Category: American Empire

By Marjorie Cohn / TruthOut / Nov. 28, 2019

Once again, the United States is complicit in an illegal coup d’état in Latin America, this time in Bolivia. On November 10, a right-wing, anti-Indigenous group seized power after the Bolivian military’s removal of President Evo Morales, who had declared victory in the October 20 presidential election.

The United States’ fingerprints are all over the coup. Advisers from the U.S. Southern Command have been stationed on Bolivia’s border with Argentina, Ivanka Trump made a surprising visit to an Argentine province near the Bolivian border in September, the pro-U.S. Organization of American States (OAS) cast unfounded doubt on Morales’s election victory, and the U.S.’s National Endowment for Democracy provided suspicious grants to Bolivia.

At least 32 people have been killed and hundreds injured since the coup began.

Editordude: Below is the short Preface to the House Intelligence Committee’s Trump-Ukraine Impeachment Inquiry Report. Go here for the full 300 page report.

This report reflects the evidence gathered thus far by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, in coordination with the Committee on Oversight and Reform and the Committee on Foreign Affairs, as part of the House of Representatives’ impeachment inquiry into Donald J. Trump, the 45th President of the United States.

By Colleen O’Connor / Times of San Diego / Oct. 25, 2019

Want to scare yourself this Halloween? Forget witches, goblins, ghosts or haunted houses. Instead, read Christopher Wylie’s book Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America.

It is a must-read primer on the dark arts of cyber politics — ”scaled online disinformation, fake news, and mass profiling.”

If half of what Wylie writes is true, everyone should be seriously frightened.

It comes as no surprise that much of what high-tech, fin-tech, med-tech and cyber-tech have unleashed is a mixed bag of tricks and treats, that remains to be sorted.

During remarks at a shale-energy conference in Pittsburgh Wednesday, Oct. 23, Trump’s said “we’re building a wall in Colorado. … a beautiful wall …”

Here’s the full statement:

By Marjorie Cohn / TruthOut / October 7, 2019

As three committees of the House of Representatives proceeded with the impeachment inquiry of Donald Trump, the president tweeted, “I am coming to the conclusion that what is taking place is not an impeachment, it is a COUP.” Encyclopedia Britannica defines coup d’etat as “the sudden, violent overthrow of an existing government by a small group.”

On the contrary, Congress is fulfilling its constitutional responsibility to investigate allegations that could constitute impeachable offenses — that is, high crimes and misdemeanors. Indeed, during its early history in England, impeachment was called “the most powerful weapon in the political armory, short of civil war.”

This whole “Ukraine-Gate” scandal is big. Real big. So big that impeachment proceedings against Trump because of it could begin this week.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is set to make a public announcement today – Tuesday – at 2:00 pm California time. She is meeting with the entire Democratic Caucus an hour before.

What it’s all about and what we know so far:

Trump pressured newly-elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky up to at least eight times in a call to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter. Trump admitted this on Sunday, Sept. 22.

Meanwhile military aid to Ukraine – already approved by Congress – was held up until after the phone call; Trump had asked his acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney to put a hold on 400 millions in military aid to Ukraine roughly one week before the call. A whistleblower within the intelligence community made a formal complaint weeks ago about Trump’s “promises” to Zelensky.

Warren’s troubling foreign policy history includes uncritical support of Israel, supporting sanctions on Venezuela, and vilifying Russia and China as national security threats. But her views are also evolving.

by Reese Erlich / The Progressive

In the last few months Senator Elizabeth Warren has gained ground in public opinion polls tracking the race for the Democratic Party presidential nomination. In some states, she’s ahead of Senator Bernie Sanders and pulling close to former Vice President Joe Biden.

In domestic politics, Warren makes a populist appeal to working people with calls for free college tuition, single-payer health care and breaking up monopolies. In foreign policy, she takes a similar stand, calling for an end to foreign trade pacts such as Trump’s renegotiated NAFTA.

By Marjorie Cohn / Truthout – Blog / Aug. 17, 2019

On July 30, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan reported that the Afghan government and international military forces, primarily the United States, caused most of the civilian deaths in Afghanistan during the first six months of 2019. That’s more killings than those perpetrated in the same time period by the Taliban and ISIS combined.

Aerial operations were responsible for 519 civilian casualties (356 deaths and 156 injuries), including 150 children (89 deaths and 61 injuries). That constitutes a 39 percent increase in overall civilian casualties from aerial attacks. Eighty-three percent of civilian casualties from aerial operations were carried out by the international forces.

By Steven Rosenfeld / August 13, 2019

A new book by one of the nation’s foremost civil liberties lawyers powerfully describes how America’s constitutional checks and balances are being pushed to the brink by a president who is consciously following Adolf Hitler’s extremist propaganda and policy template from the early 1930s—when the Nazis took power in Germany.

In When at Times the Mob Is Swayed: A Citizen’s Guide to Defending Our Republic, Burt Neuborne mostly focuses on how America’s constitutional foundation in 2019—an unrepresentative Congress, the Electoral College and a right-wing Supreme Court majority—is not positioned to withstand Trump’s extreme polarization and GOP power grabs.

By Stan Levin

Two more mass murders put the lie to an increasingly tiresome but popular cliché, “This is not who we are”.

Unless and until we make reasonable gun control the law of the land,

Unless we cease pursuit of the empire by making war all over the world,

Unless we put an end to taking inestimable human lives as well as wasting more than half of our national budget expanding the military,

By Michelle Gormlie Seguin

America was born like a child

You ever heard of Mai Lai?

You ever heard of John Brown?

It’s never been what you think,

it never wanted a crown.