MAI in USA Today
janice
essential.org
Mega-mergers and the MAI
This is the year of the mega-merger, with records being broken before the
ink is dry on the previous one. The decision to combine Daimler-Benz and
Chrysler two months ago was the largest industrial merger in history-- until
yesterday. Now we have British Petroleum and Amoco merging to form the
biggest oil producer in the US.
Six thousand employees will be thrown overboard, but don't expect any of
these "efficiency" gains to show up in the form of lower prices to
consumers. In fact the opposite is more likely, when the new giant flexes
the economic muscle of its increased market power. The big winners are the
investment bankers who brokered the deal and the stockholders, as evidenced
by the soaring stock prices of both companies that greeted the announcement.
But there are worse problems with these deals: in particular, the
concentration of political power that they produce. Consumer and
environmental groups are already concerned that a wave of mergers in the oil
industry could solidify the powerful anti-environmental alliance that these
giants can mobilize around such issues as global warming.
It is also worth noting that these last two record industrial mergers
combined American with foreign firms. These trends are often believed to be
the inevitable result of such unseen forces as "technology" and
"globalization," but this not true. Our own government has been leading the
worldwide effort by multinational corporations to rewrite the rules of the
global economy in order to facilitate such deals.
One of these efforts is the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI),
which our government has been negotiating for almost three years. This
agreement would initially include the 29 industrialized countries of the
OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), and then be
opened to the rest of the world. It would create a host of new rights and
privileges for international investors, and make it more difficult for
governments to prevent or regulate international megamergers like BP Amoco
or Daimler-Chrysler.
So long as our government continues to place the interests of multinational
corporations ahead of the public interest, we can expect more such mergers,
with similar results.
-------------------------------------
Name: Mark Weisbrot
E-mail: <weis...@rtk.net>
Preamble Center for Public Policy
1737 21st Street NW
Washington DC 20009
(202) 265-3263 (offc)
(202) 333-6141 (home)
fax: (202)265-3647
www.rtk.net/preamble
Margrete Strand Rangnes
MAI Project Coordinator
Public Citizen Global Trade Watch
215 Pennsylvania Ave, SE
Washington DC, 20003
mst...@citizen.org
202-546 4996, ext. 306
202-547 7392 (fax)
To subscribe to our MAI Listserv send an e-mail to mst...@citizen.org, or
subscribe directly by going to our website,
www.tradewatch.org
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links to other MAI sites please see http://mai.flora.org/
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