http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Corporatocracy
Excerpt:
The
war against Iraq is the creation of the
corporations that have seized control of America and its institutions. America was once a democratic republic. It is now a corporatocracy. Corporations are soulless, deathless entities that have all the rights of citizenship that real people have and none of the responsibilities. Corporations have accumulated vast wealth that they have used to purchase, infiltrate, and colonize American government and many governments around the world. Corporations have absorbed the
media, the two major political parties, the Congress, the Executive, almost all the Judiciary, in America and in many other countries, welding them into the globe-spanning unit that I have named the Corporatocracy. Corporations have distilled the essence of greed and rage to form their corporate structure. Profits must be maximized. Territory, natural resources, institutions, and citizens must be used and then discarded when they are no longer useful. Corporations must have more markets to colonize, and the military corporations,
Boeing and
Lockheed Martin, must have more countries to invade.
Since the end of
World War II, corporations have emerged as the dominant force controlling the planet. Through the
World Bank, the
International Monetary Fund, and the
World Trade Organization, a mere 200 corporations have managed to seize control of 28.3% of the world's economic output. The fifty largest commercial banks and diversified financial companies assets amount to 60% of the $20 trillion global stock of productive capital.
The war against Iraq is being promoted by the transnational
military-industrial corporations for their financial benefit. The business of America is the export of war. The financial institutions that trade in currency, stocks, bonds, derivatives, and other financial instruments must have volatility in the markets in order to make a profit. War creates volatility. Between $800 billion and $1.3 trillion in currency trades are made by speculators every day!
The military-industrial corporations and the military components of the Corporatocracy receive about $400 billion per year from the U.S. Government directly and much more indirectly through pensions. Arms sales by U.S. dealers equaled the amount of arms sold by all other countries in the world combined. The amount of profit the financial institutions will realize probably cannot be calculated. The Corporatocracy must have war in order to turn over its stocks and in order to justify its continued existence. The succession of wars beginning with
Vietnam (and continuing with
Grenada,
Panama,
Afghanistan,
Colombia,
Kuwait, Yugoslavia,
Albania, etc.) and now
Iraq is exactly like the succession of new models of cars produced by Detroit. Detroit's cars, since
Robert McNamara was head of
Ford, have been built to become obsolete (McNamara went on to head the World Bank after he was Secretary of Defense during Vietnam). These wars are like that. Wars favored by the Corporatocracy require the existence of poor countries in which the munitions can be dumped, just like we dump our toxic waste in poor countries. Bombs must be dropped, missiles fired, planes flown, rifles discharged so that more bombs, missiles, planes and ammunition can be manufactured. It is not about oil. Iraq would gladly sell us all the oil we could buy. It is not even about empire. It is about business. It is all about profit. And that makes it all the more horrible, all the more unforgivable.
John Omaha, Ph.D.
Chico, CA
"What would have happened if millions of American and British people, struggling with coupons and lines at the gas stations, had learned that in 1942
Standard Oil of New Jersey [part of the Rockefeller empire] managers shipped the enemy's fuel through neutral Switzerland and that the enemy was shipping Allied fuel? Suppose the public had discovered that the Chase Bank in Nazi-occupied Paris after Pearl Harbor was doing millions of dollars' worth of business with the enemy with the full knowledge of the head office in Manhattan [the Rockefeller family among others]? Or that Ford trucks were being built for the German occupation troops in France with authorization from Dearborn, Michigan? Or that Colonel Sosthenes Behn, the head of the international American telephone conglomerate ITT, flew from New York to Madrid to Berne during the war to help improve
Hitler's communications systems and improve the robot bombs that devastated London? Or that ITT built the FockeWulfs that dropped bombs on British and American troops? Or that crucial ball bearings were shipped to Nazi-associated customers in Latin America with the collusion of the vice-chairman of the U.S. War Production Board in partnership with Goering's cousin in Philadelphia when American forces were desperately short of them? Or that such arrangements were known about in Washington and either sanctioned or deliberately ignored?"
- Charles Higham, author of "Trading With The Enemy: The Nazi-American Money Plot 1933-1949"
'PTSD Nation' - Dr John Omaha Interviewed on Freedomain Radio
Obama: The Fear of Assassination and What You Can Do About It
by John Perkins
"Change has come to America." -- President Obama, November 2008
President Barack Obama has occupied the Oval Office for more than one and a half years. The passing of the baton from a conservative Republican to a liberal Democrat raised high hopes among people longing for change, people who dreamt of an America that walks its talk of "government of, for, and by the people," deals compassionately with the world's downtrodden, and offers a model for a sustainable and just society. As those hopes meet the reality of an escalated war in Afghanistan, oil spills, corporate bailouts, CEO pay raises at corporations with the highest layoff rates, a depressed and declining middle class, and the drama of the last election, many are left wondering what happened to the promise made during that campaign.
Why has President Obama let us down? How come he lied to us? Why has he not kept his campaign promises? These are questions I frequently hear from people who attend my speeches and book signings.
There are several geopolitical facts that help formulate the answer:
1. Nations have become almost irrelevant, and the U.S. presidency has been severely weakened. It's naive to think that a new president is in a position to reverse the trend of the last decades of profit-making from war and to escape the stranglehold corporate lobbyists hold on our body politic.
2. The form of capitalism espoused by Milton Friedman and embraced by President Ronald Reagan and every president since -- what I call "predatory capitalism" -- is based on the single goal that the only responsibility of business is to maximize profits, regardless of the social and environmental costs. Replacing the more compassionate economic theories promoted by John Maynard Keynes, it has now become the global model.
3. We have entered a time of realignment not unlike that when city-states joined together to form nations. Except this time it is global. The emerging rulers are corporate CEOs, members of the corporatocracy.
4. Democrats and Republicans alike, as well as the mainstream media, fall under the thumb of the corporatocracy.
5. Then there is another fact -- one none of us likes to contemplate, but that is a major factor in contemporary U.S. politics: President Obama fears assassination.
Historical Perspective
Corporatocracy and the Iraqi War
by John Omaha, Ph.D.
Copyright, 2003 by John Omaha
The
war against Iraq is the creation of the
corporations that have seized control of America and its institutions. America was once a democratic republic. It is now a corporatocracy. Corporations are soulless, deathless entities that have all the rights of citizenship that real people have and none of the responsibilities. Corporations have accumulated vast wealth that they have used to purchase, infiltrate, and colonize American government and many governments around the world. Corporations have absorbed the
media, the two major political parties, the Congress, the Executive, almost all the Judiciary, in America and in many other countries, welding them into the globe-spanning unit that I have named the Corporatocracy. Corporations have distilled the essence of greed and rage to form their corporate structure. Profits must be maximized. Territory, natural resources, institutions, and citizens must be used and then discarded when they are no longer useful. Corporations must have more markets to colonize, and the military corporations,
Boeing and
Lockheed Martin, must have more countries to invade.
Since the end of
World War II, corporations have emerged as the dominant force controlling the planet. Through the
World Bank, the
International Monetary Fund, and the
World Trade Organization, a mere 200 corporations have managed to seize control of 28.3% of the world's economic output. The fifty largest commercial banks and diversified financial companies assets amount to 60% of the $20 trillion global stock of productive capital.
The war against Iraq is being promoted by the transnational
military-industrial corporations for their financial benefit. The business of America is the export of war. The financial institutions that trade in currency, stocks, bonds, derivatives, and other financial instruments must have volatility in the markets in order to make a profit. War creates volatility. Between $800 billion and $1.3 trillion in currency trades are made by speculators every day!
The military-industrial corporations and the military components of the Corporatocracy receive about $400 billion per year from the U.S. Government directly and much more indirectly through pensions. Arms sales by U.S. dealers equaled the amount of arms sold by all other countries in the world combined. The amount of profit the financial institutions will realize probably cannot be calculated. The Corporatocracy must have war in order to turn over its stocks and in order to justify its continued existence. The succession of wars beginning with
Vietnam (and continuing with
Grenada,
Panama,
Afghanistan,
Colombia,
Kuwait, Yugoslavia,
Albania, etc.) and now
Iraq is exactly like the succession of new models of cars produced by Detroit. Detroit's cars, since
Robert McNamara was head of
Ford, have been built to become obsolete (McNamara went on to head the World Bank after he was Secretary of Defense during Vietnam). These wars are like that. Wars favored by the Corporatocracy require the existence of poor countries in which the munitions can be dumped, just like we dump our toxic waste in poor countries. Bombs must be dropped, missiles fired, planes flown, rifles discharged so that more bombs, missiles, planes and ammunition can be manufactured. It is not about oil. Iraq would gladly sell us all the oil we could buy. It is not even about empire. It is about business. It is all about profit. And that makes it all the more horrible, all the more unforgivable.
John Omaha, Ph.D.
Chico, CA
"What would have happened if millions of American and British people, struggling with coupons and lines at the gas stations, had learned that in 1942
Standard Oil of New Jersey [part of the Rockefeller empire] managers shipped the enemy's fuel through neutral Switzerland and that the enemy was shipping Allied fuel? Suppose the public had discovered that the Chase Bank in Nazi-occupied Paris after Pearl Harbor was doing millions of dollars' worth of business with the enemy with the full knowledge of the head office in Manhattan [the Rockefeller family among others]? Or that Ford trucks were being built for the German occupation troops in France with authorization from Dearborn, Michigan? Or that Colonel Sosthenes Behn, the head of the international American telephone conglomerate ITT, flew from New York to Madrid to Berne during the war to help improve
Hitler's communications systems and improve the robot bombs that devastated London? Or that ITT built the FockeWulfs that dropped bombs on British and American troops? Or that crucial ball bearings were shipped to Nazi-associated customers in Latin America with the collusion of the vice-chairman of the U.S. War Production Board in partnership with Goering's cousin in Philadelphia when American forces were desperately short of them? Or that such arrangements were known about in Washington and either sanctioned or deliberately ignored?"
- Charles Higham, author of "Trading With The Enemy: The Nazi-American Money Plot 1933-1949"
http://www.amazon.com/Trading-Enemy-Nazi-American-Money-1933-1949/dp/0595431666
Excerpt:
This perennial classic of political literature remains the only book to document the trading of the American financial establishment with Hitler's Germany in World War II, from Pearl Harbor to V-E Day. Ford supplied tanks to Hitler, the Chase Bank financed the Nazis in Paris, ITT built rocket bombs for Goering and Standard Oil fueled U-boats in the Atlantic.
About the Author
Charles Higham is the author of several New York Times bestsellers including The Duchess of Windsor, Kate: The Life of Katharine Hepburn, and Bette Davis. His Howard Hughes: The Secret Life is the basis of the movie The Aviator, starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
He is the recipient of the Academie Francaise Prize of the Creators, among other awards.
http://www.alternet.org/story/149793/the_egyptian_uprising_is_a_direct_response_to_ruthless_global_capitalism
Excerpt:
The Egyptian Uprising Is a Direct Response to Ruthless Global Capitalism
Economic decline at the hands of 'hot' money has driven Egyptians' discontent.
February 4, 2011 | LIKE THIS ARTICLE ?
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Petitions by Change.org|Get Widget|Start a Petition � The revolution in Egypt is as much a rebellion against the painful deterioration of economic conditions as it is about opposing a dictator, though they are linked. That's why President Hosni Mubarak's announcement that he intends to stick around until September was met with an outpouring of rage.
When people are facing a dim future, in a country hijacked by a corrupt regime that destabilized its economy through what the CIA termed, "aggressively pursuing economic reforms to attract foreign investment” (in other words, the privatization and sale of its country’s financial system to international sharks), waiting doesn’t cut it.
Mohamed Bouazizi, the 26-year-old Tunisian who catalyzed this revolution, didn’t set himself on fire in protest of his inability to vote, but because of anguish over his job status in a country with 15.7 percent unemployment. The six other men in Algeria, Egypt and Mauritania who followed suit were also unemployed.
