Captive State:

I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country... corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow." So said Abraham Lincoln whom Monbiot quotes in order to give an historical context to his discussion of the role of the modern corporation. Monbiot doesn't hesitate to describe the corporate encroachment on the modern state as a coup detat, and to predict that left unchecked it will extinguish whatever good is left in such things as democratic representation and equality before the law.

Monbiot gives a series of examples of corporate power encroaching into the politial realm at the expense of the public. These include the building of a toll bridge to the isle of Skye, the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) in the NHS, manipulation of the planning system in Southampton and elsewhere, the massive expansion of the superstore chains, the scandal over the attemp to impose GM crops on an unwilling public, and the influence of the pharmaceutical companies in university science departments. There's also a very interesting chapter listing a quite amazing number of direct conflicts of interest in government appointed positions, such as "Ewen Cameron, President of the Country Landowners Association, where he fought the government proposal for a right to roam - Chairman of the government's Countryside Agency, responsible for implementing the right to roam", and "Dinah Nichols, non-executive director of Anglia Water, the company which in 1999 came sixth in the Environment Agency's 'hall of shame' after being prosecuted six times for pollution incidents - Director General of Environmental Protection at the Department of the Environment."

Monbiot is persuasive in arguing that large, often multinational, corporations have infiltrated politics to the point where they can strongly influence, in some cases perhaps even dictate, policy. Small wonder the Labour Party abandoned the peoples' struggle and changed sides!

Further chapters relate the growth in power of the institutions of globalisation, primarily the WTO, which has taken on the aims of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, which, amonst other things, would have "granted corporations the right to sue any country whose laws restricted their ability to make money." Although their plan was temporarily derailed by large scale public protest and internal disputes, the governments and corporations behind it had a trump card up their sleeve: "A 'Transatlantic Economic Partnership' linking the markets of the EU and the US would be the first part of several agreements struck between the world's major trading blocs. The blocs would, eventually, be connected and 'harmonized' to establish a single, deregulated global market, in which, opponents feared, the laws protecting human rights and the environment would be progressively unpicked." It has been claimed that a recent Bilderburg meeting discussed the possibility of merging the Euro with the Dollar, so we an expect that to creep into the political mainstream sometime in the next few years.

This book is well worth recommending to anyone you know who is in need of convincing as regards the power of the modern corporation and of the depth of the corruption of modern politics. The problem with Monbiot's critique, and that of many of the protestors at the various international shindigs, is that they are globalists themselves. They demand a global environment policy and the centrally determined and administered redistribution of wealth and the global imposition of their preferred version of 'human rights'. But the answer isn't a different kind of global regime, but no global regime at all. In the name of freedom and folk-democracy, we must demand the abolition of all unaccountable international bodies and the decentralisation of power to small, natural entities, beginning with the nation states.