REFLECTIONS

...More than a century ago, Karl Marx predicted that in an advanced stage, capitalism would export not only its goods but its very capital...

...Furthermore, U.S...

...Sooner or later, this truth returns to haunt the mighty...

...Sometimes the sword has intervened in other lands to protect the advantages won by the dollar, and sometimes the dollar has rushed in to enjoy the benefits extracted by the sword...

...corporations exert a controlling interest over the natural resources, land, labor, trade, finances, and markets of whole nations and, indeed, of whole continents...

...So Ford Motor Company exports not only cars but whole factories to Argentina, which produce cars that are sold in that country and elsewhere...

...Almost $90 billion in military aid has been given to some eighty nations since World War II, and every variety of weapon is sold to foreign rulers by U.S...

...Over a twenty-year period, the U.S...

...Years ago, the economist Kenneth Boulding, among others, noted that empires such as ours cost more than they are worth...

...The United States has more than 400 major bases and almost 3,000 lesser ones situated in almost every region of the world, and it costs many billions of dollars yearly to maintain them...

...military have terrorized and killed tens of thousands of trade unionists, workers, peasants, clergy, students, and other persons who have offered resistance to the oppressive social orders of those countries...

...The expenditures needed to make the world safe for ITT, Chase Manhattan, and General Augusto Pinochet of Chile are taken from the pockets of the people...

...Government spent $2 billion to shore up a corrupt dictatorship in the Philippines, hoping to protect what amounts to a half-billion-dollar U.S...

...And "we" supported the Shah, trained the SAVAK torturers, and carpet-bombed Indochina...

...Americans pay a heavy price in blood, sweat, and taxes for the U.S...

...Companies do not move to Taiwan in hope of saving money for the consumer, but to increase their own profits...

...As Thorstein Veblen pointed out back in 1904, the gains of empire flow into the hands of the privileged business class, while the costs are extracted from "the industry of the rest of the people...

...They pay as little as they can in wages but still charge as much as they can in prices...

...That is why the returns on overseas investments are so much greater than on domestic investments...

...Who pays the costs and who reaps the benefits of empire...

...Today, the United States is the greatest global military-industrial power in history...

...As more and more industry moves overseas, for example, attracted by the availability of cheap labor and high profits, more jobs are lost at home...

...Nor do the benefits of this empire trickle down to the American consumer, as is often supposed...

...And on top of these there are the frightful social and psychological costs, the discouragement and decline of public morale, the growing anger, cynicism, and suffering of the poor and the not-so-poor, and the threatened imposition of authoritarian solutions...

...military-industrial global empire...

...In a recent book entitled Empire as a Way of Life, William Appleman Williams, the noted historian, scolds the American people for having become addicted to the conditions of empire...

...Two million foreign troops and hundreds of thousands of foreign police and militia, under the command of various dictators and military juntas, have been trained, equipped, and financed by the United States, their purpose being not to defend their countries from outside invasion but to protect the ruling cliques from their own potentially insurgent populations...

...military personnel are stationed in 116 countries...

...The same pattern holds true in other parts of the world: What we expend in aid and arms usually exceeds the value of the investments we hold...

...We suffer decay at home in order to better provide for "our" expanding global interests...

...Williams implies the imperialist ideology and policy are a product of mass thinking...

...There is the distortion of an entire civilization's technology ahd science as two-thirds of all research and development is controlled by the Pentagon...

...As in Rome of old and in every empire since, the center is bled in order to fortify the periphery...

...They pay in other ways, too...

...M Michael Parenti is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies and the author of "Power and the Powerless" and "Democracy for the Few...

...taxpayers to keep Ford employes and other Argentine workers in line...

...Americans pay for their empire with the cutbacks of vital human services, the neglect of environmental needs, the decay and financial collapse of our cities, the deterioration of our transportation, education, and health-care systems, and the devastating inflation that is inevitable when hundreds of billions of dollars are spent each year to produce and maintain a military colossus...

...As someone once said, foreign aid is a matter of taking money from the poor people of a rich country and giving it to the rich people of a poor country...

...The treasure of the people is squandered so that patricians can pursue their far-off plunder...

...The truth is that those who profit handsomely from overseas investments and interventions are not the same people as those who foot the bill...

...actually, it is the other way around: Mass thinking is a product of imperialist ideological manipulation and not always a reliable product—judging from the popular opposition to interventions in Vietnam and now in El Salvador...

...At the same time, the Argentine junta receives millions in aid from the U.S...

...In effect, they have become a reserve army of labor helping to deflate wages at a further cost to American workers...

...What the military-industrialists fail to see is that the pyramid of power and profit they build rests on a crumbling base...

...Throughout the Third World, counterinsurgency and assassination squads trained and financed by the CIA and the U.S...

...We" urged the building of a global network of military and counterinsurgency bases...

...It seems "we" like empire...

...But are they really...

...The implir cation is that "we" decided to send troops into Central America and Vietnam, and "we" thought to overthrow Salvador Al-lende in Chile, Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran, and Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala...

...It is a world made by and for the Pentagon and the multinational corporations...

...Ultimately, no political-economic order can remain secure by victimizing its own people...

...The billions expended by the U.S...

...In truth, however, ordinary Americans have seldom known about these things until after the fact, or—on those rare occasions when they were informed—have opposed intervention or have not given very enthusiastic support...

...This means bigger profits for Ford but a higher unemployment rate for Detroit...

...The multinationals also cause a great deal of economic misery in the Third World—some of which comes home as a visitation upon our own people...

...Millions of destitute Latinos have been compelled to migrate to the United States, many of them illegally, to compete with American workers for low-income jobs that are becoming increasingly scarce...

...In sum, much of the world has been transformed into an American-equipped armed camp to preserve an American-dominated politico-economic status quo...

...There are other ways Americans pay for "our" military-industrial empire...

...corporations (ably assisted by the Pentagon...

...Is it really "our" profit from "our" oil and "our" tin, copper, bauxite, manganese, iron, gold, timber, and foods extracted from the land and labor of the Third World that we are protecting with our taxes and our sons...

...military establishment...

...Small wonder we seem able to plan for monster science fiction wars in outer space while our trains are inferior to those we had forty years ago...

...Most impressive is the way American militarism and American capitalism have kept each other company in their travels abroad, and the way ordinary American taxpayers, consumers, and workers have had to sustain the heavy costs...

...Native lands are expropriated by agribusiness, for example, so that cash crops may be raised for export to more lucrative markets abroad, thus dispossessing the local peasantry...

...REFLECTIONS Michael Parenti THE HIGH COST OF EMPIRE The growth of American corporations from modest domestic enterprises to multinational giants with vast overseas holdings has been matched by comparable growth in the U.S...

...About 1.5 million U.S...

...We" exploit the rest of the world and don't know how to get back to a simpler life...

...Are they losing propositions for everyone...

...The multinational corporations monopolize the returns while carrying little, if any, of the financial burden...

...investment in that country...

...The radios assembled by women in Taiwan who work for twenty cents an hour, ten hours a day, six or seven days a week, do not cost much less than the transistors assembled in Ohio...

...Therefore, Boulding and others reasoned, empires are losing propositions—irrational, self-defeating enterprises...

...We" live beyond our means and need empire as part of our way of life...

...This has been the pattern throughout Latin America, with its teeming shanty towns and relatively empty countryside...

...in non-military aid to other nations show a similar pattern, benefitting the overseas corporate investors, ruling oligarchs, generals, and big landowners, while offering little to the masses of the Third World...