Staying on top of the competition means evolving technologies and products at an ever quicker pace. In corporate boardrooms, this feature of the competitive environment spawns a great desire for unrestrained global flexibility, permitting design teams and downsizers to zoom in and out of lines of production at a moment s notice. Liberalization, of course, does not mean the absence of regulation, but rather regulations that suit the transnationals. It is also important to note the fact that these agreements are treaties, rather than ordinary statutes, which limits people s ability to use their governments as instruments of power over trade. Corporations care deeply about dismantling capital controls that many developing countries erected at the time of decolonization.
Financial penetration opens opportunities for investment in places where transnationals produce.
At bottom, financial flexibility permits corporations to construct powerful claims on the present and future earnings of people all over the world. Finally, corporations increasingly dominate the movement of people around the globe. The notorious H-2 visa, which permits immigrant workers to harvest US crops but grants them nothing in the way of labor or human rights, is but one example. Corporate-led globalization has unleashed a series of forces and constructed a series of rules that drive the global race to the bottom. With no concern for labor or the environment, and with effective mechanisms for circumventing networks of accountability that we have built over the years, the transnationals have made a world in which the polarization of wealth, as well as environmental degradation, have reached unprecedented levels.