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In addition, it wasn’t entirely clear to me that people in other nations actually wanted to live like us. Our own statistics about violence, depression, drug abuse, divorce, and crime indicated that although ours was one of the wealthiest societies in history, it might also be one of the least happy societies.
Like Charlie, they were convinced that communism and terrorism were evil forces — rather than the predictable reactions to decisions they and their predecessors had made
I vacillated between viewing such people as an actual conspiracy and simply seeing them as a tight-knit fraternity bent on dominating the world. Nonetheless, over time I began to liken them to the plantation owners of the pre–Civil War
South. They were men drawn together in a loose association by common beliefs and shared self-interest, rather than an exclusive group meeting in clandestine hideaways with focused and sinister intent.
Even if slavery repulsed them philosophically, they could, like Thomas Jefferson, justify it as a necessity, the collapse of which would result in social and economic chaos.
I also began to wonder who benefits from war and the mass production of weapons, from the damming of rivers and the destruction of indigenous environments and cultures.
Slowly, I came to realize that in the long run no one benefits, but in the short term those at the top of the pyramid — my bosses and me — appear to benefit, at least materially.
According to this professor, all successful capitalist systems involve hierarchies with rigid chains of command, including a handful at the very top who control descending orders of subordinates, and a massive army of workers at the bottom, who in relative economic terms truly can be classified as slaves. Ultimately, then, I became convinced that we encourage this system because the corporatocracy has convinced us that God has given us the right to place a few of our people at the very top of this capitalist pyramid and to export our system to the entire world.
This imperialist drive has been and continues to be the cause of most wars, pollution, starvation, species extinctions, and genocides. And it has always taken a serious toll on the conscience and well-being of the citizens of those empires, contributing to social malaise and resulting in a situation where the wealthiest cultures in human history are plagued with the highest rates of suicide, drug abuse, and violence.
knew that one of the reasons for Torrijos’s popularity among his people was that he was a firm defender of both Panama’s right of self-rule and its claims to sovereignty over the Panama Canal.
the United States demanded that Colombia sign a treaty turning the isthmus over to a North American consortium. Colombia refused.
Unlike Castro, Torrijos was determined to win freedom from the United States without forging alliances with the United States’ enemies.
It was, of course, a subterfuge, a means of making Panama forever indebted and thereby returning it to its puppet status.
paroxysm of guilt flashed through me, but I suppressed it. What did I care? I had taken the plunge in Java, sold my soul, and now I could create my opportunity of a lifetime.
Then he lowered his hands and stared directly at Fidel. “I just hope we can hold on to her for another fifty years. That despot Torrijos is making a lot of waves. A dangerous man.”
“The facts,” he said. “Everything in here is US property. All the businesses — the supermarkets, barbershops, beauty salons, restaurants, all of them — are exempt from Panamanian laws and taxes.
Torrijos knew, as did most of the world, that it had been the CIA that labeled the premier a Communist
and stepped in to restore the shah to power.
“After the shah was reinstated,” Torrijos continued, “he launched a series of revolutionary programs aimed at developing the industrial sector and bringing Iran into the modern era.”
“I don’t think too highly of the shah’s politics — his willingness to overthrow his own father and become a CIA puppet — but it looks as though he’s doing good things for his country.
United Fruit had launched a major public relations campaign in the United States, aimed at convincing the American public and Congress that Arbenz was part of a Russian plot and that Guatemala was a Soviet satellite. In 1954, the CIA orchestrated a coup. American pilots bombed Guatemala City, and the democratically elected Arbenz was overthrown, replaced by Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, a ruthless right-wing dictator.
The new government owed everything to United Fruit. By way of thanks, the government reversed the land reform process, abolished taxes on the interest and dividends paid to foreign investors, eliminated the secret ballot, and jailed
thousands of its critics. Anyone who dared to speak out against Cas...
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“How could your people swallow that CIA rubbish? I won’t go so easily. The military here are my people. Political assassination won’t do.” He smiled. “The CIA itself will have to kill me!”
“Do you know who owns United Fruit?” he asked. “Zapata Oil, George Bush’s company — our UN ambassador,” I said.
“I’ve been told that the Bechtel family pulls the strings of the Republican Party.”
We must prove to the world that Panama is a reasonable country, that we stand not against the United States but for the rights of the poor.”
He crossed one leg over the other. “In order to do that, we need to build up an economic base that is like none in this hemisphere. Electricity, yes — but electricity that reaches the poorest of our poor and is subsidized. The same for transportation and communications. And especially for agriculture. Doing that will take money — your money, the World Bank, and the Inter-American
Development...
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Give me what’s best for my people, and I’ll give you all the work you want.”
What he proposed was totally unexpected, and it both shocked and excited me. It certainly defied all I had learned at MAIN. Surely he knew that the foreign aid game was a sham — he had to know. It existed to make him rich and to shackle his country with debt. It was there so Panama would be forever obligated to the United States and the corporatocracy. It was there to keep Latin America on the path of Manifest Destiny and forever subservient to Washington and Wall Street.
We were moving away from old assumptions that markets were self-regulating and that the state’s intervention should be minimal.
The 1960s was a pivotal decade in this period and in the shift from neoclassic to Keynesian economics. It happened under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and perhaps the most important single influence was one man, Robert McNamara.
We all knew about his meteoric rise to fame, from manager of planning and financial analysis at Ford Motor Company in 1949 to Ford’s president in 1960, the first company head selected from outside the Ford family. Shortly after that, Kennedy appointed him secretary of defense.
Most of my friends focused on the fact that he symbolized what was popularly known as the military-industrial complex. He had held the top position in a major corporation, in a government cabinet, and now at the most powerful bank in the world. Such an apparent breach in the separation of powers horrified many of them; I may have been the only one among us who was not in the least surprised.
I see now that Robert McNamara’s greatest and most sinister contributions to history were to jockey the World Bank into becoming an agent of global empire on a scale never before witnessed and to set a dangerous precedent.
Caspar Weinberger was a Bechtel vice president and general counsel, and later secretary of defense under Reagan. Richard Helms was Johnson’s CIA director and then became ambassador to Iran under Nixon.
Richard Cheney served as secretary of defense under George H. W. Bush, as Halliburton president, and as US vice president to George W. Bush. Condoleezza Rice was a member of Chevron’s board of directors before she became Bush’s secretary of state. Bill Clinton’s Treasury secretary, Robert Rubin, had been cochairman at Goldman Sachs. Even a president of the United States, George H. W. Bush, began as a founder of Zapata Petroleum, served as US ambassador to the United Nations under presidents Nixon and Ford, and was Ford’s CIA director. Barack Obama named members of big business and Wall Street
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We EHMs were accomplishing many of our objectives in places like Indonesia and Ecuador, and yet Vietnam was a stunning example of how easily we could slip back into old patterns.
In 1974, a diplomat from Saudi Arabia showed me photos of Riyadh, the capital of his country. Included in these photos was a herd of goats rummaging among piles of refuse outside a government building. When I asked the diplomat about them, his response shocked me. He told me that they were the city’s main garbage disposal system.
Saudi society reflected the puritanical idealism of its founders, and a strict interpretation of Koranic beliefs was enforced. Religious police ensured adherence to the mandate to pray five times a day.
Punishment for criminals was severe; public executions and stonings were common.
“No one,” he said, “would think of stealing here. Thieves have their hands cut off.”
Wahhabism’s adherence to what we would consider extreme puritanism made the streets safe from thieves — and demanded the harshest form of corporal punishment for those who violated the laws.
The Saudi view of religion as an important element of politics and economics contributed to the oil embargo that shook the Western world.
The oil embargo ended on March 18, 1974. Its duration was short, its impact immense. The selling price of Saudi oil leaped from $1.39 a barrel on January 1, 1970, to $8.32 on January 1, 1974.
In the long run, the trauma of those few months served to strengthen the corporatocracy; its three sectors — big corporations, international banks, and government — bonded as never before. That bond would endure.
Conservative religious beliefs
were replaced by a new form of materialism — and it was this materialism that presented a solution to fears of future oil crises.
Known as JECOR, it embodied an innovative concept that was the opposite of traditional foreign aid programs: it relied on Saudi money to hire American firms to build up Saudi Arabia.
