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Being a good bourgeois utilitarian, the former president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, seven months after he lost power, tried to capitalize on his connections with the world's moneybags to assemble public and French political machinery and assume the steering wheel of a private equity firm.
In the whole world, who other than the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamed bin Khalifa, with a slavish colonial mentalit,y would come up with hundreds of millions of dollars as seed money for establishing a hedge fund for a group with roots in the oldest organs of colonizers.
Having his eyes fixated on the prospect of making large amounts of easy money, in mid-December some of Europe's most influential but defeated politicians gathered in Paris to inaugurate Sarkozy as a financial armchair of the Paris Bourse. In that meeting, the idea of how to exploit the relation between France and the desert king of Qatar with deep pools of capital took shape.
The purpose of the December meeting was to create a framework for rich Gulf investors managed by the European well-connected executives. The plan was to create a private equity fund backed by the Qatar Investment Authority, the $100 billion sovereign wealth fund that would invest in "European construction".
The decision of a huge investment made by the Emir of Qatar, a hugely wealthy Arab leader, to invest in a European construction project must be contrasted against the pitiful economic pictures of the Arab world drawn by Dr Ali Kadri, a senior Research Fellow at the National University of Singapore's Middle East Institute. In a comprehensive research paper, Kadri wrote, "Since 1980, the bulk of the Arab economies experienced a less than one percent yearly average growth of real GDP per capita, one of the highest income inequality and unemployment rates globally, the lowest rates of investment of all regions and plainly, the highest rate of armed conflict." [1]
Moral questions take a back seat
Given the dismal economic and social conditions prevalent in the Arab World, and aside from moral, ethnic and national questions, the only explanations for the emir's investment in European construction are: firstly, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces commit themselves to save and protect the rule of emir and his family as long as he fully cooperates and follows their geopolitical and economic policy; secondly, the interests of European big capital is safe-guarded in Qatar and the surrounding regions.
In that meeting, Sarkozy was not the only beneficiary. In attendance, were financial directors including Sir Simon Robertson, the British banker who was formerly president of Goldman Sachs Europe and is now chairman of Rolls Royce, and Paolo Scaroni, chief executive of ENI, the Italian energy conglomerate and former chief executive of Pilkington, a UK-headquartered glassmaker that is now a wholly owned subsidiary of the Japan-based NSG Group.
A century ago, Europeans went to other continents with money, credit, and technology and the indigenous peoples provided the labor power (service); today the Europeans expect the host countries to come up with the capital and the Europeans to provide the managerial service. The current financial and economic crisis in the US and Europe has accelerated the shift in Europe from lender to borrower.
The special feature of this deal is that the creditors are not the central banks and the International Monetary Fund, but a Third World country, in this case Qatar, where surplus finance is the result of the extraction of the resources endowed by nature, independent of commensurate human labor and talent.
White House cabinet member joins conglomerate
A glaring case of "revolving doors" here in the US was when Ron Kirk, who was Barack Obama's top international trade negotiator for four years, announced on April 1, 2013, that he is joining Gibson Dunn, a US law firm, to advise its global clients, rushing to the corporate sector after stepping down from Obama's cabinet just a few weeks ago.
Kirk, the first African-American to be appointed US trade representative, will be working from offices in Washington and Dallas, where he served as a mayor. It is not hard to figure out the connection between ex-mayor Ron Kirk becoming Obama's cabinet member and being recruited by a corporation in Dallas. It is hard to dispute the close inter-relations between corporate capital accumulation and the state apparatus as an instrument at its service.
Being fully aware of the fact that the US at this point in time has launched a trade agenda that includes high-stake talks over a Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) involving among others Japan and South Korea and the launch of negotiations with the EU, Ron Kirk could not wait a week later until President Obama could nominate the next US trade representative. (Kirk announced his resignation in late January).
A great number of former senior federal employers and congressmen and women join the ranks of an army of lobbyists stationed along Washington's K Street which is just a few miles away from the US Capitol building, the seat of power. To have intercourse between these two communities - the lobbyist and "people's representatives" no one has to use public transportation.
Congress, Covington and Blackwater (Xe Services)
Metaphorically between the two bodies - international lobbyists and the Capitol - is a revolving door that shuffles the former "people's representatives" into high paid dealers and wheelers; conversely it shuffles the former hired guns into congressmen and women at the service of big capital. In both positions - as congressmen or as corporate executive officers - they serve US and foreign monopoly and oligopoly corporations.
In 2007 after leaving his congressional seat, one of darlings of the Democratic Party, Dick Gephardt, became a lobbyist for a number of corporations. Another corporate enthusiast who jumped into the arms of Covington and Burling after the 2012 election was Representative Howard Berman (D-CA), who accepted work for the law firm as senior advisor. He was a former chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and a member of the House Judiciary Committee. Berman is now joining the company's public policy and global affairs office, the primary function of the firm.
The customers of Covington and Burling are among the biggest and most ferocious international corporations, involved in US military bases, war supplies, arms production and sales, and so forth.
Among these are the following:
1. KBR, formerly Kellogg Brown and Root, is an American engineering, construction and private military contracting company formerly a subsidiary of infamous Halliburton, headquarters in Houston. The M W Kellogg Co, Brown and Root, KBR and its predecessors have received many contracts with the US military including during World War II, the war in Korea, the Vietnam War and the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
2. Southern Peru Copper Corporation (SPCC). According to a September 2003 press release of SPCC, Covington and Burling agreed on behalf of the copper company to fight against a lawsuit that was brought against it under the Alien Tort Claims by Peruvian citizens charging the copper company with polluting water sources of communities and causing illnesses and deaths. The court took the side of the copper corporation and the sentence went against Peruvian citizens, thanks to Covington and Burling.
3. The former Xe Services, formerly known as Blackwater and now known as Academi. As you noticed, the companies that have been exposed in the past for these criminal involvements have tried to change the title of the corporation. In April 2010, the corporation which was infamous as Blackwater hired Covington and Burling to lobby on "government contracts". In a lobbying report issued in April 2010, The Hill newspaper named the following staff members of Covington and Burling who were involved in the cases originated by Xe: a former Treasury deputy secretary during the Clinton administration: Brian Smith, an ex-Clinton White House aide; former congressman Michael Barnes (D-Md.): Martin Gold, a former floor advisor to ex-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn), and William Wichterman, a former White House aide in the George W Bush Administration.
What is disturbing is that the people who claim to be supporting the US Constitution and human rights are practically in partnership with criminals and gangsters in a corporate shell.
Last but not the least important is the case of Chiquita International Brands. Eric Holder, the 82nd Attorney General of the US, assumed by many as a civil rights fighter, in 2007 defended the banana company against the lawsuits brought by the relatives of people slain by hired guns paid by Chiquita executive directors in Latin America to stop the workers from unionizing and demanding higher wages. In the process, the court sentenced Chiquita for hiring terrorists against the workers.
Ardeshir Ommani, president of the American Iranian Friendship Committee (AIFC), is a writer and political analyst with a background in political economy. AIFC's website is www.iranaifc.com. The author may be contacted at: ardeshiromm@verizon.net
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have their say.Please click hereif you are interested in contributing. Articles submitted for this section allow our readers to express their opinions and do not necessarily meet the same editorial standards of Asia Times Online's regular contributors.
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