Shahid Bolsen on human rights advocacy in the era of corporate power

In terms of social impact, it can be argued that major corporations wield more power than government. And policies like neoliberalism and austerity increase that impact. Candidates for political office always say that they will create jobs. No. Governments don't create jobs.

Companies create jobs. That's the private sector. Companies decide what the wages of workers will be, which translates to deciding what their standard of living will be. They decide what the cost of goods and services will be, which translates to deciding what the cost of living will be. They decide where they will invest, where they will operate, where they will set up a factory or an office or a facility of any kind, and that choice has tangible, quantifiable impact development of that area and upon the lives of the people who live there.

When you're talking about major multinational corporations with dozens of subsidiaries, these are in practical terms their own economies and they are command economies. By the technical definition, they're not capitalist economies. They operate within a capitalist economy. But as an economic entity in and of themselves, don't follow capitalist rules. Decisions made in the corporate boardroom determine whether or not the people within their sphere of influence have livelihoods.

How much money they can make, how much money they have to spend, what goods and services will be available to them, whether or not their infrastructure in their area will be developed or derelict, whether or not they can afford to send their children to school, or what types of schools they can send their children to. Their decisions can have intergenerational impact. The economic leverage of corporations gives them tremendous political power. When a politician says that they created a job or created such and such number of new jobs, what that usually means on a practical level is that they've cut some kind of a deal. They've made an agreement of some kind with with corporations, either land concessions, tax breaks, government contract subsidies, something like this, and then the company has created jobs.

Never mind if the deal that they cut with corporations increases the general misery index in the community, it created jobs. Corporations spend billions of dollars influencing Washington, London, Paris, Berlin, Brussels, and their relationship with these governments is deeply entrenched. There are roughly 18,000 professional corporate lobbyists in Washington DC. The number of unregistered, unofficial lobbyists who just provide quote unquote strategic advice to politicians on behalf of corporations is roughly 100,000. Money buys imports, And it overrides democratic representation.

There's been a massive transfer of power and authority from the public sector to the private sector. And corporations have the capability to bankrupt any state. The unrestricted mobility of capital allows the wealthy to deprive the state of revenue. They can pit one state or one country's workforce against another, driving their wages down, eliminating benefits, eliminating regulations, and so on as governments compete for investment. Once a state finds itself unable to finance its own survival, it appeals to creditors.

Loans and investment are offered on a raft of macroeconomic reforms. The end result of all of these reforms is that the state largely divests itself of authority, of sovereignty, and more or less abolishes the social contract between the government and the population. In order to service the debt, government functions and assets are delivered piece by piece to private sector players. The revenues from those functions then flow out of the country into the accounts of multinational corporations, no longer into the state budget. Integration into the global economy today means little more than subordination to a corporate imperial structure in which, again, local elites collaborate with global elites to the detriment of the rest of the population, just like previous imperial models we've seen.

When we're talking about multinational corporations, we're talking about huge entities, huge economies, command economies, essentially floating super sovereign private states. Indeed, out of the top 100 economic economies or economic entities in the world, nearly half of them are companies, not countries, not states. That's devastating if you think about it. Advocating human rights means checking the abuse of power, and it means demanding a distribution of power, or at least demanding an accountability of power so that people can be ensured to not be oppressed or persecuted. Well, we're living in an era in which extreme power is highly concentrated in the hands of very few people who are not elected into power and cannot be voted out of power.

It is concentrated in the hands of people who are dedicated exclusively and legally to use their power to serve their own private interests. Cloaked in the corporate veil, they're protected from accountability. It seems clear enough that the conventional method of lobbying governments or institutions like the UN has become obsolete. We have to be realistic and practical about this. It seems to me that the only way forward is to address ourselves directly to corporate power.

Corporations are political entities, and we have to deal with them as such. We do not have to abolish corporate influence, which we can't do anyway, but what we have to do is democratize corporate influence. When you begin to recognize that corporations are political entities, you also begin to realize that their not their stockholders, their stakeholders, their workers, their customers, and everyone who is impacted by their business or who contributes in any way directly or indirectly to their profitability are also political players. Just like voters, just like political parties, just like political action committees, we are all members of corporate constituencies. Rather than party affiliation, what we offer is brand loyalty.

Rather than party insignias, we wear company logos. Rather than campaign contributions, we offer consumer purchases. Everything that we do, and everything that they spend billions of dollars in advertising and marketing to make us do empowers corporations to pursue their political agendas. We have the right to expect our interests to be reflected in how they use their power. Our consumption, our brand loyalty, our labor should earn us the right to representation when these corporations pursue political agendas.

And we should have a say in what they do with the power we have given them. As the situation stands now, when governments sit down at the negotiating table with business to make agreements, to draft policies, to draft laws. The public, the people, the population are at the table. In fact, we're at the head of the table, but we've been fooled into thinking that we're spectators and not participants. Companies spend a great deal of money on market research, analyzing the habits and attitudes and preferences of their customers because at the end of the day business must be responsive.

We have a far better chance of getting business to respond to us as consumers than we have of getting governments to respond to us as citizens. So how can we deal with them? You can't approach them on a moral level. Your arguments cannot be based on morality. Your arguments cannot be based on principles.

You have to speak in the language of the internal logic of a corporation. That means that you have to impact their bottom line. If their market research begins to show them that their social and political positions and the social and political agendas that they follow matter to their customers. Then you can start to see a change, you know, start to see some response. They will begin to understand that the democratization of their political influence will be a crucial element in their own profitability.

The strategy requires at the end of the day that we can mobilize on the grassroots level. We want to be able to deliver or to deny a company customer loyalty. The things that the corporations are selling most of the time you don't need them. You're giving them your money and they're using it for political agendas that are not reflective of your interests and they don't include your interests. So if they are actually taking positions that are reflective of your interests and your concerns, buy their things.

It's essentially a political donation. It's a contribution saying thank you for using your power in a representative way, in a democratic way. Because if we don't, I'm afraid we cannot expect any progress on any human rights issue or any issues of political fairness or any issues of oppression or injustice in society at all because the fact is that the dominant players in society today are corporations and their owners. And whether or not humanitarian crisis gets resolved or gets ignored or gets escalated is increasingly going to be determined on the basis of its impact on business.