Saturday, October 4, 2014

Gary Younge — Who's in control – nation states or global corporations?

Around the world, calls for national autonomy have grown. Minorities are blamed but the real culprit is neoliberalism…
"Power today is global power, the power of the big companies, the power of financial capital." — Brazilain Dominican friar Frei Betto 
The limited ability of national governments to pursue any agenda that has not first been endorsed by international capital and its proxies is no longer simply the cross they have to bear; it is the cross to which we have all been nailed. The nation state is the primary democratic entity that remains. But given the scale of neoliberal globalisation it is clearly no longer up to that task.…
"By many measures, corporations are more central players in global affairs than nations," writes Benjamin Barber in Jihad vs McWorld. "We call them multinational but they are more accurately understood as postnational, transnational or even anti-national. For they abjure the very idea of nations or any other parochialism that limits them in time or space."
Pushback?

The Guardian
Who's in control – nation states or global corporations?
Gary Younge

The nation state is the locus of democracy. Neoliberalism aims at transcending nation states and their lows or controlling them through oligarchic democracy where representative democracy exists.

1 comment:

Ryan Harris said...

If corporations were in charge, what would corporate government look like?

We have one! A city that was created by a billionaire and run by a multinational corporation with only the minimal required amount of democracy for appearances.

They create a far more prosperous culture, albeit less diverse, culture of prosperity.

Might be barking up the wrong tree, because corporations want smooth, even predictable growth and stability, they want to make investments and have customers.

The current regime doesn't provide that environment. It's almost as if the external sector runs the show and the domestic characters aren't a part of the calculation.