I got a kick out of the Reuters photo of a hockey stick-wielding protester about to slap-shot a tear gas canister back at police in Quebec City. Not because I necessarily agreed with his protest against the trade summit, but because the hockey stick showed a certain style while sending the message that this protester, for one, was most likely homegrown and didn’t fly in from Seattle to get his picture in the paper. Yes, the backlash against globalization has gone global, and legions of twentysomethings are making protest a full-time job. Have gas mask, will travel.
I wonder, though, if the protesters – be they in Seattle, Quebec or May Day London – know what they’re protesting against. Or what they’d prefer to have as an alternative.
Here’s one idea: a world parliament enforcing a global tax on corporations, a maximum wage for executives, size limits on companies and a sentence of ‘corporate death’ for corporate baddies. That’s the ‘market freedom’ formula from George Monbiot, author of The Captive State. He’s supposed to be one of the 25 most influential people in Britain, so despite evidence to the contrary, we can be pretty certain he isn’t high on tear gas.
Noreena Hertz is another anti-globalizer armed with a pen, not a hockey stick. Her book, The Silent Takeover: Global Capitalism and the Death of Democracy, is making waves with the argument that governments are ceding too much control to corporations. She points out, for example, that a remarkable 51 of the world’s 100 biggest economies are companies; the rest are nation states.
The solution, Hertz says, is a return to the ballot box and stronger governments. A return to faith in politics. Politics, shmolitics. Every election I’ve ever seen has been a travesty. Political parties are indistinguishable from one another, and they’re populated by underpaid, superannuated debating club members.
What all these protesters – gas-masked or not – are perhaps overlooking is that while political democracy may be crumbling and voting levels sagging, shareholder democracy is in better shape than ever. They accuse companies of putting fiduciary responsibility to shareholders above all else. But boards are talking more and more about ‘stakeholder responsibility’.
Indeed there’s far more hope for stakeholder democracy than there is in pipe dreams of a world democracy. The revolution, the masked ones say, has just begun. But the corporate governance revolution, I say, is already well underway.
