Empires Apart

by Brian Landers

  The success of the American vision of corporate democracy is thanks to its claim to have four great virtues: political, ethical, economic and practical. Politically American democracy ensures that the power of the state is used in accordance with the will of the majority: the American model of government is in principle fundamentally representative. Ethically the rule of law ensures that while the will of the majority prevails the rights of the minority are honoured: American democracy is in principle fundamentally just. Economically free markets and limited liability corporations ensure that the production and distribution of goods and services is optimised: American capitalism is in principle fundamentally efficient. Practically corporatist democracy works: whether the political, ethical and economic principles are accepted or disputed, the fundamental reality is that in practice they deliver. The American Dream above all rests on the assertion that life in America is ‘better’ than anywhere else, and that by following in its wake the rest of the world can achieve the same.

  There are definitional problems with all four attributes, but in some ways what they mean or even whether they are true does not matter. What is important is that people believe that America’s political processes will reflect their own desires, that its courts will bring justice, that its corporations will create wealth and that by being part of the American-defined ‘free world’ they will have a better life. The reality is that none of these assertions is entirely true. When similar claims were made (with far less justification) by Soviet Russian leaders the rest of the world rightly scoffed. US claims are widely accepted not just because they are constantly repeated but because there is a grain of truth in all of them.

  When people talk of American democracy being ‘representative’ they are usually speaking philosophically not geographically, but the first obvious point to make is that America’s institutions do not claim to represent the vast quasi-empire over which the United States exerts its influence. The term ‘United States’ when used in a geographical sense on official documents, acts and laws includes the fifty states plus Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, Guam and American Samoa.1 The hundreds of millions beyond its shores whose lives are directly influenced by the actions of its government have no claim to representation.

  This is not the place to debate the ‘representativeness’ of contemporary political life, but history highlights two factors that are often overlooked: corporatism and corruption. In as much as corporatism has an ideology, it is firstly that corporations as much as human beings are citizens and secondly that wherever possible government should step aside and allow its corporate citizens to ‘represent’ the views and desires of the wider society. To say that unelected corporate executives have often usurped the role of elected governments is not to imply some dreadful right-wing conspiracy in which crazed corporate oligarchs set out to rule the world. Corporatism is not an ideology that sprung fully formed from the pen of a Thomas Paine or Karl Marx; it evolved gradually through the activities of men, and a few women, whose intentions were usually good and whose aspirations were often noble.

  Consider for example Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in 2005. Many corporations rushed to offer assistance, among them the Anglo-American corporation Pearson, owner of the Financial Times and Penguin Books. Pearson opened call centres to help direct the relief efforts, provided temporary classrooms and donated tens of thousands of schoolbooks and computers for schoolchildren in Louisiana and Mississippi. Of course Pearson’s American chief executive realised the PR benefits, but it would be churlish to believe that this was her only motivation. Pearson’s actions were universally welcomed because they were fundamentally decent. But considered in purely economic terms, what had happened is that private assets belonging to shareholders, in this case including many British pension funds, had been devoted to activities that in earlier times would have been considered a public responsibility. The British pensioners might well have been happy to give some of their pension funds to charity (although as south-east Asia was struck by a tsunami and Kashmir by one of the world’s worst ever earthquakes at roughly the same time, it is not obvious that they would have chosen to give their charitable donations to American schoolchildren), but they were not consulted; indeed there is no way they could have been consulted. British pensioners were effectively taxed to help American children not by their elected representatives but by one or two well-meaning oligarchs: precisely the taxation without representation that Americans believe their revolutionary war was about.

  In millions of such tiny, innocent, day-to-day episodes corporations supplement, or supplant, democracy, not just within nations but internationally. Not only do corporations increasingly take on responsibilities formerly assumed by governments, but they themselves help to determine the actions of governments.

  By accepting that corporations are ‘citizens’ in the same way that human beings are citizens, American democracy legitimises the role of corporations in influencing policy, including policy towards the rest of the world. Since the early days of Standard Oil corporations have sought to ensure that the US government represents their interests. There is a whole body of obscure academic analysis on the subject. For example, New York professor Benjamin Fordham conducted a detailed statistical study of the voting patterns of US senators in the 81st Congress (1949– 50). He found that those supporting Truman’s policy of alliance with western European countries through NATO were more likely to have come from states with powerful export industries and/or internationally focused banks. Conversely, Truman was opposed by senators from states where firms were likely to be hit by western European imports and by senators linked to the mining corporations, who favoured a more ‘colonial’ approach to foreign policy. Again this is not to suggest any secret conspiracy. America’s government is ‘representative’ in that it represents the interests that are most salient in society, and corporations find it much easier to achieve such saliency than individuals.

  The relationship between corporations and the state is not all one way. As with the emerging corporate autocracy in Russia, the US government makes use of corporations as an arm of foreign policy. For example, in 1991 the CIA hired a private sector company, the Rendon Group, to set up the Iraqi National Congress, bringing Iraqi exiles together in order to ‘create the conditions’ that would produce a coup against Saddam Hussein. Most US government use of its corporate levers is more subtle. In November 2005 a British newspaper, the Financial Times, sent $4,500 from London to Iran to pay the rent on its Tehran office. The money never arrived. One of the banking intermediaries had notified the US treasury, which seized the money.

  Corporations in America have long provoked controversy. The first major scandal of the twenty-first century was Enron, where hundreds of millions of dollars of phoney profits were manufactured in a series of fraudulent accounting transactions, leading to lengthy prison sentences for a few corrupt oligarchs and penury for thousands of honest investors. What was remarkable about this scandal, apart from its sheer scale, was its insight into the tightening grip of corporatism on the levers of American democracy. No corporation in America’s history had spent so much on political lobbying in so short a time: Bush II himself is on public record as having received $572,000. It was shocking for everyone, both inside and outside government, when Enron’s leadership was ultimately revealed as corrupt. Governments around the world were ‘encouraged’ to privatise public utilities and sell them to Enron, both in America’s traditional fiefdoms, for example Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Panama and the Philippines, and further abroad – in Argentina, India and Mozambique. Financing for these deals was provided directly by the US government (over $3bn) or indirectly by the World Bank. $23bn of overseas revenues flowed into Enron’s coffers.

  Scandals like Enron are the froth on the surface of the everyday world of corporatist politics in the United States. In the ten years before the Enron scandal corporations legitimately donated $1.08bn in campaign contributions. (By way of
comparison, the World Bank listed twenty-seven countries that had a GDP of less than this amount.)

  At the same time that Putin was reining back the power of Russia’s oligarchs the US Supreme Court was moving the other way. In 2006 it ruled as unconstitutional Vermont state legislation that attempted to limit the power of money to influence elections. The Constitution, it declared, prohibited any attempt to limit the amount of money candidates could spend on their election campaigns: an assertion that would undoubtedly have shocked many of the Founding Fathers, whose idea of democracy was formed in simpler times.

  American corporations clothe oligarchy in the robes of democracy. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the Political Action Committees created by major corporations to fund political campaigns. Managers are instructed to persuade their staff to donate (after setting good examples themselves) in highly public gestures of apparent support for the political agenda of top management – for the other feature of this exercise in ‘democracy’ is the complete absence of any internal democracy. Although labelled committees, they are run entirely by senior management.

  There is sometimes a fine line between corporate lobbying and corruption, but many countries have cases of corruption on a far larger scale than the United States. In Russia the Muscovite system of civil servants feeding off the rest of the population, kormlenie, which would now be regarded as blatant corruption, was for many years the bedrock on which effective government was built, and it has left its mark on Russian political culture to this day. Lying politicians are everywhere, and often the lies are blatant: the British general election of 1924 was determined in large part by the fears of Bolshevik revolution, stirred up by publication of an inflammatory letter from the Russian official Zinoviev, a letter later shown to be a forgery.

  What has characterised American politics since the 1830s, and what differentiates it from politics in, for example, much of north-west Europe, is not that lies and corruption exist but the more or less resigned acceptance of their existence. The total corruption of political life in many large cities, starting with the control of New York’s Tammany Hall by the Irish mafia, continued well into the twentieth century, with the election of John Kennedy in 1960 being aided by the manipulative skills of Richard Daley’s Chicago political machine. Although there is no question of corruption or malpractice President Bush’s opponents have alleged that his election in 2000 was similarly indebted to the Florida machine of his brother Jeb and that, as in Kennedy’s case, partisan control of the judiciary made it impossible for the losers to successfully contest the result. His supporters would, of course, hotly deny this.

  In Britain, campaigns based on deliberate fabrication by politicians are rare (the Zinoviev letter was a media scare almost certainly initiated by rogue officers in the security services, albeit soon exploited by politicians for their own ends). In the United States, on the other hand, since Andrew Jackson there has been a widespread assumption that politicians cannot be trusted (or perhaps more accurately a belief that whether politicians are honest or dishonest is not critically important), and a willingness of many in political circles to do far more than elaborate on the truth. Recent revelations that almost all the details of the Whitewater property scandal, in which President Clinton was supposedly implicated, had simply been made up by his opponents have gone almost unnoticed in the United States. It is unfair to push the argument too far; the morality of political life in the US today is not significantly better or worse than in, for example, Italy. The difference is that Italy does not purport to be leading a moral crusade to bring freedom and democracy to the rest of the globe.

  Outright corruption is probably less prevalent in the United States than in many other parts of the western world, and where bribery is found it is usually rooted out. FBI director Robert Mueller reported in 2006 that around 500 government employees per year were convicted of corruption. Nevertheless the principles of the spoils system remain central to American political thinking. Leading supporters are often rewarded with ambassadorships and other public appointments. Legislators also reward themselves: congressional election results show that an amazing 97 per cent of those sitting members who stand for re-election are successful. This success rate is not because of the popularity of contemporary politicians but because of an eighteenth-century Massachusetts governor named Eldridge Gerry. Gerry was no friend of democracy. At the 1787 convention that drafted the US Constitution he opposed popular elections, declaring that ‘the evils we experience flow from an excess of democracy’. (More wittily he opposed the creation of a large peacetime army by comparing a standing army to a man’s standing member, ‘an excellent assurance of domestic tranquillity but a dangerous temptation to foreign adventure’.) He soon found ways of avoiding the evils of excess democracy by skilfully drawing constituency boundaries to his own advantage, in one case producing a constituency that resembled nothing as much as a salamander or, as it was dubbed, a gerrymander. Gerrymandering is now a fundamental part of US politics. In 2003 the Republican-controlled legislature in Texas redrew constituency boundaries to give itself six extra seats in the US Congress. When Democrats took this gerrymandering to court the response of Texan Republicans, supported by the Bush administration, was not to deny gerrymandering but rather to argue that there was nothing unconstitutional about redrawing boundaries for pure partisan advantage. To the victor belongs the spoils. It is assumed to be natural that those with power will use it for their own benefit. This applies as much to the law as it does to politics.

  American Justice

  The assertion that American government is uniquely just rests on the impartiality of its judicial process. The US is famed for the way that nothing appears to be incapable of legal redress. Justice may sometimes seem absent but the law is omnipresent; legality is the benchmark against which all actions can be measured. The rule of law is fundamental to the way the United States functions as a nation. It is, however, largely irrelevant to the way it functions as an empire.

  An example of this double standard emerged in investigations into the Iran Contra affair, in which the CIA funded the Contra terrorists in Nicaragua not only with funds from the Shah of Iran but with the proceeds of cocaine smuggling. Despite the near-universal illegality of drug smuggling, it emerged that the CIA had sought and received prior authority from the US attorney general: imperial adventures in Central America were deemed more important than obeying other people’s laws, even when those laws were identical to America’s own.

  Throughout the nineteenth century the United States fought war after war to extend its frontiers, culminating in the Spanish American War of 1898 which brought with it 45 square miles of foreign soil that the US decided to hang on to: an enclave where, it is alleged, international law and human rights have no place – Guantanamo Bay.

  Whether or not people were tortured at Guantanamo Bay is hotly debated, but the subject of torture itself gave rise to a particularly tortuous demonstrations of US legal reasoning. On 11 October 2002 the US army declared that the 1984 Convention on Torture, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the American Convention on Human Rights – all international conventions banning torture and signed up to by the United States – did not apply to the US military. US forces could carry on torturing people at Guantanamo because they were governed only by US domestic law. As leading international lawyer Philippe Sands puts it, ‘Can you imagine how the US would react if another country tortured an American and defended it by saying “Oh, terribly sorry, but the international treaty we signed up to which prohibits torture isn’t enforceable in our domestic law, so we don’t have to apply it”?’

  In 2006 the Associated Press news agency used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain 5,000 pages of transcript of military court hearings at the Guantanamo Bay prison. In one exchange a British prisoner quotes international law to demand the right to hear the evidence against him (a right that, incidentally, is normally present under American law); a US Air Force col
onel angrily responds with the words, ‘I do not care about international law. I do not want to hear the words international law. We are not concerned about international law.’The comments of one rogue officer do not constitute official policy, but they do illustrate an important strand of American imperial thought: international standards are for governing the rest of the world; they do not apply to the imperial power itself.

  Sands catalogues a long list of international conventions and treaties that the United States has flouted or opted out of. Many examples are famous – the Kyoto Accord, the treaty to eliminate landmines, the Biological and Toxins Weapons Convention – but there are far more of interest only to specialists. A typical example concerns a protocol attached to the 1963 Vienna Convention on the arcane subject of consular access to foreign prisoners. The US was a leading advocate of the protocol and was one of the first to benefit when it successfully sued the Iranian government over access to the Americans held hostage in Tehran in 1979. In 2004, however, it was the United States that was successfully sued, by Mexico. To avoid the same thing happening again the US simply withdrew from the treaty.

  The United States is not unique in this regard. Soviet Russia set a precedent in 1930 when an international arbitration tribunal awarded the British company Lena Goldfields £13m plus interest after the Soviet government revoked its concession to mine gold in the Urals and Siberia. Stalin simply abandoned the arbitration and refused to accept the award.