How American Corporations Sabotage National Security

Of course they do that in many ways, not least by shipping jobs overseas and evading billions of dollars in U.S. taxes, thus undermining the U.S. economy. Of course there are relatively infrequent but horrific environmental crimes like Union Carbide's murder of more than 3,000 people in Bhopal, India in 1985. Five hundred years from now, people in Bhopal will not have forgotten.

Then there are the corporate attacks on U.S. national security that are less obvious but far more damaging in the long term.

Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

This kind of behind the scenes power I’d argue causes, at least in aggregate, as much resentment toward the American government as giant screw ups like the Iraq War, the drone bombing of Afghani and Pakistani civilians, or awkward attempts to overthrow Hugo Chavez. But how this all goes down rarely comes to light.

Here’s an example in Haiti that came out in a Wikileaks cable. In 2009, the Haitian government passed an increase in the minimum wage, from 24 cents an hour to 61 cents an hour. US apparel companies flipped their lids. Many apparel companies have factories in Haiti and pay them nearly slave wages. These companies, including Haines and Levi-Strauss pressured the State Department. After the U.S. Ambassador to Haiti went and talked to the president, the Haitian government created an exception for American textile companies of a $3 a day minimum wage, which for an 8 hour day works out to something like 37 cents an hour.

2 major points about this. First, why would the United States do this? I know that one role of the American government is to facilitate good international business conditions for American companies. But does such a move promote stability in the Caribbean for the long term? When the Haitian earthquake took place, Americans poured millions in donations into the country. For an international story in an impoverished nation, the earthquake story stayed in the media for quite a long time.

But if we want to help the Haitians, allow them to build a stable society, and bring them closer to something more than extreme poverty, why would the United States support decimating a 61 cent an hour minimum wage? Doesn’t that lead to more instability in the nation, more refugees fleeing to the United States and other nations, more international problems? Stupid, short-sighted, and immoral. Not that the apparel companies care about any of these things.

Second, even a lot of progressives seem to talk of globalization as this unstoppable trend with a self-powering propulsion engine pushing it forward ever faster. How can you put the genie back in the bottle, they say. There’s of course some truth to this. But neoliberal globalization is also a series of discrete decisions made by individuals, bureaucracies, organizations, and governments. The U.S. government could very easily tell the apparel companies that they will not use pressure to push down the minimum wage. It could enact policies to protect American workers. It could pressure corporations to enact decent labor and environmental policies when they do build a factory abroad. It could do any number of things to make the increasingly globalized world a better place.

Instead it forces Haitians into continued extreme poverty.

Next time a bunch of demonstrators in some third-world hell-hole burn an American flag, remember that it's probably not our freedoms they hate, or even our drones bombing their children, but rather the American corporation destroying their lives.