WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME
SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN:
Speaks out on the “Bloated Pentagon budget,” “Global Corporate Corruption”
Senator Warren made two recent statements on foreign and military policy that are a mixed bag from the point of view of reality, but extremely progressive by Congressional (and potential presidential candidate) standards. The longer speech at American University (full video here) was riddled with official pieties about benign US interventionism (in the past), Chinese and Russian nefarious challenges to the US and the need to maintain US “strength” around the world. On the other hand, the Senator repeatedly called for “a foreign policy that worked for all Americans, not just the elites,” for ending “the stranglehold of military contractors” on US policy and reducing “the bloated Pentagon budget “(this was even more emphatically state in Warren’s statement during a Senate hearing yesterday (click on the picture below to watch the 7-minute video). She also advocated “more diplomacy,” arms control, and firmly opposed the development of new nuclear weapons (begun under Pres. Obama) and a US policy of “first use.”
7-minute VIDEO: Warren challenges military spending in the Senate
Democrats going nuclear to rein in Trump's arms buildup
Democrats preparing to take over the House are aiming to roll back what they see as President Donald Trump's overly aggressive nuclear strategy. Their goals include eliminating money for Trump’s planned expansion of the U.S. atomic arsenal, including a new long-range ballistic missile and development of a smaller, battlefield nuclear bomb that critics say is more likely than a traditional nuke to be used in combat. They also want to stymie the administration's efforts to unravel arms control pacts with Russia. And they even aim to dilute Trump's sole authority to order the use of nuclear arms, following the president’s threats to unleash “fire and fury” on North Korea and other loose talk about doomsday weapons. More
The Pentagon’s Massive Accounting Fraud Exposed
On November 15, Ernst & Young and other private firms that were hired to audit the Pentagon announced that they could not complete the job. Congress had ordered an independent audit of the Department of Defense, the government’s largest single cost center—the Pentagon receives two of every three federal tax dollars collected—after the Pentagon failed for decades to audit itself. The firms concluded, however, that the DoD’s financial records were riddled with so many bookkeeping deficiencies, irregularities, and errors that a reliable audit was simply impossible. Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan tried to put the best face on things, telling reporters, “We failed the audit, but we never expected to pass it.” Shanahan suggested that the DoD should get credit for attempting an audit, saying, “It was an audit on a $2.7 trillion organization, so the fact that we did the audit is substantial.” The truth, though, is that the DoD was dragged kicking and screaming to this audit by bipartisan frustration in Congress, and the result, had this been a major corporation, likely would have been a crashed stock. More
GM layoffs show why there’s a crisis of confidence in American capitalism
“GM layoffs are another victory for capital over labor,” Chris Ingraham notes on Wonkblog: “As this chart from the St. Louis Federal Reserve shows, corporate profits and labor income — the total wages and salaries paid to American workers — tracked pretty closely for most of the latter half of the 20th century: In percentage terms, the two rose roughly in tandem from 1947 until about 2003 … But starting in 2003, profits take off, leaving wages in the dust… A Gallup poll this summer found that more Democrats now have a positive view of socialism than capitalism by a margin of 57 percent to 47 percent. It didn’t used to be that way. The number of Democrats viewing “capitalism” as a good thing has dipped nine points in just the past two years. Among all Americans, 56 percent saw capitalism positively in the Gallup survey versus 37 percent who said the same of socialism. More
U.S. life expectancy declines again, a dismal trend not seen since World War I
The data continued the longest sustained decline in expected life span at birth in a century, an appalling performance not seen in the United States since 1915 through 1918. That four-year period included World War I and a flu pandemic that killed 675,000 people in the United States and perhaps 50 million worldwide. Public health and demographic experts reacted with alarm to the release of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s annual statistics, which are considered a reliable barometer of a society’s health. In most developed nations, life expectancy has marched steadily upward for decades. “I think this is a very dismal picture of health in the United States,” said Joshua M. Sharfstein, vice dean for public health practice and community engagement at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “Life expectancy is improving in many places in the world. It shouldn’t be declining in the United States.” More
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NEW WARS / OLD WARS – What Could Possibly Go Wrong
Senate Vote takes Major Step to End US Support for Saudi-Led War in Yemen
In response to the Senate voting 63-37 in favor of allowing floor debate on S.J.Res. 54, legislation introduced by Senators Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Mike Lee (R-UT) and Chris Murphy (D-CT) to end U.S. support for the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen, Paul Kawika Martin, Senior Director for Policy and Political Affairs at Peace Action, released the following statement: “This is a dramatic shift from last March, when only five Republican senators voted to advance the Sanders resolution. We now have a bipartisan majority in the Senate intent on doing something about Saudi Arabia’s brutal conduct from Yemen to Istanbul. This vote puts more pressure on the administration to end U.S. support for the war, and more pressure on Saudi Arabia to negotiate a political solution, and that pressure could help save countless lives in Yemen. More
Majority of Americans want to cut arms sales to Saudi Arabia over Yemen war
A majority of Americans oppose the US government’s support for the ongoing Saudi-led war in Yemen, a survey has shown. Some 58 per cent of respondents wanted lawmakers to curtail or halt the supply of arms for a conflict considered the world’s worst ongoing humanitarian disaster. Only 13 per cent of Americans said they want lawmakers to maintain or increase arms sales to the US allies in the conflict – Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. But the survey, conducted by YouGov and commissioned by the International Rescue Committee relief group, also showed striking nationwide ignorance about the conflict. The three-year conflict in Yemen has been largely ignored by broadcast media in favour of near 24-hour coverage of President Donald Trump’s foibles. More
ANDREW BACEVICH: Our Man in Riyadh
What does President Trump’s recent nomination of retired Army General John Abizaid to become the next U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia signify? …Abizaid’s appointment to this post (vacant since Donald Trump became president) could mean quite a lot. It offers an ideal opportunity to take stock of the “Long War.” Now that phrase “Long War” is one that presidents, national security advisors, defense secretaries, and their minions assiduously avoid. Yet, in military circles, it long ago superseded the Global War on Terrorism as an umbrella term describing what U.S. forces have been doing across the Greater Middle East all these many years… As it happens, General Abizaid himself coined it back in 2004 when he was still an active duty four-star and head of U.S. Central Command, the regional headquarters principally charged with waging that conflict. In other words, just a year after the U.S. invaded Iraq and President George W. Bush posed under a White House-produced “Mission Accomplished” banner, with administration officials and their neoconservative boosters looking forward to many more “Iraqi Freedom”-style victories to come, the senior officer presiding over that war went on record to indicate that victory wasn’t going to happen anytime soon… The Long War has now lasted twice as long as the average length of marriages in the United States, with no end in sight. Whether intuitively or after careful study, General Abizaid had divined something important indeed. More
Is the Trump Administration Pivoting the Fight in Syria Toward a War with Iran?
The American intervention in Syria, now in its fourth year -- [actually its 7th year if you begin with the US arming of Syrian “rebels”] -- began as a small Special Forces mission of the kind the Pentagon is currently running in a dozen countries, …the number of military personnel in-country has steadily grown, first to two hundred and fifty, then to five hundred, then to two thousand, and there’s reason to believe the true figure is now twice that. (During a press briefing in October, 2017, an Army general let slip that the number was four thousand.)… This past March, Trump announced that American personnel would be withdrawing from Syria “very soon.” In April, following the resignation and felony guilty plea of his first national-security adviser,Michael Flynn, and the firing of his replacement, H. R. McMaster, the office fell to John R. Bolton, an unrepentant architect of the Iraq War. Earlier in the year, Bolton had said on Fox News, “Our goal should be regime change in Iran.” A month after Bolton joined the White House, the Trump Administration reneged on the Iran nuclear deal and reimposed sanctions meant to strangle the Iranian economy. More
THE CASE FOR LEAVING SYRIA
It’s true that the predominantly Sunni Arab opposition— virtually indistinguishable from a broad range of Sunni Islamist terrorist groups—to Assad clings to life inside Syria’s Idlib enclave , but its days are numbered. Thanks to an agreement reached between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Sunni jihadist forces will eventually leave the demilitarized zone, patrolled by Russian and Turkish forces… Unfortunately, President Donald Trump’s Special Envoy to Syria , Ambassador Jim Jeffrey, is already recasting the American military mission in Northeast Syria as both ensuring the enduring defeat of ISIS and as “ contesting more actively Iran’s activities particularly in Iraq, Syria and Yemen .” Jeffrey adds, “ This means we are not in a hurry to pull out .” … The United States has no strategic interest in Syria that justifies a war with Russia, Iran or Turkey. A war with any of these states would destroy the prosperity that President Trump has worked tirelessly to create. Instead, it makes sense to withdraw U.S. forces. An American military withdrawal from Syria would eliminate the fragile strategic rationale for Russian-Turkish cooperation in Syria and severely obviate the few shared interests that tie Iran to Russia . More
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