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US Empire

BRICS, The Dollar, And The End Of US Empire, With Ben Norton

The United States is socially, politically and economically in crisis. As an increasingly large number of people are priced out of the economy, fewer and fewer buy into the sham of electoral politics. On the world stage, too, the U.S. is suffering. Countries everywhere are beginning to drop the dollar as the standard unit of exchange, and Washington’s prestige has been severely shaken due to its relentless, unequivocal support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Ben Norton joins MintCast host Mnar Adley to discuss all this and more. Norton is an investigative journalist and founder of Geopolitical Economy Report, a news source dedicated to looking at the world and seeing the big picture. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Beijing, China.

The Decline Of The US Empire: Where Is It Taking Us All?

The evidence suggests that empires often react to periods of their own decline by over-extending their coping mechanisms. Military actions, infrastructure problems, and social welfare demands may then combine or clash, accumulating costs and backlash effects that the declining empire cannot manage. Policies aimed to strengthen empire—and that once did—now undermine it. Contemporary social changes inside and outside the empire can reinforce, slow, or reverse the decline. However, when decline leads leaders to deny its existence, it can become self-accelerating.

Nicaraguan Democracy Exposes The US Oligarchy

There is probably no group of people more isolated from the rest of humanity than residents of the United States. Far from being the “leader of the free world” and a robust democracy where the exchange of ideas is respected, the United States is under the thumb of billionaire oligarchs who restrict what we see and hear. The corporate media play the role of servant and keep the people simultaneously uninformed and misinformed. Knowledge of the rest of the world is extremely limited and only those who are sufficiently self-motivated will venture outside of the bubble. Yet doing so is imperative.

The Impending Collapse Of US Empire

The public perception of the American empire, at least to those within the United States who have never seen the empire dominate and exploit the “wretched of the earth,” is radically different from reality. These manufactured illusions, ones Joseph Conrad wrote so presciently about, posit that the empire is a force for good. The empire, we are told, fosters democracy and liberty. It spreads the benefits of “Western civilization.” These are deceptions repeated ad nauseam by a compliant media and mouthed by politicians, academics and the powerful. But they are lies, as all of us who have spent years reporting overseas understand.

Old Man Shouting, ‘The American Empire Is Doing Great!’

Democratic elites and the reporters who clerk for them were effusively approving of Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech last Thursday evening—not so much for what he said, which came nothing new, as for the demeanor of our enfeebled president. Never mind that Biden reduced an occasion intended to address all Americans as to the condition of their nation to a cheap stump speech. He avoided falling down for his hour at the podium while stringing coherent sentences (mostly) together in the cause of his political survival. That is what counted.

K. J. Noh On The Coming US-China Clash In Asia

The United States is no longer able to exert its will in the very arbitrary and unitary way that it has been able to and the problem with this is that it is a very dangerous moment because as the Empire weakens, as it senses its power waning and slipping away from its grasp, it becomes more dangerous. It's like the drunk at the bar and the bar is closing and the drunk is drunk with power. It has maxed out its credit cards and it has struck out with everybody. It is time to go home. It is time for the Empire to go home but it doesn't want to go home. It wants to pick a fight even if it has to take on the whole bar.

Righteous Protest Drowned Out As Empire Was Worshipped At AME Church

Let’s start at the top - with President Joe Biden. Using the lame excuse of memorializing the victims of the 2015 racist massacre at Mother Emanuel Church in which nine church members were murdered in cold blood by white supremacist Dylan Roof, who they had welcomed into their Bible Study, Biden’s true purpose for speaking at the church was to beg Black people to save his lagging campaign for re-election . But Biden didn’t even memorialize the victims of that massacre nearly a decade later by name, nor did he bother to speak at the church on the actual anniversary of the massacre, June 15.

The Dangers Of Minstrel Diplomacy

There have been defining times in history-moments, epochs and periods that are typically marked by notable events or particular characteristics that have changed the world forever. Nicolaus Copernicus’ publication of On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres in 1543, postulating the model of the universe that placed the Sun rather than Earth at its center was such a moment. The Industrial Revolution (1760 – 1840), was a defining period in the methods and processes of global production that transitioned most of the world away from hand production, towards more efficient and stable mechanical manufacturing processes.

Can The US Adjust Sensibly To A Multipolar World?

In his 1987 book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, historian Paul Kennedy reassured Americans that the decline the United States was facing after a century of international dominance was “relative and not absolute, and is therefore perfectly natural; and that the only serious threat to the real interests of the United States can come from a failure to adjust sensibly to the newer world order.” Since Kennedy wrote those words, we have seen the end of the Cold War, the peaceful emergence of China as a leading world power, and the rise of a formidable Global South. But the United States has indeed failed to “adjust sensibly to the newer world order,” using military force and coercion in flagrant violation of the UN Charter in a failed quest for longer lasting global hegemony.

Chris Hedges: A Declining US Empire Is Committing Suicide

The Unites States Empire is falling, just as previous empires have done. Clearing the FOG speaks with journalist and author Chris Hedges about his newest book, "The Greatest Evil is War," and the connection between wars and the end of empire. Hedges compares current conditions in the United States and the fall of Rome. He describes the Western war against Russia being fought in Ukraine and aggression against China as part of the last gasp grabs to hold onto US hegemony, but they are failing. He talks about the Military Industrial Complex as an institution that has taken over and is out of control. It will continue to siphon every dollar it can from the US coffers while an increasing number of people are unable to meet their basic needs. Hedges provides an outline of where we are headed and what we must do to change course.

Why US Foreign Military Bases Should Be Reduced Significantly

Soon after the Second World War ended, the British government with its vast colonial empire made significant territorial concessions to the USA which could facilitate the rapid spread of USA military bases in many parts of the world. In addition of course the defeated Axis countries and their territories could provide another suitable place for the rapid proliferation of the US military bases that was to follow. In recent decades there have been several closures of these bases but there have been several new ones coming up as well. This together with definitional issues makes it difficult to give precise numbers, and it has been stated that even the Pentagon may struggle to give a precise number and list.

Newsletter: Color Revolution Comes Home?

By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers for Popular Resistance. The United States has perfected the art of regime change operations. The US is the largest empire in world history with more than 1,000 military bases and troops operating throughout the world. In addition to military force, the US uses the soft power of regime change, often through 'Color Revolutions.' The US has been building its empire since the Civil War era, but it has been in the post-World War II-time period that it has perfected regime change operations.US military presence around the world Have the people of the United States been the victims of regime change operations at home? Have the wealthiest and the security state created a government that serves them, rather than the people? To answer these questions, we begin by examining how regime change works and then look at whether those ingredients are being used domestically.

Empire’s Fleeting Leadership In Its Yard

Mr. Biden, the US President, expressed his hopes as he said: “I think I find no reason why the Western Hemisphere, the Western Hemisphere over the next 10 years, does not develop into the most democratic hemisphere in the world, most democratic region in the entire world.” He identified important factors in the region: “We have everything. We have the people, we have the resources and we have more democracies in this hemisphere than any other hemisphere.” So, the US leader expressed hope: “This is a lot we can do, but a lot of it matters in the private enterprise side equation.” He mentioned “enormous ideas and opportunities” in the region.

Biden’s Summit Of No-Shows

I tip my cap, as we all should, to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico. And to Presidents Luis Arce of Bolivia, Xiaomara Castro of Honduras, Alejandro Giammattei of Guatemala and Nayib Bukele of El Savador. They all pointedly declined to join President Joe Biden at his Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles last week, joining to protest Biden’s refusal to invite Miguel Díaz–Canel, Nicolás Maduro and Daniel Ortega, the presidents of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua respectively. Add it up. Eight of the region’s 33 nations were absent when Biden convened the summit “to demonstrate the resurgence of U.S. leadership in the region,” as the government-supervised New York Times forlornly put it. Don’t they ever get tired of these long-exhausted phrases over on Eighth Avenue?

Guantanamo Bay And The US Global Empire

In the twenty-ninth installment of “The Watchdog” podcast, Lowkey speaks to Todd E. Pierce about the global reach of the U.S. empire and its totalitarian ambitions to control the entire planet. Todd is a retired U.S. Army officer and defense attorney whose experiences serving at the front line of empire moved him to become a defender of its victims. Towards the end of his military service, he volunteered to become a defense attorney for three prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Previously a neoconservative cold warrior, Pierce joined the military at an early age and served in the first Gulf War. Yet after being exposed to the realities of neoconservative doctrine, his faith in the project began to waver.
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