KavkazCenter - Global Empire: Who Pays? Who Profits?

Global Empire: Who Pays? Who Profits?

In the last half century we have witnessed a dramatic expansion of US economic and military power into every corner of the world. U.S. corporate investors have expropriated the natural resources, lands, markets, and underpaid labor of peoples on every continent.The U.S. military has established some 750 bases in over 50 countries, with recently additional incursions into the Middle East, Central Asia, and even Europe (Kosovo). In its global reach and firepower, the present-day U.S. empire is unequaled by any other in history.

The enormous cost of this superpower expansionism is borne mostly by the people of the targeted nations who suffer the expropriation of their communal wealth and natural resources (including water and agricultural seeds), the complete privatization and deregulation of their economies, the loss of local markets, the deterioration of their living standards, a growing debt burden, the undermining of their cultures, and the suppression of their popular political movements. And when subjected to direct attack and invasion, the targeted nations often endure a horrendous toll of death and destruction from which they may never fully recover.

The U.S. empire exercises control over the world's communication universe. American consumer products, TV shows, movies, fashion styles, and popular music inundate many of the urbanized centers of the Third World and even reach into remote rural areas. U.S. advertising agencies dominate the publicity and advertising industries of the world. To some degree, poorer nations lose not only their wealth but their very identities.

The various wars of suppression pursued by imperial nations are needed not just to secure investments in any one country but to maintain the whole international system of finance capital. Those countries that attempt to pursue an independent course of self-development soon incur Washington's wrath. They are challenged and maligned, and eventually subjected to boycotts, blockades, sanctions, economic strangulation, subversive destabilization, and if necessary, direct aerial attack, invasion, and occupation.

No self-defining or self-directed country or leader is permitted to go undeterred and unpunished. No country is permitted to serve as an inspiration or source of material support to other nations that might want to pursue a path other than the mal-development offered by global free-market capitalism. The power of the "good example" is not tolerated by the imperialists.

The costs of empire are also borne to some extent by the people of the imperial nation itself. The empire feeds off the republic, and the republic becomes increasingly impoverished. American taxpayers have paid out trillions of dollars to support the U.S. global military apparatus and to subsidize the transnational corporate investors. The costs of global militarism become so onerous as to begin undermining the society that sustains them; such has been the case with empires in the past. The spending binge that the Pentagon has been on for decades has created record deficits and a runaway national debt, making the US the largest debtor nation in the world. The government is required to borrow more and more to pay the growing interest on a national debt that has climbed to almost trillion. This debt is owed by U.S. taxpayers to rich creditors at home and abroad.

Military spending continues to reach ever greater astronomical heights---over 0 billion this coming fiscal year, if we include the billions spent in Iraq. To make up for this, human services in the US are drastically cut, and local and state governments sink into insolvency as their federal funding is reduced. Most of our domestic financial woes can be ascribed to military spending.

The enormous scale of that spending is sometimes hard to grasp. The total expenses of the legislative and judicial branches and all the regulatory commissions combined constitute less than 1 percent of the Pentagon's yearly budget. Seventy cents of every income-tax dollar goes to pay for past, present, and future wars, while only two cents goes to education. Greater sums have been budgeted for the development of the Navy's submarine rescue vehicle than for occupational safety, public libraries, and daycare centers combined. The cost of military aircraft components and ammunition kept in storage by the Pentagon is greater than the combined federal spending on pollution control, conservation, community development, housing, occupational safety, and mass transportation.

Meanwhile the better paying jobs in the USA are exported to the empire's low-wage labor markets overseas. U.S. transnational corporations are now producing abroad eight times more than they export, with the fastest growth rate being in the Third World. Many firms have shifted all their manufacturing activities to foreign lands. All the cameras sold in the USA are made overseas, as are almost all the bicycles, tape recorders, radios, television sets, DVD players, and computers. One out of every three workers employed by U.S. multinational companies are now in foreign countries. U.S. companies continue to export tens of thousands of stateside jobs each year. Management's threat to relocate a plant is often sufficient to blackmail U.S. workers into taking wage and benefit cuts and working longer hours.

The American people carry the financial and political costs of empire while a tiny plutocracy at the top reap the plunder. We see that happening in Iraq at this very time. While the U.S. public pays over 0 billion for the unlawful aggression perpetrated against the Iraqi people, and thousands of U.S. military personnel are killed or wounded, some 70 giant corporations batten on the high-profit war contracts. Meanwhile U.S. and British cartels plunder Iraq's economy and oil reserves for the benefit of a small coterie of rich investors.

The costs of empire usually exceed the profits that are gleaned from them. Vast expenditures are needed for military invasion and prolonged occupation, for administrative structures, bribes and military build-up of native collaborationist forces, and for the development of a commercial infrastructure in the colonized country (roads, ports, office buildings, luxury hotels) to facilitate extractive industries and capital penetration.

The governments of imperial nations usually spend more than they take in on their overseas ventures. Empires are overly costly ventures---but not for everyone. This point was made generations ago by critics of imperialism such as Karl Marx and Thorstein Veblen who noted that the people who reap the benefits of imperialism are not the same ones who pay the bill. The gains of empire flow into the hands of the privileged monopoly investor class while the costs are borne by the taxpaying public. The transnational corporations monopolize the private returns of empire while carrying little, if any, of the expense.

Finally, the American people pay another price for "our" global empire: the diminution of their civil liberties and democratic rights. The rulers of the empire become increasingly intolerant of dissent and resistance at home. The imperialists understand, even if many of our people do not, that democracy is potentially a serious threat to their global ventures. For it is democracy that ultimately allows us to resist and call to account the crimes of empire.

MICHAEL PARENTI

Saturday, February 11, 2006

www.DailyMuslims.com

Michael Parenti is an internationally known award-winning author and lecturer. He is one of the american leading progressive political analysts. His highly informative and entertaining books and talks have reached a wide range of audiences in North America and abroad.