Before the presidential election of 2004, the Advocate Newspapers ran a short weekly feature entitled Ejection ’04, which offered a reason a week why the country needed to oust George Bush from the White House. Though Bush was the target, the writers of Ejection ‘04 were well aware that Bush was the tool of forces that didn’t see the average person as representing the nation’s center of gravity, but had different agendas. To put it more accurately, their program added up to one agenda: the making of huge fortunes for a few people. Those few were by no means only Americans.
After the election, as the outlines of that agenda grew gradually clearer, the Valley paper kept the feature going, changing its name to Imperium Watch to reflect a broader focus. One reason was that—to a degree unprecedented since the large demonstrations that helped end the Vietnam War—we felt that we and our readers needed to understand what was going on in Washington, and even in foreign countries, to understand what was going on in the Valley. Thirty years ago, for example, foreign ownership of companies located here was almost unknown; since then there’s been a wave of it, from Dutch ownership of Stop and Shop to European investment in electricity generated in Agawam to Saudi ownership of the former General Electric Plastics plant in Pittsfield.
People from the Valley are fighting alongside other Americans in Iraq. People in the Valley had friends and relations who died in New York on 9/11, a catastrophe that occurred partly because of flaws in Massport’s management of Logan Airport. People in the Valley gave money and musical instruments to people in New Orleans who didn’t get the help they should have gotten after Katrina, though the taxpayers of the country would have preferred to see massive aid to New Orleans rather than massive destruction in a country that had not attacked us.
Foreign-born Valley residents, from restaurant workers to UMass professors, fear interrogation and possible deportation because of the highly touted “war on terror” that adds its own inconveniences to travel for all of us, yet always stops short of measures (such as tightened regulations on gun sales) that would interfere with corporate profits. People from the Valley will be cold in their homes this winter because the administration will give billions for war and as little as possible for heating assistance. People in the Valley are trapped in cycles of debt because Congress won’t curb the fee-crazed banks and credit card companies, and are losing their homes partly because Washington didn’t curb the subprime lending spree that enlisted people the world over as investors.
These days the stories behind the local stories so often start in Washington, Riyadh or Dubai that we have continued to offer Imperium Watch to help frame those stories in a vital, larger context. Here we offer a year-end retrospective on Imperium Watch as an aid to reflection on which way we’re moving as we step from 2007 into 2008.
On Our Economy and Industries
Fiscally, the Bush administration is running the car into the telephone pole. Economists are hearing the shattering of the windshield and the crunching of the front fenders as our national debt hits $8.6 trillion, up 50 percent from just six years ago. One of them, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, has pointed out that a quarter of what’s been spent on the war in Iraq (which he figures at $2.3 trillion) could guarantee the solvency of Social Security for 75 years.
And it’s not only the size of the national debt that’s changed, it’s the ownership of it. As recently as 1994, Americans, individual savings bond buyers and other American interests, owned 81 percent of it—an all-in-the-family, win-win situation for the U.S. Now 52 percent of that debt is owned by foreign interests.
It would be better for us if foreign interests were buying our goods and services rather than our debt. Unless you’re going to give up believing in nation states—and in order to understand a lot that’s going on in global business today, you have to be aware that plenty of corporate mavens are giving up that belief—you have to think it’s better for the American government’s activities to enrich Americans or America’s reliable allies than to enrich somebody else. Even conservatives who point out that foreign investment is helping keep interest rates down here quickly add that we need to cut government spending—now. (Jan.4)
The Bush administration encourages nuclear power even as it cuts money from the educational systems that train people in nuclear fields.
Read on:
*According to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, in 1975 there were 77 nuclear engineering programs in the U.S. In 2003 there were 33. There are now only about half as many research reactors at our universities as there were in the 1980s.
*Nearly half the NRC’s staff are now 50 or older; 36 percent will be eligible to retire by 2010. (On the military side, the NRC finds that 37 percent of “workers with a set of critical skills needed to maintain the [nuclear] weapons stockpile” are “at or near retirement age.”)
*In 1975, only Finland and Japan had more citizens 24 years of age with science and engineering degrees than the U.S. Now 16 nations, including Italy, South Korea and Taiwan, have more than we do. At our universities, half the graduate students in engineering, math and computer science are foreign, and almost 70 percent of postdoctoral researchers in engineering and physical sciences are foreign-born. Also ominous: 30 percent of the faculty in science and engineering here are 55 and older.
The administration’s aspirations in the areas of energy —and space as well— assume an endless flow of qualified scientists. Touting teacher recruitment programs for “advanced placement” high school math and science courses while cutting billions from graduate student loan programs and non-defense research will not maintain that flow. (Feb. 8)
The times are bent out of shape, distorted by dangerous paradoxes. We can’t import drugs from Ireland and Canada to make people well. We can import dirt-cheap wheat gluten from China that turns out to be contaminated with melamine and kills small animals when put into pet food. Now it’s known that the gluten got into feed used for hogs and poultry, and may show up in food eaten by humans.
The right wing and its allies in multinational corporations have been eager to introduce Americans to the global world of lax regulation or no regulation. Now we are in that world, where danger can come from a different quarter every day. So there was no restriction on wheat gluten coming from a country with such regulatory chaos that last year an American child died because Reebok—in the same mad dash for the bottom line as the pet food companies—bought charms from China to give as perks for buying shoes; the four-year-old swallowed a heart-shaped charm later determined to be 99 percent lead. (May 3)
Everybody blames shareholders for what’s wrong with corporations and for the current epidemic of greed. Like all stereotypes, the stereotype of the callous shareholder deserves a second look.
For 10 years or more, shareholders at many companies have tried, by passing resolutions or in other ways, to rein in out-of-control executive pay and get a better deal for lower-level workers, and often been thwarted. Resolutions, even when passed, are non-binding. Trying a different tack, shareholder groups several years ago worked to get the Securities and Exchange Commission to give them the right to vote for company directors other than those nominated by the existing board; under pressure from the Business Round Table, the SEC refused.
Now the House of Representatives has passed a bill, written by Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), that would give shareholders an vote on executive pay packages. Shareholders as well as unions have pushed for this so-called “say on pay” law, but President Bush opposes the bill. His opposition, and that of the Business Round Table, are symptomatic of the opposition shareholders have met with when they were searching for ways to bring inflated executive compensation and other corporate misbehavior under control. The habit of wishing corporate excesses off on shareholders is misleading and all too convenient for corporate directors and executives. (May 10)
If you’re wondering why it’s getting so much harder to get ahead financially, or even keep your head above water, there’s a reason. It’s a combination of conservative ideology, which says the government shouldn’t do anything except maintain a military, and corporate “marketing” strategies which, sheltered by that ideology, have gone out of control. The problem of identity theft is a case in point.
A typical outrage: TransUnion, one of the three large credit reporting bureaus, just reminded readers in yet another article on identity theft that it will do us the favor of selling us unlimited rights to view our credit information—information that really belongs to us, not to Transunion—for $14.95 a month. Meanwhile the risk of identity theft is exponentially increased because these agencies have this information and give it to potential lenders and other parties without our consent or even our knowledge (unless, of course, we pay to find out). Even to keep them from doing that—to put a freeze on our data—we have to pay a fee.
The credit reporting bureaus ought to solve this problem for us free of charge. Instead, TransUnion and the other credit bureaus have taken what belongs to us in the first place, and is now trying to sell it back. That gambit characterizes this age: take what belongs to people, individually and collectively (from personal information to plant DNA and water), and sell it back. Another tactic at work here is the refusal of the large corporations, with the passive or even active support of the government, to solve the problems they’re responsible to solve for free, which forces us as individuals to solve them by buying something. The corporations are exuberant: no problem is a problem if it creates a new market! But the individual, harassed by a growing gaggle of charges, can’t keep up. (Oct. 11)
On the Battle for Dwindling Natural Resources
Soon Americans may find out what President Bush means by “victory” in Iraq. Any day the Iraqi Parliament will either pass, or refuse to pass, a law opening that country’s oil wealth to foreign companies, including British Petroleum, Shell and Exxon-Mobil. Iran has the third largest oil reserves in the world, and the oil, located under large level fields, is easily recoverable except for the current security problems, experts say.
The Iraqi oil would become available to Western firms on terms far more favorable than those on which Middle Eastern countries usually sell oil rights. After recovering their expenses, the companies could keep 20 percent of their profits, instead of the usual 10 percent; in the meantime, they could keep 60 or 70 percent of their revenues instead of the customary 40 percent. And “agreements” to develop the oil could be binding for 30 years. The draft law also stipulates that the oil companies can take their profits home without paying taxes on them to Iraq, and that disputes between Iraq and foreign oil companies must be solved by international arbitration, not Iraqi arbitration. Critics say that when the provisions of the law become widely known in Iraq, the Iraqi public will be outraged and the insurgencies may worsen. (Jan. 18)
The Bush administration has proposed new rules that sanction the ongoing destruction of the landscapes of Appalachia and other coal-rich parts of the country. Rather than reining in the devastation, the rules, presented as “clarifications” of the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act, affirm the rights of the mining companies to keep blowing the tops off mountains and dumping the soil and polluted mining wastes into streams.
An Environmental Protection Agency report from 2001 estimates that throughout the country, coal mining has polluted over 9,709 miles of streams. Seven hundred and twenty-four miles of streams were actually buried under mining debris between 1985 and 2001. And, says the report, “there are over 18,000 miles of abandoned highwalls, 16,326 acres of dangerous piles and embankments, and 874 dangerous impoundments” (translation: many coal town residents live in daily and nightly fear of dams, mudslides and rockslides, and deaths from those causes get little publicity in other parts of the country).
The new rules help answer the question of what was going on behind closed doors when the White House famously refused to disclose who concocted its energy policy. It wasn’t just the oil people. Coal was there and got its payback for $20 million in donations to Bush and other Republicans in the 2000 election cycle. For more on coal and a whole lot of mountaintops now missing in Appalachia, see Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s Crimes Against Nature. (Sept. 13)
In an age that will see more and more determined resource grabs, Americans must make hard decisions about the morality and practicality of looting the rest of the world for vital commodities. It’s just begining to dawn on many of us that “water is the next oil”—even more vital than oil, and, like oil, increasingly prone to shortages—but American corporations caught on long ago. In the 1990s a subsidiary of Bechtel, the company that gave Massachusetts a flawed and ruinously expensive Big Dig, bought the public system that supplied Cochamba, the third largest city in Bolivia, with water. Replacing older, socially responsible water distribution policies with a so-called EPP (Every Person Pays) structure favored by World Bank economists, they squeezed poor Bolivians until angry riots forced the Bolivian government to cancel Bechtel’s contract.
In The Secret History of the American Empire, former “economic hit man” John Perkins quotes a local Bolivian activist who told him just before the riots, “Bolivians are… told they can’t even collect rain water, that their contract with [the national water company] requires them to pay Bechtel for any and all water they consume.”
Can’t even collect rain water? Other sources confirm that Bechtel’s contract and the legislation surrounding it did prohibit customers from using traditional community rain water collection tanks—a tactic more outrageous, if possible, than plant patenting laws like those that allowed Monsanto to sue Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser because his plants were contaminated, totally against his will or intention, by Monsanto’s patented Roundup-resistant canola. Bechtel denied gouging Bolivians and said its subsidiary, Aguas del Tunari, hiked the water rates for its Bolivian customers by 35 percent to pay for improvements to the infrastructure in the Cochamba region (Perkins says some customers’ bills spiked by 300 percent). In 2002, after Bechtel had had to back away from the water deal, the corporation asked the World Bank to make the Bolivian government pay $25 million to compensate it for the loss of the Cochamba contract. (Nov. 8)
On Global Warming
Global warming is a threat that dwarfs the dangers of terrorism, and even the corporate world is quicker to catch on than the White House. Just before last week’s State of the Union address, CEOs from 10 major U.S. companies asked President Bush to call for caps on greenhouse gas emissions to keep climate change from accelerating out of control. Bosses from General Electric, DuPont, Pacific Gas and Electric, Alcoa and other leading firms urged him to adopt a program like one used in Europe that allows companies to meet phased goals by trading credits. The CEOs want to see greenhouse emissions cut by 70 to 90 percent in 15 years.
One can speculate that the corporate community began to get serious about global warming after Hurricane Katrina drew warnings from global reinsurer Swiss Re (and other large insurance companies) that climate change could wreak havoc with the world’s economy. In any case, they’ve gotten it now: more Katrinas could overwhelm the insurance and banking industry the way the first one overwhelmed New Orleans.
The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change just issued a new report in which 2,500 scientists agree that industrial emissions influence climate change five times as much as variations in solar radiation. But the president still resists emissions caps or tough fuel efficiency standards. He hopes for a high-tech solution; mirrors in space, underground carbon sequestering or machines that will deepen cloud cover by spraying the atmosphere with water are among those he’s had studied. Meanwhile, California has just empowered regulators to kill utility contracts for energy from dirty sources, Boston has announced radical new green standards for developments of 50,000 square feet or more, and Seattle and dozens of other American cities have pledged to meet emission reduction goals laid out in the Kyoto protocol. (Feb. 1)
To Massachusetts goes the glory for being the named plaintiff in an historic case related to global warming. That case just brought a decision from the Supreme Court that the federal Environmental Protection Agency does have the authority to regulate greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide. Climate change, the high court ruled 5-4, is a “pressing problem” and Massachusetts and its coplaintiffs do have standing to sue the EPA to force it to regulate carbon dioxide from cars.
The potential effects of the ruling are enormous. Among other things, it removes the rationale for the government to deny California and other states the right to establish tough restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions from cars. One thing it will certainly do is make it impossible for Washington to deny or ignore the passion of Americans for action against global warming. (April 12)
What the United States has spent on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq this year: $70 billion; what the United States spends each year on climate change research: $2 billion or less. Expanded budgets for exploration of the moon and Mars are taking away funding for NASA’s climate change satellites and studies. The number of satellites NASA puts into space to gather data on a myriad of conditions that affect climate is slated to be cut from six to four.
Other systems are in danger because no funding has been allocated to replace them when they are no longer usable. Hydros, a system designed to gather data about soil moisture—data vital to measuring the impact of climate change on agriculture—was discontinued last year. Other endangered devices include the Landsat system, which measures global vegetation, and the Quiksat system, which monitors wind and tracks hurricane development. Satellite devices that study ocean color, which yields information about changes in the marine food chain, are also under budget threat.
In a report leaked to the Associated Press, government scientists warned the White House that failure to invest more money in the climate change study program will result in huge information gaps at a time when tracking climate change is vital to human survival. That failure, the authors of the report admit, would make us more dependent on data from European satellites. Scrimping on the program increases risk to the climate and undermines our leadership on the most important issue facing the world. (June 14)
