Such considerations, however, should not obscure the more fundamental role of the Pentagon system (including NASA and DOE) in maintaining high-tech industry generally, just as state intervention plays a crucial role in supporting biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, agribusiness, and most competitive segments of the economy. The Reagan Administration sharply increased protectionist measures along with steps to support failing banks and industries, and generally to assist US corporate power.

By IMF standards, the United States, after a decade of Reaganite folly, is a prime candidate for severe austerity measures. But it is far too powerful to submit to the rules, intended for the weak.

As noted, the World Bank now estimates that protectionist measures of the industrial countries -- keeping pace with free market bombast -- reduce the national income of the South by twice the amount of the official "development assistance." The latter may help or harm the recipients, but that is incidental. Typically, it is a form of export promotion. One notable example is the Food for Peace program, designed to subsidize US agribusiness and induce others to "become dependent on us for food" (Senator Hubert Humphrey), and to promote the global security network that keeps order in the Third World by requiring that local governments use counterpart funds for armaments (thus also subsidizing US military producers).

A more significant case is the Marshall Plan. Its goal was "to avert `economic, social and political' chaos in Europe, contain Communism (meaning not Soviet intervention but the success of the indigenous Communist parties), prevent the collapse of America's export trade, and achieve the goal of multilateralism," and provide a crucial economic stimulus for "individual initiative and private enterprise both on the Continent and in the United States," undercutting the fear of "experiments with socialist enterprise and government controls," which would "jeopardize private enterprise" in the United States as well (Michael Hogan, in the major scholarly study). The Marshall Plan also "set the stage for large amounts of private U.S. direct investment in Europe," Reagan's Commerce Department observed in 1984, establishing the basis for the modern TNCs, which "prospered and expanded on overseas orders, ...fueled initially by the dollars of the Marshall Plan" and protected from "negative developments" by "the umbrella of American power," Business Week observed in 1975, lamenting that this golden age of state intervention might be fading away. Aid to Israel, Egypt, and Turkey, the leading recipients in recent years, is motivated by their role in maintaining US dominance of the Middle East, with its enormous oil energy reserves.¹⁰

So it goes case by case.

The utility of free trade as a weapon against the poor is illustrated by a World Bank study on global warming, designed to "forge a consensus among economists" (of the rich men's club) in advance of the June 1992 Rio conference on global warming, New York Times business correspondent Silvia Nasar reported under the headline "Can Capitalism Save the Ozone?" (the implication being: "Yes"). Harvard economist Lawrence Summers, chief economist of the World Bank, explained that the world's environmental problems are largely "the consequence of policies that are misguided on narrow economic grounds," particularly the policies of the poor countries that "have been practically giving away oil, coal and natural gas to domestic buyers in hopes of fostering industry and keeping living costs low for urban workers" (Nasar). If the poor countries would only have the courage to resist the "extreme pressure to improve the performance of their economies" and to protect their population from starvation, then environmental problems would abate. "Creating free markets in Russia and other poor countries may do more to slow global warming than any measures that rich countries are likely to adopt in the 1990's," the World Bank concludes -- correctly, since the rich are hardly likely to pursue policies detrimental to their interests. In the small print, the consensus economists also recognize that "more effective government regulation" reduces pollution, but grinding down the poor has obvious advantages.

The same page of the Times business section carries an item on a confidential memo of the World Bank leaked to the Economist. Its author is the same Lawrence Summers. He writes: "Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the [Third World]?" This makes good sense, Summers explains: for example, a cancer-producing agent will have larger effects "in a country where people survive to get prostate cancer than in a country where under-5 mortality is 200 per thousand." Poor countries are "under-polluted," and it is only reasonable to encourage "dirty industries" to move to them. "The economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that." To be sure, there are "arguments against all of these proposals" for exporting pollution to the Third World: "intrinsic rights to certain goods, moral reasons, social concerns, lack of adequate markets, etc." But these arguments have a fatal flaw: they "could be turned around and used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalisation."

"Mr Summers is asking questions that the World Bank would rather ignore," the Economist observes, but "on the economics, his points are hard to answer." Quite true. We have the choice of taking them to be a reductio ad absurdum argument and thus abandoning the ideology, or accepting the conclusions: on grounds of economic rationality, the rich countries should export pollution to the Third World, which should cut back on its "misguided" efforts to promote economic development and protect the population from disaster. That way, capitalism can overcome the environmental crisis. Free market capitalism is, indeed, a wondrous instrument. Surely there should be two Nobel prizes awarded annually, not just one.

Confronted with the memo, Summers said that it was only "intended to provoke debate" -- elsewhere, that it was a "sarcastic response" to another World Bank draft. Perhaps the same is true of the World Bank "consensus" study. In fact, it is often hard to determine when the intellectual productions of the experts are intended seriously, or are a perverse form of sarcasm. The huge numbers of people subjected to these doctrines do not have the luxury to ponder this intriguing question.¹¹

Though not intended for us, "free trade does, however, have its uses," Arthur MacEwan observes in a review of the uniform record of industrial and agricultural development through protectionism and other measures of state intervention: "Highly developed nations can use free trade to extend their power and their control of the world's wealth, and businesses can use it as a weapon against labor. Most important, free trade can limit efforts to redistribute income more equally, undermine progressive social programs, and keep people from democratically controlling their economic lives." It is hardly surprising that the "New Evangelists" of neoliberal theology have won an overwhelming victory within the doctrinal system. The evidence about successful development and the actual consequences of neoliberal doctrine is dismissed with the contempt that irrelevant nuisance so richly deserves. "The carrying out of [God's] plan...is the History of the world," Hegel explained: "That which does not accord with it, is negative, worthless existence."¹²

¹⁰ On Food for Peace, see NI, 363, and sources cited, particularly Borden, Pacific Alliance. Hogan, Marshall Plan, 42-3, 45. Commerce Department analysis, Wachtel, Money Mandarins, 44f. BW, April 7, 1975.

¹¹ Nasar, NYT, Feb. 7; "Furor on Memo at World Bank," NYT, Feb. 7; Reuters and Peter Gosselin, BG, Feb. 7, 1992. Economist, Feb. 8, Feb. 15 (Summers's letter), 1992.

¹² MacEwan, Dollars & Sense, Nov. 1991. Hegel, Philosophy, 36.