real utopias

Here's the long-awaited video of Michael Parenti's speech on the threat of US imperialism which he gave at the Revolution Banquet held in Vancouver in Novemb...

As a follow-up to the June summit meeting of the G77 + China leaders, held in Santa Cruz, the Bolivian government and the Bolivian Workers Central (COB) sponsored an “Anti-Imperialist International Trade Union Conference” in Cochabamba, June 30-July 2.

Neo-Colonialism and the Changing Nature of Imperialism in Africa Center for Research on Globalization After nearly a century, Lenin's study of the changing economic character of world capitalism remains important in understanding the nature of...

Martin Luther King was surely right when he said that  “the arc of the moral universe…bends towards justice.”   It bends at a glacial pace, but it does bend.  The fact that everyone nowadays, even unreconstructed racists, would agree that slavery was a gross injustice is evidence that it does.  So too is the fact that Jim Crow (de jure) segregation has lately come to be regarded similarly.

For America, the prospect of the structural-ideological constancy of war preparation and occasional conflagration is a delight, conviction, compulsion. For how else demonstrate hegemony? How else, by arrogating to itself guardianship—and chief beneficiary—of the world system, legitimate, affirm, and secure the fruits of Exceptionalism? Beginning in the late-19th century, with the fusion of capitalism and national power, already prefigured in domestic expansion and railroad development, the earlier phrase, “Manifest Destiny,” albeit hackneyed and contrived from day one self-serving a ruling-class-in-formation and conveying moralistic ethnocentric content, accurately described the grandiosity of public policy to follow (up to the present and no doubt future). The psychopathology of the winner-take-all mental set fulfilled by the militarization of US capitalism has, since the end of World War II, created a closed system in which anticommunism—now counterterrorism—becomes CODE for stifling alternatives to ascendant monopoly capital and the internal regimentation of political-social thought.

One reason the United States and the West aren’t particularly interested in defending their neoliberal policies is because by the time their effects are felt in a particular location, the world and its five-minute attention span has already moved on. Once the glamour of violence simmers down, the appetites of the bourgeoisie are sated. Whether Russia or Thailand or Korea or Chile or the Ukraine, the vicious coup d’état or knowingly-savage policy prescriptions that unlock a country’s economy quickly fade into obscurity. Into that fathomless swamp of imperial crimes. The media moves on to fresher fires, newer conflicts, and more entertaining waves of repression. Falling wages, rising prices, mass privatization, and vanishing tariffs are not newsworthy—at least when ‘newsworthy’ is defined by clicks and eyeballs. Who wants to listen to a cranky union vet opine on the evils of capitalist accumulation? Or see some reporter on RT or Al Jazeera wander through decaying communities in some far-flung hamlet? Not when you can listen to Wolf Blitzer’s riveting blow-by-blow of the latest artificial uprising on ‘The Situation Room’.

When discussing the Ukraine-Crimea “crisis” it might be hygienic for Americans, including their political class, think-tank pundits, and talking heads, to recall two striking moments in “the dawn’s early light” of the U. S. Empire: in 1903, in the wake of the Spanish-American War, under President Theodore Roosevelt America seized control of the southern part of Guantanamo Bay by way of a Cuban-American Treaty which recognizes Cuba’s ultimate sovereignty over this base; a year after the Bolshevik Revolution, in 1918, President Woodrow Wilson dispatched 5,000 U. S. troops to Arkhangelsk in Northern Russia to participate in the Allied intervention in Russia’s Civil  War, which raised the curtain on the First Cold War.  Incidentally, in 1903 there was no Fidel Castro in Havana and in 1918 no Joseph Stalin in the Kremlin.

In recent weeks, we’ve seen signs of an empire that refuses to cease its worst behavior. The drone strikes, preparations for a new military base on Okinawa, the dispatch of more troops on the Korean peninsula, the push for the world’s most expansive free trade agreement, the devastating legacy of the disastrous war in Iraq. The list goes on. This past December, on the 10th to be exact, the world celebrated Human Rights Day 65 years after Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted. Yet the amateur historian in me recognized that date for another reason. Fifty years prior, on the 10th of December 1898, the Treaty of Paris was signed and the US global empire had officially begun. While US political leaders engage in the lofty rhetoric of equality, justice, liberty, freedom, the policies they make directly and indirectly prevent most of the human race from ever really living life free from want, from fear, from aggression. The following article is written to commemorate that dark day and to all those countless beings who’ve suffered as a result of the ongoing crimes of US foreign policy.

Corporate imperial militarism controls U.S. society and wages destructive occupations abroad to serve the capitalist interests of the war-making, armaments manufacturing class whose bombs eradicate human beings for profit