The most depressing article I have ever read......Empire of the US

[serryjw]

quote.....
To impose its imperial fiats on the world the United States has over 730 military bases(Actually now it is over 800!) in 132 countries.
end quote.....
Learn about our dirty tricks
http://www.globalalternatives.org/911.html

[NVMojo]

1. yer right, it's depressing and we are paying for it!

[Hello_Kitty]

2. Have you read The Sorrows of Empire?

It's an excellent account of how we have been steadily building an empire and the repercussions of it. Also, Confessions of an Economic Hitman is good too. Man, we really don't learn shit in History class, do we?

[serryjw]

5. "Why we fight"

The author ( forgot his name) was on Charlie Rose last night. I think his movie or book is due out soon? Eisenhower's statement about 'Beware of the Military Industrial Complex" is one of my favorite quotes,use it all the time.


To answer your (rhetorical question) ..No we don't learn shit!

We are about to lose ROE and the next generation will have to fight for reproductive rights all over again. ONE step forward and FOUR steps back

[undergroundpanther]

7. I got sent to detention

for writing the corporate history of public schools in the 70's.I got sent to detention for telling the Native American take on"thanksgiving".The kids made fun of my father because he was so native American looking(he was part native).I got sent to the principle for a talking to in middle school for wearing a pentagram. Yep They don't teach shit in school,I am thankful I was ever curious and learned stuff from different sources and even though my parents were abusive jerks ,dispite that, they still encouraged me to keep learning and questioning and they let me research whatever I wanted to.My books and education was never censored at home. I read at college level in 3rd grade..
My favorite magizines in elementary school were national Geographic ,Scientific American and Psychology today.

[Beam Me Up]

13. If you think there is going to be a Democracy in which one can "fight for

reproductive rights" after these Nazi's get through with us, you're not getting the picture. What they have in store for us is a psychological lock-down society; we're the sheep wear their chains with pride. You think I'm joking, perhaps, yet how far away from that are we at this very moment? How many people even know there is an equivalent of a civil war taking place behind the scenes shown them by the Corporate owned media?

I can't believe how many people, even here at DU, chalk so much of what they see up to "incompetence"--as if the history unfolding around us--that has already taken the lives of several THOUSAND US citizens in varying contexts--is somehow an "accident." No, it is policy, albeit not the spoken policy preached to the masses. They would love for us to believe that things are simply "getting out of control" and, thus, give them the responsibility of bringing things under control, for our own safety, of course. New Orleans was a test run on some of the procedures, a dry run to examine in the field what an American subject population does under conditions of extreme duress and being herded into a confined space. For their own safety.

What struck me was, despite a lot of complaints, how EASILY the whole thing went down. For all practical purposes, we lost an American city. A whole city. And I'm sure they're anticipating there will be more such cities in the relatively near future.

In other words, I doubt very seriously if "reproductive rights" will be on the political agenda for the next generation. It won't need to be because it will be a completely market-fed and controlled democgraphic.

That is, of course, IF the neocons manage to pull off the complete overthrow of the American Republic or, worse, transforming it into nothing more than a symbolic representation of what it once tried so mightily to be.

BMU

edit html

[Mr Rabble]

15. It has already happened.

I totally agree with your asessment of our country, however I think that we will see that it has already happened. Its just going to take 15 or 20 years for the whole chain of events to become visible.

[Hello_Kitty]

21. Katrina response was ABSOLUTELY intentional

Unfortunately all to easy to carry out because the victims in the Superdome and elsewhere were portrayed as "undesirables". Thus the immediate hyping of the supposed widespread looting and rapes. And it worked. I sat with a group of co-workers about a week after the people were finally released from that hellhole. These people, all Caucasian, had totally bought the spin. "They were shooting at the planes!" "All they cared about was stealing stuff!" "They were all on welfare anyway!" Blah blah blah de blah, with a comment about that troublemaker Jesse Jackson thrown in. What they were saying was bad enough, but their easy assumption that it was perfectly okay to express these views because we were all White and middle-class in this gathering was astonishing to me. I had to bite my tongue because my boss was there. She was the one who initiated the conversation and said some of the worst things. Ugh...Needless to say I'm planning a career change.

I agree with you Scottie. Reproductive rights, important as they are to me, aren't even going to be blip on our screens. And I fear that we're already nothing more than a symbolic representation of what we once tried so mightily to be.

[Beam Me Up]

22. The kind of reaction you're describing, I found right here on DU.

I was appalled that so many self proclaimed "progressive Democrats" were so ready to accept AS FACT, the rumors of wide spread looting, shooting at helicopters, one thing and another, that were being put out about what was going on in NO. Now I don't mean to say everyone, far from it, but there was a strong thread of it right here that had to be fought verbally to get people to 'snap out of it' and really take a look at the reports and question them. It showed me just how vulnerable we truly are to disinformation, media spin and gloss--even those of us who should know better.

[serryjw]

24. BMU...For the same reason that many on DU don't accept

MIHOP after all the evidence.

[serryjw]

23. BMU..we always agree

Your last statement is the correct one. We will continue to have a representation of our former selfs. LOOK what they have taken in 5 years. LOOK how few people KNOW it. LOOK how few people care! As long as they can have their beer, idiot tube and Ipod, all will be happy. Wait until 2006 with HAVA is the law of the land. We have seen the last legitimate election

I petitioned at a King Soopers that I had not been to in 18 months, today. It was a great middle class neighborhood where ever one cared, was informed and VOTED. I was shocked. 50% where hispanic, didn't speak English and of course didn't vote. They are systematically taking away our country with people who don't care, don't understand or are brain dead.

[doublethink]

20. Movie Trailer ......

for "Why We Fight" http://www.sonyclassics.com/whywefight/ Peace.

note: more of Eisenhower's farewell speech when entering above site, a must listen http://www.sonyclassics.com/whywefight/main.html

[AuntiBush]

8. Makes me Ponder Many Nights These Days

as to why I am an American History major, quite frankly.

[Hello_Kitty]

10. My college classes were considerably better than the primary ones

Professors were at least willing to explore the idea that maybe, just maaaaaybe, the United States wasn't the epitome of democratic perfection at all times. But there is no excuse for the glaring omissions that I've since filled in by reading on my own. The cool thing about you being a History major is that you can go into a lot of depth with the subject. I know a man who got his doctorate in Native American history. He travelled throughout the Southwest gathering oral histories and writing about them. He had some incredible stories to tell, stuff I'd never have heard anywhere else.

[long_green]

33. Does your reading include Walter Karp?

His The Politics of War is a must for anyone who thinks that the U.S. was an altruistic force that was derailed only by the election of Reagan. You, of course, are way past that but it's a good read. The part where the archconservative Democratic Party hijacks the nascent Populist movement at the end of the 19th century is great for rolling your eyes.

[phusion]

14. Zinn is an American historian

You are in good company...

:)

[NoFederales]

18. I had to give up teaching American History--the raw stories do not mix

with the fables and legends that apologists make up.

NoFederales

[mmonk]

19. Sorrows of Empire

is a great book. Chalmers Johnson, the author, suggests to Americans that can afford it, to buy a condo in another country as a backdoor out. He suggested it while giving a review on the book on C-Span.

[firefox]

3. Empire is out of the discussion- Worthy of Greatest Page nt

[melody]

4. "We" aren't doing anything. We're just the money crank for the masters.

We have even less power than people in other countries, especially now that we've had the vote taken away.

[serryjw]

6. What money?

How are they going to continue this when we all are broke?

[hvn_nbr_2]

9. I keep wondering that, how they'll continue when everyone's broke.

There's a reason there are no perfect predators in nature--because if they get too perfect, they consume all their food supply and starve. But the corpo-industrial-plutocracy complex thinks they can prey relentlessly on the middle class and that somehow there will still always be more to serve them and give them more money.

Hmmm, I just had another thought. The next American Revolution may more closely resemble the French Revolution than the first American one. And it will be because the causes are more similar.

[Surya Gayatri]

11. Great analogy, hvn...

'Predator' being the operative word. Their voracious demand for ever more ill-got wealth is fast outpacing the working masses' ability to 'supply'. SG

[hvn_nbr_2]

12. Thanks. I think we should use the word "predator" more.

It certainly applies to so many situations these days.

[rman]

17. They don't need our money, just our labor.

Wealth is created by means of labor, so they'll just force us to do the labor and the wealth goes to them directly - they don't need consumers as a go-between.
We'll just be their slaves.
Us being broke doesn't hurt them directly. It may however hurt them indirectly, because we will probably get upset over the situation.

[rman]

16. They don't need our money, just our labor.

They make the money - literally; they print it, not we.
They need us only to do the labor. Slavery, yes - it's not as though they care, just look at the way things are already. Just look at 3rd world labor conditions - which involves the vast majority of labor positions in the world. Sweatshops, starving wages, no workers rights, no environmental protections, no pensions, etc. They are half-way there already.

[serryjw]

25. I disagree

Yes, we certainly are a plutocracy ( weath is in a few hands but not power)but it is different than in previous times. We are turning into this (oligarchy/neo-fascist nation) where corporations control everything.IF they produce a widget and we can't afford to but it, what good is it. Yes, GM & Ford screwed up in many ways but people are still not buying cars because it makes more sense to buy a low mileage used car

[rman]

27. Look at the middle ages;

didn't corporations hold power back then? Didn't "the elites" hold both economic and political power, and didn't "the rest of us" live as virtual slaves?

I strongly disagree that the current plutocrats have most of the wealth "but not power". Wealth = economic power, and wealth is an easy way to get political power. Hence revolving door politics and lobbying. I'd say that "controlling everything" means precisely controlling the economy, politics, media etc, leaving nothing for us to control. Why would they bother selling stuff to us if they can just take what little wealth we have? Perhaps there will be some consumerism a la "THX1138" (a movie), which serves little other purpose except to help keep us occupied (a means of control); it certainly would contribute very little to making the rich richer.

[serryjw]

34. Different than in the past

George Soros and Bill Gates really don't yield power, maybe some influence on legislation. The POWER comes from Control over our lives in income,healthcare and the fear of the (instability) of the future. WHY would most of these corporation EXIST if they don't make stuff for us to buy? We have a HUGE underground income base in this country. IF I can't get employeed by THEM I will get income (maybe barter) by doing something that I can barter exchange.

[melody]

29. I should have put that in the past tense n/t

[shance]

35. Actually they've been stealing our money for at least six years now.

And building bombs and weaponry to protect themselves with our taxpayer money.

Wake up America.

[ZapaPaine]

26. depleted uranium use in iraq is a looming holocaust

Excellent read about what the Empire has done in the Middle East, both historically and regarding the depleted uranium holocaust that will kill so many people. A little long but well worth the time. This is a very powerful essay. Valenzuela hits a home run.

The Killing Fields: Ghosts of the Walking Dead

-- snip --

What we are seeing is the beginning of decades of death in Iraq from the aftereffects of DU, an epidemic of radiation poisoning caused by American WMD. An entire population has been exposed to nuclear radiation by America and its government – which has been aware of the effects of DU for some time – and soon the world will be witness to the death of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Iraqi citizens. The world has entered a black hole into a genocide that will possibly last for centuries. We will see the Iraqi nation’s cancer rate skyrocket to levels we though impossible, affecting large segments of the populace, as well as the subsequent deaths of terminally ill patients, most of them children whose bodies have embedded inside them the deadly remnants of their parents’ depleted uranium. We will witness, as we already can through the grisly photos of DU mutations in babies, the horrific rise in child birth defects and deformities and miscarriages and stillbirths that are already causing thousands of potential Iraqi parents to strongly consider ever giving birth for fear of producing in their child a gross distortion of a human baby.

The devastating increase in malignancies and cancers, now a great worry, will in the next few decades grow exponentially, laying waste to a large segment of the Iraqi population. In essence, they have been given a death sentence by George W. Bush, who, when future historians see the complete damage DU has caused, will be compared to Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao in terms of numbers of murders committed, easily surpassing the 1.5 million dead Iraqis as a result of America’s economic genocide of the 1990’s.

Millions of Iraqis, forced through the consequence of their lives to live inside the smoldering radiation that is Iraq, unable to leave a land now poisoned and made toxic through America’s weapons of death and destruction, will have to face a future of uncertainty and trepidation, slowly becoming aware, if they are not already, that inside them lives a WMD that can not only kill them, but their sexual partner as well along with severely deforming any child they might decide to bring into this world. Inside a bubble of death they will live, forever to breathe the particulates of a pestilence first imported in 1991, unable to escape its damaging grip on organic human bodies.

Iraq has been transformed into a vast killing field, a wasteland overrun by the remnants of America’s silent WMD, a cheap and money saving weapon devastating to the human body, capable of killing perhaps millions of innocent human beings, capable of altering entire genetic sequences resulting in the severe birth defects, stillbirths, miscarriages and deformities now appearing almost daily in Iraq. The Cradle of Civilization has transmuted into the Iraqi Killing Fields, a place where only death and disease now prosper, where millions of walking dead stir up the dust of the same killer elements that will invariably leave them without life.

Read the entire essay at: http://valenzuelasveritas.blogspot.com/2006/01/killing-fields-ghosts-of-walking-dead.html

[Posteritatis]

28. The bases themselves

the United States has over 730 military bases(Actually now it is over 800!) in 132 countries.

I knew the extent, both in relative numbers and in amount of countries, of the US military base network. Something I've always been curious is where, specifically, they tend to be clustered or spread.

I've always been something of a map-loving person; call it a historian's vice, but the things are both kinda fun if you're geeky enough (which I am) and useful for being able to get a visual perspective on things, to see patterns, and so on. In the case of something like this, it'd probably be able to give a better understanding of the current state of American strength and diplomacy both than pundits' talking points or context-free six-digit numbers ever would.

Whenever I think of that military base network, I start wondering if they're charted out anywhere. At this point I'm about ready to give a leg or some vertebrae or something to see such a map, if one exists anywhere. On the one hand, I can see how those would Annoy Pentagon brass for "security" reasons, but on the other hand if the bases' locations are all known anyway...

Any ideas, folks?

[The2ndWheel]

30. America's Empire of Bases

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0115-08.htm

As distinct from other peoples, most Americans do not recognize -- or do not want to recognize -- that the United States dominates the world through its military power. Due to government secrecy, our citizens are often ignorant of the fact that our garrisons encircle the planet. This vast network of American bases on every continent except Antarctica actually constitutes a new form of empire -- an empire of bases with its own geography not likely to be taught in any high school geography class. Without grasping the dimensions of this globe-girdling Baseworld, one can't begin to understand the size and nature of our imperial aspirations or the degree to which a new kind of militarism is undermining our constitutional order.

Our military deploys well over half a million soldiers, spies, technicians, teachers, dependents, and civilian contractors in other nations. To dominate the oceans and seas of the world, we are creating some thirteen naval task forces built around aircraft carriers whose names sum up our martial heritage -- Kitty Hawk, Constellation, Enterprise, John F. Kennedy, Nimitz, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Carl Vinson, Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, John C. Stennis, Harry S. Truman, and Ronald Reagan. We operate numerous secret bases outside our territory to monitor what the people of the world, including our own citizens, are saying, faxing, or e-mailing to one another.

http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/

Read up on this guy. I saw him do two versions of the same power point presentation on C-SPAN in 2003 I think it was. If nothing else, it makes you think.

http://www.newgreatgame.com/excerpts.htm

If you want some fun, play around with this map. Shocking that Iran wants nukes.

As for official Pentagon maps, I guess the report that was talked about in the Chalmers article might be around somewhere.

[Sejanus]

31. America uber alles

We kind of put Rome to shame don't we?

[lovuian]

32. Its pretty obvious Bush is wanting to take over

Its just funny Rumsfeld Cheney Poppy Bush Kissinger Wolfawitz are all not going to be able to enjoy it

for very long...