Globalization PDF

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GLOBALIZATION
The Purgatory of Delusions

and
REFLECTIONS
on Imperial Pathology
Fre d e r i c F. C l a i r m ont
CITIZENS
INTERNATIONAL
Frederic F. Clairmont
Published in 2012
by
Citizens International
10 Jalan Masjid Negeri
11600 Pulau Pinang
Malaysia
email: cizs@streamyx.com
Printed by
Jutaprint
2 Solok Sungai Pinang 3
Sungai Pinang
11600 Pulau Pinang
Malaysia
ISBN 978-983-3046-18-8
Without the tenacity and sustained devotion of

my friends Lim Jee Yuan and Lean Ka-Min, who have been
a constant source of comradeship and inspiration over decades,
this publication would never have seen the light of day.
Contents
A Tribute and Overview

Bernard Mbeki 5
Globalization: The Purgatory of Delusions
Frederic F. Clairmont 29
The Demise of the Quisling Duo:
Reflections on Imperial Pathology
Frederic F. Clairmont 89
Dedicated to
those combatants who are battling for an alternative world
of equity, decency and integrity
A Tribute and Overview

Bernard Mbeki
he power of the two major contributions published in this

book highlights Frederic Clairmonts unrelenting analysis
of the driving forces of imperialism, which has now entered
the most critical stages of its decay since World War 2. They must
be read as independent entities but their richness can only be fully
grasped within the context of the totality of his work as teacher
and writer.
I shall not be concerned therefore in my commentary merely
with summarizing the major themes of these two contributions
but will reveal the continuity and constant revolutionizing of Dr
Clairmonts thought over several decades. The notion of bourgeois
objectivity is as alien to his being as it is for me. The foundations
of his critique of economic liberalism were enshrined in his classic
work on The Rise and Fall of Economic Liberalism that shredded
conventional bourgeois economics.
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F r e dBeerri nc a Fr .d CMl ba ei rk m
You will remember also his investigations into the nature of

corporate capital first revealed in his magisterial work on The
Marketing and Distribution of Bananas, which was his first major
work, universally acclaimed, written in the secretariat of the
United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (Unctad).
(That was before that institution was castrated by the triumphalist
forces of neoliberalism and its imperial agents working within the
secretariat and outside at the end of the 1970s.) What is the nature
of corporate power, of which the transnational corporation is the
highest expression, and its relationship to imperialism? Here one
was able to see the role of the United Fruit Company, for example,
in its many dimensions, which revolutionized thinking on global
marketing. But such research and the policy conclusions emanating
therefrom were inimical to corporate capital and the dominant UN
Permanent Missions. They grasped immediately the potentially
revolutionary significance of this research and the directions of
its author. It is well to review briefly what the author was saying
because such thinking was nothing short of revolutionary.
His central thesis that imploded conventional commodity analysis
revealed its fetishism. It was true that the banana republics the
very designation smacks of imperial racism were exporters of the
commodity bananas, but that statement of geographical location
did not reveal the breadth of the corporate gulags power embodied
in only three transnational corporations, of which the United Fruit
Company was the largest and most notorious. The nature of power
is masked behind formal commodity export/import data.
Indeed, three mega transnational conglomerates, with the
United Fruit Company (now known as Chiquita) leading the
pack, dominate the output, pricing, marketing and worldwide
distribution of bananas from the plantation to the supermarket.
And they have done so for decades. They achieved their primacy
A Tribute
and
Overview
by working hand in hand with the large latifundistas (landowners)

and the military. Hence mechanisms of effective transnational
power are totally dissimulated in official trade flows measured
by imports/exports. The banana tripartite gulag, as Dr Clairmont
branded them, ensured that the banana republics remained
banana republics, with all the racist and exploitative connotations
associated with that designation, as well as totally subordinate to
the geo-strategic exigencies of US imperialism.
I have stressed this seminal study because it gave us an insight into
the workings of global accumulation and disaccumulation. It was
a study in political economy for it revealed the morphology of
classes, of oppressors and oppressed. The banana republics, then
as now, had no say in the flows of investment and the directions
of profits and dividends. The peoples of those blighted republics
did not know that members of the US Congress were massive
shareholders of United Fruit.
It is obvious that bourgeois textbook economics deliberately
mystifies the class nature of power. But the masters of corporate
capital have no need for such casuistry when it comes to elucidating
the mechanics of real power and its manipulation. The repressive
implications are obvious, best perceived in a glib understatement
by a former United Fruit President in 1968, 14 years after the mass
butchery and eradication of the democratically elected Guatemalan
government of Jacobo Arbenz, whose land reforms had been seen
as inimical to United Fruits interests: There remains the question
of the political impact of a large corporation in a country such as
Honduras. It would be foolish to pretend that the United Fruit
Company is without political influence in Honduras.1
1 United Fruit Company, Annual Report 1968, Boston. Also see Unctad, The Marketing and Distribution of Bananas, Geneva, 1976; and Thomas McCann, An American Company: The Tragedy of United Fruit, New York, 1976.
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One of the celebratory pieties of Big Capital has always been the
insistence on the markets role as the dynamic activator, catalyst and
signalman of capitalist decision-making, or corporate governance,
to use their deferential platitude. But what the trite mutterings of
neoclassical dogma continue to ignore is that markets and market
relations are not, and indeed can never be, neutral between buyers
and sellers, borrowers and lenders, consumers and producers,
landlords and peasants, workers and capitalists. This is so because
markets and market configurations are structures of class power.
What runs through Dr Clairmonts works and teaching is his line
of argument buttressed by prodigious historical research that
markets are power complexes dominated by an ever-smaller but
ever-more powerful group of concentrated finance capital. Thus
they are massive configurations of sectoral muscle operating
through a web of intricately corrupt modes of shareholding
and interlocking directorates. This has become a staggeringly
pervasive trait of a totalitarian monster whose striving for fatter
and fatter market shares to boost profits and thereby enhance
the concentration of capital becomes the alpha and omega of the
system.
What the two essays in this book reveal is the extent of the stricken
state of the empire and its jackals, as seen in their perpetual
economic convulsions and military debacles. What the world has
long known is that the crimes of empire are perpetrated in the highsounding rhetoric of freedom and human rights. But these shabby
rationalizations are being destroyed before our very eyes. As a great
teacher, Dr Clairmont has the capacity to bring before our lives the
nature of change, and nowhere is this done with greater force than
in the quotations of Al Capone which he cites here. Dr Clairmont
has no time for fatuous theoretical discussions on globalization. In
one quotation from an executive of a leading petroleum company
A Tribute
and
Overview
in Venezuela in the 1950s we grasp the nettle of the meaning of

freedom as seen through the eyes of a spokesman of Standard Oil,
then one of the Seven Sisters oil cartel. The freedom that he refers
to occurred during one of the most bloodthirsty dictatorships
in Venezuelan history, that of Marcos Perez Jimenez. It would
be difficult to find a more lucid encapsulation of globalized
imperialism than that: Here in Venezuela, you have the right to
do what you like with your capital. This right is dearer to me than
all the political rights in the world.2 The advent of Hugo Chavez
and the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela wrote the epitaph of
that freedom. It was a policy generalization applicable not only
to Venezuela but to the world.
Capitalism and its parasitical political elites, as we perceive in these
essays, have lost their resilience. Its irrevocably corrupt ruling
classes have proved unable to confront the disintegration of their
system. Dr Clairmont has devoted a considerable amount of his
time to a study of the eurozone. In the first place it never had any
claims to democracy. The economic integration that its architects
peddled as the great dream of human salvation and European
brotherhood is now in a shambles. The French and Greek elections
in May 2012 were harbingers of the cataclysm in the making. What
we see in Spain is a grim laboratory of its failures and its chambers
of horrors. At the start of May 2012, Spains jobless rate exceeded
one in four, or 25% (that does not include the underemployed).
According to the National Statistical Institute in Madrid, this
totals over 5.7 million. In comparison, at the height of the Great
Depression in the United States in November 1931, the jobless
rate was 23%. Spain, like other members of the neo-colonized 17member eurozone, has no control over its monetary affairs; it is
unable to manipulate its lending and borrowing rates. Monetary
sovereignty is a vital component of national sovereignty.
2 Quoted in Time, 21 September 1952.
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Given prevailing conditions and the victory of Francois Hollande

in the French presidential elections as well as the political turbulence
in Greece, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands, it is questionable
whether the euro single currency will survive and, if so, in what
form. Hollandes reformist idea of rewriting the Fiscal Pact
(blueprinted to save and not bury the eurozone) runs up against
the implacable opposition of German Big Capital. But that is only
one of its contradictions. More important is that it does not even
address the contradictions that are at the heart of the foundations
of Maastricht with its one-size-fits-all approach, the dictatorship
of Brussels and German economic hegemony. The current battles
being waged against the Maastricht power complex must therefore
be seen as part of a process of decolonization of the group of 17.
But the current war against the dictates of Maastricht goes beyond
the affirmation of monetary sovereignty. It is an integral part of
a liberation war against the unhindered advance of globalized
capitalism and neoliberalism.
The elimination of monetary sovereignty and the centralized
dictatorship of capital in Brussels, which masquerades under the
innocuous title of the economic integration of Europe, march
hand in hand with the jackboot of austerity. Its now familiar policy
prescriptions entail the smashing of the institutions of organized
labour, cutting pensions to the bone, raising taxes, slashing wages
and social expenditures such as health and education, and the
dismantling of the public sector and its transfer to transnational
corporations. The architects of Maastricht, however, are now
jumping from one desperate expedient to another. Bailout follows
bailout and the latest, announced in December 2011 with much
fanfare, was the European Central Bank (ECB)s Longer-term
Refinancing Operation (LTRO), proclaimed to be the magic wand
that would inject an unlimited supply of cheap three-year loans
into the eurozones undercapitalized banks.
A Tribute
and
Overview
11
What we see is that the balance sheet of the ECB is now bloated
to 3 trillion euros, or one-third of the eurozones GDP. This
was proclaimed the grande finale that would stave off financial,
economic and ultimately political collapse. But these Himalayan
capital injections have not done the trick nor can they be expected
to. They are designed to capitalize the banks and are not jobcreating investments. Tinkering with the mechanisms that went
into the fabrication of this politico-financial contraption bypasses
the central fact that we are dealing with the afflictions of global
capitalism tsunamic levels of debt, deflation, overproduction
and economic stagnation, with all its depressionary implications.
In its annihilation of consumption (which is around 65-70% of
GDP) it has aggravated the economic convulsions and misery of
millions and, in so doing, slashed purchasing power. The claim
that the peripheral countries of the eurozone will be able to export
their way out of the crisis is therefore one of the greatest of political
swindles. Under these conditions there can be no such thing as a
return to normality.
The LTRO is not a palliative. With the collapse of the Spanish
and Greek economies, foreign bondholders are bolting for the exit
and selling their holdings at discount prices. The upshot of the
economic implosion and not only in Spain is that borrowing
costs are soaring. And with this comes a further explosive surge in
unsustainable debt.
The desperation of Spains predicament is portrayed in the whining
of its foreign minister, who compared the European Union to the
doomed liner Titanic, claiming that all the passengers would be
saved only if all worked together to find a solution. And who
are the all that are expected to work together? The analogy is
sentimental slush destined to delude. The very word solidarity
is alien to the operation of the colonized eurozone. The earlier
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successive bailouts to the sub-zero-growth peripheral countries

were aimed at boosting their grossly undercapitalized banks to
prevent them from defaulting. German exposure in the peripheral
countries now runs to hundreds of billions of euros. Defaults
will send Merkels Germany into a tailspin. This is debt that will
never be repaid. The Titanics fate was irreversible because it hit
an iceberg. The Spanish minister ought not to forget that the class
composition of the passengers of the Titanic revealed the nature of
the capitalist society that produced it. The bulk of those that got
into the lifeboats were members of the upper class; nine-tenths of
those proletarian passengers who were in storage class perished.
The ministers appeals for total solidarity ignore the reality on
which the eurozone was built, namely competition between its
members, and the total absence of democratic participation.
With no sarcasm intended, a Spanish labour statistician lamented
in a mood of total despair that he saw nothing to stop the jobless
rate spiralling to 30%. Youth unemployment (15-28 years) already
outstrips 51%. By the same logic of the overall jobless rate, what will
stop the youth jobless rate climbing to 60%? This is total disaster
that flings the door wide open to mass revolt. And those that are
paying the price for this, need we add, belong to the working
class who have nothing to sell but their labour power which the
capitalists no longer need. How long will human flesh withstand
such agony? Compounding Spains debacle is that Standard &
Poors, the credit rating agency, has now downgraded its rating,
thereby rocketing its borrowing costs and exacerbating its already
bloated debt.
Who has been the prime beneficiary of the eurozone? The
answer is the German powerhouse which engulfs one-third of
the eurozones GDP. Its current account surplus is positive and
18% larger than the rest of the eurozone (minus the Netherlands
A Tribute
and
Overview
13
and Finland) which is negative; its yield (interest rate) is merely

one-seventh that of the bankrupt peripheral countries, hence its
competitiveness and ability to borrow cheap further enhances its
hegemony. Meanwhile the entire eurozone has sunk to sub-zero
growth rates, with Greece leading the pack at -7.5%. It is argued
by the masters of the Bundesbank, Germanys central bank, that
austerity is the only path to adjustment which will lead sooner
or later (how soon we are not told) to boom time. Where have
we heard that claptrap before? Austerity which engenders the
mass liquidation of purchasing power generates deflation. The
peoples of the Third World felt its destructive power when the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank imposed
their programmes of structural adjustment in developing
countries, and its superfluous for me to review the horrors of that
adjustment.
I am not concerned in this Tribute with speculating on the
implications of default and the breakdown of the euro. The
political convulsions that were triggered in May will speed up this
process. Both Dr Clairmont and myself agree that the probability
that it will take place in 2012 is likely. Default on such a colossal
scale, when it occurs, will wipe out hundreds of billions of euros
to cataclysmic effect on world financial markets. There are certain
analysts like Joseph Stiglitz who argue that budgetary cutbacks
and the devastation wrought by structural adjustment will drive
Europe to suicide. Nation states, however, do not commit suicide,
individuals do.
What this does throw into relief is the suicide in Athens in April of
a Greek pharmacist. Dr Clairmont has always hammered home to
his readers the poignant truth that a drop of water gives us a clue
into the chemical composition of the sea. This is the narrative
of retired pharmacist (77) Dimitris Christoulas, who shot himself
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in Syntagma Square opposite the Greek Parliament. This is the

place where tens of thousands of protesters gathered, invariably
being tear-gassed and savagely beaten by the police and armed
militia, the appalling spectacle of repression seen by millions of
tele-viewers worldwide. The place where Christoulas shot himself
is now permanently wreathed in flowers. For most resisters it is
hallowed ground where tens of thousands of protesters gather to
denounce Maastricht as another species of occupation. For many
of the protesters his death was an assassination. The suffering
imposed on his people had become unbearable: hospitals that
could no longer afford to purchase medicines or pay their medical
personnel; malnutrition, mendicancy and poverty on a scale that
Greece had never known; the shutdown of factories and schools;
and the breadlines that got longer by the day.
Christoulas suicide note was crafted with great beauty and
simplicity: The sufferings of my people are unbearable to me.
This is the vilest of occupations and we must resist it. It runs
counter to every vital interest of our nation. It is destroying us with
a butchers knife. I can no longer continue to live on my pension
which is reduced to a pittance. I cannot continue to supplement
my daily subsistence from garbage cans, which increasingly is the
fate of many of my countrymen. We must resist this foreign evil
that sucks our blood.
Christoulas death was a stark reminder for all of us that a bleeding,
impoverished Greece would never be able to export or grow out of
its foreign-imposed, austerity-drenched debt trap. The torments
and ultimate sacrifice of this brave man exemplify the repugnant
truth of the proverbial drop of water that is neoliberalism which is
part of the larger sea of economic depression.
A Tribute
and
Overview
15
In any discussion of the global capitalist depression US imperialism

occupies a central role. In the perpetuation of its crimes, however,
it had its criminal accomplices. The British empire, for example,
wouldnt have been able to sustain its centuries-long occupation
of India without the intermediation of the Indian princes, known
as Princely India, its Gurkha mercenaries and powerful Indian
colonial expeditionary forces. Likewise, such scum as Vaclav Havel
and Christopher Hitchens illustrate the deployment of individuals
in the service of the present imperial order.
The strivings of the militaro-corporate gulag to annihilate any
individual, social or national obstacles that run counter to the
preservation and extension of its empire are writ large in the
history of the United States since 1945. People everywhere have
seen the US bleeding of the world the blood of coloured colonial
and semi-colonial peoples that imperial conquest has brought in
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its wake. The bleeding has not stopped, as seen in the cold-blooded
murder in Kabul recently of 16 innocent men, women and children
who were gunned down.
The wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria and others have cut
short the lives of more than 2 million. Their nations productive
and infrastructural assets have been wiped out. NATO was an
accomplice to this crime of colonial pillage and destruction. It
required the full force of NATO to crush a small nation like
Libya. Its defeat, which led to the assassination of its leader and
the colonial occupation that followed, was inconceivable without
the big knife of American imperialism. This was the gang leader
abetted by his vassals. Such is the confidential evaluation of a
NATO report published in the New York Times: Even Europes
most sophisticated militaries lacked the specialized aircraft
and trained personnel needed to intercept Libyan government
communications and verify potential targets, and they quickly ran
short of precision guided munitions.
This is the quintessence of imperialist internationalism. Progressive
internationalists, in contrast, will take heart from the fact that
successive US imperial expeditionary legions have never won
any of its colonial interventions starting with China in 1945. In
November 1949, Chairman Mao proclaimed in an imperishable
eight-word sentence the yearning for freedom that reverberated
throughout the colonial slave empires: We the people of China
have stood up. To the charge that US imperialism had lost
China, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, like a beaten dog with its
tail between its legs, whimpered: Nothing that this country did
nor could have done ... could have changed the result; nothing that
was left undone by the United States has contributed to it. We did
everything that could be done to halt the march of revolutionary
events in China, but it was of no avail. And with the realization
A Tribute
and
Overview
17
culled from tens of billions of dollars spent on sustaining its Asian

gulag, the Kuomintang, the Acheson report concluded truthfully:
It was the product of internal Chinese forces, forces which this
country tried to influence but could not. The Kuomintang was
its criminal accomplice in that war that led to the occupation of
Taiwan.
The only victory the US achieved in almost seven decades of
colonial pillage was the military conquest of the small island of
Grenada, the ousting of a legally elected government and a member
of the United Nations and, true to form, the murder, by one of its
domestic killers, of the prime minister. What historians can never
forget is that the combined forces of NATO, comically garbed
in the mantle of the coalition of the willing, were defeated in
Afghanistan and Iraq. Here was a combined colonial expeditionary
force whose GDP was infinitely larger than that of Afghanistan,
and yet the forces of empire ground to a halt in a country that
ranked among the poorest of the poor.
This is called asymmetric warfare. This is a war that fills the writings
and the teachings of Dr Clairmont. It is a war that imperialism
started but cannot end. We are seeing the unfolding of the same
grim narrative in Syria but this time they are using their vassals
headquartered in London, Istanbul, Doha, Riyadh and Paris. In
this they are backed by their media spokesmen in the BBC, CNN
and Fox News, to name but three major outlets that have long
been ventriloquist dummies of imperialism. The entire corporatedominated lie machine, including the Financial Times, Le Monde,
Le Figaro, the Wall Street Journal and of course the New York Times,
has joined the bandwagon in backing the wholesale destruction
of human life with its endless streams of misinformation and
scurrilous mendacity.
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The scenario is simple: the destruction of the regime of Bashar alAssad is intended as a sequel to Libya. Its degutting, as the Israeli
military high command has noted ad nauseam, will (in their view)
end the existential threat (their familiar mantra) to Israels
occupation of the Golan Heights, contribute to the weakening and
ultimate liquidation of Hizbollah and Hamas, and set the stage
for the erosion of the Iranian government leading to its internal
dissolution, the elimination of Russian influence in the eastern
Mediterranean, and the imperial takeover of the countrys huge
petroleum and agricultural resources.
Dr Clairmont has elaborated the geo-political and strategic designs
of this expansionist imperial blueprint in his major lectures and
writings. Needless to say, the best of the most homicidal of plans
often go awry. And Syria does not promise to be an exception
because the imperial plans are rooted in fantasies and take no
account of the determination of the Syrian people and their heroic
armed forces to defend their freedom and national sovereignty. In
the meantime, however, the foreign-bankrolled terrorist machine
armed by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the Arab League, with their safe
havens entrenched in Turkey, are targeting innocent men, women
and children for indiscriminate destruction. What reveals the
scope of this tragedy is that such carnage is openly abetted by the
sanctions of the European Union. What this indicates is the extent
of the imbrications of foreign accomplices acting in unison with
the US state terrorist complex.
But that is not the sum total of the imperial cabal. To this must
be added certain individuals within the United Nations secretariat
whose office directly or indirectly serves the interests of imperialism.
Here the active role of the UNs Secretary-General becomes
conspicuous because Ban Ki-moon, drawing on his authority
and his pre-eminent status as Secretary-General, has launched
A Tribute
and
Overview
19
incessant verbal onslaughts on the Syrian government. In certain

ways his utterances have parallels to one of his predecessors, that
vicious racist Dag Hammarskjold who, acting jointly with the
special services of the Belgian colonial administration and the CIA,
toppled the Congolese government of Patrice Lumumba, who was
replaced by their stooge Tshombe and later Mobutu. This is the
classic interventionist format. I should add that Dr Clairmont was
fully acquainted with these events in the Congo because he taught
at the Ecole Nationale de Droit et dAdministration and Lovanium
University in Leopoldville, and interviewed many of the Belgian
and UN actors that were involved in these changes.
It was his first contact with the operations of the United Nations,
many of whose leading cadres had become part of the imperial
neo-colonial network. In his subsequent relocation to the UN
Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) in Addis Ababa he was
able to deepen his knowledge of these processes, scrutinizing from
within the organization the techniques deployed by these sinister
destructive forces of imperialism operating inside the world body.
Subsequently, he saw the intricacies of these imperialist infiltrations
in his later assignment to the Unctad secretariat.
He was to author a profound investigative analysis entitled Iraq:
The Torments of Empire (also published by Citizens International).
One of the leading dramatis personae was the UNs chief envoy in
Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello. He was a scion of a wealthy Brazilian
family whose ancestors brought in slaves to work in their sugar
plantations in the 19th century. As Dr Clairmont emphasized, it
was misleading to believe that Vieira de Mello was recruited by
the CIA. That would be a mechanistic interpretation of history.
Rather, here was a senior UN civil servant whose class interests
meshed with theirs. He was a visceral anti-communist and he
made no bones about this. Before we proceed, it is well to remind
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a younger generation of the horrors perpetrated by the megaterrorist state to which operatives like Vieira de Mello rendered
their ignoble services.
This is how Jos Luis Zapatero, Spains former prime minister,
described the nature of the crime: The colonial invasion of
Iraq and the ugliest of lies of the lie machine that propagated
and justified these barbarous acts will forever remain among the
greatest and unpardonable crimes against humanity.
The pivotal role of Sergio Vieira de Mello in these unpardonable
crimes exhibits the extended network of quislings operating openly
within the United Nations. It is well, as Dr Clairmont noted, that
the world understands the facts that led to the execution of Vieira
de Mello and his collaborators at Canal House (the UNs Baghdad
headquarters) by the Iraqi resistance. The resistance had earlier
been aware of his daily collaborationist links with Paul Bremer,
the chief of US operations in Iraq. The attack against Canal House
was not an aberration, and it should be emphasized that Vieira de
Mello never sought to conceal his ideological propensities. In this
respect, he was above board, and well could Bremer contend: He
was one of the most loyal [sic] collaborators we ever had and I shall
go as far as to say that his services were indispensable. That is the
supreme accolade that the imperial master could confer on one of
its acolytes. Vieira de Mello, we ought not forget, had also been
deeply involved with US policies that dismembered Yugoslavia.
On the plus side of his balance sheet, Vieira de Mello did not deny
this but rather bellowed it loud and clear. In one of his infamous
utterances he quipped: My goal is to wipe out all vestiges of
communism in Iraq and ensure that henceforth it will always be
a part of the free world. And that from a senior UN civil servant.
Vieira de Mello never shunned the limelight. As a master of self-
A Tribute
and
Overview
21
promotion he grabbed publicity on every occasion. He had the gall

to utter this morsel of blasphemy not in his name but in that of the
United Nations. And there were none in the upper reaches of the
UN secretariat who reprimanded him for these mouthings. That
was the kind of lingo that the Pentagon and the CIA fulsomely
embraced. In his vulgarity, the arrogant Vieira de Mello had
become a poster boy of the empire. Well could Bremer note: he
had the makings of a great UN Secretary-General.
This was the same creature that robustly applauded NATOs
bombing of Kosovo and Belgrade. The same team of anti-communist
crusaders that he had corralled in Yugoslavia were shifted to Iraq.
Their goals were the same: to effectuate the dismemberment of
Iraq and ensure its permanent colonial occupation and the shift in
ownership of its resources to the big oil majors. His advocacy and
measures to implement the privatization of Iraqs vast petroleum
resources and to wipe out all vestiges of the public sector were the
last straw. It was tantamount to signing his death warrant. It is for
this reason that I consider Dr Clairmonts opus Iraq: The Torments
of Empire a classic that deserves to be read (it has been translated
into Arabic and widely distributed) and studied.
This investigative report that unmasked the workings of a Vieira
de Mello, which indubitably represent one of the crudest forms of
servitude to the empire, should be obligatory reading. Also, I am
not alone in my conviction that it should be read in conjunction
with, and indeed is inseparable from, Dr Clairmonts classic that
received worldwide acclaim and has also been translated into
several languages: The Rise and Fall of Economic Liberalism: The
Making of the Economic Gulag. The battles for self-determination,
decolonization and sovereignty are inseparable from our
unrelenting war against neoliberalism and its agents within
the UN secretariat, the World Bank, the IMF, the World Trade
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Organization and a multitude of non-governmental organizations

(NGOs).
The attempt to obliterate the liberation forces of Ho Chi Minh from
1946 until the ignominious debacle of the American expeditionary
force several decades later resulted in the massacre of 3 million
Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians. Joined in this act of
colonial genocide were the armies of South Vietnam, South Korea,
Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan and others. The French colonial
reconquest of Indochina, kicked off in 1946, would not have been
possible, given the dilapidated state of the French economy that
had been bled white by the Nazi occupation, without massive
US financial and military support. And here I draw the readers
attention to Dr Clairmonts gripping Dien Bien Phu: A Personal
Memoir. The reader will note that he served as a civilian officer in
the peace commission which supervised the Geneva Agreements
that followed the crushing of French colonialism in the battle
of Dien Bien Phu in April 1954. It was in Laos that he made the
lasting friendship of Prince Souphanovong, leader of the Pathet
Lao, and several leaders of the Vietminh including Ho Chi Minh
who received him personally. These were the crucial historical
forces that shaped him as a militant, a teacher and a writer.
I can do no better than to quote this revealing passage from the
memoir: It was in Indochina that I came face to face with a
multiplicity of Oradours3 that had been created by the [French
Expeditionary Corps] in its punitive strikes and its yearning to
reconquer. It was in Vietnam that Dr Clairmont saw at first hand
how France, as the power incarnate of mass colonial genocide,
had recruited and bestowed its citizenship to thousands of French
3 Oradour-sur-Glane is the small French village that the Nazis obliterated in reprisal against the French resistance.
A Tribute
and
Overview
23
Foreign Legion Nazi SS and Ukrainian fascists to pursue its imperial

butcheries.
This was the seminal occurrence that shaped Dr Clairmonts
implacable anti-imperialist perspective, incubated his unbending
hatred against injustice and impressed upon his young spirit the
historical necessity of armed struggle. Georges Bidault, former
Nazi collaborator, had abetted the management of the Indochina
genocide. He obsequiously spelt out the imperatives of the pursuit
of mass genocide to his patron and benefactor John Foster Dulles,
with his chilling demand that all Vietnamese communists and
their hangers-on must be eliminated ... In Indochina, we are
fighting for the preservation of the free world and democracy.
Dulles and his successor fully rose to the occasion. In a few years
the US conquest of Vietnam would commence.
The Nazi exterminators had posted on the iron gates of the
extermination camp in Auschwitz their credo: Arbeit macht Frei
(labour makes you free). Dr Clairmont had visited Auschwitz and I
well recall him telling his audience that this was Nazi hypocrisy for
nothing in their credo smacked of freedom. Nazism, as he always
stressed, was capitalism writ large. It was the alpha and omega of
the capitalist counter-revolution. The Nazi order was designed to
save capitalism from social revolution. It was capitalism once again
that harnessed slave labour to serve the interests of the capitalists
such as Alfred Krupp and his fellow industrialists. Capitalist wage
labour had become transmogrified into unpaid slave labour and
when these slaves were unable to work and make profits for their
Nazi slave masters, they were shovelled into the gas ovens. The
bourgeois architects of the American constitution extolled their
nostrum of what they baptized as life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness. We were not told whose lives, liberty for what and
happiness for whom.
24
i ont
History has not forgotten that George Washington and Thomas

Jefferson (the first and third presidents of the United States),
touted by the misinformed as the greatest of freedom fighters,
were slave owners. Nor has history forgotten that the American
constitution which proclaims the primacy of private property
and private ownership of the means of production, distribution
and exchange, with private profit and competition as its centrepiece
was hatched to maintain existing class structures with its
pathological excrescences. It is in this respect that Dr Clairmont
has always argued that the designation of Harold Laskis work
The American Democracy (whose critical content he valued) was
grotesquely misleading. To drive home the point, we should do
well to remember that American capitalism was founded on the
unpaid labour of millions of Blacks that prevailed for centuries
(slavery was abolished only in 1865, followed by a system of
peonage subsistence wages) and the savage expropriation of the
lands of Native Americans, which was orchestrated with their
physical extermination.
When writing these lines my attention was drawn to the explicit
comment of the police commissioner of Philadelphia at a meeting
on gun violence: Our streets are bleeding and they are bleeding
profusely.4 While it is a masterpiece of concision, it lays no claim
to novelty, for the fact has long been recognized by the Black
American freedom fighter Rap Brown: Violence is as American as
apple pie. He knew for he was to pay the ultimate price of freedom
with his skin for challenging the oppression of the system. The
profuse bleeding that the commissioner refers to is seen not only at
home but also abroad, inasmuch as foreign policy is an extension
of domestic policy. Some would appropriately call this profuse
bleeding the workings of state terrorism. Nowhere is this more
clearly articulated than by one of Reagans handlers, as quoted by
4 Quoted in the New York Times, 28 April 2012.
A Tribute
and
Overview
25
Dr Clairmont in one of his essays published here. In a discussion on

Cuba during a meeting of the National Security Council, General
Alexander Haig turned to Reagan and expostulated: You just give
me the word and Ill turn that fucking little island into a parking
lot.5
There are depths beyond depths and heights beyond heights. This
is true of the spiralling spectacle of depravity that was the display of
murdered resistance fighters in Afghanistan whose dismembered
bodies, amid the boisterous laughter of their killers, were exhibited
to be photographed. Is this a manifestation of the rule of law and
due process? Is this a manifestation of life, liberty and the pursuit
of happiness? The rape, ravages and rapacity to which colonial
peoples have been subjected are part of the march of perpetual
terror unleashed by colonial expeditionary forces since 1945. I
have never ceased to be captivated by the searing beauty of Dr
Clairmonts prose and his seething ire when he describes these
crimes and their perpetrators. Personally, I have used his references
in my lectures time and again. They are permanent mementoes
of crimes against humanity that ought never to be forgotten or
forgiven.
Here was the case of US staff sergeant James Massey, before the
Canadian Refugee Status Commission, describing how he and his
fellow Marines shot and murdered more than 30 unarmed men,
women and children in Iraq, including a boy who got out of his
car with his hands up: We fired at a cyclic rate of 500 bullets per
vehicle. The repetitive tide of these killer-confessions has been
reduced almost to the level of banality. Another killer from the 82nd
Airborne Division also confessed to the Canadian Commission:
We were told to consider all Arabs as potential terrorists ... but
5 Originally quoted in Nancy Reagan, My Turn: The Memoirs of Nancy Reagan, New
York, 1989.
26
i ont
were stimulated to encourage an attitude of hatred that gets your

blood boiling (italics mine).6
Dr Clairmonts life, teaching and militancy that continues its
unstoppable tempo have been dedicated to unmasking the crimes
of these blood-boiling techniques that are the warp and woof
of imperial exterminism. My Lai in Vietnam in 1968 was one of
the dozens of such unpardonable crimes. Writing to his senator,
a conscience-stricken Marine described the pleasures that the
members of his platoon derived from the spectacle of butchery
inflicted with a 50-calibre machine gun on a young woman.7 He
detailed how they ecstatically stamped their feet on the ground and
roared in laughter when the woman was knocked 30 feet by the
impact.
In sum, the 347 victims of My Lai, overwhelmingly women and
children, were not people. In the idiom of their killers soul-brothers
in the SS ranks, they were Untermenschen, or sub-human species.
These are words that not merely express the most excruciating of
human agony but also, as Dr Clairmont never ceases to remind us,
exemplify the nature of the bloodlust of an enemy that must be
fought. It reveals the depth and dimensions of his humanism.
David Ben Gurion himself, an impenitent Zionist, raised the crucial
question regarding the dispossessed Palestinians: We have come
and have stolen their country. Why should they accept it? The
short answer is that no oppressed people have ever accepted the
bestiality of colonial rule and the indignities that are one of its central
components. And that is because colonialism is incompatible with
human dignity. Through their heroic resistance, the Palestinian
6 See Frederic F. Clairmont, Iraq: The Nemesis of Imperialism, Citizens International, 2005.
7 US Congressional Record, Deposition of Senator Mathias, 20 March 1975.
A Tribute
and
Overview
27
people in the occupied lands, including the biggest open-air gulag

in history that is Gaza, have given their unequivocal answer.
Nor should we forget that Ben Gurion, an active collaborator in
the Anglo-American toppling of Dr Mohammad Mossadeqs
government in Iran, was an active co-conspirator in the setting
up of one of the most brutal terrorist forces of all times, the Shahs
Savak secret police. As the researches of Dr Clairmont showed,
Savak, as conceived and executed by Ben Gurion and the CIA, was
practically a carbon copy of the Nazi Gestapo secret police and the
SS military fighting units. Tens of thousands of workers, peasants,
students, intellectuals and militants were rounded up, murdered,
disappeared or sent to concentration camps in the Shahs Iran.8
The subsequent killing fields bore similarities to that of Pinochet
in Chile, save that the butchery was on a far vaster scale. In his
words, Ben Gurions Savak, as it was contemptuously labelled
in Iran, became the training ground, in the years following the
Shahs return, for mass repression and torture. Training camps
were swiftly set up within Iran and in Israel whose instructors and
torture techniques were transferred to the School of the Americas
in Panama. Ben Gurions Savak was now globalized in the service
of imperialism.
In conclusion, I might add that Dr Clairmonts research work, both
within and outside the United Nations, embraces a broad spectrum
of the criminal compacts of imperialism. What I have done is to
illustrate the interlinkages of imperialism and its dependence
on foreign mercenaries and institutions such as NATO and the
European Union as analyzed in his works. Without such jackals,
US imperialism could never have achieved its goals. But even with
their aid, its role as the master of imperial ceremonies is swiftly
8 Frederic F. Clairmont, BP: The Unfinished Crimes and Plunder of Anglo-American
Imperialism, Citizens International, 2010, pp. 28-30.
28
i ont
drawing to an end. American capitalism, with its endemic debts

and deficits straddling decades, would never have been able to
pursue its wars of colonial pillage without foreign money. Chinas
purchases of US assets and Treasury bonds already outstrip $1.3
trillion. In short, the militaro-corporate gulag is, as Dr Clairmont
writes, living off borrowed time and borrowed money.
It is borrowed money that it will never be able to reimburse. It is
this factor apart from the onrushing economic crisis of which the
collapse of the eurozone is but one example joined to the resistance
of those that it has failed to colonize, which will contribute to its
collapse. That remains one of the pivotal teachings of this inspired
writer and greatest of teachers. A reading and understanding of his
two major essays in this book will take us a long way in grasping
the lineaments and direction of imperialism. But it will also give us
hope that where there is oppression there will also be resistance.
29
Globalization: The Purgatory of Delusions

The world must know that the United States is going to maintain our
military superiority with our Armed Forces.
Barack Obama, 5 January 2012
Washington has become the torture and political murder capital of the world.
Noam Chomsky, 1979
I only had 1 billionaire. He had 18.
Newt Gingrich, attributing his defeat (2012) by Mitt
Romney for the Republican presidential nomination
to the role of big money
30
We must never forget that the triumph of Chinas Revolution is the most
momentous event in the history of our people that straddles more than 6,000 years
of recorded history. It is the greatest of events as it is the concrete expression not only
of the liberation of our people from the chains of class oppression of feudalism and
landlordism, capitalism and imperialism, but also because it is the supreme spiritual
revolution that liberates our people from the vile, reactionary oppression of religious
bigotry, superstition, ignorance and opens before us golden vistas of freedom, science
and human creativity for the benefit of all our people on a scale that will have no
precedent in the history of the world. No nation on earth has ever experienced the
sacrifices and losses that we have suffered. We were bled but we fought back and
destroyed the enemy. We have achieved these victories through the decades of the
long struggle of our Peoples Liberation Army of workers and peasants, and the cost
of this victory has been tens of millions of lives. What history will never fail, however,
to remember is that the cruel price of exploitation and discrimination, national
humiliation and indignities that our people endured at the hands of foreign imperialists
and their Kuomintang agents for so long have come to an end. The victory of our
Revolution is not only the most sublime and far-reaching that China has ever known,
but it is also a victory of internationalism. The revolutionary victory of our PLA and
workers and peasants will always be one of our greatest of joys and happiness; and one
that we shall now share with all of humanity.
Zhou Enlai, 1949
Private capital tends to become concentrated in a few hands, partly because of
competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and
the increasing division of labour encourage the formation of larger units of production
at the expense of the smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of
private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a
democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative
bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by
private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the
legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact
sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population.
Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly
or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus
extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen
to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.
Albert Einstein, 1949
Men die, but the plutocracy is immortal; and it is necessary that fresh
generations should be trained to its service.
Sinclair Lewis, 1934
If you took the greed out of Wall Street all youd have left is pavement.
Robert Reich
Globalization: The Purgatory
of
Delusions
31
his essay is concerned with throwing into relief some

fundamental issues that confront humanity. The two
fundamental questions relate to the nature of private
ownership of the means of production and the democratization
of our societies: What is the future of international capitalism as it
has evolved over the last five decades? Will its hegemon or, better
still, its plutocracies and their irrepressibly corrupt propertied
system continue their rule, and in what specific social and political
forms? The questions are not limited merely to the traditional
capitalist economies but apply also to those two great countries
that were the inheritors of the October Revolution and for a long
time were the banner bearers of socialism. I am referring to Russia
whose society is now best characterized by one word, oligarchy
and China with its millionaires that have now escalated into
billionaires and the divisive social and political struggles that are
some of the features of Chinese society.
The raw numbers of the millions seeking full-time work but who
cannot find it exemplify the mass deprivation, misery and indignity
to which capitalism subjects its victims. These numbers and the
horrors they evoke have entered even the corporate media and
they can no longer be concealed.
What do we mean by economic crisis? Crisis for whom? And at
what social cost? And what has been its impact on divergent social
classes? For the big-time capitalist roaders, to use the picturesque
idiom of Chairman Mao, there is no crisis. The Forbes rich list
(March 2012) depicts the magnitude of these behemoths (see
table).
32
The Worlds Richest Individuals

Name
Carlos Slim Helu and family
Bill Gates
Warren Buffett
Bernard Arnault
Amancio Ortega
Larry Ellison
Eike Batista
Country
Mexico
United States
United States
France
Spain
United States
Brazil
Net Worth (US$)

69 billion
61 billion
44 billion
41 billion
37.5 billion
36 billion
30 billion
Note: Net worth calculated March 2012

Source: Forbes.com, The Worlds Billionaires
The aggregate fortune of the Big Seven is more than $315 billion,
and the leader of the pack is Mexicos Carlos Slim ($69 billion)
with over a fifth of the total. Reflect well and long on these
comparative numbers. To grasp the magnitude of these fortunes
let us consider the case of socialist Cuba. While its GDP of around
$60 billion is less than the fortune of one Mexican, Slim, it is one of
the most egalitarian societies, whereas over one-third of Mexicos
population is living below the poverty line, according to the World
Bank. What we are seeing is the unfolding reality of capitalism that
gives us the concrete face of capital. These seven men that are the
incarnation of capital come from five different countries, and three
of them are American.
In these representatives of capital can be traced the trajectory of
corporate accumulation and concentration and the class content
of neoliberalism, the ideology of globalization. It is against this
background that we shall examine the unfolding of the economic
convulsions of the system related to overproduction and currency
of
Delusions
33
wars and the intensified struggle for ever-larger world market

shares.
The question is no longer if the euro, which is the single currency
of the eurozone, will collapse, but when. Economic growth has not
only decelerated universally but, in real terms, has already reached
sub-zero levels in the United States and the European Union.
Global indebtedness has long exceeded economic growth. Since
1988, the United States has shifted from being the worlds largest
34
net creditor to the worlds largest debtor. And that debt keeps
marching on.
The US government, household and corporate debt outstrips $50
trillion a number which is many times the size of its national
output. Worldwide debt now surpasses $100 trillion. The boom
that turned to bust in the autumn of 2008 with the collapse of
Lehman Brothers had been financed by debt.
The world recalls the illusions that this debt-fuelled boom
enshrined, as encapsulated in the fatuous words of the then Irish
Prime Minister Bertie Ahern: The boom is getting boomier.
These were not simply the words of a feckless politician who
cradled the delusion that capitalist boom-bust cycles were things
of the past. They were part of the mythology that the ideologues
of capitalism what Marx called the systems prizefighters had
always peddled.
of
Delusions
35
In the shortlived boom of the 1920s, the belief that capitalism had
created new and unbeatable stratagems that ended once and for all
the ups and downs of market fluctuations proved the mother of
all illusions. The system, we were told, was foolproof, its destiny
to move onwards and upwards a thing of fixity and permanence.
But in October 1929, one of the most savage and decisive years
in the history of capitalism, the illusions fell as if in a thundering
avalanche.
Just before the thunderclap, the Committee on Recent Economic
Changes under the chairmanship of Herbert Hoover (both a
politician and a Wall Street speculator) had ventured the arrogant
prophecy that economically we have a boundless field before us;
there are new wants that will make way endlessly for newer wants
as fast as they are satisfied ... we seem only to have touched the
fringe of our potentialities. Like Moses on Pisgah, the American
capitalist and his emissaries beheld the Promised Land.
But these dreams were to be smashed to smithereens immediately
thereafter. The Great Depression, as it was now labelled, became
universal in its dimensions, except, as Sir Arthur Lewis reminds
us, in the Soviet Union. What we then saw were the breadlines,
the derelict plants and people with placards that read Mister can
you spare a dime? What eventually saved the system was not
Roosevelts New Deal but war and the preparations for war that
provided a super boost to American capitalism. Indeed, the US
stock market began its steep rise only following the crushing of the
Wehrmacht at Stalingrad in January 1943.
With the onrush of the current convulsion, one sees the stark
fact that the bourgeoisie has lost faith in its ability to face up to
the horrors unleashed by mass deprivation and misery. But the
dogma is still being peddled that the market economy is the
36
most successful mechanism for creating wealth. It is not only

the economic system but also the political system of bourgeois
parliamentary democracy that has come to the end of its tether.
of
Delusions
37
This explains the massive upsurge of the Indignados in Spain and

the Occupy Wall Street movement that is unique in the annals of
American history a mass movement that has gained universal
ascendancy. Their existence and raison dtre are testimony to the
apoplexy of the system and the unstoppable convulsions of what
to many is a giant casino run amok.
There are few even in China today including its billionaires who
would utter the slogan of Deng Xiaoping in public: To get rich is
glorious. There was nothing novel in this slogan since it was first
coined by Adolphe Thiers (1797-1877) (Enrichissez-vous: get
rich) during the revolution of 1848. Precisely the same counterrevolutionary that crushed the Commune in blood in 1871.
The system, it is all too apparent, is no longer designed to create
wealth but to destroy it. By end-2011, $6.3 trillion had been wiped
out from world stock markets. The crash of Lehman Brothers and
the ensuing financial debacle wiped out the equivalent of more than
a fifth of US GDP. Economic growth in real terms in both the US
and the eurozone has already hit sub-zero levels. The downgrading
of France and seven other countries in the eurozone by the rating
agencies and Chinas Dagong is more than the writing on the wall.
This raises not only a question mark over the life expectancy of
the wobbly single currency, but also wider and no-less-ominous
questions surrounding the fate of the debt-ridden dollar. It is
well that we should add a crucial point because the expansion of
global liquidity, known as quantitative easing, has been described
by financial analyst Anthony Crescenzi as monetary morphine.
In increasing liquidity, the US Federal Reserve and other central
banks are pushing money into riskier and riskier assets, including
junk bonds and shares. This is the stratagem that led to the crash
of October 1987 and the big meltdown in the autumn of 2008.
38
Well did the British poet Elisabeth Rowe portray the spirit of
desperation of the exploited in her poem:
The 1 per cent in close communion
Enjoy a blissful fiscal union
But outside the pearly gates, hell bent
Are camped the 99 per cent.
Indeed, these lines capture the spirit of revolt against the so-called
masters of the universe whose financial shenanigans need no
publicity. For the first time in the history of the United States a
mass social movement, whose momentum shows no signs of
flagging, is directing its social firepower with laser intensity at the
bastion of the wholly corrupt financial power that is Wall Street. A
bastion that is beleaguered and in which fear now reigns.
rowth of capital concentration is one of the most

conspicuous traits of capital accumulation. This is
seen in the annihilative power of the Top 200 megacorporations. At the onset of the 1990s, there were some 37,000
multinationals with 170,000 affiliates whose tentacles bestrode
the world economy. The locus of effective power, however, lies
elsewhere. In the colourful imagery of the Bangkok Bank Monthly
Review (November 1981), there are approximately 200 of these
companies that are the fearsome giants clutching world business
in their grip. More accurately, by its throat. Here stands the
pyramid of the dictatorship of capital from whence have sprung
the globes over 1,000 billionaires. The top 200 referred to by the
BBMR have themselves undergone a wrenching metamorphosis
over the last 30 years. There are those that have come and gone.
This testifies to the implacable logic of motion of capital, namely
that the accumulation and disaccumulation of capital experience
no respite. This is what Marx meant when he said that one capitalist
of
Delusions
39
kills another. It has nothing to do with creative destruction, as

Schumpeter called it, but destruction pure and simple.
By the last quarter of the 19th century, concentration and
centralization of capital had ceased to be shackled to a single national
economy. It had traversed the seven seas. This was glimpsed in
the merger of the American Tobacco Company with the Imperial
Tobacco Company, which spawned the British American Tobacco
Company. James Buchanan Duke (1857-1925), architect of the
ATC and master of successive waves of concentration, grasped the
lineaments of the merger-and-acquisition drive as pioneered by
Standard Oil of New Jersey: If John D. Rockefeller can do what he
is doing in oil, why should I not do it in tobacco? And so he did
and the infamous Tobacco Trust was born.
Almost all in the Top 200 are holding companies interconnected in
their power structures through interlocking directorates and a wide
assortment of corporate stratagems, pricing and output policies.
Massive economic concentration is matched by geographical
concentration in a few countries: the US, China, Germany, the
UK, France, Japan and Switzerland.
What their sales and market capitalization do not illuminate,
however, is the extent to which they are inextricably coupled to the
machinery of the state apparatus, which has played and continues
to play a vital role in their growth and market aggrandizement
through central bank stimulus packages, tax breaks, subsidies,
tariffs, etc. that amount to hundreds of billions of dollars. A point
made by the Fabian J.K. Galbraith: When the modern corporation
acquires power over markets, power in the community, power
over the state and power over belief, it is a political instrument,
different in form and degree but not in kind from the state itself.
40
Let us extend this argument a little further. The theoretical

foundations of capital concentration were luminously dissected
in Chapter 25 of Marxs Capital, entitled The General Law of
Capitalist Accumulation. It will forever remain one of the greatest
scientific contributions for understanding the motive force of
capitalism.
The appropriation of the production of surplus value, or the
manufacture of profits, as Marx teaches, is the absolute law of
the capitalist mode of production. Capital accumulation works
through competition and technology that boosts productivity. In
so doing it slashes commodity prices, trims the labour force and
curbs costs, becoming an instrument of class power.
In this competitive war the bigger capitals and their capitalists beat
the smaller capitals and their capitalists. Concentration is thus
the upshot of this war that ends in the ruin and absorption of the
smaller capitalists whose banks, mines, factories and assets pass into
the hands of the larger capitalists. Competition thus becomes the
major catalytic force; it signalizes the destruction of one capitalist
by another; it is the spawning ground of monopoly. Competition
generates monopoly. In a word: monopolistic capitalism.
Not merely is concentration limited to a specific sector; extension
of the powers of capital accumulation across sectors has given rise
to what came to be known as conglomerates. The RJ Reynolds
Centenary Report gives us the dynamics of the annexationist
process that crosses sectoral lines: First, having captured onethird of the US cigarette market, the company could see a point of
diminishing returns for growth potential. Adopting an unrestricted
approach towards diversification [i.e., the drive to conglomeration]
RJR moved into entirely new areas, shipping and petroleum, on
the theory that it made sense, where appropriate, to apply cash to
of
Delusions
41
any well established business. Expressed in more concrete terms,

it means directing corporate savings and investment towards
mergers and acquisitions so as to ensure ever-larger shares in the
world market.
What Marx emphasizes is that the accumulation of capital is
abetted by what was then the emergent force of finance capital and
credit embodied in the joint-stock company that was still in its
embryonic stages when Capital appeared in 1867. In a masterly
formulation he revealed the role of the financial service sector:
The credit and finance system furtively creeps in as the humble
assistant of accumulation, drawing into the hands of individual
or associated capitalists, by invisible threads, the money resources
[i.e., savings] which lie scattered in larger or smaller amounts
over the surface of society; but it soon becomes a new and terrible
weapon in the battle of competition, and it is finally transformed
into an enormous mechanism for the centralization of capital.
What is so dazzling is the striking modernity of that analysis of
the mutations at work within the entrails of finance capital. Just
as the kitten becomes the cat, smaller capitalists aspire to become
bigger capitalists. In this historical unfolding that is, the universe
of becoming capital accumulation at national and world levels
burgeons to a hitherto unimaginable magnitude. This process
attains its culminating power stemming from one of the greatest
financial innovations of all times, the joint-stock company.
This has metamorphosed into the massive complex engines of
contemporary finance capitalism. Indubitably, this is one of
the supreme contributions of Marx to science and not merely
economic theory as it highlights the relationship between
concentration and centralization of capital as it enables the
industrial capitalist to extend the scale of his operations through
42
mergers and acquisitions that bulldoze the road to larger market

shares and, in turn, greater accumulation. Finance capital working
through the joint-stock company becomes the catalyst of this
process.
The huge strides of concentration and centralization of capital
define the magnitude and ramifications of ownership and control.
It must also be seen not merely as the economic emanation of the
accumulation of assets, but as inextricably related to the political
process. Hence the inseparability of economics and politics. This is
what Harold Laski meant when he said that since liberty is always a
function of power, the fewer the capitalists who own or manipulate
that power, the smaller the number of those to whom liberty has
any significance.
Thus, the sum total of concentrated economic power that is, the
combined individualized power of global capital is anathema to
the realization of a truly democratic economic order whose essence
is the active and sustained participation of the direct producers in
the creation and equitable distribution of collective wealth.
Recent findings by Andrew Haldane of the Bank of England reveal
the extent of concentration among banks in the United Kingdom.
At the start of the 20th century, the UKs largest three banks assets
accounted for 7% of GDP. By the middle of the century they
reached 27%. By its end, they hit 75%. By 2007, assets of the big
three banks had soared to 200% of GDP. Other countries tell a
similar tale. Size and banking concentration had hit the roof.
The financial swindlers were able to multiply their funds by means
of leverage. In general terms, leverage means the exercise of
power over individuals or institutions. In finance, it means the
capacity to invest huge sums of borrowed money with a much
of
Delusions
43
smaller investment of capital. That is, you borrow one dollar and
invest $20. Inversely, deleveraging, that ugly five-syllable word,
means debt reduction.
The question was asked: how could the financial sector, in the
case of the US, generate more than two-fifths of US corporate
profits shortly before the crisis of 2007-08? How could a sector
that was said to allocate capital and manage risk generate so much
of the business profits of capitalisms biggest economy? Banks
leverage ratio is around 20 to 1, and in many cases even this has
been surpassed. It is based on borrowed money and the massive
deployment of derivatives, instruments which Warren Buffett
excoriated as financial weapons of mass destruction. It reveals
the extent to which such banking innovations, operating in a
totally deregulated milieu, have set the stage for the widespread
criminality that is the defining mode of contemporary finance
capital.
This explains why banking assets topped five times GDP in the UK
just prior to the Lehman Brothers blowout. After the krach these
assets are concentrated mainly in what is now dubbed a couple
of too-big-to-fail institutions. Boosting profits through leverage
has transformed the system. Leverage is a mechanism for boosting
equity returns or profits. It is a device for gearing up the balance
sheet. Doubling leverage from 10 to 20 generates massive returns.
Leverage or gearing, as the British call it, allows shareholders to
profit markedly when the market swings upwards while avoiding
the downside when it turns down.
The Bank of England researchers have demonstrated that leverage
returns on equity at the start of the 20th century were in single
figures; by the close of the century they were averaging close to
20%. At the height of the boom, preceding the 2007-08 meltdown,
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equity returns hit 30%. Virtually all of this surge in equity returns
was due to increased leverage. Moving hand in hand with this has
been the rise in volatility, or sustained fluctuations. While the
variability of banks returns on assets has roughly trebled over the
past century, the variability of returns on equity has risen between
six and sevenfold.
The perils that this has created, as noted by the UK Independent
Commission on Banking (the Vickers Commission), are that
volatile banks enhance the risks to their balance sheets that are
interconnected with the national economy. The median cost of
financial meltdowns, where the liabilities of the banks are passed
on to the taxpayers, was the equivalent of 3% of GDP. What this
means is that the profits of the banks are privatized but the losses
are socialized, i.e., loaded onto the backs of the taxpayers. The
liabilities of banks become off-balance-sheet government debt.
This is what financial journalist Martin Wolf meant when he argued
that it makes the bosses of the banks the most highly paid but least
regulated of capitalists. And hence the conclusion of Haldane that
for UK banks this is an implicit subsidy that amounts to at least
tens of billions of pounds yearly. For international banks the figure
soars to hundreds of billions of dollars yearly. If this is not legal
criminalization, then what is?
Looking over a broad time span of decades, the Bank of England
researchers have lucidly sketched out the trajectory of leverage
strategy. As unlimited liability was phased out, leverage climbed
from 3-4 in the middle of the 19th century to around 5-6 at its
close. As extended liability was phased out, leverage pursued its
relentless advance into the 20th century. By its end it outstripped
20. At the end of the first decade of the 21st century, it attained 30
or more. The road to capitalist riches via the banking system is no
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longer one based on long-term horizons and planning. Those days

are over; short-termism now rules the day. High-speed financial
trading is done in micro-seconds and there can be no such thing
as long-term planning when the average share is owned for 20
minutes. Average shareholding periods for UK and US banks fell
from around 3 years in 1998 to around 3 months by 2008. Haldane
once again: Banking became, quite literally, quarterly capitalism.
Today, the average bank is owned by an investor with a timehorizon considerably less than a year. In fact, less than 24 hours.
he criminalization of finance capital covers a vast spectrum

of assets and activities that run into trillions of dollars
yearly. Claims of financial fraud against corporations like
Citigroup, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs have been settled
for pennies on the dollar, with no admission of wrongdoing. Or as
the New York Times editorialized: Executives who ran companies
that made, packaged and sold trillions of dollars in toxic mortgages
and mortgage-backed securities remain largely unscathed. And
remember at what cost, because this financial rape wiped out
trillions of dollars in household wealth and rendered millions
jobless.
The dividing line between legality and non-legality is blurred. They
are all an integral part of the empire of finance capitalism, and
hence this criminalization is a component of globalization. Among
the most salient sectors and the list is by no means exhaustive
are:
the global marketing of narcotics and prostitution;
money laundering;
insider trading;
tax avoidance via tax havens;
trading in derivatives.
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In all of these major sectors the multinational banking system

plays a paramount role. Globalization has been one of its driving
forces. According to JPMorgan Chase, the estimated earnings
of US multinationals in foreign subsidiaries on which they have
not paid taxes amounted to $1.375 trillion in 2011. The familiar
fairytale that the free play of unrestricted market forces maximizes
the allocation of resources is belied by the historical record.
One of the richest sources of concealed corporate profits is the
business of drugs (the US is the worlds largest consumer) and
prostitution whose profits are laundered through international
banking networks. The yearly turnover, according to a recent UN
estimate, was around $500 billion, a figure I reckon to be a gross
underestimate. What is significant is not merely the size of the sums,
however, but that it is a globalized business galvanized with the
complicity of several leading actors: the police and the military, the
politicians, the bankers and their legion of financial intermediaries,
and the various echelons of the traffickers themselves.
Certainly, there exists a mountain of anti-drug legislation, but
as is well known, this impressive body of laws has been largely
circumvented. The drug barons are not alone in the business, and
that is why a former Mexican president sarcastically described the
law as purely cosmetic, by which he implied that the law itself and
its lawmakers are marketable commodities.
Indeed, Mexico reveals the dynamics, complexity and scope of
this industry and its relationship with the bureaucracy at all levels.
These are not nations within nations, as they have often been
portrayed, but criminal entities that run parallel to the republics
federal government, the police and military. Their corporate
structures are part of the provincial and central bureaucracies,
the Senate, the Chamber of Deputies and the ranks of the armed
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forces. They are cogs in the giant wheel of profit extraction. These
have become, in many cases, the paid servants of the drug barons.
Through the normal flows of capital accumulation the profits of
this illegal traffic have been morphed into legal transactions, i.e.,
normal capitalist businesses.
They have become fully mature and sophisticated corporate
organizations whose tentacles extend into every niche of Mexican
capitalism. The drug barons now part of the ruling elite constitute
an economic conglomerate straddling a vast spectrum of legal
and illegal companies. Where one ends and the other begins is
impossible to demarcate. They have extended their control of the
marketing chain (which is known as the marketing dollar) from
the original raw material of cocaine and marijuana to the banking,
insurance and transportation sectors.
These linkages have been elucidated by the researches of Robert
Stout (in his article Do the United States and Mexico really want
the drug war to succeed?), who deserves to be quoted at length:
Their armed components make their competition deadlier than
competitors in other industries, but their methods of operation
duplicate those of legitimate corporations: they seek (or buy)
government support, network a well-organized retail trade, and
invest their profits in condominiums, the stock market, and highvisibility consumer items. Their corporate structures, divided into
distinct operations and with well-defined chains of command,
enable them to replace any executive who is arrested or killed
without that materially affecting production or sales.
The profits amassed from this traffic, unlike funds brought in by
legal corporations, are obviously untaxed and unreported. This is
non-accountability in its highest expression and hence does not
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redound to the benefit of the four-fifths of the population that are

living at or near the poverty level.
We now pass to insider trading, which is also one of the most
glaring manifestations of the criminalization of finance capital. It
refers to an economic agent having foreknowledge of the trajectory
whether upwards or downwards of assets that he then trades in
for his personal enrichment. It places that person at an advantage
over others that are competing on the open market. Over the last
three decades this criminal activity has burgeoned at a staggering
rate, indicating the extent to which markets are rigged by insider
traders.
There should be no doubt that stock markets are essentially casinos
for betting big sums of money. However, as one investor in the
Shanghai stock exchange put it, the difference between Macao the
worlds biggest casino joint and official stock markets is that in
the former, insider trading does not exist but in the latter, it is the
normal play of the market. As with money laundering, it is illegal
and punishable by law. But as research and legal procedure have
demonstrated, only a minuscule fraction of these deals ever come
before the judiciary. The global scale of these secret and criminal
transactions is estimated to amount to billions of dollars.
The hedge fund operators and the big investment banks are crucial
actors in swapping information on company earnings in exchange
for tips and cash payments. A recent case involving seven hedge
fund portfolio managers in Wall Street illuminates the techniques
deployed. According to the prosecutor, this circle of friends, as
they dubbed themselves, swapped information with investment
banks regarding earnings at technology companies in exchange
for financial handouts. Insider trading is the privileged domain
of the mega-rich and its activities straddle the banks, the pension
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and mutual funds and the entire gamut of financial services, not to
speak of the upper echelons of political office holders.
Turning to tax havens, what one sees is that these are legal
institutions which the mega-rich use to conceal their wealth
and defraud governments. They have been called a big-time
tax avoidance machine or tax paradises and are not subject to
regulation in most cases. These are where the mega-rich and the
worlds biggest corporations conceal their balance sheets. Here
again one finds the hedge funds and the pension funds deeply
entrenched in these locations. And so are the likes of Mexican drug
barons and the mafia.
The Cayman Islands in the Caribbean are legendary in this
respect. In another illustration of capitalisms gross and criminal
misallocation of resources, a tiny number of what are known as
jumbo directors sit on the boards of hundreds of hedge funds
as demand for their services has grown to stratospheric heights in
recent years. At least four individuals hold more than 100 nonexecutive directorships each, and 14 have more than 70. Each
directorship pulls down more than $30,000 yearly. Merely one of
these alpha-directorships, as they brand themselves, is listed on
the boards of these Cayman money mountains, as they are also
called. The pervasive and concentrated role and power of hedge
funds is seen in the fact that they account for over nine-tenths of the
financial service sector in the Cayman Islands. This is the throbbing
parasitical face of finance capitalism whose gargantuan concealed
profits lie outside the realm of accountability. The Cayman Islands
tax paradise is the location of about two-thirds of the $2.3 trillion
globe-girdling hedge fund industry, with pension funds and other
financial services among the leading protagonists.
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We now highlight the role of the derivatives market, which Warren

Buffett and others consider to be one of the major criminal agencies
of finance capital. The September 2011 arrest of Kweku Adoboli, a
trader with the Swiss bank UBS, for allegedly concealing $3 billion
trading losses on UBSs Delta One equity derivatives desk, throws
into relief the toxic nature of the derivatives market (whose size is
$700 trillion) and the role of the banks in this market. His arrest
came on the third anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers.
The $3 billion lost through a gamblers click of a computer mouse
is a phenomenal amount of money although it is only around 4%
of UBSs shareholder equity.
It is well to note that Adoboli was described by a top UBS executive
as a terrorist. Whatever the merits or demerits of that expletive
may be, recall, as the Financial Times reminds us, that the plays
of an Adoboli spring not from rogue traders, but rather from
a systemic and systematic failure to fully understand the toxic
exposure of banks, as exemplified by the UBS loss of $50 billion
due to speculation on toxic mortgage-backed securities in 2008.
However, it was depositors life savings that were wiped out UBS
itself was too big to fail.
UBS had to be bailed out by the taxpayers, and that included the
depositors. Thus the depositors and the taxpayers had to pay for
this bailout. It is important to remember that in the crash of 2008
three of the worlds biggest universal banks Citicorp, UBS and
the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) crumbled. But they did not
collapse as Lehman Brothers did, because the masters of finance
capital and the bourgeois state deemed them too big to fail as
the international consequences would have been catastrophic. It
was a question of the dimensions of their combined balance sheets
that were three times larger than that of Lehman Brothers. Their
collapse would have led to a depressionary tsunami of incalculable
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consequences. What the episode unmasked was that derivatives

had not been used to manage risk but to conceal it.
Let me repeat that the derivatives industry, according to the Bank
for International Settlements (BIS), is a $700 trillion industry,
many times the size of world GDP. The big world banks account
for about $450 trillion of the contracts, notably futures and swaps.
The value of derivative instruments stems from an underlying asset
like an interest rate or a pile of mortgages.
Derivatives, as a report by the US Comptroller of the Currency
noted, were at the epicentre of the 2008 financial meltdown that
led to the foreclosure of tens of thousands of homes. The agents
of the derivatives market had sold billions in credit default swaps
as insurance on mortgage-backed securities. These were given top
A ratings by the rating agencies. We are all aware of the sordid
criminal story the tragedy is not yet over of this big-time
gambling and the thousands of broken lives that followed in its
wake.
Who are the big players? The derivatives market is dominated by
four of the biggest US banks: Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JPMorgan
Chase and Bank of America. Credit default swaps comprise
over nine-tenths of the total credit derivatives market. Adoboli,
call him what you will, was part of a giant speculative engine of
money-making. The world has not forgotten that it was the same
UBS which had speculated and lost $50 billion on toxic mortgagebacked securities and was subsequently bailed out by taxpayer
money. This is what Philip Stevens of the Financial Times meant
when he said the big bonuses paid to the big banking executives
are as much a symptom as a cause of the problems of the City in
London. This problem has not even been addressed by the postcrash reforms.
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Britains bankers can overpay themselves because they still operate

with the benefit of a massive state subsidy in a market with limited
competition. What this highlights is that the profits of banks and
their mega-bonuses depend heavily on the largesse of the taxpayers.
This is because banks have too-big-to-fail guarantees from the
state. What has been called a policy of free insurance is, in effect, a
public subsidy as this permits the banks to borrow cheaply (given
low interest rates) and lend more dearly in the market. In this way
the prodigious profits of the banks become a feeder base for the
lavish executive bonuses.
Returning to Adoboli, I would agree with those critics who argue
that the designation rogue traders sheds little light on those
that gamble on the derivatives markets. The Delta One desk is
an instrument of speculation described with great lucidity by the
Financial Times: Placed in a grey area between proprietary and
for-client trading, these desks deploy client assets to match certain
benchmarks for their customers tracking the price of gold, for
example. Any excess profits generated by providing that exposure
can be kept by the bank: a perfect incentive to take on extra risk
... This is part and parcel of the financial criminality of so-called
risk management. Adoboli belongs to the cabal of such big-time
gamblers as Nick Leeson, who crashed Barings, and the biggest of
them all, Jerome Kerviel, who concealed $5 billion in the Delta
One desk of Societ Gnrale, one of the big three French banks.
Nevertheless, the likes of Kerviel, Adoboli and Leeson are still very
small cogs in the mammoth wheel of high-octane finance. Adoboli
may have been branded an economic terrorist, but this raises the
question as to the roots of this terrorism. We ought not forget
that the richest 25 hedge fund investors in the world in 2011 earned
more than $25 billion, or about six times as much as all the chief
executives of companies in the S&P stock index combined.
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This was part of the financial engineering which had been extolled
by that leading apparatchik of finance capital Alan Greenspan,
former chairman of the US Federal Reserve. He had the gall to
comment, as the Financial Times reported, that the growth of
trade in complex financial investments represented new and more
effective tools of risk management that made the economy more
stable. Greenspan was a hybrid between a high-level functionary
and a Wall Street operator. The borderline between the interests
of the Federal Reserve and Goldman Sachs is blurred. It reminds
me of the verdict of Charlie Wilson of General Motors made in
1947: What is good for the United States is good for GM and vice
versa.
The activities of a derivatives trader must be seen in the context
of the speculation on the foreign exchange market, where the
daily turnover exceeds $4 trillion. This massive base for financial
speculation was highlighted in January 2012 by the resignation of
the chairman of the Swiss National Bank (SNB) Philipp Hildebrand.
His resignation stemmed from the currency speculation undertaken
by his wife, who had bought $500,000 in August 2011 because the
dollar was, in her words, almost ridiculously cheap (relative to
the Swiss franc). Less than a month later the SNB intervened to
weaken the franc in order to prevent a slowdown in Swiss exports.
Due to the resulting depreciation of the franc, Mrs Hildebrand was
able to net a profit of $60,000. Unlike Adoboli, however, she was
not labelled a terrorist.
Another immense source of misallocation of resources, or what is
in fact the disaccumulation of capital, is seen in the relationship
between the state sector and the private corporate sector for the
enrichment of the latter. It is theft of a staggering magnitude but it
is underpinned by the state apparatus. Here we cover the economic
crimes involved in the bailout of Wall Street and the too-big-to-fail
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institutions, the largest taxpayer-financed bailout in the history of

the world, with virtually no strings attached. Who got the very big
money through the Federal Reserve bailout? How much money
did they get? And on what terms?
Indeed, due to the audit report of the US Government
Accountability Office (GAO), it was disclosed that the Fed had
provided a phenomenal $16 trillion in total financial assistance to
every major financial institution in the country as well as several
rich individuals. What is important to note here is the imbrication
of economic and political power, for the GAO report revealed that
many of the directors of the 12 Federal Reserve Banks came from
precisely the same financial institutions that the Fed was charged
with regulating. The GAOs findings showed, moreover, that at
least 18 current and former Fed board members were affiliated
with banks and companies that received emergency loans from the
Federal Reserve during the financial crisis. What this amounted
to was that the bank regulators were the same people who were
being regulated. This is one of the most illuminating examples of
the normal financial trafficking between finance capitalists and the
state apparatus.
While the rich and powerful were too big to fail and were given
an endless supply of cheap credit, noted Senator Bernie Sanders,
ordinary Americans, by the tens of millions, were allowed to fail.
They lost their homes. They lost their jobs. They lost their life
savings. And, they lost their hope for the future.
The present tax system is organized so as to allow US corporations
to defer US taxes forever on all their foreign profits as long as they
are kept abroad. According to the US Commerce Department, US
multinational corporations are holding abroad more than $1.5
trillion in foreign profits, which thus generate no tax revenues for
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the US Treasury. Babbling on democracy and human rights has no

place here. The GAO and Commerce Department findings have
stripped away the layers of hypocrisy of American finance capital
and its democratic pretensions. This is one more glaring example
of the misallocation of resources and the monstrous inequalities
that it incubates.
Case after case investigated by the GAO indicated how the finance
capitalists were using their influence as Federal Reserve directors
to enrich their firms and obviously themselves. This, I might add
in parenthesis, also illustrates the mechanism of insider trading
within the Federal Reserve and public sector institutions. Here we
see the chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase who served on the
New York Feds board of directors at the same time that his bank
received more than $390 billion in financial assistance from the
Federal Reserve. And to top it all, JPMorgan Chase served as one of
the clearing banks for the Feds emergency lending programmes.
All this is taking place at a time when economic recovery since the
autumn of 2008 has not materialized. This level of malfeasance
is occurring when the level of economic concentration has scaled
new heights. It was Louis XV who said: The State is me. That
would not be an unfair description of the masters of finance
capital for whom politicians and lawmakers are commodities to
be bought and sold. The six biggest banks in the US have assets
equivalent to 65% of the nations GDP. The process of economic
concentration occurs at all phases of the economic cycle. The
savings and loan debacle of the 1980s gave a prodigious fillip to
the thrust of concentration. Between 1982 and 1992, in addition
to the hundreds of savings and loans firms that were driven to the
wall, 1,543 commercial banks went bankrupt in the US. For eight
years in a row, more than 100 commercial banks failed annually,
the bulk of them of small to medium size.
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The much-touted American dream of home ownership has turned

into a nightmare of foreclosure. Let the numbers talk: 4 million
home owners lost their homes, 5.3 million others are in or near
foreclosure, and more than 11 million borrowers are underwater
by $700 billion. The banks have made a killing with zero interest
rates. How can one thus ask the Federal Reserve, which is itself
an integral part of finance capitalism, to aid home owners that
are drowning in mortgages, to call a halt to foreclosures and
democratize housing by making it affordable?
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Are we so abysmally ignorant as to believe that we can have

democratic change when American capitalism is dominated not
by the 1% but by the 0.1%? Today, the US has the most inequitable
distribution of wealth and income of any advanced capitalist
country. It has the greatest gap since 1928 the year before the
roof caved in between the 0.1% and everyone else. Under these
conditions, how can the big money moguls entrenched in such
institutions as the Federal Reserve and the big banks be expected
to curb the income and wealth inequity of American capitalism?
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To question their ability to do so, as the Occupy movement is

attempting to do, is to confront the iron fist of the dictatorship of
capital. And here the wise words of Robert Fisk of The Independent
acquire an inspirational resonance:
The banks and the rating agencies have become the dictators of
the West. Like the Mubaraks and Ben Alis, the banks believed and
still believe they are owners of their countries. The elections which
give them power have through the gutlessness and collusion of
governments become as false as the polls to which the Arabs were
forced to troop decade after decade to anoint their own national
property owners. Goldman Sachs and the Royal Bank of Scotland
became the Mubaraks and Ben Alis of the US and the UK, each
gobbling up the peoples wealth in bogus rewards and bonuses for
their vicious bosses on a scale infinitely more rapacious than their
greedy Arab dictator-brothers could imagine.
These appalling financial crimes without end are not confined to
the banks. An investigation carried out by the US Department
of Defence for Senator Bernie Sanders revealed that hundreds of
defence contractors who defrauded the US military received more
than $1.1 trillion. The findings uncovered that virtually all of the
major defence contractors in the US had been engaged in systemic
fraudulent practices for years.
The Department of Defence report spelled out how the Pentagon
paid $573.7 billion during the past 10 years to more than 300
contractors involved in civil fraud cases that resulted in judgments
of more than $1 million, $398 billion of which was awarded
after settlement of judgment for fraud. When awards to parent
companies are thrown in, the Pentagon paid more than $1.1 trillion
during the past decade just to the 37 top corporations embroiled in
these swindles. That engulfed such well-known firms as Lockheed
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Martin and Northrop Grumman. But that has not halted the rot
because billions in contracts continued to be granted to these and
other corporations.
The military-industrial complex (MIC) which blends the masters
of American finance capital and the Pentagons top brass is the
juggernaut of American imperialism. We shall never relinquish
our global military leadership and all will be done to enhance its
power and global reach, and ensure that at no moment in time will
it ever be challenged, thunders Obama. How often we have heard
these words that are part of the catechism of empire repetition is
a reminder of its lethal significance.
It does not matter whether the voice that utters this bombastic
claim to world domination emanates from a Democrat or a
Republican, for they are but two political formations that form
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part of a single trunk that is the capitalist mode of production

and its exploitative class relations. It is an imperial utterance that
has reverberated throughout the decades. Obamas declaration
of satanic intent goes beyond the confines of the United States as
it is part of NATOs counter-revolutionary bludgeon to halt the
liberating strides of those who seek paths to human emancipation.
Its goal is to sustain and expand the US military machine as seen
in its burgeoning global network of military bases.
But these grandiose instruments of death and destruction come
at a price. By the very nature of capitalism, the beneficiaries are
an exiguous minority of stockholders, and an incorrigibly corrupt
cabal of elite politicians and military caudillos. What must be borne
in mind is that the military-industrial complex represents the
embodiment of concentrated economic power and it is apposite
to recall the words (1931) of Chief Justice Louis Brandeis: We can
have democracy or we can have concentrated economic power but
we cannot have both. The gains enshrined in the concentrated
power of the MIC that spells total repudiation of democracy
are privatized, and the costs socialized; the bill is borne by the
taxpayers.
We shall understand the morphology of power when we examine
the defence outlays. Key to grasping the enormity of the sums that
have soared over successive decades is what the Pentagon designates
as the base budget. This consists of salaries, maintenance and
military hardware. The base budget is $540 billion, to which is
added $115 billion for contingency operations. This amounts to a
total of $655 billion, but that total does not provide a wide-ranging
coverage of arms expenditure that has grown exponentially in
recent decades.
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Several investigative defence analysts have stressed how the system

is fudged because when one starts probing the labyrinthine innards
of the budget, one finds arms expenditure in the Department of
Energy, the State Department, expenditures destined to pay for
border security assistance, bankrolling of terrorist bands seeking
regime change (as in Syria and Libya), and boosting the nuclear
arsenal. After making adjustments for double-counting and
offsetting receipts, the pioneering researches of Winslow Wheeler
(for the budgetary year 2012) have discovered that the MIC will
spend $125 billion on veterans care, $50 billion for separate
retirement funds, $42 billion on homeland security, $22 billion
for foreign military sales and $20 billion on nuclear programmes.
If one throws in $60 billion to cover government interest costs,
this lifts the total to $974 billion. Even this presents an incomplete
picture because it excludes the expenditures on the 16 leading
spy agencies estimated at $97 billion, which would yield a total
exceeding $1 trillion.
What is crucial is not so much the inaccuracy and the manipulation
of the numbers as their sheer magnitude. Expenditures on the war
machine now amount to about 30% of total federal spending, and
that in a country hobbled by mass unemployment, escalating levels
of social deprivation, etc. These Himalayan sums on defence
must be put side by side with the shifting class distribution of
the national income. The share of the national income going to
labour has plummeted, with little prospect of reversal; the share of
profits in contrast has rocketed. This state of affairs has endured
because a now largely defenceless and impoverished US workforce
have been forced to accept massive wage cuts to keep their jobs.
And this is due in turn to the persistent, savage and successful
corporate attacks in recent years against traditional working-class
institutions. The legacy of the legal and institutional gains of the
New Deal has been wiped out, and this applies no less so to public
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unions, as seen in the electoral outcomes dramatized in the state of

Wisconsin in June 2012.
The frantic pace to maximize profits, which stand at record
levels since 1960, is now accentuated by wholesale deregulation,
outsourcing, substitution of contract and temporary workers
for full-time employees, and rationalization measures in which
information technology and software are key ingredients. The gulf
between what is called in the jargon a compensation package
for the mega-capitalists and wages has widened, aggravated by
the policies of austerity whose tragic outcome we are witnessing
not only in the citadel of American capitalism but throughout the
now-crumbling eurozone.
A swindle of the same order as in the defence industry revolves
around Citigroup, which had to pay $285 million in fines to settle
a case in which with one bank, Citibank sold a package of toxic
mortgage-backed securities that were likely to go bust to gullible
customers. With the other hand, it shorted the same securities, i.e.,
it bet millions of dollars that they would go bust. But such fines
do not dent the power of the banking lobbies. As Senator Richard
Durbin bluntly stated in 2011: Despite having undergone losses
in the meltdown of 2008 the financial corporations are still the
most powerful lobbies on Capitol Hill. And, frankly, they own the
place. The lobbying pincers that grip the US Congress scare me
out of my wits, declared Paul Volcker, former boss of the Federal
Reserve. One understands his apprehensions. The Center for
American Progress estimates that the energy sector, for example,
received returns of 3,000% on its lobbying bribes in recent years
when energy sector laws were modified by the nations policy
makers that is, the bribe takers to accommodate the exigencies
of Big Oil.
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hese spectacles of undiminished corruption that has led to

the loss of untold billions illustrate the inability of capitalism
to harness rationally the worlds productive forces to yield
decent living standards for the people. This is occurring against the
greatest seismic shift in power that the world has ever seen. This
shift is of central importance to understand the future trajectory of
capitalism. Its significance is seen in the surge of China and other
Asian countries.
Consider the comparative numbers of the IMF. In 1980, US share
of world output (measured in purchasing power parity prices)
exceeded 25%. By end-2011, it had shrunk to 17%. In contrast,
China had a share of barely 2% of world output in 1980, climbing
to 15% in 2011. According to the IMFs projections, it is expected
to outstrip the US by 2015. Still, these aggregate figures do not fully
convey the concrete measures of economic power.
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Chinas foreign exchange reserves stand at over $3 trillion, while

those of the United States have dropped to $85 billion a ratio of
35:1. China is the worlds largest creditor nation, or if you prefer,
the worlds banker. It is also the worlds leading manufacturing
power, ousting the US as the primary automobile producer, and
the same applies to its world primacy in the machine tool and
shipbuilding industries. It accounts for 44% of global steel output,
as against less than 6% for the US. It is already the worlds leader
in modern rail technology and infrastructure. There is no point in
extending the list of Chinas world-shattering records because the
gap gets larger by the day.
Global capitalism has ceased to be Eurocentric, with all the geopolitical corollaries that this implies. Indubitably, China has
embraced market capitalism and the social relations that go with
it, but it has not succumbed to the penetration of neoliberalism.
Central to our argument is that it has never relinquished central
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planning. Foreign finance capitalists exercise ownership and

control of less than 2% of the nations assets.
The truth is that China-bashing in the US, which has scaled a new
level of virulence, is an attempt to use China as a scapegoat so as
to conceal its own self-inflicted wounds, financial profligacy and
incompetence. Parasitically, the US has sucked the tribute of the
world and Latin America is the striking example, but as we all
know, the Latin American awakening, markedly so in the case of
the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela and the ALBA (Bolivarian
Alliance for the Peoples of Our Americas) bloc, is altering at a
dazzling tempo the economic, political and cultural landscape.
Indeed, scapegoating is no panacea for ending the chronic malaise
of American manufacturing, which is fast sinking to the level of
a rust belt. The US current account deficit is deeply entrenched,
and there is no likelihood in the foreseeable future that it will be
eliminated.
The US government is living off borrowed time and borrowed
money: the numbers tell the story of the beggars bowl. In July
2011, foreign holdings of US Treasuries were $4,666 billion. By
January 2012, these had risen to $5,048 billion, a third of its GDP.
The breakdown (%) of ownership is: China (23.0); Japan (21.4);
oil exporters (5.1); Caribbean banking centres (4.5); and others
(46.0). But such profligate borrowing by a mendicant cannot
continue. The original money that bought these Treasuries is being
continuously devalued, or more appropriately, debased. A metric
of the debasement of the US greenback is seen in the exchange rate
of the Swiss franc to the dollar. In 1992, the exchange rate of the
dollar was SF3.35. By August 2011, it had dived to SF0.75. What
this says, to take the case of China, is that the money that bought
those Treasuries came from the earnings of workers and peasants
in China.
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Chinas funding is the vital bloodline to US capitalism. The US trade

deficit with China is now around $300 billion, and there is little
doubt that it will be the same by end-2012. This is so because there
are no countervailing forces within US capitalism to reverse this
process. The chronic fall in US median weekly earnings confirms
this. Americans have been promised green shoots since the slide
commenced in December 2007. There has been no recovery and
the green shoots are still brown.
There are around 30 million American workers who seek a fulltime job but cannot find one. The numbers are grim because
the jobs deficit (the number of jobs required to keep up with the
demand of new entrants to the labour force) is 15 million. The
Congressional Budget Office estimates that with a normal labour
force growth of about 1% yearly, plus productivity growth of
2.3%, it would necessitate sustained growth in excess of 4% to
reduce unemployment. Such a rosy prospective growth is not on
the horizon. The labour/capital social fracture is seen in the fact
that wages, the income of workers, are trailing behind inflation,
with the result that inequalities, already monstrously huge, are
climbing. Compounding this anaemic situation is that financially
strapped state and municipal governments are axing expenditures
to balance their books. This further contributes to a slippage of
revenues and expenditures, and hence more job cuts, etc.
The haemorrhaging continues which China-bashing will not halt.
Since 2001, according to the US Labour Department, 6 million US
manufacturing jobs have been wiped out, including 2.3 million
since the start of the Obama regime. The manufacturing workforce
in Chinas Guangdong province is four times larger than the US
manufacturing workforce. The number of jobs that are trickling
back to the US because of a falling dollar is paltry, as are the
wages in those corporations that return, which are less than half
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of the earlier manufacturing wage. The talk of a resurgence of US

manufacturing competitiveness that the Obama cabal has spouted
is little more than a public relations electioneering concoction.
Again, let the numbers speak. The dizzying deficit seen in advanced
manufacturing commodities was $60 billion in 2009. By end-2012,
in just three years, the deficit is expected to dive to $100 billion.
China is charged by Republicans and Democrats alike with
currency manipulation and pursuing mercantilist policies. What
the accusation, which is inaccurate, loses sight of is that China is
interventionist in its foreign exchange and foreign trade sectors.
It has a fixed exchange rate that fluctuates within certain bands.
And then, what about the United States itself with its policies of
quantitative easing that entail a devaluation of its currency at a
rapid clip to boost its exports? In any case, the problem is not
about Chinas foreign exchange rate and its alleged manipulation
(the Chinese renminbi has in fact risen by almost 30% since 2005).
Others contend that rising manufacturing wages in China (and
they are rising) will boost its unit labour costs, thus offsetting
its competitive edge on world export markets. In my view, these
are not substantial factors that will diminish Chinas power on
world markets. The reasons for Chinas ascendancy must be found
elsewhere.
The primacy of Chinas industrial firepower lies in the fact that the
country has never relinquished central planning as an instrument
for national renewal. A corollary of this is that its public sector
enterprises account for about half of its GDP. Together with its
control of the commanding heights, its triumphs stem from its
massive well-planned investment across the entire educational
spectrum and the non-stop upgrading of its science-based
workforce. This is obvious not only in areas like Shanghai that
have been singled out for commendation but throughout its
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geographical vastness. To this is superimposed investment in its

industrial infrastructure and state subsidies.
This in essence is the contrast I would say the unbridgeable
contrast between the Promethean forces unleashed by Chinese
planners on the one hand and the Obama regime and his Republican
opponents on the other. History has already judged the squabbling
US politicos as creatures floundering in the miasma of fictions and
no doubt the grandeur of the rich pickings of high office. They
have no strategy other than slashing their deficits by imposing fiscal
austerity with the forlorn hope that this will engender savings and
investments to boost the economy. This is the same strategy that
Angela Merkel and the German finance capitalists are attempting
to shovel down the gullets of the Greek people and whose tragic
costs are visible to all. It is nothing more than fiscal deflationary
austerity that is borne by the world of labour. Without elaborating
this specious policy and its tragic reverberations, all I can say is that
all this reminds me of Einsteins definition of insanity: doing the
same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Because of a history riddled with imperial pillage (one of the
grimmest being the Opium War (1839-41) and the subsequent
imposition by foreigners of open door policies), a socialistmarket-oriented China has not liberalized its foreign trade sector
according to the IMF songbook. Certainly, given the course of
globalization, there have been openings but these have always been
selective so as to ensure that national sovereignty is not emasculated.
China has learnt from the destruction of the economy of the Soviet
Union and the pillage to which it was subjected by a rapacious
oligarchy that conquered the levers of power with dazzling speed,
and the experience of other Third World countries.
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Researchers from the Bank of Mexico have recently (March

2012) shed light on the extent of imperialist aggrandizement by
multinational banks of the financial assets of Latin America and
Eastern Europe. This process of imperial takeovers is carried out
under the name of a free multilateral trading system. Foreign
ownership and control in Eastern Europe embraces 75-80% of
these assets. These now vassalized economies have no monetary
control over their financial resources.
What the researchers focused on is the huge wealth outflows
(what in pre-independence India was known as the drain) of these
fully owned subsidiaries to the parent owners. This is the classical
imperialist schema of the transfer of wealth in terms of profits and
dividends from colony to metropolis. To this is added the fact
that their savings are being funnelled to recapitalize (there are no
foreign exchange controls) the banks of their parent companies. If
this is not exploitation, then what is?
Chinas rejection of such modes of neoliberal exploitation explains
its successes in beating back the financial speculative outburst in
Asia in 1997-98 as well as the world financial meltdown of 2007-08.
China has not liberalized its capital account nor does it have the
intention of so doing. Its leaders and its party have not forgotten
the cataclysmic consequences of imperialism as enshrined in the
open door policies of the 19th century.
The historical record refutes the claim that once the nirvana of
financial liberalization has been galvanized, global capitalism is
immune from the shocks and tremors that are inherent in the
capital accumulation process. Chinas planners have understood
the implications of this process. This is seen in the overall financial
blueprint elaborated in the first quarter of 2012 by the Peoples
Bank of China, the Chinese central bank. It encompasses a three-
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pronged approach. The first is widening the field of Chinese foreign

investment as the shrinkage of western financial institutions
has vacated space for Chinese investment and hence opened
up a strategic opportunity. The second phase, which becomes
operational in 2-3 years and which indicates the nature of Chinas
planned economy, is the speeding up of foreign lending in the
renminbi. Beyond this period, over a 15-20-year time horizon,
foreign investors will have greater access to Chinese stock and
bond markets as well as real estate.
Chinas planners have always recognized, and this is the legacy of
its historical experience of imperialist exploitation, that capital
flows are never neutral because they are related to an historical
process, and that unregulated free-for-all capital flows are a recipe
for economic disaster. I must, however, insist on the fact that this
blueprint is not free from conflictual forces, particularly at a time
when the rising tide of protectionism is manifest everywhere,
when overproduction is generalized and the crisis of capitalism
accelerating.
Free convertibility of the renminbi is the final step, but its
implementation would by no means mark an unconditional turn
to neoliberalism inasmuch as it will be combined with restrictions
on the capital account and speculative capital flows. This
demonstrates that the notion of reform has specific national
connotations.
Meanwhile the Washington Consensus that proclaimed the
triumph of neoliberalism has been consigned to the garbage can
of history. The convulsions of globalization were seen in the
ignominious collapse of Lehman Brothers in the autumn of 2008,
and the millions who have lost their homes to foreclosure. The
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plunge in home values has blunted the prospects of economic

growth.
As former US Secretary of Labour Robert Reich has observed,
young couples are no longer buying homes. They are renting
because they have lost all confidence in their ability to acquire
and, no less important, to retain jobs and hence pay for the
mortgages. Likewise, middle-aged couples are financially strapped
or unable to sell their homes at prices that would allow them to
recover their initial financial downpayments. In short, what this
indicates is the inherent contradictions within the system. Thus the
negative wealth effect of falling home values, joined to diminished
employment prospects and eroding real wages, means that the
prospects for a sustained recovery are illusory. It is at this juncture
that one perceives the fiction of the dollar as the worlds leading
reserve currency.
What the decline of the US also indicates is that its once impregnable
backyard in Latin America is shrinking. Chinas loans and credits
to Latin America vastly surpass those of the IMF and the World
Bank, and this is likely to continue. What was once inconceivable
is now a commonplace. China is the leading trade partner of
Brazil, Venezuela, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Peru and Argentina, and
that expansion too is set to continue.
he slide of the United States is also seen in its pursuit of

wars on seven fronts, including the recent conquest of
Libya and the quasi-overt wars against Syria and Iran.
The costs of these colonial wars of conquest stand at an officially
estimated $1.4 trillion; more than a million and a half dead and
homeless; and the untold sums involved in the destruction of the
economies in the occupied territories. The military defeat of its
colonial expeditionary forces has speeded up its rapid slide and its
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over 700 military bases worldwide will not stop the gathering rot
as so painfully obvious in Afghanistan.
The process of disintegration of the empire has been compressed
in time. The loss of imperial power is seen in the shift of global
political power. And here I refer to the crumbling of such puppets
as Saleh in Yemen, Mubarak in Egypt and Ben Ali in Tunisia. The
external debacles within the empire have been matched by the
dysfunctional nature of its government. Its ruling elite no longer
has the capacity to rule. Under these conditions, to speak of the US
as a superpower is a grotesque misuse of words.
The invasion of Iraq and the imperial conquest of the Middle
East it promised gave the empire a glory that was immediately
evanescent. George W. Bushs cry of mission accomplished,
replete with such vacuous phrases as shock and awe and nation
building, proved ephemeral. The content of the US National
Security Strategy of 2002, a manifesto of colonial conquest which
embraced the familiar claim of America as the indispensable
nation, was soon to be smashed to smithereens.
It was Russias Vladimir Putin who exposed the shallowness of
claims of American exceptionalism in his perceptive comment that
the Americans have become obsessed with the idea of becoming
absolutely invulnerable. This utopian concept is unfeasible. It
amounts to the permanent wielding of a cudgel in dealing with the
world. Historians in years ahead will look back on that blunt, no
doubt brutal and accurate assessment as one of the most perceptive
comments not merely on the policies of US hegemonism but on its
internal fragility.
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ritish imperialism since the end of the Second World War

has been an unwavering vassal of American imperialism.
The economy of the United Kingdom offers us another
illustrious example of the same symptoms of decay that we
observe in American capitalism. Its industrial foundations and its
manufacturing labour force have shrunk dramatically; many of its
industries have been outsourced. What we are seeing are marked
changes in the distribution of power not only globally but within
the classical imperialist orbit.
Those who have studied my work on The Rise and Fall of Economic
Liberalism will remember the unfolding saga of British capital
accumulation. Britain was the pioneer of the Industrial Revolution
of the 18th century which generated the economic powerhouses
that created our modern capitalist universe. Among them were
the modern cotton textile and apparel industry, the metallurgical
industry and engineering, the chemical industry, etc. And what
made this possible was the invention of the steam engine.9 The
leading figures of the Industrial Revolution in Britain included
such entrepreneurs as James Watt, Matthew Boulton, Richard
Arkwright and Josiah Wedgwood.
By 1870, Britain was the worlds leading industrial, banking and
maritime power, enriched by the spoils of the worlds largest
empire. This was the country that provided Marx with the
inspiration for his scientific pursuit of the laws of motion of capital
enshrined in Capital. The evolution of the Industrial Revolution
and specifically the cotton textile industry provided the basic raw
material for Capital.
9 Indispensable for grasping these changes is the classic work of the French scholar
Paul Mantoux, The Industrial Revolution of the 18th Century, London, 1926.
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The velocity with which British industrial capitalism extended

its reach globally was regarded by Thomas Babington Macaulay,
one of capitals most militant spokesmen, as nothing short of
miraculous. Stemming from the Industrial Revolution of the 18th
century, the stage was set for the globalization of British capitalism,
as best articulated in the words of Matthew Boulton, a collaborator
of James Watt and the manufacturer of the steam engine: It is
necessary for me to produce not for a single market but for a world
market. In short, the growth of the productive forces exceeded
the capacity of the national market to absorb output, hence the
drive for the conquest of the global market. This quest for bigger
and bigger markets was driven ideologically by the doctrine of
free trade. To the Manchester textile capitalist and first governor
of Hong Kong, Sir John Bowring, Jesus Christ is free trade, free
trade is Jesus Christ.
The saga of the subsequent crumbling of Britains manufacturing
sector the workshop of the world, as it was once billed is a
long and tragic narrative strikingly perceptible in the aftermath of
1914-18 and the inter-war years. Capitalism and imperialism are
not things of fixity and permanence. The researches of Nicholas
Comfort, author of Surrender: How British Industry Gave Up the
Ghost, 1952-2012, bring out the salient features of this unravelling
since 1952. It was a false dawn when the evangelists of capitalism
proclaimed that a new Elizabethan Age would be ushered in.
Rather, what followed was the accelerated break-up of one of the
most brutal empires the world has ever known, sequelled by the
Suez debacle of 1956. It had now morphed into a fully fledged
vassal of the American imperio.
The acknowledged failure of British imperialism to crush the
postwar Greek resistance movement contributed massively to the
expansion of US imperialism and the slippage of British imperialism.
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In February 1947, a British social democratic government bled by

wartime indebtedness informed Washington that it was at the end
of the road as it was unable to defeat the progressive Marxist-led
resistance movement in Greece. The interaction of events is crucial
for understanding not only the pummelling of British imperialism
but also the ascendancy of the US empire. This was not the case
of a debilitated Britain becoming a junior partner, as some have
called it, because the emergent imperial power had no need for
junior partners but lickspittle vassals, a role that successive British
governments Tory and Labour alike were to play up to the
present. A British diplomatic cable to the rising US master exposed
the abject state of its capitulation when it pleaded that no time
must be lost in plucking the torch of world leadership from our
hands. With its death rattle all too audible, it had the folly to
babble on about bequeathing its torch of world leadership.
The crumbling of British imperial power went hand in hand with
the proclamation of the Truman Doctrine and the setting up of
NATO that followed rapidly in its wake. The Greek resistance was
now targeted for destruction. US President Harry Truman was
granted $400 million in military funds to support free peoples
who are resisting attempted subjugation. Coinciding with this
financial jackboot planted in the face of an embattled resistance
movement geared to confront the terror regime of monarchical
fascism was the Marshall Plan; it was designed, again in Trumans
words, to beat back the stranglehold of Soviet aggression. What
followed in subsequent years and decades, in Greece and beyond,
is well known: endless wars, colonial pillage and a grand holocaust
engendered by the US imperial killer machine that wiped out
millions of innocent men, women and children at a cost of trillions
of dollars.
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In 1952, the UK still accounted for a quarter of world manufacturing

exports, a level surpassing the pre-war figure of 1939. A number
now shrunk to less than 2.5%. The British industrial landscape had
been turned into a wasteland in the wake of sustained stagnation,
Himalayan levels of indebtedness, social decay and record heights
of inequality. Here was the nation that once produced the worlds
supreme fighting aircraft such as the Spitfire, the Hurricane and
the Lancaster bomber.
The industrial legacy of 19th-century dynamism, innovation and
entrepreneurship was wiped out at a rapid clip. The vestiges of its
once-mighty automobile industry have been annexed by foreign
capitalists. Illustrious names such as Raleigh, Austin Morris,
Triumph, Leyland Motors and Hillman have vanished. The subtitle of Nicholas Comforts work is appropriate British capitalism
had given up the ghost. Lugubriously, he raises the crucial question:
How is it that Germany retains a Siemens, and France an Alstom
and Italy a shipbuilding industry but there is no longer a British
General Electric Company? Britannia rules the waves is now
folklore.
Here was the Grandest of Empires, as Kipling called it, now
marginalized economically and politically, but the liquidation of
its enviable industrial heritage does not stop there. What we have
seen is that this industrial disintegration was partnered by the noless-swift disintegration, and subsequent foreign colonization, of
its financial services sector whose historical antecedents hark back
to the end of the 17th century.
John Kay has trenchantly described the disintegration of the
British banking structure and, as an English bourgeois who sees the
industrial and financial shards around him, is saddened that the
evolution of British financial capitalism is being consigned to the
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meat grinder. This is not an accident of history but a manifestation

of inter-imperialist rivalry. Indicative of this antagonism and its
outcome is that a US investment banker is now the boss of one
of Britains largest retail banks, Barclays. Investment banks, Kay
notes, have declined, while investment bankers have grown in
power, influence and remuneration. This is perhaps the most
startling of the many consequences of Big Bang [which involved]
a mixture of deregulation and reregulation ... Merchant banks,
as they were once called, had always been the aristocrats of the
financial system. One by one they were wiped out. This is the
obituary of imperial grandeur.
In the wave of liberalization, US and other foreign financial capitalists
poured into the City, the citadel of British financial imperialism
and the traditional bankroller of the Industrial Revolution. This
process of acquisitions and buyouts was consolidated by the mid1990s. Such celebrated names as Kleinwort Benson and Morgan
Grenfell, which were also subsequently gobbled up, sought
momentary refuge in the retail banks of Europe. But there was no
escape from the shackles of foreign annexation. Barings, whose
lineage harks back to the 17th century, exploded following the
derivative gambling of a so-called rogue trader. Warburg was
in turn grabbed by the Swiss Bank Corporation that in turn was
swallowed up by UBS. Among the vestigial survivors were Lazard
and Rothschild, now shrunk to marginal niche banking activities.
The blitzkrieg of the American banking giants now straddled
a vast swathe of financial markets. The colonization of Britains
wholesale banking sector had been shoved into the grab bag. Even
those few British institutions that had not been gobbled up were
now managed according to the benchmarks of US finance capital,
as Kay notes. The ruthless strategies that routed British banking
and credit institutions led ineluctably, as to be expected, to an
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enhanced concentration of capital that remains one of the salient

traits of monopolistic capitalism.
But that is not the end of this tragic debacle, because the British
stock market was not spared the humiliation of annexationism.
The total market value of UK-quoted shares is around 1,777 billion
pounds. Foreign-owned shares in the market soared from 7% to
41% between 1963-2011. From its peak in 1997, British insurers
and pension fund shares in the stock market dived to a present
paltry 12%. This simply dramatizes the fact that the policy makers
and politicians no longer have a grip on national financial power.
Like much else in Britain, ownership of the stock market has passed
under foreign control.
By the start of the last decade, the number of big independent
banks had shrunk to five, all of them American. The meltdown of
2008 would claim the scalp of three more. One of the by-products
of Big Bang was that traditional market makers, brokers, discount
houses and asset managers had been grabbed by retail banks whose
profits are based on the daily processing of millions of transactions
according to established benchmarks. This hyper-concentration of
financial firepower in a decreasing number of financial behemoths
did not lead to the promised land of market stability and growth,
as their mouthpieces had never ceased to proclaim, but to spasms
of economic convulsions and escalating human misery. Let us now
turn briefly to the human consequences wrought by capitalism in
its death throes.
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Concluding reflections
ever since the end of the Second World War have

international capitalism and its class relations been
subject to such a withering critical onslaught as at present.
Globalization is now withering on the vine. It was not fortuitous
that this anger and discontent engendered debates as sponsored in
the Financial Times the mouthpiece of la haute finance in the
first quarter of 2012.
Never since the Great Depression of the 1930s have banks and
bankers been subject to such public obloquy as at present. Of vital
class significance is that this is emanating even from within the
inner citadels of capital. The recent revelations in the New York
Times by a senior Goldman Sachs executive of unethical conduct
and the rip-off of clients once again remind us of how fatuous the
claims of capitalisms propagandists are. No, there is no such thing
as a level playing field, and we are all aware of the inanity of such
phrases as equality of opportunity.
This is how Obama, who occupies the highest point in the political
pyramid of capitalism, puts it: We still believe that this [America]
should be a place where you can make it if you try. Whether he is
playing little games with himself and his electorate I cant say. No
doubt he would label this the audacity of hope. However, the cruel
daily reality of American workers and their battle to survive tells
a different story. The image of a meritocracy was always a cheap
and vulgar fantasy throughout the history of the republic, and it
is even more so today. Obama, as a stunning political mediocrity,
has no interest whether American workers live or perish. His sole,
pedestrian concern is his political survival, and that defines his
moral compass.
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In the present climate, even bourgeois commentators are no

longer reticent to quote Marx favourably and many do so with
relish. This no doubt gives that great thinker and revolutionary
a respectability that neither he nor Engels would have solicited.
It is therefore not surprising that Jeffrey Sachs, a mainstream
economist, could argue that the true class nature of Washington
politics is disguised by the superficial debates of its leading
political prizefighters, whose shadow boxing is not geared to face
up to the quintessential contradictions of capitalisms pathology.
Both parties [Republicans and Democrats], says Sachs, depend
on the money of rich corporate contributors from Wall Street,
big oil, private healthcare, real estate, arms contractors and other
corporate lobbies. Both cater to corporate desires, especially for tax
cuts, unregulated executive pay and weak corporate regulation.
In this final section of the essay, we shall confine ourselves largely
to American documentation, bearing in mind that the conclusions
drawn from this data go well beyond the bounds of a wilting
American capitalism. Data from Columbia Business School (2011)
has revealed that corporate lobbyists dished out $4 billion yearly
to Congressional politicos, or double the sum of a decade ago.
The number of lobbyists (most of whom are bankers, corporate
financial officers and lawyers) stands at 15,000. These are the
wholly corrupt handlers of what in the jargon of Congress are
known as the big bribe carpetbaggers, whose numbers have also
rocketed in recent years.
This is the alpha and omega of moneyed politics. It is not an
aberration for, as has been argued by progressives of all stripes
at all times, freedom is a function of power and that power,
domestically and internationally, has become concentrated in the
hands of a minuscule number of mega-rich individuals encrusted
in their corporate strongholds.
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Hence those bulldozed from that circle of concentrated property

are reduced to a level of impotence. This is the ineluctable outcome
of the logic of capitalism. Thus it is a fallacy to portray this ruling
plutocracy as job creators, as some prominent ideologues of
bourgeois political parties have done. The reality is that they are
not job creators but irrepressible job exterminators.
What has been the upshot of the policies pursued by these corporate
barons, or what Teddy Roosevelt in the Gilded Age called the
malefactors of great wealth? The American industrial blue-collar
workers, housed in increasingly unliveable crime-ridden and drugstricken cities, are an increasingly impoverished mass bereft of
hope. American capitalism, like that of Japan, has entered a period
of permanent economic stagnation from which, as I see it, there is
little prospect of resurgence or return to an imagined normality.
The stark social figures are a reminder of the cul de sac into which
the system is now plunged. One out of two Americans is in a lowincome household. The legal real minimum wage is lower than it
was in the 1960s. Families earning this minimum wage fall into the
poverty level. What concerns us is that income polarization does
not merely exist; according to all major indicators, it is on the rise.
This suggests that, whichever ruling-class party is in power, the
prospects of the nations poor and those who sell their precarious
labour power are extremely bleak. This is yet another prism by
which the class struggle can be analyzed.
The following reflections bring us to the growing size and
consequences of what has been called the wealth gap, that is, the
class disparities between the rich, the middling and the poor. There
has been considerable discussion in recent years of the causes and
implications of inequality; this discussion has not been confined to
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the United States but covers global capitalism, including China, as

the unfolding political crises pinpoint.
The political corollary of this, as we have stressed, is that it matters
little whether the major political adjuncts of capital, be it in the
United States or elsewhere, are billed Democrats or Republicans,
Conservatives or Labourites. This is so because the gyrations of
bourgeois politics have always been subordinated to the demands
of capital; in general, it may be said that it is a commodity owned
and merchandized by capital.
The extra-parliamentary mass uprisings of the Indignados in
Spain and Occupy Wall Street in the United States are unique in
the annals of capitalisms history. Their goal is not incremental
reformism. They have zoomed in with laser-like intensity on the
overall mis-working, the venality and evil of finance capitalism,
judged unreformable and hence beyond redemption. Their central
thesis and activism are designed to unmask the hypocrisy of the
inherited bourgeois political forms now at the end of their political
tether. These are castigated as pernicious instruments of class rule
designed to perpetuate and reinforce existing class relations, hence
their total inability to reconfigure a wholly unstable and crisisprone profit-oriented system. Thus the numbers of 99% and the
1% (or what Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) extolled as we
are many they are few) have now become embedded in public
discourse.
US median household income over the last decade has been falling
steadily, according to the Census Bureau; adjusted for inflation, it
is the same as in 1960. Mass joblessness and short-time working
now embrace more than 30 million workers. We cannot evoke
a shortage of capital to explain this inasmuch as more than $1.5
trillion in US corporations profits is held abroad for tax reasons.
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Given present rates of return which they consider unacceptable,

capitalists have halted or drastically trimmed their investments.
Which brings us to the elementary point that the system and the
class motivations to which it is subjected are not shaped to meet
the minimum human needs of food, housing, clothing and medical
care of the world of labour, but the exigencies of profits and profit
maximization.
In the worlds so-called wealthiest country, the number of
Americans without health insurance has escalated sharply in recent
years and presently hovers around 50 million. Nearly a quarter of
American children are mired in poverty; for Blacks and Hispanics
the numbers are even more gruesome. Bourgeois politicking has
long mastered the art of pious baloney and you will remember
President Lyndon Johnsons bombastic boast and that too was
several decades ago that we have entered a war against poverty
on a mass scale and that war will be won. The march of time has
long written its obituary on such sanctimonious platitudes by such
bankrupt domestics of capital.
Indeed, the victims of American poverty and degradation have long
given up the ghost that capitalist bosses and their political shadows
are capable of tackling that problem. Exacerbating this trend of
stagnation is rising indebtedness and the sustained onslaught
against the rank and file of organized labour that have been
savaged over decades. Superimposed on this are sharp cutbacks in
municipal, state and federal outlays and the rapid erosion of the
welfare state.
What is crucial of the changed mood is that ideas once associated
with the extreme left have acquired a mainstream tone. We
have already encountered the verdict of a capitalist iconoclast like
Warren Buffett. But here we are seeing more of the same in an
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article published in the Financial Times in February 2012 by Jeremy

Grantham, the chief investment strategist of GMO, an American
international investment financial corporation. His views are
akin to those of the Occupy Wall Street movement when he says
that in the US our corporate and governmental system backed
surprisingly by the Supreme Court has become a plutocracy,
designed to prolong, protect and intensify the wealth and influence
of those who already have the wealth and influence. The crux of
the class struggle could not be stated more incisively.
Such critical views of the system, Grantham reminds us, are gaining
increasing currency despite capitals propaganda machines. This
is the stentorian voice of the bourgeois elite but it also transmits a
sense of its despair and desolation.
Granthams fears are reinforced, he says, by the fact that the
global ranking of US educational excellence and the quantity and
quality of training for workers have declined quite rapidly ... but
all complaints of justice are either ignored or dismissed as class
warfare. For progressives this statement is a pedestrian truth, but
what is astounding is the class origin of its author.
Grantham goes on to note: The benefits of the past 40 years of
quite normal productivity have been abnormally divided between
the very rich (and corporations) and the workers. Indeed divide
is not the right word, for, remarkably, the workers received no
benefit at all, while the top 0.1 per cent has increased its share
nearly fourfold in 35 years to a record equal to 1929, just prior
to the meltdown. And he concludes with a terrible cri de coeur that
the richest 400 people now have assets equal to the poorest 140
million. This is an honest bourgeois, like Warren Buffett, who
seeks justice, although the justice he pleads for is within the
existing socio-political complex and its hegemonic class relations.
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He is not calling for the socialization of the means of production

and exchange. Rather, he is advocating a far-reaching tinkering
of spending and tax measures. The convulsions of the system and
its attendant class inequalities are thus seen as a crisis of human
intelligence. In short, the system is diseased but it can be brought
back to some semblance of normal health by reformist measures
engineered by decent men and women. An aspirational blueprint
that is as old as capitalism itself. In the same order of ideas it recalls
the metaphor of Keynes: the tree is healthy, but the branches have
to be pruned.
The raging waves of history have now driven the stricken capitalist
ship into the shoals. In the eyes of many it seems unlikely that it can
be salvaged. What I wrote several years ago is a timely ending to this
essay. The systems recurrent and convulsive crises exploding in
shorter and shorter intervals of time and with mounting intensity
have given rise to abject pessimism among many of its leaders
that recalls the mood of the inter-war years (1918-39) when the
Great Depression smashed the world of illusion. Redolent of this
slide into despair and capitulation was the lamentation of the
Conservative politician the Hon. Stanley Baldwin (1867-1947), who
was also a leading British industrialist and steel tycoon. Addressing
a Methodist gathering in 1926, he evoked the satanic forces that
were rolling on: Since the end of the war the manifest forces of
Satan have been conspicuously at large. Ten years on, now Prime
Minister and faced with the tornados of the Great Depression, he
lugubriously capitulated: Having been in international politics
for most of my life I will not write myself down as a pessimist; but
let me say, at times, I feel that I am living in a madhouse.
From Satan to madhouse, the morbid howlings of Earl Baldwin
of Bewdley depicted the depth of helplessness, callousness and
vulnerability, not only of the British bourgeoisie, still master of the
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worlds most exploitative of empires, but the global bourgeoisie in

general. His political impotence, which betrayed the failure of his
class to tackle the socio-economic convulsions of capitalism, did
not of course extend to his militant life-long hatred of the Soviet
Union, as seen in his succinct utterance at the time of Munich
(1938): Cant we turn Hitler East? This was the rallying cry of
the British bourgeoisie in the inter-war years. Hitlers Mein Kampf,
which had long targeted the Soviet Union for annihilation, had
already made the blueprint. It only served to confirm the scathing
comment of David Lloyd George: Scratch a Tory and you will
always find a Fascist.
Today, faced with the crescendo of capitalist convulsions, the
predicament of its masters is unenviable. But the victims of the
crisis, hammered by imperialist wars, plummeting wages, jobless
markets and lengthy breadlines, cannot accept the judgment that
capitalisms macabre death stratagems are an immutable state of
play. It is these working men and women who are moving forward
in growing numbers to challenge an order whose symptoms of
chronic decay and disintegration can no longer be swept under
the rug.
There are those who have sought evasion by pandering to the
nostrums that we shall muddle through and that history will
solve the problem. By what magic wands history no doubt
this refers to the masters of capital will solve these problems
we are not told, nor is it difficult to surmise why this is so. What
we do know and what we perceive in our daily experiences is
that the promised paradise of globalization, neoliberalism and
its ideological protuberances the World Bank, the IMF and the
World Trade Organization are now thrashing in the sewers of
irrelevance.
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On these matters, however, we must never be absolutists, for the

US politico-corporate-military complex in particular has more
than 700 military bases worldwide and its genocidal colonial wars
are not things of the past. What can be said with great certainty,
though, is that the advances of imperialism have been halted. Its
pushback is underway. At what pace and in what direction the
future will dump the present engine of imperialism we cannot say.
But what can be said is that the struggles for social alternatives will
continue to gather momentum.
The resounding revolutionary perception of Marx with its
celebratory message of hope is of supreme relevance as humanity
confronts the exigencies of breaking the inherited mould: History
does nothing. It possesses no immense wealth. It fights no battles.
It is rather man who does everything, who possesses and fights.
The need to do is now more pressing, for it behoves us not to
forget that it is the aged tiger that becomes the maneater.
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89
The Demise of the Quisling Duo:

Reflections on Imperial Pathology
We are set apart from others. We are indeed the shining

city upon a hill.
Ronald Reagan
We have been chosen by God and commissioned by
history to be a model to the world.
George W. Bush
An out-of-control financial sector is eating out the
modern market economy from inside, just as the larva
of the spider wasp eats out the host in which it has been laid.
Martin Wolf
he near-simultaneous demise in mid-December 2011 of

the two servile ventriloquist dummies that were Vaclav
Havel and Christopher Hitchens from the stage of imperial
terrorism coincided with the reluctant withdrawal of the US
colonial expeditionary force from Iraq with all its tragic sequels.
A colonial occupation so redolent of the sheer savagery of the
Hitlerian juggernaut in its colonial depredations. Recall the words
of US General Tommy Franks at the start of the Iraqi holocaust: We
dont do body counts. Recall also the elation of Nazi amanuensis,
Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler, in another predatory colonial
war, the biggest of all, against the Soviet Union: Whether nations
live in prosperity or starve to death like cattle interests me in so
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far as we need them as slaves to our Kultur: otherwise it is of no

interest to me. Whether 10,000 Russian females drop dead from
exhaustion while digging an anti-tank ditch interests me only in so
far as the anti-tank ditch for Deutschland is finished...
We might add that those long dark nights for the colonial and semicolonial peoples are far from ended, for there will still be at least
that is the plan 18,000 personnel, according to General David
Petraeus, to ensure the operation of the US embassy in Baghdad,
the worlds largest embassy. What operations do the general and
his militarists have in mind? The answer to that question is not too
complex but it is pregnant with portentous consequences.
There is no need for refurbished, apologetic rationalization. This is
occupation by another name whose lethal reach goes well beyond
the continued presence of 18,000. The embassy is a Colonial Office
to ensure US colonial perpetuation. But it also raises the inevitable
question: does Obama or any of his miserable minions believe that
this vestigial colonial expeditionary force is beyond the reach of
the resistance forces that had never ceased to battle the occupant
over the last nine years?
The empire has been battered after nine years of sustained butchery
of its colonial victims but its death pangs, though audible, are
not yet consummated. The forced withdrawal of the colonial
expeditionary force from Iraq also coincides with the trenchant
verdict of the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal, established
under the auspices of former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir
Mohamad, that indicted the colonial atrocities of Bush and
Blair, Obama and NATO as crimes against humanity. An event
nevermind the size and scope of the tribunal of justice scaffolded
in a courageous Third World nation that matches the precedent
of Nuremberg. We ought never to forget that the verdict is an
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occurrence of the greatest historical moment that, as could be

expected, was sedulously censored by a tyrannical corporate
media.
A killer lie machine, the mainstream media is irrevocably wedded
to the preservation of a wholly corrupt order, subordinated to the
exigencies of the plutocratic 0.1% of our planets population. This
is what Warren Buffett, who stands at the summit of the plutocratic
pyramid, meant when he said: Theres class warfare, all right, but
its my class, the rich class, thats making war, and were winning.
They certainly are. Well before that, however, the republic was
conceived in the womb of the class struggle which the verbiage of
a classless society has never been able to conceal.
What Buffett, a man of outstanding personal integrity, has in
mind is seen in the pay of a US chief executive, which grew (as a
multiple of average worker pay) from 24 in 1965 to 335 in 2011 an
annual compound growth rate of 5.8%. This is not an aberration;
it is not a phenomenon that can be tackled by fiddling with a
sputtering fiscal distributional engine. We are in the presence of an
exploitative society that is, one based on exploiters and exploited
where talk of blunting the sharper edges of class inequalities is
so much sentimental slush. In short, class can never be separated
from inequality because they are organically meshed.
This is an existential trait of the system, it illuminates its essential
laws of motion that have always been inherent in the process of
capital accumulation. In the Americas, this was propelled by the
expropriation, plunder and ultimately extermination of the Native
American, the mega-exploitation of Black slave labour and the
sustained exploitation of workers where gains in productivity were
never passed on to the exploited. Nor could they be.
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Let us therefore not turn inequality into a fetishism as is being

done by Obama, who, as a master political swindler, is now lashing
out at what he calls the breathtaking greed of the system. What,
then, is the source of this greed? The answer is to be found in
the historical record of the relation between labour and capital.
Obamas peddling turn of phrase unmasks him as a demagogic
stuntman; I leave it to you to dissect that morsel of pharisaical
cant.
Suffice it to say that greed or avarice or self-interest is inherent in
the capitalist mode of production and its exploitative propertied
class relations. Recall the celebrated comment of Adam Smith, who
noted in The Wealth of Nations: It is not from the benevolence of
the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but
from their regard to their own interest. We cannot ask Obama
and his tribe to study the origin of profit, or surplus value as Marx
designated it. It is an historical category born of a particular set of
historical conditions, of which the most salient was the existence
of a propertyless class.
here are some critics who have billed the Havel/Hitchens

duo as servants of empire. By this is no doubt meant their
cringing subordination to the diktats of the US corporatemilitary gulag. What should not be obscured, however, is that
the verbal antics of Havel and Hitchens, two prime quislings of
imperialism, were not confined to the United States. They were
internationalists in the most criminalized expression of that
word. Indeed, a more appropriate designation would be ideological
apparatchiks harnessed to an exterminist imperial complex that
extends well beyond the confines of the continental United States.
Bear in mind that NATO is an integral part of that complex.
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They were quislings (you will remember that Quisling was a Nazi
collaborator hanged for war crimes) in the service of one of the
most despicable terror complexes of all times. In contrast to their
SS mentors, however, their justifications for their code of conduct
were couched in the most sanctimonious of moral platitudes.
Truth and love must prevail over lies and hatred. That was Havel
as he pronounced those words to the standing ovation of Congress
when that pathologically diseased money-bound political machine
bestowed on him the supreme US civilian award, the Presidential
Medal of Freedom. The irony of this was that Havel had been
granted this award by a class of evil politicos that sanctified the
liquidation of millions. Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu also
received standing ovations and he too was a recipient of that
medal.
A gushing George W. Bush added to the poignancy of the moment
as he embraced Havel: You are one of the greatest sons of freedom
Vacalv Havel with George W. Bush, after receiving the

Presidential Medal of Freedom.
94
that the world possesses. I read that line again and again because
it inflicted the greatest personal pain on me. Its provenance was
that of a man, or rather a blood-drenched beast, that the Nazi
Gauleiters would have recognized as their own kith and kin; one
that perpetrated a holocaust that liquidated more than a million
Untermenschen I speak only of Afghanistan and Iraq with
millions more homeless combined with immeasurable destruction
of their nations infrastructure, cities and countryside.
Bushs successor, Obama, is relentlessly pursuing the same course
and invoking the same putrid pious rhetoric. Irrationality, the
repetition of the Big Lie and the debasement of the language
remain some of the prime traits of a decomposing imperial order.
Havel and Hitchens were to prove masters of this art. On this point
recall the imperishable words of Ho Chi Minh: We have long
understood that words have different meanings for the oppressors
and the oppressed. Freedom is one such word. It has always been
so. It is a law of life. When you spit in the face of the colonialists
they will always call it rain.
Nothing better dramatizes the nature of Havels political trajectory
than the entourage of his funeral. The political elite of the imperial
order were there in their regal multitudes, and that embraced the
NGOs acting in tandem with his imperial custodian that turned
him into an icon. They came from the four corners of the world
and included Bill and Hillary Clinton, Sarkozy and Cameron. In
short, a plutocratic assemblage of men and women whose yearning
was a defence of the empire and the lush pickings it conferred on
its domestics.
There was also Madeleine Albright, the former US Secretary
of State who coined the nostrum of the indispensable nation.
That was her depiction of the US politico-militarist cabal, with
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the implication being that other nations were dispensable. What

this belligerent mediocrity had ignored were the perils of hubris
and nemesis so beautifully articulated by General de Gaulle: les
cimitires sonts pleines des gens qui se croyaient indispensables. A
verdict applicable with no less force to institutions and nations.
Havels funeral was a show of power, the tapestry of class loyalty
in its most pristine form. The piles of decorations and honours
from all quarters of his reactionary caste were exhibited on a table
adjoining his funeral casket. According to his wishes, however,
there was only one medal flaunted on his coffin: the US presidential
medal, the final genuflection of the quisling that speaks volumes of
his unbending servility to his imperial master; and one whose deep
ideological implications will not be lost on you.
The obituarists tripped over themselves in showering lavish
encomiums on the great dissident. The Financial Times was a
maudlin example: Kind, wise and modest, he accepted the role
destiny had assigned to him, and played it beautifully. I fail
to grasp the meaning of this crapulous outpouring and I have
no time to decipher its gibberish. What it behoves us to grasp,
however, is that there was nothing fortuitous in the making of this
grovelling creature of imperialism garbed in the garish garments of
dissident and human rights activist. His class origins illuminate
the odyssey of a quisling who had never betrayed his class and its
ruthless thrust to retain at all costs its hegemony.
Havel was an emanation of the haute bourgeoisie, scion of one
of the five wealthiest families in the nation that emerged after the
Treaty of Versailles. The emergence of a planned socialist order
after 1948 swiftly expropriated his dynastys assets, in what proved
to be one of the most disastrous events in my familys life, as he
lugubriously confessed.
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The Czech bourgeoisie, like many of their Western European

counterparts, not to speak of the Sudeten Germans, were among
the most vigorous of Nazi collaborators. This perhaps explains
Havels abiding hatred of the Czech resistance, primarily
Communist, and his description of them as murderous gangs.
And his opposition to the expulsion of the Sudetens, with whom
his family had had close business ties. With the restoration of
capitalism, and his triumphant US-backed power grab, his vast
holdings were restored. The leading politico was transmogrified
once again into one of the nations richest men. I shall not go into
the sordid details of this economic putsch that was achieved via the
whiplash of neoliberalism administered by the World Bank and
the IMF. As in Yeltsins Russia, a wholly corrupt class of mega-rich
economic swindlers burgeoned in what was to become a choppedup banana republic.
The Czech Republics first presidents grandfather was the inheritor
of an economic dynasty conceived in the Austro-Hungarian
empire, soon to become the biggest real estate speculator/tycoon in
the then newly independent Czechoslovakia. Its financial tentacles
extended into banking and insurance, transport and machinebuilding, textiles and apparel, with extensive funding by Sudeten
and German banks. His grandfather, as he never ceased to boast to
his foreign handlers, notably American congressmen and senators,
was a combatant who served in the Czech legion that fought in
the wars of intervention (1918-21) to topple the incipient Russian
October Revolution. As one of his critics noted, he was conceived
in the womb of anti-Bolshevism. He was also conceived in the
womb of Big Money. What this highlights is that, unlike Hitchens,
he was never an apostate.
He was a bourgeois thoroughbred and hence worthy of the
unbounded trust placed in him by his masters and manipulators.
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Let me stress this important point: it is this which demarcates him

from a mealy-mouthed quisling like Hitchens who the CIA and
other handlers always perceived as a lower order of anti-communist.
Havels class and ideological credentials were unblemished, best
enshrined in his personal catechism: I am a man of property and
my goal is to ensure the continued rule of the class from which I
came. Hence my enemy was and always will be Soviet Communism
and all its works. A credo, I might add, made prior to his political
comeback. Could one ask for greater candour?
His launch into the orbit of political power was trailed by the
grimmest witchhunt in the nations history. His prime targets were
leaders of the resistance and the communists. The ranks of the
CIA and MI6 already deeply embedded in the republic witnessed
a phenomenal expansion. The American embassy became the
central pivot of all political decision-making.
Another of Havels great dreams was to be realized: hitching his
quisling bandwagon to NATO and the subsequent deployment
of the country as a missile base against Belarus and Russia. With
a zealous collaborationist class, he galvanized the country into a
launching pad for destabilizing its neighbours.
Havel used his power to recruit agents notably in Belarus
whose goal was the overthrow of the government. On this and
adjacent matters he never dissimulated. The deployment of these
collaborationist handmaidens was also extended further afield,
harnessing the savvy of Czech businessmen. This was strikingly so
in the case of Venezuela during the anti-Chavez putsch and Cuba.
Havel also embarked on a rapid buildup of the military, deploying
his Special Forces in Afghanistan and Iraq who were trained in the
School of the Americas.
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The claim by his public relations touts that he was part and parcel
of the spiritual heritage of Gandhi and Martin Luther King was so
transparently derisory that even his CIA handlers and the Voice of
America chose to scuttle it. After all, Gandhi was the incorruptible
architect of the Indian freedom struggle, an exalted leader who
successfully fought for decades one of the most rapacious of
empires.
As for Martin Luther King, his struggles were devoted to the
emancipation of his people. In words so redolent of Marx, King
wrote: The liberation of the Black man signalizes not only the
assault against the privileges of a white class of exploiters but no
less so the liberation of the world of white labour. Neither Marx
nor Engels could have put it more trenchantly. And that was not all.
Kings vision and activism were never confined to his liberationist
domestic horizon inasmuch as he identified his crusade for human
emancipation with those of all coloured colonial peoples. We ought
never to forget that he was an obdurate adversary of the Vietnam
carnage, which he denounced as the foulest incarnation of colonial
pillage. Did he not have the courage to say that Ho Chi Minh was
one of his spiritual inspirers?
To liken Havel to these two greatest of spirits would be to drag
into the gutter the Promethean battles of all colonial peoples for
emancipation. During his sojourn at Columbia University, when
informed that black joblessness was twice the US average, he
retorted with the callousness of the most perverted of Victorian
racialists that if they were in Africa they would be eating grass and
roots. In terms of depravity, this scrapes the bottom of the barrel.
That utterance reveals more than anything else the morphology of
this dwarf-like animal. Of course, it would have been foolish to ask
Havel to shed the skin of the haute bourgeoisie.
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Likewise, his connections to the US Zionists and the Israeli

power brokers were indicative of the rabid racialism of this great
dissident. To the very end of his life, he championed the nonstop expropriation of Palestinian land and the subjection of
its people to the worst forms of exploitation. His views on this
colonized people, who were expelled with bullets and bayonets
from their ancestral land, bear comparison with the contemptuous
observation of Golda Meir (and, more recently, Newt Gingrich)
that as a people they do not exist, hence their right to claim land
that was never theirs is spurious and moreover a violation of the
colonizers human and propertied rights. When pushed as to what
should be their fate, Havel sententiously proclaimed that they
should be deported to Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. This is the logic
of Zio-fascism and imperial exterminism.
In this context of rabid racist tirades, it is not surprising that he
gave his benediction to the targeted killings of Gaddafi and Bin
Laden. A pontification that went hand in hand with his call to
maximize sanctions against Iran and Syria that would, he assured
his listeners, contribute to their collapse.
His perorations always enchanted the US State Department, which
never failed to use them, not least his quip that if Chavez and Castro
were physically bumped off (they tried innumerable times), Latin
America would be free from a great scourge. This was the stock
term that he always used to describe communists. Comment on
this level of pathological insanity is superfluous.
Havel has consistently been passed off by his Anglo-American
public relations pimps as a man of letters but even on that score the
evidence is extremely thin. His plays were crude political tracts, with
the American embassy said to have hired professional American
ghostwriters to brush up their form and content. This came to
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the attention of the Nobel Committee, which, despite American

pressure, refused to grant him the coveted prize. A perfunctory
reading of the badly constructed propaganda outpourings reveals
the work of a hack.
Find the time to compare the plays of Havel with those of a
distinguished playwright like Harold Pinter, whose aesthetic,
moral and political trajectory was of a diametrically different order.
Here was the exemplary playwright and actor who combined the
highest form of literary and dramatic attainment with his incessant
struggles for a just social order which capitalism could never
spawn.
Pinters acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature, in its
militancy, its depth and its entrancing beauty, stands in contrast to
the works of such petty scribblers as Havel and Hitchens. Reading
it is indispensable for all who wish to grapple with the meaning of
humanism and our quest for alternate paths of social and human
reconstruction.
shall not dwell at length on Hitchens because he is simply a

minor subaltern compared to Havel, whose services to the
imperial system were of an incomparably higher order of
magnitude. The duo, however, were both wedded to the same scale
of values that extolled the theory and practice of exterminism.
Hitchens was a convert, an apostate, whose scribblings were
engineered to underpin in all ways the drive of state terrorism. His
ecstatic ejaculations on NATOs bombing of Libya, which resulted
in the mass killings of thousands of innocent men, women and
children, exemplify his embrace of the allurements of imperial
terror.
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Christopher Hitchens
I do not know the size of his pecuniary pickings, but that is perhaps
irrelevant. The rewards showered on him were of a different species
from those of a Havel. Overnight, he had become the poster boy
not only of the BBC, which has mutated into a cringeworthy official
mouthpiece of the state, but of the entire corporate embedded
media. Hitchens hungered for this adulation and it became his
feeder base. He bartered the exiguous dignity he had for a mess of
public relations porridge.
I leave to others the business of compiling the scribblings of
this psychopath who not only rejoiced in NATOs bombing of
Yugoslavia and targeted killings such as of Bin Laden but also
advocated the liquidation of Venezuelas Hugo Chavez and the
Cuban leadership. On this he was at one with Havel. He was also
an apologist and fanatical endorser of the Zio-fascist complex with
its targeted killings, the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their
lands and colonization by fascist settlers. Once again on that score
Havel and Hitchens were blood brothers.
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What highlights the depth of Hitchens pathological comportment

was his imbecile onslaught against Noam Chomsky. The historical
record will ultimately unmask who pitched him into such verbiage,
but for me this is a trivial concern in view of the momentous
struggles that lie ahead for all of us in 2012. In reality, it was a
vulgar act of self-promotion designed to elicit the plaudits of his
imperial masters, which it did, and the pecuniary awards that were
the lavish corollary to his reactionary mouthings. But Chomsky,
with the natural dignity of one of the great humanists of our time,
riposted with unsurpassed analytical vigour and probity, and in so
doing dissected Hitchens levels of asininity.
The exchange was important, to be sure, but what it achieved was
to have unmasked, once again, the nature of this squalid turncoat
who would stop at nothing to propel his lunge for the moneybags
and the interests of the corporate-military cabal in which he was
now engulfed. In his anti-Chomsky diatribe he reminded me of
a drunk hobbling from one lamppost to another, retching all the
way.
It was said that Hitchens was a Trotskyite. A description that is
grotesque, for it deludes the reader into thinking that he was a man
of ideas, one committed to the conventional causes of the left. But
this is untrue. Whether one is a Trotskyite or not and I am not
a member of any of its multiple sects what is unarguable is that
Trotsky was a revolutionary, the founder of the Red Army and one
of the architects of the October Revolution whose history of the
revolution stands out as one of the classics of the 20th century.
Hence the comparison is as invidious as Havels handlers assimilating
him to Gandhi and Martin Luther King. The spectrum of the
Hitchens credo could be summarized in two words: opportunism
and self-aggrandizement. Ideological brands were part of the
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103
scaffolding he deployed to dissimulate his wider designs. In this

respect, Hitchens was a pedestrian conman who even succeeded
in swindling a decent liberal like Gore Vidal on the purity of his
anti-establishment credentials. In no uncertain terms, the grossly
unequal exchange with Chomsky revealed him with luminous
clarity as a consummate, unscrupulous political swindler. Rather
than Trotskyite, therefore, a more apposite designation would be
that of an alcoholic dabbler.
Here I must interject a personal note. I never met this man nor
did I ever wish to do so. But when one of my associates in the
United States sent him a copy of my book The Rise and Fall of
Economic Liberalism, without my concurrence, in the aftermath of
his grand conversion to imperialisms freedom and democracy,
he received the answer that the book was nothing more than the
musings of leftwing dribble drabble. Let me say that given its
provenance, I was not offended. Nor was I amused, given the fact
that, possibly in his alcoholic stupor, he was able to dismiss with a
flip of his tongue a recognized work of scholarship that involved
several years of arduous work and reflection.
To put it mildly, his asininity reminded me of what Karl Liebknecht
(who was assassinated with Rosa Luxemburg in 1918 by the
embryonic counter-revolutionary Nazi thugs) said of Chancellor
Otto von Bismarck: If the Chancellor had said that I was a
splendid fellow doing a splendid job then I would know that I have
committed the most serious of crimes against the working class
whose interests I have served my entire life.
should like to make a few brief references here to Al Capone

(1899-1947). There are certain obvious similarities between
him and the two underlings of the imperial order, but the
dissimilarities are also striking. Capone was an acknowledged big-
104
time gangster and corporate money man par excellence. He was

honest in the sense that he refused to garb himself in the rancid
rhetoric of the human rights peddlers bankrolled by corporate
capital. He found no need for the conventional baloney spouted
by the tenants of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and the likes of Havel
and Hitchens. All of this was nothing more than the razzle-dazzle
of big money marketing and public relations hogwash.
Capone was always proud to extol his anti-Communist ideology:
Bolshevism is knocking at our gates. We cant afford to let it in.
We have got to organize ourselves against it. We have got to put
our shoulders together and hold fast. We must keep America whole
and safe and unspoiled. We must keep the worker away from red
literature and red ruses. We must ensure that his mind remains
healthy.
The man who bankrolled Mussolini clamoured for keeping America
safe and unspoiled. Safe and unspoiled for whom? At first blush, it
may appear quixotic that a gangster could evoke such Promethean
moral principles. However, Al Capone was nothing if not rational,
for he was working for the defence of private property. He grasped
that an expropriatory order of class and property relations would
have spelt his ruin. This was the bedrock on which the imperial
capitalist order also rests.
There was no need for Capone to indulge in mellifluous banter. If
you say that I am a crook, he said to the Attorney General, then
let me know how you would describe the banks that are robbing
the American people day and night and in all seasons. The forces
of bourgeois law and order could not answer that luminous
comment. And then he proceeded to define the logic of his mode
of conduct and his business: I use very big money. I use guns
too. The bums who insist on double-crossing me know what they
Reflections
on
Imperial Pathology
105
are up against. I dont need a church. I dont need priests. As an

honest businessman I dont need religion to justify my deals and
the highly ethical code I live by. When I need the church and the
priests and religion Ill buy them as an honest man. I know what
my business is. City Hall understands what Im saying. At least I
hope they do.
We cannot expect the professional killers of the imperial order,
whose hands, they say, are never drenched in the blood of its
millions of victims since 1945, to speak with the candour of an
Al Capone. He operated from one city only, Chicago. Political
Gauleiters like the Havel/Hitchens duo served, each in his own
specific way, the cause of imperial genocide worldwide. We ought
never to forget that every killer action and verbal gimmick of such
apparatchiks, as indeed of all US presidents and NATO stateterrorists, has always been sanitized and sanctified in the language
of the most exalted benevolence and geo-political claptrap.
A good example of this lingo of freedom and democracy is
exhibited in the effusions of one of the cruder apologists of the
empire: The true source of its [the US] lasting significance is that
these advantages are a by-product of its faith in liberal democracy,
the rule of law, and market-driven free enterprise. This mendacious
drivel surfaced in the Financial Times at the end of December 2011.
Was the author oblivious to the torture chambers of Guantanamo
and Abu Ghraib? The colonized survivors of the endless colonial
wars and occupations of the US and its satraps since 1945, have an
opposed conception of such toxic fetishisms as liberal democracy
and the rule of law as marketed by these apparatchiks of the US
corporate-military exterminators. Recall well, despite the peace
mouthings of an Obama, that US military expenditures in 2011
were larger than those of the next 17 countries combined.
106
I shall end with a reference to Cuba that unmasks the sheer hypocrisy
of the rantings on liberal democracy and the rule of law. It is the
drop of water that gives us a clue into the chemical composition of
the seas of blood of colonial crimes. Referring to that first bastion
of socialism in the Americas, General Alexander Haig, in a meeting
of the National Security Council, turned to Reagan and said: You
just give me the word and Ill turn that fucking little island into a
parking lot.10
If this is not a call to mass murder, then what is it? It was made
behind closed doors in the White House. Its message is: We are
going to wipe you out because your socialist system is anathema to
our class rule, and the values you are propagating must be crushed.
But there is a flipside to Haigs liquidationist effusions. This was
seen in the first Bushs mendacious rebuttal to Chilean President
Salvador Allendes December 1972 speech in the UN General
Assembly rebuking the imperialist order. There is nothing in our
system designed to exploit anyone, claimed Bush Sr., who was the
US ambassador to the UN at that time.11 An assertion, you will
appreciate, that affirms the moral purity of the system.
At the very moment that Bush was committing that ignominious
falsehood, plans had already been blueprinted for the physical
liquidation of Dr Allende and his associates. The job would be
swiftly executed, as Nixon and the Pentagon celebrated, by the USanointed and bankrolled Gauleiter, General Augusto Pinochet. I
had the honour of meeting Dr Allende just prior to his fall. I shall
not enter into the details of our interview which I have already
described elsewhere.12 There was one comment, however, that
10 Quoted in Nancy Reagan, My Turn: The Memoirs of Nancy Reagan, New York,
1989.
11 Time, 18 December 1972.
12 Frederic F. Clairmont, Venezuela: The Embattled Future, Citizens International,
2011.
Reflections
on
Imperial Pathology
107
remained embedded in my brain: We have chosen the path of

the ballot box and not that of the bullet. In short, the path of
democratic choice.
The US, on its part, has consistently opted for the bullet. The
rationale of exterminism was rammed down the gullets of political
innocents by Henry Kissinger, one of the grand fabricators of the
Chilean gulag: I dont see why we need to stand by and watch a
country go communist [italics mine] due to the irresponsibility of
its own people.
Deciding what is and is not responsible thus becomes the exclusive
preserve of the US ruling class cabal. In the case of Chile, as in
Guatemala, Indochina and countless other places, exterminism
becomes the response to the imperatives of democratic change.
Change which the criminal likes of Havel and Hitchens had
dedicated themselves to combating.
108
Books by Frederic F. Clairmont

Available from Citizens International*
lairmonts classic of the

1960s, The Rise and Fall of
Economic Liberalism has
just been republished with a long new
introduction ... a blockbuster, physically
and mentally ... Clairmonts great
strength is that he not only itemises
all the numerous dimensions of the
transnationalisation of capital, but also
integrates them into a functional whole,
and assesses their impact on the world.
Consequently, the book ends not with a
whimper, but a big bang, so fasten your
seat belts when you start to read it.
Ted Wheelwright,
Transnational Centre,
University of Sydney
14 X 21.5cm
ISBN 983-9054-12-0
356pp
he battle of Dien
Bien Phu in Vietnam
was one of the most
resounding and decisive
events in the history of anticolonialist struggles in the
twentieth century. This book
portrays how the impact of
this battle sealed the fate of the
once-mighty French empire
and served as an inspiration
to anti-imperialist resistance
forces everywhere.
The best description of
12 X 17cm
55pp
the battle was provided by
ISBN 983-41938-3-1
Vietnamese resistance leader
Ho Chi Minh. Turning his khaki pith
Theres no exit, and we wont let them
helmet upside down and with his
get out. The author was a member
forefinger circling the rim, he observed:
of the International Commission for
These are the big mountains up here
Supervision and Control that was
and at the bottom of this oval-shaped
created to ensure the implementation
bowl is the valley of DBP. We are up
of the Geneva Agreement in the wake of
here and the French Expeditionary
the French defeat on 7 May 1954.
Corps is down there. They are trapped.
* Citizens International, 10 Jalan Masjid Negeri, 11600 Pulau Pinang, Malaysia
email: cizs@streamyx.com
Books
by
109
he September 2010 legislative

election in Venezuela, which saw
the governing United Socialist
Party (PSUV) lose its two-thirds
majority, highlighted the gravity of
the challenges confronting President
Hugo Chavezs Bolivarian revolution.
According to Frederic Clairmont, the
polls were a reflection of the continuing
clash of contending class forces: the
Chavez-led movement for a socialism
of the 21st century and opponents
seeking to entrench a neoliberal marketoriented order.
The buildup of Venezuelas
productive forces and the undimmed
revolutionary fervour for a more just
and equitable society is giving hope to
the people of Venezuela and inspiration
to progressives everywhere.
12 X 17cm
ISBN 978-983-3046-12-6
64pp
n this powerful book, Frederic

Clairmont explores the
transformation of Cuba from a
US colonial outpost into a beacon
of socialist freedom in the Americas.
He then charts the course taken in
Venezuela under the inspired leadership
of President Hugo Chavez, who is
forging ahead with a Bolivarian
revolution to end the odious legacy of
socio-economic inequality in the oilrich country.
The rise of Cuba and Venezuela as
leading actors in the freedom struggle
is also examined within the context
of American imperialisms wilting
power. Battered by alarming levels of
indebtedness and a withering industrial
capacity, the US economy is on the
verge of meltdown.
Against this backdrop of economic
and political ferment, Cuba and
Venezuela have emerged, the author
declares, as the most formidable
nemeses ever faced by the now
crumbling forces of empire.
14 X 21.5cm
ISBN 983-3302-14-7
135pp
110
tm o n t
B o o k Fs rbeyd eF rr iecd eFr. i C
c lFa .i rCmloa n
ir
12 X 17cm
ISBN 983-41395-4-3
24pp
he author explores the social

explosion in Bolivia as part of
the wider and ongoing social
transformation reshaping the entire
region. The victory of the insurgents, as
the author insists, is not the Promised
Land, but it is more than the start of
an arduously protracted struggle that
throws its shadow over Latin Americas
ruling elite and its foreign backers.
The uprising was the historical
upshot of the most far-reaching and
sustained social struggles that raged
for months, inconceivable without an
ideologically coherent mass organized
political base in which the Andean
Indians Aymara and Quechua
surged to the centre stage in the Federal
capital of La Paz and El Alto.
The Bolivian insurgency is one vital
component in the upsurge of IndoAmerica and the social convulsions of
the continent.
his hard-hitting brochure

based on extensive research is
a complement to the authors
earlier work, USA: The Crumbling of
Empire, that examined the implications
of the debt that permeates every
niche of American capitalism. It is
the authors central thesis that the
horrendous war crimes committed
against Iraq will prove to be one of
the crucial phases in the debacle of
imperialism.
One of the authors major
contributions is also to have unravelled
the nexus between the role of the
United Nations and its agent Sergio
de Mello and US imperialism in the
occupation of Iraq. The plans of
conquest have, however, gone awry,
as he concludes, due to the sustained
struggle of the Iraqi resistance
movement which has become an antiimperialist catalyst of Promethean force
throughout the region and beyond.
12 X 17cm
ISBN 983-41395-1-9
36pp
Books
by
111
12 X 17cm
ISBN 983-3302-04-1
32pp
n this powerful, path-breaking

contribution on the nemesis of
imperialism in its conquered
colonial territory, readers are presented
with an incisive analytical work that
traces the debacle of the American
Gulag on the military, ideological and
economic fronts.
The enquiry is broken down into
two separate segments: the first deals
with the evolution of the holocaust
perpetrated against a defenceless
nation, and of the greatest recorded
crimes against humanity. It is a crime,
however, that has imposed an appalling
toll on the perpetrators, and which at
the same time has flung wide open the
floodgates to the sweeping resistance
movements on other imperialist fronts.
The second part reveals the extent
to which the empire is a giant with feet
of clay living off borrowed time and
borrowed money and is in the process
drowning in a sea of irreversible debt.
he essential thrust of this

major contribution to
the political economy of
global power is to describe and
analyse the extent to which the
wholly corrupt, demoralised and
criminalised structure of American
capitalism is being battered and
swiftly undermined by one of the
most tenacious world economic
depressions of all times.
The author investigates the
role of the current depression
and the crumbling of empire that
is inseparable from the swelling
debt that permeates every niche of
American capitalism and which in
both the short and medium term is
unsustainable.
12 X 17cm
ISBN 983-41112-7-4
24pp
112
B o o k Fs rbeyd eF rr iecd eFr. i C

c lFa .i rCmloa n
ir
tm o n t
12 X 17cm
ISBN 978-983-3046-06-5
36pp
he disastrous oil spill in the

Gulf of Mexico is only the latest
black mark in the annals of the
corporate oil giant British Petroleum.
This booklet looks back at the central,
sordid role played by BP during a
pivotal chapter in the history of antiimperial struggle.
It was in Iran (then Persia) that
the company first struck oil in 1908
and it was the Iranian government of
Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq
that nationalized the companys assets
in 1951. However, Mossadeqs valiant
effort to reclaim the nations natural
wealth and secure for Iran genuine
economic and political independence
met with a devastating counterstrike
from the companys backers in the
corridors of imperial power.
This booklet is a strident indictment
of a corporation whose existence has
been soaked in blood, political intrigue
and manipulation of the highest order.
Prospects of War and Peace

ill the tensions generated by
one of the most devastating
crises to have struck global
capitalism trigger a major war? This
compelling book explores the possibility
of a major international conflict
erupting during this time of economic
tumult. The author also surveys the
historical antecedents of crisis and
confrontation, documenting how the
great depression of the late 19th century
incubated the conditions that would
culminate in the First World War.
Greenspan: The Torments of

Contrition
lso included in the book is an
illuminating essay on the man
whose free-market financial
policies paved the way towards the
current economic collapse Alan
Greenspan, former chairman of the US
Federal Reserve.
12 X 17cm
ISBN 978-983-3046-06-5
64pp

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1

The Purgatory of Delusions

Without the tenacity and sustained devotion of

A Tribute and Overview

A Tribute and Overview

he power of the two major contributions published in this

You will remember also his investigations into the nature of

by working hand in hand with the large latifundistas (landowners)

in Venezuela in the 1950s we grasp the nettle of the meaning of

Given prevailing conditions and the victory of Francois Hollande

successive bailouts to the sub-zero-growth peripheral countries

and Finland) which is negative; its yield (interest rate) is merely

in Syntagma Square opposite the Greek Parliament. This is the

In any discussion of the global capitalist depression US imperialism

culled from tens of billions of dollars spent on sustaining its Asian

incessant verbal onslaughts on the Syrian government. In certain

promotion he grabbed publicity on every occasion. He had the gall

Organization and a multitude of non-governmental organizations

Foreign Legion Nazi SS and Ukrainian fascists to pursue its imperial

History has not forgotten that George Washington and Thomas

Dr Clairmont in one of his essays published here. In a discussion on

were stimulated to encourage an attitude of hatred that gets your

people in the occupied lands, including the biggest open-air gulag

drawing to an end. American capitalism, with its endemic debts

Globalization: The Purgatory of Delusions

Globalization: The Purgatory

his essay is concerned with throwing into relief some

The Worlds Richest Individuals

Net Worth (US$)

Note: Net worth calculated March 2012

Globalization: The Purgatory

wars and the intensified struggle for ever-larger world market

Globalization: The Purgatory

most successful mechanism for creating wealth. It is not only

Globalization: The Purgatory

This explains the massive upsurge of the Indignados in Spain and

rowth of capital concentration is one of the most

Globalization: The Purgatory

kills another. It has nothing to do with creative destruction, as

Let us extend this argument a little further. The theoretical

Globalization: The Purgatory

any well established business. Expressed in more concrete terms,

mergers and acquisitions that bulldoze the road to larger market

Globalization: The Purgatory

Globalization: The Purgatory

longer one based on long-term horizons and planning. Those days

he criminalization of finance capital covers a vast spectrum

In all of these major sectors the multinational banking system

Globalization: The Purgatory

redound to the benefit of the four-fifths of the population that are

Globalization: The Purgatory

We now highlight the role of the derivatives market, which Warren

Globalization: The Purgatory

consequences. What the episode unmasked was that derivatives

Britains bankers can overpay themselves because they still operate

Globalization: The Purgatory

institutions, the largest taxpayer-financed bailout in the history of

Globalization: The Purgatory

the US Treasury. Babbling on democracy and human rights has no

The much-touted American dream of home ownership has turned

Globalization: The Purgatory

Are we so abysmally ignorant as to believe that we can have