Land of the Giants

Ignore the politicians. Big business is now the most powerful force on Earth. Countries don’t matter any more. Companies do. Don’t worry about who wins the next general election. Worry about who is running General Electric. Company presidents, not White House presidents, are finally in charge.

Nearly as many people work for General Motors as live in Wales. Fewer than four hundred billionaires control as much capital as half the global population. Bill Gates alone is worth more than a hundred and thirty-five countries. If we compare the biggest companies’ annual turnover with national GDP, Philip Morris makes more money than New Zealand, Ford makes more than Thailand, and Exxon Mobil as much as South Africa and Nigeria put together.

Just three hundred corporations control 25% of all the productive assets on earth. Within the next ten years, many multinationals could open their own embassies and even start issuing their own currency! Impossible? Not according to futurists, Jim Taylor and Watts Wacker. They argue that as cross-border trade increases, national frontiers become increasingly unimportant and global business begins to take over from government. Goodbye United Nations. Hello, United Corporations.

In the late 1990s it was fashionable to disregard the ‘Old Economy’, as we welcomed in the digital age. Small entrepreneurial companies were going to kill off ‘corporate dinosaurs’ like Ford and Levi’s. It never happened. Billions were wasted on dotcom disasters run by kids with no business brains, while the big companies, slow at first, simply took the technology and used it more intelligently.

Size alone may not guarantee competitiveness, but to go from innovation to mass production quickly and efficiently takes a big company with substantial resources and an aggressive marketing strategy. In the words of Andrew Grove, head of Intel: ‘We don’t beat the competition, we crush it.’ Now, more than ever, big is beautiful.

(By Mark Powell, In Company. Macmillan, 2005.)

b) Sum up the text in three sentences.

C) Scan the text for details.

d) Answer the teacher’s questions.

3. a) Open the brackets using the correct forms of the verbs.

to browse [brauz] – (зд.) ходить по магазину, рассматривая товар

cadge - попрошайничать

diaper ['daIpR] – пеленка, подгузник