Multinational Monitor magazine has published its annual list of the world's worst ten corporations. It's the twentieth anniversary of the staunchly anti-corporate organization's end-of-year reckoning, and as usual some companies get called out for sustainability-related activities.

One such corporation is multinational oil giant Chevron, which gets bashed for multiple failures. One involves the role of subsidiary Unocal in the Yadana natural gas pipeline in Myanmar (also known as Burma), which according to the report "was constructed with forced labor, and associated with brutal human rights abuses by the Burmese military … Money from the Yadana pipeline plays a crucial role in enabling the Burmese junta to maintain its grip on power."

The oil company also gets blasted for its handling of a class action lawsuit brought by indigenous Ecuadorians alleging that Texaco, which was subsequently acquired by Chevron, poisoned its land. The litigation was initially brought in the United States and then, at Chevron's request, returned to Ecuador. According to the report, "Having argued vociferously that Ecuadorian courts were fair and impartial, Chevron is now unhappy with how the litigation has proceeded in that country. So unhappy, in fact, that it is lobbying the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to impose trade sanctions on Ecuador if the Ecuadorian government does not make the case go away."

To the chagrin of other company executives, a Chevron lobbyist even told Newsweek earlier this year, “We can’t let little countries screw around with big companies like this — companies that have made big investments around the world."

Yet another Chevron misdeed involved the company's excessively cozy relationship with U.S. Department of the Interior ("DOI") executives relative to the leasing of oil exploration rights on U.S. government lands and property. A report by the DOI Inspector General documented "a culture of substance abuse and promiscuity" in the U.S. program and found that Chevron had lavished the most gifts on federal employees. The report included this memorable line, which the Multinational Monitor report quotes: "Sexual relationships with prohibited sources cannot, by definition, be arms-length.”

Agricultural giant Cargill also gets raked over the coals. The company's sin: unreasonably profiting from the planet's broken food system—and no doubt about it, the system is broken. Domestic agricultural production in developing countries has declined dramatically in recent decades, causing power to be concentrated in a handful of multinationals like Cargill. In 2008 prices for basic commodities like rice spiked. "But not everyone was feeling pain," the Multinational Monitor reports. "For Cargill, spiking prices was an opportunity to get rich. In the second quarter of 2008, the company reported profits of more than $1 billion …"

The Multinational Monitor sees corporations as complicit in a global economic system that is inherently flawed and unfair. With their annual variation on the familiar David Letterman theme, they're identifying what for them are the worst examples of an inherently bad breed.

Even those who don't buy into the publication's hard-left ideological bias will agree that if there's one thing that the last year has proven, it's that our global economic system—or what's left of it—is indeed badly flawed. Big and fundamental changes are in the works, if only because the old system has been proven not to work. Don't expect corporate malfeasance of the sort the Multinational Monitor lambastes to disappear, though. There will always be organizations that sacrifice ethics at the altar of profitability.

Sadly, the laissez-faire economic system of the past 25 years greased the skids for this sort of behavior. The new economic system that is emerging from the ashes of the old is more regulation-intensive and founded on what might be called "a more ethical ethic." Hopefully this may result in fewer examples of egregious corporate conduct.

In the meantime, we can count on a 21st edition of the Multinational Monitor's "Worst Companies" report.

Same time next year.