Deeper Than Murdoch Muck

A fine concise piece of telling it like it is from Felicity Lawrence....

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.

  UK Guardian

Of course they do. They’re all in this boat together.

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.

[...]

While traditional multinationals identified with a national home, TNCs have no such loyalty. Territorial borders are no longer important.

[...]

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.

[...]

If labour laws or environmental regulations become too onerous for them, they can move operations to less regulated jurisdictions.

Which is why the US economy can go to Hell and no one with any power will lift a hand to stop it if there’s enough economic base for the corporate titans in another country.

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.

[...]

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.

And the only thing standing between transnationals and the total slavery and destruction of entire populations, and even countries, is activists and whistleblowers, whether you like them or not. It’s how rainforests and indigenous people manage to survive, if they do, against the onslaught of TNCs that rape the land and dispossess the people. And how did the Murdochs get tripped up? By government regulations? Ha. By the law? Double Ha.

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.

And it surely can’t be long now before access to the internet is severely curtailed.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.