NYC Earth First! and Wetlands, Rainforest Action Group Stump Mitsubishi
by TS1010@aol.com
"Earth First! Profits Last! Boycott Mitsubishi!" The chanting echoed through the main entrance to Mitsubishi International as employees looked on in shock at New York City's World Rainforest Week action on their doorstep. NYC Earth First! and Wetlands Rainforest Action Group had blockaded the offices using two cement barrels, lockboxes and a wooden door, demanding an end to Mitsubishi's worldwide pillage of forests and ecosystems.
As an activist with a megaphone entered through the north doors, drawing attention by shouting about Mitsubishi, a second activist entered with a lockbox disguised as a package and locked down to a banister in the north lobby. Meanwhile, activists on the south entrance brought two large cardboard boxes on appliance dollies to the main entrance. In the cardboard boxes were two 600-pound concrete-filled barrels painted as stumps with lock boxes cemented inside!
Two activists entered the south entrance and announced that it was closed. Another activist sat down in the turnstile of the revolving door, and the person locked to the banister unlocked and joined him.
Within seconds, five activists were locked down. Two people laid down with their backs on the ground in front of the barrels and their arms stretched over their heads and into lockboxes embedded in the concrete barrels. Three people also locked into the barrels from sitting positions between and next to the barrels. A sixth activist placed a door covered in a green cloth, cut and painted to look like a treetop, on top of the barrels and laying down on it, reached his arm through a pre-cut hole in the door to lock into another lockbox embedded in the top of one of the barrels.
The media and a diversionary demonstration, who had met at another location, arrived soon after. Fifty-four cops followed them and soon arrested the activist with the megaphone. The police gave the building manager a statement to read, formally asking the activists locked down to leave or be charged with criminal trespass. The blockaders held their ground and demanded a meeting with Mitsubishi's president.
The police decided to deconstruct the blockade to arrest everyone resisting their orders. First, they sawed through the door and attempted to pull off the attached activist, almost breaking his arm in the process. Next, they tried to cut through the barrels with a circular saw and with the jaws of life, almost dislocating another activist's arm. Finally, they jackhammered through the concrete, which took three hours. When the dust settled, the arrests totaled ten. We made Mitsubishi's life hell for a day and got our message out with great newspaper, TV, international newswire and internet website coverage, bringing home the message: "Earth First! Profits Last! Boycott Mitsubishi!"
But why Mitsubishi? Mitsubishi is actually one single king corporation known as a kieretsu. Viewed as a single entity, Mitsubishi is the world's largest corporation and has the tenth largest economy (the nine larger are all nations). The Mitsubishi companies have their hands in metals, ocean engineering, chemicals, cables, beer, life insurance, steel manufacturing, petrochemicals, carbon, cameras, banking, textiles, atomic power and many other things, including, ironically, cement. As the world's largest corporate destroyer of forests, Mitsubishi is the subject of a boycott by over 200 organizations led by the Rainforest Action Network since 1991.
Mitsubishi companies have two standard responses to protests about their forest destruction: outright denial of any destructive forest practices, citing the fact that they no longer own any direct tree-felling operations, and denial of any connection between the various Mitsubishi companies. Both of these claims are proven false by a brief look at practices throughout the kieretsu.
Three main companies own part or all of each Mitsubishi company. One of these three, Mitsubishi Corporation, owns part of all these companies. These companies do more than just "share a logo;" they conduct business in a way that would violate US anti-trust laws. They rotate executives, have interlocking boards of directors, maintain exclusive contracts with each other and aggressively finance each others' projects.
Mitsubishi's destructive practices span the globe. In Washington and Oregon, Mitsubishi is consistently the largest exporter of whole logs, accelerating job loss and forest destruction in the US. Mitsubishi is one of the largest investors in the ALPAC paper mill, the world's largest chlorine bleaching paper mill, causing the destruction and poisoning of the forests and waterways of Alberta, Canada. In Indonesia, Mitsubishi is the largest exporter of plywood from rainforest habitat stolen from the indigenous occupants by the repressive, genocidal Suharto regime. In Japan, Mitsubishi is also a primary importer of boreal forest logs from Siberia. In Ecuador, Mitsubishi's Bishi Metals illegally operated the largest exploratory mining operation in that country in a highly biologically diverse, undisturbed area. In retaliation, indigenous people carefully removed and cataloged objects in the mine and then burned down the empty mine site.
But forests aren't Mitsubishi's only victims. Mitsubishi Oil's use of shoddy, single-hull oil tankers, now condemned within the industry, resulted in the largest oil spill in Japanese history, killing untold amounts of aquatic life. A subsidiary of Mitsubishi working with the Mexican government is attempting to build a salt refinery in San Ignacio Lagoon in Baja California, endangering the most vital and pristine breeding and birthing areas for the California gray whale.
The battle against Mitsubishi is daunting, but there have been many victories by both international and grassroots groups: In San Francisco, Mitsubishi had a $147-million airport-construction contract canceled and has been banned from holding other city contracts because of its dealings with the brutal, illegitimate military dictatorship in Burma. Mitsubishi was stopped from clearcutting the Tongass National Forest when the United States Forest Service caught it keeping double books and cheating the US out of millions of dollars in logging fees. Mitsubishi, feeling the pressure of the six-year boycott, recently sold its half of the largest wood milling operation in the Amazon. Students from 33 colleges have voted to bar Mitsubishi products and recruiters from their campuses. Dozens of Mitsubishi automobile dealerships have condemned Mitsubishi's destructive forest practices, including the world's largest auto dealership, New York City's Potamkin Mitsubishi. Due to public pressure, Mitsubishi sold the world's largest disposable chopsticks manufacturing company in British Columbia, Canada, which wasted 85 percent of the wood that came into the plant. At least 30 car shows have been disrupted by demonstrations, with protesters locking themselves to cars and closing down exhibits, drumming, chanting, distributing flyers and circulating petitions. Caving into public pressure, Mitsubishi Motors Sales of America and Mitsubishi Electronics of America agreed to fund comprehensive research on how to reduce wood consumption and change corporate wood use practices. In Malaysia, Mitsubishi has sold its partnership, but continues to purchase logs cut from the oldest rainforest on Earth, believed to be 180 million years old, using tactics including 24-hour floodlight logging.
You can help sustain this pressure on Mitsubishi by boycotting all products with the red three-diamond Mitsubishi logo, including Kirin Beer, Bank of California, Mitsubishi fax machines, film, art markers, computers, TVs, cars, trucks, Nikon cameras and equipment and Mitsubishi Bank.
Contact Minoru Makihara, President of Mitsubishi International Corporation at 520 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10022; (212) 605-2000, fax (212) 605-35973. Order the Mitsubishi Boycott Organizer's Guide and other anti-Mitsubishi materials from the Rainforest Action Network at 221 Pine Street, San Francisco, CA 94109; (415) 398-4404; e-mail: Boycottmc@ran.org.