AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM

GILBERT DOCTOROW says: “In my reductionist approach, the summit has one driver behind it, namely to put a cap on an arms race that the United States is losing, if it has not already irrevocably lost, and to prevent the adverse shift in the strategic balance against America from getting still worse. The side benefit would be to strike down planned military expenditures budgeted for well over a trillion dollars to modernize the nuclear triad alone. This would thereby free funds for the massive infrastructure investments that Biden is presently trying to push through Congress…”

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—The US actively works to bribe, bully and manipulate international governments into protecting and advancing its interests. When the US was seeking UN authorization for the Gulf War in 1991, Yemen dared to vote against it, after which a member of the US delegation told Yemen’s ambassador, “That’s the most expensive vote you ever cast.” Yemen lost not just 70 million dollars in US foreign aid but also a valuable labor contract with Saudi Arabia, and a million Yemeni immigrants were sent home by America’s Gulf state allies.

Or take the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which began in 1997 as an independent international body working toward the elimination of chemical weapons from the world with great success. That all changed in 2002 when the OPCW Director General, José Bustani, became viewed by the Bush administration as an obstacle to the agenda to manufacture international support for the Iraq invasion. The US threatened to cut off funding for the organization, Undersecretary of State John Bolton threatened Bustani’s kids, and Bustani was sent packing. Now the OPCW is a lackey of the US war machine whose leaders actively manipulate chemical weapons investigations to produce results which align with US imperialist interests.

Contrary to the Black capitalist myth, most Greenwood residents were low wage working people employed by whites and living in substandard housing. It was the super-exploitation of poor Black labor that facilitated both the function of Tulsa as a whole and the Black Wall Street District.

A wide variety of critics of Marxism-Leninism, beginning with liberals and outright rightwingers and fascists, plus anarchists and libertarians of many stripes, accuse Marxist-Leninists of being inherently “authoritarian”, despotic and tyrannical. Their criticism is usually directed at nations where anti-imperialists have conquered power (Soviet Union, North Korea, Cuba, Nicaragua, and the “pink tide in Latin America”, Iran, etc.) This is Michael Parenti’s insight on this important issue. 

PEPE ESCOBAR—Washington’s wishful thinking cum P.R. offensive boils down to selling itself as the primus inter pares of the West as a revitalized global leader. Why the Global South is not buying it can be observed, graphically, by what happened for the past eight years. The G7 – and especially the Americans – simply could not respond to China’s wide-ranging, pan-Eurasian trade/development strategy, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The American “strategy” so far – 24/7 demonization of BRI as a “debt trap” and “forced labor” machine – did not cut it. Now, too little too late, comes a G7 scheme, involving “partners” such as India, to “support”, at least in theory, vague “high-quality projects” across the Global South: that’s the Clean Green Initiative , focused on sustainable development and green transition, to be discussed both at the G7 and the US-EU summits. Compared to BRI, Clean Green Initiative hardly qualifies as a coherent geopolitical and geoeconomic strategy. BRI has been endorsed and partnered by over 150 nation-states and international bodies – and that includes more than half of the EU’s 27 members.