Political Philosophy

I published this on the Maurin Academy’s webpage but wanted my subscribers to see this one for sure:

Claire Provost and Matt Kennard are investigative journalists, and together they have produced a wide-ranging account of how governments, NGO’s and global corporations collude to extract wealth from taxpayers, workers and the poorest of the poor. The overall lesson of this book is that corporate governance has replaced liberal democratic government in the developed world, and in the developing world, colonial overlordship has given way to international corporate power. 

We are governed by that which controls our options, shapes our behavior by deciding the rules, and wields the power of our taxes and our disposable incomes, not necessarily by those for whom we vote. If citizens in the West are increasingly restive and receptive to populism it may be because they sense, deep down, that their taxes and incomes are being disastrously mismanaged, and that no matter how much wealth  is extracted from them, longstanding social problems do not get fixed. They sense that their votes are hollow, and their governments are largely not looking out for them but operating at the behest of unaccountable powerbrokers. What they tend to not fully realize is who those  powerbrokers are. These authors argue that the corporations and wealthy oligarchs, served by our politicians and bureaucracies, are the problem. This book is an attempt to identify who governs us, and for what purpose. For Provost and Kennard, the “deep state” is really the “deep economy,” and it has pulled off a “silent coup.” 

The journalism in this book is akin to that of Chris Hedges, but it is less dramatic and morose, and denser with facts and examples. However, it begins in an unusual way that might inadvertently obscure the usefulness of the book. The introduction gives us an account of how Provost and Kennard, as young reporters, went down the path that led to Silent Coup, especially of meeting Gavin MacFadyen, American journalist and founder of the Centre for Investigative Journalism (London). MacFadyen’s reputation was bound up with left-wing concerns from anti-Vietnam War protests to the fate of Julian Assange. MacFayden offered Provost and Kennard two-year fellowships with healthy travel budgets to do concentrated investigative journalism in the public interest. 

Their meeting was mysterious and MacFadyen’s personality is depicted as having a certain mystique that these young journalists were impressed with. But the result was that they got two funded years, and they used them to travel to 25 countries around the world and to spend time in numerous archives. “What we found surprised even Gavin,” they write. “As European empires crumbled in the twentieth century, power structures that had dominated the world were up for renegotiation. Yet instead of a triumph of democracy, what emerged was a silent coup against its very core – namely, the unstoppable rise of global corporate power and new infrastructure to protect it from rebellious peoples.” 

The book is divided into sections on corporate justice, corporate welfare, corporate utopias, and corporate armies. Through the example of El Salvador’s quest to ban international precious metals mining within its territory, and many other examples, we learn about the international investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) system that allows corporations to challenge governments seeking to curb their exploitation and any political interference within their borders. The authors trace the growth of this system, used for decades by “an elite industry of corporate lawyers, consultants, lobbyists and third-party financiers” to intimidate developing countries to get out of the way of the corporate-driven “development,” to its use even in developed countries such as Germany, “threatening democracy in rich countries too.”  

In the section on corporate welfare, the authors show how often “aid” to developing countries does not hit its target, instead funneling money and resources to the already-wealthy at the expense of dependency and precarity in the developing world. We think that foreign aid exists to help the world’s poor, but the authors show how the rules and organizations governed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a “club of rich countries in Paris,” manipulates what constitutes aid and who benefits. Most aid, according to the authors, is “routed through a web of international agencies, NGOs and for-profit contractors and subcontractors. Much of it was used to buy things, or services, from companies based in richer, not poorer, countries.”

Highlighting Africa, the authors show how local and regional subsistence farming that could be enhanced by aid to create food security for people has been supplanted by agricultural systems producing commodity crops for international trade, relying on expensive inputs supplied by corporations, such as GMO seed, chemical fertilizers, pesticides and large, high-tech equipment. This dynamic creates the opposite of food security, but this human-induced insecurity has come under the guise of “aid.” Another way to look at this is that “aid” is a welfare system, not for the world’s poor, but for globalized corporate agribusiness. 

The third section, on corporate utopias, exposes the system of Special Economic Zones (SEZ), areas created within countries that are allowed to operate under different laws and practices than the general population. US history includes the “company town,” which largely went out of existence in the wake of the New Deal. Company towns kept employees working and paying most of their meager wages to the same company, for housing, food and services during a time in the US when people felt lucky to have any roof over their heads. That abusive practice may have ended in the US, but it simply migrated in the form of SEZs to the developing world. These SEZs are created by the same mechanisms that governments at all levels use. They offer corporations tax abatements, free real estate, and other financial incentives just to locate within their areas. But, as with company towns, often the jobs are little better than slave labor.

Corporate utopias, it turns out, are places where corporations can collectivize cheap, compliant labor, with little to no regulation and for minimal benefit to the working class. They come with contracts and other financial incentives for the elites within the host country. They are the opposite of many envisioned socialist utopias, where people could supposedly work collectively, but for the common good. 

The fourth section deals with the use of force to protect and extend the reach of extractive and exploitative labor practices. Multinational companies have a menu of options to choose from. Often, they enlist the active support of the official military and police of countries they occupy. They also have at their disposal private militias and paramilitary forces, and of course, the huge and burgeoning global private security and mercenary market. The use of contractors has become the norm for state actors around the world, and it is also the norm for multinational corporations who want to keep their territories, labor force, and political enemies and supporters under control. Not only is this type of private force used to safeguard banana and palm oil operations in Latin America; it has become a major reason for inequality in the developed world. The gutting of publicly responsible security in favor of private force has obvious implications for the state of democracies and is part of the reason citizens in these countries do not feel “represented” even if they regularly go to the polls. 

In their epilogue, the authors ask: “But what if your elected representatives don’t have the power we thought they did? And what if the media has failed to let us know?” (219) Those are excellent questions, and it is refreshing to see people in the media industry contemplating how it, too, has succumbed to corporate control. 

Laurie M Johnson