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The article doesn't even begin to tell us why it's harder to stop multinationals. How to stop them what? This seems like a PR piece for multinationals. Havin

The article doesn't even begin to tell us why it's harder to stop multinationals. How to stop them what? This seems like a PR piece for multinationals. Having set the tone of the article he barely touches multinationals aside from how accountable they are. Which clearly they are not. He's talking about national organisations in developing and corrupt locations. That's not exactly new. If the conditions in Angola or Bangladesh are so bleak and unregulated why do we permit any trade or multinationals to do business there? If the country couldn't trade on the world stage until some level of accountability and minimum standards of treatment were met, perhaps things would change. Our systems never evolved to cope with trans-national corporations, having evolved to regulate national corporations. We're comparatively powerless to regulate a multinational. Having got to the size and power they are they can bankroll, fund, lobby and threaten to move their 20k employee operations elsewhere. They can play creative games with national tax codes, and may have an entire department with some very clever minds doing just that. Governments are impotent in response. It doesn't help that modern-day politicians are almost always wealthy, even those of the left, meaning they're investing and thinking in the same way. It's a rare bird indeed that votes or instigates legislation against their own interests. The olde-worlde politician who had made their way in the world as businessperson, doctor, union official or what have you then became a politician to give something back to the world is a quaint memory of former times. Altruism isn't profitable. The young property and investing MP worth millions is less likely to introduce measures to produce genuinely affordable housing (build enough homes), or to severely clip the wings of the investment banks or multinationals. They'd be killing their own income for life too. The chief shareholders in these businesses, the pension and investment funds, would also have to vote against their own interests. Return is everything. Free trade is everything. Advocating for better worker conditions does not provide a return to their pensioners. The OECD exists to promote the market as the answer for everything. So who is left to "stop the multinational"? Greenpeace? I'm not even sure from this article what we're stopping them from. Or are they all acknowledged chronic abusers of human rights? I don't have a fix. I'm not even sure it's fixable at this point. Certainly not by writing pieces telling us how bleak internal conditions are in Zimbabwe.

freddie_mercury 10y ago
Your comment seems unnecessarily argumentative, would have been stronger had it followed the Principle of Charity, and doesn't advance the conversation as much as it might. I don't want to engage in a back and forth, tedious sentence by sentence deconstruction but I think your first two statements offer an example of how a less quarrel-seeking reading would have helped you find the answers in the text itself and engage with the article better. "The article doesn't even begin to tell us why it's harder to stop multinationals." It says, 'The countries where they are headquartered are unable to regulate them, and the countries where they operate are unwilling to.' Later on the author talks about investment from developing countries to other developing countries and the changing composition of the Fortune Global 500, to give a further explanation. He quotes a researcher who talks about leverage and the 'denominator' problem. "How to stop them what?" 'preventing multinational corporations from violating human rights [...] abuses in poor countries — land grabs, sweatshops, cash-filled envelopes passed to politicians'
- anexprogrammer 10y ago
  I still don't see the article as addressing that well at all. I re-read it fully before answering. Immediately after mentioning that we think of cash-filled envelopes etc the very next paragraph says that this is not what's the problem. "The countries where they are headquartered are unable to regulate them" ... "This architecture is one of the greatest international human rights triumphs of the last 50 years." ... "they’ve raised the cost of committing human rights violations in developing countries." Well either the regulation is working well or it isn't. It's no longer a piece addressing the shortcomings of multinationals but is a piece pointing out the difficulties dealing with corrupt or overseas regimes. We're now talking of how we trade (multinationals included) with those places. Of course there is some degree of cross-over stemming from trading with. It's far more about the internals of these places "The majority — all 5,000 of them — sell clothes on the domestic market", leasing land from Zimbabwe's ARDA etc. Now I fully agree that this is an problem, but it is not the same issue. Likewise, internal regulations that he mentions. Many of those are not new. The main example, Green Fuel, in Zimbabwe has no external investors or customers. Where's the multinational angle there? So yes they're untouchable, but it's a national issue. It's been that way for a considerable number of years in some cases. So let's discuss why we're failing to make other countries more globally accountable. It's clearly important we consider that. How far can we reasonably expect to influence another nation? We don't often send a gunboat like a Victorian govt might have. Isn't that basically saying that it's not, in this case, multinationals that's the problem here? We can also talk about about shortcomings multinationals, which I already covered, probably at too much length, in the OP.

freddie_mercury 10y ago

Your comment seems unnecessarily argumentative, would have been stronger had it followed the Principle of Charity, and doesn't advance the conversation as much as it might. I don't want to engage in a back and forth, tedious sentence by sentence deconstruction but I think your first two statements offer an example of how a less quarrel-seeking reading would have helped you find the answers in the text itself and engage with the article better. "The article doesn't even begin to tell us why it's harder to stop multinationals." It says, 'The countries where they are headquartered are unable to regulate them, and the countries where they operate are unwilling to.' Later on the author talks about investment from developing countries to other developing countries and the changing composition of the Fortune Global 500, to give a further explanation. He quotes a researcher who talks about leverage and the 'denominator' problem. "How to stop them what?" 'preventing multinational corporations from violating human rights [...] abuses in poor countries — land grabs, sweatshops, cash-filled envelopes passed to politicians'

anexprogrammer 10y ago
I still don't see the article as addressing that well at all. I re-read it fully before answering. Immediately after mentioning that we think of cash-filled envelopes etc the very next paragraph says that this is not what's the problem. "The countries where they are headquartered are unable to regulate them" ... "This architecture is one of the greatest international human rights triumphs of the last 50 years." ... "they’ve raised the cost of committing human rights violations in developing countries." Well either the regulation is working well or it isn't. It's no longer a piece addressing the shortcomings of multinationals but is a piece pointing out the difficulties dealing with corrupt or overseas regimes. We're now talking of how we trade (multinationals included) with those places. Of course there is some degree of cross-over stemming from trading with. It's far more about the internals of these places "The majority — all 5,000 of them — sell clothes on the domestic market", leasing land from Zimbabwe's ARDA etc. Now I fully agree that this is an problem, but it is not the same issue. Likewise, internal regulations that he mentions. Many of those are not new. The main example, Green Fuel, in Zimbabwe has no external investors or customers. Where's the multinational angle there? So yes they're untouchable, but it's a national issue. It's been that way for a considerable number of years in some cases. So let's discuss why we're failing to make other countries more globally accountable. It's clearly important we consider that. How far can we reasonably expect to influence another nation? We don't often send a gunboat like a Victorian govt might have. Isn't that basically saying that it's not, in this case, multinationals that's the problem here? We can also talk about about shortcomings multinationals, which I already covered, probably at too much length, in the OP.