The Untouchables – Why it’s getting harder to stop multinational corporations
The article doesn&#x27;t even begin to tell us why it&#x27;s harder to stop multinationals.  How to stop them what?<p>This seems like a PR piece for multinationals.  Having set the tone of the article he barely touches multinationals aside from how accountable they are.  Which clearly they are not.  He&#x27;s talking about national organisations in developing and corrupt locations.  That&#x27;s not exactly new.<p>If the conditions in Angola or Bangladesh are so bleak and unregulated why do we permit any trade or multinationals to do business there?  If the country couldn&#x27;t trade on the world stage until some level of accountability and minimum standards of treatment were met, perhaps things would change.<p>Our systems never evolved to cope with trans-national corporations, having evolved to regulate national corporations.  We&#x27;re comparatively powerless to regulate a multinational.<p>Having got to the size and power they are they can bankroll, fund, lobby and threaten to move their 20k employee operations elsewhere.  They can play creative games with national tax codes, and may have an entire department with some very clever minds doing just that. Governments are impotent in response.<p>It doesn&#x27;t help that modern-day politicians are almost always wealthy, even those of the left, meaning they&#x27;re investing and thinking in the same way.  It&#x27;s a rare bird indeed that votes or instigates legislation against their own interests.<p>The olde-worlde politician who had made their way in the world as businessperson, doctor, union official or what have you then became a politician to give something back to the world is a quaint memory of former times.  Altruism isn&#x27;t profitable.<p>The young property and investing MP worth millions is less likely to introduce measures to produce genuinely affordable housing (build enough homes), or to severely clip the wings of the investment banks or multinationals.  They&#x27;d be killing their own income for life too.<p>The chief shareholders in these businesses, the pension and investment funds, would also have to vote against their own interests.  Return is everything.  Free trade is everything.  Advocating for better worker conditions does not provide a return to their pensioners.<p>The OECD exists to promote the market as the answer for everything.<p>So who is left to &quot;stop the multinational&quot;?  Greenpeace?  I&#x27;m not even sure from this article what we&#x27;re stopping them from.  Or are they all acknowledged chronic abusers of human rights?<p>I don&#x27;t have a fix.  I&#x27;m not even sure it&#x27;s fixable at this point.  Certainly not by writing pieces telling us how bleak internal conditions are in Zimbabwe.