Here’s one of the things I now do every morning. I go to the online Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center and check out the figures there — global coronavirus cases and deaths, U.S. coronavirus cases and deaths. And I do so the way that, not so long ago, I would have opened the sports pages and checked out the latest scores of whatever New York team I was rooting for.

Where it was once a matter of the Knicks winning 109-92 or the Mets losing 4-2, it’s now those other, always rising, ever grimmer figures — say, 29,607,486 and 538,087. Those are the ever-updated numbers of reported American cases and deaths in what, until the arrival of the Biden administration, was a pathetically chaotic, horrifically mismanaged, and politically depth-charged struggle with Covid-19. In certain Republican-run states now rushing to unmask and open anything and everything to the limit, in places where crowds gather as if nothing had truly happened in the past year (as at Florida beaches this spring), we may face yet another future “wave” of disease — the fourth wave, if it happens — in a country at least parts of which seem eternally eager to teeter at the edge of a health cliff. That it wouldn’t have had to be this way we know from the success of the city of Seattle, which faced the first major coronavirus outbreak in this country a year ago and now has, as the New York Times reports, “the lowest death rate of the 20 largest metropolitan regions in the country.”

Think of Covid-19-watching as the sport from hell. And when you look at those ever-changing figures — even knowing that vaccinations are now swiftly on the rise in this country (but not everywhere on this beleaguered planet of ours) — they should remind you daily that we live in a deeply wounded land on a deeply wounded planet and that, no matter the fate of Covid-19, it’s only likely to get worse.

Here, for instance, is another figure to attend to, even though there’s no equivalent to that Johns Hopkins page when it comes to this subject: 40%. That’s the percentage of the human population living in tropical lands where, as this planet continues to heat toward or even past the 1.5-degree Fahrenheit mark set by the Paris climate accord, temperatures are going to soar beyond the limits of what a body (not carefully ensconced in air-conditioned surroundings) can actually tolerate. Climate change will, in other words, prove to be another kind of pandemic, even if, unlike Covid-19, it’s not potentially traceable to bats or pangolins, but to us humans and specifically to the oil, gas, and coal companies that have over all these years powered what still passes for civilization.

In other words, just to take the American version of climate change, from raging wildfires to mega-droughts, increasing numbers of ever-more-powerful hurricanes to greater flooding, rising sea levels (and disappearing coastlines) to devastating heat waves (and even, as in Texas recently, climate-influenced freezes), not to speak of future migration surges guaranteed to make border crossing an even more fraught political issue, ahead lies a world that could someday make our present pandemic planet seem like a dreamscape. And here’s the problem: at least with Covid-19, in a miracle of modern scientific research, vaccines galore have been developed to deal with that devastating virus, but sadly there will be no vaccines for climate change.

The wounding of planet Earth Keep in mind as well that our country, the United States, is not only an especially wounded one when it comes to the pandemic; it’s also a wounding one, both at home and abroad. The sports pages of death could easily be extended, for instance, to this country’s distant wars, something Brown University’s Costs of War Project has long tried to do. (That site is, in a sense, the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center for America’s grim, never-ending conflicts of the twenty-first century.)

Choose whatever post-9/11 figures you care to when it comes to our forever wars and they’re all staggering: invasions and occupations of distant lands; global drone assassination campaigns; or the release of American air power across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa (most recently, the strike President Biden ordered in Syria that killed a mere “handful” of militia men — 22, claim some sources — a supposedly “proportionate” number that did not include any women or children, though it was a close call until the president cancelled a second strike). And don’t forget Washington’s endless arming of, and support for, countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates engaged in their own orgies of death and destruction in Yemen. Pick whatever figures you want, but the wounding of this planet in this century by this country has been all too real and ongoing.

The numbers, in fact, remain staggering. As has been pointed out many times at TomDispatch, the money this country puts into its “defense” budget tops that of the next 10 countries (China, India, Russia, Saudi Arabia, France, Germany, United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, and Brazil) combined. And when it comes to selling weaponry of the most advanced and destructive kind globally, the U.S. leaves every other country in the dust. It’s the arms dealer of all arms dealers on Planet Earth.

And if you happen to be in the mood to count up U.S. military bases, which are on every continent except Antarctica, this country garrisons the planet in a way no previous power, not even imperial Britain, did. It has an estimated 800 such bases, while, just for the sake of comparison, China, that other fearsome rising power the U.S. military is now so focused on, has… hmmm, at least one such base, in Djibouti, Africa (remarkably close — you won’t be surprised to learn — to an American military base there). None of this really has much of anything to do with “national security,” but it certainly adds up to a global geography of wounding in a rather literal fashion. In this sense, on this planet in this century, the United States has truly — to use a word American politicians have long loved to apply to this country — proven “exceptional.” 

America unmasked At home, too, until recently, American political leadership has been wounding indeed. Keep in mind that this was in a country in which one political party is now a vortex of conspiracy theories, bizarre beliefs, wild convictions, and truths that are obvious lies, a party nearly a third of whose members view the QAnon conspiracy theory favorably, 75% of whose members believe that Joe Biden lost the 2020 election, and 49% of whose male members have no intention of being vaccinated for Covid-19 (potentially denying the country “herd immunity”).

And just to put all this in perspective, not a single Republican “statesman” offered a vote of support when Joe Biden’s congressional radicals passed a (temporary) $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief bill, parts of which were aimed at alleviating this country’s historic levels of inequality. After all, in the pandemic moment, while so many Americans found themselves jobless, homeless, and hungry, the country’s billionaires made an extra 1.3 trillion dollars (a figure that should certainly fit somewhere on the sports pages of death). Never, not even in the Gilded Age, has inequality been quite so extreme or wounding in the country that still passes for the greatest on the planet.

For the first time in its history, in 2017, a self-proclaimed billionaire became president of the United States and, with the help of a Republican Congress, passed a tax cut that left the rich and corporations flooded with yet more money. Admittedly, he was a billionaire who had repeatedly bankrupted his own businesses, always jumping ship just in time with other people’s money in hand (exactly as he would do after helping to pandemicize this country, once again with oodles of his followers’ money in his pocket).

As for me, shocking as the assault on the Capitol was on January 6th, I never thought that the Senate should have convicted Donald Trump for that alone. My feeling was that the House should have impeached him and the Senate convicted him for the far more serious and direct crime of murder. After all, he was the one who played a crucial role in turning the pandemic into our very own set of mask wars (even as he called on his followers, long before January 6th, to “liberate” a state capital building).

The half-baked, dismissive way he would deal with the coronavirus, its importance, and what should be done to protect us from it — even before he got a serious case of it, was hospitalized, and returned to the White House, still infectious, to tear off his mask in full public view — would functionally represent acts of murder. In effect, he unmasked himself as the killer he was. (A study in the International Journal of Health Services suggests that by July 2020 his personal decision to turn masks into a political issue had already resulted in between 4,000 and 12,000 deaths.) 

Now, throw in other Republican governors like Greg Abbott of Texas and Tate Reeves of Mississippi, who knowingly refused to declare mask mandates or cancelled them early, and you have a whole crew of murderers to add to those Johns Hopkins figures in a moment when the all-American sport is surely death.

A genuinely green planet? Admittedly, I don’t myself have any friends who have died of Covid-19, although I have at least two, even more ancient than I am, one 91 in fact, who have been hospitalized for it, devastated by it, and then have slowly and at least partially recovered from it. As for myself, since I had the foresight to be 75 when Covid-19 first hit and am now heading for 77, I’ve had my two vaccine shots in a world in which, thanks again at least in part to Donald Trump and to a social-media universe filled with conspiracy theories and misinformation, far too many Americans — one-third of mostly young military personnel, for instance! — are shying away from or refusing what could save us all.

So, we’ve been plunged into a nightmare comparable to those that have, in the past, been visited on humanity, including the Black Death and the Spanish Flu, made worse by leaders evidently intent on shuffling us directly into the graveyard. And yet, that could, in the end, prove the least of our problems. We could, as Joe Biden has only recently more or less promised, be heading for a future in which Covid-19 will be truly under control or becomes, at worst, the equivalent of the yearly flu.

Let’s hope that’s the case. Now, consider this: the one favor Covid-19 seemed to be doing for humanity by shutting so many of us in, keeping airlines passengers on the ground, taking vehicles off the road and even, for a while, ships off the high seas, was cutting down on the use of oil, coal, and natural gas and so greenhouse gasses released into the atmosphere. In the year of Covid-19, carbon emissions dropped significantly. In December 2020, however, as various global economies like China’s began to rev back up, those emissions were already reportedly a shocking 2% higher than they had been in December 2019 before the pandemic swept across the world.

In short, most of what might make it onto the sports pages of death these days may turn out to be the least of humanity’s problems. After all, according to a new report, thanks in significant part to human activities, even the Amazon rain forest, once one of the great carbon sinks on the planet, is now releasing more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than it’s absorbing. And that should be a shock.

If you want to be further depressed, try this: on our planet, there are now two great greenhouse gas emitters, the United States (historically at the top of the charts) and China (number one at this moment). Given what lies ahead, here’s a simple enough formula: if China and the United States can’t cooperate in a truly meaningful way when it comes to climate change, we’re in trouble deep. And yet the Biden administration, like the Trump administration before it, remains remarkably focused on hostility to China and a military response to that country, an approach that someday is guaranteed to seem so out of touch as to be unbelievable. 

Climate change will, over the coming decades, prove increasingly devastating to our lives. It could, in a sense, prove to be the pandemic of all the ages. And yet, here’s the sad and obvious thing: the world doesn’t have to be this way. It’s true that there are no vaccinations against climate change, but we humans already know perfectly well what has to be done. We know that we need to create a genuinely green and green-powered planet to bring this version of a pandemic under control and we know as well that, over the next decades, it’s a perfectly doable task if only humanity truly sets its mind to it.

Otherwise, we’re going to find ourselves on an increasingly extreme planet, while the sports pages of death will only grow. If we’re not careful, human history could, in the end, turn out to be the ultimate ghost story.

Tom Engelhardt created and runs the website TomDispatch.com (where this article originated). He is also a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a highly praised history of American triumphalism in the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. A fellow of the Type Media Center, his sixth and latest book is A Nation Unmade by War.

Copyright ©2021 Tom Engelhardt — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 18 March 2021

Word Count: 2,221

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Just about everyone was shocked by what happened at the Capitol building on January 6th. But as a former soldier in America’s forever wars, horrifying as the scenes were, I also found what happened strangely familiar, almost inevitable. I thought that, if only we had taken our country’s imperial history seriously, none of us would have found that day either shocking or unprecedented.

Honestly, it could only seem that way if you imagined our domestic politics as completely separate from our foreign policy. But if we’re to learn anything from that maladroit attempt at a government-toppling coup, it should be that they are anything but separate. The question isn’t whether then-President Donald Trump incited the assault on the Capitol — of course he did. It is rather: Since when have we cared if an American president lies to incite an illegal insurrection? In all honesty, our commanders-in-chief have been doing so abroad for generations with complete impunity. It was only a matter of time before the moral rot finally made its way home.

Back in 2007, I actually met Nancy Pelosi whom those insurrectionists were going after — “Tell Pelosi we’re coming for that b**ch. Tell f***ing Pelosi we’re coming for her!” — in that very Capitol building. That day, my family was testifying before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform concerning the U.S. government’s disinformation campaign about how, three years earlier, my brother Pat Tillman had died in Afghanistan (as a result of “friendly,” not enemy, fire). We would testify alongside former soldier Jessica Lynch who had suffered a similar disinformation fate in the wake of a tragic ambush of her convoy in Nasiriyah, Iraq, where soldiers died and she was taken prisoner. After the hearing, we discussed the case with Pelosi, who then took us on a brief personal tour of the halls of the building. Given the circumstances, it was a thoughtful gesture and a humbling experience.

So, it was personally quite unsettling to watch that rabid mob of insurrectionists storm our Capitol, some actively seeking to kill the woman who had walked our family through those same halls, wearing her signature green business suit. To see people desecrating that building over grievances rooted in demonstrable and absurd untruths manufactured by President Trump was both grotesque and shameful.

And yet, however surreal, disappointing, disqualifying, even treasonous that assault and the 57-43 Senate acquittal of the president would be, what took place should, in another sense, not have been a shock to anyone. The idea that January 6th was something new for this country and so a unique affront to the American idea of democracy, not to speak of common decency, was simply wrong. After all, ever since 1945, this country has regularly intervened in elections all over the globe and done far worse as well. What’s disorienting, I suppose, is that this time we did it to ourselves.

Around the globe, generation after generation My own limited experience with American interventionism involves the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. After the September 11th attacks, I enlisted in the U.S. Army with Pat. We would be assigned to the 75th Ranger Regiment and our unit would in March 2003 be sent into Iraq, one of so many tools in the Bush administration’s war of aggression there. We would help remove Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein by force. It was hardly the mission I had in mind when I signed up, but I was naive when it came to foreign policy. Being part of illegal invasions, however, leaves lasting impressions.

That particular intervention in Iraq began with a barrage of administration lies about Saddam’s supposed supply of weapons of mass destruction, his reputed links to al-Qaeda, and the idea that we were liberating the Iraqi people. Some of us actually were assigned to run around Baghdad, “east, west, south, and north somewhat,” looking for those nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. The whole invasion would prove catastrophic, of course, resulting in the destruction of Iraqi society, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of American soldiers, even as that country’s leadership was removed and its military disbanded (mission accomplished!). Of course, neither President George W. Bush, nor the rest of the top officials of his administration were held responsible for what happened.

So, when I watched the January 6th insurrection unfold, my mind was immediately drawn to the period leading up to the Iraq war — except this time, the drumbeat of lies had to do with massive voter fraud, voting irregularities, “dead voters,” rigged software, and other fabrications. Obviously, the two events were drastically different in scale, complexity, and destructiveness. Still, they seemed to share common fundamental threads.

Examples of American interference in the governance of foreign countries via coups, regime change, and other ploys are commonplaces of our modern history. Among the best known would be the replacing of a number of democratically elected leaders like Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh with the Shah (1953), Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz with Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas (1954), Chilean President Salvador Allende with General Augusto Pinochet (1973), or Honduran President Manuel Zelaya in a U.S.-backed coup (2009). In other words, we’re not talking about a few one-off mistakes or a couple of dumb wars.

In truth, there has been an endless supply of such U.S. interventions around the globe: invasions, military coups, soft coups, economic sanctions, secretly funding candidates of Washington’s choice, the fueling of existing conflicts, you name it and it’s probably happened.

Take for example our neighbors in South America, Central America, and the Caribbean. I honestly don’t know if there is a single nation in Latin America that hasn’t fallen victim to a U.S. intervention of some sort: Argentina (1976), Bolivia (1971), Brazil (1964), Cuba (1961), El Salvador (the 1980s), Grenada (1983), Haiti (2004), Honduras (1980 and 2009), Panama (1989), Paraguay (1962), Peru (1968), Suriname (the 1980s), Uruguay (1973), Venezuela (the present moment). Maybe Costa Rica was spared?

Venezuela is a particularly interesting case because for 20 years — three consecutive presidencies — Washington has unsuccessfully supported multiple coup attempts, levied crippling illegal economic sanctions, and engaged in other types of tricks to topple former president Hugo Chávez and the current President Nicolás Maduro. Coincidentally, in January 2019, former President Trump recognized Juan Guaidó, a member of the Venezuelan National Assembly, as that country’s president. Guaidó had declared himself president after he didn’t like the results of an election (not unlike Mr. Trump two years later).

Looking across the Pacific Ocean, don’t forget about the wars we engaged in that ravaged Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, or about Washington’s support for Suharto’s 1965 military coup in Indonesia.

And, of course, who doesn’t remember what happened (and continues to happen) in the Greater Middle East from Iraq and Afghanistan to Syria, Yemen, and Iran, among other places? In the last nearly 20 years, Washington’s never-ending Global War On Terror has created a level of death, destruction, and displacement difficult to comprehend, though Brown University’s Costs of War Project has done a superb (if grim) job of trying to quantify it all.

And what I listed above is anything but comprehensive. The point is that, generation after generation, Americans have been directly or indirectly involved in or exposed to such rogue behavior, a type of interference that had already long become part of our national fabric by the time it made it to the Capitol.

End the tradition To be sure, this has been a bipartisan pattern, as the administrations of president after president, Democrat and Republican, engaged in it.

Even if we were to take the position that some of those interventions were somehow legal, moral, or necessary, the behavior itself has become completely normalized as a crucial go-to option for any president. It’s also worth noting just what types of nations have typically been targeted for such interventions — usually vulnerable states with weak economies and frail institutions. Whether democracies or dictatorships hasn’t seemed to matter. The populations of such countries have, however, almost invariably been nonwhite. Putting aside the obvious illegality, immorality, and even cowardice of picking on vulnerable nations, such acts historically have probably exacerbated the role of jingoism and xenophobia, as well as cultural and racial superiority in this country, just the sort of thinking so evident on January 6th. This behavior breeds disunity and hate.

When it came to overthrowing other governments, our presidents regularly peddled obvious and verifiable lies, broke or disregarded laws (domestic and international), and freely used violence and intimidation to gain power and profit, seldom being held accountable in any fashion for any of it. However such methods were to come home someday, what happened on January 6th should still be a wake-up call, forcing us all to see what it means when this signature American approach to foreign policy is used against our own democracy.

The Capitol insurrection should be (but hasn’t yet been) treated as a vivid reminder of the way this country’s foreign policy has undermined the American system, too. I see it as a form of “blowback,” to use the CIA term popularized long ago by Chalmers Johnson.

In some fashion, at least, it undoubtedly influenced the behavior of former president Trump and his followers, explaining why they believed it was a viable option to use force at the Capitol to stop democracy in its tracks. Based on our history, it was a strategy long deployed elsewhere without remorse or fear of repercussions in order to get what American leaders wanted.

What once might have seemed improbable for our democracy to suffer suddenly became a reality, one that had long been experienced by so many other peoples at our hands. And if changes aren’t made, it won’t be the last time either.

In his Inaugural Address, President Biden appeared willing to tackle many of the big challenges that our country now faces. He spoke with a kind of clarity, kindness, inclusion, and sanity that had been missing of late. Specifically, he addressed the needs of this nation:

Much to repair. Much to restore. Much to heal. Much to build. And much to gain…. To overcome these challenges — to restore the soul and to secure the future of America — requires more than words. It requires that most elusive of things in a democracy: Unity… Uniting to fight the common foes we face: Anger, resentment, hatred. Extremism, lawlessness, violence. Disease, joblessness, hopelessness.

President Biden also talked about the dangers of big lies and “alternative facts,” saying:

There is truth and there are lies. Lies told for power and for profit. And each of us has a duty and responsibility, as citizens, as Americans, and especially as leaders — leaders who have pledged to honor our Constitution and protect our nation — to defend the truth and to defeat the lies.

No doubt President Biden’s concerns do need to be addressed in this time of troubles for us all and I believe he genuinely meant what he said. From the pandemic to inequality, there are obviously domestic issues, driven by developments inside our own borders that need serious attention.

However, any efforts to achieve such goals domestically will ultimately fail if those unsustainable contradictions outside our borders persist. If President Biden’s calls for unity are to produce tangible and lasting results, what’s needed is a holistic approach that extends to America’s behavior abroad.

In the past, even when President Trump spoke of calling a halt to our endless wars and interventions, the pattern continued. There always seemed to be some reason that made the next act of pillaging “necessary and appropriate.” This time, of course, I hope that the president and his staff will indeed have the courage to break with tradition, but based on the recent airstrike Biden ordered in Syria, a country his boss helped to ravage while he was vice president, what’s probably needed is an organized and vocal demand from the American people.

Since it’s clear that our executive branch has the unchecked power to illegally command insurrections here at home, invade and destroy vulnerable nations at will, relentlessly slaughter and displace families, starve foreign peoples through economic sanctions, foment coups abroad, handpick leaders for other countries with impunity, and send American troops to die for “lies told for power and profit” against manufactured “foes,” then it’s also legally within its power not to do any of that.

Perhaps exercising the power, authority, and responsibility to stop the illegal, unlawful, and immoral behavior around the globe could prove a major first step toward the president’s goals of unifying both our nation and a shared global community.

 

Kevin Tillman, who works in the software industry, joined the U.S. Army with his brother Pat in 2002 after the attacks of September 11th. He served in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Pat was killed in Afghanistan on April 22, 2004. This article originated at TomDispatch.

Copyright ©2021 Kevin Tillman — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 16 March 2021

Word Count: 2,093

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During the Trump years, the phrase “Infrastructure Week” rang out as a sort of Groundhog Day-style punchline. What began in June 2017 as a failed effort by The Donald’s White House and a Republican Senate to focus on the desperately needed rebuilding of American infrastructure morphed into a meme and a running joke in Washington.

Despite the focus in recent years on President Trump’s failure to do anything for the country’s crumbling infrastructure, here’s a sad reality: considered over a longer period of time, Washington’s political failure to fund the repairing, modernizing, or in some cases simply the building of that national infrastructure has proven a remarkably bipartisan “effort.” After all, the same grand unfulfilled ambitions for infrastructure were part and parcel of the Obama White House from 2009 on and could well typify the Biden years, if Congress doesn’t get its act together (or the filibuster doesn’t go down in flames). The disastrous electric grid power outages that occurred during the recent deep freeze in Texas are but the latest example of the pressing need for infrastructure upgrades and investments of every sort. If nothing is done, more people will suffer, more jobs will be lost, and the economy will face drastic consequences.

Since the mid-twentieth century, when most of this country’s modern infrastructure systems were first established, the population has doubled. Not only are American roads, airports, electric grids, waterways, railways and more distinctly outdated, but today’s crucial telecommunications sector hasn’t ever been subjected to a comprehensive broadband strategy.

Worse yet, what’s known as America’s “infrastructure gap” only continues to widen. The cost of what we need but haven’t done to modernize our infrastructure has expanded to $5.6 trillion over the last 20 years ($3 trillion in the last decade alone), according to a report by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). Some estimates now even run as high as $7 trillion.

In other words, as old infrastructure deteriorates and new infrastructure and technology are needed, the cost of addressing this ongoing problem only escalates. Currently, there is a $1-trillion backlog of (yet unapproved) deferred-maintenance funding floating around Capitol Hill. Without action in the reasonable future, certain kinds of American infrastructure could, like that Texas energy grid, soon be deemed unsafe.

Now, it’s true that the U.S. continues to battle Covid-19 with more than half a million lives already lost and significant parts of the economy struggling to make ends meet. Even before the pandemic, however, America’s failing infrastructure system was already costing the average household nearly $3,300 a year.

According to ASCE, “The nation’s economy could see the loss of $10 trillion in GDP [gross domestic product] and a decline of more than $23 trillion in business productivity cumulatively over the next two decades if current investment trends continue.” Whatever a post-pandemic economy looks like, our country is already starved for policies that offer safe, reliable, efficient, and sustainable future infrastructure systems. Such a down payment on our future is crucial not just for us, but for generations to come.

As early as 2016, ASCE researchers found that the overall number of dams with potential high-hazard status had already climbed to nearly 15,500. At the time, the organization also discovered that nearly four out of every 10 bridges in America were 50 years old or more and identified 56,007 of them as already structurally deficient. Those numbers would obviously be even higher today.

And yet, in 2021, what Americans face is hardly just a transportation crisis. The country’s energy system largely predates the twenty-first century. The majority of American electric transmission and distribution systems were established in the 1950s and 1960s with only a 50-year life cycle. ASCE reports that, “More than 640,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines in the lower 48 states’ power grids are at full capacity.” That means our systems weren’t and aren’t equipped to handle excess needs — especially in emergencies.

The country is critically overdue for infrastructure development in which the government and the private sector would collaborate with intention and urgency. Infrastructure could be the great equalizer in our economy, if only the Biden administration and a now-dogmatically partisan Congress had the fortitude and foresight to make it happen.

American history offers a roadmap for infrastructure success It wasn’t always like this. Over the course of American history, building infrastructure has not only had a powerful economic impact, but regularly garnered bipartisan political support for the public good.

In July 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Pacific Railway Act. That landmark bill provided federal support to an already ongoing private effort to build the first transcontinental railroad. Though at the time all its ramifications weren’t positive — notably escalating conflicts between Native Americans and settlers pushing westward — the effort did connect the country’s coastal markets, provided jobs for thousands, and helped jumpstart commerce in the West. Believe it or not, most of that transcontinental railroad line is still in use today.

In December 1928, President Calvin Coolidge signed a bill authorizing the construction of a dam in the Black Canyon of the Colorado River in the American Southwest, a region that had faced unpredictable flooding and lacked reliable electricity. Despite the stock market crash of 1929 and the start of the Great Depression, by early 1931, the private sector, with government support, had begun constructing a structure of unprecedented magnitude, known today as the Hoover Dam. As an infrastructure project, it would eventually pay for itself through the sale of the electricity that it generated. Today, that dam still provides electricity and water to tens of millions of people.

Having grasped the power of the German system of autobahns while a general in World War II, President Dwight D. Eisenhower would, under the guise of “national security,” launch the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, with bipartisan support, creating the interstate highway system. In its time, that system would be considered one of the “greatest public works projects in history.”

In the end, that act would lead to the creation of more than 47,000 miles of roads across all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. It would have a powerful effect on commercial business activity, national defense planning, and personal travel, helping to launch whole new sectors of the economy, ranging from roadside fast-food restaurants to theme parks. According to estimates, it would return more than six dollars in economic productivity for every dollar it cost to build and support, a result any investor would be happy with.

Equivalent efforts today would undoubtedly prove to be similar economic drivers. Domestically, such investments in infrastructure have always proven beneficial. New efforts to create sustainable green energy businesses, reconfigure energy grids, and rebuild crippled transit systems for a new age would help guarantee U.S global economic competitiveness deep into the twenty-first century.

Infrastructure as an international race for influence In an interview with CNBC in February 2021, after being confirmed as the first female treasury secretary, Janet Yellen stressed the crucial need not just for a Covid-19 stimulus relief but for a sustainable infrastructure one as well.

As part of what the Biden administration has labeled its “Build Back Better” agenda, she underscored the “long-term structural problems in the U.S. economy that have resulted in inequality [and] slow productivity growth.” She also highlighted how a major new focus on clean-energy investments could make the economy more competitive globally.

When it comes to infrastructure and sustainable development efforts, the U.S. is being left in the dust by its primary economic rivals. Following his first phone call with Chinese President Xi Jinping, President Biden noted to a group of senators on the Environment and Public Works Committee that, “if we don’t get moving, they are going to eat our lunch.” He went on to say, “They’re investing billions of dollars dealing with a whole range of issues that relate to transportation, the environment, and a whole range of other things. We just have to step up.”

As this country, deep in partisan gridlock, stalls on infrastructure measures of any sort, its global competitors are proceeding full speed ahead. Having helped to jumpstart its economy with projects like high-speed railways and massive new bridges, China is now accelerating its efforts to further develop its technological infrastructure. As Bloomberg reported, the Chinese are focused on supporting the build-up of “everything from wireless networks to artificial intelligence. In the master plan backed by President Jinping himself, China will invest an estimated $1.4 trillion over six years” in such projects.

And it’s not just that Asian giant leaving the U.S. behind. Major trading partners like Australia, India, and Japan are projected to significantly out-invest the United States. The World Economic Forum’s 2019 Global Competitiveness Report typically listed this country in 13th place among the world’s nations when it came to its infrastructure quality. (It had been ranked 5th in 2002.) In 2020, that organization ranked the U.S. 32nd out of 115 countries on its Energy Transition Index.

Despite the multiple stimulus packages that Congress has passed in the Covid-19 era, no funding — not a cent — has been designated for capital-building projects. In contrast, China, Japan, and the European Union have all crafted stimulus programs in which infrastructure spending was a core component.

Infrastructure development as a political equalizer Infrastructure could be the engine for the most advantageous kinds of growth in this country. An optimal combination of federal and private funds, strategic partnerships, targeted infrastructure bonds, and even the creation of an infrastructure bank could help jumpstart a range of sustainable and ultimately revenue-generating businesses.

Such investment is a matter of economics, of cost versus benefit. These days, however, such calculations are both obstructed and obfuscated by politics. In the end, however, political economics comes down to getting creative about sources of funding and how to allocate them. To launch a meaningful infrastructure program would mean deciding who will produce it, who will consume it, and what kinds of transfer of wealth would be involved in the short and long run. Though the private sector certainly would help drive such a new set of programs, government funding would, as in the past, be crucial, whether under the rubric of national security, competitive innovation, sustainable clean energy, or creating a carbon-neutral future America. Any effort, no matter the label, would undoubtedly generate sustainable public and private jobs for the future.

On both the domestic and international fronts, infrastructure is big business. Wall Street, as well as the energy and construction sectors, are all eager to learn more about Biden’s Build Back Better infrastructure plan, which he is expected to take up in his already delayed first joint address to Congress. Actions, not just words, are needed.

Expectations are running high about what might prove to be a multitrillion-dollar infrastructure initiative. Such anticipation has already elevated the stock prices of construction companies, as well as shares in the sustainable energy sector.

There are concerns, to be sure. A big infrastructure package might never make it through an evenly split Senate, where partisanship is the name of the game. Some economists also fear that it could bring on inflation. There is, of course, debate over the role of the private sector in any such plan, as well as horse-trading about what kinds of projects should get priority. But the reality is that this country desperately needs infrastructure that, in turn, can secure a sustainable and green future. Someday this will have to be done, and the longer the delay, the more those costs are likely to rise. The future revenues and economic benefits from a solid infrastructure package should be key drivers in any post-pandemic economy.

The biggest asset managers in the country are already seeing more money flowing into their infrastructure and sustainable-energy funds. Financing for such deals in the private sector is also increasing. Any significant funding on the public side will only spur and augment that financing. Such projects could drive the economy for years to come. They would run the gamut from establishing smart grids and expanding broadband reach to building electric transmission systems that run off more sustainable energy sources, while manufacturing cleaner vehicles and ways to use them. Going big with futuristic transit projects like Virgin’s Hyperloop, a high-speed variant of a vacuum train, or Elon Musk’s initiative for the development of carbon-capture technology, could even be included in a joint drive to create the necessary clean-energy infrastructure and economy of the future.

Polling also shows that such infrastructure spending has broad public support, even if, in Congress, much-needed bipartisan backing for such a program remains distinctly in question. Still, in February, the ranking Republican senator on the environment and public works committee, West Virginia’s Shelley Moore Capito, said that “transportation infrastructure is the platform that can drive economic growth — all-American jobs, right there, right on the ground — now and in the future, and improve the quality of life for everyone on the safety aspects.” Meanwhile, the committee’s chairman, Democratic Senator Tom Carper of Delaware, stressed that “the burdens of poor road conditions are disproportionately shouldered by marginalized communities.” He pointed out that “low-income families and peoples of color are frequently left behind or left out by our investments in infrastructure, blocking their access to jobs and education opportunities.”

Sadly, given the way leadership in Washington wasted endless months dithering over the merits of supporting American workers during a pandemic, it may be too much to hope that a transformative bipartisan infrastructure deal will materialize.

Infrastructure as the great economic equalizer Here’s a simple reality: a strong American economy is dependent on infrastructure. That means more than just a “big umbrella” effort focused on transportation and electricity. Yes, airports, railroads, electrical grids, and roadways are all-important economic drivers, but in the twenty-first-century world, high-capacity communications systems are also essential to economic prosperity, as are distribution channels of various sorts. At the moment, there’s a water main break every two minutes in the U.S. Nearly six billion gallons of treated water are lost daily thanks to such breaks. Situations like the one in Flint, Michigan, in which economic pressure and bankruptcy eventually led a city to expose thousands of its children to poisonous drinking water, will become increasingly unavoidable in a country with an ever-deteriorating infrastructure.

The great economic equalizer is this: the more efficient our infrastructure systems become, the less they cost, and the more they can be readily used by those across the income spectrum. What American history shows since the time of Abraham Lincoln is that, in periods of economic turmoil, major infrastructure building or rebuilding will not only pay for itself but support the economy for generations to come.

For the next generation, it’s already clear that clean and sustainable energy will be crucial to achieving a more equal, economically prosperous, and less climate-challenged future. A renewables-based rebuilding of the economy and the creation of the jobs to go with it would be anything but some niche set of activities in the usual infrastructure spectrum. It would be the future. High-paying jobs within the sustainable energy sector are already booming. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that among the occupations projected to have the fastest employment growth from 2016 to 2026 will be those in “green” work.

Wall Street and big tech companies are also paying attention. Amazon, Google, and Facebook have become the world’s biggest corporate purchasers of clean energy and are now planning for some of the world’s most transformational climate targets. That will mean smaller companies will also be able to enter that workspace as innovation and infrastructure drive economic incentives.

The next generation It may be ambitious to expect that we’ve left the Groundhog Day vortex of “infrastructure week” behind us, but the critical demand for a new Infrastructure Age confronts us now. From Main Street to Wall Street, the need and the growing market for a sustainable, efficient, and clean future couldn’t be more real. An abundance of avenues to finance such a future are available and it makes logical business sense to pursue them.

It’s obvious enough what should be done. The only question, given American politics in 2021, is: Can it be done?

The economy of tomorrow will be built upon the infrastructure measures of today. You can’t see the value of stocks from space, nor can you see the physical value of what you’ve left to the next generation from stat sheets. But from the International Space Station you can see the Hoover Dam and even San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. What will future generations see that we’ve left behind? If the answer is nothing, that will be a tragedy of our age.

Nomi Prins, a former Wall Street executive, writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). Her latest book is Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World. She is currently working on her new book, Permanent Distortion. She is also the author of All the Presidents’ Bankers: The Hidden Alliances That Drive American Power and five other books. Special thanks go to researcher Craig Wilson for his superb assistance.

Copyright ©2021 Nomi Prins — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 March 2021

Word Count: 2,769

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You may have noticed: the Blob is back. Beneath a veneer of gender and racial diversity, the Biden national security team consists of seasoned operatives who earned their spurs in Washington long before Donald Trump showed up to spoil the party. So, if you’re looking for fresh faces at the departments of state or defense, the National Security Council or the various intelligence agencies, you’ll have to search pretty hard. Ditto, if you’re looking for fresh insights. In Washington, members of the foreign policy establishment recite stale bromides, even as they divert attention from a dead past to which they remain devoted.

The boss shows them how it’s done.

Just two weeks into his presidency, Joe Biden visited the State Department to give American diplomats their marching orders. In his formal remarks, the president committed his administration to “diplomacy rooted in America’s most cherished democratic values: defending freedom, championing opportunity, upholding universal rights, respecting the rule of law, and treating every person with dignity.”

His language allowed no room for quibbles or exemptions. In our world, some things can be waived — SAT scores for blue-chip athletes being recruited to play big-time college ball, for example. Yet cherished values presumably qualify as sacrosanct. To take Biden at his word, his administration will honor this commitment not some of the time, but consistently; not just when it’s convenient to do so, but without exception.

Less than a month later, the president received a ready-made opportunity to demonstrate his fealty to those very values. The matter at hand concerned Saudi Arabia, more specifically the release of an intelligence report fingering Mohammad bin Salman, a.k.a. MBS, the Saudi crown prince and de facto ruler of that country, for ordering the 2018 murder and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi, a journalist employed by the Washington Post. The contents of the report surprised no one. The interesting question was how the new president would respond.

Months earlier, during the election campaign, Biden had described Saudi Arabia, a longtime U.S. ally, as a “pariah state” that possessed “no redeeming value.” Previously, Donald Trump had cozied up to the Saudi royals — they were his kind of people. As far as candidate Biden was concerned, the time for romancing Riyadh had ended. Never again, he vowed, would Washington “check its principles at the door just to buy oil or sell weapons.”

Let it be said that a preference for lucre rather than principles succinctly describes traditional U.S.-Saudi relations going back several decades. While President Trump treated the “friendship” between the two countries as cause for celebration, other American leaders gingerly tip-toed around the role allotted to arms and oil. In diplomacy, some things were better left unsaid. So, to hear candidate Biden publicly acknowledge the relationship’s tawdry essence was little short of astonishing.

While a member of the Senate and during his eight years as vice president, he had hardly gone out of his way to pick fights with the Kingdom. Were Biden to replace Trump, however, things were going to change. Big time.

Threading the needle As it turned out, not so much. Once inaugurated, Biden found ample reason for checking American principles at the door. Shelving further references to Saudi Arabia as a pariah, he tweaked Washington’s relationship with the Kingdom, while preserving its essence.

The term chosen to describe the process is recalibrate. In practical terms, recalibration means that the U.S. government is sanctioning a few dozen Saudi functionaries for their involvement in the Khashoggi assassination, while giving Mohammad Bin Salman himself a pass. MBS’s sanctioned henchmen would do well to cancel any planned flights into New York’s JFK airport or Washington’s Dulles, where the FBI will undoubtedly be waiting to take them into custody. That said, unless they fall out of favor with the crown prince himself, the assassins will literally get away with murder.

Recalibration also means that the United States is “pausing” — not terminating — further arms sales to Saudi Arabia. The purpose of the pause, Secretary of State Antony Blinken has explained, is “to make sure that what is being considered is something that advances our strategic objectives and advances our foreign policy.” Translation? Don’t expect much to happen.

Inside the Beltway, lobbyists for U.S. arms merchants are undoubtedly touching base with members of Congress whose constituencies benefit from exporting weapons to that very country. Said lobbyists need not burn the midnight oil, however. Mr. Khashoggi’s demise has complicated but will not derail the U.S.-Saudi relationship. Given time, some version of the status quo will be restored.

Just one more example of American hypocrisy? Within the Blob, a different view pertains. Consider the perspective of former senior official and longtime Middle Eastern hand Dennis Ross. “This is the classic example of where you have to balance your values and your interests,” Mr. Ross told the New York Times. Biden, he added approvingly, is now “trying to thread the needle.” Mustering the wisdom acquired from decades of service deep inside the Blob, Ross pointed out that “there isn’t an issue in the Middle East where we don’t need them to play a role — on Iran, on competing with the Chinese.” Ultimately, it’s that simple: The United States needs Saudi Arabia.

As a respected member of the foreign policy establishment, Ross speaks with the authority that gets you quoted in the Times. Informing his perspective is a certain iron logic, time-tested and seemingly endorsed by history itself. Take that logic at face value and Washington needs Saudi Arabia because it needs to police the Persian Gulf and its environs, as required by the decades-old, never-to-be-questioned Carter Doctrine. The United States needs Saudi Arabia because the Kingdom already plays a not-inconsequential role in the drama accompanying energy-hungry China’s emergence as a great power. And let’s face it: the United States also needs Saudi Arabia because of all that oil (even though this country no longer actually uses that oil itself) and because MBS’s insatiable appetite for arms helps to sustain the military-industrial complex.

So the pieces all fit into a coherent whole, thereby validating a particular conception of history itself. The United States needs Saudi Arabia for the same reason that it needs to remain part of NATO, needs to defend various other allies, needs to maintain a sprawling worldwide constellation of bases, needs to annually export billions of dollars worth of weaponry, needs to engage in endless wars, and needs to spend a trillion-plus dollars annually pursuant to what is usually described as “national security.” More broadly, the United States needs to do all these things because it needs to lead a world that cannot do without its leadership. The trajectory of events going back more than a century now, encompassing two world wars, the Cold War, and the forever wars of the post-Cold War era, proves as much. End of discussion.

Second thoughts? Not all historians bow to the iron logic to which the Blob subscribes, however. Recent events are prompting a few dissenters to entertain second thoughts. Among them is Professor Martin Conway of Oxford University. Now, Professor Conway is anything but a household name. When it comes to name recognition, he doesn’t hold a candle to Dennis Ross, nor is he someone the New York Times consults on issues of the day.

So should we attend to Professor Conway’s contrarian perspective? Very much so and here’s why: Compared to Ross or the sundry Blobbers now in Joe Biden’s employ, Conway is not a prisoner of a curated past. He’s open to the possibility that the sell-by date attached to that taken-for-granted past may well have expired.

Consider his provocative essay “Making Trump History,” recently published online in H-Diplo. (A more accurate title would have been “History as Illuminated by Trump.”)

By and large, Conway writes, scholars deem Trump to have been “an insult to the historical narrative,” a living, breathing “refutation of deeply held assumptions among historians about how the democratic politics of the U.S. are supposed to work.” Their reflexive response is to classify Trump as an outlier, a one-off intruder, a conviction seemingly affirmed by his failure to win a second term. With his departure from the White House, the resumption of normalcy (or at least what passed for the same in Washington) has theoretically become possible. Biden’s job is to hasten its return.

Conway entertains another view. He speculates that normalcy may, in fact, be gone for good. And the sooner the rest of us grasp that, he believes, the better.

Conway boldly rejects the media’s preferred Manichean account of the so-called Age of Trump. Rather than insulting the traditional Washington narrative, he suggests, Trump simply supplanted it. Wittingly or not, the new president acted in concert with political opportunists in Great Britain, Hungary, Poland, and elsewhere who, in advancing their own ambitions, trampled all over the familiar storyline devised and refined to make sense of our age.

As a first step toward grasping what’s now underway, Conway urges his fellow historians to “bury their narratives of the twentieth century” — on a par with asking Ohio State or the University of Alabama to give up football. Conway then suggests that a new past he calls a “history of the present” is emerging. And he identifies “three trig points” to begin mapping the “uncharted landscape” that lies ahead.

The first relates to the collapse of barriers that had long confined politics to familiar channels. Today, democratic politics has “burst its banks,” Conway writes. The people once assumed to be in charge no longer really are. Presidents, prime ministers, and parliamentarians compete with (and frequently court) “footballers, TV celebrities, and rap artists” who “communicate more directly and effectively with the public.” Who do you trust? Mitch McConnell or George Clooney? Who has your ear? Nancy Pelosi or Oprah Winfrey?

Conway’s second trig point references the bond between citizens and the state. The old contract — individual duties performed in exchange for collective benefits — no longer applies. Instead, the “new politics of the bazaar” shortchange the many while benefiting the few (like the mega-wealthy Americans who, during the coronavirus pandemic, have so far raked in an estimated extra $1.3 trillion). Egged on by politicians like Trump or British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the less privileged have figured this out. Biden’s efforts to pass yet another Covid-19-related relief bill responded to but could not conceal the real story: the emergence of an anti-establishment populism.

His final trig point wipes out the old-fashioned “political frontiers of the left and right.” In the History of the Present, politics emphasize “identity and grievance.” Citizens lend their support to causes centered on “emotions, group identity, or aspirations,” while rendering once-accepted notions of class and party all but irrelevant. “Institutional structures, ideological traditions, and indeed democratic norms” are being “replaced by a less disciplined and more open politics.” Passions govern, imparting to the History of the Present unprecedented levels of volatility.

Conway doesn’t pretend to know where all this will lead, other than suggesting that the implications are likely to be striking and persistent. But let me suggest the following: For all their rote references to new challenges in a new era, President Biden and the members of his crew are clueless as to what the onset of Conway’s History of the Present portends. Throughout the ranks of the establishment, the reassuringly familiar narratives of the twentieth century retain their allure. Among other things, they obviate the need to think.

Wrong thread, wrong needle Nowhere is this more emphatically the case than in quarters where members of the Blob congregate and where the implications of Conway’s analysis may well have the most profound impact. Conway’s primary concern is with developments within what used to be called the West. That said, the History of the Present will profoundly impact relations between the West (which, these days, really means the United States) and the rest of the world. And that brings us right back to President Biden’s awkward effort to “thread the needle” regarding Saudi Arabia.

Someday, when a successor to Buzzfeed posts an official ranking of twenty-first century crimes, the vicious murder and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul won’t even make it anywhere near the first tier. His assassination will, for instance, certainly trail well behind the George W. Bush administration’s disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq, not to speak of various other U.S. military actions from Afghanistan to Somalia undertaken as part of the so-called Global War on Terror.

Whether explicitly or implicitly, President Bush and his successors cited those very “narratives of the twentieth century” to which Professor Conway refers to justify their interventions across the Greater Middle East. The most important — indeed beloved — narrative celebrates the U.S. role in ensuring freedom’s triumph over evil in the form of various totalitarian ideologies.

Attach all the caveats and exceptions you want: Hiroshima, Vietnam, CIA-engineered coups, the Bay of Pigs, the Iran-Contra scandal, and so on and so forth. Yet even today, most Americans believe and virtually anyone responsible for formulating and implementing basic U.S. global policy affirms that the United States is a force for good in the world. As such, America is irreplaceable, indispensable, and essential. Hence, the unique prerogatives that it confers on itself are justified. Such thinking, of course, sustains the conviction that, even today, alone among nations, the United States is able to keep its interests and “its most cherished democratic values” in neat alignment.

By discarding the narratives of the twentieth century, Conway’s History of the Present invites us to see this claim for what it is — a falsehood of Trumpian dimensions, one that, in recent decades, has wreaked untold havoc while distracting policymakers from concerns far more urgent than engaging in damage control on behalf of Mohammad Bin Salman. A proper appreciation of the History of the Present will only begin with the realization that the United States needs neither MBS, nor Saudi Arabia, nor for that matter a sprawling and expensive national security apparatus to police the Persian Gulf.

What this country does need is to recognize that the twentieth century is gone for good. Developments ranging from the worsening threat posed by climate change to the shifting power balance in East Asia, not to mention the transformation of American politics ushered in by Donald Trump, should have made this patently obvious. If Professor Conway is right — and I’m convinced that he is — then it’s past time to give the narratives of the twentieth century a decent burial. Doing so may be a precondition for our very survival.

Sadly, Joe Biden and his associates appear demonstrably incapable of exchanging the history that they know for a history on which our future may well depend. As a result, they will cling to an increasingly irrelevant past. Under the guise of correcting Trump’s failures, they will perpetuate their own.

Andrew Bacevich writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His most recent book is The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory. His new book, After the Apocalypse:  America’s Role in a World Transformed, is due out in June.

Copyright ©2021 Andrew Bacevich — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 11 March 2021

Word Count: 2,468

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A year ago, just a few weeks before San Francisco locked itself down for the pandemic, I fell deeply in love with a 50-year-old. The object of my desire was a wooden floor loom in the window of my local thrift shop. Friends knowledgeable on such matters examined photos I took of it and assured me that all the parts were there, so my partner (who puts up with such occasional infatuations) helped me wrangle it into one of our basement rooms and I set about learning to weave.

These days, all I want to do is weave. The loom that’s gripped me, and the pandemic that’s gripped us all, have led me to rethink the role of work (and its subset, paid labor) in human lives. During an enforced enclosure, this 68-year-old has spent a lot of time at home musing on what the pandemic has revealed about how this country values work. Why, for example, do the most “essential” workers so often earn so little — or, in the case of those who cook, clean, and care for the people they live with, nothing at all? What does it mean when conservatives preach the immeasurable value of labor, while insisting that its most basic price in the marketplace shouldn’t rise above $7.25 per hour?

That, after all, is where the federal minimum wage has been stuck since 2009. And that’s where it would probably stay forever, if Republicans like Kansas Senator Roger Marshall had their way. He brags that he put himself through college making $6 an hour and doesn’t understand why people can’t do the same today for $7.25. One likely explanation: the cost of a year at Kansas State University has risen from $898 when he was at school to $10,000 today. Another? At six bucks an hour, he was already making almost twice the minimum wage of his college years, a princely $3.35 an hour.

It’s definitely not art, but is it work? It’s hard to explain the pleasure I’ve gotten from learning the craft of weaving, an activity whose roots extend at least 20,000 years into the past. In truth, I could devote the next (and most likely last) 20 years of my life just to playing with “plain weave,” its simplest form — over-under, over-under — and not even scratch the surface of its possibilities. Day after day, I tromp down to our chilly basement and work with remarkable satisfaction at things as simple as getting a straight horizontal edge across my cloth.

But is what I’m doing actually “work”? Certainly, at the end of a day of bending under the loom to tie things up, of working the treadles to raise and lower different sets of threads, my aging joints are sore. My body knows all too well that I’ve been doing something. But is it work? Heaven knows, I’m not making products crucial to our daily lives or those of others. (We now possess more slightly lopsided cloth napkins than any two-person household could use in a lifetime.) Nor, at my beginner’s level, am I producing anything that could pass for “art.”

I don’t have to weave. I could buy textiles for a lot less than it costs me to make them. But at my age, in pandemic America, I’m lucky. I have the time, money, and freedom from personal responsibilities to be able to immerse myself in making cloth. For me, playing with string is a first-world privilege. It won’t help save humanity from a climate disaster or reduce police violence in communities of color. It won’t even help a union elect an American president, something I was focused on last fall, while working with the hospitality-industry union. It’s not teaching college students to question the world and aspire to living examined lives, something I’ve done in my official work as a part-time professor for the last 15 years. It doesn’t benefit anyone but me.

Nevertheless, what I’m doing certainly does have value for me. It contributes, as philosophers might say, to my human flourishing. When I practice weaving, I’m engaged in something political philosopher Iris Marion Young believed essential to a good life. As she put it, I’m “learning and using satisfying and expansive skills.” Young thought that a good society would offer all its members the opportunity to acquire and deploy such complicated skills in “socially recognized settings.” In other words, a good society would make it possible for people to do work that was both challenging and respected.

Writing in the late 1980s, she took for granted that “welfare capitalism” of Europe, and to a far lesser extent the United States, would provide for people’s basic material needs. Unfortunately, decades later, it’s hard even to teach her critique of such welfare capitalism — a system that sustained lives but didn’t necessarily allow them to flourish — because my students here have never experienced an economic system that assumes any real responsibility for sustaining life. Self-expression and an opportunity to do meaningful work? Pipe dreams if you aren’t already well-off! They’ll settle for jobs that pay the rent, keep the refrigerator stocked, and maybe provide some health benefits as well. That would be heaven enough, they say. And who could blame them when so many jobs on offer will fall far short of even such modest goals?

What I’m not doing when I weave is making money. I’m not one of the roughly 18 million workers in this country who do earn their livings in the textile industry. Such “livings” pay a median wage of about $28,000 a year, which likely makes it hard to keep a roof over your head. Nor am I one of the many millions more who do the same around the world, people like Seak Hong who sews garments and bags for an American company in Cambodia. Describing her life, she told a New York Times reporter, “I feel tired, but I have no choice. I have to work.” Six days a week,

“Ms. Hong wakes up at 4:35 a.m. to catch the truck to work from her village. Her workday begins at 7 and usually lasts nine hours, with a lunch break. During the peak season, which lasts two to three months, she works until 8:30 p.m.”

“Ms. Hong has been in the garment business for 22 years. She earns the equivalent of about $230 a month and supports her father, her sister, her brother (who is on disability) and her 12-year-old son.”

Her sister does the unpaid — but no less crucial — work of tending to her father and brother, the oxen, and their subsistence rice plants.

Hong and her sister are definitely working, one with pay, the other without. They have, as she says, no choice.

Catherine Gamet, who makes handbags in France for Louis Vuitton, is also presumably working to support herself. But hers is an entirely different experience from Hong’s. She loves what she’s been doing for the last 23 years. Interviewed in the same article, she told the Times, “To be able to build bags and all, and to be able to sew behind the machine, to do hand-sewn products, it is my passion.” For Gamet, “The time flies by.”

Both these women have been paid to make bags for more than 20 years, but they’ve experienced their jobs very differently, undoubtedly thanks to the circumstances surrounding their work, rather than the work itself: how much they earn; the time they spend traveling to and from their jobs; the extent to which the “decision” to do a certain kind of work is coerced by fear of poverty. We don’t learn from Hong’s interview how she feels about the work itself. Perhaps she takes pride in what she does. Most people find a way to do that. But we know that making bags is Gamet’s passion. Her work is not merely exhausting, but in Young’s phrase “satisfying and expansive.” The hours she spends on it are lived, not just endured as the price of survival.

Pandemic relief and its discontents Joe Biden and Kamala Harris arrived at the White House with a commitment to getting a new pandemic relief package through Congress as soon as possible. It appears that they’ll succeed, thanks to the Senate’s budget reconciliation process — a maneuver that bypasses the possibility of a Republican filibuster. Sadly, because resetting the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour doesn’t directly involve taxation or spending, the Senate’s parliamentarian ruled that the reconciliation bill can’t include it.

Several measures contained in the package have aroused conservative mistrust, from the extension of unemployment benefits to new income supplements for families with children. Such measures provoke a Republican fear that somebody, somewhere, might not be working hard enough to “deserve” the benefits Congress is offering or that those benefits might make some workers think twice about sacrificing their time caring for children to earn $7.25 an hour at a soul-deadening job.

As New York Times columnist Ezra Klein recently observed, Republicans are concerned that such measures might erode respect for the “natural dignity” of work. In an incisive piece, he rebuked Republican senators like Mike Lee and Marco Rubio for responding negatively to proposals to give federal dollars to people raising children. Such a program, they insisted, smacked of — the horror! — “welfare,” while in their view, “an essential part of being pro-family is being pro-work.” Of course, for Lee and Rubio “work” doesn’t include changing diapers, planning and preparing meals, doing laundry, or helping children learn to count, tell time, and tie their shoelaces — unless, of course, the person doing those things is employed by someone else’s family and being paid for it. In that case it qualifies as “work.” Otherwise, it’s merely a form of government-subsidized laziness.

There is, however, one group of people that “pro-family” conservatives have long believed are naturally suited to such activities and who supposedly threaten the well-being of their families if they choose to work for pay instead. I mean, of course, women whose male partners earn enough to guarantee food, clothing, and shelter with a single income. I remember well a 1993 article by Pat Gowens, a founder of Milwaukee’s Welfare Warriors, in the magazine Lesbian Contradiction. She wondered why conservative anti-feminists of that time thought it good if a woman with children had a man to provide those things, but an outrage if she turned to “The Man” for the same aid. In the first case, the woman’s work is considered dignified, sacred, and in tune with the divine plan. Among conservatives, then or now, the second could hardly be dignified with the term “work.”

The distinction they make between private and public paymasters, when it comes to domestic labor contains at least a tacit, though sometimes explicit, racial element. When the program that would come to be known as “welfare” was created as part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, it was originally designed to assist respectable white mothers who, through no fault of their own, had lost their husbands to death or desertion. It wasn’t until the 1960s that African American women decided to secure their right to coverage under the same program and built the National Welfare Rights Organization to do so.

The word “welfare” refers, as in the preamble to the Constitution, to human wellbeing. But when Black women started claiming those rights, it suddenly came to signify undeserved handouts. You could say that Ronald Reagan rode into the White House in 1980 in a Cadillac driven by the mythical Black “welfare queen” he continually invoked in his campaign. It would be nice to think that the white resentment harnessed by Reagan culminated (as in “reached its zenith and will now decline”) with Trump’s 2016 election, but, given recent events, that would be unrealistically optimistic.

Reagan began the movement to undermine the access of poor Americans to welfare programs. Ever since, starving the entitlement beast has been the Republican lodestar. In the same period, of course, the wealthier compatriots of those welfare mothers have continued to receive ever more generous “welfare” from the government. Those would include subsidies to giant agriculture, oil-depletion allowances and other subsidies for fossil-fuel companies, the mortgage-interest tax deduction for people with enough money to buy rather than rent their homes, and the massive tax cuts for billionaires of the Trump era. However, it took a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, to achieve what Reagan couldn’t, and, as he put it, “end welfare as we know it.”

The Clinton administration used the same Senate reconciliation process in play today for the Biden administration’s Covid-19 relief bill to push through the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. It was more commonly known as “welfare reform.” That act imposed a 32-hour-per-week work or training requirement on mothers who received what came to be known as Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. It also gave “temporary” its deeper meaning by setting a lifetime benefits cap of five years. Meanwhile, that same act proved a bonanza for non-profits and Private Industry Councils that got contracts to administer “job training” programs and were paid to teach women how to wear skirts and apply makeup to impress future employers. In the process, a significant number of unionized city and county workers nationwide were replaced with welfare recipients “earning” their welfare checks by sweeping streets or staffing county offices, often for less than the minimum wage.

In 1997, I was working with Californians for Justice (CFJ), then a new statewide organization dedicated to building political power in poor communities, especially those of color. Given the high unemployment rates in just such communities, our response to Clinton’s welfare reforms was to demand that those affected by them at least be offered state-funded jobs at a living wage. If the government was going to make people work for pay, we reasoned, then it should help provide real well-paying jobs, not bogus “job readiness” programs. We secured sponsors in the state legislature, but I’m sure you won’t be shocked to learn that our billion-dollar jobs bill never got out of committee in Sacramento.

CFJ’s project led me into an argument with one of my mentors, the founder of the Center for Third World Organizing, Gary Delgado. Why on earth, he asked me, would you campaign to get people jobs? “Jobs are horrible. They’re boring: they waste people’s lives and destroy their bodies.” In other words, Gary was no believer in the inherent dignity of paid work. So, I had to ask myself, why was I?

Among those who have inspired me, Gary wasn’t alone in holding such a low opinion of jobs. The Greek philosopher Aristotle, for instance, had been convinced that those whose economic condition forced them to work for a living would have neither the time nor space necessary to live a life of “excellence” (his requirement for human happiness). Economic coercion and a happy life were, in his view, mutually exclusive.

Reevaluating jobs One of the lies capitalism tells us is that we should be grateful for our jobs and should think of those who make a profit from our labor not as exploiters but as “job creators.” In truth, however, there’s no creativity involved in paying people less than the value of their work so that you can skim off the difference and claim that you earned it. Even if we accept that there could be creativity in “management” — the effort to organize and divide up work so it’s done efficiently and well — it’s not the “job creators” who do that, but their hirelings. All the employers bring to the game is money.

Take the example of the admirable liberal response to the climate emergency, the Green New Deal. In the moral calculus of capitalism, it’s not enough that shifting to a green economy could promote the general welfare by rebuilding and extending the infrastructure that makes modern life possible and rewarding. It’s not enough that it just might happen in time to save billions of people from fires, floods, hurricanes, or starvation. What matters — the selling point — is that such a conversion would create jobs (along with the factor no one mentions out loud: profits).

Now, I happen to support exactly the kind of work involved in building an economy that could help reverse climate devastation. I agree with Joe Biden’s campaign statement that such an undertaking could offer people jobs with “good wages, benefits, and worker protections.” More than that, such jobs would indeed contribute to a better life for those who do them. As the philosopher Iris Marion Young puts it, they would provide the chance to learn and use “satisfying and expansive skills in a socially recognized setting.” And that would be a very good thing even if no one made a penny of profit in the process.

Now, having finished my paid labor for the day, it’s back to the basement and loom for me.

Rebecca Gordon writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She teaches at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes and is now at work on a new book on the history of torture in the United States.

Copyright ©2021 Rebecca Gordon — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 09 March 2021

Word Count: 2,816

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Cancel culture is a common, almost viral, term in political and social discourse these days. Basically, somebody expresses views considered to be outrageous or vile or racist or otherwise insensitive and inappropriate. In response, that person is “canceled,” perhaps losing a job or otherwise sidelined and silenced. In being deplatformed by Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites, for instance, this country’s previous president has, it could be argued, been canceled — at least by polite society. More than a few might add, good riddance.

Cancel culture is all around us, with a single glaring exception: the U.S. military. No matter how poorly a major weapons system performs, no matter how much it goes over budget, no matter how long it takes to field, it almost never gets canceled. As a corollary to this, no matter how poorly a general performs in one of our twenty-first-century wars, no matter his lack of victories or failure to achieve mission objectives, he almost never gets cashiered, demoted, or even criticized. A similar thing could be said of America’s twenty-first-century wars themselves. They are disasters that simply never get canceled. They just go on and on and on.

Is it any surprise, then, that a system which seems to eternally reward failure consistently produces it as well? After all, if cancel culture should apply anywhere, it would be to faulty multibillion-dollar weapons systems and more than a few generals, who instead either get booted upstairs to staff positions or retire comfortably onto the boards of directors of major weapons companies.

Let’s take a closer look at several major weapons systems that are begging to be canceled — and a rare case of one that finally was.

• The F-35 stealth fighter: I’ve written extensively on the F-35 over the years. Produced by Lockheed Martin, the plane was at one point seven years behind schedule and $163 billion over budget. Nonetheless, the U.S. military persisted and it is now nearing full production at a projected total cost of $1.7 trillion by the year 2070. Even so, nagging problems persist, including engine difficulties and serious maintenance deficiencies. Even more troubling: the plane often can’t be cleared for flying if lightning is anywhere in the area, which is deeply ironic, given that it’s called the Lightning II. Let’s hope that there are no thunderstorms in the next war.

• The Boeing KC-46 tanker: A tanker is basically a flying gas station, air-to-air refueling being something the Air Force mastered half a century ago. Never underestimate the military’s ability to produce new problems while pursuing more advanced technology, however. Doing away with old-fashioned windows and an actual airman as a “boom operator” in the refueling loop (as in a legacy tanker like the KC-135), the KC-46 uses a largely automated refueling system via video. Attractive in theory, that system has yet to work reliably in practice. (Maybe, it will, however, by the year 2024, the Air Force now says.) And what good is a tanker that isn’t assured of actually transferring fuel in mid-air and turns out to be compromised as well by its own fuel leaks? The Air Force is now speaking of “repurposing” its new generation of tankers for missions other than refueling. That’s like me saying that I’m repurposing my boat as an anchor since it happened to spring a leak and sink to the bottom of the lake.

• And speaking of boats, perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that the Navy has had serious problems of its own with its most recent Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carriers. That service started building carriers in the 1920s, so one might imagine that, by now, the brass had gained some mastery of the process of updating them and building new ones. But never underestimate the allure of cramming unproven and expensive technologies for “next generation” success on board such vessels. Include among them, when it comes to the Ford-class carriers, elevators for raising munitions that notoriously don’t operate well and a catapult system for launching planes from the deck (known as the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System or EMALS) that’s constantly breaking down. As you might imagine, not much can happen on an aircraft carrier when you can’t load munitions or launch planes effectively. Each new Ford-class carrier costs in the neighborhood of $14 billion, yet despite all that money, it simply “isn’t very good at actually being a carrier,” as an article in Popular Mechanics magazine bluntly put it recently. Think of it as the KC-46 of the seas.

• And speaking of failing ships, let’s not forget the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ships (LCS), which have earned the nickname “little crappy ships.” A serious propulsion design flaw may end up turning them into “floating garbage piles,” defense journalist Jared Keller recently concluded. The Navy bought 10 of them for roughly half a billion dollars each, with future orders currently on hold. Lockheed Martin is the lead contractor, the same one responsible for the wildly profligate (and profitable) F-35.

• Grimly for the Navy, problems were so severe with its Zumwalt-class of stealth destroyers that the program was actually canceled after only three ships had been built. (The Navy initially planned to build 32 of them.) Critiqued as a vessel in search of a mission, the Zumwalt-class was also bedeviled by problems with its radar and main armament. In total, the Navy spent $22 billion on a failed “next generation” concept whose cancelation offers us that utter rarity of our moment: a weapon so visibly terrible that even the military-industrial complex couldn’t continue to justify it.

Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Michael Gilday has gone on record as rejecting the idea of integrating exotic, largely untried and untested technologies into new ship designs (known in the biz as “concurrent development”). Godspeed, admiral!

Much like the troubled F-35 and the Littoral Combat Ship, the Zumwalt’s spiraling costs were due in part to the Pentagon’s fixation on integrating just such “leading-edge” technologies into designs that themselves were in flux. (Not for nothing do military wags refer to them as bleeding edge technologies.) Such wildly ambitious concurrent development, rather than saving time and money, tends to waste plenty of both, leading to ultra-expensive less-than-fully effective weapons like the Zumwalt, the original version of which had a particularly inglorious breakdown while passing through (or rather not passing through) the Panama Canal in November 2016.

Given such expensive failures, you might be forgiven for wondering whether, in the twenty-first century, while fighting never-ending disastrous wars across significant parts of the planet, America’s military isn’t also actively working to disarm itself. Seriously, if we’re truly talking about weapons that are vital to national defense, failure shouldn’t be an option, but far too often it is.

With this dubious record, one might imagine the next class of Navy vessel could very well be named for Philip Francis Queeg, the disturbed and incompetent ship captain of novelist Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny. It’s also quite possible that the Pentagon’s next advanced fighter jet will fulfill former Martin Marietta CEO Norman Augustine’s estimate from the 1980s that, by the year 2054, the entire Pentagon budget would be needed to buy one — and only one – combat aircraft. Perhaps a Death Star for America’s new Space Force?

Is it even possible to cancel a major weapons system like the F-35? The Navy’s Zumwalt-class of destroyers was such a disaster that the program was indeed canceled a mere $22 billion along the line, but what about a program like the F-35? Is it even possible to cancel such a behemoth of a weapons system?

That question was put to me by Christian Sorensen, author of Understanding the War Industry, who like me is a member of the Eisenhower Media Network. Overpriced and underperforming weapons, Sorensen noted, are a feature of, rather than some sort of bug in, the military-industrial complex as future profits for giant weapons companies drive design and fielding decisions, not capability, efficiency, or even need. He’s right, of course. There may even be a perverse incentive within the system to build flawed weapons, since there’s so much money to be made in troubleshooting and “fixing” those flaws. Meanwhile, the F-35, like America’s leading financial institutions in the 2007-2009 Great Recession, is treated as if it were too big to fail. And perhaps it is.

Jobs, profits, influence, and foreign trade are all involved here, so much so that mediocre (or worse) performance is judged acceptable, if only to keep the money flowing and the production lines rolling. And as it happens, the Air Force really has no obvious alternative to the F-35. During the 1950s and 1960s, the aerospace industry used to build a wealth of models: the “century series” of fighters, from the F-100 through the F106. (The notorious F-111 was an early version of the F-35.) The Air Force could also tap Navy designs like for the F-4 Phantom. Now, it’s essentially the F-35 or bust.

In its obvious desperation, that service is turning to older designs like the F-15 Eagle (circa 1970) and the F-117 Stealth Fighter (circa 1980) to bridge the gap created by delays and cost overruns in the F-35 program. Five decades after its initial flight, it’s something of a miracle that the F-15 is still being produced — and, of course, an obvious indictment of the soaring costs and inadequate performance of its replacements.

The exorbitant pricing of the F-35, as well as the F-22 Raptor, has recently even driven top Air Force officials to propose the creation of an entirely new “low cost” fighter. Irony of ironies, once upon a time in another universe, the F-35 was supposed to be the low-cost replacement for “fourth-generation” F-15s and F-16s. Last month, current Air Force Chief of Staff General Charles “CQ” Brown exhibited the usual convoluted and nonsensical logic of the military-industrial complex when he discussed that new dream fighter:

 

“If we have the capability to do something even more capable [than the F-16] for cheaper and faster, why not? Let’s not just buy off the shelf, let’s actually take a look at something else out there that we can build.”

In other words, why buy already-proven and much-improved variants of the F-16 when you could design and build an entirely new plane from scratch, supposedly in a “cheaper” and “faster” manner? Of course, given that new fighters now take roughly two decades to design and field, that’s an obvious fantasy from the start. If my old service — I’m a retired Air Force officer — wants fast and cheap, it should simply go with the tried-and-true F-16. Yet an entirely new plane is so much more attractive to a service under the spell of the giant weapons makers, even as the F-35 continues to be produced under its old, now demonstrably false, mantra of cheaper-and-better.

As Christian Sorensen summed up our present situation to me:

 

“If an exorbitant under-performing platform like the F-35 can’t be canceled, then what are we doing? How do we ever expect to bring home the troops [garrisoning the globe] if we can’t even end one awful weapons platform or address the underlying systemic issues that cause such a platform to be created?”

Of course, an “alert and knowledgeable citizenry” like the one that President Dwight D. Eisenhower described in his 1961 farewell address to the nation (in which he first warned of the dangers of a “military-industrial complex” gaining “unwarranted influence”) would work to cancel wasteful, unnecessary weapons systems like the F-35. But what if the forces in place in American society act to keep that very citizenry apathetic and ignorant instead?

Call me jaded, but I can’t see the F-35 being canceled outright, even though it hasn’t technically yet reached the stage of full production. Likely enough, however, such a cancellation would only happen in the wake of major cuts to the defense budget that forced the services to make hard choices. But such cuts clearly aren’t on the agenda of a Congress that continues to fund record Pentagon budgets in a bipartisan fashion; a Congress that, unchecked as it is by us citizens, simply won’t force the Pentagon to make tough choices.

And here’s one more factor to consider as to why cancel culture is never applied to Pentagon weaponry: Americans generally love weaponry. We embrace weapons, celebrate them, pose with them. To cancel them, we’d have to cancel a version of ourselves that revels in high-tech mayhem. To cancel them, we’d have to cancel a made-in-America mindset that equates such weaponry — the stealthier and sexier the better — with safety and security, and that sees destruction overseas as serving democracy at home.

America’s military-industrial complex will undoubtedly keep building the fanciest, most expensive weaponry known to humanity, even if the end products are quite often ineffective and unsound. Yet as scores of billions of dollars are thrown away on such weapons systems, America’s roads, bridges, and other forms of infrastructure continue to crumble. How about it, America? Why not cancel those weapons and build back better at home?

William Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and professor of history, writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is a senior fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network (EMN), an organization of critical veteran military and national security professionals. His personal blog is Bracing Views.

Copyright ©2021 William Astore — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 04 March 2021

Word Count: 2,168

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This country is in a crisis of the first order. More than half a million of us have died thanks to Covid-19. Food insecurity is on the rise, with nearly 24 million Americans going hungry, including 12 million children. Unemployment claims filed since the pandemic began have now reached 93 million. Given the level of damage to the less wealthy parts of this society, it’s little wonder that most Americans chose pandemic recovery (including the quick distribution of vaccines) as their top priority issue.

Keep in mind that our democracy is suffering as well. After all, former president Donald Trump incited an insurrection when he wasn’t able to win at the polls, an assault on the Capitol in which military veterans were overrepresented among those committed to reversing the election results (and endangering legislators as well). If you want a mood-of-the-moment fact, consider this: even after Joe Biden’s election, QAnon followers continued to insist that Trump could still be inaugurated to his second term in office. Addressing economic and political instability at home will take significant resources and focus, including calling to account those who so grossly mishandled the country’s pandemic response and stoked the big lie of questioning the legitimacy of Biden’s election victory.

If, however, you weren’t out here in the real world, but in there where the national security elite exists, you’d find that the chatter would involve few of the problems just mentioned. And only in our world would such a stance seem remarkably disconnected from reality. In their world, the “crisis” part of the present financial crisis is a fear, based on widespread rumors and reports about the Biden budget to come, that the Pentagon’s funding might actually get, if not a genuine haircut, then at least a trim — something largely unheard of in the twenty-first century.

The Pentagon’s boosters and their allies in the defense industry respond to such fears by insisting that no such trim could possibly be in order, that competition with China must be the prime focus of this moment and of the budget to come. Assuming that China’s rise is, in fact, a genuine problem, it’s not one that’s likely to be solved either in the near future or in a military fashion (not, at least, without disaster for the world), and it’s certainly not one that should be prioritized during a catastrophic pandemic.

While there are genuine concerns about what China’s rise might mean for the United States, it’s important to recognize just how much harm those trying to distract us from the very real problems at hand are likely to inflict on our health and actual security. Since the beginning of the pandemic, in fact, those unwilling to accept our failures or respond adequately to the disease at hand have blamed outside forces, most notably China, for otherwise preventable havoc to American lives and the economy.

Trump and his allies tried to shirk accountability for their failure to respond to the pandemic by pushing xenophobic and false characterizations of Covid-19 as the “China virus” or the “kung flu.” In a similar fashion, the national security elites hope that focusing on building up our military and building new nuclear weapons with China in mind will distract time and energy from making needed changes at home. But those urging us to increase Pentagon spending to compete with China in the middle of a pandemic are, in reality, only compounding the damage to our country’s recovery.

Militarizing the future Given the last two decades, you won’t be surprised to know that this misplaced assessment of the real threat to the public has a firm grip on Washington right now. As my colleague Dan Grazier at the Project On Government Oversight pointed out recently, confirmation hearings for Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin III and Deputy Secretary Kathleen Hicks included more than 70 (sometimes ominous) mentions of China.

So again, no surprise that only a few weeks after those hearings, Biden announced the creation of a new China task force at the Pentagon. As the press announcement made clear, that group is going to be a dream for the military-industrial complex since it will, above all, focus on developing advanced “defense” technologies to stare down the China “threat” and so further militarize the future. In other words, the Pentagon’s projected threat assessments and their wonder-weapon solutions will be at the forefront of Washington thinking — and, therefore, funding, even during this pandemic.

That’s why it’s easy enough to predict where such a task force will lead. A similar panel in 2018, including lobbyists, board members, and contractors from the arms industry, warned that competition with China would require a long-term increase in funding for the Pentagon of 3% to 5%. That could mean an almost unimaginable future Department of Defense budget of $971.9 billion in fiscal year 2024. To pay for it, they suggested, Congress should consider cutting social security and other kinds of safety-net spending.

Even before Covid-19 hit, the economic fragility of so many Americans should have made that kind of recommendation irresponsible. In the midst of a pandemic, it’s beyond dangerous. Still, it betrays a crucial truth about the military-industrial complex: its key figures see the U.S. economy as something that should serve their needs, not the other way around.

Of course, the giants of the weapons industry have long had a direct seat at the table in Washington. Despite being the first Black secretary of defense, for instance, Lloyd Austin III remains typical of the Pentagon establishment in the sense that he comes to the job directly from a seat on the board of directors of weapons giant Raytheon. And he’s in good company. After all, many of the administration’s recent appointees are drawn from key Washington think tanks supported by the weapons industry.

For instance, more than a dozen former staffers from, or people affiliated with, the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) have joined the Biden administration. A recent report by the Revolving Door Project found that CNAS had repeatedly accepted the sort of funding that went comfortably with recommendations it was making that “would directly benefit some of the think tank’s donors, including military contractors and foreign governments.” When it came to confronting China, for instance, CNAS figures urged the Department of Defense to “sustain and enhance” defense contractors so that they would become ever more “robust, flexible, and resilient” in a faceoff with that country.

Sadly, even as the Pentagon’s budget remains largely unchallenged, there’s been a sudden reawakening — especially in Republican ranks — to the version of fiscal conservatism that looks askance at providing relief to communities and businesses suffering around the country. Recent debates in Washington about the latest pandemic relief bill suggest once again that the much-ballyhooed principles of “responsibility” and “fiscal conservatism” apply to everyone — except, of course, the Pentagon.

Putting Covid-19 relief spending in perspective The price tag for the relief bill presently being debated in Congress, $1.9 trillion, is certainly significant, but it’s not far from the kind of taxpayer support national security agencies normally receive every year. In 2020, for instance, the real national security budget request surpassed $1.2 trillion. That request included not only the Pentagon, but other costs of war, including care for veterans and military retirement benefits.

Over the years, such costs have proven monumental. The Department of Defense alone, for example, has received more than $10.6 trillion over the past 20 years. That included $2 trillion for its overseas contingency operations account, a war-fighting fund used by both the Pentagon and lawmakers to circumvent congressionally imposed spending caps. Reliance on that account, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office assured Congress, only made it likelier that taxpayers would fund more expensive and less optimal solutions to America’s forever wars.

In the past, the justification for such excessive national-security spending rested on the idea that the Defense Department was the key to keeping Americans safe. As a result, the Pentagon’s ever-escalating requests for money were approved by Congress year after year without real opposition. Disproportionate funding for that institution has, however, come at a significant cost.

Caps on non-defense spending under the Budget Control Act of 2011 meant that civilian agencies were already underfunded when the pandemic hit. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities pointed out, “Overall funding for programs outside veterans’ medical care remains below its level a decade ago.” The consequences of that underspending can also be seen in our crumbling roads and infrastructure, to which, in its last report in 2017, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave a D+ — and the situation has only grown worse since then.

Job protection is the other common refrain for those defending high funding levels for the Pentagon and, during a pandemic with such devastating employment consequences, such a concern can hardly be dismissed. But studies have consistently shown that military spending is a remarkably poor job creator compared to almost any other kind of spending. Some of us may still remember World War II’s Rosie the Riveter and mid-twentieth-century union support for defense budgets as engines for job creation. Those assumptions are, however, sorely out of date. Investing in healthcare, combating climate change, or rebuilding infrastructure are all significantly more effective job creators than yet more military spending.

Of course, non-military stimulus spending has been far from perfect. Even measuring the effects of the first relief package passed by Congress has proven difficult, especially since the Trump administration ignored the law when it came to reporting on just how many jobs that spending either preserved or created. Still, there’s no question that non-military stimulus efforts are more effective, by orders of magnitude, than defense spending when it comes to job creation.

Needed: A new funding strategy to weather future storms The uncomfortable truth (even for those who would like to see a trillion dollars in annual Pentagon spending) is that such funding won’t make us safer, possibly far less so. Recent studies of preventable military aviation crashes indicate that, disturbingly enough, given the way the Pentagon spends taxpayer funds, more money can actually make us less safe.

Somewhere along the line in this pandemic moment, Washington needs to redefine the meaning of both “national security” and “national interest.” In a world in which California burns and Texas freezes, in which more than half-a-million Americans have already been felled by Covid-19, it’s time to recognize how damaging the over-funding of the Pentagon and a myopic focus on an ever more militarized cold war with China are likely to be to this country. As the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft’s Stephen Wertheim has argued, it’s increasingly clear that an American strategy focused on chasing global military supremacy into the distant future no longer serves any real definition of national interest.

Vanderbilt law professor Ganesh Sitaraman recently pointed out at Foreign Affairs that “the coming era will be one of health crises, climate shocks, cyberattacks, and geoeconomic competition among great powers. What unites those seemingly disparate threats is that each is not so much a battle to be won as a challenge to be weathered.” While traditional defense threats still loom large in what passes for national debate in Washington, the most likely (and potentially most devastating) threats to public health and safety aren’t actually in the Pentagon’s wheelhouse.

Weathering those future crises will continue to require innovation and creativity, which means ensuring that we are investing adequately not in the hypersonic weaponry of some future imagined war but in education and public health now. Particularly in the near term, as we try to rebuild jobs and businesses lost to this pandemic, even the Pentagon must be forced to make better use of the staggering resources it already receives from increasingly embattled American taxpayers. Rushing to produce yet more useless (and sometimes poorly produced) weapons systems and technology will only increase the fragility of both the military and the civilian society it’s supposed to protect.

Make no mistake: the addiction to Pentagon spending is a bipartisan problem in Washington. Still, change is in order. The problems we face at home are too overwhelming to be ignored. We can’t continue to let the appetites of the military-industrial complex crowd out the needs of the rest of us.

Mandy Smithberger writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She is the director of the Center for Defense Information at the Project On Government Oversight (POGO).

Copyright ©2021 Mandy Smithberger — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 02 March 2021

Word Count: 2,038

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“Are you okay?” asked a friend and military spouse in the voicemail she left me on the afternoon the mob of Trump supporters breached the Capitol so violently. At home with a new baby, her Navy reservist husband stationed in Germany, the thoughts running through her head that day would prove remarkably similar to mine. As she said when we spoke, “It’s as if the U.S. has become a war zone.”

Do a Google search and you’ll find very little suggesting that the January 6th attack on the Capitol in any way resembled a war. A notable exception: a Washington Post op-ed by former Missouri secretary of state and Afghanistan combat veteran Jason Kander. He saw that day’s violence for the combat it was and urged congressional representatives and others who bore the brunt of those “armed insurrectionists” to seek help (as, to his regret, he hadn’t done after his tours of duty in combat zones).

Now, take a look back at that “riot” and tell me how it differs from a military attack: President Trump asked his supporters to “fight like hell” or “you’re not going to have a country anymore.” He swore he would go with them, though he didn’t, of course, just as those who launched and continued our “forever wars” of the last almost 20 years sent Americans to fight abroad without ever doing so themselves. Trump’s small army destroyed property with their metal baseball bats and other implements of aggression, in one case even planted pipe bombs near Republican and Democratic party headquarters (that didn’t go off), and looted congressional chambers, including carrying away House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s lectern.

The rioters used intimidation against those in the Capitol. Some screamed insults like “traitor” and the n-word (reserved, of course, for the black police officers protecting Congress). One rioter wore a sweatshirt emblazed with the words “Camp Auschwitz,” a reference to the Nazi death camp. Make no mistake: the America these rioters envisioned was one full of hate and disdain for difference.

In their disregard for pandemic safety protocols, they employed the equivalent of biological warfare against lawmakers and the Capitol police, breaking into the building, screaming and largely unmasked during a pandemic, forcing lawmakers to jam into enclosed spaces to save (but also endanger) their own lives. The rioters smeared blood on walls and on the busts of former presidents. Their purpose was clear: to overturn democratic processes by brute force in the name of what they saw as an existential threat to their country, the certification of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as president and vice president.

Among those aggressors were veterans and some active-duty personnel from elite U.S. combat forces (as well as from police departments) who brought years of expertise to bear on orchestrating an attempted takeover of our government, based — much like the costliest of our still-ongoing wars, the one in Iraq — on lies told by their commander in chief (“Stop the steal!”).

My own personal war To fight wars, you need to summon a mix of rage, adrenaline, and disregard for the humanity of those whose project you seek to annihilate. That seemed evident in the mob of the supposedly pro-law-and-order president that attacked Congress, their acts leading to five deaths — including that of Capitol Hill police officer Brian Sicknick, a former New Jersey Air National Guard member. More than 140 police officers who tried to protect lawmakers sustained injuries: Some, who were not given helmets prior to that day, are now living with brain injuries (which, as a therapist, I can assure are likely to come with debilitating lifelong implications). Another officer has two cracked ribs and smashed spinal disks. Yet another was stabbed by a rioter with a metal fence stake. Still another lost his eye.

These deaths and injuries will have ripple effects for the spouses, children, friends, employers, and others in the communities where those officers live. And they do not include the countless invisible injuries (such as post-traumatic stress disorder) that result from such war-like scenarios. In this respect, the cost of armed violence to human life is incalculable.

While that attack on the Capitol was underway, at the tiny community mental health clinic where I work as a therapist, I was speaking to clients who had migrated here from countries plagued by armed conflict. I listened to concerns that the far-right nationalist attack on the Capitol would, sooner or later, inspire violence against their own families. After all, those storming the Capitol backed a president who had referred to immigrants as “animals” and whose administration had put the children of undocumented migrants in cages — or sub-prison like conditions with zero-provision for their care. In the days after the attack, an acquaintance of mine, an African American man, was indeed pursued by a carful of people wearing Trump hats and shouting racial slurs. (They slowed their vehicle and followed him down the road towards his Maryland apartment.)

The day of the riots, I arrived home from my job to find my husband, a Naval officer, in front of the television news, tears in his eyes and sweat dripping down his face. My children, unprepared for bed (as they should have been), were staring at him in confusion. That night, he and I bolted awake at every sound, as we had in the weeks after Trump was first elected.

Of course, given our incomes and our home in the countryside outside Washington, D.C., we were about as far from danger as one could imagine. Still, our sense of distress was acute. After the riot was over, my husband, gritting his teeth, wondered: “Why aren’t the Capitol floors covered in rioters in zip ties right now?” We noted that, if there had been Black Lives Matter slogans and black fists on the flags and banners those rioters were carrying, the National Guard would have arrived quickly.

As time wore on, my husband and I attempted to comfort each another and explain those televised scenes of violence to our two children, four and five, who had been stunned both by glimpses of what grownups could do and by how visibly upset their father had become. And we weren’t alone. I soon found myself scrolling through texts and voicemails from other military spouses with similar fears who wanted to know if my husband and I were okay and if the violence in the Capitol had made it anywhere near our home.

In our minds, fearful scenarios were playing out about what January 6th might mean for military families like ours — and little wonder, since in those tense two weeks before Joe Biden’s inauguration, the military still answered to a commander in chief who had visibly incited the possible takeover of our government. What would the military members of our families be asked to do in the days to come, we wondered, and by whom? What would have happened if those rioters had actually succeeded in hanging Mike Pence or slaughtering other members of Congress?

Preparing for war In truth, in Donald Trump’s America, my spouse and I had been conjuring up scenarios of violence for months. We had found ourselves obsessed with the fears of rising political violence in what, during wartime, used to be known as the home front in the country with the most heavily armed civilian population on Earth. (I had even written about that very subject in those very months.) No wonder then that, before November 3rd, I was so focused not just on dispelling Trumpian disinformation about the election to come, but on helping voters locate their polling stations and finding transportation to them.

As it happens, my husband’s jobs in recent years have often involved anticipating war and what our military would do if Americans ever faced it on our own soil. He’s served as an officer on a battleship and three nuclear and ballistic-missile armed submarines. He’s had to collect intelligence under the leadership of presidents with very different levels of impulse control. Most recently, he’s worked for the Joint Chiefs of Staff thinking through scenarios in which the United States might be engaged in nuclear war — and what the costs might be.

Together, we have been amazed at how few Americans, other than our fellow military families, have been preoccupied with the violence beginning to unfold on our nation’s streets and the way, in some strange fashion, America’s distant, never-ending wars of these last nearly 20 years were threatening to come home.

One lesson of these years, in an America with an “all-volunteer” military, is that wars essentially don’t exist unless you’re directly or indirectly involved in fighting them. At no time did that seem more evident to me than on January 6th, in the divergent responses of my own family and those we know who aren’t in the military. If you’re interested (as I am as a co-founder of Brown University’s Costs of War Project) in how, during these years, voters and their representatives have justified (or simply ignored) the decision to “solve” our global problems with unending war, then you might frame what happened on January 6th in these terms: some 74 million Americans voted for a president who portrayed those who disagreed with him as existential threats to America.

In the meantime, for almost two decades our government has invested staggering, almost unimaginable sums in this country’s military machine (and the war-making industries linked to it), while diverting funds from key social services, ranging from healthcare to domestic job creation. Meanwhile, it has consistently “retired” military-grade weaponry from our war zones into the hands of police departments across the country and so onto our city streets. I mean, given such a formula, what could possibly go wrong? Why would anyone connected to the military be worried?

Of course, why wouldn’t we worry, since we — or our loved ones — are the people who are ordered to participate when wars of any kind happen?

The isolation of military service There are about two million Americans who serve in the U.S. military and 2.6 million more who are military spouses and dependents. Altogether that’s just a little more than 1% of our entire population. We are, believe me, in another world of fears and worries than the rest of you. We’ve been involved, directly or indirectly, in fighting those godforsaken wars launched after 9/11 for almost two decades now. You haven’t. You’ve generally thanked us religiously for our “service” and otherwise forgotten about those wars and gone about your business. We haven’t. Our sense of the world, our fears, are different than yours.

We military spouses are charged with comforting and caring for those who serve, especially (but not exclusively) when they are sent to one of the many countries where that never-ending “war on terror” continues to be fought into the Biden years. Caring for those who serve is no small task in a country where the very act of trying to get mental-health care could be a career-ending move for a soldier. Families are often their only recourse.

Military spouses also care for children in mourning, temporarily or in some cases permanently, over the loss of a parent. In an anemic military healthcare system, we are often left to marshal the necessary care for ourselves and our children, even as many of us struggle with depression, anxiety, and trauma thanks to the multiple, often unpredictable deployments of those very loved ones and being left alone to imagine what they’re going through. According to a recent op-ed by my colleague and military spouse Aleha Landry, approximately 25% of us are unemployed in this Covid-19 moment. On average, we also earn 27% less than our counterparts in the civilian world, not least of all because the burden of childcare and frequent redeployments prevent us from moving up in our chosen fields of work.

In this pandemic-stricken, distinctly over-armed world of ours, in which nationalist militia groups (often with veterans among them) backing the former president continue to talk about war right here in what, after 9/11, we came to call “the homeland,” it’s not surprising how increasingly anxious people like me have come to feel. Personally, what January 6th brought home was this: as a military spouse, I was living in a community that didn’t know my family, while my husband, in his own personal hell of hypothetical nuclear wars, could be called upon at any time to represent a president who had incited an assault on the Capitol, leaving my children and me alone. And that, believe me, was scary.

I was struck, for instance, that a military spouse I became friends with and who occupied a very different part of the political spectrum from me nonetheless feared that, in the event of conflict, she would be vulnerable — and it wasn’t just foreign conflicts that she was worrying about after Trump was elected. At one point, her husband had told her, “If you see a flash in the sky, then take the kids and drive in this direction,” indicating a spot on the map where he felt, based on wind patterns, nuclear fallout was less likely to blow. After the Charlottesville Unite the Right riot of 2017, she stocked up on food, water, and extra gas so she could head for Canada if armed conflict broke out among Americans. “We’d be alone,” she told me, “because obviously, he’d be gone.”

Stopping our endless wars These, then, are the sorts of fears that arise in my militarized world on this careening planet of ours. Yes, Joe Biden is now president, but this country is still on edge. And the military that’s been fighting those hopeless, bloody wars in distant lands for so long is on edge, too. After all, military personnel were present in significant numbers in that mob on January 6th. Almost one in five members of Trump’s invading crew were reportedly veterans or active military personnel.

Sometimes, the people I feel closest to (when I do my work for the Costs of War Project) are the women who must mother and maintain households in the places my country has had such a hand in turning into constant war zones. Right now, there exist millions of people living in just such places where the anticipation of air raids, drone attacks, suicide bombings, snipers, or sophisticated roadside IEDs is a daily reality. Already, over 335,000 civilians (and counting) have been killed in those foreign war zones of ours. Mothers and their children in such lands are often cut off from hospitals, reliable food, clean water, or the infrastructure that would help them get to school, work, or the doctor. Unlike most Americans, they don’t have the luxury of forgetting about war. Their spouses and children are in constant danger.

Democrat or Republican, the presidents of the past 20 years are responsible for the violence that continues in those war zones and for the (not unrelated) violence that has begun to unfold at home — and even, thank you very much, for my own family’s fears and fantasies about war, up close and personal. It’s about time that all of us in this disturbed country of ours at least bear witness to what such violence means for those living it and start thinking about what the United States should do to stop it. It can’t just be the most vulnerable and directly involved among us who lose sleep — not to speak of lives, limbs, mental stability, and livelihoods — due to the cloistered decisions of our public leaders.

Believe this at least: if we can’t stop fighting those wars across significant parts of the planet, this country won’t remain immune to them either. It hasn’t, in fact. It’s just that so many of us have yet to fully take that in.

Andrea Mazzarino writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She co-founded Brown University’s Costs of War Project. She has held various clinical, research, and advocacy positions, including at a Veterans Affairs PTSD Outpatient Clinic, with Human Rights Watch, and at a community mental health agency. She is the co-editor of War and Health: The Medical Consequences of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Copyright ©2021 Andrea Mazzarino — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 01 March 2021

Word Count: 2,627

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Slowing the pace of climate change and getting “tough” on China, especially over its human-rights abuses and unfair trade practices, are among the top priorities President Biden has announced for his new administration. Evidently, he believes that he can tame a rising China with harsh pressure tactics, while still gaining its cooperation in areas of concern to Washington. As he wrote in Foreign Affairs during the presidential election campaign, “The most effective way to meet that challenge is to build a united front of U.S. allies and partners to confront China’s abusive behaviors and human rights violations, even as we seek to cooperate with Beijing on issues where our interests converge, such as climate change.” If, however, our new president truly believes that he can build an international coalition to gang up on China and secure Beijing’s cooperation on climate change, he’s seriously deluded. Indeed, though he could succeed in provoking a new cold war, he won’t prevent the planet from heating up unbearably in the process.

Biden is certainly aware of the dangers of global warming. In that same Foreign Affairs article, he labeled it nothing short of an “existential threat,” one that imperils the survival of human civilization. Acknowledging the importance of relying on scientific expertise (unlike our previous president who repeatedly invented his own version of scientific reality), Biden affirmed the conclusion of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that warming must be limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels or there will be hell to pay. He then pledged to “rejoin the Paris climate agreement on day one of a Biden administration,” which he indeed did, and to “make massive, urgent investments at home that put the United States on track to have a clean energy economy with net-zero [greenhouse gas] emissions by 2050” — the target set by the IPCC.

Even such dramatic actions, he indicated, will not be sufficient. Other countries will have to join America in moving toward a global “net-zero” state in which any carbon emissions would be compensated for by equivalent carbon removals. “Because the United States creates only 15 percent of global emissions,” he wrote, “I will leverage our economic and moral authority to push the world to determined action, rallying nations to raise their ambitions and push progress further and faster.”

China, the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases right now (although the U.S. remains number one historically), would obviously be Washington’s natural partner in this effort. Here, though, Biden’s antagonistic stance toward that country is likely to prove a significant impediment. Rather than prioritize collaboration with China on climate action, he chose to castigate Beijing for its continued reliance on coal. The Biden climate plan, he wrote in Foreign Affairs, “includes insisting that China… stop subsidizing coal exports and outsourcing pollution to other countries by financing billions of dollars’ worth of dirty fossil-fuel energy projects through its Belt and Road Initiative.” Then he went further by portraying the future effort to achieve a green economy as a potentially competitive, not collaborative, struggle with China, saying,

 

“I will make investment in research and development a cornerstone of my presidency, so that the United States is leading the charge in innovation. There is no reason we should be falling behind China or anyone else when it comes to clean energy.”

Unfortunately, though he’s not wrong on China’s climate change challenges (similar, in many respects, to our own country’s), you can’t have it both ways. If climate change is an existential threat and international collaboration between the worst greenhouse gas emitters key to overcoming that peril, picking fights with China over its energy behavior is a self-defeating way to start. Whatever obstacles China does pose, its cooperation in achieving that 1.5-degree limit is critical. “If we don’t get this right, nothing else will matter,” Biden said of global efforts to deal with climate change. Sadly, his insistence on pummeling China on so many fronts (and appointing China hawks to his foreign policy team to do so) will ensure that he gets it wrong. The only way to avert catastrophic climate change is for the United States to avoid a new cold war with China by devising a cooperative set of plans with Beijing to speed the global transition to a green economy.

Why cooperation is essential With such cooperation in mind, let’s review the basics on how those two countries affect world energy consumption and global carbon emissions: the United States and China are the world’s two leading consumers of energy and its two main emitters of carbon dioxide, or CO2, the leading greenhouse gas. As a result, they exert an outsized influence on the global climate equation. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), China accounted for approximately 22% of world energy consumption in 2018; the U.S., 16%. And because both countries rely so heavily on fossil fuels for energy generation — China largely on coal, the U.S. more on oil and natural gas — their carbon-dioxide emissions account for an even larger share of the global total: China alone, nearly 29% in 2018; the U.S., 18%; and combined, an astonishing 46%.

It’s what will happen in the future, though, that really matters. If the world is to keep global temperatures from rising above that 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold, every major economy should soon be on a downward-trending trajectory in terms of both fossil-fuel consumption and CO2 emissions (along with a compensating increase in renewable energy output). Horrifyingly enough, however, on their current trajectories, over the next two decades the combined fossil-fuel consumption and carbon emissions of China and the United States are still expected to rise, not fall, before stabilizing in the 2040s at a level far above net zero. According to the IEA, if the two countries stick to anything like their current courses, their combined fossil-fuel consumption would be approximately 17% higher in 2040 than in 2018, even if their CO2 emissions would rise by “only” 3%. Any increase of that kind over the next two decades would spell one simple word for humanity: D-O-O-M.

True, both countries are expected to substantially increase their investment in renewable energy during the next 20 years, even as places like India are expected to account for an ever-increasing share of global energy use and CO2 emissions. Still, as long as Beijing and Washington continue to lead the world in both categories, any effort to achieve net-zero and avert an almost unimaginable climate cataclysm will have to fall largely on their shoulders. This would, however, require a colossal reduction in fossil-fuel consumption and the ramping up of renewables on a scale unlike any engineering project this planet has ever seen.

The Institute of Climate Change and Sustainable Development at Tsinghua University, an influential Chinese think tank, has calculated what might be involved in reshaping China’s coal-dependent electrical power system to reach the goal of a 1.5-degree limit on global warming. Its researchers believe that, over the next three decades, this would require adding the equivalent of three times current global wind power capacity and four times that of solar power at the cost of approximately $20 trillion.

A similar transformation will be required in the United States, although with some differences: while this country relies far less on coal than China to generate electricity, it relies more on natural gas (a less potent emitter of CO2, but a fossil fuel nonetheless) and its electrical grid — as recent events in Texas have demonstrated — is woefully unprepared for climate change and will have to be substantially rebuilt at enormous cost.

And that represents only part of what needs to be done to avert planetary catastrophe. To eliminate carbon emissions from oil-powered vehicles, both countries will have to replace their entire fleets of cars, vans, trucks, and buses with electric-powered ones and develop alternative fuels for their trains, planes, and ships — an undertaking of equal magnitude and expense.

There are two ways all of this can be done: separately or together. Each country could devise its own blueprint for such a transition, developing its own green technologies and seeking financing wherever it could be found. As in the fight over fifth generation (5G) telecommunications, each could deny scientific knowledge and technical know-how to its rival and insist that allies buy only its equipment, whether or not it best suits their purposes — a stance taken by the Trump administration with respect to the Chinese company Huawei’s 5G wireless technology. Alternatively, the U.S. and China could cooperate in developing green technologies, share information and know-how, and work together in disseminating them around the world.

On the question of which approach is more likely to achieve success, the answer is too obvious to belabor. Only those prepared to risk civilization’s survival would choose the former — and yet that’s the choice that both sides may indeed make.

Why a new cold war precludes climate salvation Those in Washington who favor a tougher approach toward China and the bolstering of U.S. military forces in the Pacific claim that, under President Xi Jinping, the Chinese Communist regime has become more authoritarian at home and more aggressive abroad, endangering key U.S. allies in the Pacific and threatening our vital interests. Certainly, when it comes to the increasing repression of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang Province or pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong, there can be little doubt of Beijing’s perfidy, though on other issues, there’s room for debate. On another subject, though, there really should be no room for debate at all: the impact of a new cold war between the planet’s two great powers on the chances for a successful global response to a rapidly warming planet.

There are several obvious reasons for this. First, increased hostility will ensure a competitive rather than collaborative search for vital solutions, resulting in wasted resources, inadequate financing, duplicative research, and the stalled international dissemination of advanced green technologies. A hint of such a future lies in the competitive rather than collaborative development of vaccines for Covid-19 and their distressingly chaotic distribution to Africa and the rest of the developing world, ensuring that the pandemic will have a life into 2022 or 2023 with an ever-rising death toll.

Second, a new cold war will make international diplomacy more difficult when it comes to ensuring worldwide compliance with the Paris climate agreement. Consider it a key lesson for the future that cooperation between President Barack Obama and Xi Jinping made the agreement possible in the first place, creating pressure on reluctant but vital powers like India and Russia to join as well. Once President Trump pulled the U.S. out of the agreement, that space evaporated and global adherence withered. Only by recreating such a U.S.-China climate alliance will it be possible to corral other key players into full compliance. As suggested recently by Todd Stern, the lead American negotiator at the 2015 Paris climate summit, “There is simply no way to contain climate change worldwide without full-throttle engagement by both countries.”

A cold war environment would make such cooperation a fantasy.

Third, such an atmosphere would ensure a massive increase in military expenditures on both sides, sopping up funds needed for the transition to a green-energy economy. In addition, as the pace of militarization accelerated, fossil-fuel use would undoubtedly increase, as the governments of both countries favored the mass production of gas-guzzling tanks, bombers, and warships.

Finally, there is no reason to assume a cold war will always remain cold. The current standoff between the U.S. and China in the Pacific is different from the one that existed between the U.S. and the Soviet Union in Europe during the historic Cold War. There is no longer anything like an “Iron Curtain” to define the boundaries between the two sides or keep their military forces from colliding with each another. While the risk of war in Europe was ever-present back then, each side knew that such a boundary-crossing assault might trigger a nuclear exchange and so prove suicidal. Today, however, the air and naval forces of China and the U.S. are constantly intermingling in the East and South China Seas, making a clash or collision possible at any time. So far, cooler heads have prevailed, preventing such encounters from sparking armed violence, but as tensions mount, a hot war between the U.S. and China cannot be ruled out.

Because American forces are poised to strike at vital targets on the Chinese mainland, it’s impossible to preclude China’s use of nuclear weapons or, if preparations for such use are detected, a preemptive U.S. nuclear strike. Any full-scale thermonuclear conflagration resulting from that would probably cause a nuclear winter and the death of billions of people, making the climate-change peril moot. But even if nuclear weapons are not employed, a war between the two powers could result in immense destruction in China’s industrial heartland and to such key U.S. allies as Japan and South Korea. Fires ignited in the course of battle would, of course, add additional carbon to the atmosphere, while the subsequent breakdown in global economic activity would postpone by years any transition to a green economy.

An alliance for global survival If Joe Biden genuinely believes that climate change is an “existential threat” and that the United States “must lead the world,” it’s crucial that he stop the slide toward a new cold war with China and start working with Beijing to speed the transition to a green-energy economy focused on ensuring global compliance with the Paris climate agreement. This would not necessarily mean abandoning all efforts to pressure China on human rights and other contentious issues. It’s possible to pursue human rights, trade equity, and planetary survival at the same time. Indeed, as both countries come to share the urgency of addressing the climate crisis, progress on other issues could become easier.

Assuming Biden truly means what he says about overcoming the climate threat and “getting it right,” here are some of the steps he could take to achieve meaningful progress:

• Schedule a “climate summit” with Xi Jinping as soon as possible to discuss joint efforts to overcome global warming, including the initiation of bilateral programs to speed advances in areas like the spread of electric vehicles, the improvement of battery-storage capabilities, the creation of enhanced methods of carbon sequestration, and the development of alternative aviation fuels.

• At the conclusion of the summit, joint working groups on these and other matters should be established, made up of senior figures from both sides. Research centers and universities in each country should be designated as lead actors in key areas, with arrangements made for cooperative partnerships and the sharing of climate-related technical data.

• At the same time, presidents Biden and Xi should announce the establishment of an “Alliance for Global Survival,” intended to mobilize international support for the Paris climate agreement and strict adherence to its tenets. As part of this effort, the two leaders should plan joint meetings with other world leaders to persuade them to replicate the measures that Biden and Xi have agreed to work on cooperatively. As needed, they could offer to provide financial aid and technical assistance to poorer states to launch the necessary energy transition.

• Presidents Biden and Xi should agree to reconvene annually to review progress in all these areas and designate surrogates to meet on a more regular basis. Both countries should publish an online “dashboard” exhibiting progress in every key area of climate mitigation.

So, Joe, if you really meant what you said about overcoming climate change, these are some of the things you should focus on to get it right. Choose this path and guarantee us all a fighting chance to avert civilizational collapse. Opt for the path of confrontation instead — the one your administration already appears headed down — and that hope is likely to disappear into an unbearable world of burning, flooding, famine, and extreme storms until the end of time. After all, without remarkable effort, a simple formula will rule all our lives: a new cold war = a scalding planet.

Michael T. Klare writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is the five-college professor emeritus of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and a senior visiting fellow at the Arms Control Association. He is the author of 15 books, the latest of which is All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change.

Copyright ©2021 Michael T. Klare — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 25 February 2021

Word Count: 2,665

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Like Gregor Samsa, the never-to-be-forgotten character in Franz Kafka’s story “The Metamorphosis,” we awoke on January 7th to discover that we, too, were “a giant insect” with “a domelike brown belly divided into stiff arched segments” and numerous “pitifully thin” legs that “waved helplessly” before our eyes. If you prefer, though, you can just say it: we opened our eyes and found that, somehow, we had become a giant roach of a country.

Yes, I know, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are now in charge and waving their own little limbs wildly, trying to do some of what needs to be done for this sad land of the disturbed, over-armed, sick, and dying. But anyone who watched the scenes of Floridians celebrating a Super Bowl victory, largely unmasked and cheering, shoulder to shoulder in the streets of Tampa, can’t help but realize that we are now indeed a roach nation, the still-wealthiest, most pandemically unmasked one on Planet Earth.

But don’t just blame Donald Trump. Admittedly, we’ve just passed through the Senate trial and acquittal of the largest political cockroach around. I’m talking about the president who, upon discovering that his vice president was in danger of being “executed” (“Hang Mike Pence!“) and was being rushed out of the Senate as a mob bore down on him, promptly tweeted: “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.”

Just imagine. The veep who had — if you don’t mind my mixing my creature metaphors here — toadied up to the president for four endless years was then given a functional death sentence by that same man. You can’t fall much deeper into personal roachdom than that. My point here, though, is that our all-American version of roacherie was a long time in coming.

Or put another way: unimaginable as The Donald might have seemed when he descended that Trump Tower escalator in June 2015 to hail his future “great, great wall,” denounce Mexican “rapists,” and bid to make a whole country into his apprentices, he didn’t end up in the Oval Office for no reason. He was the symptom, not the disease, though what a symptom he would prove to be — and when it came to diseases, what a nightmare beyond all imagining.

Let’s face it, whether we fully grasp the fact or not, we now live in a system, as well as a country, that’s visibly in an early stage of disintegration. And there lies a remarkable tale of history happening at warp speed, of how, in not quite three decades, the USS Enterprise of imperial powers was transformed into the USS Roach.

Once upon a time on earth… Return for a moment to 1991, almost two years after the Berlin Wall fell, when the Soviet Union finally imploded and the Cold War officially ended. Imagine that you had been able to show Americans then — especially the political class in Washington — that 13-minute video of Trump statements and tweets interlarded with mob actions in the Capitol that the Democratic House impeachment managers used in their opening salvo against the former president. Americans — just about any of us — would have thought we were watching the most absurd science fiction or perhaps the single least reality-based bit of black comedy imaginable.

In the thoroughly self-satisfied (if somewhat surprised) Washington of 1991, the triumphalist capital of “the last superpower,” that video would have portrayed a president, an insurrectionary mob, and an endangered Congress no one could have imagined possible — not in another nearly 30 years, not in a century, not in any American future. Then again, if in 1991 you had tried to convince anyone in this country that a walking Ponzi scheme(r) like Donald Trump could become president, no less be impeached twice, you would have been laughed out of the room.

After all, this country had just become the ultimate superpower in history, the last one ever. Left alone on this planet, it had a military beyond compare and an economy that was the heartland of a globalized system and the envy of the world. The Earth was — or at least to the political class of that moment seemed to be — ours for the taking, but certainly not for the losing, not in any imaginable future. The question then wasn’t keeping them out but keeping us in. No “big, fat, beautiful walls” were needed. After all, Russia was a wreck. China was still emerging economically from the hell of the Maoist years. Europe was dependent on the U.S. and, when it came to the rest of world, what else need be said?

This was an American planet, pure and simple.

In retrospect, consider the irony. There had been talk then about a post-Cold War “peace dividend.” Who would have guessed, though, that dividends of any sort would increasingly go to the top 1% and that almost 30 years later this country would functionally be a plutocracy overseen until a month ago by a self-professed multibillionaire? Who would have imagined that the American version of a peace dividend would have been siphoned off by more billionaires than any place else on earth and that, in those same years, inequality would reach historic heights, while poverty and hunger only grew? Who woulda guessed that whatever peace dividend didn’t go to the ultra-wealthy would go to an ever-larger national security state and the industrial complex of weapons makers that surrounded it? Who woulda guessed that, in official post-Cold War Washington, peace would turn out to be the last thing on anyone’s mind, even though this country seemed almost disarmingly enemy-less? (Remember when the worst imaginable combination of enemies, a dreaded “axis of evil,” would prove to be Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, all embattled, distinctly tertiary powers?)

Who woulda guessed that a military considered beyond compare (and funded to this day like no other) would proceed to fight war after war, literally decades of conflict, and yet — except for the quasi-triumph of the first Gulf War against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq — achieve victory in none of them? Staggering trillions of taxpayer dollars would be spent on them, while those billionaires were given untold tax breaks. Honestly, who would have guessed then that, on a planet lacking significant enemies, Washington, even six presidents later, would prove incapable of stopping fighting?

Who woulda guessed that, in September 2001, not Russia or Communist China, but a tiny group of Islamic militants led by a rich Saudi extremist the U.S. had once backed would send 19 (mostly Saudi) hijackers to directly attack the United States? They would, of course, cause death and mayhem, allowing President George W. Bush to launch an almost 20-year “global war on terror,” which still shows no sign of ending. Who woulda guessed that, in the wake of those 9/11 terror attacks, the son of the man who had presided over the first Gulf War (but stopped short of felling Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein) and the top officials of his administration would come to believe that the world was his oyster and that the U.S. should dominate the Greater Middle East and possibly the planet in a way previously unimaginable? Who would have imagined that he would invade Iraq (having done the same in Afghanistan a year and a half earlier), effectively helping to spread Islamic extremism far and wide, while creating a never-ending disaster for this country?

Who woulda guessed that, in 2009, in the wake of a Great Recession at home, the next president, Barack Obama, would order a massive “surge” of forces into Afghanistan, a war already eight years old? Tens of thousands of new troops, not to speak of contractors, CIA operatives, and others would be sent there without faintly settling things.

By November 2016, when an antiquated electoral system gave the popular vote to Hillary Clinton but put Donald Trump, a man who promised to end this country’s “endless wars” (he didn’t) in the Oval Office, it should have been obvious that something was awry on the yellow brick road to imperial glory. By then, in fact, for a surprising number of Americans, this had become a land of grotesque inequality and lack of opportunity. And many of them would prove ready indeed to use their votes to send a message to the country about their desire to Trump that very reality.

From there, of course, with no Wizard of Oz in sight, it would be anything but a yellow brick road to January 6, 2021, when, the president having rejected the results of the 2020 election, a mob would storm the Capitol. All of it and the impeachment fiasco to follow would reveal the functional definition of a failing democracy, one in which the old rules no longer held.

Exiting the superpower stage of history And, of course, I have yet to even mention the obvious — the still-unending nightmare that engulfed the country early in 2020 and that, I suspect, will someday be seen as the true ending point for a strikingly foreshortened American century. I’m thinking, of course, of Covid-19, the pandemic disease that swept the country, infecting tens of millions of Americans and killing hundreds of thousands in a fashion unmatched anywhere else on the planet. It would even for a time fell a president, while creating mayhem and ever more fierce division in unmasked parts of the country filled with civilians armed to the teeth, swept up in conspiracy theories, and at the edge of who knew what.

Call it a sign from the gods or anything you want, but call it startling. Imagine a disease that the last superpower handled so much more poorly than countries with remarkably fewer resources. Think of it as a kind of judgment, if not epitaph, on that very superpower.

Or put another way: not quite 30 years after the Soviet Union exited the stage of history, we’re living in a land that was itself strangely intent on heading for that same exit — a crippled country led by a 78-year-old president, its system under startling pressure and evidently beginning to come apart at the seams. One of its political parties is unrecognizable; its presidency has been stripped of a fully functioning Congress and is increasingly imperial in nature; its economic system plutocratic; its military still struggling across significant parts of the planet, while a possible new cold war with a rising China is evidently on the horizon; and all of this on a planet that itself, even putting aside that global pandemic, is visibly in the deepest of trouble.

At the end of Franz Kafka’s classic tale, Gregor Samsa, now a giant insect with a rotting apple embedded in its back, dies in roach hell, even if also in his very own room with his parents and sisters nearby. Is the same fate in store, after a fashion, for the American superpower?

In some sense, in the Trump and Covid-19 years, the United States has indeed been unmasked as a roach superpower on a planet going to — again, excuse the mixed animal metaphors — the dogs. The expected all-American age of power and glory hasn’t been faintly what was imagined in 1991, not in a country that has shown remarkably few signs of coming to grips with what these years have truly meant.

Centuries after the modern imperial age began, it’s evidently coming to an end in a hell that Joe Biden and crew won’t be able to stop, even if, unlike the previous president, they’re anything but intent on thoroughly despoiling this land. Still, Trump or Biden, at this point it couldn’t be clearer that we need some new way of thinking about and being on this increasingly roach-infested planet of ours.

Tom Engelhardt created and runs the website TomDispatch.com (where this article originated). He is also a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a highly praised history of American triumphalism in the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. A fellow of the Type Media Center, his sixth and latest book is A Nation Unmade by War.

Copyright ©2021 Tom Engelhardt — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 18 February 2021

Word Count: 1,952

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