Atelier n°. 1, article 3


© Susan George :
(August 6, 2000)

All I can do is tell you what I want to know about TNCs and don't. I realise there is now the obligatory women-minorities-indigenous peoples & ------ [fill in the blank, it can be TNCs or whatever else] aspect but information about victims is relatively easy to find and not very surprising [Rio Tinto has dispossessed another few thousand people in the Philippines. So what else is new. That is the Nature of the Beast. See my book The Lugano Report ou Le Rapport Lugano]. I really would rather seee your students spend their time on questions like taxes: which companies pay taxes where and the general decline of corporate taxes meaning that the welfare state does indeed become "too expensive". Don't we need a full-cost accounting of everything the corporations get from government, i.e. from taxpayers--not just subsidies but those too, of course--but in the way of transport, care for their employees, public education, and what they give back. As far as I know, no one has ever made a complete list of Corporate Welfare payments, though a guy in the US at Missouri called Kenneth Thomas I think is trying.

I think the lobbying aspects you ask about are also vitally important, particularly in their now-institutionalised form, and would look in detail at their influence on government AT THE GOVERNMENT'S REQUEST--e.g. Ms Barshevsky has about 2 dozen committees, by industry, with about 800 industry representatives, advising her on policy vis a vis the WTO, NAFTA, et al. Some ecologists tried to get on the Pulp and Paper committee and were refused, they sued in Federal court, won and the government appealed! Don't want none of that citizen interference in our affairs with the real players. The Europeans do this sort of thing too, but not as well as the Americans. I realise you're supposed to deal only with American companies, but maybe you could sneak the Europeans in by asking what differences in behaviour they display, if any. I think they need to be there.

Maybe a meta-reading of the OECD code of conduct, the other codes; what are the new PR techniques, how to pre-empt any effort to make binding rules. Maybe the ubiquitous industry Federations--e.g. the pharmaceutical manufacturers who attacked WHO as soon as it started to promote generics; the Grocery Manufacturers who are intent on making Europeans eat unlabeled GMO foods. Are you going to do finance or just traditional TNCs? [Already a lot, I agree]. .

You should be in touch with Bruce Mazlish at Harvard who last year ran a fairly interesting conference on "Mapping the Multinationals" with mostly very Establishment figures, B-school professors and the like. But they have a lot of information even if they aren't necessarily asking the right questions. I could probably dig out my papers from it, I was the token radical and nearly token woman [there were 3] but I didn't care because it was at the spectacular Rockefeller estate at Kykuit with magnificent sculpture and paintings everywhere. .

I applaud your efforts, but it's true, I really can't devote time and effort to any new causes and can't write anything. As I am wont to say, Bad causes never ask me for anything. So my life consists of having to choose between good ones.

All the best,
Susan George

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