WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

 

KINZER: Frustrating the war lobby

By trying to block a $1.15 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia, a bipartisan group of US senators is challenging one of the key forces that shape American foreign policy: the arms industry. Their campaign shines a light on the role that this industry plays in whipping up fears of danger in the world. How do Americans know that Saudi Arabia is a peace-loving country dedicated to fighting terrorism? The same way we know that Russia is a snarling enemy on a rampage of conquest: The arms industry tells us so… Not surprisingly, the arms industry has mobilized its considerable power on Capitol Hill to block this Senate resolution. “We are fighting General Dynamics,” one supporter of the resolution said last week. A vote could come soon. Blocking this arms sale would be a rebellion against one of Washington’s richest lobbies. That would send welcome chills through the corridors of power in the Pentagon, the war industry, and Saudi Arabia.  More

 

America Has Spent Nearly $5 Trillion on Wars Since 9/11

Since the September 11 attacks, the United States has spent $3.6 trillion on wars. When you add in the amount of war funding that the departments of State, Defense, and Homeland Security have requested for next year — and then the estimated costs of our present commitments to veterans — the overall price tag comes to $4.79 trillion, according to a new report by Brown University’s Watson Institute. For $4.79 trillion we could forgive all outstanding student-loan debt in the United States, provide universal preschool to all American children, buy ourselves a high-speed rail system — and still have a couple trillion left over for a rainy day.

 

Obama’s Dilemma: Justice for 9-11 Families or Saudi Arabia?

It was 9-11 which initially gave the Bush-Cheney Administration and a subservient Congress the political cover to initiate a bombing campaign against the utterly defenseless, poverty stricken country of Afghanistan for ‘harboring terrorists’ before going on to initiate a full scale ‘shock and awe’ military invasion of Iraq which had nothing to do with 9-11 in 2003.  The fact that fifteen of the nineteen 9-11 hijackers were Saudi nationals was of no apparent consequence… JASTA [the Justice Against State Terrorism Act ] which amends the Sovereign Immunity Act of 1976 will allow US Courts to hear cases against a foreign state if injuries or harm have occurred as a result of terrorism.    Thanks to the Congress for doing their job, who rarely act in the best interests of the American people, for stepping up on this vote – with unanimous aapprovals by the Senate in May and the House of Representatives on September 12… It should be disturbing that the President who has a history of acting like a Globalist when the chips are down, would so fervently obstruct release of the pages for as long as he did and so it comes as no surprise that he threatens a veto.   More

 

Senators seek to block $1.15 billion U.S. arms sale to Saudi Arabia

Four U.S. senators introduced a joint resolution on Thursday seeking to block the U.S. sale of $1.15 billion of Abrams tanks and other military equipment to Saudi Arabia, citing issues including the conflict in Yemen. The measure was introduced by Republican Senators Rand Paul and Mike Lee and Democrats Chris Murphy and Al Franken, the latest indication of strong disapproval of the deal among some U.S. lawmakers. "Selling $1.15 billion in tanks, guns, ammunition, and more to a country with a poor human rights record embroiled in a bitter war is a recipe for disaster and an escalation of an ongoing arms race in the region," Paul said in a statement. In August, 64 members of the House of Representatives signed a letter urging President Barack Obama to delay the sale.  More

 

Email your senators and ask them to support this crucial legislation!

 

United States Announces $38 Billion Israel Military Aid Package

The agreement, which the two countries have been negotiating since November 2015, the United States will provide Israel with $38 billion in military aid over 10 years, $5 billion of them to be dedicated to the development of missile defense systems… The old military aid agreement, which ends at the end of 2018, totaled $30 billion over a decade or an average of $3 billion annually. That being said, the actual military aid the U.S. transferred to Israel was greater due additional aid approved by Congress following requests by Israel. Over the last few years Congress approved an additional $500 million annually to be added to the original base sum, which made the total amount of military aid transferred to Israel annually approximately $3.5 billion… The new military aid deal is expected to total about $38 billion over a decade, or an average of $3.8 billion per year. This amounts to the largest increase ever in U.S. aid to Israel.  More

 

What do Americans think about it?

Like on all issues facing the United States, the American public is split along partisan lines. Among Democrats and Independents, a majority (57 percent and 59 percent respectively) say it’s too much or way too much, while only 5 percent and 17 percent respectively say it’s too little or way too little. Republicans, on the other hand, were split evenly (40 percent each) in saying the aid is too much/way too much, or too little/way too little.   More

 

More Military Aid for Israel? NO THANKS!

Israel already enjoys a decisive military advantage over any combination of its neighbors and does not need more military aid from the US. We should also oppose military aid for Egypt and Jordan, countries that need to use funding for development not new weapons.  And we are against the billions of dollars in arms sales to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf petro-monarchies which are making war on Yemen and intervening to fuel the violence in Syria.   Increasing military aid to Israel now that it is consolidating its control over the occupied Palestinian West Bank — relentlessly expanding settlements and conducting a record number of Palestinian house demolitions – sends precisely the wrong message.  There are many better uses for scarce taxpayer dollars.  $38 billion could do much to address issues of poverty at home and among needy countries abroad. 

Tell your Members of Congress:  This is no time to increase aid to Israel!

 

'President Donald Trump'?: Latest Polls Indicate Clinton Could Actually Lose

Two new polls released on Thursday highlight a disturbing reality: In a race between two unpopular candidates, an excited base could mean everything. And in the case of the current presidential contest—a race that observers say is "hers to lose"—the failure of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton to inspire voters could prove her ultimate downfall… According to the LA Times, the biggest reason for the bump "appears to be an increase in the likelihood of Trump supporters who say they plan to vote, combined with a drop among Clinton supporters on that question… If Clinton loses this election, it will not be because Americans are dumb, racist misogynists who would cut off their noses to spite their faces in refusing to elect a sane woman over an insane man. It will not be because too many Americans "selfishly" voted for a third party or didn't vote at all. It will be because Clinton refused to compromise her allegiance to Wall Street and the morally bankrupt center-right establishment positions of her party and chose not to win over voters.   More

 

WHOSE FINGER? ON WHAT BUTTON?

Donald Trump’s lack of government experience, disdain for concrete policy positions and flippant manner have many questioning whether he can be trusted with this finger on the nuclear button. Trump himself has fed these concerns, as reportedly he asked, three times, during a private high-level briefing on nuclear weapons policy why a president can’t use nukes.  I don’t want Mr. Trump’s finger on the nuclear trigger. Nor do I want Hillary Clinton, Gary Johnson, Jill Stein or anyone else (including the leaders of the eight other nuclear weapons states) to have the power to unilaterally decide the fate of life on our planet by “pushing the nuclear button” … Even a “limited” nuclear war, employing the relatively small arsenals of India and Pakistan in a regional conflagration, could cause global famine on top of the deaths of hundreds of millions of innocent people.  How is it acceptable or legitimate for anyone to have the power to decide whether our civilization continues, or whether other species survive? We shouldn’t trust anyone with this power. Human beings are far too fallible.  More

 

STANDING ROCK PROTESTS: North Dakota vs. Amy Goodman: Journalism is not a crime

Last Thursday, an arrest warrant was issued under the header “North Dakota versus Amy Goodman.” The charge was for criminal trespass. The actual crime? Journalism. We went to the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation to cover the growing opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline. Global attention has become focused on the struggle since Labor Day weekend, after pipeline guards unleashed attack dogs and pepper spray on Native American protesters. On that Saturday, at least six bulldozers were carving up the land along the pipeline route, where archeological and sacred sites had been discovered by the tribe. The Dakota Access Pipeline company obtained the locations of these sites just the day before, in a court filing made by the tribe. Many feel that the company razed the area, destroying the sites, before an injunction could be issued to study them. Scores of people, mostly Native American, raced to the scene, demanding the bulldozers leave. The guards pepper-sprayed, punched and tackled the land defenders. Attack dogs were unleashed, biting at least six people and one horse.

 

Drop the Charges Against Amy Goodman and Other Journalists Covering #NoDAPL

The pipeline has faced strong resistance from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and members of 280 other tribes in the United States and Canada, not to mention countless other groups working in solidarity. The activism has led to a temporary stay on the project, and journalists are needed on the ground now more than ever as the fight continues.

Tell Morton County State's Attorney Allen Koppy to drop the charges against Goodman and everyone exercising their First Amendment rights to report on this story.

 

Is Trump an Aberration? The Dark History of the "Nation of Immigrants"

Donald Trump may differ from other contemporary politicians in so openly stating his antipathy to immigrants of a certain sort.  (He’s actually urged the opening of the country to more European immigrants.)  Democrats like Barack Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton sound so much less hateful and so much more tolerant.  But the policies Trump is advocating, including that well-publicized wall and mass deportations, are really nothing new.  They are the very policies initiated by Bill Clinton in the 1990s and -- from border militarization to mass deportations -- enthusiastically promoted by Barack Obama.  The president is, in fact, responsible for raising such deportations to levels previously unknown in American history.  And were you to take a long look back into that very history, you would find that Trump’s open appeal to white fears of a future non-white majority, and his support of immigration policies aimed at racial whitening, are really nothing new either… As a start, what could the very idea of a “nation of immigrants” mean in a land that was already home to a large native population when European immigrants started to colonize it?  From its first moments, American history has, in fact, been a history of deportation.   More

 

Trump-inspired felon allegedly torches Ft. Pierce FL Mosque, says "All Islam is radical"

Joseph Michael Schreiber stands accused of having carried out an arson attack against a mosque in Fort Pierce, Florida, about an hour’s drive north from West Palm Beach. The mosque was burned down on the first night of Eid al-Adha or the Festival of Sacrifice, a major Muslim holy day that in part commemorates Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son at God’s command. The fire was set after midnight and it wasn’t until 5 am until the local firefighters could put the blaze out…  Schreiber, 32, … has a history of petty theft and faces 30 years in prison if he is convicted of the arson as a hate crime. He at one point posted to his Facebook page a GOP National Committee picture showing Trump/Spence and the words “The team that will make America great again!”  More

 

We, the Plutocrats vs. We, the People

In the 1970s, Big Business began to refine its ability to act as a class and gang up on Congress.  Even before the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, political action committees deluged politics with dollars. Foundations, corporations, and rich individuals funded think tanks that churned out study after study with results skewed to their ideology and interests. Political strategists made alliances with the religious right, with Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition, to zealously wage a cultural holy war that would camouflage the economic assault on working people and the middle class…  A plethora of studies conclude that America’s political system has already been transformed from a democracy into an oligarchy (the rule of a wealthy elite).  Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, for instance, studied data from 1,800 different policy initiatives launched between 1981 and 2002.  They found that “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”  Whether Republican or Democratic, they concluded, the government more often follows the preferences of major lobbying or business groups than it does those of ordinary citizens.  More

 

99.6% of Paul Ryan’s proposed tax cuts would go to the richest 1% of Americans

The House Republicans' proposal for tax relief could force the government to borrow trillions of dollars to continue operating and might even weaken the economy, according to a new analysis from the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.  By 2025, when the reductions would be fully implemented, 99.6 percent of the tax cuts would benefit the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans, according to the analysis. This group would enjoy the greatest relief as a share of their income (increasing their incomes after taxes by 10.6 percent on average) and in terms of dollars (an average annual savings of $240,000 for each household). Poor and working-class households would gain more modest benefits. The poorest 20 percent of Americans would see an average increase of 0.5 percent in their incomes, or about $120 a year. Households in the upper middle class, those in the 60th percentile through the 95th percentile, would pay more in taxes on average.   More

 

Elizabeth Warren Asks FBI Director to Explain Why DOJ Didn’t Prosecute Banksters

On Thursday, Warren released two highly provocative letters demanding some explanations. One is to DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, requesting a review of how federal law enforcement managed to whiff on all 11 substantive criminal referrals submitted by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC), a panel set up to examine the causes of the 2008 meltdown. The other is to FBI Director James Comey, asking him to release all FBI investigations and deliberations related to those referrals… “Not every individual or company accused of a crime is guilty of that crime and not every DOJ referral results in a conviction,” Warren writes in her letter to the inspector general. “But the DOJ’s failure to obtain any criminal convictions of any of the individuals or corporations named in the FCIC referrals suggests that the department has failed to hold the individuals and companies most responsible for the financial crisis and the Great Recession accountable. This failure requires an explanation.”   More

 

Nationwide Prison Strike Mostly Ignored

On September 9, the 45th anniversary of the Attica prison uprising, inmate laborers at 40 prisons in 24 states across the country went on strike (The Root, 9/10/16). The Nation (9/7/16), Guardian (9/9/16), Wired (9/3/16) and Waging Nonviolence (9/7/16) all reported that this may have been the largest prison strike in history.  But a search of the Nexis news database for the terms “prison” and “strike” showed that most national corporate news outlets thought that the potential of history being made on September 9 needed little to no news coverage… Organizers for the strike have also made connections between prison labor and unions. Wired (9/3/16) reported organizers are “quick to point out that relying on cheap prison labor takes jobs away from those outside—but so far response from outside organizations like labor unions has been tepid.”  More

 

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NEW WARS / OLD WARS – What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

 

Syrian ceasefire holds - but balance lies with armed opposition

The ceasefire in Syria is holding with no one reported killed in fighting anywhere in Syria during the first 15 hours of the truce. Most groups have said they will abide by its terms, though in many cases they are doing so reluctantly… The armed opposition have the biggest motive for seeing the US-Russian agreement fail because it offers them little and envisages a joint US-Russian campaign against Isis and Jabhat al-Nusra, the former affiliate of al-Qaeda that has renamed itself Jabhat Fateh al-Sham. The latter is by far the most effective fighting force of the opposition… It is much too early to predict the outcome of the ceasefire and other sections of the US-Russian agreement, which took ten months to negotiate. Much will also depend on the attitude of regional powers like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey who have armed, financed and given safe passage to the armed opposition in the past. The policy of Turkey, who has stood as a sanctuary and base area for the rebels since 2011, will be crucial and may have changed because Ankara is giving priority to its war against the Kurds rather than overthrowing President Bashar al-Assad.   More

 

SYRIAN PROPAGANDA WAR, Chapter XXXIV. . .

Given the contending internal forces and the rival proxy interventions in Syria, it was inevitable that there would be problems and challenges in implementing the ceasefire negotiated by the US and Russia.  However, nearly all the emphasis in the mainstream media, distorting UN statements, has been on supposed failures of the Syrian government to live up to the stipulations of the agreement – which have not even been published, apparently at the insistence of the US.  The reality is that many rebel factions, including some of those armed by the US, have rejected the ceasefire and declared themselves unwilling to sever ties with the Al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria now calling itself Fateh es-Sham.  Many of the apparent ceasefire violations come from these extremist groups, not from the government side.  And the delays in allowing relief supplies into rebel-held East Aleppo are at least in part due to rebel military and political actions, not just Syrian government reluctance.  Nevertheless, news reports distort the statements of the UN to place blame exclusively on the government side.  And inside supposedly starving East Aleppo, demonstrations by armed rebels and religious extremists have called for opposition to the ceasefire and the refusal of any aid under the agreement.

 

Pentagon grudgingly accepts Syria deal amid deep mistrust of Russia

“There is a trust deficit with the Russians; it is not clear to us what their objectives are,” Gen. Joseph L. Votel, head of the U.S. Central Command, said Wednesday. “They say one thing, and we don’t necessarily see them following up on this.”  That mistrust resides most deeply in Carter, who officials familiar with the Russia negotiations said almost single-handedly delayed Friday’s final agreement with his repeated questions during the conference call. Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, voiced little objection during the principals’ meeting, officials said… Amid reports of internal administration clashes, and after a terse and somewhat grudging initial Pentagon statement saying “we will be watching” the Russians to make sure they comply, the White House said Wednesday that Obama is not looking for “a bunch of people that have the exact same opinion.”   More

 

US Perpetuating Stalemate in Syria

With no end in sight for the war in Syria, the Obama administration continues to approach the conflict in a way that is prolonging the fighting. As it pursues its stated goal of removing the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad from power, the Obama administration is implementing a policy that keeps the Syrian regime and the many different opposition forces in the country locked in a deadly stalemate… In fact, some administration officials insist that a prolonged war works to their advantage. Despite the fact that the years of fighting have only succeeded in producing more death and suffering for the Syrian people, with the war now claiming somewhere between a quarter million and a half million lives, a number of officials contend that indefinite fighting provides the United States with strategic benefits… As the New York Times reported, “Mr. McDonough argued that the status quo in Syria could keep Iran pinned down for years.” In other words, McDonough believed that stalemate would require the Iranian government to expend much of its time and resources in a long-term effort to prop up the Syrian regime.   More

 

 

US troops 'forced to flee Syrian town' after FSA rebel threats

US special forces soldiers were reportedly forced to flee a town in northern Syria after Free Syrian Army fighters threatened to "slaughter" them for their "invasion", according to videos and reports posted on social media on Friday.  About 25 US soldiers were reportedly working with Turkish forces as they advanced on al-Rai, Aleppo, in preparation for an offensive against nearby al-Bab, which is controlled by the Islamic State group.  The FSA is allied with Turkish forces and ostensibly supported by the US as a "moderate" rebel group fighting against the government of Bashar al-Assad…  In the video, fighters from the FSA chant that US forces are "pigs", "crusaders" and "infidels"… A voice on a megaphone can be heard to say there will be a "slaughter". The US forces were reportedly forced to leave the town after the protests.

 

Saudi-Backed Extremism is Fueling Yemeni Outrage

Al-Qaeda and IS are the biggest winners of the war. First, despite reports over the past few months that they were driven out of a number of southern cities, they continue to operate in Aden, Mukalla, Zinjibar, Jaar, and elsewhere—and will remain as long as Yemen lacks a strong government… As the atrocities accumulate and the humanitarian crisis worsens, Yemenis blame the U.S. administration for most of their suffering. Nationwide, huge posters in the streets proclaim, “America kills the Yemeni people,” as Yemenis are sure that the Saudis would not have dared to do all that to them without the consent of the United States… Saudis are increasingly worried—not only by rising hatred, anti-Saudi sentiment, and the growing number of attacks on southern Saudi Arabia, but also by the photos and videos published almost daily showing bare-footed Yemeni fighters defeating the Saudi army and its most advanced weapons.   More

 

It’s Not the Bullets Forcing Saudi’s Yemeni Troops Off the Battlefield. It’s the Pay

Maj. Mortada al-Youssefi has more to worry about as commander of a government military unit in Yemen than the enemy. He has also had to figure out how to stop hundreds of his own men from walking off the battlefield over not being paid.  He is one of the many Yemeni officials who have been struggling to contain the growing anger of pro-government fighters over payment delays from the Saudi-led Arab coalition that has been propping up the divided country’s president, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, and for the past 18 months fighting his main opponents, the Houthi militias that rule much of the country… The coalition had promised each recruit a minimum of about $270 a month — the prewar salary of a university professor with a master’s degree. But once on the front lines, according to several officers, most of the young men found themselves penniless for months on end.   More