The People vs. Corporate Power: A Quarter Century Retrospective

Victories! Justice! The People's Triumphs Over Corporate Power

by Robert Weissman

In this issue marking Multinational Monitor’s twenty-fifth anniversary, we celebrate those citizen victories with the first of a two-part series recounting peoples’ wins over corporations and their supporting structures and institutions. Here, we present brief profiles of 25 victories; we will profile an additional 25 winning campaigns in the November/ December issue.

We don’t claim these are the most important achievements over corporate power of the last quarter century, though we do think these were all landmark accomplishments. Nor are we making any effort to rank this list in importance — it is presented in a very rough chronological order, taking into account that many of these victories have unfolded over a long period, sometimes as long as or longer than the lifespan of Multinational Monitor. MORE>>

Merger Mania and Its Disontents: The Price of Corporate Consolidation

Spurred by lax antitrust enforcement and burgeoning laissez-faire dogma under Democratic and Republican administrations alike, the U.S. economy for two decades has been consumed in an epic corporate merger and consolidation movement.

Broad statistics tell part of the story: The dollar value of corporate mergers and acquisitions amounted to $1.4 trillion during the 1980s, exploded to $11 trillion during the 1990s, and continued at a frenetic pace of $7.6 trillion during 2000-2003 (including $3.4 trillion in 2000 alone) — adding up to a combined total of $20 trillion of corporate mergers and acquisitions over the past 25 years.

These aggregate sums can be put in perspective by considering that the $20 trillion spent on mergers and acquisitions exceeds the total amount of all private nonresidential investment in the United States over the same period. It is 10 times larger than the $2 trillion U.S. industry spent on research and development during the past 25 years. It is twice the value of the U.S. annual gross domestic product (the value of all goods and services produced) in the year 2000; triple the country’s GDP in 1990; and 10 times the U.S. GDP recorded in 1980. MORE>>

Indigenous People's Power: Global Mobilization Scores Dramatic Gains - With Many Challenges Ahead

by Marcus Colchester

Pak Nazarius looked old but determined in the flickering torch light. Hunkered down against the wall of a Dayak longhouse in the Upper Mahakam river of east Kalimantan in the heart of Indonesian Borneo, he was explaining his ideas to a community workshop.

“In my community, our understanding is that we have rights to our land and the natural resources both above and below the land,” he explained. “Everything up to sky belongs to us. Several laws and policies have classified our forests as State forests and the minerals as property of the State. We don’t see it like that. I have hair on my arm, on my skin. Both are mine. I also own the flesh and bones beneath. They are also mine. No one has the right to take me apart. But the policy has cut these things apart and thus has cut us into pieces. We want the land back whole.”

The community, whose lands had been taken over by a plantation company, was exploring how to regain control of what they saw as rightfully theirs, but which the national government had handed out to an Indonesian multinational corporation, Lonsum. The discussion is just one example of a worldwide movement of indigenous peoples seeking to reclaim their rights to ancestral lands and jurisdictions. MORE>>