They Saw Multinational Corporate Power Coming in 1974

What Two Forgotten Books Got Right About Corporate Power, and What They Missed

By: Drs. Robert Malone and Jill Glasspool Malone | October 28, 2026 / Book Review

Audio Version:

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An Old Textbook

In the early 1980s, Robert was taking political science courses when he encountered Global Reach: The Power of the Multinational Corporations, published in 1974 by Richard Barnet and Ronald Müller. Its opening sentence made an extraordinary claim:

“The men who run the global corporations are the first in history with the organization, technology, money, and ideology to make a credible try at managing the world as an integrated unit.”

Our copy has long since disappeared from the library, but the connections that the book wove regarding globalism stayed with us. In our previous essay, we examined how financial interests have driven the push toward a single global market, one in which money, goods, and corporations can move across borders with as little interference as possible. Our thinking about these issues began with books like this one and conversations we had in our twenties.

Barnet and Müller saw the outlines of today’s global economy more than fifty years ago. In 1994, Barnet returned to the subject with John Cavanagh in Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order. Both books deserve another look, not because their authors were right about everything, but because they understood something that political leaders have spent decades overlooking: multinational corporations were becoming powerful enough to reshape governments, economies, and entire societies.

We remember Robert discussing the New World Order publicly in early 2022, drawing on books he had read as a political science student decades earlier. By then, even raising the subject invited accusations of conspiracy thinking. The hostility has hardly disappeared.

In September 2025, Democratic minority staff of the U.S. Senate Finance Committee issued a report declaring, “Dr. Malone’s conspiracy views extend beyond vaccines.” The report went on to accuse him of promoting theories about a secret, totalitarian world government called the New World Order, citing our 2024 book, PsyWar: Enforcing the New World Order, and quoting Robert’s criticism of the administrative and deep state as evidence.

Yet the underlying questions about multinational corporate power, international governance, and national sovereignty have been debated seriously for more than fifty years, including by prominent intellectuals on the political left. Apparently, discussing these issues was legitimate when progressive scholars raised them in 1974, but became grounds for accusations of conspiracy thinking when Robert revisited related questions decades later.

The report makes no effort to distinguish the documented growth of international corporate and institutional power from its allegation that Robert believes in a secret world government. That distinction matters, and dismissing the entire subject through political labeling does nothing to answer the questions Barnet and Müller raised half a century ago.

Richard Barnet knew Washington from the inside. He joined the Kennedy administration’s Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in 1961, working under John J. McCloy, and left two years later, disillusioned with how government decisions were made. In 1963, he and Marcus Raskin founded the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive Washington think tank. Ronald Müller was an economist at American University, while John Cavanagh, Barnet’s later coauthor, was an Institute fellow who eventually became its director. Barnet died in 2004.

These were men of the political left, and their proposed solutions generally involved more public oversight, community ownership, and government intervention. Our own thinking has moved in a different direction, influenced by Austrian economics, natural law, and subsidiarity, the principle that decisions should be made as close as possible to the people affected by them.

We disagree with many of Barnet’s proposed remedies, but his diagnosis is harder to dismiss. He and his coauthors saw the same concentration of economic power, the same erosion of local independence, and the same escape from public accountability that free-market critics are warning about today. Yet fifty years later, Democratic staff of the U.S. Senate Finance Committee used Robert’s examination of related issues to portray him as a conspiracy theorist.

The irony is difficult to miss. Ideas that progressive intellectuals once debated openly are now being used to discredit people like Robert, who question the growing concentration of corporate and international power. Where critics from opposite political traditions once recognized the same problem, Democratic Senators and their staff now invoke accusations of conspiracy thinking to attack those raising similar questions. Why are some of today’s Democrats so eager to dismiss ideas their own intellectual predecessors considered important enough to write entire books about?

What the Book “Global Reach: The Power of the Multinational Corporations” Argued

Barnet and Müller compared multinational corporations with history’s great empire builders. Alexander, Napoleon, Hitler, and the British Empire had attempted to organize vast territories through military and political conquest. Global corporations were building a new kind of empire, using money, technology, trade, and centralized planning rather than military conquest. Over the following fifty years, they would succeed in extending their influence across national economies and governments worldwide.

A corporation operating in dozens of countries decides where to manufacture its products, where to borrow money, where to hire workers, and where to report its profits. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, General Electric could pay workers in Singapore just 30 cents an hour to assemble components, compared with $3.40 an hour for American workers in Ashland, Massachusetts. These were wages of that era, not today's rates, and represented an elevenfold difference in labor costs. Between 1957 and 1967, GE had already established 61 overseas plants, demonstrating how multinational corporations were taking advantage of enormous international wage disparities.

The authors called the executives making these decisions the “World Managers,” and some were remarkably candid about their ambitions. IBM executive Jacques Maisonrouge described the world as

“one economic unit” and declared that “the world’s political structures are completely obsolete.”

Dow Chemical chairman Carl Gerstacker went further. In remarks prepared for a 1972 White House conference, he wrote,

“I have long dreamed of buying an island owned by no nation.” Such a corporate headquarters would be “beholden to no nation or society,” and Dow, he suggested, “could even pay any natives handsomely to move elsewhere.”

Gerstacker removed those passages before delivering his speech, but told the authors he was serious. He had reportedly already declined an offer involving the Minerva atoll near Fiji.

What makes Global Reach particularly interesting is that its authors did not predict the disappearance of national governments. They predicted something more subtle: multinational corporations did not need to eliminate the nation-state. They needed to change what governments did. Governments would protect the movement of capital and goods, provide infrastructure, maintain a suitable workforce, and manage the social consequences of corporate decisions. When economic disruption produced unrest, governments would be expected to contain it. Corporations would make the economic decisions, while governments would create the conditions for those decisions to succeed. Today, this is often described as the pursuit of “frictionless global commerce,” in which national borders, regulations, and local interests are treated as obstacles to corporate efficiency and profitability.

The Business of Moving Money

One of the book’s strongest arguments concerned transfer pricing. When one subsidiary of a multinational company sells goods or services to another subsidiary, the parent company has considerable influence over the internal price. By manipulating those prices, corporations can shift reported profits from higher-tax countries into lower-tax jurisdictions. Governments lose tax revenue, while smaller domestic competitors lack the same opportunities. A former Treasury official told the authors, “Prices in an economic sense do not exist. The price charged is strictly a matter of relative power.”

Even the Internal Revenue Service struggled to enforce fair pricing between corporate subsidiaries, while developing countries faced an even greater disadvantage. One Latin American regulator had enough staff to examine only about 400 of 9,000 pending technology contracts. The authors also described how global corporations could dominate credit markets, as international banks preferred lending to subsidiaries of Ford or Pfizer rather than local laundries, farms, and manufacturers.

During Argentina’s 1971 credit squeeze, domestic companies reduced borrowing by 42 percent while multinational companies increased theirs by 20 percent. When Salvador Allende took office in Chile, New York banks reduced the country’s short-term credit from $220 million to $35 million.

The consequences were predictable. Large international firms could survive financial conditions that crippled smaller competitors. Barnet and Müller estimated that fewer than a thousand individuals made the principal decisions at the world’s 200 largest industrial companies and 20 largest banks. “These individuals,” they wrote, “are the planners for our society.” Their concern was not simply that corporations had become wealthy, but that economic decisions affecting millions of people were being concentrated in remarkably few hands.

The book attracted criticism. Harvard economist Raymond Vernon challenged the authors’ arguments in Foreign Policy, and Commentary published a skeptical review. Nevertheless, Global Reach became one of the earliest widely read warnings about the political consequences of globalization.

Global Dreams: Twenty Years Later

In early 1994, just weeks after NAFTA took effect, Barnet and John Cavanagh published Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order. Their opening observation was striking:

“The world is getting smaller, as people like to say, but it is not coming together.” Global economic integration, they argued, was “stimulating political and social disintegration.”

They described four interconnected systems through which multinational corporations were reshaping the world:

1. a Global Cultural Bazaar of entertainment, television, films, and music;

2. a Global Shopping Mall of international consumer brands;

3. a Global Workplace where production moved toward cheaper labor;

4. and a Global Financial Network through which money crossed borders with little effective oversight.

The authors estimated that the world’s 300 largest corporations controlled roughly a quarter of global productive assets. They profiled Sony, Bertelsmann, Philip Morris, Ford, and Citicorp, showing how these companies were building businesses that operated across national boundaries. Their cultural observations were particularly revealing.

While American automobile, television, and machine-tool manufacturers were losing ground, American entertainment and branded consumer products were spreading everywhere. In 1989, packaged cultural products generated an American trade surplus of approximately $8 billion, surpassed only by food and aerospace. Add McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Levi’s, and Marlboro, and the authors concluded that

“the American dream is the nation’s number-one export.”

America was exporting its culture even as it was losing its factories.

The financial system concerned them even more. They compared international currency trading to a chain of gambling casinos, estimating that no more than 10 percent of currency transactions were directly connected to trade in goods and services. In September 1992, speculative pressure forced Britain and Italy out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism and drove currency adjustments elsewhere in Europe. The authors also cited a Public Citizen investigation finding that 108 of 111 members of three important American trade-advisory committees represented corporations or industry organizations. The people helping write the rules of international commerce were overwhelmingly drawn from the institutions that stood to benefit.

What They Got Right

Fifty years later, much of what these authors predicted has happened. Financial power became even more concentrated, although the institutions exercising that power have changed. In 1971, bank trust departments held 22 percent of the voting shares of publicly traded American corporations. Today, BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street collectively manage tens of trillions of dollars and exercise substantial voting influence over major American companies. These firms do not personally own all the assets they manage; much of that money belongs to pension funds, retirement savers, and other investors. But asset managers usually exercise proxy voting authority and influence corporate governance on behalf of those clients. Meanwhile, private equity, sovereign wealth funds, and other nonbank financial institutions have become major forces in corporate ownership and investment.

The global workplace also arrived much as predicted. Global Reach described Zenith laying off 7,000 workers after moving production to Taiwan. Bulova’s president offered an almost perfect summary of the emerging system: “We are able to beat foreign competition because we are the foreign competition.” After China entered the World Trade Organization in 2001, American manufacturing communities experienced another wave of disruption.

Economists have attributed roughly two million or more American job losses during the 1999–2011 period to increased Chinese import competition, depending on the study and employment measure. The effects were visible in furniture towns such as Martinsville and Bassett, Virginia, and textile communities throughout the Carolinas. Factories closed, jobs disappeared, and local tax bases shrank. For the multinational corporation, production had become more efficient. For the communities left behind, the economic and social costs were enormous.

International tax avoidance became another major political issue, but the proposed solution introduced a new problem. In 2021, more than 130 jurisdictions endorsed an OECD-backed agreement establishing a 15 percent global minimum corporate tax for large multinational companies. Although the taxes would be collected by national governments rather than an international treasury, the agreement created a framework for coordinating national tax policy and limiting competition between countries.

In January 2026, the Trump administration secured an agreement exempting U.S.-headquartered companies from its principal cross-border tax provisions. The larger question remains: should preventing multinational tax avoidance require governments to surrender some of their independence over taxation? Once again, a problem created by globalization was being used to justify another layer of international governance. Another self-licking ice cream cone.

The authors also recognized the danger of government rescuing institutions considered too important to fail. In 1971, Congress authorized a $250 million federal loan guarantee for Lockheed after the company’s bankers sought government assistance. They called it “bankers’ socialism.” In 2008, Washington used vastly larger interventions to stabilize the banking system, raising the same uncomfortable question: why should private institutions keep the profits from risky decisions while taxpayers absorb the losses when those decisions threaten the broader economy?

Finally, the political backlash arrived. Brexit in 2016, Donald Trump’s electoral victories, and renewed challenges to international institutions all reflected, to varying degrees, public resistance to political and economic decisions made far from the communities affected by them. The authors were right that economic integration could generate political fragmentation rather than global harmony.

What They Missed

The nation-state did not disappear. China demonstrated that a powerful government could direct major corporations rather than merely accommodate them, while Western governments showed that they could exclude Russian and Iranian institutions from important parts of the international financial system.

In 2026, Washington completed its withdrawal from the World Health Organization, announced its withdrawal or cessation of participation in 66 international organizations and entities, and declined to extend the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement during its scheduled review. These demonstrate that national governments still possess considerable power when their leaders choose to exercise it. Unfortunately, all of these executive decisions can be overturned on inauguration day, January, 2029.

Globalized Corporatism

Corporate executives, financial institutions, industry associations, and government officials increasingly participate in overlapping systems of international policymaking. Banking standards are developed through institutions centered in Basel, while trade agreements and regulatory arrangements are negotiated through organizations based in Geneva.

Perhaps the clearest illustration is the World Economic Forum (WEF), founded by Klaus Schwab in 1971, just three years before Global Reach was published. The WEF openly describes its mission as promoting public-private cooperation, bringing together multinational corporate executives, heads of government, international organizations, and other influential figures to develop common priorities. Although the WEF has no authority to enact laws, its meetings and ongoing partnerships provide opportunities to shape policy agendas outside ordinary democratic processes. It is remarkably close to the world Barnet and Müller described, one in which corporate and political leaders increasingly work together to determine the direction of national and international economic policy.

Large corporations can afford the lawyers, lobbyists, compliance departments, and technical experts needed to influence complex international rules. Small businesses generally cannot, which is one reason regulatory complexity can strengthen the very companies it is supposedly intended to restrain. Corporatism, by its very nature, restrains and impedes competition and a free-market economy.

We have described this convergence of corporate and political influence as globalized corporatism. It does not require a secret conspiracy. It can emerge when powerful institutions find that their interests overlap and cooperate to advance them.

The Global Power They Could Not Have Imagined

There was another development Barnet and Müller could scarcely have anticipated in 1974. Multinational corporations would eventually control not only the movement of goods, capital, and employment, but much of the infrastructure through which people communicate, obtain information, and conduct business.

Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and other technology giants introduced an entirely new dimension of corporate power. Their influence extends beyond ordinary market competition into digital communications, cloud computing, advertising, and the distribution of information. Decisions made inside these companies can affect what billions of people see, read, purchase, and discuss. Their automated algorithms determine what gets seen and not seen.

When governments pressure or collaborate with technology companies to influence public discourse, the distinction between private corporate decisions and government action becomes increasingly important. The COVID-19 period exposed just how consequential those relationships could become, particularly when government officials and digital platforms worked together on content moderation and public-health messaging.

Barnet and Müller worried about corporate executives making economic decisions beyond the effective reach of national governments. They could not have foreseen a world in which a handful of private companies would also exercise enormous influence over the infrastructure of public debate. The underlying problem, however, remained the same: concentrated power in institutions that ordinary citizens have little practical ability to hold accountable.

Corporate power also gained important constitutional protections. The consequential modern development came in 2010, when the Supreme Court ruled 5–4 in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that corporations and labor unions could spend unlimited amounts independently to influence federal elections, treating such expenditures as protected political speech. The ruling did not permit unlimited direct contributions to candidates, but it removed major restrictions on corporate-funded political advocacy. The result raises a question Barnet and Müller would have recognized immediately: when corporations command financial resources far beyond those of ordinary citizens, what happens to political equality when their money receives constitutional protection as free speech?

Where Their Solutions Fell Short

Barnet and Müller called for “countervailing power,” arguing that “the heart of the problem is excessive power.” Their proposals included requiring greater corporate financial disclosure, limiting interlocking directorates between banks and industrial companies, and separating banking from other commercial activities. Congress eventually moved in another direction. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 removed important barriers separating commercial banking, investment banking, and insurance activities, allowing these businesses to operate within the same financial holding companies.

The authors were also suspicious of proposals to create powerful international institutions to oversee multinational corporations. IBM’s Maisonrouge favored an international counterpart to multinational businesses, while former State Department official George Ball proposed international chartering for corporations operating beyond national boundaries.

Barnet and Müller feared that such arrangements would legitimize corporate power without providing meaningful accountability. The United Nations established its Centre on Transnational Corporations in 1974 and pursued an international code of conduct, but the code was never adopted, and the Centre was absorbed into the UN Conference on Trade and Development in 1993.

The difficulty with creating global institutions to control global corporations is that the largest corporations are often best positioned to influence those institutions. Friedrich Hayek’s work on dispersed knowledge helps explain the danger. Central planners cannot possess the local knowledge needed to make sound decisions for everyone, whether those planners work in government ministries or corporate headquarters. Replacing private global planning with public global planning does not necessarily restore economic freedom or accountability. It may simply create another powerful institution operating beyond the reach of ordinary citizens.

Yet Barnet himself pointed toward a better answer. In a 1976 interview, he advocated giving communities greater control over their resources and developing technologies suited to local needs. That thinking comes surprisingly close to subsidiarity. Local communities should have meaningful authority over their own affairs, but decentralization must also protect property rights, voluntary exchange, and competition. Otherwise, local political power can become just another means of protecting favored interests. The objective is not to replace one form of concentrated power with another, but to prevent economic and political power from becoming so concentrated that individuals, independent businesses, and communities lose their ability to make meaningful choices.

When Yesterday's Warnings Become Today's Conspiracy Theories.

Barnet and Müller wrote before the personal computer, the World Trade Organization, global investment giants, and the rise of digital platforms. Yet they understood something fundamental about the direction of the modern economy. Corporate planning was moving beyond national borders, profits could be shifted to favorable jurisdictions, and production could move wherever costs were lowest. Governments could be pressured to accommodate corporate priorities, while local communities were left to manage the consequences.

Globalized corporatism: their greatest insight was not that multinational corporations would become enormous. It was that corporations did not need to abolish national governments to gain power over them. They could reshape what those governments did, turning public policy toward the needs of global commerce rather than the interests of the people those governments were elected to represent.

Seen in this context, the rise of the America First movement is hardly surprising. Its central argument is that American economic and trade policies should serve American citizens, workers, and businesses, rather than the demands of a global economic system. Bringing manufacturing home, protecting strategically important industries, securing supply chains, and restoring national control over trade and immigration are all expressions of that philosophy. Whether particular policies achieve those goals is a separate question, but the underlying challenge to decades of globalization is unmistakable. The nation-state is not supposed to exist primarily to serve multinational corporations.

Barnet and Müller’s proposed remedies were less convincing. Concentrated economic power cannot necessarily be restrained by creating an even larger concentration of political power above it. But their central warning has survived fifty years of history. The question is no longer whether multinational corporations can influence governments, shape economies, and move important decisions beyond the reach of ordinary citizens. They plainly can. The question is whether sovereign governments, independent businesses, and local communities can reclaim meaningful control over decisions that affect their lives.

And this brings us back to the extraordinary irony of Robert being branded a conspiracy theorist for discussing the New World Order. Fifty years ago, progressive intellectuals wrote entire books documenting the growing influence of multinational corporations over national governments. Today, Democratic Senators and staff invoke the language of conspiracy theories to discredit Robert for examining related questions. The distinction between documented corporate influence and claims of a secret world government deserves serious examination, not political name-calling. What changed? The concentration of corporate power certainly did not disappear. It grew enormously. Yet some of the very liberal political institutions that once championed scrutiny of concentrated corporate power now seem more interested in discrediting those who question it than in confronting the problem itself.

Restoring meaningful accountability will require competition, rebuilding American manufacturing and productive capacity, protecting property rights, demanding transparency, and returning decisions to the people and institutions closest to their consequences. Above all, it requires remembering that governments are accountable first to their own citizens, not to international financial institutions or multinational corporate interests and certainly not the World Economic Forum. The problem Barnet and Müller identified was excessive concentration of power. Fifty years later, that concentration has grown enormously, and the answer cannot be to concentrate still more power in the name of correcting it.

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Both books are available to borrow through the Internet Archive’s lending library for readers who want to examine the original arguments and draw their own conclusions. Psywar is still available through Amazon and most other book sellers.

References

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