|
| Spanish |
| German |
| French |
| Russian |
The corporate globalisation agenda which led to the formation of the World Bank and the IMF and dominated Free trade policies for fifty years was masterminded by Harry Dexter White. Rather than the UN's democratic structure where each country had one vote of equal weight, votes at the IMF and World Bank are weighted according to the size of the nation's economy and its financial contribution to the institutions.
Ideas for alternatives to the World Bank and the IMF emerged from the developing world, but rather than support developing countries' demands for a strengthened UN the United States chose to use the World Bank and the IMF to maintain dominant control. and instead offered "soft" loans - i.e. more money at better rates.
The 1970s changed the Bretton Woods institutions. In 1971 President Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard. Thus eliminating one of the core functions of the IMF (i.e to manage a system of fixed exchange rates based on the US dollar and the gold standard).
Oil became a weapon of war, The influence of Paul Wolfowitz was evident in the "Carter " Doctrine - i.e. the US strategic interest in the Persian Gulf. In 1977 the World Bank began oil and gas exploration projects, and the majority of the World Bank loans were made to nationalised oil companies, forcing countries to change their laws so that US corporations would gain direct access to their oil.
By 1980 the IMF and World Bank no longer supplied funds with relatively few strings attached. Developing countries were in debt to both foreign commercial banks and the lending institutions. The banks wanted their money back, foreign companies wanted access and the developing countries were not in a position to say no.
Corporate Globalisation has successfully restricted the ability of governments and communities all over the world to regulate the activities of multinational corporations. The result is an unprecedented shift in global economic power from countries to corporations.
Chevron, Halliburton, Lockheed Martin and Bechtel represent the three key pillars - oil, war and building which are the infra structure of corporate globalisation.
The president, vice-president and the secretaries of the US Defence, Energy, Treasury and Commerce Departments in the Bush administration were all former corporate CEOs. The secretaries of the US State, Labour, Housing and Urban Development and Transportation Departments were all former corporate executives or directors.
Condoleezza Rice spent ten years on the board of directors of Chevron,( the second largest oil company in the US after Excon Mobil.) Vice President Cheney was CEO and president of the the world's largest oil services company Halliburton. Lockheed Martin had 16 executives and directors of the Bush administration.
In 1962 Halliburton purchased Brown & Root and it functioned as a automonous construction arm, to become one of the largest US construction companies due to its close association with Lyndon Johnson. DIck Cheney was CEO of Halliburton from 1995-2000. In 1998 Halliburton purchased Dresser Industries and brought a connection with the Bush family. Prescott Bush ran W. A. Harriman Company which financed the reorganisation of Dresser Industries in 1920.
Bechtel - Riley Bechtel . Today Bechtel is one of the world's largest purveyors of nuclear power. Bechtel supported Dwight Eisenhower's 1953 bid for presidency and was rewarded in 1954 when he passed the Atomic Energy Act. In 1957 Eisenhower named John McCone head of the Atomic Energy Commission . Twenty years later Bechtel and McCone founded the Bechtel-McCone Corporation. When President Reagan took office in 1981 he appointed Bechtel's president George Schultz secretary of state.
US corporations were vying for Iraqi oil before Iraq existed as a country. Before 1912 however there were obstacles to overcome. The Ottoman Empire ousted after World War I by the "British" (here it is important to realise that Britain is merely a cover name as is "America" for the fingers behind the scene.) American oil companies were given a small stake in the newly established Iraq Petroleum Company of which the "British" owned 50%. In 1932 the British granted Iraq nominal independence but the British government and British companies exercised control over key sectors of the Iraqi economy.
The first American oil company to break the British monopoly was Standard Oil of California (Chevron) when it sruck oil in Bahrain in 1932 then a year later was awarded an exclusive 50-year concession with Saudi Arabia.
Brown & Root and Lockheed began operating in the Middle East on the 1950s.
July 14 1958. Independence in Iraq - General Abdul Karim Qasim upset the West by taking control of Iraq's oil sector. OPEC was created as a counterweight to the hegemony of the world's seven largest oil companies ( by 2001 the seven became four - Excon-Mobil, Chevron, Shell and BP.) Qasim established the new government-owned Iraq National Oil Company.
The CIA joined with the Iraqi Ba'ath Party in a military coup and overthrew Qasim in 1963. according to Roger Morris a White House National Security Council staff member "It was mostly American money and even American involvement on the ground that led to the coup".
In 1973 the US government backed Israel in the Arab-Israeli war and Iraq led a successful full oil embargo against the United States by all the Arab nations of OPEC followed by a second oil crisis in 1979 when a popular revolution in Iran ousted the US-installed government of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi and replaced him with Ayatollah Ruhullah Khomeini. In 1979 Iran canceled all its contracts with US oil companies.
The Iran revolution in 1979 meant the loss of an important ally in the Middle East but the Reagan and Bush administration sought to open and increase trade with Iraq, which was one of the wealthiest countries in the Middle East. On September 11 1980 Saddam Hussein invaded Iran. The US was officially neutral throughout the eight years of the war and US business interests played a leading role in opening economic engagement with Iraq. The two groups with the greatest influence were the US Iraq Business Forum and Kissinger Associates . In November 1989 folowing the end of the 1988 Iran-Iraq war a symposium organised by the US Iraq Business Form - founded by Marshall Wiley whose close ally was Dr Henry Kissinger of Kissinger Associates.
A former managing director of Kissinger Associates was L. Paul Bremer who became US administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.
The Reagan and Bush administration spent nearly a decade secretly arming Iraq and US arms dealers did handsomely as well as other US multinational corporations, Including Bechtel, AT&T, Hewlett Packard, General Motors and Philip Morris
On October 1989 President Bush signed the National Security Directive which made explicit US support for Iraq and began discussions of a $1 billion loan guarantee for Iraq. In the early months of 1990 Saddam Hussein increased his anti US and anti Israel rhetoric and actions. There was however the problem of Iraq's growing debt. Hussein had built the largest military in the world with financial assistance from many nations, including Saudi Arabia. Hussein thought the money was aid in support for the war effort but Saudi Arabia thought otherwise and wanted its money back at the end of the Iran-Iraq war. In mid July Hussein amassed Iraqi troops on the Kuwait border and on August 1 1990 Iraqi forces crossed into Kuwait. One of the schools of thought regarding US action is that Hussein was allowed to invade Kuwait to provide an excuse to remove Hussein from power. The White House did not want to perform this task and ordered the CIA to plan a covert operation to destablise Hussein's regime, strangle the Iraqi economy and remove Hussein.
Hussein needed money and began courting oil companies. Between the first half of 1997 and summer 2000 Halliburton sold more than $73 million in goods and services to Saddam Hussein's regime. In January 1998 a letter from the PNAC (Project for the New American Century) called on President Clinton to use military force to overthrow the regime of Saddam Hussein. Yet for more than a decade, Shultz, Bush the first, Reagan, Baker, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Kissinger, Eagleburger and other US corporate and government CEOs had been supplying Hussein with weapons, money, goods and services.
The US miitary invasion of Iraq which began on March 17 2003 was completed in six weeks. Five days later President Bush named I. Paul Bremer III as presidential envoy to Iraq.
Bremer had worked directly with Henry Kissinger and George Shultz.
The three-year contract between the Bush administration and Bearing Poiint, Inc. laid out the economic agenda for Iraq. The company specified changes in every sector of the Iraqi economy. Constitutional government in Iraq dated back to 1922 and prior to 1990 Iraq had the highest percentage of college educated citizens in the Middle East.
The Bremer Orders provided:
No. 1: the "De-Ba'athification of Iraqi Society;
No, 2: the dissolution of the Iraqi army and intelligence services;
No.12: outlined the "Trade Liberalisation Policy" eliminating all protective barriers against foreign competition:
No, 14:defined "prohibited media activity":
No,17: granted full immunity from Iraqi laws to Coalition military forces and all foreign contracts:
No. 37: replaced Iraq's progressive tax strategy with a flat tax:
No.39: included the privatization of Iraq's state-owned enterprises, 100% foreign ownership of Iraqi businesses.
No.40: opened the Iraqi banking sector to foreign ownership:
All of which allowed the US corporate invasion of Iraq.
The economic policies implemented in Iraq are the same policies that US corporations wish to put in place throughout the Middle East and the world.
The National Foreign Trade Council founded in 1914 (NFTC) is the most powerfuil U.S. corporate lobbying association on international trade, and has four hundred member companies including Bechtel, Chevron and Halliburton and Wal-Mart. It joined forces with the Business Council for International Understanding (BCIU) which comprised Chevron, Halliburton, Bechtel and Lockheed Martin, plus the major US oil companies, Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase, Coca Cola, Ford, Morot and Estee Lauder and Kissinger forming the US Middle East Free Trade Coalition MEFTA. Robert Zoellick was the principal architect.
When MEFTA process began in May 2003 Saudi Arabia was not a member of the WTO. It had refused to relinquish its control over its own laws particularly those related to foreign corporations and investors. WTO membership also meant opening trade with Israel. However in September 2005 Saudi Arabia transformed its laws in full Bremer Order fashion. and two months later became a member of the WTO.
The growing use of private armies not only subjects target populations to savage warfare but makes it easier for the White House to subvert domestic public opinion and wage wars. Americans are less inclined to oppose a war that is being fought by hired foreign mercenaries, even when their own tax dollars are being squandered to fund it.
"The increasing use of contractors, private forces, or, "mercenaries" makes wars easier to begin and to fight - it just takes money and not the citizenry", said Michael Ratner, of New York's Center for Constitutional Rights.
On June 27, 2004, the day before L. Paul Bremer III, the administrator of the Coalition Provisional authority, left Baghdad, he issued Order 17 that barred the Iraqi government from prosecuting contractor crimes in domestic courts.Therefore the murder of citizens in cold blood in the Nisour area by Blackwater is considered a terrorist action against civilians just like any other terrorist operation. The company does not face any charges.
Stiglitz notes that in 2007 private security guards working for firms like Blackwater and Dyncorp were earning up to $1,222 a day or $445,000 a year. By contrast, an Army sergeant earned $140 to $190 a day in pay and benefits, a total of $51,100 to $69,350 a year.
In his bestseller "Blackwater", Jeremy Scahill writes:
"Its seven-thousand-acre facility in Moyock, N.C., has now become the most sophisticated private military center on the planet and, since mercenaries can work in civvies, they are useful to the Pentagon when it seeks to build a military presence in a country without attracting undue attention."
Domestic opposition to wars of aggression results in fewer people volunteering to serve in the armed forces. But with private mercenary companies, the pool of potential soldiers available is limited only by the number of men across the globe willing to kill for money. Private mercenary firms like Xe (formerly Blackwater) and DynCorp have raked in fortunes running private armies for the US. They are major donors to the far right of the Republican Party.
To the Pentagons’s anger, CIA runs its own killer paramilitary units and drone assassination operations, 90 per cent of whose victims are civilians. How many of the 15 other US intelligence agencies and NATO forces are running their own little illegal private armies? US mercenaries are responsible for a growing number of civilian deaths. It’s only a matter of time before all these cowboys begin shooting at one another. Reliable sources in Pakistan report that US-paid mercenaries are staging bombings there and in Afghanistan in an attempt to incite popular anger against Islamic or tribal militants, and draw Pakistan’s army deep into the fray.
In January 2008, the UN working group on mercenaries found an emerging trend in Latin America of situations of private security companies protecting transnational extractive corporations whose employees are often involved in suppressing the legitimate social protest of communities and human rights and environmental organizations of the areas where these corporations operate. South Africa's Defence Minister, Mosiuoa Lekota, termed mercenaries "the scourge of poor areas of the world, especially Africa. These are killers for hire. They rent out their skills to the highest bidder. Anybody that has money can hire these human beings and turn them into killing machines or cannon fodder."