That was also the point argued by John Kenneth Galbraith (hardly a neo-lib hack), no?
The truth is that US populism despises organization in favor of a utopia where everyone is just getting along with one another (pass that bong, dude). That is fine, but organizations (think of planned economy as a corporation writ large to vercome inefficinecies of the market) have the best track recrods in alleviating poverty and promoting rational development.
I sez:
There's no doubt that US "populists" (of many different stripes) often proffer a naive critique of bigness as bad-in-itself (and of course Doug would agree with you on this, having so documented himself many a time), but that's not the point here. It is absolutely preposterous (but not surprising, of course) for the Economist to issue a universalistic claim that TNC investment in "developing" countries necessarily "develops" those countries. Forget TNC exploitation of land and labor (taken for granted), TNC's frequently don't deliver on their own narrow criteria. Most TNC investment in Latin America during the 1990's was about buying up existing plant and equipment (both state and local capitalist-owned) and capturing L.A. markets, and did not yield increased employment, higher GDP per caps, export growth, and so on (not even as accident byproducts of TNC accumulation imperatives). One doesn't have to be a fuzzy-wuzzy to buy into Klein's general argument.
J. Gulick
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