TRANSNATIONAL CORPORATIONS

& WORLD TRADE

"We are witnessing an unprecedented transfer of power from people and their governments to global institutions whose allegiance is to abstract free-market principle, and whose favored citizens are soulless corporate entities that have the power to shape and break nations."

Joel Bleifuss

Global Exchange - link

" A serious and explicit purpose of our foreign policy [is] the encouragement of a hospitable climate for investment in foreign nations. "

Dwight Eisenhower, President of the United States, 1953

*****

"It is the professed goal of U.S. multinational corporations to control as large a share of the world market as they do of the United States market."

Harry Magdoff

Fifty Years Is Enough - link

" Since trade ignores national boundries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which are closed against him must be battered down. Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process."

Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States, 1907

Know Thine Enemy -- a history of corporations in US

"The achievements of past struggles and the aspirations of an entire nation are [being] undone and erased.... No Agent Orange or steel pellet bombs, no napalm, no toxic chemicals: a new phase of economic and social (rather than' physical) destruction has unfolded. The seemingly neutral and scientific tools of macro-economic policy constitute a non-violent instrument of recolonization and impoverishment."

Michel Chossudovsky, economist

*****

" The Pentagon budget is part of the funnel by which public funds are transferred to the high-tech industries. "

Noam Chomsky, American linguist and US media and foreign policy critic

When Corporations Rule the World

"... the establishment can't admit [that] it is human rights violations that make ... countries attractive to business -- so history has to be fudged, including denial of our support of regimes of terror and the practices that provide favorable climates of investment, and our destabilization of democracies that [don't] meet [the] standard of service to the transnational corporation..."

Edward Herman, economist and media analyst

NAFTA / FTAA (Free Trade Agreement of the Americas)

" The Darwinian concept of the survival of the fittest has been substituted by a philosophy of the survival of the slickest. "

Martin Luther King, Jr.

*****

" The so-called "defense" corporations are multinational conglomerates that have no great loyalty to the United States; they are in fact no longer U.S. corporations but transnational entities loyal only to themselves. "

John Stockwell, former CIA official and author

Multilateral Agreement on Investments (MAI)

 

"True, the white man brought great change. But the varied fruits of his civilization, though highly colored and inviting, are sickening and deadening. And if it be the part of civilization to maim, rob, and thwart, then what is progress?"

Chief Luther Standing Bear, 1933

*****

"The United States does not have an automatic call on our resources. There is no mind-set that puts this country first."

Cyrill Stewert, Chief Financial Officer of Colgate-Palmolive Corporation

World Trade Organization (WTO)

"I spent thirty-three years in the Marines, most of my time being a hlgh class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism."

General Smedley Butler, former US Marine Corps Commandant,1935

*****

" There is ...a huge tacit conspiracy between the U.S. government, its agencies and its multinational corporations, on the one hand, and local business and military cliques in the Third World, on the other, to assume complete control of these countries and "develop" them on a joint venture basis. The military leaders of the Third World were carefully nurtured by the U.S. security establishment to serve as the "enforcers" of this joint venture partnership, and they have been duly supplied with machine guns and the latest data on methods of interrogation of subversives."

Edward Herman, economist and media analyst

*****

" As an economy measures performance in terms of the creation of money, people become a major source of inefficiency. "

David Korten, economist and internationalist

International Monetary Fund, World Bank

"This use of the government of all for the enrichment and aggrandizement of few is a revolution.... These sovereign powers ... have been given by you and me, all of us, to our government to be used only for the common and equal benefit. Given by all to be used by all, it is a revolution to have made them the perquisite of a few."

Henry Demarest Lloyd,1847 - 1903, US journalist

Structural Adjustment

"Corporations have been enthroned .... An era of corruption in high places will follow
and the money power will endeavor to prolong its reign by working on the prejudices of the people... until wealth is aggregated in a few hands ... and the Republic is destroyed."

Abraham Lincoln, American president, 1861-1865

Transnational corporations & Third World

"The immiseration of the majority is an integral part of the Free World package for the Third World, the unsavory aspects of the package -- the terror, the direct spoilation of people and resources, and western complicity -- must be rationalized and, as far as possible, kept under the rug."

Edward Herman, economist and media analyst

New Global Economy

"The recent quantum leap in the ability of transnational corporations to relocate their facilities around the world in effect makes all workers, communities and countries competitors for these corporations' favor. The consequence is a "race to the bottom" in which wages and social conditions tend to fall to the level of the most desperate."

Jeremy Brecher, historian and author

Corporate watch

" What we have is not a market economy. It is a corporately planned and controlled economy. "

" We have a world in which a handful of corporations, dettached from any link to any place or community, have extended their power beyond the reach of most governments. "

" The U.S. has a centrally-planned economy, in many ways more tightly controlled than any state-planned economy that we have seen. "

" The political system ... [is] enormously expensive. The only way you can raise the money to win an election is by appealing to corporate interests, which then means you're in their debt and have to focus on their agendas."

David Korten, economist and internationalist

Corporate Welfare

"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will."

Frederick Douglass, 1817-1895, escaped slave, abolitionist, author, orator, statesman

Controlling Corporations

"We must find new lands from which we can easily obtain raw materials and at the same time exploit the cheap slave labor that is available from the natives of the colonies. The colonies would also provide a dumping ground for the surplus goods produced in our factories."

Cecil Rhodes, 1853-1902, British imperialist and "founder" of Rhodesia (Zimbabwe)

Globalization watch

"A criminal is a person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation."

Howard Scott

Oil watch

"We are entering a new phase in human history -- one in which fewer and fewer workers will be needed to produce the goods and services for the global population."

Jeremy Rifkin, economist

Water page

" Rollback [the destabilization and overthrow of Third World leftist-populist governments with right-wing governments] as a foreign policy ... causes untold devastation and misery for millions overseas, and hinders any potential positive U.S. influence in world affairs... To the extent the U.S. public backs rollback, this support is rooted in a misguided sense of patriotism. Patriotism itself - love of one's country and one's people - is a natural and reasonable human feeling. But patriotism which measures one's country by military superiority over all rivals regardless of consequence is irrational... There is surely a more rational form of patriotism that searches for excellence in social, economic and moral spheres rather than in weapon systems. "

from the book Rollback by Thomas Bodenheimer and Robert Gould

Diamonds page

" With unfailing consistancy, U.S. intervention has been on the side of the rich and powerful of various nations at the expense of the poor and needy. Rather than strengthening democracies, U.S. leaders have overthrown numerous democratically elected governments or other populist regimes in dozens of countries ... whenever these nations give evidence of putting the interests of their people ahead of the interests of multinational corporate interests. "

Michael Parenti, political scientist and author


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