At the end of September, the Clinton Administration finally addressed “the vision thing” in the domain of foreign policy, with major addresses by the President and Secretary of State, and of particular significance, by National Security Adviser Anthony Lake, who laid forth the intellectual foundations of the new Clinton doctrine at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. A new National Export Strategy was announced that set guidelines for international economic policy, and a White House panel on intervention applied the doctrine in this particular sphere, all within a few days. The seriousness of the enterprise was duly recorded with such headlines as “U.S. Vision of Foreign Policy Reversed” (Thomas Friedman, New York Times), implying a dramatic policy change.[1]

The new vision is based on a picture of the contemporary world that has risen well beyond opinion, to the heights of truism. The picture is sketched eloquently by the Times chief diplomatic correspondent, Thomas Friedman: “America’s victory in the cold war,” Friedman wrote a year ago, was “a victory for a set of political and economic principles: democracy and the free market.” At last, the world is coming to understand that “the free market is the wave of the future — a future for which America is both the gatekeeper and the model.”[2]

The term “gatekeeper” has an ominous ring. The whole affair merits some thoughts about how we keep the gates, who we let in, and what kind of model we are to offer to the world. We begin with Anthony Lake’s address, recognized to be the centerpiece of the new vision.

1. “From Containment to Enlargement”

A long-time liberal dove, Lake explained that “Throughout the cold war, we contained a global threat to market democracies: now we should seek to enlarge their reach.” Containment having succeeded, we can now go on to “enlargement — enlargement of the world’s free community of market democracies.” The title of his address is: “From Containment to Enlargement.” That is the new vision that replaces the defensive stance of the past half century. People everywhere can only hail this new departure, realizing that “of course” the US is unlike any other nation past or present, Lake observes, in that “we do not seek to expand the reach of our institutions by force, subversion or repression.” Commentators were duly impressed by this enlightened stance.

A rational person who wanted to know what Russia (pre-Gorbachev) was trying to do in world affairs would, naturally, look at what Russia did do where its influence reached, specifically, in the East European satellites. Undertaking that exercise, sane people — assuming that they did not simply collapse in ridicule — would have known how to evaluate an announcement by Leonid Brezhnev that the USSR would no longer be content with containing the Evil Empire, but would now move on to “enlargement” of the community of free and democratic societies. Similarly, sane people who wanted to know what the US is trying to do in world affairs would look at what it has done where its influence reached, and would evaluate the announcement of the new vision in these terms — again, assuming that they did not simply collapse in ridicule. It is interesting that the questions that would occur to a moderately intelligent 10 year old do not seem to have been raised.

This stance might be justified by the argument often voiced in sophisticated circles that in the special case of the United States, facts are irrelevant. Thus in the prestigious journal International Security, the Eaton Professor of the Science of Government at Harvard instructs us that the United States must maintain its “international primacy” for the benefit of the world, because its “national identity is defined by a set of universal political and economic values,” namely “liberty, democracy, equality, private property, and markets” (Samuel Huntington). Since this is a matter of definition, so the Science of Government teaches, it would be an error of logic to bring up the factual record, and we would simply be illustrating our silliness by doing so, as if Orwell’s Winston Smith had experimented with objects scattered on a table top to test Big Brother’s denial that 2+2 = 4.[3]

Lacking sophistication, let us proceed nonetheless.

We might also tarry briefly on Orwell’s core concerns, not given quite the prominence of his critique of the official enemy. In an unpublished introduction to Animal Farm, Orwell wrote that “The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without any need for any official ban.” The desired outcome is attained in part by the “general tacit agreement that `it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact,” in part as a consequence of media concentration in the hands of “wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics.” As a result, “Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness.”

Orwell believed that the United States was different, more free and open. That error was not made by John Dewey, more familiar with US intellectual culture. Speaking of “our un-free press,” he observed that critique of “specific abuses” is of limited value: “The only really fundamental approach to the problem is to inquire concerning the necessary effect of the present economic system upon the whole system of publicity; upon the judgment of what news is, upon the selection and elimination of matter that is published, upon the treatment of news in both editorial and news columns.” We should ask “how far genuine intellectual freedom and social responsibility are possible on any large scale under the existing economic regime.” Not very far, he judged.[4]

The reaction to Clinton’s new vision falls well within these strictures, though to document the (virtually exceptionless) pattern of which this is a typical instance is something of a waste of time, as Orwell and Dewey recognized. The more firmly conclusions are established that challenge system-supportive doctrine, the more they must be suppressed; if the conclusions were established by the standards of physics, they would have to be buried so deep in the memory hole as to be completely beyond recovery. Those who fail to grasp these simple requirements would be well advised to seek a trade outside of the respectable intellectual culture, where the gatekeepers understand what “it wouldn’t do” to say or think.

Returning to the questions that would at once occur to a naive ten year old, to evaluate the announcement of the new vision, we turn to US behavior in regions where its influence reached. There are many choices, the US being a global power. But the most illuminating will surely be the Western Hemisphere, where the US has long run the show virtually without interference, so its deepest values and convictions are revealed with great clarity.

According to the doctrine that we are to accept as unquestioned truth, “throughout the Cold War we contained a global threat to market democracies” in the Western hemisphere, never having sought to expand our power “by force, subversion, or repression,” from the days when we were “exterminating…that hapless race of native Americans…with such merciless and perfidious cruelty” (John Quincy Adams), until the present. To put the best possible face on the higher truths that it is unthinkable to question, let us select the peak moments of American liberalism, the days of JFK and LBJ (who far surpassed his predecessor in his commitment to liberal ideals). Taking just the most important case of the many that come to mind, the higher truth entails, then, that at the peak of modern liberalism, JFK and LBJ dedicated themselves to the violent overthrow of the parliamentary government in Brazil in favor of a National Security State in order to contain a global threat to market democracy.

So, indeed, the matter was perceived. Kennedy’s Ambassador Lincoln Gordon, who moved on to Washington after helping lay the groundwork for the coup, lauded the “democratic rebellion” of the neo-Nazi Generals as “a great victory for the free world,” “one of the major turning points in world history.” “The principal purpose for the Brazilian revolution was to preserve and not destroy Brazil’s democracy,” the respected liberal democratic statesman informed Congress two years later, while the torturers and murderers were — very visibly — at work. It was “the single most decisive victory of freedom in the mid-twentieth century,” he testified, and should “create a greatly improved climate for private investments” — a comment we may file away for later reference. After leaving the State Department, Gordon went on to become the President of Johns Hopkins University, where Lake announced the new revolution in foreign policy.

As the Generals instituted a regime of fascist terror, Brazil became “the Latin American darling of the international business community,” the business press reported. It was also hailed by the leading academic apostles of the free market, much impressed by the purity of doctrine of the technocrats and the “miracle” they had wrought — though in fairness, it should be added that there were occasional reservations about the sadistic violence by which the miracle was instituted. The euphoria persisted through the 1980s, until the fortunes of the rich began to be affected by the economic disaster, at which point the methods that had been hailed as a “real American success story,” yielding “impressive economic growth based solidly on capitalism,” were suddenly transmuted to a proof of the failure of statist interference with our market ideals; the self-adulation, not untypical, is quoted from a highly regarded 1989 scholarly monograph by Gerald Haines, senior historian of the CIA.[5]

Brazil is a highly illuminating case, perhaps the reason why “it wouldn’t do” to reflect on the obvious lessons. Brazil is far and away the most important country in Latin America, firmly under US control since 1945, when it became a “testing area for modern scientific methods of industrial development” applied by US experts, Haines observes with pride. It is a country with enormous resources that should be the “Colossus of the South,” ranking alongside the “Colossus of the North,” as predicted early in the century. It has had no foreign enemies, and benefited not only from careful US tutelage but also from substantial investment. It therefore shows with great clarity just what the US can achieve in “enlarging the free community of market democracies” under conditions that are near ideal.

The successes are real enough. Brazil has enjoyed a very high growth rate, which conferred enormous wealth on everyone except its population — apart from the top few percent, who live at the standards of the wealthiest Westerners. It is a sharply two-tiered society. Much of the population live at a level reminiscent of Central Africa. As Haines was hailing the success story of American style capitalism, the UN Report on Human Development ranked this rich and privileged country in 80th place, alongside of Albania and Paraguay. In the northeast, Brazilian medical researchers describe a new subspecies: “pygmies,” with 40% the brain capacity of humans, thanks to severe malnutrition in a region with fertile lands, owned by large plantations that produce export crops in accord with the doctrines preached by their expert advisers. Hundreds of thousands of children die of starvation every year in this success story, which also wins world prizes for child slavery and murder of street children — in some cases for export of organs for transplant, according to respected Brazilian sources.

Perhaps Brazil was unusual. We might therefore look elsewhere, perhaps Guatemala, turned into a “showcase for capitalism” in 1954 when Washington overthrew the democratic capitalist government and soon to celebrate the fortieth year of our achievements in exterminating another “hapless race of native Americans with such merciless and perfidious cruelty,” along with others who were in the way. Or El Salvador, the recipient of some $6 billion in “aid” from the US in the 1980s. The results, always well known outside of Orwell’s “prevailing orthodoxy,” were recently reviewed by the UN Truth Commission, which attributed 85% of the horrendous record of atrocities to the security forces trained, armed, and advised by the US, and another 10% to the death squads linked to them and to the wealthy business sector that the US expects to keep firmly in power. The media meanwhile professed shock at the revelation of what they had chosen to suppress when it mattered. The Clinton Administration responded by establishing a Commission to inquire into this grim history; its mandate was to improve procedures, nothing more, because “We don’t want to refight the battles of the 80’s. We’re not a house-cleaning Adminstration.” The Salvadoran government agreed, issuing an amnesty for the killers and torturers in gross violation of the peace accords that established the Truth Commission, which stated that the guilty must be punished, and rejecting the Truth Commission demand that the Supreme Court be dismantled in view of its record of complicity in atrocities.

Immediately after the Truth Commission report appeared, the political party of the killers (Arena), which the US continues to support, held its convention to nominate its candidate for the coming election, Armando Calderon Sol. The party dedicated itself anew to defending the memory of the founder, Roberto d’Aubuisson, one of Central America’s great murderers, trained at the School of the Americas, now at Ft. Benning, Georgia. Calderon Sol declared that the party is united “more than ever to defend [d’Aubuisson’s] memory,” while the convention hall echoed with the Arena theme song, which pledges to make “El Salvador the tomb where the Reds will end up” — the term “Reds” being understood quite broadly, as events have shown.[6]

In El Salvador too our defense of market democracy has spared its beneficiaries no horror. The Salvadoran government procurator for the defense of children, Victoria de Aviles, recently acknowledged that the “big trade in children in El Salvador” involves not only kidnapping and a gratifying improvement in exports, but also their use “for pornographic videos, for organ transplants, for adoption and for prostitution.” Hardly a secret, veteran British Latin America correspondent Hugh O’Shaughnessy observes, recalling his direct observation of an operation of the Salvadoran army in June 1982 near the River Lempa, where the US-trained troops “had a very successful day’s baby-hunting,” loading their helicopters with 50 babies whose “parents have never seen them since.” O’Shaughnessy’s report on “Takeaway babies farmed to order” appeared in the London Observer the same day that the Timesfeatured Anthony Lake’s uplifting and admired remarks on “enlargement” of our traditional mission of mercy and benevolence.[7]

There is no need to review further how we have “contained a global threat to market democracy” in “our little region over here,” as FDR’s Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, described the Western hemisphere. It is enough to recall a warning issued by Simon Bolivar in 1822, as he sought to liberate Latin America from Spanish rule: “There is at the head of this great continent a very powerful country, very rich, very warlike, and capable of anything” — including the evasion of “inconvenient fact.”

US power has of course reached far beyond the Western hemisphere. The obvious example that our hypothetical ten year old would look at to evaluate the presupposed higher truth is the Philippines, which has benefited from almost a century of US rule, tutelage, and assistance since its liberation-through-slaughter. The country is situated in the world’s leading growth area, in which it remains the sole basket case, very much on the Latin American model. Could that tell us something about our role in advancing market democracy? One could write a revealing article reviewing how the question has been addressed in the respectable literature; a very brief article.

We learn more about our role as “gatekeeper and model” from a World Bank study reported in the London Financial Times just as the new vision of foreign policy was released here.[8] The World Bank found that Latin America has “the most unequal income distribution in the world,” and predicted “chaos” unless governments “act aggressively against poverty,” which is truly appalling in its depth and scale. Why should Latin America win this glorious record too? Another obvious question, lying well beyond the horizons of respectability.

Those interested in an answer might look back to 1945, when the US was setting out on its crusade to “contain the global threat to market democracies” — or as the senior historian of the CIA puts it, when “the United States assumed, out of self-interest, responsibility for the welfare of the world capitalist system.” In “our little region over here,” our foreign enemies — France and Britain — were to be displaced, so we would have a free hand. That was simple enough, but another problem arose: Latin Americans had not taken the right graduate courses and didn’t understand the fundamental principles of economic rationality, which required that their development be “complementary” to the US economy, in accord with the sacred principle of comparative advantage. The Latin American countries advocated what a State Department officer described as “The philosophy of the New Nationalism,” which “embraces policies designed to bring about a broader distribution of wealth and to raise the standard of living of the masses.” Another State Department expert reported that “Economic nationalism is the common denominator of the new aspirations for industrialization. Latin Americans are convinced that the first beneficiaries of the development of a country’s resources should be the people of that country.” These mistaken priorities ran directly counter to Washington’s plans. The issue came to a head in a February 1945 hemispheric conference, where the US put forth its “Economic Charter of the Americas,” which called for an end to economic nationalism “in all its forms.” The first beneficiaries of a country’s resources must be US investors and their local associates, not “the people of that country.” There can be no “broader distribution of wealth” or improvement in “the standard of living of the masses,” unless, by unlikely accident, that happens to result from policies designed to serve the interests of those with first priority.

Given US power, economic rationality prevailed, with the consequences that the World Bank now fears. All happily invisible to the triumphalists.

Perhaps something changed in more recent years, say the 1980s, when the yearning for democracy became a leading principle of our foreign policy, right-thinking people know. Instead of rendering my judgment, let me cite that of Reagan insider Thomas Carothers, a State Department official in the Latin American Bureau who “worked on a variety of assistance projects designed to promote democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean,” he reports, and has written extensively on the consequences; he has no doubts about the “sincerity” of the efforts, though even his own account suffices to show that they were utterly cynical in conception.

Carothers finds a correlation between US influence and the rise of democracy in the hemisphere: a negativecorrelation. Where US influence was least, in the southern cone, steps towards democracy took place, opposed by the Reagan Administration, which later hastened to take credit for them. Where US influence was greatest, the effects were worst, in fact far worse than Carothers recognizes given his crabbed conventional conception of “democracy,” though he clearly articulates the main point. Washington adopted “prodemocracy policies as a means of relieving pressure for more radical change,” he writes, “but inevitably sought only limited, top-down forms of democratic change that did not risk upsetting the traditional structures of power with which the United States has long been allied.” Its “impulse is to promote democratic change, but the underlying objective is to maintain the basic order of what, historically at least, are quite undemocratic societies.” The US keeps to “very limited, controlled forms of democratic change” because of its “deep fear…of populist-based change in Latin America — with all its implications for upsetting established economic and political orders and heading off in a leftist direction.”[9]

Washington’s allies, therefore, are “the existing power structures,” not those who work “from the bottom up to spread the ideas and principles of a democratic society among the citizenries.” These miscreants, in fact, are the ones left in ditches, tortured and mutilated, dismissed to their proper place by the security forces we train, arm, and advise — though awareness of that decisive truth is too much to expect.

What of the “global threat” to the “market democracies” we were defending in Latin America? Take Brazil, where US intelligence could find no hint of Soviet intrusion, even if that were imaginable. In fact, in “our little region” there have been no Russians in sight, unless we virtually invited them in. It is perfectly true that targets of US attack sought help from somewhere, and since they were not going to get it from the subordinates of the Enforcer, they ultimately turned to the Russians, who were sometimes willing to help, for their own cynical reasons, in which case the US victims became tentacles of the Evil Empire, whom we must destroy in self-defense.

By similar logic, a Soviet Anthony Lake could have argued that the USSR was defending freedom and democracy in Afghanistan from the “global threat” of American imperialism and its terrorist forces — who, since liberation from Soviet rule, have been destroying and massacring with great zeal and success, another “inconvenient fact” that merits little notice. There would, for example, be little utility in focusing on the exploits of the CIA favorite Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the world’s most extreme Islamic fundamentalist fanatics, who bears primary responsibility for 30,000 deaths in the capital city of Kabul alone according to the London Economist, surpassing Pol Pot in Phnom Penh, it appears.

Perhaps the “global threat” refers to indigenous Communists. Here there is much to say, including some reflections on the familiar doctrine that democracy requires exclusion of “Communists” from the political system, by violence if necessary. Thus when the US-backed terror regime was doing its work in Iran after the 1953 CIA-MI6 coup that overthrew the conservative parliamentary government, the New York Times praised the US clients for their “long record of success in defeating subversion without suppressing democracy,” noting with pleasure the suppression of the “pro-Soviet Tudeh party,” formerly “a real menace” but “considered now to have been completely liquidated,” and the “extreme nationalists” who had been almost as subversive as the Communists — all liquidated without suppressing “democracy.” The practice is, again, standard, and passes with little comment, given the prevailing concept of “democracy.”

Still more interesting, perhaps, is the way the concept “Communist” is understood. Here the record is voluminous and consistent: to gain the title “Communist,” it is enough to work “from the bottom up,” appealing to the “poor people” who “have always wanted to plunder the rich,” as John Foster Dulles described the plague. That is precisely why the US terror war in Central America, motivated by the “sincere impulse” to bring democracy, was in large measure a war against the Church — “Communists,” in the technical sense, once the Bishops had adopted “the preferential option for the poor.” Nothing changes in this regard as new visions replace the old.

The Bush-Clinton approach to Haiti reveals the pattern of continuity with only tactical modifications. The matter requires much more careful treatment, but a close look will show that since the military coup that overthrew President Aristide, the basic goal has been to impose a settlement that will deny more than a figurehead role to the elected President, much disliked in Washington and New York because of his remarkable base of support in popular organizations that threaten to bring about functioning democracy. If Aristide can be returned alive, fine; it will offer opportunities for pieties about our dedication to democracy. But the bottom line is that effective power must remain with the “moderate” and “progressive” sectors of the business classes — meaning those who do not see massacre and torture as the optimal means to dominate and marginalize the poor majority. In the interests of “democracy,” the ruling sectors will have to be “broadened” to include the torturers and murderers as well — “conservative critics close to the military,” as the New York Times prefers to call them.[10] No problem, because the military will be professionalized by US trainers, that is, by the same people who have already civilized the top command in Ft. Benning, including those now orchestrating the bloodbath — facts quietly omitted from the standard resumes.

But the government will not be “broadened” to include the overwhelming majority of the population, who are to be reduced to traditional passivity by the effective use of terror, their organizations decimated and their leaders either killed or placed in remote cubicles. We will then be told that this is the best form of “democracy” for backward peoples lacking our sophistication, democratic culture, civility and respect for others, and our traditions of freedom and justice.

An important fact about our intellectual culture is that people can read and write about our long-term policies of defending market democracy from the Communist threat without laughing. That takes no little talent. It is real tribute to the educational institutions and the information system.

2. Defending Market Economies

Let us drop the drivel about our love of democracy and look at the market, thus at least approaching the real world. Recall the one quoted statement of Lincoln Gordon’s that does not simply send shivers up the spine: the neo-Nazi triumph should “create a greatly improved climate for private investments,” as indeed it did. It is quite true that we seek to impose market discipline on the Third World, now including the large regions of Eastern Europe that are to return to their Third World origins. But the odes to the market are carefully crafted to conceal two important facts. First, market discipline in the Third World is attractive because it will leave the societies open to Western plunder. Second, the wonders of the market are for them, not us, and have always been: every successful developed society, from Britain to the East Asian Tigers and dramatically including the US, gained this status by radical violation of the doctrines we impose on the poor and keeps that status in the same way.

The second prong of the new vision, Clinton’s new international economic program, reflects the understanding of these truisms. While Administration rhetoric on the marvels of free trade boomed on the front pages as part of the PR campaign to ram through an unpopular (and in fact, highly protectionist) version of a North American “free trade” agreement (NAFTA), the business sections reported the new National Export Strategy that is to go far beyond the “less coordinated efforts” of Reagan and Bush, with a planned expansion of Export-Import Bank lending, which as the Reaganites had conceded in their day, already violated GATT rules. The Clinton Administration opposes the measures it is implementing, the press reported, because “they amount to government subsidies that distort international markets.” But there is no contradiction. As explained by Ex-Im Bank President Kenneth Brody, “by creating such a program in the United States, the Clinton Administration would have more influence in seeking international limits on such lending.” The President also approved an independent program that would release $3 billion in loan guarantees to domestic and foreign buyers of US-built ships — again, for the purpose of inducing others to end such gross interferences in the market, the Wall Street Journal explained.

The logic will be recognized instantly: war brings peace, crime brings law, arms production and sales bring arms reduction and nonproliferation, overthrowing democratic governments brings “showcases for democracy,” etc. In simple words, anything goes, as long as there is a good answer to the question: “What is in it for us?”

The simple truths were underscored by Clinton’s Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen: “I’m tired of a level playing field,” he said: “We should tilt the playing field for U.S. businesses. We should have done it 20 years ago.” In fact, “we” (meaning state-corporate power) have been doing it for two centuries, dramatically so in the past 50 years, even more under the Reaganites. But that is the wrong image to convey. It is preferable to speak warmly of Carter-Reagan achievements in moving “toward a defense buildup and less government intervention in the economy” — Harvard economist and Wall Street Journal contributing editor Robert Barro, pretending (it has to be a pretense) that he does not know that the Pentagon is, and has been explicitly designed to be, a massive form of government interference in the economy to ensure that high-tech industry feeds at the public trough.[11]

As I discussed here in February, the Reaganites had forged new paths in violating market orthodoxy for the benefit of US-based corporations, but they did not go far enough to satisfy the business community, one reason for the substantial corporate-financial support for Clinton’s program as a New Democrat. And the new programs, like the old, are described in the business press, renowned for its devotion to the needs of working people, as aimed at increasing “jobs,” a term that has taken on the meaning of the unpronounceable word “profits” in conventional Newspeak.

The phrase “What is in it for us?” is not mine. I stole it from the third component of the new Clinton vision, the decisions of the White House panel on intervention. The Clinton panel determined to put an end to the era of altruism. No more “nice guy,” as in the days when we turned much of the world into graveyards and deserts. Henceforth the guiding consideration will be “What is in it for us?,” the words that the New York Times highlighted in its report.

Thomas Friedman’s full report on the new “enlargement” doctrine fills in the picture. The National Security Adviser, he observed, had focused on the fact “that in a world in which the United States no longer has to worry daily about a Soviet nuclear threat, where and how it intervenes abroad is increasingly a matter of choice.” That is the “essence” of the new doctrine, Friedman emphasized, a doctrine that clearly and explicitly reflects the understanding that the “nuclear threat” was the Soviet deterrent to US intervention. Now that the deterrent is gone, intervention can be freely undertaken, as had been observed years earlier by others, with the Cold War winding down.

Summarizing, the new vision is that in the international economy, we will no longer be satisfied by a “level playing field” for US corporations, but will construct a proper tilt by violating free trade rules even more thoroughly than before. And with the deterrent gone, we will intervene where and how we choose, though only when there is something in it for us. The technical term for this stance is “the Politics of Meaning,” to which the Clintons are said to be sincerely devoted.

Actually, there is nothing new in the new vision, apart from tactical adjustments reflecting new realities of global power. The mood of despair in the Third World is easy to understand, quite apart from the catastrophe of global capitalism that has ravaged the traditional colonies. It is captured by a leading Brazilian theologian, Cardinal Paulo Evaristo Arns of Sao Paulo, Brazil, who observes that throughout the Third World “there is hatred and fear: When will they decide to invade us,” and on what pretext? And by Egypt’s leading newspaper, the quasi-governmental Al-Ahram, which describes the new world order as “codified international piracy.”

Another component of the new vision was leaked to the press as its basic features were being presented in public: a draft report on government secrecy sent to the National Security Council by Clinton’s Information Security Oversight Office. The report recommends that classified documents be held for longer than was the practice during the Cold War, apart from the rule of the Reaganite reactionaries, whose commitment to state power and secrecy went far beyond the norm. Their 1982 decision to keep “virtually all [secret government] documents classifed indefinitely” is to be relaxed, AP reported, with restrictions of only up to 40 years, as compared to Nixon’s “hold period” of 30 years and Carter’s of 20 years. The Clinton task force also recommended slow and extremely costly document-by-document review instead of declassification en masse, and called for “balancing public interest and national security concerns,” as determined by “agency officials.” The procedure for automatic declassification of certain top secret documents, set at 10 years by Nixon and 6 by Carter, is should be extended to 15 years, the task force proposed.[12]

Returning to our attitude towards markets, the doctrinal system has faced unexpected problems among the population, who were expected to sit by in silence and ignorance while the state executives rammed through their secret version of NAFTA, grossly misdescribed as a “free trade agreement.” In the light of unanticipated popular opposition, it has been necessary to revive traditional modes of population control.

In earlier years, huge propaganda campaigns had been undertaken to overcome deviant ideas among the general public, notably after World War II, when the world was swept by a current of social reform, bitterly fought by the US government at home and abroad. Success in reversing these trends was great in most of the world, including the United States itself, though in Europe and Japan the attack on labor and democracy did not achieve all of its goals and countries adopted a kind of “social contract” that included such depraved ideas as health care, workers’ rights, and other departures from the principles for which we serve as a gatekeeper and a model.

In the US, the wave was beaten back in part through massive propaganda efforts orchestrated by the Chamber of Commerce and the Advertising Council, which conducted a $100 million campaign to use all media to “sell” the American economic system — as they conceived it — to the American people. The program was officially described as a “major project of educating the American people about the economic facts of life.” Corporations “started extensive programs to indoctrinate employes,” the leading business journal Fortune reported, subjecting their captive audiences to “Courses in Economic Education” and testing them for commitment to the “free enterprise” system — that is, “Americanism.” The scale was “staggering,” sociologist Daniel Bell (then a Fortune editor) observed, as the business world sought to reverse the democratizing thrust of the Depression years and reestablish the ideological hegemony of the “free enterprise system.” A survey conducted by the American Management Association (AMA) found that many corporate leaders regarded “propaganda” and “economic education” as synonymous, holding that “We want our people to think right.” The AMA reported that Communism, socialism, and particular political parties and unions “are often common targets of such campaigns,” which “some employers view…as a sort of `battle of loyalties’ with the unions” — a rather unequal battle, given the resources available, including the corporate media, which offered the services free of charge, then as now.

The results were remarkable, leaving the US off the spectrum of industrial societies on social issues and basic human rights. Health care is one case that finally gained attention, as the highly bureaucratized and inefficient private system began to become too much of a burden to corporations, though the US will remain alone, it seems, in ramming through — again, over popular opposition — a system that is highly regressive (not tax-based) and that attends carefully to the needs of the few huge insurance companies that are to take the central management role, at substantial public cost.

We might note that this is characteristic of the “welfare state.” A minimally realistic picture of the phenomenon will take into account the fiscal measures designed to benefit the rich, which amount to hefty government welfare payments. Reviewing the scale of these devices, political scientist Christopher Howard points out that “one crucial fact remains: the middle- and upper-income classes are the main beneficiaries of the hidden welfare state.” Thus “over 80% of the tax benefits for home mortgage interest, charitable contributions, and real estate taxes go to those earning more than $50,000,” not to speak of “the large fraction of tax expenditures that subsidize corporate fringe benefits.”[13] Moving on to a fully realistic conception of the “welfare state,” we will also take account of the Pentagon system, export promotion devices, and other measures designed to provide taxpayer subsidies to the wealthy — to protect “jobs,” in standard parlance. The new health reform program is well-crafted to satisfy the conditions of one-sided class warfare that guide policy generally.

On health reform, it has so far been possible to keep the options within a narrow spectrum that excludes the general public, which continues to favor a standard tax-based (single-payer) system by considerable margins, as has been the case from the mid-1940s.[14] But on “free trade,” discipline eroded significantly (not necessarily for good reasons, a different matter). Accordingly, as noted, it was necessary to undertake “population control measures,” to adopt some terminology of counterinsurgency literature.

Returning to the traditional methods pioneered by the PR industry, the New York Times, in a front-page story, graciously provided the foolish masses with “A Primer: Why Economists Favor Free-Trade Agreement.” Critics of the executive version of NAFTA are declared to be “malicious” liars, with what they say entirely ignored apart from the easy and irrelevant targets. The Times patiently explains the “fundamental insights” about international trade that have not changed for 250 years, citing the “legendary textbook” in which Paul Samuelson quotes John Stuart Mill as saying that international trade provides “a more efficient employment of the productive forces of the world.” Who but a lunatic could oppose that?[15]

To be concrete, who but a lunatic could have opposed the development of a textile industry in New England in the early 19th century, when British production was so much more efficient that half the New England industrial sector would have gone bankrupt without very high protective tariffs, thus cutting short industrial development in the United States? Or the high tariffs that radically undermined economic efficiency to allow the United States to develop steel and other manufacturing capacities? Or the gross distortions of the market that created modern electronics? Who could be so silly as to fail to understand that we would be far better off if the US were still pursuing its comparative advantage in exporting furs and crops from stony New England soils, while India produced textiles and ships and, for all we can guess, might have led the way to industrial revolution? Perhaps joined by Egypt, which might not have had to rely on such radical violation of market principles as extermination of the natives and slavery to enable King Cotton to fuel the industrial revolution, as the British and Americans did. And who could be so ridiculous as to contemplate a NAFTA designed to reflect the interests and concerns that are actually articulated by critical voices in all three of the countries to be linked by treaty arrangements?

No reflections on these matters appear in the primer offered to the backward peons.

Thanks to extreme departure from market orthodoxy, things did not pursue the course that economic rationality might have entailed. Thus India, under British rule, deindustrialized, becoming an impoverished agricultural society, while Britain prospered. Egypt’s attempt to enter the industrial world was beaten back by British power. The pattern has extended through much of the world, the US taking the lead in the campaign against independent development abroad, and against market discipline at home, as Britain faltered in the task. Today, India, like most of the South, is undergoing neoliberal “structural adjustment” reforms, while the US, as always, violates market principles as it pleases along with the rest of the industrial world, most of it more protectionist than in 1980, the Reaganites often leading the pack in the attack on economic rationality.

There are notable effects, and beneficiaries are not lacking. Take diamonds. Seven out of ten diamonds sold in the West are cut in India, with super-cheap labor, now being driven down to still greater depths of misery thanks to structural adjustment. But there is a bright side: “We pass some of the benefits to our overseas customers,” an Indian diamond exporter observes. Workers and their families may starve to death in the New World Order of economic rationality, but diamond necklaces are cheaper in elegant New York shops, thanks to the miracle of the market.

There are also a few highly touted success stories, notably Ghana, “regularly cited by [International Monetary] Fund and [World] Bank economists as the prime example of how structural adjustment cures failing economies and places them on a path to sustainable growth,” Ross Hammond and Lisa McGowan point out in a review of this “showcase.” Thanks to its obedience to market discipline, Ghana was “showered with foreign aid,” including more soft loans from the World Bank than any country except China and India (in absolute, not per capita value). Manufacturing has declined, as have domestic food and livestock, and food self-sufficiency generally. Malnutrition has increased, environmental degradation is proceeding apace, the external debt has tripled, and since 1987, Ghana has paid more to the IMF than it has received — a standard Third World phenomenon, as the capital hemorrhage from the poor to the rich countries has been joined by capital export to the IMF and Work Bank, now “net recipients of resources from the developing countries,” the South Center (formerly the South Commission) reports in a 1993 study. But there are reasons for IMF and Bank enthusiasm about Ghana. Agroexport has grown, “rich Ghanaians have fared quite well under adjustment” as land ownership and income have concentrated, and Western creditors and investors are doing nicely. The leading success story deserves its reputation.[16]

The picture only darkens as we move closer to home, where our benevolence can be exercised more efficiently. Consider Nicaragua, destroyed by US terror and economic warfare, now “challenging Haiti for the unwanted distinction of being the most destitute country in the Western hemisphere,” Hugh O’Shaughnessy reports from Managua. Infant mortality has reached the highest level in the continent after a dramatic decline before the effects of the US war set in by the mid-1980s. The UN reports that one-quarter of all children are malnourished. Diseases that had once been almost eliminated are rampant. Women set up street corner soup kitchens “to save tens of thousands of youngsters from starvation.” Sandinista health, nutrition, literacy and agrarian programs “have been scrapped by a government pressed by the International Monetary Fund and Washington to privatize and cut public spending.” The social fabric is coming apart under severe duress, with rapidly rising crime and violence, as usual directed mainly against the most vulnerable people: rape, for example, is escalating.

“The country’s leaders seem to care little,” O’Shaughnessy reports, though there is little they can do in the face of the orders from on high. “Finance Minister Emilio Pereira boasts that Nicaragua has the lowest inflation in the western hemisphere — never mind that its four million people are starving.” The far right refuses any compromise, knowing “that it has the support of the US government.” “The Central American Foreign Ministers and secretary general of the Organization of American States, who came on a mission of mediation, left in despair [on Sept. 9] after [right wing elements of the US-backed UNO] refused to join peace talks.”

In the countryside, the situation is even worse than in Managua. Contra forces are fighting again in the North, boasting of their Miami suppliers. Others too are mobilized, as desperation is driving peasants to armed combat. In the main cotton producing areas, not an acre was sowed this year because of lack of credits — though the most powerful producers, including the minister of agriculture and cattle-ranching and the president of the High Council of Private Enterprise, Ramiro Gurdian, received over $40 million in loans last year, Barricada Internacional reports. Central America specialist Douglas Porpora writes that 70% of what limited credits there are go to “a small number of large export producers,” in accord with standard US policies of enriching the wealthy sectors involved in agroexport. Farmers had been driven out of these regions by Somoza, who had taken over the land for cotton export, part of the “economic miracle” hailed in the US, as the economy grew while the population starved. After years of intense pesticide use, much of the soil has lost its fertility. Banana exports and other agricultural production have also collapsed, and sugar mills, including those which had become profitable under government control, are being shut down, apparently in a campaign by the former owners, now restored, to destroy the unions and reverse the gains in workers’ rights of the past years.[17]

Despite its victory, the US is not satisfied. Nicaragua’s people must suffer much more to atone for the crimes they have committed against us. In October 1993, the IMF and World Bank, virtually US-run, presented new demands of unusual severity. Nicaragua must reduce its debt to zero; eliminate credits from BANIC, one of the remaining state banks; privatize enterprises and government services such as energy and water, to ensure that poor people really feel the pain — unable to give their children water to drink, for example, if they cannot pay, thanks to zooming unemployment. Nicaragua must cut public expenditures by $60 million, virtually eliminating much of what remains of health and welfare services, while the mounting disaster offers new opportunities to condemn the “economic mismanagement” of the despised enemy.

The $60 million figure was perhaps selected for its symbolic value. Last year the already privatized banks shipped $60 million abroad, following sound economic principles: playing the New York stock market is a far more efficient use of resources than giving credits to poor bean farmers, as any competent student of economics can explain. The bean harvest was lost, a catastrophe for the population. Banks are now to be fully privatized, to ensure the “more efficient employment of the productive forces of the world,” with consequences for the population that are evident but that do not enter into calculations of economic rationality, as sophisticates understand.

It is only fair to add that the wonders of the free market have opened up alternatives, not only for rich landowners, speculators, and corporations, but even for the starving children who press their faces against car windows at street corners at night, pleading for a few cents to survive. Describing the miserable plight of Managua’s street children, David Werner, the author of Where There is No Doctor and other books on health and society, writes that “marketing shoe cement to children has become a lucrative business,” and imports from multinational suppliers are rising nicely as “shopkeepers in depressed communities do a thriving business with weekly refills of the children’s little bottles” for glue-sniffing, said to “take away hunger.” The miracle of the market is again at work, maximizing efficient use of resources.[18]

On Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast, 100,000 people are now starving to death, with aid only from Europe and Canada, Church sources report. Most are Miskito Indians. Nothing was more inspiring than the laments about the Miskitos after a few dozen were killed and many forcibly moved by the Sandinistas in the course of the US terrorist war, a “campaign of virtual genocide” (Reagan), the most “massive” human rights violation in Central America (Jeane Kirkpatrick), far outweighing the slaughter, torture, and mutilation of tens of thousands of people by the neo-Nazi gangsters they were directing and arming, and lauding as stellar democrats, at the very same time — or the “successful baby-hunting” that foreign reporters observed at exactly that moment. What has happened to the laments, now that 100,000 are starving to death?[19]

The answer is simplicity itself. Human rights have purely instrumental value in the political culture; they provide a useful tool for propaganda, nothing more. Ten years ago the Miskitos were “worthy victims,” in Edward Herman’s useful terminology, their suffering attributable to official enemies; now they have joined the vast category of “unworthy victims” whose far worse suffering can be added to our splendid account. What more need be said?

“The United States has a visceral need to annihilate the Sandinistas once and for all,” said a foreign affairs expert whom O’Shaughnessy quotes. That was evident years ago, when the refusal of the Sandinistas to genuflect in the expected fashion aroused sheer frenzy. In 1985, one congressman described “the lust that members [of Congress] feel to strike out against Communism” in Nicaragua. Opinion divided between those who called for brutal terror to punish the crime of disobedience, and those on the far left of the respectable spectrum who recommended that we should support terror only if it is “cost-effective” (Michael Kinsley), and if that test fails, we should seek other means to “isolate” the “reprehensible” government in Managua and “leave it to fester in its own juices” (Senate dove Alan Cranston). Nicaragua must be restored to the “regional standards” of our terror states, Tom Wicker and other media doves declared with passion. Nor will the US rest until the military is under Washington’s control, with consequences that are familiar throughout the continent, a crucial element of US policy towards Latin America for 50 years, emphasized with particular force by the Kennedy intellectuals.

Nicaragua’s efforts to pursue the peaceful means required by international law aroused particular fury. In 1984, senior US government officials demanded that an invitation to Daniel Ortega to visit Los Angeles be withdrawn “to punish Mr. Ortega and the Sandinistas for accepting the Contadora peace proposal,” the New York Times reported without comment, referring to peace efforts that the US government was able to undermine. The World Court condemnation of the US evoked further tantrums. Washington’s threats finally compelled Nicaragua to withdraw the claims for reparations awarded by the Court, after a US-Nicaragua agreement “aimed at enhancing economic, commercial and technical development to the maximum extent possible,” Nicaragua’s agent informed the Court. The withdrawal of just claims for billions of dollars of reparations having been achieved by force, Washington abrogated the agreement, suspending its trickle of aid with demands of increasing depravity and gall.

The imperial arrogance is most impressive. Having been condemned by the World Court for the “unlawful use of force” against Nicaragua in a campaign of wholesale international terrorism that no other actor in the world scene could hope to approach, we now demand righteously that Nicaragua prove to us that it is not engaged in terrorism. Any further aid is conditioned on this proof, the Senate voted. And having helped to destroy the country and its people prior to the terrorist war, we now demand that the beneficiaries of those wonderful years receive properties and reparations. In September 1993, while the new foreign policy vision was taking its final form, the Senate voted 94-4 to ban any aid if Nicaragua fails to return or give adequate compensation (as determined by Washington) for properties of US citizens seized when Somoza fell — assets of US participants in the crushing of the beasts of burden by the tyrant who had long been a US favorite. Voting against were Paul Wellstone (D-MN), Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), Paul Simon (D-IL), Russell Feingold (D-WI). In October, Senator Christopher Dodd, a leading Senate dove, visited Managua to ensure that these orders are fully understood.

Nothing will satisfy the lust to punish the transgressors, even their reduction to Haitian standards. Any mafia don would understand. If someone on your turf fails to pay protection money, you don’t just give him a black eye. Others have to learn the lesson. The world must come to understand what virtually limitless power will achieve if offended in any way — the lesson that Bolivar sought to impart. Accordingly, the treatment is uniform, extending to Vietnamese, Cubans, Iraqi children, indeed anyone who doesn’t understand the rules of the world for which we are the gatekeeper and the model.[20]

3. Demystification

A major qualification has to be added to everything said so far. I have been adopting the standard mystification that nations are actors in world affairs, nonsense of course. In any “really existing state,” power is sharply skewed; those who hold it use the state to defend their interests, whatever the impact on others at home or abroad, a truism emphasized by that noted revolutionary Marxist Adam Smith, among many others.

Demystifying, all looks different. Who lost War II? Certainly not German and Japanese industrialists who dedicated themselves to the fascist cause, and were quickly restored to power and wealth by the conquering armies. Who won? Certainly not the anti-fascist resistance, which was dispersed or decimated by the military victors. Who lost the Cold War? Surely not the reigning Communist nomenklatura, now the leaders of nomenklatura capitalism — “a parasitical new robber-baron class of speculators and mafiosi,” as Soviet scholar Robert Daniels calls them, with wealth beyond their wildest dreams. Surely not the tough Communist Party boss of Sverdlovsk, Boris Yeltsin, now elevated to the rank of leading democrat as he reverses Russia’s democratic gains from 1989, highly praised by Western governments and press — and by financial markets — because of his commitment to the “market shock” that is expected to “create a greatly improved climate for private investments.” Or his old subordinates from the CP apparatus, now staffing his bureaucracy. Who won the Cold War? Not the huge mass of the populations controlled by Western power sectors, neither in the former colonial domains nor at home; nor the common people of the East, now learning anew the lessons of their history as Third World subjects.[21]

A true history will depart radically from standard formulas.

In Adam Smith’s day, the “principal architects” of policy, who saw to it that their interests were “most peculiarly attended to,” were “merchants and manufacturers.” The world has changed since, quite considerably in just the last 20 years, in part as a result of Richard Nixon’s dismantling of the post-World War II (Bretton Woods) international economic system. One consequence of these major changes in world order has been a huge increase in unregulated capital. The World Bank currently estimates the total resources of international financial institutions at about $14 trillion. Not only can European central banks not defend national currencies in the face of this unprecedented private power, but the European Monetary System has “effectively collapsed” as EC governments “have experienced the power of today’s free-wheeling global capital markets,” the Financial Times reports in a review of the world economy and finance. The huge and unregulated international capital market controls access to capital, but “global investors impose a price. If a country’s economic policies are not attractive to them” they will use their power to induce changes. Such pressures may not be “fatal” to the very rich, but for the South, the international capital market is “no more than an unacceptable arm of economic imperialism,” which governments cannot resist in an era when even in the rich countries, governments “are on the defensive and global investors have gained the upper hand.”

A related development is the dramatic shift in use of capital resources. Cambridge University economist John Eatwell notes the striking fact that “In 1971, just before the collapse of the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate system, about 90 percent of all foreign exchange transactions were for the finance of trade and long-term investment, and only about 10 percent were speculative.

Today those percentages are reversed, with well over 90 percent of all transactions being speculative. Daily speculative flows now regularly exceed the combined foreign exchange reserves of all the G-7 governments,” the richest seven. One consequence is that “economic performance in the 1970s and 1980s has been poor throughout the industrial nations of the OECD,” with growth in each G-7 country about half that of the 1960s, unemployment at least doubled, and productivity growth in manufacturing industry sharply down. Furthermore, “the sheer scale of speculative flows can easily overwhelm any government’s foreign-exchange reserves,” as just noted. National economic planning is increasingly difficult even for the rich, market instability is increasing, and governments are driven to deflationary policies to preserve market “credibility,” driving economies “toward a low-growth, high-unemployment equilibrium,” with declining real wages and increasing poverty and inequality.

A third related development has been the sharpening of the double-edged conception of the market: fetters for the weak, to be thrown aside at their pleasure by the strong. During the past 20 years, free market rhetoric has soared to glorious heights, while the rich countries have enhanced their protections against market discipline. GATT economist Patrick Low draws attention to “the sustained assault on [free trade] principle from which the GATT suffered, starting around the early 1970s,” a “difficult period economically” until today, in which “the GATT did not fully succeed in holding the line against growing protectionism and systematic decline” — to put it mildly. Again, the Reaganites combined the two tendencies quite brilliantly, orating in free market voices to the poor while assuring the rich, loud and clear, that the state will intervene massively to protect their interests. Secretary of the Treasury James Baker “proudly proclaimed that Mr Ronald Reagan had `granted more import relief to US industry than any of his predecessors in more than half a century’,” international economist Ferd Bergsten points out, adding that the Reaganites specialized in the kind of “managed trade” that most “restricts trade and closes markets,” voluntary export restraint agreements — “the most insidious form of protectionism,” which “raises prices, reduces competition and reinforces cartel behavior.” The increase in the Pentagon budget alone is a major form of state intervention in the economy for the benefit of the rich, and has been understood just that way for half a century — one reason why there will be a long wait for a “peace dividend.”

A fourth related development has been the rapid acceleration of the internationalization of the economy. Foreign sales of Transnational corporations (TNCs) now far exceed all of world trade — and of what is called “world trade,” well over a third is now estimated to be intrafirm transactions, centrally managed interchanges within corporations that happen to cross an international border — one of many reasons why talk about “free trade” and “markets” is of limited relevance to the real world.

An obvious corollary is the sharp decline in meaningful democracy discussed before in these pages (see, e.g., Edward Herman, “The End of Democracy?,” Z September), as extreme totalitarian institutions (corporations, banks, investment firms, etc.), with strict top-down control, internal secrecy, and only the most limited public accountability gain even further power on a global scale. Naturally they are constructing organs of governance to reflect their interests (GATT, the IMF and World Bank, the EC executive, G-7 closed sessions, etc.), all properly insulated from popular interference, even awareness, a new and higher stage in the long struggle to remove any threat to “top-down” forms of democracy that enhance “the traditional structures of power with which the United States has long been allied” — eliminating mystification, “the traditional structures of power” with which the “principal architects” of US government policy and the interests they serve have “long been allied.”

The consequences are not hard to see or understand: slowdown in economic growth, decline in economic or other planning in the interests of the general population, and extension of the Third World model to the rich countries themselves as the domestic population becomes superfluous for profit-making, the supreme human value in the world for which we are “the gatekeeper and the model.”

The US and Britain have been leading the way in these developments, and their accomplishments are welcomed by those who matter. While the new Clinton vision was receiving its final touches, a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal reported “a welcome development of transcendent importance,” no less: “the increasingly competitive cost of U.S. labor.” Thanks to the harsh attack on labor through a combination of state power and improved opportunities to shift production abroad, US labor costs per unit output fell 1.5% in 1992, while costs increased in Japan and Europe, as well as Taiwan and South Korea. In 1985, hourly pay in the US was higher than the other G-7 countries. By 1992, it had fallen to below its wealthy competitors, apart from England, where Thatcher had done even better in punishing working people. Hourly wages were 60% higher in Germany than in the US, 20% higher in Italy. The US has not yet reached South Korea and Taiwan, but progress is being made, in the richest country in the world, with unparalleled advantages — and a highly class conscious business community, fighting a bitter class war against an enemy lacking resources, organization, and meaningful modes of interaction or participation.[22]

The lessons are spelled out by Business Week. Europe must “hammer away at high wages and corporate taxes, short working hours, labor immobility, and luxurious social programs.” It must learn the lesson of Britain, which finally “is doing something well,” the Economist announces approvingly, with “trade unions shackled by law and subdued,” “unemployment high,” and the Maastricht social chapter rejected so that employers are protected “from over-regulation and under-flexibility of labor” (job security). American workers are barely a step behind.

The end of the Cold War offers new weapons for use against working people in the rich societies. There are “green shoots in Communism’s ruins,” exults the world’s leading business daily, the London Financial Times; not everything is grim in the former Communist world. The “green shoots” are the new opportunities for corporations to reduce costs thanks to “rising unemployment and pauperization of large sections of the industrial working class” as capitalist reforms are instituted. GM opened a $690 million assembly plant in East Germany, where workers are willing to “work longer hours than their pampered colleagues in western Germany” at 40% of the wage and with few benefits, the journal relates happily. Poland is still better, with workers available at 10% the wage of the pampered Western workers, kept that way “thanks largely to the Polish government’s tougher policy on labor disputes,” that is, repression of labor.

Of course, the term “markets” has its usual meaning. GM purchased an auto plant near Warsaw, economist Alice Amsden comments, “on the under-the-table condition that the Polish government provide it with 30 percent tariff protection” — the usual form that “free market” enthusiasms take. Tax holidays for investors are also offered, among other gifts.

The same is true when our own growing Third World seeks to entice foreign investors. Alabama recently beat out competitors for a new Daimler-Benz plant for which its population “will pay dearly,” the Wall Street Journal noted a few days after the Clinton economic strategy was announced. Germany’s leading conglomerate paid a royal $100 for the plant site, and has been offered a package of tax breaks valued at over $300 million, along with other publicly-funded services. Alabama “has a Third World economy,” the head of an economic development group observes: “They’re losing money to invest in their people, their roads, their state in general,” as the market performs its miracles. The traditional Third World can explain to us how it works.[23]

The prospects are inspiring. Canadian social benefits and workers’ rights can be attacked through “free trade,” which forces harmonization downward to US standards. The same device can be used to “lock the United States into a low-wage, low-productivity future,” the congressional Office of Technology Assessment concludes in its review of the executive version of NAFTA, scrupulously designed to protect rights of investors, not workers or future generations (the environment). And an increase in standard of living for Mexican workers is not a serious threat, given harsh dictatorial rule and the flooding of the labor market as peasants are driven from the land by US agribusiness exports. German workers had become “used to some of the best working conditions on earth,” Business Week comments under the heading “Time to Leave the Cocoon?” But no more, as some “60% of German industrial jobs are threatened by competition from Eastern Europe, Asia, and the U.S.,” the last now offering its contribution to the ranks of the Third World thanks to “the welcome development of transcendent importance.” With these “green shoots” rising in old and new Third Worlds, Germany’s biggest employers’ federation, Gesamtmetall, was able to issue a “declaration of war,” canceling “union wage and vacation contracts — for the first time ever.” Meanwhile profits should do just fine, as the world moves towards the desired two-tiered model under its new visions.[24]

In brief, the developments of the past years offer new ways to put the screws on the overwhelming majority of the population both abroad and at home, options enhanced by the end of the Cold War — which is why the Cold War victors are celebrating so triumphantly: investors, executives, and wealthy professionals at home; the former Communist Party rulers now joining in the global rip-off; their counterparts in the traditional South; and, of course, respectable sectors of the educated communities, who are called upon to trumpet the “victory for a set of political and economic principles: democracy and the free market.” The Clinton vision merely announces another small step towards the same ends.

How far can this go? Will it really be possible to construct an international society on something like the Third World model, with islands of great privilege in a sea of misery — fairly large islands, in the richer countries — and with controls of a totalitarian nature within democratic forms that increasingly become a facade? Or will popular resistance, which must itself become internationalized to succeed, be able to dismantle these evolving structures of violence and domination, and carry forth the centuries-old process of expansion of freedom, justice, and democracy that is now being aborted, even reversed? These are the large questions for the future.

Notes

[1] Address by the President to the UN General Assembly, Sept. 27; Speech by Secretary of State Warren Christopher, Columbia U., Sept. 20, 1993. Remarks of Anthony Lake, Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, Johns Hopkins U, SAIS, Sept. 21; Thomas Friedman, “U.S. Vision of Foreign Policy Reversed,” NYT, Sept. 22; Lake, NYT,Sept. 26, 1993. Keith Bradsher, “Administration Plans New Export Initiative,” NYT business section, Sept. 28; Michael Frisby, WSJ, Sept. 29, 30, 1993. Elaine Sciolino, “U.S. Narrows Terms for Its Peacekeepers: A White House panel asks, What is in it for us?,” NYT, Sept. 23, 1993.

[2] Friedman, NYT Week in Review, June 2, 1992.

[3] International Security, 17:4, 1993.

[4] Orwell, unpublished preface for his Animal Farm; published by Bernard Crick in Times Literary Supplement, Sept. 15, 1972; reprinted in Everyman’s Library edition. Jo Ann Boydston, ed., John Dewey: The Later Works, vol. II, from Common Sense, Nov. 1935; see Necessary Illusions, chap. 5.

[5] For references, see my Year 501 (South End, 1993), chap. 7.

[6] For references, see my World Orders, Old and New (forthcoming). See this and Year 501 for sources not cited here.

[7] Observer, Sept. 26, 1993.

[8] Stephen Fidler, “Latin America `chaos’ warning,” FT, Sept. 25/26, 1993.

[9] Carothers, in Abraham Lowenthal, ed., Exporting Democracy (Johns Hopkins, 1991); In the Name of Democracy (U. of California, 1991).

[10] Howard French, NYT, Oct. 21, 1993.

[11] Keith Bradsher, “Administration Plans New Export Initiative,” NYT business section, Sept. 28; Michael Frisby, WSJ, Sept. 29, 30; Barro, WSJ, Oct. 25, 1993.

[12] Josef Hebert, AP, Sept. 30, 1993.

[13] Howard, “The Hidden Welfare State,” Political Science Quarterly, Fall 1993.

[14] For a review of public opinion studies, and the ways in which the facts have been falsified or suppressed, see Vicente Navarro, in Navarro, ed., Why the United States does not have a National Health Program (Baywood, 1992).

[15] Sylvia Nasar, NYT, Sept. 17, 1993.

[16] Multinational Monitor, Sept. 1993. South Center, Facing the Challenge (Zed, 1993), 4.

[17] O’Shaughnessy, Observer, Sept. 12; Guillermo Fernandez A., BI, Sept.; Porpora, Christian Science Monitor, Oct. 20, 1993.

[18] “Children pay price in Nicaragua’s New Order,” Third World Resurgence (Malaya) No. 35, 1993.

[19] CEPAD Report, July-August 1993 (Evangelical Churches of Nicaragua); Barricada, Oct. 9, 10, 1993; Envio (Jesuit University of Central America, Managua), Sept. 1993; Nicaragua News Service, Nicaragua Network Education Fund, Washington, Oct. 2-9, 1993.

[20] Senate vote, Tim Johnson, Knight-Ridder Service, BG, Sept. 24; Weekly News Update, Nicaragua Solidarity Network, Sept. 26, Oct. 10; Barricada, Oct. 9, 1993.

[21] Daniels, “The Riddle of Russian Reform,” Dissent, Fall 1993. See also Jonathan Steele, Roy Medvedev, Guardian Weekly, Oct. 3, 17; Ferd Weir, In These Times, Oct. 18, 1993 (including a review of Times falsifications).

[22] Alfred Malabre, WSJ, Sept. 13, 1993.

[23] WSJ, Sept. 30, 1993.

[24] BW, Oct. 18, 1993.