Ignoring Mexico’s claims, as they ignored the claims of the indigenous peoples, thousands of settlers poured into Mexican territory from 191the United States with the support of the U.S. government. During the Mexican-American War that followed, the United States annexed by brutal armed force half the total territory of Mexico. The only provocation from the Mexican government was its justified attempt to protect its rightful territory.24
The westward expansion followed a common pattern. Missionaries who offered schools, hospitals, and salvation led the way. Traders, land speculators, mineral prospectors, and farmers soon followed. Then came the railroad, banking, and resource-extraction corporations to consolidate control over the land and its resources. When the indigenous people mobilized in resistance, the military stepped in as needed to secure the claims to land and resources established by the missionaries, settlers, and corporations.
IMPERIAL CORPORATIONS
With memories of the abuse of corporate monopoly power fresh in mind, public sentiment in the early days of the new nation demanded strict limitations on corporate charters. Consequently, state legislatures issued such charters only for fixed periods to serve narrowly defined purposes, kept a close watch on corporate operations, and retained the power to revoke charters at will. It was also common practice to place specific limits on corporate borrowing, ownership of land, and even profits. Owners were held personally liable for all debts incurred during the period of their participation, large and small investors had equal voting rights, interlocking corporate directorates were prohibited, and one corporation was not allowed to own shares in another—all bothersome restrictions resented by powerful interests.
The U.S. Civil War (1861–65) marked a turning point for the U.S. corporation. The country was in chaos and divided against itself. The federal government was beholden to the military contractors who provisioned the troops in the field. Political corruption flourished as industrial interests used the outsize profits from military contracts to curry favor with politicians to further inflate their profits and thus their ability to pay for yet more political favors in their campaign to eliminate legal constraints on the freedom of corporate action.
Powerful railroad corporations led the way, through manipulation of public opinion, legislatures, and the courts. In one early victory for 192corporate interests, the Pennsylvania legislature removed the restriction on one corporation’s owning shares in another. This seemingly innocuous change greatly increased the financial leverage of an individual corporation by allowing it to acquire controlling interests in other companies without having to put up sufficient capital to buy them outright.
Step by step through courts and legislatures—rarely with public debate or notice—corporations eliminated the restrictions on their freedom of action. By the beginning of the twentieth century, corporate charters were being issued automatically on demand with no limits on life span, mobility, or purpose. Owners had gained exemptions from liability, and corporations had become virtually immune to charter revocation. Protections for minority shareholders were largely eliminated, allowing a consolidation of the power of the larger shareholders.
Through courtroom victories, corporations successfully claimed the status of legal personhood entitled to the same constitutional protections accorded to real persons under the Bill of Rights. Most of it happened with no public discussion and even without the vote of elected legislators.25
GOING GLOBAL
In 1823, even as the westward expansion was still in progress, President James Monroe enunciated the Monroe Doctrine as a cornerstone of U.S. policy. The publicly expressed intent was to protect independent Latin American and Caribbean nations from efforts by European powers to recolonize them; the implicit message was that the United States claimed hegemony over the Western Hemisphere.
Theodore Roosevelt took the Monroe doctrine a step further during his presidency (1901–9), announcing that the United States claimed the right to intervene in the internal affairs of any nation that engaged in “flagrant and chronic wrongdoing.” Future U.S. administrations defined this to mean any nation that transgressed against a U.S. trade or investment interest. A 1962 U.S. State Department report to the Congress listed 103 U.S. military interventions in the affairs of other countries between 1798 and 1895, including interventions in Argentina, Japan, Uruguay, China, Angola, Hawaii, and Nicaragua. The reasons were often obscure but usually related to the investments of one or more U.S. corporations.26 193
In the Spanish-American War (1898) the United States expelled Spain from Cuba and took possession of the Philippines, claiming it was fighting on behalf of Philippine independence. In the subsequent peace treaty, Spain ceded Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines to the United States. A long and bloody U.S. war against determined Filipino resistance followed.27
Visions of imperial grandeur danced in the heads of politicians, missionaries, and the Daughters of the American Revolution. One exuberant advocate who later became a U.S. senator declared,”We are a conquering race…. American law, American order, American civilization, and the American flag will plant themselves on shores hitherto bloody and benighted, but by those agencies of God henceforth to be made beautiful and bright.”28
In 1893, U.S. citizens who had settled in Hawaii as the ungrateful guests of the kingdom organized a rebellion to overthrow Queen Liliuokalani. A detachment of U.S. soldiers and marines was dispatched to “protect American property and lives.” A provisional government formed under U.S. supervision promptly signed an annexation agreement with the United States.29
In the first half of the twentieth century, in addition to World Wars I and II, U.S. Marines invaded and occupied Cuba from 1898 to 1902, Panama from 1903 to 1914, Honduras six times between 1911 and 1925, Nicaragua in 1912 and again from 1926 to 1933, Mexico in 1914 and 1916, and Haiti from 1915 to 1934.30
The pattern of U.S. expansion abroad was similar to that of the westward expansion except the goal was to expropriate agricultural lands and resources to produce goods for export back to the United States. Usually, those resources belonged to indigenous peoples, and the terms of the expropriation served to enrich the local elites, and thereby win their support. Missionaries led the way; corporations followed to organize management and extraction. The U.S. military intervened when necessary to put down resistance and depose uncooperative leaders. It was an offer most ruling elites could not refuse.
The role of the missionaries in imperial expansion was closely akin to that of the Trojan horse, the hollow wooden construction presented by the Greeks to Troy as a gift in a ruse that placed Greek warriors inside the city walls with a mission to open its gates to the invading Greek army. The missionaries offered gifts of medicine, clothing, reading, and 194salvation. Their ministrations opened the gate of trust; corporations poured in to sack the lands and economies. In a world of Empire, there is wisdom in the ancient warning “Beware of strangers bearing gifts.”
Following World War II the tainted gifts came, not from missionaries, but from foreign aid agencies, most particularly loans from the World Bank and regional banks that operated in its image. The official aid-dispensing agencies appropriately referred to their local offices and planning teams as missions. Economists steeped in the religion of neoclassical economics took on the missionary role of preaching stories of the salvation that converting to unregulated markets, open borders, and foreign borrowing would bring. The proselytes, however, did not become the saved souls of Christianity but international debtors in the church of global capital.
DRIVE TO IMPERIAL HEGEMONY
The only serious rival to U.S. global imperial hegemony following World War II was the Soviet Union. The aftermath of the war set the stage for a grand confrontation between the two superpowers.
Design for a Grand Area
Even before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and drew the United States into World War II, a U.S. foreign-policy elite was laying the groundwork for postwar U.S. initiatives that would capitalize on the
consequences of the war and create an integrated global economy dominated by U.S. interests. Haunted by the specter of the Great Depression, State Department planners believed that to curb capitalism’s boom-bust cycles, the United States would have to either move to a form of socialism or secure adequate export markets to absorb goods produced in excess of domestic demand. They chose the latter.
Memorandum E-B34, presented on July 24, 1941, by a joint planning group to the president and the State Department, outlined the concept of a “Grand Area.” This was the geographic area the planners estimated the United States would need to dominate economically and militarily to assure materials for its industries while experiencing the fewest possible stresses, “such as unwieldy export surpluses or severe shortages of consumer goods,” that might lead to economic “disintegration.”31 195
The preferred scope of the Grand Area encompassed the entire Western Hemisphere, the United Kingdom, the remainder of the British Commonwealth and Empire, the Dutch East Indies, China, and Japan. It would be expanded by weaving in other areas as circumstances permitted.
The strategic concept called for the initial economic integration of as much of the core area as possible. The more fully the Grand Area could be opened to unrestricted trade and foreign investment, the more readily the economic interests of the United States, as the strongest economic power, would be able to dominate it.
The public version of the Grand Area strategy, which was intended to rally the support of those who would be the imperial subjects, called for the creation of a free and equal community of nations and gave birth to the United Nations.
The real intention of the United States was articulated in U.S. State Department Policy Planning Study 23, a top-secret document written in 1948 by George Kennan, a leading architect of the post–World War II world.
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 intention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives…. We should cease to talk about vague… unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of 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.”32
This was the real agenda, and the agencies of its implementation would be the Bretton Woods institutions: the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).33 In 1995, the World Trade Organization (WTO) replaced the less powerful GATT.
The difference between the public and private visions was similar to the difference between the professed ideals of the U.S. Declaration of 196Independence, which was a document intended to mobilize popular support, and the reality of the U.S. Constitution, which institutionalized the power and privilege of a ruling plutocracy. The United Nations had mostly a symbolic moral authority. The Bretton Woods institutions had the power to set rules and back them with economic sanctions.
Competing Empires
The very real threat of Soviet military power provided a democratic rationale for a buildup of military power by the United States, the provision of military assistance to trusted allies, and the positioning of military bases around the world. The expressed purpose was to counter the Soviet threat and protect the free nations of the world from assimilation into the Soviet Empire.
However, U.S. military power was rarely, if ever, used in support of democratic governments and movements, which by their nature threatened U.S. imperial interests. To the contrary, when the U.S. military intervened abroad it was usually to put down popular liberation movements that sought the right to democratic self-determination, and to install or protect dictators friendly to U.S. interests. The dictators favored by both Republican and Democratic U.S. administrations following World War II included Pinochet in Chile, Somoza in Nicaragua, Marcos in the Philippines, Suharto in Indonesia, the shah of Iran, the Saudi royal family in Saudi Arabia, and (until the Gulf War in 1991) Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
As U.S. economic and military power grew in the postwar years, the imperial agenda became more expansive. Earlier the focus was on access to land and natural resources. The new agenda included the domination of markets, culture, finance, and technology.
The New Colonialism
The end of World War II began a process of phasing out traditional colonialism based on military occupation. The United States pioneered the use of foreign aid, investment, and trade to dominate the cultures, economies, and governments of client states through less overtly violent means—but with the threat of military intervention always in the background. Initial implementation of the strategy relied on global corporations, the IMF, and the World Bank. Subsequently, regional trade agreements and the WTO became favored instruments. All 197the while, the United States used its military power to support regimes that were friendly to imperial U.S. interests and to bring down those that were not.34
In the post–World War II period the United States provided over $200 billion in military assistance to some eighty countries to train, equip, and subsidize more than 2.3 million troops and internal security forces. Just as President Washington had used federal troops to put down the Whiskey Rebellion, so the primary responsibility of these security forces was to protect elite interests, including those of U.S. corporations, from domestic disturbances.
Recipients of military aid included notoriously repressive military regimes in “Turkey, Zaire, Chad, Pakistan, Morocco, Indonesia, Honduras, Peru, Colombia, El Salvador, Haiti, Cuba (under Batista), Nicaragua (under Somoza), Iran (under the Shah), the Philippines (under Marcos), and Portugal (under Salazar).” In addition, the United States funded and aided the military overthrow of “democratically elected reformist governments in Guatemala, Guyana, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Syria, Indonesia (under Sukarno), Greece, Argentina, Bolivia, and Haiti.” It “participated in covert actions or proxy mercenary wars against revolutionary governments in Cuba, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Portugal, Nicaragua, Cambodia, East Timor, and Western Sahara.” And it took hostile action “against reformist governments in Egypt, Lebanon, Peru, Iran, Syria, Zaire, Jamaica, South Yemen, and the Fiji Islands.”35 Just since 1961 the United States has been involved in overt military engagements in Vietnam (1961–73), Lebanon (1982–84), Grenada (1983), Libya (1986), Panama (1989), Kuwait/Iraq (1990–91), Somalia (1992–93), Haiti (1994), Bosnia (1995), Kosovo (1999), Afghanistan (2001–), and Iraq (2003–).36
Contrary to the assessments of many historically challenged commentators, the 2003 preemptive first-strike U.S. invasion of Iraq was far from the first time the United States had launched a unilateral preemptive first-strike invasion of another country. The United States has a long history of launching unilateral first-strike attacks against small nations of inferior military power for questionable ends. Some of these wars were minor skirmishes. Others, like the occupation of the Philippines and the current war in Iraq, were full-scale invasions costly in lives and treasure. Many were in support of brutal dictators. Rarely did they advance a democratic cause. 198
The Debt Weapon of Mass Destruction
As noted in previous chapters, debt has long been a favored instrument by which the privileged use their control over access to money to appropriate the resources of the gullible and the desperate. During the period of its post–World War II expansion the United States pioneered the transformation of debt-funded development assistance into a weapon of mass destruction to seduce corrupt rulers, generate profits for U.S. corporations, and leave the “assisted” countries in the iron grip of international creditors. It is an extraordinary tale spelled out in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, by John Perkins, whose job as chief economist f
or a major international economic consulting firm was to generate and defend grossly inflated economic projections to justify supersized infrastructure projects financed with loans from the World Bank and other foreign creditors that the borrowers could never repay.37
Intentionally making uncollectable loans to foreign governments may seem the work of fools, but the money flowed directly to the bottom lines of well-connected U.S. construction and energy companies like Bechtel and Halliburton, which built the infrastructure. The perpetual indebtedness of those nations gave global financial institutions a stranglehold over their economic and political resources. The overpriced infrastructure in turn subsidized the operations of transnational mining corporations, agricultural estates, and offshore production facilities. These loans and contracts created opportunities for lucrative payoffs to corrupt dictators who served U.S. interests, and they aligned the recipient nations with the United States on crucial UN votes. The ruling classes of the debtor nations, who benefited financially and politically, rarely objected; the people who suffered the consequences — including future generations—had no voice. The human and environmental costs have been unconscionable.
Most of those involved believed the ideological rhetoric they used to justify it all as a holy mission. Others, like Perkins, who were trained and rewarded to manufacture and defend the lies that turned these programs into weapons of mass destruction, knew exactly the true nature and purpose of their work, as the Perkins account makes clear.
199 The U.S. Constitution initiated the first major modern experiment in replacing hereditary monarchs with elected leaders, and it secured freedom of worship and thought through the separation of church and state. These achievements represented a seminal contribution to bending the arc of history in the direction of democracy and Earth Community. The idea that the architects of the U.S. Constitution created a government that secured for ordinary people the democratic ideals of popular sovereignty is, however, little more than a highly successful triumph of public relations image building over reality.
The Great Turning Page 24