Forever war: Who benefits?

"Was the Afghanistan War a failure? Not for the top five defense contractors and their shareholders.

"If you purchased $10,000 of stock evenly divided among America’s top five defense contractors on September 18, 2001 — the day President George W. Bush signed the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Afghanistan — and faithfully reinvested all dividends, it would now be worth $97,295.

"In fact, defense stocks outperformed the stock market overall by 58 percent during the war in Afghanistan.

"Now, cable news commentators with their own undisclosed ties to the defense industry are castigating President Joe Biden’s withdrawal."

from The Intercept, August 28, 2021

While we mourn the loss of lives, American and Afghani, in the terrorist attacks and in the 20 years of America's longest war, we need to be clear where the support for this and other wars that the US continues to wage comes from and why future military interventions under the rubric of the unending War on Terror will prove no more successful. As a famous scientist once said, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.” 

Another reason for Medicare for All - As if we need one

 

When this pandemic started, America had 87 million uninsured or underinsured citizens. As a result, a FamiliesUSA study found:

• Nationally, roughly one out of every three COVID-19 deaths is linked to health insurance gaps.
• More than 40% of all COVID-19 infections are associated with health insurance gaps.
• By Feb. 1, 2021, 10.9 million infections and 143,000 COVID-19 deaths may have been associated with health insurance gaps.

Medicare for All would keep America healthy. As Public Citizen noted, "For every 10% increase in a county's uninsured rate, the researchers found a 70% increase in COVID-19 infections and nearly a 50% increase in deaths from COVID-19." 

Who needs unemployment benefits?

A recent study by Arin Dube and Suresh Naidu found that in 22 states who ended enhanced unemployment benefits in June, approximately 25% of those no longer receiving benefit had found work as of August. Compare that to 21.5% of the unemployed in states that did not end these benefits. Not a whole lot of difference.

But there was one big difference: in the states that ended the benefits, while average earnings rose among those who had been receiving benefits by $14 per week, the benefits they lost were $278 per week. Spending by this cohort also decreased by $145 per week.

Unfortunately, these benefits are scheduled to end for the rest of the country on September 6th unless Congress acts.

Enough said.

“The ever-ready answer for failures in Afghanistan: More war” by Stephen Wertheim

 

You don’t get to lose a war and expect the result to look like you’ve won it.

That is the terrible truth that the collapse of the Afghan government has proved but that some in Washington continue to refuse to accept. The United States failed to achieve the objective to which it devoted most of its 20 years of war and $2.3 trillion in expenditures: to build a Western-style Afghan state that could sustain itself and prevent a Taliban takeover. In the face of a poor but tenacious insurgency, the U.S.-backed Afghan army folded within weeks in historical fashion, not for lack of training, supplies, or numbers but because it had no will to fight — something two decades of American efforts could not instill.

After the Vietnam War, Americans undertook a painful national reckoning, and for decades after Saigon fell, U.S. leaders avoided large and prolonged military interventions. But to judge from the reactions in some quarters to recent events, we face the troubling possibility that this time no reckoning is forthcoming. Instead of accepting and learning from loss, some foreign policy leaders prefer to perpetuate the very myths that inspired the tragedy in the first place, beginning with the proposition that the United States should and could transform Afghanistan, if only it tried long and hard enough.

In the past week, as one provincial capital after another surrendered to the Taliban, prominent voices advanced a dangerous form of denial: We can still fix it, through still more war. On Aug. 13, Brookings Institution President John Allen, a retired Marine general, called on President Biden to reverse his decision to withdraw ground troops and intervene to prevent the Taliban from entering Kabul. If the Taliban crossed that red line, he proposed “a concerted military response against Taliban forces and leadership across Afghanistan.” The neoconservative pundit Bill Kristol tweeted his support of Allen’s plan. “Is it too late to salvage Afghanistan?” he asked. “ … The Iraq surge worked. Could an analogous effort in Afghanistan?”

The answer is no, because we tried it. In the Obama surge, U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan rose to 100,000 in 2010 and 2011, double the total of May 2009. As The Washington Post’s “Afghanistan Papers” project revealed, military brass subsequently exaggerated the potency of the Afghan soldiers they were training. (“Afghan security forces are increasing in number and quality every day,” Allen wrote in 2012.) U.S. civilian leaders made rosy assessments in public even as they privately doubted that America could win. Obama, souring on the war, lowered troop levels below 10,000 by the end of his presidency, but he failed to fulfill his hope for a full withdrawal. The war was given so long to work that advocates of a new surge hope Americans have forgotten the last one.

Now, having all along refused to confront the paradox of trying to build an independent Afghan state that was utterly dependent on foreign support, proponents of continuing the war are blaming others, especially Biden, as decisive evidence of their fiasco unfolds before the world. Within days of their latest and possibly last call for a new surge, there was no more Afghan government for which another generation of Americans could fight.

Biden pulled troops out of Afghanistan. He didn’t end the ‘forever war.’

The war’s dark conclusion has occasioned a second form of denial. This version holds that even though it’s too late to fix Afghanistan now, the war had been on track before the Trump administration prepared to withdraw and the Biden administration followed through.

“What makes the Afghanistan situation so frustrating is that the US & its allies had reached something of an equilibrium at a low sustainable cost,” Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, opined on Aug. 13. “It wasn’t peace or military victory, but it was infinitely preferable to the strategic & human catastrophe that is unfolding.” Retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey added, as another sign of the mission’s success and stability, that the U.S. military has suffered no personnel killed in action in more than a year.

Only a small cadre in Washington could make a two-decade war sound like bloodless equilibrium. True, U.S. service members have not been killed in action recently — but that is only because the Taliban shrewdly decided not to target them in exchange for the U.S. agreement to withdraw. For Afghans, the war has been unceasingly brutal, with the Taliban on the offensive for years. An estimated 3,378 members of Afghan government forces and 1,468 civilians died in 2020. All parties understood that the Taliban was gearing up for a further offensive this summer in which it was poised to win more territory and kill more Afghans.

The president therefore never had the luxury to choose a small, casualty-free troop presence. Biden’s choice was to escalate a failing war, to counteract the Taliban’s offensive, or bring U.S. troops home. Had he done the former, he would have sent Americans to die indefinitely, only to help the Afghan government lose more slowly. Such an option should be unacceptable for any president. As Biden explained in a speech Monday: “How many more generations of America’s daughters and sons would you have me send to fight Afghans — Afghanistan’s civil war, when Afghan troops will not?”

The war has effectively been lost for years. By claiming otherwise, hawks are stoking unwarranted resentment at Biden and other civilian leaders for accepting defeat.

Or almost accepting defeat. While making the right decision to withdraw, the Biden administration has indulged in a bit of retconning to defend itself and burnish the war’s outcome. “In terms of what we set out to do in Afghanistan, we’ve done it,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Sunday. He is correct, to a point: The United States long ago accomplished its initial objectives after Sept. 11, 2001, of weakening al-Qaeda and punishing its Taliban sponsor. Yet the United States had larger ambitions, or else it would have withdrawn after its initial successes. America lost the longer war to determine who would govern Afghanistan. And it is important to say so.

Only by accepting defeat can the country mourn the precious lives lost and resources squandered, including the Afghan women and girls betrayed by promises of a Taliban-free future that no one could keep. Only by accepting defeat can U.S. leaders level with the American public, which strongly supports withdrawal, and begin to repair decades of mistrust. This was a grievous defeat for which responsibility must be assigned, not evaded.

America was finally using Biden’s Afghanistan strategy. Then he pulled the plug.

A vacuum of meaning will be filled by the least responsible among us, whose ranks are growing amid the country’s political dysfunction. Recall that even in the less polarized era after Vietnam, not everyone accepted defeat. A myth circulated that pusillanimous leaders had forced American soldiers to fight with “one hand tied behind their backs.” This myth, promoted by unsuccessful generals like William Westmoreland, led some observers to conclude that the real problem with U.S. warmaking lay with the public and politicians for supporting too little of it. To neoconservatives, the “Vietnam syndrome” needed to be kicked. After Sept. 11, 2001, they found their opportunity to demonstrate that American power could remake Afghanistan and Iraq and redeem the world.

By failing to learn, by choosing to forget, the country moves from one unwinnable war to the next. To accept defeat, however, would put America on a different course, at a time when it can ill afford to repeat destructive mistakes.

 

Stephen Wertheim was a student of mine at Montgomery Blair High School and is one of many of my former students who made my career as a teacher a pure joy. Today he is senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is the author of “Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy.”

This op/ed piece originally posted in the Washington Post, August 18, 2021

 

Much Ado about Something

We been hearing a great deal recently about the difficulty some businesses, particularly in the service sector, are having with finding workers to fill open positions. The rightwing response is, as it has always been, to blame government “handouts”; according to Faux News and other establishment media, enhanced unemployment benefits are keeping lazy workers at home. What needs to be done is to get rid of these social benefits and force workers back to work.

The is nothing new about this approach. Capitalism has been grappling with this problem for hundreds of years, and as history shows, the answer now is the same as it’s always been. The laboring classes must be forced into circumstances in which they must work or starve.

In the current situation, the capitalists are eager to forget one of the fundamental principles of their system: When a commodity is in scarce supply, that will automatically increase the price of that commodity. It’s the Law of Supply and Demand. But, and this is a big but, when monopoly rules, this Law goes out the window. Since labor has lost much of its bargaining power (the decline of unions and the value of the minimum wage as a floor for wages), it’s the employers who have had all the power to determine the price of labor.

So, we should look at the current situation as a strike of low wage workers. These workers want, no, need, higher wages and benefits (either provided by employers or by the government) and they will return to work. Although informal and unorganized, this strike is an important response to the 40 year long assault on the working class, the class war that the rich launched and have been winning.

 

Breaking News???

 

August 13, 2021 – Common Dreams NewsCenter   ·         Afghan War’s Bitter End for US Was ‘Inevitable’ ·         Louisiana and Mississippi Health Systems on the Brink of Collapse ·         NOAA Says July was Hottest Month Ever Recorded ·         Bezos, Gates and Buffet own more wealth than the bottom half of the US population

 

These four headlines from Common Dreams describe our country and our world today, and it’s not a pretty picture. OK, so I wrote the 4^th one, but it’s a fact so widely known, it doesn’t merit a news story anymore.

 

Maybe Armageddon is approaching.  “No more water, the fire next time.” If so, it’s not coming from an angry god, unless of course you consider nature a god, but from human greed and stupidity. Oh, I repeat myself.

 

Our country, indeed our world, is faced with the gravest set of crises since … forever. This from someone who considers himself an optimist and was born during WW II.

 

So, what are our “leaders” doing. One set are busy denying that any crises exist (while quietly enriching themselves and their friends and, not so quietly, taking joy rides in space) and the other, while recognizing that the crises exist (well, to some extent… maybe… sort of… ) is too timid to begin to address them.

 

There are a few voices that speak out in the wilderness and they have begun to gather some momentum, and our hope is that it’s not too little, too late. But unless every sane person in this country starts screaming for change at the top of their lungs, we are in danger of stumbling into the abyss.

 

The last time the US (and much of the world) faced anywhere near this level of multiple crises, in the late 1930s, the “greatest generation” united to fend off fascism and in the process built an economy that lifted millions of Americans (and parts of the rest of the war-torn world) into the middle class. While the post war prosperity left many of our countrymen and women out and actively suppressed development of the Global South, it showed what was possible if people pulled together, and everyone contributed their fair share. Even the very rich paid taxes (top bracket around 90%) and Senator’s sons went off to fight.

 

All of that soon fell victim to two interrelated scourges – a economic system that promoted the massive accumulation of wealth and power on the part of a tiny minority and a state of permanent war and preparation for war. I have to wonder what would the soldiers who died on the beaches of Normandy and Anzio think if they came back and saw the carnage of the endless wars the US has waged over the last 70+ years, if they watched the fires burning across the globe due to global warming, if they observed the runaway inequality that allows two billionaires to fly off into space while many, many millions lack adequate health care, housing and even food in the richest country in history. I can't imagine they wouldn't question why they made the ultimate sacrifice.

 

It’s up to us to change this picture, so that our children and grandchildren will ALL have that better world which the “greatest generation” believed they were fighting for.

 

To be continued.

Class Warfare?

 

On August 4, 1981 President Ronald Reagan fired the striking air traffic controllers, members of PATCO, marking the formal declaration of all-out war on the workers and their unions in the US. It was “a day that will live in infamy” for working Americans, much like December 7, 1941.

 

It is this war that in 40 short years has decimated the middle class by transferring more and more of the wealth of our country to the very richest Americans. As Warren Buffett (with an estimated wealth of $101 billion) put it, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

 

This war has two fronts. On the economic front, the rich have devised ways to siphon more money from the economy into their pockets. One way is by destroying the workers’ organizations that fight for higher pay and better benefits. The consequence is that as productivity increases, the rich can keep more of the income that is produced by their company’s workers for themselves. The result - most corporate executives now make 50, 100 or even 400 times what their workers make.

 

Another aspect of this economic warfare is financialization. Increasingly the big banks and Wall Street have used their control of the economy to drain off the wealth produced by American workers. Today 40% of all profits made by US companies go to the financial sector, which produces nothing of value, but simply moves money around (and mostly into the pockets of the rich).

 

A third way is through privatization. This takes many forms: contracting out public services to private businesses and corporations (private prisons, military contracts); selling public goods, like New Hanover County’s hospital, to private corporations; using public resources to fund private schools. And don’t be fooled when some one says that these private companies are non-profit. There’s plenty of profit in most “non-profit” ventures.

 

None of this would have been possible without the political war that the richest Americans have waged on the rest of us. The very wealthy have used their $$$ to influence politics so that the rules of the game are always in their favor. The Supreme Court defended the buying of elections in the “Citizen’s United Case”, when they ruled that corporations are people, and in Buckley v. Valeo, where they overturned campaign spending limits as a violation of the First Amendment and said that contributions to politicians are protected free speech.

 

Another example is our tax system. The rich have written the rules so that they pay a lower rate on their unearned income, like capital gains, than workers pay on their pay checks, which is earned income. The tax code is filled with so many loopholes, that some billionaires don’t owe a dime in taxes, and, because Congress has defunded the IRS, the rich even get away with not paying the taxes that they do owe. For the rich, when it comes to paying taxes, it’s “heads we win, tails you lose”.

 

Another casualty of this class warfare is the minimum wage. It’s now been 11 years since it was raised despite continued inflation. If the minimum wage from 1968 were just adjusted for inflation it would be $12/hr rather than $7.25. However, if it were also adjusted for increased productivity of American workers since 1968, it would be, hold on to your hats, $24/hr. At that rate, a couple working full time minimum wage jobs would make $96,000 a year which would put them squarely in the middle class.

 

So, what is to be done? We need to fight on the political front to change the rules. That’s why the For the People Act (HR 1) is so important. Protecting the right to vote is critical to returning political power to working class Americans. That’s why the rich and their political henchmen in the Republican party are pulling out all the stops to keep people from being able to cast their ballots.

 

But keeping the right to vote isn’t nearly enough. The working class needs an independent power base from which to fight for our interests; to engage in that class war that Warren Buffet alluded to. That base needs to be more than community organizations and nonprofits. It must be a strong labor movement. Which is why the PRO Act (HR 842 – Protecting the Right to Organize) is so important. For the other side in this class war, a strong and united labor movement is their worst nightmare; for us it is the path to a better future.

 

 

Critical Race Theory – Say What?

 

In the last few months there has been a flurry of activity, both in the media and in public policy debates, around the practice known as Critical Race Theory. Conservatives have lashed out at it, claiming it is some kind of socialist conspiracy to indoctrinate our children, and that it is behind the movement towards equity, diversity and inclusion in our schools.

First, some clarity about CRT. CRT is not a condemnation of any group of people as racist nor is it an attack on the fundamental beliefs of our democratic society. Rather it is an attempt to grasp how racism has been embedded in the institutions of our society – the legal system, public policy, education, and the very structure of our economy. It seeks to understand the basis of racial inequality in order to work toward racial justice.

These understandings are hardly new. In the 1960s and 70s, those of us involved in the Civil Rights Movement had come to understand that racism and white supremacy were not simply the attitudes and actions of individuals, but a system of institutional oppression and inequality that kept people of color in a subordinate position in society. In order to achieve racial justice, we argued that the system had to be changed.

Starting in the 1970s a new narrative emerged which claimed that the end of Jim Crow segregation brought about by the Civil Rights Movement had led to a “colorblind” society and opened up opportunity for all. The corollary was that the failure of communities of color to make progress was due to their own deficiencies and not to systemic racism. The War on Poverty, whose programs had benefitted poor whites as well as blacks, was replaced by the War on Drugs and mass incarceration, which devastated Black communities (and along with them, many poor white communities).

Despite the continuing effects of systemic racism, Blacks continued to make some economic progress (in areas like home ownership and education) in the post-Civil Right Movement period, but these gains were wiped out by the housing crash of 2008 and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Today, while many whites may reject overt prejudice and claim to be colorblind, the institutions of our society have continued to reinforce the systemic racism that goes back further than even 1619. Any objective analysis has to conclude that people of color are still very much the victims of “a long train of abuses and usurpations”, from treatment by the police, to lack of educational opportunities and access to health care, to a lack of generational wealth which could be used to buy a home or start a business.

Just a few startling statistics: the average Black college graduate makes less than the average white high school graduate; a Black male has a better chance of ending up in prison than he does of going to college; the average wealth of a white family is more than 10 times that of a Black family. This reality of systemic racism is well known to people of color – witness the works of Black authors like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Michelle Alexander - but up until recently has been largely ignored by whites and the media.

Why is this causing such an uproar now? Because, as a result of the massive protests of last summer, educational institutions and some media, among others, are re-evaluating their understanding of racism and their approach to our history and focusing on including voices in our history that have been marginalized in the past. In a sense, we are seeing what Dr. Barber has called a Third Reconstruction, with a revival of the mass movement for equity.

What does this have to do with CRT? Nothing and everything. You don’t need an academic theory to acknowledge systemic racism. All you need to do is take off the blinders and open your eyes. But, unfortunately, some members of our society who benefit, or think they benefit, from a system that keeps people of color down, don’t want us to see the light.