edwebbempireseminar

Unlike the Soviets, who had the good grace to implode pretty much alone, collapse of the United States could bring down the international capitalist system along with it.

Globalisation has drastically tilted the balance of the struggle between labour and management in favour of trans-national corporations. In the US, the result has been five decades of falling median wages. (Total wages, on the other hand, have soared, with the rich and superrich raking in more than ever.) Easy credit provided a Band-Aid to rising income equality during the 1980s and 1990s. When the housing bubble burst and the credit markets froze in 2008, American consumers - who drive 70 per cent of economic activity - went from feeling poor to being poor. Un- and underemployed, they couldn't earn money. Their credit lines cancelled and curtailed, they couldn't borrow it. Forced to live within their increasingly limited means, the formerly middle class stopped spending. And here we are. Gross domestic product would have to be at least 4 per cent on an annualised basis to start to bring down unemployment. The actual figure is 0.8.

Everywhere you look, there's terror that the world, by tethering itself to the once-invincible US monolith, has handcuffed itself to a fat, drowning man—one who's about to suffer another heart attack. The central bank of China, the communist-in-name-only nation that holds $2tn in its foreign exchange reserves—more than two-thirds of the total—plus $1.2tn in US Treasury bonds and notes, is loudly demanding that the US cut its deficits.

Born of a failed 1980 raid to rescue American hostages in Iran, in which eight U.S. service members died, U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) was established in 1987.  Having spent the post-Vietnam years distrusted and starved for money by the regular military, special operations forces suddenly had a single home, a stable budget, and a four-star commander as their advocate.  Since then, SOCOM has grown into a combined force of startling proportions.  Made up of units from all the service branches, including the Army’s “Green Berets” and Rangers, Navy SEALs, Air Force Air Commandos, and Marine Corps Special Operations teams, in addition to specialized helicopter crews, boat teams, civil affairs personnel, para-rescuemen, and even battlefield air-traffic controllers and special operations weathermen, SOCOM carries out the United States’ most specialized and secret missions.  These include assassinations, counterterrorist raids, long-range reconnaissance, intelligence analysis, foreign troop training, and weapons of mass destruction counter-proliferation operations.

“as a former JSOC commander, I can tell you we were looking very hard at Yemen and at Somalia.”

Olson launched "Project Lawrence," an effort to increase cultural proficiencies -- like advanced language training and better knowledge of local history and customs -- for overseas operations.  The program is, of course, named after the British officer, Thomas Edward Lawrence (better known as "Lawrence of Arabia"), who teamed up with Arab fighters to wage a guerrilla war in the Middle East during World War I.  Mentioning Afghanistan, Pakistan, Mali, and Indonesia, Olson added that SOCOM now needed "Lawrences of Wherever."

The American military remains an especially globetrotting enterprise, largely impervious to political and economic hiccups, and immune to President Obama’s best efforts to squeeze it.

Liberal war is so useful, particularly to ‘good Europeans’, because it denies it is war. It is a no-fly zone protecting human rights! While quite obviously joining the Libyan rebels in their war on the regime, coalition commanders are forced to pretend otherwise. They regularly and politely inform Gaddafi’s forces where they need to regroup to avoid being destroyed in the name of universal values. In essence, and without ever saying so, the message to Gaddafi is that he must stop defending himself from those who would overthrow him. Why, we might ask, is it not possible to speak more plainly, at least to ourselves? Why must war be confronted with liberal euphemisms? At the core of liberal war is a contradiction between big rhetoric – humanity, innocence, evil – and limited liability, signalled by ‘no ground troops’ and the pathetic legions of UN peacekeepers.

Historical memory is a casualty so instantaneous no one notices. The US fought its first war in what is now Libya, against the Barbary pirates, also justified by humanitarian concerns undergirded with commercial interest.

tales of well-intentioned Westerners and violent natives

Mr. Sarkozy’s line for Africa has been “neither interference nor indifference.”

“a continuity in the management of Françafrique — this system of reciprocal corruption, which, since the end of colonial occupation, ties France to its African henchmen.”

the words of Louis de Guiringaud, a former foreign minister, who said in 1978, “Africa is the only region of the world where France can take itself for a great power, capable of changing the course of history with 500 men.”

Last week, while other commentators ran around Cairo’s Tahrir Square, hyperventilating about what they saw as an Arab 1989, I flew to Tel Aviv for the annual Herzliya security conference. The consensus among the assembled experts on the Middle East? A colossal failure of American foreign policy.

TOKMOK, Kyrgyzstan – Softly singing along to the wistful strains of Ethiopian music, Haymanot Tesgaye and his friends are transported back to their homeland in Africa, far from this Central Asian nation where they have been stranded for two decades.

the ways in which lives are irrevocably changed when empires and regimes crumble

Kyrgyzstan is a rich blend of diverse ethnic groups, including Uzbeks, Russians, Koreans, Germans and Meskhetian Turks. But ethnic relations are often problematic, as best shown by devastating ethnic clashes between Kyrgyz and minority ethnic Uzbeks earlier this year that claimed hundreds of lives, mainly among Uzbeks, and forced hundreds of thousands to flee their homes.

Are designers helping the "Little Brown Brothers?" Are designers the new anthropologists or missionaries, come to poke into village life, "understand" it and make it better--their "modern" way?

Is the new humanitarian design coming out of the U.S. and Europe being perceived through post-colonial eyes as colonialism? Are the American and European designers presuming too much in their attempt to do good?

The Indian establishment locked OLPC out precisely because it perceived the effort as inappropriate technological colonialism that cut out those responsible for education in the country—policymakers, teachers, curriculum builders, parents. OLPC never got into China either. Or most of the large nations it had originally targeted.

Last year, the Chinese dictatorship was so panicked by the widespread uprisings that they prepared an extraordinary step forward. They drafted a new labor law that would allow workers to form and elect their own trade unions. It would plant seeds of democracy across China's workplaces. Western corporations lobbied very hard against it, saying it would create a "negative investment environment" - by which they mean smaller profits. Western governments obediently backed the corporations and opposed freedom and democracy for Chinese workers. So the law was whittled down and democracy stripped out.

Yes, if this struggle succeeds, it will mean that we will have to pay a little more for some products, in exchange for the freedom and the lives of people like Yan Li and Liu Pan. But previous generations have made that choice. After slavery was abolished in 1833, Britain's GDP fell by 10 percent -- but they knew that cheap goods and fat profits made from flogging people until they broke were not worth having. Do we?