David Korten’s introduction to When Corporations Rule the World states: “This alliance (corporate globalization) backed by the power of money and its defining project is to integrate the world’s national economies into a single, borderless global economy in which the world’s mega-corporations are free to move goods and money anywhere in the world that affords an opportunity for profit, without governmental interference.”
Do corporations rule the world? Pretty much. Are corporations people? No way! When a corporation gets returned in a body bag, then maybe. Corporations are created to make profits for stockholders and obscene profits for CEOs. This trumps any other values.
Naomi Klein, in This Changes Everything, tags capitalism as being incompatible with solving climate issues. Consider the North American Free Trade Agreement’s Investor-State Dispute Settlement mechanism: Foreign corporations can sue host-country governments to challenge anything from plain packaging rules for cigarettes to denials of permits for toxic waste dumps to increases in the minimum wage if they claim expected profits have thereby been reduced.
For example, Metalclad (a U.S. corporation) sued the Mexican federal government over a local government’s decision to deny a permit to operate a toxic waste dump. Local citizens felt the dump would pollute their water supply and petitioned their government to deny the permit. Metalclad won more than $15 million.
If a country loses a case and wants to keep the decision that was challenged, it has to pay a fine, often substantial. Ecuador was recently ordered to pay more than $2.4 billion to Occidental Petroleum.
Other prospective trade deals (TTP, TTIP, etc.) are concerned with possible similar dictates by corporations that disregard consumer and environmental protections. When corporations dominate people and governments for corporations’ narrow purposes, an unjust international economic order ensues.
Moreover, climate science gets ignored.
Corporations are powerful and “We The People” need to step up our own power and demand attention to the critical issue of our time: climate change.
Putting a price on carbon with the Fee and Dividend plan proposed by Citizens Climate Lobby would be a good start (see citizensclimatelobby.org).
Marilyn McCord
Vallecito
