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big they have superseded government”.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