Robert Reich gets the need for international action
by David Atkins
I've mentioned before with some controversy the need for a stronger set of international rules to prevent predation by various malevolent actors, including and especially multinational corporations. Robert Reich agrees:
As global capital becomes ever more powerful, giant corporations are holding governments and citizens up for ransom — eliciting subsidies and tax breaks from countries concerned about their nation’s “competitiveness” — while sheltering their profits in the lowest-tax jurisdictions they can find. Major advanced countries — and their citizens — need a comprehensive tax agreement that won’t allow global corporations to get away with this.
Google, Amazon, Starbucks, every other major corporation, and every big Wall Street bank, are sheltering as much of their U.S. profits abroad as they can, while telling Washington that lower corporate taxes are necessary in order to keep the U.S. “competitive.”
Baloney. The fact is, global corporations have no allegiance to any country; their only objective is to make as much money as possible — and play off one country against another to keep their taxes down and subsidies up, thereby shifting more of the tax burden to ordinary people whose wages are already shrinking because companies are playing workers off against each other.
Of course, just like disjointed tribes more interested in fighting one another than in resisting the invader, the nation-states of the world are reacting to the multinational corporate threat by descending into the very nationalism that will doom them:
Meanwhile, At a time when you’d expect nations to band together to gain bargaining power against global capital, the opposite is occurring: Xenophobia is breaking out all over.
Right-wing nationalist parties are gaining ground elsewhere in Europe as well. In the U.S., not only are Republicans sounding more nationalistic of late (anti-immigrant, anti-trade), but they continue to push “states rights” — as states increasingly battle against one another to give global companies ever larger tax breaks and subsidies.
Nothing could strengthen the hand of global capital more than such breakups.
Reich clearly gets what I've also been stating for a while now: that protectionist nationalism abroad is no different from "states' rights" at home. Both serve to empower corporations over governments.
Reich's progressive credentials are frankly unimpeachable. He's not an imperialist or corporatist any more than I am. Reich gets it. The status quo is a playground for multinational corporations. They get to play nation-states off one another and watch their people fight one another for scraps rather than take on the global capital threat. It's going to take international coalitions with teeth to counter the power of international corporate capital.
Coalitions: what works at a local and state level to counteract corporate power, can work at an international level as well. It's really the only thing that can.
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