NM's blog

Restoring US pre-eminence in the Western hemisphere “In 1973 the White House supported Pinochet’s coup. ‘I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people,’ Henry Kissinger had said a few years earlier . Now, decades later, the current US president has hailed the victory of Kast, whom he says he endorsed.” The intereference in Honduras last hear and now in Venezuela. The recent CIA operation in the latter has not “ provoked no response from Western governments, which are usually quick to pounce on instances of military aggression and electoral manipulation, as long as they can be attributed to Moscow.” “Ahead of Argentina’s parliamentary elections on 26 October, Trump conducted economic and financial blackmail similar to the attempt to ‘persuade’ Hondurans. “Washington has many tools for pressure and retaliation against Latin American countries, all of which help facilitate its redeployment across their region. Governments ca...

A different perspective by Richard Seymour

Donald Trump are an extension of a long US tradition of interference in the region . Related Rogue State by William Blum on the CIA website

José Martí lived for much of his life as an exile in the United States.  Here is what he said about the US:  I know the Monster, because I have lived in its lair – and my weapon is only the slingshot of David.

Among the 150-plus photographs, images of Latin America, Africa, and the Indian subcontinent appear hardly at all and usually as a foil or kitschy reflection of Euro-American modernity. North Korea, the kitschiest foil of them all, appears as many times as the entire African continent. For all our differences, [the exhibition ] Civilisation seems to preach, we people of the world are essentially the same, and we’re all trying to make the best of life within the inescapable confines of US-exported late capitalism.

Verso Books’ new Spanish language publishing partnership

A long but must read piece by Göran Therborn

 The old is hard to kill and the new cannot be born. A wave of left-wing victories in the region doesn’t guarantee sweeping social progress

  The Contradictions of Capitalist Democracy

  Smarter Empire 

“ The American media have largely echoed this language. The storming of the Capitol, we were told, was something that happened in a ‘banana republic’, not in America. (No mention of the fact that the ‘banana republics’ of Latin America were corrupt and authoritarian in part thanks to American meddling.) The presence of raucous, overwhelmingly white militants armed with guns stirred comparisons with Nazi Germany, Afghanistan and Syria, as if the many available and suitable comparisons from American history had been declared off-limits, threats to our amour propre. What to call the mob provoked a great discussion – ‘protesters’? ‘dissidents’? ‘insurrectionists’? – until, finally, much of the liberal press settled on describing them as ‘terrorists’, the word we reserve for all that is evil and un-American, and usually Middle Eastern. The use of the T-word represented a belated recognition of how dangerous a threat the far right has become. But it was also a consoling flight from realities...

 A very engaging review of Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction Under Late Capitalism

Protests predicted to surge globally