'Silent Coup'—How corporations rule the world w/Matt Kennard | The Chris Hedges Report

of the numbers and   in many countries private security, mainly security at the moment, but private security,   outnumbers the police. So what does that mean? And then, obviously, there is also the privatization of the military. And the first book I wrote was about the American military. And Donald Rumsfeld gave this famous speech at the Pentagon on September 10, 2001, where he basically said we need to privatize the services of the Department of Defense. He was forgotten after the atrocities of the next day, but the plan was fulfilled. And in 2007 or 2008 there were more private contractors working for the Pentagon than Department of Defense personnel.

And there is the Wagner Group in Ukraine. This is a very, very important trend and we are also at the beginning of it.  This sounds like a crazy dystopian idea, but there's no reason you couldn't see two

corporations

fighting over resources soon. Because the other thing about this whole system is that there is no regulation.  There is an informal regulatory framework that many

corporations

subscribe to private security companies, but there is no way to enforce it and it is like a gentleman's agreement. And that's something that Western countries and Russia have colluded on because they don't want to regulate it.

It gives them one of the most important facets of this system for the states and one of the main benefits for them is the lack of accountability. It's plausible deniability: if you get a private company to do it, all the mechanisms can be enforced; in the UK, the Ministry of Defense or in the US, the Department of Defence, they disappear. We cannot send Freedom of Information Act requests to private contractors; it is much, much easier to silence atrocities, so it is in the interest of states to outsource this in terms of accountability. It's really worrying.  And that continues with what you were asking about Rivera in El Salvador.   It is much, much easier to cover up atrocities if corporations commit them and if it is outside the state framework.

So yes. It's going to be a very, very important problem in the future. Wherever we went... We wrote the book in chronological order: we started with ISDS, continued with aid, and then moved on to EEZs. As we looked at SEZs and the destruction of physical space, we began to understand that the

world

that was being created by this corporate system, by this 1%

rule

, was a

world

of a small elite that was getting richer and richer. and then a society abroad that was becoming increasingly desperate and destitute. And in that scenario, that 1%, or even less than 1%, has to isolate itself from the rest of that society that it is destroying, and has to protect it with these private security forces.

It is a symptom of the disease and the disease is corporate power. Excellent. That was Matt Kennard, former Financial Times

report

er and co-founder and chief researcher of Declassified UK. I want to thank The Real News Network and its production team: Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, David Hebden and Kayla Rivara. You can find me at

chris

hedges

.substack.com.