TNC’s reaction
In recent weeks we have been told over and over by our great leaders that it is vitally important for us to consume - ‘Shop Britain out of economic slowdown!’ ‘Americans! Buy goods - it's your patriotic duty!’ At the same time, certain parts of the US government are calling for reduced capital gains tax and a speeding up of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) - apparently this will help the fight against terrorism. There seems to be a rather badly hidden agenda here - surely the beneficiary of tax cuts and increased trade liberalisation is not security but corporations? This should not surprise us.

There has been little remarkable in the reaction of most corporations to the events of September 11. While individuals have demonstrated the whole gamut of human reactions from selfless heroism to violent xenophobia, TNCs have for the most part simply absorbed the shock into their normal profit-driven behaviour. It is hard not to see the immediate massive layoffs by airlines and plane manufacturers as using an available excuse for previously planned actions. Every vaguely charitable act has its accompanying press release and web page. 'Vaguely' is the operative word here - the BBC reported how supermarket firm K-Mart made a much-publicised donation of 50,000 US flags to the city of New York, while on September 16, it ran full-page ads featuring an American flag, with small print below, reading: 'Remove from newspaper. Place in window. Embrace freedom.' General Motors (GM) shares Bush's suspect take on the patriotism theme - according to GM North American president Ron Zarella, 'GM has a responsibility to help stimulate the economy by encouraging Americans to purchase vehicles.' This would translate as, 'Be a good citizen: buy a planet-trashing SUV and help us make lots of money' Hmmm. Fellow vehicle manufacturer Chrysler similarly played on the patriotism angle by launching an ad campaign for its Jeep range featuring US soldiers beating the Nazis in World War II. Unsurprisingly this did not go down well in parent company Daimler-Chrysler's homeland - Germany.

The really sickening hypocrisy is elsewhere - in the twisted, sanitised world of the arms manufacturers. Lockheed Martin, whose products fuel wars worldwide and who are responsible for thousands of deaths every year, is running a fund for victims of the bombings. The innocents killed by their 'defence hardware' are written off as 'collateral damage'; only Americans count as real people, and only when there is a publicity point to be scored.

The arms companies are doing extremely well out of September 11 - stocks in US defence companies have soared by up to 39% even as the Dow Jones average fell by 14%. Anyone supplying military equipment to the US government is now considered a sound investment.

It hardly seems worth writing that corporations are incapable of anything other than a self-interested response - even to a vast tragedy on their doorsteps. As long as these non-human entities impose their sole, blind, all-dominating aim of money-making on their staff and the societies from which they draw their non-life, we can expect nothing different. The guns will be sold to the murderers, and the oil and food and money will flow from poor to rich, leaving behind the frustration which drives people to fanaticism and terrorism as readily as to progressive rebellion.

Break the cycle - stop shopping, start acting.

An oil connection
At the time of writing, the US is engaged in talks with the ageing former king of Afghanistan, Zahir Shah, about forming a 'government-in-exile', presumably with a view to installing it if full-scale military action against the Taleban goes ahead. Deposing the Taleban may have little to do with the 'war on terrorism', but it would help the 'war for oil' which has dominated US foreign policy for most of the last century.

Afghanistan itself has some oil and gas reserves, but is more important as the only practical route for a pipeline to take natural gas and possibly oil from the rich fields of south-east Turkmenistan to the growing markets in Pakistan and India. A plan to build such a pipeline was drawn up in 1997 by a consortium including US oil giant Unocal, Saudi Arabia's Delta Oil and the government of Turkmenistan, with smaller partners from Japan, Korea, Pakistan and Russia. Unocal stressed it would not go ahead with the project until an internationally recognised government was in place in Afghanistan, and in December 1998 they pulled out of the consortium, following the US missile attacks on what was claimed to be Osama bin Laden's training camp in Afghanistan. A US-friendly regime in Kabul would remove the only significant obstacle to the resumption of the project. Is it too much to suggest that such a consideration might carry weight with the notoriously oil-friendly Bush government when considering their strategy?

Sources:
Unocal news releases:

www.unocal.com/uclnews/97news/102797a.htm

www.unocal.com/uclnews/98news/082198.htm

www.unocal.com/uclnews/98news/centgas.htm