Multinational corporations see themselves as the future and countries and their laws as an anachronism, that they tolerate in order to keep things divided up to their own advantage.
So, many dont see themselves as any more responsible to any one country than to the others they do business with. People having to pay money for everything, is natural to them, and public services framed as public goods by social democracies are framed as a kind of theft of opportunity to sell in the value system of corporations. The WTO was sold originally as a way of channeling wealth to the developing world as a means to help them pay back the huge and obviously illegitimate debts they had incurred because of widespread corruption. What could be a better way to do it than by giving the jobs of the overpaid developed country workers to them to help force wages down. So this was how the WTO was sold. However it was never a serious proposal because it wasnt ever plausible that it could opr would be legal or legitimate, its a good example of a phenomenon thats been repeatedly illustrated by studies on organizational behavior. People who grow up abnormally affluent in an environment of extreme inequality have been shown to have both moral and perceptual deficits.
For the world to harmonize wages and working conditions downward, would preserve the vast inequality they are most comfortable with.
So these agreements share goals of eventual elimination, irreversibly, of public services and the concept of the public good (now renamed "services of general public interest" in keeping with their loss of public status) as soon as possible, irreversibly. Framing "state owned monopolies" as a theft of opportunity from (the richest people's corporations in the) poorest nations.
Corporations must be blind to the worst excesses of governments, except as far as attempting to make money off of them.
Even if a country is a brutal dictatorship, an MNC is obligated by international agreements to treat them identically to the best rated democracy. Making such calls is not natural for corporations so international economic governance rejects the concept pretty much. It wont go near questions of labor rules or human rights. What a national government does with its own people is its own business.
This is becoming a convenient way to gradually and in a non-obvious way totally reverse the progress of the last 75-100 years and make it as if it had never really happened.
As for the “cheating on paying tax” — umm, no, they’re in full compliance with tax law. If you think the tax loopholes in the law are too large, then lobby to get the law changed. You cannot get mad at a company (or person) for taking advantage of every tax reduction measure that’s present in the tax code!! (And in fact, since publicly traded companies are legally required to guard shareholder value, not using the loopholes would open them to potential legal exposure.)
Oh and of course you say this just 2 days after Apple announced that it’s going to be paying $38B (yes, billions) in taxes to the US government to repatriate a bunch of cash, under some new tax law. (Apple is already the US’s largest tax payer.)
A parallel with Apple and the many other American multinationals (IBM, Microsoft, , Google, Chevron). They might comply with the laws created by stupid politicians, but these companies clearly cheat the taxpayers in countries which they do business. They are bad corporate citizens. Less money for the hospitals, welfare,, schools etc. They use whatever loopholes they can cheat us all. Our personal taxes are a lot higher because of their cheating. Not only that, legitimate and decent Australian companies are taxed at 30% and they pay their taxes.
Chevron got their arse kicked and fined $300 million. These parasites took on "loans" from corporate HQ in the US at fake high interest rates, thereby sending all their taxable profits back the the US and paying nothing here in tax. IMO, the CEO and the CFO should have been jailed for fraud.
Actually, the worst corporate excesses title is one which has many possible winners in many countries around the globe. The concept of the corporation being an actual person should never have been allowed to happen.
Corporations should be broken up and never allowed to become as large as they have. Also, people need to be brought into the legal picture of transnational "economic governance", a space where we currently have no legal standing (except as part of a market, the rights to whom are bought and sold)
Unfortunately, that is where the real power rests today. This is why policy has been so spectacularly bad in many countries over the last two decades. Its just amazing that they have gotten away with this for so long.
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