I’d not heard of Felicity Lawrence prior to catching her resoundingly sharp article in The Guardian last month. (A mere state can’t restrain a corporation like Murdoch’s). It transpires that she has already written two excellent books outlining the power and corruption of the international food corporations. (Not on the Label and Eat Your Heart Out) Although I have recently blogged on this topic, (see End of Over Eating by David Kessler) I am now tempted to start reading Lawrence’s work, based on her clear headed summation of the unregulated, unelected power of the transnational corporations. Here is a hard hitting example of Lawrence’s well constructed thesis a thesis that is becoming increasingly difficult to refute, even for the most ardent neo-liberal free-marketeers, as each new day passes.

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 (TNC’s), because these companies now transcend national authorities.

Doesn’t that description so perfectly sum up the arrogant global reach of Rupert Murdoch’s ubiquitous News Corporation. Lawrence then adds:

Developing countries, dealing with corporations whose revenues often exceed their own GDP’s, have long been aware of their own lack of power. They are familiar with the way the world trade rules have been written to benefit corporations and limit what any one country can impose on them. They know about the transnational’s 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.

Of course Lawrence could have added that along with the quasi-legal lobbying comes the covert manoeuvring, the bribes and back-handers, and the outright criminality. Parliament, the police and the judiciary become compromised and complicit in this secretive, globalised, unelected corporate governance. In fact, entire governments are promoted and later dismissed at the avaricious whim of entirely unelected corporations. Even the US, the most powerful and supposedly most democratic country on the planet, is not immune. The whole FOX News/Tea Party edifice has been carefully constructed by Murdoch, the Koch brothers and other corporate interests to ensure the US swiftly returns to its unregulated capitalist trajectory. Lawrence continues her thesis:

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 authorities, they can appeal to World Trade Organisation rules to enforce their rights TNC’s 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.

And in a sinister but wholly predictable development these same transnational corporations, have used patents and intellectual property rights to create their own system of private taxation.

None of this is new but Lawrence does a superb job of connecting all the threads of the global corporate web including the threat of relocating to zones of cheap/slave labour. Nothing in our lives is immune from the toxic corporate web; neither our culture, our daily goods and services and our right to work. In Britain, following the pattern in the US, schools, hospitals, prisons and care homes are all succumbing to the unelected power of global corporations. The films we watch, the books we read, the news we consume, the food we eat, increasingly, they control the lot.
The unfolding Murdoch saga has presented the planet’s citizens with a window on just how far the global corporations can reach right into the very heart of government. Are we too cowed, too subjugated to seize back some territory? Time will tell, but the omens are not good. Already, three years into the global financial crisis the banks are still free to play casino capitalism with tax-payers revenues. Governments have talked the talk but almost nothing has changed. Not one single national government seems strong enough to take a lead. The corporations sense this, and so they become even more emboldened, driving the world economy to the precipice in their pursuit of yet a few more untaxed billions.

Given this stark reality it was quite depressing to witness Matthew Syed, a journalist with a growing reputation for bold, clear thinking journalism, taking a cringingly supine position with respect to McDonald’s pre-eminent position in the forthcoming London Olympics. (Moral bunfight over McDonald’s is madness. The Times 27/7/11)

In attempting to take the heat off McDonald’s by claiming that all the corporate sponsors have dubious ethical records, Syed is in danger of championing the whole tacky corporate shindig which has become the modern Olympics. Sure, McDonalds are far from alone in having an appalling international track record, but what Syed fails to grasp is that McDonald’s has come to symbolise the entire toxic corporate monolith, and when writers and politicians attack McDonalds it is just shorthand for a legitimate attack on the entire corporate sector. By defending McDonald’s, Syed effectively become a cheer leader for all that it unwholesome about excessive commercialisation of modern sport. This was not your finest hour Matt. Just as we speak of McJobs serving up McShit we now, it seems, have McJournalism.