De quoi Total est-elle la somme? multinationales et perversion du droit ; suivi de, Le totalitarisme pervers

"Total": that's how they chose to name it, like in a bad movie full of hyperbole. Active in more than 130 countries, this company exploits, processes and distributes petroleum products, while working in gas, solar energy, electricity production and the chemical industry. The capital available to this firm reflects the fact of a loaded history, covered by the rule of law or by the complicity of States. This capital is the result of sprawling actions on a political and economic level, ranging from participation in international cartels capable of playing on prices, to the monopolization of resources in the neocolonial African context, through the relocation of assets in complacent states, by outsourcing production costs in a massively polluting form and by collaborating with partners practicing forced labor. In this essay, Alain Deneault demonstrates that the Total case does not only testify to the power of this particular company, but that of a handful of multinationals which today make the law. To look into the history of Total and its components is to show how the rule of law and the complicity of States allowed a firm, legally, to conspire on the fixing of oil prices or the sharing of markets , to colonize Africa for the purpose of exploitation, to collaborate with officially racist political regimes, to corrupt dictators and political representatives, to conquer territories through military intervention, to relocate assets in tax havens as well as infrastructures in free zones, to put pressure on oligarchic regimes over-indebted their people, to pollute vast territories to the point of threatening public health, to vassalize political regimes that are theoretically nevertheless sovereign, to deny assertions in such a way as to exhaust legal adversaries, enslave populations or govern consultation processes. Each of these verbs is the subject of a chapter in this book. They represent a series of staggering actions that the current or recent political order has allowed a multinational to carry out with total impunity, independently of legislative texts and judicial institutions, or thanks to them.