I don't think anyone said that there was nothing altruistic about the Marshall Plan. That would be like saying that there was nothing altruistic about slave owners. Certainly, slave owners could be and were very altruistic at times.
"The favored illustration of "generosity and goodwill" is the Marshall Plan. That merits examination, on the "strongest case" principle. The inquiry again quickly yields facts "that `it wouldn't do' to mention." For example, the fact that "as the Marshall Plan went into full gear the amount of American dollars being pumped into France and the Netherlands was approximately equaled by the funds being siphoned from their treasuries to finance their expeditionary forces in Southeast Asia," to carry out terrible crimes. And that the tied aid provisions help explain why the U.S. share in world trade in grains increased from less than 10% before the war to more than half by 1950, while Argentine exports reduced by two-thirds. And that under U.S. influence Europe was reconstructed in a particular mode, not quite that sought by the anti-fascist resistance, though fascist and Nazi collaborators were generally satisfied. And that the generosity was overwhelmingly bestowed by American taxpayers upon the corporate sector, which was duly appreciative, recognizing years later that the Marshall Plan "set the stage for large amounts of private U.S. direct investment in Europe," establishing the basis for the modern Transnational Corporations, which "prospered and expanded on overseas orders,...fueled initially by the dollars of the Marshall Plan" and protected from "negative developments" by "the umbrella of American power."
It is, again, of some interest that thoughts of that nature were "silenced with surprising effectiveness" during the 50th anniversary celebration of this unprecedented act of generosity and goodwill, the strongest case put forth by admirers of the "global meliorism" of the world's most powerful state, hence of direct relevance to the question being addressed here.
http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/articles...elativity.html
"The "prevailing orthodoxy" has occasionally been submitted to tests beyond the record of history. Lars Schoultz, the leading academic specialist on human rights in Latin America, found that U.S. aid "has tended to flow disproportionately to Latin American governments which torture their citizens,... to the hemisphere's relatively egregious violators of fundamental human rights." That includes military aid, is independent of need, and runs through the Carter period. More wide-ranging studies by economist Edward Herman found a similar correlation world-wide, also suggesting a plausible reason: aid is correlated with improvement in the investment climate, often achieved by murdering priests and union leaders, massacring peasants trying to organize, blowing up the independent press, and so on. The result is a secondary correlation between aid and egregious violation of human rights. It is not that U.S. leaders prefer torture; rather, it has little weight in comparison with more important values. These studies precede the Reagan years, when the questions are not worth posing."
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarti...15&ItemID=2804
"Actually one of the purposes of the [post World War II] Marshall Plan, this great benevolent plan, was to shift Europe and Japan from coal to oil. Europe and Japan both had indigenous coal resources but they switched to oil in order to give the US control. About $2bn out of the $13bn Marshall Plan dollars went straight to the oil companies to help convert Europe and Japan to oil based economies. For power, it's enormously significant to control the resources and oil's expected to be the main resource for the next couple of generations."