Corporatocracy
According to current Wikipedia, "Corporatocracy (sometimes Corporocracy) is a pejorative term coined by proponents of the anti-globalization movement to describe a government bowing to pressure from corporate entities."
Corporatocracy and the Iraqi War by John Omaha, Ph.D. Copyright, 2003 by John Omaha
The war against Iraq is the creation of the corporations that have seized control of America and its institutions. America was once a democratic republic. It is now a corporatocracy. Corporations are soulless, deathless entities that have all the rights of citizenship that real people have and none of the responsibilities. Corporations have accumulated vast wealth that they have used to purchase, infiltrate, and colonize American government and many governments around the world. Corporations have absorbed the media, the two major political parties, the Congress, the Executive, almost all the Judiciary, in America and in many other countries, welding them into the globe-spanning unit that I have named the Corporatocracy. Corporations have distilled the essence of greed and rage to form their corporate structure. Profits must be maximized. Territory, natural resources, institutions, and citizens must be used and then discarded when they are no longer useful. Corporations must have more markets to colonize, and the military corporations, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, must have more countries to invade.
Since the end of World War II, corporations have emerged as the dominant force controlling the planet. Through the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization, a mere 200 corporations have managed to seize control of 28.3% of the world's economic output. The fifty largest commercial banks and diversified financial companies assets amount to 60% of the $20 trillion global stock of productive capital.
The war against Iraq is being promoted by the transnational military-industrial corporations for their financial benefit. The business of America is the export of war. The financial institutions that trade in currency, stocks, bonds, derivatives, and other financial instruments must have volatility in the markets in order to make a profit. War creates volatility. Between $800 billion and $1.3 trillion in currency trades are made by speculators every day!
The military-industrial corporations and the military components of the Corporatocracy receive about $400 billion per year from the U.S. Government directly and much more indirectly through pensions. Arms sales by U.S. dealers equaled the amount of arms sold by all other countries in the world combined. The amount of profit the financial institutions will realize probably cannot be calculated. The Corporatocracy must have war in order to turn over its stocks and in order to justify its continued existence. The succession of wars beginning with Vietnam (and continuing with Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, Colombia, Kuwait, Yugoslavia, Albania, etc.) and now Iraq is exactly like the succession of new models of cars produced by Detroit. Detroit's cars, since Robert McNamara was head of Ford, have been built to become obsolete (McNamara went on to head the World Bank after he was Secretary of Defense during Vietnam). These wars are like that. Wars favored by the Corporatocracy require the existence of poor countries in which the munitions can be dumped, just like we dump our toxic waste in poor countries. Bombs must be dropped, missiles fired, planes flown, rifles discharged so that more bombs, missiles, planes and ammunition can be manufactured. It is not about oil. Iraq would gladly sell us all the oil we could buy. It is not even about empire. It is about business. It is all about profit. And that makes it all the more horrible, all the more unforgivable.
John Omaha, Ph.D. Chico, CA
"What would have happened if millions of American and British people, struggling with coupons and lines at the gas stations, had learned that in 1942 Standard Oil of New Jersey [part of the Rockefeller empire] managers shipped the enemy's fuel through neutral Switzerland and that the enemy was shipping Allied fuel? Suppose the public had discovered that the Chase Bank in Nazi-occupied Paris after Pearl Harbor was doing millions of dollars' worth of business with the enemy with the full knowledge of the head office in Manhattan [the Rockefeller family among others]? Or that Ford trucks were being built for the German occupation troops in France with authorization from Dearborn, Michigan? Or that Colonel Sosthenes Behn, the head of the international American telephone conglomerate ITT, flew from New York to Madrid to Berne during the war to help improve Hitler's communications systems and improve the robot bombs that devastated London? Or that ITT built the FockeWulfs that dropped bombs on British and American troops? Or that crucial ball bearings were shipped to Nazi-associated customers in Latin America with the collusion of the vice-chairman of the U.S. War Production Board in partnership with Goering's cousin in Philadelphia when American forces were desperately short of them? Or that such arrangements were known about in Washington and either sanctioned or deliberately ignored?"
- Charles Higham, author of "Trading With The Enemy: The Nazi-American Money Plot 1933-1949"
Related References
External links
- CorpWatch
- The Elusive Saviors: Transnational Corporations and Sustainable Development
- Multinational Monitor Online
- One World
- Transnational Corporations Observatory
- Bill Moyers, Commentary 4.18.03, "It's no longer possible to tell where the corporate world ends and government begins."
- Chris Byrd, re:Jim Hightower, "Who's in Charge Here?"
- "Building Economic Democracy", Marjorie Kelly, Business Ethics, September 30, 2002
- corporatOCRACY: "Corporatism meets Democracy; Wall Street meets Main Street."
