The non-stop simplistic “good vs evil ” coverage of the war in Ukraine has continued with some people, including Canada’s former foreign affairs minister Peter McKay, calling Vladimir Putin a psychopath and almost all media outlets framing the U.S. and its allies as the all round good guys. The media continues to ignore the role of multinational corporations in the events leading up to the war in Ukraine, some of which I covered in my post The U.S. has treated Ukraine – and Putin – kinda like it treats Black people.
This is a real change from 2003 when the movie The Corporation examined the behaviour of American corporations and found that they were the ones behaving like psychopaths. The film provided a definition from psychology’s Bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Illness. The DSM-IV (it’s now on the 5th edition) said the symptoms of psychopathy included: callous disregard for the feelings of other people, incapacity to maintain human relationships, reckless disregard for the safety of others, deceitfulness, incapacity to experience guilt, and the failure to conform to social norms and respect the law. The film explained that, due to an 1886 U.S. Supreme Court case, U.S. corporations were legally considered “persons” having the same rights as human beings. The film then examined corporate behaviour and showed that, if the corporations were actually people, they’d meet the definition of psychopaths.
Whether or not some, or many, multinational corporations are acting like full fledged psychos today, what is clear is that many are acting in ways that lead to people being harmed and killed – and that the mainstream media spends very little time covering it.
For example, as I said in one of my previous posts, the war in Ukraine was partly caused by the 2014, U.S.-backed removal of Ukraine’s democratically elected president, Viktor Yanukovych following his rejection of U.S. attempts to open Ukraine markets to giant multinational companies and his restarting negotiations with Russia. The negotiations included the International Monetary Fund pushing Ukraine to implement reforms that were friendly to corporations but very unfriendly to the Ukraine people, including cutting wage controls (i.e., lowering wages), reforming and reducing health and education sectors…and cutting natural gas subsidies to Ukrainian citizens that made energy affordable to the general public. (Bryce Green outlined this in his article What You Should Really Know About Ukraine.)
Corporations were also barely, if ever, mentioned by the protesters, governments or media during the wave of anti COVID measures protests that swept across Canada in February 2022. Despite declaring the protests were about “freedom”, the protesters focused their critique – and anger – exclusively on governments, mentioning almost nothing about the role corporations played in exacerbating the effects of the pandemic on many of the most vulnerable workers. They didn’t critique the companies caught red handed giving the pandemic money they got from the government out to their shareholders like long term care home giant Extendicare. They didn’t critique Amazon for imposing on the “freedom” (and right) of its workers to safe working conditions by firing employees who spoke up about unsafe conditions. (The mainstream media did cover one major story that grew out of this: the successful formation of Amazon’s first union at its Staten Island warehouse by former Amazon worker Christian Smalls.)
The convoy protesters also said nothing about the big Canadian banks.
However, unlike the protesters and the mainstream media, the Government of Canada addressed corporations, including the big banks, directly in its recently released 2022 Budget. The government took some of the strongest action in recent years to make corporations – including Big Tech – pay their fair share of taxes by taxing excess pandemic profits, increasing the corporate tax rate (although only on banking and life insurance companies) and closing several corporate tax loop holes. This is probably partly because the deal between the governing Liberals, who have a minority, and the New Democratic Party, included tax measures, but they’re good steps whatever the reason.
The government went after the big Canadian banks in particular because it said the banks’ made huge pandemic profits partly because of measures the government took that benefited the banks. Budget 2022 said, “While many sectors continue to recover, Canada’s major financial institutions made significant profits during the pandemic and have recovered faster than other parts of our economy—in part due to the federal pandemic supports for people and businesses that helped de-risk the balance sheets of some of Canada’s largest financial institutions.” The government also wanted to curb outright tax avoidance by the banks. On that, Budget 2022 “proposes to examine potential changes to the financial transaction approval process to limit the ability of federally regulated financial institutions to use corporate structures in tax havens to engage in aggressive tax avoidance.”
In my post It’s time to cancel Cancel Culture, I pointed out that the ones actually doing the cancelling are the big media corporations that cancel people’s shows or their hosting opportunities – not people calling out celebrities on Twitter. But it’s the corporations’ bad behaviour that needs to be called out and cancelled, and it’s good to see the Canadian government taking strong first steps to cancel corporations’ ability to avoid paying their taxes.
The other bad corporate behaviour is using things like the war in Ukraine and the pandemic to raise prices more than actually needed. Do you notice that all the media stories about prices are framed like prices just go up on their own – and don’t say who’s actually raising them? This line from an April 20, 2022 CTV story is typical, “With Canada’s annual inflation at its highest point in over 30 years, experts say Canadians can anticipate their cost of living to increase significantly, warning that prices will likely not decrease for some time.”
Canadians need to ask companies to justify their price increases. And workers need to follow the lead of Ontario carpenters and strike if their employers aren’t willing to raise wages to meet the high cost of living. On Monday, May 9, CityNews reported that 15,000 workers went on strike at 12:01 a.m after they overwhelmingly rejected the latest offer from their employers in the industrial, commercial and institutional (ICI) sector.
Power to the people.