Monday, April 14, 2014

Corporatocracy and the illusion of Democracy





Corporatocracy and the illusion of Democracy


Written By Mark Taliano
 
 
 
“Freedom” and “democracy” are useful words, but very bankrupt: useful because they serve to advance imperial/corporate agendas, bankrupt because they are empty vessels perennially co-opted.

 When illegal coups are orchestrated to overthrow democratically elected governments in Venezuela, Honduras, Ukraine, or elsewhere, the lies of freedom and democracy are seamlessly attached to the criminal acts. 

 “Freedom” and “democracy” are still cloaking, tacitly or overtly, mass murder and genocide in Iraq, at this moment.

 
As long as the masses are fooled, conquest and regime change, not democracy and freedom, are enabled and perpetuated.  Illegal coups and wars of aggression are about imperial control, setting up puppet dictators, and the imposition of neoliberal economic business models for the corporate extensions of the invading nations.

 Once the vanquished “host” nation is subjugated, its industries are corporatized, and wealth is extracted  for the benefit of transnational corporations, corporate elites, and local oligarchs. The vanquished nations face corresponding losses of political and economic self-determination, human rights, democracy, and freedom. De facto corporate proxy regimes may call themselves democratic, or proclaim freedom, but the words are delusional, even if those being enslaved believe otherwise.

 Transnational corporate monopolies are the drivers behind the malaise.                           

Some of the predominant monopolies, all inter-related and mutually reinforcing, are often prefaced with the adjective “Big”.  They include:

 

                        * Finance

                        * Oil

                        * Military/Industrial Complex

                        * Media

                        * Pharmaceuticals

                                                               
These transnational monopolies  metastasize beneath protective umbrellas of secretly negotiated, supranational “free trade” agreements, and they exert disproportionate control over political economies throughout the world.  Additionally, their leverage is amplified and perpetuated through a matrix of intersecting trajectories that converge to create seamless, reciprocal unions with each other, and with elected polities.

 One strategy used by the resulting “corporatocracy” to increase its political might is the creation of a culture of “crony capitalism.” In this culture, a “revolving door” is created through which personnel from corporations and government come and go, thus creating a mutually empowering relationship, more responsible to each other, than to the voting public.   

 Author Tony Hall reveals the inherent conflict of interest created when a “revolving door” exists between industry-funded regulators and Big Oil. In "Oil Consultant Turned Whisleblower Exposes Fracking Crimes In Alberta",  Hall explains that Gerard Protti, the Alberta Energy Regulator’s (AER) current head, is a former executive of EnCana petroleum corporation.

 Not only is the industry self-regulated, but the “regulator” himself is a former executive of the industry being regulated. “His conflict of interest,” explains Hall, “is illustrative of a culture of conflict of interest that is transforming the governments of Canada and Alberta into wholly-owned subsidiaries of Texas-based and China-based oil and gas companies." 

 Big Oil also works hand-in-hand with Big Media.  Close links between corporate media and the petroleum industry are detailed in a Vancouver Observer article entitled, "Presentation Suggests Intimate relationship Between Post Media And Oil Industry".

 According to the article, the Canadian Association Of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), a powerful right-wing “think tank”, would provide “thought leadership” for the media outlet, and that “topics (would) be directed by CAPP and written by Postmedia.”  In other words, the petroleum industry’s intent in this instance is to control media messaging related to petroleum related topics, thus creating its own platform/infomercial embedded within media that presents itself as “neutral”.  Interestingly, one of the first casualties of the proposed “marriage” was environment reporter Mike De Souza.

 
Corporate media and the military-industrial complex are also welded together.  The Military-Industrial -Media complex profits from keeping countries on a war footing, and  is complicit in unfathomable misery throughout the world. 

 War and war preparations serve as a pretext for vast outlays of money from the public to corporations. Consequently, war friendly media barely reported the huge protests against the illegal invasion of Iraq, but it did spin stories about Iraq’s imaginary Weapons Of Mass Destruction, and the imperatives of invasion.  Meanwhile, once the Shock And awe invasion started, Pentagon inspired nomenclature such as “collateral damage” or  “surgical strikes” continued to anesthetize the public to the horrors of the invasion.  Over one million died as a result of the carnage of the Second Gulf War, and the death rate

is still climbing.

 The interlocked military-industrial-media complex is created by the myriad of intersecting connections between the industries. Peter Philips and Mike Huff, in "Truth Emergency: Inside The Military Industrial Media Empire" describe some of these connections:

 “Only 118 people comprise the membership on the boards of director of the ten big media giants. These 118 individuals in turn sit on the corporate boards of 288 national and international corporations. Four of the top 10 media corporations share board director positions with the major defense contractors including:

William Kennard: New York Times, Carlyle Group

Douglas Warner III, GE (NBC), Bechtel

John Bryson: Disney (ABC), Boeing

Alwyn Lewis: Disney (ABC), Halliburton

Douglas McCorkindale: Gannett, Lockheed-Martin.”

 
Financial monopolies, for the most part overseen by the U.S, are also wedded to the destructive, self-reinforcing web of supranationally protected monopolies.  Honduras is a case in point. 

 Since the U.S orchestrated coup in 2009, transnational corporations, soon to be further protected beneath the umbrella of the Canada-Honduras Free Trade Agreement, have wreaked havoc on Honduras.  Transnational Financing cartels, including the International Monetary Fund, bundle their loans with neoliberal market models, for the profit of foreign investors and Honduran oligarchs.   The loans finance cash crops such as African Palm monoculture plantations, and the results are devastating to almost all Hondurans.

 The plantations dispossess indigenous small-holder farmers, rob the nation of food sovereignty, and destroy indigenous cultures.  Since 2009, oligarchs, in concert with illegal proxy dictatorships, have killed 100 campesinos from the Aguan Valle alone  ---- with impunity.

 Big Pharma , yet another protected monopoly, also creates misery and desperation throughout the world, and its influences are woven into the fabric of lies and omissions perpetuated by the other monopolies.  

 Michael McBane, in Harper Caves In To Big Pharma, argues “(We ) need to take patents out of secret trade agreements and impose conditions that benefit the public interest in exchange for drug monopolies…”

 If the suppression of Big Pharma and its ubiquitous messaging were lifted, Canada could also create a National Pharmacare program, which would save Canadians about $10.7 billion per year.

 Once freed from the devastating tentacles of the transnational monopolies, Canadians will realize that it’s time to call 911 on the corporatocracy. We might then recapture real democracy and freedom, rather than settle for their bankrupt facsimiles.  

 

 

Written By Mark Taliano
 
 
__________________________________________________
 
 
I would like to thank Mark Taliano for keeping his eyes wide open, for looking beyond the curtain, if we the people keep banging the drum, keep opening new eyes as to the extent of this corporate takeover we will win the war.....I have a feeling we haven`t heard the last of Mr. Taliano...
 
 
 
 
The Straight Goods
 
Cheers Eyes Wide Open

5 comments:

Danneau said...

A great guest piece. The Carlyle Group is symptomatic of just about everything that is wrong with our society. Thanks for doing this.

Inse said...

This ties in very nicely with a guest post on Lorne's blog this morning by The Mound of Sound;
http://www.politicsanditsdiscontents.blogspot.ca/

Just for the Record said...

US Is an Oligarchy Not a Democracy, says Scientific Study

By Eric Zuesse

Who governs? Who really rules?"

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article38235.htm

The Power Lies in the Control of the Creation Of Money: "One Bank" and the Oligarchy said...

"While undoubtedly many reader questions still remain about this malevolent “super-entity”, certainly one question rises above all others. Can we put a specific name to this “one bank”? Apparently so: Rothschild.

Many historical sources document the Rothschild clan as being unquestionably the wealthiest “house” on the planet in the 19th century, my own favorite source being the superlative documentary, The Money Masters. This clan has never suffered any significant, publicly-recorded financial set-back. Yet flash ahead to the early 21st century, and on any (so-called) “world’s wealthiest list” you will never see the Rothschild name appear.

Simply having “more money” makes it easier to accumulate (i.e. steal) even more money. Thus our presumption (if anything) is that House Rothschild would have extended the financial gap which separates these Misers from humanity.

The implication here is clear. The “world’s richest” lists compiled in the propaganda of the Corporate Media are simply the “B-list” billionaires. What does it mean to really be one of the “world’s wealthiest”? Being able to have your name removed from that propaganda list.

The Rothschilds, world’s wealthiest bankers of the 19th and 20th centuries, have (apparently) succeeded in creating One Bank, in order to greatly expand/accelerate their looting of all the wealth of humanity in the 21st century. How important is such a corporate front to the malevolent aspirations of House Rothschild?

Here the Swiss researchers are unequivocal:

…In particular, the top ranked actors hold a control ten times bigger than what could be expected based on their wealth. [emphasis mine]

The One Bank is nothing less than a gigantic “amplifier” of financial crime – apparently the new crimes of House Rothschild. Such a paradigm leads one to paraphrase a piece of immortal verse from the legendary J.R.R. Tolkein:

One Bank to rule them all,

One Bank to find them,

One Bank to bring them all,

And in the darkness bind them.

We are all “bound” by the fraud-bonds of the One Bank. And until we finally/completely/irrevocably destroy this One Bank; we will remain the financial thralls of these real-life Dark Lords."

Anonymous said...

And our governments who have sold us out. When are we going to stop them?

http://gangstersout.blogspot.ca/2014/04/the-canadian-gas-pump-scam.html#comment-form