Colonized by Corporations: Corporations Are Colonizing Us With “Free Trade Agreements” – & Wall Street Wants In

Oldspeak: NAFTA, CAFTA, TPP, and on the horizon, the “Trans Atlantic Free Trade Agreement” or TAFTA, for short. Catchy acronyms are always a bad sign. The USA Patriot Act that essentially shredded the bill of rights  immediately comes to mind. This latest iteration of the Transnational Corporate Network’s stealth supra-government takeover of the global commons will serve to further degrade flesh and blood citizens’ rights while expanding rights of our newly minted corporate citizens to  “allow most food safety standards, financial stability measures and environmental protections to be dismantled in the name of reducing “barriers” -Ben Beachy “This ‘deal’ is shaping up to be just another vehicle for the largest U.S. and EU corporations to sneak in provisions they cannot enact through open democratic processes and leave citizens exposed to another financial crisis, unsafe foods and severe burdens on Internet freedom and innovation.” -Lori Wallach.  The colonizers are now colonizing their own populations.  Resist Neo-Colonialism.  Rebel. Protest.  Before the takeover is complete.”

By Richard Eskow @ Campaign For America’s Future:

After 237 years, we’re becoming a colony again. Our nation’s losing the right to self-determination it fought so hard to win, and it’s happening on a scale unseen since the days of George III.

As is so often the case these days, this wholesale loss of our rights is being underwritten by corporate interests.

And, as usual, it’s being called “bipartisan” – by corporations who “buy” both Republican and Democratic “partisans.”

Terms of Surrender

Republicans cheered George W. Bush for saying, “I will never place U.S. troops under U.N. command.” Democrats cheered Barack Obama for saying, “I want us to control our own energy destiny.”

But both leaders pushed trade agreements that surrender our sovereign rights to faceless bureaucrats in international bodies – bodies that are dominated by multinational corporations.

Where are those cheering crowds now? Republicans backed a president who supported a agreements which put Americans’ rights – and their environment – “under the command” of foreign bodies.  And unless something changes Democratic voters will soon see their president give up even more control of our economic destiny.

WTO Stands For “We’re Taking Over”

Public Citizen, which has been doing excellent work on this issue, reports on three U.S. laws that were nullified by the World Trade Organization (WTO):  country-of-origin labels on meat, dolphin-safe labels on tuna, and the ban on sweet-flavored cigarettes designed to get kids addicted to the tobacco companies’ carcinogenic products. (What’s next:  Cherry-flavored crack?)

The WTO and the WTO “Appellate Body” – two bodies most Americans don’t even know exist – overruled these laws in a preemptory manner that would have outraged the Continental Congress.

We didn’t elect them. We can’t communicate with them. But they’ve issued three decrees which we must obey:

1) We are not to know where the meat we’re eating comes from.

2) We must accept the fact that we may unknowingly wind up eating the flesh of dolphins, arguably the most intelligent nonhuman species on the planet. And,

3) We must continue to allow the distribution of products designed to addict our children to a deadly and habit-forming substance.

How’s that for “controlling our own destiny”?

The Next Front

The next stage of our war for economic independence is being determined in trade talks that are being conducted in deep secrecy by a president who once promised “the most transparent administration in history.”

Laurel Sutherlin calls the Trans-Pacific Partnership “a worldwide corporate power grab of enormous proportions,” and that pretty accurately sums it up. (It’s hard to write about these deals without sounding hyperbolic, even if you’re only being descriptive.) As Sutherlin points out, the TPP “is among the largest and potentially most important ‘free trade’ agreements the world has ever seen …”

And yet, as Sutherlin notes, “one can hardly be blamed for not being familiar with it yet. The corporate cabal behind it … has done an exceptional job of maintaining an almost total lack of transparency as they literally design the future we will all inhabit.”

Although 600 corporate representatives have seen drafts of the agreement, access has been denied to even high-ranking members of Congress. Dave Johnson excerpts some provisions being considered in the secret talks, and they’re truly terrifying.

In fact, as Lori Wallach and Ben Beachy point out in a must-read editorial, the treaty’s provisions are so unpopular that the last negotiator felt it could only be concluded in secret. And now sovereignty-killing provisions are being considered for a trade agreement with member nations of the European Union.

Wall Street Wants a Piece

Now Wall Street’s trying to use these draft agreements to undermine our ability to protect ourselves from bank predation or another financial crisis. They’ve already tried to use the WTO’s archaic and destructive financial rules (Americans for Financial Reform has the details). Now Bloomberg News reports that banks and insurance companies are trying to use new proposed trade deals to overrule or further dilute portions of the Dodd-Frank Act.

That legislation was weakened by bipartisan negotiation, and a number of agencies have “slow-walked” its implementation by delaying the completion of draft regulations. But that’s not enough for trade groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Coalition of Service Industries, and the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA).

They see this as an opportunity to unleash their member companies, corporations with names like Citi and AIG, to plunder and pillage – we mean, “unleash the innovative creativity of the financial sector” once again.

Easily Confused

They don’t say that, of course.  One of their favorite gambits is to say that it’s too “confusing” to deal with different countries’ rules.  A group of compliant House Republicans, for example, recently wrote to complain that “the regulatory landscape (is) too difficult for financial firms to navigate.”

Imagine.  The five largest banks in America earned more than $20 billion in the first quarter of this year alone and still can’t figure out how to “navigate” regulations. But here’s a funny thing: They don’t always want the same rules as other countries. Nobody on Wall Street mentioned “an easier landscape” when the EU set limits on bankers’ bonuses, for example.

They don’t want a “common” set of rules. They want the “lowest common denominator” of rulemaking, established by international, corporate-controlled bodies accountable to no one.

Freedom Ain’t Free

There have been some heroes in this fight. The organizations cited above have done excellent work. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has been speaking out forcefully. So has Florida Rep. Alan Grayson, who has started a petition against the proposed inclusion of WTO-like oversight bodies in the new European trade agreement.

But President Obama, like presidents Bush and Clinton before him, appears to be on the wrong side of this fight. He needs to hear from voters who insist on transparent talks and a return to full American sovereignty.

Senators and representatives need to get those emails and calls, too. Better make your voice heard quickly, while your vote still matters.

“As Nation-States Falter, Capitalism Shines”

Oldspeak: ” It’s not a question of enough, pal. It’s a Zero Sum game – somebody wins, somebody loses. Money itself isn’t lost or made, it’s simply transferred – from one perception to another. Like magic. This painting here? I bought it ten years ago for sixty thousand dollars. I could sell it today for six hundred. The illusion has become real, and the more real it becomes, the more desperately they want it. Capitalism at its finest.” -Gordon Gekko, in “Wall Street“

‘The point to be made is this: Capitalism’s prime beneficiaries now control every aspect of economic power from political office to the tax code as well as unhindered blatant avoidance of taxes. As it follows, individual citizens of the nation states are left holding the bag and nation states are going broke. How long can this continue? The answer is: As long as nation-states can manage to carry more, and more, and more, and more debt, but Greece has already demonstrated a day of reckoning lurks around the corner… unless the trend of transnational omnipotence, which is capitalism on steroids, is broken, it is probable that the legacy nation-states, like the U.S., will continue to limp along into an ever-deeper pit of indebtedness as social services are slowly disassembled. This trend is accentuated by continuing weak economic behavior within the nation-state, but paradoxically, and regardless, capitalism thrives and shines!” -Robert Hunziker

“The Supra-national control grid continues to take shape. Fear mongering and the illusions of  “safety” and “security” have brought us to this damnable point.  Increased structural violence. Decreased empathy. Societal atomization. Runaway inequality. Perpetual war. Hyper-consumption. Constant surveillance of electronic communications and activities. Privatization of the commons. Cutting of social and public services. Exploding debt. Increasingly militarized and brutalizing “law enforcement” for the smallest infractions among  proles, and little to none for the titanic crimes of those in the  inner party. Dumbed down education. Fewer rights for the proles. The planned bankruptcies and liquidations of nation-states are in progress. With the elites continued secret negotiations of “trade agreements” like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, rendering nation states powerless to hold corporations accountable when they repeatedly and flagrantly violate laws, standards and protections, while giving corporations the power to sue nation states for having their laws, standards and protections which cost them “lost profits”, it seems that the transnational corporate networks’ omnipotence is growing  every day. It is the nature of vampire capitalism. Drain the victim to within an inch of it’s life, but keep it alive enough to keep feeding on indefinitely. Extract indefinitely. “Externalities” be damned. Greed fueled capitalists don’t know the meaning of the word “enough”. “More” is their perpetual objective. There’s only one way that story ends on a diseased & dying planet with only so much blood to extract. Bad. How long will citizens hold the bag?”

By Robert Hunziker @ Dissident Voice:

The world has been ruled by nation-states throughout modern history, ever since kings and queens were put out to pasture, but nation-states may be on the brink of extinction, similar to monarchies over the past 50-200 years.

Nation-states are not meeting the basic needs and requirements of the people, and, in particular, the legacy nation-states are bleeding through the gills. They’re taking on historic levels of debt while prospectively cutting social services wherever possible. This is a prescription for failure. The main problem is a shortage of revenues for the treasury.

But, capitalism, embodied within transnational corporations, does not require upbeat nation-states to thrive. They’re doing beautifully regardless of the drag of some of the world’s biggest countries. Worldwide, several major stock markets have recently set new records; meanwhile, nation-states sustain abnormally high unemployment levels and badly deteriorating finances. The contrast between the two is breathtaking. For example, the Eurozone unemployment rate is now over 12%; meanwhile, the major European bourses have recorded new highs over the past month.

It’s all about power and money. As such, “capitalism,” which is a nickname for global corporate interests, has all of the power and the money. For example, Apple has enough cash on hand to eliminate Cyprus’s debt with plenty of change left over. And, just the five largest NASDAQ high tech listed companies have combined revenues equal to the 30th largest country (Venezuela) in the world. Moreover, corporate balance sheets make most of the world’s leading countries look like financial dolts.

In point of fact, society is witnessing one of the biggest socio-economic disruptions in history as capitalism, consisting of transnational entities, overwhelms, and cripples, the capabilities of nation-states to function.

The inchoate corporate state is a reality, and it knows no borders or allegiances beyond other corporate interests. This is transnationalism at work, and it is feverishly conquering the planet, pushing aside weakened nation-states, which are powerless in the face of rampant, unchecked capitalism.

Twenty years ago, Gus Tyler (1911-2011), the ubiquitous radio commentator and author, conjectured as follows: “The rise of transnational companies has undermined a nation’s ability to manage its private economy. How can national political institutions cope with a global economy that dissolves national boundaries?”¹

And, furthering his point, Tyler quoted Keynes, circa 1930: “The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live is its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes.”

It now appears both Keynes’ and Tyler’s forebodings were on the mark. Although, they would likely be surprised by how emphatically their words are ringing true as capitalism’s transnationalistic rise to power is unrivaled. In this pursuit of unrivaled power and influence, corporate interests unabashedly toss high-priced labor into the dustbin of nation-state unemployment rolls in favor or low wage/low regulatory jurisdictions even as these same transnational corporations shirk their responsibilities of paying a fair share of the obligations of the nation-states. And, they get away with it!

For example, Google’s UK subsidiary may have sales of over $3 billion in the UK, but they only pay the UK $6 million in corporate taxes, or 0.002%, somewhat similar to Amazon, Starbucks, and the list goes on. Major multinational corporations sell products in high tax counties but book the same sales in low tax countries.

According to Google’s Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, “I don’t think companies should decide what tax policies should be. I think governments should… All of us are operating in a very, very longstanding tax regime that was set up for various reasons that don’t necessarily make sense to me or anyone else. But they are the way the global tax regime works.”²

In short, everybody else is doing it, so why not Google?

And, isn’t Mr. Schmidt really stretching the credibility quotient when he states tax policy doesn’t make sense to “me or anyone else.”

The “longstanding tax regime,” referenced by Mr. Schmidt, is all about who has power over the purse. More precisely, the “long-standing tax regime” is the result of supply-side economic theory and globalization embraced by politicians who are beholden to global corporate interests. Over the past 40 years, corporate interests lobbied and supported political operatives to pass the very regulations, and loopholes, criticized by Mr. Schmidt. As it goes, Mr. Schmidt’s statement is an example of the fox lambasting the fox in the henhouse.

Recently, Robert Reich, Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy, University of California at Berkeley elegantly summarized the issue, as follows: “As global capital becomes ever more powerful, giant corporations are holding governments and citizens up for ransom – eliciting subsidies and tax breaks from countries concerned about their nation’s ‘competitiveness’ – while sheltering their profits in the lowest-tax jurisdictions they can find.”³

As it goes, “who pays how much” to the U.S. federal government tells a big story: According to the U.S. Budget Office, “Tax Receipts By Source As Percentages of GDP: 1934-2015,” since 1950 and up to, and including, 2010: Individual tax payer contributions to the U.S. Treasury as a percentage of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (“GDP”) have rocketed upwards by 60% while corporate tax payments as a percentage of GDP, over the same time frame, have plummeted by 70%.

All the same, if a corporate CEO is confronted with this fact, he/she will explain how the top corporate tax rate is 35%, the same as individuals, but they omit to say that average individual taxpayers cannot conveniently move assets offshore to avoid taxes altogether (although, as for the wealthy, Mitt Romney, who has numerous offshore accounts nestled in prototypical tax havens, proved otherwise, and everybody knows he only pays a tax rate of 15% on the portion of his income that he ‘declares’ for taxes), and individual taxpayers, compared to multinationals, cannot declare taxes in low tax jurisdictions outside of the country where their income originates. This is the domain for corporation interests, not individuals.

Additionally, corporate interests have discovered fascinating ploys whereby corporate officers are enriched at the expense of all individual taxpayers. Here’s how it works, as only one example of many other tax dodges: The companies pay top executives a hefty amount in “stock options,” for which the tax code allows corporations to deduct the appreciated value of the stock. This means corporations eliminate some taxes by enriching executives. This is a win-win for corporations and their officers, and it is a lose-lose for individual taxpayers and the U.S. Treasury.

Indeed, this tinkering with the tax code provides a skillful and surreptitious methodology for grossly rich corporate executives to make tons more money, and allegedly, the “trickle down theory” claims they will invest these funds to create more jobs. This supply-side theory has worked wonders these past several years… correct?

The point to be made is this: Capitalism’s prime beneficiaries now control every aspect of economic power from political office to the tax code as well as unhindered blatant avoidance of taxes. As it follows, individual citizens of the nation states are left holding the bag and nation states are going broke. How long can this continue? The answer is: As long as nation-states can manage to carry more, and more, and more, and more debt, but Greece has already demonstrated a day of reckoning lurks around the corner.

Is it possible that one of the big time legacy nation-states might be next?

Japan: Case Study of a failing Nation-State

Japan, the world’s third largest economy, is a dead ringer for economic free-fall, but nobody knows for sure when it will happen. Japan’s government debt/GDP is double Greece’s.

Japan’s debt level is approximately 25 times tax revenue. Japan’s tax revenues are 43 trillion Yen (¥) of which 10 trillion ¥ pays for annual interest on outstanding debt. And, this inordinate complexity is with interest rates below one percent (1%). Imagine what will happen to Japan’s interest expenses when rates go up!

Furthermore, the country’s tax revenues are 43 trillion ¥, but they spend 102 trillion ¥, more than double tax collections. It is no wonder the country has had 10 finance ministers over the past 5 years!

As a result, large Japanese corporations are acquiring or merging businesses outside of Japan, and in typical transnational fashion, they’re looking to get out while the getting is good.

One respected U.S. economic newsletter says of Japan’s economic situation: “It’s a bug in search of a windshield.”

Market economies historically implode when public debt levels exceed five-to-seven times tax revenues for an extended period of time. In Japan’s case, their debt level is more than one quadrillion ¥ or a ‘billion billion’ ¥, which represents twenty-five times revenues of 43 trillion ¥. Along these lines, the ‘bug’ analogy is more than fitting.

Transnationalism Reigns Supreme

In turn, some Japanese multinationals are exiting stage left in order not to get caught in Japan’s continual deflationary anti-bubble. “So far this year, Japanese firms have made more than $52.5 billion in global acquisitions, compared with $34.34 billion in all of 2010. Overall, Japanese companies are the second-largest acquirers in the world this year… according to Dealogic, a deal-tracking firm… It’s a trend that analysts expect to continue, and possible accelerate, as Japanese companies diversify their operations away from Japan’s stagnant economy….”⁴

Meanwhile, as a short-term preventative measure, and grasping for straws whilst in a quiescent panic mode, the government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has opened up the monetary spigots like Niagara Falls during the high season. This rapid devaluation of the yen, i.e., printing money like its going out of style, reminiscent of 1920s Germany, is jacking up Japan, Inc.’s worldwide competitiveness over the short term, as Japanese goods become cheaper versus the world because of intentional devaluation of the yen, but this damages economic interests with other countries, including the U.S., not to mention negative consequences for Japan down the line.

As an example, Toyota will book an extra 35 billion ¥, or 352 million USD, for every one Yen devaluation against the dollar. Regardless, Toyota announced plans to start building Lexus sedans in Kentucky as part of its plan to “become free of currency risk.” Hence, even though Toyota appreciates the short-term pop in earnings because of a rapidly depreciating yen, they continue to move operations offshore.

The Japan-Toyota scenario demonstrates the flexibility of transnationals. They can see a precipice on the horizon even though they do not know how imminently it will arrive. So, on a cautionary note, they move some operations to other countries. But, Japan cannot move the country’s governmental operations, infrastructure, schools, power plants, etc. Along these lines, as transnationals seek greener pastures overseas, Japan increasingly loses its tax base as its aging population over 60 grows to 30% versus a worldwide average of only 8% of the population over 60. To say this is a daunting problem is only too obvious.

At the end of the day, the country of Japan is left with an aging population and enormously high debts. Who’s going to care for the aging society? Not transnationals… they hire overseas workers where operations are relocated. Plus, they adroitly maneuver sales to where taxes are lowest. Thus, and increasingly, nation-states are left with the baggage, i.e., costs of infrastructure, unemployed, and medical expenses for the aging as well as depleting tax bases, meanwhile transnationals move on to new frontiers.

In this fashion, nation-states stagnate whilst multinational corporations thrive because of the flexibility to move wherever taxes and labor costs are most favorable. But, by definition, the legacy nation-states like Japan do not meet the criteria necessary for transnationals looking to move operations into their country because they provide too many costly social services and high wages!

The Trend for Nation-States

Over the past 40 years, with the onset of globalization in combination with transnational interests as dictated by the WTO, NAFTA, the World Bank, the IMF, the EU, the U.S. and other extra-international organizations long-standing policies and tax regimes have become embedded such that many of the policies required to maintain nation-states are flippantly at risk to the whims of transnationals. The complexity behind this favorable arrangement for tansnationals vis-à-vis nation-states is beyond the reach of average voting citizens and beyond the power of nation-states.

As it happens, unless the trend of transnational omnipotence, which is capitalism on steroids, is broken, it is probable that the legacy nation-states, like the U.S., will continue to limp along into an ever-deeper pit of indebtedness as social services are slowly disassembled. This trend is accentuated by continuing weak economic behavior within the nation-state, but paradoxically, and regardless, capitalism thrives and shines!

The upshot of this Gordian knot is destined to result in increasing enforcement via police state tactics while the crumbling apparatuses of nation-states threatens outbreaks of civil disobedience. Then, one has to wonder which frontier transnational elites will conquer next.

As follows, it may be in the best interests of the capital class to avoid this pitfall by calling for a return to an equitable distribution of taxes paid to the treasuries of the nation-states. Otherwise, they may run out of frontiers.

1. Gus Tyler, The Nation-State vs. the Global Economy, Challenge, March-April, 1993.
   
2. Cameron Hails Tax ‘Turning Point’ After Google Criticisms, BBC News, May 22, 2013.
   
3. robertreich.org, Global Capital and the Nation State, May 20, 2013.
   
4. Kathy Chu, Japanese Companies Look Outside for Expansion Opportunities, USA Today, Sept. 28, 2011. 

Robert Hunziker (MA in economic history at DePaul University, Chicago) is a former hedge fund manager and now a professional independent negotiator for worldwide commodity actual transactions and a freelance writer for progressive publications as well as business journals. He can be contacted at: rlhunziker@gmail.com. Read other articles by Robert.

Big Brother Is Prism: NSA Is Watching All Communications Over Phones, Facebook Google, Apple, Yahoo, Microsoft, Skype, Pal Talk, AOL & You Tube

Oldspeak:”It is a massive surveillance state of exactly the kind that the Church Committee warned was being constructed 35 years ago… the idea that the PATRIOT Act enables bulk collection, mass collection of the records of hundreds of millions of Americans, so that the government can store that and know what it is that we’re doing at all times, even when there’s no reason to believe that we’ve done anything wrong, that is ludicrous“. -Glenn Grunwald

“If Someone want’s to know why their government has decided to go on fishing expedition through every personal record or private document – through library books they’ve read and phone calls they’ve made – this legislation gives people no rights to appeal the need for such a search in a court of law. No judge will hear their plea, no jury will hear their case. This is just plain wrong.” -Senator Barack Obama, 2005, On The USA Patriot Act.

“I came in with a healthy skeptcism about these programs. My team evaluated them, we scrubbed them thoroughly, we actually expanded the oversight. But my assessment… was that they help us prevent terrorist attacks. And the modest encroachment… on privacy in getting phone numbers and durations without a name attached, and looking at content that – [I decided] net, it was worth us doing. Some other folks may have a different assessment. I think it’s important to recognize you can’t have 100 percent security and also 100 percent privacy, and also zero inconvenience. We’re going to have to make some choices as a society….In the abstract you can complain about Big Brother and how this is a program run amok, but when you actually look at the details, I think we’ve struck the right balance.” -President Barack Obama, 2013 

AHAHA! HA! My man went from “This is just plain wrong.” to “we scrubbed them throughly” and…decided it was worth doing.” My people Big Brother is OFFICIALLY watching you.  Obama was nice enough to scrub it down and balance it out for you, placing some of the burdens for surveillance on government and some on oligarchical collectivist corporations. We are living in the age of the painless concentration camp. Assume all your digital communications are insecure. I wonder though, when was it that society made these choices? When did “society” choose to be systematically surveilled during an endless war? To do away with, privacy safeguards, transparency, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom from unlawful search & seizure, summary execution and indefinite detention? I think when Obama said “society” he meant the elites and the imperial institutions they control. If you look at what he said that way, it makes a lot more sense, as I’m fairly certain most of the people who live and suffer in this society did not make those “tough choices”.  The good news about this though is there are more and more leaks springing in the secret U.S. Government. This is the third whisleblower to speak the truth about Big Brother. Thomas Drake and Willam Binney preceded him. Hopefully, conscientious patriots will continue to expose the lies, illegality and anti-democratic actions of the Secret Corporatocracy. “

Related Stories:

“A Massive Surveillance State”: Glenn Greenwald Exposes Covert NSA Program Collecting Calls, Emails“

“We Don’t Live in a Free Country”: Jacob Appelbaum on Being Target of Widespread Gov’t Surveillance”

By Glenn Grunwald @ The U.K. Guardian:

A slide depicting the top-secret PRISM program.

The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian.

The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed program called Prism, which allows officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats, the document says.

The Guardian has verified the authenticity of the document, a 41-slide PowerPoint presentation – classified as top secret with no distribution to foreign allies – which was apparently used to train intelligence operatives on the capabilities of the program. The document claims “collection directly from the servers” of major US service providers.

Although the presentation claims the program is run with the assistance of the companies, all those who responded to a Guardian request for comment on Thursday denied knowledge of any such program.

In a statement, Google said: “Google cares deeply about the security of our users’ data. We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government ‘back door’ into our systems, but Google does not have a back door for the government to access private user data.”

Several senior tech executives insisted that they had no knowledge of Prism or of any similar scheme. They said they would never have been involved in such a program. “If they are doing this, they are doing it without our knowledge,” one said.

An Apple spokesman said it had “never heard” of Prism.

The NSA access was enabled by changes to US surveillance law introduced under President Bush and renewed under Obama in December 2012.

The program facilitates extensive, in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information. The law allows for the targeting of any customers of participating firms who live outside the US, or those Americans whose communications include people outside the US.It also opens the possibility of communications made entirely within the US being collected without warrants.

Disclosure of the Prism program follows a leak to the Guardian on Wednesday of a top-secret court order compelling telecoms provider Verizon to turn over the telephone records of millions of US customers.

The participation of the internet companies in Prism will add to the debate, ignited by the Verizon revelation, about the scale of surveillance by the intelligence services. Unlike the collection of those call records, this surveillance can include the content of communications and not just the metadata.

Some of the world’s largest internet brands are claimed to be part of the information-sharing program since its introduction in 2007. Microsoft – which is currently running an advertising campaign with the slogan “Your privacy is our priority” – was the first, with collection beginning in December 2007.

It was followed by Yahoo in 2008; Google, Facebook and PalTalk in 2009; YouTube in 2010; Skype and AOL in 2011; and finally Apple, which joined the program in 2012. The program is continuing to expand, with other providers due to come online.

Collectively, the companies cover the vast majority of online email, search, video and communications networks.

The extent and nature of the data collected from each company varies.

Companies are legally obliged to comply with requests for users’ communications under US law, but the Prism program allows the intelligence services direct access to the companies’ servers. The NSA document notes the operations have “assistance of communications providers in the US”.

The revelation also supports concerns raised by several US senators during the renewal of the Fisa Amendments Act in December 2012, who warned about the scale of surveillance the law might enable, and shortcomings in the safeguards it introduces.

When the FAA was first enacted, defenders of the statute argued that a significant check on abuse would be the NSA’s inability to obtain electronic communications without the consent of the telecom and internet companies that control the data. But the Prism program renders that consent unnecessary, as it allows the agency to directly and unilaterally seize the communications off the companies’ servers.

A chart prepared by the NSA, contained within the top-secret document obtained by the Guardian, underscores the breadth of the data it is able to obtain: email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, voice-over-IP (Skype, for example) chats, file transfers, social networking details, and more.

The document is recent, dating to April 2013. Such a leak is extremely rare in the history of the NSA, which prides itself on maintaining a high level of secrecy.

The Prism program allows the NSA, the world’s largest surveillance organisation, to obtain targeted communications without having to request them from the service providers and without having to obtain individual court orders.

With this program, the NSA is able to reach directly into the servers of the participating companies and obtain both stored communications as well as perform real-time collection on targeted users.

The presentation claims Prism was introduced to overcome what the NSA regarded as shortcomings of Fisa warrants in tracking suspected foreign terrorists. It noted that the US has a “home-field advantage” due to housing much of the internet’s architecture. But the presentation claimed “Fisa constraints restricted our home-field advantage” because Fisa required individual warrants and confirmations that both the sender and receiver of a communication were outside the US.

“Fisa was broken because it provided privacy protections to people who were not entitled to them,” the presentation claimed. “It took a Fisa court order to collect on foreigners overseas who were communicating with other foreigners overseas simply because the government was collecting off a wire in the United States. There were too many email accounts to be practical to seek Fisas for all.”

The new measures introduced in the FAA redefines “electronic surveillance” to exclude anyone “reasonably believed” to be outside the USA – a technical change which reduces the bar to initiating surveillance.

The act also gives the director of national intelligence and the attorney general power to permit obtaining intelligence information, and indemnifies internet companies against any actions arising as a result of co-operating with authorities’ requests.

In short, where previously the NSA needed individual authorisations, and confirmation that all parties were outside the USA, they now need only reasonable suspicion that one of the parties was outside the country at the time of the records were collected by the NSA.

The document also shows the FBI acts as an intermediary between other agencies and the tech companies, and stresses its reliance on the participation of US internet firms, claiming “access is 100% dependent on ISP provisioning”.

In the document, the NSA hails the Prism program as “one of the most valuable, unique and productive accesses for NSA”.

It boasts of what it calls “strong growth” in its use of the Prism program to obtain communications. The document highlights the number of obtained communications increased in 2012 by 248% for Skype – leading the notes to remark there was “exponential growth in Skype reporting; looks like the word is getting out about our capability against Skype”. There was also a 131% increase in requests for Facebook data, and 63% for Google.

The NSA document indicates that it is planning to add Dropbox as a PRISM provider. The agency also seeks, in its words, to “expand collection services from existing providers”.

The revelations echo fears raised on the Senate floor last year during the expedited debate on the renewal of the FAA powers which underpin the PRISM program, which occurred just days before the act expired.

Senator Christopher Coons of Delaware specifically warned that the secrecy surrounding the various surveillance programs meant there was no way to know if safeguards within the act were working.

“The problem is: we here in the Senate and the citizens we represent don’t know how well any of these safeguards actually work,” he said.

“The law doesn’t forbid purely domestic information from being collected. We know that at least one Fisa court has ruled that the surveillance program violated the law. Why? Those who know can’t say and average Americans can’t know.”

Other senators also raised concerns. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon attempted, without success, to find out any information on how many phone calls or emails had been intercepted under the program.

When the law was enacted, defenders of the FAA argued that a significant check on abuse would be the NSA’s inability to obtain electronic communications without the consent of the telecom and internet companies that control the data. But the Prism program renders that consent unnecessary, as it allows the agency to directly and unilaterally seize the communications off the companies’ servers.

When the NSA reviews a communication it believes merits further investigation, it issues what it calls a “report”. According to the NSA, “over 2,000 Prism-based reports” are now issued every month. There were 24,005 in 2012, a 27% increase on the previous year.

In total, more than 77,000 intelligence reports have cited the PRISM program.

Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU’s Center for Democracy, that it was astonishing the NSA would even ask technology companies to grant direct access to user data.

“It’s shocking enough just that the NSA is asking companies to do this,” he said. “The NSA is part of the military. The military has been granted unprecedented access to civilian communications.

“This is unprecedented militarisation of domestic communications infrastructure. That’s profoundly troubling to anyone who is concerned about that separation.”

A senior administration official said in a statement: “The Guardian and Washington Post articles refer to collection of communications pursuant to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. This law does not allow the targeting of any US citizen or of any person located within the United States.

“The program is subject to oversight by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the Executive Branch, and Congress. It involves extensive procedures, specifically approved by the court, to ensure that only non-US persons outside the US are targeted, and that minimize the acquisition, retention and dissemination of incidentally acquired information about US persons.

“This program was recently reauthorized by Congress after extensive hearings and debate.

“Information collected under this program is among the most important and valuable intelligence information we collect, and is used to protect our nation from a wide variety of threats.

“The Government may only use Section 702 to acquire foreign intelligence information, which is specifically, and narrowly, defined in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. This requirement applies across the board, regardless of the nationality of the target.”

Additional reporting by James Ball and Dominic Rushe

Capitalism Makes Us Crazy: How The Rise Of Capitalism Has Destroyed Mind & Body Health.

Oldspeak: “Is really important for people to search for the truth themselves, and not to automatically identify with any particular system, because as soon as you start to identify, as soon you try to find the answer aside yourself, you may surrender your critical faculties, so if we hold onto our critical faculties and look at the truth, what do we see? In this society what we see is a society that literally makes people sick. Because 50 percent of north american adults have a chronic illness, either diabetes, or high blood pressure, or heart disease, or cancer, or any number of auto-immune illnesses. now, according to the strict medical model, that is too bad, these people are just unfortunate, because what the medical model does, whether with mental illness or physical illness, it makes two separations, it separates the mind from the body, so that what happens emotionally is not seen to have an impact on our physical health. Number one, and number two it separates individuals from their environment. So that we try to understand individuals in separation from their actual lives. Those separations are socially imposed, they’re culturally defined and scientifically they are completely invalid.” -Dr Gabor Mate.

“I don’t believe anything I write or say. I regard belief as a form of brain damage, the death of intelligence, the fracture of creativity, the atrophy of imagination. I have opinions but no Belief System (B.S.)” -Robert Anton Wilson.

“Our beliefs,  that we have freedom, liberty, security, justice, safety, education, equality, wealth, democracy, separation from our environment…. Are all illusions, combined with as Huxley says: “a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods“. Our belief systems are being used to manage and control us while constantly degrading our mental and physical health. All the while blaming all the deleterious effect of capitalism, on not the system that is causing them, but everything from “genetic predisposition” to unhealthy personal choices and individual weaknesses. Don’t believe the hype. The Crisis of Capitalism, is usually the cause of our pain and suffering. “

Related Videos:
Dr. Gabor Mate : Addiction

Brain Development and Addiction

Related Audio:

http://radioproject.org/embed.php?show=11399

For more information:

Dr. Gabor Maté

The Canadian Institute of Stress 

National Alliance on Mental Illness

National Institute of Mental Health

The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study

Patients Seek Greater Role in Recovery by Ryan Faughnder

7 Reasons America’s Mental Health Industry Is a Threat to Our Sanity by Bruce Levine

What’s Needed Next by Richard Frank

Memoirs of an Addicted Brain: A Neuroscientist Examines his Former Life on Drugs by Marc Lewis

The International Dyslexia Association

By Dr Gabor Mate @ Truthout: It’s very Interesting to look at the United States from the outside, of course, because your politicians are always saying what a great, the greatest country in the world, they all want to be like us, you know? And I want to ask you this question, psychological question. . .

If you met some guy who kept telling you how great he was, and everyone wants to be like him, how would you diagnose him? He’s got a grandiose personality disorder. In other words, what he is actually doing is compensating for his deep insecurity. So that, this is a country that in its very rhetoric betrays extraordinary insecurity ….

I grew up in communist Hungary, where the joke of course was: What is capitalism? Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man, and what is communism? It’s opposite *laughs*. I grew up in a system that spoke the language of socialism, that spoke the language of struggle, of anti-imperialism, of equality and justice, but in it’s actual functioning was just the very opposite. And then I came to North America, after the Hungarian Revolution, which is really uprising against a very brutal dictatorship and bought into the American idea. That lasted for exactly 4 years. Between 1957 and the early 60’s, when the Vietnam War started. And what became very clear to me that everything the Soviets said of the Americans were true, and everything they said about themselves were a total pack of lies.

The powers that be are oppressive and unjust is just how it is and it doesn’t matter in what guise  . . . This is, by the way, not an anti-communist rant; I may be one of the only two Marxists I know who came out of Eastern Europe. The reason I say that is when they beat you over the head in the name of a certain system, you’re not going to be going for that system very much. And what I’ve actually come to understand that is really important for people to search for the truth themselves, and not to automatically identify with any particular system, because as soon as you start to identify, as soon you try to find the answer aside yourself, you may surrender your critical faculties, so if we hold onto our critical faculties and look at the truth, what do we see?

In this society what we see is a society that literally makes people sick. Because 50 percent of north american adults have a chronic illness, either diabetes, or high blood pressure, or heart disease, or cancer, or any number of auto-immune illnesses. now, according to the strict medical model, that is too bad, these people are just unfortunate, because what the medical model does, whether with mental illness or physical illness, it makes two separations, it separates the mind from the body, so that what happens emotionally is not seen to have an impact on our physical health.

Number one, and number two it separates individuals from their environment. So that we try to understand individuals in separation from their actual lives. So that if somebody has cancer, well that is just their bad luck, or maybe because they smoke too many cigarettes. Which leaves us completely bereft of understanding what causes most of disease and what they’re betraying there is the complete poverty of understanding of what makes the human brain tick, and what creates a human being, and what causes people to behave and to function and feel the way they actually do.

Now, those separations are socially imposed, they’re culturally defined and scientifically they are completely invalid. Cause the truth of it is that the traditional teachings of shamanic medicinal cultures around the world, and of traditional Chinese medicine, or Ayurvedic Indian medicine, that mind and body are inseparable, have not been validated by modern science. So my profession, although it claims to ground itself in Science, and what they call evidence based practice, I only wish, I only wish they looked at the actual evidence. I only wished they would ask themselves why is it that [in] the United States an Afro-American male has six-times the risk of dying of prostate cancer than a caucasian.

’Well it’s got to be genetic’, no it isn’t, because their genetic relatives in Africa don’t suffer the same risk at all. So why is it that in this society, why are black women, even middle-class black women, more likely to suffer miscarriages in this country? Well that is not a genetic question, it’s a social question. There is something going on here.

If you look at something like the rate of autism in this country, or industrial society, particularly in North America, has gone up 40 fold in the last 50 years, or is it 30 fold in the last 30 years. Well, you know you can’t be dealing with a genetic effect because genes don’t change in a population over 30 years, or even 500 years. There is gotta be something going on in society that is driving the emotional ill-health of children. And furthermore if you look at addictions, there is a couple of myths associated with it. One of them is that it’s a choice that people make, and the criminal justice system, which I think is a very apt way of putting it, is a criminal system.

The justice system is criminal. It’s based on the very idea that people are making choices when they become addicts. If they are not making choices, why punish them for it? And the other idea is that it is genetics. And a third idea, of course, is that drugs are addictive, which is inherently nonsense. Because if it was true then anybody who tried a drug should become addicted. But most people who try most drugs don’t become addicted. most people who try cigarettes don’t become nicotine addicts. Most people who have a drink don’t become alcoholics.

Most people who try heroin, crystal meth, cocaine, don’t become addicts. The real question is, why are the drugs addictive to certain people? What creates a susceptibility? What makes them vulnerable? When the American army came back from Vietnam 20 percent of the GIs were addicted to heroin.  A few years later one percent was. There was a 95 percent curate, if you wish. Now if in my work with drug addicted clients in Downtown-east side of Vancouver, I had a 6 percent curate with 16 percent curate I’d be recognized as an international genius because the curates are really low. How come 95 percent of these GIs? If the drugs are addictive in themselves. Well maybe we have to look at their lives and maybe you have to look at the circumstances under which they became addicted. Furthermore, if you look at the aboriginal population of North America; these people actually had potentially addictive substances available to them.

Not only were they available, they used them. There was of course tobacco, but there was no addiction. If the substances in themselves had been addictive, and if these people are genetically predisposed, either or, they should have been addicted. But there was no history of addiction prior to the coming of the caucasians. As a matter of fact, the natives used these plants, but what did they use them for? They used them in spiritual ways. In other words they used them to elevate their level of consciousness, whereas the very essence of addiction is to obstruct your level of consciousness, because you don’t want to be aware. So, addiction is an escape from awareness whereas the spiritual use of these substances is the enhancement of awareness.

Now if choice and genetics don’t explain it, all we have to do is look at history. We’d have to actually ask what happened to the native people in this part of the world that drove them into addiction? Now alcohol has been known in the Western world for thousands of years, and there was plenty of drunkenness, even in ancient times, but there is no alcoholism for the most part. Alcoholism came around in the 18th century with the rise of capitalism. You can make a very good case that one of the medical outcomes or one of the health outcomes of capitalism is addiction. In other words, can you understand people in isolation from the system in which they live. Well the answer is that you can’t.

First of all, because the biology of humans beings is shaped by the psychological and social environment in which they live. I can give you one example. Asthma. It’s well known now, not controversial, that children whose parents are stressed, are more likely to have asthma. Now, ask the average physician what’s the connection, they’d have no idea. And yet, if you ask the physician how do you treat the asthma, you know how they treat the asthma, with stress hormones — with adrenaline and cortisol, or copies of it; this is how you treat asthma. I’m not going to go into the reasons why, but shouldn’t the very fact that we are treating this condition with stress hormones cause us to ask if stress has something to do with it?

So in a polluted area where children are more likely to have asthma, is the children of stressed parents much more likely to have asthma? Simply because the emotional levels of stress in the parents disorganize the stress response mechanisms of the child. And when women are stressed during pregnancy, their children have abnormal stress hormone levels more likely to use addictive substances to soothe their stresses. That’s because the emotional state of their parents have something to do with the physiology of the child. That’s just how it works, because you can’t separate the mind from the body and you can’t separate the individual from the environment.

Now, if you look at the parameters of stress, what it is that stresses people? The research shows that what is the most stressful in people is the uncertainty, lack of information, loss of control, and lack of opportunity to express yourself. When Karl Marx talked about freedom, he talked about freedom in three sense of the word. Freedom, for him, was, number one, freedom from economic necessities, freedom from the threat to life, freedom from interference of other people, and the freedom to express yourself — to be yourself. That’s freedom. Now what freedom is there in this “free society”, you know, in the free world, the free-est society in history. What freedom is there when people are not free of economic worry, where there is tremendous uncertainty and fear lack of control. When people lack control over their lives, they have no freedom. And they’re physiologically stressed. And when they’re physiologically stressed, that’s going to manifest in the form of illness.

So if you look at the California based studies called the adverse childhood experience studies, looked at 18,00 people, 80 percent Caucasian, 10 Hispanic, 10 Afro-American they looked at what happened to them in childhood and what the adult outcomes were. And an adverse childhood experience as something like physical, sexual, or emotional abuse, the loss of a parent due to a death, being jailed, or rancorous divorce, violence in the family, addiction in the family; for each of these adverse childhood experiences the risk of addiction went up by 2 to 4 fold. So, by the time a male child had had 6 of these experiences his risk of becoming an injection using substance addict was 4600 greater than that of a male child that had had no such experiences. So the risk of mental illness goes up exponentially, the risk of physical illness, like autoimmune disease goes up exponentially, and in Canadian studies it has been shown when children are abused in childhood their cancer risk goes up by nearly 50 percent. Why? Because you can’t separate the mind from the body and you can’t separate the individuals from the psycho-social environment.

But if you understand human beings, in their psycho-social context, what do we see? We see that stress is not just an abstract psycho social event. It has physiological correlates. So when you’re stressed, your whole body, homeostasis, or the internal balance, is perturbed and fundamentally you have disturbances in the nervous system, increase in heart-rate, blood pressure, and in the stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline, which play their job in helping you escape, or to fight back in the face of an acute threat, but if you’re chronically stressed they actually create stress, thin your bones, suppress your immune system, give you heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes– a whole range of heart conditions.

Dr. Mate: No when it comes to addiction, specifically, in the Downtown-East side of Vancouver I never had a single female patient who had not been sexually abused as a child. And as, were many of the men, and so it’s always, the heart of addiction is always emotional loss. And the obvious ones were those losses incurred by those adverse childhood experiences identified in this California study. But there is another side to it as well, because if you look at what is happening with this burgeoning number of children being diagnosed with this or that disorder — not all of them were abused, many of them were not, but what is going on? Well as D.W. Winnicott, the great British child psychiatrist pointed out, there’s two things that can go wrong in childhood.

First of all, when things go, things happen that shouldn’t happen, and that’s the abuse and the trauma,  and secondly when things don’t happen that should happen and that’s the presence of non stressed, non depressed, emotionally attuned available caregivers. That’s not available in a country with average maternity leave with six and a half weeks. That’s not available where kids spend most of the time away from the nurturing adults in their lives and in company of other kids. So that they are forced to look to each other as their attachment figures. The desperation of the kids to always connect.

The sense of disorientation of they feel when they can’t connect with their friends by some electronic means. Its not a technology problem its an attachment problem. Those kids have been disconnected from the adults in their lives because the adults can’t be for them. They can’t be they are too stressed. There was a study few weeks ago that showed that stressed parents and not unloving parents but stressed parents simply are not  as emotionally attuned to the emotional cues of their kids as they would like to be.

And that’s was Psychologist formerly at UCLA Alan Schore calls ‘proximal separation.’ Proximal Separation is when a parent is physically there but emotionally unavailable because they are too stressed and too distracted. And that’s what my children experienced when they were small because I was a workaholic physician. And this society rewards workaholism. They tell you what a great you are. They reward you for things that undermine the health of your family. And for a lot of people its not even a question of a choice. When under the … and … Bill Clinton, the welfare laws were changed so that mothers could have only a number  of years and have off and didn’t have to go to work. Where exactly does a single mother often have to go to work ? Usually to a low paying job far away from home. And, all that time that she is working and all that time that she is commuting her child is at a daycare, inadequately staffed. With under-trained personnel. Who does that kid get connected to then. The other kids. And the children become each others connection ….

And that means for the first time in history you have large numbers of kids immature creatures getting them modelling and their cue giving  and their sense of direction and the sense of value on how to talk and how to walk from other immature creatures. But what do you expect from that culture but all kinds of dysfunction. And again that is not the choice that individual parents have made that’s just another way in which this system has undermined the necessary conditions for child development.

A study out of Notre Dame University, last year, showed that the healthiest environment for child rearing is the hunter gatherer society, hunter gatherer village. And Why? Because in the HG village three things that happen to the kids that does not happen in our culture anymore for many many kids. Number one, the kids are always with their parents. Well, That’s not possible in this country. Civilized countries actually have a paternity leave, never mind the six weeks maternity leave.

When ?? arrived in North America they were appalled at the parenting practices of the natives you know why because the natives did not beat their kids and to the Christians this meant ?? the rod and spoiling the child. So that’s the first thing and the second thing is when the kids cry they picked up.Imagine picking up a kid when he is crying. We tell people when the kid is five or six months old we tell don’t pick up you want them to become independent . We are missing a point. The way to promote independence is to invite dependence. Because people go independent when they feel secure in the world. So you promote independence by inviting dependence.

So in that bourgeois cultures they picked up kids when they cried which meant a child’s brain don’t become overrun the brain by stress hormone. If the kids brain is overrun by the stress hormones. When child’s brains becomes overruns with stress hormones it impacts the child development  because the brain develops an interaction with the environment. So, even if you don’t abuse the kids in this country but if you just follow the parenting practices recommended by so called experts you are going to screw up your kids tremendously.

And the third quality of the hunter gatherer society is that the children are brought up in the context of nurturing adults by not just parents, not just the father, not just the mother but that clan, tribe, community and the neighborhood that I was talking before. So any system that destroys those conditions that stresses the parents.  See if everything is genetic we don’t have to asked what happened to black people in this country. And what are stresses on the black males that trigger their prostate cancer.  We have to look at the native people that triggers addiction or to … many to other people native, black, caucasians or whoever.

Its all in the genes the explanation the way things are that does not threaten the way things are. Why should someone feel unhappy or engage in antisocial behavior when that person is living in the free-est and most prosperous nation on earth? It can’t be in system there is must be something wrong with the wiring.

And finally let me read some quote from another chapter of my books on addiction…

It is beyond horrible to listen to the In the graphic videos and soundtracks of the movie. They are not screaming but just accepting the pictures they have dead eyes. You can tell that their spirit is broken.That’s their life. Why dead eyes? Dead eyes because the child can’t escape, fight back or seek help. The only way that they can possible ?? the trauma is by shutdown of the emotion and pain.

In this society we have massive emotional shutdown. And you can see it in the increasing violence in the culture. Increased violence in media culture. That gory movies have to be more and more gory. Sports have to be more violent. People have to beat themselves to each other to a … on television. Because we are so emotionally shut down that it takes more and more to titillate us and the sex has to be objectified and more and more salacious really because what used to excite people decades ago is no longer sufficient. Why? Because what we are shutting down and why we are shutting down because we are hurt so much. Because the more we shut down the more we need to external sources of stimulation to feel at all.

In the case of abused child the shutdown is obvious. But, the second point is that if the same cop instead of quitting the force had he transferred to the drug squad according to all the research who do you think he would have caught? Those kids he did not rescue because according to all the research and brain development data they are the ones which are drug addicts because they are the ones who are in so much pain that they want to sooth themselves with drugs.

If we take people who abuse to start with and we make them into our social enemy. And they are the ones who are our ?? population. So we try and rescue them and if we fail to rescue them we persecute them for their rest of the lives. And that we are doing with war on drugs. There is no war on drugs because you cannot have a war against inanimate objects. There is only war on drug addicts. Which means we are warring on the most abused and vulnerable segments of the population. You can see left and right of the war on drugs and you can see it is not working.

But you know what, I have a different point of view. If decade after decade, after decade, after decade, if the intentions of the policies are not being realized; in fact the opposite is what it is happening … may be its serving some purpose a maintaining a rational the raison d’etre of repressive apparatus that can be used against the people when the need arises. Is it really a failure or maybe it has a function of demonizing a certain section of population that justifies more repression.? May be it has a function of keeping the legal apparatus going, may it has a function of making a money for a lot of people, may be it has a function of fueling the privatized to incarceration industry.

So may be after all it is not a failure at all. And from that perspective was the Vietnam War? No not all. It was militarily. But, the end result was that US took control of the economies of the South East Asia. Is the Iraq War a failure? Well, it is for the people who died there, for a half a million Iraqis who died it is but it is not a failure for american oil companies. So that everywhere we have to be careful before we call them a failures. Somebody wins. Somebody who wins are the same people who destroy -neighborhoods, communities. It is the same system that undermines human health, that undermines dignity, that undermines human connections that really makes life less tolerable on this planet. Now, we don’t have to agree on what the solutions might be. And that’s okay. But what do we agree on is the importance of speaking for truth,  but what we do agree is on importance of people getting together and struggling in a healthy way for different life. Because if its the loss of control, and the isolation and the suppression of self expression that are the greatest cause for stress then surely one to has to distress the culture and get together express yourself  and not to be silent and to connect with human beings.

As Joy Hill said don’t mourn- organise. Thank you very much.

How to Destroy A Planet Without Really Trying: Humanity’s Path To Disaster

Oldspeak: “So, at one extreme you have indigenous, tribal societies trying to stem the race to disaster.  At the other extreme, the richest, most powerful societies in world history, like the United States and Canada, are racing full-speed ahead to destroy the environment as quickly as possible.  Unlike Ecuador, and indigenous societies throughout the world, they want to extract every drop of hydrocarbons from the ground with all possible speed. 

Both political parties, President Obama, the media, and the international press seem to be looking forward with great enthusiasm to what they call “a century of energy independence” for the United States.  Energy independence is an almost meaningless concept, but put that aside.  What they mean is: we’ll have a century in which to maximize the use of fossil fuels and contribute to destroying the world.

And that’s pretty much the case everywhere.” – Noam Chomsky

“It didn’t take long.  In the immediate aftermath of the dropping of the “victory weapon,” the atomic bomb, on two Japanese cities in August 1945, American fears and fantasies ran wild.  Almost immediately, Americans began to reconceive themselves as potential victims of the bomb.  In the scenarios of destruction that would populate newspapers, magazines, radio shows, and private imaginations, our cities were ringed with concentric circles of destruction and up to 10 million people in the U.S. and tens of millions elsewhere died horribly in a few days of imagined battle.  Even victory, when it came in those first post-war years of futuristic dreams of destruction, had the look of defeat.  And the two wartime American stories — of triumphalism beyond imagining and ashes — turned out to be incapable of cohabiting in the same forms.  So the bomb fled the war movie (where it essentially never made an appearance) for the sci-fi flick in which stand-ins of every sort – alien superweapons and radioactive reptilian and other mutant monsters — destroyed the planet, endangered humanity, and pursued the young into every drive-in movie theater in the country.

As late as 1995, those two stories, the triumphalist end of “the Good War” and the disastrous beginning of the atomic age, still couldn’t inhabit the same space.  In that 50th anniversary year, a planned exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum that was supposed to pair the gleaming fuselage of the Enola Gay, the B-29 that carried the first atomic bomb to Hiroshima, with the caramelized remains of a schoolchild’s lunchbox (“No trace of Reiko Watanabe was ever found”) would be cancelled.  The outrage from veterans’ groups and the Republican right was just too much, the discomfort still too strong.

Until 1945, of course, the apocalypse had been the property of the Bible, and “end times” the province of God (and perhaps a budding branch of pulp lit called science fiction), but not of humanity.  Since then, it’s been ours, and as it turned out, we were acting apocalyptically in ways that weren’t apparent in 1945, that weren’t attached to a single wonder weapon, and that remain difficult to grasp and even deal with now.  With that in mind, and with thanks to Javier Navarro, we have adapted a video interview done with TomDispatch regular Noam Chomsky by What, the association Navarro helped to found.  Reworked by Chomsky himself, it offers his thoughts on a perilous future that is distinctly in our hands. ” -Tom Engelhardt

Our Grand Era Of “Savage Capitalism” will come to an end. Whether we like it or not. It’s not a matter of if but when. Get Apocalyptic.

By Noam Chomsky @ Tomsdispatch:

What is the future likely to bring?  A reasonable stance might be to try to look at the human species from the outside.  So imagine that you’re an extraterrestrial observer who is trying to figure out what’s happening here or, for that matter, imagine you’re an historian 100 years from now — assuming there are any historians 100 years from now, which is not obvious — and you’re looking back at what’s happening today.  You’d see something quite remarkable.

For the first time in the history of the human species, we have clearly developed the capacity to destroy ourselves.  That’s been true since 1945.  It’s now being finally recognized that there are more long-term processes like environmental destruction leading in the same direction, maybe not to total destruction, but at least to the destruction of the capacity for a decent existence.

And there are other dangers like pandemics, which have to do with globalization and interaction.  So there are processes underway and institutions right in place, like nuclear weapons systems, which could lead to a serious blow to, or maybe the termination of, an organized existence.

How to Destroy a Planet Without Really Trying

The question is: What are people doing about it?  None of this is a secret.  It’s all perfectly open.  In fact, you have to make an effort not to see it.

There have been a range of reactions.  There are those who are trying hard to do something about these threats, and others who are acting to escalate them.  If you look at who they are, this future historian or extraterrestrial observer would see something strange indeed.  Trying to mitigate or overcome these threats are the least developed societies, the indigenous populations, or the remnants of them, tribal societies and first nations in Canada.  They’re not talking about nuclear war but environmental disaster, and they’re really trying to do something about it.

In fact, all over the world — Australia, India, South America — there are battles going on, sometimes wars.  In India, it’s a major war over direct environmental destruction, with tribal societies trying to resist resource extraction operations that are extremely harmful locally, but also in their general consequences.  In societies where indigenous populations have an influence, many are taking a strong stand.  The strongest of any country with regard to global warming is in Bolivia, which has an indigenous majority and constitutional requirements that protect the “rights of nature.”

Ecuador, which also has a large indigenous population, is the only oil exporter I know of where the government is seeking aid to help keep that oil in the ground, instead of producing and exporting it — and the ground is where it ought to be.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who died recently and was the object of mockery, insult, and hatred throughout the Western world, attended a session of the U.N. General Assembly a few years ago where he elicited all sorts of ridicule for calling George W. Bush a devil.  He also gave a speech there that was quite interesting.  Of course, Venezuela is a major oil producer.  Oil is practically their whole gross domestic product.  In that speech, he warned of the dangers of the overuse of fossil fuels and urged producer and consumer countries to get together and try to work out ways to reduce fossil fuel use.  That was pretty amazing on the part of an oil producer.  You know, he was part Indian, of indigenous background.  Unlike the funny things he did, this aspect of his actions at the U.N. was never even reported.

So, at one extreme you have indigenous, tribal societies trying to stem the race to disaster.  At the other extreme, the richest, most powerful societies in world history, like the United States and Canada, are racing full-speed ahead to destroy the environment as quickly as possible.  Unlike Ecuador, and indigenous societies throughout the world, they want to extract every drop of hydrocarbons from the ground with all possible speed.

Both political parties, President Obama, the media, and the international press seem to be looking forward with great enthusiasm to what they call “a century of energy independence” for the United States.  Energy independence is an almost meaningless concept, but put that aside.  What they mean is: we’ll have a century in which to maximize the use of fossil fuels and contribute to destroying the world.

And that’s pretty much the case everywhere.  Admittedly, when it comes to alternative energy development, Europe is doing something.  Meanwhile, the United States, the richest and most powerful country in world history, is the only nation among perhaps 100 relevant ones that doesn’t have a national policy for restricting the use of fossil fuels, that doesn’t even have renewable energy targets.  It’s not because the population doesn’t want it.  Americans are pretty close to the international norm in their concern about global warming.  It’s institutional structures that block change.  Business interests don’t want it and they’re overwhelmingly powerful in determining policy, so you get a big gap between opinion and policy on lots of issues, including this one.

So that’s what the future historian — if there is one — would see.  He might also read today’s scientific journals.  Just about every one you open has a more dire prediction than the last.

“The Most Dangerous Moment in History”

The other issue is nuclear war.  It’s been known for a long time that if there were to be a first strike by a major power, even with no retaliation, it would probably destroy civilization just because of the nuclear-winter consequences that would follow.  You can read about it in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.  It’s well understood.  So the danger has always been a lot worse than we thought it was.

We’ve just passed the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was called “the most dangerous moment in history” by historian Arthur Schlesinger, President John F. Kennedy’s advisor.  Which it was.  It was a very close call, and not the only time either.  In some ways, however, the worst aspect of these grim events is that the lessons haven’t been learned.

What happened in the missile crisis in October 1962 has been prettified to make it look as if acts of courage and thoughtfulness abounded.  The truth is that the whole episode was almost insane.  There was a point, as the missile crisis was reaching its peak, when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev wrote to Kennedy offering to settle it by a public announcement of a withdrawal of Russian missiles from Cuba and U.S. missiles from Turkey.  Actually, Kennedy hadn’t even known that the U.S. had missiles in Turkey at the time.  They were being withdrawn anyway, because they were being replaced by more lethal Polaris nuclear submarines, which were invulnerable.

So that was the offer.  Kennedy and his advisors considered it — and rejected it.  At the time, Kennedy himself was estimating the likelihood of nuclear war at a third to a half.  So Kennedy was willing to accept a very high risk of massive destruction in order to establish the principle that we — and only we — have the right to offensive missiles beyond our borders, in fact anywhere we like, no matter what the risk to others — and to ourselves, if matters fall out of control. We have that right, but no one else does.

Kennedy did, however, accept a secret agreement to withdraw the missiles the U.S. was already withdrawing, as long as it was never made public.  Khrushchev, in other words, had to openly withdraw the Russian missiles while the U.S. secretly withdrew its obsolete ones; that is, Khrushchev had to be humiliated and Kennedy had to maintain his macho image.  He’s greatly praised for this: courage and coolness under threat, and so on.  The horror of his decisions is not even mentioned — try to find it on the record.

And to add a little more, a couple of months before the crisis blew up the United States had sent missiles with nuclear warheads to Okinawa.  These were aimed at China during a period of great regional tension.

Well, who cares?  We have the right to do anything we want anywhere in the world.  That was one grim lesson from that era, but there were others to come.

Ten years after that, in 1973, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger called a high-level nuclear alert.  It was his way of warning the Russians not to interfere in the ongoing Israel-Arab war and, in particular, not to interfere after he had informed the Israelis that they could violate a ceasefire the U.S. and Russia had just agreed upon.  Fortunately, nothing happened.

Ten years later, President Ronald Reagan was in office.  Soon after he entered the White House, he and his advisors had the Air Force start penetrating Russian air space to try to elicit information about Russian warning systems, Operation Able Archer.  Essentially, these were mock attacks.  The Russians were uncertain, some high-level officials fearing that this was a step towards a real first strike.  Fortunately, they didn’t react, though it was a close call.  And it goes on like that.

What to Make of the Iranian and North Korean Nuclear Crises

At the moment, the nuclear issue is regularly on front pages in the cases of North Korea and Iran.  There are ways to deal with these ongoing crises.  Maybe they wouldn’t work, but at least you could try.  They are, however, not even being considered, not even reported.

Take the case of Iran, which is considered in the West — not in the Arab world, not in Asia — the gravest threat to world peace.  It’s a Western obsession, and it’s interesting to look into the reasons for it, but I’ll put that aside here.  Is there a way to deal with the supposed gravest threat to world peace?  Actually there are quite a few.  One way, a pretty sensible one, was proposed a couple of months ago at a meeting of the non-aligned countries in Tehran.  In fact, they were just reiterating a proposal that’s been around for decades, pressed particularly by Egypt, and has been approved by the U.N. General Assembly.

The proposal is to move toward establishing a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the region.  That wouldn’t be the answer to everything, but it would be a pretty significant step forward.  And there were ways to proceed.  Under U.N. auspices, there was to be an international conference in Finland last December to try to implement plans to move toward this.  What happened?

You won’t read about it in the newspapers because it wasn’t reported — only in specialist journals.  In early November, Iran agreed to attend the meeting.  A couple of days later Obama cancelled the meeting, saying the time wasn’t right.  The European Parliament issued a statement calling for it to continue, as did the Arab states.  Nothing resulted.  So we’ll move toward ever-harsher sanctions against the Iranian population — it doesn’t hurt the regime — and maybe war. Who knows what will happen?

In Northeast Asia, it’s the same sort of thing.  North Korea may be the craziest country in the world.  It’s certainly a good competitor for that title.  But it does make sense to try to figure out what’s in the minds of people when they’re acting in crazy ways.  Why would they behave the way they do?  Just imagine ourselves in their situation.  Imagine what it meant in the Korean War years of the early 1950s for your country to be totally leveled, everything destroyed by a huge superpower, which furthermore was gloating about what it was doing.  Imagine the imprint that would leave behind.

Bear in mind that the North Korean leadership is likely to have read the public military journals of this superpower at that time explaining that, since everything else in North Korea had been destroyed, the air force was sent to destroy North Korea’s dams, huge dams that controlled the water supply — a war crime, by the way, for which people were hanged in Nuremberg.   And these official journals were talking excitedly about how wonderful it was to see the water pouring down, digging out the valleys, and the Asians scurrying around trying to survive.  The journals were exulting in what this meant to those “Asians,” horrors beyond our imagination.  It meant the destruction of their rice crop, which in turn meant starvation and death.  How magnificent!  It’s not in our memory, but it’s in their memory.

Let’s turn to the present.  There’s an interesting recent history.  In 1993, Israel and North Korea were moving towards an agreement in which North Korea would stop sending any missiles or military technology to the Middle East and Israel would recognize that country.  President Clinton intervened and blocked it.  Shortly after that, in retaliation, North Korea carried out a minor missile test.  The U.S. and North Korea did then reach a framework agreement in 1994 that halted its nuclear work and was more or less honored by both sides.  When George W. Bush came into office, North Korea had maybe one nuclear weapon and verifiably wasn’t producing any more.

Bush immediately launched his aggressive militarism, threatening North Korea — “axis of evil” and all that — so North Korea got back to work on its nuclear program.  By the time Bush left office, they had eight to 10 nuclear weapons and a missile system, another great neocon achievement.  In between, other things happened.  In 2005, the U.S. and North Korea actually reached an agreement in which North Korea was to end all nuclear weapons and missile development.  In return, the West, but mainly the United States, was to provide a light-water reactor for its medical needs and end aggressive statements.  They would then form a nonaggression pact and move toward accommodation.

It was pretty promising, but almost immediately Bush undermined it.  He withdrew the offer of the light-water reactor and initiated programs to compel banks to stop handling any North Korean transactions, even perfectly legal ones.  The North Koreans reacted by reviving their nuclear weapons program.  And that’s the way it’s been going.

It’s well known.  You can read it in straight, mainstream American scholarship.  What they say is: it’s a pretty crazy regime, but it’s also following a kind of tit-for-tat policy.  You make a hostile gesture and we’ll respond with some crazy gesture of our own.  You make an accommodating gesture and we’ll reciprocate in some way.

Lately, for instance, there have been South Korean-U.S. military exercises on the Korean peninsula which, from the North’s point of view, have got to look threatening.  We’d think they were threatening if they were going on in Canada and aimed at us.  In the course of these, the most advanced bombers in history, Stealth B-2s and B-52s, are carrying out simulated nuclear bombing attacks right on North Korea’s borders.

This surely sets off alarm bells from the past.  They remember that past, so they’re reacting in a very aggressive, extreme way.  Well, what comes to the West from all this is how crazy and how awful the North Korean leaders are.  Yes, they are.  But that’s hardly the whole story, and this is the way the world is going.

It’s not that there are no alternatives.  The alternatives just aren’t being taken. That’s dangerous.  So if you ask what the world is going to look like, it’s not a pretty picture.  Unless people do something about it.  We always can.

Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.  A TomDispatch regular, he is the author of numerous best-selling political works, including Hopes and Prospects, Making the Future, and most recently (with interviewer David Barsamian), Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire (The American Empire Project, Metropolitan Books).

[Note: This piece was adapted (with the help of Noam Chomsky) from an online video interview done by the website What, which is dedicated to integrating knowledge from different fields with the aim of encouraging the balance between the individual, society, and the environment.]

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook or Tumblr. Check out the newest Dispatch book, Nick Turse’s The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare.

 

Engineering Empire: An Introduction To The Intellectuals & Institutions Of American Imperialism

Oldspeak: “The ‘discourse’ of foreign affairs and international relations failing to adequately deal with the subject of empire is based upon a deeply flawed perception: that one cannot have an empire without imperialists, and the United States does not have imperialists, it has strategists, experts, and policy-oriented intellectuals. Does the United States, then, have an empire without imperialists? In the whole history of imperialism, that would be a unique situation. Empires do not happen by chance. Nations do not simply trip and stumble and fall into a state of imperialism. Empires are planned and directed, maintained and expanded. This report aimed to provide some introductory insight into the institutions and individuals who direct the American imperial system. The information – while dense – is far from comprehensive or complete; it is a sample of the complex network of imperialism that exists in present-day United States. Regardless of which president or political party is in office, this highly integrated network remains in power.” -Andrew Gavin Marshall.

A brilliant analysis of the rarely discussed incestuously in-bred class of corporocrats who rule the American Empire. Only 2 degrees generally separate the key and enduing members who bounce from  organization to organization while they assiduously create and implement decades long policies objectives. Values and morality are irrelevant. Political parties and their diffrences are an illusion.  Policy that “advances American interests” at whatever cost is paramount. Enthusiastic support for policies employing death squads, genocide, terrorism, displacement, ruthless anti-democratic strongmen/dictators, assassination programs, destabilization campaigns, coup de etats, are all part of the “coercive tool kit” used to achieve American objectives: unquestioned control of  globally integrated “market-oriented” economic, political, education and social systems in which domination and exploitation of others is key. This is all done clandestinely. Hidden behind Orwellian doublespeak and coded language known only to members of the ruling class. Propagated by the think tanks, foundations, educational institutions, corporations, and government agencies they control. This is the status quo in American Empire. But as Carl Jung said “We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.” We must accept that America is not a representative democracy. Its laws, actions, and policies represent the interests of the corporocrats who control it, not the people, who toil their whole lives, managed, herded and sheared to support its imperial lunacy. This has been so for much of its existence, as is typical of all empires. We must not internalize the worldviews of our oppressors. We must not allow ourselves to be fashioned into gatekeeping secondary sociopaths. We must resist with, knowledge, reason, truth, justice, compassion, openness, cooperation, and unconditional love. Our Soul Force. View the little known documentary below “The American Ruling Class” by  Lewis H. Lapham a former corporocratic insider who’s seen the light and has chosen to expose the inner workings of the American ruling class.

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Related Video:
The American Ruling Class

By Andrew Gavin Marshall @ The Hampton Institute:

Educating yourself about empire can be a challenging endeavor, especially since so much of the educational system is dedicated to avoiding the topic or justifying the actions of imperialism in the modern era. If one studies political science or economics, the subject might be discussed in a historical context, but rarely as a modern reality; media and government voices rarely speak on the subject, and even more rarely speak of it with direct and honest language. Instead, we exist in a society where institutions and individuals of power speak in coded language, using deceptive rhetoric with abstract meaning. We hear about ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ and ‘security,’ but so rarely about imperialism, domination, and exploitation.

The objective of this report is to provide an introduction to the institutional and social structure of American imperialism. The material is detailed, but should not be considered complete or even comprehensive; its purpose is to function as a resource or reference for those seeking to educate themselves about the modern imperial system. It’s not an analysis of state policies or the effects of those policies, but rather, it is an examination of the institutions and individuals who advocate and implement imperial policies. What is revealed is a highly integrated and interconnected network of institutions and individuals – the foreign policy establishment – consisting of academics (so-called “experts” and “policy-oriented intellectuals”) and prominent think tanks.

Think tanks bring together prominent academics, former top government officials, corporate executives, bankers, media representatives, foundation officials and other elites in an effort to establish consensus on issues of policy and strategy, to produce reports and recommendations for policy-makers, functioning as recruitment centers for those who are selected to key government positions where they have the ability to implement policies. Thus, think tanks function as the intellectual engines of empire: they establish consensus among elites, provide policy prescriptions, strategic recommendations, and the personnel required to implement imperial policies through government agencies.

Among the most prominent American and international think tanks are the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Bilderberg meetings, the Trilateral Commission, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the Brookings Institution, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the Atlantic Council. These institutions tend to rely upon funding from major foundations (such as Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie, etc.) as well as corporations and financial institutions, and even various government agencies. There is an extensive crossover in leadership and membership between these institutions, and between them and their funders.

Roughly focusing on the period from the early 1970s until today, what emerges from this research is a highly integrated network of foreign policy elites, with individuals like Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Brent Scowcroft, and Joseph Nye figuring prominently in sitting at the center of the American imperial establishment over the course of decades, with powerful corporate and financial patrons such as the Rockefeller family existing in the background of American power structures.

Meet the Engineers of Empire

Within the U.S. government, the National Security Council (NSC) functions as the main planning group, devising strategy and policies for the operation of American power in the world. The NSC coordinates multiple other government agencies, bringing together the secretaries of the State and Defense Departments, the CIA, NSA, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and various other government bodies, with meetings directed by the National Security Adviser, who is generally one of the president’s most trusted and influential advisers. In several administrations, the National Security Adviser became the most influential voice and policy-maker to do with foreign policy, such as during the Nixon administration (with Henry Kissinger) and the Carter administration (with Zbigniew Brzezinski).

While both of these individuals were top government officials in the 1970s, their influence has not declined in the decades since they held such positions. In fact, it could be argued that both of their influence (along with several other foreign policy elites) has increased with their time outside of government. In fact, in a January 2013 interview with The Hill, Brzezinski stated: “To be perfectly frank – and you may not believe me – I really wasn’t at all conscious of the fact that the defeat of the Carter administration [in 1980] somehow or another affected significantly my own standing… I just kept doing my thing minus the Office of the National Security Adviser in the White House.” [1]

David Rothkopf has written the official history of the National Security Council (NSC) in his book, Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power, published in 2005. Rothkopf writes from an insiders perspective, being a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment, he was Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade Policy and Development in the Clinton administration, and is currently president and CEO of Garten Rothkopf, an international advisory firm, CEO of Foreign Policy magazine, previously CEO of Intellibridge Corporation, and was also a managing director at Kissinger Associates, an international advisory firm founded and run by Henry Kissinger. In his book on the NSC, Rothkopf noted that, “[e]very single national security advisor since Kissinger is, in fact, within two degrees of Kissinger,” referring to the fact that they have all “worked with him as aides, on his staff, or directly with him in some capacity,” or worked for someone in those categories (hence, within “two degrees”).[2]

For example, General Brent Scowcroft, who was National Security Advisor (NSA) under Presidents Ford and George H.W. Bush, was Kissinger’s Deputy National Security Advisor in the Nixon administration; Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s NSA, served on the faculty of Harvard with Kissinger, also served with Kissinger on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board during the Reagan administration, both of them are also members (and were at times, board members) of the Council on Foreign Relations, as well as members of the Trilateral Commission, and they are both currently trustees of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Other NSA’s with connections to Kissinger include: Richard Allen, NSA under Reagan, who worked for Kissinger in the Nixon administration; William P. Clark, NSA under Reagan, who worked for Kissinger’s former aide, Alexander Haig at the State Department; Robert McFarlane, also NSA under Reagan, worked with Kissinger in the Nixon administration; John Poindexter, also NSA for Reagan, was McFarlane’s deputy; Frank Carlucci, also NSA in the Reagan administration, worked for Kissinger in the Nixon administration; Colin Powell, NSA for Reagan (and Secretary of State for George W. Bush), worked for Carlucci as his deputy; Anthony Lake, Clinton’s NSA, worked directly for Kissinger; Samuel Berger, also NSA for Clinton, was Lake’s deputy; Condoleezza Rice, NSA for George W. Bush, worked on Scowcroft’s NSC staff; and Stephen Hadley also worked for Kissinger directly.[3]

The foreign policy establishment consists of the top officials of the key government agencies concerned with managing foreign policy (State Department, Pentagon, CIA, NSC), drawing upon officials from within the think tank community, where they become well acquainted with corporate and financial elites, and thus, become familiar with the interests of this group of people. Upon leaving high office, these officials often return to leadership positions within the think tank community, join corporate boards, and/or establish their own international advisory firms where they charge hefty fees to provide corporations and banks with strategic advice and use of their international political contacts (which they acquired through their time in office). Further, these individuals also regularly appear in the media to provide commentary on international affairs as ‘independent experts’ and are routinely recruited to serve as ‘outside’ advisors to presidents and other high-level officials.

No less significant in assessing influence within the foreign policy establishment is the relative proximity – and relationships – individuals have with deeply entrenched power structures, notably financial and corporate dynasties. Arguably, both Kissinger and Brzezinski are two of the most influential individuals within the foreign policy elite networks. Certainly of no detriment to their careers was the fact that both cultivated close working and personal relationships with what can be said to be America’s most powerful dynasty, the Rockefeller family.

Dynastic Influence on Foreign Policy

At first glance, this may appear to be a rather obscure addition to this report, but dynastic power in modern state-capitalist societies is largely overlooked, misunderstood, or denied altogether, much like the concept of ‘empire’ itself. The lack of discourse on this subject – or the relegation of it to fringe ‘conspiratorial’ views – is not reason enough to ignore it. Far from assigning a conspiratorial or ‘omnipotent’ view of power to dynastic elements, it is important to place them within a social and institutional analysis, to understand the complexities and functions of dynastic influence within modern society.

Dynastic power relies upon a complex network of relationships and interactions between institutions, individuals, and ideologies. Through most of human history – in most places in the world – power was wielded by relatively few people, and often concentrated among dynastic family structures, whether ancient Egypt, imperial Rome, ancient China, the Ottoman Empire or the European monarchs spreading their empires across the globe. With the rise of state-capitalist society, dynastic power shifted from the overtly political to the financial and economic spheres. Today’s main dynasties are born of corporate or banking power, maintained through family lines and extended through family ties to individuals, institutions, and policy-makers. The Rockefellers are arguably the most influential dynasty in the United States, but comparable to the Rothschilds in France and the UK, the Wallenbergs in Sweden, the Agnellis in Italy, or the Desmarais family in Canada. These families are themselves connected through institutions such as the Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission, among others. The power of a corporate-financial dynasty is not a given: it must be maintained, nurtured, and strengthened, otherwise it will be overcome or made obsolete.

The Rockefeller family has existed at the center of American power for over a century. Originating with the late 19^th century ‘Robber Baron’ industrialists, the Rockefellers established an oil empire, and subsequently a banking empire. John D. Rockefeller, who had a personal fortune surpassing $1 billion in the first decade of the 20^th century, also founded the University of Chicago, and through the creation and activities of the Rockefeller Foundation (founded in 1913), helped engineer higher education and the social sciences. The Rockefeller family – largely acting through various family foundations – were also pivotal in the founding and funding of several prominent think tanks, notably the Council on Foreign Relations, the Asia Society, Trilateral Commission, the Group of Thirty, and the Bilderberg Group, among many others.

The patriarch of the Rockefeller family today is David Rockefeller, now in his late 90s. To understand the influence wielded by unelected bankers and billionaires like Rockefeller, it would be useful to simply examine the positions he has held throughout his life. From 1969 until 1980, he was the chairman and CEO of Chase Manhattan Bank and from 1981 to 1999 he was the chairman of the International Advisory Committee of Chase Manhattan, at which time it merged with another big bank to become JPMorgan Chase, of Rockefeller served as a member of the International Advisory Council from 2000 to 2005. David Rockefeller was a founding member of the Bilderberg Group in 1954, at which he remains on the Steering Committee; he is the former chairman of Rockefeller Group, Inc. (from 1981-1995), Rockefeller Center Properties (1996-2001), and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, at which he remains as an advisory trustee. He is chairman emeritus and life trustee of the Museum of Modern Art, and the founder of the David Rockefeller Fund and the International Executive Service Corps.

David Rockefeller was also the chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations from 1970 to 1985, of which he remains to this day as honorary chairman; is chairman emeritus of the board of trustees of the University of Chicago; honorary chairman, life trustee and chairman emeritus of the Rockefeller University Council, and is the former president of the Harvard Board of Overseers. He was co-founder of the Global Philanthropists Circle, is honorary chairman of the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy (CECP), and is an honorary director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. David Rockefeller was also the co-founder (with Zbigniew Brzezinski) of the Trilateral Commission in 1973, where he served as North American Chairman until 1991, and has since remained as honorary chairman. He is also the founder and honorary chairman of the Americas Society and the Council of the Americas.

It should not come as a surprise, then, that upon David Rockefeller’s 90^th birthday celebration (held at the Council on Foreign Relations) in 2005, then-president of the World Bank, James Wolfensohn delivered a speech in which he stated that, “the person who had perhaps the greatest influence on my life professionally in this country, and I’m very happy to say personally there afterwards, is David Rockefeller, who first met me at the Harvard Business School in 1957 or ’58.” He went on to explain that in the early 20^th century United States, “as we looked at the world, a family, the Rockefeller family, decided that the issues were not just national for the United States, were not just related to the rich countries. And where, extraordinarily and amazingly, David’s grandfather set up the Rockefeller Foundation, the purpose of which was to take a global view.” Wolfensohn continued:

So the Rockefeller family, in this last 100 years, has contributed in a way that is quite extraordinary to the development in that period and has given ample focus to the issues of development with which I have been associated. In fact, it’s fair to say that there has been no other single family influence greater than the Rockefeller’s in the whole issue of globalization and in the whole issue of addressing the questions which, in some ways, are still before us today. And for that David, we’re deeply grateful to you and for your own contribution in carrying these forward in the way that you did. [4]

Wolfensohn of course would be in a position to know something about the influence of the Rockefeller family. Serving as president of the World Bank from 1995 to 2005, he has since founded his own private firm, Wolfensohn & Company, LLC., was been a longtime member of the Steering Committee of the Bilderberg Group, an honorary trustee of the Brookings Institution, a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Wolfensohn’s father, Hyman, was employed by James Armand de Rothschild of the Rothschild banking dynasty (after whom James was named), and taught the young Wolfensohn how to “cultivate mentors, friends and contacts of influence.”[5] In his autobiography of 2002, Memoirs, David Rockefeller himself wrote:

For more than a century ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents such as my encounter with Castro to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure–one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it. [6]

In the United States, the Rockefeller family has maintained a network of influence through financial, corporate, educational, cultural, and political spheres. It serves as a logical extension of dynastic influence to cultivate relationships among the foreign policy elite of the U.S., notably the likes of Kissinger and Brzezinski.

Intellectuals, ‘Experts,’ and Imperialists Par Excellence: Kissinger and Brzezinski

Both Kissinger and Brzezinski served as professors at Harvard in the early 1950s, as well as both joining the Council on Foreign Relations around the same time, and both also attended meetings of the Bilderberg Group (two organizations which had Rockefellers in leadership positions). Kissinger was a director at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund from 1956 until 1958, and thereafter became an advisor to Nelson Rockefeller. Kissinger was even briefly brought into the Kennedy administration as an advisor to the State Department, while Brzezinski was an advisor to the Kennedy campaign, and was a member of President Johnson’s Policy Planning Council in the State Department from 1966 to 1968. When Nixon became president in 1969, Kissinger became his National Security Advisor, and eventually also took over the role of Secretary of State.

In 1966, prior to entering the Nixon administration, Henry Kissinger wrote an article for the journal Daedalus in which he proclaimed the modern era as “the age of the expert,” and went on to explain: “The expert has his constituency – those who have a vested interest in commonly held opinions; elaborating and defining its consensus at a high level has, after all, made him an expert.” [7] In other words, the “expert” serves entrenched and established power structures and elites (“those who have a vested interest in commonly held opinions”), and the role of such an expert is to define and elaborate the “consensus” of elite interests. Thus, experts, as Henry Kissinger defines them, serve established elites.

In 1970, Brzezinski wrote a highly influential book, Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era, which attracted the interest of Chase Manhattan Chairman (and Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations) David Rockefeller. The two men then worked together to create the Trilateral Commission, of which Kissinger became a member. Kissinger remained as National Security Advisor for President Ford, and when Jimmy Carter became President (after Brzezinski invited him into the Trilateral Commission), Brzezinski became his National Security Advisor, also bringing along dozens of other members of the Trilateral Commission into the administration’s cabinet.

In a study published in the journal Polity in 1982, researchers described what amounted to modern Machiavellis who “whisper in the ears of princes,” notably, prominent academic-turned policy-makers like Walt Rostow, Henry Kissinger, and Zbigniew Brzezinski. The researchers constructed a ‘survey’ in 1980 which was distributed to a sample of officials in the State Department, CIA, Department of Defense and the National Security Council (the four government agencies primarily tasked with managing foreign policy), designed to assess the views of those who implement foreign policy related to how they measure influence held by academics. They compared their results with a similar survey conducted in 1971, and found that in both surveys, academics such as George Kennan, Hans Morgenthau, Henry Kissinger, and Zbigniew Brzezinski were listed as among the members of the academic community who most influenced the thinking of those who took the survey. In the 1971 survey, George Kennan was listed as the most influential, followed by Hans Morgenthau, John K. Galbraith, Henry Kissinger, E.O. Reischauer and Zbigniew Brzezinski; in the 1980 survey, Henry Kissinger was listed as the most influential, followed by Hans Morgenthau, George Kennan, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Stanley Hoffmann. [8]

Of the fifteen most influential scholars in the 1980 survey, eleven received their highest degree from a major East Coast university, eight held a doctorate from Harvard, twelve were associated with major East Coast universities, while seven of them had previously taught at Harvard. More than half of the top fifteen scholars had previously held prominent government positions, eight were members of the Council on Foreign Relations, ten belonged to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and eight belonged to the American Political Science Association. Influence tended to sway according to which of the four government agencies surveyed was being assessed, though for Kissinger, Morgenthau and Brzezinski, they “were equally influential with each of the agencies surveyed.” The two most influential academic journals cited by survey responses were Foreign Affairs (run by the Council on Foreign Relations), read by more than two-thirds of those who replied to the survey, and Foreign Policy, which was read by more than half of respondents. [9]

In a 1975 report by the Trilateral Commission on The Crisis of Democracy, co-authored by Samuel Huntington, a close associate and friend of Zbigniew Brzezinski, the role of intellectuals came into question, noting that with the plethora of social movements and protests that had emerged from the 1960s onwards, intellectuals were asserting their “disgust with the corruption, materialism, and inefficiency of democracy and with the subservience of democratic government to ‘monopoly capitalism’.” Thus, noted the report: “the advanced industrial societies have spawned a stratum of value-oriented intellectuals who often devote themselves to the derogation of leadership, the challenging of authority, and the unmasking and delegitimation of established institutions, their behavior contrasting with that of the also increasing numbers of technocratic policy-oriented intellectuals.”[10] In other words, intellectuals were increasingly failing to serve as “experts” (as Henry Kissinger defined it), and were increasingly challenging authority and institutionalized power structures instead of serving them, unlike “technocratic and policy-oriented intellectuals.”

The influence of “experts” and “technocratic policy-oriented intellectuals” like Kissinger and Brzezinski was not to dissipate going into the 1980s. Kissinger then joined the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), taught at Georgetown University, and in 1982, founded his own consulting firm, Kissinger Associates, co-founded and run with General Brent Scowcroft, who was the National Security Advisor for President Ford, after being Kissinger’s deputy in the Nixon administration. Scowcroft is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, CSIS, and The Atlantic Council of the United States, which also includes Kissinger and Brzezinski among its leadership boards. Scowcroft also founded his own international advisory firm, the Scowcroft Group, and also served as National Security Advisor to President George H.W. Bush.

Kissinger Associates, which included not only Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft, but also Lawrence Eagleburger, Kissinger’s former aide in the Nixon administration, and Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs in the Reagan administration, and briefly as Deputy Secretary of State in the George H.W. Bush administration. These three men, who led Kissinger Associates in the 1980s, made a great deal of money advising some of the world’s leading corporations, including ITT, American Express, Coca-Cola, Volvo, Fiat, and Midland Bank, among others. Kissinger Associates charges corporate clients at least $200,000 for “offering geopolitical insight” and “advice,” utilizing “their close relationships with foreign governments and their extensive knowledge of foreign affairs.”[11]

While he was Chairman of Kissinger Associates, advising corporate clients, Henry Kissinger was also appointed to chair the National Bipartisan Commission on Central America by President Reagan from 1983 to 1985, commonly known as the Kissinger Commission, which provided the strategic framework for Reagan’s terror war on Central America. As Kissinger himself noted in 1983, “If we cannot manage Central America… it will be impossible to convince threatened nations in the Persian Gulf and in other places that we know how to manage the global equilibrium.” [12] In other words, if the United States could not control a small region south of its border, how can it be expected to run the world?

Between 1984 and 1990, Henry Kissinger was also appointed to Reagan’s (and subsequently Bush Sr.’s) Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, an organization that provides “advice” to the President on intelligence issues, which Brzezinski joined between 1987 and 1989. Brzezinski also served as a member of Reagan’s Chemical Warfare Commission, and from 1987 to 1988, worked with Reagan’s U.S. National Security Council-Defense Department Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy, alongside Henry Kissinger. The Commission’s report, Discriminate Deterrence, issued in 1988, noted that the United States would have to establish new capabilities to deal with threats, particularly in the ‘Third World,’ noting that while conflicts in the ‘Third World’ “are obviously less threatening than any Soviet-American war would be,” they still “have had and will have an adverse cumulative effect on U.S. access to critical regions,” and if these effects cannot be managed, “it will gradually undermine America’s ability to defend its interest in the most vital regions, such as the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean and the Western Pacific.”[13]

Over the following decade, the report noted, “the United States will need to be better prepared to deal with conflicts in the Third World” which would “require new kinds of planning.” If the United States could not effectively counter the threats to U.S. interests and allies, notably, “if the warfare is of low intensity and protracted, and if they use guerrilla forces, paramilitary terrorist organizations, or armed subversives,” or, in other words, revolutionary movements, then “we will surely lose the support of many Third World countries that want to believe the United States can protect its friends, not to mention its own interests.” Most ‘Third World’ conflicts are termed “low intensity conflict,” referring to “insurgencies, organized terrorism, [and] paramilitary crime,” and therefore the United States would need to take these conflicts more seriously, noting that within such circumstances, “the enemy” is essentially “omnipresent,” meaning that the enemy is the population itself, “and unlikely ever to surrender.”[14]

From Cold War to New World Order: ‘Containment’ to ‘Enlargement’

At the end of the Cold War, the American imperial community of intellectuals and think tanks engaged in a process that continues to the present day in attempting to outline a geostrategic vision for America’s domination of the world. The Cold War had previously provided the cover for the American extension of hegemony around the world, under the premise of ‘containing’ the Soviet Union and the spread of ‘Communism.’ With the end of the Cold War came the end of the ‘containment’ policy of foreign policy. It was the task of ‘experts’ and ‘policy-oriented intellectuals’ to assess the present circumstances of American power in the world and to construct new strategic concepts for the extension and preservation of that power.

In 1990, George H.W. Bush’s administration released the National Security Strategy of the United States in which the Cold War was officially acknowledged as little more than a rhetorical deception. The document referenced U.S. interventions in the Middle East, which were for decades justified on the basis of ‘containing’ the perceived threat of ‘communism’ and the Soviet Union. The report noted that, “even as East-West tensions diminish, American strategic concerns remain.” Threats to America’s “interests” in the region, such as “the security of Israel and moderate Arab states” – otherwise known as ruthless dictatorships – “as well as the free flow of oil – come from a variety of sources.” Citing previous military interventions in the region, the report stated that they “were in response to threats to U.S. interests that could not be laid at the Kremlin’s door.” In other words, all the rhetoric of protecting the world from communism and the Soviet Union was little more than deception. As the National Security Strategy noted: “The necessity to defend our interests will continue.” [15]

When Bush became president in 1989, he ordered his national security team – headed by Brent Scowcroft – to review national security policy. Bush and Scowcroft had long discussed – even before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait – the notion that the U.S. will have to make its priority dealing with “Third World bullies” (a euphemism referring to U.S. puppet dictators who stop following orders). At the end of the Cold War, George Bush declared a ‘new world order,’ a term which was suggested to Bush by Brent Scowcroft during a discussion “about future foreign-policy crises.” [16]

Separate from the official National Security Strategy, the internal assessment of national security policy commissioned by Bush was partly leaked to and reported in the media in 1991. As the Los Angeles Times commented, the review dispensed with “sentimental nonsense about democracy.” [17] The New York Times quoted the review: “In cases where the U.S. confronts much weaker enemies, our challenge will be not simply to defeat them, but to defeat them decisively and rapidly… For small countries hostile to us, bleeding our forces in protracted or indecisive conflict or embarrassing us by inflicting damage on some conspicuous element of our forces may be victory enough, and could undercut political support for U.S. efforts against them.” [18] In other words, the capacity to justify and undertake large-scale wars and ground invasions had deteriorated substantially, so it would be necessary to “decisively and rapidly” destroy “much weaker enemies.”

Zbigniew Brzezinski was quite blunt in his assessment of the Cold War – of which he was a major strategic icon – when he wrote in a 1992 article for Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, that the U.S. strategic discourse of the Cold War as a battle between Communist totalitarianism and Western democracy was little more than rhetoric. In Brzezinski’s own words: “The policy of liberation was a strategic sham, designed to a significant degree for domestic political reasons… the policy was basically rhetorical, at most tactical.” [19] In other words, it was all a lie, carefully constructed to deceive the American population into accepting the actions of a powerful state in its attempts to dominate the world.

In 1992, the New York Times leaked a classified document compiled by top Pentagon officials (including Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney) devising a strategy for America in the post-Cold War world. As the Times summarized, the Defense Policy Guidance document “asserts that America’s political and military mission in the post-cold-war era will be to ensure that no rival superpower is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia or the territories of the former Soviet Union.” The document “makes the case for a world dominated by one superpower whose position can be perpetuated by constructive behavior and sufficient military might to deter any nation or group of nations from challenging American primacy.” [20]

In the Clinton administration, prominent “policy-oriented intellectuals” filled key foreign policy positions, notably Madeleine Albright, first as ambassador to the UN and then as Secretary of State, and Anthony Lake as National Security Advisor. Anthony Lake was a staffer in Kissinger’s National Security Council during the Nixon administration (though he resigned in protest following the ‘secret’ bombing of Cambodia). Lake was subsequently recruited into the Trilateral Commission, and was then appointed as policy planning director in Jimmy Carter’s State Department under Secretary of State (and Trilateral Commission/Council on Foreign Relations member) Cyrus Vance. Richard Holbrooke and Warren Christopher were also brought into the Trilateral Commission, then to the Carter administration, and resurfaced in the Clinton administration. Holbrooke and Lake had even been college roommates for a time. Madeleine Albright had studied at Columbia University under Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was her dissertation advisor. When Brzezinski became National Security Adviser in the Carter administration, he brought in Albright as a special assistant. [21]

Anthony Lake was responsible for outlining the ‘Clinton Doctrine,’ which he elucidated in a 1993 speech at Johns Hopkins University, where he stated: “The successor to a doctrine of containment must be a strategy of enlargement – enlargement of the world’s free community of market democracies.” This strategy “must combine our broad goals of fostering democracy and markets with our more traditional geostrategic interests,” noting that, “[o]ther American interests at times will require us to befriend and even defend non-democratic states for mutually beneficial reasons.” [22] In other words, nothing has changed, save the rhetoric: the interest of American power is in “enlarging” America’s economic and political domination of the world.

In 1997, Brzezinski published a book outlining his strategic vision for America’s role in the world, entitled The Grand Chessboard. He wrote that “the chief geopolitical prize” for America was ‘Eurasia,’ referring to the connected landmass of Asia and Europe: “how America ‘manages’ Eurasia is critical. Eurasia is the globe’s largest continent and is geopolitically axial. A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world’s three most advanced and economically productive regions. A mere glance at the map also suggests that control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail African subordination.”[23] The “twin interests” of the United States, wrote Brzezinski, were, “in the short-term preservation of its unique global power and in the long-run transformation of it into increasingly institutionalized global cooperation.” Brzezinski then wrote:

To put it in a terminology that hearkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.[24]

The officials from the George H.W. Bush administration who drafted the 1992 Defense Policy Guidance report spent the Clinton years in neoconservative think tanks, such as the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). Essentially using the 1992 document as a blueprint, the PNAC published a report in 2000 entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces, and Resources for a New Century. In contrast to previous observations from strategists like Brzezinski and Scowcroft, the neocons were not opposed to implementing large-scale wars, declaring that, “the United States must retain sufficient forces able to rapidly deploy and win multiple simultaneous large-scale wars.” The report stated that there was a “need to retain sufficient combat forces to fight and win, multiple, nearly simultaneous major theatre wars” and that “the Pentagon needs to begin to calculate the force necessary to protect, independently, US interests in Europe, East Asia and the Gulf at all times.”[25]

Drafted by many of the neocons who would later lead the United States into the Iraq war (including Paul Wolfowitz), the report recommended that the United States establish a strong military presence in the Middle East: “the United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.”[26]

When the Bush administration came to power in 2001, it brought in a host of neoconservatives to key foreign policy positions, including Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. As one study noted, “among the 24 Bush appointees who have been most closely identified as neocons or as close to them, there are 27 links with conservative think tanks, 19 with their liberal counterparts and 20 with ‘neocon’ think tanks,” as well as 11 connections with the Council on Foreign Relations.[27]

The 2002 U.S. National Security Strategy announced by the Bush administration, thereafter referred to as the “Bush doctrine,” which included the usual rhetoric about democracy and freedom, and then established the principle of “preemptive war” and unilateral intervention for America’s War of Terror, noting: “the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively. The United States will not use force in all cases to preempt emerging threats, nor should nations use preemption as a pretext for aggression. Yet in an age where the enemies of civilization openly and actively seek the world’s most destructive technologies, the United States cannot remain idle while dangers gather.”[28] The doctrine announced that the U.S. “will constantly strive to enlist the support of the international community, [but] we will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self-defense by acting preemptively against terrorists.”[29]

A fusion of neoconservative and traditional liberal internationalist “policy-oriented intellectuals” was facilitated in 2006 with the release of a report by the Princeton Project on National Security (PPNS), Forging a World of Liberty Under Law: U.S. National Security in the 21^st Century, co-directed by G. John Ikenberry and Anne-Marie Slaughter. Ikenberry was a professor at Princeton and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He had previously served in the State Department Policy Planning staff in the administration of George H.W. Bush, was a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Anne-Marie Slaughter was Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, has served on the board of the Council on Foreign Relations, the New America Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy, New American Security, the Truman Project, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and has also served on the boards of McDonald’s and Citigroup, as well as often being a State Department adviser.

While the Bush administration and the neoconservatives within it had articulated a single vision of a ‘global war on terror,’ the objective of the Princeton Project’s report was to encourage the strategic acknowledgement of multiple, conflicting and complex threats to American power. Essentially, it was a project formed by prominent intellectual elites in reaction to the myopic and dangerous vision and actions projected by the Bush administration; a way to re-align strategic objectives based upon a more coherent analysis and articulation of the interests of power. One of its main critiques was against the notion of “unilateralism” advocated in the Bush Doctrine and enacted with the Iraq War. The aim of the report, in its own words, was to “set forth agreed premises or foundational principles to guide the development of specific national security strategies by successive administrations in coming decades.”[30]

The Honourary Co-Chairs of the Project report were Anthony Lake, Clinton’s former National Security Adviser, and George P. Shultz, former U.S. Secretary of Labor and Secretary of the Treasury in the Nixon administration, U.S. Secretary of State in the Reagan administration, president of Bechtel Corporation, and was on the International Advisory Council of JP Morgan Chase, a director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a member of the Hoover Institution, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and was on the boards of a number of corporations.

Among the co-sponsors of the project (apart from Princeton) were: the Brookings Institution, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Centre for International Governance Innovation, Oxford, Stanford, the German Marshall Fund, and the Hoover Institution, among others. Most financing for the Project came from the Woodrow Wilson School/Princeton, the Ford Foundation, and David M. Rubenstein, one of the world’s richest billionaires, co-founder of the global private equity firm the Carlyle Group, on the boards of Duke University, the Brookings Institution, the Council on Foreign Relations, President of the Economic Club of Washington, and the International Business Council of the World Economic Forum. [31]

Among the “experts” who participated in the Project were: Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Eliot Cohen, Francis Fukuyama, Leslie Gelb, Richard Haas, Robert Kagan, Jessica Tuchman Matthews, Joseph S. Nye, James Steinberg, and Strobe Talbott, among many others. Among the participating institutions were: Princeton, Harvard, Yale, CSIS, the Brookings Institution, Council on Foreign Relations, Carnegie Endowment, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, World Bank, the State Department, National Security Council, Citigroup, Ford Foundation, German Marshall Fund, Kissinger Associates, the Scowcroft Group, Cato Institute, Morgan Stanley, Carlyle Group. Among the participants in the Project were no less than 18 members of the Council on Foreign Relations, 10 members of the Brookings Institution, 6 members of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and several representatives from foreign governments, including Canada, Australia, and Japan.[32]

The Road to “Hope” and “Change”

After leaving the Clinton administration, Madeleine Albright founded her own consulting firm in 2001, The Albright Group, since re-named the Albright Stonebridge Group, co-chaired by Albright and Clinton’s second National Security Adviser Samuel Berger, advising multinational corporations around the world. Albright is also chair of Albright Capital Management LLC, an investment firm which focuses on ‘emerging markets.’ Albright is also on the board of directors of the Council on Foreign Relations, is a professor at Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, chairs the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, the Pew Global Attitudes Project, and is president of the Truman Scholarship Foundation. She is also on the board of trustees of the Aspen Institute, a member of the Atlantic Council, and in 2009 was recruited by NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen to chair the ‘group of experts’ tasked with drafting NATO’s New Strategic Concept for the world.

Kissinger, Scowcroft, and Albright are not the only prominent “former” statespersons to have established consulting firms for large multinational conglomerates, as the far less known Brzezinski Group is also a relevant player, “a consulting firm that provides strategic insight and advice to commercial and government clients,” headed by Zbig’s son, Ian Brzezinski. Ian is a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council and also sits on its Strategic Advisors Group, having previously served as a principal at Booz Allen Hamilton, a major global consulting firm. Prior to that, Ian Brzezinski was Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Europe and NATO Policy in the Bush administration, from 2001 to 2005, and had previously served for many years on Capitol Hill as a senior staff member in the Senate. Zbigniew Brzezinski’s other son, Mark Brzezinski, is currently the U.S. Ambassador to Sweden, having previously been a corporate and securities associate at Hogan & Hartson LLP, after which he served in Bill Clinton’s National Security Council from 1999 to 2001. Mark Brzezinski was also an advisor to Barack Obama during his first presidential campaign starting in 2007. Among other notable advisors to Obama during his presidential campaign were Susan Rice, a former Clinton administration State Department official (and protégé to Madeleine Albright), as well as Clinton’s former National Security Advisor Anthony Lake. [33]

No less significant was the fact that Zbigniew Brzezinski himself was tapped as a foreign policy advisor to Obama during the presidential campaign. In August of 2007, Brzezinski publically endorsed Obama for president, stating that Obama “recognizes that the challenge is a new face, a new sense of direction, a new definition of America’s role in the world.” He added: “Obama is clearly more effective and has the upper hand. He has a sense of what is historically relevant and what is needed from the United States in relationship to the world.”[34] Brzezinski was quickly tapped as a top foreign policy advisor to Obama, who delivered a speech on Iraq in which he referred to Brzezinski as “one of our most outstanding thinkers.”[35] According to an Obama campaign spokesperson, Brzezinski was primarily brought on to advise Obama on matters related to Iraq. [36]

Thus, it would appear that Brzezinski may not have been exaggerating too much when he told the Congressional publication, The Hill, in January of 2013 that, “I really wasn’t at all conscious of the fact that the defeat of the Carter administration somehow or another affected significantly my own standing… I just kept doing my thing minus the Office of the National Security Adviser in the White House.” While Brzezinski had advised subsequent presidents Reagan and Bush Sr., and had close ties with key officials in the Clinton administration (notably his former student and NSC aide Madeleine Albright), he was “shut out of the George W. Bush White House” when it was dominated by the neoconservatives, whom he was heavily critical of, most especially in response to the Iraq War. [37]

In the first four years of the Obama administration, Brzezinski was much sought out for advice from Democrats and Republicans alike. On this, he stated: “It’s more a case of being asked than pounding on the doors… But if I have something to say, I know enough people that I can get in touch with to put [my thoughts] into circulation.” When Afghan President Hamid Karzai visited Washington, D.C. in early 2013, Brzezinski was invited to a special dinner hosted by the Afghan puppet leader, of which he noted: “I have a standard joke that I am on the No. 2 or No. 3 must-visit list in this city… That is to say, if a foreign minister or an ambassador or some other senior dignitary doesn’t get to see the President, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Adviser, then I’m somewhere on that other list as a fallback.”[38]

Today, Zbigniew Brzezinski is no small player on the global scene. Not only is he an occasional and unofficial adviser to politicians, but he remains in some of the main centers of strategic planning and power in the United States. Brzezinski’s background is fairly well established, not least of all due to his role as National Security Adviser and his part in the creation of the Trilateral Commission with David Rockefeller in 1973. Brzezinski was also (and remains) a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and was a director of the CFR from 1972 to 1977. Today, he is a member of the CFR with his son Mark Brzezinski and his daughter Mika Brzezinski, a media personality on CNBC. Brzezinski is a Counselor and Trustee of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and he is also co-Chair (with Carla A. Hills) of the Advisory Board of CSIS, composed of international and US business leaders and current and former government officials, including: Paul Desmarais Jr. (Power Corporation of Canada), Kenneth Duberstein (Duberstein Group), Dianne Feinstein (U.S. Senator), Timothy Keating (Boeing), Senator John McCain, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, and top officials from Chevron, Procter & Gamble, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Exxon Mobil, Toyota, and United Technologies.[39]

And now we make our way to the Obama administration, the promised era of “hope” and “change;” or something like that. Under Obama, the two National Security Advisors thus far have been General James L. Jones and Tom Donilon. General Jones, who was Obama’s NSA from 2009 to 2010, previously and is now once again a trustee with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Just prior to becoming National Security Advisor, Jones was president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for 21^st Century Energy, after a career rising to 32^nd commandant of the Marine Corps and commander of U.S. European Command. He was also on the boards of directors of Chevron and Boeing, resigning one month prior to taking up his post in the Obama administration.

Shortly after Jones first became National Security Advisor, he was speaking at a conference in February of 2009 at which he stated (with tongue-in-cheek), “As the most recent National Security Advisor of the United States, I take my daily orders from Dr. Kissinger, filtered down through General Brent Scowcroft and Sandy Berger… We have a chain of command in the National Security Council that exists today.”[40] Although said in jest, there is a certain truth to this notion. Yet, Jones only served in the Obama administration from January 2009 to October of 2010, after which he returned to more familiar pastures.

Apart from returning as a trustee to CSIS, Jones is currently the chairman of the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security and is on the board and executive committee of the Atlantic Council (he was previously chairman of the board of directors from 2007 to 2009). Jones is also on the board of the East-West Institute, and in 2011 served on the board of directors of the military contractor, General Dynamics. General Jones is also the president of his own international consulting firm, Jones Group International. The Group’s website boasts “a unique and unrivaled experience with numerous foreign governments, advanced international relationships, and an understanding of the national security process to develop strategic plans to help clients succeed in challenging environments.” A testimonial of Jones’ skill was provided by Thomas Donohue, the president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce: “Few leaders possess the wisdom, depth of experience, and knowledge of global and domestic economic and military affairs as General Jones.”[41]

Obama’s current NSA, Thomas E. Donilon, was previously deputy to General James Jones, and worked as former Assistant Secretary of State and chief of staff to Secretary of State Warren Christopher in Clinton’s administration. From 1999 to 2005, he was a lobbyist exclusively for the housing mortgage company Fannie Mae (which helped create and pop the housing bubble and destroy the economy). Donilon’s brother, Michael C. Donilon, is a counselor to Vice President Joseph Biden. Donilon’s wife, Cathy Russell, is chief of staff to Biden’s wife, Jill Biden. [42] Prior to joining the Obama administration, Thomas Donilon also served as a legal advisor to banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. [43]

CSIS: The ‘Brain’ of the Obama Administration

While serving as national security advisor, Thomas Donilon spoke at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in November of 2012. He began his speech by stating that for roughly half a century, CSIS has been “the intellectual capital that has informed so many of our national security policies, including during the Obama administration… We’ve shared ideas and we’ve shared staff.”[44]

Indeed, CSIS has been an exceptionally influential presence within the Obama administration. CSIS launched a Commission on ‘Smart Power’ in 2006, co-chaired by Joseph S. Nye, Jr. and Richard Armitage, with the final report delivered in 2008, designed to influence the next president of the United States on implementing “a smart power strategy.” Joseph Nye is known for – among other things – developing the concept of what he calls “soft power” to describe gaining support through “attraction” rather than force. In the lead-up to the 2008 presidential elections, Nye stated that if Obama became president, it “would do more for America’s soft power around the world than anything else we could do.”[45]

Joseph Nye is the former Dean of the Kennedy School, former senior official in the Defense and State Departments, former Chair of the National Intelligence Council, and a highly influential political scientist who was rated in a 2008 poll of international relations scholars as “the most influential scholar in the field on American foreign policy,” and was also named as one of the top 100 global thinkers in a 2011 Foreign Policy report. Nye is also Chairman of the North American Group of the Trilateral Commission, is on the board of directors of the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the board of trustees of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and a former director of the Institute for East-West Security Studies, the International Institute of Strategic Studies, and a former member of the advisory committee of the Institute of International Economics.

Richard Armitage, the other co-chair of the CSIS Commission on Smart Power, is the President of Armitage International, a global consulting firm, and was Deputy Secretary of State from 2001-2005 in the George W. Bush administration, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs in the Reagan administration, and is on the boards of ConocoPhillips, a major oil company, as well as ManTech International and Transcu Group, and of course, a trustee at CSIS.

In the Commission’s final report, A Smarter, More Secure America, the term ‘smart power’ was defined as “complementing U.S. military and economic might with greater investments in soft power,” recommending that the United States “reinvigorate the alliances, partnerships, and institutions that serve our interests,” as well as increasing the role of “development in U.S. foreign policy” which would allow the United States to “align its own interests with the aspirations of people around the world.” Another major area of concern was that of “[b]ringing foreign populations to our side,” which depended upon “building long-term, people-to-people relationships, particularly among youth.” Further, the report noted that “the benefits of free trade must be expanded” and that it was America’s responsibility to “establish global consensus and develop innovative solutions” for issues such as energy security and climate change. [46]

The forward to the report was authored by CSIS president and CEO, John Hamre, who wrote: “We have all seen the poll numbers and know that much of the world today is not happy with American leadership,” with even “traditional allies” beginning to question “American values and interests, wondering whether they are compatible with their own.” Hamre spoke for the American imperial establishment: “We do not have to be loved, but we will never be able to accomplish our goals and keep Americans safe without mutual respect.” What was needed, then, was to utilize their “moment of opportunity” in order “to strike off on a big idea that balances a wiser internationalism with the desire for protection at home.” In world affairs, the center of gravity, wrote Hamre, “is shifting to Asia.” Thus, “[a]s the only global superpower, we must manage multiple crises simultaneously while regional competitors can focus their attention and efforts.” What is required is to strengthen “capable states, alliances, partnerships, and institutions.” Military might, noted Hamre, while “typically the bedrock of a nation’s power,” remains “an inadequate basis for sustaining American power over time.”[47]

In their summary of the report, Nye and Armitage wrote that the ultimate “goal of U.S. foreign policy should be to prolong and preserve American preeminence as an agent for good.” The goal, of course, was to ‘prolong and preserve American preeminence,’ whereas the notion of being ‘an agent for good’ was little more than a rhetorical add-on, since for policy-oriented intellectuals like those at CSIS, American preeminence is inherently a ‘good’ thing, and therefore preserving American hegemony is – it is presumed – by definition, being ‘an agent for good.’ Nye and Armitage suggested that the U.S. “should have higher ambitions than being popular,” though acknowledging, “foreign opinion matters to U.S. decision-making,” so long as it aligns with U.S. decisions, presumably. A “good reputation,” they suggested, “brings acceptance for unpopular ventures.” This was not to mark a turn away from using military force, as was explicitly acknowledged: “We will always have our enemies, and we cannot abandon our coercive tools.” Using “soft power,” however, was simply to add to America’s arsenal of military and economic imperialism: “bolstering soft power makes America stronger.”[48]

Power, they wrote, “is the ability to influence the behavior of others to get a desired outcome,” noting the necessity of “hard power” – military and economic strength – but, while “[t]here is no other global power… American hard power does not always translate into influence.” While technological advances “have made weapons more precise, they have also become more destructive, thereby increasing the political and social costs of using military force.” Modern communications, they noted, “diminished the fog of war,” which is to say that they have facilitated more effective communication and management in war-time, “but also heightened the atomized political consciousness,” which is to say that it has allowed populations all over the world to gain access to information and communication outside the selectivity of traditional institutions of power.[49]

These trends “have made power less tangible and coercion less effective.” The report noted: “Machiavelli said it was safer to be feared than to be loved. Today, in the global information age, it is better to be both.” Thus, “soft power… is the ability to attract people to our side without coercion,” making “legitimacy” the central concept of soft power. As such, if nations and people believe “American objectives to be legitimate, we are more likely to persuade them to follow our lead without using threats and bribes.” Noting that America’s “enemies” in the world are largely non-state actors and groups who “control no territory, hold few assets, and sprout new leaders for each one that is killed,” victory becomes problematic: “Militaries are well suited to defeating states, but they are often poor instruments to fight ideas.” Thus, victory in the modern world “depends on attracting foreign populations to our side,” of which ‘soft power’ is a necessity. [50]

Despite various “military adventures in the Western hemisphere and in the Philippines” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, “the U.S. military has not been put in the service of building a colonial empire in the manner of European militaries,” the report read, acknowledging quite plainly that while not a formal colonial empire, the United States was an imperial power nonetheless. Since World War II, “America has sought to promote rules and order in a world in which life continues to be nasty, brutish, and short for the majority of inhabitants.” While “the appeal of Hollywood and American products can play a role in inspiring the dreams and desires of others,” soft power is not merely cultural, but also promotes “political values” and “our somewhat reluctant participation and leadership in institutions that help shape the global agenda.” However, a more “interconnected and tolerant world” is not something everyone is looking forward to, noted the authors: “ideas can be threatening to those who consider their way of life to be under siege by the West,” which is to say, the rest of the world. Smart power, then, “is neither hard nor soft – it is the skillful combination of both,” and “means developing an integrated strategy, resource base, and tool kit to achieve American objectives, drawing on both hard and soft power.” [51]

Other members of the CSIS Commission on Smart Power included: Nancy Kassebaum Baker, former US Senator and member of the advisory board of the Partnership for a Secure America; General Charles G. Boyd, former president and CEO of the Business Executives for National Security, former director of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR); as well as Maurice Greenberg, Thomas Pickering, David Rubenstein and Obama’s newest Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel.

It’s quite apparent that members of the CSIS Commission and CSIS itself would be able to wield significant influence upon the Obama administration. Joseph Nye has even advised Hillary Clinton while she served as Secretary of State. [52] Perhaps then, we should not be surprised that at her Senate confirmation hearing in January of 2009, Clinton declared the era of “rigid ideology” in diplomacy to be at an end, and the foreign policy of “smart power” to be exercised, that she would make decisions based “on facts and evidence, not emotions or prejudice.”[53]

Before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Clinton declared: “We must use what has been called smart power, the full range of tools at our disposal – diplomatic, economic, military, political, legal, and cultural – picking the right tool, or combination of tools, for each situation.” She quoted the ancient Roman poet Terence, “in every endeavor, the seemly course for wise men is to try persuasion first,” then added: “The same truth binds wise women as well.”[54]

While Joseph Nye had coined the term “soft power” in the 1990s, Suzanne Nossel coined the term “smart power.” Nossel was the chief operating officer of Human Rights Watch, former executive at media conglomerate Bertelsmann, and was a former deputy to UN Ambassador Richard Holbrooke in the Clinton administration. She coined the term “smart power” in a 2004 issue of Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, after which time Joseph Nye began using it, leading to the CSIS Commission on Smart Power. At the Senate hearing, Senator Jim Webb stated, “the phrase of the week is ‘smart power’.” Nossel commented on Clinton’s Senate hearing: “Hillary was impressive… She didn’t gloss over the difficulties, but at the same time she was fundamentally optimistic. She’s saying that, by using all the tools of power in concert, the trajectory of American decline can be reversed. She’ll make smart power cool.”[55]

Following the first six months of the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton was to deliver a major foreign policy speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, where she would articulate “her own policy agenda,” focusing on the strengthening of “smart power.” One official involved in the speech planning process noted that it would include discussion on “U.S. relations with [and] management of the great powers in a way that gets more comprehensive.” The speech was long in the making, and was being overseen by the director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Council, Anne-Marie Slaughter. [56]

Slaughter was director of Policy Planning in the State Department from 2009 to 2011, where she was chief architect of the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, designed to better integrate development into U.S. foreign policy, with the first report having been released in 2010. She is also a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton, was co-Chair of the Princeton Project on National Security, former Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, served on the boards of the Council on Foreign Relations (2003-2009), the New America Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy, New American Security, the Truman Project, and formerly with CSIS, also having been on the boards of McDonald’s and Citigroup. Slaughter is currently a member of the Aspen Strategy Group, the CFR, a member of the board of directors of the Atlantic Council, and has been named on Foreign Policy‘s Top 100 Global Thinkers for the years 2009-2012.

In preparation for her speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, according to the Washington Post blog, Plum Line, Clinton “consulted” with a “surprisingly diverse” group of people, including: Henry Kissinger, George Schultz, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Paul Farmer, Joseph Nye, Francis Fukuyama, Brent Scowcroft, Strobe Talbott (president of the Brookings Institution), John Podesta, and Richard Lugar, as well as Defense Secretary Robert Gates, then-National Security Advisor General James Jones, and President Obama himself.[57]

When Clinton began speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C., she stated: “I am delighted to be here in these new headquarters. I have been often to, I guess, the mother ship in New York City, but it’s good to have an outpost of the Council right here down the street from the State Department. We get a lot of advice form the Council, and so this will mean I won’t have as far to go to be told what we should be doing and how we should think about the future.” Many in the world do not trust America to lead, explained Clinton, “they view America as an unaccountable power, too quick to impose its will at the expense of their interests and our principles,” but, Clinton was sure to note: “they are wrong.” The question, of course, was “not whether our nation can or should lead, but how it will lead in the 21^st century,” in which “[r]igid ideologies and old formulas don’t apply.” Clinton claimed that “[l]iberty, democracy, justice and opportunity underlie our priorities,” even though others “accuse us of using these ideals to justify actions that contradict their very meaning,” suggesting that “we are too often condescending and imperialistic, seeking only to expand our power at the expense of others.”[58]

These perceptions, explained Clinton, “have fed anti-Americanism, but they do not reflect who we are.” America’s strategy “must reflect the world as it is, not as it used to be,” and therefore, “[i]t does not make sense to adapt a 19^th century concert of powers, or a 20^th century balance of power strategy.” Clinton explained that the strategy would seek to tilt “the balance away from a multi-polar world and toward a multi-partner world,” in which “our partnerships can become power coalitions to constrain and deter [the] negative actions” of those who do not share “our values and interests” and “actively seek to undermine our efforts.” In order to construct “the architecture of global cooperation,” Clinton recommended “smart power” as “the intelligent use of all means at our disposal, including our ability to convene and connect… our economic and military strength,” as well as “the application of old-fashioned common sense in policymaking… a blend of principle and pragmatism.” Noting that, “our global and regional institutions were built for a world that has been transformed,” Clinton stated that “they too must be transformed and reformed,” referencing the UN, World Bank, IMF, G20, OAS, ASEAN, and APEC, among others. This “global architecture of cooperation,” said Clinton, “is the architecture of progress for America and all nations.”[59]

Just in case you were thinking that the relationship between CSIS and the Obama administration was not strong enough, apparently both of them thought so too. CSIS wields notable influence within the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, which is chaired by the president and CEO of CSIS, John Hamre. A former Deputy Defense Secretary in the Clinton administration, Hamre is a member of the Aspen Strategy Group, sits on the board of defense contractors such as ITT, SAIC, and the Oshkosh Corporation, as well as MITRE, a “not-for-profit” corporation which “manages federally funded research and development centers.” The Defense Policy Board provides the Secretary of Defense, as well as the Deputy Secretary and Undersecretary of Defense “with independent, informed advice and opinion on matters of defense policy;” from outside ‘experts’ of course. [60]

Also on the board is Sam Nunn, the chairman of CSIS, co-chair and CEO of the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), former U.S. Senator from 1972-1996, member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and currently on the boards of General Electric, the Coca-Cola Company, Hess Corporation, and was recently on the boards of Dell and Chevron. Other CSIS trustees and advisors who sit on the Defense Policy Board are Harold Brown, Henry Kissinger, James Schlesinger, Brent Scowcroft, General Jack Keane, and Chuck Hagel. [61]

Harold Brown was the Secretary of Defense in the Carter administration, honorary director of the Atlantic Council, member of the boards of Evergreen Oil and Philip Morris International, former partner at Warburg Pincus, director of the Altria Group, Trustee of RAND Corporation, and member of the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations. James Schlesinger was the former Defense Secretary in the Nixon and Ford administrations, Secretary of Energy in the Carter administration, was briefly director of the CIA, a senior advisor to Lehman Brothers, Kuhn, Loeb Inc., and was on George W. Bush’s Homeland Security Advisory Council. He is currently chairman of the MITRE Corporation, a director of the Sandia National Corporation, a trustee of the Atlantic Council and is a board member of the Henry M. Jackson Foundation.

Brent Scowcroft, apart from being Kissinger’s deputy in the Nixon administration, and the National Security Advisor in the Ford and Bush Sr. administrations (as well as co-founder of Kissinger), is currently a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Atlantic Council, and founded his own international advisory firm, the Scowcroft Group. General Jack Keane, a senior advisor to CSIS, is the former Vice Chief of Staff of the US Army, current Chairman of the board for the Institute for the Study of War; Frank Miller, former Defense Department official in the Reagan, Bush Sr., and Clinton administrations, served on the National Security Council in the George W. Bush administration, joined the Cohen Group in 2005, currently a Principal at the Scowcroft Group, and serves on the U.S.-European Command Advisory Group, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a Director of the Atlantic Council, and he serves on the board of EADS-North America (one of the world’s leading defense contract corporations).

Kissinger’s record has been well-established up until present day, though he has been a member of the Defense Policy Board since 2001, thus serving in an advisory capacity to the Pentagon for both the Bush and Obama administrations, continues to serve on the steering committee of the Bilderberg meetings, is a member of the Trilateral Commission and he is currently an advisor to the board of directors of American Express, on the advisory board of the RAND Center for Global Risk and Security, honorary chairman of the China-United States Exchange Foundation, the board of the International Rescue Committee, and is on the International Council of JPMorgan Chase.

Another member of the Policy Board who was a trustee of CSIS was Chuck Hagel, who is now Obama’s Secretary of Defense. Prior to his new appointment, Hagel was a US Senator from 1997 to 2009, after which he was Chairman of the Atlantic Council, on the boards of Chevron, Zurich’s Holding Company of America, Corsair Capital, Deutsche Bank America, MIC Industries, was an advisor to Gallup, member of the board of PBS, member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and was a member of the CSIS Commission on Smart Power. Hagel also served on Obama’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, an outside group of ‘experts’ providing strategic advice to the president on intelligence matters.

Other members of the Defense Policy Board (who are not affiliated with CSIS) are: J.D. Crouch, Deputy National Security Advisor in the George W. Bush administration, and is on the board of advisors of the Center for Security Policy; Richard Danzig, Secretary of the Navy in the Clinton administration, a campaign advisor to Obama, and is the current Chairman of the Center for a New American Security; Rudy de Leon, former Defense Department official in the Clinton administration, a Senior Vice President at the Center for American Progress, and is a former vice president at Boeing Corporation; John Nagl, president of the Center for a New American Security, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations; William Perry, former Secretary of Defense in the Clinton administration, who now sits on a number of corporate boards, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, on the board of the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), and has served on the Carnegie Endowment; Sarah Sewall, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Peacekeeping and Humanitarian Assistance in the Clinton administration, on the board of Oxfam America, and was a foreign policy advisor to Obama’s election campaign; and Larry Welch, former Chief of Staff of the US Air Force in the Reagan administration. More recently added to the Defense Policy Board was none other than Madeleine Albright.

Imperialism without Imperialists?

The ‘discourse’ of foreign affairs and international relations failing to adequately deal with the subject of empire is based upon a deeply flawed perception: that one cannot have an empire without imperialists, and the United States does not have imperialists, it has strategists, experts, and policy-oriented intellectuals. Does the United States, then, have an empire without imperialists? In the whole history of imperialism, that would be a unique situation.

Empires do not happen by chance. Nations do not simply trip and stumble and fall into a state of imperialism. Empires are planned and directed, maintained and expanded. This report aimed to provide some introductory insight into the institutions and individuals who direct the American imperial system. The information – while dense – is far from comprehensive or complete; it is a sample of the complex network of imperialism that exists in present-day United States. Regardless of which president or political party is in office, this highly integrated network remains in power.

This report, produced exclusively for the Hampton Institute, is to serve as a reference point for future discussion and analysis of ‘geopolitics’ and foreign policy issues. As an introduction to the institutions and individuals of empire, it can provide a framework for people to interpret foreign policy differently, to question those quoted and interviewed in the media as ‘experts,’ to integrate their understanding of think tanks into contemporary politics and society, and to bring to the surface the names, organizations and ideas of society’s ruling class.

It is time for more of what the Trilateral Commission dismissively referred to as “value-oriented intellectuals” – those who question and oppose authority – instead of more policy-oriented imperialists. The Geopolitics Division of the Hampton Institute aims to do just that: to provide an intellectual understanding and basis for opposing empire in the modern world.

Empires don’t just happen; they are constructed. They can also be deconstructed and dismantled, but that doesn’t just happen either. Opposing empire is not a passive act: it requires dedication and information, action and reaction. As relatively privileged individuals in western state-capitalist societies, we have both the opportunity and the responsibility to understand and oppose what our governments do abroad, how they treat the people of the world, how they engage with the world. It is our responsibility to do something, precisely because we have the opportunity to do so, unlike the majority of the world’s population who live in abject poverty, under ruthless dictators that we arm and maintain, in countries we bomb and regions we dominate. We exist in the epicenter of empire, and thus: we are the only ones capable of ending empire.

Notes

[1] Julian Pecquet, “Brzezinski: Professor in the halls of power,” The Hill’s Global Affairs, 22 January 2013:

http://thehill.com/blogs/global-affairs/americas/278401-professor-in-the-halls-of-power

[2] David Rothkopf, Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power (Public Affairs, New York: 2005), page 19.

[3] David Rothkopf, Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power (Public Affairs, New York: 2005), pages 19-20.

[4] James D. Wolfensohn, Council on Foreign Relations Special Symposium in honor of David Rockefeller’s 90th Birthday, The Council on Foreign Relations, 23 May 2005:
http://www.cfr.org/world/council-foreign-relations-special-symposium-honor-david-rockefellers-90th-birthday/p8133

[5] Michael Stutchbury, The man who inherited the Rothschild legend, The Australian, 30 October 2010:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/the-man-who-inherited-the-rothschild-legend/story-e6frg6z6-1225945329773

[6] David Rockefeller, Memoirs (Random House, New York: 2002), pages 404 – 405.

[7] Henry A. Kissinger, “Domestic Structure and Foreign Policy,” Daedalus (Vol. 95, No. 2, Conditions of World Order, Spring 1966), page 514.

[8] Sallie M. Hicks, Theodore A. Couloumbis and Eloise M. Forgette, “Influencing the Prince: A Role for Academicians?” Polity (Vol. 15, No. 2, Winter 1982), pages 288-289.

[9] Sallie M. Hicks, Theodore A. Couloumbis and Eloise M. Forgette, “Influencing the Prince: A Role for Academicians?” Polity (Vol. 15, No. 2, Winter 1982), pages 289-291.

[10] Michel J. Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington and Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission (New York University Press, 1975), pages 6-7.

[11] Jeff Gerth and Sarah Bartlett, “Kissinger and Friends and Revolving Doors,” The New York Times, 30 April 1989:

http://www.nytimes.com/1989/04/30/us/kissinger-and-friends-and-revolving-doors.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

[12] Edward Cuddy, “America’s Cuban Obsession: A Case Study in Diplomacy and Psycho-History,” The Americas (Vol. 43, No. 2, October 1986), page 192.

[13] Fred Iklé and Albert Wohlstetter, Discriminate Deterrence (Report of the Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy), January 1988, page 13.

[14] Fred Iklé and Albert Wohlstetter, Discriminate Deterrence (Report of the Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy), January 1988, page 14.

[15] National Security Strategy of the United States (The White House, March 1990), page 13.

[16] The Daily Beast, “This Will Not Stand,” Newsweek, 28 February 1991:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/1991/02/28/this-will-not-stand.html

[17] George Black, “Forget Ideals; Just Give Us a Punching Bag: This time, fronting for oil princes, we couldn’t invoke the old defense of democracy; fighting ‘evil’ sufficed,” The Los Angeles Times, 3 March 1991:

http://articles.latimes.com/1991-03-03/opinion/op-338_1_cold-war

[18] Maureen Dowd, “WAR IN THE GULF: White House Memo; Bush Moves to Control War’s Endgame,” The New York Times, 23 February 1991:

http://www.nytimes.com/1991/02/23/world/war-in-the-gulf-white-house-memo-bush-moves-to-control-war-s-endgame.html?src=pm

[19] Zbigniew Brzezinski, “The Cold War and its Aftermath,” Foreign Affairs (Vol. 71, No. 4, Fall 1992), page 37.

[20] Tyler, Patrick E. U.S. Strategy Plan Calls for Insuring No Rivals Develop: A One Superpower World. The New York Times: March 8, 1992.
http://work.colum.edu/~amiller/wolfowitz1992.htm

[21] David Rothkopf, Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power (Public Affairs, New York: 2005), pages 17-18, 162, 172-175.

[22] Anthony Lake, “From Containment to Enlargement,” Remarks of Anthony Lake at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, Washington, D.C., 21 September 1993:
http://www.fas.org/news/usa/1993/usa-930921.htm

[23] Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives (Basic Books, 1997), pages 30-31.

[24] Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives (Basic Books, 1997), page 40.

[25] Rebuilding America’s Defenses (Project for the New American Century: September 2000), pages 6-8:
http://www.newamericancentury.org/publicationsreports.htm

[26] Rebuilding America’s Defenses (Project for the New American Century: September 2000), page 25:
http://www.newamericancentury.org/publicationsreports.htm

[27] Inderjeet Parmar, “Foreign Policy Fusion: Liberal interventionists, conservative nationalists and neoconservatives – the new alliance dominating the US foreign policy establishment,” International Politics (Vol. 46, No. 2/3, 2009), pages 178-179.

[28] U.S. NSS, “The National Security Strategy of the United States of America,” The White House, September 2002, page 15.

[29] U.S. NSS, “The National Security Strategy of the United States of America,” The White House, September 2002, page 6.

[30] Inderjeet Parmar, “Foreign Policy Fusion: Liberal Interventionists, Conservative Nationalists and Neoconservatives – the New alliance Dominating the US Foreign Policy Establishment,” International Politics (Vol. 46, No. 2/3, 2009), pages 181-183.

[31] G. John Ikenberry and Anne-Marie Slaughter, Forging a World of Liberty Under Law: U.S. National Security in the 21^st Century – Final Report of the Princeton Project on National Security (The Princeton project on National Security, The Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, 27 September 2006), pages 79-90.

[32] G. John Ikenberry and Anne-Marie Slaughter, Forging a World of Liberty Under Law: U.S. National Security in the 21^st Century – Final Report of the Princeton Project on National Security (The Princeton project on National Security, The Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, 27 September 2006), pages 79-90.

[33] The Daily Beast, “The Talent Primary,” Newsweek, 15 September 2007:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2007/09/15/the-talent-primary.html

[34] “Brzezinski Backs Obama,” The Washington Post, 25 August 2007:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/24/AR2007082402127.html

[35] Russell Berman, “Despite Criticism, Obama Stands By Adviser Brzezinski,” The New York Sun, 13 September 2007:

http://www.nysun.com/national/despite-criticism-obama-stands-by-adviser/62534/

[36] Eli Lake, “Obama Adviser Leads Delegation to Damascus,” The New York Sun, 12 February 2008:

http://www.nysun.com/foreign/obama-adviser-leads-delegation-to-damascus/71123/

[37] Julian Pecquet, “Brzezinski: Professor in the halls of power,” The Hill’s Global Affairs, 22 January 2013:

http://thehill.com/blogs/global-affairs/americas/278401-professor-in-the-halls-of-power

[38] Julian Pecquet, “Brzezinski: Professor in the halls of power,” The Hill’s Global Affairs, 22 January 2013:

http://thehill.com/blogs/global-affairs/americas/278401-professor-in-the-halls-of-power

[39] Annual Report 2011, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Strategic Insights and Bipartisan Policy Solutions, page 8.

[40] General James L. Jones, “Remarks by National Security Adviser Jones at 45th Munich Conference on Security Policy,” The Council on Foreign Relations, 8 February 2009:

http://www.cfr.org/defensehomeland-security/remarks-national-security-adviser-jones-45th-munich-conference-security-policy/p18515

[41] Company Profile, Jones Group International website, accessed 9 May 2013:

http://www.jonesgroupinternational.com/company_profile.php

[42] WhoRunsGov, “Thomas Donilon,” The Washington Post:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/thomas-donilon/gIQAEZrv6O_topic.html

[43] Matthew Mosk, “Tom Donilon’s Revolving Door,” ABC News – The Blotter, 10 October 2010:
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/national-security-advisor-tom-donilon/story?id=11836229#.UYsp6IJU1Ox

[44] Tom Donlinon, “Remarks by National Security Advisor Tom Donilon — As Prepared for Delivery,” White House Office of the Press Secretary, 15 November 2012:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/11/15/remarks-national-security-advisor-tom-donilon-prepared-delivery

[45] James Traub, “Is (His) Biography (Our) Destiny?,” The New York Times, 4 November 2007:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/magazine/04obama-t.html?pagewanted=all

[46] Richard Armitage and Joseph Nye, Jr., “CSIS Commission on Smart Power: A Smarter, More Secure America,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2007: page 1.

[47] Richard Armitage and Joseph Nye, Jr., “CSIS Commission on Smart Power: A Smarter, More Secure America,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2007: pages 3-4.

[48] Richard Armitage and Joseph Nye, Jr., “CSIS Commission on Smart Power: A Smarter, More Secure America,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2007: pages 5-6.

[49] Richard Armitage and Joseph Nye, Jr., “CSIS Commission on Smart Power: A Smarter, More Secure America,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2007: page 6.

[50] Richard Armitage and Joseph Nye, Jr., “CSIS Commission on Smart Power: A Smarter, More Secure America,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2007: page 6.

[51] Richard Armitage and Joseph Nye, Jr., “CSIS Commission on Smart Power: A Smarter, More Secure America,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2007: page 7.

[52] Thanassis Cambanis, “Meet the new power players,” The Boston Globe, 4 September 2011:

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011/09/04/meet_the_new_world_players/?page=full

[53] David Usborne, “Clinton announces dawn of ‘smart power’,” The Independent, 14 January 2009:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/clinton-announces-dawn-of-smart-power-1334256.html

[54] Hendrik Hetzberg, “Tool Kit: Smart Power,” The New Yorker, 26 January 2009:

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2009/01/26/090126ta_talk_hertzberg

[55] Hendrik Hetzberg, “Tool Kit: Smart Power,” The New Yorker, 26 January 2009:

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2009/01/26/090126ta_talk_hertzberg

[56] Ben Smith, “Hillary Clinton plans to reassert herself with high-profile speech,” Politico, 14 July 2009:

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0709/24893.html

[57] Originally posted at Slum Line, “Hillary Consulted Republicans, Neocons, And Liberals For Big Foreign Policy Speech,” Future Majority, 14 July 2009:

http://www.futuremajority.com/node/8143

[58] Hillary Clinton, “Foreign Policy Address at the Council on Foreign Relations,” U.S. Department of State, 15 July 2009:

http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2009a/july/126071.htm

[59] Hillary Clinton, “Foreign Policy Address at the Council on Foreign Relations,” U.S. Department of State, 15 July 2009:

http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2009a/july/126071.htm

[60] Marcus Weisgerber, “U.S. Defense Policy Board Gets New Members,” Defense News, 4 October 2011:

http://www.defensenews.com/article/20111004/DEFSECT04/110040304/U-S-Defense-Policy-Board-Gets-New-Members

[61] Marcus Weisgerber, “U.S. Defense Policy Board Gets New Members,” Defense News, 4 October 2011:

http://www.defensenews.com/article/20111004/DEFSECT04/110040304/U-S-Defense-Policy-Board-Gets-New-Members

Centralization and Sociopathology: Concentrated Power & Wealth Are Intrinsically Sociopathological

Oldspeak: “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” -Jiddu Krishnamurti

“We live in a time of unprecedented inequality,  with extreme wealth & power concentration. Concurrently, our civilization is dominated by sociopathic organizations. The two most powerful, the transnational corporate network, and governments worldwide have combined to form an awesome and near omniscient control grid, a corptalitarian oligarchical collective that is manipulating most humans on this planet. This collective has infected most of humanity with its worldview and belief systems, spawning billions of secondary sociopaths who act as gatekeepers, maintaining & defending the sociopathic systems around which society is organized. We’ve reached a point where these systems, rapidly metastasizing via globalization, are in direct conflict with the only system that matters, the ecosystem. If the ecosystem loses this conflict, we all lose. Localization is the key to saving our ecosystem,  Which side are you on?

By C.D. @ Oftwominds:

Concentrated power and wealth are intrinsically sociopathological by their very nature.

 

I have long spoken of the dangers inherent to centralization of power and the extreme concentrations of wealth centralization inevitably creates.

The Master Narrative Nobody Dares Admit: Centralization Has Failed (June 21, 2012)

The Solution to Concentrated Power: Decentralize, Diffuse and Devolve Power (June 22, 2012)

To Fix Healthcare, Let 100 Solutions Bloom (February 26, 2013)

Longtime contributor C.D. recently highlighted another danger of centralization:sociopaths/psychopaths excel in organizations that centralize power, and their ability to flatter, browbeat and manipulate others greases their climb to the top.

In effect, centralization is tailor-made for sociopaths gaining power. Sociopaths seek power over others, and centralization gives them the perfect avenue to control over millions or even entire nations.

Even worse (from the view of non-sociopaths), their perverse abilities are tailor-made for excelling in office and national politics via ruthless elimination of rivals and enemies and grandiose appeals to national greatness, ideological purity, etc.

As C.D. points out, the ultimate protection against sociopathology is to minimize the power held in any one agency, organization or institution:

After you watch these films on psychopaths, I think you’ll have an even greater understanding of why your premise of centralization is a key problem of our society. The first film points out that psychopaths generally thrive in the corporate/government top-down organization (I have seen it happen in my agency, unfortunately) and that when they come to power, their values (or lack thereof) tend to pervade the organization to varying degrees. In some cases, they end up creating secondary psychopaths which is kind of like a spiritual/moral disease that infects people.

If we are to believe the premise in the film that there are always psychopaths among us in small numbers, it follows then that we must limit the power of any one institution, whether it’s private or public, so that the damage created by psychopaths is limited.

It is very difficult for many people to fathom that there are people in our society that are that evil, for lack of a better term, and it is even harder for many people in society to accept that people in the higher strata of our society can exhibit these dangerous traits.

The same goes for criminal behavior. From my studies, it’s pretty clear that criminality is fairly constant throughout the different levels of our society and yet, it is the lower classes that are subjected to more scrutiny by law enforcement. The disparity between blue collar and white collar crime is pretty evident when one looks at arrests and sentencing. The total lack of effective enforcement against politically connected banks over the last few years is astounding to me and it sets a dangerous precedent. Corruption and psychopathy go hand in hand.

A less dark reason for avoiding over centralization is that we have to be aware of normal human fallibility. Nobody possesses enough information, experience, ability, lack of bias, etc. to always make the right decisions.

Defense Against the Psychopath (video, 37 minutes; the many photos of political, religious and secular leaders will likely offend many/most; if you look past these outrages, there is useful information here)

The Sociopath Next Door (video, 37 minutes)

As C.D. observes, once sociopaths rule an organization or nation, they create a zombie army of secondary sociopaths beneath them as those who resist are undermined, banished, fired or exterminated. If there is any lesson to be drawn from Iraq, it is how a single sociopath can completely undermine and destroy civil society by empowering secondary sociopaths and eliminating or marginalizing anyone who dares to cling to their humanity, conscience and independence.

“Going along to get along” breeds passive acceptance of sociopathology as “the new normal” and mimicry of the values and techniques of sociopathology as the ambitious and fearful (i.e. almost everyone) scramble to emulate the “successful” leadership.

Organizations can be perverted into institutionalizing sociopathology via sociopathological goals and rules of conduct. Make the metric of success in war a body count of dead “enemy combatants” and you’ll soon have dead civilians stacked like cordwood as proof of every units’ outstanding success.

Make lowering unemployment the acme of policy success and soon every agency will be gaming and manipulating data to reach that metric of success. Make higher grades the metric of academic success and soon every kid is getting a gold star and an A or B.

Centralization has another dark side: those ensconced in highly concentrated centers of power (for example, The White House) are in another world, and they find it increasingly easy to become isolated from the larger context and to slip into reliance on sycophants, toadies (i.e. budding secondary sociopaths) and “experts” (i.e. apparatchiks and factotums) who are equally influenced by the intense “high” of concentrated power/wealth.

Increasingly out of touch with those outside the circle of power, those within the circle slide into a belief in the superiority of their knowledge, skills and awareness–the very definition of sociopathology.

Even worse (if that is possible), the incestuous nature of the tight circle of power breeds a uniformity of opinion and ideology that creates a feedback loop that marginalizes dissenters and those with open minds. Dissenters are soon dismissed–”not a team player”– or trotted out for PR purposes, i.e. as evidence the administration maintains ties to the outside world.

Those few dissenters who resist the siren song of power soon face a choice: either quietly quit “to pursue other opportunities” (the easy way out) or quit in a blast of public refutation of the administration’s policies.

Public dissenters are quickly crucified by those in power, and knowing this fate awaits any dissenter places a powerful disincentive on “going public” about the sociopathology of the inner circle of power.

On rare occasions, an insider has the courage and talent to secure documentation that details the sociopathology of a policy, agency or administration (for example, Daniel Ellsberg and The Pentagon Papers).

Nothing infuriates a sociopath or a sociopathological organization more than the exposure of their sociopathology, and so those in power will stop at nothing to silence, discredit, criminalize or eliminate the heroic whistleblower.

In these ways, centralized power is itself is a sociopathologizing force. We cannot understand the present devolution of our civil society, economy and ethics unless we understand that concentrated power and wealth are intrinsically sociopathological by their very nature.

 

The solution: a culture of decentralization, transparency and open competition, what I call the DATA model (Decentralized, Adaptive, Transparent and Accountable) in my book Why Things Are Falling Apart and What We Can Do About It.

“Human Beings Have No Right to Water” & Other Words Of Wisdom From Your Friendly Neighborhood Global Oligarch

Peter Brabeck, Chairman of Nestlé

Oldspeak: “Water, is of course the most important raw material we have today in the world, it’s a question of whether we should privatize the normal water supply for the population. And there are two different opinions on the matter. The one opinion, which I think is extreme, is represented by the NGOs, who bang on about declaring water a public right. That means that as a human being you should have a right to water. That’s an extreme solution. The other view says that water is a foodstuff like any other, and like any other foodstuff it should have a market value. Personally I believe it’s better to give a foodstuff a value so that we’re all aware that it has its price, and then that one should take specific measures for the part of the population that has no access to this water, and there are many different possibilities there. The biggest social responsibility of any CEO, is to maintain and ensure the successful and profitable future of his enterprise. For only if we can ensure our continued, long term existence will we be in the position to actively participate in the solution of the problems that exist in the world. We’re in the position of being able to create jobs… If you want to create work, you have to work yourself, not as it was in the past where existing work was distributed. If you remember the main argument for the 35-hour week was that there was a certain amount of work and it would be better if we worked less and distributed the work amongst more people. That has proved quite clearly to be wrong. If you want to create more work you have to work more yourself. And with that we’ve got to create a positive image of the world for people, and I see absolutely no reason why we shouldn’t be positive about the future. We’ve never had it so good, we’ve never had so much money, we’ve never been so healthy, we’ve never lived as long as we do today. We have everything we want and we still go around as if we were in mourning for something.” -Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, CEO, Nestle

“It’s important to note that this is not simply the personal view of some random corporate executive, but rather, that it reflects an institutional reality of corporations: the primary objective of a corporation – above all else – is to maximize short-term profits for shareholders. By definition, then, workers should work more and be paid less, the environment is only a concern so much as corporations have unhindered access to control and exploit the resources of the environment… With this institutional – and ideological – structure (which was legally constructed by the state), concern for the environment, for water, for the world and for humanity can only be promoted if it can be used to advance corporate profits, or if it can be used for public relations purposes. Ultimately, it has to be hypocritical. A corporate executive cannot take an earnest concern in promoting the general welfare of the world, the environment, or humanity, because that it not the institutional function of a corporation, and no CEO that did such would be allowed to remain as CEO. This is why it matters what Peter Brabeck thinks: he represents the type of individual – and the type of thinking – that is a product of and a requirement for running a successful multinational corporation, of the corporate culture itself.” -Andrew Gavin Marshall

“Behold! The convoluted sociopathic logic of the corporation! Only by privatizing all water, setting a ‘market value’ for it and selling it for profit can we “actively participate in the solution of the problems that exist in the world“. Never mind that water has been a universal bounty of the earth given freely for millions of years. Never mind that 1 in 10 people on earth lack access to clean water. Never mind that the active participation in solutions of most corporations is to poison water, and render it undrinkable to create products that are generally toxic to humans and the environment.  Never mind that only 2.53 percent of earth’s water is fresh, and some two-thirds of that is locked up in glaciers and permanent snow cover, which are coincidentally being destroyed and melted away, useless; as a result of the global warming and climate change that stems from activities like infinite growth and resource extraction required to maintain a”successful and profitable future” for corporations.  And how repugnantly reality detached is the  000.1% thought  to believe that “We’ve never had it so good, we’ve never had so much money, we’ve never been so healthy, we’ve never lived as long as we do today. We have everything we want. ” Ask the 80% of the world’s population living on less than 10 dollars a day how healthy, free of wants, long lived, & how good they have it.  This man embodies the ethos and worldview of the dominant institution of human civilization on our planet. If this remains so, despite his desire to create a positive image of the world and its future, the times to come will be very bleak indeed. Think Feudalism on steroids and cocaine. Not a good scene. “

By Andrew Gavin Marshall @ Andrew Gavin Marshall:

In the 2005 documentary, We Feed the World, then-CEO of Nestlé, the world’s largest foodstuff corporation, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, shared some of his own views and ‘wisdom’ about the world and humanity. Brabeck believes that nature is not “good,” that there is nothing to worry about with GMO foods, that profits matter above all else, that people should work more, and that human beings do not have a right to water.

Today, he explained, “people believe that everything that comes from Nature is good,” marking a large change in perception, as previously, “we always learnt that Nature could be pitiless.” Humanity, Brabeck stated, “is now in the position of being able to provide some balance to Nature, but in spite of this we have something approaching a shibboleth that everything that comes from Nature is good.” He then referenced the “organic movement” as an example of this thinking, premising that “organic is best.” But rest assured, he corrected, “organic is not best.” In 15 years of GMO food consumption in the United States, “not one single case of illness has occurred.” In spite of this, he noted, “we’re all so uneasy about it in Europe, that something might happen to us.” This view, according to Brabeck, is “hypocrisy more than anything else.”

Water, Brabeck correctly pointed out, “is of course the most important raw material we have today in the world,” but added: “It’s a question of whether we should privatize the normal water supply for the population. And there are two different opinions on the matter. The one opinion, which I think is extreme, is represented by the NGOs, who bang on about declaring water a public right.” Brabeck elaborated on this “extreme” view: “That means that as a human being you should have a right to water. That’s an extreme solution.” The other view, and thus, the “less extreme” view, he explained, “says that water is a foodstuff like any other, and like any other foodstuff it should have a market value. Personally I believe it’s better to give a foodstuff a value so that we’re all aware that it has its price, and then that one should take specific measures for the part of the population that has no access to this water, and there are many different possibilities there.” The biggest social responsibility of any CEO, Brabeck explained:

is to maintain and ensure the successful and profitable future of his enterprise. For only if we can ensure our continued, long term existence will we be in the position to actively participate in the solution of the problems that exist in the world. We’re in the position of being able to create jobs… If you want to create work, you have to work yourself, not as it was in the past where existing work was distributed. If you remember the main argument for the 35-hour week was that there was a certain amount of work and it would be better if we worked less and distributed the work amongst more people. That has proved quite clearly to be wrong. If you want to create more work you have to work more yourself. And with that we’ve got to create a positive image of the world for people, and I see absolutely no reason why we shouldn’t be positive about the future. We’ve never had it so good, we’ve never had so much money, we’ve never been so healthy, we’ve never lived as long as we do today. We have everything we want and we still go around as if we were in mourning for something.

While watching a promotional video of a Nestlé factory in Japan, Brabeck commented, “You can see how modern these factories are; highly robotized, almost no people.” And of course, for someone claiming to be interested in creating jobs, there appears to be no glaring hypocrisy in praising factories with “almost no people.”

It’s important to note that this is not simply the personal view of some random corporate executive, but rather, that it reflects an institutional reality of corporations: the primary objective of a corporation – above all else – is to maximize short-term profits for shareholders. By definition, then, workers should work more and be paid less, the environment is only a concern so much as corporations have unhindered access to control and exploit the resources of the environment, and ultimately, it’s ‘good’ to replace workers with automation and robotics so that you don’t have to pay fewer or any workers, and thus, maximize profits. With this institutional – and ideological – structure (which was legally constructed by the state), concern for the environment, for water, for the world and for humanity can only be promoted if it can be used to advance corporate profits, or if it can be used for public relations purposes. Ultimately, it has to be hypocritical. A corporate executive cannot take an earnest concern in promoting the general welfare of the world, the environment, or humanity, because that it not the institutional function of a corporation, and no CEO that did such would be allowed to remain as CEO.

This is why it matters what Peter Brabeck thinks: he represents the type of individual – and the type of thinking – that is a product of and a requirement for running a successful multinational corporation, of the corporate culture itself. To the average person viewing his interview, it might come across as some sort of absurd tirade you’d expect from a Nightline interview with some infamous serial killer, if that killer had been put in charge of a multinational corporation:

People have a ‘right’ to water? What an absurd notion! Next thing you’ll say is that child labour is bad, polluting the environment is bad, or that people have some sort of ‘right’ to… life! Imagine the audacity! All that matters is ‘profits,’ and what a wonderful thing it would be to have less people and more profits! Water isn’t a right, it’s only a necessity, so naturally, it makes sense to privatize it so that large multinational corporations like Nestlé can own the world’s water and ensure that only those who can pay can drink. Problem solved!

Sadly, though intentionally satirical, this is the essential view of Brabeck and others like him. And disturbingly, Brabeck’s influence is not confined to the board of Nestlé. Brabeck became the CEO of Nestlé in 1997, a position he served until 2008, at which time he resigned as CEO but remained as chairman of the board of directors of Nestlé. Apart from Nestlé, Brabeck serves as vice chairman of the board of directors of L’Oréal, the world’s largest cosmetics and ‘beauty’ company; vice chairman of the board of Credit Suisse Group, one of the world’s largest banks; and is a member of the board of directors of Exxon Mobil, one of the world’s largest oil and energy conglomerates.

He was also a former board member of one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical conglomerates, Roche. Brabeck also serves as a member of the Foundation Board for the World Economic Forum (WEF), “the guardian of [the WEF’s] mission, values and brand… responsible for inspiring business and public confidence through an exemplary standard of governance.” Brabeck is also a member of the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT), a group of European corporate CEOs which directly advise and help steer policy for the European Union and its member countries. He has also attended meetings of the Bilderberg group, an annual forum of 130 corporate, banking, media, political and military elites from Western Europe and North America.

Thus, through his multiple board memberships on some of the largest corporations on earth, as well as his leadership and participation in some of the leading international think tanks, forums and business associations, Brabeck has unhindered access to political and other elites around the world. When he speaks, powerful people listen.

Brabeck’s Brain

Brabeck has become an influential voice on issues of food and water, and not surprisingly so, considering he is chairman of the largest food service corporation on earth. Brabeck’s career goes back to when he was working for Nestlé in Chile in the early 1970s, when the left-leaning democratically-elected president Salvador Allende was “threatening to nationalize milk production, and Nestlé’s Chilean operations along with it.” A 1973 Chilean military coup – with the support of the CIA – put an end to that “threat” by bringing in the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, who murdered thousands of Chileans and established a ‘national security state’, imposing harsh economic measures to promote the interests of elite corporate and financial interests (what later became known as ‘neoliberalism’).

In a 2009 article for Foreign Policy magazine, Brabeck declared: “Water is the new gold, and a few savvy countries and companies are already banking on it.” In a 2010 article for the Guardian, Brabeck wrote that, “[w]hile our collective attention has been focused on depleting supplies of fossil fuels, we have been largely ignoring the simple fact that, unless radical changes are made, we will run out of water first, and soon.” What the world needs, according to Brabeck, is “to set a price that more accurately values our most precious commodity,” and that, [t]he era of water at throwaway prices is coming to an end.” In other words, water should become increasingly expensive, according to Brabeck. Countries, he wrote, should recognize “that not all water use should be regarded as equal.”

In a discussion with the Wall Street Journal in 2011, Brabeck spoke against the use of biofuels – converting food into fuel – and suggested that this was the primary cause of increased food prices (though in reality, food price increases are primarily the result of speculation by major banks like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase). Brabeck noted the relationship between his business – food – and major geopolitical issues, stating: “What we call today the Arab Spring… really started as a protest against ever-increasing food prices.” One “solution,” he suggested, was to provide a “market” for water as “the best guidance that you can have.” If water was a ‘market’ product, it wouldn’t be wasted on growing food for fuel, but focus on food for consumption – and preferably (in his view), genetically modified foods. After all, he said, “if the market forces are there the investments are going to be made.” Brabeck suggested that the world could “feed nine billion people,” providing them with water and fuel, but only on the condition that “we let the market do its thing.”

Brabeck co-authored a 2011 article for the Wall Street Journal in which he stated that in order to provide “universal access to clean water, there is simply no other choice but to price water at a reasonable rate,” and that roughly 1.8 billion people on earth lack access to clean drinking water “because of poor water management and governance practices, and the lack of political will.” Brabeck’s job then, as chairman of Nestlé, is to help create the “political will” to make water into a modern “market” product.

Now before praising Brabeck for his ‘enlightened’ activism on the issue of water scarcity and providing the world’s poor with access to clean drinking water (which are very real and urgent issues needing attention), Brabeck himself has stressed that his interest in the issue of water has nothing to do with actually addressing these issues in a meaningful way, or for the benefit of the earth and humanity. No, his motivation is much more simple than this.

In a 2010 interview for BigThink, Brabeck noted: “If Nestlé and myself have become very vocal in the area of water, it was not because of any philanthropic idea, it was very simple: by analyzing… what is the single most important factor for the sustainability of Nestlé, water came as [the] number one subject.” This is what led Brabeck and Nestlé into the issue of water “sustainability,” he explained. “I think this is part of a company’s responsibility,” and added: “Now, if I was in a different industry, I would have a different subject, certainly, that I would be focusing on.”

Brabeck was asked if industries should “have a role in finding solutions to environmental issues that affect their business,” to which he replied: “Yes, because it is in the interest of our shareholders… If I want to convince my shareholders that this industry is a long-term sustainable industry, I have to ensure that all aspects that are vital for this company are sustainable… When I see, like in our case, that one of the aspects – which is water, which is needed in order to produce the raw materials for our company – if this is not sustainable, then my enterprise is not sustainable. So therefore I have to do something about it. So shareholder interest and societal interest are common.”

Thus, when Brabeck and Nestlé promote “water sustainability,” what they are really promoting is the sustainability of Nestlé’s access to and control over water resources. How is that best achieved? Well, since Nestlé is a large multinational corporation, the natural solution is to promote ‘market’ control of water, which means privatization and monopolization of the world’s water supply into a few corporate hands.

In a 2011 conversation with the editor of Time Magazine at the Council on Foreign Relations, Brabeck referred to a recent World Economic Forum meeting where the issue of “corporate social responsibility” was the main subject of discussion, when corporate executives “started to talk about [how] we have to give back to society,” Brabeck spoke up and stated: “I don’t feel that we have to give back to society, because we have not been stealing from society.” Brabeck explained to the Council on Foreign Relations that he felt such a concept was the purview of philanthropy, and “this was a problem for the CEO of any public company, because I personally believe that no CEO of a public company should be allowed to make philanthropy… I think anybody who does philanthropy should do it with his own money and not the money of the shareholders.” Engaging in corporate social responsibility, Brabeck explained, “was an additional cost.”

At the 2008 World Economic Forum, a consortium of corporations and international organizations formed the 2030 Water Resources Group, chaired by Peter Brabeck. It was established in order to “shape the agenda” for the discussion of water resources, and to create “new models for collaboration” between public and private enterprises. The governing council of the 2030 WRG is chaired by Brabeck and includes the executive vice president and CEO of the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the investment arm of the World Bank, the administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the chief business officer and managing director of the World Economic Forum, the president of the African Development Bank, the chairman and CEO of The Coca-Cola Company, the president of the Asian Development Bank, the director-general of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the president of the Inter-American Development Bank, and the chairman and CEO of PepsiCo, among others.

At the World Water Forum in 2012 – an event largely attended by the global proponents of water privatization, Nestlé among their most enthusiastic supporters – Brabeck suggested that the 2030 Water Resources Group represents a “global public-private initiative” which could help in “providing tools and information on best practice” as well as “guidance and new policy ideas on water resource scarcity.”

Brabeck and Nestlé had been in talks with the Canadian provincial government of Alberta in planning for a potential “water exchange,” to – in the words of Maclean’s magazine – “turn water into money.” In 2012, the University of Alberta bestowed an honorary degree upon Peter Brabeck “for his work as a responsible steward for water around the world.” Protests were organized at the university to oppose the ‘honor,’ with a representative from the public interest group, the Council of Canadians, noting: “I’m afraid that the university is positioning themselves on the side of the commodifiers, the people who want to say that water is not a human right that everyone has the right to, but is just a product that can be bought and sold.” A professor at the university stated: “I’m ashamed at this point, about what the university is doing and I’m also very concerned about the way the president of the university has been demonizing people who oppose this.” As another U of A professor stated: “What Nestlé does is take what clean water there is in which poor people are relying on, bottle it and then sell it to wealthier people at an exorbitant profit.”

The Global Water Privatization Agenda

Water privatization is an extremely vicious operation, where the quality of – and access to – water resources diminishes or even vanishes, while the costs explode. When it comes to the privatization of water, there is no such thing as “competition” in how the word is generally interpreted: there are only a handful of global corporations that undertake massive water privatizations. The two most prominent are the French-based Suez Environment and Veolia Environment, but also include Thames Water, Nestlé, PepsiCo and Coca-Cola, among others. For a world in which food has already been turned into a “market commodity” and has been “financialized,” leading to massive food price increases, hunger riots, and immense profits for a few corporations and banks, the prospect of water privatization is even more disturbing.

The agenda of water privatization is organized at the international level, largely promoted through the World Water Forum and the World Water Council. The World Water Council (WWC) was established in 1996 as a French-based non-profit organization with over 400 members from intergovernmental organizations, government agencies, corporations, corporate-dominated NGOs and environmental organizations, water companies, international organizations and academic institutions.

Every three years, the WWC hosts a World Water Forum, the first of which took place in 1997, and the 6^th conference in 2012 was attended by thousands of participants from countries and institutions all over the world get together to decide the future of water, and of course, promote the privatization of this essential resource to human life. The 6^th World Water Forum, hosted in Marseilles, France, was primarily sponsored by the French government and the World Water Council, but included a number of other contributors, including: the African Development Bank, African Union Commission, Arab Water Council, Asian Development Bank, the Council of Europe, the European Commission, the European Investment Bank, the European Parliament, the European Water Association, the Food and Agricultural Organization, the Global Environment Facility, Inter-American Development Bank, Nature Conservancy, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Organization of American States (OAS), Oxfam, the World Bank, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, the World Health Organization, the World Wildlife Fund; and a number of corporate sponsors, including: RioTinto Alcan, EDF, Suez Environment, Veolia, and HSBC. Clearly, they have human and environmental interests at heart.

The World Bank is a major promoter of water privatization, as much of its aid to ‘developing’ countries was earmarked for water privatization schemes which inevitably benefit major corporations, in co-operation with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the U.S. Treasury. One of the first major water privatization schemed funded by the World Bank was in Argentina, for which the Bank “advised” the government of Argentina in 1991 on the bidding and contracting of the water concession, setting a model for what would be promoted around the world. The World Bank’s investment arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), loaned roughly $1 billion to the Argentine government for three water and sewage projects in the country, and even bought a 5% stake in the concession, thus becoming a part owner. When the concession for Buenos Aires was opened up, the French sent representatives from Veolia and Suez, which formed the consortium Aguas Argentinas, and of course, the costs for water services went up. Between 1993, when the contract with the French companies was signed, and 1997, the Aguas Argentinas consortium gained more influence with Argentine President Carlos Menem and his Economy Minister Domingo Cavallo, who would hold meetings with the president of Suez as well as the President of France, Jacques Chirac. By 2002, the water rates (cost of water) in Buenos Aires had increased by 177% since the beginning of the concession.

In the 1990s, the amount of World Bank water privatization projects increased ten-fold, with 31% of World Bank water supply and sanitation projects between 1990 and 2001 including conditions of private-sector involvement, despite the fact that the projects consistently failed in terms of providing cheaper and better water to larger areas. But of course, they were highly profitable for large corporations, so naturally, they continued to be promoted and supported (and subsidized).

One of the most notable examples of water privatization schemes was in Bolivia, the poorest country in South America. In 1998, an IMF loan to Bolivia demanded conditions of “structural reform,” the selling off of “all remaining public enterprises,” including water. In 1999, the World Bank told the Bolivian government to end its subsidies for water services, and that same year, the government leased the Cochabamba Water System to a consortium of multinational corporations, Aguas del Tunari, which included the American corporation Bechtel. After granting the consortium a 40-year lease, the government passed a law which would make residents pay the full cost of water services. In January of 2000, protests in Cochabamba shut down the city for four days, striking and establishing roadblocks, mobilizing against the water price increases which doubled or tripled their water bills. Protests continued in February, met with riot police and tear gas, injuring 175 people.

By April, the protests began to spread to other Bolivian cities and rural communities, and during a “state of siege” (essentially martial law) declared by Bolivian president Hugo Banzer, a 17-year old boy, Victor Hugo Daza, was shot and killed by a Bolivian Army captain, who was trained as the U.S. military academy, the School of the Americas. As riot police continued to meet protesters with tear gas and live ammunition, more people were killed, and dozens more injured. On April 10, the government conceded to the people, ending the contract with the corporate consortium and granting the people to control their water system through a grassroots coalition led by the protest organizers.

Two days later, World Bank President James Wolfensohn stated that the people of Bolivia should pay for their water services. On August 6, 2001, the president of Bolivia resigned, and the Vice President Jorge Quiroga, a former IBM executive, was sworn in as the new president to serve the remainder of the term until August of 2002. Meanwhile, the water consortium, deeply offended at the prospect of people taking control of their own resources, attempted to take legal action against the government of Bolivia for violating the contract. Bechtel was seeking $25 million in compensation for its “losses,” while recording a yearly profit of $14 billion, whereas the national budget of Bolivia was a mere $2.7 billion. The situation ultimately led to a type of social revolution which brought to power the first indigenous Bolivian leader in the country’s history, Evo Morales.

This, of course, has not stopped the World Bank and IMF – and the imperial governments which finance them – from promoting water privatization around the world for the exclusive benefit of a handful of multinational corporations. The World Bank promotes water privatization across Africa in order to “ease the continent’s water crisis,” by making water more expensive and less accessible.

As the communications director of the World Bank in 2003, Paul Mitchell, explained, “Water is crucial to life – we have to get water to poor people,” adding: “There are a lot of myths about privatization.” I would agree. Though the myth that it ‘works’ is what I would propose, but Mitchell instead suggested that, “[p]rivate sector participation is simply to manage the asset to make it function for the people in the country.” Except that it doesn’t. But don’t worry, decreasing water standards, dismantling water distribution, and rapidly increasing the costs of water to the poorest regions on earth is good, according to Mitchell and the World Bank. He told the BBC that what the World Bank is most interested in is the “best way to get water to poor people.” Perhaps he misspoke and meant to say, “the best way to take water from poor people,” because that’s what actually happens.

In 2003, the World Bank funded a water privatization scheme in the country of Tanzania, supported by the British government, and granting the concession to a consortium called City Water, owned by the British company Biwater, which worked with a German engineering firm, Gauff, to provide water to the city of Dar es Salaam and the surrounding region. It was one of the most ambitious water privatization schemes in Africa, with $140 million in World Bank funding, and, wrote John Vidal in the Guardian, it “was intended to be a model for how the world’s poorest communities could be lifted out of poverty.”

The agreement included conditions for the consortium to install new pipelines for water distribution. The British government’s Department for International Development gave a 440,000-pound contract to the British neoliberal think tank, Adam Smith International, “to do public-relations work for the project.” Tanzania’s best-known gospel singer was hired to perform a pop song about the benefits of privatization, mentioning electricity, telephones, the ports, railways, and of course, water. Both the IMF and World Bank made the water scheme a condition for “aid” they gave to the country. Less than one year into the ten-year contract, the private consortium, City Water, stopped paying its monthly fee for leasing the government’s pipes and infrastructure provided by the public water company, Dawasa, while simultaneously insisting that its own fees be raised. An unpublished World Bank report even noted: “The primary assumption on the part of almost all involved, particularly on the donor side, was that it would be very hard, if not impossible, for the private operator [City Water] to perform worse than Dawasa. But that is what happened.” The World Bank as a whole, however, endorsed the program as “highly satisfactory,” and rightly so, because it was doing what it was intended to do: provide profits for private corporations at the expense of poor people.

By 2005, the company had not built any new pipes, it had not spent the meager investments it promised, and the water quality declined. As British government “aid” money was poured into privatization propaganda, a video was produced which included the phrase: “Our old industries are dry like crops and privatization brings the rain.” Actually, privatization attaches a price-tag to rain. Thus, in 2005, the government of Tanzania ended the contract with City Water, and arrested the three company executives, deporting them back to Britain. As is typical, the British company, Biwater, then began to file a lawsuit against the Tanzanian government for breach of contract, wanting to collect $20-25 million. A press release from Biwater at the time wrote: “We have been left with no choice… If a signal goes out that governments are free to expropriate foreign investments with impunity,” investors would flee, and this would, of course, “deal a massive blow to the development goals of Tanzania and other countries in Africa.”

The sixth World Water Forum in Marseilles in 2012 brought together some 19,000 participants, where the French Development Minister Henri de Raincourt proposed a “global water and environment management scheme,” adding: “The French government is not alone in its conviction that a global environment agency is needed more than ever.” A parallel conference was held – the Alternative World Water Forum – which featured critics of water privatization. Gustave Massiah, a representative of the anti-globalization group Attac, stated, “Should a global water fund be in control, giving concessions to multinational companies, then that’s not a solution for us. On the contrary, that would only add to the problems of the current system.”

Another member of Attac, Jacques Cambon, used to be the head of SAFEGE’s Africa branch, a subsidiary of the water conglomerate Suez. Cambon was critical of the idea of a global water fund, warning against centralization, and further explained that the World Bank “has almost always financed large-scale projects that were not in tune with local conditions.” Maria Theresa Lauron, a Philippine activist, shared the story of water privatization in the Philippines, saying, “Since 1997, prices went up by 450 to 800 percent… At the same time, the water quality has gone down. Many people get ill because of bad water; a year ago some 600 people died as a result of bacteria in the water because the private company didn’t do proper water checks.” But then, why would the company do such a thing? It’s not like it’s particularly profitable to be concerned with human welfare.

In Europe, the European Commission had been pushing water privatization as a condition for development funds between 2002 and 2010, specifically in several central and eastern European countries which were dependent upon EU grants. Since the European debt crisis, the European Commission had made water privatization a condition for Greece, Portugal, and Italy. Greece is privatizing its water companies, Portugal is being pressured to sell its national water company, Aguas do Portugal, and in Italy, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the Commission were pushing water privatization, even though a national referendum in July of 2011 saw the people of Italy reject such a scheme by 95%.

In this context, among the global institutions and corporations of power and influence, it is perhaps less surprising to imagine the chairman of Nestlé suggesting that human beings having a “right” to water is rather “extreme.” And for a very simple reason: that’s not profitable for Nestlé, even though it might be good for humanity and the earth. It’s about priorities, and in our world, priorities are set by multinational corporations, banks, and global oligarchs. As Nestlé would have us think, corporate and social interests are not opposed, as corporations – through their ‘enlightened’ self-interest and profit-seeking motives – will almost accidentally make the world a better place. Now, while neoliberal orthodoxy functions on the basis of people simply accepting this premise without investigation (like any religious belief), perhaps it would be worth looking at Nestlé as an example for corporate benefaction for the world and humanity.

Nestlé’s Corporate Social Responsibility: Making the World Safe for Nestlé… and Incidentally Destroying the World

As a major multinational corporation, Nestlé has a proven track record of exploiting labour, destroying the environment, engaging in human rights violations, but of course – and most importantly – it makes big profits. In 2012, Nestlé was taking in major profits from ‘emerging markets’ in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. However, some emerging market profits began to slow down in 2013. This was partly the result of a horsemeat scandal which required companies like Nestlé to intensify the screening of their food products.

Less than a year prior, Nestlé was complaining that “over-regulation” of the food industry was “undermining individual responsibility,” which is another way of saying that responsibility for products and their safety should be passed from the producer to the consumer. In other words, if you’re stupid enough to buy Nestlé products, it’s your fault if you get diabetes or eat horsemeat, and therefore, it’s your responsibility, not the responsibility of Nestlé. Fair enough! We’re stupid enough to accept corporations ruling over us, therefore, what right do we have to complain about all the horrendous crimes and destruction they cause? A cynic could perhaps argue such a point.

One of Nestlé’s most famous PR problems was that of marketing artificial baby milk, which sprung to headlines in the 1970s following the publication of “The Baby Killer,” accusing the company of getting Third World mothers hooked on formula. As research was proving that breastfeeding was healthier, Nestlé marketed its baby formula as a way for women to ‘Westernize’ and join the modern world, handing out pamphlets and promotional samples, with companies hiring “sales girls in nurses’ uniforms (sometimes qualified, sometimes not)” in order to drop by homes and sell formula. Women tried to save money on the formula by diluting it, often times with contaminated water. As the London-based organization War on Want noted: “The results can be seen in the clinics and hospitals, the slums and graveyards of the Third World… Children whose bodies have wasted away until all that is left is a big head on top of the shriveled body of an old man.” An official with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) blamed baby formula for “a million infant deaths every year through malnutrition and diarrheal diseases.”

Mike Muller, the author of “The Baby Killer” back in 1974, wrote an article for the Guardian in 2013 in which he mentioned that he gave Peter Brabeck a “present” at the World Economic Forum, a signed copy of the report. The report had sparked a global boycott of Nestlé and the company responded with lawsuits.

Nestlé has also been implicated for its support of palm-oil plantations, which have led to increased deforestation and the destruction of orangutan habitats in Indonesia. A Greenpeace publication noted that, “at least 1500 orangutans died in 2006 as a result of deliberate attacks by plantation workers and loss of habitat due to the expansion of oil palm plantations.” A social media campaign was launched against Nestlé for its role in supporting palm oil plantations, deforestation, and the destruction of orangutan habitats and lives. The campaign pressured Nestlé to decrease its “deforestation footprint.”

As Nestlé has been expanding its presence in Africa, it has also aroused more controversy in its operations on the continent. Nestlé purchases one-tenth of the world’s cocoa, most of which comes from the Ivory Coast, where the company has been implicated in the use of child labour. In 2001, U.S. legislation required companies to engage in “self-regulation” which called for “slave free” labeling on all cocoa products. This “self regulation,” however, “failed to deliver” – imagine that! – as one study carried out by Tulane University with funding from the U.S. government revealed that roughly 2 million children were working on cocoa-related activities in both Ghana and the Ivory Coast. Even an internal audit carried out by the company found that Nestlé was guilty of “numerous” violations of child labour laws. Nestlé’s head of operations stated, “The use of child labor in our cocoa supply goes against everything we stand for.” So naturally, they will continue to use child labour.

Peter Brabeck stated that it’s “nearly impossible” to end the practice, and he compared the practice to that of farming in Switzerland: “You go to Switzerland… still today, in the month of September, schools have one week holiday so students can help in the wine harvesting… In those developing countries, this also happens,” he told the Council on Foreign Relations. While acknowledging that this “is basically child labor and slave labor in some African markets,” it is “a challenge which is not very easy to tackle,” noting that there is “a very fine edge” of what is acceptable regarding “child labor in [the] agricultural environment.” He added: “It’s almost natural.” Thus, Brabeck explained, “you have to look at it differently,” and that it was not the job of Nestlé to tell parents that their children can’t work on cocoa plantations/farms, “which is ridiculous,” he suggested: “But what we are saying is we will help you that your child has access for schooling.” So clearly there is no problem with using child slavery, just so long as the children get some schooling… presumably, in their ‘off-hours’ from slavery. Problem solved!

While Brabeck and Nestlé have made a big issue of water scarcity, which again, is an incredibly important issue, their solutions revolve around “pricing” water at a market value, and thus encouraging privatization. Indeed, a global water grab has been a defining feature of the past several years (coupled with a great global land grab), in which investors, countries, banks and corporations have been buying up vast tracts of land (primarily in sub-Saharan Africa) for virtually nothing, pushing off the populations which live off the land, taking all the resources, water, and clearing the land of towns and villages, to convert them into industrial agricultural plantations to develop food and other crops for export, while domestic populations are pushed deeper into poverty, hunger, and are deprived of access to water. Peter Brabeck has referred to the land grabs as really being about water: “For with the land comes the right to withdraw the water linked to it, in most countries essentially a freebie that increasingly could be seen as the most valuable part of the deal.” This, noted Brabeck, is “the great water grab.”

And of course, Nestlé would know something about water grabs, as it has become very good at implementing them. In past years, the company has been increasingly buying land where it is taking the fresh water resources, bottling them in plastic bottles and selling them to the public at exorbitant prices. In 2008, as Nestlé was planning to build a bottling water plant in McCloud, California, the Attorney General opposed the plan, noting: “It takes massive quantities of oil to produce plastic water bottles and to ship them in diesel trucks across the United States… Nestlé will face swift legal challenge if it does not fully evaluate the environmental impact of diverting millions of gallons of spring water from the McCloud River into billions of plastic water bottles.” Nestlé already operated roughly 50 springs across the country, and was acquiring more, such as a plan to draw roughly 65 million gallons of water from a spring in Colorado, despite fierce opposition to the deal.

Years of opposition to the plans of Nestlé in McCloud finally resulted in the company giving up on its efforts there. However, the company quickly moved on to finding new locations to take water and make a profit while destroying the environment (just an added bonus, of course). The corporation controls one-third of the U.S. market in bottled water, selling it as 70 different brand names, including Perrier, Arrowhead, Deer Park and Poland Spring. The two other large bottled water companies are Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, though Nestlé had earned a reputation “in targeting rural communities for spring water, a move that has earned it fierce opposition across the U.S. from towns worried about losing their precious water resources.” And water grabs by Nestlé as well as opposition continue to engulf towns and states and cities across the country, with one more recent case in Oregon.

Nestlé has aroused controversy for its relations with labour, exploiting farmers, pollution, and human rights violations, among many other things. Nestlé has been implicated in the kidnapping and murder of a union activist and employee of the company’s subsidiary in Colombia, with a judge demanding the prosecutor to “investigate leading managers of Nestle-Cicolac to clarify their likely involvement and/or planning of the murder of union leader Luciano Enrique Romero Molina.” In 2012, a Colombian trade union and a human rights group filed charges against Nestlé for negligence over the murder of their former employee Romero.

More recently, Nestlé has been found liable over spying on NGOs, with the company hiring a private security company to infiltrate an anti-globalization group, and while a judge ordered the company to pay compensation, a Nestlé spokesperson stated that, “incitement to infiltration is against Nestlé’s corporate business principles.” Just like child slavery, presumably. But not to worry, the spokesman said, “we will take appropriate action.”

Peter Brabeck, who it should be noted, also sits on the boards of Exxon, L’Oréal, and the banking giant Credit Suisse, warned in 2009 that the global economic crisis would be “very deep” and that, “this crisis will go on for a long period.” On top of that, the food crisis would be “getting worse” over time, hitting poor people the hardest. However, propping up the financial sector through massive bailouts was, in his view, “absolutely essential.” But not to worry, as banks are bailed out by governments, who hand the bill to the population, which pays for the crisis through reduced standards of living and exploitation (which we call “austerity” and “structural reform” measures), Nestlé has been able to adapt to a new market of impoverished people, selling cheaper products to more people who now have less money. And better yet, it’s been making massive profits. And remember, according to Brabeck, isn’t that all that really matters?

This is the world according to corporations. Unfortunately, while it creates enormous wealth, it is also leading to the inevitable extinction of our species, and possibly all life on earth. But that’s not a concern of corporations, so it doesn’t concern those who run corporations, who make the important decisions, and pressure and purchase our politicians.

I wonder… what would the world be like if people were able to make decisions?

There’s only one way to know.

Andrew Gavin Marshall is an independent researcher and writer based in Montreal, Canada, with a focus on studying the ideas, institutions, and individuals of power and resistance across a wide spectrum of social, political, economic, and historical spheres. He has been published in AlterNet, CounterPunch, Occupy.com, Truth-Out, RoarMag, and a number of other alternative media groups, and regularly does radio, Internet, and television interviews with both alternative and mainstream news outlets. He is Project Manager of The People’s Book Project, Research Director of Occupy.com’s Global Power Project, and has a weekly podcast show with BoilingFrogsPost.

The Struggle To Save Our Planet Heats Up

Oldspeak: “To get to the root of the issue, it becomes necessary to analyze the whole economic system of production and exchange of goods and services—that is, capitalism. Only by doing this can we hope to formulate an effective strategy to combat climate change and thereby recognize that ecological and social justice are inseparably connected to each other, via an organized, grassroots and global challenge to the capitalist social order…

One doesn’t need to be an anti-capitalist to take part in this struggle, but one does need to recognize that unless the pendulum of social power swings back toward the working people in the U.S. and around the world, and that limits and regulations are placed on the activities of corporate power, we have no hope of saving our world. This struggle is not really about technology or which renewable energy models should be deployed or whether this or that politician or this corporation or that CEO is more or less evil than the other. It’s not about things or people at all—it’s about relationships. It’s about democracy, which is itself about social power, and the relationships it presumes.

The power of the oceans, the power of scientific rationality, the power of the tides and hurricane-force winds are self-evidently not enough to persuade capitalists to act. The only force strong enough to do that is the organized force of the people. We must take the place of gravity to pull the pendulum of contending class forces—wrenched rightward by 30 years of neoliberalism—back toward our side.” -Chris Williams.

YES! The root of the issue is capitalism. We have to stop nibbling around the edges. We have to recognize that capitalism in its current globalized and unrestrained form is fundamentally at odds with Democracy, human and natural rights. We have to have an honest critical discussion about global capital and how it’s destroying our planet. We must reassert our sacred commitment, as our ancestors did for millennia, to be custodians of our earth mother, not her rapists. We must recognize that infinite growth is impossible on a finite planet. The global capitalist enterprise is collapsing and blowing up all around us, one need only look to texas and Bangladesh and the explosion in unemployment and poverty, the collapse of ecosystems, to see what’s happening.  We cannot keep dumping wasteful trillions into failing, obsolete, toxic, fossil and nuclear fuel based infrastructure that is destroying and poisoning our planet. We have to fundamentally rethink how we organize our civilization and economy. The systems we have are not working.

By Chris Williams @ Z Magazine:

Capitalism stands as a death sentinel over planetary life. Recent reports from institutions, such as the World Bank, detail how, as a result of human activity, we are on track for a 4° Celsius increase in average global temperatures. Should this come to pass, the Earth would be hotter than at any time in the last 30 million years; an absolutely devastating prognosis that will wipe out countless species as ecosystems destabilize and climate becomes a vortex of erratic, wild weather events.

Despite this Americans, suffered through an election campaign in which climate change literally wasn’t mentioned—at least until the final weeks, when a hurricane forced the presidential candidates to acknowledge it.

Even as the World Bank published its report—with the conclusion that avoiding a 4° temperature increase was “vital for the health and welfare of communities around the world”—bank officials were nevertheless still handing out loans to construct more than two dozen coal-fired power plants to the tune of $5 billion.

In direct contrast to politicians and the media, fully 80 percent of Americans believe that climate change will be a serious problem for the United States unless the government does something about it—with 57 percent saying the government should do a “great deal” or “quite a bit.”

Even for the 1 in 3 Americans who say they are wary of science and distrust scientists, 61 percent now agree that temperatures have risen over the last 100 years. Commenting on the new poll, Stanford University social psychologist and pollster Jon Crosskick wrote, “They don’t believe what the scientists say, they believe what the thermometers say…. Events are helping these people see what scientists thought they had been seeing all along.”

This background of overwhelming public concern helped situate the national demonstration in Washington, DC on February 17, against the building of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline from Canada to Texas. If built, the pipeline will carry 800,000 barrels a day of highly-polluting tar sands oil, effectively dealing a death blow to hopes of preventing rampant climate change. The demonstration added significance as activists attempted to draw a line in the sand and pose the first big litmus test for the second term of Barack Obama.

Given that an overwhelming majority of Americans, and even most people hostile to climate science, are in favor of action, why is it that the overwhelming majority of politicians—who presumably are subject to the same weather as the rest of us—can’t seem to see the need? Why aren’t our elected representatives proposing serious measures to prevent it from getting worse?

How one answers this question is not one of semantics. Rather, it is of decisive importance because it determines how one should fight and with whom one should forge alliances. Unfortunately, it is a question that Bill McKibben, cofounder of 350.org and a key organizer of the February 17 demonstration, has struggled with, but not conclusively resolved. His confusion is evidenced by the title of an article he wrote in January: “Our Protest Must Short-Circuit the Fossil Fuel Interests Blocking Barack Obama”—implying that Obama would do something if he could.

The momentum generated from this demonstration may serve as the launching pad for a sustained campaign that begins to stitch together the myriad forces fighting locally around the country, transforming previously isolated or single-issue initiatives and groups into a broad united front for climate justice that draws in other forces, such as unions.

This was the position of Big Green groups like the Sierra Club. Even as it pledged for the first time to take part in civil disobedience, its executive director, Michael Brune, declared that the new strategy was part of “a larger plan to support the president in realizing his vision and make sure his ambition meets the scale of the challenge.”

The first thing Obama and his new Secretary of State John Kerry could do is say no to the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. That would be inordinately easy, as Obama has the final say and doesn’t require Congress’ support to shut it down. After 53 senators from both parties signed a letter urging him to green-light the pipeline, Obama is running out of ways to further delay his decision.

In spite of the rhetoric of his inaugural address, the pivotal question remains: Is Barack Obama—or any Democratic leader, for that matter—really on our side? Is it just a question of persuading a reluctant friend, hamstrung by a right-wing, dysfunctional Congress and stymied by powerful corporate interests, to act by demonstrating outside his house to let him know we’re there for him? Or should we be surrounding his house, knowing full well that he won’t give in to our demands without a social movement that acts independently of his wishes and control.

To understand the reasons for Obama’s “lack of desire” to address climate change—a microcosm of the larger inability of global leaders and institutions to do likewise amid two decades of futile climate negotiations—it’s necessary to go beneath the surface appearance of things; to examine the structure and ideology of the system of capitalism.

Systemic Causes

When their financial system was threatened by the crisis that began in 2008, political leaders didn’t sit around for 20 years arguing that they had to wait until all the facts were in and attempting to reach consensus on a solution. No, in a heartbeat, they threw trillions of dollars at the banks.

But when a far larger crisis, one that threatens the basic stability of the planetary biosphere, unfurls as a result of the same policies of reckless growth, waste and warfare, they spend their time trashing scientists and ignoring the unraveling weather outside their windows. Therefore, to get to the root of the issue, it becomes necessary to analyze the whole economic system of production and exchange of goods and services—that is, capitalism. Only by doing this can we hope to formulate an effective strategy to combat climate change and thereby recognize that ecological and social justice are inseparably connected to each other, via an organized, grassroots and global challenge to the capitalist social order.

One doesn’t need to be an anti-capitalist to take part in this struggle, but one does need to recognize that unless the pendulum of social power swings back toward the working people in the U.S. and around the world, and that limits and regulations are placed on the activities of corporate power, we have no hope of saving our world. This struggle is not really about technology or which renewable energy models should be deployed or whether this or that politician or this corporation or that CEO is more or less evil than the other. It’s not about things or people at all—it’s about relationships. It’s about democracy, which is itself about social power, and the relationships it presumes.

The power of the oceans, the power of scientific rationality, the power of the tides and hurricane-force winds are self-evidently not enough to persuade capitalists to act. The only force strong enough to do that is the organized force of the people. We must take the place of gravity to pull the pendulum of contending class forces—wrenched rightward by 30 years of neoliberalism—back toward our side.

Ultimately, as a socialist, I would argue that we need to live in a world where there are no classes with diametrically opposed interests, in perpetual conflict over social and political power. Only in such a socially just and ecologically sustainable world will there be any long-term hope for humanity to live in peace with itself, other species, and the planet on which we depend. The stepping-stones of the revolutionary road are the acts of struggle needed to create it.

In contrast to his inaugural speech, Obama’s first press conference after re-election gave a more accurate insight into the priorities of his second term. Unlike four out of five Americans who want the government to do something to address climate change, Obama made it clear that this wouldn’t be a priority for his administration: “Understandably, I think the American people right now have been so focused and will continue to be focused on our economy and jobs and growth that, you know, if the message is somehow we’re going to ignore jobs and growth simply to address climate change, I don’t think anybody’s going to go for that. I won’t go for that.”

With two mentions of the need for “growth” in a single sentence, Obama faithfully echoed the declaration of the Earth Summit, Rio+20, held in June 2012, where the representatives of 190 countries, while dismally avoiding any commitment to new targets or limits on greenhouse gas emissions, did commit—16 times in all—to “sustained growth,” a phrase taken to be synonymous, rather than in fundamental conflict, with another term: “sustainability.”

The obligation to promote growth underlines why the root of the climate problem is systemic. If capitalism is not growing, it is in crisis. Growth must occur continuously and in all sectors. If the sector in question is highly profitable, it will grow even faster, regardless of any social considerations.

Like, for example, the fossil-fuel sector. Oil production, rather than declining, as is desperately needed to stop climate change, is predicted to increase from the current 93 million barrels per day to 110 million by 2020—with some of the biggest increases worldwide occurring in the U.S. The Holy Grail of all administrations since Richard Nixon —energy independence—is being made possible by the policies of the Obama administration, as the New York Times reported in a special feature: “National oil production, which declined steadily to 4.95 million barrels a day in 2008 from 9.6 million in 1970, has risen over the last four years to nearly 5.7 million barrels a day. The Energy Department projects that daily output could reach nearly 7 million barrels by 2020. Some experts think it could eventually hit 10 million barrels—which would put the United States in the same league as Saudi Arabia.”

As the climate blogger and former Clinton administration official Joseph Romm put it, Obama is “basically pushing a moderate Republican agenda. It’s just that there aren’t any moderate Republicans left, much as we don’t have any ‘below average temperature’ years any more.”

Again, if we examine the roots of the issue, we find that the pathetic response of an administration purporting to be concerned with environmental questions has much less to do with individual personnel than with the dynamics of capitalism.

In 1992, when George H.W. Bush flew to Rio for the first Earth Summit, all things seemed possible. The “evil empire”—as Ronald Reagan liked to call the tyrannical dictatorships of the USSR and Eastern Europe, which operated falsely in the name of socialism—had collapsed under the weight of its own economic, social, and ecological contradictions. Politicians in the West were euphoric. They had seen off what they perceived to be an existential threat to their system.

In today’s world of enforced austerity, it’s difficult to recapture the sense of optimism that pervaded Western ruling class circles in the early 1990s. The atmosphere of triumphalism was so great even Republican presidents like Bush could make promises about protecting the environment. A few years later, when the 1997 Kyoto Protocol was written, Western governments were still willing to pledge that they would do the heavy lifting with regard to reducing emissions, while developing countries would be free from such limits.

Hence, the seeming “lack of will” at Rio+20 last year can be much better explained by the onset of a huge structural crisis of capitalism, rather than the “lack of vision” of individual politicians.

Instead of optimism about acting on climate change, the real optimism these days among capitalists is about the profits they can make from the oil and gas bonanza. Oil giant and planet-wrecker par excellence BP is predicting that by 2030, the entire Western Hemisphere will be energy independent, due to the expansion of new techniques for oil and gas exploration, such as fracking in shale deposits and horizontal and deep-water drilling. Fossil fuels are expected to remain at 81 percent of the energy mix in an energy economy that will be 39 percent larger than today.

Naturally, oil executives such as Scott D. Sheffield, chief executive of Texas-based Pioneer Natural Resources—headquartered in an area of the world that received only two inches of rain for the whole of 2011 and spent most of the year with large parts of the state on fire—are nevertheless overjoyed: “To not be concerned with where our oil is going to come from is probably the biggest home run for the country in a hundred years… It sort of reminds me of the industrial revolution in coal, which allowed us to have some of the cheapest energy in the world and drove our economy in the late 1800s and 1900s.”

Depending on who you are, the outlook for natural gas is even rosier. The International Energy Agency recently released a report that asked in its title “Are We Entering a Golden Age of Gas?” The answer was a resounding “yes,” due to the North American shale gas boom and a “strong post-crisis recovery.”

The other side to this “golden age,” as the report makes clear, is that future economic expansion based on natural gas “alone will not put the world on a carbon emissions path consistent with an average global temperature rise of no more than 2° Celsius,” but on a “trajectory consistent with stabilizing the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at around 650 parts per million CO2 equivalent, suggesting a long-term temperature rise of over 3.5°  Celsius.”

Insane Logic

In the insane capitalist “logic” of the 21st century, short-term profit-taking must be maximized at all costs. In a little-reported phenomenon, the energy companies have figured out that they can find oil in shale deposits previously considered marginal in the same way that they “frack” for natural gas. With the price of oil over $80 a barrel, it’s profitable to seek oil in this way, regardless of the environmental cost.

Hence, not only is there a natural gas boom in the U.S., but there’s also an enormous, though much less publicized, oil boom. In fact, the oil boom from previously untapped shale deposits is so large that its effects can be seen from space. The Bakken Field in North Dakota, all 15,000 square miles of it, is one of the largest contiguous oil fields in the world, with output doubling every 18 months. In Texas, production from the Eagle Field increased 30-fold between 2010 and 2012. The reason that the remote and sparsely populated Bakken Field rivals Chicago in light pollution, making it visible to orbiting satellites, is because the natural gas that comes up with the oil, rather than being collected and sold, is set on fire in a process called “flaring.” This senseless act of vandalism and waste is the result of the fact that companies are in a rush to make money from oil that they can’t be bothered to develop the infrastructure necessary to cope with associated natural gas.

As Stanford University academic Adam Brandt, who analyzes greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels, explains: “Companies are in a race with their competitors to develop the resource, which means there is little incentive to delay production to reduce flaring.” In Texas, the natural gas flared in 2012 could have provided electricity to 400,000 homes.

So while one set of capitalists is fracking for natural gas on the East Coast—thanks to political leaders like Governor Andrew Cuomo in New York, who appears to be ready to open up the state to fracking—in other parts of the country, a different set of capitalists is setting fire to the exact same gas because it’s a nuisance that slows down production of the different fossil fuel they’re after.

Nothing could exemplify the utter waste and anarchic insanity of capitalism than this fact. One of the government regulatory bodies supposedly in charge of overseeing the oil corporations, North Dakota’s Industrial Commission, gave their logic for refusing to take action against this senselessness: “If we restricted oil production to reduce flaring, we would reduce the cash flow from oil wells fivefold…. As well as cutting waste, we are mandated to increase production, which we would not be doing.”

As for the third and dirtiest arm of the triumvirate of fossil fuels, the world is predicted to be burning 1.2 billion tons more coal per year in 2017. Coal has actually declined in use in the U.S. due to companies switching electricity production to cheaper natural gas, which has reduced U.S. carbon emissions.

One might think this is a good thing. However, capitalism is a global system, so any coal not sold here finds a market overseas. The Chinese population is literally choking to death on grotesque amounts of air pollution in cities such as Beijing. And who’s to blame? The U.S. government says China is building too many coal plants, but increasing amounts of the coal in Asia is coming from mines in the U.S. According to a report in ClimateWire: “Although Chinese coal is largely sourced from domestic mines, EIA figures show that U.S. coal shipments to China have dramatically risen in recent years, punctuated by a 107 percent jump from 2011 to 2012. Chinese imports of U.S. coal surged from 4 million tons in 2011 to 8.3 million tons last year.”

This brings us to the international dimension—and the economic and military competition between countries that makes it impossible for effective international agreements on climate change and emissions reduction to be negotiated. If Barack Obama really wanted to do something about reducing energy consumption in America—and killing a lot fewer people around the world—he could start with a massive reduction in military spending. The U.S. military is the single biggest user of energy in the United States, with the Department of Defense responsible for 80 percent of government energy requirements. Just the cost of the war in Iraq would have paid, from now until 2030, for all the investment in renewable energies necessary to stay below 2° Celsius of warming.

These examples illustrate two things. First, we are in a do-or-die battle with the economic system because capitalism is in fundamental conflict with the biosphere. And second, only a committed alliance of social and ecological justice activists that is clear about the nature of the enemy and prepared to confront the political and economic architects of the crisis stands a hope of winning.

This is why fighting the XL pipeline is about much more than stopping a single pipeline or the first test of Obama’s second term. It’s about building a movement for social and ecological justice and making it clear that we are going to organize to prevent any more infrastructure being built that will drive us over the ecological cliff.

As energy analyst Chris Nelder has put it, we face a choice between keeping the old fossil-fuel based infrastructure that is burning up the planet, and adding to it at an annual cost of $1.6 trillion just to keep it running—or transitioning, at much lower economic, let alone environmental, cost, to a new energy paradigm. His figures and argument are worthy of a lengthy quote: “Instead of incremental spending on an effectively dead transportation regime, we should be thinking about one that can survive the challenges ahead, and deliver more economic benefits than costs. We should be setting an ambitious target, like replacing all commercial passenger air flights with high speed rail for trips under 1,000 miles, replacing 90 percent of our city street traffic with light rail, and moving all long-haul freight traffic to rail. Even if the cost of all that rail infrastructure were in the range of $3 trillion, it would be a fantastic investment.

“Against $6 trillion (minimum) in sunk costs and $1.6 trillion per year in maintenance, the $1.2 trillion per year, plus building the high speed rail network at a generous estimate of $1 trillion, looks very reasonable.

“Put another way: Would you rather spend another $32 trillion over the next 20 years just to maintain a outmoded, unscaleable, aged, unhealthy system, plus another $2.8 trillion in lost productivity due to delays and gridlock, only to wind up out of gas? Or would you rather spend $25 trillion to repair our infrastructure, transition transportation to rail, transition the power grid to renewables, upgrade the entire grid, and solve the carbon problem, to have free fuel forever.”

Of course, whether we travel that road or not—and whether we leave a world to our descendants as beautiful as the one we were born into—will depend on our own independent, organized self-activity to wrench control away from a ruling elite that is quite happy to continue making money from a system that must be overturned.

Chris Williams is an environmental activist, professor of physics and chemistry at Pace University, and the author of Ecology and Socialism.

Welcome to the Network of Global Corporate Control: Meet the Global Corporate “Supra-Government”

Oldspeak: “This small network of dominant global companies and banks, many of which are larger than most countries on earth, with no democratic accountability, are also acting independently as a type of “global supra-government” forcing even our dysfunctional and façade-like “democratic” governments to collapse if they do not do as “financial markets” say – such as the recent cases of democratically-elected governments in Greece and Italy whose officials were forced out and replaced with unelected bankers. In any other situation that’s called a coup d’état. Powerful government officials will not oppose this network, whether or not the power is good for human lives and human communities.” -Andrew Gavin Marshall “They oust entrenched regimes where normal political processes could not do so. They force austerity, banking bail-outs and other major policy changes. Their influence dwarfs multilateral institutions such as the International Monetary Fund. Indeed, leaving aside unusable nuclear weapons, they have become the most powerful force on earth.” -Roger Altman, the former Deputy Secretary of the Treasury under the Clinton administration. Behold! The fruits of “free markets”, globalization, & unfettered capitalism. Workers around the world being fleeced, literally worked to death. People suffering with poverty, malnutrition, homelessness. The environment we all depend on being depleted, poisoned, destroyed… all to relentlessly maximize profits for the “supra-government” ever tightening its grip on power and all the while obliterating every day, incrementally, civil, human, natural and economic rights & freedoms. This system is not working. It must be changed.

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The “Real” Recovery: Welcome to the Network of Global Corporate Control

Cash Hoarding, Tax Evasion, and the Corporate Coup

Revealed: The Transnational Corporate Network That Runs The World

By Andrew Gavin Marshall @ AndrewGavinMarshall.Com:

Part 1: Meet the Global Corporate “Supra-Government”

We live in a corporate culture, where most of us have worked or currently work for corporations, we spend our money at corporate venues, on corporate products, watch corporately-owned television shows and movies, listen to corporate-sponsored music; our modes of transportation, communication and recreation are corporately influenced or produced; our sports stadiums and movie theaters are named after car companies and global banks; our food is genetically altered by multinational conglomerates, our drinking water is brought to us by Coca-Cola, our news is brought to us by Pfizer, and our political leaders are brought to us by Exxon, Shell, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase.

In this global corporate culture it is often difficult to take a step back and look at transnational corporations, beyond what they represent in our culture, and see that they are, in fact, totalitarian institutions with power being exercised from the top down, with no democratic accountability, legally bound to be interested only – and exclusively – in maximizing quarterly short-term profits, often to the detriment of the environment, labor, human rights, democracy, peace and the population as a whole.

In this first of a three-part series on the reaches of global corporate power, we’ll look specifically at the size and network influence of the world’s largest corporations. This is especially important given that the world’s population faces increasing challenges with over 1 billion people living in slums, billions more living in poverty, hunger and increasing starvation; with unemployment increasing, austerity and “adjustment” programs demanding that even those in the once-industrialized West dramatically reduce their living standards; as the environment is plundered and pillaged, and as governments give corporations more state welfare and subsidies while cutting welfare and social services for the poor.

Corporate culture creates, over time, a totalitarian culture as this dominant institution seeks to remake society in its own image – where people are punished and impoverished as corporations are supported, rewarded and empowered.

The network of global corporate control, in numbers

In the year 2000, of the world’s 100 largest economies, 51 were corporations, while only 49 were countries, based upon national GDP (gross domestic product) and corporate sales. Of the top 200 corporations in 2000, the United States had the largest share with 82, followed by Japan at 41, Germany at 20, and France at 17.

Of the world’s 100 largest economic entities in 2010, 42% were corporations; when looking at the top 150 economic entities, 58% were corporations. The largest corporation in 2010 was Wal-Mart, the 25th largest economic entity on earth, surpassed only by the 24 largest countries in the world, but with greater revenues than the GDP of 171 countries, placing it higher on the list than Norway and Iran.

Following Wal-Mart, the largest corporations in the world were: Royal Dutch Shell (larger than Austria, Argentina and South Africa), Exxon Mobil (larger than Thailand and Denmark), BP (larger than Greece, UAE, Venezuela and Colombia), followed by several other energy and automotive conglomerates.

In 2012, Fortune published its annual Global 500 list of the top 500 corporations in the world in 2011. The top 10 corporations in the world, as determined by total revenue, are: Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil, Wal-Mart Stores, BP, Sinopec Group, China National Petroleum, State Grid, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Toyota Motor.

Among some of the other top 100 are: Total (11), Gazprom (15), E.ON (16), ENI (17), ING Group (18), GM (19), General Electric (22), AXA (25), BNP Paribas (30), GDF Suez (33), Banco Santander (44), Bank of America (46), JP Morgan Chase (51), HSBC Holdings (53), Apple (55), IBM (57), Citigroup (60), Société Générale (67), Nestlé (71), Wells Fargo (80), Archer Daniels Midland (92), and Bank of China (93).

The 10 largest corporations in Canada include: Manulife Financial, Suncor Energy, Royal Bank of Canada, Power Corporation of Canada, George Weston, Magna International, Toronto-Dominion Bank, Bank of Nova Scotia, Onex, and Husky Energy.

The 10 largest corporations in Britain are: BP, HSBC Holdings, Tesco, Vodafone, Barclays, Lloyds Banking Group, Royal Bank of Scotland, Aviva, Rio Tinto Group, and Prudential.

The 10 largest conglomerates in France are: Total, AXA, BNP Paribas, GDF Suez, Carrefour, Crédit Agricole, Société Générale, Électricité de France, Peugeot, and Groupe BPCE.

The 10 largest conglomerates in Germany are: Volkswagen, E. ON, Daimler, Allianz, Siemens, BASF, BMW, Metro, Munich Re Group, and Deutsche Telekom.

The 10 largest conglomerates in the United States are: Exxon Mobil, Wal-Mart Stores, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, General Motors, General Electric, Berkshire Hathaway, Fannie Mae, Ford Motor, and Hewlett-Packard.

In October of 2011, a scientific study about the global financial system was released, the first of its kind, undertaken by three complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland. The conclusion of the study revealed what many theorists and observers have noted for years:

“An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.” As one of the researchers stated, “Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it’s conspiracy theories or free-market… Our analysis is reality-based.” Using a database which listed 37 million companies and investors worldwide, the researchers studied all 43,060 trans-national corporations (TNCs), including the share ownerships linking them.

The mapping of “power” was done through the construction of a model showing which companies controlled other companies through shareholdings. The web of ownership revealed a core of 1,318 companies with ties to two or more other companies. This “core” was found to own roughly 80% of global revenues for the entire set of 43,000 TNCs.

And then came what the researchers referred to as the “super-entity” of 147 tightly-knit companies, which all own each other, and collectively own 40% of the total wealth in the entire network. One of the researchers noted, “In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network.”

This network poses a huge risk to the global economy, noted the researchers: “If one [company] suffers distress… this propagates.” The study was undertaken with a data set established prior to the economic crisis, thus, as the financial crisis forced some banks to fail (such as Lehman Brothers) and others to merge (such as Merrill Lynch and Bank of America), the “super-entity” would now be even more connected, concentrated, and thus, dangerous for the economy.

The top 50 companies on the list of the “super-entity” included (as of 2007): Barclays Plc (1), Capital Group Companies Inc (2), FMR Corporation (3), AXA (4), State Street Corporation (5), JP Morgan Chase & Co. (6), UBS AG (9), Merrill Lynch & Co Inc (10), Deutsche Bank (12), Credit Suisse Group (14), Bank of New York Mellon Corp (16), Goldman Sachs Group (18), Morgan Stanley (21), Société Générale (24), Bank of America Corporation (25), Lloyds TSB Group (26), Lehman Brothers Holdings (34), Sun Life Financial (35), ING Groep (41), BNP Paribas (46), and several others.

In December of 2011, Roger Altman, the former Deputy Secretary of the Treasury under the Clinton administration, wrote an article for the Financial Times in which he explained that financial markets were “acting like a global supra-government,” noting:

“They oust entrenched regimes where normal political processes could not do so. They force austerity, banking bail-outs and other major policy changes. Their influence dwarfs multilateral institutions such as the International Monetary Fund. Indeed, leaving aside unusable nuclear weapons, they have become the most powerful force on earth.”

Altman continued, explaining that when the power of this “global supra-government” is flexed, “the immediate impact on society can be painful – wider unemployment, for example, frequently results and governments fail.” But of course, being a former top Treasury Department official, he went on to praise the “global supra-government,” writing that, “the longer-term effects can be often transformative and positive.”

Ominously, Altman concluded: “Whether this power is healthy or not is beside the point. It is permanent,” and “there is no stopping the new policing role of the financial markets.”

So, this small network of dominant global companies and banks, many of which are larger than most countries on earth, with no democratic accountability, are also acting independently as a type of “global supra-government” forcing even our dysfunctional and façade-like “democratic” governments to collapse if they do not do as “financial markets” say – such as the recent cases of democratically-elected governments in Greece and Italy whose officials were forced out and replaced with unelected bankers.

In any other situation that’s called a coup d’état. But as Altman’s view reflected, powerful government officials will not oppose this network, whether or not the power is good for human lives and human communities – which is, in Altman’s words, “beside the point.” After all, in his view, “it is permanent.”

Unless, of course, the people of the world decide to have a say in the matter.

Andrew Gavin Marshall is an independent researcher and writer based in Montreal, Canada, with a focus on studying the ideas, institutions, and individuals of power and resistance across a wide spectrum of social, political, economic, and historical spheres. He has been published in AlterNet, CounterPunch, Occupy.com, Truth-Out, RoarMag, and a number of other alternative media groups, and regularly does radio, Internet, and television interviews with both alternative and mainstream news outlets. He is Project Manager of The People’s Book Project and has a weekly podcast show with BoilingFrogsPost.