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How Private Contractors Disguise the Real Costs of War – Inkstick

Posted by M. C. on January 15, 2022

Beyond wasting billions, private contractors are enablers of war.

https://inkstickmedia.com/how-private-contractors-disguise-the-real-costs-of-war/

Words: William D. Hartung

Pictures: Tapio Haaja

It’s well known that waste, fraud, and abuse were widespread among contractors working for the US government in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the negative consequences of the heavy reliance on contractors to help wage wars go well beyond that to the question of whether and how the United States wages war.  

The issue of waste in America’s endless wars should certainly not be ignored, given its immense costs to taxpayers. As early as 2011 — ten years into the Afghan war — the congressionally-mandated Commission on Wartime Contracting estimated that there had already been between $31 billion and $60 billion in waste related to contracting in the two war zones. There has been no comparable analysis since, but it’s safe to say that there have been tens of billions more in waste — including criminal fraud — in the most recent ten years of war. The Special Investigator General for Afghan Reconstruction has produced scores of reports documenting waste in Afghanistan, even as it has helped convict 160 companies and individuals of fraud and saved taxpayers $3.8 billion in the process.

Hiding the full costs of war, from the number of casualties to the true size of the force, makes unnecessary conflicts more sustainable.

All of this occurred in the context of the record surge in Pentagon spending that accompanied and was publicly justified by what was originally known as the Global War on Terror. As I noted in a joint report of the Center for International Policy and the Brown Costs of War Project published in September 2021, the post-9/11 surge in Pentagon spending resulted in $14 trillion in Pentagon spending from 2001 to 2020, up to half of which went to contractors. Among the report’s findings were that the biggest beneficiaries by far were the top five weapons contractors, namely Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman. These five companies alone have split $2.1 trillion in contracts since 2001. To give some sense of scale, Lockheed Martin alone received $75 billion in Pentagon contracts in 2020, which was more than one and one-half times the combined budgets of the State Department and the Agency for International Development. If the Biden administration is truly to put diplomacy first, this extreme militarization of our budget must be corrected.

So, war and preparations for war are big business, on an almost unimaginable scale.  But the use of contractors has an even more pernicious effect: It makes war more likely and makes it easier to extend wars long beyond the point at which they should have been ended. In short, the use of private contractors enables war.

HOW WE GOT HERE

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Why are Hillary and Trump United in Warning of Bitcoin’s Dangers? Interview with Alex Gladstein

Posted by M. C. on January 2, 2022

People across the political spectrum are recognizing multiple, growing threats: escalating Big Tech censorship of our political speech, the costs and corruption of Endless War, the spying of the US security state on American citizens, the dominance of neoliberal globalist institutions. Many believe that Bitcoin, by undermining the power of fiat money and enabling greater anonymity, can erode if not solve many of these problems. Glenn Greenwald speaks to one of the leading Bitcoin advocates, Alex Gladstein of the Human Rights Foundation, about the challenges and critiques of Bitcoin. (The part of their discussion about the environmental impact of Bitcoin will be published as a separate segment). Original Rumble video: https://rumble.com/vr9i0j-why-are-hil… Read Alex’s article: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/b…

https://secure.hushmail.com/mail/#message/Inbox/1121821?show_images=1

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The System Is Rigged For Endless War: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix – by Caitlin Johnstone – Caitlin’s Newsletter

Posted by M. C. on August 26, 2021

I still can’t find words to describe how insane it is that all the “experts” who spent twenty years being wrong about Afghanistan remain esteemed and wealthy while those who spent that time being right about Afghanistan remain marginalized and regarded as fringe kooks.

https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/the-system-is-rigged-for-endless

Caitlin Johnstone

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I still can’t find words to describe how insane it is that all the “experts” who spent twenty years being wrong about Afghanistan remain esteemed and wealthy while those who spent that time being right about Afghanistan remain marginalized and regarded as fringe kooks.

❖

Nobody gets “credit” for ending the Afghanistan occupation. Everyone involved in keeping it going for twenty years gets blame. That’s it. You don’t get a trophy for not murdering more people.

But it’s not surprising that the Afghanistan war took twenty years to end. If anything, the way the deck is stacked in favor of perpetual war, it’s surprising it happened that fast. 

Military members who support imperialism get promoted. Those who get to the top go on to work for war profiteers. The war profiteers fund think tanks which promote more wars. The mass media report “news” stories citing those think tanks. These stories manufacture consent for more wars.

The war industry reinforces itself. Those who get to the top of the war machine move on to the private sector and spend their time lobbying for more wars which create more eventual Pentagon officials who go on to lobby for more wars. Peace should be easy. This is why it’s not.

It’s horrifying when you realize how much of the behavior of the most powerful military in history is driven by the simple fact that weapons manufacturers don’t make money if those weapons aren’t being used. The most powerful government on earth is stuck in a self-exacerbating feedback loop where the behaviors of the war machine are dictated by the war industry, and people wonder why it’s so hard to end wars. With a cycle this vicious, you can only end the wars by ending the empire.

This is what you get when mass-scale human behavior is driven by profit. As long as war is profitable, you guarantee that more wars will happen. As long as ecocide is profitable, more ecocide will happen. As long as corruption is profitable, more corruption will happen. Meanwhile, peace is not profitable. Demilitarization is not profitable. Nuclear disarmament is not profitable. Getting plastic out of the oceans is not profitable. Leaving trees standing is not profitable. Leaving oil in the ground is not profitable. Freedom is not profitable.

The religion of profit drives all human behavior. And it’s a death cult that will end us all if we don’t end it first.

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Some people seem to think it’s only justifiable to end a military occupation if you can continue to control everything that happens in that nation after your military occupation ends. This is the same as believing it’s never okay to end a military occupation under any circumstances.

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The mainstream media always cheerlead a US president’s foreign policy when it involves mass murder on an unthinkable scale and always criticize a US president when he tries to stop doing this. That’s all you really need to know about the trustworthiness of the mainstream media.

❖Nick is a Fred Hampton Leftist 🥋 @SocialistMMASupport for withdrawing from Afghanistan has dropped 20 points since April Goddamn corporate media propaganda is powerful afAugust 19th 2021306 Retweets2,142 Likes

Corporate media is mind control at mass scale. People who identify as smart, independent thinkers have their minds altered by it every day, and they believe they came to those opinions on their own. Until this problem is addressed, none of our other major problems are going away.

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“How are we supposed to get everyone vaccinated if we don’t make it mandatory?”

Uhh, you don’t? You don’t begin with the assumption that the existence of a nasty coronavirus justifies forcing or coercing everyone to inject themselves with a brand new drug they don’t trust?

I mean, compelling people to take an injection that they are actually afraid of is a huge deal. Can we not at least agree on that? Can we not at least agree that forcing someone to receive an injection they fear would be so serious that you’d better have an amazingly bulletproof argument for doing it? I think so. And I don’t think such an argument exists at this time.

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It’s important to follow and be followed by people you disagree with. You’ll see a lot of crap, but you’ll also keep yourself from falling into a self-validating echo chamber and eventually finding yourself saying something like unvaccinated people should be denied medical care.

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Expecting a communism-oriented country to look like a utopia in the midst of a global imperialist war against communism is like expecting a family to look like a Norman Rockwell painting while they are being chased by wolves. 

Saying communism doesn’t work because nations who try to espouse it don’t look like thriving utopias while they’re being relentlessly assaulted is like saying a new invention doesn’t work because a band of armed thugs kept shooting and stomping on it during the demonstration.

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Poverty is the result of an abusive system and telling the poor to “Get a job” or “Get a better job” has always enabled that abuse. Now that small businesses are being killed by that same abusive system, many who used to enable its abuses by saying this are becoming its victims.

Blaming poverty on the poor in a system that’s literally built on the premise of a permanent underclass has always been insane, but if you’re making good money and lack empathy it’s easy to think they’re just lazy. Only when such people are screwed by the same system do they see.

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‘Why Americans No Longer Trust the Biden Administration’ – Ron Paul’s 2 August Column

Posted by M. C. on August 3, 2021

Also, just over a week ago President Biden told us that if we got the vaccine we would not get Covid. Then a few days later his own CDC released data from a Massachusetts study showing that 78 percent of the people who caught Covid were fully vaccinated. Is it any wonder Americans have lost all faith in “the science” as it pours forth from the politicized “scientists” in charge of US public health institutions?

Just this week, Gen. Frank McKenzie, head of US Central Command (CENTCOM) announced that the US is increasing – not ending – its airstrikes on Afghanistan. The US would be pulling regular military troops out of the country (though likely keeping CIA, Special Forces, and mercenaries on the ground), but it would continue to bomb Afghanistan using “over the horizon” facilities from the Persian Gulf.

https://mailchi.mp/ronpaulinstitute/biden2?e=4e0de347c8

Aug 2 – For libertarians – and even many non-libertarians – it’s not shocking to discover that a US Administration lies and deceives the electorate. For government on all levels, lying to the American people is as American as apple pie. Sometimes the liars are held to account for their deception, but most often they are not.

Watching these early months of the Biden Administration it’s hard not to think that lying, deceiving, and manipulation is rising to a whole new level.

Take “ending the endless war” in Afghanistan. President Biden was cheered for achieving what even Donald Trump could not deliver: an end to the pointless 20 year – and several trillion dollar – war in Afghanistan. By the 20th anniversary of 9/11, we were told, the war would be over.

The only people furious about this decision were the bombmakers at Raytheon and the rest of the military-industrial complex and the laptop warriors in the Beltway think tanks. It turns out, they really didn’t need to worry.

The US is not finally leaving the Afghan people alone to run their country as they see fit. Just this week, Gen. Frank McKenzie, head of US Central Command (CENTCOM) announced that the US is increasing – not ending – its airstrikes on Afghanistan. The US would be pulling regular military troops out of the country (though likely keeping CIA, Special Forces, and mercenaries on the ground), but it would continue to bomb Afghanistan using “over the horizon” facilities from the Persian Gulf.

I’m sure that makes Afghan victims of US bombs feel much better.

Then last week Biden announced an “end of the US combat mission” in Iraq by the end of the year. While we’ve heard that line before, still it seemed like good news. However, as usual, the devil was in the details. While the “mission” was over, the US troops would remain in-country in an “advisory role.” This is despite the fact that the Iraqi Parliament formally requested last year that US troops leave the country.

Biden has bombed anti-ISIS militias supported by the Iraqi government twice this year (so far).

The 900 US troops illegally occupying Syrian territory would also remain in-country, the Biden Administration announced last week.

Also, just over a week ago President Biden told us that if we got the vaccine we would not get Covid. Then a few days later his own CDC released data from a Massachusetts study showing that 78 percent of the people who caught Covid were fully vaccinated. Is it any wonder Americans have lost all faith in “the science” as it pours forth from the politicized “scientists” in charge of US public health institutions?

The US mainstream media has morphed into a de-facto arm of the Biden Administration, however, covering up for all of these lies and word-games and holding precisely no one in government accountable. So much for a free media acting as a check on government power.

In fact, any “enemy” country overseas with such a subservient press would be targeted for a State Department color revolution.

Governments lie. We understand that. It is the nature of politics and power. In the absence of independent institutions to hold government accountable, however, such lies become indistinguishable from facts, and soon “freedom” itself becomes slavery, as Orwell wrote. Let’s hope more of America wakes up soon.

—

Read more great articles on the Ron Paul Institute website.
Subscribe to free updates from the Ron Paul Institute. Copyright © 2021 by Ron Paul Institute. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit and a live link are given.

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The Endless War With Russia | The Z Blog

Posted by M. C. on April 22, 2021

This is why the Germans are not rushing to support the empire on this. Germans have been dealing with the Russians for a very long time. they will be dealing with Russians long after the American empire is gone. Backing the yesterday men of Washington does not look like the best move for the Germans. America’s Varian Disaster may not be a military defeat, but instead be a diplomatic catastrophe. This attack on Russia could be what breaks the NATO coalition.

https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=23520

Without formally announcing it and for reasons no one has bothered to explain, the American empire has declared war on Russia. That is the clear message the Biden administration is sending with the new round of sanctions. They have also kicked out some Russian diplomats. More importantly, the US is telling US banks they cannot have any dealings with companies working on Nord Stream 2, the big natural gas pipeline the Russians are building to supply gas to Europe.

In fairness, the war with Russia started before Biden was installed. You could argue it started back in the Bush years when they convinced the former Soviet republic of Georgia to annex parts of South Ossetia. The Bush people were making noises about adding Georgia to NATO, which did not sit well with Russia. From their perspective, this was a provocative act of aggression. It was correctly seen as an effort to surround Russian with states loyal to the American empire.

Team Obama promised to cool things down with the old enemy. They made a big show of the “big reset” with the Russians. Hillary Clinton did a photo-op with the Russian foreign minister in which they jointly held a big red button labeled “reset” on which each had their hand. Of course, administrations come and go, but the usual suspects that actually run imperial foreign policy never change. By the end of the Obama years, they were claiming the Russians rigged the presidential election.

Under Trump there was a real effort to call off the attacks on the Russians, but the usual suspects responded to that with two impeachment efforts. First there was the coup effort led by the FBI to get Trump removed. The claim was that he worked with the Russians to rig the election. Then there was the effort launched by the usual suspects in the State Department. It is easy to forget but pretty much everyone involved in the first impeachment trial had a connection to Ukraine.

Now of course, Ukraine is at the center of the Biden administration’s efforts to start a shooting war with the Russians. They have encouraged the Ukrainian president to declare his intention to return the Crimea to Ukraine, by force if necessary. Then they offered military guarantees in the event of war with Russia. The Russians have responded by putting their military on high alert. They have moved forces onto the border of Ukraine in preparation for a shooting war.

As if the guarantees to Ukraine are not enough, the Biden people immediately deployed long range nuclear bombers to Norway. They put bombers in Portugal as well and raised the strategic posture at the same time. Russian and NATO air forces are having regular incidents on the border of Russia. These are deliberate provocations. The hope is there is an incident that would warrant escalation. The fact that this happened as soon as Biden took office says it was not the doing of his people.

One obvious conclusion that can be drawn from this now two decade long effort to start a war with Russia is the President no longer controls foreign policy. Obama and Trump tried to normalize relations with Russia, but both were thwarted by the semi-permanent foreign policy establishment. Many of these people now have financial dealings with Ukraine, which goes ignored by Congress. Joe Biden is a vegetable and his family is literally on the payroll of the Ukrainians.

Of course, there is the madness of it all. Why is the American empire trying to start a war with Russia? One reason is money, of course. The usual suspects would like to raid Russia for natural resources. The parasitic financial system of the West is running out of domestic capital to burn, so Russia is seen as a new opportunity for plunder. There is also the grudge they have with Putin, who put an end to the looting. No one holds a grudge like the people running the American financial system.

There is also the fact that the foreign policy establishment is packed to the gills with people who were selected for their hatred of Russia. This goes back to the Cold War when foreign policy was simply about Russia. When the Cold War ended, those people did not retire. They did not stop selecting for people who shared their views on Russia and have the same cultural connections to the East. The maps have changed, but the people who see themselves as map makers has not changed.

One not so obvious reason is the need for liberal democracy to have an enemy. Like the Athenian Empire 2,000 years ago, the American empire is the result of conflict and as such it is designed to have an enemy. For half a century, the Russians were the enemy around which the empire was organized. They tried to replace Russia with Islam, but the Muslims proved to be a poor adversary. Cultural inertia has brought the American empire back to Russia as the enemy they need to survive.

Ironically, this new fight with Russia could turn out to be the disaster that seems to be the natural end of all empires. A shooting war with Russia will end in disaster for the empire because it would be a disaster for Europe. Russia would seize Ukraine in short order and this would result in an air war in the skies over Europe. Then Syria would unleash a million migrants from the south. It would be a catastrophe that would be blamed on Washington, one that would probably end NATO.

This is why the Germans are not rushing to support the empire on this. Germans have been dealing with the Russians for a very long time. they will be dealing with Russians long after the American empire is gone. Backing the yesterday men of Washington does not look like the best move for the Germans. America’s Varian Disaster may not be a military defeat, but instead be a diplomatic catastrophe. This attack on Russia could be what breaks the NATO coalition.

There is also the domestic situation. Despite the blaring from the regime propaganda organs, the Biden regime has limited support among Americans. Half the country thinks he is illegitimate, while the other half is instinctively dovish. They are also more focused on the domestic pogroms against their enemies. A war now would be a disaster domestically for the empire. Half the country would be rooting for the Russians, just because they hate the American government.

This entry was posted in Foreign Affairs by thezman

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If Biden truly wants bipartisanship, he can start by working to end endless war – Responsible Statecraft

Posted by M. C. on January 25, 2021

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2021/01/22/if-biden-wants-bipartisanship-he-can-work-with-congress-on-ending-endless-war/

Written by
Dan DePetris

The ascendance of the Joe Biden era in Washington is giving some lawmakers renewed hope that the lopsided executive-legislative power imbalance on war and peace issues will be addressed as a top priority.

According to a January 21 report in Politico, the top Democrats on the House foreign affairs, intelligence, and rules committees have written to President Biden calling on him to work with Congress to eliminate the 2002 authorization for the use of military force (AUMF) and begin the process of paring down the 2001 AUMF that has justified every U.S. counterterrorism action since September 2001. There is some evidence the Biden administration intends to work with interested lawmakers on curtailing these resolutions. 

The 2020 Democratic Party Platform states that “we will work with Congress to repeal decades-old authorizations and replace them with a narrow and specific framework that will ensure we can protect Americans from terrorist threats while ending the forever wars.”

Antony Blinken, Biden’s choice for secretary of state, made similar comments to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during his confirmation hearing this week. “It is long past time we revise these [AUMFs] and review them in many instances,” Blinken told the committee. “It is long past time we do this and I welcome the opportunity to do that.”

“Long past time” would be the understatement of the century. 

The last time members of Congress voted on an authorization for the use of military force, or AUMF, Nelly had the hottest song in America. Kiefer Sutherland’s “24” was the most popular television show in the country. President George W. Bush’s approval rating was in the 60s. And the specter of Saddam teaming up with al-Qaida to end American civilization was actually treated as plausible by respected politicians and intelligence officials in Washington.

All of which is to say that the geopolitical situation and indeed the entire world was vastly different in 2002 than it is in 2021. And yet, nearly 20 years removed from the Iraq War vote that would linger over the heads of lawmakers for years on end, the law itself is still on the books along with a 60-word authorization passed a year earlier which gives the president a near-blank check authority to use force wherever and whenever he wishes.


For the executive branch, the 2001 and 2002 AUMFs are gifts that keep on giving — invoked as legal justification for successive military actions against targets far removed from the laws’ original intent. The 2001 AUMF, crafted to provide the Bush administration with statutory authority to decimate al-Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan, has been cited dozens upon dozens of times across four consecutive administrations in countries as far away as the Philippines and Georgia. The entire situation is eerily reminiscent of an 18th century monarchy, where the king decides to thrust his forces into a conflict and the powerless commoners on the sidelines merely nod in agreement.

The difference, of course, is that the U.S. Congress is not a powerless, rubber-stamp body that meets every so often to put their symbolic signature on a presidential action. Far from it: it’s an independent and co-equal branch of government that, according to the U.S. Constitution, is the ultimate authority of when and where the United States goes to war.

It has taken years of executive branch overreach for lawmakers to come to grips with a disturbing reality: On debates over war and peace, Congress has essentially neutered itself. The predominant opinion on Capitol Hill is not one of skepticism of military action, but reticence of second-guessing the commander-in-chief (of course, on the perverse flip-side, Congress as an institution is more than willing to second guess a president if it means gumming up the works on getting out of a 20-year conflict).

It often takes an act of such egregiousness and stupidity to shock Congress into action. Saudi Arabia’s premeditated murder of dissident writer Jamal Khashoggi in the fall of 2018 was a key motivator for the War Powers Resolution passed less than seven months later rescinding U.S. military support to the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen (Trump would quickly veto the resolution). If it weren’t for Khashoggi’s grisly killing, it’s an open question as to whether this resolution would have been debated at all.

Fortunately, there are lawmakers in the rank-of-file of both parties who care about these issues. Reps. Barbara Lee, Ro Khanna, and Matt Gaetz in the House and Sens. Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and Jeff Merkley in the Senate have been trying to educate their colleagues on the necessity of curtailing the executive’s stranglehold over war powers.

Reps. Khanna and Andy Biggs created the War Powers Caucus in June 2019 to advocate for Congress’s constitutional role in the war-making process. On some occasions, the efforts have made progress. In 2019 and 2020, the House of Representatives voted to repeal the 2002 AUMF against Iraq, both on a bipartisan basis. Last July, the House Appropriations Committee tucked a repeal of the 2002 AUMF into the defense spending bill, this time on a party-line vote. Unfortunately, none of those efforts passed the full Congress, with each attempt either killed or bottled up by Senate Republican leadership. 

Most people agree on the problem. But if nobody can agree on a solution, the problem merely festers. And therein lies the real issue: cobbling together a bipartisan solution that encompasses the views of progressives, moderates, and classic interventionists on a subject as controversial as war powers has been as difficult as herding cats.

The Obama administration tried to add a sense of urgency to the issue by issuing a draft AUMF for the war against the Islamic State and encouraging Congress to revisit the original 2001 resolution. Yet the White House received resistance in the Senate almost immediately. 

Proponents of AUMF reform face  two main challenges: First, a general reluctance on Capitol Hill about crossing the commander-in-chief during a time of perpetual war, and second, extreme fear of taking a consequential vote.

We can talk about the details of what a replacement AUMF would look like, including how narrow what the specific objectives would be, how long the authority would last, which countries are covered, and how often the White House would be required to brief Congress on the particulars of a mission. But the sad truth is that until the atmosphere changes, it will be extraordinarily difficult for the fiercest and most committed AUMF-reform advocate to cross the finish-line.

Written by
Dan DePetris

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The Trump Administration Kills Coldly in Yemen, Putting Jobs Before Lives – Antiwar.com Original

Posted by M. C. on May 18, 2020

It soon became evident that the Saudi military is a vanity force, largely for show. Even with abundant American assistance, providing planes and munitions, training personnel, refueling planes, and giving intelligence to assist in targeting, Riyadh found itself stuck in what became an endless war, a quagmire that revealed the Saudi royals to be incompetent, unimaginative fools.

However, they proved to be efficient killers – of civilians.

Weapons supplied by American companies, approved by American officials, allowed Saudi Arabia to pursue the reckless campaign.”

https://original.antiwar.com/doug-bandow/2020/05/17/the-trump-administration-kills-coldly-in-yemen-putting-jobs-before-lives/

by

Many observers have been mystified by the Saudi regime’s hold over President Donald Trump. For years he had criticized the gaggle of corrupt, dissolute royals. He also asked why Americans were paying to defend the wealthy, licentious al-Saud family, as it practiced totalitarianism at home and promoted Islamic fundamentalism abroad, including in America.

Yet Trump made his first trip as president to Saudi Arabia. Some observers wondered if Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had salvaged his infamous orb from Mordor’s collapse eons ago and used it to take control of the president’s mind. No other explanation made sense.

Now the New York Times reports that the fault lies with Peter Navarro, the protectionist aide who spends much of his time urging economic and real war with China. He apparently was instrumental in convincing the president to put the profits of munition makers before the lives of Yemenis.

Consider the tragedy that had befallen Yemen, a deeply divided and tragically impoverished nation. During the Arab Spring the Yemeni people ousted the longtime president, leaving a weak and unpopular successor. The former chief executive joined a longtime rebel movement to overthrow the government. All par for the course in a divided land that has never known peace or stability.

But MbS, as the reckless, impulsive, dictatorial crown prince is known, wanted a toady in power next door. He also desired to demonstrate that he was the Big Man in the Middle East. So he and his counterpart in the United Arab Emirates, Mohammed bin Zayed, created a faux coalition filled with the bought and conscripted and invaded Yemen. The conquest was supposed to be completed in a few weeks.

It soon became evident that the Saudi military is a vanity force, largely for show. Even with abundant American assistance, providing planes and munitions, training personnel, refueling planes, and giving intelligence to assist in targeting, Riyadh found itself stuck in what became an endless war, a quagmire that revealed the Saudi royals to be incompetent, unimaginative fools.

However, they proved to be efficient killers – of civilians. Reported the Times: “Year after year, the bombs fell – on wedding tents, funeral halls, fishing boats and a school bus, killing thousands of civilians and helping turn Yemen into the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Weapons supplied by American companies, approved by American officials, allowed Saudi Arabia to pursue the reckless campaign.”

Notably, President Barack Obama and the supposedly liberal interventionists who surrounded him, who insisted that something must be done to stop the killing in Syria, didn’t care and didn’t act. Nothing changed with President Trump; if anything, he seemed bewitched when he returned from his May 2017 trip. The slaughter continued. Read the rest of this entry »

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The Switch: ‘Liberal’ Thought Police and Endless War – Antiwar.com Original

Posted by M. C. on November 6, 2019

https://original.antiwar.com/Danny_Sjursen/2019/11/05/the-switch-liberal-thought-police-and-endless-war/

by

“People can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders…All you have to do is tell them they’re being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”
~Hermann Goering, Nazi Field Marshal and Hitler henchman

Somehow I’m always a “traitor.” At least according to my critics. It’s a rather odd thing, however. See, I’ve been penning antiwar screeds for over five years, much of it done whilst still on active duty. During just under three of those years Obama was president. Back then, when I criticized Bush’s old wars and Obama’s new ones, my ubiquitous hate mail – “love it or leave it,” “you’re a communist,” “you’re a disgrace to the uniform” – came from the hawkish right. That much I expected.

Then my universe inverted. The moment Trump was elected, if ever I dared cheer his anti-interventionist rhetoric (though rarely his deeds), my “friends” on left attacked me with even more intensity than the neocons. But the language was mostly the same. I was still a “traitor,” still “anti-American,” only now I was also a “Trump-apologist,” even a “Putin-puppet.” Once purportedly antiwar liberals were horrified that I hoped, and sought to encourage, that Trump might end even a couple of the hopeless American conflicts. Born again hawks, these folks now rose like a mythical Phoenix to support the wars Trump theoretically opposed. As a tiny band played “The World Turned Upside Down” on repeat in my head, it occurred to me that this turn of events represented something profound: liberal thought policing, consensus disciplining, and the limits of Democrats’ antiwar activism.

Look, I’m a lefty, for the most part. My academic specialty is in African-American civil rights history. Eugene Debs is one of my heroes. The morning after the 2016 election I said unspeakable, hateful things – the sort you can’t really take back – to my Trump-voting father. In my last year in the army, I was even under a serious, pension-threatening, investigation according to the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ,” for the crime of publishing language “contemptuous” of President Trump.

The editors here at Antiwar.com accept my “progressive” sins because we’re in the end-the-endless-war trenches together. But of course, my libertarian friends enjoy treating me to a good ribbing. So you can understand why it seems so odd, so preposterous, this recent spate of attacks leveled against me as a “Trump apologist,” even a “Trump supporter.” I mean I’m not. Still, the fact that my ostensible compatriots – at least the mainstream liberals – are the ones directing these attacks is instructive. Their hysterical critiques define these alarmist times. Consider it Red Scare 2.0: Russia Strikes Back.

On some level, this is nothing new…

Large majorities of all Americans, but especially Democrats, seem eminently persuadable to support a new war, this time with Iran. Just as 42 percent of the public believed – even after the invasion of Iraq – that Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for the 9/11 attacks, and 55 percent thought he directly supported Al Qaeda (neither was even remotely true), so too are the citizens of today misinformed about Iran. In a poll conducted late last month, 84 percent of Americans said they were concerned that Iran was developing nuclear weapons (it is not), including 89 percent of Democrats. Say what?

Lastly, there’s the, perhaps even more dangerous, liberal establishment’s policing of foreign policy thought, which narrows the range of “acceptable” discourse, and threatens (small d) democracy. That’s where the attacks on my writing, my character, and my “Americanism,” come in. But it isn’t just me. Hillary Clinton, the New York Times, and the CNN-MSNBC duo’s absurd slander that Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard – an antiwar long shot presidential contender and serving major in the US Army – is a “Russian asset,” being “groomed,” perhaps by the Republicans, for a third-party run, personifies the current fit of national delirium. Tulsi’s combat tours (what branch did Hillary or Rachel serve in?) couldn’t save her from accusations of treason – a crime punishable by death for a serving soldier – and my 18 odd years in uniform won’t protect me from the new breed of Democratic neo-McCarthyism.

Mind you, the establishment liberal thought police have not, and will not, provide a shred of evidence that I, Tulsi, and our like-minded brothers and sisters are “un-American” “traitors.” They don’t have to. Even muted praise for Trump’s few sensible pronouncements, or the use “Putin talking points” like ending regime change wars, is today a sin punishable by libel, by professional and intellectual exile. Proof, evidence, truth – these concepts no longer matter. As a Bush official pronounced back in the Iraq War days, “We’re an empire now.” And as the Indian novelist Arundhati Roy so presciently wrote, “When it comes to Empire, facts don’t matter…”

Be seeing you

Bernie Blasts Hillary's "Outrageous" Gabbard "Russian ...

 

 

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What a Nobel Peace Prize, the Federal Reserve, and endless war have in common | The Daily Bell

Posted by M. C. on August 22, 2019

War funding is the main reason the government needs this hidden tax power.

With the help of the Federal Reserve, about $8 trillion of the $22 trillion national debt was spent on the wars in the middle east since 2001.

https://www.thedailybell.com/all-articles/news-analysis/what-a-nobel-peace-prize-the-federal-reserve-and-endless-war-have-in-common/

By Joe Jarvis

It was ten years ago that Congressman Ron Paul released his book, End the Fed.

It immediately shot to number six on the New York Times Bestsellers list.

Paul’s message was that the Federal Reserve was created to bail out banks. It privatized profits for them and socialized losses for the rest of us.

He said the system works against us by killing competition among banks and hiding taxes through inflation.

He’s right. The Federal Reserve can create money out of thin air, and lend it to the government to spend. But increasing the supply of money– when it’s not backed by anything– leads to inflation.

That’s because there are more dollars chasing the same amount of goods in the economy. So every dollar is worth less.

But the government benefits from the value stolen from each existing dollar… because it makes each dollar of government debt worth less in the future. Therefore inflation is just a hidden tax.

War funding is the main reason the government needs this hidden tax power.

In 2009, nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize closed just 11 days after President Obama took office.

Later that year, The Nobel Committee selected Obama to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

Somehow, they knew that Obama– the new Commander-in-Chief of a nation embroiled in two wars– was truly a peaceful man.

At the same time, the Federal Reserve went to work on “quantitative easing”– a.k.a printing money. Ostensibly to save the country from a recession, the Fed conjured up trillions of new dollars.

But as you know, the wars continued…then they expanded.

The US gave air support to Libyan rebels in 2011, ousting Ghadaffi. Ghadaffi was no angel, but at least the country was stable under his regime. Today Libya is lawless and serves as a breeding ground for terrorism. Open public slave-markets have returned to Libya after being virtually non-existent during Ghadaffi’s four-decade rule.

The same year, America’s Nobel-peace-prize-winning President escalated drone bombings in Yemen which continue to this day, causing countless civilian casualties.

And then the US started bombing Syria, siding with rebels in the fight against Bashir al-Assad. Again, not a great guy. Yet the opposition forces, which the US funneled weapons to, included ISIS…

By 2015, Obama had sent in US ground forces to stop ISIS from gaining a foothold in the country which the US destabilized.

With the help of the Federal Reserve, about $8 trillion of the $22 trillion national debt was spent on the wars in the middle east since 2001.

But it hasn’t helped.

Today, the US is still bombing Yemen, is still at war with Afghanistan, still has troops in Iraq and in Syria, where the civil war continues.

And now you can hear the war drums beating once again, this time for Iran.

The wars have not ended, and neither has the Fed.

Today, the same banks that got us into the 2008-2009 recession exist, because the Federal Reserve helped bail them out.

They engage in the same behavior that got us into the last recession– essentially betting customers’ deposits on toxic investments, without enough reserves to back even a fraction of the potential catastrophic losses.

The US isn’t going to voluntarily end the Fed any more than it will pull out of all its wars and overseas interventions.

But the inflation needed for the war (and created by the Fed) threatens both the perpetual warfare system and the Federal Reserve…

Be seeing you

Commodity Money | Pronk Palisades

 

 

 

 

 

 

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11 Years and $8 Billion Later, US-built Afghan Air Force Still Struggling – News From Antiwar.com

Posted by M. C. on January 12, 2019

Endless War, Endless US tax dollars

https://news.antiwar.com/2019/01/10/11-years-and-8-billion-later-us-built-afghan-air-force-still-struggling/

Jason Ditz

…Officials say that 11 years after the US started this process, and about $8 billion of US funding in, the Afghan Air Force is still struggling. Only about one in five airstrikes in Afghanistan involves an Afghan plane, and officials say that civilian casualties in Afghan strikes are even worse than the shoddy track record of the US planes.

The plans are to continue growing the air force, but US officials concede there is no timetable that’s going to get them to the point where the Afghans can control the skies of their country by themselves, with the expectation of them relying heavily on US air support for years, perhaps decades to come.

And relying on American money, of course…

graveyard

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