34 November 2014
have gathered to form our de facto global
government... corporations have grown so
big they have superseded government”.
Minnow states, such as Ireland, must
prioritise the demands of multinational
corporations and venture capitalists ahead
of the rights of citizens. Decent people even
believe that we had no choice but to guaran-
tee the banks!
As Al Gore wrote last year, “More than half
(53) of the 100 largest economies on Earth
are now corporations”. The world’s top 200
corporations “control over a quarter of the
world’s total assets, and their control is
increasing”, noted Noam Chomsky.
We live in an era of corporate gigantism
and monopoly. Just five companies control
some 90 per cent of global trade in grain.
Such control bestows on corporate giants a
near-immunity from political and popular
control and influence. Democratic capital-
ism is dead.
Together, capitalism, liberal democ-
racy and globalisation comprise a US-sired
instrumentality of US and corporate global
imperialism.
It is not surprising that the US ethos is
hegemonical. We live in a unipolar world,
with just one hyperpower. “At the dawn of
the new millennium, the United States is
enjoying a pre-eminence unrivalled by even
the greatest empires of the past”, former US
secretary of state and national security advi-
sor Henry Kissinger wrote in 2001. It sets
the global agenda.. US culture is dominant
almost everywhere – its music, its films, its
TV soaps, its food, even its accent.
Zbigniew Brzezinski notes that when the
Placed end to end in one-dollar bills, this
sum would stretch around 1,100 times from
earth to the moon and back – a total distance
of over 500 million miles.
Under the influence of the markets,
countries generally redistribute wealth
upwards.
In 2007, multibillionaire Warren Buffett
candidly spoke of how super-rich investors,
such as himself, “pay a lower part of our
income in taxes than our receptionists do,
or our cleaning ladies”, thus widening the
wealth chasm between rich and poor.
In Ireland, native Irish businesses pay
substantial taxes, while many giant mul-
tinationals have sweetheart deals with the
Revenue Commissioners, conferring them
with selective tax advantages. Proponents
of capitalism and liberal democracy – the
dominant ideologies driving the new world
order – argue that the twin concepts provide
the best, certainly the most ‘realistic’, ide-
ological frames for the future, even though
as Piketty showed thirty years after Orwell
they inevitably lead to the hyper-concentra-
tion of wealth.
More pervasive – and, arguably, more
dangerous – than communism ever was, the
markets have served to reconfigure the glo-
bal balance of economic power, transforming
mega-corporations, collectively, into one of
the world’s most powerful hegemons.
Globalisation – whose primary focus is the
breaking down of barriers to global trade,
foreign investment and finance – also played
a major role in fostering corporate power. In
many ways, globalisation is the international
face of the markets, generating a powerful
global hegemon.
Naomi Klein has written of the “power of
the select group of corporate Goliaths that
T
HE social class hierarchy of Oceania,
where George Orwell’s 1984 is set, has
three levels – the upper-class Inner
Party, the elite ruling minority, who make
up 2% of the population; the middle-class
Outer Party, who make up 13% of the popu-
lation; and the lower-class Proles, who make
up 85% of the population and represent the
uneducated working class.
Funny that, really: in January of this year,
Oxfam showed that the wealthiest 85 people
in the world – who could almost all be seated
in a double-decker bus – have an aggregate
wealth equivalent to the combined wealth
of the poorest 50 percent of mankind i.e.
3,500,000,000 human beings.
Al Gore has written that, in the United
States, “the top one percent... now have more
wealth than the people in the bottom 90 per-
cent. The wealthiest 400 Americans... have
more wealth as a group than the 150 mil-
lion Americans in the bottom 50 percent”. A
March 2013 special edition of Forbes maga-
zine listed the richest people on our planet,
comprising 1,426 billionaires with an aggre-
gate net worth of $5.4 trillion.
The booted
future: inequality,
surveillance, US and
market hegemony,
climate catastrophe,
violent insecurity.
By Tom Hanahoe
30
1984
years after
POLITICS ORWELL
2014
34 November 2014
November 2014 35
of people”.
If the tyranny is clear even at the apex of
such a conservative institution why aren’t
the streets of the world’s cities filled with
demonstrators seeking an end to the grossly
inequitable new world order?
The answer is simple. We live in an increas-
ingly authoritarian world. An Orwellian
world – a world of surveillance, police
oppression and spin-doctored news.
In Oceania people lived with an unrelent-
ing fear that every movement they made
was being observed. Giant posters warned
that BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.
Telescreen monitors were everywhere, spy-
ing on people’s activities.
Orwell’s Big Brother is no longer fiction. A
March 2007 London Evening Standard arti-
cle outlined the extent of CCTV surveillance
in Britain. “Britain has a staggering 4.2 mil-
lion CCTV cameras, one for “every 14 people
in the country… use of spy cameras in mod-
ern Britain is now a chilling mirror image of
Orwell’s fictional world”.
In his 2001 book Total Surveillance,
British journalist John Parker observed
that “Civil liberty and human rights cam-
paigners argue that the United Kingdom now
has the infrastructure for a near-Orwellian
society”.
There is an even more surveilled society.
The number of surveillance cameras is “30
million in the US, shooting about 4 billion
hours of footage a year”, according to Naomi
Klein. One surveillance camera for every ten
men, women and children in the ‘capital of
the free world’.
America’s key spying body is the National
Security Agency (NSA), the largest espionage
establishment the world has ever known. In
an interview published in The Guardian in
June 2013, Edward Snowden – a 29-year-old
fugitive IT specialist, who had worked for
an NSA defence contractor before becoming
a whistleblower – outlined the compass of
the agency’s operations. “The NSA has built
an infrastructure that allows it to intercept
almost everything. I can get your emails,
passwords, phone records, credit cards…
We hack everyone everywhere… You are not
even aware of what is possible. The extent of
their capabilities is horrifying”.
Former US vice-president Al Gore has
warned that his country had reached a point
“where much of the essential apparatus of a
police state is already in place”.
In mid-2013, Snowden revealed that, for
seven years, American intelligence agen-
cies had been receiving client data from the
US telecom giant Verizon and that the NSA
had access to the servers of nine US-based
internet and social media behemoths
United States and the European Union agree
on policies, “together they can dictate to the
entire world the rules governing global trade
and finance”..
“Voter surveys in Britain, Italy, Spain,
Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden,
Ireland and Japan show citizens who have
grown to feel almost as disempowered as
Americans”, concedes Robert Reich, for-
merly President Clinton’s Secretary of
Labour. The vast majority of the most impor-
tant decisions taken around the world (the
signing of treaties, declarations of war,
‘free-trade’ agreements, loss of national
sovereignty and independence, and much
more) are taken without any public referen-
dum or consultation, and hence without any
mandate, from the people.
As independence and national sovereignty
are increasingly, being jettisoned by states
and as political parties and politicians are
‘bought’ by the donations and lobbyings
ofcorporations, political power is being
privatised.
Around the world, job insecurity and
casual employment are increasing. Social
welfare nets are being removed. Civil and
human rights are being trampled on.
In May of last year the spiritual head of
the Catholic Church – Pope Francis - issued
an extraordinarily harsh condemnation of
capitalism, asserting that “human beings
are now regarded as consumer goods, to be
used and discarded”. Under such a model of
capitalism a “new invisible and, at times, vir-
tual tyranny is established”. He denounced
“savage capitalism... with its logic of profit at
any cost... of exploitation without thinking
(Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, Skype, Google,
Apple, PalTalk, YouTube and AOL) and,
hence, to mountains of clients’ personal
information.
Collaborating with the NSA is its British
counterpart, GCHQ, which passes data it
intercepts from a huge volume of the world’s
phone and internet traffic to the NSA.
Leading ‘democracies’ with a penchant
for spying on their own citizens include
Germany, France, Spain, Holland and, espe-
cially, the US and Britain.
Corporations and financial giants also
have access to frightening quantities of
personal information on people worldwide.
“Google’s 1m servers are sucking up 24
petabytes of information daily. This makes
possible a degree of surveillance that would
have glazed over the eyes of George Orwell”,
a Sunday Times article stated in
July 2012.
Similarly disconcerting is
the fact that phone masts can
be used to track the daily move-
ment and calls of mobile phone
users.
Freedom is a register of
autonomy of agency so coun-
tries with high levels of spying
on citizens cannot be regarded
as free societies.
Oceania’s Ministry of Truth
could convince the people that
‘WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM
IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS
STRENGTH’.
Like the people of Oceania,
people today live in a world of
often fabricated ‘truth’: what
Or well’s Newspeak called ‘black-
white’ – that Iran had nuclear
weapons, that ‘global warming’
is fiction, that austerity works,
that our police are paragons.
We live in a world of PR and spin-doctored
news and political statements.
Electorates never sanctioned a world that
enables megacorporations to wield more
power and influence than most ‘sovereign’
states, that hyperconcentrates wealth and
income, that destroys our species and our
climate, that facilitates governments and
corporations in covertly spying on citi-
zens’ activities, and that disempowers civil
society. A world of ISIS, beheadings, the
flattening of Gaza, a resurgent Right, of
moral collapse. In 2014 much of our world
is disintegrating.
In 1984 the Party’s picture of the future
was a boot stamping on a human face—for-
ever. In 2014 we simply cannot say what is a
realistic picture for 2044. •
In Oceania the
elite ruling
minority make
up 2% of the
population. In
the US “the top
one percent
have more
wealth than
the people in
the bottom 90
percent”
“

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