Michael Parenti puts it this way:
***** Who Pays? Who Profits?
We are made to believe that the people of the United States have a common interest with the giant multinationals, the very companies that desert our communities in pursuit of cheaper labor abroad. In truth, on almost every issue the people are not in the same boat with the big companies. Policy costs are not equally shared; benefits are not equally enjoyed. The "national" policies of an imperialist country reflect the interests of that country's dominant socio-economic class. Class rather than nation-state more often is the crucial unit of analysis in the study of imperialism.
The tendency to deny the existence of conflicting class interests when dealing with imperialism leads to some serious misunderstandings. For example, liberal writers like Kenneth Boulding and Richard Barnet have pointed out that empires cost more than they bring in, especially when wars are fought to maintain them. Thus, from 1950 to 1970, the U.S. government spent several billions of dollars to shore up a corrupt dictatorship in the Philippines, hoping to protect about $1 billion in U.S. investments in that country. At first glance it does not make sense to spend $3 billion to protect $1 billion. Saul Landau has made this same point in regard to the costs of U.S. interventions in Central America: they exceed actual U.S. investments. Barnet notes that "the costs of maintaining imperial privilege always exceed the gains." From this it has been concluded that empires simply are not worth all the expense and trouble. Long before Barnet, the Round Table imperialist policymakers in Great Britain wanted us to believe that the empire was not maintained because of profit; indeed "from a purely material point of view the Empire is a burden rather than a source of gain" (Round Table, vol 1, 232-39, 411).
To be sure, empires do not come cheap. Burdensome expenditures are needed for military repression and prolonged occupation, for colonial administration, for bribes and arms to native collaborators, and for the development of a commercial infrastructure to facilitate extractive industries and capital penetration. But empires are not losing propositions for everyone. The governments of imperial nations may spend more than they take in, but the people who reap the benefits are not the same ones who foot the bill. As Thorstein Veblen pointed out in The Theory of the Business Enterprise (1904), the gains of empire flow into the hands of the privileged business class while the costs are extracted from "the industry of the rest of the people." The transnationals monopolize the private returns of empire while carrying little, if any, of the public cost. The expenditures needed in the way of armaments and aid to make the world safe for General Motors, General Dynamics, General Electric, and all the other generals are paid by the U.S. government, that is, by the taxpayers.
So it was with the British empire in India, the costs of which, Marx noted a half-century before Veblen, were "paid out of the pockets of the people of England," and far exceeded what came back into the British treasury. He concluded that the advantage to Great Britain from her Indian Empire was limited to the "very considerable" profits which accrued to select individuals, mostly a coterie of stockholders and officers in the East India Company and the Bank of England.
Likewise, beginning in the late nineteenth century and carrying over into the twentieth, the German conquest of Southwest Africa "remained a loss-making enterprise for the German taxpayer," according to historian Horst Drechsler, yet "a number of monopolists still managed to squeeze huge profits out of the colony in the closing years of German colonial domination." And imperialism is in the service of the few monopolists not the many taxpayers.
In sum, there is nothing irrational about spending three dollars of public money to protect one dollar of private investment--at least not from the perspective of the investors. To protect one dollar of their money they will spend three, four, and five dollars of our money. In fact, when it comes to protecting their money, our money is no object.
Furthermore, the cost of a particular U.S. intervention must be measured not against the value of U.S. investments in the country involved but against the value of the world investment system. It has been noted that the cost of apprehending a bank robber may occasionally exceed the sum that is stolen. But if robbers were allowed to go their way, this would encourage others to follow suit and would put the entire banking system in jeopardy.
At stake in these various wars of suppression, as already noted, is not just the investments in any one country but the security of the whole international system of finance capital. No country is allowed to pursue an independent course of self-development. None is permitted to go unpunished and undeterred. None should serve as an inspiration or source of material support to other nations that might want to pursue a politico-economic path other than the maldevelopment offered by global capitalism.
<http://members.aol.com/bblum6/parenti.htm> *****
The working class of the United States pay the costs of the Empire while profits of the Empire are pocketed by the ruling class of the world. Further, American workers are themselves exploited, producing surplus value for the ruling class. American workers, per capita, certainly consume larger amounts of resources than workers of underdeveloped nations do, given resource-inefficient consumption patterns (e.g., long commutes in individually owned automobiles) that the ruling class has imposed on the former, but it is likely that the former are even more exploited by the ruling class than the latter, when you consider differences in productivity. -- Yoshie
* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Anti-War Activist Resources: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/activist.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osu.edu/students/CJP/>