Bush Clears the Way for Corporate Domination

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Bush Clears the Way for Corporate Domination

Sat, 6 May 2006 14:25:12 -0700

 

 

 

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/050506D.shtml

 

Bush Clears the Way for Corporate Domination

By Joshua Holland

AlterNet

 

Friday 05 May 2006

 

Antonia Juhasz, author of 'The Bush Agenda,' explains what Bush

really means when he says he wants to spread freedom around the world.

 

When George W. Bush says that he wants to spread freedom to every

corner of the earth, he means it.

 

But of course the president that turned Soviet-era gulags into

secret CIA prisons in order to do God-knows-what to God-knows-whom

isn't talking about individual freedom. He means corporate freedom -

freedom for the great multinationals to extract everything they can

from the world's resources and labor without the hindrance of public

interest laws, environmental regulations or worker protections.

 

Bush's vision of a free world actually looks just like the

corporate globalization agenda pushed by a succession of American

presidents in institutions like the World Trade Organization.

 

But this administration yearns for freedom too much to leave it up

to trade negotiators. Unlike his predecessors, Bush isn't content to

use carrots and sticks and a liberal dose of arm twisting to advance

that agenda. His administration has made the neoliberal policies

euphemistically referred to as " free-trade " a centerpiece of its

national security policy.

 

Bush is willing to use the awesome force of the United States

military to guarantee the freedom of the world's largest multinationals.

 

In her new book, The Bush Agenda, Antonia Juhasz peels the veils

away from Bush's agenda - imperialism, militarism and corporate

globalization - and exposes who drives it: a group of hawkish

ideologues with an unprecedented relationship to major defense and

energy companies.

 

Juhasz shows that the invasion of Iraq - an invasion that was as

much economic as military - was the centerpiece of a larger project:

the creation a New American Century in which the end-goal of American

foreign policy is to enrich the corporate elites, and dissent at home

will not be tolerated. Juhasz is a wonk - she got her start as a

staffer for Rep. John Conyers - but the book is as readable as it is

deeply researched.

 

I caught up with Juhasz last week at Washington's Union Station,

just blocks away from the White House, to chat about The Bush Agenda.

 

Joshua Holland: [19th century Prussian military philosopher Carl

von] Clausewitz said that war is an extension of politics by other

means. You suggest that for the Bush administration, war is an

extension of corporate globalization by other means. Run down your

basic premise.

 

Antonia Juhasz: The Bush administration has implemented a

particularly radical model of corporate globalization by which it has

teamed overt military might - full-scale invasion - with the

advancement of its corporate globalization agenda. And this model is

particularly imperial - that's one of the things that makes it

different from, for example, the Reagan or Bush Sr. regimes. As

opposed to simply replacing the head of a regime that is no longer

serving the interests of the administration, the Bush team has gone

further - using a military invasion to fundamentally transform a

country's political and economic structure.

 

It is also using an occupation to maintain that altered structure,

which is the definition of imperialism in my mind: spreading the

empire by changing the very laws of foreign nations to service the

empire's needs. And, as Bush is repeatedly saying, " Iraq is only the

beginning. " I detail the rest of the empire's pursuits across the

Middle East in the chapter on the U.S.-Middle East Free Trade Area.

 

The fundamental purpose of the book was to determine how this

model came to be, where its advocates hope it will go and who its

advocates are so that we can better dismantle it.

 

JH: But Bush isn't the first to use a full-scale invasion -

unilaterally - in furtherance of those goals. I think of Reagan's

invasion of Grenada to knock off Maurice Bishop, a moderate socialist.

 

AJ: There was no occupation, and it wasn't done the same way that

the Bush administration - using its own tools, its own people, its own

policies - to explicitly restructure the entire functioning of the

country's economy to serve its own ends. Reagan wanted a different

leader, a leader that would meet his needs and that was enough. Bush

has locked in an entirely new economic and political structure. I'm

certainly not justifying the invasion of Grenada, but for me that was

quantitatively different.

 

JH: What is Pax Americana - the " American Peace " - and what is it

about the original Roman version, Pax Romana, that makes it a poor

model to emulate?

 

AJ: I talk about Pax Americana because that's what members of the

administration talk about - Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Libby,

Khalilzad, Perle, Zoellick, Bolton. … In fact, there are 16 members of

the Bush administration that were also participants in the Project for

the New American Century, which was very clear that the U.S. not only

has a Pax Americana but should seek to maintain it.

 

This is problematic because it seeks to achieve the Roman model,

with an all-powerful emperor who ran his kingdom on 50 percent slave

labor, who eliminated all guarantees of civil liberties and eliminated

all civic participation, but maintained the fallacy of public

institutions and participatory government to keep the elites at bay -

to make elites feel like they had the presence and prestige of serving

in government.

 

So there were senators and there were " representatives of the

people, " but of course the emperor appointed those he wanted to sit in

the senate, and he chose those who would serve his interests. And then

he appointed regional overlords to oversee the rest of the empire. In

addition, the idea that Rome generated peace - that it really was in

fact a Pax Romana that guaranteed peace for the rest of the world - is

false. To create the empire, there was an enormous amount of war and

bloodshed, and also to maintain the empire there was continued

fighting as nations and peoples were forced to acquiesce.

 

However, there was a period of about 200 years where there was

relatively less struggle within Rome over who would rule. But one key

reason Rome was able to maintain that internal peace was all the money

that the empire poured into public services - building aqueducts,

providing services, supporting intellectual thought and - as I say in

the book - creating the Western Canon.

 

The Bush administration has chosen all the worst elements of the

Roman Empire: the lack of civil liberties and the movement towards a

nonrepresentative government run by a dictator. Even the most

conservative Republican columnist will admit that Bush has

consolidated more and more power in the executive branch than any

president in modern history. And he's increased the proportion of

people in the United States in the lower income sphere, people who

have to work day in and day out in order to meet basic needs like

health care, and who often aren't able to meet those needs. I argue

that that is a modern form of slavery.

 

And while the administration is explicitly imperial - it is trying

to annex other nations through its military and its economic policy -

its not putting any of that attention to public education, public

resources and public services. So we are getting the worst of the

worst. And just as it was a myth that the Pax Romana created world

peace, the Pax Americana clearly generates more global insecurity.

Acts of deadly terror have increased every year of the Bush

administration; they increased more than three-fold between 2003 and 2004.

 

JH: So he's not just the worst president ever, he's also the worst …

 

AJ: … Yes, he's also the worst emperor ever.

 

JH: You're blunt about calling Iraq an economic invasion. Most

analyses are geopolitical, but you put it together with the

long-standing wish list of the corporate globalists. Can you tell me

about Bremer's100 rules and what Bearing Point is?

 

AJ: If you look at the corporations that have profited most from

the invasion - Bechtel, Halliburton, Lockheed Martin and Chevron -

these are all corporations that have decades of operations and

activities trying to increase their economic engagement in Iraq -

lobbying the U.S. government to increase their access to Iraq. And

they've done so successfully - first with Saddam Hussein and later

with the coalition authorities and now with the new government of

Iraq. They have participated with or guided - you can choose the word

you want - the Bush administration in its invasion. Through their

executives, they played key roles in advocating for war. George Shultz

is the perfect example and one I focus on in the book.

 

I emphasize that it's an absolute fallacy that there was no

post-war plan. The plan was written two months before the invasion of

Iraq by a company, Bearing Point Inc., which is based in Virginia - it

was KPMG Consulting until it changed its name in the wake of the

Arthur Anderson-Enron corruption scandals. The company is not

well-known. It works behind the scenes for every branch of government,

and it provides all kinds of consulting services.

 

Bearing point received a $250 million contract from USAID to write

a remodeled structure for the Iraqi economy. It was to transition Iraq

from a state-controlled economy to a market economy, but I argue that

the new model was more a state-controlled economy that is controlled

on behalf of multinational corporations, and heavily regulated in fact

on behalf of multinational corporations. It just no longer serves the

public interest.

 

Bearing point's plan was implemented to a T by L. Paul Bremer, the

administrator of Iraq's coalition government. The U.N.'s special envoy

to Iraq, Lakhdar Brahimi, called him the " Dictator of Iraq, " and he

was. He ruled Iraq for 14 months, and he implemented Bearing Point's

plan; he rewrote Iraq's entire economic and political structure by

implementing his 100 orders. The orders had the force of law, and any

Iraqi laws that contradicted the orders were overridden.

 

The 100 orders put into place a standard set of corporate

globalization policies. Instead of having to wait for Iraq to become a

member of the World Trade Organization, for example, or to fulfill

requirements of the International Monetary Fund or World Bank, or

worrying about whether the policies they most wanted would be

accepted, the administration was able to simply invade, occupy and

impose those provisions itself. And many of those provisions have been

long opposed at institutions like the WTO - for example the

investments provisions - but they were implemented overnight in Iraq

with a stroke of the pen by Paul Bremer.

 

Probably the most important order in terms of what happened with

the occupation was the very first order. Bremer fired 120,000 key

bureaucrats in every government ministry in Iraq. That meant that

ministries that had been functioning very well for decades lost their

bureaucracies almost overnight. The excuse that was given was that

they were Ba'ath Party members, but nobody could hold those positions

unless they belonged to the Ba'ath Party, so it wasn't an indication

that they were a party to Saddam Hussein's crimes. They were fired

because they could have stood in the way of the economic transformation.

 

Then there was the firing of the entire Iraqi military, and I

think that problem is well-known. Less well-known is how that played

out in relation to the rest of the orders. Order number 39 was the

foreign investment order. There were several provisions which I detail

in the book, but the most important may be national treatment, which

meant that Iraqis could not preference Iraqi companies and Iraqi

workers in the reconstruction.

 

So 150 United States corporations have received $50 billion for

work in Iraq, $33 billion of which was exclusively for standard

reconstruction - building bridges, repairing electricity and repairing

water. But originally the plan was to use the soldiers - the Iraqi

military - for the reconstruction. Instead of taking a half a million

men and canceling their salaries and sending them home with guns, they

were going to go to work and get money, and provide for their families

and be part of the reconstruction.

 

Even worse is that those American companies failed. Miserably. And

it's not just because of the insurgency - the insurgency didn't begin

immediately. They failed because they went in to maximize their

profit, to build the most expensive state-of-the-art systems they

could and to get their feet firmly in Iraq so they would be able to

profit long term. But what Iraq needed was just to get the systems up

and running. It was summer in the desert.

 

JH: How long did it take for Iraq to get those systems up after

the first invasion?

 

AJ: Three months. The Iraqi workers and companies rebuilt their

systems in three months.

 

JH: OK, so Bremer imposed these rules under the Coalition

Provisional Authority. Explain how rules set up by a provisional

government ended up codified in Iraq's new constitution?

 

AJ: Bremer appointed an interim government for Iraq when the

occupation formally ended. The interim government, together with

Bremer, threw out the existing Iraqi Constitution. And I think at the

time there was this idea that it was a nation being molded out of the

dirt - that it didn't have a government, didn't have a structure - and

here was the United States helping them form a constitutional

convention. But they had a government, they had a constitution -

they've had a constitution since 1922. We didn't have to create a

constitutional government for them.

 

The first constitution that was written had all of Bremer's

orders, and it could only be changed by a very complicated process -

it essentially locked the orders in. Then the new constitution for

Iraq was supposed to be " of the people. " It was drafted by the interim

government and put to a popular vote. But it was crafted so that it

locked into place the occupation, the economic transformation, the

constitutionality of the new oil law - which the United States had

drafted - and all of the Bremer orders.

 

The only public discussion of the constitution was the few things

people were gleaning from the press and what their religious leaders -

who were themselves gleaning it from the press - told them. Five days

before the constitution was to be voted on, the paper copies were

released. They made 5 million copies for 15 million voters. And on

that same day, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, was

meeting with influential Iraqi leaders to rewrite fundamental aspects

of that very constitution. There was absolutely no way that the vast

majority of the Iraqi people had any idea what was in the

constitution. They were voting for hope, and they risked their lives

to do so. But there's no way they knew that they were voting to

maintain the Bremer orders.

 

JH: What's the Hague Convention of 1907?

 

AJ: Under international law an occupying government has one set of

responsibilities, and they're very clear. An occupying government must

provide security and basic services. An occupying government

explicitly cannot fundamentally rewrite the laws of the country

they're occupying. The United States did exactly the opposite; we

rewrote the laws, and we didn't provide basic services or security for

the people.

 

JH: Did we ratify the Hague Conventions?

 

AJ: We certainly did.

 

JH: You focus on four firms that pushed the policy and have

profited handsomely from the invasion: Bechtel, Chevron, Lockheed

Martin and Halliburton. But there are many other multinational

corporations that have both made a killing in Iraq and have close ties

to both the administration and to the conservative movement more

generally. Why those four and, playing devil's advocate, is there a

danger focusing on a small number of firms when the issues are

militarism and corporate globalization more broadly?

 

AJ: These four companies have the longest relationship to Iraq.

Through their executives, they lobbied on behalf of an invasion of

Iraq, and they have profited more than almost all other companies from

that invasion. And they have intimate interlocking relationships with

this administration. They demonstrate very clearly how, in the Bush

administration, there essentially is no distinction between corporate

characters and government characters. They also are companies that

because of their corporate behavior around the world have preexisting

and longstanding movements - social movements - that are organized

against their harmful actions, which readers of the book support and

become a part of.

 

JH: That's a great segue. In your final chapter, you discuss ways

that people can oppose the Bush agenda, and you suggest that another

agenda is possible. I think that's very important because so many

books bash Bush and then leave readers feeling dispirited. Name just

one thing that needs to be done to reverse this agenda?

 

AJ: There are so many alternatives, and I give concrete examples

of solutions - for how to end the economic invasion of Iraq. What I

hoped to do in the last chapter was to present the movements and many

of the ideas generating fundamental change already. I wanted to

empower people - to show that the information in the book can be used

as a tool for these movements and a tool for change.

 

So I give examples of not only different policies, but I also give

examples of organizations and communities that have been successfully

mobilizing against the full Bush agenda - that means corporate

globalization, war and imperialism. To me that's more important than

any one of the alternatives that I present. The whole point of the

chapter is that there are, thankfully, millions of alternatives to

choose from. And we're already seeing successful transformation -

there are real movements that we can join and in which we can have an

impact.

 

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Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer.

 

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