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Waste Management Urged to Curb Influence-Peddling Abuses in Light of Enron Scandal At Waste Management Annual Meeting Infact Challenges Garbage-Hauling Giant To Earn its Removal from Hall of Shame For Immediate Release: Contacts: HOUSTON -- As Waste Management shareholders, employees and executives gather for its annual meeting, the national corporate accountability organization Infact is urging the corporation to reduce its influence over public policy. Infact inducted Waste Management into its Hall of Shame in 1996, challenging the garbage-hauling giant to stop interfering in public policy at the expense of health and the environment. Since that time, Waste Management has reduced its PAC and soft money contributions, the size of its federal lobbying force, as well as its federal lobbying expenditures. According to Infact, however, there are important steps that Waste Management must still take in order to earn its removal from the Hall of Shame. Speaking before shareholders to Waste Management's top leadership, Infact National Organizer Stacey Folsom said, "Today's public and political climate demands new leadership from the business community in the areas of ethics and accountability. The Enron and Arthur Andersen scandal has shone a bright spotlight on the need for real checks and balances over corporate behavior, and few corporations have been more closely linked to this news story than Waste Management." Last June Arthur Andersen and three of its audit partners were fined $7 million, the largest fine ever paid by a Big Five accounting firm at the time, for allowing Waste Management to engage in improper accounting practices. Infact's Hall of Shame challenges the gross imbalance in political influence between large corporations and ordinary people-an imbalance made evident by thousands of pages of Department of Energy documents released earlier this year. The documents revealed that the White House's 2001 national energy report and an executive order signed by President Bush mirrored proposals made by groups such as the American Petroleum Institute, a trade association that represents the largest oil companies in the US. Increasing public concern about corporate influence over public policy was illustrated by a Harris Interactive poll released last month, which found that 87% of the US public believes that big companies have too much power and influence in Washington. "The passage of campaign finance reform legislation earlier this year demonstrates that people are serious about leveling the political playing field. While Waste Management has taken a step in the right direction by severing its ties with Arthur Andersen, and maintains it has 'closed the book on the Old Waste Management,' the public is demanding real checks and balances over corporate behavior," said Folsom. ### Since 1977, Infact has been exposing life-threatening abuses of transnational corporations and organizing successful grassroots campaigns to hold corporations accountable to consumers and society at large. From the Nestlé Boycott of the 1970s and '80s to the GE Boycott of the 1980s and '90s to today's Boycott of Philip Morris's Kraft Foods, Infact organizes to win!
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