http://www.colorado.edu/AmStudies/lewis/2010/decline.htmIn the 1970s and 1980s, many of the industrial giants in the United States, Europe, and Japan became global companies; they no longer wanted to claim allegiance to any country in the world. By becoming global companies they could force nations to compete with each other to attract their companies to build factories in their countries. By the 1980s, these global companies, now often called Transnational corporations (TNCs) were aggressively using this strategy of globalization to blackmail countries into reducing their costs and increasing their profits. I believe that President Reagan's economic program, which Phillips and others have called Reaganomics, reflect the increasing reality of the global industrial economy and the power of TNCs to blackmail even the biggest and strongest countries and force them to create economic, political, and social conditions that will reduce their companies' costs and increase their profits. Let's now look at some of the major demands these TNCs imposed on industrial countries in the 1980s and 1990s:
Demands Made by Transnational Corporations to do Business in a
Country under the Global Economy
1. Greatly reduce Corporate taxes and taxes on the rich.
2. Greatly reduce government spending in order to cut taxes.
3. Increase taxes on the middle-class and poor to pay for the necessary government services, such as support for TNCs.
4. Reduce environmental, work-safety, and product-safety regulations.
5. Provide millions and millions of dollars in tax incentives and subsidies to TNCs in order to convince them to locate in your country.
6. Build and support modern industrial factories for TNCs to use rent-free.
7. Create tax-free export processing zones so that TNCs can produce products without paying any taxes at all.
8. Reduce and lower worker's wages by keeping the minimum wage low or eliminating the minimum wage altogether.
9. Reduce the costs of hiring workers by reducing or eliminating workers' compensation taxes, social security taxes,and health insurance taxes.
10. Allow child-labor at almost any age and under any conditions.
11. Do not enforce maximum work-day hours, such as the eight hour day or the 40 hour week.
12. Use government power to crush and weaken labor unions. Allow companies to hire security firms to harass and intimidate workers and unions.
13. Allow TNCs to freely take their money and profits out of your country.
14. Reduce government support for health-care, education, and anti-poverty and anti-hunger programs, forcing workers to work for any wage just to take care of and feed their families.
15. Support global free trade and work to prevent countries from denying companies the right to sell their products despite the brutal conditions, environmental destruction, and exploitation of their workers.
16. Don't restrict or limit immigration and encourage high levels of unemployment in order to force workers to compete by working for lower and lower wages.
17. Limit and restrict local and national government control over their economies. Encourage global bodies to set economic standards that will benefit TNCs.
18. Limit the ability of workers and citizens to challenge the TNCs and their own government's economic programs which help the TNCs at their expense.
19. Create massive national debts in order to bankrupt governments and force them to be even more at the mercy of the TNCs. Governments can thus say they have no choice but to accept these conditions.
20. Force your citizens to accept lower standards of living and quality of life in order to guarantee higher profits for TNCs.
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