Who’s Actually in Power in the Empire

This map, from Multipolarista, shows how ‘western’ countries, in repeated UN votes last month, have consistently refused to condemn sanctions as human rights violations, opposed the principle of a democratic and equitable world order, opposed the promotion of human rights and cultural diversity, and opposed restrictions on the use of mercenaries. These votes are not just symbolic, meaningless rhetorical statements of principle. The lockstep ‘no’ votes illustrate precisely the map of Empire, including its Sub-Imperial Powers (in red) versus non-Empire nations committed to multipolarity and the international rule of law (in green). These are the battle lines in the struggle to control the planet’s political power structure and its remaining resources, as our civilization slides into global chaos and collapse.

Billmon at Moon of Alabama recently reposted a review by Arnaud Bertrand of a new short book by Clinton Fernandez, an Australian professor and former intelligence officer. The book is called Sub-Imperial Power and it attempts to explain the position and role of countries like Australia, Canada, Japan, Israel, and Germany in the current political order. The UK is a bit of a special case Sub-Imperial Power, as the sort of ‘lieutenant’ in the order.

In the book, Clinton acknowledges that the US is the current Imperial Power in the world, struggling to obstruct attempts by many countries (and, by its mandate, the UN) to establish a multipolar world in the face of the Empire’s growing and increasingly belligerent hegemony (political, economic and military dominance). Sub-Imperial Powers, he asserts, are not the vassals or client-states we imagine, but rather they have struck a bargain with the Imperial Power to enforce the Imperial Power’s rule in their geographic region, in return for political, economic and military favours (including “security”).

This makes considerable sense to me, as a Canadian with a typical fear-respect relationship with our southern neighbours. American corporations own the majority of Canadian public companies, and with that, substantial control over our economy, our natural resources, and much of our land and infrastructure.

Like many Canadians, I have always felt a combination of anxiety and resentment about this dependence, which always struck me as a devil’s bargain. When the US runs low on oil and water, which it will soon enough, it will have no hesitation in taking Canada’s, not by military force (though that remains a background threat), but by simply using its economic control to move resources it already effectively owns, south, as a ‘business decision’, without even asking permission. For example, US regulators actually control a number of critical Canadian dams, for the purpose of regulating cross-border water flow in the best interests of Americans. This control was quietly negotiated in return for — of course — cash. Like the cash that bought them control of Canada’s oil & gas industry.

It will do the same to Australia to access its mineral needs and to second the Australian military forces (recently equipped with US-standard planes and other war equipment) for its planned war against China. Sub-Imperial Powers do what they’re told, by the Empire’s boss, until they’re no longer needed or useful, or misbehave, and they are then summarily ‘terminated’.

What do Canadians actually get in terms of concessions and “security” in return for our dependence and subservience? Basically, we don’t get invaded by the US, as they’ve invaded and destroyed so many other countries that didn’t toe the line. Both major Canadian parties have toadied to the US consistently for the past 75 years. We (Canada’s government and mainstream media) quickly supported the Empire’s decision to fight a proxy war, through NATO, in Ukraine, and have been unflagging in our support for continuing that insane war. We (Canada’s government and mainstream media) likewise condemned Hamas for its attack on Israel (like Canada, Israel is a Sub-Imperial Power), and have enthusiastically supported Netanyahu’s retributive siege, genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

When you’re just a junior partner, you don’t argue with the boss. And you don’t criticize other Sub-Imperial Powers. Only the boss is allowed to do that.

It’s quite a revelation, when you’ve been scoffing at the gutlessness of Canadian ‘leaders’ to criticize the US for half a century, to realize that our ‘leaders’ have been conditioned, indoctrinated, and carefully ‘taught’ by their administrations to never openly challenge or criticize what the massive, ruthless, temperamental nuclear power next door commands. They’ll remind you of what happened to Gough Whitlam in Australia, or Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, or Salvador Allende in Chile, or dozens of other critics of the Empire.

But the real eye-opener of Clinton’s book IMO is that, if you really want to understand why the Empire and its governments are acting the way they are, even when those actions seem totally out of step with most citizens’ opinions, despite massive and systematic propaganda programs, you need to look beyond the state and government to the corpocracy that actually rules it. That is where the real power lies. That is who is actually making the decisions.

I know this is not a new idea, but it’s the first time I’ve seen it articulated so well, and used to help make much more sense of seemingly utterly illogical western government decisions.

The argument is that the US government, which is always portrayed as the bogeyman in international interventionist political and military actions and as a stooge for domestic corporate campaign donors, is actually, for all its staggering arrogance and hubris, just the ‘executive front’ for the US (Empire’s) corporate interests. Above the President, the corpocracy is pulling all the strings, telling the President what to say. Telling him what policies and programs to approve and veto. Writing many of the laws for him, especially on deregulation. Telling him what wars to launch and what governments to sanction, blockade, and overthrow. Telling him what countries and pipelines to bomb and giving him (barring a few intrepid investigative reporters) plausible deniability. Telling him which elected members of his party to shut up, on threat of primarying or defeating them in the next election.

Why doesn’t he object? Because he’s a good Company man. The Company, and on a larger scale the Corpocracy, speaks with one voice, through its President and Chair. It brooks no messy public dissent among its members. The President is mostly a figure head, preferably with good hair, who convincingly announces the Executive Committee’s consensus, even if he fervently disagrees with it.

So what is this corpocracy (my term, not Clinton’s)? It is absolutely not a secretive all-powerful group. Corpocracy is government by and in the interests of collective moneyed interests whose goals are entrenched in their corporate charters, and those goals are always to maximize growth and profit of the collective, the “shareholders”. Not in order to be mean and miserly and greedy, but to acquire as much wealth a possible and distribute it, not immorally but amorally, to its members. As Joel Bakan argues in The Corporation, corporations (and corpocracies) behave in inherently pathological ways, and they do so by design.

Indrajit Samarajiva has argued that the corporation was the first form of AI, and remains its dominant form. It has a life of its own, and through intensive lobbying and other ‘means’ it now has all the rights and privileges of ‘personhood’. And unlike messy democracies, it arrives at its consensus on how to amass and distribute wealth and profit (and the spoils of war) not on a one-person-one-vote basis, but on a one-investor-dollar-one-vote basis. It is unapologetically undemocratic. We invented it because it’s efficient.

It’s so efficient that the corpocracy — the large set of corporate oligopolies that now collectively dominate every significant industry in the Empire’s economy — has now amassed power that is vastly greater than that of any political group or party, to the point that it can and does now control all political parties with any chance of being elected to govern. And while campaign contributions play a role in this, what plays a far greater role is the ability of this collective to condition the leaders, administrators, and parties to believe that their in-group — the political and economic elite groomed to lead and run things and make important decisions — knows better than the citizenry what is best for the world, and that a corpocratic-style loyalty to this in-group and to behaviours and practices that have emerged in corporate culture over five centuries is what is needed to prevent chaos and tyranny from prevailing.

Biden recently put it this way: “American leadership is what holds the world together”. And Blinken followed it up in case that wasn’t clear enough: “The world doesn’t organize itself. When we’re not engaged, when we don’t lead, then one of two things happens: either some other country tries to take our place, but probably not in a way that advances our interests and values, or no one does, and then you get chaos.”

So if you want to understand why the US government does things that the citizens absolutely don’t like or want, this is the reason — the government doesn’t actually report to the citizens, if it ever did, and the citizens can easily be propagandized to fight among themselves when they threaten corporate interests anyway. And in the process, the befuddled citizens can be brought around to the “correct” ways of thinking (eg that China is now the principal enemy of Empire and an existential threat to “our” security) with sufficient propaganda and conditioning. And they’re right about that — Modern media are astonishingly effective at propagandizing and conditioning the beliefs and “values” of a largely ignorant, distracted and disinterested citizenry that lacks even basic critical thinking skills.

The government actually reports to the corpocracy, which now has far more power than the government, and the corpocracy’s power is growing as the US government sinks deeper into technical bankruptcy and as public resources become increasingly privatized, to the point government can finally be, as was infamously said by an arch-neocon, “drowned in a bathtub”.

But the corpocracy doesn’t actually want to run government, a messy, unpalatable and unprofitable business. Instead, having a crypto-democratic government doing the corpocracy’s bidding has its PR advantages, and so it will be tolerated unless one of the Tweedle parties puts forward a Bernie Sanders or some other figure who threatens to misbehave. The American Empire is not an empire of a government and its people. It is an empire of corporate interests, for whom the government and the people are just pawns to be manipulated.

I wrote an article a while ago, suggesting that once a corporate oligopoly has subdued all its competitors, it then turns on the remaining ‘enemies’ it can’t control — first, the government, that sometimes dares to offer services that could be run profitably by the oligopoly; second, foreign competitors (which have to be bought cheaply, or discredited and crushed à la Huawei or TikTok); and finally, the customers, who sometimes misbehave and complain about prices, service, or the shoddy quality of products, but whom a sufficiently large army of expensive corporate lawyers can subdue and silence without too much difficulty.

The corpocracy collectively operates the same way. It seeks to privatize (or dismantle or deregulate) just about everything governments do, because that maximizes its profit and growth. It seeks to dismantle foreign governments it doesn’t control and divide up those countries’ resources among its own members, and develop them for profit to be repatriated to the Empire. And it seeks to stifle political and other dissent among the citizens (its ostensible “customers”) and condition them (us) all to be obedient little consumers, mindful of what their advertising and PR and other forms of propaganda (through the mainstream and social media that they completely control) tells us is true, and tells us to do.

This is absolutely not a conspiracy theory. There is no secret cabal ‘controlling’ the corpocracy. It’s simply the effect of millions of shareholders independently doing what they’re incented and conditioned to do — buy up and shut down all competition, form oligopolies, and use their immense economic (and hence political) power to advance their own (profit and control) interests, all over the world.

This is not coordinated. The corpocracy is the complex, unorganized expression of the collective (conditioned) will of millions of shareholders and ‘stakeholders’, using the undemocratic leverage of wealth and power to do what they have been conditioned to believe is the right thing to do, and what the corporations that aggregate that wealth and power are absolutely compelled by their corporate charters to do. No one and no group is in charge of it. The corpocracy is simply a very effective vehicle for conditioning large numbers of people — within the oligopoly corporations, within the governments and administrations they have effectively indoctrinated over generations, and among the populace at large.

And perhaps what is most amazing is that while the corpocracy is conditioning all of us, we are in turn conditioning it, each in our own little ways. Sometimes, like in ending the Vietnam War, that conditioning can take some surprising turns. But mostly it is pretty sclerotic — like any mechanistic, uncontrolled behemoth, the larger a corporation or corpocracy gets, the less innovative and resilient it becomes, and the less able to change course.

This driving of the Empire’s political and economic decision-making by the preferences of the corpocracy, rather than the will of its citizens, is one of two overarching, complex political realities that, I think, currently dominate the precarious state of our contemporary political reality. Now I want to say a bit about the second overarching reality, which is the longing for people everywhere for stability and security in an increasingly insecure, precarious, collapsing world, and our propensity to be easily and totally conditioned in what we believe by our peer group and by the information we are exposed to.

Aurélien has written extensively on this subject, but one of his essential arguments, which he reiterates again in his most recent post, is that most people will support whatever political power group offers them the most security and stability in their lives, whether that is a democratically elected government (or a corpocracy masquerading as one), a populist or military dictatorship, a theocracy, an organized crime syndicate, or a street gang. Most people are, understandably, suspicious of large and opaque power structures of all kinds, and more aware of how much they are lied to by those in power than many would like to admit, but they will take what they can get.

In addition to that, their political sensitivities, fears, and hatreds, are conditioned over generations and centuries by the relentless stories (often, stories of outrage) that they have been saturated with for their entire lives. Part of human nature is the natural desire to belong to a group (humans don’t fare well in the wild outside of the protection of community), and belonging means adapting your worldview and “values” to those of the group.

Applying these three political ‘drivers’, can we make sense of some of the seemingly senseless things going on in our world? Let’s see:

• Trump, and other populist sociopaths in many countries: Many citizens of most countries, if you believe the surveys, believe their government doesn’t represent them, and nostalgically want to a return to simpler times when there was apparent order and homogeneity of beliefs, so they vote for whoever offers to throw out the current government (and the immigrant ‘Others’ they hold largely responsible) and make their lives easier/better. They’re right that the government doesn’t represent them. But having never studied history, most don’t realize that populists do not (and in fact usually cannot) represent their interests either. The result is often civil war, in the back rooms of power and possibly in the streets.
• Biden & co’s bloodthirstiness for war against Russia, China, and any of the other non-Empire countries that are seen to threaten the Empire: A good Company Man speaks for the corpocracy. The corpocracy wants to control Russia’s (and other countries’) resources, especially now that the Empire’s are running short, and it wants to control China’s manufacturing industries (having offshored its own capacity to the point it no longer knows how to make anything of value itself except munitions — oops!). So, in their minds, those Other countries’ governments need to be labelled as enemies to allow the corpocracy’s Empire to dismantle them and take over economically — a simple, sound business decision to deal with pesky ‘competitors’ through ‘liquidation’. And the hegemony of the corpocracy’s Empire depends on the continuation of the exorbitant privilege of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency, to command all nations to settle accounts in Empire money, and to be able to uniquely print unlimited amounts of Empire money without consequence. So, in their minds, any country that threatens that privilege must likewise be neutralized.
• America’s incapacity to provide basic universal health care for its citizens: To do this makes some sense in the long run — healthier, happier citizens are likely going to buy more stuff. But corporations and corpocracies are designed to think only about the short-run, the next year at most. Universal health care would cost money and require the raising of taxes, and make citizens less dependent on the corpocracy as well as hurting its bottom line. Not acceptable to corporate interests.
• The 2008 financial collapse and bailout: Well, the corpocracy doesn’t care if citizens go bankrupt, but they can’t allow their corporate members to go bankrupt, even as a result of their own stupidity. Their thinking: “Tell the President what to do. He knows what will happen if he disobeys.”
• Canada’s obsequious obedience to the US, despite its history as a neutral, peace-loving country: The Empire’s thinking: “You’re a junior partner in this organization, Canada. But play your cards right, and do what you’re told, and we’ll make space for you here in the corpocracy’s Empire. Lots of money in it for you if you do. Lots of grief for you if you don’t.”
• The Ukraine War: The Empire’s thinking: “Hmmm. Great opportunity to destabilize Russia and get access to their natural resources, and eliminate one of our biggest competitors. Should have finished the job in 1991 when we had the chance! Get rid of that Ukrainian government (2014), put in our own guy, and have him abolish the pro-Russian political parties, remove Russian as an official language, hire some Russophobes to bomb the Donbas, and apply to join NATO. That will get Russia to invade, and then we can use the Ukrainians to fight the war for us. Great opportunity to sell the corpocracy’s arms to the Ukrainians, and we won’t have to risk a single Empire body to get the Russians to overthrow their government, so we can then move in. Ukraine? Meh; it’s a hopelessly corrupt, failed state and not worth anything to us.”
• The War in Palestine: The Empire’s thinking: “Israel is a Sub-Imperial Power in our Empire. The Empire has always had Israel’s unconditional support, and they’ll do whatever we say. The least we can do is give them our unconditional support in return. After all, they’re our permanent aircraft carrier in the midst of those oil-rich Arab states who we just can’t manage to destroy or coerce into joining the Empire. So they’re committing genocide? Probably not terribly wise to do so so overtly, and it’s a dubious strategy in any case. But we need them, to help prevent the Arabs’ oil from falling out of our grasp. So hold your nose, don’t look, and don’t tell the Empire’s citizens what’s really going on. The Israelis have been abusing the Palestinians since we put them in charge of that department of Empire 75 years ago, and there’s no money in it for us to intervene. Not our problem to solve. Get HR and PR to deal with the fallout. It’ll blow over. Bad timing though, damn it.”

Of course this is a huge oversimplification of a set of massively complex political challenges. But it does seem to explain a lot.

And, once again, I’m not saying that the Empire (or the corpocracy) is ‘evil’. Their behaviour is pathological, for sure, but in our precarious, horrifically overpopulated, collapsing civilization some form of mental illness is inevitably present everywhere, in all of us. Some of the countries in green in the chart above have long histories of pathological behaviour themselves, and in some cases it is ongoing. All I’m saying is that human behaviour is entirely conditioned, and hugely driven by fear, and what it has led to in the world we find ourselves dealing with today can largely be explained by understanding that conditioning. Not condoning, understanding. There are no good guys and bad guys.

And the rise to power of the corpocracy as the driving force and muscle behind the power of the current western Empire, unintended as it most surely was, is also understandable. We thought it was for the best. Many of us still think it is.

But if the growing battle between the Empire (the red countries in the chart) and the Other countries (in green), leads us into WW3, you won’t see me taking sides. I’m just chronicling collapse, as best I can, telling it as I see it.