Who Says We Can't Curb Corporate Power?

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9. End Corporate Welfare

Many people, many progressive/liberal people, don’t realize what corporate subsidies are. In order to survive and make profits, most corporations depend on a complex regime of public subsidies, exemptions, and externalized costs, including the indirect subsidies they gain when allowed to pay less than a living wage, maintain substandard working conditions, market hazardous products, dump untreated wastes into the environment, and extract natural resources from public lands at below-market rates.

10. Give Preference to Independent Enterprises

To build sustainable communities, it is imperative that local citizens exercise some control over the work and the goods on which their livelihoods depend. This means reforming tax and economic policies—from the global level to the local—to favor ownership of enterprises and resources by local hands-on stakeholders such as workers, community members, customers, and suppliers. Community boards composed of elected citizen representatives ought to review, approve, and monitor the local operations and investment plans of absentee-owned corporations.

11. Reregulate Corporate Investment

Many cities require that businesses receiving public investment provide living-wage jobs, but we should challenge our leaders to broaden these requirements to include certain levels of environmental protection, food safety, employee and community ownership, and other socially responsible goals. Similarly, governments must reassert control over corporate fiscal policies by reregulating the securities and banking industries.

12. Democratize or Dump Free Trade Deals

The new mechanisms pushing economic globalization—the World Trade Organization, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas—are, in effect, the constitution of the new world order, designed to protect the rights and freedoms of global corporations. These treaties need either to be reconfigured to promote the economic, social, environmental, and cultural interests of all citizens or to be scrapped. Fair trade, not free trade, must be the centerpiece of a global economy.

Adapted from the book Alternatives to Economic Globalization: A Report of the International Forum on Globalization (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, $15.95).

he Davids of Corporate Globalization

In January 1994, champions of corporate globalization seemed on top of the world. Congress had passed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), beating back and disillusioning a broad movement of progressives and unions. A new round of corporate-friendly measures was being negotiated worldwide through the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were building an economic framework for the world that prescribed free markets and privatization as the cure for nearly all social and economic problems.

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