The United States in the World Book

This is Noam's book about the how the US keeps the world from achieving the very things the US says it stands for. We say our country stands against aggressors and yet we freely invaded South Vietnam, bombed Laos and Cambodia, ignored the International Court of Justice ruling against US "unlawful use of force" against Nicaragua, and the list goes on. We say we are for democracy while thwarting democracy elsewhere. We are for human rights, and even the UN, except when that keeps us from doing what we secretly want to do. For example, the Declaration of the Vienna Conference became problematic when the Declaration "implied that any foreign occupation is a human rights violation." If the US acted morally, that would make sense, but US couldn't sign because Israel's illegal occupation had to get a free pass. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was a moral document that couldn't get signed by the U.S. because, well, we and Israel do a lot of immoral stuff. There was a phrase about everyone having the right "to return to his country" which is just and great but not if you want Palestinians unable to return to their rightful lands and to sanction that obvious theft. The violations of Article 14 of the UD by the U.S. are many. It says, "Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution" but Clinton quickly violated that with the Haitian boat people. The U.S. granted only 11 Haitians asylum out of 24,000 applications.

Now, let's look at Cuba: 75,000 applications received and 75,000 Cubans granted asylum. This is the true munificence of the U.S. - we hate the threat of a good example. Had Cuba or Haiti succeeded as countries they might act as a good example and that has been intolerable to U.S. planners for decades. As Noam notes, "'worthy victims' fall under Article 14, 'unworthy victims' do not. The categories are determined by the agency of terror and prevailing power interests." When the UD recognized Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, UN ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick thoughtfully referred to such basic rights as "a letter to Santa Claus." Then let's look at the UN; we owe an estimated $1.3 billion dollars of unpaid dues to them. The Senate knows this and yet votes "90-10 that the United Nations thank the United States for its contributions." Every year the entire world votes through the UN against the two holdouts the U.S. and Israel about both Israel's Occupation and the Cuba Embargo. When you read that Clinton recently saw Cuba as still a security threat it is hard not to laugh. Even, famed centrist historian Arthur Schlesinger said the actual threat of Cuba was "the spread of the Castro idea of taking matters into their own hands." "Of 116 cases of sanctions used since WWII, 80% were initiated by the United States alone."

"Freedom" in the U.S. media, means the economic freedom to screw people over everywhere - the freedom to get prisoners to fight your fires for only $1 per day, or to let Philip Morris become China's largest advertiser. The freedom to make unlimited money by killing people even outside the weapon industry; 50 million Chinese children alive today will die from "cigarette-related diseases" according to an Oxford study. We all hear about the millions of people dead by Mao's or Stalin's Famine or the six million Jews because we were not responsible. That we don't focus on our own crimes as well is, well, criminal. Noam notes we have more young people on death row than anywhere else in the world. Black incarceration has been labelled by two criminologists as "the new American Apartheid." To place fear of all things black in perspective, note that "the Justice Department estimates the cost of corporate crime as 7 to 25 times as high as street crime." Then remember the words of conservative Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "we are choosing to have an intense crime problem concentrated on minorities." The War on Drugs has done nothing to change drug availability or street price, but it is a success because it serves it's intended purpose, "the removal of elimination of disposable people. It also frightens the rest of the population, a standard device to induce obedience." One more amazing book by Noam.