America’s Corpocracy: Conspiracy Theory or Conspiracy Reality?

=By= Gary Brumback

Benxi heavy steel industries in February 2013. By Andreas Habich.

[dropcap]I[/dropcap] was prompted to write this article when a twitter contact of mine wondered whether some of my writings about the corpocracy amounted to a conspiracy theory. Having been a behavioral scientist most of my adult life I know a thing or two about what’s theory and what’s not. I don’t know how anyone, scientist or lay person, could mistake the corpocracy for a theory. I doubt if any readers of articles published in the alternative news media would confuse the two. Nevertheless, I want to tell you what I have learned over the years.

A Tacit Conspiracy, Not a Public Wedding

I have called America’s corpocracy the “devil’s marriage between big corporations and what should be but isn’t the American peoples’ government. The marriage was not a public wedding by any stretch of the imagination. It was more like a tacit conspiracy between the two partners, with government being the subservient to the other in every respect.

To act together toward common goals is one definition of a “conspiracy,” and one of its synonyms is collusion. What are the conspirators’ goals? To name a few: keeping its marriage intact; staying for a lifetime in public office; protecting corporations’ fraudulent constitutional rights, not citizen rights; maintaining a hands-off policy toward corporate crime and ensuring legislation, regulations, and judicial verdicts that protect corporate interests, not the public’s interests or the general welfare; keeping the government’s plentiful and endless hand outs to corporations; privatizing public services; controlling the mass media; keeping the marketplace free, not fair; and to expanding and protecting a profitable hegemony in other lands (corporations want global markets and politicians want global influence).

Being a conspiracy doesn’t automatically mean the conspirators must operate secretly, although they obviously aren’t going to publicize their conspiring. That being so, how do we know they conspire and collude among themselves? The conspiracy’s goals stated earlier suggest the signs to look for as evidence. We don’t have to look hard. The signs pop up daily it seems, at least when reading the alternative media, not obviously the corpocracy’s mainstream media and propaganda.

Consider some signs from three of America’s industries in their control of “our” government and thus of 99%.of us. The three picked are the most dangerous industries because they are often extremely injurious and deadly in the consequences of their decisions and actions.

The “Defense” Industries

The “defense” industry, bar none, is the most dangerous as it inflicts on humanity destruction and death on a world-wide scale. The industry pushed for preemptive war with Iraq before Bush Jr.’s first administration and then was heavily represented among the war policy makers in the administration. It spends billions of dollars lobbying Congress. It locates facilities in all or almost all Congressional districts to ensure servitude. It makes sure the most compliant politicians chair and sit on influential committees. It persuades Congress to authorize purchase of obsolete, unreliable, and extravagantly expensive weapons. It constantly engages in contract fraud with impunity. Ad infinitum.

Lest we forget the companion gun industry, its lobbyists have basically been assured a carte blanche by “our” government to arm Americans to the teeth with almost any form of firearm.

The Health Care Industries

These industries are a cluster of industries made up of big Pharma, the health insurance industry, and the provider industry, all conspiring with “our” government, to keep Americans in dept and in poor health needing expensive attention. The bête noir of this conglomeration is the pharmaceutical industry. Over the years it has reaped an astounding 7,000 percent return on its investment in lobbying Congress and has gotten in return for its bribery such favorable government actions as defeat of mandatory discount pricing; protection of drug patents in trade agreements; joint research patents with public institutions allowed; Medicare price negotiations with companies prevented; government list of preferred drugs prohibited; availability of generic pediatric drugs delayed; faster government drug safety reviews; company recommended reviewers allowed; bill to make generic drugs more accessible defeated; bigger hurdle before government warning letters issued; approval of some drugs just from animal testing; medical device makers get favorable considerations; unapproved uses of drugs gets journalistic license; restrictions eased on direct-to consumer advertising; tax credits given to makers of orphan drugs; licensing of new sites for making drugs eased; continuous review of approved new sites ended; pre-clinical trial data allowed for patent application; criteria for awarding patents for genes relaxed.; price control proposals dropped by government; companies allowed to pay fee for faster reviews; faster review of drugs for life-threatening diseases; distribution of drug samples allowed; easier for brand-name makers to sue generic makers; government promotes university-industry partnerships; and allowed to tap research at subsidized facilities.

The Chemical/Agriculture Industries

I put the chemical and agribusiness industries together because chemicals saturate the food chain and agribusiness thrives on chemicals. There’s an old nostrum that “we are what we eat,” which is why these two industries are so hazardous and potentially deadly, especially with their genetically modified organisms that are an assault on and gamble with nature that may ultimately have dire consequences for our species.

Within this pair of industries is the Monsanto Corporation. Mike Adams, chief contributor and editor of NaturalNews.com, says that “MonSatan—is now the No. 1 most hated corporation in America—and the destructive force behind the lobbying of the USDA, FDA, scientists and politicians that have all betrayed the American people—.”

Monsanto is simply too big and has too many allies outside government (e.g., American Farmers for the Advancement and Conservation of Technology) and too many friends in government, both at the federal level (e.g., former Monsanto executives appointed to positions with the USDA) and state level (e.g., Secretaries of Agriculture) to be thwarted in its continuing drive to reap profit from its toxic products that threaten the health and lives of animals and humans alike. It was the U.S. Supreme Court in 1980 that opened the sluice gate for GMOs by issuing the absurd ruling that nature could be patented. And it will very likely be this same captive, infamous court that bats down all lawsuits against Monsanto and the rest of the chemical and agribusiness industries. But whatever they unlikely lose at the Federal level they can try recouping and conspiring at the state level. “Don’t count Monsanto out” concludes the co-editors of Vanity Fair in a long and detailed expose.

Industries at Large

There are over 100 US industries. Take a random pick. Any industry, besides the three just cited is most likely to be a “card-carrying” member of the conspiratorial corpocracy. Banking industry? Remember the government’s bailouts after the second greatest depression? Remember the bail outs in the auto industry? Energy industry? As I recall oil big wigs were influential in the build up to the invasion of Iraq. I could go on to cite many other industries, but I think my point has already been made. Any industry that is supposedly governed by government regulations, and most if not all are, is ipso facto a conspirator with “our” government. The most flagrant instances are the many times industry representatives ghost write the regulations and/or the regulations, lax or not, are not enforced.

Privatization

The epitome of collusion may be the many instances where corporations buy public services and public land out from under our noses.

Here is a privatization riddle. What a) sorts mail but is not the USPS, b) cuts Social Security checks but is not the SSA, c) counts the census but is not the Bureau of the Census, d) monitors air traffic but is not the FAA, and e) runs space flights but is not NASA? Give up? It is Lockheed Martin, the largest military contractor in the U.S.

Pick any type of public service or public land and you will find some corporate owners. Public schools? Not any longer in many school districts. After Hurricane Katrina swept through New Orleans privatizers swept in and took over the public schools. Health care industry? Our health care ought to be a human right not to be put on the auction block. Public toll ways? Not any longer in some states. Law enforcement? In some areas private police have the same authority as deputy sheriffs. And pause on this. The State of Arizona even sold its State Capitol and then leased it back.

Privatization, argue Si Kahn and Elizabeth Minnich, co-authors of The Fox in the Henhouse, is the private sector’s way to “undercut, limit, shrink, or outright take over any government and any part of the public sector that stands in the way of corporate pursuit of ever larger profits and could be run for profit.”

Conspiracy within a Conspiracy

I suppose there are numerous instances where petty conspiracies arise within one part of the government to spoil or thwart another part. I’m not going to bother trying to ferret them out. Politics as usual is rife with internal rivalries as appointed officials vie for influence.

The conspiracy I have in mind here is within the corporate part of the corpocracy. Probably the most prevalent form of it is the collusion among corporations in fixing prices. Whenever government is lax in stopping the practice it conspires with the price fixers.

In Closing

“Our” government is accountable to no one, a scofflaw committing all sorts of legal and illegal wrong doing daily up to and including murdering people with drone strikes. This government, moreover, in good faith as a conspirator, rarely holds corporations accountable for all sorts of wrongdoing, including defrauding and gouging the government. Is it any wonder then that the two parties to the marriage made in Hell raise Hell with 99% of Americans and the rest of the world?

Gary Brumback, PhD is a retired psychologist and Fellow of both the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science. He is the author of The Devil’s Marriage: Break Up the Corpocracy or Leave Democracy in the Lurch; and America’s Oldest Professions: Warring and Spying. His most recent book is Corporate Reckoning Ahead. Gary can be reached at: democracypower@bellsouth.net. Read other articles by Gary, or visit Gary’s blog site, Democracy or Corpocracy.

Author Name Bio

Featured Image Source: Benxi heavy steel industries in February 2013. By Andreas Habich.

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Dumping the current ‘market economy’ paradigm

=By= Mathew Maavak

Photo by AK Rockefeller

The US position vis a vis China has been an interesting evolution to watch. China has rapidly moved from “yet another third world country” to be used for its cheap labor pool, into an economic competitor who holds (or held as it has been selling off US debt) about 7% of US government debt (Investopedia). Much of China’s rise to the top has been because US manufacturing saw China as the go-to labor market and much of US productive capacity now sits firmly in China (for example approximately 97% of all vitamins and supplements sold in the US are manufactured in China).

“The total U.S. goods trade deficit with China reached $324.2 billion in 2013. Between 2001 and 2013, this growing deficit eliminated or displaced 3.2 million U.S. jobs” (EPI, 2015)

Big business also eyed China (and still does) as the largest untapped commercial market on the planet. However, after growing China into a financial monster, the US must now try to find a way to control what they have played such a large role in creating. The attempt to renege on allowing China into the WTO as a member with standing is one of those strategies.

-rw

The West is accusing China of manipulating global markets yet again. This time, it wants to delay a much-anticipated Market Economy Status (MES) for China under the World trade Organization (WTO). When China joined the WTO in 2001, it was pre-conditionally designated as a centrally-planned “non-market economy” for the next 15 years – till December 2016.

Now that the “probationary period” is almost over, the West is balking. European lawmakers voted overwhelmingly on May 12 to designate China as a “non-market” economy.

There is nothing new in this latest trade tirade. Beijing faces the same old accusations of artificially glutting global markets with cheaper products from its state-subsidized enterprises. This results in a Made in China item in every household that matches – in frequency and costs – the annual bankruptcy tally in the West. This is the borderless free market system working at its best, but “laissez-faire” no longer excites its Western originators. In fact, it has conveniently disappeared from the vexing corpus of Western business clichés.

Trade disputes involving China are of epic, bazaar proportions. They involve items ranging from chicken feet, thermal paper, steel sinks, lawn equipment, automotive radial tyres, and VSF textiles to amoxicillin. But it is Chinese steel that is currently agonizing EU lawmakers.

China, in fact, has already taken steps to reduce its steel overproduction. The Hebei provincial government had recently announced the phased closure of 240 of its 400 steel mills by 2020. Hebei accounts for 25 percent of all steel production in China. But even with such declared plans of factory closures in Hebei and elsewhere, China’s annual excess steel capacity would still be in the region of 200 million tons. The total steel workforce facing redundancy in the Hebei province alone may exceed one million workers – three times the number of steelworkers in the EU. That is a staggering figure from one Chinese province alone, entailing a sacrifice that EU policymakers seem to conveniently ignore.

The EU’s steely recriminations, however, tend to mask its growing angst over several strategic undercurrents along the revived Silk Road.

China’s current steel surplus, reportedly weighing over 400 million tons, may take years to be absorbed into various One Belt One Road (OBOR) initiatives. Until then, Beijing needs to keep many of its factories intact. That means more Chinese steel in the market, and more insolvency reports from the West. In a classic Catch-22 situation, a WTO-prescribed “rationalization” (closure) of Chinese factories may render many OBOR proposals stillborn due to the ensuing paucity of cheaper steel. Some of China’s Silk Road partners do not have the capital to afford market prices for steel and this seems to be what the EU is banking on.

The Western stratagem seems ingenious enough. Raise trade barriers against China, apply pressure on its exports and undermine the OBOR process over next two or three years through selective interpretation of a turgid WTO legal codex.

The EU needs its factories running for other reasons as well. Germany alone will spend €94 billion on refugees until 2020. Apart from housing, integration, German language courses and social welfare benefits, this budget includes educational material for adults on proper toilet and gender etiquettes. The Mannheim Center for European Economic Research (ZEW) estimates Germany’s refugee crisis to cost €398 billion. When this sum is extrapolated across the EU, total refugee costs may easily exceed €1 trillion by 2020.

If the West thinks that Asian enterprises are going subsidize this madness by applying WTO-style brakes to its industries, then it better think again.

Mathew Maavak is a doctoral researcher in security foresight at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM). His areas of study include strategic foresight; open source intelligence (OSINT); science, technology and innovation (STI); national policy-making; Eurasian integration; and global risks and uncertainties.

This article first appeared as a Panview Op-ed at CCTV

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Greenpeace Netherlands releases TTIP documents

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HUMANITY IN TORMENT

=By= Greenpeace .org

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]oday Greenpeace Netherlands releases secret documents of the EU-US TTIP negotiations. On www.ttip-leaks.org the documents will be made available for everyone to read, because democracy needs transparency.

“These documents make clear the scale and scope of the trade citizens of the United States and the European Union are being asked to make in pursuit of corporate profits. It is time for the negotiations to stop, and the debate to begin.

Should we be able to act when we have reasonable grounds to believe our health and wellbeing is at risk, or must we wait until the damage is done?

Were our governments serious in Paris when they said they would do what was necessary to protect the planet, and keep climate change under 1.5 degrees?

Environmental protection should not be seen as a barrier to trade, but as a safeguard for our health, and the health of future generations.

We call on citizens, civil society, politicians and businesses to engage in this debate openly and without fear. We call on the negotiators to release the latest, complete text to facilitate that discussion, and we ask that the negotiations be stopped until these questions, and many more have been answered. Until we can fully engage in a debate about the standards we and our planet need and want” – Sylvia Borren, Executive Director Greenpeace Netherlands.

Which documents are we releasing?

The documents that Greenpeace Netherlands has released comprise about half of the draft text as of April 2016, prior to the start of the 13th round of TTIP negotiations between the EU and the US (New York, 25-29 April 2016). As far as we know the final document will consist of 25 to 30 chapters and many extensive annexes. The EU Commission published an overview stating that they have now 17 consolidated texts. This means the documents released by Greenpeace Netherlands encompass 3/4 of the existing consolidated texts.[1]

Consolidated texts are those where the EU and US positions on issues are shown side by side. This step in the negotiation process allows us to see the areas where the EU and US are close to agreement, and where compromises and concessions would still need to be made. Of the documents released by Greenpeace Netherlands, in total 248 pages, 13 chapters offer for the first time the position of the US.

How have the documents been handled?

The documents we received had clearly been treated to make it possible to identify individual copies. Prior to release they have been retyped and identifying features removed. We have not altered content of the documents and have preserved the layout. For this reason we are not offering access to the original documents.

How do you know the documents are genuine?

After receiving the documents both Greenpeace Netherlands and Rechercheverbund NDR, WDR und Süddeutsche Zeitung, a renowned German investigative research partnership have analysed them and compared them to existing documents. The Rechercheverbund, which consists of different German media outlets, has covered, amongst other big stories, the Snowden leaks and the recent Volkswagen emissions scandals.

What are the first conclusions from the documents?

From an environmental and consumer protection point of view four aspects are of serious concern.

1, Long standing environmental protections appear to be dropped

None of the chapters we have seen reference the General Exceptions rule. This nearly 70-year-old rule enshrined in the GATT agreement of the World Trade Organization (WTO), allows nations to regulate trade “to protect human, animal and plant life or health” or for “the conservation of exhaustible natural resources” [2]. The omission of this regulation suggests both sides are creating a regime that places profit ahead of human, animal and plant life and health.

2, Climate protection will be harder under TTIP

The Paris Climate Agreement makes one point clear: We must keep temperature increase under 1.5 degrees to avoid a climate crisis with effects on billions of people worldwide. Trade should not be excluded from climate action. But nothing indicating climate protection can be found in the obtained texts. Even worse, the scope for mitigation measures is limited by provisions of the chapters on Regulatory Cooperation or Market Access for Industrial Goods. [3] As an example these proposals would rule out regulating the import of CO2 intensive fuels such as oil from Tar Sands.

3. The end of the precautionary principle

The precautionary principle, enshrined in the EU Treaty[4], is not mentioned in the chapter on Regulatory Cooperation, nor in any other of the obtained 12 chapters. On the other hand the US demand for a ‘risk based’ approach that aims to manage hazardous substances rather than avoid them, finds its way into various chapters. This approach undermines the ability of regulators to take preventive measures, for example regarding controversial substances like hormone disrupting chemicals.

4. Opening the door for corporate takeover

While the proposals threaten environmental and consumer protection, big business gets what it wants. Opportunities to participate in decision making are granted to corporations to intervene at the earliest stages of the decision making process.

While civil society has had little access to the negotiations, there are many instances where the papers show that industry has been granted a privileged voice in important decisions. [5] The leaked documents indicate that the EU has not been open about the high degree of industry influence. The EU’s recent public report [6] has only one minor mention of industry input, whereas the leaked documents repeatedly talk about the need for further consultations with industry and explicitly mention how industry input has been collected.

END

Notes

[1] The documents we are releasing are

[chapter 1.1.] National Treatment and Market Access for Goods

This chapter addresses trade in goods between EU and US.

[chapter 1.2.] Agriculture

This chapter deals with trade in agricultural products and illustrates EU-US disagreements on matters such as genetically modified organisms.

[chapter 1.3.] Cross-Border Trade in Services

This chapter addresses trade in the service industry sector.

[chapter 1.4] Electronic Communications

This chapter addresses Internet and telecommunications issues.

[chapter 1.5.] Government Procurement

This chapter deals with purchases by government entities within the EU and US.

[chapter 1.6.] Annex Government Procurement

The annex of the previous chapter, with additional information about a US-proposed chapter on anti-corruption.

[chapter 1.7.] Customs and Trade and Facilitation

This chapter addresses differences among various customs regulations.

[chapter 1.8.] EU – US revised tariff offers

These are the respective positions regarding tariffs.

[chapter 2.1.] Regulatory Cooperation

In this controversial chapter EU and US aim for joint regulations on products and services, for example for food and cosmetics safety.

[chapter 2.2.] Technical Barriers to Trade

This chapter addresses differences between EU-US regulations and the ways in which they affect trade.

[chapter 2.3.] Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures

This chapter deals with the protection of plant and animal health.

[chapter 3.1.] Competition

This chapter deals with competition between parties.

[chapter 3.2.] Small and Medium-sized Enterprise

This chapter addresses enterprises smaller than multi-national corporations.

[chapter 3.3.] State-owned Enterprise

This chapter addresses nationalised enterprises.

[chapter 4.] Dispute Settlement

This chapter deals with resolving disagreements between the EU and the US.

[chapter 5.] Tactical State of Play

Not intended for public viewing, this document describes EU-US disagreements and shows how much private industry influences the TTIP negotiations.

[2] Most of the WTO’s agreements were the outcome of the 1986-94 Uruguay Round of trade negotiations. Some, including GATT 1994, were revisions of texts that previously existed.

[3] Nothing in the relevant Articles 10 (Import and Export Restrictions) and 12 (Import and Export Licensing) of the Chapter on National Treatment and Market Access for Goods shows that necessary trade related measures to protect the climate would be allowed as a trade restriction under GATT Article XX (see footnote 1).

[4] “The precautionary principle is detailed in Article 191 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (EU). It aims at ensuring a higher level of environmental protection through preventative decision-taking in the case of risk. http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=URISERV%3Al32042

[5] e.g. “While the US showed an interest, it hastened to point out that it would need to consult with its industry regarding some of the products” – Chapter ‘Tactical State of Play’, paragraph 1.1, Agriculture.

[6] ‘The Twelfth Round of Negotiations for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP)’ http://trade.ec.europa.eu/doclib/docs/2016/march/tradoc_154391.pdf

Contacts:

Dutch media please contact Greenpeace Netherlands, +31 (0)6 21 29 68 95, persvoorlichting@greenpeace.nl

Brussels media please contact Greenpeace EU press desk, +32 (0)2 274 1911, pressdesk.eu@greenpeace.org

International media please contact Greenpeace International press desk (24 hours), +31 (0)20 718 2470, pressdesk.int@greenpeace.org

Source: Greenpeace Press Release

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Panama Papers show that capitalism is working perfectly

=By= Ben Hillier

The waterways, and poverty in Jakarta, Indonesia. World Bank. Farhana Asnap.

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]ne law firm, working for over 40 years with more than 14,000 banks, lawyers and incorporating authorities, set up more than 200,000 off-shore shell corporations to enable mass tax avoidance by rich people and large corporations around the world. Some of the details now have been widely-reported – and there is probably much more to come from the 2.6 terabyte file leak from Mossack Fonseca.

This is just the tip of the iceberg.

According to University of California economist Gabriel Zucman’s research, about US$330 billion is lost each year to tax avoidance and evasion. Writing at theintercept.com, journalist Jon Schwarz noted that Zucman “conservatively calculates that, as of 2014, at least $7.6 trillion of the world’s financial wealth – or about 8 percent of the world’s total financial wealth of $95.5 trillion – was ‘missing’”.

It didn’t go for a walk on a sunny morning and run away from home. It was kidnapped by some of the most ruthless corporate minds in the world. States have the power to pull these rogues into line, yet many continue to enable profit-shifting and actively weaken the powers of tax agencies and regulators in the name of “reducing bureaucracy and red tape”. Take the federal government’s gutting of the Australian Tax Office, or the recently instituted “deferred prosecution agreements” in the US, which allow companies to buy their way out of criminal charges.

When national elections are increasingly fought on the question of whether or not social services can be maintained, it is a basic right that we have knowledge of corporate crimes and access to the real figures of potential government revenue – not skewed data that confirm the narrative of politicians who say that we can’t afford decent health care, welfare and public infrastructure.

Consider, for example, that US$7.6 trillion figure. That is about 10 trillion Australia dollars. If it were “found” and taxed at 40 percent there would be government revenues enough to build more than 1,900 state of the art hospitals like the large new Royal Adelaide – about 10 hospitals for each country on the planet.

Yet while corporate fraud is gargantuan in its scale, it is not the expression of a system that “isn’t working”, as Time magazine’s Rana Foroohar noted in early April. In fact, the tax rorts are only a small part of the proceeds of a colossal theft from the world’s workers, which is the foundation of the system. This larger theft is often overlooked because capitalism’s structure obscures how value is created and distributed through the economy.

Value

Three basic aspects of this structure are, first, that firms carry out their productive activities independently of one another. Their books – the record of inventories, bills, inputs etc. – are confidential, to hide as much of their operations as possible. That’s the nature of private property.

Second, while they act independently, private businesses nevertheless interact to provide goods and services (commodities) for each other and for other consumers. During this process, local, national and regional economies, and a global economy, are formed.

Third, the interaction of these firms occurs via the market, which allocates labour and goods to different branches of production. The result is an economy in which the connections between people are formed only indirectly via the exchange of things (the products of labour).

The economic value of things, expressed in their price, is a result of the labour expended in their production: the average time it takes the average worker using the standard technology in any given industry to produce some particular commodity. It is also a result of the value transferred from raw materials and machinery, which are the products of previous rounds of production.

The way value is formed is complex; no-one knows in advance what the value of anything will be. We can say what something is selling for today, and business managers make estimations about what it might sell for tomorrow. But only after the commodities have been produced and put on the market for sale can their value be gauged. Why? Because only through the exchange of things are the various activities of businesses throughout the economy systematically compared; averages can be formed only through such comparison. And only after it has been performed can we find out whether or not the labour was actually useful.

Because prices are formed only on the market, it appears as though it is the natural properties of the commodities themselves, or simply the psychological wants of consumers, rather than labour, that determine a thing’s value.

Exploitation

One of the key ideological defences of capitalism is that, when individuals pursue our own economic self-interest, the greatest welfare will accrue to society as a whole. As Adam Smith famously wrote in The wealth of nations:

“Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want, is the meaning of every [bargain]; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”

It’s a nice theory, naturalising the operations of the market, transforming economic reflexes into a moral imperative and confirming, for anyone wanting confirmation, that being a greed-filled self-absorbed turd is good for everyone around you. Smith’s words retain some currency because everyone must interact on market to satisfy our needs. In that sphere we seemingly are on equal footing – we buy, we sell, and we allegedly enjoy the same protections, whether we are rich or poor, a person or a corporation.

This reality, and the theory built on it, obscures a fourth feature of capitalism – that it is a class society in which a minority of people own or control the vast majority of the productive apparatus that is required to produce the things that we all need – the telecommunications infrastructure, the agricultural land, the machinery, the office blocks, the factories, the mines and so on.

Entering the market, workers have only one commodity to sell: their capacity to labour, their “labour power”. That commodity can’t be hidden away in the British Virgin Islands, or treated like a financial instrument and loaned out in return for a cut of the profits produced elsewhere. Workers need food, water and shelter every day to replenish their capacity to work. So, far from being on equal footing, they are at the mercy of property owners, who will hire only those from whom they expect to make an economic gain – the extraction by bosses of “surplus value”.

This surplus value extraction is, on one hand, easy to grasp. When a firm’s products are sold, the revenues come back to the business to pay for the costs of production. But every firm requires that the sales revenues will be greater than the money originally outlaid. This extra value goes to the executives, the shareholders, to pay taxes and interest on loans, and part of it is retained for reinvestment.

Where do these profits, this surplus value, come from? From the workers. Labour power is a unique commodity, which in the production process not only passes the value embodied in it on to other commodities, but also creates additional value. This is the source of the great theft.

In other class societies, the transfer of the products of labour from the labouring classes to the ruling class is fairly transparent. A peasant family, for example, could calculate clearly how much they were being exploited: they might work five hours each day producing things for themselves on their own plot of land. They might then work another three or four hours on the lord’s land producing food for him. They could see what was theirs and what was his. If the lord had 20 peasant families on his estate, you could easily do the math regarding how much the lord took overall. In a capitalist economy, as the late Marxist scholar Ellen Meiksins Wood put it in Empire of capital,

“The class relation between capital and labour is rather more difficult to decipher. Here, there is no direct transfer of surplus value. The workers pay no rent, no tax or tribute, to their employers. There is no obvious way of distinguishing between what workers keep for themselves and what they forfeit to capital. In fact, far from extracting rent from workers, the employer pays them, in the form of a wage, and that payment appears to cover all the work the worker performs.”

Exploitation is still occurring – someone might get paid for eight hours’ work, but the value created in that eight hours surpasses the value of the wage. That’s capitalism’s great “secret”. The exploitation is hidden beneath the fiction of “a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work”, and further obscured by the fact that, because value formation is itself so opaque, it is impossible to say exactly how much value above its wages the global working class is losing to the capitalist class.

All this is totally legal. In fact, the legal system is designed to facilitate it – even to the point that we have the legal term “fiduciary duty”, which basically says that corporate board members and executives have a legal requirement to maximise the returns to their shareholders. That is, they are guilty of a crime if they don’t facilitate the greatest degree of exploitation deemed reasonable.

Some among the political establishment rail against the tax rorting and unfair or corrupt businesses practices. But they all defend the wage-enslavement of the majority of the world’s population. This process doesn’t happen in a shell company on Grand Cayman. It is the hum-drum of workplaces in every town and city, in every county and state, in every country. Even if we can’t precisely calculate it, we know that it is occurring. And this theft, in monetary terms, dwarfs what is being exposed in the tax avoidance of the ruling class.

Competition and corruption

The firms carrying out the exploitation are locked in a competition that forces on each a never-ending quest to increase productivity (reduce the amount of labour expended in the production of commodities). New technologies, efficiency gains and the closure of older businesses all affect the average time it takes to create something. The businesses that produce things using less than the average amount of labour time have a competitive advantage.

The intense economic competition over time results in the greater centralisation of wealth in fewer hands and its concentration in larger corporations, which exert greater powers. In the case of the US, the Economist noted in March:

“Our analysis of census data suggests that two-thirds of the economy’s 900-odd industries have become more concentrated since 1997. A tenth of the economy is at the mercy of a handful of firms … A US$10 trillion wave of mergers since 2008 has raised levels of concentration further. American firms involved in such deals have promised to cut costs by $150 billion or more, which would add a tenth to overall profits.”

The race to sell as much as possible also necessarily leads to extra-economic competition. This involves conspiracy, the rewriting of laws (labour, environmental, tax and competition laws for example), bribery, espionage and violence. It is important to understand that such practices are intimately bound up with capitalist production. They are not intrusions into an otherwise unadulterated economic process. Nor are they some new development, as New York University historian Greg Grandin, in an article published in the US liberal magazine Nation, implied when he wrote, “financial crimes and political conspiracies aren’t discrete events but the essence of neoliberalism”.

There is no doubt that the neoliberal era has provided legal enablers for illicit financial flows. Yet Grandin’s comment is deceptive. Today’s frauds are shocking in their scale, but they are a direct extension of the anarchic private competition at the heart of the capitalist system, not simply a by-product of the great financial deregulations and restructurings of the 1980s and 1990s. As an example, the Russian revolutionary Nikolai Bukharin noted a century ago of the struggle among US trusts in the 19th century:

“Criminal gangs were hired to destroy railroad tracks, to damage and blow up oil pipes; incendiarism and murder were practised; governmental authorities, including entire judicial bodies, were bribed on a large scale; spies were maintained in the camp of competitors etc., etc. – there is a plethora of material in this respect in the history of the giant American combines.”

What the Panama Papers reveal is not a broken system, but one running as it was intended to and as it always has – concentrating ever greater sums of wealth in the hands of a tiny few, with the connivance of their political and legal servants.

Socialism

All this is why socialists don’t just argue for higher corporate taxes and financial transparency (although we certainly do), but for a completely different economy. We have a world of abundance in which poverty and inequality are the conditions for economic growth because capitalism is run according to the maxim: “From each worker according to their labour, to each capitalist according to their investment”.

We need an economy that eliminates the private ownership of the productive apparatus of society. An economy that eliminates the anarchy of the production processes. An economy that is governed by the planned production of goods, rather than by the interactions of things in a market. An economy that is not guided by competition and the search for profits. An economy that eliminates exploitation.

We need a socialist economy run according to Karl Marx’s maxim: “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need”. If you think that sounds like a good idea, then it’s time to join the socialists and work towards that goal.

Ben Hillier is an Editor for Socialist Alternative, a revolutionary socialist organisation that is the publisher of Australia’s leading radical left newspaper Red Flag.

Source: RedFlag

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CounterSpin interview with Maria Luisa Mendonça on Brazil’s president under fire

by
By Janine Jackson

Transcript

‘Brazil Is One of the Most Unequal Countries in the World’

Under a constant regime of vicious propaganda issuing from the country’s media, chiefly TV, many people are now shouting for Rousseff’s resignation. “Out with Dilma!” reads the demand on this guy’s face.

Janine Jackson interviewed Maria Luisa Mendonça for the April 22, 2016, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Maria Luisa Mendonça: “This is not an impeachment, because there is no legal basis for the impeachment right now.”

1. CounterSpin Maria Luisa Mendonça Interview

MP3 Link

Janine Jackson: The situation in Brazil—where President Dilma Rousseff faces impeachment charges spurred by legislators, many of whom are themselves under investigation for corruption—is hard to grasp at a glance, but glances are all we get in US media. And when it comes to Latin America, elite media haven’t been shy about their disaffection for leftist governments, sometimes going to great lengths to paint them as delusional and dangerous to the region, and somehow to the US. So how do we assess the situation in Brazil without that particular filter? Here to help us with that is Maria Luisa Mendonça. She is director of Brazil’s Network for Social Justice and Human Rights, and a professor in the international relations department at the University of Rio de Janeiro. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Maria Luisa Mendonça.

Maria Luisa Mendonça: Thank you very much.

Retweeted by NBC‘s Chuck Todd (3/17/16)

JJ: NBC’s Chuck Todd retweeted an image of some of the people protesting in the street for Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment, and it was labeled “The People vs. the President.” And that’s kind of the picture you get from a quick look at US media. Is that a fair picture of what’s happening in Brazil? What would be a clearer picture of events there?

Mendonca

MLM: Yes, that’s not at all a clear picture. What we have been seeing in the media in the United States is a very simplistic version, basically saying that there are accusations of corruption against the government, and people were protesting against the government. What is missing is that there have been huge demonstrations in favor, in support of the government, and against what we are calling a coup.

This is not an impeachment, because there is no legal basis for the impeachment right now. The president has not been accused of any corruption crimes, and the opposition parties themselves are the ones concerned with the recent investigations of corruption. Because the government gave more autonomy to the federal police, and several opposition leaders are being accused of having, for instance, hidden accounts in Switzerland, in offshores with millions of dollars. That has been documented.

The accusation they are using against the president is that she used a type of budget mechanism to borrow from public banks and then invest in social programs in Brazil, which is a very common mechanism that is being used by other administrations, previous administrations in Brazil, by state governors. And every country in the world issues bonds to pay for social spending. The United States does this.

So there is no legal basis for the impeachment, and there is a lot of support for the government. In fact, because the opposition has not been able to win elections in more than a decade, and they never accepted the result of the elections that happened just last year that re-elected Dilma Rousseff, they are trying to subvert the electoral process and take power.

JJ: What do you think makes Dilma Rousseff vulnerable to this at this time? I mean, Brazil is in a state of real economic crisis at this point. Do you think that is what is created the opportunity for this to happen now?

MLM: Exactly. This is exactly what happened. Right after the elections last year, Brazil suffered a speculative attack from the financial sector. Interest rates now have increased from 7 percent to more than 12 percent, almost doubled in the last six months.

But there was no specific reason for the financial crisis. It was not like in the United States, that there was a housing bubble. In the case of Brazil, it’s pure speculation. There was not enough reason for suddenly the economy—we were growing one day and the next day, we were in a financial crisis. And the government had to double interest rates and start imposing austerity measures in an economy that was growing just the month before. So I think there was kind of an orchestrated speculative attack to make the economy more vulnerable.

In case after case we see how the media in capitalist hands wreaks havoc with the country’s political system, bending it to its will. “All the major TV networks and newspapers are against the government. It’s as if you had only Fox News. Can you imagine that? And the Workers Party didn’t invest as much in alternative media, didn’t deal with the problem of media monopoly in Brazil. Just to give you an idea, the protests against the government were orchestrated by the major TV networks. They were reporting live all day, and calling people to go to the streets and protest against the government…”

And, of course, there is also the interest of foreign oil companies. Because Brazil has huge oil reserves, and there is a fight and a debate now about the right of the state oil company Petrobras of having priority to explore the oil reserves, and there is a lot of pressure from multinational oil companies to be able to explore those reserves as well.

JJ: Brazil has intense inequality. There is a real class division in Brazil, is there not? Not that there is not in the United States, but it’s quite pronounced, and it’s important to understand that fact as we look at what’s going on there today.

MLM: Yes, exactly. Brazil is one of the most unequal countries in the world. And our critique of the Workers Party government was that they didn’t go too far in terms of structural reforms. They were able to implement large social programs that made it better, the situation, the economic situation, that the inequality was better during those years, and unemployment was in a very low level. So the country was growing, there was a sense of optimism, there was more investment in education, on health programs. Although, you know, there are lots of problems, inequality, poverty still. But they were implementing policies [such] that the presence of the state in the economy was larger than in the previous neoliberal governments, that imposed austerity measures and privatization.

But now what we see in the future, of what the opposition parties are defending, is more austerity, more of the kind of structural adjustment policies that we think will make the situation even worse.

JJ: Glenn Greenwald pointed to the role of media in Brazil, if folks are getting some of their understanding of the situation from Brazilian media. And he noted that, if you think about the role that Fox News played in promoting the Tea Party protests, and then imagine that those protests were promoted not just by right-wing networks like Fox but also by all the networks, all the magazines, the New York Times, the supposed alternative media—that that is kind of what the media looks like in Brazil. What can you tell us about the role that the big media are playing within Brazil?

MLM: Yeah, that’s a key role. All the major TV networks and newspapers are against the government. It’s exactly how you described. It’s as if you had only Fox News. Can you imagine that? And the Workers Party didn’t invest as much in alternative media, didn’t deal with the problem of media monopoly in Brazil. More than 90 percent of the funding goes to about six major media conglomerates in Brazil.

Just to give you an idea, the protests against the government were orchestrated by the major TV networks. They were reporting live all day, and calling people to go to the streets and protest against the government. It was very open that they’re supporting the coup—we are calling this a coup—and at the same time, when we had millions of people protesting against the coup, there was almost no coverage at all of that. So it’s very biased, and they’re very active to try to get rid of the president. Really, that’s what is going on.

JJ: Let me just ask you, finally, I understand that Dilma Rousseff is coming to the UN on Friday. I hear also that—I think it’s now nine ministers in the cabinet have quit, including the sports and tourism minister. (This is four months before the Olympics.) What do you see happening?

MLM: Well, the OAS, the UN, UNASUR, several multilateral organizations have expressed their concern about the process that is going to undermine democracy in Brazil. And we hope that the Obama administration and the US government also would be able to voice their opposition to this process that we are calling a coup. Because it’s very similar to what happened in Honduras and Paraguay. So we hope that at this time, the US administration will play a positive role and would support the result of the elections that elected President Dilma Rousseff in Brazil, that that should be respected.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Maria Luisa Mendonça from Brazil’s Network for Social Justice and Human Rights, and also from the University of Rio de Janeiro. Thank you very much, Maria Luisa Mendonça, for joining us today on CounterSpin.

MLM: Thank you. Thank you very much.

About the author

Janine Jackson is CounterSpin's

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