 This is not, of course, to state that a lack of globalization could cause human rights abuses, but they give a number of reasons why this correlation could be found, and I'll share a couple of them which I think are interesting. One of them is that multinationals can be free of domestic prejudices, like with Coca-Cola employing women where a domestic firm may choose not to, or bringing jobs into an area that's predominantly based around discriminated minorities, discriminated against minorities, I'm sorry. Another one is that in many states where corruption is very heavy and right, an increased amount of wealth in non-state actors can weaken corruption and weaken the absolute state power, which makes human rights abuses much more difficult. Finally, contract rich economies and for a country to be good for business, it must be legally very contract rich, protect vulnerable populations from exploitation. One more thing, and this is just a personal speculation, going back to what some of my colleagues have said, firms, large American multinationals are extremely image conscious. They're aware of how easy it is in the age of the internet to bring attention of any bad behavior they have into the public eye. And so with the whole world becoming an increasingly globalized economy, I believe that they might be in many ways reluctant to do business with various economies where they believe that they could find themselves in trouble for human rights abuses. And if a country is wanting to draw business into their economy, that provides an incentive for them to respect international standards for human rights. Thank you, that's our presentation. So now we're going to do a five minute break where each team will formulate a rebuttal and then each person will have two to three minutes to speak and present a counter argument to each side. So five minutes and we'll regroup. So if we want to turn our attention back to the team, the small business team is going to come back with their rebuttal and then we'll follow it with three members from the other team to refute their main arguments. So one of the points that I want to refute and touch upon is something that Daniel mentioned. He talked about how Walmart is making improvements with their environmental responsibility. And I want to talk about Walmart's responsibilities to its workers. One of the things that I looked at was a study done by UC Berkeley and they basically studied the use of safety net programs by Walmart wage workers in California. And the cost of the taxpayers is roughly $86 million annually for Walmart wage workers' use of these safety net programs such as Medi-Cal food stamps and subsidized housing. Their average wages are $10 per hour compared to the average of other retailers in California of $14 per hour. Walmart offers lower prices through their efficient distribution centers and they're leveraging over suppliers basically. Other retailers may not have these luxuries, so in order to stay competitive with Walmart's prices, they may have to break up unions, take away employee benefits and lower wages. If other retailers in California followed suit with this, it would cost taxpayers an estimated $400 million annually for the increased supply of the use of safety net programs. On average, there's been 50 openings of Walmart stores in every state across the nation and the retail wages drop an average of 10% as new stores introduced into the state. I think that sums up my point that I wanted to make. I would like to touch upon a few points made in terms of long-term community development that was discussed by Angela, I believe. Some businesses by their very nature are long-term community development. They stay within a community obviously because they're physically grounded in that local community and as such they can't lift off and go to a different location quite as easily as large multinational corporations can do as we've seen not only in foreign countries but also in parts of the United States that have experienced economic stagnation as a result of the financial crisis. Many large businesses have closed up. Many branches in some large businesses, for example Circuit City, let's say, has left many very large, strange shaped red buildings around the country. And another point that was made had to do with charities and causes and the fact that large businesses can contribute a lot of money to these charities and causes and how these companies actually paid their taxes. There may have been less of a need for these charities and causes as the government whose purview it actually is to provide for the poor and the sick and the less fortunate would have been able to actually afford to give money to these causes as opposed to having to engage in pretty ridiculous budget deficit battles. And a point that Daniel made, I think, regarding large companies supporting local farms by buying up all the organic produce. That also eliminates a lot of smaller buyers that would like to be able to buy produce or CSAs or smaller grocery stores that are unable to compete with the rates offered by these large corporations. And I think Daniel also made a point about risk aversion. Small firms being risk averse towards investments and that was something that I had earlier contradicted talking about clusters and usually, not usually, in some cases the risks taken by largest businesses can obviously be too big as we saw in 2008. One last point was that AT&T created an infrastructure and a network that enabled the United States to become more centralized. However, AT&T was a monopoly that had to be broken out because it was engaging in some pretty shady practices. And I believe that's it. Thank you. I'd just like to make a few small points. One, you guys said that large businesses have larger research and development budgets but that necessarily isn't always a good thing. I sided with actually Microsoft. The Microsoft Office Division was often competing against other research and development clusters within the company and taking most of the investment money, shutting out other forms of research and development within the country. You mentioned railroad industry in the beginning age of America as a great thing for big business. However, railroads were actually the basis of the antitrust legislation I mentioned in my presentation, pretty much contradicting the benefits you brought up. When it comes to the environment, big businesses lobby against environmental changes that will cost them money as seen as how the United States is no longer part of the Kyoto Protocol. And the risks that big businesses also are allowed to take often can be very dangerous on social welfare as seen as large businesses can invest in the housing bubble and we see how that has popped and affected social welfare. And you guys said yourself that Walmart only makes changes for profit and when they make a change, it has an impact. However, they lobby against change that they don't want to do because it goes against making profit. And they can also use their power to change certain laws. Like Walmart is the largest supermarket for organic produce. However, they have lobby to change the laws of what organic even means. And you guys hailed Boeing as a great employee in America. However, Boeing is part of the military industrial complex that I described in my presentation are actually involved of propelling our nation of war and building industry of weapons. You guys talked about positive standards they can set and also the positive spulver effects but you failed to mention the negative standards and negative spulver effects that large businesses house when they go abroad. I feel that you used a naive interpretation, Tom, of what neoliberalism has around the world. As you can see in the Middle East, South America and in Central and Eastern Europe, especially Egypt and Tunisia which were lauded as successes just months before the revolution that people there are starving and they don't have work and that's due to neoliberalism policy. So all in all, while many of your benefits are true, I don't feel that they go far enough to show that in actuality big businesses are actually using their power to work against social welfare. Well, I'm tempted to use these three minutes and just talk about Walmart but I was afraid that would happen because that's just what occurs all the time when we're talking about monopolies and it's getting boring at this point. I mean, the point I brought them up is because it's not all bad and that they can promote social welfare just like Boeing does, although they might be proud of a military industrial complex and you know, I didn't, I wasn't able, you know, our team wasn't able to mention all the disadvantages and bad things about big business because, I mean, they're there, of course, but we also promote social welfare and the point with the railroad and I just want to drive this a little further was that, you know, you're arguing the organizational problems that come along with hierarchy and the big, and the organization of big business but that was also crucial to how our economy grew, you know, with mass production and mass distribution. You know, we wouldn't be here without big business is what I'm arguing and bureaucracy actually does play an important role as well and there's a reason that, you know, big businesses have grown and they're subject to regulation and that's, you're right, there is a role the government needs to play like AT&T, but AT&T still did Why Are The Nation? Okay, if they became a monopoly and so what if the railroads created an antitrust regulation? That's necessary because, you know, there are problems, you know, that arise from all types of organizations. So that's one point I wanted to make. The other point I wanted to address was the clusters. I'm not entirely sure and understand what clusters are but I think I get a clue and, first of all, I've never really come across too many and that could be my own fault and none of us really have but I will say that it seems like there could be way too many interests playing for one and that's a lot of times what happened, you know, when we looked at building networks that are crucial for the economy like the telegraph or the railroad also, you know, you gave technology as an example, well, I didn't hear any other examples and I'm curious to know some more because technology doesn't demand large amounts of capital for the most part until it gets really big. Technology, there's tons of start-up firms and that's great but there's not too many start-up and business clusters in the auto industry or big manufacturing industries like Boeing and GE, it's tough to have clusters making airplane engines and also, regarding the problem with people at the bottom of the structure in the organizations, well, big businesses are also often subject to unions. Walmart is an example and that's definitely a problem but Walmart has been making some changes too and they're raising their wages and they can offer certain benefits and have increased that recently and big businesses are subject to unions like UPS when a lot of smaller businesses are not so it's difficult to make changes and enforce them as well. So those are some points I wanted to address and I'll turn now to Angela not Angela, I'm sorry to Laura, no, to Thomas who's going to follow up. Great. So as far as talk about response to small companies being more productive and also in part to what I was saying here about my view of neoliberalism or at least my debate position on neoliberalism I'd like to point out that multinational corporations are in many ways responsible for improving productivity in developing countries where domestic policies may prevent maximum productivity and higher wages. In free trade under fire Douglas Irwin wrote that in 1998 the general population in Vietnam had a disposable income of about 205 US dollars per year whereas people working in foreign-owned businesses earned about 420 US dollars per year. In addition, the poverty rates for those working in multinationals were only a quarter of the level of the general population. Wages are strongly related to productivity and productivity is very poor in underdeveloped countries largely as a result of domestic policies. Multinationals have the infrastructure necessary to establish a viable business in an underdeveloped country and multinationals are one vehicle for providing productivity.