Imperial Perspectives (Part XIV)

by Jim Miles

2006

As the Twentieth Century progressed, empire operated through visible military means and through the ‘invisible’ cloak of corporate secrecy. Part XIV of Imperial Perspectives combines the new empirical cloak of the corporations with the old empirical kahki and fatigues of the military.

XIV The Empires New Clothes

As mentioned as part of previous discussions on empire, corporations have played a large role in the institutions that are part of any modern empire. The East India Companies of Holland and Britain, the Hudson's Bay Company, and The Company of One Hundred Associates (the Company of New France) all had a variety of interests and assignments in the territories that they were chartered to occupy. All had rights of resource extraction, furs in the North American instances, and were partly obligated, partly anticipating, the settlement of the lands designated as their territory.

These corporations gave way to nation states by means of evolution in which the settling population gradually took over governmental duties as the population and their power increased. Others nation states developed by way of revolution as with the United States when the settled peoples, at least the newly powerful and increasingly wealthy, became discontented with their limited power and abilities to exercise it. The final manner in which nation states have risen, the most common, is through insurrection of the indigenous people against their invaders and occupiers (rather than their ‘discoverers’ and ‘settlers'). The great land corporations chartered by European governments disappeared but became imitated within the nation states, mainly through corporate control of transportation and communication, usually railways and telegraph, and resources, be it the mineral wealth of an area or the agricultural produce that could be harvested on a large agro-business scale.

These corporations in North America obtained a life of their own, receiving subsidies and tax relief and land grants that provided the ‘social welfare’ they needed to grow and expand and then contributed to the politicians that supported their land grants in the first place. Banking institutions were involved in a large way with these procedures, providing the large loans that were required to further the earnings of the corporate few. Another aspect, perhaps more important, was the development of corporations into ‘persons', having the right and protections of every flesh and blood citizen, but able to hide behind laws that protected the individuals within the corporation from direct responsibility for corporate damages or failures. The ‘person’ of the corporation becomes invisible just as the emperor's clothes did and as indicated by Hans Christian Anderson “None of the Emperor's clothes had ever met with such success.”

Besides being invisible, a corporation has an advantage that real persons don't have in that “A corporation can buy, sell, lease, and own property, just like any adult…But unlike us, a corporation has…perpetual life.” [1] Thus corporations continue to grow continue to multiply, and then merge and break apart like some biological amoeba or cancer, and grow some more, all the time gathering wealth and power to themselves beyond the capacity of most citizens to see. [2]

Post War Governance

After the Second World War the American government, with others, still used military power, covert and overt, subversive or pre-emptive, to expand and control their areas of interest. But a kindler, gentler empirical structure was born shortly after the end of the war when a group of governments gathered together and created the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) under the auspices of the United Nations at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, but with mostly American and British input, in 1948. Its objective, looking back in fear at the restrictive trade practices that affected the depression of the 1930s, was to open up global trade between the countries, to keep the flow of goods moving across boundaries. The transnational corporations were about to fledge, stretch their new wings, and take flight across the globe, to achieve an empire of business – still associated with the military of course – that today supersedes many national governments.

Gatt was not about free trade, but about managed trade, as “for most of the Cold War, GATT was part of an American grand strategy…in which the United States traded access to its markets and its technologies in return for support against communism.” [3] These gentler means were accompanied of course by clothing of a rougher highly visible cloth, various mini-wars in Vietnam, Korea, and the Latin Americas. They were also accompanied by two other sibling institutions, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank), both of whom will be looked at more closely later, but for their immediate purposes were designed “with the intention of consolidating the economic control exercised by the center states, and the United States in particular, over the periphery, and hence the entire world market.” [4]

Corporations grew larger and more powerful as trade increased from hundreds of millions before the war to many trillions of dollars by the end of the Cold War. Their power grew enormously in proportion to their wealth and their essentially secret, completely non-democratic management and agreements. Supported by the semi-private negotiations that took place without negotiation with or submissions from the people of the countries concerned, GATT and its two sibling institutions have become a system of world governance that is neither democratic nor free but fully supports the expansion of empire. The more the corporations and trade institutions developed, the more important it became for them to be invisible – invisible to the environmental destruction they cause, invisible to the profits they reap from sales based on cheap resources and labour, invisible in their relationship to the deaths they cause as evidenced by such detritus as Lockeheed Martin missile remnants throughout the Middle East, [5] and invisible to the democratic processes necessary for truly ‘open and transparent governance'.

Obviously my analogy to invisible clothes becomes weak if one thinks of what can be seen in the nakedness of empire exposed. But as with all modern technology, the emperor's clothes could be updated and considered to be an invisibility cloak, a more suitable analogy as Star Trek and Star Wars technology came into ideation.

Post Cold War

The IMF and the World Bank underwent changes through the 1970s and 1980s that tended to mingle their original purposes. The GATT was never ratified by the American government. And then the world was surprised if not stunned by the collapse of the Russian Empire. For a while, history had ended and the rough cut cloth of the military became much less visible, put away in the closet, only sometimes appearing from the closet to bomb a country or invade another banana republic.

In 1995 the GATT was replaced by the World Trade Organization (WTO) to which the United States did sign on and world governance became increasingly invisible (if it is possible to be more invisible than invisible) as the various governments that created the organization set about making new rules for a new global agenda for governance, governance that favoured corporations and their rights far beyond those of individuals and even the states the corporations operated in. The emperor's clothing met with increasing success in its cloaking invisibility. Unfortunately for global governance, the majority of the people of the world, better informed through another form of globalization – the internet – became increasingly aware of its intents and purposes, able to make out a sheen and glimmer of the fabric of secretly negotiated wealth creation for the powerful.

The Multilateral Agreement on Investment, designed by the WTO and its associated think tank, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), was defeated by a multifaceted attack once its purposes were discovered. Since then there has been much more awareness of international posturing and the lack of successes of the IMF and World Bank in many countries around the world. Shortly after that, another important factor brought the dirty khaki cloth of the military to the forefront again – the attacks on the World Trade Center.

Unfortunately this has led to a two pronged attack on global citizens: the highly visible war on terror that serves the purposes of government control and corporate profit; and the continuing so-called ‘bilateral’ negotiations between the United States and various trading partners along with further discussions about a Free Trade Agreement of the Americas, a neoliberal agenda that cloaks a revived Monroe Doctrine and a revived MAI for the Americas.

New clothes and old rags

Immediately after the World Trade Center attacks, a wide variety of arguments were presented concerning the existence or non-existence of the American Empire. For all the various arguments, the perception of the people outside the United States becomes the defining factor in that it is the people on the receiving end of American behaviour who should define such actions, just as the law defines personal harassment from the perspective of the complainant. That opinion is fairly obvious, that yes, in both respects of corporate power and military power, the U.S. is an empire.

It is not an empire in the land based definitions of the ancient empires of Egypt, Rome, and Greece in which control was extended through military ground forces with some naval battles (battle of Salamis between the Greeks and Persians; the Roman invasion of Carthage). It is not the same kind of empire as the near-modern era of European empires that used extensive gunboat diplomacy to establish regimes ruled by expatriate governors, controlling local militias to suppress other indigenous groups, or with their own garrisons from the home state. The new empire is one of the invisible corporate cloak gathering financial and governance power through secret non-democratic negotiations combined with the renewed, out of the closet, dirty khaki visibility of the American military with feet on the ground and bombs in the air in many areas of the world, but significantly the Middle East and Israel.

There is much more to the arguments about whether or not America can be defined as an empire than this, but before becoming too much enmeshed in the ‘New American Century’, it is to the latter area, the Middle East, that I again return the shuttle for our growing tapestry. It is this area where the United States became increasingly involved after World War II in the resource of paramount importance to the American consumer and the American military – oil.

Notes

[1]	Glasbeek, Harry. Wealth by Stealth, Corporate Crime, Corporate Law, and the Perversion of Democracy. Between the Lines, Toronto, Canada, 2002. p. 8.
[2]	In Canada, Canadian Pacific Railway received huge land grants across the country, assuming control of land across the Prairies and into prime locations such as Vancouver Harbour waterfront property, later associated with Marathon Realty. They took over rights of way through indigenous territories without treaty, denying any entitlement, and they used large numbers of workers that were killed working under terrible conditions to push the corporate agenda forward, the same agenda as the government.
[3]	Johnson, Chalmers. Blowback, The Cost and Consequences of American Empire. Metropolitan/Owl Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2000. p. 172.
[4]	Foster, John Bellamy. “The New Age of Imperialism”, Pox Americana, exposing the american empire. Monthly Review Press, New York, 2004. p. 163. Monthly Review Press, New York, 2004. p. 163.
[5]	“Our vision is to be the best… the most respected, global leader in every market and community we serve through the pride, commitment and power of enterprising people.” Lockheed Martin Website