Understanding the Framework
The order of things is primarily the entrenchment of the status quo, the maintenance of the elites who hold the money, power and influence. These elites of differing persuasions hold a collective interest in their prerogatives. Disinformation, media manipulation, foreign policy machination, dark covert operations, historical deceit, institutional genuflection and political domination interlocked with corporate interests are all part of this process to shift diseconomies on to the common people while skimming the cream and making the necessary apologia or denials. Some major manifestations are living standard decline, rampant illicit drug enterprises, corporate media concentration and increasing repression in the world including the United States. While some think tank ideologues and widely read pundits might maintain a degree of ideology in the process, the overall tone projects on a right-center (neo-conservative) to centrist-liberal (mainstream) baseline. This is to afford so-called “differing viewpoints” or an illusory parameter of debate to the extent that very iconoclastic views are ignored. Naturally there are disagreements within the overall network on how to maximize. As such, the different persuasions do not form a monolithic entity with certainly the existence of varying institutions, tactics and factions. But the premise still rests on the preservation of the order of things at extreme costs.
The analysis of the status quo is not necessarily limited to defined concepts such as nationality, ethnicity or race though there are times they do have a modal purpose in the expedition of things. Thus, for instance, there are power wielders in the United States who work in concert with the upper class stratum in the Third World countries at the expense of the poverty wage classes in their respective nations. This does seem to mean that there is a class-based analysis to be made despite contemporary intelligentsia’s assurances to us in the contrary. But then the intelligentsia are a good part of the persuasion anyway.
For the most part the United States’ mechanisms, foreign policy a major piston, are the primary global motors today. In fact, this has been so since the end of World War II. They generally work in concert with the other industrial powers of the world and then carry the process to the various regions of the Third World. And what persons work to effect and/or make apologia for these mechanisms? Within the borders of the US resides the common interest structure of the corporate community (industry lawyers, bankers, big oil, weapons manufacturers, agribusiness, etc.), mass media conglomerates (Rupert Murdoch’s FOX, Hearst, Luce, Time-Warner, etc.), think tanks (American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation, Brookings Institute, etc.), highly visible mouthpieces (George Will, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Dan Rather, Barbara Walters, etc.), vast security state apparatus (Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Security Agency and the other various Defense branch agencies, etc.), policy institutions/planning committees (Trilateral Commission, Council on Foreign Relations, Project for a New American Century, etc.) and the branches of government (Presidency, Congress and Supreme Court) as well as the Cabinet (Departments of Commerce, Treasury, State, Education and so on).
These entrenched entities (and “Founding Father” forbears) have exceedingly much to do in the way of policy formation, much in the way the current world is shaped from its historical premises to the contemporary discourse. The fluid connections among these entities are quite transparent though rarely emphasized or analyzed in the mainstream media (unless certain scandals and shifting tactical winds prove too much to contain). Some persons from the elite socio-economic groups become Defense, State, Commerce and CIA heads or high-ranking officials (i.e. former Bankers Trust vice-chairman A.B. “Fuzzy” Krongard who became CIA Executive Director in 1998) and vice-versa (such as former Reagan Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger who went on to a comfortable position as a Forbes publisher and Bechtel general counsel). Just to illustrate a stark picture of the intimacy between private economic privilege and federal officialdom, it is noted that the George W. Bush Administration was or is full of corporatists and think tank/policy group directors. Among them: Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill held corporate director positions at Lucent Technologies and Eastman Kodak while posting as director at the likes of Rand Corporation and American Enterprise Institute; Commerce Secretary Donald Evans was CEO at the oil and gas company Tom Brown, Inc.; Interior Secretary Gale Norton, entrusted to protect the American environment had spent a number of years fighting on behalf of Corporate America to pollute it, worked for right-wing law firms funded by Amoco, Ford and Phillips 66; US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick was vice-president at Fannie Mae, $50,000 adviser to Enron and was on board at the Council on Foreign Relations as well as the Trilateral Commission; National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice served on the board at Chevron, even having a tanker named after her.(1) These are just but a small reference to the privileged connection between government and private economy. The usual extbook analysis does not like to see the greater implications presented (lest one be labeled a "conspiracy theorist").
Again, while not working from a single formal agenda, the convergence of elite priorities is still the basic endgame: preservation of the big business-big government system on behalf of the rich and powerful, fisting the left-liberals, socialists, progressives, reformists, civil rights groups, environmentalists, labor unions, libertarians, liberation theologians, nationalist masses, isolationists, Islamic revolutionaries and other troublesome folk who conceivably get in the way of the proper initiatives. To further illustrate, University of California research professor G. William Domhoff adds:
"As the annoyances expressed by the ultraconservatives reveal, the policy network is not totally homogenous. Reflecting differences of opinion within the corporate community, the moderate and ultra-conservative subgroups within the policy-formation network have long-standing disagreements…however, for all their differences, leaders within the two clusters of policy organizations have a tendency to search for compromise policies due to their common membership in the corporate community, their social bonds, and the numerous interlocks among all policy groups. When compromise is not possible, the final resolution of policy conflicts often takes place in legislative struggles of Congress..."(2)
Since it is the United States’ managers who mostly control and preside over the discourse over much of the world, the lavished terms “freedom," “democracy” and “human rights” as provided by their nation’s fanciful legacy serve the basic ideological and tactical verbiage. There tends to be a basic genuflection in this legacy that serves to remind other lesser nations who has the most superior values and the attendant “greatness” with which to chart the global course.
"By the turn of the (twentieth) century the keystone of US foreign-policy ideology had fallen securely in place. Americans had succumbed to the temptations of an assertively nationalist foreign policy. Hamilton had first dangled it before them, Jefferson himself had fallen to its charms, Polk and McKinley had warmly embraced it. Step by step foreign-policy activists had come to occupy the patriotic high ground…In this endeavor they ultimately brought Americans to terms with colonies and naval bases, spheres of influence and protectorates, a powerful blue water navy and an expeditionary army. A multiplicity of arguments justified the search for international greatness…Secure in their faith in liberty, Americans would set about remaking others in their own image while the world watched in awe. At the same time liberty sanctified greatness.
The appeal of greatness is perhaps most easily understood. The advocates of greatness wished to harness policy to the burgeoning power generated by a commercializing and later an industrializing economy. This economic power created the potential for fashioning the instruments of policy essential to dreams of international greatness. At the same time economic growth created needs and problems that were no less important to the thinking of the advocates of greatness. Markets needed protecting. Divisions at home needed papering over. The national stability, wealth and power on which an activist foreign policy depended required in turn a strong state with ample revenue…"(3)
It is an elementary deduction as to who the source of “ample revenue” is for those “foreign policy activists.” Understanding the origins of the USA, at least in some measure, is essential in analyzing the basic thrust and premise of US foreign policy. There is a reverence to place these deified notions of “liberty” as something purely from the good hearts and high-mindedness of the Founding Fathers, thus the systemic premise of American policy henceforth.
"Democracy is the flaming watchword of the age, beloved of hard-eyed politicians and starry-eyed professors, soothing to the masses...so contrary to what is taught in the schools of the United States and bruited about in the news media and expressions of politicians, the United States is not – in the opinion of one of its principal founders and interpreters – a democracy. The Constitution itself, Article IV, Section 4, says: 'The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican form of government…' There is no mention of the word democracy in the Constitution. But, devotees of the word 'democracy' may object…”(4)
Thus American children are taught in the indoctrination process that the Founding Fathers began a pluralistic society free of European monarchial conditions. The truth is that men of privilege were the ones who wrote the formal foundation of the United States of America. Influential colonial men received the land grants and estate sovereignty from the majesty, three-fourths of New York’s acreage belonged to twelve important men (by 1700) and by 1760 only a few hundred men controlled most of the commerce, shipping banking, mining and manufacturing in five colonial cities while the restive poor were kept in their places. Native Americans, African slaves, women, indentured servants and white men without sufficient property were not allowed to vote in the thirteen original states. That privilege belonged to the rich white men. The foundation of early American government was for the benefit of these elites and indeed the Founding Fathers agreed with Adam Smith that it was “instituted for the rich against the poor.”(5)
“Democracy was not highly rated by the writers of the Constitution," shares Ferdinand Lundberg. Elbridge Gerry wrote “the evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy.” Edmund Randolph expressed the “turbulence and follies of democracy.”(6) The Constitution itself was less a framework of true democracy than a final solution for the rich white men of the day after tactical disagreements over the interests of property were resolved. No poor farmers or artisans were present in Philadelphia to represent the common man’s concerns. The Constitution is an elitist document that has a background in Federalist bribery, intimidation and fraud, faced with initial multi-state opposition. Though the “high-minded” framers proudly proclaimed “We the People," the Constitution was never put to a popular vote. Indeed, “the Founding Fathers were not representative of the four million Americans in the new nation, most of whom were small farmers, debtors, trades people, frontier dwellers, servants, or slaves.”(7) Democracy was simply a detestable machination in the minds of the Founding Fathers. But the Constitution still had to have some measure of popular appeal “to secure the public good and private rights against the danger” of democracy “and at the same time preserve the spirit and form of popular government” as pronounced by James Madison in the Federalist No. 10.
Certain well-established admirers of the Constitution preach of the framers’ high-mindedness though the language was clear from the Philadelphia fraternity that democracy and other good things for common men were not pursued. After all, the Bill of Rights was not an original feature in it. In the vaunted literature or syndicated love letters to America, we find nuggets from the elite penmen who believe in the Founding Fathers’ conventional pluralism. William F. Buckley apparently agrees with fellow rightist William Bennett that the Founders were really a bunch of open-minded, egalitarian fellows whose only criterion for public office was “character…the only qualification enumerated by the Founding Fathers for serving.”(8) Perhaps it might be too troubling to acknowledge that in the Independence days, New Jersey legislators had to be worth 1,000 pounds, South Carolina senators were required to possess estates worth at least 7,000 pounds free of debt (about equal to $1,000,000 today) and in Maryland, candidates for governor had to own 5,000 pounds worth of property. As with voting, one had to be a wealthy white male to be eligible for office.(9) Far from having a foundation in genuine democracy, the founding of American governance via its literary mandate was the instrument in maintaining post-colonial elites’ economic interests first, and then whatever semblance of popular government existed second.
With a point of reference in regard to the elite American value system established here, the economic system we know as capitalism that the important people place above common social and environmental decency is the socio-economic premise of the endgame. We know that this is the system where the means of production, distribution and wealth-exchange are generally in the hands of private investors, corporations or individuals as opposed to public and/or state means. There is nothing inherently wrong with this concept of economics but in the United States its variant, since the retrenchment of the working man’s peak 1950s gains, has increasingly put the priorities and volition of Corporate America as the endgame while the country slowly but surely reverts back to its Gilded Age and Great Depression form.
The resurgent neo-conservative direction of American capitalism demands “free market” discipline. The thinking is that government should help neither the needy nor the small yet at the same time “deregulate” industry and enterprise. Capitalism’s pundits such as Paul Craig Roberts say as much.(10) The US still has substantial vestiges of working class protections compared to more truly “free market” economies out in the world (those Third World death squad democracies and outright dictatorships buttressed by the CIA) but the rightward tilt is surely quite a far cry from the more humane recourses in the Western European social democracies. “Free market” is a bandied term that readily means the government should stay out of the way while the poverty wage fodder should be thrown into it. But it is readily apparent what the result is when deregulation happens. If we look at the banking industry as an example (the one used by Roberts), it is duly noted that without “industrial policy” bad things tend to happen to these key industries. The bank failures of the deregulated 1980s are record as the annual ones from 1985 to 1987 set the post-Depression bar.(11) The next time we encounter the mindset that business is better without some decent “industrial policy," we might pause and reconsider it.
While the ability for a person or group to engage in private enterprise is an exemplary icon in the principles of liberty, the term capitalism is very sacrosanct in the US neo-conservative sectors of expression. It is placed on a pedestal that can do little or no wrong. This pedestal is what the elites and power managers base their policies on, their framework for us to fit in and be good statistical fodder. And they typically wax warm words about it. According to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a fount of public babble, “generosity, trust, optimism and hard work…are the elements that have driven the American system.”(12) Gingrich is not clear with the context of his “elements” although it is apparent that “the American system” is capitalism as he spins it. Historically it was certainly the nine-year old children who worked the fourteen hour days in the sweat shops and had “driven the American system” all while the “hard work” of labor’s suffrage and post-World War II Keynesian measures finally paid off the US working people’s dreams, perhaps affording some measures of “trust” and “optimism.” The AM radio disinformationist Rush Limbaugh bristles, “The world’s biggest problem is the unequal distribution of capitalism. If there were capitalism everywhere, you wouldn’t have food shortages.”(13) According to ABC’s John Stossel, we should believe in “capitalism, the system that has lifted more people out of poverty than charity or government ever has.”(14) Gingrich, Limbaugh, Stossel and their constituents typically believe that market forces, fairly free of “industrial policy” and optimistically driven by “the elements," should be the guiding light for our society to follow as the welfare mothers and other such rabble pick up the bread crumbs along the trail. Certainly big government should help the high and mighty though.
But there are unconvinced traditional conservatives such as Kevin Phillips who are aware of the regressive nature of the current rightward US socio-economic drive and are very disturbed by this so-called free market and the Reagan era’s ushering of “trickle down” or “supply side” economics:
"What conservatives found difficult to admit, even by 1989, was that the capitalist exuberance of the 1980s – bolstered by a supportive culture and well-placed allies in Washington – had begun, inevitably, to create its own economic imbalances and social dilemmas…During the 1980s the bucket of liberty and economic freedom rose, while the bucket of income equality fell. Upper-tier Americans significantly expanded their share of national wealth while low-income citizens lost ground, and Reagan policies were critical to this shift."(15)
No matter how the system looks, corporations that manufacture weapons for the Pentagon and make immense profits from them are quite free from real world “free market discipline” and “entrepreneurial values.” As I will touch on regarding this particular aspect, military spending, the Cold War and realpolitik served a certain rich few at the expense of the struggling taxpaying many who did not benefit from them. Overall, there is indeed an “industrial policy” at work, though not the kind that Paul Craig Roberts and his ilk would like to talk about. It also took a quasi-Soviet style planned US economy during World War II to "lift more people out of poverty" and indeed government did more to do so, contrary to Stossel's purist view.
In order to understand the system, following the money is quite necessary. These financial exchanges within the important networks highlight the dynamics of it. Capitalism as preached certainly is not quite so self-reliant or subject to the deified market as commonly expressed. Corporations receive approximately $85 billion in direct annual government subsidy disbursed through 125 spending programs. Some of the Cabinet agencies such as the Departments of Agriculture and Commerce, for instance, engage in spending programs that underwrite private business. The Agriculture Department provides the ethanol and corn syrup industry almost $500 million in corporate welfare. Price supports in the form of government sugar subsidies bolster the profits of companies like Archer Daniels Midland, an agribusiness company that markets ethanol and corn syrup, thereby protecting them from “free-market” forces like foreign sugar imports and decreasing food prices. The Fanjul family earns roughly $60,000,000 annually in artificial profits thanks to such price supports and import quotas. It contributed $350,000 to political agendas supportive of the sugar subsidy program. The Department of Agriculture Market Promotion Program spends $111 million just to underwrite the overseas advertising costs of American companies.16 Indeed some of the expenditures specifically were $10 million for Sunkist oranges, $2.9 for Pillsbury muffins, $2.5 million for Dole fruit, $1.2 million for American Legend mink coats and $465,000 for McDonald’s chicken nuggets. The Forest Service spends about $140 million annually via the Federal Highway Trust Fund building superfluous roads through national forests simply to provide tree resources for multi-million dollar timber companies like Weyerhauser and Georgia Pacific. The Sematech program involves $100 million worth of welfare handouts to fourteen of the largest US microchip companies like Intel and National Semiconductor. As the New Republic’s Steve Tidrick observes, “When corporations stand in line for handouts, they act as surrogates for their owners who are rarely poor people.”(17)
Boeing is another excellent example of the “free market” paragon in historical application. The aeronautical company is legendary for being primarily a product of the state-coordinated American command economy of World War II though ex-President Bill Clinton called it a “model for companies across America.” 92% of its investment was via Federal funding during the time. It virtually made no profit before the war. But state management induced it to increase its net worth from $9.6 million in 1940 to $49.2 million in 1945. After the war, Fortune had to recognize that the aircraft industry could not survive in a pure competitive economy. By 1948, the Federal government recognized the problem and subsequently nurtured Boeing and the aeronautical industry.(18) Symbolic of how the “free market” program works in American “capitalism," new technologies and industries, from electronics to biomedical genetics to computer systems, are funded at taxpayer expense, running in the billions, only to be handed over to private business. AT&T had the entire satellite industry placed under its control in 1962 after working Americans paid the initial $20 billion to develop it. The US government, not necessarily loyal to American workers judging by the discourse of information technology, also provided $1 billion in the early 1990s to help corporations move American jobs out to countries with cheaper labor costs via the Agency of International Development.(19)
Reactionaries like Limbaugh who sing praises to the “free market” are quite fond of the sink-or-swim, self-reliance pop medleys (when they are directed at poor people) but sing other types of tunes when it comes to the rich, dazzling and swindling corporate crooks in their time of greed and need. Regarding the Savings and Loan industry that totally sank over its seismic proportion scandal, Limbaugh does not exactly advocate a sink-or-swim regimen for the high-class hustlers and crooks who broke it. His political flatulence is quite renowned and is certainly not dispelled by his opinion that ordinary people such as “you” benefited from the wholesale S&L deregulation and that they have an obligation to forgive these crooks or else “if you’re tired of bailing out the S&Ls, then send the money back that you’ve got.”(20) What Limbaugh leaves unmentioned is that the industry was historically intended to be a fair means for modest income people to acquire home loans but a “free market” fanatic, Richard Pratt (who chaired the Federal Home Loan Bank Board), turned it into a free-wheeling “junk bond” casino for the “remarkable collection of swindlers, con artists, and high rollers” who “took over many thrifts and proceeded to run them into the ground.”
In other words, the S&Ls were mostly no longer a mechanism for regular citizens but one for the swindlers and other assorted con artists. The carnage of the scandal will cost about $500 billion, if not more, when all is said and done, the bill paid by “you” and other ordinary people said to have enjoyed the fruits of the S&L industry.(21) Relating to the topic of “industrial policy," like the banking example, the S&L industry was also deregulated big time in the 1980s. But the scope of the S&L bailout just further illuminates where the taxpayer money goes when the alleged “free market” system goes awry.
Billions of this taxpayer money are spent saving big corporations like Chrysler and Lockheed from the destructive effects of a pure competitive market. One of the largest banks, Continental Illinois, received $7.5 billion to rescue it from the “free market.” And when loans went bad in the Third World for American banks, the US government gave $8 billion to the International Monetary Fund to offset the losses.(22) Libertarian rightist Stephen Moore of the Cato Institute, one think tank that actually seems to believe in a genuine free market, observes, “Corporate welfare is anti-capitalist…it converts the American businessman from capitalist to lobbyist…a conservator not a risk taker.” He further illustrates that of some 400 farm commodities, about twenty-four receive 90% of government subsidies which enrich those farmers worth over a net $500,000.23 It is fact that “the American system” needs and uses government. Not just in terms of subsidies, a virtual network of other apparati on a global scale is needed to prop and support “the American system.”
Capitalism has a dynamic that needs to expand beyond a national border, accumulate more capital and increase profits. There is no other course, for doing otherwise is to shrink and die while competitors grow or do a leveraged buy-out. The industrialized nations have general corporate interests around the world such as investments, factories, plantations, oil wells and other such items that need to be protected from reformers who may pursue alternate paths of production and distribution. They collectively cooperate in order to make for a generally mutually beneficial structure though they will also have heated disagreements on particular issues such as when France and the United States had their beef over the Iraq War issue and its pertinent French oil contracts. And beyond the realm of the top G nations, the general global system of economics has become market-centric and it finally came to fruition in the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs where 124 nations settled issues on tariffs, agriculture and textiles/clothing.
The volition is for lower tariffs and less barriers to “free trade” and the United States has primarily been the most vociferous proponent of such; hypocritcally it is also the United States that throws up some of the most stiff tariff protections for its own industries (such as steel, for instance). What is most noteworthy is that the Uruguay Round spawned the World Trade Organization (WTO). It is an enforcement entity impaneled by corporate lawyers who set the rules on trade between nations, usually favoring the United States, when it comes to forcing reluctant nations into importing tainted beef, killing off protected species in the name of free trade or putting out small East Caribbean banana exporters on behalf of Dole and the fruitful like.
"(Transnational corporations) are essentially capitalist enterprises…as such they must behave according to the basic ‘rules’ of capitalism. The most fundamental of these is the drive for profit which is at the heart of all capitalist activity. Of course, business firms may well have a variety of motives other than profit, such as increasing their share of a market, becoming the industry leader or simply making the firm bigger. But, in the long run, none of these is more important than the pursuit of profit itself. A firm’s profitability is the key barometer to its business ‘health’; any firm which fails to make a profit at all over a period of time is likely to go out of business (unless ‘rescued’ by government or acquired by another firm). At best, therefore, firms must attempt to increase their profits; at worst, they must defend them (my emphasis).
More than at any time in the last 50 years, virtually the entire world economy is now a market economy. The collapse of the state socialist systems at the end of the 1980s and their headlong rush to embrace the world market, together with the more controlled opening up of the Chinese economy since 1979, has created a very different global system from that which emerged after the Second World War. Virtually all parts of the world are now, to a greater or lesser extent, connected into an increasingly integrated system in which the parameters of the market dominate."(24)
With the imperatives of collective US entrenched interests laid out within their respective networks and the global free market agenda, the next step is to understand the thrust of US foreign policy in that context. Foreign policy includes all the items from consular paperwork to the maintenance of military bases as well as firing missiles at largely civilian populations. Of course, the US elites have a vested interest in overseeing the affirmative processes of the WTO, ensuring that the interests of Big Capital flourish where “action at the federal level has been based on macroeconomic policies of a fiscal and monetary kind. The aim has been to create an appropriate investment climate in which private sector constituents could flourish.”(25) Thus foreign policy is the primary conduit used by the important people and that in itself has dire manifestations at home as well as abroad.
The restive peoples across the Third World, as well as at home, need to be placated in order for “free trade” to happen and the “appropriate investment climate” to flourish. The descendants of the Founding Fathers and their altruistic notions come into play here whatever the actual history. The concomitant notions deified in US expression such as “freedom," “democracy” and “human rights” have a basis, these modern key words in exposition. Historian Theodore Von Laue quotes this passage from a New York senator circa January 1848:
"Whoever will look back upon the past and forward to the present, must see that, allured by the justice of our institutions, before the close of the present century, this continent will teem with a free population of a hundred million souls. Nor have we yet fulfilled the destiny allotted to us. New territory is spread out for us to subdue and fertilize; new races are presented for us to civilize, educate, and absorb; new triumphs for us to achieve in the cause of freedom."(26)
Contrary to mid-eighteenth century politicians who offered “freedom…forward to the present," the real world does not work that way, according to a senior lecturer at the University of East London:
"The West’s commitment to democracy ignores how the inequalities of (global and local) capitalism restrict democracy and how neo-liberals themselves wish to restrict democracy to a simple method of choosing (limited) government. Governance therefore represents the latest round of an elitist, technocratic approach to development, with all the inequalities that this entails, and which downplays the establishment of a more egalitarian global order, and of substantive, rather than formal, democracy in the Third World. It is not surprising, then, that actually existing development has been, and is actively being, resisted with in the Third World. One of the most important ways in which it has been resisted is with the rise of ‘new social movements’, which view the development process ‘as inimical to local tradition and livelihood’…The implementation of actually existing development has involved environmental destruction, exploitation, state oppression and impoverishment. The global nature of this process has entailed the integration of more and more people into a global economy, leaving many worsened as the failures of state-led development have been (partially) replaced by global market forces."(27)
He describes “prescriptions of advancement” that are “either half-hearted or completely misguided” which is what a liberal would write. The fact is the “development” system as such is very successful to those few who matter in the suites and the posh island resorts. There is nothing “misguided” about the processes of the endgame and rarely are prescriptions “half-hearted.” The success of the system is when the Pentagon and Fortune 500 have their global prerogative remain stable while whatever negative happens to the afflicted populations is of no real concern to them. Might over plight is the perspective to maintain.
US foreign policy, covert and overt, since the end of World War II has been to access and chart the world’s resources and affairs. That urgent contemporary fact is tantamount though prior to the establishment of a gargantuan military-industrial complex, the United States had partaken in imperialist ventures (and still does). The pretext typically centered on themes of innate racial/cultural inferiority and non-constructive use of the land/resources by the conquered denizens. The Anglo settlers’ westward drive along the continental USA, slaughtering the original Native American inhabitants in the quest for buffalo hides and land, is well acknowledged in mainstream history though without semblance of substantial sympathy for the unfortunate redskin:
"Americans – to now put their most characteristic qualities into this thumbnail sketch – certainly were the most successful expansionists in the world…In this spirit the white man claimed dominion over all lands from the eastern seaboard to the Rocky Mountains and beyond. Resenting the encroachment of arrogant strangers, the Indians fought back, sometimes in utter desperation, to now avail; in the ceaseless Indian wars the best Indian, as the saying went, was a dead Indian. Between the Indians and the frontiersmen backed up by the US army, the contests of power were so unequal that by the end of the 19th century the Indians had ceased to be a political factor...the Indian wars, while nurturing romantic fantasies, left no scares on the civic creed. In the process of fighting the Indians the seaboard settlers grew into proud Americans adding new states to the United States from the Atlantic to the Pacific."(28)
These same Anglo aggressors also stole the land belonging to Mexico in 1846, land that is now California, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Arizona and Nevada, courtesy of an insufferable President James Polk. Mexicans were seen as “an imbecile, pusillanimous, race of men” that was “unfit” to rule those “beautiful” lands, according to the poet Walt Whitman. Furthermore, Michael Warder of the Claremont Institute opines because “there were hardly any Mexicans in the Southwest," the Anglo expansionists were manifestly destined and entitled to use force to take it.(29) These days, one might imagine if the Canadians or Russians had grand designs on relatively unused Alaska, a place with “hardly any” Americans in it.
After that US attention turned to the Pacific, of mind to practice some pre-emptive imperialism. Commodore Matthew C. Perry sailed into Edo, Japan with eight warships in 1853 carrying letters to the Emperor that expressed President Millard Fillmore’s wanting trade concessions such as “supplies for (American) ships, rights for their shipwrecked sailors and two strips of land on which to build ports.” Perry, via written message, informed a Japanese representative aboard the Susquehanna, part of said “hostile superior military force," that there would be “consequences” if the friendly letters were not “duly replied to.” The Commodore also reflected to himself “it seems that the people of America will, in some form or other, extend their dominion and their power until they shall have brought within their mighty embrace multitudes of the Islands of the great Pacific, and placed the Saxon race upon the eastern shores of Asia.”(30)
Within that “mighty embrace," pineapples in Hawaii became a nice commodity in the 1890s for certain budding US expansionists. Incoming Anglos (or Saxons) usurped the native Hawaiians, the Kanaka, admonishing their simple, self-reliant and egalitarian ways while building the infrastructure (plantations, banks, warehouses, rail, etc.) to extract the fruits of their existence. When rightful Hawaiian ruler Queen Liliuokalani decided to regain dignity for her people, the white men became angry. In a fit of Anglo terrorism, armed posses such as the Annexation Club and Committee of Safety attacked and occupied the government office. These quasi-terrorist organizations subsequently formed a provisional government whereby one Sanford B. Dole later became President of Hawaii, thus superseding the irksome monarchy. (The next time we open a can of Dole pineapple juice, we can reflect on that bit of Hawaiian Punch history.) It took one battalion of US Marines to suppress resistance and a new expansionist President William McKinley to formally annex the islands in 1896.(31)
After emerging victorious in the Spanish-American War in 1898, the US expansionists deemed the Philippines an excellent choice in continuing the Manifest Destiny but the Filipinos having endured three centuries of Spanish rule wanted their final freedom. In order to “Christianize” and “uplift them," despite 300 years of Catholic conversion, it was necessary to kill hundreds of thousands of them in order to be uplifted into freedom and democracy. American military methods were savage and cruel as US troops shot any Filipino boy over age 10 on Samar Island and in other instances set fire to entire villages, shooting folks who dared to leave burning huts. In another instance “people of a rebellious village, men, women and children, were herded into an extinct crater and cold-bloodedly gunned to death from the rim.” The US invasion induced American troops to refer to Filipinos as “niggers” (Henry Adams preferred “worthless Malay types”) and “often gave no quarter to the wounded or surrendered Filipino soldiers.” These horrific details of the Philippine-American War are sidestepped in US classroom history.
The war for the Philippines lasted more than three years and cost the Americans nearly 5,000 lives. The Filipinos suffered even more. The war cost them the lives of 20,000 soldiers and nearly 200,000 civilians. It was a war marked by atrocities and racial hatreds. American soldiers expressed their feelings in a song that was so offensive the American commanders tried to ban it:
"Damn, Damn, Damn the Filipinos
Cross-eyed kakiak Ladrones
Underneath our starry flag
Civilize them with a Krag,
And return us to our own beloved homes."(32)
To sum the nineteenth century and in order to impress the historical mark that the United States was peaceful and militarily defensive, American troops used violence or show of force in Mexico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Nicaragua, Uruguay, Brazil, Haiti, Argentina and Chile some thirty-plus times between 1831 and 1891. Into the twentieth century, the United States occupied Mexico intermittently from 1914 to 1919, Panama from 1903 to 1914 and Nicaragua from 1909 to 1933. US troops invaded China in 1927. Thousands of Haitians were killed during plebiscites by US Marine Corps methods in Haiti circa 1914 to 1934. The Dominican Republic was invaded and occupied from 1916 to 1924.(33) The United States also invaded the infant Soviet Union in 1918 in order to destroy the new socialist officialdom though the pretexts always changed. If we have been taught that the United States was the global policeman or Good Guy, with the “greatness” and “liberty” for the rest of the world, why has the United States projected aggressive force well beyond its borders so many times? Was it because the rest of the world simply has so many delinquent nations? The late USMC Major-General Smedley D. Butler answered:
"I was a "racketeer.” It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent 33 years and 4 months in active service as a member of our country's most agile military force -- the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from a second lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism. I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all members of the profession I never had an original thought until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of the higher-ups. This is typical of everyone in the military service.
Thus I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers 1909-12. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 191G. I helped make Honduras "right" for American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotion. Looking back on it, I feel I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three city districts. We Marines operated on three continents.
The war racket operates at full swing in our own country today - make no mistake. We no longer fulfill by our example as a nation the role of Leader in Disarmament and Peace Maker to Mankind. Our present war preparations and military expenditures forever nullify the Kellogg Peace Pact to which we subscribed, and all our previous efforts to ease the burden of war throughout the world."(34)
Although there are rightists and other apologists of US interventionism who may smear Butler’s good name, if not altogether ignore the details of his stance, the fact remains that during a coup plot hatched in good part by the entrenched Du Pont and Morgan families unhappy with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Butler, a two-time congressional medal of honor winner was one of the few well-loved military men. Only Butler could induce veterans, who would ordinarily have nothing to do with insurrection to follow him. The plotters felt they could seduce Butler with money and power. They misjudged him.” The House Special Committee on Un-American Activities found that he was telling the truth.(35)
Butler died in 1940. After World War II the United States was virtually untouched save for the loss of some 500,000 troops as well as destroyed equipment overseas. Potential rivals, allies among them, were in ruins. The peoples traditionally or recently subjugated by the French, British, Belgians, Dutch and Japanese asserted their nationalist drive. The USA not long after the war mostly aided these long-standing imperialists in Vietnam, Greece, the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), China, the Middle East and other regions. No possible alternatives to the traditional colonial sphere, with their attendant alternative production and distribution means, not matter how slight the deviation, were to be tolerated. Yet, this post-World War II world was rife with movement toward such. The Bandung Conference of 1955, as a significant example, was one such motion. Twenty-two Asian and seven African nations’ leaders at the Indonesian-hosted event discussed the “color curtain” of global racial subjugation, colonialism, non-alignment, and mutual cooperation among them. Leaders such as Nasser of Egypt, Lumumba in the Congo, Sukarno of Indonesia, Mossadegh of Iran and others more independent of the imperialists emerged. And they were all heartily hated by the US planners. The Soviet Union was the primary pretext for retrieving or repressing the subjects while taking out these potentially demagogic elements in the post-war climate. Both liberal and conservative US academics, politicians and opinion makers have premised that countering “Soviet expansion” in these regions of question was the basic function of US foreign policy. But well before any Soviet Union (1917–1991) or Red China (1948- ) ever existed, the United States with its altruistic foreign policy had invaded dozens of countries. The pretexts are thus exposed.
Post-World War II was a reboot of sorts for the US rulers. It was a chance to take stock and chart modified directions in policy, especially foreign. With industry healthy, vibrant and humming, thanks to command Keynesian mechanisms borne of the cataclysmic global war, the United States very much had the opportunity to call the shots. Noam Chomsky identifies the “Grand Area” which is necessary to facilitate the interests of the elite US management, those being free trade, investment opportunities, markets, resources and the like (and crushing the irksome alternative systems). The Grand Area as envisioned by the US State Department and Council on Foreign Relations included virtually the entire non-Soviet world. Abe Fortas went so far as to declare it is “part of our obligation to the security of the world…what was good for us was good for the world.” Michael Hogan in his study of the vaunted Marshall Plan, an initial $2 billion aid package to Western Europe, stated that the policy intitiative was to “prevent the collapse of America’s export trade…protect individual initiative and private enterprise” for the alternative was the possibility of “experiments with socialist enterprise and government controls.”36 It is best understood what sectors of the US policy drivers were discussing in the suites behind closed doors. One of the most influential drivers of post-war US State planning, the liberal George Kennan, expressed in a document once top-secret:
"We have about 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6.3% of its population...In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity...To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives...We should cease to talk about vague and…unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better."(37)
Naturally, the “idealistic slogans” are what the US rulers brandish to the citizenry and the world but the hitherto top-secret context just goes to show how the elites and planners discuss things behind those closed doors.
Contemporary US foreign policy is very much the trajectory from this more coherent post-World War II planning. From the racist Manifest Destiny pretexts in acquisition of “US interests” abroad, a more carefully laid out plan for conquest transformed after the defeat of the burgeoning Nazis, Fascists and Japanese imperialists. Instead of the old colonial racist invectives, the method of “idealistic slogans” is much more preferable to access the Third World treasures and placate their natives in the modern era. US foreign policy is very much there to assert the US elites’ volition to structurally arrange, if perhaps not actually control, the world’s resources and cheap labor. There is nothing genuinely altruistic about it, despite what is genuflected by our pundits, denied in textbooks and indoctrinated in US schools. US military violence and force projection abroad, as we see, are very much connected to algorithms of the top people’s priorities: their own perpetual enrichment and power. War as such is not necessarily an end though its concept surely is a factor in things. The history and record are clear. Pretexts, in conjunction with the “idealistic slogans," are always needed. Pretexts have been a way to massage or propagandize an American populace that is left relatively free (though the September 11 pretext is altering that) since it is quite more efficient to manage that way. The “idealistic slogans” and pretexts like the “war on terror," “Cold War” and “war on drugs” have been very much the blanket used to cover the entrenched suite people’s program to take most everything for themselves while the rest of surplus humanity are fodder in the “free market” process. But in light of the United States’ war on Iraq and Afghanistan, the US with its facile ability to utilize varying modalities does indeed “deal in straight power concepts.”
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NOTES
1 Multinational Monitor, May 2001, (http://multinationalmonitor.org/mm2001/01may/may01bushcc.html)
2 G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America? Power and Politics in the Year 2000 (Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing, 1998), p. 126. Domhoff’s book is a detailed class-based look at the “policy network” that operates the United States. He discusses how the top and diverse elite class incorporates social functions, marriage, education, policy discussion groups and the like. The author surely sees class, something that is avoided like leprosy in the mainstream analysis of politcs, but does not seem to see all the motives.
3 Michael Hunt, Ideology and US Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 41-43.
4 Ferdinand Lundberg, The Myth of Democracy (New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1989), pp. 7, 12.
5 Michael Parenti, Democracy for the Few (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), pp. 49-61. In this chapter, the actual background of the Constitution is discussed beyond the classroom version. A rich source of research material is listed. This book has a similar scope to Domhoff’s in terms of analyzing policy formation but Parenti goes further in the manner of being inclusive of the national security state and foreign politics in context, which Domhoff somewhat avoids.
6 Lundberg, pp. 12-13.
7 Thomas Dye and Harmon Zeigler, The Irony of Democracy: An Uncommon Introduction to American Politics (Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole, 1987), p. 25. The authors seem to identify with the virtue of the elites and sum, “Elitism does not mean that power holders continually lock horns with the masses or that they always achieve their goals to oppress the masses” and that “democratic values have survived because elites, not masses, govern…Elites in the United States – leaders in government, industry, education and civic affairs; the well educated, prestigiously employed and politically active – give greater support to basic democratic values and ‘rules of the game’ than do the masses.” The authors’ essential argument is that “elites are not a product of capitalism, or socialism, or industrialization, or technological development” since “all societies are governed by elites.” While there are some grains of truth to that, there is quite a flaw in this particular look from an elitist theory, for example, as the authors in no way place the declining wages of the middle class and the bloodied desperate Third World “masses” in context with the global policies and machinations of the elites, they who are a “product of capitalism,” and “continually locking horns with the masses." Also this particular theory needs to redress the entire context of the ongoing immoral, in many cases illegal, CIA, FBI and local police covert actions against the people in proper light, certainly beyond the pale of "rules of the game." The authors do not fully explicate the covert policies of the “leaders in government” that lead to end effects such as the Patriot Act, such which diminish “democratic principles” substantially on behalf of the “leaders of industry” and other such “prestigiously employed.” We see that workers in certain poverty wage jobs toil in absolutely fascist conditions of speed-ups, lock-ins, beatings, inhumanely assigned restroom breaks and labor union destruction on behalf of the “prestigiously employed” and the “leaders in industry,” all material conditions that do not reflect "democratic values."
8 William F. Buckley, Jr., Happy Days Were Here Again (New York: Random House, 1992), p. 292.
9 Parenti, p. 50.
10 Paul Craig Roberts, “The Asian Crisis Proves Industrial Policy Doesn’t Pay," Business Week, 12/22/97, p. 24.
11 Anne H. Ehrlich and John W. Birks, ed., Hidden Dangers: Environmental Consequences of Preparing for War (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990), p. 213.
12 Newsweek, 7/10/95, p. 27.
13 Rush Limbaugh, The Way Things Ought to Be (New York: Pocket Books, 1993), p. 48.
14 John Stossel, “In Defense of Greed," Forbes, 2/2/04, p. 36.
15 Kevin Phillips, The Politics of Rich and Poor: Wealth and the American Electorate in the Reagan Aftermath (New York: Harper-Collins, 1991), p. 73.
16 Stephen Moore and Dean Stansel, “Put an End to Corporate Welfare," USA Today, September 1995, pp. 24-26.
17 Editors of New Republic, Guide to the Issues ’96 (New York: Basic Books, 1996), pp.44-45, from a piece by Tidrick, “The Budget Inferno.”
18 Noam Chomsky, World Orders Old and New (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 171-172.
19 Parenti, p. 78.
20 Limbaugh, p. 39.
21 Michael Waldman, Who Robbed America? (New York: Random House, 1990), p. 4, 15; Steve Brouwer, Sharing the Pie: A Citizen’s Guide to Wealth and Power in America, (New York: Henry Holt & Co, 1998), p. 98.
22 Parenti, p.78.J
23 Moore and Stansel, p. 25.
24 Peter Dicken, Global Shift: Transforming the World Economy (New York: Guilford Press, 1998), pp.178-79, 461.
25 ibid, p. 119.J
26 Theodore Von Laue, The World Revolution of Westernization: The Twentieth Century in Global Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 160.
27 Ray Kiely and Phil Marfleet, ed., Globalisation and the Third World (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 38-39.
28 Von Laue, p. 159.
29 Walt Whitman quoted in Chomsky, Deterring Democracy (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), pp. 35-36; Michael Warder, “1848 Treaty with Mexico Good One for All Concerned," Houston Chronicle, 10/16/98, p.33a.
30 Small Planet Communications, “An Online History of the United States: the Age of Imperialism," (http://www.smplanet.com/imperialism/letter.html), excellent and rich bibliography listed at http://www.smplanet.com/imperialism/biblio.html; Michael Lewis, Pacific Rift, Adventures in the Fault Zone Between the US and Japan, (Knoxville: Whittle Direct, 1991), p. 9.
31 ibid, (http://www.smplanet.com/imperialism/hawaii.html)J
32 Von Laue, p. 161; Jerald A. Combs, The History of American Foreign Policy: Volume I to 1917 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), pp. 123, 155-57; Lea E. Williams, Southeast Asia: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 116, 139; see also Jim Zwick, ed., Sentenaryo/Centennial, (http://www.boondocksnet.com/centennial/index.html). This excellent Philippine-American War topical spin-off from Zwick’s richly awarded and highly regarded Anti-Imperialism in the United States site contains rich history, online historical documents and letters of the period.
33 Parenti, The Sword and the Dollar: Imperialism, Revolution and the Arms Race (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), p. 94.
34 Smedley D. Butler, “In Time of Peace," Common Sense, November, 1935 (Vol. 4, No. 11), pp. 8-12. Currently available online (http://www.chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/butler1.html) Butler’s personal experiences and observations certainly light the fire under the more reticent authors such as Theodore Von Laue and Jerald Combs, they who do not necessarily see or connect the imperialism behind the imperialism which they account. These authors, for all the butchery, war-mongering and sordid expansion they catalog, do not see capitalist motives as prime movers in extracting from the Third World on behalf of privileged interests beyond national collective will and altruistic motives. Regardless, the breadth of their work reveals the catalog quite more so than the usual textbook recitals and should be recommended.
35 Barbara LaMonica, “The Attempted Coup Against FDR," Probe, March-April 1999 (Vol. 6, No. 3). (http://www.webcom.com/ctka/pr399-fdr.html); Robert T. Cochran, “Smedley Butler: A Pint-Size Marine for All Seasons," Smithsonian, June 1984, p. 156. The fascist plot to remove FDR is briefly discussed in Smithsonian but in the spirit of exemplary media, no plotters’ names are mentioned outside of “some prominent people…implicated.” Also in keeping the spirit of institutionalized historical evasion, the nice magazine does not delve into the actual content of Butler’s “anti-war speeches.”
36 Chomsky, Deterring Democracy, pp. 44-58.
37 George Kennan, State Department Policy Planning Study #23, 1948.
(http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000567.html)
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