
The Untouchables – Why it’s getting harder to stop multinational corporations - AndrewKemendo
https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/04/11/the-untouchables-zimbabwe-green-fuel-multinational-corporations/
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maxerickson
It's interesting to consider that huge corporations are sort of an AI
apocalypse. The intelligence isn't a well defined thing running on a computer,
but it has super human capability and is not necessarily well attached to
human motivations.

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maaku
It may seem that way from the outside, but once you're actually involved with
a leadership team at the top of such an organization, you realize it is 100% a
human endeavor.

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IsaacL
I agree. I went through a period where I seriously held the same insight as
the grandparent and thought that it was profound insight into the nature of
the universe -- "omfg, corporations are artificial intelligences! reality is
an interlocking series of patterns! collective intelligence is the future!"

I cured myself of these beliefs when I looked at how reality actually works
(and when I stopped smoking weed). When Louis Gerstner turned around IBM as
the company's first outside CEO, that was a result of his decisions and
vision, not the emergent decision-making power of IBM. More fundamentally:
people can think about companies, companies can't think about people. There
are no collective minds, only individual minds working together.

The actual article in interesting. It sounds like Russian/Chinese/non-Western
multinationals are growing in power, and with significantly less scruples than
their Western counterparts.

~~~
maxerickson
I totes don't smoke weed bro, not even on the weekend.

My point is not really to present the thought as a deep explanatory insight
into the universe but more to get people to apply an existing mythology of
powerful otherness to corporations. An interesting POV to consider, nothing
more.

And I think that while corporations don't quite think, they do use business
rules and abstracted information about individuals to trigger actions. The
humans writing those rules are probably reasoning differently about the rules
than they would the individual decisions. The corporation can become more than
the sum of it's parts through very simple mechanisms.

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prance
This article tells some truths but is pretty confused. It headlines
multinationals based in China, India, Russia etc. as the problem but then only
mentions that these companies are not accountable in their home countries,
allegedly. Apart from not providing any evidence towards this, it also doesn't
give any reasons of why this is so or who could do what to change that.

Then, it gives an example at length that doesn't have anything to do with
multinationals. Instead, it's a classic example of corruption and land-
grabbing. But while these problems are prevalent in much of the developing
world, there are certainly huge differences between different countries. E.g.
here in Kenya, land-grabbing is rampant, but its usually smaller cases, and
the public increasingly fights back (see e.g.
[https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/ureport/story/2000163954/lan...](https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/ureport/story/2000163954/land-
grabbing-a-kenyan-disease))

Nevertheless, the article chooses to present an example from Zimbabwe of all
countries, one of the worst-governed countries on Earth, as representative.

There was another recent article on Foreign Policy which summed up the land-
buying/grabbing situation across Africa much more balanced:
[http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/10/20/the-myth-of-the-
african-...](http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/10/20/the-myth-of-the-african-land-
grab/)

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Synaesthesia
Article seems somewhat biased, as if US and European agribusiness hasn't done
similar in countless other countries with similar brutality! Let's not pretend
that they were or are saints.

The reason why it's hard to stop huge multinational corporations is because
they're unaccountable to the public, and because they're in league with
governments. Legislation usually favours these huge corporations as a
consequence.

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rayiner
People ignore the most important thing, which is that huge multinational
corporations have enormous influence because they employ so many people. More
than 20% of the private-sector workforce is employed by a Fortune 500 company.
And a huge number of the non-Fortune 500 companies exist to serve the Fortune
500 companies (think parts-suppliers for the automakers, wireline contractors
for telecos, professional services firms, etc). Multinationals control the
single most important thing in politics: jobs. That guarantees them enormous
political influence.

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wpietri
I doubt that's the key factor. If it were, we wouldn't have aggressive
outsourcing and layoffs be endemic in the Fortune 500.

I suspect the more likely explanation is that they have enormous influence
because they have a lot of money. We certainly have a lot of evidence that
people with lots of money continue to have a lot of influence even when they
don't employ a lot of people.

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rayiner
> We certainly have a lot of evidence that people with lots of money continue
> to have a lot of influence even when they don't employ a lot of people.

Do we? The tech industry for example makes enormous amounts of money, but has
relatively little political influence because it employs relatively few people
in relatively few states. Sundar Pichai can't call up a Congressman in Indiana
and casually mention the 5,000 workers they have in Fort Wayne.

~~~
wpietri
That's the only possible reason you can think of for tech's supposed relative
lack of influence? Rather than, say, these possibilities:

* new industry, therefore less entrenched in existing power networks * until recently, relatively low spending on lobbying * technology people not known for political savvy * technology people inclined to assume that merit and savvy will carry the day * tech industry leaders more ethically inclined, or at least less inclined toward legalized bribery

I don't think _making_ money is sufficient. Politicians care about other
people's money because they can get some of it.

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ajnin
The problems seems to lie more with rampant state-level corruption in Zimbabwe
than with multinationals per se. Not to mention that the company in question,
Green Fuel, operates only in the domestic market. The end of the article
reveals that president Mugabe is at the origin of the initiative to build this
plant and expropriate farmers. Fix the political system, implement
accountability of the leaders towards the general population and then you can
fix the multinationals problem.

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javajosh
If you keep reading you'll realize that it was Mugabe and Zimbabwe's
dysfunctional mechanisms of accountability that allowed Chachengwa's land to
be taken from her.

Frankly, I'd be looking very closely to find links between multi-nationals
that straddle two developing countries, and the larger, better known corps. It
would be just too convenient to do business like that through an easily-
defended, easily discarded puppet company.

The unfortunate truth is that there's nothing we can or should do, above and
beyond our general promotion of free speech and suffrage. It's not our
country, and there are plenty of examples of the strong preying on the weak
here to keep anyone inclined to injustice-fighting quite busy.

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anexprogrammer
The article doesn't even begin to tell us why it's harder to stop
multinationals. How to stop them what?

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's talking about national organisations in
developing and corrupt locations. That's not exactly new.

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't trade on the world stage until some level of accountability and
minimum standards of treatment were met, perhaps things would change.

Our systems never evolved to cope with trans-national corporations, having
evolved to regulate national corporations. We're comparatively powerless to
regulate a multinational.

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.

It doesn't help that modern-day politicians are almost always wealthy, even
those of the left, meaning they're investing and thinking in the same way.
It's a rare bird indeed that votes or instigates legislation against their own
interests.

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't profitable.

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'd be
killing their own income for life too.

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.

The OECD exists to promote the market as the answer for everything.

So who is left to "stop the multinational"? Greenpeace? I'm not even sure from
this article what we're stopping them from. Or are they all acknowledged
chronic abusers of human rights?

I don't have a fix. I'm not even sure it's fixable at this point. Certainly
not by writing pieces telling us how bleak internal conditions are in
Zimbabwe.

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riskable
> I don't have a fix. I'm not even sure it's fixable at this point. Certainly
> not by writing pieces telling us how bleak internal conditions are in
> Zimbabwe.

The only "fix" is to make exploiting people unprofitable or at least very
expensive. I suggest that instead of sanctioning entire countries we sanction
the individuals responsible for these abuses. The premise of sanctioning a
country is that in order to get out of the sanction/punishment the people of
that country will pressure, elect, or forcibly replace their leaders to force
change. That doesn't work when the people of a country hold no power over
their government.

We need to put more resources into finding the individuals responsible for the
abuses and sanction them directly. Seize their assets and the assets of those
who enable them.

If it means we need to hack or bribe information out of companies like Mossack
Fonseca in order to identify those benefiting from human rights abuses then we
should do it and be very public about it.

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anexprogrammer
> I suggest that instead of sanctioning entire countries ... That doesn't work
> when the people of a country hold no power over their government.

OK, fair point. I'm the first to admit I don't have the answers on this topic.

I fully agree we should be making resources available for dealing with some of
these issues, and those responsible, as you suggest.

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neugier
"Giving chiefs unassailable power over their communities makes sense when
their primary role is settling boundary disputes or ordering their younger
constituents to pay a pension to one of their older ones. In rural areas,
where literacy is limited and the central government is weak or absent, it is,
in fact, essential. But when traditional leaders start negotiating land
purchases in the tens of millions of dollars or selling tracts the size of
small European countries with little transparency or accountability, it’s a
recipe for disaster."

Does this remind you of anything?

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jackcosgrove
Corporations span national boundaries and can arbitrage legal regimes to their
advantage. This gives them a competitive advantage over governments. There are
two ways to solve this problem: ever-larger, approaching world-scale,
government or limiting the international rights of corporations. The former is
horrifying to me because I believe plurality of power is the best defense of
freedom and against corruption. The latter is far more palatable.

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Namrog84
That world scale type government I thought those shoes were partially be
filled by the un and/or other international committees overseeing their
respective areas. Despite limited effect and power I thought they still did
some good.

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jackcosgrove
I would fear a global authority with real teeth. If it becomes corrupt, where
would you run to? A plurality of powers allows for escape from a bad regime to
another, hopefully better regime.

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0xCMP
The more you read in to the situation they're talking about you learn it's not
that a multinational corporation running amok, but a mostly domestic puppet
company of the corrupt Zimbabwean government's redevelopment agency.

e.x. They force people to mix their shitty ethanol into gasoline (originally
5%, now 15% of gasoline sold). They take advantage of the traditions and steal
land. etc.

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worldsayshi
If this problem is indeed about local corporations being worse than the
multinational ones then it seems we have actually successfully tackled the
problem on the multinational level??

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cmdrfred
I believe the authors point was at very least the larger multinational
corporations have some thin veneer of accountability as they have investors in
countries where that type of behavior isn't tolerated. I've been thinking
about it since I've read the article and I can't think of a good way to deal
with this problem.

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PakG1
Reading all these comments makes me not interested in reading the article. How
can so many people be saying that the article's subject doesn't match the
title unless it really doesn't? Why the heck would I read anything like that?
Article titles are totally FOR judging books by their cover.

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restalis
Summary: Out of financial considerations the business shapes itself into
elaborate structures and the poor suffer. The mechanisms built to prevent the
bad consequences remain rigid and from ineffective to powerless against the
exploding amount and diversity of versatile enterprises on the global level.

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debacle
For anyone who hasn't read Dick's Paycheck, it's an important read on the kind
of world we're moving to. I don't believe we can throw off international
corporations without some sort of massive socialist revolution (fat chance).
The future is bleak, but it's going to be more bleak for the people who
pretend that the global power structure isn't changing, and for the people who
are ignorant of the amount of power international corporations have held as
far back as 400 years ago.

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powera
If GreenFuel is a Zimbabwe-based company, doing bad things in Zimbabwe, and
only selling to the Zimbabwe market, how is this related to "multinational
corporations" at all?

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yuhong
I wonder what would happen to record companies if DAT existed in the 1960s or
1970s (before they really consolidated). I am thinking that it is probably not
a good thing for middleman like record companies to get big.

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known
1\. Impose tax on corporate revenues, not profits

2\. Regulate market capitalization of corporations

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forrestthewoods
Enforcement of property rights is one of the most basic responsibilities of
government. When a government is unable or unwilling to help it's people then
you're gonna have a bad time.

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vonklaus
YCombinator os from Lamda calculus, a function that starts other functions.

I have been thinking a lot about throw(). A function that returns control to
the user after a program goes into error.

~~~
pnut
I get what you're saying, but it's a little binary.

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vonklaus
I love Y Combinator, I think they are solving a big problem. Starting new
great companies is super important. However, a fund to kill bad large
companies would be great as well, specifically rent collectors and trolls.

YCombinator funds small companies and the successful ones typically do some of
that by default just by solving a problem those companies overlook. It would
not be mutually exclusive in my mind, that a separate fund could support
stopping bad companies either by the regular VC model under a mission, or by
forming a meta-company that unites a few small companies under a single
umbrella and mission.

I assume starting a VC fund/company specifically designed to stop specific
companies or industries from succeeding is not particularly "investable" and
unlikely to take off, but it is an interesting thought experiment. While
YCombinator/Accelerators fund companies solving some of the problems big
players miss, another company tries to dethrone them and let the space
fragment.

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fractal618
When I read stories like this I get so angry and frustrated because I don't
see how I can help.

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Herring
If you can't help then you can't help. It's not your problem.

If you _want_ to make it your problem then take a long hard look at all the
things you want to accomplish & see if you can fit this one in. Possibly spend
10 years in that part of the world & maybe you'll have a chance to change
something.

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JabavuAdams
This is part of the reason why rich techies think it's easier to send probes
to another star system than to fix basic injustices on Earth.

Blue (black) sky vs. legacy code.

~~~
fallingfrog
Sad but true. Sending probes to another star system is about 3 orders of
magnitude easier than fixing basic injustices on earth. The laws of physics
don't adapt and fight back when you try to apply delta v to a system. Systems
of power tend to do that.

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sydneysider
This sounds like an anti BRICS scare piece. Author conveniently forgets to
mention that the USA / UK etc (along with their respective multinationals)
destroy whole countries for their energy resources, or Monsanto testing crops
in India, causing farmers to commit suicide.

