Words matter. These are the best Greg Grandin Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The argument that capitalism was dependent on slavery is, of course, not new. In 1944, Eric Williams, in ‘Capitalism and Slavery,’ made the case.
Berta Caceres, a Lenca woman, grew up during the violence that swept through Central America in the 1980s. Her mother, a midwife and social activist, took in and cared for refugees from El Salvador, teaching her young children the value of standing up for disenfranchised people.
As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton was an active promoter of increased resource extraction in Latin America, pushing both fracking and the privatization of petroleum production.
America is exceptional, it is asserted, because, with the exception of the abolition of slavery, it has been able to extend the promise of liberal reform mostly peacefully, through its democratic institutions.
Just as much as the United States mattered to cotton, cotton mattered to the United States. Cotton reinvigorated slavery, established the young nation’s place in the global economy, and eventually helped create the political and economic conflicts that resulted in civil war.
Is Donald Trump a fascist? It’s an interesting question that has generated insightful commentary over the past few months, with the best answers situating Trumpian illiberalism within America’s long history of racial oppression, slavery, Jim Crow apartheid, and the ongoing backlash to the loss of white privilege.
‘Blowback,’ as many ‘Nation’ readers are aware, was a term introduced into popular circulation by the late political scientist Chalmers Johnson, an old Cold Warrior turned dissident.
Since 2010, Hillary Clinton’s State Department, with the aid of Brazil, France, and Canada and in league with the Clinton Foundation and other ‘philanthropists,’ put into place something like a never-ending coup, an everlasting intervention.
In the 1960s, as a rising defense intellectual, Kissinger was a Nelson Rockefeller man, firmly entrenched in the center-right establishment. When he attended the infamous 1964 Republican convention in San Francisco, he was horrified by Goldwater supporters, whom he likened to fascists.
As she was about to run for president in 2008, Clinton opposed a free-trade agreement with Panama – an agreement that, as Sanders pointed out, would make the kind of money-laundering we learned about from the Panama papers even more pervasive.
Kissinger celebrants inevitably point to two things to justify their admiration: an opening to China – ‘rapprochement’ – and improved relations with the Soviet Union – detente – which included SALT, a historic arms-limitation treaty.
Ronald Reagan, who led the larger New Right project of re-sanctifying U.S. foreign policy after its Vietnam disaccreditation, felt compelled to drape his support for Central American death squads in the rhetoric of American exceptionalism.
Honduras in 2009 and Paraguay in 2012 were low-hanging fruit, small countries with outsized oligarchies, where mild reformers were easily dispatched.
Brazil imported more enslaved Africans than any other American nation and was the last country in the hemisphere to abolish the institution, in 1888.
The first mention of a ‘ranger’ is as early as 1622, during the 1622 Powhatan rebellion, a near-successful effort to drive the British out of what is now Virginia.
At issue when professional sports teams take the name of Native Americans is the problem of mimicry: having appropriated the land and wealth of America’s vanquished peoples, settler culture then appropriates the supposed values and spirit of the vanquished as well.
The question of causality is complex. For some philosophers and physicists, time might not exist. And since cause-and-effect reasoning needs the concept of time – of one thing preceding another – the effort to establish causality is a mug’s game, an infinite regression of increasingly unanswerable questions.
Most critical histories of U.S. involvement in Iran rightly began with the joint British-U.S. coup against democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, which installed Pahlavi on the Peacock Throne. But it was Kissinger who, in 1972, greatly deepened the relationship between Washington and Tehran.
In Texas, the rangers were established on an ad hoc basis in the 1820s to protect the settlers making inroads into Spanish borderlands. Soon, Mexicans and Mexican Americans replaced Native Americans as the prime target of ranger repression.
The unraveling of America’s long mid-century domestic consensus, which ran from about 1941 to 1966, had begun earlier, under Lyndon B. Johnson.
The removal of the British after the American Revolution opened the floodgates of paramilitary ranger power. For instance, in 1786, ranger units, including one that included Daniel Boone, attacked a number of friendly Shawnee towns along the Mad River.
As first lady, Hillary Clinton spent the early months of her husband’s administration drafting healthcare-reform legislation, only to see it put on the back burner by the North American Free Trade Agreement.
After Plan Colombia came the Colombian Free Trade Agreement. Hillary Clinton opposed the treaty when she was running against Barack Obama in 2008 but then supported it as secretary of state.
There was a brief moment, after Haiti’s 2010 earthquake, when even Bill Clinton recognized what had been done to Haiti in the name of ‘free trade’: the destruction of local markets and rice production.
The idea that Hillary Clinton wants to do to Central America what her husband did to Colombia is troubling.
Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, heavy-handedly provoked South American governments on any number of issues, including a rush to endorse the 2002 coup attempt in Venezuela, which only worked to steel resistance and build solidarity.
In the 1960s, after the Cuban Revolution, CIA and FBI agents often coordinated their activities with anti-Castro Cuban exiles.
Like Hillary Clinton in the United States, Kuczynski is a prototypical member of the trans-American governing class, with deep roots in both the private and public sector and its revolving-door relationship between Washington think tanks, the State Department, and high-level Latin American ministries.
Hillary Clinton’s progress as a public figure and politician can, in fact, be indexed perfectly by her relationship to Henry Kissinger.
In 2000, just before leaving the White House, Clinton ratcheted up military aid to Colombia. Plan Colombia, as the assistance program was called, provided billions of dollars to what was, and remains, the most repressive government in the hemisphere.
‘Toughness’ and ‘credibility’ are leitmotifs that run through both Trumpian and Kissingerian deal-making. Both men insist that war and diplomacy are inseparable and that, to be effective, diplomats need to be able to wield threats and offer incentives in equal, unrestricted measure.
The effect of Bill Clinton’s NAFTA and Hillary Clinton’s Colombian Free Trade Agreement has been devastating to Michigan and most of the rest of the country, and accounts for the appeal of Donald Trump.
Without U.S. input, the countries of South America joined forces in 2008 to shut down a coup attempt in Bolivia and prevented a war between Ecuador and Colombia.
Decades before President Richard Nixon bet his re-election on winning the Dixiecrat vote, Wilson worked out his own Southern Strategy. Even as he was moving the nation to war, Wilson re-segregated Washington and purged African-Americans from federal jobs.
Obama and Kuczynski each promised to do all they could to enact the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
