Military spending is the capitalist world’s fuel

It is common for activists to decry the enormous sums of money spent on the military. Any number of social programs, or schools, or other public benefits could instead be funded.

Not least is this the case with the United States, which by far spends the most of any country on its military. The official Pentagon budget for 2015 was $596 billion, but actual spending is far higher. (Figures for 2015 will be used because that is the latest year for which data is available to make international comparisons.) If we add military spending parked in other portions of the U.S. federal government budget, we’re up to $786 billion, according to a study by the War Resisters League. Veterans benefits add another $157 billion. WRL also assigns 80 percent of the interest on the budget deficit, and that puts the grand total well above $1 trillion.

The War Resisters League notes that other organizations estimate that 50 to 60 percent of the interest would be more accurate. Let’s split the difference — if we assign 65 percent of the interest payments to past military spending (midway between the high and low estimates), then the true amount of U.S. military spending was $1.25 trillion. Yes, that is a gigantic sum of money. So gigantic that it was more than the military spending of every other country on Earth combined.

(Cartoon by Carlos Latuff)

China is second in military spending, but far behind at US$215 billion in 2015, according to an estimate by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Saudi Arabia ($87.2 billion), Russia ($66.4 billion) and Britain ($55.5 billion) round out the top five. And lest we chalk up the bloated Pentagon budget to the size of the U.S. economy, the official $596 billion budget constituted 3.5 percent of its gross domestic product, the fourth-highest ratio in the world, while China spent 2.1 percent of its GDP on its military. But if we use the actual total of U.S. military spending, then U.S. spending as a share of GDP leaps to second place, trailing only Saudi Arabia.

The U.S. maintains military bases in 80 countries, and has military personnel in about 160 foreign countries and territories. Another way of looking at this question is the number of foreign military bases: The U.S. has around 800 while the rest of the world combined has perhaps 30, according to an analysis published in The Nation. Almost half of those 30 belong to Britain or France.

Asking others to pay more is endorsing imperialism

Is there some sort of altruism in the U.S. setting itself up as the gendarme of the world? Well, that’s a rhetorical question, obviously, but such self-deception is widespread, and not just among the foreign-policy establishment.

One line of critique sometimes heard, especially during this year’s presidential campaign, is that the U.S. should demand its allies “pay their fair share.” It’s not only from Right-wing quarters that phrase is heard, but even from Left populist Bernie Sanders, who insisted during this month’s Brooklyn debate with Hillary Clinton that other members of NATO ought to pay more so the Pentagon budget can be cut. Senator Sanders said this in the context of pointing out the superior social benefits across Europe as compared to the U.S., but what it really implies is that militarism is justified.

Setting aside that Senator Sanders’ record on imperialism is not nearly as distant from Secretary Clinton’s as his supporters believe, it is a reflection of how deeply imperialism is in the bones of United Statesians when even the candidate positioning himself as a Left insurgent doesn’t seriously question the scale of military operations or their purpose.

So why is U.S. military spending so high? It’s because the repeated use of force is what is necessary to maintain the capitalist system. As top dog in the world capitalist system, it’s up to the U.S. to do what is necessary to keep itself, and its multi-national corporations, in the driver’s seat. That has been a successful project. U.S.-based multi-nationals hold the world’s highest share in 18 of 25 broad industrial sectors, according to an analysis in New Left Review, and often by commanding margins — U.S. multi-nationals hold at least a 40 percent global share in 10 of those sectors.

A partial list of U.S. interventions from 1890, as compiled by Zoltán Grossman, a professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington state, lists more than 130 foreign military interventions (not including the use of troops to put down strikes within the U.S.). Consistently, these were used to impose U.S. dictates on smaller countries.

At the beginning of the 20th century, U.S. President William Howard Taft declared that his foreign policy was “to include active intervention to secure our merchandise and our capitalists opportunity for profitable investment” abroad. Taft overthrew the government of Nicaragua to punish it for taking a loan from a British bank rather than a U.S. bank, and then put Nicaragua’s customs collections under U.S. control and handed two U.S. banks control of Nicaragua’s national bank and railroad. Little has changed since, including the overthrows of the governments of Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Brazil (1964) and Chile (1973), and more recently the invasion of Iraq and the attempted overthrow of the Venezuelan government.

Muscle men for big business

We need only recall the statement of Marine Corps general Smedley Butler, who summarized his highly decorated career in 1935, in this manner:

“I spent thirty three years and four months [in] the Marine Corps. … [D]uring that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.”

The bipartisan refusal to acknowledge this is exemplified in U.S. narratives concerning the Vietnam War. The “debate” that is conducted in the corporate media is only between two “acceptable” viewpoints — an honorable effort that tragically failed or a well-intentioned but flawed effort that should not have been undertaken if the U.S. was not going to be “serious” about fighting. Never mind that tonnage of bombs dropped on Vietnam were greater than what was dropped by all combatants in World War II combined, 3 million Vietnamese were killed, cities were reduced to rubble and millions of acres of farmland was destroyed. By what sane measure could this be said to be fighting “without really trying,” as Right-wing mythology still asserts?

No modern corporate enterprise would be complete without subcontracting, and the Pentagon has not stinted here. That is not a reference to the massive, and often guaranteed, profits that military contractors enjoy as more supply operations are handed over to connected companies, but rather to the teaching of torture techniques to other militaries so that some of the dirty work of maintaining capitalism can be undertaken locally.

The U.S. Army’s infamous School of the Americas, lately masquerading under the deceptively bland-sounding name Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, has long been a finishing school for the personnel enforcing the rule of military and civilian dictatorships throughout Latin America. Major Joe Blair, who was the director of instruction at the School of the Americas from 1986 to 1989, had this to say about the curriculum:

“The doctrine that was taught was that if you want information you use physical abuse, false imprisonment, threats to family members, and killing. If you can’t get the information you want, if you can’t get that person to shut up or stop what they’re doing, you assassinate them—and you assassinate them with one of your death squads.”

The change of the name more than a decade ago was cosmetic, Major Blair said while testifying at a 2002 trial of School of the Americas protestors:

“There are no substantive changes besides the name. They teach the identical courses that I taught, and changed the course names and use the same manuals.”

The entire history of capitalism is built on violence, and violence has been used to both impose and maintain the system from its earliest days. Slavery, colonialism, dispossession of the commons, draconian laws forcing peasants into factories and control of the state to suppress all opposition to economic coercion built capitalism. The forms of domination change over the years, and are often financial rather than openly militaristic today (although the armed fist lurks in the background); regardless, exploitation is the lifeblood of wealth. Demanding that the cost of this should be spread around is a demand to continue exploitation, domination and imperialism, and nothing more.

War crimes and forgetting

Forty years after the long Vietnamese struggle for independence concluded with the capture of Saigon, the mythologies surrounding the war on the other side of the Pacific Ocean have not loosened their grip. The “debate” surrounding the war is a textbook example of corporate media obfuscation.

A strong debate played out in the corporate media outlets of the United States concerning the Vietnam War at the end of the 1990s, and that same debate, with the same parameters, continues today. This debate, however, is only between two “acceptable” viewpoints — an honorable effort that tragically failed or a well-intentioned but flawed effort that should not have been undertaken if the U.S. was not going to be “serious” about fighting.

A U.S. Air Force plane drops a white phosphorus bomb on Vietnam in 1966.

Left out are the widely held views that the war should never have been fought because it was a war to extend U.S. hegemony or that the U.S. simply had no business fighting in another country’s civil war. Further, the first “acceptable” viewpoint implies, and the second explicitly states, that the U.S. didn’t really fight hard to win the war, ignoring the actual intensive level of the U.S. war effort in which most of North Vietnam’s larger cities were reduced to rubble, much of the farming lands were destroyed and three million Vietnamese were killed.

Thus there was all the appearance of a free and open media at the same time that the media obscured.

Elections only when you do as we say

What were some of the messy things going on in Southeast Asia at the time? (Most of the following is taken from Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, Pantheon Books, 1988.) The U.S. sabotaged the scheduled 1956 all-Vietnam election that was a cornerstone of the 1954 agreement that ended the French intervention; an election that was not allowed to occur precisely because Ho Chi Minh would have won. The U.S. set up South Vietnam as an artificial puppet state, overthrew and killed South Vietnam’s “leaders” and installed new “leaders,” who were invariably military thugs.

The U.S. invented the Gulf of Tonkin attack, a deliberate lie to create a cover for increasing the U.S. military role. By the time of the U.S. land intervention in 1965, American aerial bombing, napalming and gassing had already killed 15,000 Vietnamese. The U.S. carried out a policy of rural and urban terror. The military forced peasants in wide parts of the country off their land and into “strategic hamlets” — in reality, rural concentration camps — and killed peasants who refused to leave their homes. Tens of thousands were swept from their homes and sent to camps in single ground operations.

A writer in Foreign Affairs wrote that destroying the countryside and forcing rural residents into cities was necessary because the Viet Cong were “a powerful force which cannot be dislodged from its constituency so long as the constituency continues to exist.” The U.S. systematically destroyed by force any South Vietnamese grouping opposed to the installed military dictators, even non-Communist groups such as organized Buddhists.

The U.S. leveled major cities — 77% of the buildings in Hue, one of Vietnam’s biggest cities, were completely destroyed. Dams were blasted away, allowing salt water from the South China Sea to flood farmland, making the growing of food impossible. When North Vietnam agreed to the Paris Peace Agreements in 1972, Henry Kissinger decided not to accept the pact, began demanding major changes to an agreed-upon document, then launched the Christmas bombings of Hanoi and Haiphong when the North Vietnamese government insisted the agreement be signed.

In South Vietnam, 9,000 of 15,000 hamlets were damaged or destroyed, as were 25 million acres (100,000 square kilometers) of farmland and 12 million acres of forest. Killed were 1.5 million cattle. One million widows and 800,000 orphans were left behind.

In North Vietnam, 34 of the largest 36 cities suffered significant damage, with 15 completely razed, while 4,000 of about 5,800 communes were damaged. More than one million acres of farmland and 400,000 cattle were destroyed in the North. The Central Intelligence Agency admitted that at least 30,000 North Vietnamese were killed per year by 1967 by U.S. bombing, with these deaths primarily civilian. The total tonnage of bombs dropped by the U.S. in Vietnam exceeded that of all bombing by all countries during World War II. Reports of the countryside at the end of the war spoke of entire regions as “bare, gray and lifeless.”

No mercy in neighboring countries

Next door, in Laos, following a 1958 election in which a two-party Left coalition won 13 of 21 legislative seats, the U.S. swiftly overthrew the government, with the new government seated by the U.S. vowing to disband the Pathet Lao, which had won the most seats. Two years later, that new government was overthrown by the U.S., which installed a CIA-backed extreme Right-wing general.

In rural Laos, entire districts were wiped out by bombing. A series of articles in Le Monde reported on a district capital that had been deserted for three years because of repeated bombings. This capital was a portion of a 20-mile area stretching into the countryside in which not a single building was left standing and in which were found the remnants of American fragmentation bombs, which are dropped to maximize civilian casualties.

There were areas of Laos where villagers hid in nearby mountains, in caves or in ditches during daytime because of the ceaseless bombardment and who could conduct life only at night. Craters so saturated some areas that it was impossible to distinguish them, and all vegetation was destroyed. More than 350,000 Laotians — more than 10% of the country’s population — were killed and a similar number left homeless.

In Cambodia, bombing by the U.S. during the period 1969 to April 1975 resulted in 600,000 deaths and two million refugees, according to the same Finnish Inquiry Commission that concluded one million people died during the subsequent Khmer Rouge régime. As the bombing was ending in 1975, the U.S. government estimated that deaths from starvation in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, were near 100,000 per year.

This horrific bombing is believed to have played a role in the rise of the Khmer Rouge, which the U.S. covertly sided with during its murderous four-year reign. A U.S. government report in 1975 said 75 percent of Cambodia’s draft animals had died and that it would likely be three years before the country could regain rice self-sufficiency.

The carnage inflicted on Vietnam reverberates still. An estimated 19 million tons of toxic herbicides were applied that has resulted in more than half a century of damage to health and birth defects.

Such is the price of empire, paid by those on the receiving end. If these are not war crimes, then what would be?

The art of becoming human

About 180,000 people enlist in the United States military each year, many of whom will come home with physical injuries or psychological damage. Recruits are trained to kill, taught to de-humanize others, to participate in torture, but are expected to forget upon returning to civilian life.

That 22 veterans commit suicide per day is a grim reminder not only of the harsh demands of military life but that the Pentagon effectively throws away its veterans after using them. The U.S. government is quick to start wars, but although political leaders endlessly make speeches extolling the sacrifices of veterans, it doesn’t necessarily follow up those sentiments, packaged for public consumption, with required assistance.

Veterans themselves are using art to begin the process of working their way through their psychological injuries in a program known as “Combat Paper.” In an interesting twist on the idea of beating swords into plowshares, the Combat Paper program converts veterans’ uniforms into paper, which is then used as a canvas for art works focusing on their military experiences. Deconstructed fibers of uniforms are beaten into pulp using paper-making equipment; sheets of paper are pulled from the pulp and dried to create the paper.

“No One Can Change The Animal I’ve Become,” silkscreen, by Jesse Violante

Drew Cameron, one of the initiators of Combat Paper Project, writes of the concept:

“The story of the fiber, the blood, sweat and tears, the months of hardship and brutal violence are held within those old uniforms. The uniforms often become inhabitants of closets or boxes in the attic. Reshaping that association of subordination, of warfare and service, into something collective and beautiful is our inspiration.”

The results are dramatic, as I found while viewing an exhibit at the Art 101 gallery in New York City’s Williamsburg neighborhood. Take, for example, Jesse Violante’s silkscreen, “No One Can Change The Animal I’ve Become.” The title sentence is written in bloody red letters above a scene of soldiers in an exposed forward position, lying prone with weapons ready. The image is stark, depicting only the most immediate surroundings, representing the lack of vision on the part of officials who see war as a first option and the fog of uncertainty as experienced by the solider in the field reduced to a scramble for survival.

Wounds that can be seen and those not seen

There are those whose injuries are obvious, such as Tomas Young, whose struggles were shown in full intensity in the documentary Body of War. In the letter he wrote to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney when his death was impending, he put into words his agony:

“Your cowardice and selfishness were established decades ago. You were not willing to risk yourselves for our nation but you sent hundreds of thousands of young men and women to be sacrificed in a senseless war with no more thought than it takes to put out the garbage. I have, like many other disabled veterans, come to realize that our mental and physical [disabilities and] wounds are of no interest to you, perhaps of no interest to any politician. We were used. We were betrayed. And we have been abandoned.”

And there are those whose injuries are not so immediately obvious. Let’s hear from a couple of them. Kelly Dougherty, who helped to found Iraq Veterans Against the War after serving as a medic and as military police, said she appreciates having a space to “talk about my feelings of shame for participating in a violent occupation.” She writes:

“When I returned from Iraq ten years ago, some of my most vivid memories were of pointing my rifle at men and boys while my fellow soldiers burned semi trucks of food and fuel, and of watching the raw grief of a family finding that their young son had been run over and killed by a military convoy.

I remember being frustrated with military commanders that seemed more concerned with decorations and awards than with the safety of their troops, and of finding out that there never were any weapons of mass destruction. I was angry and frustrated and couldn’t relate to my fellow veterans who voiced with pride their feelings that they were defending freedom and democracy. I also couldn’t relate to civilians who would label me a hero, but didn’t seem interested in actually listening to my story.”

Garett Reppenhagen, also a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, wrote on the group’s Web site about how the resistance he received at Veterans Administration meetings when he tried to speak of his experiences, the illegality of the Iraq occupation and the lies of the Bush II/Cheney administration that started the war.  “The ‘you know you aren’t allowed to go there’ look,” as he puts it:

“I can’t bring up the child that exploded because she unknowingly carried a bomb in her school bag and how her foot landed next to me on the other side of the Humvee. I can’t talk about how we murdered off duty Iraqi Army guys working on the side as deputy governor body guards because they looked like insurgents. I can’t talk about blowing the head off an old man changing his tire because he might have been planting a roadside bomb. I can’t talk about those things without talking about why we did it.”

Fairy tales become nightmares

Why was it done? United States military spending amounts to a trillion dollars a year, more than every other country combined. The invasion and occupation of Iraq was intended to create a tabula rasa in Iraq, with its economy cracked wide open for U.S.-based multinational corporations to exploit at will, a neoliberal fantasy that extended well beyond the more obvious attempt at controlling Iraq’s oil. Overthrowing governments through destabilization campaigns, outright invasions and financial dictations through institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have long been the response of the U.S. to any country that dares to use its resources to benefit its own population rather than further corporate profits.

And the fairy tales of emancipating women from Muslim fundamentalists? We need only ask, then, why the U.S. funded and armed the Afghan militants who overthrew their Soviet-aligned government for the crime of educating girls. Or why the U.S. government stands by Saudi Arabia and other ultra-repressive governments. Those Afghan militants became the Taliban and al-Qaida, and spawned the Islamic State. More interference in other countries begets more resistance, more extreme groups feeding on destruction and anger.

What does it say about our humanity when ever more men and women are asked to bear such burdens, pay such high prices for an empire that enriches the 1 percent and impoverishes working people, including the communities from which these soldiers come from. What does it say about our humanity when the countries that are invaded are reduced to rubble and suffer casualties in the millions, and this is cheered on like a video game?

“These Colors Run Everywhere,” spray paint, by Eli Wright

All the more thought-provoking are the art works of the Combat Paper Project. Another work, “Cry For Help” by Eli Wright, is of a man screaming and a phone held by a skeletal hand and arm. Barbed wire is stretched over the top. How well would we hold on to our humanity had we been on patrol? If we were at risk of being killed at any time by such a patrol?

A second exhibit by Mr. Wright is “These Colors Run Everywhere,” a more minimalist work that shows reds, whites and blues dripping down the canvas, a rain falling upon an urban landscape reduced to a shadowy background that could be interpreted as symbolic of the lack of knowledge of the places that the U.S. invades and of the societies that invasions destroy. It is also a wry twisting of a common slogan used as a defensive mantra into a doctrine of offense and invasion, the actual practice of that slogan.

I assuredly do not speak for, could not speak for, these artists. Perhaps you would have different, maybe very different, interpretations. The movie American Sniper, glorifying a racist murderer and thus symbolizing the dehumanizing tendencies of those who beat their breasts while screaming “We’re number one!” when the death toll climbs higher, has taken in tens of millions of dollars. Vastly less money will change hands as a result of the Combat Paper artworks. But what price should be paid for our humanity?

Combat Paper is on display at Art 101 until April 5.

You don’t spend a trillion dollars on the military for benign reasons

The idea that a country spends as much on its military as the rest of the world and has military personnel deployed in three-quarters of the world’s countries does so for purely defensive reasons is the absurdity it appears to be.

As former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright memorably said to General Colin Powell, “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” Ah, bipartisanship. Neither Republican nor Democratic administrations have been shy in this regard: The United States militarily has invaded Latin American and Caribbean countries 96 times, including 48 times in the 20th century. That total constitutes only direct interventions and doesn’t include coups fomented by the U.S., such as Guatemala in 1954 and Chile in 1973.

Secretary Albright doesn’t have a short memory so much as ideological blinders. She of course is far from alone there. But before tackling some of those details, an examination of the size of U.S. military spending is in order, although that is not necessarily an easy number to determine. What is undisputed is that the U.S. spends many times more than any other country on Earth.

One measure of the world’s military spending is provided by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, a self-described independent research organization that is nonetheless largely funded by the Swedish government. According to its figures, the U.S. spent $640 billion in 2013, roughly equal to the combined military spending of the next nine largest spenders combined.

The Stockholm Institute estimates China’s military spending (the world’s second highest) at $188 billion, about 50 percent higher than the figure found in the official Chinese budget, based on its analysis of China’s budget. That is reasonable, but the same standard should be applied to the United States, rather than simply accepting the Pentagon budget figure as the Stockholm Institute has done.

Pentagon budget only part of U.S. military spending

One estimate of actual U.S. military spending in 2013, put forth by the War Resisters League, is $1.355 trillion. The league arrives at that figure by adding military spending deriving from parts of the government other than the Pentagon, including veterans’ benefits and assigning 80 percent of the interest on the national debt. These are in addition to the official Pentagon budget.

In its annual pie charts exposing this spending, the league notes that other groups estimate that 50 to 60 percent of the national debt is attributable to military spending. For the sake of argument, splitting the difference between the high and low figures (using a figure of 65 percent debt assignment), lowers U.S. military spending to about $1.285 trillion. Adjusting U.S. spending to that level, while accepting the Stockholm Institute’s upward revisions for China and Russia, means that the United States spends more on its military than every other country on Earth put together.

There is no conceivable defensive purpose for such massive spending.

Nor is there one for the geographical breadth of the Pentagon. A web site for veterans, Vet Friends, states that the United States currently has military personnel deployed in about 150 countries, and 56 countries have hosted at least 1,000 U.S. troops at some time since 1950. The number of overseas U.S. military bases to which personnel are assigned is a matter of dispute. The Pentagon, in a 2003 report, said it had 702 overseas installations. As the Bush II/Cheney administration’s “war on terror” was then in its early stages, that number has likely grown. A report published by the conservative Canadian newspaper National Post estimates the actual figure is anywhere from 700 to 1,000.

The cost of that vast overseas deployment is no easier to estimate. David Vine, writing for Al-Jazeera, did his best to pin down a reasonable figure:

“How much does the U.S. spend each year occupying the planet with its bases and troops? How much does it spend on its global presence? Forced by Congress to account for its spending overseas, the Pentagon has put that figure at $22.1bn a year. It turns out that even a conservative estimate of the true costs of garrisoning the globe comes to an annual total of about $170bn. In fact, it may be considerably higher. Since the onset of ‘the Global War on Terror’ in 2001, the total cost for our garrisoning policies, for our presence abroad, has probably reached $1.8 trillion to $2.1 trillion.”

Playing the ‘democracy’ card never gets old

Why does the United States government put itself into debt for such unjustifiable spending? The usual story spoon-fed to United Statesians and to the rest of the world is a benign, even self-sacrificing, willingness to be the world’s policeman. The question then becomes one of “Can we afford to do this?” The actual reason — to enforce and extend U.S. dominance and to boost profitability of U.S.-based multi-national corporations — is treated as if such considerations did not exist, despite being repeatedly demonstrated by the words of U.S. government officials.

A splendid example of this self-serving myopia is a 2012 paper produced by the Cato Institute, a font of far right, libertarian material taken seriously in such circles, at least before the Koch Brothers’ coup two years ago that tightened their control over the organization. This paper, “Why the U.S. Military Budget is ‘Foolish and Sustainable,’ ” does acknowledge that military spending “is designed for projecting power abroad, not protecting Americans.” But the paper would have us believe that is because the U.S. is too nice:

“We adopted our current strategy — which amounts to trying to run the world with the American military — because we could, not because it was wisest. … U.S. security guarantees can create moral hazard — emboldening weak allies to take risks they would otherwise avoid in their dealings with neighbors, heightening instability and threatening to pull the United States into wars facilitated by its benevolence.”

The problem, this Cato Institute paper asserts, is that the U.S. allows its allies to “free-ride” on its “benevolence” while receiving nothing tangible in return. The solution to this is to force other countries to spend more on their militaries. In this fairy tale, a global arms buildup would bring an end to the “infantilization” of U.S.-allied countries. Better to force the rest of the world to grow up, the paper asserts:

“Abandoning the pretension that global trade depends on U.S. protection would allow vast reductions in overseas missions and peace-time military expenditures. Avoiding the conflation of foreign disorder would allow American leaders to plan for fewer occupational wars.”

Although those on the receiving end of imperial bombs and dictated “structural adjustments” are not in doubt about the phantasmagoria of these Cato Institute arguments — consistent as they are with the level of debate found in elite circles and the corporate mass media — let us at least dip our toes into a real world-based examination of U.S. foreign policy.

Bankers, banana barons and military interventions

At the beginning of the 20th century, U.S. President William Howard Taft declared that his foreign policy was “to include active intervention to secure our merchandise and our capitalists opportunity for profitable investment” abroad. Those were not idle words. A Nicaraguan dictator, José Santos Zelaya, was overthrown in 1909 because he angered the United States by accepting a loan from British bankers instead of U.S. bankers. Taft then placed Nicaragua’s customs collections under U.S. control and refinanced the loan through two U.S. banks, which were given control of Nicaragua’s national bank and railroad as a reward.

Half a century later, the U.S. overthrew Guatemala’s democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz, on behalf of the United Fruit Company. That was a company with friends in high places — Central Intelligence Agency Director Allen Dulles and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles earlier in their careers were partners in United Fruit’s main law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell. A 1952 “national intelligence estimate” (a joint document put together by the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies) had this to say about United Fruit’s efforts to maintain its dominant position:

“If the company should submit to Guatemalan demands the political position of the Arbenz Administration would be greatly strengthened. The result, even if it were a compromise agreement, would be presented as a national triumph over ‘colonialism’ and would arouse popular enthusiasm. … The Government and the unions, under Communist influence and supported by national sentiment, would probably proceed to exert increasing pressure against other U.S. interests in Guatemala, notably the Railway.”

Note the use of quote marks around “colonialism,” as if such a concept did not exist, and a privately owned railroad is a “U.S. interest.” Class interests are also revealed by the ritual reference to “Communist influence” — a phrase implying that Guatemalans, or anybody else subject to the formulation, are intellectually incapable of analyzing their own lives and experiences.

In the following decade, the United States backed a military coup overthrowing a democratically elected government in Brazil in 1964. The U.S. ambassador to Brazil, who served in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, said the coup, which installed a right-wing dictatorship that tortured opponents, would “create a greatly improved climate for private investment.” In more recent times, the Bush II/Cheney administration sought to sweep away all constraints limiting the plundering of Iraq by U.S. multi-national corporations following the invasion, establishing a foothold intended to be replicated elsewhere. That it didn’t succeed doesn’t ameliorate that the attempt was made nor the enormous damage done.

That isn’t only in the history books

And as the failed U.S.-backed coup in Venezuela in 2002, and the current destabilization attempt there, demonstrate, any country that doesn’t orient government policy to the enrichment of foreign capital above all other considerations quickly becomes a target. As a 2006 secret memo revealed by WikiLeaks discusses, the U.S. government spends considerable money destabilizing countries it does not like. This memo, circulated to the Army command for South America in addition to various U.S. embassies, outlines a five-point program to topple then president Hugo Chávez that included tens of millions of dollars funneled through the U.S. Agency for International Development and the creation of opposition groups.

Typical of the warped prism through which U.S. elites view the world, the memo’s first sentence is: “During his 8 years in power, President Chavez has systematically dismantled the institutions of democracy and governance.” That was said of a president whose movement won 16 of 17 national elections, almost all by at least 10 percentage points. (Sixteen more legitimate national electoral victories than achieved by George W. Bush for those keeping score.)

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, an observer, characterized the Venezuelan election process as “the best in the world.” Voters in Venezuela make their selections on computers in which party and independent observers participated in 16 pre-election audits, election-machine software has built-in systems to prevent tampering, and a paper receipt is printed out for every vote. A system of community councils is building up participatory democracy, and processes intended to build economic democracy are ongoing.

Venezuela is attempting to create an economy geared toward the betterment of its population, rather than the maximization of corporate profits. The majority of Venezuelans, previously shut out of political participation by the country’s capitalists, are now involved in creating popular institutions.

That is what is seen as a threat by the U.S. government, acting on behalf of its industrialists and financiers, as it has done since the 19th century. Although nowadays financial pressure is the preferred methodology thanks to the development of a global web of banks and multilateral institutions, force underlies the enforcement of these interests around the world. Violence has always been the handmaiden of capitalism.