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What War Are We Buying With Another $58 Billion for the Military? |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=20877"><span class="small">William Boardman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Thursday, 16 March 2017 08:47 |
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Boardman writes: "The Middle East is a big place, so straightening 'it' out could be even more complicated than health care. And the President hasn't proposed a strategic plan that we know of, so how he plans to go about straightening it out is a little murky."
US Navy fighter jets flying side-by-side with Chilean Air Force fighter jets next to the USS George Washington aircraft carrier. (photo: US Navy)
What War Are We Buying With Another $58 Billion for the Military?
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
16 March 17
We have to start winning wars again. I have to say, when I was young, in high school and college, everybody used to say we never lost a war. We never lost a war, remember?...
America never lost. And now we never win a war. We never win. And don’t fight to win. We don’t fight to win. We’ve either got to win or don’t fight at all.
  on’t fight at all” has a pleasant, fresh ring to it, like any good salesman’s con. The President was about to announce a proposed military budget increase of $58 billion, making the world’s biggest military budget that much bigger. So he probably wasn’t thinking, “Don’t fight at all.” In fact, almost as soon as he said that, he turned to his frustration with the Middle East after 17 years and a cost of $6 trillion. “That’s just unacceptable. And we’re nowhere,” the President said,
Actually, if you think about it, we’re less than nowhere. The Middle East is far worse than it was 16, 17 years ago. There’s not even a contest. So we’ve spent $6 trillion. We have a hornet’s nest. It’s a mess like you’ve never seen before. We’re nowhere. So we’re going to straighten it out.
The Middle East is a big place, so straightening “it” out could be even more complicated than health care. And the President hasn’t proposed a strategic plan that we know of, so how he plans to go about straightening it out is a little murky. Still, we’re already at war there, so that’s a start. We’re at war under a 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF), passed then by a mindless and panicked Congress, and left in place ever since by a feckless Congress (Rep. Barbara Lee the lone exception). With his AUMF in place, with the world’s largest military, and with virtually no American opposition to war in other places, the President pretty much has carte blanche to wreak havoc as he chooses.
Escalation in Syria is well under way, especially bombing raids
As part of Operation Inherent Resolve, more US troops have been deployed in northwestern Syria (how many is unclear, but the total force is about 500). According to US Centcom, their mission is a “reassurance and deterrence [mission] … designed to be a visible symbol to other parties there that Manbij has already been fully liberated” from the Islamic State (which held it from January 2014 to August 2016). Manbij is a city that once had a population of 100,000, located roughly midway between Aleppo and the Turkish border. Military forces nearby in the region include Syrian, Russian, Turkish, and Kurdish troops, as well as elements of the Islamic State and Syrian rebels. The American role, in cooperation with the Russians at least, is to keep others from interfering in Manbij, which was governed for awhile by a mostly local military council. Now the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), a leading force of Syrian Kurds, is trying to establish Manbij as a democratic autonomous administration that would, in effect, be part of a de facto Kurdistan in northern Syria. The Turks are adamantly opposed to Kurdish autonomy and would have attacked Manbij but for the US and Russian forces in their way.
US Weapons of Mass Destruction might get wider use
The US Central Command (based in Tampa, Florida) has recently confirmed what it had previously denied: that the US has used depleted uranium weapons in Syria against the Islamic State. For decades now, the US has been using – and denying that it uses – depleted uranium weapons in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries in the region. Depleted uranium weapons have long been controversial, and their use is arguably a war crime, since the radioactive impact of the weapons does not discriminate between combatants and civilians and leaves radioactively poisoned areas behind for decades. Under international law as well as 18 US Code sec 2332c, depleted uranium weapons are considered weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). Use of depleted uranium weapons arguably violates numerous international treaties, including the Geneva Conventions and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. More than 150 countries have worked to control or ban depleted uranium weapons, an effort always opposed by the US despite the connection between depleted uranium and the poisoning of US troops called Gulf War Syndrome.
Yemen: an undefended target of opportunity for any murderous impulse
The pace of drone strikes by the US on suspected terrorists has increased more than fourfold since Trump took office. At the same time, Trump has abandoned responsibility for ordering drone strikes, leaving it to others down the chain of command to kill unlucky civilians at will. The US carried out more than 30 drone strikes against Yemen in the first days of March alone. According to the US Central Command, the ostensible target was “al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula” and the drone strikes “were conducted in partnership with the government of Yemen.” The “government of Yemen” is essentially a legal fiction that controls a small portion of the country around Aden and is significantly controlled by Saudi Arabia. The US Command characterizes al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula as “a local and regional threat” with manpower in the “low thousands.” US Central Command also says this al-Qaida “has more American blood on its hands” than the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria does, and that it is a “deadly terrorist organization that has proven itself to be very effective in targeting and killing Americans, and they have intent and aspirations to continue doing so,… This is a dangerous group locally, regionally and transnationally, to include against the United States, the West and our allies,” while offering no specific details. Meanwhile Yemen is on the verge of mass starvation and the US continues to support the Saudi-led blockade of the poorest country in the region. That’s one way to “straighten out” the Middle East.
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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Trumpcare vs. Obamacare: Apocalypse Foretold |
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Wednesday, 15 March 2017 13:26 |
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Krugman writes: "The Congressional Budget Office report on Trumpcare is out, and it's devastating: 14 million people losing insurance in the first year, 24 million over time, with premiums soaring for older, lower-income Americans - in many cases, the very people who went strongly for President Trump."
Economist Paul Krugman. (photo: Getty Images)
Trumpcare vs. Obamacare: Apocalypse Foretold
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
15 March 17
 he Congressional Budget Office report on Trumpcare is out, and it’s devastating: 14 million people losing insurance in the first year, 24 million over time, with premiums soaring for older, lower-income Americans — in many cases, the very people who went strongly for President Trump. The C.B.O. thinks it would reduce the deficit, but only marginally, around $30 billion a year in a $19 trillion economy.
Let me offer one assertion and ask two questions.
The assertion is that something like this was to be expected. The C.B.O. came in even worse on coverage than most predicted, but it was obvious that the news would be terrible because that’s what the logic of the situation told us. Obamacare imposes a mandate to induce healthy people to sign up, offers means-tested subsidies to make insurance affordable and expands Medicaid to take care of people with really low incomes. Trumpcare eliminates the mandate, slashes subsidies overall and redirects them to those who don’t need them and sharply cuts Medicaid. Of course that leads to a huge drop in coverage.
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Dear Rep. King: Our Civilization Isn't White and American Babies Aren't Other |
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Wednesday, 15 March 2017 08:54 |
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Cole writes: "Steve King's self-conception as part of a northern European white Christian hegemonic class that deserves its high status because of its achievements is just wrong."
Iowa congressman Steve King. (photo: Justin Hayworth/AP)
Dear Rep. King: Our Civilization Isn't White and American Babies Aren't Other
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment
15 March 17
 ep Steve King of Iowa (whose constituents should be ashamed to show their faces in public went full-on racist again, supporting hate-speech master Geert Wilders in his quixotic quest to reverse globalization and ban Muslims from Europe.
King lauded Wilders’ supposed wisdom and added “we can’t restore our civilization with other people’s babies.”
I’d just like to point out that in 1900 the Netherlands was a tiny European country but a very large empire, and that it mainly amounted to something in world affairs at that time because it ruled a very large number of Muslims in its East Indies (today’s Indonesia). Some 15% of Dutch GDP was from stealing Indonesian petroleum in that era, and it was the cream that, as it accumulated and was invested, allowed nobodies like Geert Wilders to live an opulent lifestyle. That is, Dutch civilization is inextricably interwoven with Muslim civilization, and rather owes a debt to Muslims.
Likewise, in 1900 the US had taken the Philippines, a pillar of its emergence as a Pacific Power, which has a significant Muslim population of 5-8%. Yes, folks. The US went out and gathered up millions of Muslims to rule, and Filipino Americans have shaped our country. Even today, Filipino-Americans are about 23% of the state of Hawaii. (Hi, Bruno Mars!)
King has displayed his ignorance of history many times before. When he was challenged on the all-white Republican Party leadership, he alleged that only white people had contributed to civilization and actually alleged that Africa had not.
Uh, Pharaonic Egypt, which self-described white people like King have expropriated for Europe? Actually, like, in Africa . Not only was the cradle of civilization in Africa, but genetic testing on the Pharaohs appears to show Y chromosome haplotypes typical of today’s Uganda. That is, the Egyptian ruling class appears to have come up the Nile from sub-Saharan Africa. They invented elements of geometry, paper, cursive writing, and other key components of civilization.
A similar argument could be made about the contributions of ancient Mesopotamia, today’s Iraq, under the Sumerians, Akkadians and Babylonians. King’s party doesn’t seem to think Iraqis are white– it almost banned their entry into the US.
At the time that Pharaonic and Mesopotamian civilization was flourishing, Europeans were half-naked savages.
But the bigger point is that American civilization is civic and does not depend on race. There are no “other people’s babies” here. All American babies are our babies. People of all races have contributed to American civilization.
It was Senegalese Muslims, kidnapped and brought for slave labor to the Carolinas, who taught white people how to grow rice.
Michael E. DeBakey, contributor to the development of the artificial heart? Lebanese-American.
You can look up minority engineers and scientists.
Arab-American inventors and scientists are here
The US Patent and Trade Office under the impression that a lot of significant inventions have been the work of Latino Americans.
King’s self-conception as part of a northern European white Christian hegemonic class that deserves its high status because of its achievements is just wrong.
In the United States, under our Constitution, we are all equal under the law, regardless of race or religion. That is our civilization.
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If It Stays in Congress, There Will Never Be a Credible Russia Investigation |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
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Tuesday, 14 March 2017 13:59 |
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Pierce writes: "The investigation into Russian ratfcking in the 2016 presidential election is already falling apart, which is a good thing, because it was already halfway to a worthless bag-job."
Mike Flynn. (photo: Lucas Jackson/Reuters)
If It Stays in Congress, There Will Never Be a Credible Russia Investigation
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
14 March 17
And it's not just because of Devin Nunes.
he investigation into Russian ratfcking in the 2016 presidential election is already falling apart, which is a good thing, because it was already halfway to a worthless bag-job. From the NYT:
Absent from the witness list was Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump's first national security adviser, who resigned after it was revealed that he had misled Vice President Mike Pence and other White House officials about his conversations with the Russian ambassador. Though Mr. Nunes emphasized it was only an early list, he referred to Mr. Flynn as "a tangent," portraying him as more of a victim of the intelligence leaks Mr. Nunes is seeking to investigate than a target of the inquiry. "From everything that I can see, his conversations with the Russian ambassador, he was doing this country a favor, and he should be thanked for it," Mr. Nunes said.
Say what? If you thank him, make sure to do it in Turkish. From the Times:
Mr. Nunes may need to tread cautiously to avoid the perception of crossing the line from impartial moderator to advocate. He has said the issue of whether Trump Tower was under surveillance during the campaign was well within the scope of the inquiry, and has denied that he added it after the president demanded that Congress investigate.
Nunes, who is rising in prominence on the list of the administration's congressional toadies, worked on the transition team for El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago, so it's hard to imagine why anyone would question his good faith as an independent investigator. Beyond that, however, if this whole thing stays in the Congress, there never will be a credible investigation.
Out in the country, most of the people the administration depends on already believe that Barack Obama wiretapped their hero. Kellyanne Conway on Monday opined that Obama may have done it through the microwaves in Trump Tower. Of course, that's just crazy, but I'm not the audience for it. Trump first established his personal credibility with his voters by pushing birtherism. The rest of the country—and especially the Democratic Party—made a capital mistake in thinking that his credibility (and the political utility of birtherism) died simply because it had no connection to reality.
A great deal depends on how long they persist in that fundamental error.
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ednesday was a whirlwind day for lawmakers investigating Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
