
Resisting corporate globalization
The ever-expanding global economic system, dominated by gigantic multinational corporations, is undermining local communities and cultures everywhere, and threatening the health of the biosphere. This system depends on a number of structural mechanisms, the most important of which include subsidies and taxes, free trade and investment treaties, and the legal powers given to corporations. In order to build healthy, equitable and sustainable localized economies, these structural forces must be resisted and fundamentally changed in the interests of people and the planet.
Around the world, institutions are chasing after the highest possible monetary return on trillions of investment dollars. This means that banks, pension funds, university endowments, and state and local government portfolios are heavily invested in fossil fuel, nuclear, and military industries, as well as deforestation, land grabs, predatory lending, and other destructive activities. Doing what we can to convince governments and institutions to stop funding the destruction of the planet is an important act of resistance.
Take action
- Join or start a fossil fuel divestment campaign. This interactive map by GoFossilFree.org shows where existing campaigns are underway, and describes the basic steps for starting up a campaign in your community.
- Work to divest government funds from fossil fuels with the Mayors Innovation Project's guide Divestment from Fossil Fuels: A Guide for City Officials and Activists.
- Join the Center for International Environmental Law's campaign to get pension funds to stop investing in fossil fuel companies.
- Investments in military industries not only fuel conflict and environmental destruction, they make survival even more precarious for local cultures, communities and economies. Divest from the War Machine can connect you with existing campaigns, provide you with model city divestment resolutions, and more.
- Learn which pension funds contribute to land grabs by visiting the websites of GRAIN, National Family Farm Coalition, and Farm Land Grab, and to deforestation by visiting Deforestation Free Funds. Ask your labor union or professional association to pass a resolution against land grabbing by pension funds.
- Hold your pension fund responsible for unethical investments. See the TIAA (US) petition against land grabbing as an example.
- Join The Next Egg (US), an online community working to shift retirement savings from global to local economies.
- Make My Money Matter makes it easy to send a message to your pension provider, asking them what they are doing to help cut emissions in half this decade.
Get inspired
- By the end of 2018, institutions ranging from universities and banks to sovereign wealth funds and major cities had made nearly USD 8 trillion in fossil-fuel divestment commitments.
- Fossil Free California maintains a list of California cities and counties that have divested pension funds from big banks and fossil fuel companies.
- In 2021, thanks to pressure from NGOs, the Norwegian Parliament adopted a new criterion to guide the investments of the Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global – the world's largest sovereign wealth fund. The Fund will now exclude companies that sell weapons to countries that violate international humanitarian law. Read more in this story from the German NGO Urgewald.
Countries around the world are fixated on growing their economies as measured by the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), but this measure counts destruction and breakdown as positives as long as they generate economic exchange, and ignores fundamental ecological and social qualities that make life possible and meaningful. With multiple interlocking crises besetting the world, it is clear that the obsession with growth measured by GDP is little short of madness. It is time to ditch growth for growth's sake and transition to models that better reflect and promote human and ecological well-being.
Take action
- Learn and share about alternative, more holistic measures of sustainable well-being that have been developed, and urge your governments - from the local to the national level - to prioritize them over GDP growth:
- The Happy Planet Index is a measure of sustainable well-being for all developed by New Economics Foundation in the UK, that shows how well nations are doing at achieving happy lives within ecological limits.
- Gross National Happiness (GNH) was developed by Bhutan in the 1970s to provide a fairer, more accurate picture of the true wealth and welfare of this small country full of biocultural wealth but typically denigrated as "poor" by GDP metrics. Learn more about GNH from the Centre for Bhutan Studies and the GNH Centre Bhutan.
- The Genuine Progress Index focuses on "full-cost accounting", comprising "tools of analysis that properly value social, economic and environmental assets" and "appraise both costs and benefits, and balance them against one another." Get in touch with GPI Atlantic for advice to communities, governments, organizations, and businesses interested in implementing a GPI.
- Learn about and get involved in the degrowth movement, with its vision of radical abundance and downscaled but richer economies and lives.
- Make the case for a shift away from GDP growth to well-being with your governments using the New Economics Foundation's Human Wellbeing and Priorities for Economic Policy Makers, these policy priorities from the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Wellbeing Economics in the UK, these Policy and Project Screening Tools from the GNH Centre Bhutan, The Happiness Policy Handbook from the Happiness Alliance, and the Wellbeing Economic Policy Design Guide from the Wellbeing Economy Alliance.
Get inspired
- In the article Want to avert the apocalypse? Take lessons from Costa Rica, Jason Hickel explains how Costa Rica delivers high quality of life for its citizens at a low ecological cost, regularly topping the Happy Planet Index, serving as an inspiring example for the world and turning conventional measures of "development" and "progress" on their heads.
- In Don’t Laugh: The UN’s First International Happiness Day is Serious Business, Frances Moore Lappé highlights how governments around the world,from the national to the city level, are taking the critique of GDP seriously and pursuing more holistic measures of well-being.
Subsidies – government expenditures of public money in support of particular industries or businesses – play a major role in shaping our world, economically, politically and environmentally. Unfortunately, the vast majority of subsidies today serve to augment corporate power while undermining local economies, homogenizing cultures, and degrading the environment. Shifting the current subsidy regime – giving support to the small and local instead of the large and global – would go a long way towards solving our multiple crises.
Take action
Contact your political representatives, write opinion pieces and letters-to-the-editor, spread the word on social media, and talk to your friends and neighbors about the need to shift the subsidies that now support global corporations, so that they instead support place-based businesses, family farmers, and local communities.
Here are some examples of subsidies that need to be shifted:
- In the US and Europe especially, agricultural subsidies go to the largest farms growing crops for export, while small producers growing for local markets get little or nothing. According to a report by the Food and Land Use Coalition, subsidies amounting to $1 million per minute globally support agribusiness practices that are destructive of the climate, wildlife and the environment. A UN report concludes that 90% of global farm subsidies damage people and planet.
- In most countries, energy and technology are subsidized, while human labor is heavily taxed. The result is that robots and high technology are destroying jobs, and we use ever more energy and emit ever more greenhouse gases.
- Even with the climate emergency worsening, fossil fuel companies are still being subsidized at the rate of $5 trillion per year, 6.5% of global GDP. Learn more and get involved in stopping fossil fuel subsidies with the campaign series Stop Funding Fossils by Oil Change International.
- To see how the US government subsidizes fossil fuels, download this factsheet from the Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI). And sign Friends of the Earth's petition Stop Bailing Out Big Oil to put a end to those US fossil fuel subsidies.
- Most infrastructure funding represents a hidden subsidy to large export-oriented businesses, which require globe-spanning transportation and communications infrastructure. Ports and shipping terminals, airports, rail yards and multi-lane highways all provide huge benefits to global corporations, but are of much less use to local producers and marketers.
- Publicly-funded research and development programs also selectively benefit huge corporations. For example, taxpayer money funded much of the research into biotechnology, which has resulted in billions of dollars in profits for pharmaceutical companies and GMO seed corporations. Shifting that funding to the needs of community-based health centers and small farmers would be hugely beneficial.
- City and regional governments also heavily subsidize corporations, tilting the playing field against smaller, more place-based businesses. To see how much Wal-Mart has received from state and local governments in the US, check out the interactive map produced by Wal-Mart Subsidy Watch. Or join the effort of Good Jobs First to oppose further subsidies for Amazon, the largest online retailer in the world.
- US citizens may be surprised (and disappointed) when they discover where their tax dollars are going. Read the article Biggest corporate subsidies of the last 20 years to see how much was given to the fossil fuel, automotive and biotech industries, and to corporations like Tesla, Amazon, Intel, IBM, and billionaire real estate developers.
- Learn more about how government tax incentives are being used across the US to subsidize the biggest corporations, and policy efforts to end that practice with this resource – ‘Banning Public Subsidies for Big Retailers’ – from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.
- For local elected officials, learn how to redirect public subsidies away from big corporations and towards small, local businesses in this guide from the Institute for Local Self Reliance (scroll down to "How States and Cities Can Fight Back").
Get inspired
- When internet behemoth Amazon announced that it would be looking for sites for its second US headquarters, cities and states around the country tried to outdo one another in offering the biggest tax breaks and fattest subsidies. The company eventually settled on two sites, including one in Queens, New York. But outraged Queens residents and even some political leaders protested against the proposed $3 billion handout to Amazon, as well as the impact on housing in the densely populated area. Eventually, Amazon withdrew its offer – a major victory for city residents and taxpayers. Read more about this successful struggle in this article in The Atlantic magazine.
Free trade is shorthand for the process of removing government regulations on corporate trade and investment, thereby "freeing" global corporations and banks to do business and extract profits across borders. Free trade is powered by trade and investment treaties, institutions like the World Trade Organization, and a system of arbitration courts that effectively grant more rights to corporations than to citizens or their governments. Free trade is one of the primary drivers of corporate globalization and concentration of power, and one of the most serious threats to local democracy and local economies. To achieve resilient and just localization, we must work to scrap the free trade regime, and rewrite international rules to protect local economies, cultures, and environments.
Take action
Note: the nature of political action is fluid and dynamic, and it's necessary to seize the moment. Even if particular actions below have reached completion, please check back with the organizations to participate in their latest campaigns!
- See how-to guides on holding a town hall meeting on trade issues, organizing an event about free trade, and holding your elected officials accountable with Citizen Trade Campaign's Activist Resources (US).
- Sign petitions and open letters for the Stop EU-Mercosur campaign, a coalition of 450 civil society organizations opposing this treaty, which puts corporate interests above the needs of people and the planet. If approved, the agreement would exacerbate social inequalities, promote extractive, export-oriented monocultures, and undermine small farm livelihoods in South America and Europe.
- In the UK, join a local group campaigning to stop free trade deals through Global Justice Now's map of local Groups.
- Sign Global Justice Now's petition Stop the US Trade Deal to stop an upcoming closed-door US-UK trade deal that would lower food quality standards in the UK and open up UK public services to US corporations.
- In Australia, get involved with the Australia Fair Trade and Investment Network's campaigns against the many existing and proposed free trade treaties between Australia and other countries and regions.
Get inspired
- In The Defeat of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MIA): National Movements Confront Globalism, Gordon Laxer tells the story of how an international citizen's movement defeated the MIA and thus "punctured the aura of corporate globalization as the inevitable direction of history."
- The TTIP (Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) and other controversial EU free-trade deals were defeated by people power and activism, as described in this article by Molly Scott Cato, and this one by Nick Dearden.
- International activism also defeated the TPP (Trans Pacific Partnership) as Arthur Stamoulis explains in this piece.
- Maude Barlow describes how activism and alternative media combined to kill the FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas) in 2001.
- Biswajit Dhar explains how a diverse movement of opposition including farmers and trade unionists forced India's withdrawal from the RCEP (Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership).
- The video, Corporate Trade Deals: A History of Resistance, by The World Transformed, documents some of the most vibrant and successful anti-globalization movements.
Investor-State Dispute Settlements (ISDS) are a global private court system where corporations can sue governments over laws or regulations that may reduce corporate profits. ISDS rulings can force governments to pay huge penalties and damages to corporations simply for having laws aimed at protecting citizens or the environment. Not only does this effectively grant corporations more rights than governments, it is an assault on local democratic decision- and rule-making, and has already had a chilling effect on the enactment of public-interest laws.
Take action
Note: the nature of political action is fluid and dynamic, so it's necessary to seize the moment. Even if particular actions below have reached completion, please check back with the organizations to participate in their latest campaigns!
- Withdraw your business from companies involved in ISDS lawsuits. Find a list of disputes through the United Nations Commission on Trade and Development's database Investment Dispute Settlement Navigator. Or check out the ISDS Case Map from Bilaterals.org, with links to information about each case.
- Sign petitions by local and regional organizations against corporations who have initiated ISDS lawsuits in your country.
- For European organizations, join the Stop ISDS alliance of 200 European organizations, trade unions and social movements that are campaigning against ISDS, which they describe as "a parallel, one-sided and unfair justice system for corporations.”
- Sign this petition by Traidcraft calling for the removal of all Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) from UK trade policies.
Get inspired
Resistance to ISDS agreements is growing:
- South Africa decided that its international treaties with ISDS could undermine policies to benefit historically-disadvantaged Black South Africans after apartheid, and has begun terminating treaties that include ISDS clauses.
- Indonesia plans to terminate 60 of its international treaties with ISDS clauses.
- The Brazilian Congress rejected several investment treaties because they determined that ISDS does not comply with their Constitution.
Banks are all too willing to finance projects that do irreparable damage to the natural world and human communities, so long as the financial return is high enough. It's important to shed light on those connections and oppose destructive bank lending.
Take action
Note: the nature of political action is fluid and dynamic, and it's necessary to seize the moment. Even if particular actions below have reached completion, please check back with the organizations to participate in their latest campaigns!
- Sign this letter from Rainforest Action Network to demand that the biggest banks stop financing fossil fuel development projects around the world.
- Sign this petition from Amazon Watch demanding that big banks stop funding and investing in oil extraction in the Amazon.
- Sign onto letters from Oil Change International to stop Japan's biggest banks from financing coal, and the European Investment Bank from funding fossil fuels.
Get inspired
- Efforts by climate change activists led U.S. Bank to become the first major bank in the United States to formally exclude gas and oil pipelines from their project financing. Read about it in the post U.S. Bank to Stop Financing Pipeline Construction on Common Dreams.
Giant corporations continue to amass power and wealth, further undermining community sovereignty and character, exploiting workers and the environment, and driving inequality to obscene levels. To build sustainable, equitable and just local economies, we must tackle corporate power head-on.
Take action
- Get involved and participate in the Global Campaign to Reclaim Peoples Sovereignty, Dismantle Corporate Power and Stop Impunity, a global network of over 250 social movements, civil society organizations (CSOs), trade unions and communities affected by the activities of transnational corporations (TNCs).
- Learn why it is so crucial to resist concentration of corporate power, and how to do so – especially at the policy level in the systematic guide Fighting Monopoly Power: How States and Cities Can Beat Back Corporate Control and Build Thriving Communities, by the Institute for Local Self Reliance (US). Topics covered include banking, electricity, food and farming, and small business.
- For small businesses in the US, sign this petition urging the US Congress to break up Amazon, "America's most dangerous monopoly," by the Institute for Local Self Reliance.
- Learn why and how to stop a big box retail store from establishing itself in and dominating your local community with the Big Box Toolkit from the Institute for Local Self Reliance.
- Learn how to do research on corporations with the Investigating Companies Do-It-Yourself Handbook and the Know Your Enemy online course by Corporate Watch (UK).
Get inspired
- A coalition of activists, labor unions, and local politicians defeated a proposed headquarters in New York for the online retail behemoth Amazon that would have depended on huge public subsidies, exploited labor and harmed local businesses in this article in Vox. Also in New York City, a coalition of groups including Walmart Free NYC and the Institute for Local Self Reliance have successfully kept the retail giant out of the city.
- Tosepan in Puebla, Mexico, was instrumental in blocking a planned Walmart super center in the town of Cuetzalan. Read more about Tosepan in this article on Local Futures' blog.
- The Corporation documentary by Joel Bakan and Jennifer Abbott "explores the nature and spectacular rise of the dominant institution of our time", and their sequel film, The New Corporation "reveals a world now fully remade in the corporation’s image, perilously close to losing democracy" as well as inspiring "with stories of resistance and change from around the world."
- In the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s Building Local Power podcast, Stacy Mitchell explores How Big Businesses Get Big Subsidies, in an interview of Greg LeRoy of Good Jobs First.
- In the short video The Big Picture: End Corporate Welfare, economist Robert Reich explains how US tax dollars that should be funding public investments are instead going to corporate coffers.
- The video, Corporate Trade Deals: A History of Resistance, by The World Transformed, documents some of the most vibrant and successful anti-globalization movements.
- A World Without Free Trade, a recording of a conversation between Local Futures’ Helena Norberg-Hodge and the Institute of Agriculture and Trade Policy’s Karen Hansen-Kuhn explores why “Wherever your focus lies – social justice, worker’s rights, climate change, food and farming, animal welfare, community health, environmental protection – it’s time to get trade literate and take part in the resistance against a destructive system that only benefits the 1%.”
- In Reimagining the Next Economy, a seminar organized as part of Local Futures' World Localization Day 2021 event by LAB2050, South Korea, speakers argue for the end of "growthism" and for transitioning from GDP growth-centric economic development to civic happiness as a policy goal.
- In this episode of Local Futures' podcast, Richard Heinberg makes a compelling case for moving from GDP to GNH (Gross National Happiness).
- John de Graf makes the case for moving from GDP to happiness and well-being in his talk at Local Futures' Economics of Happiness conference in 2015 in Portland, Oregon, US.
Resisting the various mechanisms of corporate globalization covered in this section - subsidies, free trade, monopoly power, GDP growth - is fundamentally a matter of policy intervention. As is evident from many of the stories in the Actions above, successful resistance has come from citizen mobilization, first overturning the narrative of the inevitability of globalization, and finally forcing governments and policymakers to change course. Policy can block and diminish further concentration of global corporate power, and instead support local living economies, but it will only do so if we insist on it.
This section contains resources on the following topics, in order: free trade, corporate subsidies, resisting corporate power, and moving beyond GDP.
Free Trade
- Free Trade: Myth, Reality and Alternatives, by Graham Dunkley, “explains and critiques the crucial concept of free trade,” showing how it sacrifices local economies on the alter of global corporate power and economic growth.
- The Alternative Trade Mandate was developed by 50 European organizations – representing farmers, trade unions, human rights advocates, environmentalists, and fair trade networks – showing the need for democratic control over trade and investment policy making, and calling for the promotion of local and regional over global trade, and for the right of communities to prioritize local and regional food systems, among many other goals.
- A Vision For Positive Trade, by the Landworkers’ Alliance (UK), proposes a “three point vision for our future trade of agricultural produce: 1. Food that can be produced here is produced and consumed here; 2. Food that is imported creates opportunities for ecological regeneration, economic development and social justice; 3. Food is exported only when it is ecologically and socially beneficial to do so."
- Red Carpet Courts: Ten Stories of How the Rich and Powerful Hijacked Justice, a report by Friends of the Earth, Transnational Institute and Corporate Europe Observatory provides an excellent primer on the anti-democratic Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanism that empowers multinational corporations over sovereign governments, and shows why we must end this practice now if we hope to protect local communities and environments.
- Five Reasons Modern Trade Deals are Terrible for the Climate, by Global Justice Now shows how free trade deals are protecting polluting industry practices and blocking effective climate action, and argues that “if trade rules conflict with climate goals, then trade rules must give way.”
- Bilaterals.org is “collaborative clearinghouse on the internet where people could find and post their own information and analysis about bilateral free trade agreements (FTAs) and investment treaties being negotiated and signed across the globe … [and to] support social movements resisting the imposition of these deals.” Among their other resources, the organization posts an online ISDS Case Map showing where ISDS disputes are underway, and giving details about each.
- Trading away localization in TTIP, by Karen Hansen-Kuhn of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, shows how free trade threatens efforts of people “pursing their rights as citizens to make sure governments from local to national support localization”.
- On the Local Futures blog, Isabel Marlens explores why political progressives are sometimes confused about free trade, and why they should oppose it.
Corporate Subsidies
- In the US, the Subsidy Tracker by Good Jobs First is a national search engine for economic development subsidies and other forms of government financial assistance to business.
- Uncle Sam’s Favorite Corporations: Identifying the Large Companies that Dominate Federal Subsidies, a report by Good Jobs First, shows how from 2000-2015, the US federal government provided $68 billion in grants and special tax credits to business, with two-thirds of the total going to large corporations.
- Learn about how government tax incentives are being used across the US to subsidize the biggest corporations, and policy efforts to end that practice with this resource – ‘Banning Public Subsidies for Big Retailers’ - from the Institute for Local Self Reliance.
- Small Is Beautiful, Big Is Subsidized, by Local Futures’ Steve Gorelick, while written at the end of the 1990s, remains very relevant today for understanding the systematic way in which direct and indirect subsidies underwrite the global economy.
- In ‘The Super Bowl of Subsidies’, Local Futures’ Kristen Steele argues that “shifting subsidies is just about the simplest way to make our economies more ecologically-sound, more community- and people-friendly, and more localized.”
Resisting Corporate Power
- David Korten's classic book, When Corporations Rule the World, remains one of the clearest and most powerful analyses of the catastrophic consequences of global corporate rule, while also envisioning alternatives to this fate.
- In his book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, Joel Bakan unveils the modern corporation as an amoral psychopath by design.
- The Transnational Institute's State of Power 2020 report, The Corporation, "delves deep into the changing nature of the corporation in a time of digitalisation and financialisation and asks how we might best confront its power and construct alternatives."
- Corporate Capture in Europe: When Big Business Dominates Policy-Making and Threatens Our Rights, "examines the extreme and undue influence of big bu-siness on European Union (EU) and member state decision-making pro-cesses" by the Alliance for Lobbying Transparency and Ethics Regulation (ALTER-EU).
- The Food System: Concentration and Its Impacts, by Family Farm Action Alliance (US) exposes "the current state of [corporate] concentration in the food system in the United States and globally, examine[s] the consequences of that concentration and suggest[s] avenues for action and transformation of the food system."
- The International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) explores the impacts of mega-mergers, consolidation and concentration of power in the agri-food sector in its report, Too Big to Feed.
- In her book Break 'Em Up: Recovering Our Freedom From Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money, Zephry Teachout explains why, "in order to build a better future, we must eradicate monopolies from the private sector and create new safeguards that prevent new ones from seizing power."
Beyond GDP
- On Local Futures' blog, ecological economist Hermany Daly explains the ecological, economic and ethical shortcomings of "growthism."
- Robert Costanza and colleagues systematically make the case for the need for new measures of progress beyond GDP in this article.
- Economist Joseph Stiglitz explains why GDP is not a good measure of wellbeing in this short piece.
- In The UK should stop obsessing over GDP. Wellbeing is more telling, New Economics Foundation's Dan Button shows that it is well past time a country like the UK shifted away from GDP as a meaningful metric.
- In their classic aritcle, If the GDP Is Up, Why Is America Down?, Clifford Cobb, Ted Halstead, and Jonathan Rowe offered an early expose of the pervese nature of GDP growth obsession that comes at the cost of society and nature that is even more relevant today than when they wrote it in the 1990s.