Globalized business has become the arbiter of political reality in America. The headlines of 2018 are replete with examples.
Harley Davidson, “the American Brand” announced that it will move some production offshore because of Trump’s new tariff policies. American and Frontier airlines asked the Federal government not to transport separated immigrant children on their airlines. PRIDE parades across the country were sponsored by companies such as Microsoft, Whole Foods, Dow, Walgreens, and GE. Meanwhile no one at ABC/Disney was fired for firing Roseanne Barr.
Corporations rarely aim to determine and uphold moral standards, but they almost always go where the market is. And in exercising that market prerogative, the globalized American consumer corporation, with its need to market and produce across the globe, has become a new political power within America. Indeed, it is possibly the most powerful force challenging Trump’s anti-globalization, nativist rhetoric.
The actions by Harley, American Airlines, and Disney were just the latest and most public demonstrations of corporations’ political clout. The 2017 race for the United States Senate seat in Alabama that pitted eventual winner Doug Jones against Roy Moore delivered a clear victory for globalization in a state where the word itself is anathema. Not only did Jones back NAFTA (an economic win-win for Alabama), but he constantly hammered on the fact that Moore's extremely conservative social stances would drive away international automobile manufacturers from continuing to operate in Alabama and cause them to question whether they should set up additional plants there.
What Moore failed to realize was that globalization -- and specifically, the international manufacturing supply chain -- had successfully begun to supplant Alabama’s plantation culture. As of 2016, Mercedes, Hyundai, Honda, and Toyota had plants in Alabama providing more than 57,000 jobs. In addition 1.7 million automobile engines were produced in Alabama, both for domestic use and for sale abroad, and all of this has made transportation equipment, not the traditional cotton, Alabama’s number one export.
The other example is in North Carolina, where globalized mores won the battle over more regional and traditional views. The state legislature in March 2016 passed the so-called bathroom bill, which blocked an Obama-era executive order on the use of bathrooms by transgender individuals. In response to this action, major corporations and organizations that were planning investments or activities in North Carolina put their actions on hold. The AP had calculated that the legislature’s bathroom bill would cost the state of North Carolina more than $3.7 billion in business revenue. PayPal dropped plans to build a facility that would have added an estimated $2.66 billion dollars to the state’s economy, and Deutsche Bank dropped plans for 250 jobs in the Raleigh area.Adidas -- which was planning to build its first U.S. sports shoe factory in High Point, North Carolina -- switched its plans to Atlanta, Georgia, and the National Basketball Association decided to move its All Star game out of Charlotte.
As Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan, head of the largest company in North Carolina, said to the World Affairs Council of Charlotte:
"Companies are moving to other places because they don't face an issue that they face here, "What's going on that you don't know about? What convention decided to take you off the list? What location for a distribution facility took you off the list? What corporate headquarters consideration for a foreign company — there's a lot of them out there — just took you off the list because they just didn't want to be bothered with the controversy?”
The actions and threats by consumer corporations not to do business in North Carolina forced the legislature to re-consider their position. On March 30, 2017 --almost a year after the original bathroom law went into effect -- a new law was passed and signed by the governor that rescinded most of the original bathroom bill. The forces of globalization had trounced regional cultural values.
Globalization-derived international social media has become the new Greek chorus of corporate and brand status, a new political power.The globalized market and the importance of the brand have given the international corporation a veto power over extreme nativism. And although the North Carolina Legislature for sure represented a local constituency with local values, the size of that constituency, like the viewership for Roseanne, could not compete against the size of the globalized marketplace.
Edward Goldberg is a professor of international political economy at New York University’s Center for Global Affairs and author of “The Joint Ventured Nation: Why America Needs A New Foreign Policy.” His next book is “Why Globalization Works for America: How Nationalist Trade Policies Will Lead to Ruin” Follow him on Twitter @EdwardGoldberg. The views expressed are the author's own.
