[governance] FW: <nettime> Felicity Lawrence: A mere state can't restrain a corporation like Murdoch's (The Guardian)

Thu Jul 28 20:17:42 EDT 2011

Here<http://www.jura.uni-frankfurt.de/l_Personal/em_profs/teubner/dokumente/CSR_conference_bremen.pdf>'s
a good article by prof. Gunther Teubner about this reality!
Best,
Ivar

On Thu, Jul 28, 2011 at 21:05, michael gurstein <gurstein at gmail.com> wrote:

> In case anyone needed reminding about the reality of governance in this
> part
> of the 21st century.
>
> M
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: nettime-l-bounces at mail.kein.org
> [mailto:nettime-l-bounces at mail.kein.org] On Behalf Of Patrice Riemens
> Sent: Friday, July 29, 2011 3:11 AM
> To: nettime-l at kein.org
> Subject: <nettime> Felicity Lawrence: A mere state can't restrain a
> corporation like Murdoch's (The Guardian)
>
>
> original to:
>
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/28/murdoch-news-corp-banks-
> transnationals
>
> A mere state can't restrain a corporation like Murdoch's
>
> Whether News Corp, banks or food giants, transnationals are not so much a
> state within a state as a power beyond it
>
>
> The deep corruption of power revealed by the phone-hacking scandal has led
> many to question how Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation could establish "a
> state within a state". MPs have trumpeted their determination to make sure
> it never happens again. They will struggle.
>
> As if to rub the point in, BSkyB's board announced it was back to business
> as usual on Thursday. Despite parliament's question mark over the integrity
> of its chairman, James Murdoch, the rest of the board said they fully
> supported him. A few hours later the Guardian reported a new low in the
> saga
> - allegations that Sarah Payne's mother's phone may have been hacked. But
> the corporation marches on.
>
> The fact is that the modern globalised corporation is not a state within a
> state so much as a power above and beyond the state. International
> development experts stopped talking about multinationals years ago,
> preferring instead the tag of transnational corporations (TNCs), because
> these companies now transcend national authorities.
>
> Developing countries, dealing with corporations whose revenue often exceeds
> their own GDPs, have long been aware of their own lack of power. They are
> familiar with the way world trade rules have been written to benefit
> corporations and limit what any one country can impose on them. They know
> about the transnationals' tendency to oligopoly; and their ability to
> penetrate the heart of government with lobbying. For an affluent country
> like the UK, it has come as more of a shock.
>
> While traditional multinationals identified with a national home, TNCs have
> no such loyalty. Territorial borders are no longer important. This had been
> the whole thrust of World Trade Organisation treaties in the past decades.
> Transnationals can now take advantage of the free movement of capital and
> the ease of shifting production from country to country to choose the
> regulatory framework that suits them best. If restrained by legitimate
> legislative authorities, they can appeal to WTO rules to enforce their
> rights, as the tobacco company Philip Morris has threatened recently. It
> says it will sue the Australian government for billions of dollars for
> violating its intellectual property rights if it goes ahead with its plan
> to
> ban branding on cigarette packets.
>
> TNCs can and do locate their profits offshore to thwart any individual
> country's efforts to take revenue from them. The ability to raise taxes to
> provide services is a core function of democratic government, yet
> governments have been reduced to supplicants, cutting their tax rates
> further and further to woo corporates. Meanwhile, as the Rowntree visionary
> Geoff Tansey has pointed out, transnationals have used patents and
> intellectual property rights to create their own system of private
> taxation.
>
> If labour laws or environmental regulations become too onerous for them,
> they can move operations to less regulated jurisdictions. So globalised
> food
> and garment manufacturers can move to cheaper centres of production when
> governments introduce minimum wages or unions win workers' rights. If
> financial rules curb their ability to invent complex, risky new products to
> sell, they can set up shop elsewhere. The transnational banks have been
> past
> masters at playing off one jurisdiction against another and using the
> threat
> of relocation to resist government controls. Much of their activity still
> takes place in a shadow system beyond the states that have bailed them out.
>
> Nearly three years on from the near collapse of the whole system, the
> structural reform that everyone agreed was needed has not materialised.
> Lobbying at the heart of governments in Europe and the US has seen off
> calls
> for the separation of investment banking from the retail banking that takes
> ordinary people's deposits.
>
> So the banks remain too big and too interconnected to fail. Vince Cable,
> the
> business secretary, who still argued forcefully this week for that
> separation, is nevertheless reduced to hoping that the ringfencing of
> functions preferred by the big corporates will work. The German chancellor,
> Angela Merkel - wanting to make sure private banking corporations would
> share the pain for the Greek loans they made as that country hovers around
> default - was threatened with not just relocation but with the whole
> banking
> system being brought down again. Not surprisingly, she backed off.
>
> The most effective checks on transnationals are as likely to come from NGOs
> and consumers as individual governments these days. Campaigners have found
> new forms of asymmetric engagement that enable them to take on corporations
> whose resources dwarf their own. Harnessing the same advances in technology
> and instant globalised communication that TNCs have used to build up their
> control, activists have brought together shared interest groups across
> borders to challenge them. So for example, direct action groups such as
> Greenpeace have been able to connect protesters against transnational soya
> traders in the Amazon, with activists across European countries in highly
> effective simultaneous campaigns against the brands that buy from them.
>
> When the Murdochs initially refused to appear before parliament to account
> for their corporate behaviour, there was much anxious consultation of
> ancient rules to see if these two foreign citizens could be forced or not.
> In the end, it was probably the market that got them there, as the damage
> limitation gurus advised that a dose of humble pie would be the most
> effective strategy for restoring shareholder confidence. After the Milly
> Dowler phone-hacking revelation, it was neither our compromised elected
> representatives nor our law enforcers the police, but activists on Twitter
> that brought them down. Attacking not just the brands owned by the Murdochs
> but those owned by their advertisers until they withdrew from the News of
> the World's pages, they played by the globalised market's rulebook.
>
>
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