Subject: M-INTRO: BIG Business and the State
From: Tolkien-AT-pseud.pseud
Date: Fri,  2 Nov 2001 02:07:03 -0700 (MST)



Sorry for the length, but this is a great article from 
the marxist.com web site. 

The state is more powerful than ever; the view that big 
business alone shapes the new world order is wrong.
by John Pilger, 9th July 2001

There is a view fashionable in the media that the world 
is being taken over by huge multinational corporations, 
accountable to no one. "Governments are reduced to 
playing the role of servile lackeys to big business," 
Noreena Hertz, the dissident financier, wrote in these 
pages recently. Even the US government has surrendered 
state power, she says, citing "George W Bush's shameful 
obsequiousness to big energy corporations".

For all the vivid examples of modern corporate power, 
such as the annual income of Motorola being equal to 
the annual income of Nigeria's 118 million people, it 
is folly to believe that big business on its own is 
shaping the new world order. This allows the argument 
against globalisation to be depoliticised, reducing it 
to single issues of "ethical trading" and "codes of 
conduct", and inviting its co-option. Above all, it 
misses the point that state power in the west is 
accelerating.

"Globalisation does not mean the impotence of the 
state," wrote the Russian economist and activist Boris 
Kagarlitsky, "but the rejection by the state of its 
social functions in favour of repressive ones, 
irresponsibility on the part of governments and the 
ending of democratic freedoms." The illusion of a 
weakened state is enticing: indeed, it is the 
smokescreen thrown up by the designers of modern, 
centralised power. Margaret Thatcher concentrated 
executive power while claiming the opposite; Tony Blair 
has done the same. The European project is all about 
extending the frontiers of the state. Totalitarian 
China has embraced the "free" market while 
consolidating its vast state apparatus. The autocracies 
in Singapore and Malaysia achieved the same while 
growing stronger. (Not surprisingly, Blair is an 
admirer of Singapore.)

It is the American state that surpasses them all, and 
it has never been more powerful. The notion that George 
Bush is "obsequious to big energy corporations" (and 
ought to be ashamed of himself) is naive. Big oil, like 
big weapons manufacturing and big agribusiness, has 
always been as one with the occupants of the White 
House and the US government; they are interchangeable. 
That is the American way. Without government patronage, 
some of the greatest corporations would fail. The 
Cargill Corporation, which dominates the world trade in 
food grains, would not enjoy its monopoly, were it not 
for years of big subsidies to American agribusiness, as 
well as US government policies that used "food aid" to 
subvert the agriculture of developing countries.
It was the triumphant American state that fashioned the 
present "global economy" at Bretton Woods in 1944, so 
that its military and corporate arms would have 
unlimited access to minerals, oil, markets and cheap 
labour. In 1948, the State Department's senior imperial 
planner, George Kennan, wrote: "We have 50 per cent of 
the world's wealth, but only 6.3 per cent of its 
population. In this situation, our real job in the 
coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships 
which permit us to maintain this position of disparity. 
To do so, we have to dispense with all 
sentimentality . . . we should cease thinking about 
human rights, the raising of living standards and 
democratisation." The World Bank and the International 
Monetary Fund were invented to implement this strategy. 
Their base is Washington, where they are joined by an 
umbilical cord to the US Treasury, a few blocks away. 
This is where the globalisation of poverty and the use 
of debt as a weapon of control was conceived. When John 
Maynard Keynes, the British representative at Bretton 
Woods, proposed a tax on creditor nations, designed to 
prevent poor countries falling into perpetual debt, he 
was told by the Americans that if he persisted, Britain 
would not get its desperately needed war loans. More 
than half a century later, the gap between the richest 
20 per cent of humanity and the poorest 20 per cent has 
doubled; and "structural adjustment programmes" have 
secured an indebted imperium greater than the British 
empire at its height.

The danger of the "moderate" view, which refuses to 
contemplate the sheer rapacity of western state power, 
is that it can be co-opted. The World Bank and the IMF, 
now under siege as never before, have devised their 
survival tactics in relation to this. Overnight, the 
IMF, the greatest of the loan sharks, has begun to 
sound like an institutional Mother Teresa, with 
a "mission to defeat poverty". Together with the World 
Bank, and the World Trade Organisation, it now 
promotes "dialogue" with "moderate" non-governmental 
organisations (NGOs) opposed to globalisation, 
anointing them as "serious opponents", in contrast to 
the "hooligans" on the streets. Clare Short's 
Department for International Development employs this 
tactic, co-opting leading NGOs for "consultation", even 
commissioning them to contribute to government white 
papers. This collaboration should not be 
underestimated. Following the successful attack on the 
WTO in Seattle two years ago, more than 1,200 groups 
and organisations from 85 countries called for 
a "moratorium" on further liberalisation of trade and 
an "audit" of WTO policies as the first stage of 
reforming it. The WTO and its creators in Washington 
were delighted, for its legitimacy was not in question. 
Yet, this secretive, entirely undemocratic body is the 
most rapacious predator devised by the imperial powers. 
The Economist calls it an "embryo world government" - 
which no one has voted for. Beware of moderates.




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