Costs of Empire (1st edition)

Edited by Alejandro Reuss and the Dollars & Sense collective

Costs of Empire compiles articles that ran in the pages of Dollars & Sense magazine as part of a project suggested to the Dollars & Sense collective by our long-time supporter John Maher, to whose memory this book is dedicated. The Costs of Empire project sought to highlight issues, critical to our present and future, explaining the shape of the capitalist world economy today, including the roles of international financial institutions (IFIs), the reshaping of the world economy through trade-and-investment agreements, the distribution of income and wealth (and power) worldwide, and the unequal distribution of the costs and benefits of environmental degradation. This project sought to draw out the connections among these issues and the global role of the United States: who benefits from its exercise of economic, political, and military power worldwide, how the global power of U.S. elites further concentrates their power in the economic and political spheres, and the toll this inflicts on ordinary people both in the United States and around the world.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• CHAPTER 1: Imperialism Today
  • 1.1 The Global Economy Today
    Arthur MacEwan
  • 1.2 Globalization and the End of the Labor Aristocracy
    Jayati Ghosh
    
    
• CHAPTER 2: Labor Under Empire
  • 2.1 Transnational Capital and Transnational Labor
    An Interview with William K. Tabb
  • 2.2 The Global Industrial Working Class
    An Interview with Immanuel Ness
  • 2.3 Colonialism, “Underdevelopment,” and the International Division of Labor
    Alejandro Reuss
    
    
• CHAPTER 3: Migration and Empire
  • 3.1 Migration, Labor, and U.S. Policy
    David Bacon
  • 3.2 “Migration Is a Form of Fighting Back”
    David Bacon
  • 3.3 Europe’s Refugee “Crisis”
    Jayati Ghosh
    
    
• CHAPTER 4: Finance, Trade, and Empire
  • 4.1 Dollar Dominance
    Arthur MacEwan
  • 4.2 An Empire Upside Down
    Christy Thornton
  • 4.3 No Friendship in Trade
    Sasha Breger Bush
    
    
• CHAPTER 5: Imperialism and Development
  • 5.1 What Ever Happened to Development?
    Jawied Nawabi
  • 5.2 Debt and Development: Frequently Asked Questions
    Alejandro Reuss
  • 5.3 Puerto Rico’s Colonial Economy
    Arthur MacEwan
  • 5.4 Haiti’s Fault Lines
    Marie Kennedy and Chris Tilly
  • 5.5 “Tied” Foreign Aid
    Arthur MacEwan
    
    
• CHAPTER 6: Militarism, Natural Resources, and the Environment
  • 6.1 Military Spending in the Swampland
    James M. Cypher
  • 6.2 Costs of the U.S. Global War on Terror Since 2001
    Gerald Friedman
  • 6.3 Is It Oil?
    Arthur MacEwan
  • 6.4 Climate Change, Imperialism, and Democracy
    Questions and Answers with Liz Stanton
    
    
• Further Reading
  • Imperialism by the Book
    John Miller, Alejandro Reuss, Zoe Sherman, and Will Whitham

Edition: 1st
Date of publication: December 2018
ISBN: 978-1-939402-40-0
Pages: 134
Price: $19.50