Subjects Archives: Empire

This is a serious subject.

The summit meeting of leaders of the eight most highly industrialized powers on the planet took place July 7-9 at a mountain retreat on the banks of the Toyako, a lake formed inside a volcanic crater located in the north of the island of Hokkaido, in the northern reaches of the Japanese archipelago. It would be hard to choose a site more removed and distant from the madding crowd than this.

I basically drew these data from statements made by William Brownfield, US ambassador to Colombia, from that country’s press and television, from the international press, and other sources. It”s impressive the show of technology and economic resources at play.

Narrated by Viggo Mortensen.  Art by Mike Konopacki.  Video editing by Eric Wold.  The video is based on Howard Zinn, Mike Konopacki, and Paul Buhle, A People’s History of American Empire (Metropolitan Books, 2008). | | Print

Labor and political cartoonist Mike Konopacki — close friend and collaborator of UE’s cartoonist Gary Huck — has produced a brilliant book-length graphic adaptation of a major portion of Howard Zinn’s classic A People’s History of the United States. Created in collaboration with Zinn and historian Paul Buhle, Konopacki’s A People’s History of American Empire tells, in pictures and text, the story of U.S. government and corporate policies of controlling other people’s countries — from the seizure of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Cuba in the Spanish-American War, to George Bush’s invasion of Iraq. But it also shows that U.S. foreign policy is and always has been inseparable from domestic policies that have stolen land from and massacred Native Americans, crushed workers’ movements, and employed racism and immigrant bashing to divide and conquer working people.

The empire is not resigning itself to being the only loser at the Rio Group meeting held in Santo Domingo on March 7. It wants to set up the bloody mess once more. That is not difficult to demonstrate.

The status of the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt remains unsettled.  Egypt is under heavy pressure from both Israel and the United States to reestablish control and seal the border.  In an uncharacteristically blunt criticism of the regime of President Husni Mubarak, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice testified before the House Foreign Affairs […]

When the United States and its NATO allies started the war on Kosovo, Cuba immediately defined her position on the front page of the newspaper Granma, on March 26, 1999. This was done in a Declaration of her Ministry of Foreign Affairs under the title of “Cuba’s appeal to end NATO’s unjustified aggression against Yugoslavia.”

Today’s two most conspicuous global flashpoints — the Middle East and Latin America — have widely exposed the fact of US imperialism and highlighted some of its limitations.  Adding the apparent cracks in US economic hegemony seems to indicate an empire in decline.  Yet a more cautious assessment would recall that the earlier defeat in […]

Ayub Nuri, a Kurdish man from Halabja, was a fixer for the Western media in Iraq (he is now based in New York City, having received a scholarship from Columbia).1  A fixer, in the words of Nuri, is “a journalist’s interpreter, guide, source finder and occasional lifesaver.”2  Local fixers, more or less, shape what foreign […]

“Avoir défini l’Etat d’Israël comme un Etat juif est la clef de sa perte.  Un Etat juif, c’est explosif, c’est de la dynamite.”  Ces propos sont ceux de l’ex-président de la Knesset de 1999 à 2003 et ex-président de l’agence juive, Avraham Burg. M. Burg n’a jamais mâché ses mots, mais, dans un entretien publié […]

  What happens when hundreds or even thousands of small and not-so-small organizations come together to meet, dialogue, and present their ideas over the course of a long weekend?  The World Social Forum (WSF), an annual gathering of tens of thousands of people from over 100 countries, has provided this space for those able to […]

Because empire creates so many enemies it has to be rigorously defended.  To gain support of the citizenry, agents of empire create bogeymen, founded in fact but demonized, behind which the ongoing work of empire can be accomplished.  In the 20th century the demon was communism; in the 21st it is terrorism. Currently, defense of […]

Q.  2007 is the 140th anniversary of the publication of Volume One of Marx’s Capital.  In your opinion, what is its main contribution to understanding contemporary capitalism? Marx’s object in Capital was to explain capital as a social relation in the fullest dialectical sense and in the process to describe its law(s) of motion.  I […]

  Need a crash course on the present state of the world?  Want to untangle the terminology, separate the victims from the victimizers, understand the dynamics of unilateralism, and deduce what can be done about it all?  I’d like to introduce you to a small literary arsenal. A good place to begin is the book […]

“Un esercito segreto contro di noi ma gli sciiti sapranno resistere” BAGDAD – Si sente braccato e si nasconde.  Non dorme mai più di una notte nello stesso letto.  Qualcuno dei suoi fedelissimi gli ha già voltato le spalle.  Ha perfino trasferito la famiglia in un luogo segreto.  Moqtada al Sadr sente che la fine […]

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Since the coming into power of the Stephen Harper Conservative government in January of this year, there has been much gnashing of teeth over the foreign policy stance of Canada.  In particular, Canada’s relation with the U.S. on a phalanx of fronts has been at the center of controversy.  One has been the softwood lumber […]

  Australian Prime Minister John Howard should get a hostile reception at the Pacific Islands Forum this week.  His in-your-face imperialism has provoked conflicts in three island nations. The Solomons and Papua New Guinea In the latest outrage, Aussie police have raided the office of Solomons PM Manasseh Sogavare.  Meanwhile a key report on the […]

The depth and breadth of bipartisan commitment to the US empire among America’s political elite is best seen in the House vote on HR 282, the “Iran Freedom Support Act,” essentially a bill to “make U.S. sanctions against Iran under ILSA permanent unless there is a change of government in Iran”1:   YEAS NAYS PRES […]

A Review of “Nuestro Himno,” in Somos Americanos, Urban Box Office (www.ubo.com) $10 ($1 goes to support the immigrant rights movement).  Release date May 16, 2006 A Spanish-language version of the US national anthem was distributed to radio stations Friday, April 29th, in time to be played over the air to build the May 1st […]