1. Free Markets/Trade IS Economic Colonialism.
2. Oil Runs The Military Machine.
3. Today's Enemy Was Yesterday's Friend.
4. The Military-Industrial-Complex Is Composed Of 4 Components:
a. The military professionals.
b. The defense industry.
c. Congress.
d. The think tanks.
5. The NeoCon's didn't have an "Exit Strategy" for Iraq, because they NEVER intended to leave. Now, America has 14 permanent military bases in Occupied Iraq.
6. "There is this incredible hubris right now, that we are invincible and that we are the pre-eminent power on Planet Earth. American power, and American empire is actually flaunted in people's faces around the world; where we rub our shoe in their face and tell them that we are top-dog, and you will work with us, because you sure as hell don't want to be against us."
7. "We are walking on thin ice. We are treading the same path taken by the first democratic regime ever created in the Western World, namely the Roman Repbulic.
The Roman Republic inadvertantly aquired an empire around the world, and they then discovered that to maintain, expand, and protect this empire, they required standing armies.
Standing armies is what George Washington warned us against in his farewell address, that they will destroy the structure of government that we tried to create in our Constitution, to prevent the rise of the imperial presidency."
8. "It doesn't matter if they love us or not, so long as they fear us." [Roman Phrase]
2. Of Cowboys & Kings:
[Commentary By:Mumia Abu-Jamal]
U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II (by William Blum)
"[American leaders] are perhaps not so much immoral as they are amoral. It's not that they take pleasure in causing so much death and suffering. It's that they just don't care ... the same that could be said about a sociopath. As long as the death and suffering advance the agenda of the empire, as long as the right people and the right corporations gain wealth and power and privilege and prestige, as long as the death and suffering aren't happening to them or people close to them ... then they just don't care about it happening to other people, including the American soldiers whom they throw into wars and who come home-the ones who make it back alive-with Agent Orange or Gulf War Syndrome eating away at their bodies. American leaders would not be in the positions they hold if they were bothered by such things."
3. When Democracy Equals Empire
[Commentary By: Mumia Abu-Jamal]
Compare "Representative Democracy" (ours) & "Direct Democracy" (ancient Greece)
Every American president, whether Democrat or Republican, conservative or liberal, speaks lovingly of 'democracy', whenever the nation engages in some escapade abroad. When the U.S. invaded Iraq, it did so, ostensibly, to 'bring democracy to the Middle East.' When it launches a raid in Grenada, or rains death on a poor neighborhood in Panama, when it invaded Haiti in the last century, ad infinitum, it always did so in the name of 'restoring democracy.
'What is this democracy of which they so blithely speak?
We all have heard the term since our infancy, but who really knows what it means? I wanted to learn more about it, so I began to read one of the finest historians I know of,the great C.L.R. James, author of the ground-breaking *The Black Jacobins*, an influential study of the Haitian Revolution. Some years ago, James published a pamphlet titled, *Every Cook Can Govern: A Study of Democracy in Ancient Greece* (Jackson, MS: New Mississippi, Inc., Mar. 1986). I found myself (as I often am when I read his stuff) blown away by what I learned. As his subtitle suggests, James looks at Greek history for the roots of the democratic idea, and finds it, in some stages, truly democratic, in ways we can hardly imagine.
He writes:
Perhaps the most striking thing about Greek democracy was that the administration (and there were immense administrative problems) was organized upon the basis of what is known as sortition, or, more easily, selection by lot. The vast majority of Greek officials were chosen by a method which amounted to putting names into a hat and appointing the ones whose names came out. Now the average C10 bureaucrat or Labor Member of Parliament in Britain would fall in a fit if it was suggested to him that any worker selected at random could do the work he is doing. But that was preciselythe guiding principle of Greek democracy. And this form of government is the government under which flourished the greatest civilization the world has ever known. [p.1.]
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