Re: <nettime> Facebook’s “toxic” global lobbying

The corporations already are the lawmaker of the world. In the 80s the World Bank and the IMF destroyed national governments' ability to protect their own economies(Structural adjustment policies) in order to enable the free flow of global capital. Now the capital is invested in these countries and lacks a regulatory framework. Capital can't afford to have different rules wherever they go. Capital needs the nation-state to act as a local policeman, but not to make its own laws. New international regulations are coordinated by the Bank, ILO, WTO etc with majority corporate participation. I have taken part in three such exercises (for the sake of ethnography of course): labour law to correct informalization, international certification of organic foods (5 corporations led by Nestle handle 95% of the trade) and a municipal credit rating agency allowing towns to go directly for loans to corporate funding for loans. They can't

All of his does not dispense with buying national politicians in order eventually to by-pass them. The corporations are well on the way to making a world society of which they are the only citizens. They consider with some truth that the national model of politics has collapsed: nation-states are corrupt and ineffective, national laws irrelevant for the big issues and citizens are lazy and disaffected -- their model, not mine. The campaign against Facebook has been triumphantly vindicated, yet Zuck made more money last year than before, public exposure encourages him to be more blatant and the American Empire relies on FAANG to undermine our capacity to make society independently.

Nettime was (is?) aimed largely at 90s left techies who have been by-passed and have no wider political base. Exposure of Facebook's criminality is no longer the issue. The corporate world as a whole is increasingly criminal, given the weakness of the old political model. Time for a movement that addresses the problem we face now: where will we find the popular political forces to stop all this? Probably not short of another world war.

From South Africa. If you think the US and Europe are a mess, take a look at the BRICS.

Keith

On Sun, Mar 3, 2019 at 10:50 AM <allan@allansiegel.info> wrote:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/mar/02/facebook-global-lobbying-campaign-against-data-privacy-laws-investment?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
Revealed: Facebook’s global lobbying against data privacy laws

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