Michael Parenti, Empire benefits a small elite and devastates everyone else.

Michael Parenti passed away peacefully this morning, surrounded by his family, at the age of 92.

One of the most influential anti imperialist thinkers in the United States, Parenti spent decades exposing how power actually works beneath the language of democracy, development, and humanitarianism. In this 1986 lecture at the University of Colorado Boulder, he dismantles the myth that foreign aid is about helping people.

Parenti argued that foreign aid functions as a subsidy for empire, transferring wealth from ordinary people in the Global North to elites in the Global South who protect multinational interests. Drawing on economists like Kenneth Boulding and Thorstein Veblen, he highlighted the missing class dimension, that those who profit from imperial investments are not the ones who pay the costs of maintaining them.

He pointed to the Philippines, Cuba before the revolution, and British ruled India to show a recurring pattern. Infrastructure was built for plantations and exports while entire communities were left without roads, clinics, or schools. Aid money, he argued, props up private corporations and funds police and military forces whose real role is suppressing impoverished populations.

His message was blunt and remains urgent. Empire benefits a small elite and devastates everyone else. Without class analysis the conversation is baby talk. With it the machinery of empire becomes impossible to deny.