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In nursing, the Filipinos were the second movers. In rock, it was the Liverpudlians. In industry, it was Sony and the other Japanese firms that grew up around the U.S. military.
It is telling that the countries hosting the most U.S. peacetime bases—such as Britain, Japan, West Germany, and South Korea—numbered among the United States’ most formidable competitors.
He excoriated the United States for its racism, economic inequality, and lack of business acumen.
“Why do they hate us?” was the constant question. Yet Bin Laden’s motives were neither unknowable nor obscure. September 11 was, in large part, retaliation against the United States for its empire of bases.
Even Okinawa, a bastion of U.S. power in Asia, looked shaky. When three marines raped a twelve-year-old girl in 1995, it provoked another long wave of protest.
“extraordinary rendition,” the CIA used a secret air fleet to fly more than a hundred and possibly thousands of detainees to foreign countries, particularly Egypt, Morocco, Syria, Uzbekistan, and Jordan. “They are outsourcing torture because they know it is illegal”
“black sites.” In these, detainees were held in CIA custody, but covertly and on foreign soil, where they could be dealt with more harshly.
a legal environment where foreign workers could toil for paltry wages with little oversight to stitch garments labeled MADE IN THE USA.
empire is still around, and places with anomalous legal statuses can be extremely useful.
McCain and Palin weren’t much impeded by their colonial entanglements. They were white, and they projected an image of being “American”—McCain
The same immunity was not enjoyed by their opponent in the 2008 election, Barack Obama. On paper, Obama had fewer colonial liabilities than his opponents.
Obama was admittedly unusual for the mainland. But he certainly wasn’t unusual for Hawai‘i, whose current congressional delegation includes a Samoan Hindu and a Japan-born Buddhist, but not a single WASP.
Puerto Rico, taking out the island’s power grid, water system, and communications. It also exposed the parlous state of affairs in the United States’ largest remaining colony.
percent of the island’s remaining inhabitants were on Medicare or Medicaid. Because the federal government funds those programs less generously in Puerto Rico than on the mainland,
the territories today, in Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Northern Marianas. They’re subject to the whims of Congress and the president, but they can’t vote for either.
in all, there are probably thirty overseas bases owned by non-U.S. countries. The United States, by contrast, has roughly eight hundred, plus agreements granting it access to still other foreign sites. Dozens of countries host U.S. bases.
Empires are the bullies that bat weaker nations around. It’s not hard to argue that the United States is imperialist in that sense.
