Who's Pushing the Nuclear Envelope and Why?

I'm reposting below an opinion piece from Nation of Change by Norman Solomon. The only thing missing is the rationale for US actions - the "defense" of it economic hegemony, which is being challenged by China and its junior partner, Russia. It's time to put all the pieces together to understand the existential polycrisis that confronts us, and by us I mean the human race, and organize the fightback here in the belly of the beast.

The announcement by Vladimir Putin over the weekend that Russia will deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus marked a further escalation of potentially cataclysmic tensions over the war in neighboring Ukraine. As the Associated Press reported, “Putin said the move was triggered by Britain’s decision this past week to provide Ukraine with armor-piercing rounds containing depleted uranium.”

There’s always an excuse for nuclear madness, and the United States has certainly provided ample rationales for the Russian leader’s display of it. American nuclear warheads have been deployed in Europe since the mid-1950s, and current best estimates say 100 are there now — in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey.

Count on U.S. corporate media to (appropriately) condemn Putin’s announcement while dodging key realities of how the USA, for decades, has been pushing the nuclear envelope toward conflagration. The U.S. government’s breaking of its pledge not to expand NATO eastward after the fall of the Berlin Wall — instead expanding into 10 Eastern European countries — was only one aspect of official Washington’s reckless approach.

During this century, the runaway motor of nuclear irresponsibility has been mostly revved by the United States. In 2002, President George W. Bush withdrew the U.S. from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, a vital agreement that had been in effect for 30 years. Negotiated by the Nixon administration and the Soviet Union, the treaty declared that its limits would be a “substantial factor in curbing the race in strategic offensive arms.”

His lofty rhetoric aside, President Obama launched a $1.7 trillion program for further developing U.S. nuclear forces under the euphemism of “modernization.” To make matters worse, President Trump pulled the United States out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, a crucial pact between Washington and Moscow that had eliminated an entire category of missiles from Europe since 1988.

The madness has remained resolutely bipartisan. Joe Biden quickly dashed hopes that he would be a more enlightened president about nuclear weapons. Far from pushing to reinstate the cancelled treaties, from the outset of his presidency Biden boosted measures like placing ABM systems in Poland and Romania. Calling them “defensive” does not change the fact that those systems can be retrofitted with offensive cruise missiles. A quick look at a map would underscore why such moves were so ominous when viewed through Kremlin windows.

Contrary to his 2020 campaign platform, President Biden has insisted that the United States must retain the option of first use of nuclear weapons. His administration’s landmark Nuclear Posture Review, issued a year ago, reaffirmed rather than renounced that option. A leader of the organization Global Zero put it this way: “Instead of distancing himself from the nuclear coercion and brinkmanship of thugs like Putin and Trump, Biden is following their lead. There’s no plausible scenario in which a nuclear first strike by the U.S. makes any sense whatsoever. We need smarter strategies.”

Daniel Ellsberg — whose book The Doomsday Machine truly should be required reading in the White House and the Kremlin — summed up humanity’s extremely dire predicament and imperative when he told the New York Times days ago: “For 70 years, the U.S. has frequently made the kind of wrongful first-use threats of nuclear weapons that Putin is making now in Ukraine. We should never have done that, nor should Putin be doing it now. I’m worried that his monstrous threat of nuclear war to retain Russian control of Crimea is not a bluff. President Biden campaigned in 2020 on a promise to declare a policy of no first use of nuclear weapons. He should keep that promise, and the world should demand the same commitment from Putin.”

We can make a difference — maybe even the difference — to avert global nuclear annihilation. This week, TV viewers will be reminded of such possibilities by the new documentary The Movement and the “Madman” on PBS. The film “shows how two antiwar protests in the fall of 1969 — the largest the country had ever seen — pressured President Nixon to cancel what he called his ‘madman’ plans for a massive escalation of the U.S. war in Vietnam, including a threat to use nuclear weapons. At the time, protestors had no idea how influential they could be and how many lives they may have saved.”

In 2023, we have no idea how influential we can be and how many lives we might save — if we’re really willing to try.

The Empire of Liberty – Part 3 – 1914-1939

 

Introduction

This is the third in a series of posts outlining the history of the US empire since the founding of the first British colony at Jamestown in 1607 and its intimate relationship with white supremacy. The first was posted on May 6^th, the second on June 14^th, both last year, and you should check them out, if you haven’t already read them.

My personal experience in the anti-imperialist, anti-racist movement beginning in the mid-1960s, with my active opposition to the Vietnam War, and my study of history (both in college and while I taught US History to high school students in Montgomery County, Maryland) have deepened my understanding of anti-imperialism and white supremacy and my commitment to the struggle against them. Although I have witnessed many setbacks in that struggle, I continued to be buoyed by the credo of FRELIMO, the 1970s national liberation movement in Mozambique, "A luta continua, vitória é certa". A better world is possible and we must continue the struggle, “if not for ourselves, then for our children and our children’s children”.

The US response to the war in Ukraine and the failure of many progressive forces to understand the role of US imperialism in the conflict has energized me to write this short history of US imperialism and its foundation in the paradigm of white supremacy. In previous posts I have raised the question as to why the horrors of the war in Ukraine are paraded before us as war crimes, but not those being waged against people of color in the Global South. The answer, of course, should be obvious, but sometimes you need to state the obvious.

I have also been motivated by reading two books in the last few months – Tomorrow the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy by Stephen Wertheim, a former student of mine; and Cold War: An International History by Carole Fink, a friend here in Wilmington. More recently, I’ve been reading and discussing the book American Midnight by Adam Hochschild, which recounts the US entrance into WWI and the aftermath of that war, a period that is glossed over when it comes to teaching in this country. All three have helped me unmask some of the myths about our history with regard to foreign policy and its relationship to systemic racism.. And, of course, I owe a great deal to the dean of American historians, Howard Zinn.

I hope you will read the analysis and if it makes sense, disseminate it broadly. And please take the time to comment and criticize this and my other posts.

The War to End all Wars

In August of 1914, the capitalist nations of Europe were plunged into World War I, which would directly result in the deaths of more than 16 million people, 7 million of whom were civilians, and contribute to the deaths of 50 million more in the 1918-19 flu epidemic. While the causes of the war were complex, underlying all was the imperialist competition for empire, primarily between the British and their ally, the French, the reigning imperial powers (who had almost gone to war in 1898 during the Fashoda crisis, but ended up settling their imperial claims in central Africa as a result of their mutual fear of the ascending power of Germany) and the Germans, the “new kid on the block”.

The war followed 100 years of “peace” in Europe sometimes known as the Pax Britannica (although some might say the Pox Britannica), as capitalism developed and then spread unevenly across the continent, as well as in the US and towards the end of the 19^th century, in Japan. Increasingly, internal developments in the major capitalist powers (including periodic and worsening depressions, exhaustion of natural resources and the development of labor movements and a socialist left), led them to expand their reach beyond their borders into less developed areas in Europe and the Middle East, and in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In some cases, the expansion was accomplished through investment, in many through outright colonization and violent conquest.  Capitalism had evolved (or perhaps devolved) into what J.A. Hobson and later V.I. Lenin termed imperialism.

Accompanying the transformation of capitalism was the rise of nationalism. Unleashed by the Napoleonic Wars in the early 19^th century, it frequently provided a unifying force which bound together the capitalist class and the working class of each nation. In the advanced capitalist nations of Europe, this proved to be effective in suppressing class struggle and in marrying the two opposing classes behind the goals of the imperialists and ultimately in support of the slaughter of WWI. (Aside: In the post WWII period, nationalist unity would often serve a different role, providing a basis for the liberation movements in the colonies of European nations.)

The Empire of Liberty remained somewhat aloof from the 19^th century imperial competition, i.e., the land grab in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Having established its unquestioned imperial dominance in the Western Hemisphere and the Pacific and having built a strong two-ocean navy under the tutelage of Teddy Roosevelt, who never saw a war he didn’t like, it had the luxury of following a policy of isolation from European conflicts, that is, as long as US trade was not affected and, perhaps just as importantly, as long on Britain, with whom the Empire of Liberty had a very special relationship, remained the strongest imperial power and could enforce the Pax Britannica.

But the Great War (WWI) endangered both US trade and British power, particularly by 1917 when the collapse of the Russian army on the Eastern front threatened to end the stalemate and allow for a German victory. As a result, the US entered the war in support of the Allied Powers (aka the Triple Entente), primarily Britain and France, to “make the world safe for democracy.”

This noble goal, which would be repeated over and over in the next 100+ years to justify US wars and military interventions in every corner of the globe, wasn’t enough to convince many young American men to sign up for the military or allow themselves to be drafted, so the Wilson administration, with the assistance of rightwing “citizens” groups, conducted major campaigns to round up and jail vocal opponents to the war and the draft, to make an example of them. Many prominent organizers from the labor movement and the Socialist Party spent years in prison, their crime being that they exercised their supposed freedom of speech.

The US role, as the supplier of weapons and fresh troops at a critical moment, allowed it to emerge from the war as a major political, economic and military world power and offered it a chance to assume leadership in a “new world order”. President Wilson went to the Paris Peace Conference with his 14 points, to argue for a just settlement, a peace without victors, and support for nationalist yearnings for political independence in Europe. His idealism (some might say arrogance) failed to sway the other victorious nations, who demanded reparations from Germany to pay for the war and who worked to dismantle the German, Hapsburg and Ottoman empires and gobble up as much of their respective territories as possible. (Note: While Wilson wanted the peace treaty to make the world safe for democracy, he had not problem with England, France, etc., maintaining and expanding their dominion over colonies in the Global South, and in one case, that of Ireland, in Europe.)

The failure of the Treaty of Versailles to establish a just peace and the US Senate’s decision not to ratify the peace treaty and join the League of Nations, pointed to a return for the US to isolation from European affairs and a refocusing on the Empire of Liberty’s domination of the Western Hemisphere and the Pacific.

Post War Foreign Policy: Isolationism of a Sort

While the period between the two world wars is generally characterized as isolationist, the US, having clearly emerged as a great power, attempted to use its new status to promote Wilson’s idealism on the world stage. It participated in, and in some cases initiated, efforts to establish a peaceful new world order. Notable among these were the Washington Naval Conference to limit navies of the major world powers (1921-22), the Dawes and Young Plans to stabilize Germany’s economy and the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which outlawed war. Much of the involvement might be characterized as making the world safe for US business and trade interests.

But, while the US tread softly in its relations with European powers, it continued its domination south of the border. From 1914 until 1932, the US intervened militarily on dozens of occasions, to protect American investments and to install dictators who would further those interests. Despite announcing the Good Neighbor policy in 1933, the Roosevelt administration continued the domination of Latin America. To avoid military interventions and occupations, the United States trained Latin American national guards and supported dictators, including Trujillo in the Dominican Republic (1930-61), the Somozas in Nicaragua (1933-79) and Batista in Cuba (1934-59).  Referring to Trujillo, FDR noted “He may be an S.O.B., but he’s our S.O.B.” And American corporations continued their exploitation of all of Latin America, not just the Banana Republics, unchallenged.

 

Jim Crow, Immigration Quotas and Consolidation of White Supremacy

This period in US history also saw the complete consolidation of white, Anglo supremacy at home. Prior to the war, the last vestiges of Reconstruction had been eliminated with the breakup of the multiracial political movement which had grown out of the agrarian protests of the post-Civil War era. The coup that ended the Fusion government in Wilmington, NC, the separate but equal decision in Plessy v Ferguson, President Wilson’s segregation of government offices, the movie Birth of a Nation, director D. W. Griffith’s violently anti-black blockbuster film of 1915, and white racist violence in the immediate aftermath of the war (for example, Red Summer, 1919, The Black Wall Street Massacre in Tulsa, 1921) provided the basis for the social and cultural conflict that resuscitated the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in the 1920s and led to what many historians consider the most openly racist period in US history.

By the end of WW I Jim Crow was firmly established in the South. Whereas the original KKK was a violent, racist organization born in the post-Civil War South and directed toward maintaining white planter control over the Freedmen, the “modern” Klan was driven by somewhat broader concerns. Many white, lower middle-class, Protestant Americans in the North and Midwest were fearful that Blacks from the South AND immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe were a threat to their traditional Anglo-American culture and to white supremacy.  They viewed Eastern and Southern European immigrants as inferior, and targeted Catholics and Jews as well as Blacks. It is important to note that the two states with possibly the largest Klan presence in the post WWI era were Indiana and New Jersey, not Mississippi and Alabama.

While this modern Klan could easily be as violent as its Reconstruction Era ancestor, it was more fraternal and social, though its brand of socializing was restricted to native-born, Protestant whites. It supported the recently enacted national prohibition on alcoholic beverages and opposed labor unions, immigration, and foreign entanglements such as the League of Nations. Drawing on the populist heritage of many of its members, the Klan leadership attacked Wall Street and big business. Said national Klan leader Hiram Evans, “Increasing economic inequalities threaten the very stability of society.” Unfortunately, much of this sounds vaguely familiar some 100 years later.

One result of this virulent racism was the anti-immigrant legislation known as the National Origins Act of 1924, titled “An Act to limit the immigration of aliens into the United States”. Immigration from Asia and Africa was effectively banned and immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe reduced to a trickle. White, Anglo supremacy was to be guaranteed by keeping “lesser races” out and preserving the racial purity of “native” white Americans. We can certainly see the origins of replacement theory in the turmoil following WWI.

In addition to the populist-based movements in support of maintaining white, Anglo supremacy, many US academics and intellectuals became adherents of the eugenics movement which emerged from England’s upper classes in the later 1800s. While the British eugenicists wanted to promote what they saw as the superior traits of the upper classes through selective breeding, the eugenics movement in the US quickly focused on eliminating “negative” traits. 

Not surprisingly, “undesirable” traits were concentrated in poor, uneducated, and non-Anglo populations. To prevent these groups from propagating, eugenicists helped drive legislation for their forced sterilization. The first state to enact a sterilization law was Indiana in 1907, quickly followed by California and 28 other states by 1931. At first, sterilization efforts focused on the disabled but later grew to include people whose only “crime” was poverty.

These sterilization programs found legal support in an increasingly conservative Supreme Court. In Buck v. Bell (1927), the state of Virginia sought to sterilize Carrie Buck for promiscuity as evidenced by her giving birth to a baby out of wedlock. In ruling against Buck, “progressive” Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes stated, “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.” California’s program was so robust that, after coming to power in Germany, the Nazi’s turned to California for advice in perfecting their own efforts. Hitler proudly admitted to following the laws of several American states that allowed for the prevention of reproduction by the “unfit”.

The triumph of nativism, white supremacy, and unbridled capitalist power in the early 1920s required something else – the weakening of the trade unions and the allied socialist movement. The suppression began in the period leading up to WWI, and focused on the more radical sectors of the labor movement, particularly the IWW, or Wobblies as they were known. The 1919 general strike in Seattle, in which the strikers literally took control of the city, scared the hell out of the capitalists, following as it did so closely on the triumph of workers' soviets in revolutionary Russia. The fact that Eugene Debs, trade union leader and five-time Socialist Party candidate for President, had garnered almost 1 million votes in 1920 while in prison for his opposition to the US entering WWI, added to their concerns. One response was the Palmer Raids utilized by US Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer to suppress radical organizations. They were characterized by illegal search and seizures, politically motivated arrests and detentions, and the deportation of several hundred suspected radicals.

With the threat from the left and labor crushed and the return to normalcy after the election of Harding G. Harding in 1920, the Empire of Liberty embarked on the second Gilded Age, aka The Roaring Twenties. There is some truth to the image of this period as one of prosperity; for the 40% of the population whose income was greater than $2,000 a year, the age of mass consumption had arrived. But just like today, Black and white tenant farmers and sharecroppers along with migrants and immigrants, who crammed into tenements in the big cities, etc., were left out. One tenth of one percent at the top received as much income as 40% of the families at the bottom (sounds familiar, doesn’t it) and each year 25,000 workers were killed on the job. Two million New York City residents lived in buildings condemned as firetraps.

In October of 1929 the party (for some) ended. In the next several years the US and much of the world entered the Great Depression, a crisis of capitalism so deep that it resulted in a massive response which took three forms in the US:

1.       The rapid growth of the labor movement, in particular the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and various other forms of collective organizations among the working class;

2.       Political support among some members of the capitalist class for the development of a broad social safety net for significant sectors of the working class (non-whites and women were often left out of the net or received far fewer benefits); and

3.       An attempt to regulate the most egregious actions of capital to prevent another great depression.

Under the pressure of the massive labor movement with strong left leadership and which reached even into the deep South; and spurred by the fear that American workers might look to the socialist Soviet Union, which had escaped the worst ravages of the Great Depression, the capitalist class made concessions that opened up avenues for ordinary Americans to survive.

Despite the triumph of the reformers, the New Deal and Keynesian Economics did not bring the US out of the Great Depression. WWII did. But that’s a story for another day.

 

 

Bits and Pieces, March 14, 2023

For this week’s Bits and Pieces, I am mostly reposting from other media I subscribe to. The polycrisis continues to surface in so many different ways, and we need to see the interconnections, but just being aware of what’s happening is a beginning. I’ve edited the reposts for brevity and made an occasional comment, always in italics.

The good news: Focusing the attention away from the glitz of Hollywood

From the Huffington Post

March 14, 2023

Just one day after her historic Oscars win, Michelle Yeoh used her spotlight to redirect attention to the inequalities women and girls globally face after a disaster. In an op-ed, she recalled her 2015 trip to Nepal, where she experienced the deadly 7.8-magnitude earthquake. The recent quakes in Turkey and Syria brought back those memories. “Crises aren’t just moments of catastrophe: They expose deep existing inequalities. Those living in poverty, especially women and girls, bear the brunt,” she wrote. (Tell it like it is, Michelle!)

 

Long shadow of US invasion of Iraq still looms over international order (or disorder?)

From the Guardian, by Patrick Wintour, Diplomatic editor

March 13, 2023

The French statesman Georges Clemenceau once said: “War is a series of catastrophes that results in a victory.” In the case of the invasion of Iraq, however, the war that began 20 years ago started in victory (of sorts, if you ignore the destruction and deaths caused by the US “shock and awe” campaign) and has ended in a series of catastrophes.

When the US rightly denounces Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and extols the sacrosanct virtues of national sovereignty, territorial integrity, and the UN charter, it only takes seconds for China and Russia, along with a distrustful global south, to point to the example of Iraq and accuse the US of double standards.

“Countries have memories,” Josep Borrell, the EU foreign affairs chief, recently conceded…The invasion certainly had a profound immediate impact on Vladimir Putin, at the time only three years into his first term as president. American unilateralism in Iraq was critical in convincing Putin, initially an ally in Bush’s war on terror, of what he saw as the irredeemable arrogance of the US.

(Tony) Blair’s press secretary, Alastair Campbell, in his diaries captures the confrontation between Putin and Blair at a press conference in May 2003, and how it spilled over into the dinner afterwards: “This was someone who felt he ought to be treated as an equal and was not being treated as an equal. He said the whole post-9/11 response was designed to show off American greatness.” The US was demanding that Russia acquiesce to a unipolar world in which it was accountable to no one.

From Putin’s perspective, everything the US did subsequently – including flirting with Islamists during the Arab Spring, misleading him over UN authorization for the toppling of Gaddafi in Libya, siding with groups that included jihadists against Assad’s Syria and support for Ukraine’s 2014 Maidan protests – were signs of a country that saw no distinction between a “rules-based order” and American hegemony.

This gives a much different picture of the motivation of the Russians, not just Putin, with regard to US/NATO/EU actions between 2014 and the start of the war in Ukraine. Are the Russians trying to re-establish the Soviet Empire, or reacting to the fear that the US/NATO/EU are attempting, with a great deal of success so far, to assert hegemony over countries on its borders, and isolate it?

US Increases Dominance as World's Top Arms Exporter

From Common Dreams, by Brett Wilkins

March 13, 2023

"The impacts of the global arms trade aren't just about the volume of weapons delivered," said one expert, citing "a few examples of how U.S. arms deliveries can make the world a more dangerous place."

A Sweden-based research institute published a report Monday showing that the United States accounted for 40% of the world's weapons exports in the years 2018-22, selling armaments to more than 100 countries while increasing its dominance of the global arms trade. The United States saw a 14% increase in arms exports over the previous five-year period analyzed by SIPRI. U.S. arms were delivered to 103 nations from 2018-22, with 41% going to the Middle East.

And who is getting these weapons. In the Middle East, Israel is the largest recipient, followed by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Emirates. One might question why the US is arming these historic enemies, whose human rights records are hardly impeccable? Hmm, could it be that we are getting ready for a war with Iran? In the name of promoting democracy and human rights? Another coalition of the willing?

Former top U.S. admiral cashes in on nuclear sub deal with Australia

From The Washington Post, by Craig Whitlock and Nate Jones

March 7, 2023 at 7:00 a.m. EST

In its quest to build nuclear-powered submarines, the government of Australia recently hired a little-known, one-person consulting firm from Virginia: Briny Deep.

Briny Deep, based in Alexandria, Va., received a $210,000 part-time contract in late November to advise Australian defense officials during their negotiations to acquire top-secret nuclear submarine technology from the United States and Britain, according to Australian contracting documents.

U.S. public records show the company is owned by John M. Richardson, a retired four-star U.S. admiral and career submariner who headed the U.S. Navy from 2015 to 2019.

Richardson, who declined to comment, is the latest former U.S. Navy leader to cash in on the nuclear talks by working as a high-dollar consultant for the Australian government, a pattern that was revealed in a Washington Post investigation last year. 

I can hear the ghost of  President Eisenhower reminding us, “Beware of the Military/Industrial Complex.”

And, are we firming up the coalition of our allies in the Pacific (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization + Japan & South Korea) as we abrogate our longstanding One China policy?

 

And finally, at home - Look who gets bailed out and who doesn’t

From Inequality.org, March 13, 2023

The Silicon Valley Bank collapsed this past week.

Like Senator Elizabeth Warren, we see a clear connection between the bank’s demise and a bill Donald Trump signed in 2018 that undid essential banking reforms enacted in 2010, paving the way for financial institutions to chase after profits and disregard the downsides. SVB’s top dog Greg Becker, Senator Warren points out, took home almost $10 million last year for boosting his bank’s profitability — “and its riskiness.”

Federal officials are now strategically positioning their rapid-fire involvement in SVB’s financial recovery as definitely not a taxpayer-funded “bailout.” We find more convincing the analyses that see the rush to protect SVB’s clients as a sign of the outsized political power of rich bad actors that gives lower-income people the short end of the stick.

SVB, a bank with $200 billion in assets, collapses and gets rescued on a 48-hour timeline. Meanwhile, average Americans are now approaching $2 trillion in crushing student debt. Ask activists at the Debt Collective, a debtors union working to cancel student debt: “What have we gotten?”

They’re asking the right kind of question: How can the federal government spring to action to bail out mercurial venture capitalists while letting the debt of hard-working Americans pile up as banks levy heavy overdraft fees and the cost-of-living skyrockets?

No comment needed!

Have a great St. Paddy’s Day, while remembering that in the 1850s, it was the Irish immigrants who were “coming to America” in large numbers as a result of the potato famine and Imperial British rule over Ireland, and who were the target of the racist Know-Nothing Party.

Bits and pieces - 3/12/23

 At Home: Serve and Protect -

Wilmington, NC Police Chief Donny Williams has requested a Pave Hawk HH-60G helicopter, a modified version of the Army Black Hawk helicopter, from the U.S. Air Force. The U.S. Department of Defense permits the transfer of excess supplies and equipment to state, county and local law enforcement agencies across the country. Any property obtained must be used for law enforcement purposes and by trained officers only. The helicopters are typically used for crimes in progress, supporting ground units, searching for lost people, tactical support, vehicle pursuit, surveillance, and photographic missions. From Wilmington’s Port City Daily

Black Hawk helicopters? Tactical support? Army surplus to be used for “law enforcement purposes”? Is there still any pretext that the police are not an occupying army?

Abroad: The Warfare State

“The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality… we will find ourselves organizing “clergy and laymen concerned” committees [like the one against the war in Vietnam] for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala — Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end, unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy.” – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

President Biden’s budget: $1.6 trillion discretionary spending request includes $886 billion for the Pentagon and military. This means that more than half of the discretionary spending will be for war, with half of that going directly to Pentagon contractors. Spending on nuclear weapons (not included in the Pentagon’s budget) and Congressional add-ons could push total spending for national “defense” to as much as $950 billion or more for FY 2024. This would be the highest US military budget since World War II, far higher than at the peaks of the Korean or Vietnam Wars.

If we add in the money earmarked for heavily militarized homeland security programs, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) the total comes to nearly 2/3rds of the discretionary spending. After all that, only one in three federal discretionary dollars under the Biden budget would be available for human needs and community programs like affordable housing programs, public education, and public health.

Dr. King’s admonition was right on target, except for one not so minor detail that he could not foresee. The Masters of War and their political henchmen have found a way to minimize the marches and rallies at home against our wars. They have organized their efforts so that there are few, if any, body bags containing young Americans being unloaded at military bases this time.

Proxy wars are so much easier to "justify" to those of us on the "homefront".Our wars are fought by others, mostly from the Global South. Even when American forces are directly involved, they are either paid mercenaries from corporate outfits like BlackRock or poor “volunteers”, who join the military with the hope of moving up from the bottom of the economic ladder.

50 years ago, as the war in Vietnam was ending with a US military defeat, those of us (and there were a lot of us) who had helped build an antiwar movement understood that the basis of US foreign policy was the maintenance and extension of its economic control in much of the world, its Empire. Nothing has changed in the interim to convince me that US imperialism is not the main danger to the people of the world, and that it is incumbent on those of us who reside in the belly of the beast to rebuild and strengthen the movement to end US imperialism.

The crises we face from the danger of escalation in the Ukraine, or perhaps in the Pacific with the Chinese over Taiwan, into a nuclear confrontation, to climate change, to another pandemic (or the revival of the current one - in either case we are totally unprepared), to runaway inequality, along with a whole lot of others, are all interrelated and reinforcing.

These are the times that try our souls; the sunshine patriot will, in the face of these crisis, shrink from the service to human kind; but those who stand firm now, deserve the love and thanks of all." 

 

Who blew up Nord Stream?

Well, it appears that a few mainstream media folks and their friends are taking notice of Seymour Hersh’s postings, if only to try of refute them. The latest comes from Politico. To save you from reading their “analysis” (aka BS), I can give you their conclusion: “There are lots of theories. They’re all full of holes.” Well some perhaps more than others.

When you are trying to solve a mystery, there are a few main threads to follow. They are the motive, the means and the opportunity. And one needs to look for clues in what the suspects say and do. Of the four “theories” that Politico analyzes, none provide much in terms of means or opportunity and at least one doesn’t provide any motive.

That is except one, Hersh’s analysis. It provides us with motive, with means and with opportunity. On top of that he reminds us that the US has carried out similar actions in the past. And, here is the crowning point, President Biden as much as stated that we would take action to prevent Nord Stream II from coming on line.

Short of an outright confession, how much more proof do we need?

 

An International Rules Based Order?

A Prologue, or rehashing yesterday’s news  

For as long as I can remember (and here I would include time periods I, as a historian, have studied in depth) the United States has claimed that its actions around the world are designed to enforce a “rules-based order”, which, we are told, promotes democracy and economic progress that benefits everyone. Based on that premise and the hubris of American exceptionalism, nothing that it does can be challenged on either legal or moral grounds.

Take the question of war crimes (isn’t that really a redundancy?) which are much in the news today as the war in Ukraine grinds on and on, in large part, I would argue, to the US refusal to work for a negotiated settlement. The US condemns the Russians for committing horrendous crimes against civilian populations and the press, even those outlets claiming to be liberal or progressive, carries story after story documenting these crimes. US leaders demand that the Russians from the lowliest private in the Army up to the Russian President, Putin, be put on trial, one would assume by some international agency, perhaps the International Criminal Court, ignoring the fact, which they are well aware of, that because Russia does not recognize the ICC, under international law, its nationals can’t be tried there for the war crimes they have committed, in Ukraine or anywhere else. So no one seriously believes that these trials will ever take place, but it plays well in the press.

There is no question about whether these crimes have been committed and must be condemned.

But what’s left out of this discussion is that the US also doesn’t recognize the ICC and therefore its soldiers and political leaders can’t be tried for war crimes, either. As if to emphasize that point, the US Congress passed legislation during the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars (during which, of course, it should be clear, there were no war crimes committed by anyone except the Taliban), that gave the US government the authority to use military force to “rescue” any American citizens who were about to be tried by international courts for war crimes.

The US may not recognize the authority of the ICC, but Afghanistan does. Under Donald Trump, the US refused to cooperate with the ICC’s chief prosecutor when she announced that her investigation into war crimes during the Afghan War would include “alleged C.I.A. and American military abuse in detention centers in Afghanistan in 2003 and 2004, and at sites in Poland, Lithuania, and Romania” (aka black ops sites). At this point the Trump administration revoked her visa, preventing her from interviewing any witnesses here. It then followed up with financial sanctions on her.

Well, that was Trump, you might say, but here is Joe Biden’s response to the investigation, which can only be described as genuine bipartisanship:

“the United States continues to object to the International Criminal Court’s assertions of jurisdiction over personnel of such non-States Parties as the United States and its allies absent their consent or referral by the United Nations Security Council and will vigorously protect current and former United States personnel from any attempts to exercise such jurisdiction.”

To put it bluntly, the “rules-based order” that the US is intent on enforcing around the world goes like this: We make the rules and we enforce the order, and nobody, or no international body (ICC, UN, etc.) can overrule us. In a slight modification of the golden rule (he who has the gold, rules - which clearly applies domestically), the US asserts that “he who has the guns, rules” and we surely have the MOST guns, from the military right down to the gen pop.

Since the ICC was established, no Americans have been tried for war crimes in Iraq or Afghanistan, not to mention Vietnam, Korea and the hundreds of other large or small US military actions outside its borders since the end of WW II. No courts have been convened to try US Presidents or Congressmen for supplying weapons of war to countries like Israel and Saudi Arabia (the list could go on and on, but these are good examples), who have used them against their own civilian populations as well as those of their neighbors. Apparently, the US leaders and their sycophants in the press haven’t brushed up on their bible verses lately. “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone …” (John, 8:7)

The first rule of war, as laid out by the ICRC, requires combatant countries to distinguish between (permitted) military and (prohibited) civilian targets. The second states that “acts or threats of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population” — an all-too-on-target summary of Russia’s war-making these last 10 months — “are prohibited.” Violating that prohibition is a crime.”   Rebecca Gordon in Nation of Change https://www.nationofchange.org/2023/01/10/american-exceptionalism-on-full-display/ 

To reiterate, the Russians are certainly guilty of war crimes. But

·         in a country whose military budget is more than the military budgets of the next 10 largest countries spending on war, COMBINED;

·         in a country that spends over ½ of its national budget on war (aka “defense”, a rather interesting term to justify massive military spending in a country that hasn’t been invaded in over 200 years);

·         in a country whose weapons have been used time and again against civilian populations;

·         in a country that has the world’s largest stockpile of nuclear weapons and has been steadily withdrawing from treaties designed to reduce the stockpiles of all the major nuclear powers;

·         in a country that has 750 publicly acknowledged military bases in over 80 countries (and that doesn’t count the black ops sites);

·         in a country that is by far the largest supplier of military weapons to other countries around the world, many of whom do not in any sense qualify as democracies;  

·         in a country which has invaded countless other countries throughout its history,  particularly since WW II, and engaged in mass carpet bombing of civilian populations and infrastructure and more recently, targeted bombings (but I guess this was OK because these populations weren’t white Christians);

·         AND in a country that has used the most horrendous weapon of war on civilians, not once, but twice and still refuses to rule out first use of these weapons in the future;

in that country, one might ask if it isn’t guilty of “prohibited” attacks on civilians on a scale that dwarfs even what Putin and the Russians have done. (Note: if you are not familiar with these actions, it’s because we generally don’t learn about them in our history books, which praise The Empire of Liberty for spreading the “liberty” (by any means necessary), but all too often leave out the “empire” part.)

 

In this week’s news: The Spring Offensive?

Now comes another example, directly related to the war in Ukraine, of how the US “rules-based order” works to promote its “interests around the world”, and it comes from a journalist who has a long history of exposing the dark side of the Empire of Liberty, Seymour Hersh. A real investigative journalist, who doesn’t just parrot releases from the State Dept.  and the Pentagon, Hersh gained recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai massacre and its cover-up, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize. During the 1970s, he covered the secret bombing of Cambodia and in 2004, he detailed the U.S. military’s torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq for The New Yorker.

Hersh’s latest investigation, however, has received little or no attention from the mainstream press, with a couple of exceptions, mainly in Europe. Why? Perhaps because it exposes one more piece of what’s behind the US actions with regard to Ukraine. In a substack post (https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream) Hersh provides a detail analysis of the “mysterious” explosion that shut down 3 of the 4 Nord Stream pipelines, which were designed to transport cheap natural gas from Russia to Germany.

At the time of the “mysterious” explosion, many in the US press speculated that the Russians blew up their own pipeline. This strains the bounds of my imagination, since I find it hard to believe that they would be stupid enough to destroy something so beneficial to them, both economically and in terms of political leverage on European nations, particularly Germany. No matter who you are, you’d have to be awfully stupid to bite the hand that feeds you, big time. The other “explanation” at the time claimed that it was an accident. You know that the Russians aren’t very competent when it comes to technology. Again I find this far-fetched, when we note that there were several separate explosions in different pipelines. A chain reaction?

Hersh’s post presents us with a lot of the pieces for solving the “mystery” by pointing out that the US had a very strong motive (even before the Russian invasion, and more so, once Russian troops invaded Ukraine). It had the opportunity and it had the means, as Hersh documents. Various officials of the US government had made it clear prior to the destruction of the pipelines, that the US would not tolerate the expansion (as in Nord Stream II, which was ready to come online) of the pipelines.

I’ve read a couple of attacks on Hersh’s facts, and don’t doubt that due to the aura of secrecy surrounding this event, he is only beginning to unravel the whole story, but I find this, far and above, the most credible theory of what happened. After all, as Hersh points out, how many times has it happened before? And, unlike the main stream media, I remember and understand the history of the Empire of Liberty.

US has a long and sordid history of secret actions in every corner of the world to promote its economic and political interests. As I am putting together my brief account of the history of the Empire and its relationship to white supremacy, I have included many such instances. Will we find out in 5 or 10 years that Hersh was on to something, that is if we are still around?

The Drums of War Beat Louder

In a recent WAPO piece, the link between the War in Ukraine and China policy was also spelled out clearly.

A Russian military victory in Ukraine will embolden Beijing and lead to war between the United States and China over Taiwan, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the exiled Russian tycoon and vocal critic of Vladimir Putin’s regime, warned in an interview ahead of remarks that he will deliver to global leaders at a major security and defense conference in Germany this weekend…

Khodorkovsky is due to speak this weekend at the Munich Security Conference, where he and two other opposition figures, the former world chess champion Garry Kasparov, and Yulia Navalnaya, the wife of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny, have been invited instead of official representatives of the Russian government. Khodorkovsky warns West of war with China if Russia wins in Ukraine – By Catherine Belton, February 15, 2023 

And now we have the threats by both the US and its NATO partner in crime, Germany. They demand, according to the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, that China refrain from sending weapons to Russia, or else. The or else isn’t spelled out.

If the connections between the war in Ukraine and US actions (military, diplomatic, economic and political) with regard to China weren’t clear to the reader, they certainly should be now. If the eerie parallel to the events leading to WW I weren’t obvious before now, it certainly should be now. And if it’s not clear that WW III will be the war to end all wars, one would hope it is now

And again, the Empire gets ready to strike in conjunction with its “democratic” allies

It’s hard sometimes to keep up with the US’s (and its allies) use of its military threats around the world. While attention is focused on Ukraine and the South Pacific as hot spots, the situation in the Middle East continues to heat up. The Trump administration deep sixed the Iran Nuclear Deal and the Biden administration, after a half-hearted attempt to renegotiate, has abandoned any effort to revive it. In the meanwhile, other plans are afoot. From the Intercept:

The US military has allocated spending for secret contingency operations pertaining to an Iran war plan, according to a classified Pentagon budget manual listing emergency and special programs reviewed by The Intercept.

The contingency plan, code-named “Support Sentry,” was funded in 2018 and 2019, according to the manual, which was produced for the 2019 fiscal year. It classifies Support Sentry as an Iran “CONPLAN,” or concept plan, a broad contingency plan for war which the Pentagon develops in anticipation of a potential crisis…

When asked about the program and whether it is still in place, Maj. John Moore, a spokesperson for U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM, said, “As a matter of policy, we do not comment on numbered plans. Iran remains the leading source of instability in the region and is a threat to the United States and our partners. We are constantly monitoring threat streams in coordination with our regional partners and will not hesitate to defend U.S. national interests in the region.”

And who exactly are those regional partners? That great democracy, Saudi Arabia, whose government sanctions the murder of journalists and has been carrying out a genocidal war in Yemen for 8 years, with weapons generously supplied by the US.

And Israel, whose human rights record with regard to the Palestinians is once again making headlines and whose current government actions have resulted in massive protests at home and condemnation abroad.

So while we, in the US, are focused on “Putin’s War” in Ukraine and the audacious Chinese “weather” balloon,

… the Biden administration is on the verge of sleepwalking (I beg to differ; it’s going down this path with eyes wide open) into a major armed conflict in the Middle East. Last week, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Thomas Nides appeared to endorse a plan for Israel to attack Iranian nuclear facilities with U.S. support. “Israel can and should do whatever they need to deal with [Iran], and we’ve got their back,” he said at a meeting of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.

Nides’s words come after recent high-level military drills between Israel and the United States intended to showcase the ability to strike Iranian targets, as well as recent acts of sabotage and assassination inside Iran …

… the Biden administration has not walked back the remarks. In a press conference, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that the remarks reflected consistent U.S. support of Israeli security. (The Intercept, Hawkish Israel Is Pulling U.S. Into War With Iran, 3/1/23)

What now?

It is incumbent on the left in this country to work on developing a broad antiwar movement, one that can build off the lessons learned in opposing the war in Vietnam. To do so, we need to understand the basis for US actions, its defense of empire, as well as the implications for the working class, here in the US and internationally.

While many will be drawn to oppose the US policies as immoral because of the horrors of war (the religious and pacifist objections), and others will join because of the threat of escalation to nuclear war, what is critical is that left advance a clear anti-imperialist perspective and center the movement with a working class perspective. To do this it is absolutely necessary to highlight the relationship of this crisis to the others that threaten our very existence. These include the climate crisis; the rise of neo-fascism with its appeal to white supremacy; the continuing threat of COVID and other pandemics; and runaway inequality, which has resulted in the extreme concentration of wealth AND power in the hands of a tiny minority.

What we are facing is aptly described by Adam Tooze and others as a polycrisis. Stated simply, a polycrisis is the conjunction of several interrelated crises. The implication of the term is that these crises combine to form a polycrisis that is more than the sum of all of its parts. The nature of the “beast” is that you can’t deal with each individual crisis as independent from the others.

I hope to turn my attention to clarifying the nature of the polycrisis and how we can deal with the whole in future postings.

Bits and pieces (originally written to be posted at the beginning of Feb.)

A breakthrough in renewable energy? And guess who’s helping out? Not intentionally, I’m sure - from

BASED, a new American Prospect newsletter

“A new study says geothermal could smash growth forecasts with the backing of a powerful ally: the oil and gas industry. “Long-dormant geothermal energy is having a moment in the sun (I have to wonder if the pun was intended or not). Recent technological advancements have transformed the potential of hot rocks as a renewable-energy resource, and now, a stream of federal and state incentives have put geothermal on the cusp of breakout success. “Hot rocks near the Earth’s surface contain immense quantities of energy. In some places, that subsurface heat breaks through in geysers, hot springs, and steam vents near volcanic activity. Humans long ago identified the potential of this energy as a resource. Way back in 1892, Boise, Idaho, created the United States’ first district heating system, piping hot water into buildings from nearby hot springs. Today, the bulk of U.S. geothermal is concentrated in California and Nevada, which have relatively shallow geothermal resources. “Until the past decade, it was expensive and technically challenging to dig deeper. But those obstacles have been rapidly cleared, setting off a volley of deep geothermal exploration projects. The up-front cost is high, but district systems pay dividends in lower long-term bills for heating and cooling.”   Now comes the irony. The technological advances, that have made it possible for the oil and gas industry to tap previously unreachable sources or oil and gas, have provided the tools to make geothermal energy readily available and price competitive. Wouldn’t it be great if the industry that is one of the major sources of greenhouse gases will go down in history as helping to provide for its own demise? For once, unintended consequences may end up benefitting humankind.

 

A peek behind the continual dust ups with China on the day we shot down the big, bad balloon - from the Intercept

 

“A WAR BETWEEN China and Taiwan will be extremely good for business at America’s Frontier Fund, a tech investment outfit whose co-founder and CEO sits on both the State Department Foreign Affairs Policy Board and President Joe Biden’s Intelligence Advisory Board, according to audio from a February 1 event.

 

“The remarks occurred at a tech finance symposium hosted at the Manhattan offices of Silicon Valley Bank. According to attendee Jack Poulson, head of the watchdog group Tech Inquiry, an individual who identified himself as “Tom” attended the event in place of Jordan Blashek, America’s Frontier Fund’s president and chief operating officer.

 

“Following the panel discussion, “Tom” spoke with a gaggle of other attendees and held forth on AFF’s investment in so-called choke points: sectors that would spike in value during a volatile geopolitical crisis, like computer chips or rare earth minerals. It turns out, according to audio published by Poulson, that a war in the Pacific would be tremendous for AFF’s bottom line.”

 

I applaud the Intercept for its reporting on this, but have to wonder, is this news to anyone? War is good for big business, particularly if it’s fought on someone else’s turf. We have the war in Ukraine to bleed the Russians dry, why not one in the Pacific to bleed the Chinese dry and make a buck (or a few trillion) for starving billionaire Masters of War in the process? Then, with the return of the US and friends to hegemonic power, both military and economic, we and our junior partners (Western Europe and Japan) can get back to the business of exploiting the Global South and our working classes at home.

 

Recent developments seem to indicate that this is front and center in Biden and his fellow corporate Dems minds. Since taking office, one of Biden’s top priorities has been shifting American foreign policy toward confronting China, which he views as the biggest long-term threat to American interests, while still providing massive amounts of advanced weapons to Ukraine. Those are two things that centrist Dems and not totally crazy Republicans can unite around. And who says that bipartisanship is dead?

 

 

Government regulation of business – benefits v costs

 

I’m not a big fan of Paul Krugman, but every once in a while, he focuses attention in the right direction, sort of. In a NYT opinion piece on Feb. 7^th, he took on the conservatives’ argument that government regulations restrict the business community from promoting growth in productivity. While not denying this, he pointed out that it only looks at one side of the equation, the costs. But what about the benefits?

 

In the late 1970s, as productivity lagged behind its breakneck pace from the post WW II era, Ronald Reagan took aim at government regulation as the problem. He popularized “supply-side economics” (aka, trickle-down economics) as a solution to both lagging productivity gains and inflation, which was running at rates of over 10%.

 

Take the Occupational Safety and Health Act, passed in

 

Krugman’s conclusion: “And the broader lesson is that measured productivity isn’t the only thing that matters. What, after all, is the economy for? The goal is to improve people’s lives (my emphasis, since this is where Krugman and I totally disagree – the goal in capitalist society is to increase the wealth and power of the 1%, and it always has been.) This is often achieved by increasing gross domestic product per capita, but G.D.P. is an indicator, not an ultimate goal. We could have a bigger economy if we were willing to have filthy air and a lot more injured workers, but that’s not a trade-off we want to make.” (Paul, I couldn’t agree more if the “we” you are talking about is ordinary working-class Americans. You’ve identified the problem, but your class perspective leads to a faulty analysis.)