``So how do we start? I'd really love a rigorous analysis of just how much imperialism contributes to the U.S. standard of living today, but I don't know of any. Any ideas?'' Doug
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You have to write it. We've been over this so many times, I am a little surprised it isn't obvious.
Start with the myth level and illustrate how it was constructed and by whom (US elite). Then deconstruct it with whatever facts you assemble.
So you can set up a fact v. myth chart marching down the list of US econ propaganda biz-words (Empire of the Innocent) and their concrete effects with numbers (global toxic waste dump of the starving).
My basic guess is the US empire benefits only the top who has managed to collectively manipulate both foreign and domestic labor (and material resources) and play them off against each other (race to the bottom)---and that is enabled by the globalization of technology in manufacturing, agriculture, communication, transportation, finance, etc, etc.
So, while the standard of living in say Sweden might be better at the middle and lower end, the standard of living at the top between the US and Sweden is completely skewed with the US at hundreds of times higher. In other words the two-class US society and its imperialism are locked together and mutually re-enforce each other. Sweden isn't an empire, so its top can not leverage these imperial benefits for themselves---you can be sure they would if they could.
On the other hand the US working/middle class is propagandized to identify with the US top (and ignore their own conditions) and believe they (or we) are the beneficiaries through cheaper goods---economic access to the consumer society. And we are further propagandized to believe we are part of the Good Empire, the Empire of the Innocent. It's all win-win, spreading the American dream. We are not like the old nasty imperialists. Of course not. The US government isn't running an empire of military trade outposts and plantations (Heart of Darkness), US corporations are spreading and sharing prosperity abroad (malquiladoras).
So, given the Empire of the Innocent, Bush can rightly claim `they hate freedom', and enough people in the US can pretend to believe him.
If they don't believe him, then the house of cards of the Good Empire, Empire of the Innocent starts to implode. On implosion you drop out of your mindpod dream world like Neo in the Matrix. The world we really live in (as in depend on as a society) is a god damned nightmare of exploitation, a vast wasteland of peoples and lands all over the earth. (Out of sight, out of mind.)
You can get to the `real' world just by following the trail back on a bag of groceries or a computer. Pretty soon you end up in some industrial slum with toxic waste and sewage running down the middle of the street with skinny little kids playing in it. A few miles up the road, we get to the palace of the compardors with their stolen native artifacts, glass living rooms and global cell phones with private numbers to US corporate HQ. Their two-class society as its beneficiaries too.
What's the mystery?
The analytical world of facts will need a cohesive theme, a rational for their presentation. Without that rational, facts communicate very little other than a confusing and ambiguous picture that can interpreted in numerous ways. (A feature that US apologists depend on when criticized)
So, the moral and ethical world of right and wrong, fair and unfair, just and unjust will ultimately have to be brought to bare as part of the organization of the material. There is no way around that.
There really is no such thing as `objectivity' when we are looking at the human world. That doesn't mean it isn't worth doing. It is merely a reflexive recognition, that yes, there is a point of view at work in the presentation.
In any event, the work of assembling the statistics and going through them is already predicated on ethical themes (Marxism is after all, also a about injustice). Nevertheless, sometimes facts fool you, and you discover something you didn't know. That's the adventure. Maybe I am all wrong on all of the above. Maybe once you get down on those numbers, something else will emerge. But I kinda of doubt it.
CG