<a href="http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-vppet202631333mar20.story?coll=ny%2Dviewpoints%2Dheadlines">America Sells Itself Out for Stability</a> on the <a href="http://www.newsday.com/">New York Newsday</a> is a fantastic piece by Ralph Peters, <iq>a retired Army officer and the author of two books on strategy</iq>. He very succintly and calmly points out that quite a lot of the U.S. problems in the world today stem directly from a foreign policy that supports ideals exactly opposite to those the U.S. espouses. While the premise is not new, his approach is much more factual and far less hyperbolic. He arrives at the modern-day reality that the U.S. seems not to have noticed that enforcing "stability" in the rest of the world, often to the detriment of the people in other countries, is tantamount to imperialism. The fact that the U.S. has military bases in over 100 other countries coupled with the strong support of U.S. multinational corporations in other countries also lends credence to the accusation of a de facto colonialism imposed by the U.S. Peters writes that the moral and ethical slide is a recent phenomenon, beginning after World War II: <bq>For generations, the United States truly did stand for something noble and unprecedented in human history. That vision drew so many to our shores - and it still draws the most ambitious and determined immigrants in the world. But when those Cold War leftists, with their pinups of Josef Stalin and Che Guevara, accused us of oppressing the wretched of the earth, they were at least partly right. After 1945, our attention to moral details lessened, and we bedded down with evil. In the last decade, we hit bottom.</bq> The <a href="http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-vppet202631333mar20.story?coll=ny%2Dviewpoints%2Dheadlines">entire article</a> is a must-read. An article by Tariq Ali on <a href="http://www.zmag.org">ZMag</a>, called <a href="http://www.zmag.org/content/ForeignPolicy/ali_new_empire_loyalists.cfm" title="The New Empire Loyalists: Former Leftists Turned US military Cheerleaders are Helping Snuff Out Its Traditions of Dissent">The New Empire Loyalists...</a>, which discusses the dissolution of dissent in the U.S. The reason given is that the U.S. is seen as the only hope of a world gone mad: <bq>What unites the new empire loyalists is an underlying belief that, despite certain flaws, the military and economic power of the US represents the only emancipatory project and, for that reason, has to be supported against all those who challenge its power.</bq> What this attitude overlooks is while the admittedly poor solution is being put into place, there is no search for a better one. Simply because there is agreement that there is a problem, does not in any way oblige all parties to agree to every proposed solution. Often it seems that what is put forth as a solution does not in fact solve any problems at all; instead it provides advantage to the one proposing the solution. In many of the poorer countries being helped by the IMF, <iq>Neo-liberal economics ... has reduced countries in every continent to penury and brought their populations to the edge of despair.</iq>. These are solutions that only help those implementing them. The lives of the people that must endure them are often considered "collateral damage".