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Michael Parenti is a political economist, historian, and author renowned for his insightful critiques of empire, capitalism, and global politics. With a prolific career spanning several decades, his works have offered vital perspectives on U.S. interventionism, the dynamics of poverty, and the suppression of democratic movements in the third world.

For issue #50 of The Internationalist, we’ve transcribed and excerpted from Parenti’s 1986 lecture given at Colorado State University. In this extract, Parenti explores the sordid history of U.S. interventionism. The transcript has been edited for clarity.

The Cold War did not begin in 1947, but in 1917. The Cold War had been going on even before the Russian Revolution, in the sense that the U.S. has been consciously, and other Western countries have been consciously, suppressing any kind of revolutionary force. When Ronald Reagan says that "we've got to stop the Sandinistas and overthrow them because they are an extension of Soviet power", we might ask ourselves: We've been in Nicaragua 11 times and at least five of those times there was no Soviet Union. We've invaded Costa Rica; we've invaded Haiti; we've invaded Mexico; and there wasn't a Soviet Union. We invaded these countries long before there was a Soviet Union. It's not that they're surrogates of the USSR, but that they are developing revolutionary movements which will bring a competing social order, one that will use the land, the labour, the resources, the technology and the capital in a different way [which] is for social need communally, for non-profit public sector development rather than for private capital accumulation. This would mean the death of capitalism, of that class with its power and privileges.

At the end of World War II, the U.S. empire replaced Britain. The Brits were eased out of Iran. British oil companies were replaced by American oil companies. British sugar companies in Honduras were eased out by American sugar companies. And America picked up the tab. America built an American empire of over two thousand bases around the world including about three hundred major ones. American fleets are on every ocean. American planes fly the skies over almost every continent. And so we see enormous investment in the third world — and with that enormous investment an enormous growth in poverty.

Now that's unusual and that really goes against the accepted ideology which is: "attract investment because that'll bring prosperity and jobs and all that sort of thing." But what investment has brought to Haiti is the emigration of small Haitian farmers. What investment has brought to Latin America, and most other countries, has been the displacement of the peasantry, their proletarianization. They're being thrown into shanty towns to suffer poverty wages or chronic underemployment. Investment has also brought with it increasing illiteracy, sickness, disease, poverty, and dislocation and disfranchisement. A growing foreign debt and indebtedness. Growing investment for cash crops, by the way, that's what the whole Mexican Revolution was about. The land was going to belong to the Mexicans so they could grow beans and alfalfa and feed their people. Or was the land going to belong to the big sugar companies and latifundio owners so they could grow sugar to export as a cash crop to make more money?

And with that growth in investment comes a dislocation in the structure of the third-world country. And when you send foreign aid to those countries, nine out of ten of those dollars goes to build the infrastructure to subsidize the capital investment of the private corporations or to pay for the police and the army of that country. Not to defend it from foreign invasion because Uruguay is not going to invade Bolivia, because Taiwan isn't going to be invaded by the Philippines. But they need those big armies to defend their rulers from their own people. Because those people are in such a state of miseration. So that's where our foreign aid goes.

As someone once said, foreign aid is when the poor people — that's us — of a rich country give money to the rich people of a poor country.

And when Kenneth Bolden gets up, and he says empire is irrational because it costs more than what we get out of it. The British, it cost them more in India than what they got out of it. The American investment in the Philippines is only about three and a half billion dollars but we had to give them about six billion dollars in aid. Thurston Babylon said back in 1909, "the wealth that's extracted from imperialism goes into the caucus of the select few, whereas the costs of empire are paid out of the common treasure of the people." And so it was with the British Empire in India: it was the Brits, the ordinary working people, who paid for the cost of the empire. It was the Bank of England and the East India Trading Company that got the cream.

There’s another resource in the third world that attracts capital investment. And you say to yourself what is that mysterious resource? I'm looking at El Salvador and I'm looking at the companies that are in El Salvador and I look and I see Pillsbury, Procter Gamble, US Steel Continental, Firestone, Ford. I'm saying to myself: "wait a minute, what the hell's in El Salvador: a little sugar, bananas, what [are] all these companies doing there?" What they're doing is they're manufacturing everything from energy rods to baking powder from auto tires to computers. They're in El Salvador because of a very precious resource in El Salvador which is cheap labor, which is paying people 15 cents an hour instead of having to pay auto workers 50 an hour up here. You go down there and you pay them 15 cents an hour and that becomes a very attractive thing. And you go to South Korea. The New York Times had a story about the South Korean farm girls who work in the textile companies that used to be in New England until they moved south. And then when the southern workers unionized, they moved to South Korea where there's a nice fascist little country where if the workers try to unionize, they get beaten up and thrown in jail or they get shot dead. And the Korean farm girls in those textile compounds are working for 18 cents an hour for 12 hours a day, seven days a week, no time off and if you want a day off you work a double shift. That's the Industrial Revolution. That's the 1870s. But that's big profit and that's what they call capital investment.

General Motors, when they tell you that they've got to pave over Detroit and they've got to close down factories because the cars aren't selling as well as they should, what they don't tell you is that in the last 10 years, General Motors has opened up a dozen new factories in other countries for the reasons I've just talked about.

So here's another resource — this, in fact, is the key resource. The resource which is the source of wealth along with natural resources, is labour, because one thing about labour — it's one of the commodities of production that does not use up its own value entirely in that process of production. It creates wealth. Now there's another development though that's come with all of this and that other development is that revolutionary movements have been emerging all around the world.

The United States has given a number of reasons for why Ronald Reagan must go on with our military buildup and our intervention in the third world. Why we must attack countries like Nicaragua, why we must oppose guerrilla movements in El Salvador, why we must try to overthrow Afghanistan, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, and various other countries where the forces of social change taking place? And the reason they give is the freedom of the people there for democracy. We are in Central America to defend democracy.

Well, a moment's reflection would raise some serious questions about that hypothesis because it becomes clear that, in fact, the U.S. government has a record in recent years of overthrowing democracies. In Chile, Salvador Allende who was elected in a free and open election was overthrown. Ten thousand people were executed, tens of thousands of others were driven into exile, others have been put in prison and you have one of the worst fascist dictatorships all with the support of the United States, which after Allende's election cut off all aid except to the Chilean military.

In 1954, the Arbenz government was instituted and Arbenz legalized all student organizations. The first democratically elected governor, the president of Guatemala, Arbenz, legalized trade unions and opposition newspapers. And then he started doing some very dangerous things: he began to nationalize the unused land of United Food Company. That's when U.S corporations and the CIA went in and overthrew Arbenz because he was a serious leftist influence. And so with Mosaddegh in Iran, so with Goulart in Brazil so with Bosch in the Dominican Republic, so with a variety of other democratic leaders. At least six or seven in Latin America were overthrown and generals were brought in with the aid and assistance of the U.S. government. So it can't be that we're there to foster democracy.

We seem to also make war against democracies and in addition, we support some of the worst dictators. If Reagan is really against tyranny, if he really hates tyranny, why doesn't he send freedom fighters into Paraguay or Chile or South Africa? Why doesn't he start sabotaging there? In fact, the whole fight with Libya might be less of a mystery if you understand that really the worst thing about Colonel Gaddafi — who is a kind of a strange guy in some ways, but not as strange as the media has made him out — he has called repeatedly for negotiations between him and Reagan, for peaceful negotiations, for peaceful settlement of all disputes. And the Reagan administration has repeatedly rebuffed those overtures.

Gaddafi has done some other things which make him really dangerous. It's not the terrorism, it's not the attack on the Vienna and Berlin airports, for which they have no proof that Libya was involved. The troublesome thing about Gaddafi is that when he took over in 1969, he took over a country that was like Saudi Arabia, a country of mass misery and a lot of rich oil that went into the pockets of a few rich. And when his revolution took over, they got rid of the rich, they took all their extra houses and gave them to the poor, they put out a land reform program, they put out a public free school program, they started a national health medical program — something that we Americans still don't have, the Libyans have it — he planted 40 million trees and started massive irrigation and ecological reclamation. These are some of the things that Gaddafi did and that's a dangerous example to the Arab world. He took a bigger chunk of the oil revenues and reinvested them into the needs of his own people and the per capita earnings of the Libyan people are the highest in the Arab world, and the highest in the third world.

You didn't hear that in the media, did you?

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