It stretched from the Caspian to the Baltic Sea, from the middle of Europe to the Kurile Islands in the Pacific, from Siberia to Central Asia. Its nuclear arsenal held 45,000 warheads, and its military had five million troops under arms. There had been nothing like it in Eurasia since the Mongols conquered China, took parts of Central Asia and the Iranian plateau, and rode into the Middle East, looting Baghdad. Yet when the Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991, by far the poorer, weaker imperial power disappeared.

The slogan of President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign was “Forward.” As progressives and others celebrate his victory, they need to take a moment to soberly reflect on the reality that his second term will be marked by advancing policies that he helped institutionalize or allowed to become further entrenched—some of which picked up on expanding executive power where President George W. Bush left off in 2008.

Film director Oliver Stone and American University history professor Peter Kuznick have produced “The Untold History of the United States.” The project consists of a book released on October 30 and a documentary series that is scheduled to begin airing on Showtime on November 12.

A variety of links to articles/interviews/speeches/videos on current issues that may be of interest.

It is America and NOT China that has been embracing tyranny, lawlessness and injustice. And how China has embraced the economic benefits of most to the majority of it’s citizens, where as we here have only been making life better for the elites.

You can summarize the story of Peter Van Buren’s We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People with his assessment of the scams Iraqis pulled off with reconstruction dollars: “It wasn’t so much we were conned, it was as if we demanded to be cheated and would not take no for an answer.” The book describes what he saw of the various reconstruction efforts in Iraq, particularly his experience serving on a State Department Provisional Reconstruction Team in 2009.

Andrew J. Bacevich has emerged in the early years of this century as the country’s most widely read and widely respected critic of U.S. militarism and empire. He has addressed this issue with unprecedented intensity for an academic. With the appearance of Washington Rules, he has produced six books addressing illuminating these themes in the span of a single decade, writing three major books American Empire (2002), The New American Militarism (2005), and The Limits of Power (2008), and editing two other volumes, The Imperial Tense (2003) and The Long War (2006).

Tom Engelhardt should be well known to anyone who’s looked online for information on U.S. militarism during the past several years. His website, TomDispatch.com, has been invaluable, publishing new articles every few days, either edited by Tom (I’ve written a few of those myself) or written by Tom. And it’s Tom’s own writing, I’m sure, that brings people back.

If a person could approach you on the street, gently caress your cheek, and walk away leaving you with the feeling of having been violently slapped and dowsed with a bucket of ice water, they would approximate Tom Engelhardt’s writing, including that in his newest book “The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s.” And it’s all perfectly composed, edited, and triple-proof-read. So, here today is our unique chance to read Tom Engelhardt unscripted by asking him about just about anything related to our wars, our empire, our media, or probably any other topic. I can’t imagine Tom Engelhardt lacking for an insightful and informative opinion on anything.