“Even more serious would be the loss of the MENA countries - Middle East/North Africa - which have been regarded by planners since the 1940s as "a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history", Control of MENA energy reserves would yield "substantial control of the world", in the words of the influential Roosevelt advisor AA Berle.”

“The pretence of opposition reached the level of farce in February 2011 when Obama vetoed a Security Council resolution calling for implementation of official US policy (also adding the uncontroversial observation that the settlements themselves are illegal, quite apart from their expansion). Since that time there has been little talk about ending settlement expansion, which continues, with studied provocation.”

“It is understandable that Palestinian rights should be marginalised in US policy and discourse. Palestinians have no wealth or power. They offer virtually nothing to US policy concerns; in fact, they have negative value, as a nuisance that stirs up "the Arab street".”

“These forces have become particularly significant since the Reagan years, as the Republicans have abandoned the pretence of being a political party in the traditional sense, while devoting themselves in virtual lockstep uniformity to servicing a tiny percentage of the super-rich and the corporate sector. However, the small constituency that is primarily served by the reconstructed party cannot provide votes, so they have to turn elsewhere. ”

“The only choice is to mobilise tendencies that have always been present, though rarely as an organised political force: primarily nativists trembling in fear and hatred, and religious elements - extremists by international standards if not in the US. One outcome is reverence for alleged Biblical prophecies, hence not only support for Israel and its conquests and expansion, but passionate love for Israel, another core part of the catechism that must be intoned by Republican candidates - with Democrats, again, not too far behind.”

“The regime is doubtless a serious threat to much of its own population - and regrettably, is hardly unique on that score. But the primary threat to the US and Israel is that Iran might deter their free exercise of violence. A further threat is that the Iranians clearly seek to extend their influence to neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan, and beyond as well. Those "illegitimate" acts are called "destabilising" (or worse). In contrast, forceful imposition of US influence halfway around the world contributes to "stability" and order, in accord with traditional doctrine about who owns the world.”

“Revealing how little fundamental assumptions have changed, US strategic analysts describe the result of China's military programs as a "classic 'security dilemma', whereby military programs and national strategies deemed defensive by their planners are viewed as threatening by the other side", writes Paul Godwin of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. The security dilemma arises over control of the seas off China's coasts. The US regards its policies of controlling these waters as "defensive", while China regards them as threatening; correspondingly, China regards its actions in nearby areas as "defensive" while the US regards them as threatening. No such debate is even imaginable concerning US coastal waters. This "classic security dilemma" makes sense, again, on the assumption that the US has a right to control most of the world, and that US security requires something approaching absolute global control.”

"Famed linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky delivered a lecture titled "'I Am Kinda': Reflections on the Culture of Imperialism" last Monday, March 8, in McCosh 50. Chomsky, a professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is a renowned public intellectual who has written and lectured widely on linguistics, philosophy, intellectual history, international affairs and US foreign policy. The lecture's title refers to a woman named Kinda who introduced herself to Chomsky at a lecture he gave in Beirut in 2006. As a child, she had written a letter to President Ronald Reagan after the 1986 US bombing of Libya, her home country. Chomsky had printed the letter in his book "Pirates and Emperors: International Terrorism in the Real World." Chomsky's other books include "Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance," "Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy" and "Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs." The talk was designated as the Edward Said Memorial Lecture and was sponsored by the Department of English and the Princeton Committee on Palestine."

"Let me start by saying that there's a way to take all this that makes it entirely correct. The key motive of science is explanation, and it's often essential to abstract away from the complexities of raw observation, and so on. I took courses from Chomsky as an undergraduate and a graduate student, and I'm grateful for what I learned from him, and for the eminently fair way that he always treated me. But increasingly, it seems to me, he has been elevating his personal distaste for the complexities of the real world into a systematic philosophy. To the extent that others accept these views, it excludes them from participation in (what I think are) the most promising and exciting current directions in the sciences of speech and language."

from the page: "This letter is a call for active support of protest to Michael Moore, Norman Solomon, Katrina van den Heuvel, Michael Eric Dyson, Barbara Ehrenreich, Thomas Frank, Tom Hayden, Bill Fletcher Jr., ..and other high profile progressive supporters of the Obama electoral campaign. With the Obama administration beginning its third year, it is by now painfully obvious that the predictions of even the most sober Obama supporters were overly optimistic. Rather than an ally, the administration has shown itself to be an implacable enemy of reform... you have in your power the capacity to help reignite the movement which brought millions onto the streets in February of 2003 but which has withered ever since. There are many thousands of progressives who follow your work closely and are waiting for a cue from you and others to act. We are asking you to commit yourself to actively supporting the protests of Obama administration policies which are now beginning to materialize...

from the page: "...It would be necessary, they urged, to devise means of "manufacture of consent" to ensure that the "ignorant and meddlesome outsiders," the general population, be kept "in their place," as "spectators," not "participants in action,"... I am quoting from the most respected progressive public intellectuals in the US in the 20th century, Walter Lippmann and Reinhold Niebuhr, both Wilson-Roosevelt-Kennedy liberals, the latter president Obama's favorite... The democratic uprising of the 1960s was frightening to elite opinion. Intellectuals from Europe, the US, and Japan called for an end to the "excess of democracy." The population must be returned to apathy and passivity, and in particular sterner measures must be imposed by the institutions responsible for "the indoctrination of the young": the schools, universities, churches... Major efforts were soon undertaken to reduce the threat of democracy, with a certain degree of success. We are now living in that era...

from the page: "...“I’m just old enough to have heard a number of Hitler’s speeches on the radio,” he said, “and I have a memory of the texture and the tone of the cheering mobs, and I have the dread sense of the dark clouds of fascism gathering” here at home... He cited a statistic from a recent poll showing that half the unaffiliated voters say the average tea party member is closer to them than anyone else... There is class resentment, he noted... He said “the colossal toll of the institutional crimes of state capitalism” is what is fueling “the indignation and rage of those cast aside.”...“The Weimar Republic was the peak of Western civilization and was regarded as a model of democracy... In 1928 the Nazis had less than 2 percent of the vote... Two years later, millions supported them. The public got tired of the incessant wrangling, and the service to the powerful, and the failure of those in power to deal with their grievances.”..."

from the page: ""The United States’ health care system is so dysfunctional it has about twice the costs of comparable countries and some of the worst outcomes... This bill continues with that." The decades-long critic of corporate power alleged that premiums won't stop rising as the package is designed in no small part to funnel money into the pockets of the health care industry. "The bill gives away a lot to insurance companies and big pharmaceutical corporations,"... The legislation forbids government from negotiating prices with pharmaceutical companies or permitting the importation of drugs. Nor does it provide competition to private insurers, an oligopolistic industry that will maintain its impunity from antitrust laws. But despite this, Chomsky, an advocate for a single-payer system, said killing the bill wasn't a better solution. "If I were in Congress," he said, "I’d probably hold my nose and vote for it, because the alternative of not passing it is worse, bad as this bill is..

from the page: " ....Chomsky talks about President Obama’s foreign and national security policies, the lessons of Vietnam and his own activism. “You just can’t become involved part-time in these things,” Chomsky says. “It’s either serious and you’re seriously involved, or you go to a demonstration and go home and forget about it and go back to work, and nothing happens. Things only happen by really dedicated, diligent work.”"

from the page: "... Chomsky critiqued the foreign policy of President Obama '91 and explained the historical reasons that Iran would perceive a need to develop nuclear weapons. “If they're not developing a nuclear deterrent, they are crazy.” The problem, said Chomsky, is the defiant and hypocritical insistence of the United States on holding the constant threat of military action over Iran as a punishment for its noncompliance with United Nations mandates. “Hostile actions of the United States and its Israeli client are a major factor in Iran's decisions of whether or not to develop a nuclear deterrent.”... Indeed, with its nuclear missile submarines positioned within striking distance of Iran, Chomsky estimates that there is effectively no chance that Iran would ever use a future nuclear weapon for offensive purposes. But he warned, “The threats do have the effect of inducing Iran to develop a deterrent.”..."

from the page: "...who could be a more noble and passionate supporter of R2P than the person who celebrated his achievement of granting Australia the rights to the sole resources of the territory brutalized with Australian support, while explaining that it matters little, because "the world is a pretty unfair place, littered with examples of acquisition by force." True enough, a matter that appears to be of slight concern to the advocates of selective R2P, and also to the Western intellectuals who feign great indignation at the other fellow's crimes, while easily condoning or denying their own, updating a leading theme of the inglorious history of intellectuals from the earliest records. What then are the hopes for human rights in the new millennium? I think the answer is the one that reverberates through history, including recent years. It is not a law of nature that we have to subordinate ourselves to the violence and deceit of the "principal architects" of policy and the doctrinal..

from the page: ".. There's been a very consistent U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, at least since the Second World War, whose primary concern has been to ensure that the energy reserves of the Middle East remain firmly under American control. The State Department noted in 1945 that these reserves constitute "a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history... One of the ways the U.S. keeps control over Europe and Japan is by having a stranglehold on their energy supply..."

from the page: "Chomsky said that a leading doctrine of US foreign policy during the period of its global dominance is what he termed as "the Mafia principle." "The Godfather does not tolerate 'successful defiance'. It is too dangerous. It must therefore be stamped out so that others understand that disobedience is not an option,"... Chomsky explained that although the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003...was a " major crime", many critics of the invasion - including Obama - viewed it as merely as "a mistake" or a "strategic blunder"... "There are terrible things going on in Darfur, but in comparison with the region they don't amount to a lot unfortunately.. But Darfur is a very popular topic for Western humanists because you can blame it on an enemy - you have to distort a lot but you can blame it on 'Arabs', 'bad guys'," he explained... Chomsky stressed that the right to self-defence does not mean resorting to military force before "exhausting peaceful means"..."

from the page: " Ecuador’s president Rafael Correa has vowed to terminate Washington’s use of the Manta military base... In July, the U.S. and Colombia concluded a secret deal to permit the United States to use seven military bases in Colombia. The official purpose is to counter narcotics trafficking and terrorism, “but senior Colombian military and civilian officials familiar with negotiations” told the Associated Press “that the idea is to make Colombia a regional hub for Pentagon operations.” ...he[Morales] continued. “When they couldn’t call us communists anymore, they called us subversives, and then traffickers, and since the September 11 attacks, terrorists.” He warned that “the history of Latin America repeats itself.” ...The United States and United Kingdom are demanding that the U.S. military base in Diego Garcia be exempted from the planned African nuclear-weapons-free-zone—as U.S. bases are off-limits in similar zoning efforts in the Pacific."

from the page: "But what if those states with the greatest capacity to carry out large-scale, cross-border aggressions, and before whom the populations of entire foreign countries are vulnerable to harm, are relieved of their UN Charter liabilities under the R2P and ICC innovations? ... This is the great achievement of R2P -- that it sanctions the most powerful states to invoke R2P as a cover for their imperial endeavors, while imbuing their deadly actions with a moral aura. Undermining the UN Charter's order, supplanting it with "illegal but legitimate" wars, and channeling activism and dissent away from the growing list of victims of the U.S.-led NATO bloc of states, towards the targeted and demonized countries such as the Sudan, is part of the work of imperialism promotion... But as we have shown, the ICC does not protect the victims of wars and "sanctions of mass destruction" by those states "with the capacity to act."