A View From The Local Left (Boston)- WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

How will it survive on $750 billion?

OUR POOR, STRUGGLING MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

The prospect of a cut to the military elicited a storm of condemnation across the media landscape. The National Review wrote that “cutting the resources available to the Pentagon is a bad idea,” noting that, “for decades, America has short-changed defense” meaning “America’s ability to defend its allies, its partners, and its own vital interests is increasingly in doubt.” In a Wall Street Journal article headlined “Don’t Cut Military Spending Mr. President,” Senate and House Armed Services committee chairs James Inhofe and Mac Thornberry claimed the military is in “crisis” after “inadequate budgets for nearly a decade,” and that “any cut in the Defense budget would be a senseless step backward.” More centrist outlets concurred. Forbes Magazine began its article with the words, “The security and well-being of the United States are at greater risk than at any time in decades,” recommending a “sensible and consistent increase” to the budget. Bloombergrecommended a consistent increase in military spending of 3 percent above inflation for five to 10 years, while Reuters noted the increased “risk” of a lower military budget.   More

STOP WASTING MONEY ON THE PENTAGON

Nearly 30 years ago, Congress asked the Pentagon to complete an audit that could show military leaders knew where our money was going. This year, the Pentagon finally delivered a result: After waiting nearly 30 years, the Pentagon failed its first-ever audit. Even more disturbing is that Pentagon leaders aren’t the least bit disturbed about this. Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan, the number two official at the Pentagon, told reporters, “We failed the audit, but we never expected to pass it.”  There’s every reason for Pentagon leaders from Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis on down to be ashamed of this result.  Every other major government agency has completed and passed an audit during that time, often many times. If the Pentagon doesn’t know where its money is going, how can they assure us it’s being put to good use? With a Pentagon budget of $647 billion this year — not even counting war costs — the potential for waste and fraud is sky-high…  If we keep going this way, we’re going to waste precious resources that could be used any number of other ways: creating jobs, fighting the opioid epidemic, building a health care system that works for all of us, fixing our crumbling roads and bridges, etc.

Until they can show they know what they’re doing, the Pentagon should be cut off from further increases so we can focus resources elsewhere.     More

The Man from Boeing Now Running the Pentagon

CNN noted in a headline reviewing the president’s decision that: “Trump’s acting secretary of defense will step into the role with no foreign policy, military experience.”  So what experience does Shanahan have? He is, literally and figuratively, the embodiment of the military-industrial complex about which former President Dwight Eisenhower warned Americans at the close of his presidency in 1961....  [Under Mattis] Shanahan was tapped to oversee defense policy, the budget and, um, acquisition teams at the Pentagon. “Shanahan, 54, has no military or political experience,” noted the Seattle Times when the selection was announced in March (of 2017). “He is, however, familiar with defense procurement from the business side.”  …Shanahan worked for many years as the vice president and general manager of Boeing Missile Defense Systems, and before that he was general manager for Rotorcraft Systems and U.S. Army Aviation programs. In other words, if there was a living, breathing embodiment of the military-industrial complex, it was Patrick Shanahan, a 31-year Boeing employee, member of the Boeing Executive Council and now the guy who will be helping the Pentagon with procurement issues.   More

Trump Voters Would Be Hit Hardest by GOP’s Food Stamp Work Rules

A House Republican plan to set stricter work rules for food stamp recipients would disproportionately affect low-income residents in states that supported Donald Trump for president and may imperil passage of farm legislation.  House Agriculture Committee Chairman Michael Conaway, a Texas Republican, said after a White House meeting with Trump on Thursday that the president "is keen on work requirements being a part" of the bill and offered to help pass a plan.  "The president wants to deliver a farm bill this year," White House legislative affairs director Marc Short said Thursday. "He also has a strong belief in the work requirements."   The plan so far doesn’t have enough Republican votes to pass the House, according to Mark Meadows, a North Carolina Republican who is chairman of the conservative Freedom Caucus, which wants even stricter work requirements. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy said the chamber plans to consider the legislation next week.   More

Where Government Is a Dirty Word, but Its Checks Pay the Bills

Harlan County is the nation’s fifth most dependent on federal programs, according to the government’s Bureau of Economic Analysis. In 2016 some 54 percent of the income of the county’s roughly 26,000 residents came from programs like Social Security and Medicaid, food stamps — formally known as SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — and the earned-income tax credit. That is up from 28 percent in 1990.  Surrounding counties are similarly dependent. Part of a coal-mining region in long, inexorable decline, this pocket of the nation exemplifies a political paradox: Why are so many American voters hostile to the government hand that feeds them?  “The SNAP card works every month; the kids eat two meals a day, but people don’t think about where the food comes from and go vote for Republicans,” said Larry King, a Kentucky farmer who is chairman of the Democratic Party in McCreary County, whose residents get 55 percent of their income from federal transfers.   More

SOME ARTICLES LOOKING AT CLASS AND RACE:

How Come So Many Bernie Bros Are Women and People of Color?

White Identity Politics Aren’t Going Anywhere

The Yellow Vests and the Left

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NEW WARS / OLD WARS – What Could Possibly Go Wrong

A YEAR OF FOREVER WAR IN REVIEW: The World According to the "Adults in the Room"

As Donald Trump wraps up his second year in the Oval Office, despite sudden moves in Syria and Afghanistan, the United States remains entrenched in a set of military interventions across significant parts of the world. Worse yet, what those adults guided the president toward was yet more bombing, the establishment of yet more bases, and the funding of yet more oversized Pentagon budgets. And here was the truly odd thing: every time The Donald tweeted negatively about any of those wars or uttered an offhand remark in opposition to the warfare state or the Pentagon budget, that triumvirate of generals and good old Rex went to work steering him back onto the well-worn track of Bush-Obama-style forever wars… Why those nearly two years of bowing to the long-stale foreign policy thinking that had infused the Bush-Obama years, the very thing he had been theoretically running against?  Well, pin it on those adults in the room, especially the three generals.    More

BRING THE TROOPS HOME, BUT ALSO STOP THE BOMBING

As our nation debates the merits of President Trump’s call for withdrawing U.S. troops from Syria and Afghanistan, absent from the debate is the more pernicious aspect of U.S. military involvement overseas: its air wars. Trump’s announcement and General Mattis’ resignation should unleash a national discussion about U.S. involvement in overseas conflicts, but no evaluation can be meaningful without a clear understanding of the violence that U.S. air wars have unleashed on the rest of the world for the past 17 years. By our calculations, in this “war on terror,” the U.S. and its allies have dropped a staggering 291,880 bombs and missiles on other countries—and that is just a minimum number of confirmed strikes.   More

Of course, it should be “Left” and “Right”. . .

Trump Unites Left and Right Against Troop Withdrawal Plans, but Puts Off Debate on War Aims

President Trump managed to do something remarkable with his abrupt order last week to withdraw all American troops from Syria and half from Afghanistan: unite the left and right against a plan to extract the United States from two long, costly and increasingly futile conflicts.

So chaotic was Mr. Trump’s decision-making process; so transparent his appeal to his political base; and so lacking in a cogent explanation to allies or the public that the president’s move short-circuited what many say is a much-needed national debate about the future of America’s wars… “It’s been getting increasingly harder to explain to European publics why we need to stay there,” said Tomas Valasek, a former NATO ambassador from Slovakia who is the director of Carnegie Europe.   More

Trump Critics of Syria Withdrawal Fueled Rise of ISIS

How ISIS overran large swaths of territory in northeastern Syria and established its de facto capital Raqqa is scarcely understood, let alone discussed by Western media. That is partly because the real story is so inconvenient to the established narrative of the Syrian conflict, which blames Assad for every atrocity that has ever occurred in his country, and for some horrors that may not have ever taken place. Echoing the Bush administration’s discredited attempts to link Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda, some neoconservative pundits hatched a conspiracy theorythat accused Assad of covertly orchestrating the rise of ISIS in order to curry support from the West. But the documented evidence firmly established the success of ISIS as a byproduct of the semi-covert American program to arm Assad’s supposedly moderate opposition.  More

Of course, the Israel Lobby is also a key component of the Washington War Party. . .

Pro-Israel groups turn their backs on Trump for the first time over Syria withdrawal

U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw all the American forces from Syria has, for the first time since he entered the White House, led him to face strong criticism from leading pro-Israel groups in Washington. The shift comes after two years in which these same groups mostly endorsed his administration’s Middle East policies, with some even claiming that his support for Israel was important enough to justify ignoring aspects of his presidency deemed less than palatable by many in the American Jewish community…  AIPAC took to Twitter to retweet a number of senators – both Democrats and Republicans – who severely criticized Trump’s decision on Syria. One tweet, by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, described the withdrawal as a “huge mistake.” Another by Democratic Senator Jeane Shaheen called the decision “ill-informed and hasty,” and warned that it will “breathe new life into ISIS and other terrorist groups.”   It was the first time that AIPAC even tacitly endorsed such strong-worded criticism against Trump since he became president in January 2017.   More