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Seasoned political analyst James Petras addresses in broad brush the four major upheavals that loom:
For the first time, the goal of socialism has been raised in the presidential primaries, backed by tens of millions of voters. The likely Republican candidate leads a mass right wing revolt which opposes globalization, capital flight and the free entry of immigrant labor. The US presidential elections are everything abnormal, with both major party candidates arousing popular revulsion. Not since the New Deal, nearly a century ago, have class relations come into sharper confrontation.
This book concerns the form taken today by US imperialism in Latin America, with reference to the projection of US state power as a means of both advancing the economic interests of the US capitalist class in the region and maintaining its hegemony over the world capitalist system.
In Part I the book delves into the complex relationship that exists between imperialism and capitalism as the system that dominates the world economy. Part II elaborates on the economic and political dynamics of imperial power in Latin America and the forces of resistance that these dynamics have generated. Part III focuses on the relationship between the United States and Venezuela, which has assumed the leadership in the anti-imperialist struggle.
This book provides a unique conception of US empire building, linking overseas expansion with:
- the growth of a police state and declining living standards;
- advanced technologically driven global spying on adversaries and allies with declining economic competitiveness and military defeats;
- large scale, long term commitments of economic and military resources to wars in the Middle East to the detriment of major corporate interests, but for the benefit of a pariah state, Israel; and
- the power of a foreign state (Israel) over US policy via its domestic pro-Zionist power configuration The interplay of these four specific features of US empire building has no past or present precedent among imperial states.
“The New Extractivism. A Post-Neoliberal Development Model or Imperialism of the Twenty-First Century?” Henry Veltmeyer and James Petras. Zed Books.
In a primary commodities boom spurred on by the rise of China, countries the world over are turning to the extraction of natural resources and the export of primary commodities as an antidote to the global recession. The New Extractivism addresses a fundamental dilemma faced by these governments: to pursue, or not, a development strategy based on resource extraction in the face of immense social and environmental costs, not to mention mass resistance from the people negatively affected by it.
With fresh insight and analysis from Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico and Peru, this book looks at the political dynamics of capitalist development in a region where the neoliberal model is collapsing under the weight of a resistance movement lead by peasant farmers and indigenous communities. It calls for us to understand the new extractivism not as a viable development model for the post-neoliberal world, but as the dangerous emergence of a new form of imperialism.
IMPERIALISM AND CAPITALISM IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY. A SYSTEM IN CRISIS
James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer. Available from Ashgate Publishing.
We live in a time of dynamic, but generally regressive regime change a period in which major political transformations and a rollback of a half-century of legislation are accelerated under conditions of a prolonged and deepening economic crisis and a worldwide offensive against the citizenry and the working class. Written by two of the worlds leading left-wing thinkers, Capitalism and Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century takes the form of a number of analytical probes into some of the dynamics of capitalist development and imperialism in contemporary conditions of a system in crisis.
James Petras, State University of New York, Binghamton and Saint Marys University and Henry Veltmeyer, Saint Marys University and Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas, México. With Raúl Delgado Wise and Humberto Márquez, both at Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas, México.
THE ARAB REVOLT AND THE IMPERIALIST COUNTERATTACK
ISBN: 0-98527-10-0-0 / 978-0-98527-10-0-8 $16.95 /128 pp. / 2012
As the Arab revolt spreads from North Africa to the Gulf and deepens its demands to include socio-economic as well as political demands, the Empire is striking back. The ruling military junta in Egypt has cracked down on the prodemocracy movement and looks to its autocratic partners in the Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula to drown the civil society movements in a blood bath.
While standing by the crumbling dictatorships elsewhere in the region, the United States, France and the United Kingdom raced to intervene when it seemed the revolt had spread to Libya. NATO was deployed, using the UNs new responsibility to protect doctrine authorizing humanitarian intervention. Already NATO intervention has exceeded the UN mandate by bombing the Libyan capital and inflicting civilian casualties. Meanwhile, western governments openly pursue regime change in Libya while seeking to forestall it elsewhere.
These essays chronicle the growing militarization of US policy in North Africa and the Gulf and the historic confrontation between the Arab democratic revolution and the imperial backed satraps; between Libyans fighting for their independence and the Euro-American naval and air forces ravaging the country on behalf of their inept local clients.
WAR CRIMES IN GAZA and the ZIONIST FIFTH COLUMN IN AMERICA
ISBN: 0-9845255-0-5 ISBN13: 978-0-9845255-0-8 / $15.00 / 126 pp. / 2010
The texts and illustrations in this book provide graphic accounts and visual evidence of why Israel has provoked a worldwide ‘Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions’ campaign by human rights activists, trade unions and a multitude of other groups, including individuals in Israel and Jewish organizations in Europe and North America. It includes the Executive Summary of the Goldstone Report, an in depth case study of Israel’s war crimes in Gaza. The US governments’ sustained complicity with Israeli war crimes in the face of worldwide reprobation, and the conduct of the Obama White House and nearly 90% of the US Congress in denouncing the Goldstone Report are addressed in the chapters discussing the political, economic and cultural power of the Presidents of the Major American Jewish organizations, including but not confined to AIPAC.
GLOBAL DEPRESSION AND REGIONAL WARS
ISBN: 0-932863-68-X ISBN13: 978-0-932863-68-3 $16.95 / 234 pp. / 2009
This book exposes the roots of the crisis in the unsustainability of the United States’ military-driven empire building based on a volatile speculative economy, and influenced by Zionist policy makers committed to the colonialist state of Israel. It offers a critical study of the collapse of the empire and a profound indictment of the respectable and prestigious personalities either responsible for the debacle, or for its continuance. Petras provides clear insight into how the ramifications of the world depression and regional wars that originated in Washington and on Wall Street are extending throughout the world, provoking popular challenges especially in Latin America, while reinforcing the belligerency and increasingly fascistic nature of the state of Israel. He demonstrates how unending wars and a deepening capitalist depression have demolished the ideology of free market neo-liberalism and forced to the forefront the need for structural changes.
ZIONISM, MILITARISM AND THE DECLINE OF US POWER
ISBN: 0-932863-60-4 / 978-0-932863-60-7 / $16.95 / 192 pages / 2008
Only Zion-Con demands and Israeli interests can explain the current US moves against Iran—threats, infiltrations, naval blockades, US Treasury-imposed sanctions on the entire Iranian financial sector including threats to global finance for any linkages—policies which are contrary to the interests of Big Oil, US corporations, and the weakened US military. Petras empirically demonstrates that while the interests of the US do not in fact coincide with those of Israel, the effective power of the pro-Zionist Lobby gives Israel the capacity to replace the US agenda with its own. At a time when our national economy is in deep crisis, the Israel Lobby is pushing for a new military confrontation and war with Iran, oblivious to its catastrophic consequences for the American people. Major pro-Israel officials and politicians in Homeland Security, the National Security Council, the Congress and the White House are passing more police-state legislation to control and silence the growing majority opposition to the expansion of wars in the Middle East promoted by the Israel Lobby.
RULERS AND RULED IN THE US EMPIRE: Bankers, Zionists, Militants
ISBN: 0-932863-54-X / 264 pp / $16.95 / 2007
This book provides a comprehensive guide to the systemic dimensions of the US empire. Petras elaborates the changes within the US ruling class, as its manufacturing sector declines and gives way to the ascendancy of finance capital, illustrated by its dominance of both the US economy, and the parameters for political debate on the US role in the world economy (globalization, trade liberalization). Petras addresses the fallacy of discussions on the imminent collapse of capitalism when what is occurring in reality is the collapse of workers rights. He elaborates the contradictions in current immigration/trade liberalization policies, and how these work toward forcing the displacement of peoples, and furthering the underdevelopment of third world countries. He reveals the dark heart of modern empire, in the emergence and proliferation of holocaust-scale carnage.and further outlines how the world capitalist system is laced together in an intricate hierarchy where the US pulls most of the strings, even outside its ostensible area of dominance. The role of corruption in securing world markets is addressed, as are the reasons for the spectacular global growth in new billionaires.
THE POWER OF ISRAEL IN THE UNITED STATES
ISBN: 0-932863-51-5 / 192 pp. / $16.95 / 2006
This book is a chapter-by-chapter analysis and documentation of the power of Israel via the Israeli, Jewish or Pro-Zionist Lobby on US Middle East policy. It raises serious questions as to the primary beneficiary of US policy, and its destructive results for the United States. The extraordinary extent of US political, economic, military and diplomatic support for the state of Israel is explored, along with the means whereby such support is generated and consolidated. Contending that Zionist power in America ensured unconditional US backing for Israeli colonization of Palestine and its massive uprooting of Palestinians, it views the interests of Israel rather than those of Big Oil as the primary cause of the disastrous US wars against Iraq and threats of war against Iran and Syria. It demonstrates and condemns US imitation of Israeli practice as it relates to conduct of the war on terrorism and torture. It sheds light on the AIPAC spying scandal and other Israeli espionage against America; the fraudulent and complicit role of Americas academic terrorist experts in furthering criminal government policies, and the orchestration of the Danish cartoons to foment antipathy between Muslims and the West.
It questions the inability in America to sustain or even formulate a discourse related to the subject of Israeli influence on the United States.