War and Corporate Power

Brilliant writing. Rather long, it's worth the read.
The exact url link was not available for this latest lecture. This 
will get you started.
http://www.wilpf.org/sitemap.htm
http://search.atomz.com/search/?sp-q=molly+Morgan&submit=Search&sp-a=sp10025057&sp-f=ISO-8859-1&sp-p=all

Tim Jones

War and Corporate Power

Talk given by Molly Morgan at the Los Angeles Peace Center on 21 July 2003

One of the consequences of the US government's invasion of Iraq and 
the breathtaking speed with which Halliburton, Bechtel, and other 
corporations have received lucrative contracts is that war 
profiteering is once again part of the mainstream conversation. But 
beyond the billions in profits, the cronyism, and the obvious abuses 
of power, why is it important to understand how deep the relationship 
between war and corporate power goes? To begin with, capitalist 
corporations are the dominant institutions of our time. They have not 
superseded nation-states, but they have transcended them. What this 
means is that corporate values and needs - not human values and needs 
- dictate the day-to-day lives of most people on the planet - who has 
power; how we allocate resources; who gets healthcare, housing, and 
education; literally who lives and who dies. But corporations are not 
living beings. They do not exist to take care of people or the earth; 
they exist to provide ever-growing profit for their stockholders - 
into infinity. This means that the dominant institution of our time 
is operating from an insane expectation. Nothing can grow infinitely 
because we don't have a continually expanding planet. So the 
corporate value system is on collision course with finite resources 
of the earth.

In addition to having an insane mandate, corporations exist to 
benefit a few people - primarily their major stockholders, top 
executives, and directors - at the expense of everyone and everything 
else. Therefore, war is essential for capitalist corporations to 
fulfill their growth mandate, because violence is required to force 
people to work for someone else to their own detriment and to give up 
their own local life-sustaining resources for someone else to use, or 
squander, or profit from. In our current global political climate, 
nation-states are still needed to provide legitimacy and cover for 
wars that benefit corporations, so governments and the capitalist 
corporate system co-exist in a symbiotic relationship. We can look at 
two examples to see how this works - how these corporate values are 
driving government decision-making and affecting people's lives. 
Obvious war profiteering, like weapons manufacturers encouraging more 
bombing, is only the tip of the iceberg.

The first example is Yugoslavia. In the early days of the Cold War, 
Tito had disagreements with the Soviet Union and as a result, 
although it remained socialist, Yugoslavia was more receptive to the 
West than the other nations of the eastern bloc and received lots of 
financial aid and loans from the US for decades. For the US, it was 
extremely important to build this strategic relationship with a 
country inside the enemy camp. After the wall fell in 1989, though, 
not only did the US no longer need this relationship with Yugoslavia, 
but the race was on to establish capitalist economies inside the 
eastern European countries. So in the fall of 1990, Congress passed a 
law cutting off all financial aid and loans to Yugoslavia in six 
months. When it went into effect, the economy collapsed and the 
resulting chaos rapidly descended into civil war, with certain 
factions aided and abetted by the US.  In the aftermath, western 
corporations were able to buy up Yugoslavia's national assets at 
bargain-basement prices. But the economic link caused by the actions 
of the US Congress was not making it on anyone's front page because 
by that time the first Bush administration was then warring with Iraq.

The last chapter in the breakup of Yugoslavia happened eight years 
later when the Serbs were being demonized as carrying out "ethnic 
cleansing" in Kosovo. News agencies reported that peace negotiations 
were being conducted in Rambouillet, France. When the Serbs 
eventually walked away from these meetings, they were accused of 
being unreasonable, which provided the US and NATO with the excuse 
they needed to start bombing Kosovo. Had anyone bothered to read the 
Rambouillet Accord, they would have seen that in its 80 pages it 
called for "The economy of Kosovo [to] function in accordance with 
free market principles. . . free movement of persons, goods, 
services, and capital to Kosovo, including from international 
sources. . . international contracts for reconstruction projects. . . 
[and] to reallocate ownership [of] government-owned assets (including 
educational institutions, hospitals, natural resources, and 
production facilities)." The US government said they were trying to 
negotiate a peace agreement to stop attacks on defenseless civilians, 
but what they were really doing was giving Yugoslavia a choice: 
economic invasion or military invasion. Yugoslavia took its chances 
with the latter and got both.

Another example is Afghanistan. For years Unocal and others had tried 
to negotiate with power-holders in Afghanistan to build pipelines 
across their country from the oil- and gas-rich Caspian Sea region. 
The power, wealth, and geopolitical control that would come with 
those particular pipelines were important to the US government as 
well as the corporations, so when business negotiations didn't work, 
the Pentagon developed plans to invade Afghanistan. All they needed 
was an excuse, which they got on September 11. Within hours of what 
they tried to make us believe was a total "surprise" attack, the FBI 
alleged to have found substantial evidence linking the hijackers to 
al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, hiding out in Afghanistan. The Taliban 
government said they'd turn Osama over if the US would simply show 
them the evidence. The US refused, said Afghanistan was harboring 
terrorists, and proceeded to bomb the country. They were able to 
mobilize within a few months because the battle plans already existed 
before September 11. The US military is still occupying Afghanistan, 
the Taliban is out, a former Unocal consultant is the puppet 
president of the country, and Unocal is now proceeding with its 
pipeline. Osama bin Laden has never been found, and no one is being 
prosecuted for the September 11 attacks, but the US has embarked on a 
"war against terror" that will give it an excuse for military 
excursions for years to come.

The present Iraq situation is not just about making sure that people 
in the US get oil, but about the US controlling who in the world gets 
oil. Now that US troops are occupying Iraq, if France or Russia - for 
example - are engaging in any kind of activity someone in the US 
elite doesn't want, withholding oil from Iraq is one way to force 
them to comply. This is not necessarily about driving SUVs - 
withholding oil can be a matter of who gets heat in the winter. To 
think about how this kind of blackmail works, consider the 
legislation Senator Bill Frist introduced a couple of months ago. The 
bill suggests that African countries facing famine and requesting 
food aid who reject genetically modified food from the US might then 
be denied AIDS medicines. In other words, this legislation threatens 
Africans who need life-saving medicine to take food that has not been 
adequately researched for safety, that no one in Europe will buy, and 
that could destroy their own country's capacity to produce healthy 
crops in the future. Senator Frist is a physician, the only one in 
the Senate, so he holds a lot of influence in these kinds of issues. 
What kind of doctor have the voters of Tennessee sent to Washington? 
Clearly one for whom the Hippocratic oath takes a back seat to the 
violence of economic exploitation of some of the most desperate 
people on the planet. Senator Frist is on the side of agribusiness 
corporations having trouble selling their GMO crops. These kinds of 
negotiations, quid pro quos, and forcing already oppressed people to 
choose between deadly alternatives goes on all the time; there are 
hundreds of stories like these every year.
_____________________________________

Since the inception of modern-day corporations at the beginning of 
the 17th century, they have been inextricably linked to war. Queen 
Elizabeth of England granted a charter to the British East India 
Company in 1600, providing the stockholders with "limited liability" 
to skirt England's inherited debt laws in case the extremely risky 
business of developing trade in Asia and exploiting the so-called 
"New World" was a disaster. In exchange, the Crown received a portion 
of the profits. Other European countries were doing the same thing, 
and as early as 1614 a Dutchman, Jan Pieterzoon Coen, wrote to his 
directors, "Trade in India must be conducted and maintained under the 
protection and favour of your weapons, and the weapons must be 
supplied from the profits enjoyed by the trade, so that trade cannot 
be maintained without war or war without trade." Although monopoly 
rights assured the various India trading companies of the exclusive 
privileges of buying and selling, they did not guarantee that they 
could buy goods cheaply. For that, political control was essential, 
which soon led the Europeans into imperialism.

Many of the colonies in the Americas were chartered as corporations, 
and in order to control property and commerce, the representatives 
for these long-distance stockholders had a lot of autonomy, including 
levying taxes, writing laws, and raising armies to fight Indians and 
control rebellions. Life was hard in the colonies, and the majority 
of people who were touched by the colonial system suffered 
enormously. The colonists died by the hundreds of overwork, disease, 
and starvation, and the indigenous people were slaughtered to take 
their land. The purpose of these colonial corporations was to funnel 
wealth to the already wealthy in Europe, no matter what the human 
cost was, and despite serious initial setbacks, when successful they 
did their job so spectacularly that the European aristocrats 
continued to gamble their investments on this horrific form of 
exploitation.

Justification for this kind of trade and this kind of corporation had 
been established more than a century and a half before when the 
Europeans were starting to claw their way out of the Dark Ages. They 
believed in a transportable, proselytizing religion that rationalized 
conquest. As feudalism gave way to mercantilism, the crown heads and 
nobles sought trade routes and regional consolidation to expand their 
power and wealth. These emerging nation-states threatened the power 
of the Vatican, which then sought favor with the competing monarchs 
by giving them God's approval for their exploits. In the middle of 
the 15th century, for example, the Pope granted to the king of 
Portugal "general and indefinite powers to search out and conquer all 
pagans" and to enslave them and appropriate their lands and goods. 
They were given responsibility for the spiritual development of all 
lands they acquired. It was better for the Vatican if the Europeans 
waged war on non-Christians than with each other, so to resolve a 
dispute later in the century the Pope established a line in the 
Atlantic giving Spain one side of the world to conquer and Portugal 
the other. This was the situation in 1492 when Columbus sailed to the 
Americas for Spain. When Columbus, Pizzarro, and other "explorers" 
landed on foreign shores, they would usually read aloud - in Spanish 
- a document that came to be called "the Requirement" to the 
friendly, uncomprehending native people:

"I implore you to recognize the Church as a lady and in the name of 
the Pope take the King as lord of this land and obey his mandates. If 
you do not, I tell you that with the help of God I will enter 
powerfully against you all. I will make war everywhere and every way 
that I can. I will subject you to the yoke and obedience to the 
Church and his majesty. I will take your women and children and make 
them slaves. . . . The deaths and injuries that you will receive from 
here on will be your own fault and not that of his majesty nor of the 
gentlemen that accompany me."

Gets right to the point, doesn't it? In one short paragraph, the 
Church provided justification and absolution for invasion, theft, 
war, murder, torture, and slavery all rolled into one! While being 
non-Christian was the original justification for such atrocities, 
within a century and a half skin color started to replace it as a 
dominant technique for economic exploitation. The natives in the 
Americas were decimated by disease, war, and sometimes mass suicide; 
forcing them to work was not long successful and soon led to the 
enormous trade in slaves from Africa, yet another highly profitable 
form of commerce for which corporate monopoly trade charters were 
issued. A few centuries later, the US Supreme Court quietly adopted 
the Church's Doctrine of Discovery, which said that Christian nations 
had a divine right, based on the Bible, to claim absolute title to 
and ultimate authority over any newly "discovered" non-Christian 
inhabitants and their lands. In 1823, in Johnson v. McIntosh, Chief 
Justice Marshall asserted that the US, upon winning its independence, 
became a successor nation to the right of "discovery" and acquired 
the power of "dominion" from Great Britain. Unoccupied lands - 
unoccupied by Christians, that is - rightfully belonged to Christian 
"discoverers" to do with as they pleased. As a result of absorbing 
these philosophies into US law, the consequences of these practices 
of economic exploitation are with us today in many forms, including 
racism, grossly unequal distribution of wealth, substance abuse, the 
prison-industrial complex, the poverty draft, and destruction of the 
earth. Although we talk about periods of peace, the reality is that 
this hemisphere has been engaged in a continual racist war for 
profits since Columbus first set foot in Haiti in October of 1492.

By the 1770s, some of the wealthiest colonists in the Americas had 
grown tired of being second-class English citizens and sharing their 
wealth with the king, so they fomented a rebellion and, with the help 
of France, waged a successful war of independence against one of 
Europe's superpowers. Cloaked in the language of liberty, this was a 
war about who would get the spoils of commerce. The new rulers in the 
US associated corporations with the king's oppression, so when they 
wrote Constitution, they didn't mention corporations, leaving the 
responsibility for chartering them to the state legislatures, which 
kept corporations under tight control, specifying exactly what a 
corporation could do, when, where, with whom, how, and for how long. 
Stockholders were held personally liable for any harm done in the 
name of the corporation, corporations were prohibited from any kind 
of political activity and from owning stock in other corporations, 
and they could only get their profit-making privileges by doing 
something for the public good. Most charters expired after 10 or 15 
years and weren't renewable. And when corporations violated their 
charters, state legislatures and courts frequently revoked them. But 
all these restrictions were eventually doomed to the dustbin because 
the Constitution protects property - not people - and corporations 
are a unique and extremely useful form of property because, unlike 
land or buildings, they can be redefined at will under the law. And 
this is exactly what happened to facilitate the desires of those who 
wanted to amass ever-growing wealth. This is how a good idea, like 
keeping corporations on a short leash, gets dismantled.

As the industrial revolution proceeded, the elites in the US started 
to understand how convenient corporations could be as a tool for 
shielding their wealth, so they shed their old prejudices about 
corporations being tools of the king's oppression and gradually 
worked to change the laws that kept corporations accountable to the 
citizens. The size and number of corporations grew rapidly during the 
Civil War as governments on both sides of the Mason-Dixon chartered 
lots of them to produce guns, cannons, powder, wagons, uniforms, 
tents, and all the other supplies needed to keep an army fighting. 
That era's version of war profiteering included rancid food, rifles 
that shot off soldiers' thumbs, and shoes with soles that melted in 
the rain. Nonetheless, the war funneled large amounts of public money 
into private corporations, which was then used by the powerful men 
who owned them to facilitate rapid corporate growth in the late 1800s 
and usher in the era of the robber barons. The railroads were the 
first monopoly in the US, and although they viciously abused their 
employees and the people who were dependent on them (like farmers), 
investors prospered so well that soon monopolies existed in many 
other industries as well. It was a spiral: the more money 
corporations made, the more their owners could bribe elected 
officials and judges, hire lawyers to write new laws and challenge 
existing ones in court, and the more corporate power grew. By the 
middle of the 19th century the US had acquired all of its continental 
territory, and by the end of the 19th century, it had begun its 
imperialist phase to meet the demands of those investors, who needed 
to keep growing their capital. Corporate profiteering became an 
increasing feature of US wars of conquest.

It's worth noting that Thomas Jefferson, who had a far more 
democratic vision for the United States, advocated two additional 
amendments that didn't make it into the Bill of Rights. One was a 
prohibition against monopolies, and the other was against a standing 
army.

The US, and even the Europeans, didn't invent this idea, of course - 
for thousands of years people have waged wars to control resources 
and labor, obtain and protect trade routes, and colonize. But the US 
was essentially born at the same time as industrialization, and 
within a relatively short period of time it shifted from a primarily 
agrarian economy to a capitalist one.  Don't forget that Adam Smith's 
Wealth of Nations was written the same year as the Declaration of 
Independence. The Civil War was fought to determine whether the 
industrial capitalists of the North would seize the historical 
political power of the plantation owners of the South. Once that 
happened, the corporation quickly became the commercial vehicle of 
choice for the elite. The corporation was molded in US law to reflect 
the core mandate of capitalism: infinite growth. By the end of the 
19th century, the investor class, through their industrial 
corporations and financial institutions, were well established as the 
most powerful people in the country, where they have remained ever 
since.

As the US got into the imperialism game, it launched its own wars for 
corporate conquest. Smedley Butler was in the US Marine Corps from 
1898 to 1931, fighting in the Philippines, China, Asia, and Latin 
America, and rising to the rank of Major General. He became a vocal 
critic of US foreign policy after WWI, and after his retirement 
became a national hero for his outspokenness, giving more than 300 
speeches a year to veterans groups. He published a booklet, "War is a 
Racket," in 1935, in which he made the links between corporate 
profiteering and war. Just before his death in 1940, he gave a speech 
in which he said, "I spent 33 years and four months in active 
military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a 
high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the 
bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I 
helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil 
interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for 
the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the 
raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of 
Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking 
House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the 
Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped 
make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In 
China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way 
unmolested." Little has changed since Smedley Butler's death.

Both world wars had commerce issues - control of territory and trade 
- at their roots. Then came the Cold War and the arms race, which 
allowed corporate abuse of power to reach new heights. We were 
periodically treated to scandalous stories of Uncle Sam purchasing 
$600 hammers and $700 toilet seats from so-called "defense 
contractors." In the name of national security, weapons manufacturers 
were not held accountable for cost overruns, delays, and even stuff 
that just didn't work. This could not have happened without the 
complicity of elected officials, who increasingly worked on behalf of 
their corporate constituents rather than the majority of their human 
ones. Behind the scenes, laws and institutions like the IMF and World 
Bank were retooled in the 1970s to facilitate the next phase of 
corporate expansion to the transnational level - what we now refer to 
as globalization. Corporate capitalism needed new markets and more 
cheap labor and resources to keep growing, or else it would collapse, 
and the CIA and uncontested military superiority of the US delivered 
them. Since the unprecedented disgrace of the military in Vietnam, 
much of this work has been done covertly. Sometimes the strategy is 
to create chaos where none existed so the US has an excuse to come 
"straighten things out." Sometimes it's to punish governments that 
had the audacity to nationalize assets. Often it's to prevent 
democratic, socialist, or union movements from becoming successful. 
When the people in the way are powerless - like indigenous tribes on 
land that logging or mining corporations want - they're wiped out by 
proxy armies, paramilitaries trained by the US, or covertly funded 
guerrillas, and it doesn't register a blip on the national news. If 
the people in the way have some power, then a plausible story has to 
be told.

Propaganda is absolutely essential to this process, and it is more 
sophisticated in the US than in any other country. Because naked 
aggression is distasteful to most people, the US's imperialist wars 
of the 20th century have had to be camouflaged as something else: 
helping our "little brown brother" in the Philippines, fighting 
fascism, stopping the "domino effect" of communism, ending ethnic 
cleansing, spreading democracy, fighting terrorism. Revenge is a 
common rationale, with self-inflicted or manufactured insults like 
the Alamo, the Maine, the Lusitania, Pearl Harbor, the Gulf of 
Tonkin, and September 11 all carefully propagandized to create 
maximum US outrage at being attacked. Language is important. At the 
end of WWII, when a permanent war economy was established, the 
Department of War was renamed Department of Defense. The brilliance 
of the propaganda is to take a nugget of truth - after all, Pearl 
Harbor and September 11 really happened - and weaving a different 
story with techniques like leaving out key people and events, 
suggesting connections where there are none, and fanning prejudice to 
reinforce myths of US supremacy and goodness. The reality is that US 
wars and military actions are always about protecting corporate 
commercial interests that benefit a small number of people 
enormously. The fact that these actions might also accomplish 
something desirable - like getting rid of the Taliban - is secondary, 
but useful for propaganda. The interests are determined first, well 
out of sight and sound of the citizens of the US, and then an 
appropriate cover story is concocted. The reason that corporate 
capitalism has thrived in the US is because power-holders are 
brilliant at co-opting people at just the right level to obtain their 
support of the system - or at least prevent them from working against 
it. In the second half of the 20th century, it was in the interest of 
the system to allow a large and prosperous middle class to develop, 
and they created stories that allowed people to feel ok about their 
privilege or at least not ask questions. That need is much less 
important now, which is why the middle class is being targeted by 
changes in the system.

Militarism is so deeply intertwined with corporate capitalism that 
the two cannot be pulled apart. They complement each other in 
essential ways. Our economy cannot exist without either. So it's no 
surprise that corporate world shares many characteristics with the 
military. It starts with intent: the purpose of capitalist 
corporations, as with the military, is to exploit the many in order 
to benefit a few. It's reflected in the structure: the power, 
privilege, pay, and prestige of military officers compared with 
enlisted people is the same relationship that corporate executives 
have to line workers, whether in a factory or an office. The language 
of corporations often mirrors that of the military's language of rape 
and plunder: penetrating markets, cutthroat competition, battle for 
profits. In both the corporate worldview and the military, other 
actors are divided into interchangeable allies and enemies, sometimes 
turning traditional relationships on their head. A few years ago the 
FBI successfully investigated and convicted Archer Daniels Midland in 
a huge international price-fixing scheme. The top-level executive who 
provided undercover assistance revealed that in those meetings these 
global partners in crime often referred to each other as friends and 
their customers as the enemy. Both the military and the corporation 
seek to minimize individual accountability, whether it's by leaving 
the evidence dead on the battlefield or obscuring it in departmental 
finger-pointing. Except when political expediency demands it, 
power-holders routinely sweep accusations under the rug in response 
to military and corporate wrong-doing. And the military and corporate 
worlds are both, of course, not just undemocratic, but 
anti-democratic.

There is even a kind of spiritual similarity. Chris Hedges is a 
columnist for the New York Times and has been a war reporter for many 
years in more than a dozen countries on three continents. Here are 
some excerpts of his observations about war from a commencement 
address he gave in May:

"The seduction of war is insidious because so much of what we are 
told about it is true. It does create a feeling of comradeship, which 
obliterates our alienation and makes us, for perhaps the only time in 
our life, feel we belong. War allows us to rise above our small 
stations in life. We find nobility in a cause and feelings of 
selflessness, and even bliss. . . . War gives us a distorted sense of 
self. It gives us meaning. Once in war, the conflict obliterates the 
past and the future. All is one heady, intoxicating present. You feel 
every heartbeat in war, colors are brighter, your mind races ahead of 
itself. . . . The ecstatic glow that makes us in war feel as one 
people, one entity, is real, but this is part of war's intoxication. 
. . . [While we may not all be able to have true friends or love, w]e 
can all have comrades. The danger of the external threat that comes 
when we have an enemy does not create friendship, it creates 
comradeship; and those in wartime are deceived about what they are 
undergoing. And this is why once the threat is over, once war ends, 
comrades again become strangers to us. This is why, after war, we 
fall into despair. .  . . In comradeship, the kind that comes to us 
in patriotic fervor, there is a suppression of self-awareness, 
self-knowledge, and self-possession. Comrades lose their identities 
in wartime for the collective rush of a common cause, a common 
purpose. In comradeship, there are no demands on the self. This is 
part of its appeal and one of the reasons we miss it and seek to 
recreate it."

These words about comradeship sound very much like the experience I - 
and many other people - have had in the corporate world, at least in 
the middle and upper levels of management. If you enjoy your work and 
are involved in it, you can spend hours, days, weeks, intensely 
discussing projects, strategies, and company politics in meetings, 
over lunch or drinks, the excitement perhaps even leading to an 
affair. But once you leave the company to go on to another job, it is 
hard to conduct a conversation, let alone maintain a relationship, 
with those same people. The corporation creates the same kind of 
environment, the same context for relationships, that Hedges 
describes in war - ephemeral and illusory. This is not to say that 
people in the military or corporations don't make friends or even 
find love - just that the structure makes most relationships a 
temporary, hollow sham. And rather than bemoan the loss and figure 
out what's happening, most of us just reach for the next war, the 
next job, to try to replace what we've lost and get rid of that 
empty, lonely feeling.

Just as the purpose of the military is to maintain control of 
resources through war, the purpose of the capitalist corporation is 
to maintain control of resources through the economy. And "resources" 
in this worldview includes people, because that's all human beings 
are to the world's elite power-holders - "human resources." This need 
to control resources is why corporations are now entwined into 
virtually every aspect of our lives - food, healthcare, housing, 
clothing, entertainment, energy, transportation - and they're rapidly 
closing in on education and essential services like water. Both 
methods - control through war and control through the economy - are 
violent. Either method is acceptable to the world's elites; the only 
question is which is less expensive and more politically expedient at 
continuing to consolidate power and wealth. If one doesn't work, the 
other will, and often both are used. The economy is a system of 
violent rule, but its brilliance is that people don't realize it. 
This is the hard reality we must wake up to.

This two-pronged approach for controlling people's lives, whether 
it's wartime or so-called "peacetime," is no new invention. The model 
for our system, quite enthusiastically embraced by the US 
Federalists, the French Revolutionaries, and the British, is the 
Roman Empire. Rome was a great band of robbers. War and plunder were 
essential to the Roman economy. Taxing newly conquered peoples and 
waging war were routine ways of expanding wealth and power for those 
in control, and continual expansion was necessary to keep their 
unsustainable system going. Co-optation happened at many levels; 
soldiers in the early days, for example, were paid in pillage, and 
the plebian struggles to get power and equality really amounted to 
nothing more than getting their "fair share" of the booty. Lest the 
people have too much time to think, make common cause, and rise up 
against the emperors and senators, a new war campaign would be 
announced. While the Roman Empire lasted for many centuries, and 
certainly became the most fearful and powerful military of its day, 
we all know how the story ended. Like all empires throughout history, 
it was unsustainable and eventually collapsed of its own weight and 
corruption.

The point I am trying to make is this: most of us, when we think 
about violent action involving military personnel, don't have trouble 
calling it war, whether it's declared or not. But most of us don't 
realize that our economic system is also a form of war, which turns 
our day-to-day lives, literally, into battle. Scholar John Gillis 
contrasts older forms of militarism - in which civil society is 
separate from and subordinate to military authority - with 
contemporary militarization. According to Gillis, militarization is 
the process by which "civil society organizes itself for the 
production of violence." Whereas militarism was once understood as a 
set of beliefs limited to specific - separate - social groups or 
sectors of the ruling class, militarization is a series of mechanisms 
that involve the entire society. We are all implicated.

Many of us understand that we cannot have peace without economic and 
social justice. What may not be as clear, however, is that a struggle 
for equality in an inherently unjust system cannot, by definition, be 
a struggle for justice. If all we want is our share of the spoils of 
war - the spoils of capitalism - we will, in our very struggle, 
maintain the institutions and beliefs that cause war. If we want 
peace, and if we want justice, then the work must be about the 
complete transformation of our society to one that is sustainable, 
cooperative, and democratic.

We cannot accomplish that by following the rules of a system set up 
by people with fundamentally different values. The anti-democratic 
vision established by the men who wrote the Constitution is fully 
operational today. This vision calls for a small number of people to 
retain power, and the reason the system has lasted for more than two 
centuries is that they've been very successful at giving people just 
enough table scraps to keep them from really challenging the balance 
of power - not that people with a very different vision of society 
haven't tried. Through enormous struggle, the majority of people in 
this country have won real victories, real privileges, real rights 
that are extremely valuable. But these privileges have lulled most of 
us to sleep and prevented us from taking a radical stand against the 
root causes of the problem: corporate capitalism and centralized 
elite rule. The seduction of the system is like gambling in Vegas. 
The odds always favor the house; they let people win just often 
enough to keep them coming back to gamble some more. Our occasional 
victories, as important as they have been, haven't changed the 
balance of power; they've been like rearranging the deck chairs on 
the Titanic. But now those privileges are being taken away which is 
causing more people to wake up. We are on a collision course between 
the myth of infinite corporate and economic growth, the rapidly 
expanding human population, and the mass extinction of plant and 
animal species. If we want to do the work of minimizing the damage of 
this collision, we need to rethink our strategies by redefining 
power, learning how to think and act like small-d democrats, and 
deeply questioning our assumptions about the world we live in and 
what we can do.

Why should we believe this is possible? For one thing, I don't think 
we have a choice. Maintaining the status quo is no longer an option 
for us. The voracious, insatiable nature of corporate capitalism is 
forcing revolutionary changes whether we like it or not. The 
alternative to not trying to transform our world is letting the 
current system continue on its self-destructive path until we have a 
world in which most of us are dead or wish we were. But too many 
people don't think transformation is possible because we've been 
taught to believe that we've always lived under oppressive 
hierarchical systems and that we can't change human nature. 
Eradicating this lie from our belief system is an essential first 
step for us, and an extremely difficult one because we live in a 
culture that severed itself from human history some 10,000 years ago 
- which is a long time but compared to millions of years of human 
existence on the planet is nowhere near "always."

The foundation for the culture we live in goes back much farther than 
even the Roman Empire, and here's a theoretical story to explain what 
might have happened.  At some point around 10,000 years ago, some 
tribe of people changed their cultural story from one about living in 
harmony with the earth to one about dominion over the earth - not 
about finding their place in the world, but changing it to suit their 
needs and theirs alone. Unlike the other tribes, they applied their 
skills in agriculture and animal herding to building food surpluses, 
which led to a growth in population, which led to conquering and 
displacing other tribes. Their cultural story changed from being at 
one with life in the universe to being separate from both the divine 
and the planet - and separate from other human beings. Cooperation 
was replaced with competition, sustainability with growth, shared 
power with hierarchy, and peaceful co-existence with domination. By 
force and by emulation this new cultural story spread around the 
planet, with a huge push in the last 500 years. This is the root of 
the growth mentality that has metastasized into corporate capitalism.

Why should we believe this story? Most people who refused to change 
their cultural story and adopt the dominator mode have now been wiped 
out, but we know that there is an alternative because some of these 
people are still living with this fundamentally different worldview, 
because information about other cultures was collected before the 
extermination, and from archeological records. We may never know just 
what caused this change to come about, but the point is that humans 
have existed on the planet for millions of years - we haven't 
forgotten our sustainable, cooperative ways of living in just 10,000 
years, but they have atrophied. If we want to stick around much 
longer, we have to invest in, connect with, and re-develop our 
democratic, life-loving, cooperative, sustainable selves. We have to 
reconnect with that much longer, deeper history of human evolution 
and consciousness. This needs to happen in small groups and at local 
levels because that's the only way we can develop our skills. And 
because there is no one right way to live, there is no one right way 
to do it.

Doing this is critically important, because we can't leave this job 
to our so-called "leaders." The power-holders in nation-states and 
corporate capitalism are too trapped in their own belief system, too 
deeply in denial, to provide real solutions. The only responses they 
can come up with is more of the same - more violence, more lies, more 
suppresion of the truth. They call for "more growth" the same way a 
medieval doctor might prescribe "more leeches." Well, we're running 
out of blood. We have to let go of our dependency and abandon the 
illusion of security that these people have convinced us they 
provide. We need to figure out how to do this without them, and 
later, when we've developed the new systems, they'll join us. Here's 
a short story illustrating what I'm saying.

The World Economic Forum happens every year in Davos, Switzerland - a 
gathering of the world's most powerful bankers, financiers, corporate 
CEOs, media people, and government officials. In 1996 they were 
addressed by Oren Lyons, Peacekeeper of the Iroquois-Six Nations 
Confederacy. When asked to give his perspective on the financial 
community's role in the present world situation, Chief Lyons 
responded, "I see you all as jockeys, and your companies are the 
horses you ride. You're beating your horses on in a race, but now you 
can see that you are racing toward a stone wall. You see some of 
those ahead of you smashing into the wall, but you don't turn around 
or even pause. You're beating your horses on anyway as fast as you 
can."

A few months later, one of the women who'd been at Davos had tea at 
the home of a banker from Rio de Janeiro whom she'd met there. She 
asked her host how he saw the world economic situation from his 
position as one of the leading bankers of Brazil. "He said that 
frankly it looked as though we were all going over the edge of a 
cliff. I caught my breath and asked if his colleagues felt the same 
way. He confirmed that they did. I asked him then whether he - or 
they - were interested in discussing alternatives. He said there was 
nothing to be done. Finally I tried one last question: How do you 
reconcile this inaction with the fact of being a grandfather? He 
turned his eyes away. 'Don't ask me that,' he said, 'I can't bear to 
think about it.'"
_____________________________________

In order for people to want to work to change the system, they need 
three things. They must see a problem with the current system, they 
must have a vision of a different system and see it as an 
improvement, and they must see a way to get from here to there. These 
are not sequential steps; they are conditions that must all be 
present for most people to act. One of the great things about this is 
that lots of different skills are required for all of these things to 
happen - diagnosticians, visionaries, architects, organizers, 
writers, teachers, artists, musicians - happily, the diversity we 
will need to do this work reflects the diversity of the human 
species. For decades people have been talking about the problems with 
corporate capitalism and dedicating their lives to the life-saving 
work of mitigating the harms caused by that system. For generations 
visionaries have dreamed of alternatives. We're coming into a time 
when the current system is causing misery for so many more people 
that many of us are asking questions, and just when other people are 
starting to figure out how to build bridges to get to alternatives. I 
believe understanding the connections between corporate power and war 
is an essential part of helping us strip away our illusions so we can 
participate in his building of a new world. Although we live in 
dangerous times, they are also very exciting times - full of promise 
- and I, for one, am looking forward to the journey. Thank you.


Molly Morgan
National board member and leadership team member for Challenging 
Corporate Power, Asserting the People's Rights Campaign of the 
Women's International League for Peace and Freedom

Editor of By What Authority, the thrice-yearly publication of the 
Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy

morganm@sdsc.edu

--
<http://www.groundtruthinvestigations.com/>