'SILENT COUP': How Corporations Intimidate, Bully & Rule The World

International corporate governance bullies, flouts and crushes any attempts by the former colonial world to enact development on their own terms.

The Chris Hedges Report (9/22/23)

The 20th Century saw a great global uprising against European imperialism as the former colonial countries shook off their shackles and rose up for independence. More than a half century later, global inequality is sharper than ever before. To understand the current predicament of the vast majority of the world's people, we must understand the intervening decades.

Matt Kennard and Claire Provost's book, Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy, looks inside the international architecture of global corporate governance that exists to flout and crush any attempts by the former colonial world to enact development on their own terms. Matt Kennard joins The Chris Hedges Report for a look at this intriguing and essential history.

47-minute video

The World Of Global Corporate Rule

“When we were  looking at SEZs [Special Economic Zones] and the chiseling off of physical space, we started understanding that the world that was being created by this corporate system, by this rule of the 1%, was a world of a small elite which was becoming richer and richer and then a society on the outside that was becoming more and more desperate and destitute. And in that scenario, that 1%, or even less than 1% has to wall itself off from the rest of that society that it's  destroying, and it has to guard that with these private security forces. It's a symptom of  the disease and the disease is corporate power.”

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THE SHADOW LEGAL SYSTEM: How Corporations Have Overthrown Democracy

Planet Critical (11/1/23)

Because the developing nation changed its mind about Prospera building a charter city on its territory. This case, which could bankrupt Honduras, will be judged in a back room of the World Bank by three people, none of whom are obliged to even have a law degree.

Matt Kennard, investigative journalist and author of Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy, explains the origin of this shadowy legal system, and how it has infiltrated politics, skews policies, and traps developing nations into exploitative relationships with some of the world’s biggest corporations, definitively undermining the democratic process.

1-hour, 9-minute video

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Mexican Land Defenders Shut Down Toxic Mine. Now Its Corporate Canadian Backers Demand Damages

By Tamara Pearson
Truthout (7/20/24)

Puebla, Mexico — Canadian gold mining company Almaden Minerals has announced that it will seek arbitration against Mexico, demanding damages of at least $200 million for “financial losses” after its mining concessions in the mountains of Puebla State were canceled.

But, having lied and asserted there were no Indigenous communities in the area, the company had its concessions canceled by the Mexican Supreme Court due to the legally required Indigenous consultation process not having occurred. That followed years of resistance by Nahua and Totonaco Indigenous communities in the affected municipality of Ixtacamaxtitlan, in the Sierra Norte mountains, concerned about irrversible environmental damage.

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“From 1960 to 2021, rich countries drained $152 trillion from the Global South through resource robbery, selling the Global South’s raw materials, exploiting labor and economically benefiting from manufacturing in the Global South. That is around $2.2 trillion annually, enough to end extreme poverty globally many times over.”

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Almaden has been operating in Mexico via its subsidiary Minera Gorrión, on a single project: the Ixtacamaxtitlan mines. It announced on June 17 that it was seeking arbitration against Mexico under the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) — a so-called free-trade agreement that includes Mexico and Canada. The company is claiming financial losses from the Mexican government, including the voiding of mineral titles and refusal to issue an environmental permit. It has filed its request for arbitration with the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Dispute (ICSID), and on June 27 announced it had $9.5 million in litigation funding.

Almaden had not yet started its open-pit mining when the concessions were canceled. Typically, mines spend five to 15 years to go from an initial exploration phase to full-scale mining. Almaden arrived in Mexico in 2001, when then-President Vicente Fox gave it an exploration concession. It began exploration of two mountain areas covering 14,229 hectares belonging to 15 Indigenous communities in 2009, and completed its feasibility study in 2018. In that study, it claimed that there were enough minerals available for an average annual production of 108,500 ounces of gold and 7.06 million ounces of silver.

Marketing Environmental Destruction

Even at the exploration stage, Almaden was already causing severe damage. The Ejidos Union pointed out discrepancies between the amount of drilling that Almaden reported to its shareholders and the amount authorized by Mexican authorities, and that the drilling damaged aquifers, depleted springs and killed livestock. (Ejidos are communal lands awarded by the government to mostly Indigenous communities that lacked colonial documentation of their collective ownership.)

Communities spent four years conducting their own human rights impact study, and found that there were negative impacts on the environment, water and health during the exploration stage, as well as a risk of forced displacement.

Divide & conquer

Hence, the company worked hard to get communities on its side, activist leader Miguel Sánchez Olvera told Truthout. Sánchez, a member of the Totonaco Regional Council and Indigenous Totonaco farmer in Olintla, in the Sierra Norte mountains, said the company would hand out presents on Mother’s Day and at other events.

“That’s how they work, dividing [communities] and offering support. They were building some infrastructure for drinking water so that they could be accepted, but with time, those people who supported them stopped, despite all their presents, because they saw that the company is here illegally and doesn’t benefit the people,” Sánchez said.

Even after the Supreme Court ruling…

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