“9/11 IN PLANE SIGHT”,
A DVD By William Lewis. Power Hour Production, 2004.

“LET’S ROLL 9/11”,
A DVD By Dylan Avery. Loose Change, 2006.

“THE BUSH AGENDA:
Invading The World, One Economy At A Time”
By Antonia Juhasz. Duckworth, London, 2006.

“CONFESSIONS Of AN ECONOMIC HIT MAN”
By John Perkins. Edbury Press, London and Random House, Auckland. 2005.

“OVERTHROW:
America ’s Century Of Regime Change From Hawaii To Iraq”
By Stephen Kinzer. Times Books, New York, 2006.

“FUTURE: TENSE.
The Coming World Order”
By Gwynne Dyer. Scribe, Melbourne, 2006.

A couple of years ago, Robin Cook, a former UK foreign affairs minister, suffered a fatal heart attack when tramping in Scotland. Cook was comparatively young and fit. But isn’t that the way it goes? Cook’s death made the news because he was admired by some for the scepticism about Tony Blair’s Iraq policy that had got him sacked, but we hear now that a better explanation is making the rounds in the Middle East. Cook was bumped off. Of course. Aren’t they all? He can join President Kennedy, Princess Di and the rest, the ones Who Knew Too Much or were Too Good.

Kennedy and Di had powerful friends and enemies, so all sorts of motives can be invented for their demise. We can place sinister interests on the grassy knoll* in Dallas or in the Paris tunnel. For conspiracy buffs it’s an entertainment, an aspect of celebrity worship. Was it the Mafia or Castro who had Kennedy killed? Who got Princess Di’s chauffeur drunk? Will Hollywood stars Brad Pitt and Jennifer Anniston make up? * The grassy knoll in Dallas was supposedly the site of the “real” assassin(s) of President Kennedy in 1963. The Paris tunnel was where Princess Diana died in the 1997 car crash. Ed.

The more his musings confound common sense, the more the conspiracy theorist is validated. His wisdom is deep and subtle. It sees through the trite surface of things that lesser beings accept. There’s an episode of the TV cartoon series The Simpsons when Springfield is faced with bad news. Homer knows that sinister forces are to blame. Marge thinks it was an accident. “How naïve”, sighs a condescending - and naive - Homer.

Like thousands of public figures Cook, as a former politician, might have written the odd op. ed. or spoken to a few student seminars. It might flatter his memory for him to be grouped with the glamorous dead, but to imagine that The System needed him eliminated is unimaginatively dumb. There is, though, a serious way the conspiracy theorist blocks understanding: if all deaths of prominent people and all spectacular events have the same sinister cause, you can’t cry wolf when you need to.

Conspiracy Theories

The surprise is that 9/11 has not excited conspiracy buffs more than it has. What other event has so many of the necessary ingredients? The big panics of the past, like the 1938 radio broadcast of HG Wells’ War of the Worlds, were stories which audiences thought real. The Twin Towers reversed that, the usual response being that an image of planes smashing into New York skyscrapers must be a movie. When fact is more spectacular than fiction, and apparently features stereotypical heroes and villains of the moment, wild rumour is as certain as an explosion of fuel.

The laboriously punning title, “9/11 In Plane Sight”, could charitably be forgiven if it referred to the content of this DVD, but it doesn’t, and that’s a problem, because the conspiracy busters’ central claim is that they can see something that The System has overlooked. Lots of things. They admit to the much-witnessed New York planes, but these weren’t all that important. What the rest of us missed were the multiple signs that the planes didn’t bring down the Towers, which were in truth lowered by a planned demolition. And the other two “supposedly hijacked” aircraft were not in plane sight at all. In the DVD’s alternative reality they didn’t exist. The Pentagon was hit by a cruise missile, while United Airlines Flight 93, the plane that the unwitting world believes to have come down in the countryside, also disappeared. The Pennsylvania field that featured on TV news was really untouched. And according to “Let’s Roll 9/11” the al Qaeda suicide bombers didn’t exist either.

A stated dislike for Bushite America should not blind the conspiracist to mundane understandings. He can’t grasp that even if US foreign policy might be up to no good that doesn’t mean that Americans are uniquely villainous individuals. Neither does the bad guy win every time. The paranoid pessimism of the conspiracist, his insistence that everything is always worse than it seems, betrays him every time. With no paints in the palette but midnight black the picture can’t ever be pretty. That might be the intention, but what results is not just unremitting, it’s featureless. So when the DVDs frame the big question - WHY? - they become merely tedious.

The first answer is the one we all knew to expect: 9/11 was set-up by the US government to justify aggression. A belief that Bush has used 9/11 to advance his quest for global hegemony is hard not to hold - and a projection of American superpower should have been anticipated right from the start - but this does not make the conspiracists prescient. It’s more like the old saw about how if you got enough monkeys on enough typewriters they’d eventually write “King Lear”. More important than mere coincidence is prediction based on analysis, and here the conspiracists fire blanks. They reel off names - Afghanistan, Taliban, Iraq - but they don’t say why Bush wanted these enemies.

Instead they pile up a random usual suspects enemies list. The evil forces connected to the State include “defence contractors” and Congress. The implication is that, like any scam artists, the former are in it for the money; the latter want nothing more than the ability to “legislate your freedoms away” by subjecting American citizens to bodyscans and body cavity searches.

In a moment what was purporting to be an analysis of imperialism morphs into a spoiled child whine. The subject matter might seem to be Noam Chomsky, but it’s more like the musings of the fascist bomber Timothy McVeigh*. Indeed the film veers swiftly from 9/11 and the corrupt government to the more congenial territory of Oklahoma City. The conspirators want to establish some sort of link between the (apparently still undisputedly) homegrown bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma and 9/11, but not even these nutters can do more than throw the names and words into the pot, words like “explosion” and “bomb”, and mix like mad, hoping they’ll bake something. * Timothy McVeigh was executed for the 1995 bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which killed more than 160 people. Ed.

The narrator of “9/11:In Plane Sight” looks soberly at the camera and sounds like one of those “trusted” TV anchormen. “Let’s Roll” has more fun. “I hope you’re sitting down”, the voice-over warns. It’s got the boring Government stuff out of the way, so we know we’re going to get the real gen. Under the Twin Towers was $US160 billion in gold and/or the owner with the obviously Jewish name wanted the place torched as an insurance scam. Wait, there’s more: big - and of course not investigated - insider trading in airline shares. Get it? And, listen up, the purpose of American foreign policy is “only to make trillions of dollars”.

“‘Angry yet?”, the unseen Timothy McVeighite voice asks as he prepares the punch line. “Tell total strangers. Ask questions”. We’re being harangued by the pub bore. We see a clip from a TV chat show, where some guy, captioned as “conspiracy theorist”, is being interviewed by US talk show host, Geraldo Riviera. Foreign audiences need to know that Riviera’s whole schtick is to be tacky. If Geraldo has you on the show, you’re not supposed to be taken seriously.

Bush Is A Frontman For Washington Insiders

Conspiracists are prone to uncovering “hidden agendas”, so Antonia Juhasz’s title could give the impression that she’s also off on a ghostbusting mission. She isn’t. She is accurate in a literal sense. For all his incoherent manner and cowpoke persona George Bush is frontman for powerful Washington insiders who have written down their aims.

Juhasz traces the “Bush Agenda” to 1992, the final year of his dad’s presidency. That’s when six men, who included Dick Cheney, now Vice President, and Donald Rumsfeld, now Defense Secretary, drafted Bush Senior’s Defense Planning Guidance (DPG). Bush Senior was “setting the agenda” for his successors. Emboldened by the collapse of the Soviet bloc and his recent (first) Gulf War win, Bush was hoping to create a legacy. DPG was a blueprint for the projection of an unrivalled American power at one of those moments when anything seemed possible.

DPG’s agenda was to abort the prospect of a “peace dividend” by making sure that America kept up its big military spending. The authors argued that the US should be able to project overwhelming force anywhere any time. The authors envisioned a system in which “the world order is ultimately backed by the US”.

Although it had no feasible military rival, America needed to “establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests. Second, in the non-defence area, we must discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order. Finally, we must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role”.

Note how the language slides from defence, the need for which is assumed. Thus the creation of a “world order” refers to the purpose of American military and defence policy. It’s to do with what’s meant to result, the imposing of a “new order”, a planet in which all and sundry accept that America is the sole superpower. It’s aimed as much at Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and Group of Seven (G7) rivals as at places like Russia or China. No-one needs to be reminded of America’s attitude to the mass of the planet that used to be called Second or Third World. That aspect of the “old order” hasn’t changed. The “new order” part is that the US might drop its First World North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and European Union (EU) mates of the last half century. Bush thinks the US now has the ability, and perhaps the need, to go it alone. That’s the agenda.

The CIA Spells It Out

The new order, which is usually called globalisation, is to do with economic supremacy, and it’s quite happy if it leaves in its wake what others might call disorder. It even expects it. In 2000 the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) noted that the policies which Bush and his mates were hawking would induce “deepening economic stagnation, political instability, and cultural alienation. They will foster political, ethnic, ideological, and religious extremism, along with the violence that often accompanies it” (“Global Trends 2015: A Dialogue About The Future With Non-government Experts”, approved for publication by the National Foreign Intelligence Board, under the authority of the Director of Central Intelligence, US National Intelligence Council, 2000-02, December 2000, cited by Juhasz, p5).

Four years later the CIA, the brain that guides Pentagon muscle, confirmed these predictions. “The gap between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ will widen... Globalisation will profoundly shake up the status quo, generating enormous ... convulsions”. The CIA concludes: “The key factors that spawned international terrorism show no signs of abating” (“Global Trends 2020: Mapping The Global Future”, National Intelligence Council’s 2020 Project, December 2004; cited by Juhasz, p298. The National Intelligence Council is a Federal agency which provides the Government with intelligence forecasts).

Between these two assessments, in January, 2002, four months after the plane attacks - though plans to attack Iraq were aired in the White House on September 12, 2001 - Bush addressed Congress: “In this moment of opportunity a common danger is erasing old rivalries... In every region, free markets and free trade and free societies are proving their power to lift lives... [T]he forces of terror cannot stop the momentum of freedom”.

Central to all these “freedoms”, Juhasz remarks, is the one which is called “free trade”, a phrase which serves as “shorthand for a number of economic policies that expand the rights of multinational corporations and investors to operate in more locations, under fewer regulations”. “Free trade” is the freedom that defines and legitimises all the other freedoms.

It’s no news that businessmen run Washington - they always have - but their presence has morphed from being overwhelming to being absolute. Juhasz notes that “the President, the Vice-President, and the Secretaries of Defense, Energy, Treasury and Commerce are all former Chief Executive Officers (CEOs). The Secretaries of State, Labor, Housing and Urban Development, and Transportation are all former corporate executives or directors”.

So, in an obvious sense, there doesn’t need to be a conspiracy. It used to be said that what was good for General Motors was good for America. These days GM might be down on its luck, but the sentiment remains: what’s good for corporate America is good for America. The essence of Bushite America is the emergence of a new elite within American capitalism. Juhasz finds its centre in four corporations: “Chevron, Halliburton, Lockheed Martin and Bechtel represent three key pillars of the Bush Agenda: oil, war, and building the infrastructure of corporate globalisation... Not only have their past and present executives directly shaped the Bush Agenda, but the companies directly profit from its implementation today”.

Iraq Is The Obsession

Juhasz shows how Iraq has come to be a Bushite obsession. Because it has large oil reserves and a strategic position, Iraq has long bothered both the American and British governments, so Juhasz reminds us that sometimes the new order resembles old orders. In the years after World War 1 the then imperial rivals, the US and the UK, squabbled over who would get Iraq’s oil. The West was content that an Iraqi government remained in office so long as the US-UK axis was in power: “The Iraqis, however, wanted the British out. In 1932, in a situation remarkably similar to that of present day Iraq and the United States, the British granted Iraq nominal independence while British troops remained stationed in the country. British officials maintained posts in all levels of the Iraqi government, and both the British government and British companies exercised control over key sectors of the Iraqi economy” (author’s emphasis).

Iraq’s pattern of veering between dependence and defiance culminated in Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait (itself created as a client state of UK oil interests). Juhasz notes that “there are two main schools of thought as to why the United States did not stop the invasion of Kuwait before it began. The first is that Bush Senior believed that he and Hussein were working together, but Hussein had to make a show of aggression to impress both those inside and outside of Iraq of his seriousness. Bush did not actually believe that Hussein would invade Kuwait in defiance of US interests (even if those interests had not been stated) and those of most of Iraq’s neighbours, and Hussein did not actually believe that Bush would stop him if he did invade. But once Hussein invaded Kuwait, the Bush Administration could not allow him to control both his own and Kuwait’s oil and threaten Saudi Arabia, particularly since he had demonstrated that he could no longer be trusted in serving US interests. Hussein had to be removed. The other school of thought ... is that Bush allowed Hussein to invade Kuwait because it provided an excuse to remove Hussein from power, and the war with Iraq, in turn, provided the necessary excuse to bring a significantly increased US military presence into the region...”.

This assessment is typical of Juhasz’s restrained and thoughtful tone. She suggests that “a combination of the two arguments is also possible” and leaves the matter. Juhasz is similarly open-ended in discussing the debatable answers as to why Bush Senior’s army did not go on to Baghdad and catch Hussein. Gwynne Dyer (see below) makes the case that Bush Senior, a product of the post-WW2 order, was cautious about leaving Iraq with no rooted government as the country would have become unpredictable and ungovernable. Bush Senior might not have launched Gulf War 2.

Juhasz is, however, sure that the current conventional wisdom about Bush Junior’s policy is wrong. “It has been said so often that it is now repeated as gospel that the Bush administration had no plan for post-conflict Iraq. But the gospel is not correct. There was at least one clear plan - an economic plan - the blueprint for which was ready and in Bush Administration hands at least two months prior to the invasion”. Of course it was. It was the plan for “free trade”. And as Napoleon supposedly said, you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.

As expressed in its Iraq clauses, the Bush agenda is commendably specific, consisting of 100 “Orders”. These were published in 2003 by a certain L Paul Bremer 3 rd. Once Hussein was overthrown, the US sent in an “administrator”. The first choice, General Jay Garner, was fired in no time, scorned as a failure by a sycophantic mass media reciting lines drafted in Washington. His “failure” was that he urged two policies that made sense to most outside Washington but not to those inside it: a quick transfer of power to Iraqis so that the US would not come to be seen as an occupying force; and a more restrained, less ideological, economic prescription. A reliable toady, Paul Bremer, had to be flown in to draft a constitution for Washington’s new, improved product.

Bremer’s consultants, BearingPoint Inc. of McLean, Virginia (home of the Pentagon), picked up $US250 million for writing it up, so it should be good. BearingPoint was spun off from KPMG, one of the “Big Four” accountancy transnationals – it used to be KPMG’s management consultancy arm (BearingPoint is a sponsor of Local Government NZ.).

Blueprint For A Pure Neo-liberal Economy

Bremer and BearingPoint’s 100 “Orders” are a complete blueprint for running a purist neo-liberal economy. We heard in May 2006 of US Marines running amok and murdering civilians. They might have been comforted by Order 17, which grants legal immunity from Iraqi laws to Coalition forces - and to corporations, corporate subcontractors and their employees. Order 37 mandates a flat tax system, replacing Iraq’s progressive tax system. Order 94 opens a previously closed banking system to allow complete and unrestricted foreign ownership.

The occupation is equally military and economic. Were Bush’s purpose to be the establishment of “democracy”, as he has always insisted, he would not be trying to remove the possibility of choice from a successor Iraqi government. The Orders are the laboratory of the “new order” and they exist to negate democracy (as the rest of us conceive it).

This did not preclude Bremer and BearingPoint from resurrecting business as usual when it came to their mates at Bechtel and Halliburton. They were guaranteed the very “old order” cost-plus contracts. These allow a company to bill for a fixed percentage over and above whatever the work costs. The fattest pig at the trough, Halliburton, recent home of Vice-President Dick Cheney, has contracts worth over $US11 billion (in July 2006, the Pentagon cancelled Halliburton’s huge logistic support contract and put it up for open bid, because of Halliburton’s shoddy management, flagrant over-charging and general corporate arrogance in its dealings with the military. Ed.).

The core of Bremer’s constitution is Order 39 legislating “national treatment”, a provision that would disallow an Iraqi government from any measure which might be deemed to protect domestic contractors from foreign competition. Yet it provides for foreigners to get preferential treatment. This enacts the complete neo-liberal freedom that, in the face of global protest, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) has been unable to achieve. After this, his work brilliantly done, Bremer went back Stateside. Those who keep saying that Bush had no plan do not see that Bremer succeeded in putting in place one of the clearest and most complete plans in all of history.

Juhasz traces the “free trade” phase of the American agenda to the 1980s’ Reagan-era Structural Adjustment Program (SAP). Developing countries, trapped in debt to foreign banks, “had to adhere to a series of strict conditions that would reduce domestic spending while increasing capital available to pay back loans. The conditions were always the same, regardless of the country in question. They all followed the same corporate globalisation model: privatise government industries, eliminate restrictions on foreign ownership and investment, eliminate barriers to trade, eliminate government restrictions on foreign corporations, cut government spending, devalue the nation’s currency, and focus development on exporting key resources such as oil, minerals, trees, agricultural products, luxury goods such as coffee and flowers, and the like”.

Meanwhile the US was tying its neighbours, Canada and Mexico, into the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). NAFTA, which was to be the template for the world, enacting SAP policy at governmental levels. The inevitable result of a deregulated continent was that only the biggest corporations, those with the lowest unit costs and most automated procedures, thrived. Juhasz picks Wal-Mart, the grossest of them all, as the icon of the new order. Wal-Mart has eliminated livelihoods in the US by ending competition in manufacturing and retail and by producing its goods in foreign countries. Throughout North America it has laid waste local towns. Yes, its products are cheap and nasty, but then, with its customers increasingly hard up, they need to be.

By importing its wares from the cheapest sources Wal-Mart made its owners, the Walton family, multi-billionaires. Juhasz describes Mexican border towns as being cheap labour camps from which Wal-Mart and others export into the American market. Mexican enterprises cannot compete. As the only viable employer in a regional economy it has itself created, Wal-Mart can drive down wages all over again. Wal-Mart is an emblem of globalisation.

In 1997, during the Clinton presidency between Bushes Senior and Junior, a cabal of neoconservative intellectuals proclaimed their Project for the New American Century (PNAC). The first order of business, PNAC urged, was the removal of Saddam Hussein, who occupied a strategic space on top of lots of oil. A few weeks later an outfit called the Center for Peace and Security in the Gulf (CPSG) wrote to Clinton with the same demand. The two groups - and others with the same agenda that sprouted like toadstools on a dung heap - had interlocking Bush Senior and Junior Cabinet-and-CEO membership. One such, Richard Perle, who chaired CPSG, is best known for his 1980s-era promotion of a first-strike nuclear policy against the former Soviet Union.

Gwynne Dyer (see below) cites an agenda that would have delighted conspiracists, were they into reading. A thinktank penned “Rebuilding America’s Defenses”, which openly yearned for “some catastrophic and catalysing event - like a new Pearl Harbor”. The flood of propaganda broke the dam when Clinton enacted the Iraq Liberation Act. This stated that “it should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic (i.e. ‘free trade’ neo-liberal) government to replace that regime”. Does this mean that Bush’s agenda is not new?

Bush Junior is certainly brazen. Few would deny that he is different in degree from both his father and Clinton. Is he also different in kind? He is the first modern president to avowedly go it alone. It is hard to imagine that Clinton would have sought opportunities to insult the United Nations, as Bushite American officials do routinely. And Clinton’s hacks, while free traders one and all, were not the neo-con zealots who poured hatred into the ears of Bush Junior. Perhaps the difference between the last two presidents is the difference between opportunism and fanaticism.

Oil Is The Drug Which The Empire Must Have At Any Cost

Juhasz might not be the first commentator to suggest that, at the black core of US policy, is oil, but not always is the connection between oil’s part in informing foreign and domestic policy as succinctly analysed as it is here. All US governments have put the need for (what they deem to be) secure supply of oil as a first principle, and for the last three decades a sort of permanent oil crisis has preoccupied policy makers.

In 1970, Juhasz argues, domestic US oil production peaked. From then on the need for foreign supplies became increasingly urgent. Libya nationalised its oil in 1971 (making its ruler, Colonel Ghadaffi, part of the “Axis of Evil”) and Iraq, a more important source, nationalised in 1972. This was the time of the “oil crisis”, when the world’s economies seemed permanently stuck in a bog of crude. Prices soared; so too - though they prattled endlessly of how sorry they were for the whole unavoidable mess - did Big Oil’s profits. It is not a coincidence that the decade of the 1970s marked the end of a post-war expansion of the domestic economy. Thirty years of rising production and prosperity brought a booming Gross Domestic Product (GDP), strong trade unions, rising wages and greater equality. In the US the share of total wealth that the richest cornered for themselves fell by 10%.

In 1980 the Reagan presidency ushered in a decade in which the trend towards better living standards was more than reversed. In the 1980s the rich’s share of national wealth went up by 20%, while the great bulk of the population were mired, and the poorest became poorer, even in absolute terms. The oil shock had been the catalyst for two historic shifts, long sought by transnational corporations: a global transfer of money and influence to the very richest Americans and their mates overseas, and, within America, from working families to corporations, the biggest of which were from the same all-too-familiar rogues’ gallery.

The Bush agenda, largely written by oil men, is to make explicit the primacy of Big Oil in a historical moment which has seemed to leave the US with enhanced global power. Big Oil acts as the keystone for an imperial arch. The men around Bush were in most cases the men who advised his father. They have spent their working lives passing between Government and the corporations that get all the big federal contracts. The power elite, the men - and one woman, Condoleezza Rice - who literally have written the agenda, have made themselves known to us. The agenda is anything but secret. Juhasz’s focus is the international aspect of Bushite arrogance. This does not mean that the agenda is not also concerned with keeping the locals in check. On the contrary, both Juhasz and Bush take this motive for granted.

How much more useful is this explanation, and how much more straightforward, than the conspirators’ vague, generic rant about “defence contractors”, insurance scams, inside traders and lost gold. How much more devastating and convincing as evidence is the real world. The conspiracists are unused to systematic analysis, and because they cannot see either the trees or the wood, they have to invent. They have picked up from the popular mass media (the same mass media that they now “denounce”) a suspicion that the world might have complexities they had not imagined, but they have no idea as to how it works. Like Homer Simpson, they adopt a know-nothing cynicism as a shield against their ignorance being revealed.

“Confessions Of An Economic Hit Man” is a title that invites scepticism. John Perkins, though, was recruited by a Boston-based engineering consultancy as just that. According to Perkins the role of an Economic Hit Man, known more discreetly in public as an EHM, is to produce econometric* forecasts about developing countries for investors, principally the World Bank. Perkins had only an undergraduate degree and no experience but was soon head economist. * Econometrics – the branch of economics concerned with the use of mathematical methods (especially statistics) in describing economic systems. Oxford Compact English Dictionary. Ed.

To hear him say it, his boss told Perkins that specialist economists could not handle foreign spots. To check the jungle or the desert you needed more than formal qualifications. Perkins’ US Peace Corp background helped. He was being groomed as a sort of spy, so personality was important. As he keeps reminding us, there was a cloak-and-dagger aspect to being an EHM - to the extent of beautiful woman with a fake identity who tested Perkins to check he had the required discretion and loyalty.

Shock Troops For The Transnationals

However much the details might be embellished to make a good story, this is not the fantasy it might seem. An economic hit man produces forecasts to justify the big projects that the World Bank and the State Department want. Perkins understood that his role was to justify loans so that host governments could invite huge transnational corporations like Bechtel to come in and build dams and roads. His employers wanted clients to get into debt. This was not explicit. It was just that one economist who warned that one project’s repayments would be risky was never promoted, and another who expressed misgivings about a pure neo-liberal future soon resigned. The EHM tag is one that can be laughed off as irony. Would the US government and the World Bank really style themselves as gangsters? Ha ha.

There’s an old joke to the effect that an individual in hock to a bank for a few hundred dollars will be squeezed for every cent that’s due, but a country that’s billions in arrears will get more credit. Partly this might be because banks hope that delaying bankruptcy keeps alive the possibility that the lender can later hope to get something back, but Perkins’ experience is that this common wisdom is not the issue. Getting repaid has not been the point. Institutions like the World Bank have longer term agendas. Neo-liberal agents like Big Banks lend money so that client states can be influenced to deregulate and privatise, and they’re more susceptible when they’re more grateful. And corporations like Bechtel, the grateful recipients of billions, want the contracts that follow from the bailouts - which are funded by taxpayers.

Some might see Perkins as being conspiratorial here, but the evidence backs him. Debt means dependence. With the debtor’s obligation comes the lender’s power to dictate policy. Otherwise the banks wouldn’t be so ready to ignore the oldest wisdom of them all: they wouldn’t throw good money after bad. For the Bushites, as for any manipulative power elite, money in itself is not the end; it’s the means to a political end.

“If an EHM is completely successful”, Perkins explains, “the loans are so large that the debtor is forced to default on its payments after a few years. When this happens, then like the Mafia we demand our pound of flesh. This often includes one or more of the following: control over United Nations votes, the installation of military bases, or access to precious resources such as oil or the Panama Canal. Of course, the debtor stills owes us the money - and another country is added to our global empire”.

Perkins talks of his particular interest in South America. In his opinion, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s present challenge to the old pattern of gringo bullying slipped through the CIA net and became established as it happened to coincide with a US preoccupation with former Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein. Later, when the Americans tried to subvert Chavez’s presidency, domestic elites, notably the army, remained loyal.

Perkins describes his career, which spanned the years between 1963 and 1980 in such pivotal destinations as Indonesia, Panama, Iran and Saudi Arabia. His biography is the history of the new imperial order. Usually an EHM will get more or less what’s needed. If he fails, the jackals go in. Their work tends not to be well minuted. It’s likely that few, even in high places, know what jackals are prowling. Usually the jackals will be co-opted locals with their own agendas, quite happy to settle old scores or stir a crisis into chaos. The third stage, the admission of failure, is war.

Corporatocracy

Perkins has a name for the “Bush agenda” coalition, that common interest of Washington and Big Business to suppress freedom in the developing world. He dubs it the corporatocracy. Its immediate impulse is dictated by the strategic importance of the Middle East and of oil (and although the American writers under review do not feel the need to spell it out, the Iran coup of 1953 also confirmed the US as the world’s superpower. Three years later, a reduced but still imperial-minded UK was to be taken aback by US opposition to its unsuccessful military campaign, along with France and Israel, to wrest control of the Suez Canal back from Egypt’s nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser).

“Some”, remarks Perkins, “would blame our current problems on an organised conspiracy. I wish it were so simple. Members of a conspiracy can be rooted out and brought to justice. This system, however, is fuelled by something far more dangerous than conspiracy. It is driven not by a small band of men but a concept.... The corporatocracy is not a conspiracy, but its members do endorse common values and goals.

“The vast majority [of staffers] merely performed the tasks they had been taught in business, engineering, and law schools... Although unconscious, deceived, and - in many cases - self-deluded, these players were not members of any clandestine conspiracy... The bribes consisted of salaries, bonuses, pensions, and insurance policies; the threats were based on social mores, peer pressure, and unspoken questions about the future of their children’s education”.

Perkins’ eyewitness take on US policy is essentially the same as that presented in journalist Stephen Kinzer’s detailed history. “Overthrow”, which chronicles American adventures overseas, is an entertaining account, well written and full of anecdotes from the adventurers themselves. On a global scale, American mastery of technique and control of information often looks smooth, at least from a distance of time and space. On the ground, as they say, the plotters are, as likely as not, bunglers.

Perkins and Kinzer pick the same events as being significant, an interpretation that follows a historians’ consensus. When the narrative has to do with US foreign policy, the role of the mass media, the biases of corporatocracy and their enemies, the conventional wisdom can be dangerous, a recital of unexamined assumption. It’s not a worry here. Kinzer has made good choices.

In a section called “Covert Action”, Kinzer relates four key interventions, chosen because in all of them the American role was decisive. They shared three other characteristics. In each case, Kinzer says, the presidents concerned were acting within US law. In each case (with one obvious exception) “reasonably democratic governments” were replaced by dictatorships. In all four cases, a hunger to control resources was a central motivation.

Iran

In 1953, when an uppity Iran had to be put down, the US did not need to send in the Marines. The British wanted to secure their oil, nationalised by Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh. Mossadegh had been much admired in some Western circles for his progressive government, so this was too much. He had to go down. The UK was scared that an invasion could provoke a Soviet response, so they asked for US help. With buckets of Yankee dollars, the CIA did the trick. Out went the Prime Minister and a burgeoning democracy. In came the Shah and his secret police.

Thieves fall out, especially if one of a pair has the big bucks and the big guns. Mossadegh had offered British oil interests a 50/50 split. After the Americans took over their coup, they had to settle for a 20% take. A US Supreme Court judge who had visited Iran both before and after the coup was not impressed. “When Mossadegh and Persia (the old name for Iran. Ed.) started basic reforms, we became alarmed. We united with the British to destroy him; we succeeded; and ever since, our name has not been an honoured one in the Middle East”.

Notoriously, Americans tend to the Henry Ford view that history is bunk, so that, a generation later, when the Shah was deposed and the US Embassy in Tehran was overrun, in 1979, the kidnappers were wont to remind their baffled captives of the events of 1953. Iranian resentment had since been nurtured by the Shah’s destruction of democracy and secular humanism. Mosques, which needs be were left alone, sheltered obscurantist clerics, who filled the vacuum.

Guatemala

It was much the same the next year in the Central American nation of Guatemala. A progressive leader was ousted for trying to wrest some control over his country’s tiny finances from a foreign corporation. President Jacobo Arbenz nationalised United Fruit, a US banana monopoly, on the basis of its stated revenues of around $US1 million, only to find that the company deemed it unreasonable to suppose that United Fruit would tell the truth about such matters. Its real profits were 20 times higher, Arbenz was informed. He might have guessed they would be miffed. United Fruit had acquired its lands by taking them. So out went another promising democracy and in came another thug to make Guatemala safe again for banana profits.

President Dwight Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, and his brother, Allen, Director of the CIA, were both shareholders of United Fruit and John was one of their lawyers. This would not have been a moral impediment to Dulles. A fundamentalist Christian, John Foster Dulles was untroubled by doubt. Like so many political careerists he had little experience of life beyond provincial Republicanism. Dulles, whose tenure in federal office coincided with the grotesqueries of Joe McCarthy*, saw a monster called Communism lurking in the shadows, encircling the bright city on the hill that was America. Arbenz wasn’t keen on an American banana company, which made him a commie, which meant he had to go. * USSenator Joe McCarthy, with his inquisitions and deranged accusations, became synonymous with the anti-Communist witchhunts and hysteria in the 1950s. Ed.

There is a tendency to suppose that men like Dulles, with access to both intelligence and “intelligence”, do not mean what they say. It suits great powers to have bogeymen to blame for the depredations they are said to force upon the guardians of the cities on the hill. We’d like you to be free and happy, the guardians say, but not yet. First we must be on watch against the bogeyman, so you’ll have to forgive us for upping your taxes so we can buy more tanks. Priests and imams hunt for devils; official America nurtures a Communist threat. Indeed it is the very crudity of McCarthyist scapegoating, and its often farcical hysteria, that gave the whole phenomenon of conspiracy theory a kick start. If a superstition has the effect of justifying an elite through metaphysics and irrational speculation, and if it comes to be believed by opinion leaders, then it’s probably the creation of that elite.

Vietnam

Who can be sure if Dulles believed what he said? Ultimately it might not matter, because he would have said it anyway. Ten years later, after Vietnamese had forced from their country first a rapacious Japan, and then a sadly lingering imperial France, the world might have cut them slack. It might even have given them a hand. But as we know only too well, a different American president, Kennedy, from a different party, the Democrats, looked at Vietnam and saw again the bogeyman. If Dulles was the epitome of 50s’ conservatism, Kennedy’s main man, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, was supposed to be Dulles’ nemesis. He was the essence of 60s’ cool. According to the high priests in the West’s governments and media, McNamara was a “technocrat”. His “buttoned-down” mind was said to be an awesome calculating machine, as cold and clear as a prairie winter dawn (in the excitement of the moment, metaphors got mixed).

The word from Camelot (as the Kennedy era was dubbed, after the court of the mythical King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Ed.), and later from his successors, Presidents Johnson and Nixon, was that “international Communism” was subverting South Vietnam, on orders from Russia. Faced with having to figure out how a lumbering Soviet Union could invisibly direct affairs from an improbable distance, the propagandists discovered a new puppeteer, China (Vietnam’s traditional enemy).

Kinzer relates a 1963 CIA-sponsored coup in which the Americans deposed their own man, Ngo Dinh Diem, leader of South Vietnam. This event, Kinzer argues, marks the moment the US passed its point of no return. It had not been easy to find a leader to credibly claim a legitimacy to rival Vietnam’s war leader, Ho Chi Minh. Diem didn’t talk of independence or economic progress and he hadn’t lifted a finger against invading Japanese or French armies, so he was safe. He wasn’t a nationalist, but, best of all, and in fact his only qualification that mattered, he had defined himself as an anti-commie. At the time of need Diem was training in an American Catholic seminary - Christians comprise about 10% of Vietnam’s population - and he had to be flown back home to be installed as President. As President Lyndon Johnson (LBJ) put it: “Shit, Diem’s the only boy we’ve got out there”.

Diem was put in charge of South Vietnam (the country had been partitioned into two independent States at the conclusion of the victorious Communist-led war of independence against France, in the 1950s. An election to decide reunification was promised but never held. Ed.). In North Vietnam, Ho governed, and not even LBJ and McNamara claimed he did not have a mandate to do so. In the ravaged and arbitrary territory that was South Vietnam an undisguised puppet leader with no popular backing could have ruled - for perhaps a decade or two - only by terror. Diem didn’t have it in him, seeming to want to come to some accommodation with Ho. As this could have lead only to a unitary Vietnam controlled by Ho, Diem had to go. He and his brother were shot dead by an Army chief.

Kinzer narrates the nasty details of direct US government collusion. As he tells it (and previous accounts agree), the murder of Diem was not in the script, so squabbles broke out both within and between South Vietnamese and American plotters. Thus it could have been said - as it is now being said about events in Iraq - that the Americans did not have a plan. Coup followed coup; the war spluttered.

Conspiracy or cock-up? Again it’s the wrong question. There was an undeniable conspiracy, directed by the US Ambassador, to end Diem’s government. The means might have been a cock-up, but as long as US complicity could not be proven, no-one in Washington would have cared. Some might have welcomed the mess. A bit of chaos along the way made it clear that the Vietnamese were now entirely subservient to an intransigent American goal. In modern administrative parlance it could be said that the US were the governance branch and the South Vietnamese were operations.

Chile

Kinzer’s fourth example is the 1973 coup in Chile (also on the fateful day of September 11. Ed.). When General Augusto Pinochet led a military revolt against the government of Salvador Allende it was, in one sense, business as usual, the businesses in this case being the members of a Chile Ad Hoc Committee, which included ITT, Firestone Tire and Rubber, Bethlehem Steel, Bank of America, Ralston Purina and Dow Chemical. This was a step up from bananas, and Chile was a step up from Guatemala in that its citizens had an expectation of democracy.

Allende is often remembered as the first elected Marxist - though he is more accurately seen as a social democrat. His role possibly would have been analogous to that of New Zealand‘s first Labour Prime Minister, Michael Joseph Savage, in 1935. Whatever the shade of pink, from an American point of view he was unacceptable. The immediate crisis that led to his murder (some say he committed suicide when troops stormed the Presidential Palace) was Allende’s nationalisation of a mining company on terms consistent with the best available information about the company’s books. Here was the exact Guatemala scenario. But no matter what the trigger, the gun was primed to fire. Allende’s election had been celebrated by Chile’s American bank refusing a loan. Other banks were told not to advance credit. The World Bank suspended a livestock improvement grant.

Eisenhower had Dulles; Kennedy had McNamara; Richard Nixon had Henry Kissinger, a person often considered either a genius or an evil genius. Evil would be closer. Kissinger’s exalted reputation cannot be explained by anything on the public record that he has said or done. Kissinger, Nixon’s Secretary of State, is still around, selling influence, flattering the powerful, uttering deep platitudes (that always are just what the powerful want to hear). It is Kissinger’s voice that brought him fame. His Germanic accent reminds Americans of brilliant professors from television cartoons.

Kissinger could be relied on to tell the President to act tough and build more bombs. Normally a place as uncool as Chile would not warrant his attention. “Nothing important”, opined the good doctor, “can come from the South”. As he had previously told the Chilean Ambassador, “I am not interested in, nor do I know anything about, the southern portion of the world from the Pyrenees on down”. Ambition, opportunism and an obsession with the arid cliches of the Cold War made Kissinger an ideal organiser of Pinochet’s coup. Kissinger and the CIA drafted the agenda. “Allende After The Inauguration” noted that if Chile were to suffer “continued economic decline”, the country might collapse into chaos and “the military would have justification for intervening”. CIA boss Richard Helms was happy to scratch the back of the man who was scratching the back of the President. Helms cabled Kissinger with the observation that “a sudden disastrous economic situation would be the most logical pretext for a military move”. Soon Henry Hekscher, the CIA station chief in Santiago, joined the dots. “You have asked us to provoke chaos in Chile”. he cabled. “We provide you with formula for chaos, which is unlikely to be bloodless”.

Hekcsher was trying to cool his boss’s ardour, not realising that chaos was the intention. In all four of the classic US operations - those in Iran, Guatemala, Vietnam, and now Chile - CIA chiefs in the field advised against violence, and in all four cases they were ignored. This might to some extent have been an example of institutional memory and pragmatic local knowledge being brushed aside by the State’s theologians (when experts differ from the less exalted, who allow themselves to be guided by intuitive hunch, the experts are almost always wrong). But a blanket know-nothing contempt for the experts, the gambit of one school of conspiracists, doesn’t help either. The received expert wisdom isn’t all stupid all the time.

Permanent Crisis Is The Goal

Perkins hinted at how to bridge this gap - and he’s by no means the first to do so. This is to appreciate that, far from being a careless by-product of imperial venture, permanent crisis is its goal. A client in need is a client indeed. The corporatocracy wants peace and quiet as much as the credit card company wants borrowers to pay on time. Bush’s planned foray in Iraq “without a plan” is merely the latest example.

It follows that discussion of these matters framed as a “cock-up or conspiracy?” dilemma misses the point. In the medium term, it doesn’t matter what happens in the short term. If Guatemala allows United Fruit a free rein, the niceties that detain judges or lower-ranking CIA agents are a threat - or would be if they became known to a wider public - because the motive of imperial foreign policy is never the welfare of the dependency. In the middle of his account Kinzer’s wanders into a perfunctory diversion. “What if?” there had been a different president? What if such a fact had been taken into account? It’s as though Kinzer feels that he must appeal to liberal notions of individual agency. His conclusion is nearer the mark. He presents a formula: whenever ideology and economic interest coincide the US will act to secure its needs. You get the feeling that in all four cases the end result was not in doubt.

The United Fruits of the world can no longer act with impunity at home because democracy deters profits. Dictatorship is more efficient. To suppose that the US could have or should have fostered freedom in Guatemala or Vietnam is to reverse all the evidence. To the corporatocracy democracy is a risk that must be eliminated. Guatemala and Nicaragua (the site of America’s imperialist war of the 1980s. Ed.) were not called “banana republics” for nothing.

So there is a fifth common element. In each country, once the CIA and the other agents of corporatocracy got stuck in, moral and material standards of living degenerated. Kinzer places the last century of US foreign policy in three periods. What he calls the imperial phase began in 1893 when Hawaii was forced into the process that ended with statehood. 1898 was a decisive year, as it was then that the US took over colonial Cuba and the Philippines by waging war against a Spanish empire in terminal decline (the US business conspiracists operating in Hawaii called themselves The Committee of Safety. They would have been unaware of Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety, from the 18 th Century French Revolution. When you despise the guidance of history, you can look pretty stupid.) The US began the 20 th Century by thereby announcing that the Americas and the Pacific were to be seen as within a US sphere of influence.

The second period, the tawdry era of Dulles and Kissinger, lasted until Bush’s foray into Iraq. Before this present adventure, overt US force was always qualified. Kinzer provides two examples of direct American military invasion that pre-dated the collapse of the Soviet Union, but both, Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989, were within the American hemisphere (the first all-US coup was a 1909 foray into Nicaragua, an event which installed a century - and counting - of dependencies).

A Century Of Pax Americana And The Quest For Profit

If an American initiative to seize the moment and impose a Pax Americana on the world has been the impetus for the amBush of Iraq, so too was the first imperial phase the result of the restless search for profit. America pushed into the Caribbean and the Pacific, Kinzer suggests, because by the end of the 19 th Century, the major businesses had saturated the domestic market. They needed new customers and new resources. So it is not surprising that 2003, the climax of this expansion, played like 1898.

“The tendency of modern times is toward consolidation. Small states are of the past, and have no future”. This sentiment sounds contemporary; it has the flavour of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). In fact it was the 1913 opinion of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, uttered when most of today’s small states did not yet exist. That is, Lodge wanted colonies to forget about independence, an unnecessary status if “the market” was to rule (appropriately, the history of the Lodge family is reminiscent of that of the Bushes).

Teddy Roosevelt, the imperial president, was a more impressive person than Bush, but his role was comparable. Like Bush he liked to swagger, affecting disdain for the wimps of Europe and the “futile sentimentalists of the international arbitration type”. Here Teddy was pure George, yet neither the United Nations nor its forerunner, the League of Nations, had been dreamed of. Roosevelt represented the high-water mark of international anarchy, the assumption that big powers could do what they wanted to the powerless, and he didn’t want any do-gooders to get ideas that there might be better ways of living together on our small planet (Roosevelt is back in fashion in today’s America. For example, see Time, 3/7/06, which devoted its Annual Special issue on The Making of America to “Teddy”. George Bush likes to let it be known that Roosevelt biographies are among his favourite reading. Ed.).

In the critical year of 1898 an influential German newspaper complained that “Americans have never worried too much about diplomatic questions. Wild as their land is wild.... they go forward on the road they believe they must travel and do not care at all what Europe says”. Americans were acquiring the “cowboy” tag - put aside over the last 50 years - that Bush is doing his best to restore.

Gwynne Dyer prefaces his analysis of US foreign policy with a remark by an academic. “In all of American public life”, said Andrew Bacevich, “there is hardly a significant prominent figure who finds fault with the notion of the United States remaining the world’s sole military superpower until the end of time”. There’s the rub. At a casual glance from overseas it seems sometimes that Bush is unpopular. Domestic critics accuse him of arrogance or ignorance or whatever. But listen closely and you notice that the criticism has to do with the style of his Administration. When it comes to the basics, the substance, America’s role as world cop, Bush represents a consensus.

It is axiomatic to Americans that theirs is the best of all possible worlds. America represents democracy and opportunity in a way that no other land does. This is partly historic, stemming from the 18 th Century War of Independence which enshrined Enlightenment principles. The moralism that others associate with America derives in part from its history as the embodiment of progressive values. To be American was to uphold life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This is indeed a great tradition.

The Doctrine Of American Exceptionalism

Americans came to believe that they could avoid the various miseries that inflicted Europe, which had to contend with a messy past. The doctrine of American Exceptionalism teaches that the US economy need not suffer the depressions that periodically engulf the rest of the world. Another doctrine, Manifest Destiny, declares that it is in the very nature of things that America is destined to be the best. These assumptions are ingrained in the national psyche. A century after an American invasion of Canada had been beaten back, a politician like Lodge could still call for the annexation of Canada as a deed that would be doing the Canadians a favour. If that was the prospect for the people across a river with a common heritage, where did all the other countries stand?

Secular and liberal Americans might find their President brash. They might wish he was more fluent, but when Bush says that the world needs American leadership, they don’t argue. And when Bush confides that he checks out ideas with God, he might be deluded but he’s not being hypocritical. Better than many commentators, Dyer, a Canadian now living in Britain, has the perspective to understand this history. He’s also has some useful things to say about terrorism, a phenomenon which Americans find hard to see clearly. Obviously that’s to some extent a result of the 9/11 trauma, but it’s partly a function of America’s blessed history.

Terrorism is the weapon of the weak, Dyer argues, and it never works against your own people. Terrorism’s only chance is to trap a stronger opponent into reckless behaviour. Like many other observers, Dyer thinks that Bush’s actions and words have done wonders for al-Qaeda, but he suggests that 9/11 was flukishly successful, that Osama bin Laden is unlikely to pull off another such outrage, and that, even if he were to manage it, this would not affect subsequent world history. Dyer knows the Islamic and Arab worlds well. He shows why bin Laden has never been able to hope for much help from the folks back home.

It has already become trite to note that the need to act against “terrorism” serves as a justification for aggression. “Terrorism” is the new “Communism”. At a certain level this is of course true, but with a proviso. Terrorism, as practised at 9/11, and in Madrid and London, does exist, and its targets have the right to defend themselves. Harassing the Taliban in Afghanistan, as State sponsors of terrorism against innocents, was not the same thing as the later war on Iraq. “Communism”, however, in neither its theory nor its practice - not that is as it has been defined by successive US presidents - has ever existed .

Conspiracy theorists have helped Bush by building up bin Laden’s prestige. Conspiracists suppose terrorists or master criminals to be smarter than their victims. In their eyes, The Other, whatever is foreign to their own experience, is always a genius, fiendishly clever. The bin Ladens of the world are granted a moral and intellectual clarity that eludes the rest of us. Conspiracists (and their frequent allies from both the extreme Right and Left in the West) hear al-Qaeda’s manic rants and obsessions and suppose them to be both acute and sincere. A good, gossipy conspiracy with the right cast of characters will always gain widespread admiration. Witness the “Da Vinci Code” frenzy, which has millions of educated people believing an impossible series of things about the Catholic Church’s theology and organisation.

In many ways the conspiracists and the Bushmen are mirrors of each other. Dyer reminds us that Bush is being constantly egged on by the End-Timers, fundamentalist Christian zealots who believe that the world is about to end, with the saved (them) about to experience the bliss of Rapture and an ascension to heaven, while the rest of us burn. So why not let God’s armies take down a few Hell-bound sinners in the meantime? End-Timers include Cabinet members. Fifty years ago the bigots’ language was more honest. “For us”, Dulles once pointed out, “there are two sorts of people in the world. There are those who are Christians and support free enterprise, and there are the others”.

By posing the big question, as do all the authors - Why Iraq? - Dyer offers a rational alternative to the manipulations of the religious nutcases. Dyer sees as self-evident the thesis of Juhasz and Kinzer that the dominant fact to take into account is a post-Cold War American desire to hold hegemony over the world. That was why Washington looked around for new scapegoats and came up with “rogue States”. Bushite insincerity is indicated by the fact that all the rogues were countries whose relations with America had not worsened for decades. Bush needed to pick a fight with one of them.

The candidates were North Korea, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Libya. The chosen rogue could not be so small that it was not seen as a credible threat, nor big enough to be too hard. You don’t need those body bags that TV reporters like to talk about. Iran was big enough to be ruled out on this score; North Korea, possibly nuclear and bordering China, was too dangerous a target.

Iraq: Illegality And Impunity

Iraq was ideal. It was the right middling size; its flat, desert terrain was manageable for swift troop advances; its army had been weakened by previous wars and by sanctions; its position is strategic, and its leader had already been demonised by Bush Senior. Dyer rejects the notion that a sheer need for oil was a factor, because states will always buy and sell for money. This does not necessarily mean that the politics and economics to do with oil were not a key reason for the choice, as Juhasz has made clear. Dyer’s focus is on military and geopolitical relations. He does not discuss finance or trade.

Most importantly for Bush, the Iraq War was illegal. Reasons were invented to justify the attack, and, after the event, a fig leaf was worn so that Europe would not lose face, but what Bush wanted above all else was the means to sideline the United Nations (and “old” Europe). Bush wanted to make an omelette as that meant he’d have to crack eggs. Dyer explains how the Bush agenda can be fully implemented only if there is no rival source - the United Nations is the only candidate - of legitimacy for a global police force.

Dyer argues that it was by declaring war to be illegal that the international bodies of the 20 th Century deterred violence, not wholly of course, but enough to make the warmongers feel they had to justify themselves. If that impediment goes, if the big can act with impunity as they did in the days of Teddy Roosevelt, well yes, that could usher in catastrophe. What Bush needs to understand is that Kinzer could well have added a sixth common element to his accounts of American folly. Most of the chickens that Bush and his predecessors disturbed have not yet come home to roost.

“AT WHAT COST?”

Robert G Anderson. RG and J Anderson Books, Tauranga, 2005.

Robert G Anderson’s brisk polemic about the banking system asks “at what cost?” is money created? The ability of banks to issue credit, he argues, makes money too expensive. The price is reflected through debt and inflation. The further cost is a corrupted social order. “Debt”, Anderson writes, “is why the Government, desperate for money to pay back loans and their interest, increasingly taxes the people.... Debt is why Government has sold off assets previously owned by the people and is now willing to sell off the land itself”. We all become beholden to banks. “Our money, instead of being supplied to some extent debt-free as a means of exchange, now comes as a debt to foreign bankers, providing them with vast profits, power and control”. A better idea would be for governments to issue credit. Then society could finance itself.

If you think you’ve heard this before, you probably have. Anderson’s case is the Social Credit theory, which was born out of the experiences of productive, honest workers and farmers being exploited by parasitic banks. Now the banks might have better public relations, but their power is even greater. In our case, in NZ, it’s bad that foreign-controlled big banks conduct 99% of New Zealand’s banking business, sucking profits offshore that should be reinvested in our economy. No-one in these pages is going to disagree. Indeed, Anderson quotes Murray Horton and Watchdog extensively.

But whether Social Credit is entirely coherent an explanation of the ills of our economic systems is another matter. Anderson is not the first to pick on the Reserve Bank and he won’t be the last. While his 70 pages raise some fundamental questions about the control and purpose of our money supply, they’re not enough to let us arrive at new conclusions. Too many of the references are old ones, from popular 19 th Century polemicists like the American politician William Jennings Bryan and his illustrious compatriot, the inventor Thomas Edison. Yes, the discussion has been around some time, but if so few have yet been convinced, the problem might not be several centuries of “public ignorance”. The material needs updating, all the more so because the abuse of their power by big banks is increasing. An analysis of the role of derivatives, for instance, would have helped make the case more pressing.

Chicken And Egg

Anderson has some good points. But it’s a chicken and egg thing. Did the NZ government really sell off State assets because it was “desperate” to escape bank debt? Similarly, Anderson argues that the “root cause” of an underfunded NZ health system and onerous student loans is the ability of banks to create credit. Many comparable social services, Anderson reminds us, used to be free. Yes, that’s right, but they were free long after Bryan and Edison were reacting to the power of big banks. Underfunded and inequitable government initiatives are the result of political decisions. They might be devilish policies, but to say that the Devil made them do it has the effect of allowing all sorts of villains off the hook.

Is it banks that are the problem or is it foreign banks? In NZ we might be unusually aware of the consequences of a loss of domestic control, but historically the Social Credit case has been mounted against the power of lending institutions themselves rather than against foreign capital. When you’re a bankrupted 1930’s Alberta farmer it didn’t matter. Neither did Depression-era borrowers worry about whether the banks were privately or publicly owned. For us, these differences do have implications.

The problem with Social Credit is its insistence that financial power originates with banks, when they are better seen as an expression and an aspect of economic power. Bankers get along fine with their mates in industry and government. Banks are powerful and they’re nasty, but they hunt in a pack. If banks are granted a misplaced omnipotence, explanation tends to slide into conspiracy. Twice Anderson hints that it was bankers who pulled the trigger on that grassy knoll in Dallas in 1963. If that’s who killed President John Kennedy, we want to see the smoking gun.