arraya: Depending on your perspective (and how you read history), you could argue that the US has always been about the almighty dollar (as were the Romand and the British).
The original draft of the Constitution contained the phrase “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Property”, which was subsequently changed. You look at the Louisiana Purchase, Lewis & Clark expedition, Manifest Destiny and Gunboat Diplomacy, and it’s increasingly hard to argue that the US hasn’t been a going concern from the jump.
I did read Perkins and that tied into what I had already seen during my time down there. US corporations (and British, Dutch, French and German as well) exert a huge amount of influence in that part of the world, along with the other parts of the world that are rich in natural resources. The military becomes, in essence, the policing force behind the corporate extraction of resources.
Check out Walter Lefeber’s “Inevitable Revolutions: The US in Central America” (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393309649). Talk about eye opening. The section regarding the US “support” of the Guatemalan coup of 1954 will drop your jaw.
I read a revisionist history of the Spanish-American War of 1898 that argued it was solely for control of the resources of the Caribbean Basin and the US recognized that Spanish influence was on the wane and we wanted to pre-empt any new comers and thus the war.
