#u.s. imperialism

[vague-humanoid]

every 36 hours American sends Israel more bombs to kill civilians, but with delays in shipping Israel is now accusing America of purposefully delaying supplying them with genocide tools.

us officials have apologized and assured Israel the massacre is still on schedule, and it snot on purpose.

I'm not gonna explore the dynamic of Israel being able to demand anything of America, especially demanding weapons from their supply. like what are they gonna do to America? shoot us with the weapons we don't give them??

but anyway, this response form officials should put to rest any excuse about how Biden is being "forced" to do this or has any reluctance.

The United States has slowed the pace of its military aid to Israel compared to the beginning of the war, according to a report quoting an Israeli official Friday that American officials denied.

As ties between the Biden administration and Israel become increasingly strained over the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, the unnamed senior Israeli official told ABC News that supply shipments “were coming very fast” when the war erupted after Hamas’s October 7 attack, but “we are now finding that it’s very slow.”

The official said Israel was running out of 155 mm artillery shells and 120 mm tank shells. The official also said that it required sensitive guidance equipment, without elaborating.

According to the official, it was not clear what was causing the slowdown.

The Israel Defense Forces refused to comment on the report.

US officials told the network that there was no deliberate delay in aid shipments and that no policies have changed.

Both Israeli and US officials acknowledged American frustrations with the war and the mounting death toll in Gaza, the report said, but US sources said the White House has not signed off on any decision to leverage military support to pressure Israel to do more to protect civilians.

@el-shab-hussein @ubernegro

#Palestine #genocide #u.s. imperialism

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

I've seen a lot of folks talk about how in-universe things would be different in a modern AU, but I'm curious if you have any thoughts about how Animorphs and its world building would be if it were being written now in a (post?-) war on terror world rather than a post-Vietnam War world.

So this'd be speculation, but. But a lot has changed since 1996. We'd probably get YA Animorphs if published today (sigh), and we'd definitely get 6 or 12 oversized tomes rather than 54 slim paperbacks. On the plus side, we'd get canon queer rep, especially Tobias and Marco, and we'd get updated animal facts.

And then there's the War on Terror. Controversial opinion: I think it wouldn't change that much about Animorphs, because it's obvious in hindsight that Applegate saw the foreverwar coming.

Like, look at Marco's speech in MM2 about how the U.S. is "always on the lookout for new enemies... Enemies 'R Us, EnemyMart, J.C. Enemy. Don't worry, we'll find one." Or his point in #46 about how "global warfare is a thing of the past. That’s what people think, anyway" and the inherent danger in war becoming this glorious abstraction to too many Americans. Look at Visser's point about how humans "tear down a living man but revere a dead one" and use tragic deaths to forward the political agenda, whatever that might be. Look at Jake's job in #54, developed because "terrorism had grown... religious extremists... antigovernment paranoids... latter-day racists."

And then look at the andalites. "Police force of the galaxy" (#8), "Meddlers of the galaxy" (HBC), who often do more harm than good to the planets they try to save. They try to use their tech and military advantages responsibly... but not so responsibly that they're willing to give up even an iota of power to save lives. We first meet the andalites as the absolute good guys, and then over the course of the series that foundation crumbles (#8), and crumbles (#18), and crumbles (#19), and crumbles (#38), until Jake and Eva are "making deals with taxxons and yeerks to gain a victory fast enough to keep the andalites from deciding... to blast the entire planet out of existence and take out the bulk of the yeerk race along with the human race" (#53). Sound like any countries you know?

Anyway, Animorphs shows the Afghanistan War wasn't caused by the Sept. 11 murders any more than World War I was caused by Franz Ferdinand's murder. Applegate was writing in a U.S. itching for any moral-looking excuse to go to war, and clearly she knew it.

#animorphs #k.a. applegate #u.s. politics #war on terror #u.s. imperialism #violence #war #terrorism

[gothhabiba]

As noted in post-colonial and gender studies, there has long been a pattern of homogenizing and victimizing discourses, particularly in international agencies and NGO’s, that highlight the need of Western nations to intervene on behalf of “third-world women” and “save” them (Spivak 1988; Wood 2001). Robinson-Pant [notes] that it is common for women’s literacy programs, in particular, to become the gateway for other development interventions such as family planning or child nutrition. Collins and Blot note that literacy projects are not power neutral and argue that,

the interconnectedness of literacy, power and identity formation are unavoidable in thinking about relationships between colonizers and colonized. Colonized discourses often emphasize the “inherent” goodness of bringing education, enlightenment and civilization to formerly savage peoples – literacy becomes a legitimizing narrative for other colonial projects (2003:21)

Such positions were evident in U.S. government discourses about literacy and development during the time the Passerelle program was being developed [in Morocco]. This can be seen for example, in a speech made in 2006 by Dr. Paula Dobriansky, the former U.S. Under Secretary for Democracy and Global Affairs, in which she advocated for better education for adult women in developing contexts. In her speech, Dobriansky argued that women and girls should be viewed as “untapped resources” and “vital sources of human capital” for future economic and social growth (Dobriansky 2006).

Thus, in addition to gender, of central importance to understanding the power structures and ideologies underpinning USAID’s Passerelle methodology[] is a consideration of how discourses about literacy often link it up to notions of social and economic development. Collins and Blot (2003) identify these discourses as forming the “Literacy Thesis” [...]. They explain that,

the central claims of the [literacy] thesis are that writing is a technology that transforms human thinking, relations to language, and representations of tradition, a technology that also enables a coordination of social action in unprecedented precision and scale, thus enabling the development of unique social and institutional complexity (Collins and Blot 2003:17)

Numerous critiques of the literacy thesis [...] have since questioned whether literacy can in fact be viewed as a universal, unitary skill that is determinate of social realities or if it is rather embedded in and shaped by the particular, historically contingent cultural contexts in which multiple literacies can occur. [...] Despite [...] challenges to the literacy thesis, its pervasiveness in academic literature, development agendas and the pedagogy of local literacy programs in Morocco is striking.

Given the 2004 Free Trade agreement between the U.S. and Morocco, the emphasis on relationships between literacy and economic forces by U.S. officials, such as [...] Dobriansky, is not unexpected. Prendergast (2003) for example, has argued that since literacy is usually acquired in relation to institutions, it is necessary to consider what other functions these institutions serve. A significant portion of American financial and pedagogical support for adult literacy education in Morocco is funneled through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), as illustrated by the Passerelle program. Among USAID’s “strategic objectives and goals” in 2006, was the goal of “Democracy and Economic Freedom in the Muslim World,” a plan, which “[confronts] the intersection of traditional and transnational challenges… [combining]… diplomatic skills and development assistance to act boldly to foster a more democratic and prosperous world integrated into the global economy.” Thus, any literacy promotion by USAID in Morocco should be considered in light of its broader mission statements and how increased literacy in Morocco is being imagined to align advantageously with them. USAID’s role and interest in promoting literacy in Morocco, can also viewed as a form of literacy sponsorship (Brandt 2001). Brandt explains that sponsors of literacy should be understood as “any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach, and model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold, literacy – and gain advantage by it in some way” (19). [...] Furthermore, Brant notes that, “in whatever form, sponsors deliver the ideological freight that must be borne for access to what they have” (20). In addition to transmitting ideological freight, perhaps indirectly, regarding language varieties and scripts, USAID also explicitly imposes ideological frameworks regarding notions of gender roles and human rights through the inclusion of Moudawana [Moroccan Family Legal Code] content in the Passerelle classroom.

— Jennifer Lee Hall, Debating Darija: Language Ideology and the Written Representation of Moroccan Arabic in Morocco (PhD dissertation), 2015, pp. 76-9.

#Jennifer Lee Hall #Morocco #U.S. imperialism #literacy #literacies #long post /

[milkboydotnet]

Marcos Jr. sells out PH sovereignty for US war preparations vs China

NDF-International | National Democratic Front of the Philippines

April 10, 2024

Marcos Jr.’s trip to the United States for a trilateral summit with US President Joe Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida is an utter and complete sell-out of Philippine sovereignty to US war designs in Asia. The so-called “trilateral summit” is set to discuss “maritime security cooperation” between the three countries.

Marcos Jr. is willingly offering the Philippine archipelago to serve as a ‘theater of war’ by allowing the US to position its military arsenal on land, sea, and air. The Philippines is a crucial piece in the “US Island Chain strategy” to contain China. The Philippines’ strategic location allows the US to constrict regional waterways and position readily deployable military air power in close proximity to China. In order to achieve its objectives, the US is escalating war preparations in the region by encouraging Japan and other imperialist allies to join the geopolitical chess game.

In the said trilateral meeting, Marcos Jr. seeks to further increase US military footprint in Philippine soil while talks are underway with Japan for a reciprocal access agreement that will allow Japanese military presence in the country. In fact, preparations are already ongoing for the biggest Balikatan Exercises in history which is expected to draw at least 16,000 troops to participate. The Balikatan war games this year aims to test the so-called ‘Comprehensive Archipelagic Defense Concept (CDAC)’ patterned after US imperialist war plans in the region. These actions form part of the US strategy to provoke China into “firing the first shot” demonstrating the US government’s bloodthirst.

On the other hand, Marcos Jr.’s actions prove his outright subservience to US imperialist war preparations and his readiness to drag the Filipino people in the middle of a brewing inter-imperialist conflict. Marcos Jr. must be held accountable for his reprehensible sell-out of Philippine sovereignty and his blatant disregard for the lives of the Filipino masses. More importantly, the Biden administration must be denounced for its continued exportation of wars of aggression from Ukraine to Palestine and now using the Philippines as a pawn in its attempt to stifle China’s growing influence.

#philippines #biden #u.s. imperialism #imperialism #anti-imperialism

[abolitioncommunism]

But what is happening in Gaza is not only Israel’s war: it is a US war, and it is most particularly Biden’s war. Israel simply could not afford to carry out this prolonged and resource-intensive assault on the Palestinian people without US money and weaponry. Polling shows that a majority of Americans want a permanent ceasefire; Biden’s support for Israel even appears to be damaging his chances in the upcoming presidential race. And yet he’s refusing to listen to his voters, and has repeatedly bypassed Congress, in order to keep supplying Israel with the resources on which it relies. Conspiracy theorists may like to imagine that Israel exercises some outsize influence on the US, but the reality is quite the opposite. It is the US that exerts enormous power over Israel – and previous American presidents have been prepared to use that power. In the 1980s, in response to illegal Israeli attacks on Iraq and Lebanon, Ronald Reagan not only criticised the attacks in public, but also restricted US aid and military assistance to Israel in response, helping to force the withdrawal of troops. In the early 1990s, George H.W. Bush likewise used US aid to Israel as a bargaining chip in international negotiations. If Biden is refusing to leverage these same resources in order to make Israel comply with US policy, the only reasonable conclusion is that this war is already US policy.

#israel #zionism #palestine #ireland #u.s. imperialism #sally rooney #readings

[hollytanaka]

Today is the anniversary of the U.S.'s military invasion of Panamá, which occurred on December 20, 1989.

Julio Yao writes in the article "Legacies of the U.S. Invasion of Panama":

On December 20, 1989, former president George H.W. Bush ordered the invasion of Panama. The U.S. 82nd Airborne division pummeled Panama City from the air, as U.S. soldiers from the 193rd Brigade clashed in the streets with troops from the Panamanian Defense Forces (PDF) and the Dignity Battalions, a militia of workers and campesinos. Thousands of civilians were caught in the crossfire as the heavily populated El Chorrillo neighborhood was set ablaze. By the time General Manuel Noriega surrendered on January 3, 1990, 23 U.S. soldiers and 314 PDF troops had been officially killed in the fighting. Civilian casualties were estimated in the thousands. According to an independent investigation by former U.S. attorney general Ramsey Clark, as many as 7,000 people may have been killed. Mass graves were uncovered after U.S. troops had withdrawn, and over 15,000 civilians were displaced.

Despite the civilian body count, no Panamanian government since has authorized a commission to investigate the killings that took place during the foreign military aggression. No administration has attempted to demand reparations from the United States, nor filed a lawsuit against the United States before the International Court of Justice at the Hague.

Over twenty two years later, the U.S. “Christmas invasion” of Panama is being lost to memory, yet its legacy lives on in profound ways that continue to shape both domestic and foreign policy in Panama.

[...]

Panama’s tendency to submit to U.S. policy has resulted in a foreign policy devoid of independence. For example, Panama is one of the few countries in the world that has not established diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China, though it maintains relations with Taiwan in accordance with “checkbook diplomacy.” The U.S. government has prohibited Panama’s gestures toward diplomatic relations with Beijing.

Guided by this protectorate concept and right-wing policy, Martinelli’s administration [(2009-2014) had] offered its unconditional support to Israel and withdrawn all backing for Palestine. It [had] distanced Panama from the Central American process of regional integration, withdrawn from the Central American Parliament (PARLACEN), and increased ties with France and Italy’s conservative former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, who was blackmailed by Italian arms company Finmeccanica into brokering a corrupt bilateral security agreement with Panama in which Panama was overcharged for military hardware, including helicopters, radar, and mapping systems. It signed a free trade agreement with the United States and Canada, and [had] given natural resources to foreign corporations, especially mining companies, including Vancouver-based Bellhaven Copper and Gold, Ontario’s Aur Resources, Toronto’s Inmet Mining, and New York’s Dominium Minerals Corporation. All of these actions [were] fully aligned with the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States.

This was, after all, the ultimate goal of the 1989 U.S. invasion. At a meeting on December 10, 1985, four years before Bush ordered Operation Just Cause, then U.S. national security adviser John Poindexter met with Noriega with several U.S. demands: (1) Panama should allow the training of Nicaraguan Contras in the Canal Zone; (2) PDF troops should invade Nicaragua to justify U.S. aggression toward Nicaragua’s Sandinista government; (3) Panama should help dismantle the Contadora Group, a regional initiative to resolve the military conflicts that were destabilizing Central America; and (4) Panama should consent to continued U.S. military presence in Panama.

[...]

The move [of the invasion] destroyed Panamanian sovereignty and the PDF, dismantled security structures, reformed the political system, and returned power to the old oligarchy. This paved the way for new forms of foreign domination, and the Panamanian people continue to suffer its legacy.

More Resources to learn about Panamá's Invasion:

Julio Yao's "Legacies of the U.S. Invasion of Panama," NACLA (March 22, 2012).

John Lindsay-Poland, Emperors in the Jungle (Duke University Press, 2003).

The documentary The Panama Deception (2002) on YouTube

The documentary INVASIÓN (2014)

Stephen Kinzer's chapter "You're No Good," in his book Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq (Times Books, 2007)

___

Photo Credits & Description: Images taken on the morning of December 20, 1989, when various parts of the capital city were under US military control | Images from Panamá Vieja Escuela or (@PaViejaEscuela on Twitter).

#panama #operation just cause #u.s. imperialism #imperialism #central america #history #latin america #martinelli is a piece of shit btw #my mom used to work for him before he became president #and she confirmed he's a major dick #on top of being a zionist neocolonial vendepatria #and yao's article is a bit too pro-noriega for me imo #like the batallones de digndad were death squads #not just militias of workers / peasants #like they were terrorizing people who were already living in misery #but i digress #just recognize that most panamanians hate noriega but also understand this invasion was overkill

[the-bitch-in-the-tower]

This is fucking World War 2 all over again! These are the same fucking laws we passed in the 1930's and 40's to bar Jews from fleeing the Third Reich

#palestine #free palestine #us politics #palestinian genocide #twitter post #free palestine 🇵🇸 #from the river to the sea palestine will be free #u.s. imperialism

[whatisonthemoon]

Excerpt

Over the last week, Israel has launched yet another round of bombings on Gaza. The attacks have destroyed civilian infrastructure and killed at least 31 Palestinians, many of them women and children. This terror is not the exception, but the rule of Israel’s history.

75 years ago, the apartheid state of Israel began its decades-long history of oppressing, occupying, and killing the Palestinian people. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced to leave their homes at gunpoint, and to this day are fighting for the right to return. Israel has only taken more Palestinian land since the original expulsion in 1948.

The violence that the Israeli occupation forces use to enforce their colonial project has no limits. Israel deprives Palestinians of medicine, regularly murders Palestinian children and journalists, bombs Gaza while using it as an open-air prison for Palestinians, labels Palestinian NGOs as terrorist groups, attacks Palestinian mosques, and demolishes Palestinian homes, sometimes forcing Palestinians to destroy their homes themselves. These are all just a few examples of the constant horrors Israel inflicts on Palestinians.

Support for Palestine has long been suppressed in the United States. U.S. imperialism relies on Israel to maintain its interests in the Middle East. This is why Israel’s crimes are armed by the United States to the tune of $3.8 billion annually, while American critics of Israel often face retaliation from their workplaces and are smeared as antisemitic, despite antisemitism and anti-Zionism being completely different.

Full article: https://www.leftvoice.org/75-years-of-israel-waging-violence-on-palestine-maintaining-u-s-imperialism-and-exporting-repression-around-the-world/

#imperialism #anti-imperialism #palestine #israel #colonialism #united states of america #u.s. imperialism #politics #leftist politics #u.s. politics #middle east #violence #war crimes

[connorthemaoist]

Marco Valbuena | Chief Information Officer | Communist Party of the Philippines | April 17, 2024 

The patriotic and peace-loving Filipino people, together with the American people, must condemn and reject the US government’s plan to provide the Philippines with $500 million in annual military aid for the next five years, in order to dump and preposition US war matériel in the Philippines.

This huge amount of US foreign military financing forms part of its war-mongering and war preparations against China, which is raising military tensions in the West Philippine Sea and the Asian region.

The planned US military aid will completely transform the Philippine military into an auxiliary force of the US military, that will be trained and tasked to handle US-provided weapons, to achieve US military objectives in its campaign to encircle and provoke China.

The increase in US military aid will also exacerbate the human rights situation in the Philippines amid Marcos’ order to intensify counterinsurgency operations. It will provide the AFP with more lethal and brutal force to carry out its campaign of political repression against the Filipino people.

At the instigation of US military advisers, the AFP has been spending billions of pesos to buy jet fighters, helicopters, bombs, missiles and rockets that have rained terror among the people in the countryside.

With the planned $2.5 billion military funding, American public money will again be used to bankroll the military-industrial complex. After having made large amounts of profits from US involvement in the war in Ukraine and support for Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, American arms manufacturers such as Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Boeing are drooling to pocket even more money from US war provocations in the Asia-Pacific.

#the philippines #Filipino #CPP #military #war #imperialism #anti imperialism #revolution #communism #maoism #marxism leninism maoism #revolutionary #communist #maoist #mlm #socialism #marxism #world affairs #world events #world war #China #u.s. imperialism

[deadassdiaspore]

#A.I. #Police State #Surveillance State #Imperialism #techno-capitalism #U.S. Imperialism

[sataniccapitalist]

#american exceptionalism #permanent war #u.s. imperialism

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“The foothold created by prisoner-built roads in the Canal Zone enabled colonial officials, army engineers, and politicians in the United States to train their sights on a Pan-American Highway, which would run north-south from Alaska to Argentina. Convict road building in Panamá became part of the massively increased federal support for convict road building projects across states, territories, and colonies under US jurisdiction. Federal officials, meanwhile, pushed their modernizing agenda for prisons and roads at the convenings of international organizations like the Pan American Union (PAU) and the Pan American Prison Congress. The Pan-American Highway was shrouded in the rhetoric of hemispheric harmony, and PAU Director General L.S. Row described the “Good Roads Movement” as encapsulating “the very essence of true Pan-Americanism.”

E.W. James, chief of the inter-American regional office of the Public Roads Administration, promised the highway would open up great tracts of land and offer US motorists scenes of “exotic interest,” discovery, and adventure. Probably “no white man” has ever traveled between Central and South America overland, he wrote referring to the Darién Gap between Panamá and Columbia. He provided a list of voyages along portions of the highway, including that of Zone policeman 88, Harry A. Franck. At the 1915 Panama-Pacific World’s Fair in San Francisco, the US Office of Public Roads staged the most comprehensive road exhibit to date. By the end of World War II, the inter-American portion between the United States and Panamá included 1,557 miles of paved roadway, 930 miles of all-weather, 280 miles of dry-weather, and 567 miles of trails. “The last quarter century in the Western Hemisphere has been preeminently an era of road building,” James proudly concluded.

Forced transportation was central to the chattel mode of incarceration, along with degrading hard labor. Throughout the period of US canal construction, 1904–1914, police and prison officials routinely deported people from the Zone. Indeed, when he was appointed police chief, George Shanton saw it as his first order of business. Before he was even expressly granted expanded deportation powers, he gathered members of Teddy Roosevelt’s “Rough Riders” and other “American gunmen” to round up any “bad men” in the newly occupied territory. 

“We went after them and some we found necessary to kill off but the great majority were gradually rounded up and placed in the stocks, later being put into bull-pens which we constructed,” he told the Boston Globe years later. “The next thing to do was to get them out of the country altogether,but we were in a position where we could not legally deport them. So we rounded up some old three masters […] and, bundling the birds all aboard, shot them off to the Islands thereabout.” 

His nonchalance masked a more systematic process of targeted depopulation that combined Spanish-speaking Afro-Panamanians, French-speaking Martinicans, and English-speaking Jamaicans and Barbadians under the general category of “negro criminal,” who were then indiscriminately sent off to neighboring Caribbean islands. “With them out of the Zone,” Shanton wrote, “we were then in a position of refusing them entrance should they attempt to return.”

Canal Zone District Attorney William Jackson argued that the “great expense” the government had incurred by paying to transport some twenty thousand workers from Barbados and elsewhere in the West Indies “abundantly justified” expanded powers of deportation and judicial cost savings measures. The Canal Zone government paid the cost of deportation, he added, and rightly recouped the “enormous expense incident to jury trials.” As with other labor recruitment contracts, some officials worried they were skirting a line too near slavery. Responding to John Steven’s request to import more Chinese laborers, for instance, Secretary of War William Taft wrote, “peonage or coolieism, which shortly stated is slavery by debt, is as much in conflict with the Thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution as the usual form of slavery.” Others were less concerned. Despite apparent ambiguities in charting these degrees of unfreedom, they knew for certain that the Thirteenth Amendment’s convict clause provided that those convicted of a crime would become slaves of the state. Following a paradigm of patriarchal governance, Canal officials also assumed that other forms of dependent or coerced labor—of women, children, and colonial subjects—were part of the natural order of things. Evidently paying the passage of a small fraction of the total Canal Zone workforce had metaphorically, if not contractually, already indentured much wider segments of the population in the eyes of certain administrators.

...

The police and prison guards charged with implementing the forced labor program brought their own ideas about dependency, deviance, punishment, and work. Racialized labor control schemes had been vitally important to their jobs throughout the American empire. Zone policemen like Harry Franck and Robert Lamastus remarked that their fellow officers were mostly Southerners and almost all military men. Police Chief George Shanton, for instance, had served in the Rough Riders during the US wars in Puerto Rico and the Philippines. His successor had been a Confederate blockade runner, and the police chief after him was a former US Marshal in Indian Territory. When a police chase was on, wrote Harry Franck, everyone from the lieutenant down to the newest rookie would swarm out of the police station: “[T]he most apathetic of the force were girding up their loins with the adventurous fire of the old Moro-hunting days in their eyes, and all, some ahorse, more afoot, were dashing one by one out into the night and the jungle.” With this turn of phrase, Franck evoked the experience of colonial violence from fighting in the predominantly Muslim region of the Philippine archipelago to characterize the rush of tracking alleged outlaws in the Panamanian jungles as a kind of manly “adventure.”

Robert Lamastus, who was put in charge of working prisoners outside the penitentiary, exemplified many of these elements guards brought to the road gangs. With his family back in Kentucky, heavily indebted after the Civil War, he had gone fortune-seeking in the far reaches of the Northwest, joining the army in Alaska. He dreamed of striking it rich prospecting for gold or purchasing land to clear and cultivate. Yet his letters home made clear that he envisioned himself directing rather than performing hard physical labor; referring to farm work, for example, he exclaimed that there were “plenty of easier ways of making a living besides working like a slave for it.” Lamastus joined the police force in 1907 and was rapidly promoted. Within two years he was making $107.50 per month, five times what he earned when he first enlisted in the army, and the following year he received an additional $10 a month to serve as labor foreman over prisoners at Culebra. “We are building roads with them,” he wrote home, “I start work at 7 in the morning and I am through 5:30 in the evening.” 

After successfully completing his road building assignments in the town of Empire, he was made Assistant Deputy Warden in charge of all outside work. “I was promoted on the 19th of Dec. my pay is $125 per mo.” he proudly wrote home. In addition to his salary, as Gold Roll employees, white police and prison officers like Robert Lamastus also received the full range of government benefits including paid housing, health care, and vacations. The racially segregated social and economic hierarchies he and his colleagues helped establish in the Canal Zone therefore ensured that white American men, as a group, would stand to gain the most from the incarceration and forced labor of Zone inhabitants deemed criminals.

The Canal Zone governors, wardens, police, and prison guards who implemented the prison labor program drew on techniques of labor extraction and domination that had characterized the American expansion under slavery, settler colonialism, and war-making. While they were not all members of the ex-Confederate diaspora who sought to spread white supremacy across the Caribbean to Brazil, or across the Pacific to Hawaii, Fiji, and Australia, most shared lived experiences of slavery and colonial violence. They also shared a vision of patriarchal mastery and racial hierarchy in which white men assumed themselves to be the head, performing mental and skilled labor, and racialized others to be the body, performing unskilled, physically demanding, menial labor. Their vision of white settler-colonial agricultural development depended on roads being built throughout the Zone and across Panamá. It also provided prison administrators and guards a unique avenue of upward social mobility. After a career commanding prison labor in the Canal Zone and directing the Panamanian island prison colony at Coiba, for example, Robert Lamastus went on to set up coffee plantations in Boquete, Chiriqui, that have remained in his family to this day.”

- Benjamin D. Weber, “The Strange Career of the Convict Clause: US Prison Imperialism in the Panamá Canal Zone,” International Labor and Working-Class History No. 96, Fall 2019, p. 88-90, 91-92.

Image at top is: “Road Making by Convicts” from Willis J. Abott, PANAMA And the Canal IN PICTURE AND PROSE. New York: Syndicate Publishing Company, 1913. p. 352.

#panama canal #canal zone #thirteenth amendment #convict clause #convict labour #american prison system #american empire #u.s. imperialism #penal labour #slavery by another name #settler colonialism #road building #road work #prison camp #good roads movement #bad boys make good roads #academic quote #academic research #history of crime and punishment #united states history #prison guards #racism in america #shoveling out the unwanted

[connoratwood8]

Rafael Kadaris on the real history of U.S. imperialism in Latin America on #RNLShow Ep. 105: YouTube.com/therevcoms

SUBSCRIBE! New episodes drop every Thursday at 5pm pt/8pm et.

Support the revolution & the RNL Show: patreon.com/therevcoms

#imperialism #capitalism #anti imperialism #u.s. imperialism #Latin America #guatemala #el salvador #honduras #Haiti #Cuba #latino #anti capitalism #fuck capitalism #nicaragua #central america #America #summit of the americas #USA #revolution #revcom

[rivage-seulm]

Twenty-Five Reasons for Supporting Palestinians in Their Conflict with Jewish Zionism

As I listen to the debate surrounding the awful events unfolding in Israel Palestine, I can understand how many are fooled by the one-sided pro-Israel propaganda circulated in the mass media and by their refusal to understand the Palestinian viewpoint. The media’s welter of misinformation and knee-jerk support for U.S. policy in the Middle East coupled with their implicit appeals to sentiments of…

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#Colonialism #Fascism #Hamas #Imperialism #international law #Israel-Palestine #Jewish Colonialism #U.S. Imperialism #UN Charter: Article 51 #UN Resolution 242

[milkboydotnet]

The religious right plays an important international role in fighting political progress in developing nations. It is not surprising therefore that there has been an influx of these organizations into the Philippines. Intense and effective anticommunist propaganda arc trademarks in their religious campaigns. Vigilante death squads, civic action programs, "land reform," and U.S. military advisers are clear indications that the U.S. has chosen the Philippines as its next low intensity conflict testing ground and the religious right is there to lead the propaganda front.

Howard Goldenthal, Moonies, WACL and Vigilantes: The Religious Right in the Philippines (1988)

#unification church #moonies #anti-communism #philippines #u.s. imperialism #imperialism #quote #religious right #religion

[personal-blog243]

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/looted-cambodian-antiquities-returned_n_62f236d3e4b0acf9d001a704?d_id=4750930&ncid_tag=fcbklnkushpmg00000098&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&utm_campaign=us_asian_voices&fbclid=IwAR1IFP-ECOCajSHh0n3ljr4crkBZCO-N1feRFF-ePB1TbaP9ysQCiTrWbMM

#anti imperialism #u.s. imperialism #Cambodia