Fabi
20th May 2002, 17:00
... feel free to diss me after reading the articles i collected so far. and if any of you feel like dismissing them as leftist propaganda, be my guest...
"1. Of the 100 largest economies in the world, 51 are corporations; only 49 are countries (based on a comparison of corporate sales and country GDPs).
2. The Top 200 corporations' sales are growing at a faster rate than overall global economic activity. Between 1983 and 1999, their combined sales grew from the equivalent of 25.0 percent to 27.5 percent of World GDP.
3. The Top 200 corporations' combined sales are bigger than the combined economies of all countries minus the biggest 10.
4. The Top 200s' combined sales are 18 times the size of the combined annual income of the 1.2 billion people (24 percent of the total world population) living in ''severe'' poverty.
5. While the sales of the Top 200 are the equivalent of 27.5 percent of world economic activity, they employ only 0.78 percent of the world's workforce.
6. Between 1983 and 1999, the profits of the Top 200 firms grew 362.4 percent, while the number of people they employ grew by only 14.4 percent.
7. A full 5 percent of the Top 200s' combined workforce is employed by Wal-Mart, a company notorious for union-busting and widespread use of part-time workers to avoid paying benefits. The discount retail giant is the top private employer in the world, with 1,140,000 workers, more than twice as many as No. 2, DaimlerChrysler, which employs 466,938.
( i found this one especially interesting because someone told me not too long ago on this forum, that i was taking walmart way too serious....)
8. U.S. corporations dominate the Top 200, with 82 slots (41 percent of the total). Japanese firms are second, with only 41 slots.
9. Of the U.S. corporations on the list, 44 did not pay the full standard 35 percent federal corpo-rate tax rate during the period 1996-1998. Seven of the firms actually paid less than zero in federal income taxes in 1998 (because of rebates). These include: Texaco, Chevron, PepsiCo, Enron, Worldcom, McKesson and the world's biggest corporationGeneral Motors. 10. Between 1983 and 1999, the share of total sales of the Top 200 made up by service sector corporations increased from 33.8 percent to 46.7 percent. Gains were particularly evident in financial services and telecommunications sectors, in which most countries have pursued deregulation."
source:
http://www.corpwatch.org/issues/PID.jsp?articleid=377
now a little something on the worl bank and global trade...
"WTO and Global Trade: Who Benefits?
Since it was created in 1995, the WTO has ruled that every environmental policy it has reviewed is an illegal trade barrier that must be eliminated or changed. With one exception, the WTO also has ruled against every health or food safety law it has reviewed.
Nations whose laws were declared trade barriers by the WTO-or that were merely threatened with WTO action-have eliminated or watered down their policies to meet WTO requirements.
Supposedly each of the WTO's 134 member countries have an equal say in governance. In practice, decision-making is dominated by the "Quad": USA; European Union; Japan and Canada.
Each member of the Quad represents its corporations' interests at the WTO. These corporations are often directly involved in writing and shaping WTO rules. In the U.S. this is achieved through official "Trade Advisory Committees" which are dominated by the private sector.
For instance, the US International Trade Administration's Energy Advisory Committee is made up exclusively of representatives of giant oil, mining, gas and utility corporations, including Texaco, Enron, Halliburton and Freeport-McMoran.
The top fifth of the world's people in the richest countries enjoy 82% of the expanding export trade and 68% of foreign investment-the bottom fifth, receive roughly 1%.
Women comprise 70 percent of the world's 1.3 billion absolute poor. Worldwide, they bear the brunt of economic and financial transition and crisis caused by market forces and globalization.
NAFTA & FTAA: Who Benefits?
Seventy-five percent of Mexico's population lives in poverty today, compared with 49 percent in 1981, before Mexico underwent reforms that paved the way for NAFTA-the North American Free Trade Agreement.
The number of Mexicans living in severe poverty (living on less than $2 a day) has grown by four million since NAFTA began in 1994.
NAFTA has generated booming industrial development but little investment in the environment. As a result, environmental pollution and related public health problems have increased on both sides of the US-Mexico border.
In the first four years of NAFTA, 15 wood product companies, including International Paper and Boisie Cascade, set up shop in Mexico, cutting some of North America's largest intact forests.
Hundreds of thousands of US jobs have shifted to Mexico under NAFTA. 260,000 U.S. workers have qualified for a special NAFTA retraining program. Especially hard hit are the apparel and electronics industries, major employers of women and people of color.
The Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), currently being negotiated by 34 countries, is intended by its architects to be the most far-reaching trade agreement in history.
Although it is based on the model of NAFTA, the FTAA goes far beyond it in scope and power, potentially granting unequalled new rights to corporations to compete for and even challenge publicly funded government services, including health care, education, social security, culture and environmental protection.
The World Bank and IMF: Who Benefits?
In the 1980s and early 1990s, the International Monetary Fund imposed structural adjustment programs on more than 70 countries.
Structural adjustment policies have required 36 countries in sub-Saharan Africa-where more than half of the population lives in absolute poverty-to decrease domestic consumption and shift scarce resources into production of cash crops for export; state-owned companies and many state services have been privatized, and health and education expenditures have been cut and restructured.
The absolute number of people living in poverty rose in the 1990s in Eastern Europe, South Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and sub-Saharan Africa-all areas that came under the sway of adjustment programs.
Structural adjustment policies have elicited massive protests in countries as far flung as Ecuador, Zambia, the Philippines and Jamaica.
In 2000 a bipartisan Congressional panel-the Meltzer Commission-found that World Bank Group and IMF failures can be traced to "overlapping missions, ineffectiveness, corruption, and waste of resources, and failure to develop successful regional programs in agriculture, forestry, environment and health care," among other problems.
Each year, the World Bank awards some 40,000 contracts to private firms.
US Treasury Department calculates that for every US$1 the U.S. contributes to international development banks, US corporations receive more than double that amount in bank-financed procurement contracts.
The World Bank has an astounding 65-70 per cent failure rate of its projects in the poorest countries."
source:
http://www.corpwatch.org/issues/PID.jsp?articleid=378
also here is a report on alternatives to globalization... it is in pdf (acrobat reader ) format....
http://www.ifg.org/alt_eng.pdf
that for now is it, cause my computer keeps crashing when trying to go to the other websites that looked interesting... i tried to go to some bbc-head to head thing, where some smart person *****ed about protesters, claiming they were against the world's poor, hindering them of overcoming their poverty....
maybe it'll work later...
"1. Of the 100 largest economies in the world, 51 are corporations; only 49 are countries (based on a comparison of corporate sales and country GDPs).
2. The Top 200 corporations' sales are growing at a faster rate than overall global economic activity. Between 1983 and 1999, their combined sales grew from the equivalent of 25.0 percent to 27.5 percent of World GDP.
3. The Top 200 corporations' combined sales are bigger than the combined economies of all countries minus the biggest 10.
4. The Top 200s' combined sales are 18 times the size of the combined annual income of the 1.2 billion people (24 percent of the total world population) living in ''severe'' poverty.
5. While the sales of the Top 200 are the equivalent of 27.5 percent of world economic activity, they employ only 0.78 percent of the world's workforce.
6. Between 1983 and 1999, the profits of the Top 200 firms grew 362.4 percent, while the number of people they employ grew by only 14.4 percent.
7. A full 5 percent of the Top 200s' combined workforce is employed by Wal-Mart, a company notorious for union-busting and widespread use of part-time workers to avoid paying benefits. The discount retail giant is the top private employer in the world, with 1,140,000 workers, more than twice as many as No. 2, DaimlerChrysler, which employs 466,938.
( i found this one especially interesting because someone told me not too long ago on this forum, that i was taking walmart way too serious....)
8. U.S. corporations dominate the Top 200, with 82 slots (41 percent of the total). Japanese firms are second, with only 41 slots.
9. Of the U.S. corporations on the list, 44 did not pay the full standard 35 percent federal corpo-rate tax rate during the period 1996-1998. Seven of the firms actually paid less than zero in federal income taxes in 1998 (because of rebates). These include: Texaco, Chevron, PepsiCo, Enron, Worldcom, McKesson and the world's biggest corporationGeneral Motors. 10. Between 1983 and 1999, the share of total sales of the Top 200 made up by service sector corporations increased from 33.8 percent to 46.7 percent. Gains were particularly evident in financial services and telecommunications sectors, in which most countries have pursued deregulation."
source:
http://www.corpwatch.org/issues/PID.jsp?articleid=377
now a little something on the worl bank and global trade...
"WTO and Global Trade: Who Benefits?
Since it was created in 1995, the WTO has ruled that every environmental policy it has reviewed is an illegal trade barrier that must be eliminated or changed. With one exception, the WTO also has ruled against every health or food safety law it has reviewed.
Nations whose laws were declared trade barriers by the WTO-or that were merely threatened with WTO action-have eliminated or watered down their policies to meet WTO requirements.
Supposedly each of the WTO's 134 member countries have an equal say in governance. In practice, decision-making is dominated by the "Quad": USA; European Union; Japan and Canada.
Each member of the Quad represents its corporations' interests at the WTO. These corporations are often directly involved in writing and shaping WTO rules. In the U.S. this is achieved through official "Trade Advisory Committees" which are dominated by the private sector.
For instance, the US International Trade Administration's Energy Advisory Committee is made up exclusively of representatives of giant oil, mining, gas and utility corporations, including Texaco, Enron, Halliburton and Freeport-McMoran.
The top fifth of the world's people in the richest countries enjoy 82% of the expanding export trade and 68% of foreign investment-the bottom fifth, receive roughly 1%.
Women comprise 70 percent of the world's 1.3 billion absolute poor. Worldwide, they bear the brunt of economic and financial transition and crisis caused by market forces and globalization.
NAFTA & FTAA: Who Benefits?
Seventy-five percent of Mexico's population lives in poverty today, compared with 49 percent in 1981, before Mexico underwent reforms that paved the way for NAFTA-the North American Free Trade Agreement.
The number of Mexicans living in severe poverty (living on less than $2 a day) has grown by four million since NAFTA began in 1994.
NAFTA has generated booming industrial development but little investment in the environment. As a result, environmental pollution and related public health problems have increased on both sides of the US-Mexico border.
In the first four years of NAFTA, 15 wood product companies, including International Paper and Boisie Cascade, set up shop in Mexico, cutting some of North America's largest intact forests.
Hundreds of thousands of US jobs have shifted to Mexico under NAFTA. 260,000 U.S. workers have qualified for a special NAFTA retraining program. Especially hard hit are the apparel and electronics industries, major employers of women and people of color.
The Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), currently being negotiated by 34 countries, is intended by its architects to be the most far-reaching trade agreement in history.
Although it is based on the model of NAFTA, the FTAA goes far beyond it in scope and power, potentially granting unequalled new rights to corporations to compete for and even challenge publicly funded government services, including health care, education, social security, culture and environmental protection.
The World Bank and IMF: Who Benefits?
In the 1980s and early 1990s, the International Monetary Fund imposed structural adjustment programs on more than 70 countries.
Structural adjustment policies have required 36 countries in sub-Saharan Africa-where more than half of the population lives in absolute poverty-to decrease domestic consumption and shift scarce resources into production of cash crops for export; state-owned companies and many state services have been privatized, and health and education expenditures have been cut and restructured.
The absolute number of people living in poverty rose in the 1990s in Eastern Europe, South Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and sub-Saharan Africa-all areas that came under the sway of adjustment programs.
Structural adjustment policies have elicited massive protests in countries as far flung as Ecuador, Zambia, the Philippines and Jamaica.
In 2000 a bipartisan Congressional panel-the Meltzer Commission-found that World Bank Group and IMF failures can be traced to "overlapping missions, ineffectiveness, corruption, and waste of resources, and failure to develop successful regional programs in agriculture, forestry, environment and health care," among other problems.
Each year, the World Bank awards some 40,000 contracts to private firms.
US Treasury Department calculates that for every US$1 the U.S. contributes to international development banks, US corporations receive more than double that amount in bank-financed procurement contracts.
The World Bank has an astounding 65-70 per cent failure rate of its projects in the poorest countries."
source:
http://www.corpwatch.org/issues/PID.jsp?articleid=378
also here is a report on alternatives to globalization... it is in pdf (acrobat reader ) format....
http://www.ifg.org/alt_eng.pdf
that for now is it, cause my computer keeps crashing when trying to go to the other websites that looked interesting... i tried to go to some bbc-head to head thing, where some smart person *****ed about protesters, claiming they were against the world's poor, hindering them of overcoming their poverty....
maybe it'll work later...