Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of articles on American empire and its impact on the conditions in which revolutionaries work.

“Of all the enemies of true liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded…No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of perpetual warfare.”
– James Madison, “Political Observations”, 1795

Since World War II the United States has been engaged in or mobilized for war. There have been over 200 military operations in which the U.S. struck the first blow, and none has resulted in the institution of democracy. Rather, American military operations gave the world the Shah of Iran, Suharto in Indonesia, Batista in Cuba, Somoza in Nicaragua, Pinochet in Chile, and Mobutu in Zaire.

The U.S. ruling class has always followed the motto “No permanent friends, only permanent interests,” and they have always skillfully adjusted to new conditions and new tasks. The post-Cold War expansion of the American military empire has been a crucial aspect of their adjustment to new conditions. Then Undersecretary of Defense in the Bush I Administration, Paul Wolfowitz, stated in 1992 that the U.S. must “prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.” These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the former Soviet Union, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. In 2001, as Deputy Secretary of Defense, Wolfowitz asserted that this notion of a “Pax Americana” had now become mainstream strategic thought.

In this same vein and within days following September 11, 2001, then National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice addressed the National Security Council: “How do you capitalize on these opportunities to fundamentally change American doctrine and the shape of the world in the wake of September 11?” Seen as a second Pearl Harbor, 9/11 became the catalyst to reshape the American state as a military behemoth bestriding the earth. “The 9/11 Commission Report“ chillingly made this point. “9/11 has taught us that terrorism against American interests ‘over there’ should be regarded just as we regard terrorism against America ‘over here.’ In this same sense, the American homeland is the planet.” The militarization of the U.S. state and its consequence, the militarization of the globe, is the concrete manifestation of American empire.

 

Why now?

 

These developments are not simply the actions of zealots with no consideration for the consequences – although many who advocate this course fit the description. These developments are rather driven by the real and profound changes wrought by globalization – capitalism in the age of electronics – and the ensuing dramatic changes in the world conditions faced by the ruling class as well as the peoples of the world.

As capital travels freely across borders to exploit the resources and the peoples of the earth, workers migrate across the planet in a desperate search for jobs. On the one hand, the billionaires and millionaires of this world control over 56 trillion dollars in financial wealth. On the other hand, three billion people across the globe live on less than two dollars a day. In the U.S., as electronic technology permanently eliminates jobs, a million cast-off wage-less workers are made homeless. As all workers are forced into competition with the robot, and the value of labor-power is driven toward zero, the numbers of severely poor accelerates. One million four hundred thousand of America’s poor are now incarcerated in our jails and prisons, with another three million on parole. This rising new global class, who cannot live if they cannot work, is on a collision course with the capitalist system and the state that protects it.

The corporations, banks and financial speculators are moving to transform the state to guarantee their political power over society at home and to maintain both economic and political supremacy over the global class of dispossessed. The U.S. state is being reorganized as empire to protect the sanctity of private property globally, to guarantee U.S. control of geopolitically strategic resources, and to facilitate domination by globally integrated capital. At home the state proceeds to demolish the social contract, to attack constitutional rights, and with laws, force, intimidation and violence to assault society. A reorganization necessitated by the instability engendered by the introduction of electronic production, every step the ruling class takes – war, human displacement and destruction – only exacerbates the ensuing political and economic instability both at home and abroad.

 

U.S. global military occupation

 

The actual extent and depth of the U.S. military presence in the world is staggering. “The Base Structure Report” published in 2005 by the Department of Defense indicates that there are 737 U.S. military bases located on every continent on the globe. But the report fails to mention bases in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar and Uzbekistan. The actual size of the American empire exceeds 1000 bases, not including the 969 located on U.S. soil.

The total number of military personnel reported world wide is 1,840,000, but that does not include the 600,000 Defense Department employees, and it does not include the 871,000 in the National Guard and the Reserves, or the commander-in-chief’s own private army, the CIA, or the Special Forces, or the growing numbers of private military companies that hire themselves out to the government.

Special Forces soldiers are deployed in 150 countries to train local militias in “foreign internal defense,” a euphemism for state terrorism, and are also deployed clandestinely as a “Proactive Preemptive Operations Group.” IMET – the International Military Education Training Program – is engaged in 133 countries around the world in training 100,000 soldiers a year. The mission of the Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies (School of the Americas) is to “create military-to-military relations” by sending U.S. Special Forces to train and arm Latin American armies.

In addition, there are other top secret military operations that comprise the “Black Budget.” The Government Accounting Office estimates that 30 to 35 billion dollars per year are allocated to 185 covert programs to fund secret military and intelligence operations.

Foreign Military Financing (FMF) provides money to foreign countries to buy American weapons and then supplies the training for the weapons. By far the largest exporter of arms and munitions on the planet, the U.S. exceeded $44 billion in weapons sales from 1997-2001. Private military companies, such as Vinnell, a subsidiary of Northrop Grumman, also supply arms and training to other countries. Vinnell is licensed to train the Saudi National Guard, and is one of 35 private rent-a-mercenary companies that hire themselves out to the U. S. government and its allies. It is estimated that the revenues of the private military companies will exceed $200 billion by 2010.

 

War and profit

 

The military-industrial complex is today an integral part of the U.S. economy. Corporations, financial speculators and energy conglomerates, as well as arms and defense manufacturers profit from war and a militarized economy. Today 51 per cent of all discretionary funds in the current budget are allocated to the military, over one trillion dollars annually. Included is the $16.4 billion annual bill to maintain the 9960 nuclear weapons that remain in the U.S. arsenal, and a current $41 billion for Homeland Security. That is expected to increase with the militarization of the U.S. Mexican border. Plans are still in the works to “militarize the heavens” at an estimated cost of $1.2 trillion. “Whoever has the ability to control space will likewise possess the capability to exert control of the surface of the Earth,” says Air Force Chief of Staff General Thomas D. White. As of 2006, the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan stood at about $450 billion, but it is calculated that the real costs will amount to $2 trillion.

Our communities have become entangled with the military-industrial complex. Many of our youth who have no where else to turn, choose the military as an option for education and jobs. Entire cities located near military bases throughout the country, but especially in the South, would collapse without the jobs and income provided by military installations.

The militarization of the economy is largely funded by debt – the U.S. deficit. In 2006, for example, the Congress raised the debt limit to $8.96 trillion to allow the continuation of a growing deficit spending to finance the maintenance and expansion of the empire. While the capitalists make trillions, the militarization of the economy propped up by debt only adds to the growing worldwide economic instability, and exacerbates the ensuing political instability throughout the world.

 

The end of democracy

 

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt points out that “although tyranny, because it needs no consent, may successfully rule over foreign peoples, it can stay in power only if it destroys first of all the national institutions of its own people.” Using a rather obscure legal doctrine termed the “unitary executive theory of the Presidency,” the Bush administration has taken steps to legally allow the President to override U.S. law and to render inapplicable any ratified treaties, congressionally enacted statutes, or military orders that, for example, prohibit torture, pursuant to the authority of the commander-in-chief. By-passing the veto, the executive has employed instead “signing statements” whereby the president reserves the right not to implement certain provisions contained in legislation if he disagrees with them. There have already been over 500 extra-constitutional challenges to various provisions enacted by Congress. Former Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales declared “a new paradigm” that renders obsolete the Geneva Convention, and General Tommy Franks has surmised that in the event of another 9/11 “ the Constitution could be scrapped in favor of a military form of government.”

An aspect of the militarization of America, and to justify and garner support for empire abroad is the romanticizing of soldiers, a tendency to see military power as the truest measure of national greatness, to define the nation’s strength and well-being in terms of military preparedness, military action, and the fostering of military ideals. It is part of the process that in practice elevates the military to a position that is above the law.

Unilateral, perpetual war abroad, and a loss of democracy and constitutional rights at home, these are the “sorrows” of empire (Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire, 2004), and these are aspects of the re-shaping of the American state as it moves to guarantee the interests of global capital and the domination of a rising new class of poor both at home and abroad. That these actions are contested, here at home and throughout the world, fuels the growing economic and political instability and the danger of worldwide war.

The power of the U.S. empire is awesome, but it cannot stand in the wake of the mightiest power on earth, a class whose destiny is to reorganize society and to build a truly human world, a world without poverty, and at peace.

 

Future articles in this series:

• Empire Abroad, War on the New Class at Home

• Political Economy of Empire and Global Instability

 

September.2007.Vol17.Ed5
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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