1. STRONG BUT WEAK One of the richest men in the US is Richard Mellon Scaife. His personal wealth is over 150 million dollars and he controls organisations with even greater assets. With the power of his capital, he directed a large part of the public debate and the political life in the US, during the 1980s. His influence also extended to other countries. Richard Mellon Scaife owns several medium-sized newspapers, but that was not his most important instrument of influence. He succeeded in multiplying the political effect of his monetary power by investing in a series of well-known and more obscure research institutes, discussion clubs, and political campaigning organisations. The annual donations of over 10 million dollars made by Richard Mellon Scaife and his organisations contributed to the breakthrough of the new Right into US politics, in the 1980s. The most important of Scaife’s think-tanks is The Heritage Foundation. When Ronald Reagan became president, eleven of his closest advisors came from this Foundation.1 The head of The Heritage Foundation, Edwin Feulner, explained in 1995 how they operate. Milton Friedman and other intellectuals could argue for private investments, tax reductions, and deregulation. But then, the ideas had to be marketed. Thus, it was not enough to try to win the support of voters at political elections. Large corporations needed to finance the continuous cultivation of the public opinion, both at the top and the "grass roots". This work was Feulner’s specialty.2 Environmental issues provide many examples of how his principles have been applied by those representing the largest capital interests. Today, the world economy is controlled by several hundred transnational corporations based in the US, Europe, and Japan. Each of these corporations is at the top of a pyramid of layer upon layer of suppliers, reaching down to small companies located on the edges of cities in the third world. At the top of the pyramid we have patents and trademarks, marketing, finance management, and strategic parts of manufacturing. From there, all the smaller vassal companies are supervised. It is at the top of the pyramid that most of the riches extracted in the global production process are collected. At the bottom of the pyramid, the hardest work is done for the lowest salaries. That is where the dirtiest industry is placed, where forests are devastated and waste accumulates. This production system delivers more material goods than ever before, but it cannot do this without, at the same time, squandering the sources of wealth: both the human and natural resources. In the transnational world economy, goods are not the only things that are produced. Unemployment, poverty, and environmental crises are also created. In India, hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated against the new GATT free trade agreement. They thought cheaper medicine was more important than patent rights for corporations like Merck, Glaxo, and Astra. They believed that agriculture in India must be protected against the grain giant Cargill. Despite their protests, the government in New Delhi signed the agreement. In Sweden, most people consider the situation, where several hundreds of thousands of people are unemployed, while at the same time, the medical system collapses and industrial workers put in unprecedented amounts of overtime, madness. They vote for those who promise employment, welfare, and a better environment. However, once elected, politicians make decisions that have the opposite effect. What causes these discrepancies between the will of the people and political decisions? In school we learn that our democracy works as follows: first, equal citizens test different views and arguments in a public debate. Then, they choose representatives who carry out the policies most people consider just and right. In practice, that is not the way it works. Citizens do not have equal weight in the debate, and their power over their elected representatives is very unevenly distributed. Those who own and control the transnational companies represent a very small part of the total population, but their influence over the public debate and the political decision making process in the rich countries is disproportionately large. Since the rich countries control many global instruments of power – everything from economic warfare to bombers and intervention forces – a tiny percentage of the total population is able to maintain a world order which is damaging for several billion people. Moving through the corridors of decision making organisations in Washington, Brussels, and Tokyo, are thousands of men on the payrolls of corporations and interest groups to influence politicians and government representatives to make certain decisions. This lobbying activity is dominated completely by large corporations, since they have the most money with which to buy influence. For example, of the 10,000 lobbyists in Brussels, over 90% come from industry.3 But more important than hob-nobbing in the corridors of power, is the control that large corporations have over the infrastructure of public debate and political life. The small minority at the top of the transnational corporate pyramids own newspapers, book publishing companies and radio and TV channels. In many countries, they finance the leading political parties, and control and influence research organisations and discussion clubs. Thus, political decisions are what they are because they are filtered through a censored choice process. This is particularly blatant in the US. Leading politicians are taken directly from investment banks on Wall Street and from large corporations and think tanks. When their period in office is over, the Ministers, government secretaries and officials return to their old posts. Whoever wants to be president does not anchor himself in public opinion, but in the top echelons of capital. President Jimmy Carter and at least 25 of his highest ranked collaborators were recruited from the Trilateral Commission, an exclusive international discussion club founded by David Rockefeller in 1973.4 The same mechanism for selecting political leaders is used in Great Britain. When the new Labour leader Tony Blair tried to secure himself a victory in the parliamentary elections, he rushed down to Australia to give a speech at a conference of 200 CEO’s in Rupert Murdoch’s media empire. He assured them that the new Labour Party would continue to attune British society to the market, and that the media market would be deregulated and the anti-union laws left intact.5 Blair visited Murdoch because Murdoch owns the most popular newspapers in England and controls satellite TV. In previous election campaign, the Murdoch press strongly opposed the Labour candidature. It is not a question of conspiracies. The power of the transnational giants is both more refined and more widespread. Plots do play a role, but for the most part they are not necessary. Closed operations like the Trilateral Commission, European Round Table of Industrialists, and World Business Council for Sustainable Development provide forums where the leaders of the biggest corporations gather to clarify their interests and develop political strategies to further these common interests. The chosen few of the inner circle reason and argue in order to arrive at the ideas that best serve their interests. These debates are no stranger than the political debates in the coffee rooms of factories or at union and environmental movement meetings. The difference is that because of their control over the infrastructure for public debates, it is much easier for the company leaders to market their ideas. Via the media their concepts reach all the way down to discussions in coffee rooms, but the thoughts that come out of popular discussions are for the most part filtered out of public discussions. It is a question of probability. Before the 1994 referendum on Swedish membership in the European Union, there was no decree that stated that the daily newspapers should lobby for the pro side, but the probability that they would do so was overwhelmingly large. Nine of ten newspapers were for EU membership, since almost all the owners of the newspapers were also pro-EU, and because these owners had chosen editors they could trust. Different constellations of capital can have changing and often completely contradictory interests. They can also choose separate political approaches to reach the same goal. In Sweden, which is a small country, the large companies manage for the most part to compromise and present a united front. Also, through the Swedish Employers Association (SAF – Svenska arbetsgivareföreningen) and its affiliates, they have had great success in getting small and medium-sized companies to join many of their campaigns. In the US, rivalry and opposition is more common. In the 1980s, large corporations were involved in both sides of the debate about President Reagan’s armament programme. Parts of the weapons industry benefited greatly from the major rearmament, but the financial interests on Wall Street were worried about the budget deficit and inflation. Real estate owners in the large cities suffered from cutbacks in roads and infrastructure, and companies with interests in Western Europe, and hope for new markets in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, saw their plans upset by political tensions and economic sanctions. Therefore, from 1982, real estate magnates, finance houses, and private foundations started to direct money towards peace researchers and organisations that criticised Reagan’s armament programme.6 This criticism was not directed towards US superpower politics per se. It focused almost exclusively on the new nuclear weapons and was connected to old divisions within the US establishment. The liberal, so-called east-coast, establishment is usually in favour of an expansive foreign policy since it has large capital investments in Europe and other parts of the world. Opposing this group, is a coalition of conservative, so-called isolationists. They are in favour of directing capital towards the domestic market and neighbouring countries. In general, they are against expensive, foreign military involvement and in favour of a defence directed towards keeping enemy powers out of the western hemisphere. In the European debate, it is usually taken for granted that the liberal expansionists are better than the conservative isolationists, but for people in the Third World it is rather the opposite. They have had the greatest problem with the liberals, since the east-coast establishment has been the most enthusiastic concerning military intervention and the placement of soldiers in foreign countries. The liberal critics of Reagan’s armament programme saw the fixation with new missiles and anti-missile systems as an isolationist tendency. They feared that the ability of the US to intervene in local conflicts around the world would suffer. They wanted a preliminary agreement with the Soviet Union on nuclear weapons to enable resources to be directed towards conventional military forces which could be used in the Middle East and other parts of the Third World. The same conflict exists between the liberal expansionists and the conservative isolationists in the debate about environmental and North-South issues. Isolationists refuse to negotiate “the American way of life", deny threats to the environment, and want to cut back development aid. On the other hand, those in the expansionist wing present themselves as green capitalists. They discuss the problem, defend development aid and sponsor leading environmental organisations. This report deals primarily with these green capitalists and their counterparts in Europe. The question is, what position should popular movements take with regard to the interest for environment and development issues being shown by leading representatives of transnational corporations? This report shows how the green capitalists got their colour and what they are striving for. The perspective is from the top down. A description is given of the plans and strategies being developed by leaders of large corporations whose purpose is to control environmental politics and North-South issues. This is not to say that development is decided at the top. It is just a reflection of the social position of the green capitalists. In reality, it is the movements at the bottom of the pyramid that direct development. The men at the top know that. That is why they spend so much time trying to manipulate public consciousness. Basically, the men at the top have a weak position. They can only try to influence what happens at the grass roots from a distance. Some environmentalists think that it is possible to climb to the top and then change development. I believe that is wrong. Organised mass movements cannot imitate their adversaries and take over their instruments of power. With statistical certainty, such attempts end with the activists acting just like the people they were opposed to at the beginning. The strength of popular movements lies precisely in their underdog position. They live and work among those who decide the course of history. 1. Columbia Journalism Review. July-August 1981. 2. Briarpatch. May 1990. 3. Metallarbetaren, April 1993; and Dagens Nyheter, 14 July 1995. 4. Holly Sklar (ed), Trilateralism (Montreal 1980), p. 2. 5. Financial Times, 17 July 1995. 6. Thomas Ferguson, Joel Rogers, Right Turn - The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics (New York 1986), p. 150. BACK TO CONTENTS
		© Mikael Nyberg 2001-03-29