Global Power Dynamics in the Real World Today. Middle Nation Podcast (E:7)

Welcome everyone to the seventh episode of the Middle Nation podcast. Before I proceed with the channel, I think it might be useful for me to articulate the way I see the power dynamics operating in the world So that can help you understand maybe the views that I take on various issues. It should be recognized and understood that the founding fathers of The United States were not particularly fond of the idea of democracy. They were primarily concerned with averting tyranny by the state. To this end, they set up numerous checks and balances that restricted the power of the federal government and even the state governments.

This system is notoriously inefficient, but this inefficiency is by design. They did not want the government to have the means of being effectively tyrannical. This is also why voting privileges were very slow to spread to the general population because they distrusted both the government and the public and basically felt that the wealthy were best qualified to make the decisions for society. So it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that the wealthy do make the decisions in The United States. Every measure that has come along to increase public participation and accountability in The US has been offset by measures that nullify them.

As the voting franchise expanded, for example, so did the lobbying industry. Now, of course, when you design a system in which the government has limited power, other types of power flourish and become dominant in the society, the power of the private sector. And when you are already inclined to prioritize the interests of the wealthy, it is probably inevitable that private sector power would increasingly be exercised by institutions of organized capital, namely corporations and banks rather than, say, workers. Hence, you have the very American axiom that what's good for General Motors is good for America. But what happens when General Motors is no longer, strictly speaking, an American company?

When globalization turns companies into multinational corporations with decreased interest in the prosperity or stability of any one nation. Now something I've written about for a very long time is how the transfer of state authority to the private sector deteriorates national sovereignty and security. Multinational corporations are better described as anational, I e having no fealty to any particular nation. Thus, you have huge power entities that possess no sense of loyalty, duty, or responsibility to the countries in which they are headquartered and no vested interest in the well-being of those countries. During the last half of the twentieth century, there was a systematic transfer of authority from governments that were subject to democratic mechanisms to nongovernmental or quasi governmental institutions of private power, which are immune to mechanisms of democratic accountability.

Trade agreements discussed and signed without public participation and written by corporate lawyers like the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, GATT, and the drafting of international rules pertaining to the arbitration of trade disputes have further undermined national democracies and sovereignty. Institutions like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization enjoy tremendous authority over state policies with near dictatorial power while these institutions are completely insulated from democratic controls. New governmental institutions were also created in the last half of the twentieth century, such as the European Parliament, which were designed to circumvent national democracies, marginalizing domestic electorates. Corporations constitute roughly half of the largest economic entities in the world, and they adhere to a strictly totalitarian model of authority. With no democratic participation in decision making and no popular accountability, they are increasingly taking over the assets and functions of states.

Relatively recently, the United Nations signed an MOU with the World Economic Forum, essentially transforming international governments into a public private partnership in which corporations and private sector elites will formally be required to cosign UN decisions. Authority and power, therefore, is being rapidly transferred into the hands of unaccountable private institutions, and populations are being disenfranchised and marginalized. And this trend is symbiotically connected to the elevation of The United States as the world's only global superpower. It's one of the great paradoxes of history that the rise of America has meant the dismantling of democracy wherever it exists in the world and within The United States itself. But then again, as I said, the founding fathers never intended popular democracy to govern the decision making process in society.

The National Intelligence Council, which represents basically the intelligence community in The United States, issues a report every five years called global trends, essentially forecasting what they expect the world to look like over the coming fifteen years. In their previous report, not the latest one, but the one from 2016, they somewhat obliquely talked about how global power dynamics are changing. They predicted that by 2030, there will no longer be one single hegemonic power dominating the world, but rather there will be networks and coalitions of power, and that the traditional centers of power will shift from Western Europe and The US to Asia. Now this needs a bit of decoding. Within the context of the ongoing transfer of authority from the state to the private sector, that is the ascendancy of corporate power and the deterioration of government, it makes sense.

Quote, unquote, coalitions of power is a surprisingly explicit description of corporate shareholders. Investment firms like BlackRock and Vanguard, for example, represent such a coalition of power. There's a network of power organizing the combined interests of super wealthy investors across a wide spectrum of industries around the world. The report refers to this trend as the diffusion of power. And it's just another way of saying the decline of sovereign nation states.

The transfer of control and authority from the political sphere into the economic sphere. And this includes control and authority in The United States. When they predict that The US will no longer be the world's predominant hegemonic power, they do not mean that US power will decrease, but the control of US power will be less and less nationalistic. The United States will be an instrument, the most powerful instrument utilized by the new coalitions and networks of private power, which will enjoy a kind of collective hegemony. Now the shift to Asia referred to in the report should not be understood as a transfer of power to Asia, but rather a shift of private sector powers, focus, and operations to Asia for the simple reason that Western Europe and The US are in social and economic decline.

Insofar as the actual authority of the US government is becoming increasingly subordinate to corporate power, it is indeed true that it will no longer be the sole global hegemon. That doesn't mean that America will no longer be the most powerful state on earth. Of course, it will be. There's no rival that can even begin to challenge the unprecedented power of The United States, and that's likely to actually increase over the next fifty years, not decrease. But what that means is that American power will be even more totally controlled by corporate interests and not by the electorate or their elected officials.

US power will not be exercised for the national interest, but for the interests of nonstate elites who have no patriotic loyalty to any nation. The global response to COVID nineteen has perhaps been one of the most blatant demonstrations of this trend. Countrywide lockdowns, whatever you think of the pandemic, are not responsible measures to ensure the public health. They are a shock and awe style economic coup de grace by big business, accelerating the consolidation of market share by the largest players, slashing millions of jobs, and ushering in the great reset that we'll see automation, artificial intelligence, and robotics permanently render huge segments of the population superfluous. None of this is in the interests of any single nation.

Indeed, every nation, if by nation we mean people, has been drastically and irreparably damaged. Here it needs to be said that there are no rich or poor nations. There are rich people and poor people in the world. The rich collude and collaborate across national borders, and the poor are compartmentalized and contained and exploited within national borders. Consider the fact that Apple is only an American company in name, and Apple is just an example here.

The supply chain of Apple runs through almost a dozen countries. An iPhone is the product of a coalition or a network of power operating across borders. When an iPhone is shipped from China to The US, it is counted as a Chinese export to America, but it is the movement of a product internal to Apple with the value chain cast around the globe. So is that part of China's GDP or America's, or is it from the GDP of The Czech Republic or Singapore or South Korea or of any of the other countries that are involved in the value chain to make the iPhone? No.

It's part of the GDP of Apple. Of the 100 largest economic entities in the world, nearly half of them are corporations, not states, And they exist as borderless coalitions of power, floating, super sovereign, anational institutions of private authority and influence that have subordinated states, governments, and populations. This is the diffusion of power referred to in the NCI report. Understanding this fundamental reality of modern power dynamics is crucial to any analysis of current affairs, the situations in the Muslim world, Muslims living in Western countries, and international relations in general. This is another reason why the old paradigms of the West and the Muslim world are obsolete and unuseful.

We cannot begin to grasp why things are the way they are, why things happen or don't happen if you fail to recognize the mechanics of power in the world today as they really exist. Consider, for instance, that some 85 countries entered loan agreements with the IMF since the onset of COVID nineteen, seventy three of which have signed on to harsh austerity measures once the pandemic abates. 27 of those countries are either Muslim majority countries or countries with significant Muslim populations. The World Bank and the IMF encouraged all of those countries to initially spend as much money as possible to mitigate the effects of the pandemic precisely to intensify their vulnerability and their ultimate dependence upon outside funding. In short, these lenders have grossly exploited the global pandemic and the incapacity of governments in the developing world to deal with it, essentially forcing them to ransom their long term futures for immediate assistance in the short term.

This will have long lasting devastating impact on hundreds of millions of Muslims. But again, our countries are not alone. Since corporations went multinational, they have been parasitically eroding conditions even in developed countries to the point that Europe and many parts of The US today would barely be able to survive a harsh winter. Just look at the energy shortages taking place in those countries, engineered by private companies. These institutions of power are self serving, and it does not matter to them which population suffers, east or west.

They are loyal to their shareholders and to no one else. So if you are analyzing anything going on in the world that affects our ummah, whether it's the culture wars or actual wars, corporations are the context. And if you're still thinking in terms of nation states, you are woefully behind the times. It is overdue for Muslims to understand economics beyond discussions of riba and arguments over fiat currency and gold coins and so on and so on. It's overdue for us to realign our activism to acknowledge corporations as political entities that are the main drivers of every conflict and crisis we face in the world, from Myanmar and the Rohingya to Xinjiang and the Uighur.

Multinational corporations, international financial institutions, and the private sector elite are the of our age. They are crusaders of capital, and they already have more power than any imperialist occupying army ever had in our lands. If we do not adequately understand this, we will fail to understand anything that happens in the world.