WikiLeaks and other reformers: has Machiavelli met his match?

That's why it's so interesting that Stratfor emails reveal the US Department of Homeland Security concerns about the potential risks of the Occupy Wall Street movement to critical infrastructure, "critical infrastructure" being the assets, systems, and networks, whether physical or virtual, so vital to the United States that their incapacitation or destruction would have a debilitating effect on security, national economic security, public health or safety, or any combination thereof. They don't mention that the private sector owns or controls 85-90 per cent of the United States' recognised national assets. So who are the princes? And to what lengths would they and their governmental minions go to protect their empire?

When being interviewed about Stratfor's emails about Bhopal Andy Bichlbaum, a member of The Yes Men, made this astute observation:

...what Stratfor seems to be really a bit obsessed with is whether we or other organizations are going to draw this into a bigger critique of corporate power... they seem to be really concerned that we, Amnesty, Greenpeace, etc., would be broadening this into a systematic critique and attacking the basis of corporate power. And it's interesting that that's what they were concerned with, rather than anything to do with the exact bottom line of Dow itself. And that might be a clue that they were really concerned about systemic critique and, you know, making statements that could affect policy. Maybe that's also why they've been so afraid of Occupy Wall Street....

Equally telling is Stratfor's 'Client Project-must read' 2008 email about threats facing chemical companies and their products, like nationalisation of oil, increased regulation or even talk of regulation.

What it all comes down to is that the greatest threat to monopolies, oligopolies, plutocracies and to neoliberal capitalism itself is reform.

Machiavelli knew that 'the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order, this lukewarmness arising partly from fear of their adversaries, who have the laws in their favour; and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had actual experience of it.'

Enter WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, a person and an organisation capable of achieving reform because of the information they publish. Or Anonymous, a network of computer hackers that neutralises Machiavelli's essential requirement for 'the powerful to disguise their character well, and to be a great feigner and dissembler, by hacking thoughts and strategies off a computer system and putting them out for publication'. Organisations and people like these are the harbingers of reform because they expose the truth: they expose for all to see the blatant mendacity, insatiable greed and calculated inhumanity of the economic elite and their political stooges.

What would Machiavelli do to destroy reformers and preserve the (old order) empire? Be ready to break both morals and religious principles when needed? Issue economic sanctions and red Interpol notices? Be prepared to waterboard, incarcerate, isolate or assassinate the enemy? The answer is an unreserved "Yes". Any measures necessary to drive the wolves out. As Henry Kissinger said:

There are some situations in which the more the survival is threatened the narrower the margin of choice becomes unless you can say you would rather have your society destroyed than to pursue the marginal means.

The problem for the plutocrats is that horse has bolted. Even if they silence reformers like Assange - and it's all stops out to do that - the people of many countries around the world are already hostile and feel oppressed. Attempts to censor the internet and crack down on social media will only intensify those feelings. Over the last 30 years people have watched what Machiavelli described as cruelties ill committed (ie increasing rather than diminishing with time): the poor get poorer and the rich get richer. The plutocrats are well aware of that: America's National Defence Authorisation Act is a clue that the powerful have become afraid of their own shadow.

As Arundhati Roy suggests in her 2012 Anuradha Ghandy Memorial Trust Lecture 'Capitalism - A Ghost Story', capitalism is going through a crisis. The international financial meltdown is closing in and huge corporations are sitting on large cash reserves that they don't know where to invest, which she describes as a structural crack in capitalism. More terrifying than anything is having money that they can't make grow. Roy's lecture demonstrates the catastrophic results of Machiavelli's Prince operating in the neo-liberal economic model.

In the aftermath of International Women's Day 2012 celebrations I urge all women to watch Arundhati Roy's lecture and to read 'The Prince'. Women aspiring to sit at the boardroom table shouldn't imitate the alpha males operating in their Machiavellian corporate world but need to be forewarned and forearmed to be able to change it. May you all give life and legs to corporate and social responsibility and may we all support the reformers.