Video. Abby Martin: Rise of a US Corporate Empire & Global Resistance Bringing It To Its Knees
The corporate media will never refer to the United States as an empire, nor will it cover the horrors of exploitation at home and abroad.
Video | Snowden to Iowa City Audience: What are we going to do about it?
Snowden: “It was no longer narrowly targeting people suspected of criminal activity,” Snowden said. “Instead, they began watching all of us all the time because any of us could be bad or we could go bad.”
David Vine| Garrisoning the Globe: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Undermine National Security and Harm Us All
Vine: The Pentagon’s overseas presence is actually even larger. There are U.S. troops or other military personnel in about 160 foreign countries and territories, including small numbers of marines guarding embassies and larger deployments of trainers and advisors like the roughly 3,500 now working with the Iraqi Army. And don’t forget the Navy’s 11 aircraft carriers.
Chris Hedges: The Great Unraveling
Hedges: The labels “liberal” and “conservative” are meaningless in the neoliberal order. Political elites, Democrat or Republican, serve the demands of corporations and empire. They are facilitators, along with most of the media and most of academia, of what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls our system of “inverted totalitarianism.”
Diane Johnstone: Turning the Cradle of Civilization Into its Graveyard
Johnstone: Western leaders share major responsibility for making much of the world unfit for normal human habitation. And so far, they are getting away with it. The massive refugee crisis swamping Europe is just the beginning of the troubles that these unscrupulous leaders have brought on their own countries.
▶ Noam Chomsky on American Empire • Henry A. Wallace National Security Forum
Expansion is the path to security, and to achieve security you have to control everything of value. This is the blueprint that has guided US leaders for decades, but is this empire worth building – and at what cost?
John Pilger: Free Julian Assange
Pilger: The Assange case amplifies many truths, and one is the growing, global totalitarianism of Washington, regardless of who is elected president.
Mark Fiore: Death & Destruction, Inc (animated cartoon)
Fiore: It’s nothing new that the United States is the biggest arms dealer in the world, I just think it’s worth noting that we have a hand in nearly every war currently under way. What looks like crazy countries battling over religion, politics or resources far away from our shores, is closer to home when you peel back the layers to find out who is supplying those weapons.
David Swanson: The Decline and Fall of the United States
From the article: In early 2014 there were unusual news stories about Gallup's end-of-2013 polling because after polling in 65 countries with the question "Which country do you think is the greatest threat to peace in the world today?" the overwhelming winner had been the United States of America. In fact, the United States is less generous with aid but more profligate with bombs and missiles than other countries and trails generally in how it treats the rest of the world. *** The U.S. government is currently working on ratifying, in secret, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which empowers corporations to overturn laws enacted by the U.S. government.
Break-In at Y-12: Nuns and Nuclear Power
Schlosser: When I inquired whose safety and security might be jeopardized by my visit, a prison spokesman declined to answer. Sister Megan is eighty-five, one of the oldest women in the federal prison system, and she has a heart condition. During roughly the same period in which the Justice Department refused to let me meet with her for security reasons, the National Nuclear Security Administration allowed me to visit three high-security nuclear-weapons sites.
Political Smears in U.S. Never Change: the NYT’s 1967 Attack on MLK’s Anti-War Speech
Greenwald: The attack of the NYT editors on King for that speech is strikingly familiar, because it’s completely identical to how anti-war advocates in the U.S. are maligned today. It begins by lecturing King that his condemnation of U.S. militarism is far too simplistic: “the moral issues in Vietnam are less clear cut than he suggests.” It accuses him of “slandering” the U.S. by comparing it to evil regimes. And it warns him that anti-war activism could destroy the civil rights movement, because he is guilty of overstating American culpability and downplaying those of its enemies
Tomgram: Nan Levinson, America’s New Military Mystique
Levinson: Fear can be a useful political tool because people who believe they’re surrounded by enemies are primed to accept almost anything. When you feel you’re losing control, the response is often to try to get more control, which is part of the appeal of the BDSP crew, with their exaltation of swarms of people in uniforms equipped with tanks and guns.