So, the problem is an interesting provision in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act known as Section 1504:
[H]ow to help citizens in poor countries stop their leaders from stealing money earned from oil and mineral sales.
Dodd-Frank would use Securities and Exchange Commission rules to require resource companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges to make timely, detailed disclosures of the tax and royalty payments they make to governments worldwide.
Anti-poverty groups such as Oxfam and Publish What You Pay have long argued that such transparency can help reduce corruption in oil-rich, thievery-plagued places such as Nigeria and Iraq by giving local media and civil society the hard data they need to ask where their country’s cash is going.
American big oil wants, of course, to have nothing to do with this section of the act, and Its lobbyist are working as hard as ever to kill it dead. But here is the catch: Big oil is right on this one. This provision will only rearrange the problem of corruption, not end or minimize it.
The fear is that Chinese, Russian, Brazilian and Indian oil and mining companies, lacking qualms and unburdened by Dodd- Frank rules, would exploit the financial disclosures made by their Western competitors to outbid them—and potentially persuade leaders of resource-rich countries in the developing world to stay away from U.S. companies altogether.
To be meaningful, revenue transparency has to be enacted at a global level. But this can’t happen because we still operate under neoliberal governance, which is only about the global enforcement of strong property rights and economic conditions that are favorable to investors, banks, and big business. But as the world is more and more integrated, these tools and mechanism for global governance are proving to be dangerously inadequate, dangerously one-sided—supply-side governance.
You can’t have Dodd-Frank rules just for America. America is not the whole world, and yet we, more than any other time in human history, live with the whole world.
