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" In its original version, the FTAA was meant to be a special carve-out for Washington and Wall Street as global 'free trade' advanced under the umbrella of the Doha round of the WTO. "
Greg Grandin
Wall
Street
Special
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" 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
" Neoliberalism is hard to define. It could refer to intensified resource extraction, financialization, austerity, or something more ephemeral - a way of life - in which collective ideals of citizenship give way to marketized individualism and consumerism. "
Greg Grandin
Life
More
Way
" Hillary Clinton became secretary of state under Barack Obama. It's hard to convey just how stunningly cynical she has been on Colombia: In 2008, running against Obama, she opposed, in unambiguous terms, a free-trade deal with Colombia. "
Greg Grandin
She
Running
Hard
" In the 1960s, as a rising defense intellectual, Kissinger was a Nelson Rockefeller man, firmly entrenched in the center-right establishment. When he attended the infamous 1964 Republican convention in San Francisco, he was horrified by Goldwater supporters, whom he likened to fascists. "
Greg Grandin
Defense
Republican
Man
" On April 14, 1986, when the Reagan administration launched an airstrike on Libya in clear violation of international law, Kissinger did the rounds on news shows to justify the bombing. The day after the bombing, Kissinger appeared on ABC's 'Good Morning America' to voice his 'total support.' Attacking Libya, he said, was 'correct' and 'necessary.' "
Greg Grandin
Support
Day
Good
" As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton was an active promoter of increased resource extraction in Latin America, pushing both fracking and the privatization of petroleum production. "
Greg Grandin
Active
Resource
Latin America
" Just as much as the United States mattered to cotton, cotton mattered to the United States. Cotton reinvigorated slavery, established the young nation's place in the global economy, and eventually helped create the political and economic conflicts that resulted in civil war. "
Greg Grandin
Place
Create
War
" 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
" 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
" Defenders of Wilson are correct to beg for context when considering his legacy. But it is they who ignore the context: the role Wilson played in using war, including Haiti's racist counterinsurgency, to nationalize white supremacy, militarism, and Christian evangelism. "
Greg Grandin
Legacy
War
White
" 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
" Haiti and the Dominican Republic don't just share an island, Hispaniola, but a history, one that includes all the signal events that went into creating the modern world: Columbus, conquest, genocide, slavery, imperial war, revolution, and U.S. counterinsurgencies and military occupations. "
Greg Grandin
War
Columbus
Revolution
" 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
" In the early 1800s, both Spain and Portugal disseminated the smallpox vaccine throughout the Americas via the 'arm to arm of the blacks,' that is, enslaved Africans and African-Americans, often children, who were being moved along slave routes as cargo from one city to another to be sold. "
Greg Grandin
Spain
Slave
Early
" In particular, Kissinger was a key player during a transformative period of the imperial presidency, in the 1960s and '70s, when the Vietnam War undermined the traditional foundations on which it had stood since the early years of the Cold War: elite planning, bipartisan consensus, and public support. "
Greg Grandin
Planning
Key
Support
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Since 2010, Hillary Clinton's State Department, with the aid of Brazil, France, and Canada and in league with the Clinton Foundation and other 'philanthropists,' put into place something like a never-ending coup, an everlasting intervention. "
Greg Grandin
Canada
Like
Place
" 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
" Is Donald Trump a fascist? It's an interesting question that has generated insightful commentary over the past few months, with the best answers situating Trumpian illiberalism within America's long history of racial oppression, slavery, Jim Crow apartheid, and the ongoing backlash to the loss of white privilege. "
Greg Grandin
Best
Past
Loss
" Most critical histories of U.S. involvement in Iran rightly began with the joint British-U.S. coup against democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, which installed Pahlavi on the Peacock Throne. But it was Kissinger who, in 1972, greatly deepened the relationship between Washington and Tehran. "
Greg Grandin
Washington
Involvement
Relationship
" If all Henry Kissinger contributed to the Middle East were a regional arms race, petrodollar addiction, Iranian radicalization, and the Tehran-Riyadh conflict, it would be bad enough. His legacy, however, is far worse than that: He has to answer for his role in the rise of political Islam. "
Greg Grandin
Rise
Race
Political
" The idea that Hillary Clinton wants to do to Central America what her husband did to Colombia is troubling. "
Greg Grandin
Husband
Her
America
" In Texas, the rangers were established on an ad hoc basis in the 1820s to protect the settlers making inroads into Spanish borderlands. Soon, Mexicans and Mexican Americans replaced Native Americans as the prime target of ranger repression. "
Greg Grandin
Native Americans
Texas
Mexican
" 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