What Cheer?

The Marketocracy, Earth, and Our Next Move

"The nation-state, unfortunately, is a very old-fashioned idea and badly adapted to our present complex world. . .Working through great corporations that straddle the earth, men are able for the first time to utilize world resources with an efficiency dictated by the objective logic of profit." - George Ball, former undersecretary of state, former chair of Lehman Brothers International.

[The global corporation is creating a world economy,] "a global shopping center." --Peter Drucker, business consultant.

"The world's political structures are completely obsolete. The critical issue of our time is the conceptual conflict between the search for global optimization of resources
and the independence of nation-states." -Jacques Maisonrouge, Senior Vice President, IBM.

At the Roundtable for Chief Executive Officers organized by Business International in Jamaica in 1971, global corporate executives "vowed to take a more active political role in suggesting a constructive role for nation-states in developing the Global Shopping Center. . . The global corporation must also make a "huge" effort to "educate people who would prefer not to be educated and who so deeply feel that the nation state is necessary for their happiness."

These statements were recorded in the book Global Reach by Richard J. Barnet and Ronald E. Muller.

Some while ago, I wrote about the marketocracy - replacement of representative democracy and its consent of the governed by rule of corporations with no consent of the governed. I traced its history to both the 1971 Powell memorandum and to the Roundtable of Chief Executive Officers meeting in 1971, in which transnational corporate officers who were intermittently cabinet members stated their intent to turn the world into a shopping mall and do away with nation states, which were inconvenient.  I wonder if Justice Powell would be pleased with what he wrought.

Tragically, the "left behind" white public in Europe, the UK, and the USA have mis-identified their enemies, and how to gain happiness. It is not hordes of bad guys who will burn the house down, and it is not one sociopath who will drain the swamp or redistribute capital, jobs and public resources. Transnational capitalism is the culprit. Corporate sovereignty is trumping national sovereignty, representative democracy, and civil society around the world. The process accelerated rapidly during the Reagan administration and is accelerating now. It transfers wealth and sovereignty from individuals and governments to primarily U.S.-based transnational corporations, and transfers increasing numbers of regulatory and judicial processes to their trade courts. As a result, the relationship between civil society and governments and between governments and TNC’s has deteriorated.

Human rights and environmental protections are being marginalized and trivialized. Sustainability – the carrying capacity of the planet – is rapidly approaching or has passed its limit.

Peter Turchin is a project leader at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna, emeritus professor at the University of Connecticut, a trained theoretical biologist, the founder of the field of cliodynamics, and currently is working on coordinating CrisisDB, a massive database of societies historical and present sliding into crises and emerging from them. His most recent book is entitled End Times- Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration. The book was published in 2023. Dr. Turchin’s quest has been to understand what causes political communities – nations, corporations, banks – to fall apart, and what forces can societies bring to bear to avoid that fate.

In 2010, Nature magazine asked a number of scientists to make ten-year forecasts. Dr.Turchin forecast that the United States was in a spiral of social disintegration that would lead to a breakdown in the political order in about 2020.

That brings us to now.

In End Times, Turchin says that the data of world history shows the same cards turning up repeatedly. When the political equilibrium between ruling elites and the majority of citizens goes too far in favor of elites, political instability is about inevitable. When the income equilibrium – income inequality – grows too large, everybody not an elite suffers, and society-wide, even planet-wide, the masses make efforts to leave precarity behind – and that means trying to become an elite, or at least get further away from the precarious reality that grows, with every jump in grocery prices, housing prices, floods, droughts, fires, your nation taken over by kleptocrats who drive people to become climate and economic migrants, refugees, desperate wanderers on Earth, hated and abused everywhere, traumatized for the entirety of their lives, however short, and traumatizing the nations that abuse them.

Turchin observes that the number of beds in the elite hotel is finite, and thus, ignoring the migrating masses, the aspiring elites, the children of the powerful, become divided into winners and losers. And when this happens, even if the planet were not making it too expensive to house and serve everyone uprooted from Florida, we get a society in crisis.

Turchin’s CrisisDB (DB=Data Base) has identified about 300 crises from the Neolithic period to now, in every major continent on earth. Of the 300 crises, the CrisisDB has good data on about 100 of the crises. The questions are obvious: what did the people and leaders do wrong when things collapsed? And what did they do right when the societies managed to right themselves?

And what are we going to do?

One element of avoiding collapse and further sociopathic policies seems to be to increase wages and jobs. The wealth pump must be stopped and a return to economic fairness has to be achieved.

But wait. The planet. Global warming.

The two following paragraphs are my views, not Dr. Turchin’s.

All “cures” require putting a leash on the transnational corporations destroying Earth. We need to be recovering regulatory control of the TNC’s. Some tools: establishing an international rule of corporate crime as preventable harm, marketing sustainability models in contradistinction to the current “free trade” model of trade; democratization of the WTO, a global tax on currency transactions, a debt arbitration mechanism for debtor nations, the empowerment of global civil society such as the World Social Forum is now fostering, and building a non-Anglo-Saxon global media.

It is not realistic to discuss whether globalization is good for economies or makes people happy. The planet does not have the carrying capacity to support every human in an American lifestyle.  Hawking that dream is cruel denial of reality.  Economic models must change to include natural capital as a scarce and limiting factor, rather than a free good.  Economic analysis must shift from market-based definitions of the economy to include the subsidies provided by ecosystems, household labor, and human culture.  Nation-states, having been emasculated, must reclaim authority, along with civil society.  There is no other way to create the consent of the governed, and only the consent of the governed will create a just and stable world.

Meanwhile, to quote Dave Edmunds and RockPile:  I know the rules of the game, but what have I got to do to win?