track companies like Bechtel, Dyncorp and Halliburton, profiting out of the so-called "war on terrorism." Following that, CorpWatch led two investigative journalistic teams to Iraq to investigate the out-sourced reconstruction there. Some of the footage CorpWatch obtained in Iraq was used in Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 9-11.

In May 2004, CorpWatch released an alternative annual report on Halliburton, along with Global Exchange, called Houston, We Have a Problem. We subsequently issued an alternative annual report on Halliburton in 2005 titled, Houston, We Still Have A Problem, and one in 2006, called Hurricane Halliburton: Conflict, Climate Change and Catastrophe.

In November 2004, CorpWatch released Iraq, Inc., A Profitable Occupation, through Seven Stories Press in New York, written by then-director, Pratap Chatterjee. Iraq, Inc was the first book-length on-the-ground account of Year One of the occupation of Iraq. Matt Swibel of Forbes Magazine said, "Iraq, Inc. will introduce you to the entrepreneurs who really understand war profiteering and the price the rest of us will have to pay." Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! called Iraq, Inc. "…muckracking, practiced with diligence and courage…the ultimate primer of how modern U.S. invasion and occupation for profit is being waged." Oliver Robinson, of the Observer (UK) described it as "... a damning guide to the web of private companies and 'hired guns' parasitically conjoined to the 'war on terror.'"

In May 2006, CorpWatch, released Afghanistan, Inc. by Afghan-American writer Fariba Nawa, which details the bungled reconstruction effort in Afghanistan. Our third report in the series of reconstruction boondoogles, was Big, Easy Money: Disaster Profiteering on the American Gulf Coast by Rita J. King, published in August 2006, on the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's devastation.

These reports were followed by Barrick's Dirty Secrets: Communities Respond to Gold Mining's Impacts Worldwide and Casualties of Katrina: Gulf Coast Reconstruction Two Years after the Hurricane during 2007; and a ground-breaking report on U.S. intelligence and translation contracting, Outsourcing Intelligence in Iraq: A CorpWatch Report on L-3/Titan, released on the eve of L-3's shareholder meeting in late April, 2008.

Today CorpWatch continues to investigate multinationals that profit out of war, fraud, environmental and human rights abuse. In addition, we are an affiliate member of Friends of the Earth International. In September 2007, we launched the Wiki project Crocodyl.org, in partnership with the Center for Corporate Policy and the Corporate Research Project. Crocodyl is an acronym for Collaborative Research On Corporations.