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US Empire

The “Non-Aligned” Nations Realign

October 17, 2020 Wilmer J. Leon, III, Black Agenda Report. , , ,
In 1955 the US and the Soviet Union were in the midst of the Cold War.  Both countries were pressuring Asian and African countries to align with them.  In April of 1955, twenty-nine of these countries met in Bandung, Indonesia for the first Bandung (Asian-African) Conference.  Most of the countries that attended were in the process of emerging from the shackles of colonial rule.  They met to address their common problems; sovereignty, political self-determination, non-aggression and equality.

The US Is On A Path To War With China

October 15, 2020 K. J. Noh, Popular Resistance. , , ,
It was gripping , stunning testimony.  Before congress, a 15 year old volunteer nurse, Nayirah, struggled to compose her trembling voice, barely holding back tears, as she testified that marauding soldiers had thrown babies out of incubators in a hospital, leaving them to die on the floor. Later, Amnesty International confirmed authoritatively that 312 babies had been killed this way[i].  All the news agencies ran with the story, and the country and congress were in a total uproar. There was only one problem: it was completely, utterly, totally fraudulent. 

Trump’s Endless Wars

October 13, 2020 Nicolas J. S. Davies and Medea Benjamin, The Progressive. , , ,
In the aftermath of the attacks on 9/11, the Bush Administration invaded Iraq and tortured prisoners of war and terrorism suspects, in flagrant violation of the U.N. Charter and the Geneva Conventions. As a result, the United States lost standing among many of its traditional allies around the world. President Barack Obama’s global charm offensive brought friends and allies back to America’s side, but his ten-fold increase in drone strikes to assassinate often innocent terrorism suspects, and his failure to reverse the ever-expanding violence and chaos of U.S. wars, overshadowed his efforts to restore America’s international credibility, especially in the Global South.

AFRICOM: Deadly Deception.

October 9, 2020 Friends of Congo, Black Agenda Report. , , ,
On October 1, 2007, the United States under the presidency of George W. Bush and the military leadership of the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, launched the Africa Command (AFRICOM). The command was based in Stuttgart, Germany. In the same vein as the 1884/85 Berlin Conference, AFRICOM was a wholly external concoction to be imposed on Africans without their input or consent. In fact, when African leaders first heard of the establishment of an African command, they overwhelmingly rejected its intent to expand U.S. military presence on the African continent.

China: US Is ‘Destroyer Of World Peace’

September 13, 2020 Kyle Balluck, The Hill. , , ,
A spokesman for China’s defense ministry said on Sunday that the U.S. is the “destroyer of world peace” while criticizing a Pentagon report on Beijing’s military goals. The Associated Press reported that Col. Wu Qian called the Department of Defense report released earlier this month a “wanton distortion” of his nation’s intentions. “Many years of evidence shows that it is the U.S. that is the fomenter of regional unrest, the violator of the international order and the destroyer of world peace,” he said, noting U.S. actions in Iraq, Syria, Libya and other countries, according to the news service.

Report: So-Called US War On Terror Has Displaced As Many As 59 Million People

September 9, 2020 Jake Johnson, Commondreams. , , ,
The ongoing U.S. "war on terror" has forcibly displaced as many as 59 million people from just eight countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia since 2001, according to a new report published Tuesday by Brown University's Costs of War Project. "U.S. involvement in these countries has been horrifically catastrophic, horrifically damaging in ways that I don't think that most people in the United States have grappled with or reckoned with in even the slightest terms."  —David Vine, American University Titled "Creating Refugees: Displacement Caused by the United States' Post-9/11 Wars" (pdf), the new report conservatively estimates that at least 37 million people have "fled their homes in the eight most violent wars the U.S. military has launched or participated in since 2001."

Richard Wolff: The Declining Empire With Chris Hedges

September 4, 2020 Richard D. Wolff, Democracy at Work. , , ,
On this week's Economic Update, Prof. Wolff discusses the following: Denmark's new taxes on banks and rich people to help workers doing dangerous jobs; West Virginia AG sues Walmart and CVS for complicity in opioid scandal; and US State Department urges universities to sell shares in Chinese corporations. On the second half of the show, Prof. Wolff interviews author and journalist Chris Hedges on signs of the declining US empire.

The US Expeditionary Kleptocracy

September 3, 2020 By Danny Sjursen, AntiWar.com. , , ,
Of course, a desperate US military – and its Washington masters – had an expedient solution for the ethno-sectarian strife they’d catalyzed: consider it the Lebanon formula. So America’s orientalist ambassadors – most, staggeringly young Republican stalwarts with no knowledge of the Mideast – imported France’s imperial Levantine blueprint. Essentially, this meant sectarian quotas and preferences for political office: a Kurdish president, Sunni parliamentary speaker, and Shia prime minister. The French have actually added the term for this disastrous recipe – libanisation – to their dictionaries: "A process of state fragmentation, resulting from the clash between various communities of faiths." In Sectarian America, a people divided, distracted, and armed, battle for control of the nation’s streets, whilst their nominal leaders corruptly carve up contracts with the defense industry and in overseas fiefdoms. Washington’s duopoly elites ship their bombs to Saudi Arabia and their sons (well, not their sons) to Syria to secure arms deals and oil fields. And if, as a result, about a 100,000 Yemeni children, and a handful of American soldiers have to die, well – so be it.

US’ Anti-China Call To Arms Has Not Won Over All Of Europe

September 2, 2020 By Jiang Feng, South China Morning Post. , , ,
There has also been a notable shift in German views about China. On August 17, Der Tagesspiegel published a column titled, “The West has to prove that it offers the better life”, which emphasized the role positive competition plays in Sino-European relations. It pointed out that if Europe can take effective action against internal social divides, then the West does not have to fear China’s rise. On August 2, the directors of 10 Confucius Institutes in Germany issued a joint statement to decry the politicisation of these institutes. The statement notes that the institutes, which are similar to Germany’s Goethe-Institut, make important contributions to Sino-German academic, cultural and social exchanges. It should be clear that the China-Europe and China-Germany relationship are not just about single issues, but also affect the overall development outlook of all concerned. Therefore, one should not view these ties through a narrow lens, and certainly not add ideological shackles to them. The diverse breadth of ties requires all sides to rationally grow and maintain them. Recent German perspectives on China that are based on reason and logic would be a positive trend.

The CIA’s Addiction To The Afghanistan War

September 2, 2020 Finian Cunningham, Strategic Culture. , , ,
US involvement in Afghanistan is the archetypal quagmire. Hundreds of thousands killed or maimed, trillions of dollars wasted, a failed state – despite American pretensions of nation-building, and a militant insurgency stronger than ever. Washington’s declared strategic objectives in Afghanistan have never been coherent or convincing even among Pentagon top brass. The initial justification of “avenging terrorism of 9/11” sounds threadbare. The irony is that Washington first got involved in Afghanistan back in the late 1970s to inflict a “Vietnam scenario” on Soviet troops who were defending an allied government in Kabul. The Mujahideen fighters sponsored by the US and their Taliban outgrowth have gone on to make the country an even worse Vietnam scenario for Washington than it intended for Moscow. Afghanistan is known as the “Graveyard of Empires” where the British suffered a blow to their imperial prowess, like the Soviets and now the United States.

The Irresistible Rise Of The Civilization-State

August 25, 2020 By Aris Roussinos, Unheard. , , ,
A specter is haunting the liberal West: the rise of the “civilization-state”. As America’s political power wanes and its moral authority collapses, the rising challengers of Eurasia have adopted the model of the civilization-state to distinguish themselves from a paralyzed liberal order, which lurches from crisis to crisis without ever quite dying nor yet birthing a viable successor. Summarising the civilization-state model, the political theorist Adrian Pabst observes that “in China and Russia the ruling classes reject Western liberalism and the expansion of a global market society. They define their countries as distinctive civilizations with their own unique cultural values and political institutions.” From China to India, Russia to Turkey, the great and middling powers of Eurasia are drawing ideological succor from the pre-liberal empires from which they claim descent, remolding their non-democratic, statist political systems as a source of strength rather than weakness, and upturning the liberal-democratic triumphalism of the late 20th century. 

China And The Decline Of US Power

August 25, 2020 By Chandra Muzaffar, Transcend Media Service. , , ,
Constant attacks by some US elites on China will, according to some observers, diminish and disappear once the US presidential election is over in November 2020. This is unlikely to happen. China appears to have moved ahead of the US. Maritime surveillance and lunar geography would be two such sub-fields. Chinese advances in electronics and telecommunications have also been breathtaking. It is because China is at the forefront of cutting edge technology that there is so much anxiety in the US and the West today about China’s ascendancy. More than its production of goods and services, it is China’s massive global infrastructure transformation through its Belt Road Initiative (BRI) that is destined to have a lasting impact upon humankind. An endeavor that spans 138 countries, the BRI connects Asia with Africa and Europe through land and maritime routes.  It not only seeks to build highways and ports but also attempts to initiate agrarian projects and accelerate industrial ventures which will raise incomes and increase the productivity of many poor countries.

The Ongoing US Dominance Of The Dominican Republic

August 22, 2020 Narciso Isa Conde,  Noticias sin. , , ,
This is an island with two nations that have suffered from foreign intervention and repeated imperialist invasions, and, in our case, a country that has been absolutley captured by the Pentagon after our most recent attempt to change ourselves into a sovereign nation in 1965 (following Cuba’s path in our own manner) precisely due to the popular-democratic revolution of 1965 which was blocked by the landing of 42,000 invading US Marines. Since then we’ve been unable to break these powerful chains. Every time there are attempts in our country at changes out of the control of the US, the shackles are tightened. The empire doesn’t hesitate to impose its orders, often gift-wrapped and adorned with pretty phrases.  When they wear out one formula, they construct the replacement and fix it in place. This has occurred and it is occurring now. To give continuity to this imperial task, the Super-CIA arrived, sometimes also in the role of US Ambassador.

Indicators For Measuring Injustice And Societal Decay

August 17, 2020 Ralph Nader, Nader Page. , ,
Economic indicators – data points, trends, and micro-categories – are the widgets of the big information industry. By contrast, indicators for our society’s democratic health are not similarly compiled, aggregated, and reported. Its up and down trends are presented piecemeal and lack quantitative precision. We can get the process started and lay the basis for qualitative and quantitative refinement. Years ago, when we started “re-defining progress” and questioning the very superficial GDP and its empirical limitations, professional economists took notice. Unfortunately, with few exceptions, economists cling to the yardsticks that benefit and suit the plutocrats and CEOs of large corporations. Here are my offerings in the expectation that readers will add their own measures:

The Real Reason For ‘Grave Concern’ Over The Hong Kong Security Law

July 23, 2020 Ken Moak, Asia Times. , , ,
Before and since China passed the national-security law (NSL) for Hong Kong, many in the West have expressed concern if not outrage, accusing Beijing of taking away the Special Administrative Region’s freedom and reneging on the “one country, two systems” architecture. The US was particularly incensed, rescinding Hong Kong’s special trade status and imposing sanctions on Chinese and Hong Kong officials suspected of being complicit in making the NSL a reality. Western media were quick to let the world know 600,000 Hongkongers had expressed opposition to the NSL, but there was hardly a word about the more than 2.9 million and 1.7 million people who signed petitions, respectively, supporting the law and demanding that the US stop meddling in the city’s internal affairs.
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