The Corporate Empire Rules the Planet: A View from Europe

[Dirk39]

Hello from Germany,

...

THE WORLDWIDE SWINDLE

No government will ever come to the rescue of the people since all governments in the industrialized world are in on this gigantic swindle. The great world leaders are all lined up to take their share of the booty, be it in Iraq or Latin America or Africa. Give them a chance and they'll all be ready to jump. The IMF, the World Bank and the WTO are putting their people in place to serve the interests of the corporations. George W. Bush is just one of their pawns.



If Chirac, the French president, and his government held out firmly against the U.S. plans to invade Iraq, it was not because of any compassionate feelings for the fate of the Iraqis and maybe not even any real understanding of the danger of bringing instability to that part of the world. The French government was only looking out for itself. France and Germany were both mainly tending to their own corporate interests, trying to keep some control over the unipolar world, this unipolarity being the mainstay of the PNAC articles of faith that have supplanted the U.S. Constitution and which is not well in tune with the planetary symphony.



When Blair played along with the U.S. in the illegal invasion of Iraq, it was because the UK government, Anthony Blair and the Chancellor to the Treasury, Gordon Brown, in particular, were confident that they would be rewarded by sharing in the booty after the takeover of Iraq. They have largely been disappointed in their hopes. But then - how can they possibly at this point find a way out of their misdirected collaboration with the great beast, playing second fiddle in the 'Power House' created by the neocons? (See: "How We Got Into this Imperial Pickle: A PNAC Primer").



When 'New Labour' came to power in UK, when Gerhard Schröder and the 'New Social Democrats' took over from Helmut Kohl in Germany in 1998, we had no idea that those supposedly leftist governments were going to sell us down the river, gleefully, knowingly and without a second thought. They both came to power during the '90s when Bill Clinton, the corporate pawn-in-chief was in power in Washington. All three were men of big words, compassionate words, promising the 'reforming of society'. Blair promised in 1997 that he was going to be the head of one of the greatest radical reform governments in History (qu'il conduirait " l'un des plus grands gouvernements radicaux réformateurs de notre Histoire" - that, under 'new Labour', Britain would no longer have to choose between the US and Europe.

...

Siv O'Neall was born and grew up in Sweden, graduated from Lund University. She is living in Lyon, France with her family after having lived extensively in Paris, France and in New Rochelle, N.Y. She is now retired but she has worked for many years as a French teacher in Westchester, N.Y. and as an English teacher in the Grandes Ecoles (Institutes of Technology) in France.



Copyright 2005 by Siv O'Neall


http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_19470.shtml

When will the Liberals and the progressive democrats in the USA will wake up, who believe that there's still a kind of social democratic "New Deal" Europe and if only the next democrat will win an election, the nightmare is over?

Dirk

[OneBlueSky]

1. she's hit the nail right on the head . . . the question is . . .

what can/will we do about it? . . .

corporate control of virtually EVERYTHING is a reality . . . corporations are more powerful than governments, and the corporate oligarchy is more powerful than the UN or any other international body . . . our representatives in Congress KNOW this . . . they KNOW that corporations control their institutions, and many of them are paid handsomely to perpetuate the situation . . . rather than representing the people who elected them, they represent the corporate interests who finance their campaigns . . . and tuck the occasional untraceable donation into a convenient coat pocket . . .

so how do we change this reality? . . . we elect a Congress that will NOT perpetuate the situation . . . representatives who will represent THE PEOPLE rather than the corporations . . . representatives who will take the power back from the corporations and return it to the people . . .

accomplishing this will not be easy . . . it may not even be possible . . . it will require a fair voting/vote tabulation system (don't have it yet), candidates who will support an populist, anti-corporate platform (they can be found), and the ability to get the right information into the hands of the voters (can be done locally, but not through the corporate media) . . . I don't know if anyone is thinking and/or organizing along these lines, but I'd be interested to find out . . . anyone? . . .

[Dirk39]

2. I'm not the one to judge the situation in the USA

but in Germany, one of the most exciting things did happen during the last year.
I'm 41 now, and I would never have expected something like this to happen.
Our situation is much different from the one in the USA. We have a neoliberal Blairist/Clintonist Socialdemocrat/Green-Government for about 7 years now, not a neoconservative one. But the programm goes like this: privatise everything, lowering wages, lowering the tax for the wealthy few, smash the Unions, "deregulate" this, "deregulate that".

About a year ago, a new party was established with the support of some former Social Democrats and Union Leaders - not what many people might expect: the people, who did organise this had not much in common with the rebellions and resistance we have seen from mostly middle-class people in the sixties. The main reason was a neoliberal programm to impoverish those, who are unemployed and to steal their dignity.
Schröder did resign now, one year before a new official election and all polls show that this new party will reach about 12% of the voters.

We experience now in Germany one of the largest hate-campaigns I've ever seen during the last 20 years.
And during the last months the whole public discourse has changed. Not a single Green or Social Democrat would have only touched the word "left" during the last 7 years. Now, they cannot stop to talk about themselves, being the real "Left".

It's ridicolous.
And on the other hand, the propaganda tries to separate the interests of the former middle-class Leftists and Progressives from that new party.
The Greens did get a paper from their leadership to label the new party as "reactionary".

I say it again: I'm not the one to judge the situation in the US right now, but: The Democrats would never ever win an election again, if the leftists and liberals and progressive people wouldn't give them their vote. And they might not know, how to use this power.

And what about all these people, who - for good reasons - don't vote anymore?
If we don't buy into the cynical theory that these people are so happy with the democracy they live in that they don't even care to vote anymore: what if we would make clear that we're fighting for them and if they would understand this?
As rather pessimistic as I am: We should never forget that THEY stand on our shoulders and if we step away they fall: and they are afraid of us as long as we have the right to vote.

Billions of dollars are spent worldwide to keep us off thinking for ourselves.

What makes me really afraid and what I do not understand about the USA: former Empires tried to let the people in their own country somehow benefit from Imperialism. But although Bush doesn't even offer them that and the economic situation of the middle class, not to mention the situation of the poor in the USA is getting worse, there's still no kind of rebellion.
I simply do not understand this. For decades now, the majority of the Americans do not even have a party in congress that represents their interests, but they simply do not care.

Dirk

[bloom]

4. "former Empires tried to let the people... benefit from Imperialism...

It is amazing that people would allow their standard of living to be degraded - and don't seem to recognize it.

I attribute it to the increased power of marketing/advertising/propaganda through the media. And the use of the "hate" campaign - so they are more focused against the "liberal" enemy than those in power.

[OffWithTheirHeads]

11. Oh yeah

The DLC & RNC are really gonna back honest candidates? I think not.

[Fovea]

12. The first step

is completely open, publicly funded elections.

The second is to get corporate money 100% out of government, and imprison/bankrupt all violators.

[IrateCitizen]

3. Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse predicted these trends over 40 yrs ago...

The state of supposedly "leftist" politics today, espcially in Europe -- "New Labour" in the UK, the "Neu SPD" in Germany, etc. -- is a predictable result of the decision of many old socialist elements to work for incremental reform back in the early part of the 20th century. In abandoning the revolutionary element of orthodox Marxism, they abandoned the materialist dialectic that lay at the heart of their philosophy. In order to embrace the idea of gradualist reform, they were forced to accept many of the assumptions regarding society and government held by their capitalist opponents.

The current "new" incarnations of these parties, including the increasingly moribund Democratic Party in the United States, is simply the culmination of decades of succumbing to the perceptions and frameworks advanced by the traditional bourgeois elements controlling conservative parties. As the SPD, Labour, and the Democrats embraced the basic system under which politics was conducted in their home countries, they gradually took on the general outlook of their opponents in terms of economics and social stratification.

Of course, while the major economies were still primarily focused on heavy industry, and the culture industry was still in relative infancy, the "leftist" parties maintained some sort of real tie to their roots, because leftist rhetoric was still able to find resonance among the working classes for whom the great labor struggles were still a thing of recent memory. However, as the major western nations began to transform into economies of advanced capitalism, and emphasis began to move away from heavy industry and toward mass media and high finance, the "leftist" parties began to lose resonance.

The reasons for this were many, but Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse did a good job in explaining them. The overall thrust of their argument is that bourgeois elements in Western society stopped fighting with the working classes and gradually assimilated them into bourgeoise culture. Advanced capitalism required a massive expansion of technical know-how to properly function, and university systems went to work educating more and more people to fulfill the roles of technocrats and managers in the economic system. This new educated class was particularly susceptible to the bourgeoise culture, and sought to emulate it in every way (typified in American suburban development post WWII).

As the society became more stratified, with everyone having their pre-assigned roles, the mass media machine exerted considerable influence, reinforcing the bourgeoise value system on the majority of the population. The test of good citizenship was to simply fulfill one's role to the best of one's ability, and to consume in order to fit in with the rest of society. Thinking about broader questions such as why society was functioning in this way, and if there really was a better alternative, was strictly forbidden. The genius in this system is really quite extraordinary. It does not explicitly forbid the discussion of alternatives -- but the media mostly shuts them out. For example, the only place where you can be exposed to an honest discussion of Marxism, socialism and communism anymore is in a university history class -- certainly not on a major television network. Furthermore, issues of class in society are erased away, as people from the working and professional classes are led to believe that they all vacation at the same destinations such as Disneyworld, and what could be more egalitarian than that? Finally, as people become more atomized and specialized in their daily existences, they are encouraged not to think about substantive issues, but instead to leave such things to designated "experts". The end result is a sort of Potemkin Democracy in which people have really very little say over their daily lives outside of fitting within a narrow, pre-determined role. Hell, we even now have an entire "culture industry" dedicated to dictating to us how we should spend our free time.

The rise of the New Left in the 1960's was an attempt to counter this vision of society by the first generation to really be brought up in its flowering stage. In essence, the New Left was a recoiling in horror by the young people of that time from a regimented, corporatized society that offered them little more than a life as nameless, faceless cogs in a corporate machine. The problem was that all they could offer was a vague criticism without any viable alternatives. That is why the New Left largely was engulfed and commoditized itself by the corporate juggernaught. Just think of the way that the 1960's are used as a marketing ploy to this day for a variety of products, without any real analysis of the deeper aspects of the rebellion against accepted norms that took place in that time.

The author of this article, sadly, is engaging in pipe dreams in expecting a massive grassroots movement to overthrow the corporate beast. It is now all-pervasive and all-consuming. Its reach is so insidious that most people don't even realize it's there, so convincing them to counter it is a fool's errand. The recent "no" vote in the EU by France and Holland was not necessarily a vote against corporate power, as much as it was about subordinating their national identities to corporate culture. The only thing that is sure in this exercise is that the corporate juggernaught will not go away, but will simply set about retooling its message to convince these malcontents that their identities will be safe in integration, only to then turn around and dismantle them in pursuit of the same bland homogenization that exists here in the US.

The only way that the corporate juggernaught will be stopped is when it collapses under its own gargantuan weight. I say "when" rather than "if", because I believe that it is inevitable, that the current order is unsustainable. The best bet for those opposed to it is to simply carve out places free of it in our daily lives and living arrangements, and do the best that we can in the meantime....

[blindpig]

5. outstanding post

very well expressing a lot of stuff that's been accumulating in my head over the past three decades.

The point about the middle class assimilating the working class really struck a nerve with me. I grew up in a working class neighborhood in Baltimore in the early 60's, white marble steps, all that. I was told at some early age that we were middle class but even then it didn't make sense that we were the same as those people in Towson with their big houses(with lawns!)and generally nicer stuff. I alway felt more akin to the East Side Kids than Beaver.

I fear that you're depressingly correct about the chances for real change, they will not, perhaps cannot, relinquish power and control. As long as bread and circuses are available opposition to their power will be negligible. Television is by far their most important asset.

Put the horses in the wagon, it's all downhill from here.

[IrateCitizen]

6. It's not as much about middle class absorbing working class...

... as it is about the established order, the status quo, the vision of bourgeois values absorbing and assimilating all classes. The strengthening of cultural hegemony took place as people from an increasing number of socioeconomic backgrounds were led to believe that the classic bourgeois life was within their grasp. It started with the middle class way back in the days of the industrial revolution. It wasn't until the post-WWII years that this vision really got down into the working class as well, as many families whose breadwinners toiled in factories and manufacturing plants gradually began to be able to achieve their little piece of the "American dream" -- a house in the suburbs, a little yard with a white picket fence, and so on.

The ruling classes realized that the old strategy of extracting each last drop of blood and toil from the working class was counterproductive -- it resulted in too much instability due to labor uprisings -- so they instead cut them in on the deal through better wages and, more importantly, benefits. In this sense, the working class fulfilled Georg Lukacs's prediction that the path of social democrats and trade unionism would result in the class opposed to capitalism eventually becoming the class for itself -- and the pervasiveness of the culture industry, with its elimination of class form large parts of the national conscience, went a step further by helping transform them into just another amalgamation of individuals out for themselves.

But, things are not completely lost. It is still possible to have some kind of impact on the local level, where face-to-face interaction is still possible. However, even this is many times more difficult than before, thanks to the successful atomization of the individual accomplished by modern advanced capitalist society and the culture industry it spawned.

[blindpig]

7. well yeah,

that's what I meant.:P

I'm getting the impression that our rulers are about done with the Henry Ford model, something that the unions, particlarly the UAW, should have picked up on. If this mad economy continues, something I very much doubt considering all of the very bad externals converging, the American people will be abandoned like a red-headed stepchild as Asia becomes the new great money churning machine. Crippled and indebted like Argentina, we will be ruled by some World Bank satrap like Wolfie. And though victims of the most pervasive propaganda machine in history we will deserve it for the damage we have wrought on the world and its people. Be assured, that kind of ugly justice does't give me any joy but I see little else for it.

[IrateCitizen]

8. The reasons the unions didn't pick up on any of this...

... was that they bought into the inherent contradictions of the advanced capitalist system hook, line and sinker. It was fundamentally impossible for them to oppose a system they had allowed to completely absorb them.

Many people seem to place the heyday of labor in the post-WWII years, where the "American Dream" had extended its hand to the regular industrial shift worker. Having studied it a little bit, I would disagree. I would place the heyday of labor actually in the period of 1890-1915. I do this not because labor wielded extraordinary power at this time, because it clearly did not. In fact, labor was struggling during this period. Rather, it was a period of unmatched solidarity in the labor movement -- the genuine development of a class consciousness and numerous examples of the working class sticking together. It was the last time that the working class was a class opposed to the evils of industrial capitalism, before the labor movement as a whole was absorbed under a banner of trade unionism and became a bunch of fragmented entities simply out for themselves. The next logical step was for workers to simply become out for themselves as individuals, which has been accomplished through the failure of the liberal left to offer alternatives to the trajectory of advanced post-industrial capitalism and the abandonment of the Democratic Party by the working class.

The concept of "globalization" nullifies the previous arrangment of increased wages and benefits in exchange for stability. Workers are increasingly given the choice between competing with LDC's who can offer rock-bottom labor rates with no benefits, or being out of a job.

[blindpig]

9. Your analysis of union history sums it up

Probably have to wait until the so-called middle class is broken on the wheel for misery to engender solidarity.

A real problem that I see is that a new mass movement encompass more than a mere avenue to more, more, more. If our relationship to the Earth is not addressed all will be for naught.

[fedsron2us]

10. It saddens me to have to agree with you

I have spent twenty five years in the union movement, including time as an official and activist. Sometime in the early 1990's whilst researching the history of organised labor I came to conclusions about trade unions that are almost identical to those outlined in your post. Essentially the movement became just another cog in the capitalist machine whose ostensible role was to represent employees interests but who in reality acted as a mechanism whereby the aspirations of the working class could be controlled, directed and finally neutered. Now that the globalisation of the labor market has rendered them unnecessary to the capitalist system it is no surprise that their power has decayed so badly. Working people need to find other means to reconnect with each other and to reignite their sense of class solidarity.

[IrateCitizen]

13. Your analysis is correct, but I think you're mistaken on the "why"...

There wasn't any grand conspiracy plotted out by people to neuter the aspirations of the working class by co-opting the labor movement. Rather, the fate of unionism in the United States was just succumbing to the nature of the beast that is advanced capitalism. It either destroys or assimilates anything that dares to oppose it.

Just look at what has become of every single expression of rebellion over the past 50 years or so. The "beats" of post-WWII? They were co-opted and commoditized. The hippies of the 1960's? Ditto. Hell, just look at what has happened to "extreme" sports over the past 15 years -- they have gone from niche cultures of their own to being expressions of "cool" in mainstream society.

Advanced capitalist society is like the borg -- it assimilates all in its path. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your perspective, it is also ultimately unsustainable.

[fedsron2us]

14. I never believed it was a conspiracy.

Nor do I subscribe to the view that all the union leaders consciously sold out their members (some did but I think they were a minority). The way that unions evolved was just a by product of the whole historical process by which capitalism developed. Nonetheless, I think that employers do deliberately adopt practices that are designed to encourage the separation of individual employees from each other in order to prevent the development of any sense of worker solidarity. I suppose the classic example is the podulised work place where each office worker is penned off from his neighbor in a cubicle.

On edit - I can't help thinking that the suicide bomber is one trend that capitalism will probably not be able to co-opt. Having said that I would not be surprised if someone was working on the clothing accessories and other spin offs as I type.

[Dirk39]

15. Solidarity...

Nonetheless, I think that employers do deliberately adopt practices that are designed to encourage the separation of individual employees from each other in order to prevent the development of any sense of worker solidarity.

I think this is incredible important and often underestimated. The Labour movement in the U.S. was radical and the fights between Labour and Corporations were - if Chomsky and Zinn are right - often very brutal, more brutal than in many European countries. Well until the 30's. And the corporations really waged a class-war against Labour and later against the New Deal. And wasn't one reason for the decline of the anti-war-movement during the sixties the Brutality with which the police acted against the Students in Chikago?
I watched a very impressive documentary made by Adam Curtis (the same guy, who has directed "The Power of Nightmares" for the BBC), called "The Century of the Self", where he describes Ohio as a turning point, when people started to withdraw into one's own private world again - even if they did it collectivly. It might not have been the only reason for the decline, but one shouldn't underestimate it.

I sometimes think that the reason that so many students became radicals during the Sixties wasn't so much that they were academics: it's simply the fact that people, who had much in common, did meet on a daily basis and talked to one another and the pressure on them was much lower than it is today, there were still niches in the system. Everybody who would somehow manage to pass through university could expect a good paid and secure job then.

The podulised worker you talk about might be in a situation even worse than many industriell workers ever were: but he or she does feel middle-class and the whole working situation is constructed in a way that people work against one another and regard one another as competitors. And the pressure that is put onto someone, who somehow always feels like he has to pretend being someone, he isn't, or the little he has reached in life is always at stake, might absorb an unbelievable amount of people's energy.

Hello from Germany,
Dirk

[sintax]

16. This statement of yours is very telling

"What makes me really afraid and what I do not understand about the USA: former Empires tried to let the people in their own country somehow benefit from Imperialism. But although Bush doesn't even offer them that and the economic situation of the middle class, not to mention the situation of the poor in the USA is getting worse, there's still no kind of rebellion.
I simply do not understand this. For decades now, the majority of the Americans do not even have a party in congress that represents their interests, but they simply do not care."

My friend in Germany it is like living in the land of the walking dead, even those who are "aware" seem to be in a state of fear or numbness or want an "easy Solution'. It is very disturbing.


"I have never needed the hope of victory to spur me on to fight!"

"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it - please try to believe me - unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop.  Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, "regretted," that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these "little measures" that no "patriotic German" could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing.  One day it is over his head.

[Kenergy]

18. Very good post n/t

[Lydia Leftcoast]

17. Excellent analysis, IC

:thumbsup: