Joe Biden, full of shit one last time

In his "farewell address," Genocide Joe / Warmonger Joe / Wallbuilder Joe, etc. warned about a number of issues. I roasted him with some flash snark on Shitter, but wanted to go more in depth about the full reality of his outright mendaciousness.

This was the first warning of his:

“Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead,” Biden said.

Really? 

Yes, your Democraps have been out-oligarchied by Rethuglicans, perhaps, but not for want of trying.

Your Veep blew through billions on her presidential campaign, went massively in debt, and will stiff every non-oligarch she can.

You yourself cut back, or rather, gutted COVID aid (just like your old boss, Dear Leader, not spending enough on the Great Recession because Rahm Emanuel said so) and other issues.

You've done nothing for national healthcare.

But, you DID have your Department of Justice pile on, with the person angry to violence about healthcare and the oligarchs who run it, Luigi Mangione, and file a federal case in addition to state charges.

Fuck off right there.

On to the rest:

The president outlined some of his most pressing concerns, including what he described as a “crumbling” free press, the outsized influence of the military-industrial complex, rising disinformation, and the need to remove dark money from politics.

Oh, you're getting your ass kicked.

"Crumbling" free press? Coming from the guy who wants to ban TikTok because he's afraid of ChiNazis, tried to get social media to self-censor and other things?

Update: Throwing Sam Husseini out of a presser with Tony Blinken is sure as hell crumbling the free press.

"Criminal! Why aren't you in The Hague," shouted Sam Husseini, an independent journalist and longtime critic of Washington's approach to the world. The Hague is where the International Criminal Court is located.

The unusually confrontational scene in the State Department briefing room only ended when security personnel forcibly picked up Husseini and carried him out of the room as he continued to heckle Blinken.

Max Blumenthal was escorted out, but without force:

"Why did you keep the bombs flowing when we had a deal in May?" Max Blumenthal, editor of the Grayzone, an outlet that strongly criticizes many aspects of U.S. foreign policy, called out to Blinken, before he was escorted out.

Yeah, self-crumbling the free press. Here's Husseini writing about it himself. And, video:

Here's Max's video.

This is, per The Nation's Jeet Heer, "ultra-hawk" Tony Blinken, surely one of the Team Biden insideres who has long known about his dementia and who ran foreign policy as an independent fiefdom like Henry Kissinger. As for Biden himself? Heer notes his fawning over Scoop Jackson:

In a 1983 eulogy on the Senate floor, Biden said that “Jackson changed a major part of my political life” by teaching him the importance of Israel to American foreign policy.

Blech. That said, the farthest left Jeet can go for people criticizing Biden's military Keynesianism is Adam Tooze.

Outsized influence of the military-industrial complex? This is Genocide Joe, the man who never met a bomb for Israel he didn't like.

Rising disinformation? 

Like when Anthony Fauci told people NOT to wear masks at the start of COVID (and went on from there)? When he claimed Peter Daszak was NOT doing gain of function research? When he himself claimed that a "red line" with Bibi Netanyahu was a red line? When he said four years ago he'd only run for one term?

Dark money in politics? Neither you nor Dear Leader tried to do any repairs to McCain-Feingold, for starters.

Reich: Harvard donors could fuel antisemitism with Gay axing

Robert Reich thinks that Harvard's donor class, namely its Zionist members, risk fueling actual antisemitism by chasing out President Claudine Gay. This:

As a Jew, I also cannot help but worry that the actions of these donors – many of them Jewish, many from Wall Street – could fuel the very antisemitism they claim to oppose, based on the age-old stereotype of wealthy Jewish bankers controlling the world.

Is the nut graf, though the last one in the story.

It's hard to argue with this. That of course wouldn't justify such antisemitism, but, again, it's hard to argue with Reich's fear that it will trigger such antisemitism.

Beyond Reich, it's hard to argue that this doesn't reflect on how things like the "military-industrial complex," or, vis-a-vis foreign policy, what I call theNat-Sec Nutsacks™, are not a stereotype but reality. (They may be a generalization, but sweeping observations that are 51 percent or more true, to riff on informal logic, are generalizations, not stereotypes.) And, as part of that, it reflects on the generalization that, in the Middle East, Zionism, hand in hand with the Christian Religious Right, drives those two.

Also, per Reich, it bodes not so well for Harvard's future:

I can understand the frustrations of these donors. But to use their influence to force the ouster of these university presidents is an abuse of power. It sets a dangerous precedent of mega-donor intrusion into university life.

To go beyond Reich, when the Harvards of the university world stoke fears about Trumpian-like quashing of academic freedom, state government and other attacks on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion efforts in academia and more, these donor actions cut out the ground from underneath them.

(Update: I called it! Bill Ackman said DEI is next in his gunsights.)

==

This afternoon, NPR was discussing the Gay resignation, through an interview with the editor of the Harvard Crimson. And, got almost nothing correct, or at least, hid the reality of Gay's last two months.

For that, we go to Mondoweiss.

First, rather than than tolerating antisemitism, back in November she was trying to censor "from the river to the sea" being used on campus. A month before that, the Harvard Grad Union called on her to get doxxing of Palestinian activists and other anti-Palestinian activities to stop.

Second, there was a raft of McCarthyist (the original one and the guy just booted as Speaker, both) type of original cancel culture behind the recent House hearings by Rep. Elise Stefanik, the ones that hung Gay out to dry. Stefanik, herself arguably actually antisemitic, basically gaslighted Gay and two other university presidents at her hearing.

That said, Gay, along with Penn's Liz Magill and MIT's Sally Kornbluth, offered Stefanik plenty of rope for the self-lynching, Mondoweiss notes, by not challenging her absurdity that "from the river to the sea" is genocidal. 

And, re the #BlueAnon chuds? Many House Democrats played right along.

Finally, the day after the resignation, a new guest commenter at Mondoweiss, a South African-American and fellwo Black American, noted she was both furious FOR Gay for being the target of racial and/or sexual related bullying and also furious AT Gay for putting up with ongoing blatant anti-Palestinian activities at Harvard and even, arguably enabling them. She notes the doxxing affected the safety of Black students at Harvard, among others.

This:

Let me be clear: President Gay was forced out not because she is antisemitic and/or anti-Zionist but because she is not Zionist enough. The Congressional hearing on December 5 was little more than political theater in which right-wing leaders created and seized an opportunity to undermine core tenets of liberal arts institutions and divert attention from the genocide in Gaza.

What else can you say? Well, you can say, as I did above, that all three presidents gave Stefanik et al the rope to hange them after gaslighting them. And as linked via Mondoweiss, Gay's post-resignation inked NYT op-ed STILL doesn't push back against this.

It's even worse than Michael Arria's one quote at Mondoweiss. Per the linked piece above by Aaryan Morrison, Gay's column is groveling to Harvard. 

This, a different quote than Arria's:

Those who had relentlessly campaigned to oust me since the fall often trafficked in lies and ad hominem insults, not reasoned argument.

Indicates how she doesn't get it. The antisemitic smears were of a piece with and intertwined with the racist ones. Gay simply doesn't get the whole issue of weaponized Zionism.

And, tying the two issues together? At The Nation, Dave Zirin says that DEI's lack of objective metrics and such allows Zionists to claim they're being picked on whenever a Palestinian flag is waved in their direction.

That said? Contra Mondoweiss' Philip Weiss, I'm not so sanguine about today's American Jewish youth saving the religion here in the US, especially if this war goes on a lot longer with blank checks from the American political establishment and the American Jewish establishment. Rather, the elders of that Jewish establishment are likely to somewhat self-genocide their own religion. I expect most younger non-Zionist American Jews to abandon even Reform-type Judaism, even for Pesach at a Reform synagogue.

Hypocrisy alert: Bernie Sanders, wanting to suck on the military teat

Sen. Bernie Sanders

No wonder Bernie Sanders wants to run as a Democrat, not a Green; he's too willing to suck at the military teat (near end of story): 

Whatever its technical challenges, the F-35 is a triumph of political engineering, and on a global scale. For a piquant illustration of the difference that political engineering can make, consider the case of Bernie Sanders—former Socialist mayor of Burlington, current Independent senator from Vermont, possible candidate from the left in the next presidential race. In principle, he thinks the F-35 is a bad choice. After one of the planes caught fire last summer on a runway in Florida, Sanders told a reporter that the program had been “incredibly wasteful.” Yet Sanders, with the rest of Vermont’s mainly left-leaning political establishment, has fought hard to get an F-35 unit assigned to the Vermont Air National Guard in Burlington, and to dissuade neighborhood groups there who think the planes will be too noisy and dangerous. “For better or worse, [the F-35] is the plane of record right now,” Sanders told a local reporter after the runway fire last year, “and it is not gonna be discarded. That’s the reality.” It’s going to be somewhere, so why not here? As Vermont goes, so goes the nation.

So, Bernie, really? Ohh, it's bad, but I"m not going to oppose out-of-control military spending that makes Ike's "military-industrial complex" that much, because I want Vermont on the gravy train, even if it's a war weapon, even if it's a bloated one.

What else, Bernie? Want to invite the federal prison system to Vermont. You are a border state, and people could be sneaking through from Canada. Why not ask Immigration and Customs to build one, since they're already being nutbar on one town straddling the border with Quebec?

Better yet, why not contact Geo or one of the other private prison folks about this?

It would be one thing, Bernie, if you fought for tighter standards for organic dairy products to benefit Vermont's dairy industry, or a rule that automatically let all maple syrup be organic unless farmers are spraying known nonoriganic products on trees.

And, beyond that, Vermonters didn't WANT the F-35. They became more and more adamant about that. Result? Bernie pushed harder and harder to land it.

And, it's not just warhawking. It's warhawking for a plane that sucks. No other word for it:

Update, Feb. 23, 2021: By looking for a new low-cost fighter, as Forbes reports, the Air Force has tacitly admitted the F-35 is a fail.

 

But this is ridiculous.

(And, maybe it's connected to Israel wanting to upgrade F-16s to F-35s.)

Bernie, re the military-industrial complex, here's what you should be trying to do instead.

The M16 and its descendant rifles still suck almost as bad as they did in Nam, especially when compared to the good old AK-47, per this sidebar Atlantic piece.

Why don't you find out what,if any, international patents the Kalashnikov family has, get Congress to buy them up, and have us use the damned AK-47 for a quarter of the cost and double the reliability of the M4?

Speaking of guns, Bernie is also some kind of gun nut.

And, then, fight to kill all funding, period, for the F-35.

I've always thought that Sanders was kind of the Wizard of Oz behind some imagery, and now I'm thinking that more and more.

And, on military-related issues, I'm right. Counterpunch was raking him over the coals four years ago.

Let’s start with this:

Senator Sanders rarely misses a photo opportunity with Vermont National Guard troops when they are being deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq.  He’s always at the Burlington International Airport when they return.  If Sanders truly supported the Vermont troops, he would vote to end all of the wars posthaste.

Then note that the F-35 lust isn’t new, either:

Senator Patrick Leahy, Senator Bernie Sanders, and Congressman Peter Welch could hardly contain their enthusiasm over the news that Burlington International Airport had been named as a possible site to house the Air Force’s new F-35 fighter jet scheduled to replace the Vermont Air National Guard’s aging fleet of F-16s.

The author is a Vermonter. It appears that back home, Bernie’s not been fooling all the people for quite some time.

Another Counterpunch piece notes that Sanders is a bit of a squish on fighting hardcore Zionism.

And, a libertarian online mag, gathering a variety of links and sources, argues that Sanders might almost be a warhawk lite.

And, per this link, maybe Bernie's running as a Dem, if anything, because at the Vermont state level, he's long been into deal-making with the Democratic apparatus, and his rightward moves on foreign policy issues are part of this. The skinny on that piece is that Bernie has sold out to the bipartisan foreign policy establishment in exchange for the state Democratic party quashing any official opposition to him.

And, he was a war lover ever since the original Gulf War. Read that piece. Substitute the n-word into Bernie's take, and he sounds like George Wallace or other White South politicos saying in the 1960s that nobody was going to out-n them. Plus, part of why he probably doesn't like to talk about foreign policy issues a lot is that he's illiberal in general on them.

In other words, Bernie already is a Democrat, and has been for 20 years. Thank doorknob he's not running Green; the myth might quash a more legitimate candidate, like Dr. Jill Stein, the 2012 nominee, who's thrown her hat in the ring again.

The first link is a great read in general. James Fallows goes in depth about the separation of the military from the general public, the shallowness of "thank you for your service," the greater shallowness of continuing to feed the beast of the military-industrial complex and more.

And, I'm by no means alone. Here's another blogger calling out Sanders as a warhawk. So does friend Brains, who also tags him as a panderer on gun issues, which he is.

Right-wing US chickens home to roost with border influx of young Ill Eagles

The Dallas Morning News has a good summary of what's up with the recent surge of border crossings.

There's a few things to note, besides the biggie that these are primarily youth. (Sidebar: I'm surprised the wingnuts haven't unveiled the phrase "anchor teens" yet.) The second biggest is that, while the numbers are growing, the U.S. border isn't being overrun by 1 million, or even 100,000, Hispanic teenagers.

The next big thing is that these are not from Mexico. Rather, most of them are from Central America, specifically the so-called "northern triangle" of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.

Commonality? U.S. meddling, sometimes going back decades, to prop up or install repressive right-wing governments.

Guatemala is the original banana republic, when Jacobo Arbenz was overthrown in a 1954 coup, launched by the CIA and done on behalf of United Fruit, parent of Chiquita Bananas. Sidebar: This is why Ike blathered about the military-industrial complex. He thought the snoops-industrial complex could do things like this cheaper, as it had already in Iran, and as Ike planned for it to do in Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.

Per that Wikipedia link:

Following the coup Guatemala was ruled by a series of US-backed military regimes until 1996. The coup sparked off the Guatemalan civil war against leftist guerrillas, during which the military committed massive human rights violations against the civilian population, including a genocidal campaign against the Mayans.

All of that contributed to a lack of stability that is tied to gang-related crime in Guatemala today.

El Salvador? This is where Reagan backed death squads in the early 1980s. 

Honduras? That's where Reagan built up a U.S. military presence in the 1980s, to support the aid to the death squads in El Salvador as well as the help to the "freedom fighters" trying to overthrow the democratically elected leftist government in Nicaragua. Can't forget about the burning U.S. hatred for the Sandanistas, can we? That said, Nicaragua has managed to have more stability than the above three countries, probably in part because the U.S. was never able to get the same foothold there.

That said, all four countries, including Nicaragua, have per capita incomes about one-third that of Mexico. Purchasing power may go farther, but still, that's a slim income. Also, while NAFTA only undercut Mexico's agriculture, CAFTA may have some similar effects further south.

So, between U.S.-caused instability, U.S.-connected violence, and possible U.S.-caused wage instability, is it any wonder that people from these countries are coming north?

Chickens coming home to roost.

And, that's not the only way they are.

In its own craven nod to McCarthyism, already back at the time of that Arbenz coup, the AFL-CIO was helping set up "friendly" unions in Latin America, many of which were little more than CIA listening posts.

And, the Reaganite anti-Communism of the 1980s, combined with conservative Catholics in both the U.S. and Latin America taking their cues from the papal ascent of John Paul II and kicking liberation theology, and a more liberal attitude toward birth control, to the curb had other consequences.

Result? On birth control? Guatemala having the highest birth rate in the Western Hemisphere. Honduras is second highest. They're both below a number of African and south Asian countries, but their rate is high enough to add to all the instability, with exploding populations.

On the rest of liberation theology? More liberal priests and bishops, and nuns, who challenged right-wing governments to do more for the poor, especially if they led protests and movements themselves, got reassigned. Ask Francis the Talking Pope about that, and his own involvement with the reassignments.

Of course, that ignores the more liberal church workers who, at least in places like Francis' Argentina, met the jails and torture cells of the right-wing dictators. Or sometimes, met their guns.

Take that, to a Texas lite guv candidate, The Stinking Anglo Formerly Known as Danny Goeb™. And no, they're not diseased, either.

So, yes, failure to actually go to the border may be Obama's Katrina moment, or at least something in the neighborhood. But, he's cleaning up a mess that's more Republican than Democratic.  (That's setting aside that neoliberal Democrats often went along for the GOP ride, especially on free trade.)

And, making it easier to throw the kids back across the border may be a short-term answer for the U.S. but it's not a long-term answer for us, nor any sort of answer at all for Central America.

I'm actually surprised it took this long for this much of a surge like this. That said, in the previous decade, when I was in suburban Dallas, my anecdotal evidence is that, based on young children's entries in elementary school projects, at least 10 percent of Hispanic immigration to America, if not more, was from further south than Mexico, namely, from Central America.

#Benghazi is now dead for #teaparty bitching — what's next?

A scene in Benghazi the night of the 2012 attack.
AFP/Getty Images via Washington Post

The Washington Post reports that a Team Obama commando raid has captured a top suspect in the 2012 Benghazi, Libya embassy bombing, the first such person to be nabbed.

The New York Times now reports the operation to seize Ahmed Abu Khattala was in planning for about a year. The Obama Administration reportedly did not want to destabilize the Libyan government (so much for the success of nation building, not just now but in years to come, eh?) and wanted to make sure it had enough evidence to stand up legally. (At least he's apparently? not going to be tried by a military commission.)

Anyway, the operation was reportedly smooth:

A United States law enforcement official said the military-law enforcement team — composed of American commandos and F.B.I. agents — captured Mr. Abu Khattala somewhere on the outskirts of Benghazi. No shots were fired, no civilians were hurt and no one else was taken into custody, the official said, in what was apparently a surprise raid.

So, we can probably now expect the tea partiers and the official GOP to go officially silent about Benghazi. The "do-nothing" and "inept" angles have both been abruptly removed.

That's especially true since a wingnut-friendly senator is on the record as liking things. Per the Post's story:

Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told reporters after news of the capture broke that the administration had “been in touch with us for the last several days on this.”

“It’s good news,” Chambliss said. “He’s being interrogated right now.”

Well, there you go, wingnuts. The Benghazi gig is past its expiration date for sure. (Unless, of course, Saxby Chambliss is a sellout, which, of course, he may be.) That's even more true since Abu Khattala has now confirmed an anti-Islam video is at least part of what drove the attack.

So, what now, wingnuts?

Given that more and more U.S. district judges are ruling more and more states' gay marriage laws unconstitutional, I guess that will be our next big scandal. Ignore that some of these judges have been appointed by either Shrub or Poppy Bush, of course.

And, there's always the socialist Obama destroying our country, with the EPA carbon emission standards proof of that. Never mind that a fair portion of those reductions are already "baked in" from earlier control standards.

And, of, course, there's Iraq. Never mind that we still have nobody from the 101st Fighting Keyboarders, to revise an old phrase, volunteering to go over and fight themselves.

The least you nutbars could do is come up with a new scandal or two, like reparative therapy for Obama Derangement Syndrome. THAT, after all, IS a choice.

Of course, the wingnuts could double down on Benghazi, too, claiming that this arrest was made to hide the true record of what happened there. Stay tuned.

(Bowe Bergdahl is also "dead" as a meme since, as Wonkette notes, he was actually a Randian who wanted to go Rambo.)

The true, true record, of course, is one that nobody wants to discuss in either party. Benghazi was a spook shack. The CIA didn't want uniformed military security there in part for that reason.  Ambassador Christopher Stevens presumably went along, and hence the result.

The true, true scandal is that Eisenhower warned about the "military-industrial complex" even as he ramped up the covert war complex. Mossadegh in Iran. Arbenz in Guatemala. The Bay of Pigs was originally his baby, too, don't forget. And, since then, nobody in the bipartisan foreign policy establishment has looked back.

Cluster bombs - more U.S.-Israeli hypocrisy

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is semi-officially condemning Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi for alleged use of nasty cluster bombs.

Two SLIGHT problems, though.

1. We, along with Libya, have failed to sign a 2008 convention against cluster bombs' use. Our military-industrial complex is a huge maker of the devices. And, as the second page of the story notes, we sold plenty to Israel.

2. Which used them indiscriminately in Lebanon and elsewhere:

"What we did was insane and monstrous, we covered entire towns in cluster bombs," the head of an IDF rocket unit in Lebanon said regarding the use of cluster bombs and phosphorous shells during the war.

I guess the military-imperial U.S. establishment thinks that in the days of Google, it can still get away with telling such monstrosities.

More on the issue and our similar hypocrisy on land mines here, from Human Rights Watch.

The AP story, in the top link, pulls some of the info together in one graf, that may get cut in many hardcopy newspapers:

The campaign against the weapons picked up steam after Israel's month-long war against Hezbollah in 2006, when it scattered up to 4 million of the munitions across Lebanon, according to the U.N. In response, more than 100 countries pledged to ban the bombs. The United States has rejected the call, insisting that the bombs are a valid weapon of war when used properly. Libya also has never signed a treaty banning them.

Agreed that Libya may be targeting civilians. That said, that's what Israel did in Lebanon. That's what we allegedly did in Iraq (and, like Israel, with white phosphorus, too).

Meanwhile, in the world of realpolitik, Clinton hasn't said what the U.S. will actually do about this. Team Obama is caught between the rock of Wilsonian idealism and the hard place of further mission creep. (See Kurds, Iraq, and George H.W. Bush.)

The warmongering bipartisan duopoly

Over at Truthout, Andrew Bacevich has one of his best commentary pieces in a long time.

Reflecting on Obama's State of the Union address, he explains why we won't have actual cuts in defense spending any time in the near future.

Bacevich first tackles the situation at hand:

The Pentagon presently spends more in constant dollars than it did at any time during the Cold War. ... What are Americans getting for their money? Sadly, not much. Despite extraordinary expenditures (not to mention exertions and sacrifices by U.S. forces), the return on investment is, to be generous, unimpressive. The chief lesson to emerge from the battlefields of the post-9/11 era is this: the Pentagon possesses next to no ability to translate “military supremacy” into meaningful victory.

And, looks at the situation at hand close up, too:

The problems are strategic as well as operational. Old Cold War-era expectations that projecting U.S. power will enhance American clout and standing no longer apply, especially in the Islamic world. ...

And the why, first with a twist on "bread and circuses:

to distract attention from the fact that patriotism had become little more than an excuse for fireworks displays and taking the occasional day off from work -- people and politicians alike found a way to do so by exalting those Americans actually choosing to serve in uniform. ...

In effect, soldiers offer much-needed assurance that old-fashioned values still survive, even if confined to a small and unrepresentative segment of American society. Rather than Everyman, today’s warrior has ascended to the status of icon, deemed morally superior to the nation for which he or she fights, the repository of virtues that prop up, however precariously, the nation’s increasingly sketchy claim to singularity.

Politically, therefore, “supporting the troops” has become a categorical imperative across the political spectrum.

Result?

The duopoly of American politics no longer allows for a principled anti-interventionist position. Both parties are war parties. They differ mainly in the rationale they devise to argue for interventionism. The Republicans tout liberty; the Democrats emphasize human rights. The results tend to be the same: a penchant for activism that sustains a never-ending demand for high levels of military outlays.

Bacevich adds that by demonizing the "losing side" of debate before Dec. 7, 1941, we haven't learned enough from WWII:

In this sense, American politics remains stuck in the 1930s -- always discovering a new Hitler, always privileging Churchillian rhetoric -- even though the circumstances in which we live today bear scant resemblance to that earlier time. There was only one Hitler and he’s long dead. As for Churchill, his achievements and legacy are far more mixed than his battalions of defenders are willing to acknowledge. And if any one figure deserves particular credit for demolishing Hitler’s Reich and winning World War II, it’s Josef Stalin, a dictator as vile and murderous as Hitler himself.

Until Americans accept these facts, until they come to a more nuanced view of World War II that takes fully into account the political and moral implications of the U.S. alliance with the Soviet Union and the U.S. campaign of obliteration bombing directed against Germany and Japan, the mythic version of “the Good War” will continue to provide glib justifications for continuing to dodge that perennial question: How much is enough?

Anyway, I've just presented a summary. Read the whole thing.

Dumbass Obama quote of the day

President Barack Obama has named GE's CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, to a new presidential council on competitiveness and job creation.

Ignoring the question of why we need another presidential council, other than to distance Obama from criticism, etc. and, this is the way of Obama, here's your dumbass quote:

Obama: "GE is not part of the usual Washington crowd." Really? An establishment member of the military-industrial complex, maker of military jet engines and more, is "not part of of the usual Washington crowd"? Boy, the whoppers get more blatant, and shift more to the "right," all the time.

Much more on Immelt and liberal/non-Villager blog reaction to this nuttery from Tobin Harshaw.

The ‘war industry’

Gene Lyons is right. Misguided dunderheads of David Broder ilk aside, the increased privatization of the U.S. military means that, far beyond Ike’s famous “military-industrial complex” line, there is a “war industry” sounding the tocsin of battle all in the name of the almighty dollar — even as more and more of that dollar migrates to Beijing in the first place.

So, fuck you, Dick Cheney. Go talk to Chinese President Hu Jintao if you really think Afghanistan is such a problem.

Oh, and take Tim Geithner, Hank Paulson and some other Goldman Sachs alums, or current brass, with you.

Better yet, since the Army now accepts people until age 42, tell Liz and Mary to support the war industry by driving down to the nearest Army recruiting station.

Senate votes to kill F-22 funding

Very good news; we don’t need to pay for a Cold War relic that only flies 3 percent of the time. And, contra some former Lockheed employee, and possible current Lockheed lobbyist, who has made multiple comments to my previous posting on this subject, this does NOT denude our military.

But, it will be a tougher battle to drive a stake through it in the House.

Can we just junk the F-22?

Let Lockheed-Martin build drones for pennies on the F-22 dollar rather than continue to build this worthless piece of crap.

Pierre Sprey, a key designer in the 1970s and 1980s of the F-16 and A-10 warplanes, said that from the beginning, the Air Force designed it to be "too big to fail, that is, to be cancellation-proof.”

And, Congressional pushes, to buy more, more, more of this albatross, reflect Lockheed having subcontractors in almost every state. And, I’m sure some of those Congressmen also cite the recession as an excuse for more military pork.

The truth about Somali pirates

Far from being al-Qaeda influenced radicals, they’re poor fishermen “piratized” by international fishing fleets, among other things.

They want money, not jihad, notes John Feffer, who notes the same things I do about their strong similarity to the Barbary pirates of 200 years ago, also secularists after money — this time, after being “piratized” out of European trade markets.

Feffer rightly worries that this could be the wedge to try extending U.S. imperialism in the horn of Africa again. He also worries that this will be a wedge for the military-industrial complex to ramp up its greed, this time for the crappy, problem-burdened (what modern American military hardware hasn’t been “burdened”?)

And, Obama’s defense budget has a 4 percent increase. No starving the beast by him.

Zinni gets stiffed for Iraq – and maybe he should have been

Former Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni was first proposed to be Obama’s ambassador to Iraq, but then had the rug pulled out from under him in favor of Chris Hill, and didn’t find out about it from retired Marine Gen. buddy James Jones, the national security advisor, until shortly before it hit the media.

Zinni was obviously steamed.

But, doesn’t appointing the guy who was executive VP of Dyncorp, with all of its Iraq-based defense contract money, until the end of last year violate at least the spirit of Obama’s no-lobbying pledge?

Answer, yes.

Zinni has much less reason to be steamed at the Obama Administration than do We The People.

Courts-martial for insubordinate warmongers sucking up to Rummy

I see no conspiracy theory, unlike tinfoil hat bloggers, in Donald Rumfeld’s comments to the war shakers, military mouths, brass hat talking heads, or whatever you call them, who threw him a goodbye party in December 2006. 911 truthers are beyond rational discussion, though.

However, even on places like this TPM thread about the April 2006 briefing of Rumsfeld by military analysts, I still don’t see enough outcry about the real problem.

And, that is the military-industrial complex is now morphing into the military-political complex.

Where’s the outcry for courts-martial of any of these brass hats still on active duty, or retroactively stripping the pensions of those who aren’t.

The military swear an oath to the Constitution, not the President — a Constitution that lists Congress first, no matter what political party has a majority.

I think there’s a legitimate argument to be made — and I’m making it — that we’ve got insubordinate behavior here.

It’s not just that individual generals are insubordinate, it’s the culture they’re coming from is also, in a word, insubordinate.. It’s a culture that needs to be slapped down, slapped down hard, and slapped down now.

Science politicized – Dow Chem gets EPA admin fired

Two top representatives of EPA Administrator Chief Hack Stephen Johnson told EPA Region 5 Administrator Mary Cade to quit by June 1 or be fired.

Why?

Because she wanted Dow Chemical to do more to clean up years of dioxin waterway discharges from its Midland, Mich., headquarters.

As detailed in the graphic, Dow has a LOT of polluting history for which to answer.

And, it’s sad.

I’ve been to Dow HQ. It’s a beautiful campus. Midland is a nice large town/small city.

And, the Saginaw River and Saginaw Bay attract lots of anglers. But, you just can’t eat the fish there.

Dow not only refuses to do more cleanup, in the past, it has tried to get the state of Michigan to lower its dioxin standard, which is tougher than federal allowance. It also funded paid for a University of Michigan study, not peer reviewed, which claims dioxin soil levels have little to do with human activity.

If there were a “Military-Industrial Complex Hall of Shame,” Dow Chemical would be a first-year dishonoree.

The military-industrial complex is alive and kicking or lying for Iraq dollars

All those retired general talking heads on network and cable news programs? Most of them have big-time connections with defense weapons makers, otherwise politely called “military contractors.”

Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the … several dozen military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized.

That’s why President Bush has had no problem in the past flying some of them on Air Force 2.

In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.

A few expressed regret for participating in what they regarded as an effort to dupe the American public with propaganda dressed as independent military analysis.

“It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you,’ ” Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and former Fox News analyst, said.

Kenneth Allard, a former NBC military analyst who has taught information warfare at the National Defense University, said the campaign amounted to a sophisticated information operation. “This was a coherent, active policy,” he said.

As conditions in Iraq deteriorated, Mr. Allard recalled, he saw a yawning gap between what analysts were told in private briefings and what subsequent inquiries and books later revealed.

“Night and day,” Mr. Allard said, “I felt we’d been hosed.”

This is a long, 11-page exposé in the New York Times and well worth a read.

Some of the 75 or so brass hat talking heads are also lobbyists, for example. The whole affair was launched in large part by former Defense Department assistant secretary for PR Torie Clarke. But, the military talkers were given their own, independently-officed handlers.

Others were in charge of contract negotiation or procurement at their firms, a very direct conflict of interest in going on TV and promoting the war.

Some of them had huge anti-media axes to grind going back to Vietnam:

This was a major theme, for example, with Paul E. Vallely, a Fox News analyst from 2001 to 2007. A retired Army general who had specialized in psychological warfare, Mr. Vallely co-authored a paper in 1980 that accused American news organizations of failing to defend the nation from “enemy” propaganda during Vietnam.

“We lost the war — not because we were outfought, but because we were out Psyoped,” he wrote. He urged a radically new approach to psychological operations in future wars — taking aim at not just foreign adversaries but domestic audiences, too. He called his approach “MindWar” — using network TV and radio to “strengthen our national will to victory.”

In a word, bullshit. Former DoD schmoozer and Donald Rumsfeld flunky Larry Di Rita confirms this was the attitude the Whatagon had. Other analysts, anonymously, also explicitly called this “psyops.”

Meanwhile, these talking heads coneheads were perfectly content to be led around by the nose by Paul Bremer et al on the occasions they actually did visit Iraq.

How can you be an “analyst” when you’re not actually out in the field analyzing anything?

But, most of the tin stars didn’t care. It was a way to meet U.S. mercenary companies like KBR, or Iraqi decision-makers, and try to drum up more business.

Showing their importance, one of the first things Gen. David Petraeus did after being named commander in Iraq was to meet with the group of analysts. I assume he does the same as part of his preparation for each round of Congressional testimony, so the talking heads are ready and armed.

And, for all of this bullshitting, most the analysts were being paid, in essence, on commission, by how many times they talked on TV.

And, while some of them admit soon being disillusioned about what lies BushCo was spinning, none of them saw fit to stop talking on TV. Those who were wary said “military loyalty” kept them from speaking out.

More bullshit. Fear of scorn from fellow colonels or generals is what it was, along with fear of losing contracts or lobbying access. As for loyalty to privates and noncoms, the actual military? Hah.

The few who did speak out? Well, this happened:

On Aug. 3, 2005, 14 marines died in Iraq. That day, William V. Cowan, who said he had grown increasingly uncomfortable with the “twisted version of reality” being pushed on analysts in briefings, called the Pentagon to give “a heads-up” that some of his comments on Fox “may not all be friendly,” Pentagon records show. Mr. Rumsfeld’s senior aides quickly arranged a private briefing for him, yet when he told Bill O’Reilly that the United States was “not on a good glide path right now” in Iraq, the repercussions were swift.

Cowan said he was “precipitously fired from the analysts group” for this appearance. The Pentagon, he wrote in an e-mail message, “simply didn’t like the fact that I wasn’t carrying their water.” The next day James T. Conway, then director of operations for the Joint Chiefs, presided over another conference call with analysts. He urged them, a transcript shows, not to let the marines’ deaths further erode support for the war.

As for the cable and network news companies? None of them asked questions about outside business dealings.

Today, of course, most these folks are ghettoized to Fox, but not all of them, and it certainly wasn’t that way in the run-up to the war and the first year afterward.

Of course, there are a few things you won’t find in the story.

One is the number of weapons contractors who give plenty of money to Democrats as well as Republicans. Indeed, one of the retired shills, Gen. John Ralston, eventually went to work for William Cohen’s lobbying group. True, Cohen was a Republican senator, but he became defense secretary in a Democratic administration.

The other is how much money some of these war merchants, war-merchant lobbyists and such, spend on advertising, both with the TV networks and in places like the NYT.

We’re No. 1, even vs. all the world combined!

In military spending, that is.

To me, this is another reason I’m inclined not to vote Democratic, rather than Green again this year. What should be another important political issue, especially with military contractors for support services and contractors mercenaries for combat-area security, plus the whole, 45-year-old issue of the military-industrial complex, isn’t on Democrats’ radar screens any more than Republicans’.

And, no, you can’t pass this all off as the U.S.’s high per-capita income. That’s offset by the massive population of countries such as China and India. Hell, the EU plus Japan has twice our population, and a per capita income in the same ballpark, and the defense spending difference is astronomical. That combination of countries is spending only about $250 billion, compared to our $623 billion.