Global Corporations example essay topic

An 'Era of Fear' a world where corporate competence verses government scruples, where cutting edge technological advancements designed for the sole purpose of uniting the world through viable, easy access communications networks... verses the biting reality of the dependent nations, trapped in a purple haze, dominated by frugal pseudo-charity in the form of exploitation, government corruption, and the lack of ability for a stable, friction-free collective. In a world consumed by the wealth, power and sheer monstrosity of Global Corporate networks, economic re-invention, restructuring, revolution, the ordinary man, is redundant. Profit taking precedence over the instability of rudimentary human principles... ethics, morals, remorse... but LEGAL, and so in the eyes of the warlords of our time, those corporate Tycoons, Cocoa-cola, Nike, Teledisec, Motorola, that service the mainstream conformity of our... neoliberal... ideals, the narcissistic face of our global investors serves us all, be it through the opulence of modern day technology and communication, or its internecine munificence in its attempt to harness the free-market. Separation from such idealistic, political dogma seems absurd...

Even in the face of inevitable anti-global reformation, the corporate giants and their fundamental monetary expansion probe the airways and satellites with their micro-villi al communications, serviced by other such elite organisations, manage to stretch their legal limits to smaller, needy, and thus susceptible countries. Eventual exploitation and corruption of its people is inevitable, but can't the world just see it as... a means to an end! Take the infamous Nike label, global sponsorship for sporting activities, charitable donations, and a rather wrinkle-free public profile. This concealing the exploitation of labour conditions in Indonesia where labourers were employed at below minimum wage, below legal age and below such standards of labour conditions, as one would not expect from a company of Nike's scale.

Sweatshops. Children. International demand for renowned Nike sportswear. Who does Nike serve? The consumer. The belly of its own economic greed.

The hapless gullibility of people demanding a pair of 'takkies', a peak, even a shirt, made for, at most, one tenth of the selling price to the public. All this while its employees live in an economic drought, unable to purchase even the product itself. It renders its mind-bending services to young and impressionable youth, lured by the promise of status by advertising ploys depicting their favourite hero's wearing the product. The social community is satisfied and the corporation satisfying the need to fill low-skilled jobs with cheap labour. Psychological seduction of the consumer versus humanism?

One would almost refrain from it... to serve, of course, the poor serve the corporation, serve the world in demand for the product, serve the poor in an attempt to fashion away such violation of contemporary human rights. And yet, in the growing awareness of these neoliberal ideals, corporate power means control, and for most small, third world countries, this would mean the effective importing of foreign ideals and media, but those based on the company investors ideals themselves. Even the strength of an entire active government dependent on an outside economic boost, vying for the redistribution of wealth and move for social democracy among its nation, is easily razed by the lure 'thirty pieces of silver', the substantial investment from the 'Herod' corporations. With that the introduction of private, global corporations rendering the free-market, again, null, reforming the employment infrastructure, and ultimately creating a private sector in which the Judas's of our age will flourish without remorse. People will now be limited to contract work, wages and salaries will be stipulated now by the company regulations, and government subsidies will no longer exist. Serve the people?

Perhaps this growing privatisation acts in such a way as to train, market and promote its workers and their skills, unemployment becoming a scarcity but what predilection to human ethos is there when the 'Mitty' cover-stories of such revolution are rooted in corruption at the highest levels of legal immorality. Even though the hefty interest rates afforded to developing countries by the economically capital-rich first world means both countries benefit, one from the capital, the other from its hefty price-tag, their is hardly sufficient benefit to most poorer nations, whose eventual debt becomes the responsibility of the nation. These long-term effects of global debt are evident even today, reality bites, sharper then the double-edged global blade. 'Trickling' down towards the average 'Joe', inflation and labour-skill his pitfall, lower wages and even government sanctions, tied to foreign investors, mean a general unease within the heart of the nation, and eventual protest.

The World Trade Organisation based in America has sanctions and import and export tariffs whose consequential affects have caused not ripples, but waves of change and unrest amongst many nations of the world. Sure, the consumer benefits when lower transport costs and reduced tariffs allow goods to be sold cheaply, and productivity is stimulated by increased competition, BUT for foreign countries. When we, as South African's are not allowed to export goods above a certain cost because of legalities and sanctions passed in the United States of America, allowing exported goods to be bought cheaply, and thus sold cheaply overseas, the 'last supper' must be had. For by doing so, our nation, and many others likewise, are in effect, kept under economic control! Still, corporate globalisation serves. It serves to at least create some form of sanction, where there would perhaps be a reversal of import / export tariffs...

Worldwide efficiency vs. economic censorship? Serve indeed. Yet even in the 'Americanised' version of our own conceptual struggles with global conformity, there still promises to be the inevitable playground scuffle. Published by Rolling Stone magazine, and article by William Greiner entitled, 'One World, Ready or Not', "How could it be that when American based corporations invested abroad they harm American workers by stealing their jobs, while German based corporations invested in Alabama harm American workers by exploiting them to earn profits to be transferred back to Germany? What is sauce for the goose, muse be sauce for the gander". ... highlights the panky parody of first world bickering... in the face of their global economic prosperity. Globalisation has become a persnickety reality, and the power behind its success is its corporate sponsorship.

Its incessant innovations and improvements mean its diffusion within cultures and people can be seen as merely a natural evolution. It requires certain social structures, 'laws' and institutions in which to flourish, and in so doing, we become unwittingly uniform in our cultures, religion, language... our lifestyles are already adapted to corporate globalisation. Teenagers can invest online, trans-continental communication is already old school. The broad-based distribution of necessary commodities cannot however be denied as leading to a more productive and efficient way of life for most people, the hoi polloi of society's social restructuring is satisfied... pro tempore.

Yeats wrote in his 'The Second Coming'... of "Turning and turning in the widening gyre / the falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere Anarchy is loosed upon the world, / the blood-rimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / the ceremony of innocence is drowned; / the best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity". People have already demonstrated such impetus political adversity campaigning against the abuse of such an inevitable global era, with symbols of global hedonism being periodically slandered in various cities around the world, e. g., the 1999 Seattle 'summit' protest where people campaigned against sanctions passed by the World Trade Organisation (WTO), anti-privatisation campaigns in South Africa and abroad, and even individuals who are willing to defend their beliefs, e.g. the Steel / Morris case, where two ordinary individuals took on the might of a corporate monster. Behind the blazing fury of international corporate colour, the neoliberal masses are striving against an extreme, the corporate globals for it. These economic moguls embrace the future surely, with their egalitarian principles being brought to the fore by such neoliberals, the conviction of both fraught with obvious personal bias.

This global era serves those it exploits, and exploits those it endeavours to serve. Can we cast such an advanced global centre to an Oedipus state, when it is here, it will stay, and for the good or detriment of us evolving toward singular conformity, for richer or poorer, in pension, or in medical aid schemes, we are marred to its consequence.