Healthy Money Healthy Planet - library.uniteddiversity.coop

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globalisation is transnational capital, while the losers are the environment, the
poor, small farmers, small businesses, workers and democracy.
The Demands of Corporations
As they become increasingly powerful, the global corporations are demanding
more of governments. In their various guises, the corporations have placed
relentless pressure on nation states to abandon economic and cultural
protectionism, and instead adopt rules necessary for their long­term prosperity.
As David Korten says, global corporations bear no allegiance to place, can
demand tax breaks and public subsidies, and can move their plants to wherever
labour is cheapest and environmental and employment standards weakest. 8
The shelved 1990s proposal for a Multinational Agreement on Investments
(MAI) showed how blatantly corporations act in trying to usurp the power of
sovereign governments and local authorities. The MAI was an attempt by the
world’s richest corporations to legitimise, in binding international law, their
freedoms to operate businesses globally with the least possible local or national
government interference. Governments could have been sued if they had given
preference to locally owned companies. The defeat of the MAI shows that
corporate power can be thwarted by people power.
Michel Chossudovsky, a professor of economics at the University of
Ottawa, has examined the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), which was
signed in April 2001, and found that it is, in fact, more than just a trade
agreement. Through the agreement, water, sewage systems, roads and
municipal services can be owned and operated by private companies. As a