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" In 1954, Guatemala's deposed president, the democratically elected Jacobo Arbenz, was forced to strip down to his underwear and photographed before being allowed to leave the country. "
Greg Grandin
Before
Down
Leave
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" The unraveling of America's long mid-century domestic consensus, which ran from about 1941 to 1966, had begun earlier, under Lyndon B. Johnson. "
Greg Grandin
Consensus
America
Domestic
" A new book by 'New York Times' reporter Charlie Savage, 'Power Wars,' suggests that there has been little substantive difference between George W. Bush's administration and Obama's when it comes to national-security policies or the legal justifications used to pursue regime change in the Greater Middle East. "
Greg Grandin
Power
Legal
New York
" Endorsing Ronald Reagan in 1980, Kissinger threw in with America's new militarists, who would jump-start a revived Cold War and drive to retake the Third World. "
Greg Grandin
World
Drive
New
" It wasn't until 1973 that Congress and journalists began to investigate 'Operation Menu,' around the same moment that the Watergate scandal was unfolding. "
Greg Grandin
Same
Watergate
Congress
" 'Blowback,' as many 'Nation' readers are aware, was a term introduced into popular circulation by the late political scientist Chalmers Johnson, an old Cold Warrior turned dissident. "
Greg Grandin
Political
Late
Cold
" According to some tallies, since 1776, the United States has been at war 93 percent of its existence, passing through a mere 21 years of peace. "
Greg Grandin
Existence
Peace
Through
" Such is the nature of the 'unity government' Clinton helped institutionalize. In her book, 'Hard Choices,' Clinton holds up her Honduran settlement as a proud example of her trademark clear-eyed, 'pragmatic' foreign policy approach. Berta Caceres gave her life to fight that government. "
Greg Grandin
Fight
Book
Unity
" Beyond institutional amnesia, a rejection of causal analysis is the existential rock on which American Exceptionalism sits. The United States unique sense of itself depends on an ambiguous relationship to the past. History is affirmed, since it is America's unprecedented historical success that justifies the exceptionalism. "
Greg Grandin
History
Past
Relationship
" America is exceptional, it is asserted, because, with the exception of the abolition of slavery, it has been able to extend the promise of liberal reform mostly peacefully, through its democratic institutions. "
Greg Grandin
Liberal
Been
Through
" As first lady, Hillary Clinton spent the early months of her husband's administration drafting healthcare-reform legislation, only to see it put on the back burner by the North American Free Trade Agreement. "
Greg Grandin
American
Lady
Husband
" Wilson won re-election in 1916, his campaign running on the slogan, 'He kept us out of war.' But he could then betray his anti-war supporters knowing that a rising political coalition - made up, in part, of men looking to redeem a lost war by finding new wars to fight - had his back. "
Greg Grandin
New
Men
Looking
" If you search for Colombia on The Nation's website, you will see how key the country has been in regional politics. "
Greg Grandin
Country
See
Search
" It is a job requirement of U.S. envoys to El Salvador to be skilled in the art of the threat. And Aponte, named ambassador in 2010, is a pro. In particular, she's been tasked with making sure the former insurgent FMLN, which first won the presidency in 2009 and was reelected in 2014, reconciles itself to neoliberal reality. "
Greg Grandin
Threat
Art
Job
" The story of how Chile, in the decades after its 1973 coup and death of democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende, became one of the most neoliberal societies on the planet is well known. "
Greg Grandin
Planet
Death
President
" In Honduras, in particular, Hillary Clinton as Obama's secretary of state was instrumental in legitimizing the coup's subsequent death-squad regime. "
Greg Grandin
Secretary
Coup
Hillary Clinton
" Kissinger's unusually high body count and singular moral imperiousness has the effect, among his critics, of obscuring his didactic utility. An outsized personality who has committed outsized mayhem, Kissinger eclipses his own context. Yet, as animals were to the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, Kissinger is good to think with. "
Greg Grandin
Personality
Body
Good
" Most students of Kissinger find it hard to say anything about Kissinger that isn't about the man himself. He is such an outsize figure that he eclipses his own context, leading his many biographers, critics, and admirers to focus nearly exclusively on the quirks of his personality or his moral failings. "
Greg Grandin
Personality
Man
Focus
" The argument that capitalism was dependent on slavery is, of course, not new. In 1944, Eric Williams, in 'Capitalism and Slavery,' made the case. "
Greg Grandin
Made
Capitalism
Argument
" Ronald Reagan, who led the larger New Right project of re-sanctifying U.S. foreign policy after its Vietnam disaccreditation, felt compelled to drape his support for Central American death squads in the rhetoric of American exceptionalism. "
Greg Grandin
Support
Rhetoric
New
" Starting in the early 1800s, Southerners in the United States began to defend slavery as their 'peculiar institution,' and northerners didn't mind, since the phrase suggested that chattel bondage was quarantined from the rest of the nation: that it was, or soon would be, a relic of its past and would not define its future. "
Greg Grandin
Early
Rest
Slavery
" Migrants don't come to the United States because, as Ambassador Aponte argued in her press conference, of 'lies' told by smugglers that, once here, you can't get deported. They come because their countries have been destroyed by U.S. policy. "
Greg Grandin
Lies
Conference
Her
" Kissinger celebrants inevitably point to two things to justify their admiration: an opening to China - 'rapprochement' - and improved relations with the Soviet Union - detente - which included SALT, a historic arms-limitation treaty. "
Greg Grandin
Opening
Salt
Two
" The only person Henry Kissinger flattered more than President Richard Nixon was Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the shah of Iran. In the early 1970s, the shah, sitting atop an enormous reserve of increasingly expensive oil and a key figure in Nixon and Kissinger's move into the Middle East, wanted to be dealt with as a serious person. "
Greg Grandin
Sitting
Oil
Serious
" There was a brief moment, after Haiti's 2010 earthquake, when even Bill Clinton recognized what had been done to Haiti in the name of 'free trade': the destruction of local markets and rice production. "
Greg Grandin
Moment
Free
Done
" Caceres was a vocal and brave indigenous leader, an opponent of the 2009 Honduran coup that Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, made possible. "
Greg Grandin
Leader
Brave
Possible
" The CIA's always-useful World Fact book says that a staggering 6.3 million Colombians have been internally displaced (IDP) since 1985, with 'about 300,000 new IDPs each year since 2000,' the year Bill Clinton enacted Plan Colombia. Added up, that's 2.4 million people during Clinton's eight-year presidency. "
Greg Grandin
People
Book
Plan
" One of the first things the PT government did when it took office in 2003, after Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva won the presidency, was to create a 'dirty list' of hundreds of companies and individual employers who were investigated by labor prosecutors and found to be using slaves. "
Greg Grandin
Labor
Government
Office
" Decades before President Richard Nixon bet his re-election on winning the Dixiecrat vote, Wilson worked out his own Southern Strategy. Even as he was moving the nation to war, Wilson re-segregated Washington and purged African-Americans from federal jobs. "
Greg Grandin
Strategy
Vote
Moving
" As she was about to run for president in 2008, Clinton opposed a free-trade agreement with Panama - an agreement that, as Sanders pointed out, would make the kind of money-laundering we learned about from the Panama papers even more pervasive. "
Greg Grandin
She
Kind
Run
" After Plan Colombia came the Colombian Free Trade Agreement. Hillary Clinton opposed the treaty when she was running against Barack Obama in 2008 but then supported it as secretary of state. "
Greg Grandin
Running
She
Trade