As Our Global Corporate Regime Goes, So Goes America

The world sees an American empire. Rather, the world’s multinational corporations are using the United States’ military and economic dominance to create a corporate empire.

However you feel about that empire, it is now in trouble. Economic institutions and principles created to control the 20th century’s Cold War are not fitted to 21st century globalization, technology and religious militancy.

The prognosis isn’t good. These mega-trends of the 21st century are already working to thwart the corporate empire even as that power is reaching its zenith. Just as the multinational corporations were celebrating total victory with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the presidency of George W. Bush, the financial crisis and worldwide recession came along. The corporate agenda took the credit and got the blame. The American economy is now embedded in this empire and, sadly, we will all share its fate.

In the second half of the 20th century, the need for world policy coordination – world governance, if you will – led to multilateral institutions by which corporations were pretty much able to impose their policies on the world economy. The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization are the most important and powerful of these. All three are based on multilateralism (any market economy can join), free trade (at least in manufacturing and agriculture) and the corporate values of efficiency and profit.

These institutions served the corporations

well in the 20th century but were quickly recognized as inadequate to the 21st. They were thus abandoned in favor of neoliberalism, which advocates tight monetary and fiscal policy, deregulation, privatization and market fundamentalism. In current jargon, this is the austerity option. Unfortunately for the corporations, this is also proving to be inadequate to the tasks of this new century.

The 21st century’s struggle will be with the rise of China, the awakening of Islam and the future of Africa – Mediterranean, Nilotic and sub-Saharan. The periphery in Latin America and Southeast Asia has already fought off the corporate empire and its neoliberalism. Neoliberalism, whatever its failures, remains the preferred policy choice of the empire.

Neoliberalism pretends a democracy that treats everyone the same. In the 20th century, the advanced countries were supporting multilateral agreements that allowed all to participate. But now they are doing the real deals in bilateral or regional agreements like NAFTA and the Trans Pacific Partnership. The first of these puts a wall around Mexico, and the second is being designed to exclude and isolate China. It is a rejection and undermining of globalization.

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