Big (Good) America?

Americans assume we're doing good abroad. After all, the US is the only country that aided its defeated enemies and prostrate allies (after WWII) to return them to prosperity and democracy.

Since Vietnam, or, arguably, Korea, the American record has been mixed, but that hasn't altered the predominant American mythology: Americans go abroad to do good.

We're in Afghanistan to wrest it--for the Afghans--from Islamic extremist fanatics. We went into Iraq to save it from the tyrannous dictatorship of Saddam Hussein and to bring Iraq democratic politics--although, of course in both cases, we were also defending America from the threat they posed to us: two small countries halfway around the world, separated from us by seas and oceans, as well as other lands.

Hah! What about oil and oil pipelines?

Romans had a similar ideology. Romans believed they were doing good in the world. In Italy, they were unifying the peninsula; in Greece, they were bringing peace and order; in Asia and Europe, they were bringing order and law, and ultimately, civilization and Christianity.

Both Rome and America would boast the old Quaker saying about its most prosperous citizens: "They did well by doing good."

Romans--of the better sort--believed this. They believed it, even though they were wealthy beyond their contemporaries imagining (and right up there with our contemporaries). They became wealthy by grabbing lands Romans had conquered, and accumulating hundreds, even thousands of slaves, captured in Roman wars of conquest. The Senators of the western empire, in its decline, owned huge estates from Egypt to northern Gaul. Some of them had estates along the whole range: they could supply themselves with northern crops and tropical fruits simultaneously.

Now we have billionaires. While not all of them are American (the wealthiest is Mexican), it is the American system of war, and corporate monopoly, which makes them possible.

What most Americans don't realize is that our wars make a few very rich, but they impoverish the many. The Bush family made their fortune in wars going back to WWI. The Obamas didn't, but there are probably a lot of people in Obama's administration, and more of those advising him about "National Defense," who have become wealthy from war.

Furthermore, while the National Security Industrial complex makes a few very rich, it depends on high unemployment and low wages to recruit "the troops." Conveniently, defense contracts generate less than half the jobs civilian government contracts create for the same money, which means, in a finite budget: war dis-employs millions.

Wars also enable a few--our global elite--to rip off large parts of the rest of the world. That's how empires work.

Big bad America is a (declining) Empire.