It should not go unnoticed that leaders occasionally do verbalize their dedication to making the world safe for the transnational corporate system. At such times words seem to speak louder than actions, for the words are an admission of the real motives behind the action.
In 1953, for instance, President Dwight Eisenhower uttered a forbidden truth in his State of the Union message: “A serious and explicit purpose of our foreign policy [is] the encouragement of a hospitable climate for [corporate] investment in foreign nations.”12 In 1990, General Alfred Gray, commandant of the US Marines, observed that the United States must have “unimpeded access” to “established and developing economic markets throughout the world.”13
US opinion makers treat capitalism as inseparable from democracy. However, rather than coming right out and saying capitalism, they prefer softened terms like “free market,” “market economy,” “economic reforms,” and “free market democracy.” So President Clinton announced before the United Nations on September 27, 1993: “Our overriding purpose is to expand and strengthen the world’s community of market-based democracies.”14
In a similar vein, the New York Times, supportive of the repressive and murderous measures perpetrated against parliamentary democracy by Russian president Boris Yeltsin in 1993, opined that “Yeltsin remains the best hope for democracy and a market economy in Russia.”15 For many years, one of the most pronounced cheerleaders of the US imperium was Samuel P. Huntington, Harvard professor and former CIA advisor, who wrote that the United States is the “only major power whose national identity is defined by a set of universal political and economic values,” specifically “liberty, democracy, equality, private property, and markets.”16
US rulers frequently inject themselves into elections in other lands, lavishly funding rightist elements that disrupt egalitarian movements or help overthrow leftist reformist governments. Elections can serve as a means of régime change, acting as a legitimating cloak for capitalist restoration. But when popular forces successfully utilize electoral democracy as a defense against untrammeled capitalism, democracy runs into trouble. In this latter instance, rather than being wedded to each other, capitalism and democracy are on a fatal collision course, as US leaders demonstrated in Guatemala in 1953, Chile in 1973, Greece in 1967, Indonesia in 1965, Yugoslavia in 2000, and a score of other countries in which US funds and guns were used in great abundance to overthrow democratically elected governments.
Over the past two decades US policymakers have explicitly demanded “free market reforms” in all the former communist nations of Eastern Europe. We no longer have to impute such intent to them. In 1996 Lawrence Summers, serving as President Clinton’s undersecretary of the treasury, proudly remarked: “Our ideology, capitalism, is in ascendancy everywhere.”17 In 2000, the White House hailed the Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe (an organization of about fifteen nations plus the European Union) for planning to create “vibrant market economies” in the Balkans. That same year, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) inaugurated a fund to be managed by Soros Private Funds Management. Its purpose, as stated by the US embassy in Macedonia, was “to provide capital for new business development, expansion and privatization.” Meanwhile, the Agency for International Development (USAID) planned—in its own words—“assistance programs . .. to advance Montenegro toward a free market economy.”18
In April 2001, according to the London Financial Times, the newly installed conservative rulers of Yugoslavia, beneficiaries of millions of dollars in US electoral funds, launched “a comprehensive privatization program as part of economic reforms introduced following the overthrow of former president Slobodan Milošević.” This included the sale of more than 7,000 publicly owned or worker controlled companies to private investors at giveaway prices.19