The BRICS challenge to US financial dominance

The US is an imperial power. Unlike other former empires such as Britain, France, Germany, and Belgium, it hides its imperial nature by various ways, as Daniel Immerwahr describes in his book How to Hide an Empire that I reviewed back in 2019 and further discussed here. Rather than exercising direct over control over large countries, the US empire consists of small regions it calls ‘territories’ and bases scattered over all the world, because that enables it to exercise control without having to deal with large local populations. It is what Immerwahr calls a ‘pointillist’ empire.

China is challenging the US on the global stage and is also adopting the pointillist model with its ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ in which China invests heavily in infrastructure and other development projects in countries around the world, cementing economic links. Back in 2019, the Chinese leader Xi Jinping hosted a summit on this and despite heavy lobbying by the US to deter countries, 125 nations signed up and attended.
[Read more…]

Israel blockade of Gaza challenged

Joe Biden has long been one of the staunchest supporters of Israel and has even called himself a Zionist. He has been a steadfast supporter of that country’s governments, refusing to condemn them even when they did the most appalling things. So it was no surprise when he rushed to Israel following the October 7th attacks by Hamas and embraced prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, although Netanyahu had shown his disdain for Barack Obama when he was president and Biden was vice-president and Netanyahu even accepted an invitation to speak to Congress, bypassing the Obama White House. Netanyahu’s preference for serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) and Republicans is not hard to discern.

Biden’s seeming unqualified support for Israel has angered many progressives in the US and infuriated many Arab Americans who see him as condoning the ongoing slaughter of Gazans by the Israeli military machine. The US has been increasingly isolated on the world stage as leaders of many countries and the United Nations have condemned the Israeli policy of essentially starving the entire population of Gaza, numbering about two million people, by refusing to allow in relief trucks to bring in adequate amounts of food, water, energy, and medical supplies. Israel controls ground access to the Gaza strip and has long imposed a blockade to prevent access even by sea. The situation is so bad that the few relief trucks that Israel allows in have been besieged by starving people and Israeli troops have opened fire on them, reportedly killing over a hundred.
[Read more…]

The arrival of ‘pointillist empires’

It is clear that China is slowly changing that balance of power on many fronts. Last week saw the Chinese hosting a summit on its Belt and Road Initiative in which China invests heavily in infrastructure and other development projects in countries around the world, cementing economic links. Despite heavy US lobbying against participating in it, 125 nations attended and signed on.
[Read more…]

A poignant story

I have just finished reading How to Hide an Empire by historian Daniel Immerwahr. It is an excellent book about the complex relationship of the US with the concept of empire and the great lengths it has gone to hide the fact that it is an imperial power. In the early part (p. 56-58) he recounts a poignant story. He tells it so well that to summarize and paraphrase it would be to do a disservice to the story so I give it below.

He sets it up by saying that industrialized agricultural practices had greatly depleted the soil and up to the beginning of the 20th century, the main sources of fertilizer to revive soils were natural sources that were mined from rocky islands in the Pacific ocean that were made of out of hardened bird droppings called guano.
[Read more…]

The hidden, ugly face of US empire

The radio program On The Media this week had an absolutely gripping interview with Daniel Immerwahr, author of How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States. It begins at the 3:30 mark and lasts for about 50 minutes, laying out in great detail the hypocrisy of claiming to be a republic while actually being an empire that denied rights to the large populations under its control.
[Read more…]