March 15, 2013
"We need, if you will, a new American dream, one that doesn’t require promises of limitless material abundance, one that doesn’t depend on the profits of empire or the temporary rush of affluence we got by stripping a continent of its irreplaceable natural resources in a few short centuries."

— John Michael Greer at The Archdruid Report. Reinventing America

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Filed under: empire paper wealth dollars 
March 15, 2013
"For the first time in contemporary history, resource states refused to give back the money received for their resource. At Chavez’ funeral, Lula, former President Ignacio de Silva of Brazil, praised this as Chavez’ most revolutionary act."

— Greg Palast at Vice. HUGO CHAVEZ AND THE GLOBAL POVERTY CONSPIRACY

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Filed under: poverty dollars empire Hugo Chavez 
February 18, 2013
"Does the US remain a global imperial power? Or are the Pentagon’s - and the shadow CIA’s - armies nothing more than mercenaries of a global neoliberal system the US still entertains the illusion of controlling?"

— Pepe Escobar at Asia Times. The illusory state of the Empire

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Filed under: empire American foreign 
December 16, 2012
"Given the reigning domestic political climate, those holding or seeking positions of power find it easier—and less risky—to stay the course, vainly nursing the hope that by killing enough “terrorists” peace on terms of our choosing will result."

— Andrew J. Bacevich in The American Conservative. How We Became Israel

Peace means dominion for Netanyahu—and now for us.

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Filed under: militarism empire USA policy 
November 12, 2012
"Celebrating liberalism’s present, lambasting remnants of the South’s (but only the South’s?) past, this racist image transforms the awesome, terrible, unfinished history of freedom into a persistent structure—one assembled by white men, for white men. But this is what the image, fixated on juridical and electoral geographies, cannot reveal. Even as it tries mobilizing the affectivity of the term, the discontinuous, unemplottable subjectivity of freedom remains elsewhere."

— Chris Taylor at C.L.R. James. Electoral Maps, Antebellum Maps: Or, How Liberal Self-Satisfaction Dissolves History into a Racist Mess

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Filed under: empire whiteness maps politics 
November 7, 2012
"Hardt and Negri’s argument in Empire is that neo-liberal economic globalization should not be understood as a kind of imperialism (where a hegemonic power invades other countries to capture their resources), but a new form of empire that tolerates no external limit and seeks to incorporate all life within its order. This empire employs the internet to organize the global multitude into a productive force; yet as it does so, it enables the multitude to form swarm-like pockets of resistance that coalesce across borders to challenge the status quo. Hardt and Negri propose that the multitude will eventually realize its collective power and establish a new political order based in the productivity of the commons."

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Tim Rayner at Philosophy for Change. Five books that shaped my thinking

Empire.

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Filed under: Empire philosophy change 
October 2, 2012
"In Why America Failed I lay out, unsurprisingly enough, the reasons for why America failed, and I say that it was primarily because throughout our history we marginalized or ignored the voices that argued against the dominant culture, which is based on hustling, aggrandizement, and economic and technological expansion."

—

Morris Berman at Counterpunch. Time to Abolish the American Dream: The Waning of the Modern Ages

Why America Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline (Amazon)

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Filed under: culture empire modernity collapse 
August 20, 2012
"The material upshot of this materialist view is a world in which 17 per cent of the population consumes 80% of its resources, 358 billionaires have assets exceeding the combined annual incomes of countries that account for 45 percent of the global population, and one in seven people go hungry."

—

Julie Wark in OpenDemocracy.  The history of the west is not the history of the world

Pankaj Mishra book: From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia

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Filed under: international politics politics empire 
August 17, 2012
"The central lesson to be learned from this bit of ancient history is that military power is always contextual.What counts as overwhelming power in one context can be lethal weakness in another, and the shift from one context to another can take place without warning."

— John Michael Greer at The Archdruid Report. The Specter of Military Defeat

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Filed under: empire collapse history 
July 17, 2012
"For China and Russia in particular, ever more U.S. bases near their borders threaten to set off new cold wars. Most troublingly, the creation of new bases to protect against an alleged future Chinese military threat may prove to be a self-fulfilling prophecy: such bases in Asia are likely to create the threat they are supposedly designed to protect against, making a catastrophic war with China more, not less, likely."

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David Vine at Tom Dispatch. The Lily-Pad Strategy

How the Pentagon Is Quietly Transforming Its Overseas Base Empire and Creating a Dangerous New Way of War

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Filed under: empire military war 
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