A crisis is brewing in the background of the day to day, and soon it will sweep the world by surprise, and that crisis is when corporations are equal to governments. When conglomerate organizations can govern how humanity does the day to day, truly at that moment slavery will have returned.
Corporations are self-seeking, and increasingly becoming stateless superpowers, even though nationalism and protectionism have threatened their rise, they are still increasing in both size and influence. Imagine a day where Facebook, Apple, or Google operated in the same capacity as a governing body, every policy crafted would be used to grow the corporation further and for profits rather than for the preservation of life or for maintaining law and order.
Instead, these companies would house vast amounts of wealth while drip feeding their employees opportunities and daily necessities. Don’t think this can happen? One glance at where these corporations house the majority of their factories and a change of tone comes about. Some of the ‘contractors’ or ‘partners’ that align themselves with the tech giants have worse human rights violations than the government of North Korea, but you don’t hear CNN complaining, now do you?
Instead, we see the face value of conglomerate dominance, and we watch as the governments of the world bend over backward to keep ‘the giants’ from leaving their shores. That is of course because the influence and economic value derived from the corporations within Silicon Valley can almost equal that of an entire small countries government.
According to Parag Khanna a leading globalist, it is global liberalization and integration that has derived this outcome. Within a given amount of time, it will be these corporations that decide the fate of local governance, because geography no longer holds back the tides of corporations. Rather, if a government decides against an organization the company can relocate overseas to ‘greener-pastures,’ and a different state can benefit from the relocation.
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However, that’s not what is taking place; instead the corporations are ‘localizing,’ and anchoring themselves within their locales and then injecting themselves into other regions of the world.
Upon localizing themselves and then generating global revenue, a problem arises, the government ends up weaker than the conglomerate because rather than sticking to the local market, the corporation has the global market to benefit. Upon benefiting from the global landscape the firm generates more influence and power than the local government, thereby if the government tries to regulate the corporation, the business will just relocate, and the government loses.
All in all, the stateless superpowers have a vast amount of influence within the government, and this can generate a massive problem legally. If a corporation holds influence in the balance either the state gives in and continues to receive benefits or loses out entirely and the consequences can be devastating; people lose jobs, the government loses funding, and so on.
Corporations over many years have sought loopholes within regulation and generated huge companies because of such, and now, by design, the conglomerate businesses cannot be controlled. Rather, they become stateless and eventually house similar power to that of a government.
According to Parag Khanna;
Moving forward, the fate of these stateless superpowers will be be much more complex than the road taken to their current scale. Contrary to the prevailing view that America’s global firms will cave to White House pressure, the opportunities presented by global markets—even fragmented ones—will push them to “go local” everywhere, anchoring themselves in each market to comply with domestic requirements. They will reorganize to become, in effect, holding companies or federations of internationally distributed firms.
International governance is being in part decided by an ever-changing market; corporations are bending the ‘strong-arm’ of governance near and far because of one reason, control. As the conglomerate giants grow in size, influence, and become more ‘local globally’ the ability to geographically change regulations will only aid their rise in power and essentially grant the corporation the same power as a government. Such was apparent under Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership accord; essentially corporations were able to govern the populace as if they were a regulating body.
