excerpt from the book

The Sword and the Dollar

Imperialism, Revolution, and the Arms Race

by Michael Parenti

St. Martin's Press, 1989

Imperialism and the Myth of Underdevelopment

p10
There are more than 200,000 corporations in the USA today, but 100 companies control more than half the nation's industrial assets. Fifty of the largest banks and insurance companies own half of all the financial assets. Ten firms make 22 percent of all the profits.

... Some 400 corporations control about 80 percent of the capital assets of the entire nonsocialist world. One-third of the assets of US industrial corporations are located outside the United States. Eight of the nation's nine largest banks now rely on foreign sources for over 40 percent of their total deposits. Many of these holdings-often the larger portions-are in other industrial countries. But more and more investment is going into the Third World. Citibank, for instance, earns about 75 percent of its profits from overseas operations, mostly in the Third World. American and other Western corporations have acquired control of more than 75 percent of the known major mineral resources in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The USA is South Africa's largest trading partner and its second-largest foreign investor, with investments amounting to about $2 billion as of 1986. US banks provide the apartheid regime with one-third of its international credit.

p11
Where business goes so goes government ... In the service of big business, the governments of capitalist nations, including the United States, have striven mightily to create and maintain the conditions of investment and accumulation in other lands. This may not be the only function of US foreign policy, but it is the function that is often ignored by those who would minimize the role played by international capitalism in the affairs of nations.

p11
For some 500 years the nations of Western Europe, and later North America, plundered the wealth of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This forceful expropriation of one country's land, labor, markets, and resources by another is what is here meant by imperialism.

p12
When the merchant capitalists replaced the mercantilist monarchs, the process of expropriation accelerated and expanded. Along with gold and silver, they took flax, hemp, indigo, silk, diamonds, timber, molasses, sugar, rum, rubber, tobacco, calico, cocoa, coffee, cotton, copper, coal, tin, iron, and later on, oil, zinc, columbite, manganese, mercury, platinum, cobalt, bauxite, aluminum, and uranium. And of course there was that most dreadful of all expropriations--of human beings themselves-slaves. Millions of people were abducted from Africa, while millions more perished in the hellish passage to the New World.

The stupendous fortunes that were-and still are being extracted by the European and North American investors should remind us that there are very few really poor nations in what today is commonly called the Third World. Brazil is rich; Indonesia is rich; and so are the Philippines, Chile, Bolivia, Zaire, Mexico, India, and Malaysia. Only the people are poor. Of course in some areas, as in parts of Africa south of the Sahara, the land has been so ruthlessly plundered that it too is now impoverished, making life all the more desperate for its inhabitants.

... the Third World is not "underdeveloped" but overexploited. The gap between rich and poor nations is not due to the "neglect" of the latter by the former as has been often claimed. For forty years or more we have heard how the nations of the North must help close the poverty gap between themselves and the nations of the South, devoting some portion of their technology and capital to the task. Yet the gap between rich and poor only widens because investments in the Third World are not designed to develop the capital resources of the poor nations but to enrich the Western investors.

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