The balance sheet for 2014 and the prospects for 2015 provide us with a complex panorama of negative and positive outcomes. In most cases the advances, are not earth-shattering but open possibilities for further progress. The negative developments, however, have greater and more threatening systemic outcomes.
Last night, in Beijing, I sat in a historic Szechuan restaurant with a friend who happens to be a Chinese diplomat. We exchanged some stories, ordered food, and then, suddenly, my throat felt dry and my eyes got misty.
I bowed and thanked her for the heartfelt offer China made to rescue Russia.
Just before leaving my hotel, I read the news on the RT:
“China’s foreign minister has pledged support to Russia as it faces an economic downturn due to sanctions and a drop in oil prices. Boosting trade in Yuan is a solution proposed by Beijing’s commerce minister.
Despite vast amounts of imperial data to the contrary, the great majority of writers on imperialism continue to describe and analyze US imperialism strictly in economic terms, as an expansion of “capital accumulation”, “accumulation on a world scale”.
From the beginning of our century until now, Haiti and its inhabitants under one aspect or another, have, for various reasons, been very much in the thoughts of the American people. While slavery existed amongst us, her example was a sharp thorn in our side and a source of alarm and terror…. Her very name was pronounced with a shudder.
– Frederick Douglass, World’s Columbian Exposition, January 2, 1893
The notion that history tends to favor the hegemonies that would write it is nothing new. This is especially the case for the United States today. Take US-Latin American international relations, for example: they are indelibly stippled with gunboat diplomacy and seditious coups; even the many perverse trade agreements and subsequent growing poverty belie the neoliberal overtures that America continually makes.
There is no question that over the past decade and a half, Europe, the US, and Israel have engaged in a series of bloody wars, inequalities have increased throughout the globe, economic crisis has become endemic and, more recently, right-wing military and civilian regimes have swept to power throughout Asia, North Africa, Europe and Canada.
Oregon voters in two counties voted against GMOs, against Monsanto. That’s 2 to 1 in favor of protecting organic farmers, communities, farmers and our health from pollan and seeds of the Frankenstein variety.
Vermont has signed the nation’s first GMO-labeling law, effective July 2016 (again, incremental, slide-side change — labels — but it’s something, nonetheless).
The Obama regime, in coordination with its allies and proxies, has re-launched a virulent world-wide campaign to destroy independent governments, encircle and ultimately, undermine global competitors, and establish a new US – EU centered world order.
We will proceed by identifying the recent ‘cycles’ of US empire-building; the advances and retreats; the methods and strategies; the results and perspectives. Our main focus is on the imperial dynamics driving the US toward greater military confrontations, up to and including conditions which can lead to a world war.
Brain Busting Bombs — News (faux, sic, err, persona non grata)
This is an experiment. Quickly, in tsunami like fashion, riffing with the junk of the day, picked up from mainstream madness newspaper news, and from the feeds on NPR, National Pediatric News. Other polluted pipelines from the crapper, like HuffPost, all the junk on line, etc. etc.
