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157 of the top 200 economic entities are corporations — Global Justice Now
Four global corporations — Chevron, Exxon, BP, and Shell
are responsible for more than 10% of the world’s carbon emissions — The Guardian in 2019
Adidas supplier factories still had “excessive working
hours and extremely low wages” in 2010 — China Labour Watch
Around two-thirds agree that the government had benefited
large banks, financial institutions, large corporations, and wealthy people,
and the rest of the population had benefited “not too much or not at all.” — Pew Research Centre
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The
revenues of the world’s 200 largest corporations were equivalent to 47.5% of
world gross domestic product (GDP) in 2016.
General
Motors is now bigger than Denmark.
Walmart
exceeds Spain and Australia.
Daimler
Chrysler is bigger than Poland.
Royal
Dutch/Shell is bigger than Venezuela.
IBM is
bigger than Singapore; and
Sony is
bigger than Pakistan.
Apple has greater revenues than Belgium, Mexico and Switzerland.
Finland’s
budget was about 40 billion euros, 20% less than Nokia’s annual sales.
------------------------------------------------------
A corporate entity is a legal fiction with neither
morals nor soul.
The economic power in the hands of the few persons who control a giant corporation is a tremendous force that can harm or benefit a multitude of individuals, affect whole districts, shift the currents of trade, bring ruin to one community and prosperity to another.
The rise of
the modern corporation has brought a concentration of economic power that can
compete on equal terms with the modern state. Big tech companies — Amazon,
Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft — present novel threats that exacerbate the
crisis of corporate concentration and economic inequality.
Many of
these companies have a track record of wielding their newfound power in deeply
dangerous ways, including harvesting our data, engaging in surveillance and
algorithmic bias, and adopting fiercely anti-competitive practices.
The largest
and wealthiest corporations have gained unprecedented power and influence in
contemporary life. The decisions made by them have an enormous impact on how we
live and work, what we eat, our physical and psychological health, what we know
or believe, whom we elect, and how we deal with one another and with the
natural world around us.
The
government seems ever more subservient to the power of these oligopolies,
providing numerous forms of corporate welfare — tax breaks, subsidies,
guarantees, and bailouts — while neglecting the most basic needs of the
population.
Markets are
inherently political, partially due to their “ties to the regulatory functions
of the state”. Markets can no longer be regarded as entirely separate entities
from the state. Therefore, the issue of corporate social responsibility is
political and should be treated as such.
The Rise of Corporate Power
Corporations have proven themselves to be faithless stewards of political power. Greed trumps principle. Corporate power today is a weed that has grown out of control, choking off everything else and ruining the garden.
The corporate end-goal of maximizing profit is destroying our environment and ruining livelihoods in developing nations. Even with loose codes of conduct and labour laws in place, multinationals are still able to exploit workers and significantly contribute to climate change.
Over the
last few decades, corporations have lobbied to weaken laws and policies
governing antitrust, environmental protections, worker rights and protections,
and more — all to further consolidate their own power.
Corporate
concentration only helps consolidate power among a wealthy few, which in turn
worsens economic inequality, destabilises our communities and democracy, and slows overall economic growth. It exacerbates racial inequities and
entrenches economic and social disparities between people.
As has been made abundantly clear throughout the COVID-19
pandemic, corporate concentration also contributes to price hikes and puts negative pressure on wages.
Corporate monopolies harm consumers and small
businesses by curbing competition through practices such as self-preferencing and predatory pricing. They unionize and
undermine working people’s power. They lobby lawmakers to embed racist and extractive policies into our economic and political
systems, all to further consolidate their own power and wealth.
Corporate power is the result of the merger of the corporation and the state.
Corporations amassed an ever-expanding set of rights through the courts, going much beyond property rights that are essential for corporations to serve society and eventually including liberty rights initially created for human citizens.
Society is
ruled and dominated by a small minority of the wealthiest. The rich have always
been powerful; they have been present in all societies. But the degree of
control being exercised now is too high. The number of ultra-rich people
essentially buying political power is high.
The public
relations and technical resources controlled by corporations and the richest
individuals are high. The much denser concentration of wealth in even the
largest countries is high, and the global nature of the resources, power, and
connections being accumulated have combined to foreclose meaningful democratic
options and space for a life independent of the materialistic values of the
plutocracy.
The economy
no longer facilitates human society; humans live to serve the economy. The
logic that undergirds all of this — the greed for money, power, and
control — is antithetical to preserving an environment in which living things
can thrive.
Corporate power is protected, but the people’s rights are stripped and rejected.
Through most of human history, we have endured various unbalanced political and social systems. Today’s market economy has roots going back centuries, but only in this one has it become so monolithic, with virtually the entire world under its spell.
We are living in an age of hyper-capitalism; we have gone beyond industrialization and value addition to a point where the rules are written by the financiers, and the finance industry, rather than a sector that actually makes something, has become arguably the most politically powerful industry in history.
A brief
period of relative equality in the richer countries after World War II gave way
in the late 1970s to a powerful ideology of competition, unending growth, and
unhindered profit. This ideology was charted deliberately by institutes
lavishly funded by aspiring plutocrats.
The denial
of limits, the privilege of competition and profit over cooperation and public
goods, and the capitulation of governments to the power of money have made
modern plutocracy a dominant reality and one that must be reversed. “Freedom”
has been reconfigured to refer to consumer choice rather than the ability to
determine how to order one’s life.
A few years
ago, there was considerable debate about the concept of “peak oil — the
possibility we were reaching the beginning of the end of usable petroleum
supplies. We may be reaching a more dangerous point — peak plutocracy — where
society and the environment can sustain no more concentration of power and
resources.
The now
predominant and powerful ideology of competition, unending growth, and
unhindered profit was charted deliberately by institutes lavishly funded by
aspiring plutocrats. So, it is worrying to hear so consistently from colleagues
around the world about the extent to which the power of people is being
curtailed by the people with power.
We see
evidence of peak corporatocracy in:
- the
so far largely successful efforts of business interests to prevent meaningful
action on climate change.
- the push
for high-input, high-tech, restricted-ownership agriculture that excludes
smallholder farmers — a great portion of them women — who feed most of the
world’s people.
-the
collusion of governments and companies in taking control of land and natural
resources from communities in order to generate profits for privileged
outsiders.
-the “race
to the bottom” among governments to sacrifice revenues through blanket “tax
holidays” in order to lure foreign investment, even when the benefits are
unclear or negligible.
Corporate Power must be confronted.
Addressing this imbalance requires more than policy changes. Power must shift away from corporations and back to the people. We may, as individuals lack the power to entirely change the course of climate change or stop ongoing corporate exploitation, but we can still hold these corporations accountable.
Boycotting
companies and pressuring governments to place heavier regulations on corporate
entities can change the outcome of detrimental corporate plans. We must
continue to hold corporations responsible for their detrimental impacts on
humanity and our planet.
We can
boycott companies; we can educate ourselves on ethical consumerism. We are not
socially responsible for the way in which our capitalist society is formed, but
in some ways, as consumers, we hold the most power.
One example
of successful boycotting was when Greenpeace organised a media campaign to stop
the leading oil company Shell from sinking the Brent Spar oil platform in the
North Sea. Consumer boycotts of Shell gasoline led to a substantial fall in
sales, and as a result, Shell made a drastic U-turn and did not sink the
platform.
Organisations
such as the Asia Floor Wage Alliance
have placed pressure on global corporations to increase living wages for
employees in developing nations — another example of successful corporate
pressure to instigate change.
“This is a
global political issue we should all be paying attention to. We must get out
the pruning shears and the weed-whacker quickly and cut back on the dangerous
levels of corporate influence.”
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