Rerun: The New Imperialism or the Iron Heel By William Bowles

16 March 2003 — Investigating Imperialism

Welcome to the World of Double Standards

“The challenge to the post-modern world is to get used to the idea of double standards. Among ourselves, we operate on the basis of laws and open cooperative security. But when dealing with more old-fashioned kinds of states outside the post-modern continent of Europe, we need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era – force, pre-emptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary to deal with those who still live in the nineteenth century world of every state for itself.

The Media is the Message By William Bowles

23 December, 2010

“By working primarily with media organizations from NATO countries, Wikileaks has chosen to submit its leaks to one single ‘worldview’, that of the West.” — Who’s Who at Wikileaks? By Julie Lévesque

Cyber-warfare – Cyber-Anarchy – Anarchists – Hackers

It’s all so predictable isn’t it and how quick the media was to brand the leaks as the opening shots of a ‘Cyber-War’, a designation that fed back into the government’s propaganda almost immediately. To paraphrase, the media really is the message not just the messenger.

‘Prepare for all-out cyber war’

Government sites braced for attack by pro-WikiLeaks ‘hacktivists’

Whitehall is preparing for a crippling attack on government websites as evidence mounts that the backlash against the arrest of the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is rapidly growing into a mass movement that aims to cause widespread disruption on the internet. — ‘Prepare for all-out cyber war‘ By Cahal Milmo and Nigel Morris, The Independent, 14 December 2010

Time travelling or does Obama have any kind of deal let alone a new ‘New Deal’? By William Bowles

26 December 2008

In the essay by Stanley Aronowitz ‘Facing the economic crisis’, we read the following summation,

“Progressives have advanced hope that Obama will usher in a ‘new’ New Deal. But the New Deal of yesteryear was never intended to pull the United States out of the depression. While it did employ more than a million workers in government projects, even considering that these might have produced three times or 3 million jobs, as late as 1940, unemployment hovered at about 20% of the labour force. What the New Deal accomplished went well beyond its relatively modest economic impact; more important was its ideological and political force.

The Obama Dilemma: A Mission Impossible? By William Bowles

28 November 2008

“The bourgeoisie [are] out of answers, and with the increasing costs of production and transportation driven by the price of oil, with the price of oil driving the bourgeoisie into greater capital expenditures to increase the rate of surplus value; with oil undermining growth in the mass and rate of value added– manufacturing, hidden beneath all the noise and clamor of Wall Street, of all the investment bankers at all the trading desks slapping themselves on the back with each new deal– manufacturing had all ready rung the closing bell.

“Those who didn’t hear it, couldn’t hear it. They were too smart. They were too stupid.

“The only answer left for capitalism…is the destruction of assets.” — ‘Pimp My Assets Part 3’, The Wolf Report.

So desperate are we for real change that Obama’s election promises became a veritable mantra for millions of people, especially the young, black and poor. Understandably, there is more than a little wishful thinking involved here given the disastrous decade we’ve been through. And after all the guy is young, apparently gifted and black, what more could anyone ask for?

Barack Obama — a wolf in sheep’s clothing or just the shepherd? By William Bowles

13 November 2008

“There is no doubt that the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States is historic. But does framing him as America’s “first black president” show that we have not come nearly as far as we’d like to think?” — How Far Have We Really Come from the “One-Drop Rule”? by Judith Siers-Poisson, The Weekly Spin

A triumph of image over substance

Well, depending on your politics, it seems that either Obama is the best thing since sliced bread (or Mandela, take your pick) or, he’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing. I lean toward the latter but with a lot of reservations and not just because of what he, Obama is but simply because of how and why he got to be prez. Thus I view Obama more as the shepherd, who, to paraphrase is instead leading the sheep to slaughter.

Vast forces were set in motion some time ago, a decision was taken at the very highest level, that an entire new reality had to be constructed if the gangsters were going to hang onto their ill-gotten gains. Bush and his half-arsed megalomaniac cronies had really fucked things up, it was time for the construction of a ‘break with the past’. And I said it at the time of Obama’s selection, that it was a stroke of pure genius, but one not without its opponents in the ruling political class who we might well term the ‘old guard’, witness the evil rantings of Hillary Clinton, who really blew her ‘feminist’ cachet, copious tears notwithstanding.

“Obama Wins! … Ad Age’s Marketer of the Year” — Advertising Age, November 5, 2008 and beating out Apple no less.

The Capitalist Shakedown By William Bowles

12 October 2008

“It is only in these dire circumstances that the United States, where private property is more sacrosanct probably than anywhere else in the world, is talking about some kind of nationalization of banks, if only limited. In financial circles they are now calling this ‘regime change,’ borrowing the term of course from a different context. But it is clear what it means: the end of neoliberalism, and the rise of aggressive government interventions into the economy. It represents a clear recognition that this is not a liquidity crisis that can be solved by pouring more money into financial markets or by lowering interest rates.” — Interview with John Bellamy Foster, “Can the Financial Crisis Be Reversed?”

The end of (capitalist) history? By William Bowles

17 September 2008

After the Soviet Union collapsed, Francis Fukuyama published his now utterly discredited book, ‘The End of History’, which told of a glorious future, a capitalist paradise, where we would all be rich, eventually, when the wealth unleashed by an unfettered capitalism would ‘trickle down’ to us in that best of all possible worlds, ‘free market’ capitalism, where the market would take care of everything.

Is it the 1930s all over again? By William Bowles

6 September 2008

The parallels with the situation in Europe prior to the outbreak of WWII surely cannot be avoided, for not only do we have an economic crisis that closely resembles the ‘29 Crash in its magnitude, the US-engineered invasion of South Ossetia could very well be a prelude to more dangerous provocations on the part of the US, in much the same way that German support for the fascist coup in Spain served as a testing ground not only for Hitler’s military machine but also to sew chaos and to test the reactions of two of the leading imperialist powers of the time, Britain and France. For what they all shared was a hatred of Bolshevism and ultimately, that’s what WWII was really all about, the destruction of the Soviet Union.

Back to the future: “Chaos and instability Washington’s official policy line” By William Bowles

28 August 2008

“In the operation the West conducted on Georgian soil against Russia – South Ossetians were the victims or hostages of it – we can see a rehearsal for an attack on Iran. There is a great deal of “new features” that today are being fine tuned in the theater of military operations.

“…[T]he likelihood of a war against Iran was growing with each passing day, “As a result, the situation in the region will become destabilized…causing chaos and instability” was becoming Washington’s official policy line. — ‘Russian analyst points to link between Georgian attack and Iran’.

Book Review: The ‘Empire of Chaos’ or living in the age of impunity By William Bowles

1 August 2008

Book Review: International Justice and Impunity – The Case of the United States, edited by Nils Andersson, Daniel Iagolnitzer and Diana G. Collier. Clarity Press, 2008.

Impunity: N. Nonliability, exemption, let-out, immunity, special treatment.
Impunity: Vb. Exempt, set apart, absolve, grant immunity, are just some of the descriptions my Roget’s Thesaurus lists for the word impunity.

Other descriptions listed by the Thesaurus are perhaps even more apt:

Owe no responsibility, be free from, have no liability, spare oneself the necessity, exempt oneself, excuse oneself, the list goes on…

“The American ambassador to the United Nations in the middle of the 1970s, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has thus congratulated himself in his memoirs, for having rendered “totally ineffective, on the instructions of the State Department, all measures taken by the United Nations [with regard to the 40-plus UN resolutions on Palestine]”. — ‘Rudolph El-Kareh, The American Politic in the Middle East, Force, Impunity, Lawlessness.’ (p.64)