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CHAPTER 7
Modern Empire

No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.

Matthew 6:24

As we look deeper for the soul of capitalism, we find that, in the terms of ordinary human existence, American capitalism doesn’t appear to have one. In the economic sphere, efficiency trumps community. Maximizing returns comes before family or personal loyalty. What seems priceless in one realm may be wasted freely or even destroyed by the other.¹

William Greider

By the reckoning of Western historians, the modern era began in 1500. The turmoil of endless and pointless wars in which rival noble factions fought one another to exhaustion for largely personal ends had created a readiness to welcome a restoration of rule by monarchs with the power to impose order.

Prior to 1500, empires had been based primarily on the expansion of borders through military conquest to incorporate new territory under the central military and administrative control of a city-state ruled by a king or emperor. Center and periphery were territorially contiguous, and the boundaries between them often lacked significant definition. Land and trade were the foundations of wealth, and the institutions of monarchy generally controlled and profited from the power to tax and allocate the rights to both. Independent commercial enterprises were individually far too small to challenge the power of the sovereign king.

The imperial model of the modern era replaced city-states with nation-states defined by clearly delineated territorial borders under a well-defined central administration. Rather than exhaust themselves in military campaigns against one another to redefine the territorial division of Europe, the European kings of the modern era satisfied their ambitions for imperial expansion by projecting their power outward 127over long sea routes from their relatively secure and stable domestic borders on the European continent and establishing dominion over the lands, peoples, and resources of distant colonies. By the logic of Empire, they were enormously successful. Although persons of European descent were only a tiny percentage of the world’s people, by 1878 they ruled 67 percent of the planet’s land surface.²

The transition from city-states to nation-states brought a growing challenge to the institutions of monarchy. Growing demands for the accountability of the institutions of the state gradually stripped monarchy of its absolute power. Monarchy died. Empire, however, retained its dominion in a new form.

CRIME LORDS AND SYNDICATES

National military forces and colonial administrations remained important to the new model of Empire, but for the most part the European kings of the modern era projected their power by granting commissions to favored adventurers, brigands, and corporations who worked for their own account in return for a share of the spoils. Thus began the transition from rule by imperial monarchs to rule by imperial corporations. Herein lies the story of how money came to rule the world.

Adventurers

Most of us know the period of Europe’s drive for colonial expansion primarily by the names of the great adventurers commissioned and financed by their sovereigns to carry out great voyages of discovery, plunder, and slaughter. In search of a westward sea route to the riches of Asia, Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) landed on the island of Hispaniola (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic) in the West Indies in 1492 and claimed it for Spain. Hernando De Soto (1496–1542) made his initial mark trading slaves in Central America and later allied with Francisco Pizarro to take control of the Inca Empire based in Peru in 1532, the same year the Portuguese established their first settlement in Brazil. De Soto returned to Spain one of the wealthiest men of his time, although his share in the plunder was only half that of Pizarro.³ By 1521, Hernán Cortés had claimed the Mexican Empire of Montezuma for Spain.

Spain ultimately extracted so much gold from South and Central America that it ruined its own economy and fueled inflation throughout 128Europe. With so much gold available to purchase goods produced by others, Spain’s own productive capacity atrophied as it became dependent on importing goods from abroad. The result was a domestic economic decline from which it never recovered. It was a pattern disturbingly similar to that of the current import-dependent U.S. economy—with the primary difference that U.S. imports are financed not by stolen gold, but by foreign borrowing.

Although licensed by the Crown, these celebrated adventurers operated with the independence and lack of scruples of crime lords, competing or cooperating with one another as circumstances dictated for personal gain and glory. Their mission was to extract the physical wealth of foreign lands and peoples by whatever means—including the execution of rulers and the slaughter and enslavement of Native peoples — and to share a portion of the spoils with their sovereign. Securing lands for settlement would become important later but had no place in these early ventures.

Supported by improvements in the tools of navigation, Portugal and Spain initially led the way. By the mid-1500s, Spain had established control over nearly all of Central and South America. Highly profitable for Portugal and Spain, these conquests came at an unconscionable cost to the peoples of the colonized territories. The profits from Spain’s conquests in the Americas inspired the imperial exertions of the English, Dutch, and French, who were soon dividing Africa, Asia, and North America into colonies from which to extract plunder and trading profits for the benefit of the mother state.

Privateers

The competition for foreign spoils among the European powers led to the elevation of the ancient practice of privateering —essentially legalized piracy—to a major instrument of state policy and a favored investment for both sovereigns and wealthy merchants. Why endure the arduous exertions of expropriating the wealth of foreign lands through conquest and trade when it was much easier to attack and plunder the ships carrying the spoils on their way back to European ports?

Monarchs often found it advantageous to grant a license to privately owned, financed, and captained armed vessels to engage in this profitable enterprise. These privateers offered important advantages to cash-strapped rulers. They provided revenue with no cash outlay, and official 129responsibility could be disavowed more easily than if the warships of the Crown had pillaged the victim vessels. Crew, captain, private investors, and the commissioning king divided the revenues from the booty while the king’s license lent a patina of legality to the acts of plunder and granted the ships safe harbor. A new era was in gestation.

The English, Dutch, and French all had their commissioned privateers licensed to pillage the ships, lands, and treasure of their primary colonial competitors, especially Spain. English privateers first sought their fortunes in the New World during the reign of Elizabeth I (1558– 1603) by plundering Spanish shipping in the Caribbean. Elizabeth, who was preoccupied with conquering Ireland, largely left the English privateers to their own devices without support or supervision.⁴

Famous English privateers included Sir John Hawkins (1532–95), Sir Francis Drake (1540–96), and Sir Henry Morgan (1635–88).⁵ It was not only an honored vocation, as their titles suggest; it was also a lucrative one. British economist John Maynard Keynes referred to Drake’s profits from his three major privateering expeditions as “the fountain and origin of British foreign investment.” Tax records for 1790 indicate that four of Boston’s top five taxpayers that year obtained their income in part from investments in privateering—including John Hancock, famed for his outsize signature on the Declaration of Independence.⁶

Some privateers operated powerful naval forces. In 1670, Morgan launched an assault on Panama City with thirty-six ships and nearly two thousand buccaneers, defeating a large Spanish force and looting the city as it burned to the ground.⁷

In 1856 the major European powers, with the exception of Spain, signed the Declaration of Paris, declaring privateering illegal. The United States, which relied heavily on privateers as its primary source of naval power and a major source of commercial profits in its early years, declined to join the agreement on the argument that it lacked an adequate navy to protect itself in time of war. The United States, which to this day regularly declines to honor treaties aimed at securing the international rule of law, did not stop commissioning privateers until the end of the nineteenth century.⁸

Chartered Corporations

Over time, the ruling monarchs turned from swashbuckling adventurers and chartered pirates to chartered corporations as their favored 130instruments of colonial expansion, administration, and pillage. It is instructive to note that in England this transition was motivated in part by its incipient step to democracy.

By the beginning of the seventeenth century the English parliament, one of the first modern efforts to limit the arbitrary power of the king, had gained the authority to supervise the Crown’s collection and expenditure of domestic tax revenues. Chafing under this restriction, sovereigns such as Elizabeth, James I, and Charles I found that by issuing corporate charters that bestowed monopoly rights and other privileges on favored investors, they could establish an orderly and permanent source of income through fees and taxes that circumvented parliamentary oversight. They also commonly owned personal shares in the companies to which they granted such privileges.⁹

In addition, chartered corporations sometimes assumed direct responsibility for expenses that otherwise would have fallen on the state, including the costs of maintaining embassies, forts, and other naval, military, and trade facilities. English corporations were at times even given jurisdiction over Englishmen residing in a given territory.¹⁰

Several of the earliest colonial settlements in what later became the United States were established by corporations chartered by the British Crown; they were largely populated with bonded laborers—many of them involuntarily transported from England—to work corporate properties. The importation of slaves from Africa followed.

The British East India Company (chartered in 1600) was the primary instrument of Britain’s colonization of India, a country the company ruled until 1784 much as if it were a private estate. The company continued to administer India under British supervision until 1858, when the British government assumed direct control.¹¹

In the early 1800s, the British East India Company established a thriving business exporting tea from China and paying for its purchases with illegal opium. China responded to the resulting social and economic disruption by confiscating the opium warehoused in Canton by the British merchants. This precipitated the Opium War of 1839 to 1842 —which Britain won.

As tribute, the victorious British pressed a settlement on China that required the payment of a large indemnity to Britain, granted Britain free access to five Chinese ports for trade, and secured the right of British citizens accused of crimes in China to be tried by British courts.¹² This settlement was a precursor to the modern “free trade” 131agreements imposed by strong nations on weak nations to secure the rights of global corporations to act in disregard of local interests.

The Dutch East India Company (chartered 1602) established its sovereignty over what is now Indonesia and reduced the local people to poverty by displacing them from their lands to grow spices for sale in Europe, a forerunner of the practices of contemporary global corporations that displace local farmers in order to consolidate their lands into foreign-controlled estates producing goods for export. The French Company of the East Indies (1664) controlled commerce with French territories in India, eastern Africa, the East Indies, and other islands and territories of the Indian Ocean.

The Hudson Bay Company, which was founded in 1670 to establish British control over the fur trade in the Hudson Bay watershed of North America, was an important player in the British colonization of what is now Canada. Armed skirmishes with the rival North West Company were common until the British government forced their merger in 1821 into a single company with a monopoly over the fur trade in much of North America, including the Northwest Territories. The British South Sea Company, which was chartered primarily to sell African slaves to Spanish colonies in America, became the centerpiece of the “South Sea Bubble,” one of history’s most famous financial scams.¹³

The new corporate form, the joint stock company created to fulfill the above functions, combined two ideas from the Middle Ages: the sale of shares in public markets and the protection of owners from personal liability for the corporation’s obligations. These two features made it possible to amass virtually unlimited financial capital within a single firm, assured the continuity of the firm beyond the death of its founders, and absolved owners of personal liability for the firm’s losses or misdeeds beyond the amount of their holdings in the company.

Furthermore, separating owners from day-to-day management allowed for a unified central direction that was difficult or impossible with management control divided among a number of owner partners. The new enterprise form made it possible to amass financial power, in perpetuity and virtually without limit, under a central authority on behalf of the financial interests of owners who bore no liability for the consequences of its actions and with rare exception took no part in management.

It is no exaggeration to characterize these forebears of contemporary publicly traded limited-liability corporations as, in effect, legally 132sanctioned and protected crime syndicates with private armies and navies backed by a mandate from their home governments to extort tribute, expropriate land and other wealth, monopolize markets, trade slaves, deal drugs, and profit from financial scams. One of the defining institutions of the modern era, publicly traded limited-liability corporations of gigantic scale now operate with substantial immunity from legal liability and accountability even in the countries that issue their charters.

Institutional Sociopaths

The publicly traded limited-liability corporation is an artificial entity legally accountable to the owners whose financial interests the corporation’s managers and workers are hired to serve to the disregard of public interests or their own values. Since the owners of publicly traded corporations rarely have personal knowledge of the corporations they own or involvement in their operations, there is no effective mechanism for them to express their values through their ownership participation even if they wish to do so. Shareholders committed to socially responsible investment who attempt to express their views on values issues at formal shareholder meetings are routinely ignored, even when they represent major blocks of stock.

Professors of law and businesses commonly teach their students that bringing ethical considerations into corporate decision making is unethical, as it may compromise the bottom line and unjustly deprive shareholders of their rightful return. It is a rather perverse moral logic given that, as Marjorie Kelly points out in The Divine Right of Capital, shareholders contribute less than any other corporate stakeholder to the success of the enterprise.¹⁴

Although the principle that the legal and ethical obligation of management is to place financial returns to shareholders above all other interests is not spelled out in any legislation, it has become deeply embedded in the U.S. legal culture and case law and has spread to other national jurisdictions. It is a pure case of judge-made law based on the arguments of corporate-interest lawyers.

Consequently, under current U.S. law, the publicly traded limited-liability corporation is prohibited from exercising the ethical sensibility and moral responsibility normally expected of a natural-born, emotionally mature human adult. If it were a real person rather than an artificial legal construction, we would diagnose it as sociopathic. Unless 133constrained by rules set and enforced by a public body functioning as a kind of parent surrogate, the publicly traded corporation operates in an ethical vacuum.¹⁵

Corporations spend billions of dollars on lawyers, lobbyists, and PR flacks whose job is to gain corporate freedom from such rules by manipulating the political process. Corporate CEOs have suggested, only partly in jest, that in their ideal world their corporate headquarters would be located on a private island outside the jurisdiction of any government and their plants would be on barges that could be moved on a moment’s notice to wherever labor is cheapest, public subsidies and tax breaks most generous, and regulations most lax.

DEMOCRATIC CHALLENGE

Absolutism, the belief in the absolute right of kings, had been put to rest in England by 1689. The monarchy remained, however, and the nobles and other men of property who had secured the power of the vote for themselves showed no enthusiasm for broadening the democratic franchise at home or ending colonial rule abroad. Absolutist monarchy remained strong in much of the rest of Europe, particularly France, for another hundred years. However, the erosion of monarchy had begun.

End of Monarchy

As the American Revolution of 1776 challenged the concept of foreign rule, so the French Revolution of 1789 was a direct challenge to the institution of monarchy. It began as a revolt of the French middle class against the power of the nobles and the clergy. A growing peasant rebellion in the provinces panicked the nobles and clergy sufficiently to persuade them to join with relatively conservative members of the merchant middle class—the bourgeoisie, in the terminology of the day—to draft a Declaration of Rights and a new constitution that stripped the nobles and clergy of their special power and privilege. The loss by Spain and Portugal of control over their Latin American colonies followed in the early 1800s during the Napoleonic Wars, when those colonies followed the example of the United States and established themselves as independent states ruled by descendants of their European occupiers.

The fears of other European monarchs that the French Revolution might inspire others to rebel proved well founded. Europe experienced a 134wave of democratic revolutions. The Spaniards revolted against Joseph Bonaparte in 1808. Insurrections followed in Greece, Italy, Spain, France, Belgium, and Poland between 1820 and 1831, and in 1848 in France, Austria and Hungary, Germany, and Italy. A flourishing of democracy in the twentieth century was accompanied by extraordinary technological and economic advances that brought to roughly 20 percent of the world’s population a level of material comforts that would have been the envy of nobles in generations past.

End of Colonialism

The aftermath of World War II brought another wave of dramatic advances in the democratization of human cultures and institutions as the spirit of freedom swept the world. In India, a modest and diminutive man named Gandhi rallied a nation behind an independence movement that countered British military power with the moral power of principled nonviolence in the cause of a universal right to self-governance.

The inspiration of Gandhi’s victory energized oppressed people the world over to join a struggle for human liberation from European imperial domination. Independence movements throughout Europe’s colonial territories built an unstoppable momentum with the support of human-rights movements organized in solidarity by citizens of the colonial powers themselves.

The institution of the corporation remained alive and well throughout this period of democratic reforms, but emerged from World War II constrained by government oversight, the countervailing power of strong labor unions, and a social contract that supported an equitable sharing of wealth and power and cooperative working relations among government, labor, and business. Various social movements successfully lobbied for strong consumer, worker, and environmental protections. It appeared for a time that the corporate beast had been tamed to the service of the public interest.

By the end of the second millennium, the institutions of political democracy had replaced the institutions of monarchy in most of the world, and classic colonialism had come to a much deserved end. The Soviet Empire had disintegrated, and China, although far from democratic, had opened its economy to market forces. Pundits declared the universal triumph of democracy and the free market.

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The democracy, however, was more a democracy of money than of people, and the markets were only truly free for corporations and big investors. In its actual expression, market freedom means that corporations are free to do whatever they like. People are free to buy or do without whatever products or jobs corporations choose to offer them on terms of the corporation’s choosing.

IMPERIAL COUNTERATTACK

The extreme and growing inequality that has turned out to be a hallmark of the corporate global economy did not happen by accident. It results from the work of skilled planners who designed the institutional framework for a post–World War II global economy with the intention to secure U.S. global economic and political dominance based on well-proven principles of imperial rule.

Grand Plan

Britain entered World War II as the world’s dominant colonial power and intended to maintain that position at the war’s conclusion. Secret British planning documents from 1945 and beyond outline plans to strengthen British access to raw materials in Africa and to develop the Middle East, in the words of Ernest Bevin, Britain’s postwar foreign secretary, as “a prosperous producing area to assist the British economy and replace India as an important market for British goods.” To this end Britain would use development assistance to influence other countries’ internal decisions to protect and advance British economic and political interests.¹⁶

The United States, for whom World War II was an opportunity to pull itself out of an economic depression and strengthen its industrial base while the European economies were being devastated by the conflict, had a similar, but larger and bolder, vision by which it, not Britain, would dominate the postwar global economy. The U.S. intention was to use to its own advantage a principle the British had demonstrated prior to the war: an open global economic system works to the benefit of the strongest player.

The plan, which is discussed in more detail in chapter 11, “Empire’s Victory,” centered on opening national economies to unfettered access 136by U.S. corporations and financial institutions, which at that point were unquestionably the most powerful on the planet. A set of three international institutions formed at U.S. initiative and known collectively as the Bretton Woods institutions—the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (later replaced by the World Trade Organization)—would be key players in implementing the U.S. strategy.

Easy Credit

The Bretton Woods institutions played their roles well. As country after country emerged from colonialism, the World Bank encouraged them to spur the growth of their economies by accepting foreign loans to finance the purchase of goods and services from the industrialized nations. Soon the new nations found themselves in a condition of debt bondage to the very countries from which they had presumably gained their independence.¹⁷

Corrupt rulers for whom the loans were a win-win proposition eagerly joined in the scam. They gained political capital from projects paid for with borrowed money, and they profited directly from bribes related to the deal making. Generous grace periods granted on interest and the repayment of principal assured that the burden of repayment would fall on their unfortunate successors.

Former colonies borrowed not only to finance development projects but also to get the foreign exchange to import luxury goods for their ruling elites and arms to repress dissent. Later they used new loans to finance the debt-service payments that eventually came due on previous loans. This pyramiding of the debt burden accelerated dramatically in the late 1970s due to significant increases in energy costs.

Adjusting the Poor

By 1982, it was evident that many low-income countries would never be able to repay their accumulated foreign debts. Fear that default could bring a collapse of the global financial system spread panic in the ranks of global financiers. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank stepped in as debt collectors to impose a package of standardized economic “reforms” known as structural adjustment.

The IMF and World Bank are both headquartered in Washington, D.C., and operate under the influence and close oversight of the U.S. 137Treasury Department, which has traditionally served as the U.S. government representative of Wall Street banks and investment houses. It was therefore no surprise that the policy prescriptions demanded as conditions for new credit served the interests of global finance at the further expense of the people in whose name corrupt leaders had incurred the debt. The standard “structural adjustment” agreement called for

• rolling back regulations that benefited workers and protected public health, safety, and the environment but increased business costs;
• eliminating restrictions on foreign imports, foreign ownership, cross-border financial flows, the export of natural resources, and the activities of foreign banks and financial houses so that global corporations could move goods and money across their borders at will;
• privatizing public assets and services, including communications, power, and water, by offering them for sale to private investors at bargain prices;
• slashing public expenditures for health and education to free funds for the repayment of foreign loans; and
• providing special tax breaks and subsidies to foreign investors.

These measures attracted foreign investment and increased exports to generate foreign exchange to repay outstanding debts to foreign creditors —starting with the IMF and World Bank. They also gave foreign corporations and financiers unrestricted access to national economies to extract the maximum amount of wealth with the minimum investment of time and money.

Deeper in Debt

Faithful implementation of the mandated policies made a government eligible for yet more loans. Foreign indebtedness thus continued to grow in tandem with growing foreign control of national economies—playing out much the same scenario by which the moneylenders of ancient time consolidated their control over the lands of once independent farmers and reduced free farmers to serfdom. The new colonialism had a friendlier face than the old, but the consequences in terms of foreign control and expropriation were much the same. 138

In the 1990s, the corporate plutocrats turned to international trade agreements as their favored instrument for rewriting national laws to implement their corporate-friendly agenda of deregulation, open borders, and privatization. A single international trade agreement could at a stroke effectively overturn hundreds of laws inconvenient to foreign corporate interests in each of the signatory countries with virtually no public debate. It was far more efficient than overturning the democratic process one country at a time, and it worked for rich and poor countries alike.

Each new agreement further constrained the ability of governments to hold global corporations accountable for the consequences of their actions, thus advancing the transition from elite rule by unaccountable monarchs to elite rule by unaccountable corporations and financial markets.¹⁸ It was an undeclared class war of the owners and managers of big capital against democracy and those who actually produce wealth, and it continues today without respite. The weapon of choice is a money system that silently and invisibly transfers an ever growing portion of the world’s real wealth to the control of a small ruling class.

MONEY RULES

In modern societies in which access to most everything essential to survival depends on money, money has become the ticket to life itself. Through a kind of psychological transference, the instinctual human love of life becomes a love of money. Money becomes an object of worship. This gives almost total power to those who have the means to create and allocate money, silently and invisibly ruling from their temples in the sky those who must serve them in return for the money on which their very lives depend. The rule of money works all the better for corporate plutocrats because most people are wholly unaware of the ways in which the organizing principles of Empire have become embedded in the money system.

The Ultimate Con

Recall the observation in chapter 3 that money is simply an accounting chit created out of nothing, without substance or intrinsic value, which has value only because we believe it does and therefore willingly accept it in exchange for things of real value. In modern financial systems, 139banks create money when they issue a loan. The bank opens an account in the name of the borrower and enters a number representing the amount of the loan in the account. The bank in essence rents to the borrower money it has created from nothing at whatever interest rate the market will bear. It may also acquire a mortgage on the home, farm, or other real property of the borrower. If the borrower cannot make the payments, the bank gets the real property.

This is the relatively straightforward and widely understood part of the modern money con. The more complex part relates to the ability of laxly regulated corporations, banks, and financial markets to facilitate the artificial inflation of the market value of financial assets—including stocks, land, and housing—through accounting fraud, lending pyramids, financial bubbles, and other forms of financial speculation and manipulation.

These financial games contribute nothing of value to the larger society. They do, however, significantly increase the buying power of the ruling elites and their claims on the real wealth of society relative to the claims of those persons who contribute to the creation of that wealth by producing real goods and providing real services. They are the most successful of financial cons because the mechanisms are invisible and the marks—the objects of the con—rarely realize they have been conned. Even if they were to recognize they have been conned, there is nothing they can do about it because the con is both legal and culturally accepted.¹⁹

Money from Money

Through the mechanisms of the financial system, the control of real assets inexorably moves over time from those who create real wealth by doing real work to an owning class that lives on the returns on money. In the wake of banking deregulation, nonbanking corporations in the United States have been establishing their own banks to attract government-insured deposits that allow them to lend money to themselves at substantially lower rates than they could get from nonproprietary banks. They recycle the borrowed money into deposits in their own banks to create new reserves from which to make yet more loans to themselves and others.²⁰ It is a kind of a government-guaranteed financial pyramid scheme that generates handsome profits on minimal initial investment, another bit of a smoke-and-mirrors, self-dealing gaming of the money system. 140

The ideal of finance capitalism is to make money solely by collecting monopoly rents or through speculation on financial bubbles and debt pyramids without the inconvenience of producing anything of actual value in the process—an ideal exemplified by Enron until its collapse in disgrace in the hallmark financial scandal of the twenty-first century.

Pervasive Bias

The money system’s bias in favor of the owning class is so pervasive and widely accepted as the natural order as to go largely unnoticed. For example, by the logic of the prevailing money culture, every public and private economic choice is properly vetted on the basis of which of the available options will produce the highest returns on money, which generally works out to mean to people with money.

Another source of bias comes from central bankers, whose publicly acknowledged function is to manage the financial markets of supposedly “free market” economies to maintain a downward pressure on the price of labor. If full employment shows signs of putting upward pressure on wages, the central bankers raise interest rates to slow the economy to reduce inflationary pressures. The unmentioned consequence is to assure that benefits from gains in worker productivity go to profits and the owners of capital rather than to workers.

The gradual transition from monarchy to political democracy during the last half of the second millennium stimulated a corresponding transition from imperial rule by the power of the sword to imperial rule by the power of money. The new rulers donned business suits rather than imperial robes and embraced more subtle tactics as they deftly circumvented the democratic challenge to their power and privilege.

The transition began with the rise of the European nation-states in the aftermath of the Middle Ages. Of a mind to expand their imperial dominion while minimizing the prospect of direct military confrontation with their powerful neighbors, they projected their expansionist ambitions outward to the far reaches of the planet to triumph over weaker states. Rather than turn to loyal generals as their agents of imperial conquest, they issued commissions to swashbuckling adventurers, licensed 141

pirates, and chartered corporations that functioned as officially sanctioned criminal syndicates working for their own account under an imperial franchise. British kings issued corporate charters primarily as a means to create income streams not subject to democratic oversight by the nobles of the early British parliament. Contemporary publicly traded corporations carry forward the mantle of the Crown corporations of an earlier day. The largest now wield more economic and political power than most contemporary nation-states and continue to serve as institutional vehicles by which the propertied class circumvents the institutions of democratic accountability.

The money system, however, is an even more powerful and successful weapon than the corporation in the war of the ruling class against the middle- and lower-income working classes. By controlling the creation and allocation of money, the ruling class maintains near total control over the lives of ordinary people and the resources of the planet.

Empire, in the guise of democracy, remains alive and well. True democracy remains an essential but elusive ideal. As we need to confront the reality of the imperial legacy, so too we must confront the limitations of the democratic experiment. To that end let us now turn to an earlier effort to break free from the play-or-die logic of Empire.