Corporations no longer influence our laws — now, they write them! Multinationals, working behind closed doors are writing the world’s economic agreements unfettered by any one nation’s interests and unaccountable to individual nations’ citizens. For example, the WTO, which emerged from GATT, which covered international trade and tariffs, is an organization that protects multinationals. And Chapter 11 of the supposed free-trade agreement of NAFTA, establishes a new system of private arbitration for foreign investors to bring injury claims against governments. The operative principle is that foreign capital investing in Canada, Mexico or the United States may demand compensation if the profit-making potential of their ventures are injured by government decisions. This gives foreign-based companies more rights than have domestic businesses operating in their home country. Global corporations are free to litigate on their own without having to ask national governments to act on their behalf in global forums. The national identity of multinationals will become less and less relevant, since they have status to challenge governments. NAFTA creates, as Lydia Lazar, a Chicago attorney, puts it, “an open class of legal equals.” She adds that “NAFTA is really an end run around the Constitution.”
What we’d like to see changed is the form of governance needed for global trade. Current forums and trade agreements (WTO, World Bank, IMF, NAFTA, CAFTA) have stripped many nation-states — hence, their people — of their former roles governing trade. Not doing this, indeed, could lead to the scenarios described in Harvard’s David Korten’s book, When Corporations Rule the World.
Because globalization is the greatest reorganization of the world since the Industrial Revolution, there’s no pat checklist to instantly change policy and strategy. We’re talking about a multi-year struggle for individuals, companies and nations to adjust and readjust. Although we do not in any way provide cookie cutter solutions in our book, we enumerate many of the issues that must be addressed. Here are some examples: 1. Reform of the dependence on Treasury securities, which funds U. S. over-consumption with borrowed dollars from China, Japan and other export driven nations. 2. Reform the IMF, World Bank, and WTO to make their decision-making more transparent. 3. Provide education subsidies, not farm subsidies in the U.S. and Europe 4. Establish worldwide regulation that would restrict continuing damage to the environment and maintain biodiversity. 5. Have government once again govern corporations versus the reverse as it is today (e.g. put trade policy back into Congress, not in trade agreements written behind closed doors). 6. Establish a U.S. Federal Competitiveness cabinet position. 7. Break the bribery cycle between poor countries’ governments and international companies. 8. Establish tripolar trading blocs, not American unipolar hegemony (e.g. establish true economic unions, not asymmetric trade agreements). 9. Separate public goods (the commons) from private goods. 10. Foster increased savings (e.g., with automatic 401K plans). 11. Develop energy policies and strategies that will break our dependency on oil (e.g. rethink and reorganize America’s sprawling suburbs (exurbs). 13.Globalize health care, e.g., allow people to spend Medicare dollars overseas (Mexico would boom, solving much of the illegal immigration problem in the U.S.). We are well overdue for a wakeup call to address these and other issues. And an open debate could just lead to people’s active engagement in creating a just, sustainable, economic world.
Article comments
1 - Jake
The following is writing response assignment I have done for my English class on the world is flat?. Is my analysis misguided or is it nearer to the truth than Friedman was?
In this critique of Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat, the reader receives an occasional glimpse into Friedman’s book itself. Some of these glimpses are more disturbing than others and some are even given appropriate recognition by the authors of the critique, Ronald Aronica and Mtetwa Ramdoo. However, there is one excerpt from Freidman’s book which I found to be far and above the most disturbing and culturally degrading. In this section Friedman asserts that there are certain jobs in our new flat world that have become “untouchable”. These “jobs” are demarcated by Freidman as the Great Collaborators and Orchestrators, the Great Synthesizers, the Great Explainers, the Great Leveragers, the Great Adapters, the Passionate Personalizers, and the Great Localizers. As Aronica and Ramdoo have paraphrased this proposal from Friedman’s book, “we should all become masters of social, organizational, and motivational skills”, or as they go on to say, managers. The most disturbing aspect of this idea is Freidman’s apparent perception of the American people as only being interested in getting a job so we can have money to buy stuff. In his defense, this is a very popular ideal of the American identity, but it is not the kind of goal we should hold above all else and certainly not what we should be teaching our children.
It is also important to note that Freidman is pushing for the American people to do something which not everyone was made for, to lead. Being a manager or president is a
heavy responsibility that requires lots of work with very little recognition aside from a pay check. To lead is essentially to carry the concerns of all those who are under you and this is a task that very few are suited for. Should we start telling our kids, “you can do whatever you want when you grow up…on the weekends.” Friedman’s idea not only contradicts the ideological foundations of this country but also a later chapter in his book. In this later chapter Friedman encourages for a push in math and science. Are these jobs also untouchable? Or is that only if we become smarter than China and India? As a college student graduating with a degree in English, it is a very bleak, flat world that Thomas Friedman has painted for me.