“Although they do contribute to society in positive ways, my research over the past decade and a half, revealed in Foundations of the American Century, shows that the big U.S. foundations—Rockefeller, Ford, and Carnegie—made fundamental contributions to America?s rise to global leadership, a global imperium sometimes more benignly promoted as the ‘American century.’
This includes some of the darkest chapters in American foreign policy: hubristically guiding economic development policies that exacerbated problems in the newly independent Nigeria and played a role in its slide into civil war; sponsoring and guiding opponents of the leftist Sukharno administration in Indonesia and contributing to the bloodshed that accompanied the rise of the right-wing militarist Suharto regime; and funding and training right wing economists as well as their centrist and even leftist opponents in Chile as it careened into the bloody military coup of 1973.”
This excerpt is from Inderjeet Parmar’s new book Foundations of the American Century: The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations and the Rise of American Power. The Bradley Center hosted an event on May 31st to discuss the questions raised by this new work.
Required Reading
Inderjeet Parmar, Not So Cuddly, berfrois, April 4, 2012.
Inderjeet Parmar, Foundation Networks and American Hegemony, European Journal of American Studies, February 2012.
