Following the end of the rubber boom, the French-Belgian created bloodbath in the Congo basin subsided somewhat but the basic extraction of profits went on. By 1960 the Congo, now called Zaire, was being readied for independence like many African colonies. Independence was to be with a Belgian-chosen leader and with continuing outside ownership and control of the rich resources of oil, cobalt, copper and other minerals. As Independence Day neared, an indigenous leader, Patrice Lumumba arose and began to win elections. By the day of independence he was the acknowledged leader of the new country. Soon a former sergeant in the Congolese army, Mobutu, who had been handpicked by Belgian Intelligence and the U.S. CIA to be the leader, had much of the military behind him and Lumumba murdered. By 1965, Mobutu Sese Seko became the absolute dictator and continues to rule this hapless land to this day under the direction of the Israeli Mossad and the CIA. They oversee security affairs while the industrial elite is represented by such groups as the International Oil Cartel, Union Minie’re, owned at the time of independence by the Belgian Corporation, the Special Board of Katanga and the company well known in South Africa, the Anglo-American company, Oppenheim de Beers.¹

Prior to independence the Belgian directed export agriculture had also made the country food self-sufficient (prior to colonialism the area had been food self-sufficient for thousands of years). The money making export crops were sugar, rice, corn, millet, cassava, bananas and other minor crops. As the society disintegrated under the Mobutu dictatorship, food production fell. In 1988 the country imported 60% of its food.

Like other U.S. backed dictators such as Marcos of the Philippines, Somoza of Nicaragua and the Shah of Iran who were super thieves, Mobutu has simply thrown open the country to the trans-nationals who pay a sum to Mobutu for the resources. The Mobutu government occupies itself with robbing the people of what little is left while Mobutu travels to his many palaces, including 26 luxury apartments, villas, chateaux and palaces in Europe. Some place his personal fortune at $8 billion, all of it stolen from the impoverished people of Zaire.

Journalist Steve Askin reports that despite Zaire’s being one of the richest countries in Africa, the country is $5 billion in debt to the international banks. The Zairian people are the ninth poorest on earth yet they must struggle to bear up under a typical International Monetary Fund "austerity plan." "Zaire has fired 40 percent of its government workers, withheld wage increases from those still on the payroll, [and] drastically cut its already meager social service spending. By this economic bloodletting of the population, Zaire is able to pay the international bankers 30 percent of the national budget for debt repayment."²

Three billion dollars of the loan money that incurred this debt went to the Trans-National construction company of Morrison-Knudson to build a power line 1,100 miles long from a dam near Mobutu’s capital of Kinshasha, to Katanga province where the cobalt and copper mines are located. Even though there is hydro-electric potential near the mines, this $3 billion was spent so that Mobutu could "turn off the lights" from Kinshasha, 1,100 miles to the north, in case of any secessionist effort.

Mobutu is used by the U.S. for votes in the UN and the Organization of African Unity. The country is used as a staging area for CIA warfare, projected into other African states and Mobutu’s army is used as a U.S. surrogate for invading other African countries according to the needs of U.S. strategy. Torture, including the CIA’s favorite, the electric shock machine, is widely used against both political and criminal detainees. Total fascism is the form of government under the dictator and total neglect is the social policy. Estimates are that less than 10% of the roads that existed on Independence Day remain and indigenous commerce has all but stopped. After three hundred years of colonial plunder Zaire still has riches to loot, the people continue to starve and the living conditions deteriorate under the "neo-colonialism" of the industrial order.³

Following the ouster of Mobutu the situation has deteriorated even further. Warfare is coursing across much of Africa. Even though major powers each have favorite players that they encourage from the background, the value of the resources that could be gained in such a volatile area do not appear to be enough to bring in heavy military investment from major colonial nations. Also, with the retreat of the Soviet Union it is difficult to convince taxpayers that vast expenditures for military adventures in far flung regions are necessary.

The reason that Zaire was never a matter of household conversation in the U.S. is that the International Corporate Media does not report the situation. The mass information media is essentially controlled by the state in the socialist countries and in the capitalist countries the capitalist class owns it. In the U.S., according to Ben Badgakian, in his study, The Media Monopoly, the whole of television, films, radio, newspapers, magazines and book publishing is essentially owned by less than twenty-five huge conglomerate corporations. This number has been falling steadily for decades. As Michael Parenti explains in his recent book, The Mass Media, the corporate owned media do not so much alter the facts, but frame the facts of each event within the social and ideological framework of the national security state- the militarized juggernaut. Within the context of the National Security State the CIA has significantly infiltrated the ranks of the media as we began to learn in the late 1960’s. In addition to subsidizing the publications of many books, there are working writers on the CIA payroll, or the payrolls of CIA front groups, as well as media workers who are conduits for information that the agency wishes to be presented to the public. Because of the CIA infiltration of journalism, especially in Third World countries, it is possible for them to conduct worldwide disinformation campaigns.

During the initial stages of the anti-Communist hysteria in the United States a secret government was formalized within American democracy. For the first time an elaborate system of security clearances and classified documents was created along with a presidentially appointed National Security Council that was not provided for in the U.S. Constitution. This placed a firewall between the electorate and the activities of the higher reaches of government. This is especially true concerning activities of the U.S. government outside its borders. This has enabled the U. S. Government to conduct activities on behalf of the economic elite throughout the world while clothing these activities in the pieties of "aiding democracy" or "free trade."

Nothing describes the needs and motives of the present industrial empire so well as the final rape-Antarctica. This beautiful and mysterious land is literally the end of the world. It is the south end of the planet and it is the last piece of the planet that has not been plundered by the culture of empire.

Because of the convection currents and because Antarctica is exposed to all oceans, it occupies a pivotal place in the planetary cycles of weather and biology. Barney Brewster in his, Friends of the Earth, book about Antarctica says that:

Ocean upwellings around the periphery of Antarctica provide the nutrient to charge the food chain. The phytoplankton feed the masses of krill. Krill are a small shrimp-like organism that grow up to three inches long and exist in the Antarctic waters in the amounts of millions of tons. They are the basic energy of the simple food chain of Antarctica. They directly feed the baleen whales, squid and small fish, crabeater seals, adelie penguin, and the sea birds. The next level of the food chain that feeds on the krill eaters are the large fish, weddell and ross seals, killer whale, leopard seal, gull and emperor penguin. The whales in the southern waters were early hunted to near extinction as they migrated in, seasonally, to feed on the krill. Now, "It is estimated that blue whales are less than 5 per cent of their original stock, humpbacks 3 per cent, and fin whales less than 20 per cent."⁵ The fur seals around South Georgia and the South Shetland islands have been slowly increasing since the devastation for the Yankee trade to China but some authorities believe the small population is now going down again because of the initial krill fishing in the area which is impacting the food chain.⁶ In the islands north of Antarctica, especially toward Australia, there, historically, have been industries that boiled seals and penguins for the oil in their bodies but so far as is known, no extinctions have been the result of that practice.

The landmass of Antarctica has not yet been devastated by human activities. Most of the visitors have been "scientific expeditions" who are there to do science as well as to bolster their respective country’s claim to a piece of the action by their presence- as well as look for industrial valuables. Approximately 700 people winter over at Antarctica and the population rises to 4-5,000 in the summer. This population is scattered at 33 year-round bases and other temporary sites. Two thousand tons of cargo and food come in each year as well as 20 million litres of fuel. Very little is taken out.⁷ Most of these human settlements are on the rocks or other spots bare of ice. This has created a conflict with the animals and birds who themselves heavily use these scarce sights for nesting and other life activities. Because there are no land animals larger than three centimeters in size (mites), the living population is centered on the ocean and the shorelines, which are essential to them. This is also the location where the human exploiters will congregate as they arrive and set up operations.

Increasing human populations are a threat to the Antarctic environment. Another continuing threat is human stupidity. In 1962 the United States Navy brought in a nuclear power plant in violation of the Antarctic treaty. After ten years of trouble and leaks the reactor was shut down. It was shipped back to the U.S. with 101 large drums of contaminated earth and was followed later by 11,000 cubic meters of radioactive rock. After six years of work, the site was declared sanitized.⁸

That the industrial predators are preparing to dismember the Antarctic is plain. The most serious threats at the present are krill fishing, whaling, sealing, oil drilling and mining. Krill fishing has been commenced by Japan and the former USSR. Other countries are testing products made with the krill to try to find ways to make money from it. The krill catch was estimated by the FOA at 20,000 to 40,000 tons in the early 1970’s and has been rising steadily. The life habits of the krill are quite complex and little is known about them and little is known about the whole complex of krill and krill eaters. Nonetheless, the industrialists have charged ahead. Harvesting the krill could have serious effects. The nearly extinct whale species need it to revive their numbers and other krill feeders depend on it.

There are pirate whalers who have connections with the Japanese fishing fleets in the area who are still killing the nearly extinct large whales. The large scale whalers of recent years, the Russians and the Japanese, are taking minke whale in the area but have not killed the endangered fin, blue, humpback or southern right whales as far as is known. Because of the expense of operating in Antarctica, exploiting the area is to a great extent dependent upon how desperate countries become for protein, minerals and oil. As ecological catastrophes and exhaustion of resources progress outside Antarctica, the likelihood of industrial exploitation of Antarctic increases.

A very serious possibility is a rush for the "black gold." A number of countries have had oil exploration teams and programs in Antarctica. If oil production begins, Antarctica will be finished. Already there are reports of penguins covered with oil from local spills from ships in the area. The biodegradation rate in the area is far longer than in warmer areas. All garbage, equipment and other debris left since the first humans came there is still there. Oil spills and the locating of human communities that would be needed for the work on Antarctica could finish the life that needs the sea and the strip of land close to it. The krill, the baleen whales that filter seawater to catch the krill, the penguins, seabirds and seals that travel from land to water would all be devastated. In an environment like the Antarctic, clean-up would be almost impossible and if a blow-out occurred it could be under conditions that would make it difficult to stop and if it could not be stopped, (in mid-winter for example) it would simply continue to drain into the sea.

The approach of the industrial countries to Antarctica demonstrates that the essential dynamics of empire culture have not changed since the time of the Sumerians. The motive of immediate gain continues to take precedence over all other values.

The evidence of history suggests that as the public awareness increased in the First World countries, the imperial elites found it necessary to manage domestic opinion and sources of information. The motives and methods of extorting the colonies did not change but the sensibilities of the public in the imperial countries became more acute. The French Revolution, the American Revolution and other changes brought a more sophisticated view of the rights of citizens and the functioning of elites. The motives and strategies of colonialism do not change but the justifications and explanations to the public of the First World have become a smooth integral part of the operation. In the Sixteenth Century no explanation to the European public was necessary but later imperialism became a phenomena of cultural opinion. It became a social ideology. As this change occurred it became necessary for the elites to reflect back to the public the charitable and beneficial effects on the colonies and to conceal the basic motives and methods. In the U.S. it was clothed in "Manifest Destiny," God was often said to have given the New World to the deserving Christians and this encouraged the "missionary fervor" which was encouraged by the elites. All this combined into a jingoistic support for empire. In the present the continuing enterprise to extort valuables from the colonies and to ensure control of them, is clothed in a mythology of "anti-communism," "antiterrorism," and bringing democracy and economic development to the less socially developed masses. The competing elites of the industrialized countries have managed to thoroughly militarize human society. The elites often say that the reason that we must have such tight police control of civilized society is because of "human nature." That is, humans are so violent and savage that there must be outside control of their behavior. On the world scene, the justification for the military control of the planet is said to be the threat of "capitalist imperialism," "the terrorist threat," "communist subversion" or "guerilla insurgency." The reality is, however, that empires expend the effort to have colonies because they are getting something from them - money- markets and resources. Now, with the huge debt of Third World countries, the elites of the capitalist group can literally take over these countries. When the debt cannot be paid and the country is desperate for capital, the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank will extend another loan if the country agrees to allow the bankers to send in its own teams to run the economic planning and commerce departments of those countries. The "austerity" or "reform" programs that the bankers subject the country to, are designed to sell off socially owned enterprises to the planetary economic elite and squeeze money out of the masses of the country to pay the debt. The foreign exchange to pay the debt is generated by exporting the country’s resources and impoverishing its citizens. This impoverishes the workers, the country's society, the ecology and tends to centralize the remaining economy in the hands of the domestic and international elite.

In a world of empires, colonies and competing "spheres of influence," there is the threat that some competing empire may steal a colony but there is also the greater threat that the population of the colony may try to stop the extortion and throw out the invaders. This threat of "nationalism" is dealt with by preventing any social development in the colony that is not under the control of the colonial elite. The colonial elite, in turn, ultimately is under the control of its handlers, in the First World industrial elite.

Just after the close of World War II the centers of imperial power began to consolidate their turf. The USSR surrounded itself with dominated colonies, China began to assert its old imperial dominance and the U.S. and European capitalists moved to manage the control of the old colonial structure. This colonial control exercised by the capitalists often took the form of "giving independence" to a colony run by a colonial elite but covertly maintaining control of that former colony’s military and economic infrastructure. One technique of control used in the U.S., "banana republic" colonies is revealed by a Central America study group who say:

After the close of World War II, first Britain, then the U.S. assisted in fighting a war in Greece against indigenous and left leaning forces that had been the anti-Nazi resistance during World War II. These populist Greek forces were defeated and a puppet (and Fascist, in the case of the military dictatorship) colonial elite was installed. The old colonial empires then fought the indigenous guerrillas, the "Huks" of the former U.S. colonial possession of the Philippines,to a standstill in the 1950’s and a peasant revolt in British controlled Malaysia in the same era. This was a historical recreation of the original U.S. takeover from the Spanish. In the earlier era both Cuba and the Philippines had anti-colonialist forces who were nearly to throw out the Spanish. The U.S. saved the day for the empire by frightening off and defeating the Spanish and then wiping out the anti-colonialist resistance. The U.S. in the Kissinger era was able to role back "threatening" nationalism in Indonesia under Sukarno. Kissinger and Nixon backed a military coup and the CIA handed out lists of people marked for elimination. The estimate is, at least one half million people died in this strategy to control empire. Eventually a war was fought in Vietnam in an attempt to regain the French colony that had been taken over by the anti-Japanese resistance under the leadership of Ho Chi Min.

In the post-World War II era, a system of conflict and competition evolved wherein secret government agencies were used as the spearhead of covert war. This system exists and evolved because of this same motive- to conceal these foreign activities both from the "enemies" and the First World domestic populations. The home populations would not approve of them, or the policies they serve, if they were known. That is the functional reason for the shroud of secrecy of the "National Security State." Honorable government actions are not kept secret from the people. Secret covert action agencies like the U.S., CIA and Russian, KGB exist now in many governments of the earth. After World War II, the imperial governments used their secret war agencies to set up secret police and covert action agencies in their colonies. The KGB assisted the creation of secret police in Eastern Europe and the CIA helped create secret police and intelligence agencies like the hated Savak in the Shah’s Iran, the CIA counterpart in West Germany under General Rheinhard Gehlen and the KCIA in Korea. These agencies carry out domestic and foreign activities. The foreign activities are usually acts and atrocities that the elite would not want to be associated with publicly.

At times the clothing of "anti-Communist" rhetoric was not used but some other negative image such as "nationalist," as in the CIA overthrow of Mohammed Mossedeq of Iran to get the oil fields. Generally, such as in the overthrow of Arbenz, the nationalist leader of Guatemala in 1954, with CIA assistance, all of the drumbeaters and "anti-Communist" cheerleaders in the corporate controlled mass media were called out to manipulate the mental images of the populace of the empire. By the time of the CIA’s war in Vietnam, the control of empire was being called "counter-insurgency warfare." Not only the control of the colonial elites was necessary but also it became necessary to control the infrastructure of society itself. In Vietnam, the CIA discovered that they were fighting the very society itself, in a war of colonial domination. The response to this was the perceived need to destroy indigenous social leadership. Operation Phoenix and the strategic hamlet concepts came out of this. Operation Phoenix was a program to murder or imprison persons who occupied positions of social leadership not controlled by the empire. Strategic hamlets were created usually by forced relocation of peasant populations and imprisonment in guarded "villages" that were under military control.

These strategies have developed into the present such that colonial militaries and police forces that are trained in the First World, maintain "death squads" who’s task it is to eliminate any indigenous leadership that may compete with the controlled cadres of the empire. Farm cooperative leaders, labor leaders, church leaders who advocate compassion for the poor, doctors, teachers who may teach self-help or assist the dispossessed are all seen as creating the possibilities of social power outside of imperial control and so are kidnapped, tortured and murdered. These assassination team members have often been trained at the U.S. base in Panama or at the torture schools at U.S. bases in Texas and Louisiana maintained by the CIA. "Low-intensity warfare," the new name for imperial control, is not always intended to have dramatic winners, often it is used simply to "soften-up" a country for some policy strategy. This amounts to simply bashing the target country with terrorism, divisiveness and sabotage until the country is shredded and its people suffering and easily controlled. What is called low-intensity warfare is not really warfare but simply the covert management techniques of the empires. This does not necessarily have anything to do with violence but involves such things as manipulating the local media through journalists, militarists and politicians who are on the foreign intelligence agency’s payroll.

There is usually foreign participation in elections above ground, such as through the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy, the AFL-CIO and CIA linked American Institute for Free Labor Development, and the CIA-U.S. Chamber of Commerce linked Center for International Private Enterprise. There are also underground conduits of cash, supplies and experts offered to selected candidates and parties. Books are published clandestinely and widely circulated, serving covert strategies. Particular social groups and institutions are organized and financed within the target country, which serve particular strategies. In effect only the imagination limits these covert action agencies who have huge budgets hidden within their own home government’s accounting.

There is the motive to protect the investments and profits in the colony and there is also the motive to prevent the example of independence of a colony, its escape from a "sphere of influence."

Although we now have the imperial centers of the U.S., Europe, and China, the coordination of the capitalist powers has integrated into a powerful elite under the auspices of the Rockefeller/Kissinger created Tri-Lateral Commission with what appears to be the executive function in the annual Bilderburg Conference. These groups include some of the richest people in the world, leading military figures (not always in uniform), the major international bankers, some representatives of wealthy royal families and high government officials especially from the U.S., West Germany and Japan. Membership in the Tri-Lateral Commission is centered on corporate entities that do business in from several to many countries. This "Commission" has developed along with a homogenized elite that owns and controls the international class of Trans-National corporations.

In a country such as the U.S., being 6% of the world’s population and consuming more than half the entire planet’s resources each year, most coming from outside its borders, the need to control the resources and markets is obvious on the face of it. As with the old slaving days and the opium days, the masses in the First World countries must be convinced that the activities of their governments are absolutely altruistic. "Helping," "economic development," "anti-terrorism," "assisting democracy," "winning hearts and minds," and of course the "communist menace" are images used to camouflage what is really happening, which is the control and operation of an industrial empire who’s vast flow system needs massive amounts of raw materials and equally massive markets for the products. Much of the control, planning and execution of these policies is out of view of the electorate and often are performed by clandestine groups such as CIA, the Israeli Mossad, the KGB and the covert action groups of the other industrial states. The structure of power that has developed from the earlier colonial empires is one of complete militarization of the world through alliances such as NATO, ASEAN, Warsaw Pact, and other military aid and currency loan connections. This has spawned the largest arms race the world has ever seen. Countries that cannot feed their people can always get loans for armaments from First World states.

The struggle for planetary supremacy is conducted with secret strategies and it is conducted in the minds of the people through the mass media. The control of sources of information is an important factor in domination of each empire’s "sphere of influence."

(A full bibliography is included for those interested in the covert management of the contemporary empire.) ¹⁰

Although industrial investment in the colonies generally returns large profits (25% per year being the standard), super-profits since World War II have come from guns and drugs. The U.S. has been the largest armaments producer, with other countries now catching up rapidly. Alliances and militarization have been encouraged all over the world and this has seen the militaries take power (overt or covert) in most societies. The petroleum industry is the largest planetary industry but it is closely followed by the armaments industry in size and production. The armaments industry mushrooms as all forms of colonial exploitation grow. A modern example is the [1989] Iran-Iraq war, where 42 arms-exporting countries sold weapons to the combatants and 36 sold to both sides.

Some now estimate the planetary drug market to be $500 billion per year. The sources of opium are Turkey (where the plant originated), Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Burma, Laos and Mexico. A few peasants in remote areas do not control the huge volumes of this valuable substance. Peasants are not seen transporting the trainloads of cash involved in this trade. It is not difficult to see that commerce of this importance requires people of equal importance to conduct it. This super-profit trade is controlled by some of the more powerful people in the world. Governments of origin get cuts, international transporters get cuts and controllers of distribution in the rich countries get cuts. The opium poppy growing regions are (with the possible exception of portions of the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia) substantially under the control of the U.S. In many regions such as with the Meo tribesmen of Laos, the tribals of Afghanistan/Pakistan, and the colonial elites of the cocaine producing countries of Colombia, Bolivia and Peru, there are strong historical contacts with the U.S. CIA.

The economic trade relations of empire are simple. The price of manufactured goods produced in the industrial countries rises faster than the price of raw resources sold by the Third World countries. This is the basic economic relationship. This has historically been the case. In the field of economics, the studies that developed this information are called the Prebisch Thesis, named after Raul Prebisch. Prebisch worked at the United Nations in the 1960’s when he developed these statistical studies. Because of this export/import disparity and because of the energy price rise of the 1970’s, the Third World has gone heavily into debt with the international bankers. This gives the bankers the opportunity to manage the economies of the Third World. In return for new loans the country must accept an economic plan that effectively bleeds the country and destroys remaining healthy ecology in the name of "resource extraction." In 1990, the net flow of money from the developing world to the developed nations was over $100 billion (U.S.) per year. This is a net figure, meaning the excess over the flow from the developed to the developing nations.¹¹

The possibility of Third World countries taking over their own countries for their own benefit is slight. The overwhelming destructive power of secretly maneuvering covert action groups, an economic blockade by First World governments, a "capital strike" (the withdrawing of funds from the colony), strangulation by the international banks and a cutoff of funds by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank is almost certain to smother any indigenous movement. Just as workers can withhold their labor in a labor strike, so can capital withhold investment. Though the remaining and remote forager/hunters of the earth can still survive nicely without the industrial empire, everyone in the money economy, who’s survival systems are dependent on industry, are subject to those who control the money, guns and industrial production.