|
Statistics published in 2000 reveal that, of the world's 100 largest economic entities, 51 were corporations and only 49 countries. Furthermore, the world's top 200 corporations accounted for over 25 per cent of economic activity on the globe while employing less than one per cent of its work force.
National governments have lost their grip on the reins of world power. In addition the combined sales of those same top 200 corporations surpassed the combined economies of 182 countries. Yet, far from improving the working conditions of the countries over which they hold such influence, the top 200 have been net job destroyers in recent years.
Between 1980 and 1992 the 500 biggest corporations in the US saw their assets rise by 227%. Over the same period the number of people they employed fell by 28%.
In the 1970s in the last flowering of political thinking in the west, no corporation wanted to be seen as wielding too much power, but the rise to power of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher changed all that. In the 1980s greed was good and conscience was for wimps.
Britain's Tory government put forward an aggressive policy of privatising publicly owned industries. These new privatised companies were supposedly "freed" by the liberal economic mantra that prevailed in the period. In fact something much more sinister was taking place.
Powerful corporations are now wielding an unprecedented influence over the countries in which they operate. In 2002 the combined tobacco revenues of the world's three biggest tobacco companies: Japan Tobacco, Philip Morris/Altria and BAT, was a sum larger that the combined gross domestic product of 27 developing countries.
Poor countries when offered jobs, revenue, exports and foreign exchange are unable to turn down such a package and when multi-national companies extend loans to small farmers for fertiliser and insecticides they trap them into a cycle of debt.
Many Bush loyalists are also associated with Philip Morris, such as Carl Rove (?). Carl Rove was one of the many Bush appointees with stock in the Company which caused the biggest corporate scandal, Enron. When George Bush was sworn into office as the 43rd President of the United States on January 20th 2001, Carl Rove was in the process of selling between $100,000 and $250,000 of his share holding in Enron.
The connection between the Bush administration and corporate corruption goes far back. Enron and its executives were the single largest contributors to the Texas Governor George W. Bush's election campaign. Enron boss Kenneth Lay was also a member of the "pioneers" - i.e. one of those who raised $100,000 for the election campaign.
Yet in February 2005 the disgraced energy firm found itself once again in the spotlight. The Enron bankruptcy scandal was the biggest corporate scandal of recent times. Indeed it was the largest corporate bankruptcy in history. When it finally crashed it was one of the ten largest companies in America, famous for selling everything while owning nothing.
Any thought that these corporate shocks would push America into a new era of rectitude was destined for disillusionment.
Several boardroom scandals emerged such as AOL Time-Warner, Merck, Bristol-Myers, Squibb, Taico International, chief executive, Dennis Kozlowski.
Then as all British football fans know, Chelsea FC's new owner, Roman Abramovitch is the second richest man in the former Soviet Republic, thanks to his ownership of Sibneft and Russian Aluminium. His wealth is dwarfed only by Michail Khodorkovsky , owner of the Yukos group. (now in gaol for fraud).
Not only are the world's largest corporations cutting back workers, their CEOs often benefit financially from the job cuts. Nine of a total of 59 of the global top 200 U.S. firms, laid off at least 3,000 workers in 1995 i.e.: AT&T, Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, Belsouth, Kemart, Chase Manhatten, GTE, Mobil and Texaco.
As the New York newspaper "Village Voice" reported on May 5th, 2003, "The main instrument of the US in Iraq, is not the Pentagon, the US Agency for International Development or the Army Corp of Engineers but the Bechtel Group. The giant engineering outfit won a contract worth up to $680 million which gave the company a leading role in rebuilding Iraq. A job which some estimate may end up costing about $100 billion.
Bechtel may be a powerful organisation, but it has powerful friends both within and outside the government. Riley Bechtel, (?) the company's chairman is on the President's Export Council. Both Reagan's Secretary of Defence Caspar Weinberger and Reagan's Secretary of State, George Schultz (?) were from Bechtel. Schultz is currently a Director.
The war threw out challenges for both Halliburton and Bechtel. On April 4th, 2005, "Forbes" magazine's Peter Elkind, reported that federal prosecutors were investigating how Halliburton had sidestepped US sanctions against doing business with Iran.
According to the website www.halliburtonwatch.org., on June 11th 2004 the US Department of Justice opened an investigation into an alleged $180 million bribe by Halliburton during Cheney's period as CEO to the government of Nigeria in exchange for a contract to build a $4 billion natural gas plant. In addition the FBI began to investigate the army's $7 billion fire-fighting contract for Iraqi oil wells.
In Britain too,scandals have emerged that have dented investor confidence, such as the "Arms to Iraq" cover-up, in which British weapons contractors were taken to court for trying to smuggle arms out of the country with the government's tacit approval.
One farcical incident was the great "Dome" fiasco, which was meant to see in the new year and the new millenium. Tony Blair's government had invested hugely in the Dome and the Dome Minister Peter Mandelson had been marketing it as one of the refining images of the first term of the Blair government.
Further, according to BBC news, five bio-technology companies: Aventis, Dow, DuPont, Mitsui, Monsanto and Syngenta, between them own 69% of the patents granted on rice, wheat, maize, soya and sorghum. These staple crops account for almost three-quarters of the world's food supply.
Does big business rule the world? Certainly globalisation is becoming the engine that keeps the world turning. In June 2005 the UK-based New Economics Foundation reported that "four out of ten of Britain's high streets were 'clone towns' made up of chain stores with no regional or local identity... The individuality of high street shops has been replaced by a monochrome strip of global and national chains." Many towns have become somewhere that could easily be mistaken for dozens of bland town centres across the country. Nevertheless as long as the cash tills at Boots, W.H. Smith and Gap are still ringing the bosses won't fear for their jobs.
Large companies, the legal requirement for which, in Britain at least, is to maximise shareholding value and profit, are forging close alliances with, and attempting to influence, the government, whose duty is to protect the interest of the population generally.
British writer George Monbiot cites a company sponsorship of a fringe-meeting at the 2004 Labour Conference Tesco sponsored the delegates inaugural drinks party while the financial company Bloomberg meanwhile picked up the drinks bill for what was called an internal reception.
Monbiot also shows how "the provision of roads and hospitals in Britain has been deliberately tailored to meet corporate demands rather than public needs." He argues that "planning permission for urban regeneration projects has been offered to the highest bidder and that supermarkets ruthlessly suppress competition and control their markets." He also discussed the corporate take-over of Britain's universities and the resulting distortions of the research and teaching agendas.
To quote from "Corporation Nation" written by Charles Derber, a professor of sociology at Boston College:
"Corporate ascendancy refers to the rise of a new weakened form of democracy in which the powers of average Americans are being transferred to vast institutions with diminishing public accountability. With the government increasingly unresponsive to popular opinion and corporations almost entirely unaccountable to the public, corporations have begun acquiring new public powers and acting as unelected partners with governments."
John Pilger's TV documentary "The New Rulers of the World" claimed to tell the amazing story of how globalisation began. It began in Indonesia with a blood bath. Historians had already accepted that Suharto rose to power in the mid-1960s with a blood bath, but what was less known was the role of international capital. Says Pilger "The film describes how in the wake of the Suharto seizure of power, which was backed by the United States and Britain and some of the most powerful capitalists in the world, the likes of David Rockefeller... convened a secret meeting in Geneva in 1967 when Suharto's ministers sat across the table from Rockefeller and various other representatives of the Carnegie Foundation and the great banks of the United States. Here the whole of the Indonesian economy was redesigned in a week".
The above is only a skimming off of what is a very dirty barrel.
Whether or not 9/11 is accepted for what is what purported to be, i.e. a "terrorist" attack, or whether it is considered as a disaster whose occurence was condoned if no actually aided by the Bush menagerie, one thing it did do was the creation of an atmosphere of intimidation.
A further result of September 11 and the consequent atmosphere it engendered that prevented balanced reporting, also drew attention to the shrinking media market.
In 1983 fifty corporations owned most of the US media operation. By 1992 this had shrunk to below 24. In September 1999, CBS was bought by Viacom, therefore by 2001 it was six, by 2004 the number stood at five: Warner, Disney, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany and Viacom.
Never has so much power been concentrated in so few hands.
Whenever a newspaper or a magazine is read, or a TV or radio station is turned on, the information supplied is controlled by only a few hands.
The first and quickest players to capitalise on the trend to globalisation were American media organisations such as Time Warner and CNN, when Viacom took over CBS in September 1999, Sumner Redstone , Viacom's chief executive, made no effort to conceal his jubilation: "The creation of this formidable new Media giant marks a new era of explosive growth domestically and around the world. Our future is without limit".
Bertelsmann whose CEO is Thomas Middelhoff said: "I am an American with a German passport. We are not foreign. We're international".
Once it was considered unacceptable for a media company to be owned in a different country from that in which it broadcast, but such sentimental talk is outdated. Bertelsmann owns 15% of the US book publishing and music markets.
In brief the global media market is now divided up between seven multi-national corporations: AOL-Time Warner, Sony, News Corporation, Viacom, Vivendi and Bertelsmann. Only three could really be called US-based firms, between them they own the entire Hollywood studio system and all the US television networks, bar one. Add to that the world of book and magazine production, all, or most, of the global TV market and a vast chunk of European terrestial TV - a truly vast network of control.
So who benefits from these global media players? Lawrence K. Grossman was president of NBC news from 1984 to 1988 commented:"Where news used to be a major centrepiece of a broadcast operation, it is now very minor and relatively insignificant in terms of the balance sheet of Time Warner .... News is just a small player in those companies, so the whole set of priorities and focus becomes very different.... While you get many more channels you can tune into, what is happening now is you get fewer and fewer news-gathering operations. They are all feeding off the same syndicated news-reporting services."
The quality of the news is also compromised by the new practice of embedding, where a news reporter who works for one side in an armed struggle is protected by the army. The drawback of this in terms of journalistic neutrality or integrity is that they are dependent upon the army for all their stories and cannot go off on their own.
The Media has an enormous influence together with a proven ability to shape our attitudes and perceptions. Over the past two decades there has been a trend towards entertainment rather than dealing with difficult or challenging issues. Issues like the future of Medicaid in the US or the state of hospitals in the UK have been ignored or swept under the carpet. The tabloid formula peddled by TV has been adopted by the printed Media. Television now sets the agenda from Europe to North America, reducing newspapers and magazines to the role of commentators on whichever minor celebrities are parading themselves on the small screen. Society's loss is a sense of proportion. Everything these days is about having fun.
The Internet of course is no exception. The recent deal by Google with the owner of MySpace.com, i.e. Rupert Murdoch of News Corporation could be only the beginning.
And it hasn't taken long! From their disclaimer, Google has been taken to task for featuring sites that highlight Jewish control.
No group, political, religious, or ethnic, should consider itself beyond criticism.
The best method to combat false or unfair judgment is surely to supply proof to the contrary.
Any other method, surreptitious or otherwise, to muzzle information is a challenge to freedom of the Press and also a contravention of Article 19 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man adopted by the Assembly General of UNO in Paris on the 10th December, 1948, which stipulates:
"every individual has the right of freedom of opinion and expression, which implies the right not to be harassed for his opinions nor for searching for or receiving and publicising, without consideration of frontier, information and ideas by whatever means of expression there may be."
As anticipated Africa is in the sights of the world capitalists be they politicians, industrialists or drug cartels.
Guinea-Bissau - the fifth poorest country in the world now has the distinction of being the continent's first "narco-state" and has become the hub of a flow of cocaine from South America into Europe. In the 19th century Europe's hunger for slaves devastated West Africa. Two hundred years later its growing appetite for cocaine could do the same.
The street value for the drugs trafficked far exceeds gross national product. A quarter of all cocaine consumed in Western Europe is trafficked through West Africa, according to UNOCD, for a local wholesale value of $l.8 billion and a retail value of 10 times that in Europe.
Nigerian drug gangs have always been an energetic presence on the global trafficking scene.
It appears South Africa is now deemed ready to fall like a ripe plum into corporate hands.
During 2007 a little cavalcade of corporate personalities came visiting. Bill Gates, Microsoft, then Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia followed by Sir Anthony O'Reilly the major shareholder of Heinz, who is the CEO of Independent News and Media, the owners of the Cape Argus and sister titles in Ireland, India, Britain, Australia and New Zealand. The News and Media International Advisory Board formed 13 years ago to provide intellectual guidance for their global operations, comprises leading political and business figures from around the world.
O'Reilly, not surprisingly as an ex-customer of Kissinger's economic "know-how", is a great protagonist of "Free Trade" and the need to open the doors to foreign capital. During his visit he drew attention to the Irish model of growth and expanding prosperity. He noted that 90% of Irish exports to-day were in the hands of companies that did not exist 15 years ago, and are all imported. They include Microsoft, Google , all the major pharmaceutical companies and a host of ancillaries ranging from the producers of Botox to Viagra.
According to him the net inflow of capital is perhaps the best bell-weather of what the world thinks and that's the path to follow so that all processes of empowerment to ensure that the economy is more democratically allied, etc., etc., (the familiar mantra of the globalising fraternity.)
It all started to fall in line, the controversy over the building of the 2010 stadium for the Games suddenly fell away, the electricity supplier Eskom unable to cope with rising demand caused rolling blackouts, the rand fell and then (but minus the roll of drums and white charger) who galloped to the rescue? None other than Nicholas Sarkozy, the French President.
Sarkozy on his state visit to South Africa led a delegation of about 40 French corporate executives, most prominently Anne Lauvergeon CEO of Areva. Areva heads a consortium of French and South African companies which has bid to build nuclear 1, a twin reactor nuclear power plant which will start construction later this year.
The French development Agency helped the cause of corporate France by signing an agreement for a 100 million euro loans over twenty years for the partial financing of Eskom's new wind-farm to be built north-west of Vredendal.
Sarkozy undertook to open all defence agreements to public scrutiny. It remains to be seen if this transparency will extend to state-owned French arms companies such as Thales whose local affiliates Thint and Thint Holdings were accused alongside Zuma in the arms deal fiasco.
For more detail on corporations try:www.kayshu.com