[The statement of purpose I'm using for my MA Review at UCI. Please leave comments and suggestions, especially before my exam (on 15 Feb)!] My main interest is in political economy. I am interested in the ways in which material scarcity (real and imagined) leads to some kind of system or regime, a certain way…
Tag Archives: American Empire
[Shopping at Macy's, the world's largest store; Image from corbis] Andrew Bacevich, Professor of International Relations at Boston University, contributes to the discourse on American empire in an interview with Bill Moyers. Bacevich’s thesis is that America’s current troubles (brewing for decades now)—a consequence of its worldwide empire—are caused not by something external—some enemy plotting…
[The New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street; Image from the New York Times] [Continues "Blood on Our Hands"] Roughly four decades earlier, in the midst of another war, the major newspapers performed an act against the government analogous to the exposés we witnessed of late. In 1971, the New York Times and the Washington…
[Image from masternewmedia.org] [Continues "The Surge"] As the war effort was going on abroad, another war was being waged at home: the war of information, with the news media at the forefront. Frontline chronicles how the mainstream media was used by the White House to help build its case for war in Iraq. The media,…
[Image from University of Texas Library] [Continues "Record of a Neocon War"] The President did change the strategy. Belatedly towards the end of his term, perhaps concerned more for his legacy than the war’s consequences for the country (much less for conditions in the “free world,” much less for conditions in the Middle East, much…
Five years after the invasion, Frontline presents a documentary on the war in Iraq. This latest broadcast is an effort to sum up Frontline‘s investigations of the various phases and aspects of the war. Taken together, these reports make up an excellent archive for studying (and remembering) the war. One important thing to remember, of…
[Bartholomäus Strobel's The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist] The current electoral season in America has been built up–especially on the Democratic side–by the mainstream media (as was also my impression) as one of the most exciting in recent history, where, after what seemed to be exceptionally dark days in American politics (that witnessed, among…
[A map of the "American Empire" from Double Standards] Thanks to occasional mentions over at John Protevi’s Blog, I was led to the incisive, large-scale, long-term, and always-thought provoking commentaries on contemporary politics by world systems scholar Immanuel Wallerstein. Analyzing political developments “from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term,”…
[Image from Cagle Cartoons] So the value of the dollar has been depreciating. Lots of speculation, in the media, the markets . . . Policy-makers don’t really know what to do about it because they haven’t encountered the problem before. Concerns have been raised, both at home and abroad. As we all know, the dollar–stable,…
