This excerpt from a 2004 article by John Pilger tells the entire story of America's foreign policy for the last 100 years. It's not about freeing people, it's about freeing capital. Often, people's freedom is actually reduced as a direct result.
<<< ... Equally revealing was a chapter dealing exclusively with the Kosovan economy. This called for a "free-market economy" and the privatisation of all government assets. As the Balkans writer Neil Clark has pointed out: "The rump Yugoslavia . . . was the last economy in central-southern Europe to be uncolonised by western capital. 'Socially owned enterprises', the form of worker self-management pioneered under Tito, still predominated. Yugoslavia had publicly owned petroleum, mining, car and tobacco industries . . ."
At the Davos summit of neoliberal chieftains in 1999, Blair berated Belgrade, not for its handling of Kosovo, but for its failure to embrace "economic reform" fully. In the bombing campaign that followed, it was state-owned companies, rather than military sites, that were targeted. Nato's destruction of only 14 Yugoslav army tanks compares with its bombing of 372 centres of industry, including the Zastava car factory. "Not one foreign or privately owned factory was bombed," wrote Clark ... >>>
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