 Three books in the past year have analyzed the behaviour of corporations and concluded
that many of them act in a psychopathic manner, exhibiting indifference
to the suffering some of their activities produce and a willingness to
act dishonestly and sometimes even illegally if they know they can get
away with it -- all in the name of "increasing shareholder value".
But now a new article by George Monbiot suggests that perhaps the majority of corporations would act more compassionately and ethically if they could be assured their competitors would do the same.
After listing the latest litany of evidence that global warming is for
real and accelerating, Monbiot describes his astonishment at a
conference where a number of companies called for tough new
across-the-board regulations to start to deal with the problem, only to
be rebuffed by governments unwilling to institute them.
The
reaction is perhaps not surprising. After all, at the behest of
multinationals, many governments pushed through so-called 'free trade'
regulations that forced participating countries worldwide to lower
their social welfare and environmental standards to the lowest of any
member country, and imposed huge fines on any country that dared try to
protect its workers or its environment. Now, some of these same
companies are saying it's not deregulation that's needed to make 'free trade' and a 'free market' work, but consistent regulation,
so that there is an even playing field. But now governments, having
meekly done what the corporatists told them to do, are arguing that
such re-regulation would be "an unwarranted intervention in the
market". Now who's behaving psychopathically?
In a demonstration
of good faith and concern for our planet's future, a bevy of innovative
companies, Monbiot reports, have developed new, and expensive,
anti-pollution technologies. Big business has acknowledged these
solutions and expressed a willingness to adopt them, but insist "none
of this is going to happen if the market is left to itself". As Monbiot
puts it "it is regulation that creates the market" for these new
technologies. Unfortunately, it appears that most politicians never got
past the laissez-faire chapter of Economics 101, and now cloddishly
believe that all regulation is inherently evil.
Caught up in
the enthusiasm for deregulation, many governments have shed regulatory
authorities, manpower and budgets. Re-regulation to a global standard
would cost these governments serious money. Their reluctance to do an
about-face is therefore quite understandable. Who's going to pay for
the enforcement? Unhappy taxpayers? The companies themselves? Yeah,
right.
Monbiot's next book will include a detailed proposal to
get government and industry, working together, to reduce greenhouse
gases by 80% by 2030, which he believes is the minimum needed to
prevent ecological meltdown. But now he's worried that the politicians,
not the corporations, will be the hardest to convince.
Now, I
can hear the advocates of a single world government saying this
vindicates their argument. Only one government to convince instead of
hundreds, right? The problem with this is the assumption that any
government has the capability to institute and enforce regulations as
long as there is a reward (higher profits) for the millions of
companies around the world for circumventing the regulations.
Let's
suppose that a suite of new regulations were agreed to by a global
government (or by all the world's national governments), that set high
social and environmental standards, from restrictions on child labour
to high-tech scrubbers on all smokestacks. There is an immediate
incentive for companies, especially in areas of the world where
enforcement of the law has always been lax (and that's most of the
world) to defy the law, not by flaunting it but by claiming to be in
compliance and bribing the odd inspector who comes by to overlook
violations. These companies will be at a competitive advantage relative
to the law-abiding ones. No government or set of governments, even of
the Orwellian variety, will be able to counter this incentive to break
the law, or increase the probability of lawbreakers being caught and
brought to justice. This will be particularly true in third world
countries (some of which already have strong social and environmental
laws, but so little enforcement that residents scoff at them) but it
will be true in any country where there is a reward for breaking the
law. The raft of recent criminal activities by companies like Enron
demonstrates that if the incentive is there to do so, executives will
break the law, often with catastrophic consequences. And for every
Enron you do hear about, there are dozens of companies like mega-polluter Koch Industries, which simply buy their way out of convictions for their criminal activities, and stay below the media radar.
So
as much as I would like to believe Monbiot's prescription for fighting
greenhouse gases, I don't think it has a chance of working, even if we
could garner global government and corporate support for it, simply
because it cannot be enforced.
That's not to say I think it is a
waste of time to re-establish high social and environmental standards
of conduct that are uniform around the globe. But the only way such
standards will be enforced is by the people, by all of us. And before
that happens, billions of people need to be made aware of the reason
for these standards and the urgency of upholding them. Today, most of
the people on the planet are dealing with the daily struggle to
survive, and only when and if we are able to bring overpopulation,
overuse of resources, and endemic poverty and disease under control
will most of the world have any time or inclination to police corporate
and government (many of the world's worst polluters and human rights
abusers are government organizations) conduct in their communities. And
in addition, we need much stronger whistleblower
protections (protections which would need to be enforced not by
existing authorities, which in many countries are likely to be in
cahoots with the wrongdoers, but rather by the citizenry at large).
Without such protections, no citizen will be willing to risk their
personal safety to report wrongdoings, and that danger rises
commensurately with the extent of the wrongdoing.
None of this
will be easy, and it may not even be possible. We're quickly running
out of time to bring those most responsible for destroying our planet
into line. But the Internet at least gives us the possibility of
recruiting six billion whistleblowers to log social and environmental
wrongdoing in their own communities, combine them to provide a clear picture of which organizations are the worst offenders, and use that data to boycott
those companies and, at least in the most extreme cases, push
regulators to bring them to justice. We simply cannot expect
governments, laws and corporations to police (and in some cases
self-police) social and environmental misconduct. We have to do it
ourselves, together, and soon.
Thanks to Jeff Gold of the Green Party for catching this article. |
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