Friday, October 01, 2004

NBR's Hubbard Files

The NBR has now made the infamous Hubbard articles available on their website as a "public service". The articles are:
Hubbard's triple bottom lie,
The triple bottom line lie,
Hubbard struggles to hold line,
Strike loomed at stopwork meeting,
Hubbard's $1,000,000 Queenstown sandpit,
The dumbed-down City of Souls vision,
Charismatic churchgoer,
The self-styled 'plodder' rose from delivery boy and
Don't stand for office if you can't take the heat.
All fairly scurrilous stuff but there's no allegation of criminal activity and individual accusations are pretty mild compared to what politicians get called these days.

Some of the allegations I have heard before in context of the labour unrest at his factory in 2000. That alone showed there was an unhealthy gap between what Hubbard thought he was like and what his workers felt. On the other hand, the allegation that Hubbard lied about the number of triple bottom line reports that he produced rests upon an uncharitable interpretation of an ambiguous statement of his. Having seen the video clip of Hubbard making the statement, I'll have to say the NBR was wrong to characterize it as a lie.