Corporations Role in Politics essays

Corporations' Role in Politics essays There is no simple straight line from corporations to politics to job loss in the economy. Nor is it possible to consider politics as being simply corporations making donations to a particular candidate's campaign, and then that candidate somehow shutting down a factory. The issue is more complex, and it is now also global. Nevertheless, the result is pretty much the same as if XYZ Corporation paid off Rep. Smiley Face to vote to increase taxes on XYZ's product's components making it advantageous to move XYZ's plant to Mexico, where the peasants work cheaper and the investors will get a greater return on their XYZ stocks. But because of the interrelationships between corporate America, global commerce and politics, perhaps one of the first places to look at corporate political influence and unemployment is by looking at the events surrounding the World Trade Organization. In 1999, more than 50,000 took to the streets of Seattle to demonstrate against the policies of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Their problem concerned the power and privileges of an elite class that controls U.S. wealth (corporations) and politics. It is also, by extension, a fight against multinational corporations and governments that view workers as no more than pawns in a global chess game (O'Meara 2000) and unemployment as no more than a bunch of numbers on a balance sheet. The media, as is increasingly common knowledge, consists of major corporations with political agendas. The media tried to portray the demonstrators as a bunch of flower children left over from the 1960s. Although some such were involved, mainly, it was a demonstration of "middle- American workers, environmentalists, conservative nationalists and Teamsters and longshoremen, religious activists, campus crusaders against sweatshops, Reform Party furies, feminists, Birchers, hu...