Militarized US Capitol is being called a ‘war zone’ / The Fall of the American Empire? / The Earth Does Not Belong to Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk
For some Americans, including the Muslim and Arab Americans who have faced decades of government surveillance and suspicion, the war on terror has always been operating at home. But the reaction to the 6 January attack may represent a new stage of the “imperial boomerang”, in which tactics developed by empires to maintain control abroad end up being used against the residents of the homeland.
It’s not simply that the wars gave “training and operational experience to insurrectionists like the Navy SEAL and Iraq/Afghanistan veteran who posted to the internet that he breached the Capitol”, Spencer Ackerman, a former Guardian national security reporter and author of the forthcoming Reign of Terror: How The 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump, said. The War on Terror also created “a paranoid, racist and militarized atmosphere of permanent emergency”, he added.
And because the war on terror has never ended, it creates a “volatile atmosphere” for people obsessed with American invincibility, fueling frustration that “the war’s failure is due to internal subversion”. “When you tell people for an entire generation that their enemies are among them, some of them are going to act accordingly,” Ackerman said. America’s foreign wars have fueled waves of racist extremism at home for at least a century, including a huge resurgence of Ku Klux Klan membership in the wake of the first world war….
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/20/capitol-breach-washington-dc-war-zone
The Earth Does Not Belong to Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk
Rebecca Gordon: The Fall of the American Empire?
In a break from postwar multilateralism, the Bush Doctrine outlined the neoconservative belief that, as the only superpower in a now supposedly “unipolar” world, the United States had the right to take unilateral military action any time it believed it faced external threat of any imaginable sort. The result: almost 20 years of disastrous “forever wars” and a military-industrial complex deeply embedded in our national economy.
Although Donald Trump’s foreign policy occasionally feinted in the direction of isolationism in its rejection of international treaties, protocols, and organizational responsibilities, it still proved itself a direct descendant of the Bush Doctrine. After all, it was Bush who first took the United States out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and rejected the Kyoto Protocol to fight climate change. His doctrine instantly set the stage for the disastrous invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, the even more disastrous Iraq War, and the present-day over-expansion of the U.S. military presence, overt and covert, in practically every corner of the world. And now, to fulfill Donald Trump’s Star Trek fantasies, even in outer space.
An Empire in Decay: If you need proof that the last superpower, our very own empire, is indeed crumbling, consider the year we’ve just lived through, not to mention the first few weeks of 2021…. https://tomdispatch.com/the-rubble-of-empire/
Amulya Ganguli - End of India’s “Howdy, Modi” Bonhomie with the USA
Donald Trump's gift to America: Realizing we've never
been a liberal democracy. By PAUL ROSENBERG
Steve Bannon Documentary, 'The Brink', Will Leave You
Cold
Mohammed Hanif: The rest of the world has had it with
US presidents, Trump or otherwise
You're fired ! Americans taunt Trump with his own
catchphrase
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ends truce by warning
‘incompetent’ Democratic party
George Monbiot: Ayn Rand - A
Manifesto for Psychopaths
Tom McTague: The Decline of
the American World
Donald Trump: Democracy’s mirror image? By Philip
Manow / David A. Bell - Fascism or Caesarism?
Jonathan Freedland - Donald Trump's plot against
democracy could break America apart
Debt: The first five thousand years. By DAVID GRAEBER
HARRY BLAIN: America’s Wars
always Come Home
Jill Lepore A History of America’s military spending
