Juan Cole: The "House of Representatives don’t hold with Amurkins knowin’ ’bout furriners..."

[pampango]

The current House of Representatives don’t hold with Amurkins knowin’ ’bout furriners, and seems determined to defund federal support for international studies in the US. The Neoconservative lobbyists have been gunning for these programs for years and want the money given to rightwing think tanks in Washington instead. ...

This step represents a rollback of everything achieved since Sputnik reminded Americans that they are not the only game in town. The programs being cut are in Federal terms funded at the peanuts level and no real savings are had, but they leverage the big universities into being more supportive of less-taught languages...

While the House Labor/HHS/Education Appropriations Subcommittee has yet to take up its version of the bill, Chairman Denny Rehberg (R-MT) has released a “draft” FY 2012 funding bill that eliminates funding Fulbright-Hays ...

http://www.juancole.com/2011/10/grossman-call-your-congressman-and-save-international-studies-in-the-us.html

[gratuitous]

1. The same mindset that burned the library at Alexandria

And if you don't know what I'm referring to, Republican tactics bear fruit.

[kestrel91316]

2. If we know about foreign countries, it's a lot harder to convince us that

RW policies are the greatest thing on earth.

[seafan]

3. But, but, -----then we wouldn't know what our government is doing overseas....!

Juan Cole: GOP-controlled U. S. House 'seems determined to defund federal support for international studies in the U. S.'


Got to keep the populace ignorant and, therefore, most easily manipulated.


This mutant GOP can't have the commoners reading about things like this and talking among themselves about it:



Asia Times, October 21, 2011: The US power grab in Africa, By Pepe Escobar

.....

As for Obama "putting us in Africa" (see Obama, King of Africa Asia Times Online, October 18, 2011), those 100 special forces in Uganda billed as "advisers" should be seen as a liquid modernity remix of Vietnam in the early 1960s; that also started with a bunch of "advisers" - and the rest is history.

.....

Italian geographer and political scientist Manlio Dinucci is one of the few to point out how neo-colonialism 2.0 works; one just needs to look at the map. In Central Africa, the objective is US military supremacy - on air and in intel - over Uganda, South Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

In Libya, the objective is to occupy an absolutely strategic crossroads between the Mediterranean, northern Africa and the Middle East, with the added (nostalgic?) benefit of the West - as in Paris, London and Washington - finally getting to hold military bases as when King Idris was in power (1951 to 1969). As a whole, control must be established over northern Africa, central Africa, eastern Africa and - more problematically - the Horn of Africa.

The trillion-dollar question ahead is how China - which plots strategic moves years in advance - is going to react. As for Amazon Clinton, she must be beaming. In Iraq, Washington meticulously destroyed a whole country over two long decades just to end up with nothing - not even a substantial oil contract. Clinton at least got a private army - the "advisers" who will be stationed in the bigger-than-the-Vatican US Embassy in Baghdad.
And considering that Obama's new African "advisers" will be paid by the State Department, now Clinton's also got her own African private army. After November 2012, Clinton might well consider a move into the contractor business. In the sacred name of R2P, naturally.

And this:


WhoWhatWhy’s Libya Primer: The (Still) Untold Back Story to Qaddafi’s Demise, October 22, 2011, By Russ Baker

In light of Muammar Qaddafi’s apparent death—and in anticipation of the deluge of news “coverage” that will tell us little of substance about what happened in Libya this past year, and, more importantly, why—we’d like to offer some answers, taken from our reporting over that period. (And please share this information with your friends and colleagues; an informed public is a public not easily duped.)

.....

And this:


America's secret empire of drone bases, October 26, 2011, By Nick Turse

They increasingly dot the planet. There's a facility outside Las Vegas where "pilots" work in climate-controlled trailers, another at a dusty camp in Africa formerly used by the French Foreign Legion, a third at a big air base in Afghanistan where Air Force personnel sit in front of multiple computer screens, and a fourth at an air base in the United Arab Emirates that almost no one talks about.

And that leaves at least 56 more such facilities to mention in an expanding American empire of unmanned drone bases being set up worldwide. Despite frequent news reports on the drone assassination campaign launched in support of America's ever-widening undeclared wars and a spate of stories on drone bases in Africa and the Middle East, most of these facilities have remained unnoted, uncounted, and remarkably anonymous - until now.

.....

The epic battle for the heart and soul of our country lies closely ahead.