CAIRO: Do you know that some 100 multinational companies budgets make up 20 percent of the world s funds? That 51 private monetary establishments own several companies worldwide, compared to some 49 which remain controlled by governments? What do you make of the fact that two American motoring companies sales (General Motors and Ford) exceed the total local production of all the sub-Saharan states put together? Do you know that the assets of the mammoth American IT company (IBM), along with those of a British oil company (BP) and General Motors, swamp the resources of the majority of small nations? What if the revenues of the well-known hypermarket chain Wal-Mart outshine those of the Eastern and central European nations including Poland, Ukraine, Romania, the Czech Repbublic, Hungary and Slovakia? To top it off, a huge number of mergers that took place during the last decade have dwarfed the activities of companies that have been operating for decades. And what would you make of business empires that spearhead anti-smoking and anti-starvation campaigns merely to exploit such issues to promote their sales while pretending to champion a human cause? Doesn t that hint to a global system in which all such entities and practices thrive in a world still being hit by military conflicts, starvation, unemployment and social injustice? When democracy has failed to co-exist with dictatorship, can it be fuelled by such an overwhelming global system, a cornerstone of which is democratic rule? All these mind-boggling facts appeared in the first chapter of "The Silent Takeover, Global Capitalism and The Death of Democracy . Authored by British researcher Noreena Hertz in 2002, the Arabic translation by Sedki Hattab was published last month as part of Alam Al Marifa series issued by the National Council for Culture and Arts in Kuwait. This is the second time a title such as this comes to the notice of local readers of the series after "Economy that Exudes Poverty by German specialist Horst Afheldt, who urged capitalists to cement liberal economy with social equality. While Afheldt focused on the case of Germany in the modern global era, Hertz, a professor at Cambridge University, spoke of the repercussions of that economy in the West as it relates to the entire world; a world that remains swept by the former s effort to unify the globe through market economy. But Hertz s new addition to the traditional criticism of the issue is that the system in its modern form is the biggest obstacle to democracy which the West claims to be spreading in the Third World. Citing "farces like the re-election of US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the author reiterated that the market economy is the biggest blow to democratic rule even in the largest democratic nations, where politicians jobs have now been restricted to serving the interests of capitalists. No wonder the star of politicians is waning, wrote Hertz. People are now aware of the contradictions of politicians interests which are no longer people-oriented. The governments that had once battled for the cause of land and freedom are currently struggling unilaterally to boost the market s indicators and find the ideal environments for attracting these multinational companies. The role of the citizens has focused on providing government services and infrastructure to these companies at the lowest cost. Where are we being led by a system where the consumer rather than the citizen is given the priority, where economy has taken the upper hand over politics? For Hertz it is a kind of monopoly that endangers democracy, wherein the government is encouraged to sell its citizens cheap, push the state to the sidelines and place the companies center stage. We re at a crossroads and unless we challenge this silent monopoly, test our beliefs and own up to our guilt in creating this system, we re bound to lose everything, wrote Hertz.
