Globalism

The ever-greater use by the United States of drone air strikes in Yemen, Somalia, Syria-Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere has focused global attention on the use of killer robots and the possibility of autonomous artificial intelligence weapons.

As Donald Trump settles into the Oval Office this week, say goodbye to the one-worlders of the Obama-Clinton years and say hello to a new era of the one-percenters. America’s oligarchs will profit handsomely from the administration’s infrastructure program, its reconfigured trade deals, and its accelerated emphasis on resource extraction.

It is impossible to know now whether Trump’s campaign promise to renegotiate NAFTA will result in any substantial improvements. But there is also no reason for the civil society movements that defeated the TPP to allow other interests to set the agenda on NAFTA.

Trump seems to think that there are only two countries other than the United States that matter in the world today – Russia and China. As both Robert Gates and Henry Kissinger have pointed out, he is using the Nixon technique in reverse.

On December 8th 2016, the State of Washington's Attorney General's office filed a lawsuit against Monsanto for contaminating rivers, land, air, people and wildlife. 120 bodies of water in Washington were named as suffering from PCB contamination. This recklessness by Monsanto comes as no surprise and is a glimpse as what to expect if the Bayer Monsanto merger is completed. 

Vijay Prashad speaks on Western Bombs, Eastern Societies: The Destruction of Nations and 'Humanitarian' Interventionism. Prashad is an Indian historian, writer, and commentator.  He has reported from around the world -- from Colombia to Iraq.