THE DEATH OF LAW & THE RISE OF CORPORATES
To the four subjects headlined above, one could also justifiably add the western media line on Syria’s Bashar Assad, the Ukraine, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Italian economic statistics, QE aims, Libor rates, gold prices, Hackgate Court verdicts, the Mayor of London’s business arrangements, the ‘saving’ of the Coop, RBS techno-glitches, Non-farm US payroll assumptions, and the application of the term paedophilia to instances where the condition is quite obviously absent. The Slog offers a personal view on why the corporatocracy, the security services, the political class, and the media are joined at the hip. This analysis is the preface to an unfolding series over the next few days.
Once you start to delve further into the Foley beheading saga (as I’ve been doing for the last three days) it turns into a sort of black farce worthy of the Cohen brothers, but with overtones of Len Deighton’s books about espionage – and the sociopathic double-dealing of those who run agents.
When I first went into corporate life some 46 years ago, for some reason I kept on bumping into people who were very good at crosswords or chess – and occasionally both. They always struck me as having bits missing in the insight and emotional parts of the brain: mathematically talented with capacious memories, they nevertheless seemed to me not only otherwise uncreative, but also unaware of the socio-ethical ramifications of their actions.
As I became more senior in the advertising profession, more and more of these people popped up on the client side. My job on the agency side was to advise, caution and rationalise why they should say this or that sort of thing about good brands…and thereby help sell genuinely innovative ads that would cut through the cluttered smoke and mirrors of media communication.
At that time, the multinationalisation of advertising was getting under way. For my sins, I helped sell an agency into that world, and then moved on to work mainly for international agency groups during the autumn of my career. (In advertising, it’s a bad idea to be around when winter comes….if you have any sense, autumn is the final season: arrange a benefit match, and then GTF out.)
Over the years, my clients became more globally ‘aligned’, and oddly enough, the chilly chess-playing crossword wizards kept on turning up. There was one at Kodak who was CIA (and everyone knew it, which can’t have been that clever) and another at Gallaher who was an active agent in Northern Ireland – the homeland of the company – at the height of IRA terrorism.
I recall one memorable dinner in Brussels, shortly after the demise of the Soviet Union, at which I was placed next to a senior client whose inability to converse would’ve challenged Oscar Wilde on a good day. This chap also turned out to be a spy: he informed me at the end of a tense meal that he was off to Moscow the following day….to watch a chess championship. Another (more raucous) business supper in Portugal during 1993 found me in conversation with a crossword fanatic who looked for all the world like the 1950s roué Soviet agent Guy Burgess. He alleged some quite astonishing things about the divided loyalties of George Galloway.
There are two points I’m trying to illustrate in the above: first, the multinational corporatocracy has been used by sovereign security agencies as ‘cover’ forever and a day…if nothing else, it provides a credible excuse for constant travel on either side of the various Great Ideological Divides; and second, there is a very obvious psychographic type engaged in the subterfuge. One can sum that type up in two words: sociopathic dissembler.
Extrapolating from that personal life experience, it has gradually dawned on me this week that this is a multinational corporate/sovereign security agency relationship every bit as unhealthy as that between national politicians, the police and the media. But the bottom line is this: whoever perpetrated the Foley Fake has now muddied the waters and gone to ground: the trail is not so much cold as permanently camouflaged. Conjecture about the past is pointless: careful analysis of current events – and preparation for future stunts – is what the decent citizens of hijacked sovereign States should be about.
Over the next few days, I shall be featuring several examples of how – more often than not – behind every miscarriage of justice lies a thinly-disguised corporate agenda. (And to me, Islamist Jihadism is a corporation as evil as anything the US could produce).
In the meantime, suffice to say that the latest ‘developments’ in the Foley case include reports that a British subject suspected of murdering U.S. journalist James Foley is the son of an alleged Al-Qaeda terrorist who is awaiting trial over the bombing of two U.S. embassies that resulted in the deaths of 224 people (the Daily Telegraph); while on the other side of the Pond, ‘Father of suspect in Foley beheading was Osama lieutenant’ (New York Post). As these papers are owned respectively by the reclusive Barclay Brothers, and the antimatter formerly known as Rupert Murdoch, I leave you to your own devices in judging their veracity. My own observation would be that both these long-jump conclusions will suit the US and British security services down to the ground.
Be all that as it may, President Obama vowed ‘justice’ for the killing (by which one suspects he meant ‘revenge’) and then went out to have a golf jolly with his mates.
Last night at The Slog: Large holes found in global economic outlook
The Slog 