Globalization: Think Of It Like NASCAR! Part Fifteen

Welcome to part fifteen of my series on globalization. As always, let me recommend -- if you are just joining us here -- that you go back to part one and read from there, to bring yourself up to speed. This hub may not make sense to you if you don't. More likely than not, you'll decide that life is too short to bother. And it is! I completely understand.

Since this is part fifteen, the essays are not stand-alone pieces. Each one builds upon the preceeding hub that came before it. You are free to try reading this hub independently, of course, if you are just joining us, but please be advised that it may not make sense to you, especially if you don't have any familiarity with post-World War Two U.S. economic history -- as well as a vague awareness of Western economic and political history, in broad outline, from, say, the 1870s forward.

With that said, let us proceed. My task, here, is to put the administration of President George W. Bush (2001-2009) into historical context. Now, there have been voices on the liberal end of the American political spectrum that have insisted that George W. Bush and his political associates from Texas, and thereabouts, were 'radical' insurgents who did not accept the legitimacy of the American System, and are/have been seeking to overthrow it.

I'm thinking of people like Keynsian economist, author, and New York Times columnist, Paul Krugman, as an exemplar of this opinion. Krugman believed (still believes?) that it was/is a gross misnomer to call George W. Bush a 'conservative.' A 'conservative,' Krugman has explained, is someone who does NOT want to make things very different from the way they are today.

This domain of analysis sees George W. Bush (and his political associates) as radical, right-wing extremism in terms of economic policy, military policy, and in terms of social and cultural policy (particularly in trying to intrude religion deeper into the realm of public policy).

To take on the cultural/religious stuff first -- if you have been following this series, you know that the institutionalization of homophobia, for example, the official rejection of homosexual activity as 'immoral,' 'unnnatural,' and 'sinful,' to the point to which male homosexuality was outlawed in England over a century ago, was firmly rooted in ECONOMIC NECESSITY!.

How so?

Remember, we're talking about the late nineteenth century, after actual slavery and indentured serviture had been, more or less, outlawed. This meant that capital (by which I mean the political and economic elites of the Western world) could no longer draw on an endless supply of labor from outside the borders their own countries. What capital (or ruling classes, is another term) had to do was attend to the decent reproduction of the worker WITHIN the political and geographic lines of the various nation-state systems.

As we discussed before, some of these business owners even went so far as to create 'model worker villages,' with a strict ban on alcohol. It is out of this milieu (originated in the economic necessity of capital) that we get our views, today, about what the 'decent' nuclear family is supposed to look like. It is out of this milieu from which comes generalized, institutionalized homophobia.

After all, homosexual activity does not result of the procreation of children (reproduction of the worker) -- children who can be added to the workforce to increase the productivity and profit of the farms and factories, and thus honor the creative spirit of the Lord, and thus making your particular society more 'pleasing in the sight of God' (you can never forget the Calvinism, which is the ideological source of the SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM, not the operational system of capitalism itself).

This historical-geography I've been reviewing has two other issues bound within it: immigration and abortion -- then and now. If you are politically against allowing labor to move freely across borders, you probably want to take special care for the internal, domestic reproduction of labor, by way of engaging in political activity against abortion, which you probably see as contrary to the will of God.

Note: If I have just lost you, that probably means this is your first time reading one of my hubs, and you have started here, at part 15. That is probably a good argument for either giving up or starting at 'square one.' Know that these remarks are in the way of a review, and that elsewhere in this series I have documented my sources for the factual claims about the economic origins of certain 'Western'/'Christian' values.

If you look at American economic and political history from the mid-to-late 1970s forward, what we see is that the Republican party moved away from the Nixonesque race-baiting as a political call to arms, and concentrated more on religious fundamentalism. Remember, across the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s (when George W. Bush was in the White House), the American economy was undergoing the processes of financialization, deindustrialization, deregulation, the 'hollowing out' of the American economy.

Parallel to this economic process over thirty years, political religious fundamentalism was also growing and would later explode, if you like, during the presidency of George W. Bush. Given the historical relationship of Calvinism and what would become 'traditional (nuclear) family values' (including homophobia) to the development of capitalism -- I would, therefore, say that when you have eruptions or inflammations of political (Christian) religious fundamentalism, you have a societal reaction to a weakening economy.

What is the bumper sticker of religious/cultural conservatives? "Strong families, strong economy, strong country." Isn't that so?

Now, I say its a societal response because these periods of political religious fundamentalism always involves a dialectic between conservatives pushing those values and those who oppose them, ideologically and politically. Both atheists (especially so-called 'new' atheists) and fundamentalists are obsessed with religion. 'Centrists' or 'moderates' are pulled in to, well, plead for moderation -- which usually means some kind of awful center-right compromise.

So, what we have now is three very broad groups of people, each obsessed with religion. Each group believes that their particular prescriptions are what is needed to heal the intellectual and social polarization of the society, and restore material prosperity to the society. Fundamentalists believe we need to 'turn back to the Lord' in order to extracate ourselves from crisis and be restored to prosperity. Atheists believe that we need to cut ourselves off, once and for all, from what they consider to be childish superstition. The middle-of-the-roaders think that the way forward is to try to strike a 'balance between faith and science.'

It is important to understand that capitalism developed in a very different way, here in the United States, than it did anywhere else -- very different! I can't stress this enough, because the very way it developed here led to the development of the feeling of 'American Exceptionalism' (in both its overtly religious and secular theological forms). Here, we are indebted to the analysis of economist RIchard D. Wolff, who is emeritus professor of economics at the University of Massachussets-Amherst, and now teaches at the graduate center of The New School in New York City.

First of all, let me preface my condensation of Professor Wolff's analysis by saying: Basically, the outsized success of American capitalism is largely due to what can be called two really big 'accidents,' if you like, of the historical-geography of the United States. I am about to discuss the first one, now, with the condensation of Professor Wolff's analysis of internal American economic history from 1820 to 1970. The second 'accident' (this is not exactly the right word, but I can't think of a better one) is the fact and aftermath of World War Two. I'll come back to this, but one way to think of what is called 'globalization,' from the perspective of American capital (by which I just mean the economic and political elites of our society) is that it was, what I shall call a re-normalization of effective spatial proximity. I'll return to this rigged-up term and explain a little later on.

Moving on...

Up until 1975 or so American capitalism, due to a unique convergence of serrendipitously convenient circumstances, delivered spectacular results for most Americans, both capital and labor. What's so special about the one hundred fifty year period of 1820 to 1970?

First of all, for all of that period capital (business owners) suffered from a chronic labor shortage. The indigenous peoples were neutralized either by expulsion (being constantly driven westward, i.e., Andrew Jackson's 'Trail of Tears'), decimation of the population through war with settlers and their vulnerability to 'Old World' diseases. The southeast region of the United States relied on the plantation slave system. The areas of free labor were the northeast and midwest. Remember, the country's 'frontier' had not been sorted out, organized and incorporated into the emerging 'American' geopolitical entity.

Business owners had to pay higher and higher wages to attract labor, from Eastern Europe. And they had to pay higher and higher wages to retain labor -- another option for workers who were disatisfied with the conditions of their employment, had the option of getting a Homestead Act land grant, moving out west and becoming a farmer, self-employed, as it were. This is why 'we' are a 'nation of immigrants.' Wave after wave of immigrants were encouraged to come over. Disadvantaged immigrants, as you know, have always been used by business as a wage depressant. But as long as the western 'frontier' was open, business owners were forced to, reluctantly, keep raising (real) wages to try to ward off the temptation of labor to abandon the factory.

Note: We're talking about REAL wages. Real wages (not absolute wages) are the pay a worker gets compared to the prices he/she has to pay to sustain him-herself and the family (food, shelter, clothing, etc).

Because of this unique reality of American historical-geography, the American worker saw his real wage rise decade after decade. Something amazing was happening here! This is why the United States, the 'nation of immigrants,' got its reputation as 'the land of opportunity.' No other capitalist system ever produced such results for its working class.

Of course, we cannot neglect to mention that whatever benefits the working class received in the United States, as anywhere else, had been won by over a century of grass roots struggle from below. But, in the United States, those struggles were aided by this central fact of our historical-geography. But, of course, the United States developed a fairly tough labor union movement around the 1870s/1880s.

Now, by the end of the nineteenth century the western frontier, in the United States, was all filled up, 'closed.' Some scholars have said that this is what really gives the labor movement its impetus to activism. In other words the thinking went something like this: Okay, now that the frontier has closed up and we can't improve our situation that way, we'd better get to work on improving our lot right here and now!

So, real wages rose, on average, decade after decade from 1820 to 1970. This was so even throughout the Great Depression of the 1930s, according to Professor Wolff, because as wages surely fell, prices fell still more!

This rising real wages (the most spectacular in the capitalist world for working people) had cultural effects. It led to a broadly held sense that there something special, or 'exceptional,' if you like about the United States, the 'City on the Hill,' and so forth. One of those cultural effects, says Professor Wolff, was that across that period, the people of the United States came to, largely, get our sense of self-worth from what we own, or in more technical language, a constantly rising level of consumption -- which the constantly rising real wage provided for.

It seems to me, that this legacy is, in part, responsible for the fact the United States has such a weak social safety net compared to other capitalist societies of Western Europe, Japan, and Canada. The feeling is -- and the facts of our serrendipitous historical-geography backed this up -- that 'a rising tide lifts all boats.' The feeling is that we don't really need to engage in the politics of redistribution, because the 'pie,' if you will, can always be enlarged.

1945-1975

This thirty-year period is considered to be the 'Golden Age' of American capitalism. World War Two ended in 1945. No fighting had been done on American soil, and so it was the only capitalist system left standing. Western Europe and Japan had to rebuild by buying American stuff! And since these governments were short on funds, at the time, the U.S. lent them the money to buy the America stuff with! America emerged from World War Two as the world's number one CREDITOR nation.

A good time was had by all, more or less. It was during this period that the socioeconomic tribe known as the 'middle class' came into being at this time, not before! The 'middle class' had not existed before 1945. The middle class came into being with a host of redistributive policies coming out of Washington: Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, the G.I Bill, the suburbanization of the United States; housing finance was put on a different basis, opening up federally-guaranteed home ownership to the multitudes.

A lot of this was funded by taking a huge tax bite out of the rich and corporation, who, after all, had done so much to crash the world economy. Strong labor unions continued to win higher wages and more and better benefit packages for the workers they represented. It was a good time for business owners as well. The largest American firms had an uncontested monopoly privileged access to the world market; and as for the demands of the unions..... after a minor squabble, the owners would give in, grant the demands, and simply pass the cost onto the consumer.

Now, up until 1975 or so, most Americans could be forgiven for thinking that there was something 'special' about America. Capitalism had delivered, and spectacularly so for a majority of the population. Even as late as 1980 the United States had been the most EQUAL society in the advanced capitalist world. Wages were the highest for workers, and working hours were the LEAST. Some time after the middle of the decade those statistics exactly reversed -- working hours were the highest, in the industrial world, and wages were the least for American workers.

The 1970s and the end of the labor shortage

We're still working with Professor Wolff's analysis.

During the 1970s the labor shortage came to an end for a variety of reasons, most of which are widely and very well known. The development of the computer and automation means that factories become able to produce MORE stuff with FEWER workers. Women demand a place for themselves in the wider world, outside the home, and therefore join the paid workforce in increasing numbers.

Capital (again, this is a shorthand I sometimes use to designate the political and economic elites of our society) encouraged increased immigration by passing the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which did away with national origin quotas (previously only white Europeans were privileged). Now capital had access to the global surplus population. This process was going on all over the advanced capitalist world at the same time! In the late 1960s the French government subsidized the import of labor from North Africa. The Germans brought in cheap Turkish labor. Sweden brought in folks from the former Yugoslavia. The British drew upon the territories of their former empire (Harvey, The Enigma of Capital, p.14).

There were more people looking for fewer jobs. Its well known that changes in both communications and transport technology made it desirable and advantageous for capital to shift more and more production overseas, in search of 'more flexible labor markets,' etc.

There was also a sustained, vicious political attack on labor during this period (the 1970s and 1980s) with people like Ronald Reagan in the United States, Margaret Thatcher in Britain, General Augusto Pinochet in Chile, and the Brazilian and Argentinian generals (ibid, p.15).

Those of you who've been following this series know that, beginning in the 1980s, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) [an organization which the United States retains, by far, the largest percentage of the vote] has been applying 'structural adjustment' programs all over the world: all over Latin America, Africa, and even Poland -- to get back, for US banks, money that they (the US banks) had loaned out to the third world in the 1970s -- AND THEN SOME!!!; and, as you recall (those of you who've been following this series), these countries ran into difficulty paying the debts when the interest rates suddenly spiked after 1979.

You have to visualize the numerous, massive in-flows of money into the United States that these procedures made possible. Also, don't forget (those of you who've been following this series) the ongoing stream of money arranged by the way the Nixon administration handled the 1973 oil price rise.

On top of all of this, add....

1. The fact that when the countries of the global north, the rich countries give out aid to the global south, 70 percent of the money goes right back to Western corporations to purchase goods and services they provide, according to the World Bank (Napoleoni, p.196).

2. The rich countries impose agricultural tariff against the poor countries, and provide their farmers $300 million a year in subsidies. This costs Africa alone, something like $100 billion a year in lost revenue (ibid, p.195).

3. Western corporations are able to advantageously use patent law to commit what might be called 'biopiracy' of the ecosystems of the global south. To take one small example, the American multinational, Genencor International, took from the lakes of the Rift Valley in Kenya, a bacterial microorganism used in the production of blue jeans. When they are mixed with laundry detergent, these bacteria fade the cloth used to create that expensive, fashionable look. A 2006 report on biopiracy commissioned by the African Center for Biosafety showed that Genencor earned $3.4 billion from the use of this bacteria without paying taxes to the local administration (Napoleoni, p.114). Incidentally, IMF agreements always insist on liberal terms for the repatriation of profits for foreign (Western) corporations.

4. Corporations can patent anything, anywhere. And from that moment forward, they own the trademark regardless of the origin of the patented material. For example, (I may have mentioned this before but...) the Dutch company, Soil and Crop Improvements patented teff, a cereal from Ethiopia, and all the derivatives of its flower. Teff is the main staple grain of 80 million Ethiopians (ibid). Furthermore, individuals and companies can trademark genes in their name and charge a fee for each time it is used (including use in medical research). The patent fees increase the cost of medical research and inflate the cost of treatment. Less expensive tests are blocked by the patent holder, who will not grant permission to use the gene. In this way, such patent holds earn millions each year from research labs around the world (Napoleoni, p.115).

5. In connection with item #4, those of you who have been following this series will recall our discussion of the curious incident of August 1998, when the Clinton administration fired 80 cruise missiles into the Sudan on the grounds that they were targeting Osama bin Laden because his Al Quaeda groups had bombed some American embassies. No terrorists were killed, but 'by accident,' the missiles hit an old mujahideen camp AND a PHARMACEUTICAL PLANT in Khartoum, Sudan (Johnson, p.10).

6. Those of you who've been following this series will recall our discussion about the dependency, since the end of World War Two, of the United States and the other Western capitalist powers on armament sales to third world countries. Incidentally, if you're interested, there's a Frontline documentary that talks about this; the episode is called "Black Money." Its about how Western firms were using bribery to get foreign, third world governments to buy weapons and fighter jets they didn't need. The heads of these corporations said that they had to bribe foreign officials because all of their competitors were doing it..... Anyway, the international institutions actually had to pass a law, formally prohibiting the bribery of foreign officials. Here, have a look at this...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8RhxK5VPDw

You and I probably don't know the half of it. My point is simply this: If you take all of these things together, it becomes clear that the global south, the poorer countries of the planetary south and east, finances or subsidizes the global north, or rich countries of the north and west -- not the other way around, as the standard line goes.

Therefore, it is small wonder that half of the wealth ever accumulated by the United States of America, was accumulated since the year of Ronald Reagan's election as President of the United States, in 1980. But I've gotten ahead of myself. Let's back up a step.

1970-2000

The economist Richard Wolff points out that in the United States, because of the fact that the shortage of labor matter came to an end, employers stopped raising real wages. The real wage today is about what it was in 1978. And yet, there was something interesting about the period of roughly 1970 to 2000. Two parallel and contradictory social currents ran throughout the period, which caused, I think, a bit of understandable confusion.

Throughout the period, as real wages were being held flat for workers and deindustrialization and the financialization of the economy was DECREASING economic security for the so-called 'unskilled' and 'semi-skilled' blue collar working class, and increasingly the 'skilled,' college-educated white collar sectors -- AT THE SAME TIME due to the legacy of the civil rights movement, women's movement, gay, bisexual, transgendered liberation movements, and other things, personal freedom and liberty actually INCREASED.

Moreover, the extension of 'easy' credit to the working class (starting in the 1970s), provided a temporary anasthetic, numbing the pain of flat wages, and ennabling increasing consumption.

Now, take all of that historical-geography we reviewed, all of that economic history, and cultural history we glanced at. Keep in mind the fact that the 1990s gave us the 'prosperity gospel' and 'megachurch' movement. I cannot stress what I'm about to say enough: The former movement (prosperity gospel) was going on at the same time as money-making on that supposed citadel of cool-headed, efficient, rational capitalism (if there is such a thing), Wall Street, was, itself, becoming more and more divorced from the 'real' economy (financialization), and more and more irrational, illogical, and even magical, with the proliferation of more and more elaborate derivative devices, securitization procedures, other financial instruments of more and more exotic nature, as well as more and more Byzantine investment strategies, which -- as we now know -- were often designed and executed NOT by MBA graduates of top business schools, but rather by scientists, engineers, and mathematicians from M.I.T., and other such scientifically-oriented universities, the so-called 'quants.'

It was these quants or otherwise hotshot traders who designed these investment approaches for the financial institutions -- the leadership of which, often did not understand them (particularly the mathematics) but went along out of 'faith,' if you will, because these investment approaches were so very profitable (Harvey, The Enigma of Capital, pp.24-25). Also, please remember that, as we discussed before, starting in the 1980s and continuing to the present day, more and more large nonfinancial, manufacturing firms were starting to make multiple times more by banking on this kind of 'faith' (financial operations and the stock market) than they were making things; this is especially the case with the auto industry (Harvey, The Enigma of Capital, p.23; Phillips, Wealth and Democracy, pp.143-144; Phillips, American Theocracy, p.28).

Moreover, the United States was the first 'leading world economic power' to see its real economy surpassed forty-fold in nominal dollar value by this rather 'faith-based' financial economy. As Kevin Phillips wrote: "Partially real and partially unreal, with the day-to-day balance simply guesswork, the profits from these digital dances seeped into the real economy, and by the mid-1990s the financial sector -- finance, insurance, real estate -- for the first time moved ahead of the manufacturing sector in the U.S. national income and GDP measurements" (Phillips, Wealth and Democracy, p.138).

Also, we have to remember that from 1982 to 2000 the U.S. had the most powerful stock market run we'd ever had. It was a run so powerful, fuelled no doubt, by the various IMF-arranged in-flows of money we've reviewed (and no doubt more) that half of the wealth that the United States ever accumulated was accumulated since the year 1980 (1). Also, as I mentioned before, during the mid and late 1990s ordinary working class/lower middle class people tried to get in on the magic of the stock market. Again, there is an old PBS Frontline documentary you can watch on YouTube called "Betting on the Market."

Now then, why wouldn't a religious person, in America, making $15,000 a year, who through a sub-prime mortgage, now able to have a nice house with a backyard, not think that it was his reward for being faithful, for 'believing the Lord' for his prosperity? Why shouldn't he see this turn of events as proof that 'The Lord can make a way out of no way'? Everybody else -- both secular and religious -- did.

We're almost done

Let's bring all of these understandings to bear upon George W. Bush's attempt to privatize Social Security. Well, for one thing, if you believe in the karmic principle of 'What goes around, comes around,' given the fact that the United States has been pushing the Washington Consensus for more than a decade -- a core principle being the privatization of state assets -- one therefore has to look at this attempt, here in the United States, and say: Yeah, of course our political leaders tried to do the same thing here!

There is another way to look at it. What if Bush, like Reagan before him, had what I call a 'Prometheus Complex'? Prometheus was the Greek god who gave humankind fire. Let me explain.

The privatization of Social Security would have turned our public accounts into private accounts linked to the stock market, made 401Ks out of them, in effect. Now, given the absolutely miraculous, positively intergalactic and cosmic level of wealth created in the United States between 1980-2000, in the ways I've outlined, perhaps George W. Bush and his inner circle thought that the way to distribute prosperity to all (or most) Americans was to plug everybody up to that seeming manna-dsipensing machine called the stock market. From our political-economic point of view, dear reader, the idea may seem ill-advised at best, preposterous, and utterly ridiculous. On the other hand, empires are based on fantastical, magical thinking, are they not?

I wrote a hub about Ronald Reagan making this argument. If you'd like to have a look at that...

http://wingedcentaur.hubpages.com/hub/Ronald-Reagan-A-Republican-Prometheus

Last word

I mentioned, before, that one way to look at globalization (this current form traces back to the late 1970s), from the perspective of capital (political and economic elites), is through the lens of what I call the re-normalization of effective spatial proximity.

What I mean by that is simply this: Suppose the United States, with its present demographic make up, and even with its vast territorial size, had been physically part of Europe. It seems to me that several consequences flow from that hypothetical situation.

The United States, along with the other European states, probably would have become a fellow imperial state, managing to carve out its own 'sphere of influence,' as the euphemism goes, in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the 'New World.' But the United States could never, under those circumstances, have become a super-empire. The United States could have never effectively walled off an entire hemisphere of this planet, the western one, as 'ours alone' to exploit and enrich ourselves with.

Under these circumstances, the United States would have been just another broken, shattered capitalist nation-state, at the end of World Wars One and Two. The United States, therefore, would not have been in the position to play the benevolent Godfather role at the end of the Second World War, offering the Marshall Plan for Western European and Japanese reconstruction and the Bretton Woods proposals for post-war economic peace and cooperation between the capitalist states -- but for the accident of historical geography, which gave America the spatial advantages it needed to become the super-empire that it did. The United States could have never enjoyed that period of three decades (1945-1975) that were the golden age of American power, prestige, and American capitalism

One way to look at globalization, then, is as a force that actually erodes the spatial advantages that had helped sustain American hegemony, let's say, since the end of World War One.

Given all of this, then, it seems to me that the politics in the United States, since the late 1970s, has been about this question: How do we (the ruling class thinking to itself) re-establish the position in the world that we enjoyed during the golden age of 1945-1975? The politics that emerged as an answer to this question -- sometimes called neoliberalism in the sphere of economics, and sometimes called neoconservatism in the sphere of geostrategic military policy -- has been dedicated to restoring the EFFECTIVE geographical spatial advantages that American power had enjoyed for well over a century, but which had reached its peak during the 'golden age' of 1945-1975.

In the realm of economics, when the United States lost its hegemonic role in manufacturing, it countered by asserting global primacy in the sphere of FINANCE, as we have been discussing throughout this series, with all the disciplinary effects that had on workers and industry at home and abroad through IMF 'structural adjustment' programs.

After America's military defeat in Vietnam, military strategic policy became much less manpower-intensive, especially since the conscription system was now ruled out. Since 1980 the United States can be seen drifting back to a more traditional American strategic stance, which did not seek to directly absord territories, but sought to control territory from a distance though a network of client regimes.

Even during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, echoes of an older American tradition remained visible. Let me explain.

You may recall that during this invasion and occupation, then Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, and his number two man, Paul Wolfowitch, got into something of a public tussle with one General Shinseki. The conflict was about the number of troops needed to 'do the job right' in Iraq. The General said that several hundred thousand were necessary. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitch said that assessment was 'way off the mark..... way off the mark.'

The liberal/MSNBC/New York Times view agreed with the general -- if you put aside differences in point of view about the need to go to war in the first place, and the fact that President Bush The Second failed to ask Congress first. Anyway, they said -- and even the Brits joined in this criticism -- that Bush was carrying out this operation, as well as the reconstruction of Iraq 'on the cheap.' Remember? They bemoaned the fact that the Bush administration 'hadn't asked America to sacrifice anything,' noting that the White House was continuing to push tax cuts.

What was this reluctance, on the part of the Bush administration, to commit the 'proper' number of troops all about? Well, once again, if we take the long historical view, what we find is that this reluctance actually harkens back to a much, much older American tradition of foreign policy and military policy. There are a few points to keep in mind.

1. The United States is an imperial state (indeed a super-empire) NOT a colonialist power in the tradition of Britain or France, etc.

2. This means that the United States, unlike Britain or France, has always preferred to control its subject territories and protect its interests by influencing the politics of foreign countries, from a distance, through the use of proxies, client regimes, training the military and secret police of clients at places like the School of the Americas, and sponsoring and/or participating in coups when 'necessary.'

3. Actually sending in troops has always been a reluctant last resort of U.S. policy. When they have to they try to dribble them in with cadres of troops, who are at first called 'advisors.'

4. The United States, being an empire not a colonizing power, has always resisted the very idea of directly absorbing conquered territories, on the grounds that our powers-that-be never wanted to assume responsibility for administering added multitudes of non-whites within its borders; and they feared that this meant that they would be in the unfortunate position of having to sit in Congress and the senate with all kinds of people from strange, faraway lands of people with their strange, faraway dialects, appearances, and customs (Kinzer, pp.84-85; Grandin, p.24; Harvey, The New Imperialism, p.47).

5. This being the case, the United States structured its military policy this way, from the very start of its intercontinental expansionary phase, in the late nineteenth century. The ruling class first emphasized a strong navy and then a strong air force. They discouraged the development of a large, powerful army because they feared this would lead to "overseas wars and increasing involvement in the messy waters of international politics." This strategic stance goes back to William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt (Grandin, p.24).

6. You'll recall, we heard reports about returning soldiers, from Iraq (2003), having difficulties accessing medical benefits and the like. We heard about soldiers being subjected to what many informed observers thought of as excessive redeployments, and so forth. Don't quote me, but I believe it was army and marine personnel most subjected to this kind of thing. I think this is perfectly consistent with an unconscious desire, on the part of the ruling class, to erode the strength of American infantry forces. As I said, American policy NEVER wanted robust ground infantry forces, for the reasons I've already outlined.

7. Indeed, the use of mercenaries like Blackwater (since conscription has been politically unviable since the 1970s), the weaponization of outer space, starting with Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), 'Star Wars,' and Obama's stepped-up use of unmanned drones -- can be seen, I think, as a kind of attempt to recreate the comforting barriers of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, which, had historically, provided the United States with a formidable natural protection zone against attack; but the improvements in transport and communications of globalization has erased that advantage.

8. After all, American policy has always been consumed with and driven by a fear of the Other and the challenge 'they' pose to the 'The American Way,' and all that, which the historian Richard Hofstadter called the 'paranoid style' of American poltics (Krugman, pp.108-109; Harvey, The New Imperialism, p.49).

9. My last point -- and I'll close with this -- I'll make is this: The Latin American specialist Greg Grandin has pointed out that Central America has always been regarded a little differently by U.S. policy. Because of the political-geography of the region the United States could afford to go in there heavy-handed whenever the leadership felt like it. Basically the United States could go in there hot and heavy without too much fear of international political blowback hitting America. Dr. Grandin reminds us that even Reagan, for all of his chest-thumping rhetoric and the militaristic image we have of him to this day, certainly did take liberties in Latin America but more or less played it cool everywhere else (Grandin, pp.71, 225).

Alright, I'll leave it there. Thank you for reading.

References

Grandin, Greg. Empire's Workshop: Latin America, The United States, And The Rise Of The New Imperialism. Metropolitan Books (Henry Holt & Company), 2006. pp.24, 71, 225

Kinzer, Stephen. Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq. TImes Books (Henry Holt & Company), 2006. pp.84-85

Harvey, David. The New Imperialism. Oxford University Press, 2003. pp.47,49

Harvey, David. The Enigma of Capital And The Crises of Capitalism. Oxford University Press, 2010. pp.14-15, 23-25

Napoleoni, Loretta. Rogue Economics. Seven Stories Press, 2008. pp.114-115, 195-196

Johnson, Chalmers. BlowBack: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. Metropolitan Books, 2000. p.10

Phillips, Kevin. Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich. Broadway Books, 2002. pp.138, 143, 144

Krugman, Paul. The Conscience of a Liberal. 2007. pp.108-109

Phillips, Kevin. American Theocracy: The Peril And Politics Of Radical Religion, Oil, And Borrowed Money In The 21st Century. Viking (Penguin Group), 2006. p.28

(1) I heard economics reporter David Cay Johnston say this fact, aout half of the wealth of the United States being accumulated since 1980. Here's a short video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYL1iHcl6GU

And now, let us exit stage left with this....

Bye! Bye!

And now part sixteen.

http://wingedcentaur.hubpages.com/hub/Globalization-Think-Of-It-Like-NASCAR-Part-Sixteen