Anti-Empire Report
by William Blum / January 4th, 2012
“Most people don’t understand what they have been part of here,” said Command Sgt. Major Ron Kelley as he and other American troops prepared to leave Iraq in mid-December. “We have done a great thing as a nation. We freed a people and gave their country back to them.”
“It is pretty exciting,” said another young American soldier in Iraq. “We are going down in the history books, you might say.”
Ah yes, the history books, the multi-volume leather-bound set of “The Greatest Destructions of One Country by Another.” The newest volume can relate, with numerous …
by Luke Hiken / January 4th, 2012
There are millions of Americans who realize that Obama is a front-man for Wall Street, the Pentagon and the oil conglomerates. Nonetheless, they intend to vote for him because he will potentially have the power to appoint future Supreme Court Justices. While this assumption is true in the abstract, it is a rationale that does not stand up to scrutiny.
There are a number of reasons for this conclusion:
1) Obama has never stood upon principle when the issue of personnel and appointments are concerned. He abandoned Van Jones; same for Shirley Sherrod; same for Elizabeth Warren; same for Justice Liu, currently …
by Gareth Porter / January 4th, 2012
IPS – President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are engaged in intense maneuvering over Netanyahu’s aim of entangling the United States in an Israeli war against Iran.
Netanyahu is exploiting the extraordinary influence his right-wing Likud Party exercises over the Republican Party and the U.S. Congress on matters related to Israel in order to maximise the likelihood that the United States would participate in an attack on Iran.
Obama, meanwhile, appears to be hoping that he can avoid being caught up in a regional war started by Israel if he distances the United States from any Israeli attack. …
by John V. Walsh / January 4th, 2012
Dear Ms. Goodman,
I have a bone to pick about your coverage of Ron Paul and the five racist comments that appeared in his newsletter a generation ago.
First, contrary to what you say, the rest of the MSM does publish the exact words of the statements – in fact they appear ad nauseam in semi-official publications like the NYT.
Second, as you surely know, Paul has said he did not write those statements, did not read them or know of them at the time and DISAVOWS them. You did not mention that.
Third Ron Paul is against the death penalty and mandatory …
by Bill Quigley and Amber Ramanauskas / January 4th, 2012
Haiti, a close neighbor of the US with over nine million people, was devastated by an earthquake on January 12, 2010. Hundreds of thousands were killed and many more wounded.
The UN estimated international donors gave Haiti over $1.6 billion in relief aid since the earthquake (about $155 per Haitian) and over $2 billion in recovery aid (about $173 per Haitian) over the last two years.
Yet Haiti looks like the earthquake happened two months ago, not two years. Over half a million people remain homeless in hundreds of informal camps, most of the tons of debris from destroyed buildings still lays …
Looking Back at Durban and Other Progressive Failures, and "Occupying" Ourselves
by Nicholas C. Arguimbau / January 3rd, 2012
This is the time for New Year’s resolutions. Notwithstanding occasional gains like President Obama’s promise to delay approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, a promise now whittled down to 60 days by his signature on recent legislation, we are losing the fight against global warming decisively and with it losing:
- the homelands of a number of the world’s nations;
- the productivity and reliability of global agriculture; and,
- likely more of the world’s biodiversity, and faster than in any other period in geological history.
Maybe there are physical forces making disaster inevitable, or maybe what is happening is within the control of …
by Ron Ridenour / January 3rd, 2012
(Expanded speech written for “Message from the Grass Roots” conference held December 10, 2011 at Carpenters Union—TIB—in Valby, Denmark. Herein are many wars and liberation struggles from Afghanistan and Iraq, Pakistan, Palestine, over to Haiti and Honduras, to Sri Lanka-Tamils, to the pro-liberation and anti-capitalist movements in the Arabic world, in Chile, at OWS and spreading throughout the US and into some of Europe, sparking Russians.)
“To be internationalist is to pay our debt to humanity” says Fidel Castro and this can be read on many billboards in Cuba.
What is internationalism?—cooperation among people and nations, states my dictionary. The book of …
by Tom Burghardt / January 3rd, 2012
Reacting to American threats to crater their economy, Iran’s first vice president Mohammad-Reza Rahimi said last week that the Islamic Republic would retaliate by blocking all oil shipments through the strategic Strait of Hormuz.
Following a sustained covert terror campaign by the U.S. and Israel, Rahimi declared: “If they impose sanctions on Iran’s oil exports, then even one drop of oil cannot flow from the Strait of Hormuz.”
On Saturday, President Obama took that step and signed crippling sanctions legislation as part of the Pentagon’s massive $662 billion 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).
It should be noted that the NDAA, which threatens …
by Linh Dinh / January 2nd, 2012
Remember Mohamed Osman Mohamud? Of course not, no one does, and I haven’t thought about him myself until yesterday, when Iran’s Press TV solicited my (last) two cents about Somalia.
Somalia, but who’s thinking about Somalia? Yesterday, Americans were burdened with football and a hangover, and in Philadelphia, there was the Mummers Parade, a glorious display of blue collar creativity where plumbers and roofers cross-dressed, played saxophones or banjos, and strutted down Broad Street towards City Hall, the site of Occupy Philly until not that long ago.
Truth be told, the Mummers Parade has gone downhill for a while, ever since …
by Rosemarie Jackowski / January 2nd, 2012
This is not a problem limited to one State. It is an international problem affecting large areas from Maine to California, and countries around the world.
Some things should be uninvented – DES, HRT, GMOs, hexachlorophene in infants’ soap, nuclear power plants, nuclear weapons, etc. Now a new threat, the Smart Grid and Smart Meters. If these are good ideas, why is the free market not providing them? Why the need for taxpayer funding? The fact that this industry must depend on taxpayer money is just one of many reasons it is suspect.
The May 20, 2011 Sandia Labs News Release reported …
by James Petras / January 2nd, 2012
One of the great paradoxes of history are the claims of imperialist politicians to be engaged in a great humanitarian crusade, a historic “civilizing mission” designed to liberate nations and peoples, while practicing the most barbaric conquests, destructive wars and large scale bloodletting of conquered people in historical memory.
In the modern capitalist era, the ideologies of imperialist rulers vary over time, from the early appeals to “the right” to wealth, power, colonies and grandeur to later claims of a ‘civilizing mission’. More recently imperial rulers have propagated, many diverse justifications adapted to specific contexts, adversaries, circumstances and audiences.
This essay …
by Friends of the Congo / January 2nd, 2012
The November 28th Presidential and legislative elections were fraught with tremendous irregularities and widespread charges of fraud. The National Independent Electoral Commission (CENI in French) announced on December 8th that Joseph Kabila won the elections with 49 percent of the vote and long-time opposition, Etienne Tshisekedi garnered 32 percent.
The Supreme Court validated the results published by CENI and dismissed a challenge to the results by the opposition, led by presidential candidate Vital Kamerhe. The opposition categorically rejected the results as fraudulent. Nonetheless, Joseph Kabila was sworn into office on Tuesday, December 20th, where only one head of state (Robert …
Slouching Towards 2012
by Linh Dinh / December 31st, 2011
For the last two days, Yahoo! has featured an article, “N. Korea alters photo of Kim Jong Il funeral.” Juxtaposing two images, it shows that half a dozen inconsequential figures have been photoshopped out. It is fitting that Yahoo!, a leader in frivolity, is burdening its attentive yahoos with a pointless, carping article masquerading as political expose. This bitch slapping piece of pseudo-journalism is juxtaposed with “Baby Startled by Mom’s Noise,” “Model Pregnant on Runway,” “NASCAR Star Sorry for Tweets” and “Disney’s Women’s ‘Real’ Looks.”
Future observers will be aghast to discover that, as our economy collapses and the country slides …
by Cyril Mychalejko / December 31st, 2011
A controversial public relations program run by former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s Pentagon was cleared of any wrong-doing by the agency’s inspector general in a report published last month. The program used dozens of retired military officers working as analysts on television and radio networks as “surrogates” armed by the Pentagon with “the facts” in order to educate the public about the Department of Defense’s operations and agenda.
At the same time, the report quoted participating analysts who believed that bullet points provided by Rumsfeld’s staff advanced a “political agenda,” that the program’s intent “…was to …
by Rosemary and Walter Brasch / December 31st, 2011
In January 2009, with a new president about to be inaugurated, we wrote a column about the stories we preferred not having to write, but knew we would. Three years later, we are still writing about those problems; three years from now, we’ll still be writing about them.
We had wanted the U.S. Department of the Interior to stop the government-approved slaughter of wild horses and burros in the southwest, but were disappointed that the cattle industry used its money and influence to shelter politicians from Americans who asked for compassion and understanding of breeds that roamed freely long before the …
