Library:The Face of Imperialism

The Face of Imperialism
Author	Michael Parenti
First published	2011

The Face of Imperialism is a book written by Statesian political scientist Michael Parenti, published in 2011 by Paradigm Publishers.

1 - Thinking About Empire

IN THIS AGE OF EMPIRE, how do we arrive at the truth? Many of our political perceptions are shaped by culturally prefigured templates implanted in our minds without our conscious awareness. To become critically aware of these ingrained opinions and images is not only an act of self-education; it is an act of self-defence. This seems especially true when dealing with matters of global impact, such as the nature of empire.

Orthodoxy as "Objectivity"

In 1932, Carl Becker was among the first to give currency to the phrase the climate of opinion. Becker argued that ideas and notions about reality do not spring forth from the mind in a social vacuum. They are pursued because they seem to fit into the ongoing climate of opinion.[1] They reinforce each other, gaining acceptance through circulation and repetition. The notions that fit into the prevailing climate of opinion are more likely to be accepted as objective, while those that clash with it are usually seen as beyond the pale and lacking in credibility. So, more often than we realise, we accept or decline an idea, depending on its acceptability within the ongoing opinion climate.

In other words, the mental selectors we use to organise our perceptions are not mostly of our own creation. Much about our personal perception is not all that personal; rather, it is shaped by a variety of forces and conditions outside ourselves, such as the dominant ideology (or "dominant paradigm"), the conventional social values, one's position in the social structure, the available flow of information and disinformation, and the potential benefits and losses attached to the perceptions and pronouncements one makes. On that last point it is obbligato to reference Upton Sinclair's remark: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."[2]

If what we call "objectivity" is really little more than a conformity of mainstream bias, then isn't one paradigm about as reliable—or unreliable—as another? Is all truth, then, nothing more than opinion and belief? If not, what makes a heterodox analysis better than an orthodox one?

First, radical views that are outside the mainstream generally (but not always) are more reliable than the dominant view because they are more regularly challenged and tested against evidence. They do not get to float freely down the mainstream. They cannot rest on the orthodox power to foreclose dissent, and they are not supported by the unanimity of bias that passes for objectivity.

Second, we can value an opinion by the function(s) it serves. The heterodox view has a special task: to contest the prevailing orthodoxy, to broaden the boundaries of debate, to wake people up, to unearth suppressed data. The function of orthodox or conventional opinion is just the opposite: to keep the parameters of discourse as narrow as possible, to dismiss evidence that ill fits the dominant paradigm. Hence, all opinions are not of the same value. It depends on what they are being used for, what interests they serve.

We have all observed that if something does not fit what people believe, they marshal their reserve defences. Rarely when faced with contrary evidence do they discard their preciously held beliefs. And if they cannot challenge the validity of what confronts them, they have fallback positions that explain to their satisfaction the data that do not fit the pictures in their heads.

When the orthodox view becomes so entrenched, evidence becomes irrelevant.

Broaching certain subjects casts doubt on the credibility and sanity of the dissident who dares to raise a question. Consider such inflammatory topics as: the legitimacy of the 2004 presidential election in the United States, the Shangri-La image of Tibet before the Chinese invasion, the findings of the Warren Commission regarding the assassination of President John Kennedy, the number of people killed by this or that tyrant, the Clinton/NATO/CIA war against Yugoslavia, the unanswered questions of the 9/11 Commission, a class power analysis of the American political system, and the absence of politico-economic content in public policy debates.

Such topics raise issues that cross the boundary of allowable opinion. They move into forbidden terrain and are therefore dismissed out of hand, denied the opportunity for rational discourse. Through a process of immediate assertion and intensive repetition, the universe of discourse is preempted and monopolised. This is one way the dominant paradigm is maintained. One crosses the lines beyond permissible opinion only at a risk to one's intellectual reputation or even one's career.

The Myth of Innocent Empires

The presence of self-legitimating ideological boundaries is evident in the discussion about empire. When writing a book about ancient Rome, I discovered that much of the historic literature on empire is rather favourable.[3] Empires have been hailed as grand accomplishments, bringing stability and peace where before there had been only squabbling tribes. We even give empires laudatory peace names, such as Pax Romana and Pax Britannica.

Empires also are sometimes seen as innocent unintentional accretions that arise stochastically—that is, by chance, without benefit of any kind of "conspiratorial" planning or even consistent causality. Years ago we used to hear that the British Empire was put together in a "fit of absentmindedness." More recently, four months after the United States invaded Iraq, and referring to that event, The Economist, a conservative British publication, wrote, "Empires are born in funny ways, and sometimes via the law of unintended consequences by accident."[4]

In fact, empires are not innocent, absent-minded, accidental accretions. They are given purposive direction by rulers who consciously mobilise vast amounts of personnel and materials in order to plunder other lands and peoples. The British, for instance, did not just happen to find themselves in India. They pushed their way in with all deliberate force and rapacious intent. The Americans did not just mistakenly stumble into Iraq because of some misinformation that the Iraqis were linked to Al Qaeda and possessed weapons of mass destruction. The White House coterie that pursued war had been calling for intervention against Iraq for at least a year before the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, and well before there was ever any thought of Al Qaeda terrorist networks in Baghdad or Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.[5]

Despite the sympathetic treatment accorded empires by numerous historians and others, the term empire was not comfortably applied to the United States during most of the twentieth century, at least not by us Americans. Other countries had colonies, but America had "territories" and "possessions"—so I was taught in grade school. The word empire remained suspect, an unbecoming appellation that besmirched our shining republic.

No wonder that when I wrote my book Against Empire in 1995, some of my American compatriots thought it was wrong of me to call the United States an empire. It was widely believed that US rulers did not pursue empire; they intervened abroad only out of self-defence or for humanitarian rescue operations or to restore order in a troubled region or overthrow tyranny and propagate democracy. But some few years later, oddly enough everyone started talking about the United States as an empire and writing books with titles like The Sorrows of Empire, The Folly of Empire, Twilight of Empire, Empire of Illusion—all referring to the United States.

One professor, writing in Harvard Magazine, was unequivocal about his country's force majeure role in the world: "We are militarily dominant around the world. [...] A political unit that has overwhelming superiority of military power, and uses that power to influence the behaviour of other states is called an empire. [...] [O]ur goal is not combatting a rival but maintaining imperial order."[6]

One also could hear right-wing pundits announcing on television that we are an empire, with all the responsibilities and opportunities of empire, and as the strongest nation in the world we have every right to act as such—as if having the power gives US leaders an inherent entitlement to exercise it upon others as they see fit. So liberals and conservatives began to lay claim to the notion of empire and treat it as worthy of public embrace.

"What is going on here?" I asked myself at the time. How is it that after years of denial and denunciation, many individuals now feel free to talk about empire when they mean American empire? The answer, I realised, is that the word has been divested of its full meaning. "Empire" seems to mean simply dominion and power, most notably military power. Thus Chalmers Johnson tells us that the United States has an empire of bases rather than colonies. He sees a US government that is "obsessed" with maintaining military dominance over the entire world. The 730 or more US military bases that ring the globe, he claims, are proof that the "United States prefers to deal with other nations through the use or threat of force rather than negotiations, commerce, or cultural interaction." (In fact, the United States constantly uses negotiations, commerce, or cultural interaction along with a whole arsenal of other modes of influence.) The rise of American militarism, Johnson goes on to say, is accompanied by layers of bureaucracy and secrecy designed to circumvent public scrutiny and keep power in the hands of the Pentagon.[7]

What is missing from these kinds of analyses and even more so from the public discourse in general is the politico-economic content of empire. In other words, while we hear a lot about empire and militarism, we hear very little about imperialism. This is strange, for imperialism is what empires do. Imperialism is the very activity of empire. (Another name for empire is imperium.)

By imperialism I do not mean just power and dominion; I mean the process of transnational investment and capital accumulation. Nor would I pretend to be the only investigator who thinks of imperialism that way. There are a number of advanced scholars—such as James Petras, Eva Golinger, Gregory Elich, Gerald Horne, Henry Veltmeyer, Francis Shor, and David Harvey—who offer a more developed and accurate view of the forces of imperialism.[8]

For latter-day liberal converts like Chalmers Johnson, however, the word imperialism is used in the same empty way as is the word empire: to denote dominion and control with little attention given to the powerful economic interests that operate as a motor force behind US policy. Johnson and a host of others have produced shallow critiques of empire, characterising US interventionist policies as "reckless," "misguided," "inept," "bumbling," "insensitive," "overreaching," "self-deceptive," "deluded," "driven by false assumptions," and "presuming a mandate from God," while ladened with "tragic mistakes" and "imperial hubris."[9] They see all this as a mindless proclivity embedded in the American psyche or culture. We are left to conclude that US leaders are chronically deluded, stupid, and incapable of learning from past experience; they lack the splendid intelligence of their liberal critics. For the critics, empire has little to do with economic class interests and is mostly a product of an aggrandising national temperament incited by myopic overweening leaders.

Not Just "Power for Power's Sake"

In this book, imperialism is defined as follows: the process whereby the dominant investors in one country bring to bear military and financial power upon another country in order to expropriate the land, labour, capital, natural resources, commerce, and markets of that other country. In short, empires do not just pursue power for power's sake. There are real material interests at stake, fortunes to be made many times over. Behind Colonel Blimp there stood the East India Company and the Bank of England. Behind Teddy Roosevelt and US Marines there stood the United Fruit Company and Wall Street. The intervention is intended to enrich the investors and keep the world safe for them.

For centuries the ruling interests in Western Europe and, later on, North America and Japan laid claim to most of planet Earth, including the labour of indigenous peoples (as workers or slaves), their incomes (through colonial taxation or debt control or other means), their markets, and the abundant treasures of their lands: their gold, silver, diamonds, slaves, copper, rum, molasses, hemp, flax, ebony, timber, sugar, fruits, tobacco, palm oil, ivory, iron, tin, nickel, coal, cotton, corn, and more recently, uranium, manganese, titanium, bauxite, oil, and—say it again—oil, and numerous other things.[10]

Empires are enormously profitable for the investor interests of the imperial nation but enormously costly to the people of the colonised country. Even today, plundered populations bemoan the resource curse, knowing from bitter experience that countries rich in natural resources usually end up as losers. Many of the countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America are rich, only the people are poor. The imperialists search out rich places, not barren ones, to plunder.

"Arid Spain and Portugal siphoned off South America's gold; tiny Holland dominated vast Indonesia. Britain, barren except for coal, built an imperial swap shop of grain, lumber, cotton, tea, tobacco, opium, gems, silver, and slaves. Japan, less than a century out of its bamboo-armour era, conquered much of China for its iron and coal. The postcolonial era [1950 to today] hasn't been any easier on the resource-rich have-nots."[11]

In addition to the pillage of their lands, the people of these targeted countries are frequently killed in large numbers by the intruders. This is another thing that empires do which too often goes unmentioned in the historical and political literature of countries like the United States, Britain, and France. Empires impoverish whole populations and slaughter huge numbers of innocent people. Along with those who are killed outright, the victims should include the many shattered survivors whose lives are reduced to a miserable subsistence or a grieving and painful undoing.[12]

The purpose of the imperial killings is to prevent alternative, independent, self-defining nations from emerging—nations that might threaten the imperium's hegemonic control, thereby jeopardising its political-economic advantages. Just to give one example of the imperium's carnage, during the Vietnam War about a million and a half Vietnamese were killed: 185,000 South Vietnamese soldiers, 924,000 North Vietnamese and Vietcong soldiers, and 415,000 additional civilians. About 58,00 American troops also perished.[13] The great majority of these killings were perpetrated by US military forces with their vastly superior fire power.

Regarding imperialism's capacity to deliver death and destruction, consider the case of Iraq. In 1991, twelve years before Iraq was invaded and occupied by President George W. Bush, his father, President George H. W. Bush, launched an aerial war (the Gulf War) against that same nation. At that time, Iraq's standard of living was the highest in the Middle East. Iraqis enjoyed free medical care and free education. Literacy had reached about 80 percent. University students of both genders received scholarships to study at home and abroad. Most of the economy was state owned. Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein was pressing for a larger portion of the international oil market. In the eyes of the Western imperialists, Saddam was charting an independent course and was guilty of committing economic nationalism. He would have to be taught a lesson. His country needed to be bombed back into the Third World from which it was emerging.

In the six weeks of aerial attacks in 1991, US planes (with minor assistance from other NATO powers) destroyed more than 90 percent of Iraq's electrical capacity, and much of its telecommunication systems including television and radio stations, along with its flood control, irrigation, sewage treatment, water purification, and hydroelectric systems. Domestic herds and poultry farms suffered heavy losses. US planes burnt grain fields with incendiary bombs and hit hundreds of schools, hospitals, rail stations, bus stations, air raid shelters, mosques, and historic sites. Factories that produced textiles, cement, petrochemicals, and phosphate were hit repeatedly. So were the refineries, pipelines, and storage tanks of Iraq's oil industry. Some 200,000 Iraqi civilians and soldiers were killed in those six weeks. Nearly all the aerial attackers employed laser-guided depleted-uranium missiles, leaving hundreds of tons of radioactive matter spread over much of the country, leading to tens of thousands of more deaths in the following years, including many from what normally would be treatable and curable illnesses.[14] Twelve years later, Bush Jr. invaded Iraq and wreaked further death and destruction upon that country (see Chapter 9).

So the face of imperialism reveals endless carnage. This should be kept in mind when using such neutral terms as foreign policy, international relations, overseas commitments, régime change, and intervention.

Instrumental "Truths" and the Dominant Paradigm

The imperialists are among the socio-economic and political elites who are the keepers of the dominant paradigm. The dominant paradigm is the prevailing ideology or mode of thought that purports to explain how and why society functions as it does. The purveyors of the dominant paradigm in the United States and the western world in general most certainly believe in it. The ideology they propagate defines their world for them. It is the magic alchemy that lends virtue to their class supremacy, assuring them of their indispensable worth to society. The dominant paradigm tells them that all their wrongfully acquired gains and privileges are rightfully theirs.

Along with one of their eighteenth-century progenitors, Alexander Hamilton, the corporate economic elites believe that the country should be run by "the rich and the wellborn." They deeply feel they are deserving of their station in life. They believe the United States should lead the world and they should lead the United States. They are convinced that the poor are the authors of their own poverty, and that the working class consists of a troublesome lot who need to be reined in along with the middle class—both of whom are admonished to ratchet down their standard of living so that those at the very top can get an ever larger portion of the pie and an ever firmer grip on the servings.

Do those who put forth the lies of empire believe what they tell us? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. That an opinion buttresses one's self-interest does not necessarily mean it is hypocritically embraced. If anything, it is all the more fervently held and is believed to be correct by the very fact that it serves one's advantages so well. Do the empire builders believe the propaganda they put out in support of specific policies? To be sure, sometimes they deliberately fabricate, as when you catch them in blatant inconsistencies. Much of the time truth is not even given consideration. It is much like the advertising world: the prime concern when selling a product is not "is it true?" but "will it sell?" Is the message effective? Is it getting across? If so, then it is "true" so to speak, and we can go with it. If not, then it is discarded. The approach to truth is purely instrumental.

Take the propaganda line that President George W. Bush used for almost a year in regard to Iraq: stay the course. Eventually the administration ascertained that the public did not like the idea of indefinitely staying the course in Iraq. It made them feel as if there was no hope for a change in policy, no hope for ending the war. Hence, sometime in early 2007 the White House stopped using that phrase not because they no longer believed it (assuming they ever did) but because it was not serving their propaganda goal, their big sell.

Do those who preside over the US empire believe in their own virtue? All people, parties, and national leaders believe in their own virtue. But even more so, more than anything else in the world, with the utmost dedication and ferocity, they believe in protecting and advancing their own material interests. And, as we shall see, they do whatever it takes to do so.

2 - The Omnipresent Arsenal

LIKE EMPIRES BEFORE IT, the American imperium needs to muster immense quantities of military might. An empire finds its birth, growth, and perhaps even its eventual death in its force majeure, its irresistible armed power. Born of its own aggrandisement, an empire lives in a world of real or imagined enemies who must be subdued with force and violence.

An Expensive Parasite

The imperial nation conceives of only two kinds of nations beyond its boundaries: satellites (or vassal states) and enemies (potential and actual). Among the satellites can be included "allies," those of lesser powers that remain friendly by staying more or less in line with the imperial transnational investment policies of large-scale capital accumulation. The satellite is a vassal state bonded to the imperium. Among the enemies (or "potential" enemies) is any country that seeks to chart an independent and self-defining course, to use its land, natural resources, capital, labour, and markets for its own development and possibly for regional hegemony.

Each new imperial acquisition creates a broadened perimeter, yet another area to defend against some real or imagined adversary. The empire builders know no rest. They require ever larger budgets and ever more elaborate weaponry. The corporate investors batten on defence contracts, leaving the taxpayer to bear the crushing costs.

In 2009, the Obama administration proposed a "stimulus package" to counteract the deep recession that afflicted the corporate economy. The package consisted of $787 billion in spending programmes presumably designed to create jobs and stimulate growth. (Although one critic noted that the stimulus plan was "overloaded with business-friendly tax cuts and too short on labour-intensive projects to put people to work right away."[1]) Left unmentioned in the debate over the package is that the US corporate economy has been living off annual stimulus packages ever since World War II. They are called "defence expenditures." Every year the military spending package is by far the largest item in the discretionary federal budget.

As to be expected, these colossal allocations are encouraged by corporate America, first, because such expenditures create a military might that boosts corporate global hegemony; and second, because military contracts are risk-free, set without competitive bidding or adequate oversight. They come with guaranteed cost overruns and bring in superlative profits. Defence spending does not have to struggle with sluggish consumer demand; there are always more advanced weapons to develop, obsolete weaponry to replace, soldiers to feed and shelter, and new wars to be fought.

These, then, comprise the two basic reasons why the US assiduously remains an armed superpower even in the absence of a comparable opponent. First, keeping the world safe for global capital accumulation requires a massive military establishment. Second, a massive military itself constitutes a source of immense capital accumulation.

The centrists and liberals dare not challenge these military appropriations for fear of being seen as faltering in their devotion to "keep America strong." Obama's 2009 stimulus package was heavily contested because it was for civilian economic purposes rather than for empire and war—in contrast to the huge 2010 defence spending bills that Congress passed with relatively little debate.

The enormous national debt the United States carries, and the heavy tax burden the public bears in servicing that debt, is largely an outgrowth of the gargantuan sums expended on wars and military budgets, the cumulative multi-trillion-dollar expense of maintaining a growing global empire for the past sixty years or more.

Some reactionaries argue that the debt is caused mostly by Social Security payments and other entitlements, all of which threaten to go broke in some years ahead. In fact, over the past half century or more the Social Security Trust Fund has been self-sufficient, taking in more money than it spends. By 2010 it contained an accumulated $2.6 trillion surplus.[2]

Cui Bono?

Numbering among the victims of imperialism are the common people of the imperial nation itself, those who pay the costs of empire with their blood and taxes. The empire feeds off the republic. The populace does without essentials so that the patricians can pursue their far-off plunder. The centre is bled so that the perimeter can continue to expand.

By 2011 the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq had cost over 5,000 American lives, along with tens of thousands more wounded or disabled, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghani deaths. Suicide rates among US veterans from these two wars remained dramatically higher than in the rest of the US population. Mental health breakdowns were now the leading cause of hospital admissions for the military, higher than physical injuries. On any given night, tens of thousands of homeless veterans were living on our nation's streets.[3]

As we moved deeper into the "Great Recession," almost every state and municipality in the United States was facing a budget crisis with serious shortfalls in revenues, record debts, and harsh cutbacks in human services. But one component of government, the Defense Department, suffered no shortage of funding. In 2010, the Pentagon and related agencies expended somewhere between $850 billion to $1 trillion, if we count the indirect costs of war and empire, such as veterans benefits and medical costs, annual debt payments due to military spending, covert military and intelligence operations, the 70 percent of federal research and development funds that goes to the military, "supplementary appropriations" for specific wars as in Iraq and Afghanistan, and defence expenses picked up by non-military agencies including "defence-related activities" of the General Services Administration, along with the Energy Department's nuclear weapons programmes, which consumes more than half of that department's budget.[4] This was a vastly larger sum than what all fifty states of the union together spent on education, housing, police, fire fighting, roads, hospitals, human services, occupational safety, and the like.

With only 5 percent of the world's population, the United States now accounts for almost 50 percent of the world's military spending. In second place is China, with 6.6 percent of the world's expenditure on arms. In the past decade the US allocated over $6 trillion on war and preparation for war.[5] Forty percent of the US military budget goes for overhead. One critic notes that the Pentagon cannot account for much of its funds, property, and supplies. "[I]t cooks its own books to make them appear in balance, and it makes new spending decisions based on the phony data." Many years of reports by the Government Accountability Office and the Pentagon's own inspector general testify to this.[6]

Along with immensely profitable war contracts comes increased income inequality and the defunding of public services. The impoverishment of public services is not only one of the costs of empire; it is one of the goals. The imperial rulers wage war not only against people in foreign lands but against their own populace as well, diminishing their demands, expectations, and sense of entitlement.

There are those who say that empires are "economically irrational" affairs because they cost more than they bring in. The British spent more in India than they were able to extract, and they extracted quite a bit. So too with the Americans in the Philippines and in Central America. But the people who pay the costs of empire are not the same as those who reap its rewards. As Thorstein Veblen pointed out in 1904, the gains of empire flow into the hands of the privileged business class, the large overseas investors, while the costs are extracted from the general treasury, that is, from "the industry of the rest of the people."[7] The same has been true in regard to Iraq: US taxpayers have carried the costs and are paying the debt that the war brought, while Halliburton, Blackwater, and a hundred other corporations reap the fat no-bid contracts and corrupt dealings, almost all of it not audited.[8]

Global Military Dominance

If US policy is respectful of other peoples' sovereignty and needs, then we might wonder why US leaders find it necessary to engage in a relentless push for global military domination. Since the 1990s they have been guided by various versions of a policy plan put together by Dick Cheney (soon to become U.S. vice-president) with Paul Wolfowitz and Colin Powell, who respectively became secretaries of Defense and State. The agenda was for the United States to exercise unilateral rule over the world. As one writer put it:

"[The plan] calls for the United States to maintain its overwhelming military superiority and prevent new rivals from rising up to challenge it on the world stage. It calls for dominion over friends and enemies alike. It says not that the United States must be more powerful, but that it must be absolutely powerful."[9]

The United States presides over an armed planetary force of a magnitude never before seen in human history. As listed by the Department of Defense, this force includes over a half-million troops stationed at over 700 military bases around the planet and many more within the fifty states, including numerous secret ones that go uncounted, along with unusually large bases recently constructed in Central Asia, Iraq, Colombia, and Kosovo.[10] In 2009 a democratically elected progressive government in Ecuador closed down the last US military base on its soil, claiming it was a violation of that country's sovereignty. Both Ecuador and Bolivia now have a ban on foreign bases written into their constitutions.

The US global war machines boasts an arsenal of over 5,000 strategic nuclear warheads[11] and 22,000 tactical ones, along with a naval strike force greater in total tonnage and firepower than all the other navies of the world combined, sailing every ocean and making port at every continent. Bomber squadrons and long-range missiles can deliver enough explosive force to cripple the infrastructures of entire countries anywhere on the globe. US rapid deployment forces have a firepower in conventional weaponry vastly superior to any other nation's force. Satellites and US spy planes conduct a surveillance that blankets the entire planet. Recent years brought a skyrocketing increase in military spending for the "war on terrorism."[12]

By 2011 the Obama administration was planning to deploy, on US soil, a new class of weapon capable of reaching any corner of the planet in less than an hour. The weapon will deliver a conventional warhead of enormous explosive force at pinpoint accuracy and phenomenally high speed, mimicking the destructive impact of a nuclear warhead and greatly diminishing America's reliance on its nuclear arsenal.[13]

The Pentagon has also developed an arsenal of space weaponry that runs the risk of sparking an arms race in outer space, including the unmanned X-37 space plane now circling Earth. The goal is to develop space vehicles that can hit terrestrial and outer space targets (including satellites) and send reconnaissance and attack drones back into the atmosphere.[14] By 2010 the Obama administration had stated its commitment to "equitable" arms control measures and "openness and transparency" among nations in conducting operations in outer space, while continuing a claim "to use space for national security activities."[15]

Despite the development of new weaponry, Washington showed no readiness to diminish its aging stockpile of tactical nuclear missiles in Europe. Requests by several NATO allies to cut back were rejected by the White House. As one reporter noted, "Many analysts consider these weapons a dangerous relic of the cold war, expensive to safeguard and deadly if they fell into the wrong hands."[16]

In the realm of conventional arms also, the United States has exercised an unmatched global reach, accounting for almost 70 percent of the world's conventional arms sales. Since World War II, Washington has given hundreds of billions of dollars in military aid to train and equip the troops and internal security forces of more than eighty countries, the purpose being not to defend these nations from outside invasion but to protect ruling oligarchs and multinational corporate investors from the dangers of domestic insurgency.

How do we know this? By observing that:

• With few exceptions there is no evidence suggesting that these various régimes have ever been threatened by neighbouring countries.
• There is a great deal of evidences that US-supported military and security forces and death squads in many of these countries have been repeatedly used to destroy popular reformist movements and insurgencies within the countries themselves, ones that advocate egalitarian redistributive ("leftist") politics.
• Most "friendly" recipient régimes have supported the integration of their economies into a global system of corporate domination, opening themselves to foreign penetration on "free trade" terms singularly favourable to transnational investors.[17]

Note also the Pentagon's wide-ranging incursions into everyday life in America. The military exercises a censorial role in the making of Hollywood war films and cultivates connections with the World Wrestling Entertainment, NASCAR, Starbucks, and companies that deal with everything from iPods to Oakley sunglasses. The military is contractually involved in hundreds of scientific research projects, including such exotic and frightful undertakings as creating "cyborg insects" that can be remotely controlled and armed with bio-weapons. The Pentagon also is devising ways to socialise youngsters into having a receptive "culture of cool" response to the military by making friends on MySpace and other cyberspace connections and promotions.[18]

After the Red Menace

For decades we were told that a huge military establishment was necessary to contain an expansionist world communist movement with its headquarters in Moscow (or sometimes Beijing). The United States and other western capitalist nations formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949 supposedly to serve as a bulwark against the threat of a Soviet invasion across Europe. Evidence of such a threat was never forthcoming.[19] Still, the "NATO shield" was put together, consisting of a massive build-up of military forces throughout Western Europe operating in effect under the hegemony of the United States.

But after the overthrow of the Soviet Union and other Eastern European communist nations, Washington made no move to dismantle NATO. Instead of being abolished, NATO was expanded to include nations that reached across Eastern Europe right to Russia's border. In trying to convince us that we still needed NATO, policymakers and editorialists let fly a variety of arguments.

First, we heard that NATO is a relative bargain since the United States pays only 25 percent of its cost—as if this spoke to its purpose or political value.

Second, NATO can be used as a collective force for interventions without being stymied by a UN veto, as might happen when Washington seeks a United Nations mandate for war and invasion against some country. In other words, the United States has a freer hand operating through NATO than through the United Nations. Thus when the UN Security Council (because of Russian and Chinese vetoes) refused to cooperate with the destruction of Yugoslavia, Washington just enlisted NATO.[20]

Third, we are told by one mainstream newspaper that "NATO is committed to defending countries that share a commitment to democracy and free enterprise."[21]

Do we still need NATO? Actually the US public never needed NATO. The Soviet Red Army had neither the interest nor the capacity to invade Western Europe after World War II; State Department studies have admitted as much. Does that mean NATO has been senseless or useless? Not at all; it is a valuable tool to lock the Western European countries into the US imperial system, just as it is now doing to the newly capitalised Eastern European countries.

After the overthrow of the Soviet Union and the other Eastern European communist nations, all Cold War weapons programmes in the United States continued in production, with new ones being added all the time, including plans to conduct war from outer space. In short time the White House and Pentagon began issuing jeremiads about a whole host of new enemies—for some unexplained reason previously overlooked—who posed a mortal threat to the United States, including "dangerous rogue states" like Libya with its menacing rag-tag army of 50,000.

The Newly Conjured Menace

Since the 1990s, a favourite villain conjured by US rulers to strike fear into the hearts of the American public has been the Islamic terrorist, who supposedly is part of a vast international network named Al Qaeda, headed by the diabolical Osama bin Laden, master of trained operatives in over forty countries. No hard evidence of such a wide-reaching coordinated terrorist foe has been found.[22] Usually left unmentioned is how the United States helped organise, finance, and mobilise the Islamic militants to fight a regressive war against revolutionary Afghanistan during the Soviet intervention into that country.[23]

To be sure, real terrorists do exist, a sparse scattering of poorly organised grouplets. They must be stopped before they can commit their wanton acts. But this gives no government—not even the one in Washington—license to bomb and destroy whole countries. Such massive military aggression delivers a much greater destruction than anything done by the jihadists and is destined to create rather than eliminate Islamic terrorists.

This seems to be the view held by Osama bin Laden and his followers, who see themselves involved in a defensive war against a merciless aggressor. They seem less impelled by some blind hatred and envy of America and more by a desire to get the American empire off their backs. They hate the empire because of the terrible things it does to them, their homelands, and their region of the world, bringing them exploitation, death, and destruction on a grand scale.[24]

3 - Why Rulers Seek Global Dominion

HOW DO WE DIVINE THE MOTIVES of US leaders when they intervene in other countries? There is no shortage of lamenting about all the terrible and difficult situations that US leaders get into around the world, a lamentation made all the more pathetic for being unaccompanied by any critical analysis of the interests being served by such involvements.

Determining Intent

Human motives are impossible to observe in any empirical way. We can view behaviour and listen to utterances, but we cannot directly observe the actual intent that is attributed to such things. No one has ever seen a motive as such. Intent can only be inferred or imputed. While people profess all sorts of intentions, they also are capable of outrageous deception, including self-deception. How then can we determine, or dare presume, what might be their actual motives?

The problem becomes crucial when dealing with political leaders, many of whom make it difficult to divine the intentions behind their actions. Some of us maintain that the overriding purpose of global interventionism is to promote the interests of transnational corporations and make the world safe for global free-market capitalism and imperialism. As noted earlier, imperialism is what empires do. It is the process whereby the rulers of one country use economic and military power to expropriate the land, labour, markets, and natural resources of less powerful countries on behalf of wealthy interests at home and abroad.

Washington policymakers are the last to admit that they engage in such a process. They claim that their interventions abroad are propelled by an intent to defend our national security or other unspecified "US interests," or the intent is to fight terrorism, protect human rights, oppose tyranny, prevent genocide, bring democracy to other peoples, maintain peace and stability in various regions, and protect weaker nations from aggressors.

Are we to accept these noble claims at face value? If not, how can we demonstrate that they are often false and that the motive we critics ascribe is the real agenda? How can we determine intent if intent is not readily susceptible to direct observation and policymakers can make claim to almost any noble motivation? How can we determine that interventionism is engendered by imperialist concerns rather than, say, humanitarian and democratic ones?

First of all, we can look for patterns of intervention. Are there any consistencies in US overseas intercessions? If so, what kinds of governments and political movements do US leaders support? What kinds do they oppose and wish to subject to régime change? And what politico-economic goals do they pursue when intervening? Rather than characterising US policy as befuddled and contradictory, we observe that it is remarkable consistent in services rendered on behalf of transnational economic domination. Other policy considerations do come into play during times of intervention, but there is no reason to treat them as mutually exclusive of global business interests, and no reason to ignore the latter.

Bolstering the Right-Wing Autocrats

The motives of the US national security state can be revealed in part by noting whom it supports and whom it attacks. By the "US national security state" I mean the Executive Office of the White House, the National Security Council (NSC), National Security Agency, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and other such units that that are engaged in surveillance, suppression, covert action, and forceful interventions abroad and at home. Also included are the various monitoring committees set up by the NSC, composed of top players from the Department of State and Department of Defense (the Pentagon), the CIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the White House.

The efforts of these highly placed government bodies are supplemented by ostensibly non-governmental groups such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Conference, the Bohemian Grove, and other formal and informal elite groups populated by political leaders, policy specialists, bankers, CEOs, big investors, leading publicists, and a sprinkling of academic acolytes. The Americans among them are the individuals who inhabit the upper circles of US power, who become the secretaries of State, Defense, Treasury, Commerce, and heads of the CIA and the National Security Council, in that revolving door between Washington and Wall Street.[1]

These US leaders have consistently supported rightist régimes and organisations and opposed leftist ones. The term right and left are frequently bandied about but seldom specifically defined by policymakers or media commentators—and with good reason. The power of a label is in its being left undefined, allowing it to have an abstracted built-in demonising impact that precludes rational examination of its political content. To explicate the actual political-economic content of leftist governments and movements is to reveal their egalitarian and usually democratic goals, making it much harder to demonise them.

The Left, as I would define it, encompasses those individuals, organisations, and governments that advocate egalitarian, redistributive policies and human services benefitting the common people and infringing upon the privileged interests of the wealthy propertied classes.

The Right is also involved in redistributive politics, but the distribution goes the other way, in an upwards direction advancing the privileges of private capital and the wealthy few. Rightist governments and groups, including fascist ones, are dedicated to using the labour, markets, and natural resources of countries as so much fodder for the enrichment of the owning classes. In almost every country including our own, rightist groups, parties, or governments advocate privatisation and deregulation of the economy, along with tax and spending programmes, wage and investment practices, and methods of police and military control that primarily benefit those who receive the bulk of their income from investments and property, at the expense of those who live off wages, salaries, fees, and pensions. That is what usually distinguishes the Right from the Left.

In just about each instance, rightist forces abroad are deemed by US opinion makers to be "friendly to the West," a coded term for "pro–free market" and "pro-capitalist." Conversely, leftist ones are labelled as hostile, "anti-democratic," "anti-American," and "anti-West," when in fact they are anti–corporate capital and against the privileges of the super rich.

While claiming to be motivated by a dedication to human rights and democracy, US leaders have supported some of the most notorious right-wing autocracies in history—régimes that have pursued policies favouring wealthy transnational corporations at the expense of local producers and working people; régimes that have tortured, killed, or otherwise maltreated large numbers of their more resistant citizens, as in (at one time or another) Chad, Pakistan, Turkey, Indonesia, Honduras, Peru, Colombia, Argentina, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, the Philippines, Chile (under Pinochet), Cuba (under Batista), Congo/Zaire (under Mobutu), Nicaragua (under Somoza), Iran (under the Shah), Iraq (under Saddam Hussein until 1990), Morocco (under King Hassan), and Portugal (under Salazar), to offer an incomplete listing.

US imperialists have assisted counterrevolutionary insurgencies that have perpetrated brutal bloodletting against civilian populations; for example, Unita in Angola, Renamo in Mozambique, the contras in Nicaragua, the Khmer Rouge (during the 1980s) in Cambodia, the mujahedeen and then the Taliban in Afghanistan (in the 1980s and 1990s against a Soviet-supported reformist government), and (in 1999–2000) the drug-dealing Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army in Yugoslavia (originally deemed a terrorist organisation by the US State Department). All this is a matter of public record, although it is seldom if ever reported in the US media.

Supports for rightists extends to Nazism itself. After World War II, US leaders and their western capitalist allies did little to eradicate fascism from Europe, except for putting some of the top Nazi leaders on trial at Nuremberg. In short time, many former Nazis and their active collaborators were backed in the saddle in Germany.[2] Hundreds of Nazi war criminals found a haven in the United States, either living in comfortable anonymity or employed by US intelligence agencies during the Cold War.[3]

In France, too, very few Vichy collaborators were purged. "No one of any rank was seriously punished for his or her role in the roundup and deportation of Jews to Nazi camps."[4] US military authorities restored fascist collaborators to power in various Far East nations. In South Korea, for instance, police trained by the fascist Japanese occupation force were used immediately after the war to suppress left democratic forces. The South Korean Army was commanded by officers who had served (proudly) in the Imperial Japanese Army, some of whom had been guilty of horrid war crimes in the Philippines and China.[5]

In Italy, within a year after the war, almost all Italian fascists were released from prison while hundreds of communists and other leftist partisans who had been valiantly fighting the Nazi occupation were incarcerated. Allied authorities initiated most of these measures.[6] From 1945 to 1975, US government agencies gave an estimated $75 million to right-wing organisations in Italy, including some with close ties to the neofascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI).

Suppressing the Leftist Rebels and Reformers

When trying to determine the intentions of policymakers, we should look not only at whom they support but whom they attack. US rulers have targeted just about all leftist governments, parties, leaders, political movements, and popular insurgencies—that is, any political entity that attempts to initiate equitable reforms, egalitarian programmes for the common people, restraints on corporate capital, and self-development for their own countries.

Consider once more the parliamentary social democracies in Italy and Western Europe. From 1969 to 1974, high-ranking elements in Italian military and civilian intelligence agencies, along with various secret and highly placed neofascist groups, embarked upon a campaign of terror and sabotage known as the "strategy of tension," involving a series of kidnappings, assassinations, and bombings (i stragi), including the explosion that massacred eighty-five people and wounded some two hundred in the Bologna train station in August 1980. Fueled by international security agencies including the CIA, the terrorism was directed against the growing popularity of the democratic parliamentary left. The objective was to "combat by any means necessary the electoral gains of the Italian Communist Party" and create enough terror to destabilise the multiparty social democracy and replace it with an authoritarian "presidential republic," or in any case "a stronger and more stable executive." Deeply implicated in this terrorist campaign, the CIA refused to cooperate with an Italian parliamentary commission investigating i stragi in 1995.[7]

In the 1980s, scores of leftists were murdered in Germany, Belgium, and elsewhere in Western Europe by extreme rightists in the service of state security agencies. As with the "strategy of tension" in Italy, the US corporate-owned media largely ignored these acts of right-wing terrorism—while giving prominent play to tiny and far less effective left terrorist grouplets found in Italy and West Germany.

In Italy, as long as the Communist Party retained imposing strength in parliament and within the labour unions, US policymakers worked with centrist alternatives such as the Christian Democrats and the anti-communist Italian Socialist Party. With communism in decline by the 1990s, US leaders began to lend more open encouragement to extreme rightist forces. In 1994 and again in 2001, national elections were won by the National Alliance, a coalition of neofascists, ultraconservatives, and northern separatists headed by ultra-rightist media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi.

The National Alliance played on resentments regarding unemployment, taxes, and immigration. It attempted to convince people that government has the enemy—especially its social service sector (as do reactionary elements in the Republican Party in the United States), all the while preaching the virtues of the free market, and pursuing tax and spending measures that redistributed income upwards. US leaders and mainstream media have had not a harsh word to say about these Italian crypto-fascists.

The methods of domination employed by the US imperium to subvert and defeat reformist and leftist governments are as varied and ruthless as the opportunities of intervention may allow. Here is an incomplete listing:

• Bribe and penetrate a government's internal security units and intelligence agencies, providing them with counterinsurgency training and technology. Bribe top political and military leaders, and other power players, at times giving them a share of the drug trade payoffs in their region.
• Collude with organised crime in gun running, narcotics trafficking, and special (illegal) operations.
• Maintain secret prisons and interrogation centres; provide instruments of torture, train torturers, and supervise torture sessions.
• Disrupt and destroy protest groups and other popular organisations that support reform. Organise death squads to assassinate especially effective progressive leaders and organisers.
• Recruit and finance mercenary mercenary armies and paramilitary units to conduct assassinations, disappearances, massacres, and terror bombings. Wage low-intensity warfare (low-scale wars of attrition) that can continue for years, including strikes against "soft targets" such as schools, clinics, farm cooperatives, public venues, and whole villages.
• Incite, arm, and finance retrograde ethnic separatists and supremacists who act as a divisive element and rise against the targeted government.
• Propagate endless waves of false propaganda and move towards monopolising world media. Buy up or secretly subsidise existing radio and television stations, periodicals, and publishing houses, or finance new ones.
• Sabotage and suppress dissident media by threat and intimidation, police actions, killing journalists, and destroying media sites, sometimes with aerial attacks, as done in Yugoslavia, Bosnia, and Iraq.
• Secretly subsidise conservative academic research and mainstream political scholarship; promote and finance depoliticised forms of art and literature. Provide awards; arrange exhibitions, guest lectures, and teaching opportunities; and free trips abroad designed to bribe, win over, and politically neutralise writers, academics, artists, and journalists from the targeted countries.
• Undermine the targeted country's indigenous cultures with US corporate consumer and entertainment products.
• Secretly finance compliant labour unions to undermine more militant radical ones. Finance conservative religious proselytisers, lecturers, and various non-governmental organisations (NGOs).
• Rig elections; finance and advise collaborationist political parties and candidates while perpetrating disruptive ploys and other dirty tricks against their opponents.
• Impose crippling embargoes and trade sanctions that damage the living standards of targeted régimes. Draw them into heavy deficit spending and debt peonage to paralyse their development, forcing them to endure austerity programmes in order to meet debt payments.[8]

Enemies Without End

US leaders profess a dedication to democracy. Yet over the past six decades, democratically elected reformist governments and revolutionary governments and movements, guilty of supporting egalitarian economic programmes, have been attacked by their own military forces (secretly infiltrated and funded by the United States), or by US-supported mercenary forces and "dirty tricks" operatives dedicated to rolling back reforms and opening their countries to foreign corporate investors and private market "solutions"—such as happened at one time or another in Afghanistan, Angola, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Cambodia, Chad, Chile, Congo, Cuba, Cyprus, Dominican Republic, East Timor, Ecuador, Egypt, Ethiopia, Fiji Islands, Greece (twice), Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti (twice), Honduras, Indonesia (under Sukarno), Iran, Jamaica, Lebanon, Libya, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Peru, Portugal, South Yemen, Syria, Thailand, Uruguay, Western Sahara, and others.[9]

Since World War II, US military forces have invaded or launched aerial assaults against Afghanistan, Cambodia, Dominican Republic, Grenada, Iraq (twice), Laos, Lebanon, Libya, North Korea, Panama, Somalia, Vietnam, Pakistan, and Yugoslavia—a record of military aggression unmatched by any communist or "terrorist" government in history.[10] (All these listings are incomplete.) In some instances, neoimperialism has been replaced with an old-fashioned direct colonialist occupation, or attempted occupation, as in Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia (and for more than a century, Puerto Rico), and more recently Iraq and Afghanistan.

Even before World War II, the US imperium was engaged in violent interventions. US military forces waged a bloody war of attrition in the Philippines from 1898 to 1903. US expeditionary forces fought in China along with other western armies to suppress the Boxer Rebellion and keep the Chinese under the heel of European and North American colonialists. Along with over a dozen other capitalist nations, the United States invaded revolutionary Russia from 1918 to 1921. US Marines invaded and occupied Nicaragua in 1912 and again in 1926 to 1933; Cuba, 1898 to 1902; Mexico, 1914 and 1916; Panama, 1903 to 1914; Haiti, 1915 to 1934; and Honduras six times between 1911 and 1925.

Governments that strive for any kind of economic independence, or apply some significant portion of their budgets to public-sector, not-for-profit services that benefit the people and bring self-development, are the ones most likely to feel the wrath of US intervention. The designated "enemy" can be:

• a populist military government as in Panama under Omar Torrijos (and even under Manuel Noriega), Egypt under Gamal Abdul Nasser, Peru under Juan Velasco, Portugal under the MFA (leftist military officers), and Venezuela under Hugo Chávez (the latter democratically elected president several times)
• a Christian socialist government as in Nicaragua under the Sandinistas (democratically elected after the revolutionary overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship)
• a social democracy as in Chile under Salvador Allende, Jamaica under Michael Manley, Greece under Andreas Papandreou, Cyprus under Mihail Makarios, and the Dominican Republic under Juan Bosch
• an anti-colonialist radical reform government as in the Congo under the democratically elected Patrice Lumumba
• a Marxist–Leninist government as in Cuba, Vietnam, and North Korea
• an Islamic revolutionary order as in Libya under Muammar al-Qaddafi
• a conservative Islamic government that maintains some economic nationalism and minimal populist programmes as in Iran under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or even
• a conservative militarist régime as in Iraq under Saddam Hussein should it maintain an independent course on oil quotas and a state-owned economy[11]

In sum, we can determine the motives that impel US leaders by observing the following: just about all the countries designated as friendly to the United States are régimes that maintain economic systems integrated into the US sphere of corporate global domination. Just about all the countries designated as unfriendly have at one time or another resisted being drawn into the US sphere of corporate domination.

US-supported military and paramilitary forces, death squads, and police have been repeatedly used to destroy reformist movements, labour unions, peasant organisations, and popular insurgencies that advocate some kind of egalitarian redistributive politics in both the "unfriendly" countries and, when necessary, the "friendly" ones as well.

Our political and corporate leaders repeatedly tell us that the world is a relentlessly hostile place. They see enemies everywhere, largely because their own imperial interests put them in conflict with so many. About half a century ago, the celebrated conservative military figure General Douglas MacArthur had this to say about those who profess to guard our ramparts: "Our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear."[12]

For the global interventionists to insure the blessings of an untrammelled "free market" corporate paradise, they must maintain plutocratic control of the planet. To accomplish this, they must rally public opinion behind them through patriotic pride and fear of alien dangers. Once the people fear for their survival, they are ready to hand over their tax dollars and even their democratic rights to their rulers—who are presumed to know best.

4 - Deliberate Design

THE GOAL OF US REACTIONARY RULERS is the Third Worldisation of the entire world including Europe and North America, a New World Order in which capital rules supreme with no public sector services or labour unions to speak of; no prosperous, literate, effectively organised working class or highly educated middle class with rising expectations and a strong sense of entitlement; no public medical care, pension funds, occupational safety, or environmental and consumer protections, or any of the other insufferable things that might cut into profits and lead to a more egalitarian distribution of life chances.

The Third Worldisation of Eastern Europe

Only in a few rare cases have US leaders treated leftist governments or forces in a "friendly" fashion: Yugoslavia as a buffer state during the Cold War, the Khmer Rouge killers (if they could be considered leftist) against the socialist government in Cambodia during the 1980s, and China and Vietnam today as they allow business investments in their "enterprise zones." In such instances Washington's support has been dictated by temporary expediencies or the promise, as in the case of China and Vietnam, that the countries are moving towards a capitalist system.

In the period after World War II, US policymakers sent assistance to Third World nations and put forth a Marshall Plan for Western Europe, grudgingly accepting reforms that produced social benefits for the working classes of various countries. They did this because of the Cold War competition with the Soviet Union and the strong showing of communist parties in European elections and in the control of trade unions, especially in France and Italy.[1]

But today with the communist nations having disappeared, there is no need to make concessions to workers in Western Europe. There being no competing lure, Third World peoples—and working populations everywhere—are subjected to the rollback of benefits and wages that had been won through years of democratic struggle.

One can judge the intentions of policymakers by what they do to countries drawn into the Western orbit. For decades we were told that the Cold War was a contest between freedom and an expansionist communism, with nothing said about the expansionist interests of global capitalism. But immediately after communism was overthrown in the USSR and Eastern Europe, US rulers began intimating that there was something more on their agenda than just free elections for the former "captive nations"—namely free markets.[2] Of what use was political democracy, the free marketeers seemed to be saying, if it allowed the retention of an economy that was socialistic or even social democratic? To the US globalists, a country's political system weighed less than the kind of economic system it had.

Getting rid of communism, it became clear, meant getting rid of public ownership of industry and most of the public sector in general, reducing the social wage to as close to zero as possible, and installing an untrammelled free market economy.

Throughout the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, post-communism "reforms" and newly installed private-market governments brought high unemployment and a severe decline in the standard of living, specifically as follows:

• The free market governments eliminated price controls and subsidies for food, housing, transportation, clothing, and utilities.
• They abolished job guarantees and workplace benefits and in many instances forbade workplace political activities by labour unions.
• They privatised many medical services, cut back on medical benefits, and decreased support for public education.
• They sold off publicly owned lands and news media at bargain prices along with state-owned oil, gas, iron, coal, and transport resources. Profitable and competitive mines, factories, and energy systems were in effect stolen by the new gang-related oligarchs.[3] Numerous other industries were simply shut down.

There was a massive transfer of public capital into the coffers of private owners amounting to over a trillion dollars. Contrary to a common view propagated on both the Left and Right, the new Russian oligarchs were not former Communist Party commissars who merely shifted from public to private control but mafia-style private groups unconnected to the government, appearing on the national scene in unprecedented numbers. "Without exception," notes James Petras, "the transfers of property were achieved through gangster tactics—assassinations, massive theft [...] of state resources, illicit stock manipulation, and buyouts."[4] A kleptocracy in progress.

Throughout the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, this process of privatisation by plunder and intimidation, described in the western press as "reforms," brought severe economic recession and a high rate of unemployment, along with a dramatic drop in educational and literacy standards; serious deterioration in health care and all other public services; skyrocketing infant mortality; and a sharp increase in crime, suicide, homelessness, beggary, prostitution, and drug addiction—all resulting in plummeting life expectancy rates.[5] In 2010, twenty years after the installment of free market capitalism in Eastern Europe, these distressing conditions were as bad as ever. Countries like Latvia (having experienced full employment under communism) still suffered about 20 percent unemployment, and those were only the official figures, which tend to understate the real situation by leaving all sorts of down-and-out cohorts uncounted.[6]

In former communist countries like Russia, Poland, Hungary, and Romania, crypto-fascist and anti-Semitic organisations surfaced. Leftist dissidents were gaoled, their parties outlawed, their publications silenced, and their labour unions banned. Laws were passed in some of the countries prohibiting criticisms of capitalism, the advocacy of socialism, and the propagation of "class hatred."[7]

One of the former communist nations, Belarus failed to convert fully to the free market paradise. Belarus was ruled by freely elected President Alexander Lukashenko, who dared to kick out the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank and refused to privatise and deregulate the entire economy, preferring to pursue policies on behalf of low-income people, rural workers, and the elderly. The Organization for Security and Cooperation (OSCE), which includes the United States and some fifty other nations, has the self-appointed task of overseeing the transformation away from socialism in former communist nations. The OSCE succeeded in organising the splintered opposition to Lukashenko in a single voting bloc that favoured the free market. In 2001 The New York Times admitted that the CIA also was working with the Belarussian opposition.[8]

Other Rollbacks

One method of imposing régime change upon a dissident country is by direct military invasion. Consider what happened to revolutionary Grenada. In 1983, US forces invaded the tiny sovereign nation of Grenada (population 102,000) in violation of all international law. The invasion could not be denied, but what of the motive? The Reagan administration justified the assault by claiming that it was a rescue operation on behalf of American students whose safety was being threatened at a Grenadian medical school; and worse still, the island was being turned into a Soviet-Cuban launching base "to export terror and undermine democracy."[9]

When it became evident that these charges were without foundation, some critics determined that the White House had been unduly alarmist and misguided. But, again, the fact that officials offer misleading rationales is no reason to conclude that they are themselves misled. It may be that they have other motives that they prefer not to enunciate.

In fact, the policy towards Grenada was quite rational and successful, given the Reagan administration's devotion to counterrevolutionary free market goals. Under the New Jewel revolutionary government in Grenada, free milk and other foodstuffs were being distributed to the needy, as were materials for home improvement. Grade schools and secondary education were free for everyone for the first time. Free health clinics were opened in the countryside, thanks mostly to assistance rendered by Cuban doctors. Measures were taken in support of equal pay and legal status for women. The government leased unused land to establish farm cooperatives and turned agriculture away from cash-crop exports and towards self-sufficient food production.[10]

The US counterrevolutionary occupation put an immediate end to almost all these government-sponsored programmes. In the years that followed the US invasion, unemployment in Grenada reached new heights and poverty new depths. Domestic cooperatives were shut down or starved out. Farm families were displaced to make way for gold courses. The corporate-controlled tourist industry boomed. Grenada was once more firmly locked into a privatised Third World poverty.

The same process occurred after the US invaded Panama in December 1989, supposedly to apprehend Manuel Noriega, described by the White House and the US press as a drug-dealing dictator. With Noriega and his leftist military deposed and the US military firmly in control, conditions in that country deteriorated sharply. Unemployment, already high because of the US embargo, climbed to 35 percent as drastic layoffs were imposed on the public sector? Pension rights and other work benefits were abolished. Government subsidies were eliminated and services were privatised. The US invaders shut down publicly owned media and gaoled a number of Panamanian editors and reporters who were critical of the invasion. The US military arrested labour union leaders and removed some 150 progressive labour leaders from their elected positions within their unions. Crime, poverty, drug trafficking, and homelessness increased dramatically.[11] Free market Third Worldisation was firmly reinstated in Panama, all in the name of restoring "democracy."

Underlying Consistencies

US foreign policy is often criticised by confused liberals for being "self-contradictory." For instance, they point out that communist Cuba has been subjected to every hostile stratagem, including travel and trade embargoes, sabotage, and expeditionary invasion, while communist China—which has committed numerous human rights violations—has been granted "most favoured nation" trading status. US policymakers repeatedly have tried to assure the fundamentalist hawks in Congress that we should not impose a political litmus test on China. But one is regularly imposed on Cuba. This is not a sensibly consistent policy, the liberal critics say.

In fact, it is quite consistent. Behind the apparently contradictory policies towards China and Cuba rests the same underlying commitment to capital accumulation. China has opened itself to private capital and free market "reforms," including "enterprise zones" wherein western investors can take advantage of the country's huge labour supply with no worry about occupation standards or other restrictive regulations—although in July 2010, for the first time, wildcat strikes did occur in China against foreign employers. And today the professed goal of the Chinese government is to improve the standard of living of its own population and assist by trade and aid the developing nations of the world. (Indeed, the more successful China proves to be in its internal development and its relations with Third World nations, the more it is again becoming a target of western elites, defamed as a mortal threat to US national security.)

Cuba so far has refused to go down the free market road, although it appears in late 2010 to be moving towards a partially privatised economy in the service sector. When the Cuban government abolishes the social wage that serves the common populace, when it eliminates its totally free public health system, when it privatises the factories and lands and allows the productive wealth to be pocketed by rich corporate owners, and removes all labour protections for workers, then it will have come full circle, being once more under capitalist vassal-state servitude. And then most surely will Havana be embraced by Washington, as have the ex-communist newly established free market nations in Eastern Europe.

When the Truth Slips Out

It should not go unnoticed that leaders occasionally do verbalise their dedication to making the world safe for the transnational corporate system. At such times words seem to speak louder than actions, for the words are an admission of the real motives behind the action.

In 1953, for instance, President Dwight Eisenhower uttered a forbidden truth in his State of the Union message: "A serious and explicit purpose of our foreign policy [is] the encouragement of a hospitable climate for [corporate] investment in foreign nations."[12] In 1990, General Alfred Gray, commander of the US Marines, observed that the United States must have "unimpeded access" to "established and developing economic markets throughout the world."[13]

US opinion makers treat capitalism as inseparable from democracy. However, rather than coming right out and saying capitalism, they prefer softened terms like "free market," "market economy," "economic reforms," and "free market democracy." So President Clinton announced before the United Nations on 27 September 1993: "Our overriding purpose is to expand and strengthen the world's community of market-based democracies."[14]

In a similar vein, The New York Times, supportive of the repressive and murderous measures perpetrated against parliamentary democracy by Russian president Boris Yeltsin in 1993, opined that "Yeltsin remains the best hope for democracy and a market economy in Russia."[15] For many years, one of the most pronounced cheerleaders of US imperium was Samuel P. Huntington, Harvard professor and former CIA advisor, who wrote that the United States is the "only major power whose national identity is defined by a set of universal political and economic values," specifically "liberty, democracy, equality, private property, and markets."[16]

US rulers frequently inject themselves into elections in other lands, lavishly funding rightist elements that disrupt egalitarian movements or help overthrow leftist reformist governments. Elections can serve as a means of régime change, acting as a legitimating cloak for capitalist restoration. But when popular forces successfully utilise electoral democracy as a defence against untrammelled capitalism, democracy runs into trouble. In this latter instance, rather than being wedded to each other, capitalism and democracy are on a fatal collision course, as US leaders demonstrated in Guatemala in 1953, Chile in 1973, Greece in 1967, Indonesia in 1965, Yugoslavia in 2000, and a score of other countries in which US funds and guns were used in great abundance to overthrow democratically elected governments.

Over the past two decades US policymakers have explicitly demanded "free market reforms" in all the former communist nations of Eastern Europe. We no longer have to impute such intent to them. In 1996 Lawrence Summers, serving as President Clinton's undersecretary of the treasury, proudly remarked: "Our ideology, capitalism, is in ascendancy everywhere."[17] In 2000, the White House hailed the Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe (an organisation of about fifteen nations plus the European Union) for planning to create "vibrant market economies" in the Balkans. That same year, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) inaugurated a fund to managed by Soros Private Funds Management. Its purpose, as stated by the US embassy in Macedonia, was "to provide capital for new business development, expansion, and privatisation." Meanwhile, the Agency for International Development (USAID) planned—in its own words—"assistance programmes [...] to advance Montenegro toward a free market economy."[18]

In April 2001, according to the London Financial Times, the newly installed conservative rulers of Yugoslavia, beneficiaries of millions of dollars in US electoral funds, launched "a comprehensive privatisation programme as part of economic reforms introduced following the overthrow of former president Slobodan Milošević." This included the sale of more than 7,000 publicly owned or worker controlled companies to private investors at giveaway prices.[19]

Secrecy and "Innocent Incompetence"

To say, as many critics do, that US national security leaders know more, intend more, and do more than they let on is not to claim they are omnipotent or omniscient. Critics such as I argue that—although mistakes are made and unintended consequences certainly can arise—US policy is not habitually misguided and bungling. Rather, it is impressively consistent and cohesive, a deadly success for the interests it represents. Those who see the US imperium as chronically befuddled are themselves revealing their own befuddlement.

Sometimes the policymakers themselves seize upon incompetence as a cover. In 1986 it was discovered that the Reagan administration was running a covert operation to bypass Congress (and the law), using funds from secret arms sales to Iran to finance counterrevolutionary mercenaries (the "contras") in Nicaragua and probably GOP electoral campaigns at home. President Reagan admitted full knowledge of the arms sales but claimed he had no idea what happened to the money. He was asking us to believe that these operations were being conducted by subordinates, including his own top advisors, without being cleared by him. Reagan publicly criticised himself for his slipshod managerial style and lack of administrative control over his staff. His admission of incompetence was eagerly embraced by various pundits who prefer to see their leaders as suffering from innocent ignorance rather than designing deception. Subsequent testimony by his subordinates, however, revealed that Reagan was not as dumb as he was pretending to be, and that he had played a deciding role in the entire Iran-contra affair.[20]

The same holds for President George W. Bush, whose tendency to flub words added to the facile conclusion that he was witless and stupid. In fact, Bush knew what he was doing and did what he wanted. Consider the following:

• On behalf of the super rich, Bush succeeded in greatly diminishing the progressive inheritance tax, at the same time reducing corporate taxes to nominal amounts and undermining federal controls and regulations on business.
• Bush stacked the federal courts with young right-wing activist ideologues, expanded the autocratic powers of the "unitary executive," operated in secrecy and blocked transparency, and rolled back civil liberties under the guise of fighting "terrorism."
• Bush opened federal lands to timber and mining interests at giveaway fees. He doubled the already immense military spending. He more than doubled the national debt for the benefit of rich creditors and at great cost to public programmes and taxpayers.
• Bush overturned the Iraqi government, shattered Iraq's state economy, and created a multi-billion-dollar bonanza of war contracts for US corporate investors. When it was revealed that Iraq was not linked to Al Qaeda and did not harbour weapons of mass destruction, Bush covered his lies by claiming he had been misled by faulty information.

In sum, while promoting an appearance of innocent bungling, President Bush advanced his agenda with rather impressive success.[21]

US rulers pretend to an innocence they seldom attain. No less a political personage than Henry Kissinger repeatedly pleaded innocent ignorance and incompetence when confronted with the dirty role he and his cohorts played in East Timor, Indochina, Chile, Bangladesh, and elsewhere.[22] He would have us believe that the people he worked for were nincompoops, not imperial operatives.

Secrecy is another phenomenon that would—by definition—suggest the existence of hidden agendas. If policymakers have nothing to hide, why do they hide so much? An estimated 21,500 US government documents are classified every workday of the year.[23] Some of these materials eventually come to light decades later—and can still be quite revealing. Thus, an October 1970 cable to CIA operatives in Chile from Kissinger's "Track Two" group (released over thirty years later) states, "It is firm and continuing policy that [the democratically elected government of Salvador] Allende be overthrown by a coup. [...] We are to continue to generate maximum pressure toward this end utilising every appropriate resource. It is imperative that these actions be implemented clandestinely and securely so that the USG [United States Government] and American hand be well hidden" [italics added].[24] If the public utterances of policymakers represent their real intentions, if they have no hidden agendas, then why do they find it necessary to hide their actions not only from the US public but sometimes even from their own staffs?[25]

Sometimes outcomes are explained away as the innocent result of organisational inertia. With this mode of analysis there is no intentional human application to speak of. Intervention are said to occur because a national security agency wants to prove its usefulness or is simply carried along on its own organisational momentum, as supposedly happened with the CIA and Pentagon intervention in the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. To be sure, organisational interests do come into play, but to see them as the predominant force behind policies is like claiming that the horses are the cause of the horse race.

Anything Except Moneyed Interests

Some people might complain that the analysis presented herein is simplistic and insufficiency nuanced because it ascribes everything to purely economic and class motives while ignoring other variables like geopolitics, culture, ethnicity, nationalism, ideology, morality, and leadership psychology. But I do not ascribe everything to purely economic interests. To focus on powerful corporate class interests that are usually ignored is not to claim that nothing else is to be considered as acting upon events. I do not argue that the struggle to maintain capitalist global hegemony explains everything about world politics or even everything about US foreign policy. However, it does explain quite a lot—so it is time we become aware of it and be willing to speak its name.

International capitalism is not the only consideration but it is the most crucial one. We do not have to stay transfixed upon it, but we ought to give some consideration to the role played by moneyed protagonists in international politics. If policymakers give such serious consideration to the global interests of their super rich financial class, might not we also?

It is a passion among certain academics to claim authorship to nuanced perceptions, that is, perceptions of many complexities. These complexities often turn out to be just so much polished evasion, whose primary function is to deny consideration of powerful economic factors. If such opinion makers really want to portray political life in all its manifold complexities, then we might expect that they be less studiously reticent about the immense realities of economic imperialism. They might consider how the process of global capitalist domination assumes many dimensions, including the economic realm as well as the political, military, and cultural.

The existence of other variables such as nationalism, militarism, the search for national security, and the pursuit of power and hegemonic dominance compels us neither to dismiss economic realities nor to treat these other variables as insulated from moneyed interests. Thus, to argue that US rulers intervene in one or another region not because of economic interests but for strategic reasons may sound to some like a more nuanced view, but in most cases, empirical examination shows that the desire to extend US strategic power is impelled at least in part by a desire to stabilise the area along lines that are favourable to political-economic elite interests—which is usually why the region becomes a focus of concern in the first place.

Various considerations are not mutually exclusive but work upon each other. The growth in overseas investments invites a need for military protection, just as military interventions open opportunities for overseas investment and the expansionist of free market production in new parts of the world. All this, in turn, creates a need to secure bases and establish alliances with other nations. The alliances now expand the defence perimeter that must be maintained. So a particular country not only becomes an "essential" asset in the support of US defences but must itself be defended, like any other asset.

To repeat, US leaders may have other concerns, such as advancing their nation's prestige, maintaining national security against potentially competing (capitalist and non-capitalist) nations, developing strategic military superiority, distracting the American public from domestic problems and scandals, advancing the heroic macho image of the president, and the like. But these purposes almost always dovetail with dominant capitalist interests, or certainly do not challenge those interests in any serious way. No US president, for instance, would ever think of promoting his (or her) macho image by heroically supporting the cause of socialist revolution in this or any other country.

The point is not that nations act imperialistically for purely material motives but that the ideological and psychic motives, embraced with varying degrees of sincerity by individual policymakers, unfailingly serve the systemic interests of the dominant moneyed class. In short, US political-corporate elites have long struggled to make the world safe for transnational capital accumulation; to attain control of the markets, lands, natural resources, and cheap labour of all countries; and to prevent the emergence of revolutionary socialist, populist, or even nationalist régimes that refuse to submit to this arrangement.

To achieve global hegemony, a global military machine is essential. The goal is to create a world populated by vassals (known also as "client states") and compliant populations completely open to transnational corporate penetration, on terms that are completely favourable to the transnationals. It is not too much to conclude that such a policy is produced not by dumb coincidence but by conscious effort and deliberate design.

5 - How Moneyed Interests Create Poor Nations

THERE IS A "MYSTERY" WE MUST EXPLAIN. How is it that as transnational corporate investments and trade with poor countries—and international aid and loans to these same countries—have all increased dramatically over the past half century, so it has world poverty? The number of people living in poverty is growing at a faster rate than the world's population. In other words, poverty is spreading among the many even as wealth accumulates among the few. As the global empire grows stronger, the world's working populations grow larger but poorer. What do we make of this?

"Only Themselves to Blame"

Many years ago, when I attended grade school in New York City, my teacher explained to us why people in far-off places like Africa, Asia, and Latin America (what soon became known as the Third World) lived in extreme poverty. They were poor, she said, because there was something wrong with them and their situations. They resided in hot climates that made it difficult to work industriously and caused them to be slow and lazy. Furthermore, they were in the habit of having too many children. To make matters worse, they were not very adept; they were culturally backwards. Finally, she pointed out that their lands were poor, lacking in natural resources. Given all this, there was not much hope for them unless America came along and introduced them to more uplifting ways.

This view was not my grade-school teacher's personal creation. She was enunciating what was the conventional wisdom of that day. Being but a youngster, I never thought to draw a parallel between what was said about impoverished people in America itself, including my own family. We working poor were—and still are—seen as the authors of our own plight, "culturally backwards," "lazy," "having too many children," and just not at the top of our game. Same old story.

This too is the opinion about the poor held by many affluent people throughout the Third World itself—if not throughout the entire world. I once saw a documentary in which a group of prosperous, well-dressed, well-fed Paraguayans were lounging on a luxurious veranda, denouncing the deficiencies of Paraguay's indigent. One of them finally said, quite emphatically, "The poor need education." I immediately took heart at this comment. Here at last, someone was showing some understanding of what the penniless faced in a country where education was usually out of their reach. But I completely misread the sentiment. The man continued in a most emphatic key: "They need education in how to be human beings! They are animals who don't know how to live like human beings!" The others in the group readily concurred.

Only years later through my own independent study did I discover that every one of the explanations given about world poverty was false. Treu, the climate and topography of some parts of the Third World could be forbidding. But even in very dense jungles and frozen arctic regions, people applied themselves resourcefully in order to survive. In any case, they certainly were not lazy; they often worked just as hard or harder than people in more temperate climes.

Nor did they have so many more children than the rest of us. The population density of much of the Third World, especially in those days, was less than in places like the Netherlands, Japan, or England or even parts of the northeast United States. Nor were the denizens of Africa, Asia, and Latin America "culturally backwards" (whatever that might mean). From ancient eras to more recent centuries, they had produced magnificent civilisations capable of impressive feats in architecture, horticulture, irrigation, arts, crafts, medicines, public hygiene, and the like, superior in many respects to what was found among the ill-washed, priest-ridden, diseased populations of European Christendom.

Quite frequently it was contact with the western colonisers that brought poverty and disaster to the indigenous populations of Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere. Once their farmlands and crops were stolen, their resource plundered, their herds slaughtered, their townships destroyed, and their peoples enslaved deep poverty was the inescapable outcome, leaving them to be denounced as lazy, backwards, and stupid. In fact, they were not underdeveloped but overexploited. Their development was never allowed to proceed in peace and self-direction.[1]

For all its own maldevelopment, illiteracy, class oppression, and violence, Europe did enjoy one telling advantage in the world, in the realm of weaponry. As I pointed out in an earlier work, "Muskets and cannons, Gatling guns and gunboats, and today missiles, helicopter gunships, and fighter bombers have been the deciding factors when West meets East and North meets South. Superior firepower, not superior culture, has brought the Europeans and Euro-North Americans to positions of supremacy that today are still maintained by force, though not by force alone."[2]

Winning Out the Locals

Why are these various peoples and "failed nations" still so poor today and becoming ever poorer? What is wrong with them? Over the past half century or more, western transnational corporations and banks have invested heavily in the Third World. The transnationals are attracted by the rich natural resources, the high return that comes from low-paid labour, and the nearly complete absence of anything that cuts into profits, such as taxes, environmental regulations, worker benefits, and occupational safety codes. The US government has subsidised this flight of capital by granting tax concessions to corporations for their overseas investments, and even paying some of their relocation expenses—much to the outrage of workers here at home who see their jobs being exported.

American agribusiness cartels, heavily subsidised by US taxpayers, dump surplus products in other countries at below cost to undersell local producers. As Christopher Cook describes it, they expropriate the best land in these countries for cash-crop exports, usually monoculture crops requiring large amounts of pesticides, leaving less and less acreage for the hundreds of varieties of organically grown foods that feed local populations and sustain the local economy.[3]

Haiti is a prime example of this displacement of productive local populations. Decades of US farm imports pouring into Haiti—heavily subsidised by the US government and therefore easily sold at lower prices than local agrarian commodities—wiped out about three million small farmers, created more debt and hunger, and seriously damaged Haiti's ability to be self-sufficient.

In 2010 Bill Clinton publicly apologised for championing policies that totally destroyed Haiti's rice production. In the mid-1990s then-president Clinton encouraged Haiti to drastically cut tariffs on imported US rice. US rice growers received a federal refund of 72 cents on every dollar they expended to produce rice. Without tariff protections, the Haitian rice farmer was easily underpriced and put out of business by the heavily subsidised agribusiness growers in America. Haiti was not the only victim of this arrangement. In one year, US corporate rice production was subsidised by US taxpayers almost $1.3 billion. The rice shipped from the United States for sale in Honduras and several African countries was sold at 40 percent below production costs, causing 92 percent of Honduran rice farmers to lose their livelihoods.[4]

It was presumed, Clinton explained, that the displaced Haitian farmers would find new livelihoods by turning their efforts towards industrial development, though no specific full-scale programme of industrialisation was forthcoming. "It has not worked. It was a mistake," he concluded.[5]

It actually was less a "mistake" and more a policy of opportunistic design, fitting nicely with the export interests of US corporate agribusiness. Clinton's free trade policies towards Haiti, writes Kevin Edmunds, "deliberately reconfigured the country to fit into the new global division of labour, turning relatively self-sufficient farmers into low-wage workers in assembly plants." Despite his belated mea culpa, ex-president Clinton and his big investor friends ignored the practical ideas to restore self-sufficiency put forwards by Haitian popular organisations. Instead they continued to bolster export-oriented agribusiness cash-crops like coffee, mangos, and avocados.[6]

Instances of local industries and farming being wiped out by highly subsidised US products can be found across the globe from the Philippines to Honduras, from Mexico to Africa. In 2002 alone the US government allotted $3.7 billion in subsidies to its cotton agribusiness, which was then able to undersell African cotton producers. Countries like Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, Togo, Kenya, and Mali lost up to $400 million in potential export revenue as a result.[7]

By displacing people from their lands and robbing them of their self-sufficiency, corporations create labour markets overcrowded with desperate populations forced into shanty towns to toil for poverty wages (when they can get work), often in violation of the country's own minimum wage laws. In various Third World countries, workers are paid pennies per hour by corporate giants such as Nike, Disney, Walmart, and I.C. Penney.[8]

The United States was one of the few nations that refused to sign an international convention for the abolition of child labour and forced labour. The convention protested the child labour practices of US corporations throughout the Third World and within the United States itself, where child workers suffer high rates of injuries and fatalities and are often paid well below the minimum wage. Across the entire planet an estimated 158 million children aged five to fourteen are engaged in child labour.[9]

Shoes made by Indonesian children working twelve-hour days for 13 cents an hour cost less than $5 to be made but still sell $150 or more in the United States. The savings that big business reaps from cheap labour abroad are not passed on in lower prices to their customers at home. Corporations do not outsource to far-off regions so that US consumers can save money. They outsource in order to increase their margin of profit.

Phony Aid

Working hand in hand with these transnational investments are the foreign aid programmes. US aid to other countries subsidies construction of the infrastructure needed by corporations: ports, highways, and refineries. Aid given to Third World governments comes with strings attached. It often must be spent on US products. The recipient nation is required to give first preference to US companies, relying less on home-produced commodities in favour of imported ones, thereby creating more dependency and debt and leaving these countries less able to feed themselves.[10]

A good chunk of US aid money never sees the light of day, going directly into the personal coffers of sticky-fingered officials in the recipient countries. The very ease by which these officials are bought off makes them the favoured choices of the powerful investor interests. Better to have readily cooperative and corrupt leaders who help themselves rather than dedicated incorruptible leaders who mobilise popular sentiment to resist foreign takeovers.

Aid (of a sort) also comes from other sources. In 1944 the United Nations created the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Voting power in both organisations is determined by a country's financial contribution. As the largest "donor," the United States has a dominant voice, followed by Germany, Japan, France, and Great Britain. Though it has 186 countries as members, the IMF operates in secrecy with a select group of bankers and finance-ministry staffs drawn mostly from the rich nations.

The World Bank and IMF are supposed to assist nations in their development. What actually happens is another story. The World Bank will lend money to this or that country to finance a huge dam project that displaces thousands of families while providing cheap irrigation for export agriculture and cheap power for a private company.[11] Or a poor country may borrow from the World Bank to build up some aspect of its economy. Should it be unable to pay back the heavy interest because of declining export sales or some other reason, it most borrow again, this time from the IMF. But the IMF imposes a "structural adjustment programme" (SAP), requiring debtor countries to grant tax breaks to the transnational corporations, reduce local wages, and make no attempt to protect native enterprises from foreign imports and foreign takeovers.

In accordance with SAP rulings, the debtor nations are pressured to privatise their economies, selling at scandalously low prices their state-owned mines, railroads, and utilities to transnational corporations. They are forced to open their forests to clear-cutting and their lands to strip mining, without regard to the ecological damage done. The debtor nations also must reduce or eliminate subsidies for health, education, transportation, and food, spending less on public needs in order to have more money to meet debt payments. So it is that throughout the Third World, real wages have declined, and national debts have soared to the point at which debt payments absorb almost all of the poorer countries' export earnings—leaving the debtor even less able to provide for the minimal needs of its population.[12]

Here then we have explained a "mystery." (It is, of course, no mystery at all if you don't adhere to trickle-down mystification.) Why has poverty deepened while foreign aid, loans, and investments have grown? Answer: loans, investments, and most forms of aid are not designed to fight poverty but to augment the wealth of transnational investors at the expense of local populations. There is no trickle down, only a siphoning up from those who labour to those who accumulate.

It Works Well for Somebody

In their perpetual confusion, some liberal critics conclude that foreign aid and IMF and World Bank SAPs "do not work" because the end result is less self-sufficiency and more poverty for the recipient nations. Why then do the rich member states continue to fund the IMF and World Bank? Are their leaders just not as intelligent as the liberal critics who keep pointing out to them that their "failed" policies are having the opposite effect?

In fact, it is the critics who are stupid, not the western leaders and investors who enjoy such immense wealth and success and own so much of the world. They pursue their aid and foreign loan programmes because such programmes do work. The question is, work for whom? Cui bono? (Who benefits?)

The function of overseas investments, loans, and aid is not to uplift the masses in other countries. (There's no profit in that.) It is to advance to imperial interests of the global capital accumulators, to help them take over the lands and local economies of Third World peoples, monopolise their markets, depress their wages, indenture their labour with enormous debts, privatise their public service sector, and prevent these nations from emerging as trade competitors by depriving them of normal development. In these respects, investments, foreign loans, and structural adjustment programmes work very well indeed.

The real mystery is: why do some commentators find such an analysis so improbable? Why do they dismiss it as a "conspiracy theory?" Why are they skeptical that US rulers knowingly and deliberately pursue policies in the Third World (suppress wages, roll back environmental protections, diminish the public sector, cut back human services) designed to benefit the global corporate interests? These are the same policies that the same US rulers pursue on behalf of the same moneyed interests right here in our country. Why would any of these players behave so differently elsewhere?

The United Nations Research Institute for Social Development released a 2005–2006 report showing that half the world's wealth is owned by 2 percent of the richest adults. It is time that liberal critics stop thinking that the people who own so much of the world—and want to own it all—are "incompetent" or "misguided" or "failing to see the unintended consequences of their policies." When we think the empire builders are being stupid, we are not being very smart ourselves. They know what they are doing; they know where their interests lie—and so should we.

6 - Globalisation for the Few

ALONG WITH CORPORATE INVESTMENT and US foreign aid, another way the empire accumulates wealth and spreads poverty is by imposing international rulings misleadingly referred to as free trade and globalisation.

Introducing "Globalisation"

The goal of the transnational corporation is to become truly transnational, poised above the sovereign power of any particular nation, while being served by the sovereign powers of all nations. Among the measures contrived by international business to achieve dominion over the entire planet is globalisation. As presented to the public, globalisation is just part of a natural and inevitable expansion of trade and economic development beneficial to all. In early times, there were only village markets; these eventually expanded into regional markets, then national ones, then international ones, and now finally global agreements that cover the entire world.

As presented to the public, globalisation supposedly was going to create more jobs and prosperity by abolishing restrictive regulatory laws and by integrating nation-state economies into a more open and active trade system. In fact, these "free trade" arrangements represent a kind of global coup d'état by the giant business interests of the world.

With the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), and numerous other multilateral international covenants, the transnational corporations have been elevated above the sovereign powers of nation-states.[1] These agreements endow anonymous international trade committees such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO), established in 1994, with the authority to overrule any nation state laws that are deemed a burden to the investment opportunities of transnational corporations.

These trade panels consist of "trade specialists" elected by no one and drawn from the corporate world. They meet in secret and often have investment stakes in the very issues they adjudicate, being bound by no conflict-of-interest provisions. Their function is to allow the transnational companies to do whatever they wish without any regulations placed on them by any country. Not one of GATT's 500 pages of rules and restrictions are directed against private corporations; all are against governments. Signatory governments must lower tariffs, end farm subsidies, treat foreign companies the same as domestic ones, honour all transnational corporate patent claims on natural resources, and obey the rulings of a permanent elite bureaucracy, the WTO.

Should a country refuse to change its laws when a WTO panel so dictates, the WTO can impose fines or international trade sanctions, depriving the resistant country of needed markets and materials.[2] The WTO has ruled against laws deemed barriers to free trade. It has forced Japan to accept greater pesticide residues in imported food. It has kept Guatemala from outlawing deceptive advertising of baby food. It has eliminated the ban that various countries had imposed on asbestos and on fuel and emission standards for motor vehicles. And the WTO has ruled against marine-life protection laws and the ban some nations imposed on the importation of endangered-species products.

The European Union banned the importation of hormone-ridden US beef, a ruling that had overwhelming popular support throughout Europe, but a three-member WTO panel decided the ban was an illegal restraint on trade. The WTO decision on beef put in jeopardy a host of other food import regulations based on health concerns. The WTO overturned a portion of the US Clean Air Act banning certain additives in gasoline because it interfered with imports from foreign refineries, along with a portion of the US Endangered Species Act that forbade the import of shrimp caught with nets that failed to protect sea turtles.[3]

Privatising Nature

What is called "free trade" is neither free nor really about trade as such. Free trade is certainly not fair trade. It benefits strong nations at the expense of weaker ones, and rich interests at the expense of the rest of us, circumventing what little democratic sovereignty we have been able to achieve. Free trade elevates property rights above every other right among the nations of the world.

There is the example of the neem tree, whose extracts contain natural pesticidal and medicinal properties. Cultivated for centuries in India, the tree attracted the attention of various pharmaceutical companies that filed monopoly patents, causing mass protests by Indian farmers. As dictated by the WTO, the big pharmaceuticals now had exclusive control over the marketing of neem tree products, a ruling that would force thousands of erstwhile independent farmers to work for the powerful pharmaceuticals on low-wage terms set by the companies.

Occasional victories are won against this kind of corporate aggrandisement, including one involving the neem tree. In 1994 the European Patent Office (EPO) granted patent rights to the US Department of Agriculture and the transnational agribusiness firm WR Grace of New York for a fungicide derived from the neem tree, which it described as "an Indian medicinal plant." Following a long struggle and after being presented with subsequent evidence of traditional use of the fungicide, the EPO revoked the patent in 2005, ruling that the patent application was an act of biopiracy. (This was the first time a patent was rejected on such grounds.) The ruling established that the traditional knowledge of farmers is a right that takes precedence over the false assertions of agribusiness firms. These corporate claimants put forth a newly invented use for the neem plant to justify their monopoly grab of a natural agrarian resource that has been in common use for generations.[4]

The war to monopolise nature continues. A trade agreement between India and the United States, the Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture (KIA), backed by Monsanto and other transnational corporate giants, allows for the takeover of India's seed sector by Monsanto and India's trade sector by Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill. This amounted to a war against millions of India's independent farmers and small business, and a threat to that country's food security. Farmers began organising against this economic invasion by maintaining traditional seed banks and setting up systems of communal agrarian support. As one farmer said, "We do not buy seeds from the market because we suspect they may be contaminated with genetically engineered or terminator seeds."[5]

Another corporate invasion in India was the one launched by Walmart, whose intent was to take over India's retail sector. Walmart announced plans to open 500 stores in India, starting in 2007. But several years later the government, to its credit, still was not allowing Walmart stores and other foreign companies to sell directly to consumers.[6] The WTO ruled that the US corporation RiceTec had the patent rights to the many varieties of basmati rice grown for centuries by India's farmers. It also ruled that a Japanese corporation had exclusive rights in the entire world to grow and produce curry powder. As these instances demonstrate, what is called "free trade" amounts to international corporate monopoly control over nature itself. Such developments caused Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad to observe:

"We now have a situation where theft of genetic resources by western biotech TNCs [transnational corporations] enables them to make huge profits by producing patented genetic mutations of these same materials. What depths have we sunk to in the global marketplace when nature's gifts to the poor may not be protected but their modifications by the rich become exclusive property?"

If the current behaviour of the rich countries is anything to go by, globalisation simply means the breaking down of the borders of countries so that those with the capital and the goods will be free to dominate the markets.[7]

Globalisation has even targeted "water markets." Recognised everywhere as a community resource and a human right, water sources are now being privatised, sold to corporations like Monsanto that then lay exclusive claim to marketing the water as a profitable commodity, in some cases even prohibiting local residents from using barrels to collect their own rainwater. The companies claim to own the water that comes from deep within the earth and from the rivers and streams, and now from the heavens too.[8]

Free trade agreements give transnational corporations control not only of production but of consumption as well. A WTO meeting was called in May 2010 in Quebec for the purpose of changing international standards on food labelling. The goal was to abolish the labelling of genetically modified (GM) foods. The US delegation sent by the Obama administration led the fight to abolish labelling. Deprived of a warning label, the public would have no way of avoiding the consumption of GM foodstuffs. In effect, Americans and the peoples of other nations would be deprived of their democratic sovereignty, the right to take protective measures against such products. It would become illegal under international law for government agencies to inform consumers that the food being sold to them was genetically modified. As it happened, the US delegation was unable to get the pro-Monsanto proposal adopted at the 2010 meeting.[9] But future attempts to wipe out protective consumer labelling lurk on the horizon.

Free Trade vs. Public Service

Globalisation means turning the clock back on reforms. Health and safety regulations can be judged as imposing an unfair burden on trade. Public services can be charged with depriving foreign corporations of market opportunities.[10] To offer one instance: under NAFTA, the US-based Ethyl Corporation sued the Canadian government for $250 million in lost business opportunities and interference with trade because Canada banned MMT, an Ethyl Corporation–produced gasoline additive found to be carcinogenic by Canadian investigators. Fearing they would lose the case, Canadian officials reluctantly lifted the ban on MMT, paid Ethyl $10 million compensation, an issued a public statement calling MMT "safe," even though they had scientific findings showing otherwise. California also banned the unhealthy additive; this time a Canadian-based Ethyl company sued California under NAFTA for placing an unfair burden on free trade.[11]

In another case the good guys won: United Parcel Service (UPS) charged the Canadian postal service for lost market opportunities, which means that under NAFTA, the Canadian government would have to compensate UPS for all the business that UPS thinks it would have procured had there been no public postal service in Canada. Just about all public services could be wiped out had the judgement gone as UPS wanted. The Canadian postal workers union challenged the case, arguing that the agreement violated the Canadian Constitution. The NAFTA tribunal decided on behalf of the Canadian postal service in a complicatedly argued decision. The positive effect of the decision was to free other Canadian public-service initiatives that were being held in abeyance out of fear of being charged with interfering with free trade.[12] But potential difficulties in expanding or maintaining public services continue as long as free trade agreements rule the roost.

Spreading Poverty

Agreements like GATT and NAFTA have hastened the corporate takeover of local markets in various countries, squeezing out smaller business and worker collectives. Under NAFTA, better-paying US jobs were lost as US firms contracted out to the cheaper Mexican labour market. In its first few years over 600,000 jobs in the United States were eliminated under NAFTA. New jobs created in that period were mostly in the lower paying sector of the US economy. Meanwhile, Mexico was flooded with cheap, high-tech, mass-produced corn and dairy products from giant American agribusiness firms (themselves heavily subsidised by the US government), driving small Mexican farmers and distributors into bankruptcy and displacing large numbers of poor peasants and small businesses. With the advent of NAFTA, the incomes of poor Mexicans was halved, poverty spread from 30 percent to at least 50 percent of the population, and Mexican sweatshop profits skyrocketed.[13]

Under NAFTA, wages have fallen in the United States, Mexico, and Canada, and union membership has shrunk dramatically. Canada has lost tens of thousands of well-paying jobs. Companies now can more easily move operations across borders to cheaper labour markets, a threat that has further undermined union organising and deterred wage demands.[14]

African nations like Ghana, Uganda, and Mali found that their gross domestic product (GDP) declined sharply with the advent of free trade. Contrary to the promises of prosperity put forth by free trade advocates, when poor countries phase out tariff protections, import quotas, and import duties designed to protect their local industries, "imports climb sharply and local producers are priced out of the market by cheaper, often subsidised Western goods. This also depresses prices."[15]

North Americans are told that to remain competitive in this newly globalised world marketplace, they must increase their output while reducing their labour costs; in other words, work harder for less pay in what has been called a race to the bottom. This is happening. The work-week lengthened by as much as 20 percent (from forty hours to forty-six and even forty-eight hours) and real wages flattened or declined during the reign of George W. Bush, continuing into the Barack Obama era.

During the deep recession ushered in by the financial crises of 2008, some of the millions of unemployed eventually were able to gain reentry into the US workforce. But many of the new jobs were part-time, of limited duration, lower pay, and lacking in benefits. Bosses had their pick of workers willing to accept less secure positions. Many have been rehired as "self-employed contract workers," often doing the same work they once did as full-time employees, only now for a limited duration and for lower pay and no benefits. By 2005 almost one-third of the workforce consisted of these so-called contingent workers. By the end of the decade the number was estimated at closer to 40 percent.[16]

In sum, globalisation diminishes the living standards of working people not only in the Third World but in the major industrial countries as well. As represented by the free trade agreements, globalisation is not an inevitable "natural" development. The trade agreements have been consciously planned by big business and its government minions over a period of years in pursuit of a totally deregulated world economy that undermines all democratic checks on business practices. The people of any one province, state, or nation are now finding it increasingly difficult to get their governments to impose protective regulations or develop new forms of public-sector production out of fear of being overruled by some self-appointed international free trade panel.[17]

Bending the Rules

Usually it is the large nations demanding that poorer, smaller ones relinquish the protections and subsidies they provide for their local producers. But occasionally things take a different turn. In late 2006 Canada launched a dispute at the World Trade Organization over the use of trade-distorting agricultural subsidies by the United States, specifically the enormous sums dished out by the US government to agribusiness enabling US farm corporations to sell commodities abroad at prices lower than what the farmers in other countries can offer, thereby creating an unfair advantage in agrarian exports. The case also challenged the entire multibillion-dollar structure of US agricultural subsidies. A report by Oxfam International revealed that at least thirty-eight Third World countries were suffering severely as a result of trade-distorting subsidies by both the United States and the European Union.[18]

The US government attempted to insert a special clause into trade negotiations that would place its illegal use of farm subsidies above challenge by WTO member countries and make the subsidies immune from adjudication by the WTO. In 2009 the WTO ruled that "massive government subsidies for large-scale cotton growers in the United States are unfair and hurt farmers in poor countries." An Oxfam study found that a complete removal of US cotton subsidies would lift the world price of cotton by 6 to 14 percent, resulting in better markets and increased income for many poor West African cotton-growing households. But US rulers continued as before, refusing to abide by the WTO ruling to scrap its subsidies.[19] The empire always places itself above the strictures it imposes on others.

WTO aside, what is seldom remarked upon is that NAFTA and GATT are in violation of the US Constitution, the preamble of which makes clear that sovereign power rests with the people: "We the People of the United States [...] do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." Article I, Section 1 of the Constitution notes that all legislative powers shall be vested in the US Congress. Article I, Section 7 gives the president (not some trade council) the power to veto a law, subject to being overridden by a two-thirds vote in Congress. And Article III gives adjudication and review powers to federal courts, not to self-appointed trade tribunals. The Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the Constitution declare that all rights and powers not explicitly delegated to the federal government are reserved to the people and the states. In a word, there is nothing in the entire Constitution that allows—and much that disallows—an international trade panel to exercise supreme review powers undermining the constitutionally mandated decisions of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches.

True, Article VII says that the Constitution, federal laws, and treaties "shall be the supreme Law of the land," but this was not intended to include treaties that overrode the sovereign democratic power of the people and their representatives. In any case, strictly speaking, the trade agreements are not treaties. NAFTA and GATT were called "agreements" instead of treaties, a semantic ploy that enabled President Clinton to bypass the two-thirds treaty ratification vote in the Senate and avoid any treat amendment process. The World Trade Organization was approved by a lame-duck session of Congress held after the 1994 elections. No lawmaker running in that election uttered a word to voters about putting the US government under a perpetual obligation to international trade rulings.

What is being undermined is not only a lot of good laws dealing with environment, public services, labour standards, and consumer protection but also the very right to legislate such laws. Our democratic sovereignty itself is being surrendered to a secretive plutocratic trade organisation that presumes to exercise a power greater than that of the people and their courts and legislatures.

"Free trade" is designed to leave the world's economic (and ecological) destiny to the tender mercy of bankers and transnational corporations. The globalisation it promotes is a logical extension of imperialism, a victory of empire over republic, a victory of international finance capital over local productivity and nation-state democracy (such as it is).

Militant protests against free trade have taken place in over forty nations, from Britain and France to Thailand and India. In 2000–2001 alone, there were demonstrations in Seattle, Sydney, Prague, Genoa, Washington, D.C., and various other locales, causing several multilateral trade agreements to be stalled or voted down. Poorer nations were catching wise to the free trade scams and refusing to sign away what shreds of sovereignty they still had.

Some Confused Marxists

The discussion of globalisation by some prominent Marxists (but not all) has oddly focused on the question of whether the new "internationalisation" of capital will undermine the national sovereignty and the nation-state. Invariably these observers (for instance, Ellen Wood and William Taab in Monthly Review; Ian Jasper and Morris Zeitlin in Nature, Society, and Thought; and Erwin Marquit in Political Affairs) conclude that the nation-state still plays a key role in capitalist imperialism, that capital—while global in its scope—is not international but bound to particular nations, and that "globalisation" is little more than another name for overseas capital investment.

They repeatedly remind us that Karl Marx already had described globalisation, this process of international financial expansion, as early as 1848, when he and Friedrich Engels in the Communist Manifesto wrote about how capitalism moves into all corners of the world, refashioning all things into its own image. Therefore, there is no cause for the present uproar. Globalisation, these Marxists conclude, is not a new development but a long-standing one that Marxist theory uncovered long ago. Nor is there any reason to fear, they assure us, that the nation-state will disappear from history because of the globalisation of trade and production.

The problem with this position is that it misses the whole central point of the current struggle. It is not national sovereignty that is at stake, it is democratic sovereignty. People all over the world have taken to the streets to protest free trade agreements not out of concern for their flag but for their democratic rights, their ability to defend themselves from the preemptive expropriations of an internationalised monopoly capital. Among them are farmers, workers, students, and intellectuals, including many Marxists who see things more clearly than the aforementioned.

As used today, the term globalisation refers to a new stage of international expropriation, designed not to put an end to the nation-state but to undermine whatever democratic rights exist to protect the social wage and restrain the power of transnational corporations.

The free trade agreements potentially can override all statutes and regulations that restrict private capital in any way. Carried to full realisation, this means the end of whatever imperfect democratic protections people have been able to muster after generations of struggle. Under the free trade agreements, any and all public services can be ruled out of existence because they cause "lost market opportunities" for private capital. Soo too, public hospitals can be charged with taking away markets from foreign-owned private hospitals; and public water supply systems, public schools, public housing, and public transportation are guilty of depriving their private counterparts in other countries of market opportunities, likewise public health insurance, public mail delivery, and public auto insurance systems. Laws that try to protect the environment or labour standards or consumer health already been overturned for "creating barriers to free trade."

But let it be repeated: what also is overthrown is the right to have such laws. This is the most important point of all and the one most frequently overlooked by persons from across the political spectrum. Under the free trade accords, corporate investment rights have been upraised to impartial supremacy, able to take precedent over all other rights, including the right to a clean, livable environment, the right to affordable public services, and the right to any morsel of political-economic democracy. Under the banner of "free trade," corporate property rights are elevated above all democratic rights.

Globalisation has been used to stifle the voice of working people and their ability to develop a public sector that serves their interests. Even free speech is being undermined by free trade agreements as when product disparagement (public criticism of the safety or quality of a product) is treated as an interference with international trade. And even nature itself is being privatised by transnational capital, as corporations buy up patents to monopolise the world's natural food supply. What we have is an international coup d'état by big capital over the peoples of the world.

Another form of laissez-faire supremacy not mentioned so far (and given relatively slight attention by Marxists) is the European Union (EU). It is a 27-state confederation in which "free movement" of goods, services, capital, and labour are promoted, and no EU member state is allowed to protect local producers from the competition of a more powerful transnational company situated in another member state. As there are substantial income disparities between member states, "free movement," as Anthony Coughlin points out, leads to wider inequalities, with "high cost capital and business tending to move from Western to Eastern Europe and low cost labour moving from Eastern Europe westward."[20]

In sum, the fight against free trade is a fight for the right to political-economic democracy, public services, and a social wage, the right not to be completely at the mercy of big capital. It is a new and drastic phase of the class struggle that some Marxists, as immersed in classical theory and so ill-informed about present-day public policy—seem to have missed. The free trade accords benefit the rich nations over poor ones and the rich classes within all nations at the expense of ordinary citizens. It is the new imperial spectre that haunts the world.