Alfred W McCoy

Hace mucho tiempo que la grandeza y la decadencia de los imperios están en el centro mismo de la historia. Desde que los europeos hicieron su primera salida –en el siglo XV– de lo que más tarde sería una zona marginal en sus barcos de vela hechos de madera y dotados de cañones, pocas veces en el mundo ha habido un momento en el que varias potencias imperiales no estuviesen contendiendo por la supremacía. En 1945, el número de esas potencias quedó reducido a dos; después, cuando la elite de Washington imaginó fugazmente que sería para siempre, a una. En estos momentos, como el historiador Alfred W. McCoy, autor de In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power (En las sombras del siglo estadounidense: grandeza y decadencia de la potencia mundial Estados Unidos), describe hoy en su vívido estilo, da la impresión de que estamos regresando a una actualizada versión imperial de los enfrentamientos navales que dieron comienzo a la historia moderna hace tantos años. Estados Unidos, China y, más modestamente, Rusia, están fortaleciendo su presencia en el mar en una forma cada día más desafiante. Pero hay una cuestión. En realidad, dos. Ya no estamos en el siglo XV. Ni siquiera estamos en el momento, a comienzos del siglo XX, en que aparecieron los grandes acorazados. El relato del ascenso y caída de los imperios ahora tiene lugar en un contexto diferente: la posible desaparición del mismísimo planeta Tierra (al menos en la forma de razonable hábitat humano). Al principio, desde mediados del siglo pasado, los enfrentamientos entre imperios –navales o de otro tipo– tenían lugar en un mundo en el que cualquier conflicto entre las potencias más importantes había tenido detrás una apocalíptica arma de fuego –cargada y amartillada–. Si el lector se pregunta qué quiero decir, nada más piense en la crisis de los misiles en Cuba de 1962, en la que un duelo naval entre la Unión Soviética y Estados Unidos amenazaba con acabar con lo que conocíamos como la vida en este planeta. No pensemos siquiera un segundo que eso pudiera volver a pasar. Paro es estos días hay otra arma amartillada en este planeta Tierra; la conocemos con el nombre de cambio climático. En cierto sentido, es todo lo opuesto al arma nuclear en que el posible Armagedón no llegaría con la velocidad del dios romano Mercurio sino en una atroz cámara lenta mientras el planeta se calienta lentamente; el derretimiento de la Antártida y Groenlandia provoca que el nivel del mar aumente poco a poco poniendo en peligro a las ciudades costeras; la estación de los incendios se alarga; las sequías y los fenómenos climáticos extremos de todo tipo se convierten en algo normal; el agua escasea cada vez más; grandes grupos humanos se ponen en Rebelion. La diplomacia de la cañonera y el fantasma del capit...

Abstract: This essay explores a domain of geopolitical conflict called “covert netherworld” that has been a seminal in world politics for the past half century and likely to become more central in the century to come. During the Cold War and its aftermath, covert netherworlds formed worldwide through confluence of four essential elements: reliance of modern states on covert methods for power projection at home and abroad; the consequent emergence of a clandestine social milieu populated by secret services and criminal syndicates; a complementary illicit economic nexus that sustains non-state actors and sometimes state security; and finally, spatial dimensions that range from a narrow criminal or covert milieu to entire countries or continents. When these elements align, this netherworld can attain the sheer geopolitical power to shape the course of national and internation- al events. To lend substance to these generic elements, the essay explores three arenas of widening geographical scope. At the local level in the southern Philip- pines, a regional netherworld fostered Islamic insurgency and state counterinsur- gency, while national elections were sustained by an illegal lottery, shaping the character of an emerging polity. At the transnational level, France’s postcolonial hold on the West African region dubbed Françafrique constrained corruption within state-mediated circuits and entrenched elites at both ends of this bilateral exchange. By contrast, U.S. covert operations in Afghanistan and Central America had divergent outcomes influenced by their degree of congruence with the narcotics traffic, demonstrating that the covert netherworld can exercise sufficient autonomy to be treated as a significant factor in world politics.

Globo, revealing nothing less than the architecture of the U.S. global surveillance apparatus. Despite heavy media coverage and commentary, no one has pointed out the combination of factors that made the NSA's expanding programs to monitor the world seem like such an alluring development for Washington's power elite. The answer is remarkably simple: for an imperial power losing its economic grip on the planet and heading into more austere times, the NSA's latest technological breakthroughs look like a seductive bargain when it comes to projecting power and keeping subordinate allies in line. Even when revelations about spying on close allies roiled diplomatic relations with them, the NSA's surveillance programs have come with such a discounted price tag that no Washington leader was going to reject them. For well over a century, from the pacification of the Philippines in 1898 to trade negotiations with the European Union today, surveillance and its kissing cousins, scandal and scurrilous information, have been key weapons in Washington's search for global dominion. Not surprisingly, in a post-9/11 bipartisan exercise of executive power, George W. Bush and Barack Obama have presided over building the NSA step by secret step into a digital panopticon designed to monitor the communications of every American and foreign leader worldwide. What exactly was the aim of such an unprecedented program of massive domestic and planetary spying, which clearly carried the risk of controversy at home and abroad? Here, an awareness of the more than century-long history of U.S. surveillance can guide us through the billions of bytes swept up by the NSA to the strategic significance of such a program for the planet's last superpower.1 What the past reveals is a long-term relationship between American state surveillance and political scandal that helps illuminate the unacknowledged reason why the NSA monitors America's closest allies. Not only does such surveillance help gain intelligence advantageous to U.S. diplomacy, trade relations, and war-making, but it also scoops up intimate information for leverage—akin to blackmail—in sensitive global dealings and negotiations of every sort. The NSA's global panopticon thus fulfils an ancient dream of empire. With a few computer key strokes, the agency has solved the problem that has bedeviled world powers since at least the time of Caesar Augustus: how to control unruly local leaders, who are the foundation for imperial rule, by ferreting out crucial, often scurrilous, information to make them more malleable. At the turn of the twentieth century, such surveillance was both expensive and labor intensive. Today, however, unlike the U.S. Army's shoe-leather surveillance during the First World War or the FBI's break-ins and phone bugs in the Cold War years, the NSA can monitor the entire world and its leaders with only one hundred-plus probes into the Internet's fiber optic cables.2 This new technology is both omniscient and omnipresent beyond anything those lacking top-secret clearance could have imagined before the Edward Snowden revelations began.3 Not only is it unimaginably pervasive, but NSA surveillance is also a particularly cost-effective strategy compared to just about any other form of global power

Through comparison of two families, Filipino and American, this essay finds that the axiomatic three-generational cycle of rise and decline, articulated famously by Andrew Carnegie, proved predictive for an American family firm but not for its Filipino counterpart. Over the span of a century, both families followed a surprisingly similar move from agriculture to food processing and then publishing. Thereafter, however, divergent state policies shaped different destinies for these two families. In the United States, impersonal enforcement of state security and economic regulation allowed the unchecked rise of finance capital that consolidated some 2000 US breweries, most of them family owned, into two transnational corporate conglomerates. In the Philippines, by contrast, persistent rent seeking by elite families, combined with personalised, partisan state economic enforcement, has allowed the continuing dominance of family-controlled corporations. Through comparison of two societies with close relations for over a century, we can see how state economic regulation can encourage the eclipse of major family firms in one society and the perpetuation of a political economic oligarchy in another.

Using a methodology that inserts the current controversy over NSA surveillance into its historical context, this essay traces the origins of U.S. internal security back to America's emergence as a global power circa 1898. In the succeeding century, Washington's information infrastructure advanced through three technological regimes: first, the manual during the Philippine War (1898–1907); next, the computerized in the Vietnam War (1963–75); and, recently, the robotic in Afghanistan and Iraq (2001–14). While these military missions have skirted defeat if not disaster, the information infrastructure, as if driven by some in-built engineering, has advanced to higher levels of data management and coercive capacity. With costs for conventional military occupations now becoming prohibitive, the U.S. will likely deploy, circa 2020, its evolving robotic regime—with a triple-canopy aerospace shield, advanced cyberwarfare, and digital surveillance—to envelop the earth in an electronic grid capable of blinding entire armies on the battlefield or atomizing a single insurgent in field or favela.

(The original version of this story was first published in the 'National Times' of Australia. That story was written by Alfred W. McCoy, Marian Wilkinson, and Gwen Robinson. This exclusive to Veritas was edited by  McCoy with key changes in the text. Culled from extensive interviews with key participants in the event, it presents a perspective of the revolution that so far has received  inadequate documentation. 'Veritas' publishes this report to help form a fuller understanding of the revolution and its implications for the present and the future - 'Veritas' Editor)

The Marcos Regime is in deep political crisis with a constant barrage of demonstrations in the cities and guerilla war in the islands and the countryside. His opponents can now be found in the villages and in the office blocks of the cities as the economic policies imposed by the U.S. through the I.M.F. and the World Bank grind down the living standards of a growing number of Filipino workers and smaller capitalists. The days of the regime are numbered as the ailing Marcos clings to power while his army cronies brawl over his successor.