Hidden Agendas (Paperback)

The world Pilger describes is one where the power of multinational corporations is ever increasing at the expense of the rest of us. In Australia and the United States, wages are stagnating or declining for the majority of the population and full time, secure employment is greatly diminishing in favor of part time, service oriented, insecure, low wage type of work, a major factor why the American economy is "booming" as we are constanly assured by its pundits. The "outsourcing" of employment to cheap, repressed, sweatshop labor in countries like Indonesia, Vietnam and Burma will only perpetuate this system. It is a world where the major industrial powers can attempt to put together an agreement called the Multilateral Agreement on Investment at the Organization For Economic And Commercial Development (OECD) that would abolish laws in its signatory countries protecting labor, consumers, the environement, etc. and services for the general population against transnational corporations and allow these corporations to sue governments at an international tribunal but make corporations immune from lawsuits by governments or citizens. It is a world where, at least in the United States, this treaty goes almost completely uncovered by the mainstream media. It is a world where the United States can back the murder by death squads of tens of thousands of people in Central America in the 80's yet its fulminations about the menace of terrorism against it are accepted unquestioningly by the Western media.

In Australia, beginning with the Hawke labor government, and in the U.S. under the Reaganites, the standard of living for the general population greatly declined, poverty rates shot up, social services were cut, a very regressive tax system was instituted, and so on. But Britain, beginning with Thatcher,and continuing with "New Labor" tops them all. In Britain, childhood diseases which had been virtually extinct since the Victorian era made a reappearance as did widespread child malnutrition. Most of British industry was destroyed, one exception being the arms industry, receiving much of its research and development from British taxpayer money, as they receive taxpayer money from the subsidies given to fascist and genocidal governments like Turkey and Indonesia to purchase their murderous weapons. One particularly interesting example is the case of Robin Cook, the current foreign secretary, who while a Labor backbencher in the 70's and 80's vigorously denounced Labor and Tory governments for selling weapons to fascist and genocidal regimes such as Indonesia as it was committing the worst genocide relative to population since the Holocaust in East Timor. But by the time he became foreign secretary in 1997, he continued to support and even extended arms sales to Indonesia and other murderous regimes, despite all the hooplah about his new "ethical foreign policy," even repeating the same lies which he had earlier exposed, such as denying the British Hawk aircraft were being used in East Timor.

Pilger also investigates the "arms to Iraq" scandal of the 80's when Margaret Thatcher, like Reagan and Bush were good buddies of Saddam Hussein. After no longer able to openly sell arms to Iraq after an official ban in 1985, the Thatcher government and especially the secret arm of its defense ministry, the International Military Services, resorted to clandestine methods, such as using the fireworks company Astra and its subsidiaries, unknown to its chairman Gerald James whom Pilger interviews along with former foreign office Iraq desk head Mark Higson, placing phony end-user certificates (often marked for Jordan) on the weapons which would be passed on to Jordan or Singapore or whomever and then be passed on to Saddam. British military sales and other investment in Iraq greatly increased after 1985. Much of this was exposed in the Scott inquiry years later, but was completely whitewashed by Lord Scott in his ridiculous final report as Pilger shows.

Pilger devotes the mid-section of the book to discussing Burma (now officially called Myanmar). This nation, very rich in natural resources, descended into unbelievable poverty under the dictatorship of the crazed New Win, 1962-88, and has since been taken over by a much worse regime of military gangsters who have plundered the country with the cooperation of transnational corporations. I was not aware of the depth of the human rights violations in Burma, some of the worst in the world, until reading these chapters where Pilger provides documentation from human rights organizations and eyewitness accounts from his clandestine visit to Burma to make a film about the country with David Munro. Perhaps the worst instance in Burma is the railroad being built to accomodate the international oil companies Total, Premiere and Unocal building of a pipeline to transfer Burma's natural gas into Thailand. On this railroad, as in all the other sites of the building of infrastructure to accomodate foreign investment, the laborers are all forced from their villages by the military wheather they are sick, elderly, pregnant, or children, so that they may "volunteer" to labor on these projects where they labor under horrendous conditions, often suffering torture and murder if they refuse work because it would interfere with their very miniscule income from farming or if they become too sick or weary during their work. In addition, millions have been driven from their homes so that hotels or tourist roadways or golf courses for rich foreigners may be built or as part of the army's counterinsurgency campaign against the oppressed Shan minority. The leading dissident in Burma is Aung San Su Kyi, whom Pilger interviews in her home, daugter of Burma's famous independence leader Aung San. She won the nobel peace prize in 1991 while she was under house arrest. She was under house arrest from 1989 to 1995, but her movement is still greatly restricted. Her movement, the National League for Democracy, has been greatly decimated by arrests, murder, torture and draconian prison sentences against its members, but it is still in business and going strong in the underground.

Pilger moves on to discuss the activities of Rupert Murdoch as the politicians in Britain, the U.S. and Australia put aside the meagerest anti-trust laws to allow him to gobble more and more of the media in their countries (especially in Australia where he owns most of it), further ingraining the peculiar practices of sleaze and sensationalism which he pioneered, and accumulate billions and billions of dollars and move his money from country to country, from tax haven to tax haven to avoid paying the hundreds of millions of dollars of tax money he owes.

He moves on to discuss the Murdochization and Americanization of the media in Britain with concerns about adhering to "market competitiveness"--i.e. shorter soundbytes and sensationalism-- replacing any pretense of serious journalism. His account of the British media, examining their extreme pro-government and business bias in their coverage of the events in Northern Ireland and their coverage of the various strikes which broke out accross Britain in the 80's and the close relationship and favors taken from the British government by its top journalists--particularly in the BBC--is particularly interesting in its similarity to the situation in my country. His relatively brief account of his own work in the British media is particularly intersting.

Finally, he closes with sections on Vietnam and South Africa, countries where he spent considerable time in the past. In Vietnam, after years of barbaric American bombing and embargo because of its opposition to their friends Pol Pot and Deng Xiaoping in the 80's, the neoliberal program in place since 1986 has risen the number of people in absolute poverty to seventy percent, along with sharp rises in child malnutrion and the other usual maladies of globalization. Pilger interviews Vietnamese who are still strong even as conditions become worse in their country, such as doctors at hospitals who are suffering severe shortages, as a result of the cutting off of government funding and the astronomical expenses required to import the equipment from foreign corporations, to treat the most basic diseases and injuries. He also interviews a couple of foreign tycoons who have rushed in to take advantage of the very cheap and repressed workforce who labor under some of the worst conditions in the world.

Finally Pilger ends in South Africa, where the end of political apartheid in fact has brought the extension of economic apartheid with the black population sinking into even greater poverty on their bantustans, denied most of the basic social services the Mandela government had promised them in 94,' as the wealth of the rich white minority and the Black elite skyrockets and foreign corporations rush in to take advantage of the very cheap and oppressed black

But Pilger also tells us some great stories about the best of the human spirit. He celebrates the courage and integrity of people like the nobel prize winning Aung San Suu Kyi and the four working class English women who heroically destroyed a British war plane which was about to be transported to Indonesia.

This book is not only a call to an authentic consciousness that has the courage to sees things the way they really are. It's also an inspiring call to action. Read it.