Doug, it is important not to approach these question in too mechanical a fashion. For example, one can make the case that United Fruit Company bled Honduras dry. The cash flow numbers are there, as well as the record of military interventions. But on the question of the relationship between the First World and the Third World as a whole, you have to step back and factor in things that can not exactly be quantified.
For example, when you look at the African continent of today, there may be evidence of neglect by Western corporations. A superficial interpretation, which I've seen in places like Atlantic Monthly, is that there is too little colonialism in Africa, rather than a surfeit.
In reality, most of the damage has already been done. Africa was destroyed by the slave trade of the 16th to 19th centuries, the theft of its natural resources in the 20th century, and the insane, self-destructive wars that are a legacy of the arbitrary borderlines inherited from the colonial past. While Rwanda was not invaded by western armies, the internecine violence between Hutu and Tutsis is a direct consequence of colonial manipulation of subject peoples.
That being said, there is a rich literature--much of it from Monthly Review--that documents the theft that has taken place. This is a fairly representative section from Eduardo Galeano's "Open Veins of Latin America." ------- Galeano: The siphoning off of national resources into imperialist affiliates is largely explained by the recent proliferation of U.S. branch banks pushing up their heads throughout Latin America like mushrooms after rain. The offensive against local savings in satellite countries is linked with the United States' chronic balance-of-payments deficit, which compels the restriction of its own investments abroad, and with the dollar's dramatic deterioration as a world currency. Latin America provides the saliva as well as the food, and the United States limits its contribution to the mouth. The denationalization of industry has turned out to be a gift.
According to the International Banking Survey, there were 78 branches of U.S. banks south of the Rio Grande in 1964. By 1967 there were 133; they had $810 million in deposits in 1964 and $1.27 Million in 1967. In 1968 and 1969 the foreign bankers' advance picked up speed: today First National City alone has 110 branches scattered through seventeen Latin American countries--the figure includes various recently acquired local banks. Chase Manhattan Bank acquired the Banco Lar Brasileiro (34 branches) in 1962, the Banco Continental (42 branches, in Peru) in 1964, the Banco del Comercio (120 branches, in Colombia and Panama) and the Banco branches, in Honduras) m 1967, and the Banco ArgenLercio in 1968. The Cuban Revolution had nationalized ing agencies, but the bankers more than recovered from in 1968 alone more than 70 U.S. bank affiliates were Central America, the Caribbean, and the smaller South American countries.
No one knows the precise extent of the simultaneous growth of parallel activities--subsidiaries, holding companies, finance companies. What is known is that an equal or greater amount of can funds have been absorbed by banks which, while not operating openly as branches, are controlled from abroad through decisive blocks of shares or by the opening of conditional external lines of credit.
This banking invasion has served to divert Latin American savings to the US enterprises established in the region, while national enterprises are strangled by lack of credit. The public relations departments of various U.S. banks operating abroad unblushingly an-their chief aim in the countries in which they operate is to channel savings into the multinational corporations which are their head offices' clients. Let us indulge in a flight of the imagination: could a Latin American bank establish itself in New York and capture the national savings of the United States? The bubble explodes: such an outrage is expressly prohibited. U.S. banks, through branches, dispose of Latin America's national savings at their pleasure. Latin America watches as the United States takes over its finances· as tenderly as does the United States itself. In June 1966, the Banco Brasileiro de Descontos consulted its shareholders about a great and vigorous nationalist step which it proposed printed the phrase "N6s confiamos em Deus" on all its documents. The bank pointed with pride to the fact that the dollar motto "In God We Trust."
Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)