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The 9-11 bombings Are Not Acts of War

The 9-11 bombings Are Crimes Against Humanity


the focus is:
U.S. [Seeking] Empire
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"The imperial ambitions of the Bush Administration, post-9/11, are founded on quicksand and are eventually sure to founder, but for fundamental reasons not currently under discussion. Bush's open-ended claims for US power -- including the unilateral right to invade and occupy `failed states' to execute `regime change' -- offend international law and are prerogatives associated only with empire. But Bush's greater vulnerability is about money. You can't sustain an empire from a debtor's weakening position -- sooner or later the creditors pull the plug. That humiliating lesson was learned by Great Britain early in the last century, and the United States faces a similar reckoning ahead.
        "The US financial position is rapidly deteriorating, due mainly to America's persistent and growing trade deficit. US ambitions to run the world, in other words, are heavily mortgaged. Like any debtor who borrows more year after year with no plausible way to reverse the trend, a nation sinking deeper into debt enters into an adverse power relationship with its creditors -- greater and greater dependency.
        "These creditors are both private investors and governments from Europe and Asia; now none of them have any incentive to disrupt their lopsided relationship with the superpowerful leader of the world. After all, it works for them: Their exports have unfettered access to the largest consumer market in the world, producing trade surpluses and gaining greater market share. Their capital, meanwhile, reaps good returns on the loans and investments in the American economy. But history suggests that with sufficient provocation, the creditor nations will eventually assert their leverage over the United States, however reluctantly. That critical juncture is likely to arrive either because the American debt burden has become so great that additional lending would be too risky or because the creditor nations want to jerk Washington's chain, perhaps to head off reckless new adventures. Either way, it will be a humbling moment for American triumphalism.
--William Greider, The End of Empire, The Nation, 23 Sept 2002




"In portraying Enron as a `scandal', and as an isolated case of overheated capitalism and `unusual political influence', the mainstream American corporate media and congressional investigators have studiously hidden the truth: Enron, like many multinational corporations, has long functioned as an operational arm of the US government, the ruling financial elite and as a weapon of economic, political, and territorial hegemony.
        "The Enron scandal, arguably the biggest financial and political crime in modern history, exposes a terminal malignancy at the heart of world politics, and global capitalism itself. . . .
        "The American empire is built on a thousand Enrons. It will exhaust every means to avoid implicating itself, even as it drowns in the cesspool of its own creation, dragging thousands of innocent people down with it."

--Larry Chin, Enron: ultimate agent of the American empire,
Online Journal, February 2002




Crimes Against Humanity contents:
Subject Index
Quotations
Further Reading On the Web



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