Corporate Power

1. Corporate Power The Role of the Global Media in Shaping What We Know About the Environment

2. Privileging Corporate Acts • Transnational Corporations (TNCs) lobbied international organizations (WTO) for increased freedoms in the movement of capital, technology, and goods and services. • With binding regional and global trade agreements, TNCs have undermined the efforts of individual governments to regulate within their borders. • NAFTA’s Chapter 11 & the case of MTBE

3. Privileging Corporate Acts • TNCs increasingly operate with little public accountability. How did this happen? • Why did the American public agree to a shift in power from local people and states to unaccountable, unelected international institutions and TNCs? • How did the public endorse job insecurity and outsourcing, lower wages, downsizing of the welfare state, decline in social services, and a rollback of environmental protections standards?

4. Privileging Corporate Acts • The rise and influence of corporate power in the global media industry … Shapes what we know or don’t know about social and environmental issues. • Media is one of the largest factors in socializing each generation about politics, the environment, and personal values.

5. Privileging Corporate Acts • By reducing complex issues like global warming to simplistic special interest-driven sound bites about whether or not it really exists, citizens consuming the media become incapable of understanding and acting on real debate and questioning and instead prefer easy answers, quick fixes, and easy-to-grasp phrases

6. Privileging Corporate Acts • A healthy democracy depends on an educated citizenry. • A democracy beholden only to corporate interests will never pursue a path toward social and environmental sustainability.

7. The Rise of Transnational Corporations • Historically, the corporation was a public institution created by government over which the state had great regulations and control • Special charters granted by state legislators • Limited what a corporation could do, • For how long, and • How much they could accumulate

8. The Rise of Transnational Corporations • By the nineteenth century corporations became increasingly privatized in both law and ideology—no loner beholden to public officials but private citizens (investors). • Relying on the 14th Amendment, added to the Constitution in 1868, the US Supreme Court ruled that a private corporation is a “natural person” and consequently has the same rights and protections …

9. The Rise of Transnational Corporations • Corporation given same rights and protections extended to persons by the Bill of Rights • Right to free speech • Right to influence government (lobby) • Use mass media, • Construct a public image that they believed would best serve their interests • Right to privacy (used to ensure that federal agencies cannot investigate TNC for crimes) • Eliminated “public good” provisions from charter.

10. Defining Characteristics of Corporations • Through advertising, marketing, and control of information, corporations are able to create desires, invent needs, and foster traditions that encourage unquestioned consumption. • Corporations today spend over half as much per capita on advertising than the world spends on education • Those who control the mass media control the core culture

11. Defining Characteristics of Corporations • Common set of shared beliefs, values and assumptions of how corporations operate • Understood to be private sovereign enterprises • Separate between public and private • Sustained growth = human progress • Free market economy … maximize growth • Privatization removes inefficiencies (p. 72)

12. Defining Characteristics of Corporations • TNCs penetrate every single country • Exceed most governments in size and power • TNCs are motivated by profit • TNCs are extremely mobile • Easily able to hire and fire employees • No commitment to local or regional affairs • Absentee ownership • 70% of world trade controlled by 500 TNCs • 1% of TNCs own half the total stock of direct foreign investment.

13. Corporate Welfare • Each year the US Congress pays out tens of billions of dollars to American corporations in the form of direct subsides and tax breaks. • In 2006, these subsidies totaled $92 billion. • TNCs thus collect more government handouts than all of the nation’s poor people combined • Benefit from government sponsored research and development • Corporations use public infrastructure, such as transportation and communication. • Corporations benefit from public investment in education • Corporations benefit from publicly funded environmental cleanups

14. Corporate Welfare • The powers to educate, jail, rehabilitate, care for the poor, manage nature itself are all being entrusted to corporations, which have no accountability to the public.

15. The History of Corporate Global Media • Media serves two main functions • central economic role for non-media firms by facilitating their business interests, through advertising to facilitate expansion into new markets • global media’s news and entertainment provide an informational and moral basis for marketing goods and for having a dominant free-market agenda • The media is central to convincing us that American-style democracy & the free-market economy are paths toward “freedom.”

16. Core Elements of the Global Media Corporate Ideology • Markets allocate resources efficiently and should provide the means of organizing economic and perhaps all human life. • Dominated by a strong belief in privatization • Freedom is often equated with the absence of any state business regulations. • Economic freedom leads to/guarantees political freedom

17. Corporate Global Media • Size, ownership, and profit orientation • The role of advertising • Global media sources • Violating the corporate agenda • Global media evasion