Selectric,
You seem to suffer from selective rather than selectric synaptic scintillations. Good grief, colonies? That's passe, pal. Naw, today the extraction of wealth from client states is much more opaque. Tell me, how many military installations does lil' ol' hands off Amurrica maintain on foreign soil? Well, you'd think it might number in the dozens, in order to protect our foreign interests, wouldn't you? Or maybe in the low hundreds? Naw, we need 800 military installations throughout the world to make sure that Exxon-Mobil, United Fruit, Coca-Cola, Allied Signal, GE, etc., etc. etc. are safe to operate in the world. 800 military installations. Does that seem a bit excessive to you for a nation that is at peace and hasn't had an enemy worth a dang for the last 10 years?
Or how about our regime of enticing lesser developed nations into debt schemes that pay off like a slot machine for the corrupt thugs ruling these poor benighted countries while our bankers are assured a continuous drip of filthy lucre and the natives of these countries are left hopelessly behind in the crooked credit game? You don't view the World Bank and IMF as extensions of our Treasury Deptartment I imagine, now do you? Yet if you were to spend the time to examine the purposes these institutions have been put to for the past 40 years it is an inescapable conclusion that they are tools of American hegemon.
No, imperialism is dead. Gone. We don't engage in it. At least not in the way that 95% of the American public have been taught to understand it. We aren't colonists, we aren't like the bad Europeans of the 19th Century. Naw. We're actually much more cunning about securing the benefits of trade with the rest of the world than they were. But we're certainly not engaged with other nations for their benefit, for the benefit of the American manufacturing worker or for the American taxpayer. We're engaged in it to benefit the multinational corporate interests who get rich on the trade, without real consideration or concern for the consequences or for the victims.
Yes, we really wanted to colonize South Vietnam, no matter what the cost.
You don't get it. We wanted the resources, not the territory.
And now, Afghanistan. Yep, real feathers in our caps.
Not "ours" kimosabe. Unocal's. They've been negotiating with the Uzbekis to move Caspian oil for over a decade now. Geo-political considerations such as they are, the three routes are through Russia, Iran or (you guessed it) Afghanistan. The Herat to Kandahar section was the only stumbling block as of the mid 1990's. What in the world do you think we're in Afghanistan for? To root out some crackpot fanatic?
Cheerio, Ray :) |
