By Takis Fotopoulos
Last weekend thousands of European citizens across Europe took part in demonstrations against the New World Order (NWO) of neoliberal globalization and the Transnational Elite (TE)--mainly the transnational elites' network based in the G7 countries--which runs it. The reason was the latest TE plan for a transatlantic trade deal called "Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership" (TTIP)[1] Negotiations for this new agreement are in fact well advanced and have taken place between representatives of the political and economic elites of USA and EU. A similar agreement called The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TTP) is being negotiated between nations of the Pacific Rim (Canada, the US, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Vietnam, Peru, Mexico, Singapore, South Korea, Malaysia, Taiwan and Brunei).
One could immediately notice that both Russia and China are deliberately excluded from these negotiations, which instead take place exclusively among members of the TE, and those fully integrated into the NWO as associate or subordinate members of it. As I tried to show in a previous Pravda article, Russia is not fully integrated into the NWO,[2] despite recently joining the World Trade Organization, whose aim is to fully integrate into the New Order of neoliberal globalization as many countries of the world as possible, provided they would agree to fully open and liberalize their markets for commodities, so that Transnational Corporations (TNCs) do not have any tariff or other barriers restricting their activities.
However, despite the fact that the World Trade Organization was highly successful in opening and liberalizing goods markets, it was not so successful in opening services markets given that many countries still try to protect basic needs services like Health, Education, Transportation and Communications, which are still characterised as social services and are not therefore left free to become easy prey for the TNCs and their profit making activities. This is unlike the US case, where meeting these basic needs depends on market forces, (i.e. on how thick the citizen's wallet is) rather than on collective social decisions taken democratically. On top of this, the World Trade Organization was not particularly successful in opening and liberalizing some production sectors in the "South" (e.g. the agriculture sector), which are still the main production sectors (at least in terms of providing employment) to many of those countries. As an expert on the field stressed:
"To put it mildly, the World Trade Organization has not proven terribly popular. In fact, the organization has mainly been used as a vehicle to force open vulnerable economies and make the rich richer and the poor poorer around the world. Thus, unsurprisingly, talks on further liberalization measures within the World Trade Organizations' global framework have stalled....Hence, the confusingly abbreviated TTIP and TTP, which are being negotiated by more exclusive sets of countries whose leaders happen to (mainly) agree that it would be a good idea to go much further down the trade liberalization rabbit hole than even the hugely unpopular World Trade Organization has. One of the most concerning ways they want to do this is by seeking to institutionalize what is known as investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) within the agreements' framework."[3]
So, these agreements are in fact part of the same process that began with the emergence of the NWO following the mass expansion of TNCs in the last thirty years or so - which is a new phenomenon in the history of the capitalist market economy - and the parallel collapse of the USSR and the soviet bloc in general. As a result of the mass expansion of TNCs, which, by 2009, numbered more than 80,000, accounting for about two-thirds of world trade, several experts on the field talk today about a hyper globalization. As a New Scientist study has shown, today, just 1,318 core TNCs, through interlocking ownerships, own 80% of global revenues and 147 companies out of them (i.e. less than 1 per cent of the network) form a 'super entity', controlling 40 per cent of the wealth of the entire network! [4] This vast expansion of TNCs would have been impossible without open and liberalized markets for commodities and capital, which have been established all over the world in the last thirty years or so by governments of every persuasion: Christian democrats, social democrats, liberals and any combination between them. This was not the result of some conspiracy by 'bad' economists and politicians, exploiting any kind of crisis, as some best-seller conspiracy theorists suggest.[5] Instead, this was just the inevitable effect, which followed the collapse of the social-democratic model that was based on national markets, and which was not compatible anymore with the growing internationalization of the market economy. In other words, governments in the new framework had to follow neoliberal policies to make their economies competitive and capable of continued growth and the expansion of the consumer society.
However, the creation of an internationalized market economy necessitated some sort of international economic and political "regulation". When the market economy was mainly "national", the role of enforcing the market rules was assigned to the 'nation-state' - through its monopoly of violence - and the political and economic elites controlling it. This included the old national empires, like the British colonial empire, which in effect had its own internal market for trade and capital investment. However, a transnational economy needs its own transnational political and economic elites to control it. Although the state monopoly of violence still remains in the present internationalized market economy, it is now supplemented by a transnational form of violence, which is enforced not just by one state--even if this happens to be the last "empire" in the classical sense of the word (USA)-- but by the main military powers in the G7 i.e. France, UK, US (the 'FUKUS' powers). Therefore, even though economic power is spread today among a few hundred TNCs, which originated, mainly, in the G7 countries, (i.e. FUKUS plus Germany, Japan, Canada and Italy), the USA, due to its unambiguous military supremacy, has a de facto leading position - but it is not the Emperor. In other words, the NWO is an 'Empire', in the sense of a unipolar world, but without an Emperor - unless we consider as 'emperor' the entire TE.
In this framework, we may define the "transnational elite" as the elite that draws its power (economic, political or generally social power) by operating at the transnational level - a fact which implies that it does not express, solely or even primarily, the interests of a particular state. It consists of a network of interconnected elites controlling each major field of social life (economic, political, ideological and so on). Therefore, the following elites constitute the major components of the transnational elite:
Ø The transnational economic elites in charge of economic globalization, which control the main TNCs (corporate directors, executive managers, major shareholders of the main TNCs), as well as the directorates of the main international economic organizations (IMF, World Bank, OECD and so on);
Ø The transnational political elites in charge of political globalization, which control the distinctly politico-military dimension of the NWO and consist of globalizing bureaucrats and professional politicians functioning either within major international organizations or in the state machines of the major market economies, (principally the G7 countries);
Ø The transnational propaganda elites in charge of promoting the ideology of the New World Order, through their control of transnational mass media (e.g. CNN, BBC and the likes), as well as the elites involved in implementing this ideology in dealing with the protection of human rights etc (leading cadres of international NGOs financed by the transnational economic elites, like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, etc.). Transnational media and international NGOs, as well as the so-called 'social media' of the Internet (blogs, facebook, twitter etc) have played a crucial role in the manufacturing of "news" (and of the legitimacy of 'insurgents'), let alone in supporting the propaganda about the supposed progressive role of criminal organizations like NATO. It is now known, for instance, that DARPA - the Pentagon-run Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency - has in one way or another funded several studies recently that set out to explore the fact that social networking sites, as well as users of Twitter, Pinterest, Kickstarter etc. (as well as its Social Media in Strategic Communications, or SMISC, program), have as a general goal the pure manipulation of social data information, so that the TE's line is filtered through them. As its goal is described: "Through the program, DARPA seeks to develop tools to support the efforts of human operators to counter misinformation or deception campaigns with truthful information."[6]
Ø The transnational academic elites, namely the prominent systemic academics in various transnational organizations (foundations, institutes, think tanks and the likes) in charge of creating/improving the ideology of the NWO and globalization, "scientifically" justifying the need for globalization, as well as disorienting people on the real causes of the present multi-dimensional crisis.
Ø The transnational cultural elites, namely the film industry (mainly controlled by the Transnational and Zionist elites that control the dominant Hollywood industry) which plays a crucial role in propagating the values of globalization and the 'normal' way of living (which 'by coincidence' happens to be the one consistent with the bourgeois way of life and values!), the music industry (particularly the pop industry which is also controlled by TNCs) and so on
Needless to add that the globalization process run by the TE has already led to an unprecedented concentration of wealth and income and as the just published Credit Swisse report shows, the richest 1 percent on the planet now own 48.2 percent of the world's wealth, up from 46 percent last year, whereas the bottom half of the global population own less than 1 percent of the total wealth![7]
The twofold aims of the TE since the rise of the NWO have been:
First, to expand globalization into countries which have not yet lost all national and economic sovereignty within the globalization process, mainly Russia and also countries still controlled by governments that came to power through national liberation movements (Syria and Iran, following the destruction by the same TE of countries like Iraq and Libya) or, alternatively through socialist movements (Cuba, Venezuela and others). The means used to achieve this aim were either economic violence, as e.g. with respect to the EU peripheral countries, or physical violence, exercised directly by the TE or its proxies, (as e.g. in the Middle East), or some combination of the two forms of violence.
Second, to deepen the globalization process into areas not yet covered by the World Trade Organization rounds and particularly the movement of capital, whose complete freedom to move, up to now, has only been secured within the EU and NAFTA and as regards to other countries mainly through bilateral agreements. The new agreements (TTIP and TTP) propose clauses that will create universal mechanisms to settle disputes between TNCs and states. Thus, unlike individual deals on developing specific natural resources, the TTIP and TTP cover a wide range of what are considered to be investments in the states. Therefore, as the same expert points out "incorporating these clauses would mean that if a country later makes a law that contravenes the terms of the TTIP or TTP, for example, in the interests of protecting public health, that a company that suffers damages (for example, because they have been making a product that contravenes the new rule) can sue the state for compliance with the treaty, bypassing the normal court system. In other words, foreign companies are placed above the law of the host State through these agreements."[8] Thus, TNCs with a stake in the UK health service, for instance, could sue the government if it decided to pursue a program of nationalization. No wonder that Unite's (a major British Trade Union) Assistant General Secretary Gail Cartmail urged congress delegates in the last TUC conference to oppose the TTIP and rally support amongst people in the UK to demand Prime Minister David Cameron keep Britain's health services out of the TTIP agreement. As it was reported at the time:
"It is clear this government thought they could do this deal in secret - a deal that would mean the irreversible sell-off of our NHS to America," Cartmail said. "Wall Street financiers like Blackrock and Invesco are already heavily invested in the NHS - over 70 percent of new contracts are now in private hands. Over £11 billion of our money in the hands of casino capitalists," she added.[9]
It is not therefore surprising that some of the campaigners against TTIP worry that once this agreement is converted into EU law and then finds its way to domestic parliaments (as it is well known at least 75% of each EU country's legislation originates in the EU Commission) then it could open the way to privatize any social service still available, following the onslaught of the NWO of neoliberal globalization and the mass neoliberal legislation adopted in the last 30 years by both conservative, Christian Democratic and social democratic parties in power. Environmentalists are also concerned that the dispute settlement procedure could well be used by TNCs to block moves to protect the environment. The conduct of the negotiations is also contentious. Campaigners say they are secretive and undemocratic, as of course it should be expected as they are, in fact, (despite formalities) carried out between unelected US and EU bureaucrats, who owe their posts to the transnational political and economic elites, and representatives of TNCs.
The effects of globalization particularly as far as the continuous squeezing of employees' real incomes is concerned, (in the context of liberalizing labor markets, so that they could become more competitive) are being realized now widely by many people all over the world. The present 'job miracle', for instance, in Britain, (which is characterized as "the job creation capital of the western economies"), hides the fact that "unemployment is low largely because British workers have been willing to stomach the biggest real-terms pay cut since the Victorian era"[10]--all this as a result of globalization. It is not therefore surprising that even the conservative London Times had to admit this fact in explaining the reasons why the nationalist Right under Nigel Farage's UKIP is rising rapidly:
"The surge in support for UKIP is not simply a protest vote. The party has a constituency among those left behind by globalisation... the globalisation of the economy has produced losers as well as winners. As a rule the winners are among the better off and the losers among the least affluent."[11]
The same process is repeated almost everywhere in Europe with people (and particularly working class people) turning to the nationalist Right not because they suddenly became "nationalists" let alone "fascists" (as the "Left" accuses them) but simply because the present degenerate Left does not wish to lead the struggle against globalization, while, at the same time, the popular strata have realised that national and economic sovereignty is incompatible with globalization. The strong patriotic movement in Russia encompassing all those opposing the integration of Russia into the NWO, i.e. from nationalists up to communists and from Christian orthodox to secularists, is just such a movement.
The typical reaction of the ideological organs of the TE, either in the media or in universities, think tanks, NGOs and the like, is to attack this rapidly rising global movement against the NWO of neoliberal globalization with two parallel aims:
a) to slander as 'fascist' such popular movements against globalization[12] (while looking the other way concerning the actions of the real fascists in Ukraine whom it used as its main organs for its 'coup from below')[13] and;
b) to try to marginalize or even defame as conspiracy theorists every writer who does not toe the TE's line on globalization, while, at the same time directly or indirectly promoting liberal or even Marxist "Left" authors and publications, who ignore globalization and the TE and prefer to talk about today's reality in terms of completely outdated theories of the past two centuries, developed well before the emergence of globalization. Clearly, this Palaeolithic Marxist Left (apart from some enlightened Marxists who attempted-in a genuine Marxist fashion-- to use the classical Marxist tools to develop new theories for today's reality[14]) is today politically and ideologically dead.
Neil Clark, aptly described the systematic effort by the TE organs to describe any effective critique of present reality like the above as a 'conspiracy theory':
"The labelling of people as 'conspiracy theorists' by gatekeepers in the West has nothing to do with how much evidence there is to support a claim or the quality of that evidence, but is a political call, based on who the conspiracy theory concerns and who is making it. Establishment gatekeepers are not objective judges, but are heavily biased and label any idea they don't like as a 'conspiracy theory'. Labelling someone a 'conspiracy theorist' is their standard way of declaring that person to be 'off-limits', i.e. he/she is an unreliable source and a 'crank'. It's a way that dissent and debate is stifled in what appear to be free, democratic societies - and how people who challenge the dominant establishment narrative are deliberately marginalized."[15]
Thus a common slander against the conception of the TE I gave above is that it implies the presence of a well organized international elite which decides for the planet' s future in a way that "History is written on the basis of the commands of this elite which represents the 'New World Order'".[16] Of course, as I have consistently stressed, History is always a creation, something that rules out both any kind of conspiracies and, alternatively, any 'objective' laws determining its outcome. Naturally, this does not mean that the elites do not plot. The example of the TE conspiracy about the supposed weapons of mass destruction in order to dismantle the Iraqi Ba'athist regime is particularly topical. Yet, whether a conspiracy will succeed or not always depends on the outcome of the social struggle.
As I attempted to show elsewhere,[17] in describing the process leading to the NWO, the new form of internationalized market economy that has been established in the last thirty years or so represents a structural change, a move to a new form of modernity, i.e., a move from statist to neoliberal modernity, rather than a change in economic policy and an ideology, as the reformist Left argues. In this sense, today's globalisation is indeed a new phenomenon, although it is the outcome of the interaction of the social struggle with the dynamics of the market economy, which was established two centuries ago and has led to the marketization process, i.e. to the process of minimising social controls on the markets and particularly those aiming to the protection of labour and the environment that were coming inevitably into conflict with economic "efficiency" and profitability. The emergence and rapid expansion of multinational corporations (a new phenomenon in the history of the capitalist market economy), has initially led to an informal opening and liberalisation of markets that was later institutionalised by Thatcherism and Reaganomics. It was this development that, together with the change in the subjective conditions, i.e., the decay of the labour and socialist movements in the aftermath of de-industrialisation in the West, signalled the collapse of social democracy and the rise of neoliberal globalization.
Takis Fotopoulos
Takis Fotopoulos is a political philosopher, editor of Society & Nature/Democracy and Nature/The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy. He has also been a columnist for the Athens Daily Eleftherotypia since 1990. Between 1969 and 1989 he was Senior Lecturer in Economics at the University of North London (formerly Polytechnic of North London). He is the author of over 25 books and over 1,000 articles, many of which have been translated into various languages.
A short version of this article, which is based on several This article is based on extracts from the author's forthcoming book SUBJUGATING THE MIDDLE EAST:Integration into the New World Order, Vol.1: Pseudo Democratization (Progressive Press, 2014). A shorter version of it was published in Eleftherotypia on 19/10/2014. It was edited by Jonathan Rutherford.
[1] see e.g. Andrew Walker, "Concerns rise over US-EU trade talks", BBC News, 11/10/2014, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-29572475#story_continues_1
[2] "Russia, the Eurasian Union and the Transnational Elite", Pravda.ru, 1/9/2014
[3] Roslyn Fuller, Pyrrhic victory for whistleblowers on Transatlantic Trade Agreement, RT, 2/4/2014http://rt.com/op-edge/transatlantic-trade-agreement-817/
[4] Andy Coghlan and Debora MacKenzie, "Revealed - the capitalist network that runs the world", New Scientist Magazine, issue 2835 (24/10/2011)
[5] Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine, (Penguin, 2007)
[6] Pentagon spent millions studying how to influence social media in Darpa-funded research, RT, 8/7/2014 http://rt.com/usa/171356-darpa-social-media-study/
[7] "Richest 1% own 50% of world wealth- Credit Suisse report", RT, 16/102014 http://rt.com/business/195816-richest-1-percent-credit-suisse/
[8] Roslyn Fuller, Pyrrhic victory for whistleblowers on Transatlantic Trade Agreement, op.cit
[9] No TTIP: Mass protests slam US-EU trade deal as 'corporate power grab', RT, 11/10/2014 http://rt.com/news/195144-europe-protests-stop-ttip/
[10] Ed Conway, "The UK is paying the price of its jobs miracle", The Times, 14/10/2014
[11] Editorial, "The People's Revolt", The Times, 11/10/2014
[12] see Takis Fotopoulos, Ukraine, The attack on Russia and the Eurasian Union, (published shortly by Progressive Press, ch. 10
[13] Takis Fotopoulos, "The Russian embargo and the Ukrainian 'coup from below'", Pravda.ru, 18/8/2014
[14] see e.g. Leslie Sklair, The Transnational Capitalist Class (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001).
[15] Neil Clark, 'Conspiracy theories? No one does it better than West's elite', 13/11/2013
[16] see e.g. a collective work on "The conspiratorial discourse in the Greek political system", University of Thessaloniki, 2010
[17] Takis Fotopoulos, "Globalisation, the reformist Left and the Anti-Globalisation "Movement"," Democracy & Nature, Vol. 7, No. 2 (July 2001).