 to continue discussion of cancer. But in a little different form, Hans invited me to speak and suggested the topic of costs of the American Empire. And that is probably not a topic I would have selected myself. I don't regard myself as an expert in the American Empire in particular, but I have done research in writing on closely related areas. And I'm pleased to speak under that title. I do want to call to your attention before I begin that what I'll be talking about, I'll have only a few minutes to discuss. And so I can't do much more than hit some high points. But if you have an interest in reading more some of these subjects that I've written about, I would recommend to you a book of mine published first in 2006 by Oxford University Press called Depression, War, and Cold War. And the book, fortunately, has just been reproduced in a paperback version with a new subtitle. Otherwise, it's just like the original. So the cover is important, it seems, at least to this publisher. And also more readable. The book was reset so that the type is larger and it's not so much work to read. So I recommend this book to you. I recommend that you buy them by the ton, if possible. Now, to speak about American Empire automatically gives away one's ideological coloration because Americans rarely talk about the American Empire. It's not a standard term in American English. The only Americans that talk this way are leftists who have been talking about the American Empire for quite a long time and a few libertarians. So crackpots, basically, talk about the American Empire. And it turns out I'm one of these crackpots. I believe there is an American Empire and has been one for some time. And in fact, what I want to start with is the suggestion that, unlike the description given in the standard history book used in almost all American universities and colleges, which say that America began to become a great power or a world power around the end of the 19th century, particularly with the Spanish-American War, I would maintain that America, both before and after the formation of the United States of America, has always been an imperial enterprise. We need to remember, for example, that when the first English settlers came to America, they were, in a sense, imperial outreach. The British were in the process of establishing an empire that, as the saying went, the sun never set on, an empire of global scope. And the Englishmen who came to North America were part of that imperial enterprise. They didn't come here to establish democracy. They came here. They came to America to plunder. And when the plundering didn't turn out to be very good, they stayed and engaged in commercial enterprises, especially growing tobacco and exporting it back to Europe. But we shouldn't fall for the myth that the people who came to America from Europe were all seeking freedom. We're all fleeing oppression. Some were, that's true. But that was not the rule. All of these colonies were approved by the Crown. They operated subject to British imperial rules, the navigation acts, and all the rest of the regulations the British government devised for the management of its worldwide empire. So these Americans came to North, these Englishmen, and eventually other people from Europe as well, came to America. And they immediately began to seize land from the people who were already living in America. They weren't always violent. Sometimes they actually made attempts to purchase land. And sometimes they made agreements with the Indians who were living in North America at the time. But nonetheless, if they had to, they resorted to violence. And they immediately began to push away from the coastline where they began and to spread across the entire continent of North America. And indeed, if one goes back and reads centuries ago what their view of the future was, it was the expectation that the European settlers would eventually spread their populations across the whole of North America and either displace or kill the indigenous people in the process. In any event, they would subjugate them. They were generally viewed as savages and not viewed as people who had the same moral and political stature as the Europeans that came to North America. So they were not treated as second class citizens. They were simply not treated as citizens at all, or even as potential citizens. So this was the way things proceeded up to the formation of the United States in the late 18th century. And many of the so-called founding fathers of the United States, people such as Jefferson and James Madison, who are held up to this day as great proponents of liberty, which in some ways they were, were also imperialists. This is usually mistaken because they were also people who advised against foreign entanglements. George Washington, in his famous final speech, and Jefferson on many occasions, and the Jeffersonians who formed the party around him, were people that were strongly averse to engaging in European quarrels. But notice how specific this is. European quarrels, not quarrels, period. And in fact, Jefferson and Madison were both keenly interested in pushing out the authority of the United States government and the settlement of American people across the whole of North America. And they set in motion policies to begin that process, including the acquisition of Louisiana in 1803, which almost doubled the amount of national territory and opened up vast new areas of natural resources and potentially fertile farmlands for the settlement of the millions that Jefferson and his friends foresaw, eventually breaking those lands and bringing them to cultivation. But they also undertook intrigues of more immediate import, such as the seizure of West Florida, which is the area where I happen to live right now. This is a portion of southern Louisiana state now. But once upon a time, it was an extension of the Spanish province of Florida, which extended all the way to the Mississippi River. And in 1810, I'm very proud to say, the people of West Florida rebelled against the Spanish government and overthrew their local administrators and established the Republic of West Florida. And they have a nice flag with a blue background and a white star in the center. And this became what later was known as the Lone Star and the flag was used later in the Civil War by some of the Confederate troops and became the model for the Texas flag with its lone white star and a blue background, which Texas is known as the Lone Star State. So we West Floridians started all of this and had our little republic. And little republics are probably the only good republics because that was the downfall from the beginning. This imperial project was bound to produce bigger and bigger political units. And as they became bigger, the potential for the preservation of liberty became less and less. The importance of scale has never been fully appreciated by American historians and political scientists. Centuries ago it was appreciated. It was long believed that all republics needed to be small because otherwise they became empires and became corrupted and any liberty that they promoted would be lost to tyrants. But that was an ancient wisdom that fell by the wayside somewhere. Certainly Americans stopped subscribing to it very quickly to their peril. So Americans were imperialists from the beginning. But for several centuries, their empire was confined to the continent of North America, which was vast and potentially very rich source of raw materials and potential for trade. And they occupied themselves exploiting that opportunity rather than taking sides in European wars for more than 100 years. Now, eventually they did, at the end of the 19th century, fall into the trap of thinking that somehow the natural development of their wealth entitled them to the status of great power, which is to say the kind of nation state that is constantly warring against other nation states for some kind of international supremacy or hegemony. And so even the orthodox historians recognized that something happened of great importance in 1898. But what happened was only that the American imperial impulse had reached its continental limits. The continent had been subdued and placed under United States jurisdiction. And so in order to continue growing, the Americans had to leap over the seas, which is what they did by taking possession of the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, and in effect Cuba as well in the war with Spain. This was very easy pickings, of course, because by 1898 the United States was indeed the world's greatest industrial power, the greatest economic power. And therefore potentially the greatest military power if it turned its resources in that direction. So that is what increasingly began to be done for 20 or 30 years of the early 20th century. The United States engaged in so-called gunboat diplomacy, which was a way of intimidating the small nations of Central America and the Caribbean and sometimes South America, in order to bring them into line with US preferences about trade relations especially, and sometimes to compel the payment of debts. The next big change in American imperial thrust occurred after World War II, which left the United States in the position of being the world's overwhelmingly superior economic and military power. For the first time, the United States did not dismantle its armed forces after a war, but dismantled them only partially, retained an armed force that was very, very large and powerful by historical standards, and has continued to maintain such an armed force ever since, and to use it for the purpose of maintaining global hegemony. And that's where the term American empire comes into play. There's a good deal of dispute among historians about what to call this arrangement. People deny sometimes that it even exists, why America doesn't control anybody out there in the world. But that's the rankest nonsense. Americans have so much economic and military power that they are in a position to intimidate many, many countries of the world or to bribe them if intimidation doesn't work or to bribe and intimidate. And if neither of those works, then to bring military force to bear. So it behooves practically every nation in the world to be cooperative to American wishes if they don't want to suffer the consequences. And to some extent, even rich and powerful nations of the world, such as the nations of Western Europe, are subject to this intimidation. And there's no point wishing it away. In the process of maintaining this post-World War II apparatus of global hegemony, the United States built many, many military bases around the world, permanent bases. I have a report issued last year, which gives us the following information. The Department of Defense admits that they maintained more than 545,700 facilities, which are building structures and so forth, located in more than 5,400 sites on approximately 30 million acres. And that includes more than 300,000 buildings around the world with a total value of almost $1.5 trillion. These holdings are spread across nearly 5,000 sites in the United States and 761 sites in foreign countries. And of those in foreign countries, that 761 does not include bases and sites in war zones, which is to say right now Iraq and Afghanistan, which contain a number of big US bases, as well as many, many smaller bases. So if we added those in, we would certainly have more than 800 US military bases scattered around the world. And this is unprecedented. The height of its glory as the British Empire could not come close to exerting this kind of military presence on a worldwide scale. And then, of course, the US naval forces may show up anywhere in the world as well, bringing great military power to the location. So the United States is not only an immense economic power, but stands ready to exert enough military power to destroy the earth. Even now, after considerable reduction in the stockpile of atomic weapons, the US forces maintain thousands of nuclear weapons, all designed and positioned so that they can be used very quickly against any place in the world. And along the way, of course, the United States is engaged in a number of small wars, such as those in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, repeatedly, Afghanistan, and many other places on a smaller scale. So the United States, when I said to begin my talk, is like a cancer, I mean it. It has metastasized on a global scale. Its tentacles are everywhere. It is an octopus indeed. Now, we like to say in the United States that nobody sticks with anything very long unless there's money in it. And that's true of the military industrial congressional complex in the United States. This is the combination of the armed forces and their leadership, the civilian military leadership from the president and the secretary of defense on down. The great defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, and so forth. And the congressional overseers of military expenditure who have a great stake in this oversight because it allows them to extract very large bribes from the defense contractors. And to live the high life, everyone wants to live like a king, especially congressional leaders. The contracting system that's used to facilitate the operation of this complex was created just before the United States became an active belligerent in World War II. That is to say, in 1940 and 41, when the United States began to prepare and to build up its forces for the war. And since that time, this contracting system has been designed in such a way that it allows immense latitude to the contracting parties and therefore allows them to serve their interests at great expense to the public and at great benefit to themselves. One of the papers in this book I held up to you before is a study I did with a colleague, Ruben Trevino, of the rates of return to defense contracting companies over a period of four decades of the Cold War. And they were very high rates of return. And you ought to remember when you think about them that they were also high rates of return with very little risk. There's nothing unusual about high rates of return to investment, but normally they come only to people who take great risks. These people have discovered a way to have the best of all worlds. High returns and low risk. And the low risk comes from the fact that they have always enjoyed what ultimately became known as the green span put, which is they can expect to be bailed out if they get in trouble. And we know that because again and again and again, these big defense companies were bailed out. Every one of them from Lockheed on down at tremendous expense to the American taxpayer. Of course, the American taxpayer is relatively quiescent about military expenditure because he's always told that unless the military gets enormous amounts of money, some foreigner will show up in his front yard and kill his family. These tall ideological tales have been the backdrop for all of this military activity from the very beginning. And if you track the history of American foreign policy, what you see is not only a series of crises, such as the wars in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq and so forth, but you see a whole series of phony crises. Alarms that were rang about threats that didn't really exist, gaps. There was always a gap of some kind from the very beginning. Immediately after World War II, there was a troop strength gap because the Soviets had enormous numbers of people under arms and the Americans many fewer. Shortly thereafter, there was said to be a bomber gap. So we needed to build more bombers to match the Soviets. Of course, we already actually had more bombers than they and better ones, but never mind. Each gap scare served its purpose if it frightened people long enough to bring them to capitulate into being plundered to enrich the defense establishment. And so we had a succession of these missile gaps, missile throw weight gaps, anti-submarine warfare gaps. And right at the end of the Cold War, believe it or not, we had a Star Wars gap in which the Secretary of Defense asserted that the Soviets had virtually perfected an anti-missile system to protect their leaders in Moscow. And unless we built our Star Wars systems, we would be sitting ducks for intimidation. These are all phony stories, every one of them, with a grain of truth large enough to keep the belief intact. The amount of money spent, we can easily look up. It's always reported in the budget documents and in the press. And in recent years, the Pentagon has greatly expanded its expenditure. It's almost doubled since the year 2000, even after adjustment for inflation, that being the Iraq gap, the Iraq war being used as an apology for diverting enormous sums of money to military uses wholly unrelated to the war in Iraq, especially the purchase of big, expensive hardware, such as rockets and military aircraft and the related materials, software, operations and maintenance supplies and so forth. Maintaining this huge defense apparatus is enormously expensive. And of course, it's two or three times more expensive than it needs to be because of all the corruption that's inherent in its operation. But it is a magnificent machine for the enrichment of its participants. Even though the American people know or think they know how much is being spent for defense, they're actually not even close to the truth. Because the accounts are kept in such a way that many defense related expenditures are classified somewhere other than the Department of Defense budget. And that's nice. It makes people look at the Defense Department's budget of now more than $600 billion per year, year after year, with increases each year. But it puts them to sleep without realizing that actual expenditures for defense related purposes are actually about twice that much. I've done in recent years two studies to bring all of these other forms of expenditure into account. And for example, in fiscal year 2006, which was the last set of data for which I did this exercise, the Department of Defense was spending approximately $500 billion that year. But then we start adding things that are actually defense related or military related, such as $17 billion in the energy department, which is where the nuclear weapons are manufactured. The Department of State, $25 billion, including the foreign aid, a large sum of which takes the form of credit for foreign military sales, which is to say the U.S. government is giving weapons to countries it favors at the moment. The Department of Veterans Affairs, almost 70 billions, that's obviously a military related expense, but it's been hived off into a separate department so that it doesn't fall under the category of defense spending. But it's very large amount. The Department of Homeland Security, surprise. Many Americans thought that's what the Defense Department was for, defending their homeland. Then we discovered, no, we were mistaken. The Defense Department was actually for imperial maintenance and policing. It had nothing to do with protecting us in the United States. For that purpose, we now needed to create a wholly new apparatus, the Department of Homeland Security. And its budget in fiscal 2006 was almost $70 billion. And if you've ever traveled through a U.S. airport, you know what a travesty this expenditure is. A great deal of it is what we call security theater. It's for presenting the impression of protection by going through senseless motions and by intimidating people so that they become accustomed to abasing themselves before petty tyrants. Then we have some expenditure in the Department of Justice for anti-terrorism actions. The Department of the Treasury pays almost 40, now actually more than 40 billions a year towards some of the military retirement costs. Almost no one knows about this. When I tried to find out the amount, I had a devil of a time, even tracking down where the account was located. Even after I called experts in the budget process, they didn't know either. But it's squirreled away in the Treasury Department rather than put under Defense Department. NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is engaged in a certain amount of defense-related research. And then finally a big item that almost no one ever takes account of is a large portion of the interest on US government debt. And the reason that needs to be counted is that this is a deferred cost of previous debt-financed defense spending. So if you don't pay the full cost in the year that you make the outlays, but you borrow money to make a portion of your expenditures, then you're incurring a debt service obligation. And what I did is I went back to 1916 when the US national debt was approximately zero and cumulated forward each year the amount pro-rata of any deficit in the budget attributable to defense spending. And then cumulated that forward until I knew how much of the current US government debt is the product of past debt-financed defense spending. And that added in fiscal 2006 more than $200 billion to the total. So it's a very large amount and getting larger all the time because now of course the US government is financing in this fiscal year approximately half of its entire budget from borrowing. We finally reached third world status in that regard. So rich countries make full circles it seems. Well, this is not a pretty picture. I'm not going to talk any longer because my time is up but I would say in conclusion that this is indeed a cancer. It's a great threat to the world. It's a threat to world peace despite claiming to be the guarantor of world peace. It has been responsible for many of the wars and much of the suffering among human beings for the past 50 years or more. And until it's contained the Leviathan state of the United States will never be brought to heel. Thank you very much.