In significant parts of this country, the Supreme Court’s June 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade returned Americans to a half-century-old situation in which hundreds of thousands of women, faced with unwanted pregnancies, were once forced to resort to costly, potentially deadly underground abortions. My spouse’s employer, the Pentagon, recently announced that its own abortion policy, which allows military insurance to cover the procedure when a pregnancy results from rape or incest, or poses a threat to the mother’s life, still holds.

Sadly enough, this seems an all-too-hollow reassurance, given the reality that pregnant women in the military are, in many places, likely to face an uphill battle finding providers trained and — here’s the key, of course — willing to perform the procedure. The Supreme Court abortion ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health leaves it up to the states to determine whether to allow abortions. In doing so, it ensures that the access of military populations to that procedure will be so much more complicated, especially for spouses who need to seek off-base care, including ones like me who have chosen the military insurance option TRICARE Select that allows us to access almost exclusively civilian providers. America’s 2.6 million military dependents now live in a country where an ever-changing patchwork of state laws can make seeking an abortion costly, risky, and stressful in the extreme.

Any military spouse with young children in tow who’s had to relocate somewhere in this nation’s vast network of military bases can tell you that just caring for another person is challenging in itself. Upon learning you’re pregnant, you practically need a Ph.D. to locate a competent obstetrician who also accepts military insurance.

And even when you do, don’t discount the problems to come. After an ultrasound, my first provider in the military’s TRICARE Select healthcare program told me that my child was missing a foot. (In fact, he was just positioned with his back to the camera.) My second provider almost injured that same child by attempting to apply force during labor when his head was stuck against my hip bone.

And once you’ve actually had the child, you’re likely to find yourself bickering for hours with uninformed military insurance providers simply to get coverage for a breast pump so you can feed your baby and go to work. Your military-approved pediatrician may — or may not! — know anything about local TRICARE Select specialists who can help you address common family problems like deployment-related anxiety in kids. And childcare? This country’s childcare facilities are already stuffed to the gills and that’s even more true of military childcare centers. Typically enough, I fear, I was on wait lists for them for years without the faintest success.

Now, add the devastating Dobbs decision to that military reproductive healthcare landscape. Imagine that you want and need an abortion and rely on TRICARE Select, especially if you and your family are stationed in one of the 13 states that have near or total bans on the procedure. If you’re lucky enough to have the funds and social connections, you may be able to call in your babysitter to watch your older children and let your employer know that you’ve got to travel out of state for a medical procedure — as if they wouldn’t know what kind! Then you’ll spend what disposable income you have, if any — poverty and food insecurity being rampant in today’s military — to head out of state alone in hopes of getting access to an abortion.

You may want your partner to come with you. If he’s not deployed and assuming he supports your choice to seek an abortion, the two of you will face a barrier peculiar to military life: any service member who needs medical leave must request it through a commanding officer. To be sure, the Army and Air Force have issued directives to commanders not requiring soldiers to state why they’re requesting it. Still, it’s hard to imagine how a pro-life commanding officer wouldn’t see right through such a sudden request and deny it. This is one of the many reasons you may find yourself alone on your journey.

And oh, the places you’ll go! The nearest abortion clinic likely won’t be off base over on Main Street. The states with the most restrictive laws governing abortion also have among the highest concentrations of military bases. So military dependents and soldiers whose insurance or health conditions require them to go off base will likely have to travel across state lines (possibly many state lines) to get the services they need and, of course, do so on their own dime. And by the way, the anti-abortion states are also among those with the largest number of per capita troop hometowns, meaning that military personnel from them are unlikely to get access to care if they go home to be with family during a time when they undoubtedly need extra support.

In other words, in the military world, Dobbs is a recipe for disaster.

Military Health Insurance 101

For those unfamiliar with the military’s insurance system, let me make a key distinction. Military family members like myself get to choose between two main types of health insurance. The first, called TRICARE Prime, lets you access care in Department of Defense healthcare facilities military bases or posts. This is how active-duty troops typically get care as well. A case manager refers you to various primary and specialty-care providers as needed. With TRICARE Prime, you’d be using federal facilities, so you might, at least theoretically, have an easier time getting access to an abortion when, under a narrow set of conditions, the federal government is willing to cover such a procedure.

In my experience as a therapist listening to military spouses over the years, to seek healthcare at military facilities almost invariably involves conflicts of interest. Doctors there tend to treat you as though your concerns about your health or that of your children are remarkably insignificant compared to the needs of the troops. They tend to speak to spouses like me as if we were the only ones responsible for the health of our families, in the process essentially dumping such issues (and the services that go with them) onto the unpaid shoulders of us and us alone.

To offer an example, a mother I knew in Washington State was increasingly worried about her toddler’s rapidly declining weight, only to have that phenomenon dismissed by physicians at a military hospital as the result of poor parenting. In the end, her suspicion that her child was gravely ill turned out to be all-too-sadly correct. Another military wife I interviewed went to couples’ therapy on a military base to discuss how an upcoming move might impact their marriage. The counselor they saw, she told me, emphasized her spouse’s service to the country, suggesting that she prioritize his career over hers and complete the move.

Perhaps because of such conflicts of interest and the greater choice offered by civilian-based health plans, most military dependents (72% in 2020) choose the second military-authorized insurance program, TRICARE Select. There, you manage your own care by finding civilian doctors willing to accept the Select plan or you simply pay out of pocket for civilian providers, hoping for some reimbursement sooner or later. With this option, if you were faced with an unwanted pregnancy, you would be subject to any abortion restrictions in your surrounding area.

Keep in mind that specialty care like obstetric services is not likely to be easy to find when you’re looking for military providers in your community. A recent Pentagon evaluation of access to healthcare found that 49% of the people with TRICARE Select could not find a specialist in their community who accepted TRICARE patients, nor could 34% travel the necessary distance to reach an appropriate specialist. Meanwhile, 46% couldn’t access a specialist in a timely manner due to long wait lists. Worse yet, overall access to specialist care within 24 to 48 hours for TRICARE Select beneficiaries decreased significantly between 2016 and 2019 and continued to do so through the first half of 2021.

Lack of access is not an accident. Despite the monstrous size of the Pentagon budget in these years, the Department of Defense actually decreased its health expenditures for all medical programs relative to its overall spending between 2017 and 2020.

New barriers to treating patients and even saving lives

In such an environment, it’s hardly surprising that state abortion bans containing exceptions in cases when pregnancy threatens the parent’s life will not easily result in access to the procedure. For example, Tennessee, home to five military bases and with a per capita troop concentration about 10% greater than the national average, provides exceptions to its ban when a parent’s life is at risk. Here’s the catch: doctors need to be prepared to show evidence that the procedure is necessary to prevent the impairment of a parent’s major bodily functions were the pregnancy to continue — enough evidence that a team of prosecutors with its own expert medical witnesses could not convincingly argue otherwise in court. If not, a doctor could face felony charges and up to 15 years in prison.

Under such circumstances, if you were a doctor considering whether to terminate a life-threatening pregnancy for a patient, would you choose the patient or protect your ability to stay with your own family, avoiding the risk of prison? I’m not sure what I would do in such a situation.

There’s reason to believe that even military dependents not seeking abortions could end up struggling to get the pregnancy care they need because of the restrictions doctors will face when it comes to treating complicated pregnancies. For example, the drugs used to induce abortion by medication, misoprostol and mifepristone, are also the most effective ones for treating patients experiencing miscarriages. At the Cleveland Clinic Emergency Department, under Ohio’s new “heartbeat ban,” which makes it a felony to end a pregnancy after a fetal heartbeat has been detected, women could soon enough have to wait 24 hours before receiving treatment for miscarriages, since anything earlier might qualify as an illegal abortion. Thankfully, for the time being two judges have placed a pause on the ban.

Another troubling fallout from new state abortion bans is the way providers and their patients are now being left to handle exceptions when a pregnancy results from rape. Many abortion bans contain sexual assault reporting requirements that make it all but impossible for doctors to avoid serious liability. For example, Utah’s new abortion law permits the procedure in cases of rape, but for a doctor to perform it without risking criminal charges, he or she would need to report the rape to law enforcement. Similarly, in Wyoming (a state with just one abortion clinic that has two providers), the new exception in cases of rape does not specify how a client should prove that rape occurred, again leaving it up to doctors to decide how to treat patients and protect their own lives from devastating consequences.

The assaulting of civilian women by soldiers is not a widely studied subject, but accounts by activists and journalists suggest that it is a significant problem. What’s more, about 80% of rapes committed by soldiers are never officially reported because victims fear retaliation either from their rapist or others in their communities, including their own or their spouse’s commands. If the rapist happens to be their spouse, reporting the rape in order to obtain an abortion could mean that the family loses its sole source of income, since a convicted rapist would assumedly be discharged from duty. In addition, it’s widely known that people who report sexual assaults often face uninformed responses from law enforcement officers who doubt their stories or blame them for being attacked, only increasing the trauma of the situation.

Pro-Lifers, their pro-violence society, and a new approach to reproductive rights

The pro-life activists and policies behind those cowardly laws belie the fact that much of what far-right Americans and their elected representatives support undermines human life. Look at the violence and poverty some of the same leaders who advocate abortion bans allow in a country whose politicians generally choose to sanction war and investments in weapons development over better social services. Look at the way a significant minority of the citizenry support elected officials who encourage violence against other Americans of differing political beliefs. Look at the way some of us would support the separating of parents and children at the end of life-saving journeys away from drug wars and poverty in their home countries.

Given such political headwinds, it’s worth remembering that a pregnant person is not a passive receptacle but a worker, whether for nine months or the rest of her life. If anyone should have the power to choose death, she should, because there is always a damn good, heart-wrenching reason for doing so.

I don’t know how many people realize this, but if Roe had not become the law of the land in 1973 to protect abortion rights, a different case might have taken its place. In the early 1970s, the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, took up the case of an Air Force nurse in Vietnam named Susan Struck who was told (as was the military’s policy at that time) that she would be discharged if she were to carry her pregnancy to term.

Captain Struck was a devout Catholic who wanted to keep her job and have that baby. Ginsburg argued that all government attempts to regulate reproduction constituted sex discrimination, whether it involved restricting pregnancies or abortions. The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case in 1972, but before that could happen, the military changed its policy, rendering the case moot. Had Ginsburg won that case before the Supreme Court, our legal system might have prioritized parents, not the state, as the ultimate decision-makers — heroes no longer navigating a landscape of red tape and indignities.

Last June, right after Roe was overturned, I contacted a fellow military spouse visibly pregnant with her first child. She told me how complicated her feelings were about showing up in Washington, D.C., to advocate for abortion rights just after the draft decision to overturn Roe was leaked this past May. Would people misunderstand her presence at that demonstration? About a year ago, she’d sought emergency care for a miscarriage, which she might not have been able to get had abortion rights already been taken away. Perhaps, in the absence of adequate care, she might have suffered complications that prevented her from becoming pregnant this time around. She did, however, attend that demonstration, convinced that advocacy was as important to self-care as any other act in this country.

Hers is a true pro-life position. It’s the position of someone who has for years moved from one military base to another. Loving both yourself and your baby is a struggle, not a campaign slogan. As a parent myself, I think that parenting is a journey many more pregnant people would happily embrace if the conditions in this country were significantly more humane. Right now, if you truly care about the lives of us all, it’s up to you (and me) to join women like my friend in her post-Roeadvocacy.

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 ©2022 Andrea Mazzarino — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 03 October 2022
Word Count: 2,553
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As a military professor for six years at the U.S. Air Force Academy in the 1990s, I often walked past the honor code prominently displayed for all cadets to see. Its message was simple and clear: they were not to tolerate lying, cheating, stealing, or similar dishonorable acts. Yet that’s exactly what the U.S. military and many of America’s senior civilian leaders have been doing from the Vietnam War era to this very day: lying and cooking the books, while cheating and stealing from the American people. And yet the most remarkable thing may be that no honor code turns out to apply to them, so they’ve suffered no consequences for their mendacity and malfeasance.

Where’s the “honor” in that?

It may surprise you to learn that “integrity first” is the primary core value of my former service, the U.S. Air Force. Considering the revelations of the Pentagon Papers, leaked by Daniel Ellsberg in 1971; the Afghan War papers, first revealed by the Washington Post in 2019; and the lack of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, among other evidence of the lying and deception that led to the invasion and occupation of that country, you’ll excuse me for assuming that, for decades now when it comes to war, “integrity optional” has been the true core value of our senior military leaders and top government officials.

As a retired Air Force officer, let me tell you this: honor code or not, you can’t win a war with lies — America proved that in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq — nor can you build an honorable military with them. How could our high command not have reached such a conclusion themselves after all this time?

So many defeats, so little honesty

Like many other institutions, the U.S. military carries with it the seeds of its own destruction. After all, despite being funded in a fashion beyond compare and spreading its peculiar brand of destruction around the globe, its system of war hasn’t triumphed in a significant conflict since World War II (with the war in Korea remaining, almost three-quarters of a century later, in a painful and festering stalemate). Even the ending of the Cold War, allegedly won when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, only led to further wanton military adventurism and, finally, defeat at an unsustainable cost — more than $8 trillion — in Washington’s ill-fated Global War on Terror. And yet, years later, that military still has a stranglehold on the national budget.

So many defeats, so little honesty: that’s the catchphrase I’d use to characterize this country’s military record since 1945. Keeping the money flowing and the wars going proved far more important than integrity or, certainly, the truth. Yet when you sacrifice integrity and the truth in the cause of concealing defeat, you lose much more than a war or two. You lose honor — in the long run, an unsustainable price for any military to pay.

Or rather it should be unsustainable, yet the American people have continued to “support” their military, both by funding it astronomically and expressing seemingly eternal confidence in it — though, after all these years, trust in the military has dipped somewhat recently. Still, in all this time, no one in the senior ranks, civilian or military, has ever truly been called to account for losing wars prolonged by self-serving lies. In fact, too many of our losing generals have gone right through that infamous “revolving door” into the industrial part of the military-industrial complex — only to sometimes return to take top government positions.

Our military has, in fact, developed a narrative that’s proven remarkably effective in insulating it from accountability. It goes something like this: U.S. troops fought hard in [put the name of the country here], so don’t blame us. Indeed, you must support us, especially given all the casualties of our wars. They and the generals did their best, under the usual political constraints. On occasion, mistakes were made, but the military and the government had good and honorable intentions in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.

Besides, were you there, Charlie? If you weren’t, then STFU, as the acronym goes, and be grateful for the security you take for granted, earned by America’s heroes while you were sitting on your fat ass safe at home.

It’s a narrative I’ve heard time and time again and it’s proven persuasive, partially because it requires the rest of us, in a conscription-free country, to do nothing and think nothing about that. Ignorance is strength, after all.

War Is brutal

The reality of it all, however, is so much harsher than that. Senior military leaders have performed poorly. War crimes have been covered up. Wars fought in the name of helping others have produced horrendous civilian casualties and stunning numbers of refugees. Even as those wars were being lost, what President Dwight D. Eisenhower first labeled the military-industrial complex has enjoyed windfall profits and expanding power. Again, there’s been no accountability for failure. In fact, only whistleblowing truth-tellers like Chelsea Manning and Daniel Hale have been punished and jailed.

Ready for an even harsher reality? America is a nation being unmade by war, the very opposite of what most Americans are taught. Allow me to explain. As a country, we typically celebrate the lofty ideals and brave citizen-soldiers of the American Revolution. We similarly celebrate the Second American Revolution, otherwise known as the Civil War, for the elimination of slavery and reunification of the country; after which, we celebrate World War II, including the rise of the Greatest Generation, America as the arsenal of democracy, and our emergence as the global superpower.

By celebrating those three wars and essentially ignoring much of the rest of our history, we tend to view war itself as a positive and creative act. We see it as making America, as part of our unique exceptionalism. Not surprisingly, then, militarism in this country is impossible to imagine. We tend to see ourselves, in fact, as uniquely immune to it, even as war and military expenditures have come to dominate our foreign policy, bleeding into domestic policy as well.

If we as Americans continue to imagine war as a creative, positive, essential part of who we are, we’ll also continue to pursue it. Or rather, if we continue to lie to ourselves about war, it will persist.

It’s time for us to begin seeing it not as our making but our unmaking, potentially even our breaking — as democracy’s undoing as well as the brutal thing it truly is.

A retired U.S. military officer, educated by the system, I freely admit to having shared some of its flaws. When I was an Air Force engineer, for instance, I focused more on analysis and quantification than on synthesis and qualification. Reducing everything to numbers, I realize now, helps provide an illusion of clarity, even mastery. It becomes another form of lying, encouraging us to meddle in things we don’t understand.

This was certainly true of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, his “whiz kids,” and General William Westmoreland during the Vietnam War; nor had much changed when it came to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and General David Petraeus, among others, in the Afghan and Iraq War years. In both eras, our military leaders wielded metrics and swore they were winning even as those wars circled the drain.

And worse yet, they were never held accountable for those disasters or the blunders and lies that went with them (though the antiwar movement of the Vietnam era certainly tried). All these years later, with the Pentagon still ascendant in Washington, it should be obvious that something has truly gone rotten in our system.

Here’s the rub: as the military and one administration after another lied to the American people about those wars, they also lied to themselves, even though such conflicts produced plenty of internal “papers” that raised serious concerns about lack of progress. Robert McNamara typically knew that the situation in Vietnam was dire and the war essentially unwinnable. Yet he continued to issue rosy public reports of progress, while calling for more troops to pursue that illusive “light at the end of the tunnel.” Similarly, the Afghan War papers released by the Washington Post show that senior military and civilian leaders realized that war, too, was going poorly almost from the beginning, yet they reported the very opposite to the American people. So many corners were being “turned,” so much “progress” being made in official reports even as the military was building its own rhetorical coffin in that Afghan graveyard of empires.

Too bad wars aren’t won by “spin.” If they were, the U.S. military would be undefeated.

Two books to help us see the lies

Two recent books help us see that spin for what it was. In Because Our Fathers Lied, Craig McNamara, Robert’s son, reflects on his father’s dishonesty about the Vietnam War and the reasons for it. Loyalty was perhaps the lead one, he writes. McNamara suppressed his own serious misgivings out of misplaced loyalty to two presidents, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, while simultaneously preserving his own position of power in the government.

Robert McNamara would, in fact, later pen his own mea culpa, admitting how “terribly wrong” he’d been in urging the prosecution of that war. Yet Craig finds his father’s late confession of regret significantly less than forthright and fully honest. Robert McNamara fell back on historical ignorance about Vietnam as the key contributing factor in his unwise decision-making, but his son is blunt in accusing his dad of unalloyed dishonesty. Hence the title of his book, citing Rudyard Kipling’s pained confession of his own complicity in sending his son to die in the trenches of World War I: “If any question why we died/Tell them, because our fathers lied.”

The second book is Paths of Dissent: Soldiers Speak Out Against America’s Misguided Wars, edited by Andrew Bacevich and Danny Sjursen. In my view, the word “misguided” doesn’t quite capture the book’s powerful essence, since it gathers 15 remarkable essays by Americans who served in Afghanistan and Iraq and witnessed the patent dishonesty and folly of those wars. None dare speak of failure might be a subtheme of these essays, as initially highly motivated and well-trained troops became disillusioned by wars that went nowhere, even as their comrades often paid the ultimate price, being horribly wounded or dying in those conflicts driven by lies.

This is more than a work of dissent by disillusioned troops, however. It’s a call for the rest of us to act. Dissent, as West Point graduate and Army Captain Erik Edstrom reminds us, “is nothing short of a moral obligation” when immoral wars are driven by systemic dishonesty. Army Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis, who blew an early whistle on how poorly the Afghan War was going, writes of his “seething” anger “at the absurdity and unconcern for the lives of my fellow soldiers displayed by so many” of the Army’s senior leaders.

Former Marine Matthew Hoh, who resigned from the State Department in opposition to the Afghan “surge” ordered by President Barack Obama, speaks movingly of his own “guilt, regret, and shame” at having served in Afghanistan as a troop commander and wonders whether he can ever atone for it. Like Craig McNamara, Hoh warns of the dangers of misplaced loyalty. He remembers telling himself that he was best suited to lead his fellow Marines in war, no matter how misbegotten and dishonorable that conflict was. Yet he confesses that falling back on duty and being loyal to “his” Marines, while suppressing the infamies of the war itself, became “a washing of the hands, a self-absolution that ignores one’s complicity” in furthering a brutal conflict fed by lies.

As I read those essays, I came to see anew how this country’s senior leaders, military and civilian, consistently underestimated the brutalizing impact of war, which, in turn, leads me to the ultimate lie of war: that it is somehow good, or at least necessary — making all the lying (and killing) worth it, whether in the name of a victory to come or of duty, honor, and country. Yet there is no honor in lying, in keeping the truth hidden from the American people. Indeed, there is something distinctly dishonorable about waging wars kept viable only by lies, obfuscation, and propaganda.

An epigram from Goethe

John Keegan, the esteemed military historian, cites an epigram from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as being essential to thinking about militaries and their wars. “Goods gone, something gone; honor gone, much gone; courage gone, all gone.”

The U.S. military has no shortage of goods, given its whopping expenditures on weaponry and equipment of all sorts; among the troops, it doesn’t lack for courage or fighting spirit, not yet, anyway. But it does lack honor, especially at the top. Much is gone when a military ceases to tell the truth to itself and especially to the people from whom its forces are drawn. And courage is wasted when in the service of lies.

Courage wasted: Is there a worst fate for a military establishment that prides itself on its members being all volunteers and is now having trouble filling its ranks?

William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and professor of history, writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated) and 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 ©2022 William J. Astore — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 29 September 2022
Word Count: 2,201
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No one listened better than Studs. For those of you old enough to remember, that’s Studs Terkel, of course. The most notable thing about him in person, though, was this: the greatest interviewer of his moment, perhaps of any moment, never stopped talking, except, of course, when he was listening to produce one of his memorable bestselling oral histories — he essentially created the form — ranging from Working and Hard Times to The Good War.

I still remember him calling my house. He was old, his hearing was going, and he couldn’t tell that my teenage son had rushed to answer the phone, hoping it was one of his friends. Instead, finding himself on with Studs talking a mile a minute, my son would begin yelling desperately, “Dad! Dad!”

With that — and a recent publishing disaster — in mind this morning, I took my little stepladder to the back of my tiny study, put it in front of my bookcase and climbed up until I could reach the second to the top shelf, the one that still has Studs’s old volumes lined up on it. Among others, I pulled down one of his later oral histories, Will the Circle Be Unbroken?: Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith. In its acknowledgments, I found this: “Were it not for Tom Engelhardt, the nonpareil of editors, who was uncanny in cutting the fat from the lean (something I found impossible to do) and who gave this work much of its form, I’d still be in the woods.”

And that still makes me so proud. But let me rush to add that, in the years of his best-known work when I was at Pantheon Books (1976 to 1990), I was never his main editor. That honor was left to the remarkable André Schiffrin who started Studs, like so many other memorable authors, on his book career; ran that publishing house in his own unique way; found me in another life; and turned me into the editor he sensed I already naturally was.

For me, those were remarkable years. Even then, André was a genuinely rare figure in mainstream publishing — a man who wanted the world to change, a progressive who couldn’t have been a more adventurous publisher. In fact, I first met him in the midst of the Vietnam War, at a time when I was still an Asian-scholar-to-be and involved in organizing a group, the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, that had produced an antiwar book, The Indochina Story, that André had decided to publish.

In my years at Pantheon, he transformed me into a book editor and gave me the leeway to find works I thought might, in some modest fashion, help alter our world (or rather the way we thought about it) for the better. Those included, among others, the rediscovery of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s early-twentieth-century utopian masterpiece Herland; the publishing of Unforgettable Fire, Pictures Drawn by Atomic Bomb Survivors (not long before, in the early 1980s, an antinuclear movement in need of it would arise in this country); Nathan Huggins’s monumental Black Odyssey; Eduardo Galeano’s unique three-volume Memory of Fire history of the Americas; Eva Figes’s novel Light; John Berger’s Another Way of Telling; Orville Schell’s “Watch Out for the Foreign Guests!”: China Encounters the West; and even — my mother was a cartoonist — the Beginner’s comic book series, including Freud for Beginners, Marx for Beginners, Darwin for Beginners, and, of course, Art Spiegelman’s MAUS, to mention just a modest number of works I was responsible for ushering into existence here in America.

The second time around

What a chance, in my own fashion and however modestly, to lend a hand in changing and improving our world. And then, in a flash, in 1990 it all came to an end. In those years, publishing was already in the process (still ongoing) of conglomerating into ever fewer monster operations. Si Newhouse, the owner of Condé Nast and no fan of progressive publishing, had by that time taken over Random House, the larger operation in which Pantheon was lodged and he would, in the end, get rid of André essentially because of his politics and the kind of books we published.

We editors and most of the rest of the staff quit in protest, claiming we had been “Newhoused.” (Writers like Barbara Ehrenreich and Kurt Vonnegut would join us in that protest.) The next thing I knew, I was out on the street, both literally and figuratively, and my life as a scrambling freelancer began. Yes, Pantheon still existed in name, but not the place I had known and loved. It was a bitter moment indeed, both personally and politically, watching as something so meaningful, not just to me but to so many readers, was obliterated in that fashion. It seemed like a publishing version of capitalism run amok.

And then, luck struck a second time. A few years later, one of my co-editors and friends at Pantheon, Sara Bershtel, launched a new publishing house, Metropolitan Books, at Henry Holt Publishers. It seemed like a miracle to me then. Suddenly, I found myself back in the heartland of mainstream publishing, a “consulting editor” left to do my damnedest, thanks to Sara (herself an inspired and inspiring editor). I was, so to speak, back in business.

And as at Pantheon, it would prove an unforgettable experience. I mean, honestly, where else in mainstream publishing would Steve Fraser and I have been able to spend years producing a line-up of books in a series we called, graphically enough, The American Empire Project? (Hey, it even has a Wikipedia entry!) In that same period, Sara would publish memorable book after memorable book like Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed and Thomas Frank’s What‘s the Matter with Kansas?, some of which made it onto bestseller lists, while I was putting out volumes by authors whose names will be familiar indeed to the readers of TomDispatch, including Andrew Bacevich, James Carroll, Noam Chomsky, Michael Klare, Chalmers Johnson, Alfred McCoy, Jonathan Schell, and Nick Turse. And it felt comforting somehow to be back in a situation where I could at least ensure that books I thought might make some modest (or even immodest) difference in an ever more disturbed and disturbing America would see the light of day.

I’ve written elsewhere about the strange moment when, for instance, I first decided that I had to publish what became Chalmers Johnson’s remarkable, deeply insightful, and influential book Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire on the future nightmares my country was then seeding into the rest of the planet. Think, for instance, of Osama bin Laden who, Johnson assured his readers well before 9/11 happened, we had hardly heard the last of. (Not surprisingly, only after 9/11 did that book become a bestseller!) Or consider Noam Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance, which I published in 2003. So many years later, its very title still sums up remarkably well the dilemma we face on a planet where what’s on the mind of top foreign policy officials in Washington these days is — god save us! — a new cold war with China. We’re talking, in other words, about a place where the two major greenhouse gas emitters on Planet Earth can’t agree on a thing or work together in any way.

The second time around (part 2)

But let me not linger on ancient history when, just the other day, it happened again. And by it I mean a new version of what happened to me at Pantheon Books. It’s true that because, in my later years, TomDispatch has become my life’s work, I hadn’t done anything for Metropolitan for a while (other, of course, than read with deep fascination the books Sara published). Still, just two weeks ago I was shocked to hear that, like Pantheon, Metropolitan, a similarly progressive publishing house in the mainstream world, was consigned to the waves; its staff laid off; and the house itself left in the publishing version of hell.

Initially, that act of Holt’s, the consigning of Metropolitan to nowhere land, was reported by the trade publication Publisher’s Weekly, but count on one thing: more is sure to come as that house’s authors learn the news and respond.

After all, like Pantheon, at the moment of its demise, it was a lively, deeply progressive operation, churning out powerful new titles — until, that is, it was essentially shut down when Sara, a miraculous publisher like André, was shown the door along with her staff. Bam! What did it matter that, thanks to her, Metropolitan still occupied a space filled by no other house in mainstream publishing? Nothing obviously, not to Holt, or assumedly Macmillan, the giant American publishing conglomerate of which it was a part, or the German Holtzbrinck Publishing Group that owns Macmillan.

How strange that we’re in a world where two such publishing houses, among the best and most politically challenging around, could find that there simply was no place for them as progressive publishers in the mainstream. André, who died in 2013, responded by launching an independent publishing house, The New Press, an admirable undertaking. In terms of the Dispatch Books I still put out from time to time, I find myself in a similar world, dealing with another adventurous independent publishing outfit, Haymarket Books.

Still, what an eerie mainstream we now inhabit, don’t we?

I mean, when it comes to what capitalism is doing on this planet of ours, book publishing is distinctly small (even if increasingly mashed) potatoes. After all, we’re talking about a world where giant fossil-fuel companies with still-soaring profits are all too willing to gaslight the public while quite literally burning the place up — or perhaps I mean flooding the place out. (Don’t you wonder sometimes what the CEOs of such companies are going to tell their grandchildren?)

So the consignment of Metropolitan Books to the trash heap of history is, you might say, a small matter indeed. Still, it’s painful to see what is and isn’t valued in this society of ours (and by whom). It’s painful to see who has the ability to cancel out so much else that should truly matter.

And believe me, just speaking personally, twice is twice too much. Imagine two publishing houses that let me essentially find, edit, and publish what I most cared about, what I thought was most needed, books at least some of which might otherwise never have made it into our world. (The proposal for MAUS, for instance, had been rejected by more or less every house in town before it even made it into my hands.)

Yes, two progressive publishing houses are a small thing indeed on this increasingly unnerving planet of ours. Still, think of this as the modern capitalist version of burning books, though as with those fossil-fuel companies, it is, in reality, more like burning the future. Think of us as increasingly damaged goods on an increasingly damaged planet.

In another world, these might be considered truly terrible acts. In ours, they simply happen, it seems, without much comment or commentary even though silence is ultimately the opposite of what any decent book or book publisher stands for.

You know, it suddenly occurs to me. Somebody should write a book about all this, don’t you think?

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 ©2022 Tom Engelhardt — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 27 September 2022
Word Count: 1,888
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On October 1st, the U.S. military will start spending the more than $800 billion Congress is going to provide it with in fiscal year 2023. And that whopping sum will just be the beginning. According to the calculations of Pentagon expert William Hartung, funding for various intelligence agencies, the Department of Homeland Security, and work on nuclear weaponry at the Energy Department will add another $600 billion to what you, the American taxpayer, will be spending on national security.

That $1.4 trillion for a single year dwarfs Congress’s one-time provision of approximately $300 billion under the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) for what’s called “climate mitigation and adaptation.” And mind you, that sum is to be spent over a number of years. In contrast to the IRA, which was largely a climate bill (even if hardly the best version of one), this country’s military spending bills are distinctly anti-human, anti-climate, and anti-Earth. And count on this: Congress’s military appropriations will, in all too many ways, cancel out the benefits of its new climate spending.

Here are just the three most obvious ways our military is an enemy of climate mitigation. First, it produces huge quantities of greenhouse gases, while wreaking other kinds of ecological havoc. Second, when the Pentagon does take climate change seriously, its attention is almost never focused on reducing greenhouse gas emissions but on preparing militarily for a climate-changed world, including the coming crisis of migration and future climate-induced armed conflicts globally. And third, our war machine wastes hundreds of billions of dollars annually that should instead be spent on climate mitigation, along with other urgent climate-related needs.

The Pentagon’s carbon bootprint

The U.S. military is this globe’s largest institutional consumer of petroleum fuels. As a result, it produces greenhouse gas emissions equal to about 60 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually. Were the Pentagon a country, those figures would place it just below Ireland and Finland in a ranking of national carbon emissions. Or put another way, our military surpasses the total national emissions of Bulgaria, Croatia, and Slovenia combined.

A lot of those greenhouse gases flow from the construction, maintenance, and use of its 800 military bases and other facilities on 27 million acres across the United States and the world. The biggest source of emissions from actual military operations is undoubtedly the burning of jet fuel. A B-2 bomber, for instance, emits almost two tons of carbon dioxide when flying a mere 50 miles, while the Pentagon’s biggest boondoggle, the astronomically costly F-35 combat aircraft, will emit “only” one ton for every 50 miles it flies.

Those figures come from “Military- and Conflict-Related Emissions,” a June 2022 report by the Perspectives Climate Group in Germany. In it, the authors express regret for the optimism they had exhibited two decades earlier when it came to the reduction of global military greenhouse gas emissions and the role of the military in experimenting with new, clean forms of energy:

In March, the Defense Department announced that its proposed budget for fiscal year 2023 would include a measly $3.1 billion for “addressing the climate crisis.” That amounts to less than 0.4% of the department’s total spending and, as it happens, two-thirds of that little sliver of funding will go not to climate mitigation itself but to protecting military facilities and activities against the future impact of climate change. Worse yet, only a tiny portion of the remainder would go toward reducing the greenhouse-gas emissions or other environmental damage the armed forces itself will produce.

In a 2021 Climate Adaptation Plan, the Pentagon claimed, however vaguely, that it was aiming for a future in which it could “operate under changing climate conditions, preserving operational capability, and enhancing the natural and manmade systems essential to the Department’s success.” It projected that “in worst-case scenarios, climate-change-related impacts could stress economic and social conditions that contribute to mass migration events or political crises, civil unrest, shifts in the regional balance of power, or even state failure. This may affect U.S. national interests directly or indirectly, and U.S. allies or partners may request U.S. assistance.”

Sadly enough, however, as far as the Pentagon is concerned, an overheated world will only open up further opportunities for the military. In a classic case of projection, its analysts warn that “malign actors may try to exploit regional instability exacerbated by the impacts of climate change to gain influence or for political or military advantage.” (Of course, Americans would never act in such a manner since, by definition, the Pentagon is a benign actor, but will have to respond accordingly.)

The CIA and other intelligence agencies seem to share the Pentagon’s vision of our hotter future as a growth opportunity. A 2021 climate risk assessment by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) paid special attention to the globe’s fastest-warming region, the Arctic. Did it draw the intelligence community’s interest because of the need to prevent a meltdown of the planet’s ice caps if the Earth is to remain a livable place for humanity? What do you think?

In fact, its authors write revealingly of the opportunities, militarily speaking, that such a scenario will open up as the Arctic melts:

In other words, in an overheated future, a new “cold” war will no longer be restricted to what were once the more temperate parts of the planet.

If, in climate change terms, the military worries about anything globally, it’s increased human migration from devastated areas like today’s flood-ridden Pakistan, and the conflicts that could come with it. In cold bureaucratese, that DNI report predicted that, as ever more of us (or rather, in national security state terms, of them) begin fleeing heat, droughts, floods, and tropical cyclones, “Displaced populations will increasingly demand changes to international refugee law to consider their claims and provide protection as climate migrants or refugees, and affected populations will fight for legal payouts for loss and damages resulting from climate effects.” Translation: We won’t pay climate reparations and we won’t pay to help keep other peoples’ home climates livable, but we’re more than willing to spend as much as it takes to block them from coming here, no matter the resulting humanitarian nightmares.

Is it finally time to defund war?

Along with the harm caused by its outsized greenhouse gas emissions and its exploitation of climate chaos as an excuse for imperialism, the Pentagon wreaks terrible damage by soaking up trillions of dollars in government funds that should have gone to meet all-too-human needs, mitigate climate change, and repair the ecological damage the Pentagon itself has caused in its wars in this century.

Months before Russia invaded Ukraine, ensuring that yet more greenhouse gases would be pumped into our atmosphere, a group of British scholars lamented the Biden administration’s enthusiasm for military funding. They wrote that, “rather than scaling back military spending to pay for urgent climate-related spending, initial budget requests for military appropriations are actually increasing even as some U.S. foreign adventures are supposedly coming to a close.” It’s pointless, they suggested, “to tinker around the edges of the U.S. war machine’s environmental impact.” The funds spent “procuring and distributing fuel across the U.S. empire could instead be spent as a peace dividend [that] includes significant technology transfer and no-strings-attached funding for adaptation and clean energy to those countries most vulnerable to climate change.”

Washington could still easily afford that “peace dividend,” were it to begin cutting back on its military spending. And don’t forget that, at past climate summits, the rich nations of this planet pledged to send $100 billion annually to the poorest ones so that they could develop their renewable energy capacity, while preparing for and adapting to climate change. All too predictably, the deep-pocketed nations, including the U.S., have stonewalled on that pledge.  And of course, as the recent unprecedented monsoon flooding of one-third of Pakistan — a country responsible for less than 1% of historic global greenhouse gases — suggests, it’s already remarkably late for that skimpy promise of a single hundred billion dollars; hundreds of billions per year are now needed. Mind you, Congress could easily divert enough from the Pentagon’s annual budget alone to cover its part of the global climate-reparations tab. And that should be only the start of a wholesale shift toward peacetime spending. No such luck, of course.

As the National Priorities Project (NPP) has pointed out, increases in national security funding alone in 2022 could have gone a long way toward supporting Joe Biden’s expansive Build Back Better bill, which failed in Congress that year. That illustrates yet again how, as William Hartung put it, “almost anything the government wants to do other than preparing for or waging war involves a scramble for funding, while the Department of Defense gets virtually unlimited financial support,” often, in fact, more than it even asks for.

The Democrats’ bill, which would have provided solid funding for renewable energy development, child care, health care, and help for economically stressed families was voted down in the Senate by all 50 Republicans and one Democrat (yes, that guy) who claimed that the country couldn’t afford the bill’s $170 billion-per-year price tag. However, in the six months that followed, as the NPP notes, Congress pushed through increases in military funding that added up to $143 billion — almost as much as Build Back Better would have cost per year!

As Pentagon experts Hartung and Julia Gledhill commented recently, Congress is always pulling such stunts, sending more money to the Defense Department than it even requested. Imagine how much crucial federal action on all kinds of issues could be funded if Congress began deeply cutting, rather than inflating, the cash it shovels out for war and imperialism.

Needed: a merger of movements

Various versions of America’s antiwar movement have been trying to confront this country’s militarism since the days of the Vietnam War with minimal success.  After all, Pentagon budgets, adjusted for inflation, are as high as ever. And, not coincidentally, greenhouse gas emissions from both the military and this society as a whole remain humongous. All these years later, the question remains: Can anything be done to impede this country’s money-devouring, carbon-spewing military juggernaut?

For the past twenty years, CODEPINK, a women-led grassroots organization, has been one of the few national groups deeply involved in both the antiwar and climate movements. Jodie Evans, one of its cofounders, told me recently that she sees a need for “a whole new movement intersecting the antiwar movement with the climate movement.” In pursuit of that very goal, she said, CODEPINK has organized a project called Cut the Pentagon. Here’s how she describes it: “It’s a coalition of groups serving issues of people’s needs and the planet’s needs and the anti-war movement, because all of us have an interest in cutting the war machine. We launched it on September 12th last year, after 20 years of a ‘War on Terror’ that took $21 trillion of our tax money, to destroy the planet, to destroy the Middle East, to destroy our communities, to turn peacekeeping police into warmongering police.” Cut the Pentagon, says Evans, has “been doing actions in [Washington] D.C. pretty much nonstop since we launched it.”

Sadly, in 2022, both the climate and antiwar struggles face the longest of odds, going up against this country’s most formidable strongholds of wealth and power. But CODEPINK is legendary for finding creative ways of getting in the face of the powerful interests it opposes and nonviolently upending business-as-usual. “As an activist for the last 50 some-odd years,” Evans says, “I always felt my job was to make power uncomfortable, and to disrupt it.” But since the start of the Covid pandemic, she adds, “Power is making us more uncomfortable than we are making it. It’s stronger and more weaponized than it has been before in my lifetime.”

Among the hazards of this situation, she adds, social movements that manage to grow and become effective often find themselves coopted and, she adds, over the past two decades, “Too many of us got lazy… We thought ‘clicktivism’ creates change, but it doesn’t.” Regarding an education bill early in the Trump administration, “We had 200 million messages going into Congress from a vast coalition, and we lost. Then a month later, we had only 2,000 people, but we were right there in the halls of Congress and we saved Obamacare. Members of Congress don’t like being uncomfortable.”

As the military-industrial complex and Earth-killing capitalism only seem to grow ever mightier, Evans and CODEPINK continue pushing for action in Washington. And recently, she believes, a window has been opening:

The major crises we now face are so deeply entangled that perhaps grassroots efforts to face them might, in the end, coalesce. The question remains: From the neighborhood to the nation, could movements for climate mitigation and justice, Indigenous sovereignty, Black lives, economic democracy, and, crucially, an end to the American form of militarism merge into a single collective wave? Our future may depend on it.

Stan Cox writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is a research fellow in ecosphere studies at The Land Institute. He is the author of The Path to a Livable Future: A New Politics to Fight Climate Change, Racism, and the Next Pandemic, and The Green New Deal and Beyond: Ending the Climate Emergency While We Still Can, and also the current In Real Time climate series at City Lights Books.

Copyright ©2022 Stan Cox — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 22 September 2022
Word Count: 2,433
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Here’s a nightmare scenario: Unable to recruit enough soldiers from the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin takes North Korean leader Kim Jong-un up on his recent offer to send 100,000 North Koreans to join the Russian president’s ill-fated attempt to seize Ukraine. Kim has also promised to send North Korean workers to help rebuild that country’s Donbas region, parts of which Russian forces have destroyed in order to “save” it. Consider this an eerie echo of the fraternal aid that Eastern European Communist states provided Pyongyang in the 1950s after the devastation of the Korean War.

The current love connection between Russia and North Korea is anything but unprecedented. The Kremlin has provided a succession of Kims with military and economic support. If Putin were ultimately to rely on so many North Korean soldiers and laborers, however, it would mark the first time that country had returned the favor in any significant way. As a down payment on the new relationship, Pyongyang is already reportedly assisting Moscow’s war effort with shipments of Soviet-era rockets and ammunition.

An even tighter alliance between Moscow and Pyongyang, now just one goose step from reality, suggests the possibility of a future Eurasian Union of autocracies, including China and several Central Asian states. Just a few years ago, an anti-Western alliance making up nearly 20% of the world’s landmass and roughly the same percentage of its population would have seemed unlikely indeed. For all its autocratic tendencies, Russia was still pretending to be a democracy then and, together with China, maintaining reasonable economic relations with the West. North Korea, on the other hand, was an isolated outsider, suffering under a hereditary dictatorship and tight sanctions that restricted its access to the global economy.

Now, instead of North Korea adopting the political and economic norms of the international community, it’s surging to the front of the illiberal pack as Kim waves his tour-guide flag to encourage others to walk his way. Putin, for one, seems ready to enthusiastically follow his lead. Over the last decade, after all, he’s taken steps to eliminate Russian civil society, while creating a top-down, corporatist economy. After ordering the invasion of Ukraine in February, the Russian leader now faces the same kind of sanctions regime that plagues Pyongyang, forcing his country to pursue its own version of juche, North Korea’s philosophy of self-reliance. Both nations have largely replaced their governing ideologies of the 1990s — communism in North Korea, democracy in Russia — with an ugly, xenophobic nationalism.

At a more fundamental level, North Korea and Russia are both exemplars of exceptionalism. From its founding after World War II, North Korea has generally considered itself an exception to any rules governing international conduct. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, meanwhile, has cemented in place Putin’s version of a new Russian exceptionalism, meant to bury once and for all the efforts of Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin to bring the Soviet Union and its successor states into greater compliance with global norms.

Nor are Russia and North Korea exceptional in their exceptionalism. Thumbing a nose at international authorities has become an integral part of a growing authoritarian populism, which has manifested itself as anger at economic globalization and disenchantment with the liberal democratic elites who have supported that project. Although the assault on liberalism and the embrace of illiberal exceptionalism have taken an acutely violent form in the war in Ukraine, they can be found in less virulent but no less troubling forms in Europe (Hungary), Asia (Myanmar), Africa (Ethiopia), and Latin America (Brazil).

Ground zero for modern-day exceptionalism, however, has always been the United States, where a longstanding bipartisan consensus holds that America has the right to do almost anything it wants to maintain its global hegemony. Of course, exceptionalism here is also on a spectrum, with liberal internationalists like Joe Biden at one end and Donald Trump, a Russian-style autocrat in the making, at the other. Put differently, there’s a growing struggle here over the degree to which this country should play well with others.

What’s taking place in Ukraine — an exceptionalist power trying to crush a liberal internationalist system — is a version of that very same power struggle. Indeed, the ongoing bloodbath there anticipates the kind of carnage that could ensue in this country if Donald Trump or some politician like him were to take the White House in 2024.

The end of accession?

Nationalists hate globalization because they believe that international bodies should not be writing the rules that constrain the conduct of their governments.

In Brazil, Trump-style President Jair Bolsonaro has lashed out at U.N. agencies and transnational environmental organizations for their criticism of his laissez-faire approach to the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. Euroskeptics like Hungary’s Viktor Orban and the United Kingdom’s Brexiteers dislike having to abide by regulations from European Union (EU) headquarters in Brussels covering everything from the size of cucumbers to the freedom of the press. Trump famously pulled the United States out of every international accord that came within swinging distance of his MAGA machete, including the Paris climate agreement, the Iran nuclear deal, and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.

Ukraine has moved in the opposite direction. After the 2014 Euromaidan protests sent its pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, packing, the more-or-less liberal governments that followed certainly didn’t shy away from appealing to Ukrainian nationalism. Still, they were also willing, even eager, to submit to the rules and regulations of external powers, at least those further to the west. The Ukrainian political struggles of 2013-2014, after all, centered around a desire to join the EU, support for which has recently topped 90%.

Putin has, of course, held out a very different kind of membership to Ukraine — in a Slavic brotherhood. Whatever the pluses or minuses of any future tight partnership with Russia and neighboring Belarus, it would flow from compliance with the parochial dictates of the Kremlin. In other words, Ukraine has faced an all-too-stark choice: become an unwilling partner of Russian exceptionalism or willingly accede to the rules of the West. Given such options, it’s hardly surprising that Euroskepticism barely registers there.

Nor, of course, is Ukraine the only country eager to knock on the EU’s door. Several others are already in the queue, undoubtedly including — if it votes to separate from the United Kingdom and its Brexiteers — Scotland. For Europe, in response to the challenges of economic globalization, including pressures to privatize and a potential race to the bottom when it comes to environmental and labor regulations, the response has been to establish a transnational system that preserves at least some social-democratic features. And that seems like an attractive compromise to a number of countries huddling outside the EU’s door, exposed to the harsh winds of free trade and onerous debt.

But Brexit has hardly been the only challenge to the power and breadth of the European Union. A refusal to abide by the democratically determined policies of Brussels has united right-wing populists in Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic, even as it’s generated a strong current of Euroskepticism in countries like Romania. Support for the far right — as well as the Euroskeptical left — remains strong in France, particularly among the young. A coalition of far-right parties historically allergic to European federalism is poised to take over the governance of Italy after elections later this month. In fact, the EU faces a threat even greater than its possible fragmentation: a hostile takeover by right-wing forces determined to destroy the system from within.

Such authoritarian nationalism is on the rise elsewhere as well. According to the metrics of the largely government-funded research institute Freedom House, only 20% of the world’s population now lives in “free” countries. (In 2005, it was 46%.) And of that 20%, many are in countries where authoritarian nationalists — Trump in the United States, Marine Le Pen in France, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel — have a plausible chance of taking or retaking power in the near future.

What a far cry from the 1990s when much of the former Soviet sphere scrambled to join the EU after the Warsaw Pact dissolved. In that decade, too, even China lobbied hard to join the World Trade Organization, finally gaining Washington’s support in 1999. It was such a golden age of United Nations conferences and international agreements — from the U.N. Conference on Environment and Development to the Rome statute establishing the International Criminal Court — that the name the U.N. chose for the 1990s, the Decade of International Law, seemed extraordinarily apt. Unfortunately, today it seems more like ancient history.

Of course, the need for international cooperation has hardly disappeared. Think climate change, pandemics, and the loss of biodiversity, to mention just three urgent crises. But any enthusiasm for creating binding international commitments has dwindled to the vanishing point. The 2015 Paris climate accord was voluntary. Transnational cooperation during the Covid pandemic, beyond scientific circles, was minimal and often undermined by export restrictions on critical medical supplies. Nuclear arms control agreements remain at a standstill, while the “modernization” of such arsenals continues apace and military budgets rise as the weapons trade hits new highs.

The 2020s are shaping up to be the Decade of the International Scofflaw. Ukraine’s tragedy lies not just in its geography, so near to Russia and so far from God, but in its timing. Three decades ago, after the Soviet Union imploded, Ukraine’s desire to accede to international norms was unremarkable and its willingness to relinquish its nuclear weapons universally applauded. The worst response an EU application could have engendered back then was a cold shoulder from Brussels. Today, the desire to join Europe has led to war.

Whither autocracy

Autocrats often hide behind sovereignty. China argues that what’s happening to its Uyghur minority in Xinjiang province is simply none of the international community’s business. North Korea insists that it has the sovereign right to develop nuclear weapons. And, of course, in the U.S., Donald Trump’s MAGA crew stoutly rejects snooty foreigners passing judgment on the American attachment to fossil fuels, border walls, and guns of all sizes.

Sovereignty was once the king’s prerogative; he was, after all, the sovereign. Today’s autocrats, like Vladimir Putin, are more likely to have been voted into office than born into the position like Kim Jong-un. The elections that elevate such autocrats might be questionable (and are likely to become ever more so during their reign), but popular support is an important feature of the new authoritarianism. Putin is currently backed by around 80% of Russians; Orban’s approval rating in Hungary hovers near 60%; and while Donald Trump could likely win again only thanks to voter suppression and increasingly antidemocratic features baked into the American political system, millions of Americans did put Trump in the White House in 2016 and continue to genuinely believe that he’s their savior. Bolsonaro in Brazil, Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, Narendra Modi in India, Kais Saied in Tunisia: they were all elected.

Yes, such leaders are nationalists who often act like populists in promising all sorts of handouts and feel-good nostrums to their supporters. But what makes today’s autocrats particularly dangerous is their exceptionalism, their commitment to the kind of sovereignty that existed before the creation of the United Nations, the earlier League of Nations, or even the Treaty of Westphalia that established the modern interstate system in Europe in 1648. Both Trump and Xi Jinping harken back to a Golden Age all right — of rulers who counted on the unquestioned loyalty of their subjects and exercised a dominion unchallenged except by other monarchs.

Sovereignty is the ultimate trump — sorry for that! — card. It can be used to end every argument: I’m the king of this castle and my word is law inside its walls. Autocrats tend not to be team players, but increasingly democracies are playing the sovereignty card as well. Even Russia, in so obviously violating Ukrainian sovereignty, has done that by arguing that Ukraine had always been part of Russia.

The war in Ukraine boils down to a conflict between two conceptions of world order. The first is defined by a one-against-all exceptionalism, the second by an all-for-one transnational cooperation. Unfortunately, the latter has become associated with economic globalization (which is really about ruthless competition, not global cooperation), Davos-style political elitism (which is usually more focused on collusion than transparent collaboration), and trans-border migration (which results from wars, the miseries of global economic inequality, and the ever more devastating nightmare of climate change). Anger at these three elements of “globalism” pushes voters to support “the other side,” most commonly an authoritarian exceptionalism rather than an authentic internationalism.

The dismal endpoint of such political devolution could be a Russia with North Korean characteristics: isolated, belligerent, and tyrannical. Today, countries that take such a path risk the outlaw status North Korea has enjoyed for 75 years. The question is: What happens if, in some future moment, the outlaws constitute the majority?

What’s truly frightening, however, is that this larger geopolitical conflict is a two-front war. Even as the West unites against the Russia that Putin built, it finds itself fighting homegrown variants of authoritarian exceptionalism, from Trump to Orban. Think of this as the geopolitical version of that commonplace horror-film twist: the phone call from the serial killer that turns out to be coming from within the house.

Can the heroine of this story, true internationalism, survive the onslaught of lawless maniacs bent on reviving a world of unaccountable sovereigns and promoting a war of all against all? We can only hope that our heroine not only survives these harrowing challenges but goes on to star in less horrifying and more edifying sequels.

John Feffer writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is the author of the dystopian novel Splinterlands and the director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. Frostlands, a Dispatch Books original, is volume two of his Splinterlands series, and the final novel in the trilogy is Songlands. He has also written Right Across the World: The Global Networking of the Far-Right and the Left Response.

Copyright ©2022 John Feffer — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 19 September 2022
Word Count: 2,149
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Thanks to Donald Trump, secrecy is big news these days. However, as political pundits and legal experts race to expose the layers of document-related misdeeds previously buried at his Mar-a-Lago estate, one overlooked reality looms large: despite all the coverage of the thousands of documents Trump took with him when he left the White House, there’s been next to no acknowledgment that such a refusal to share information has been part and parcel of the Washington scene for far longer than the current moment.

The hiding of information by the former president, repeatedly described as “unprecedented” behavior, is actually part of a continuum of withholding that’s been growing at a striking pace for decades. By the time Donald Trump entered the Oval Office, the stage had long been set for removing information from the public record in an alarmingly broad fashion, a pattern that he would take to new levels.

The “secrecy president”

As recent history’s exhibit number one, this country’s global war on terror, launched soon after the 9/11 attacks, was largely defined and enabled by the withholding of information — including secret memos, hidden authorizations, and the use of covert methods. During President George W. Bush’s first term in office, government lawyers and officials regularly withheld information about their actions and documents related to them from public view, both at home and abroad.

Those officials, for instance, legalized the brutal interrogations of war-on-terror prisoners, while conveniently replacing the word “torture” with the phrase “enhanced interrogation techniques” and so surreptitiously evading a longstanding legal ban on the practice. The CIA then secretly utilized those medieval techniques at “black sites” around the world where its agents held suspected terrorists. It later destroyed the tapes made of those interrogations, erasing the evidence of what its agents had done. On the home front, in a similarly secretive fashion, unknown to members of Congress as well as the general public, President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to set up an elaborate and far-reaching program of warrantless surveillance on Americans and others inside the United States.

Consider that the launching of an era of enhanced secrecy techniques. No wonder Bush earned the moniker of the “secrecy president.” Only weeks after the 9/11 attacks, for instance, he put in place strict guidelines about who could brief Congress on classified matters, while instituting new, lower standards for transparency. He even issued a signing statement rebuking Congress for requiring reports “in written form” on “significant anticipated intelligence activities or significant intelligence failure.” To emphasize his sense of righteousness in defying calls for information, he insisted on the “president’s constitutional authority to… withhold information” in cases of foreign relations and national security. In a parallel fashion, his administration put new regulations in place limiting the release of information under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

President Obama also withheld information when it came to war-on-terror efforts. Notably, his administration shrouded in secrecy the use of armed drones to target and kill suspected terrorists (and civilians) in Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. Official reports omitted reliable data about who was killed, where the killings had taken place, or the number of civilian casualties. As the American Civil Liberties Union concluded, administration reporting on civilian harm fell “far short of the standards for transparency and accountability needed to ensure that the government’s targeted killing program is lawful under domestic and international law.”

And well beyond the war-on-terror context, the claim to secrecy has become a government default mechanism. Tellingly, the number of classified documents soared to unimaginable heights in those years. As the National Archives reports, in 2012, documents with classified markings — including “top secret,” “secret,” and “confidential” — reached a staggering 95 million. And while the overall numbers had declined by 2017, the extent of government classification then and now remains alarming.

Erasing the record before it’s created

President Trump’s document theft should be understood, then, as just another piece of the secrecy matrix.

Despite his claim — outrageous, but perhaps no more than so many other claims he made — to being the “most transparent” president ever, he turned out to be a stickler for withholding information on numerous fronts. Taking the war-on-terror behavioral patterns of his predecessors to heart, he expanded the information vacuum well beyond the sphere of war and national security to the purely political and personal realms. As a start, he refused to testify in the Mueller investigation into the 2016 presidential election. On a more personal note, he also filed suit to keep his tax records secret from Congress.

In fact, during his time in office, Trump virtually transformed the very exercise of withholding information. In place of secrecy in the form of classification, he developed a strategy of preventing documents and records from even being created in the first place.

Three months into his presidency, Trump announced that the White House would cease to disclose its visitor logs, citing the supposed risk to both national security and presidential privacy. In addition to hiding the names of those with whom he met, specific high-level meetings took place in an unrecorded fashion so that even the members of his cabinet, no less the public, would never know about them.

As former National Security Advisor John Bolton and others have attested, when it came to meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump even prohibited note-taking. In at least five such meetings over the course of his first two years in office, he consistently excluded White House officials and members of the State Department. On at least one occasion, he even confiscated notes his interpreter took to ensure that there would be no record.

Congress, too, was forbidden access to information under Trump. Lawyers in the Department of Justice (DOJ) drafted memos hardening policies against complying with congressional requests for information in what former DOJ lawyer Annie Owens has described as “a policy that approached outright refusal” to share information. In addition, the Trump administration was lax or even dismissive when it came to compliance with the production of required reports on national security matters. Note as well the reversal of policies aimed at transparency, as in the decision to reverse an Obama era policy of making public the number of nuclear weapons the U.S. possessed.

But don’t just blame Donald Trump. Among the most recent examples of erasing evidence, it’s become clear that the Secret Service deleted the text messages of its agents around the president from the day before and the day of the January 6th insurrection. So, too, the phone records of several top Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials were wiped clean when they left office in accordance with directives established early in the Trump presidency. Similarly, the phone records of top Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security officials were scrapped. In other words, recent reports on the way Trump regularly shredded documents, flushed them down the White House toilet, and generally withheld presidential papers — even classified documents, as revealed during the Mar-a-Lago search — were of a piece with a larger disdain on the part of both the president and a number of his top officials for sharing information.

Erasing the record in one fashion or another became the Trump administration’s default setting, variations on a theme hammered out by his predecessors and taken to new levels on his watch.

A perpetual right to secrecy?

Admittedly, before Trump arrived on the scene, there were some efforts to reverse this pattern, but in the long run they proved anemic. Barack Obama arrived at the White House in January 2009 acknowledging the harm caused by excessive government secrecy. Emphasizing transparency’s importance for accountability, informed public debate, and establishing trust in government, the new president issued an executive order on his first full day in office emphasizing the importance of “transparency and open government” and pledging to create “an unprecedented level of openness in government.”

Nearly a year later, he followed up with another executive order setting out a series of reforms aimed at widening the parameters for information-sharing. That order tightened guidelines around classification and broadened the possibilities for declassifying information. “Our democratic principles require that the American people be informed of the activities of their government,” it read. Six years later, Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper produced a report on the “principles of Intelligence transparency for the intelligence community” and a “transparency implementation plan” that again aimed at clarifying the limits, as well as the purposes, of secrecy.

And Obama’s efforts did indeed make some headway. As Steven Aftergood, former director of the Federation of American Scientists, concluded, “The Obama administration broke down longstanding barriers to public access and opened up previously inaccessible records of enormous importance and value.” Among other things, Aftergood reported, Obama “declassified the current size of the U.S. nuclear arms arsenal for the first time ever,” as well as thousands of the president’s daily briefs, and established a National Declassification Center.

Still, in the end, the progress proved disappointing. As Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan put it, the Obama administration’s record on transparency was among “the most secretive” in our history. She also castigated the president’s team for “setting new records for stonewalling or rejecting Freedom of Information Requests.” As an Associated Press analysis of federal data verified, the Obama administration did indeed set records in some years when it came to not granting those FOIA requests.

Executive distaste for sharing information is certainly nothing new and has often been linked, as during the war on terror, to misrepresentations, misdeeds, and outright deceit. After all, half a century ago, the administration of President Richard Nixon (of Watergate fame) defended the right to withhold information from the public as an effective way of covering up the American role in Vietnam. Those withheld materials, eventually released by the New York Times, showed that, over the course of four administrations, the national security state had misled the public about what the U.S. was doing in Vietnam, including hiding the secret bombing of neighboring Cambodia and Laos.

Still, let’s recognize what Donald Trump has, in fact, done. Though no longer president, he’s now taken the withholding of government information well beyond the borders of the government itself and deep into his private realm. In doing so, he’s set a dangerous precedent, one that brought the FBI to his doorstep (after months of attempts to access the documents in less intrusive ways). The challenge now is to address not just Trump’s clumsy efforts to unilaterally privatize a government practice, but the systemic overreach officials have relied on for decades to withhold staggering amounts of information from the public.

The Biden administration is alert to this issue. Notably, President Biden reversed several of Trump’s classification decisions, including his policy of not reporting the number of American nuclear weapons. More systematically, the National Security Council recently launched an effort aimed at revising the nation’s unwieldy classification system, while Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines has stated her intention to review the excessive classification of government documents.

In a 2022 letter to Congress, Haines pointed to the downside of a government that refuses to share information. “It is my view,” she wrote, “that deficiencies in the current classification system undermine our national security, as well as critical democratic objectives, by impeding our ability to share information in a timely manner, be that sharing with our intelligence partners, our oversight bodies, or, when appropriate, with the general public.”

True to her word, in the three months following that statement of allegiance to transparency, Haines has released a steady flow of material on controversial topics, including unclassified reports on everything from the origins of Covid to climate change to an assessment of the “Saudi government’s role in the killing of Jamal Khashoggi.”

Still, despite such efforts, the powers that be are arguably being hoisted on their own petard. After all, Donald Trump followed in the wake of his predecessors in sanctioning expansive secrecy, then made it a be-all and end-all of his presidency, and now claims that it’s part of his rights as a former president and private citizen. As the head of a political movement, now out of office, he’s done the once unthinkable by claiming that the veil of secrecy, the right to decide what should be known and who should know it, is his in perpetuity.

The horror of his claim to untethered secret authority — no wonder some of his MAGA followers refer to him as their “god-emperor” — violates the very idea that a democracy is a pact between individual citizens and elected officials. The valid response to the holding of documents at Mar-a-Lago shouldn’t just be reclaiming them for the public record or even the clear demarcation of the law as it applies to a private citizen as opposed to a president (though both are essential). What’s needed is a full-throated demand that policies of secrecy, allowed to expand exponentially in this century without accountability or transparency, are destructive of democracy and should be ended.

Karen J. Greenberg writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She is the director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law and author most recently of Subtle Tools: The Dismantling of Democracy from the War on Terror to Donald Trump (Princeton University Press). Julia Tedesco conducted research for this article.

Copyright ©2022 Karen J. Greenberg — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 20 September 2022
Word Count: 2,160
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Congress has spoken when it comes to next year’s Pentagon budget and the results, if they weren’t so in line with past practices, should astonish us all. The House of Representatives voted to add $37 billion and the Senate $45 billion to the administration’s already humongous request for “national defense,” a staggering figure that includes both the Pentagon budget and work on nuclear weapons at the Department of Energy. If enacted, the Senate’s sum would push spending on the military to at least $850 billion annually, far more — adjusted for inflation — than at the height of the Korean or Vietnam wars or the peak years of the Cold War.

U.S. military spending is, of course, astronomically high — more than that of the next nine countries combined. Here’s the kicker, though: the Pentagon (an institution that has never passed a comprehensive financial audit) doesn’t even ask for all those yearly spending increases in its budget requests to Congress. Instead, the House and Senate continue to give it extra tens of billions of dollars annually. No matter that Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has publicly stated the Pentagon has all it needs to “get the capabilities… to support our operational concepts” without such sums.

It would be one thing if such added funding were at least crafted in line with a carefully considered defense strategy.  More often than not, though, much of it goes to multibillion dollar weapons projects being built in the districts or states of key lawmakers or for items on Pentagon wish lists (formally known as “unfunded priorities lists”). It’s unclear how such items can be “priorities” when they haven’t even made it into the Pentagon’s already enormous official budget request.

In addition, throwing yet more money at a department incapable of managing its current budget only further strains its ability to meet program goals and delivery dates. In other words, it actually impairs military readiness. Whatever limited fiscal discipline the Pentagon has dissipates further when lawmakers arbitrarily increase its budget, despite rampant mismanagement leading to persistent cost overruns and delivery delays on the military’s most expensive (and sometimes least well-conceived) weapons programs.

In short, parochial concerns and special-interest politics regularly trump anything that might pass as in the national interest, while doing no favors to the safety and security of the United States. In the end, most of those extra funds simply pad the bottom lines of major weapons contractors like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon Technologies. They certainly don’t help our servicemembers, as congressional supporters of higher Pentagon budgets routinely claim.

A captured Congress

The leading advocates of more Pentagon spending, Democrats and Republicans alike, generally act to support major contractors in their jurisdictions. Representative Jared Golden (D-ME), a co-sponsor of the House Armed Services Committee proposal to add $37 billion to the Pentagon budget, typically made sure it included funds for a $2 billion guided-missile destroyer to be built at General Dynamics’ shipyard in Bath, Maine.

Similarly, his co-sponsor, Representative Elaine Luria (D-VA), whose district abuts Huntington Ingalls Industries’ Newport News Shipyard, successfully advocated for the inclusion of ample funding to produce aircraft carriers and attack submarines at that complex. Or consider Representative Mike Rogers (R-AL), the ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Committee and a dogged advocate of annually increasing the Pentagon budget by at least 3% to 5% above inflation. He serves a district south of Huntsville, Alabama, dubbed “rocket city” because it’s the home to so many firms that work on missile defense and related projects.

There are even special congressional caucuses devoted solely to increasing Pentagon spending while fending off challenges to specific weapons systems. These range from the House shipbuilding and F-35 caucuses to the Senate ICBM Coalition. That coalition has been especially effective at keeping spending on a future land-based intercontinental ballistic missile dubbed the Sentinel on track, while defeating efforts to significantly reduce the number of ICBMs in the U.S. arsenal. Such “success” has come thanks to the stalwart support of senators from Montana, North Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming, all states with ICBM bases or involved in major ICBM development and maintenance.

The jobs card is the strongest tool of influence available to the arms industry in its efforts to keep Congress eternally boosting Pentagon spending, but far from the only one. After all, the industrial part of the military-industrial-congressional complex gave more than $35 million in campaign contributions to members of Congress in 2020, the bulk of it going to those on the armed services and defense appropriations committees who have the most sway over the Pentagon budget and what it will be spent on.

So far, in the 2022 election cycle, weapons firms have already donated $3.4 million to members of the House Armed Services Committee, according to an analysis by Open Secrets.org, an organization that tracks campaign spending and political influence. Weapons-making corporations also currently employ nearly 700 lobbyists, more than one for every member of Congress, while spending additional millions to support industry-friendly think tanks that regularly push higher Pentagon spending and a more hawkish foreign policy.

The arms industry has another lever to pull as well when it comes to the personal finances of lawmakers. There are scant, if any, restrictions against members of Congress owning or trading defense company stocks, even those who sit on influential national-security-related committees. In other words, it’s completely legal for them to marry their personal financial interests to those of defense contractors.

The cost of coddling contractors

Legislators arbitrarily inflate Pentagon spending despite clear evidence of corporate greed and repeated failures when it comes to the development of new weapons systems. Under the circumstances, it should be no surprise that weapons acquisitions are on the Government Accountability Office’s “High Risk List,” given their enduring vulnerability to waste and mismanagement. In fact, overfunding an already struggling department only contributes to the development of shoddy products. It allows the Pentagon to fund programs before they’ve been thoroughly tested and evaluated.

Far from strengthening national defense, such lawmakers only reinforce the unbridled greed of weapons contractors. In the process, they ensure future acquisition disasters. In fact, much of the funding Congress adds to the Pentagon budget will be wasted on price gouging, cost overruns, and outright fraud. The most notorious recent case is that of the TransDigm Group, which overcharged the government up to 3,850% for a spare part for one weapons system and 10 to 100 times too much for others.

The total lost: at least $20.8 million. And those figures were based on just a sampling of two-and-a-half years of that company’s sales to the government, nor was it the first time TransDigm had been caught price gouging the Pentagon.  Such practices are, in fact, believed to be typical of many defense contractors.  A full accounting of such overcharges would undoubtedly amount to billions of dollars annually.

Then there are weapons systems like Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighter aircraft and that same company’s Littoral Combat Ship (LCS). Both are costly programs that have proven incapable of carrying out their assigned missions. The F-35 is slated to cost the American taxpayer a staggering $1.7 trillion over its life cycle, making it the most expensive single weapons program ever. Despite problems with its engine performance, maintenance, and basic combat capabilities, both the House and the Senate added even more of them than the Pentagon requested to their latest budget plans. House Armed Services Committee Chair Adam Smith (D-WA) famously remarked that he was tired of “throwing money down that particular rat hole,” but then argued that the F-35 program was too far along to cancel. Its endurance has, in fact, forced the Pentagon to restart older jet fighter production lines like the F-15, developed in the 1970s, to pick up the slack. If the U.S. is going to be forced to buy older fighters anyway, cutting the F-35 could instantly save $200 billion in procurement funding.

Meanwhile, the LCS, a ship without a mission that can’t even defend itself in combat, nonetheless continues to be protected by advocates like Representative Joe Courtney (D-CT), co-chair of the House shipbuilding caucus. The final House and Senate authorization bills prevented the Navy from retiring five of the nine LCS’s that the service had hoped to decommission on the grounds that they would be useless in a potential military faceoff with China (a conflict that should be avoided in any case, given the potentially devastating consequences of a war between two nuclear-armed powers).

No surprise, then, that a substantial part of the tens of billions of dollars Congress is adding to the latest Pentagon budget will directly benefit major weapons contractors at the expense of military personnel. In the House version of the military spending bill, $25 billion — more than two-thirds of its additional funding — is earmarked for weapons procurement and research that will primarily benefit arms contractors.

Only $1 billion of the added funds will be devoted to helping military personnel and their families, even as many of them struggle to find affordable housing or maintain an adequate standard of living. In fact, one in six military families is now food insecure, a devastating reflection of the Pentagon’s true priorities.

In all, the top five weapons contractors — Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman — split more than $200 billion in “defense” revenue in the last fiscal year, mostly from the Pentagon but also from lucrative foreign arms sales. The new budget proposals will only boost those already astounding figures.

Pushing back on contractor greed

Congress has shown little intent to decouple itself in any way from what’s still known as “the defense industry.” There is, however, a clear path to do so, if the people’s representatives were to band together and start pushing back against the greed of weapons contractors.

Some lawmakers have begun making moves to prevent price gouging while improving weapons-buying practices. The Senate Armed Services Committee, for instance, included in its version of the defense budget a provision to establish a program that would improve contractor performance through financial incentives.  Its goal is to make the Pentagon a smarter buyer by addressing two main issues: delivery delays and cost overruns, especially by companies that charge it above-market prices to pad their bottom lines. It would also curb the ability of contractors to overcharge on replacement parts and materials.

The program to prevent further price gouging has a couple of possible paths to President Biden’s desk. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Representative John Garamendi (D-CA) also included it in the bicameral Stop Price Gouging the Military Act, an ambitious proposal to protect the Pentagon from outrageous contractor overcharges. The bill would close loopholes in existing law that allow companies to eternally rip off the Defense Department.

There are obviously all too many obstacles in the path of eliminating moneyed interests from defense policy, but creating an incentive structure to improve contractor performance and transparency would, at least, be a necessary first step. It might also spur greater public input into such policy-making.

Secrecy, Inc.

Here’s the sad reality of the national security state: we taxpayers will fork over nearly a trillion and a half dollars this year in national security spending and yet the policy-making process behind such outlays will essentially remain out of our control. The Senate Armed Services Committee typically debates and discusses its version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) behind closed doors. The subcommittee hearings open to the public rarely last — and yes, this is not a mistake! — more than 15 minutes. Naturally, the House and Senate will reconcile any differences between their versions in secret, too. In other words, there’s little transparency when it comes to the seemingly blank check our representatives write for our defense every year.

Sadly, such a system allows lawmakers, too many of whom maintain financial stakes in the defense industry, to deliberate over Pentagon spending and other national security matters without real public input. At the Pentagon, in fact, crucial information isn’t just kept private; it’s actively suppressed and the situation has only gotten worse over the years.

Here’s just one example of that process: in January 2022, its Office of the Director of Operational Test & Evaluation issued an annual report on weapons costs and performance.  For the first time in more than 30 years, however,  it excluded nearly all the basic information needed to assess the Pentagon’s weapons-buying process. Redacting information about 22 major acquisition programs, the director treated data once routinely shared as if it were classified. Given the Pentagon’s rocky track record when it comes to overfunding and under-testing weapons, it’s easy enough to imagine why its officials would work so hard to keep unclassified information private.

Scamming the taxpayer has become a way of life for the national security state. We deserve a more transparent, democratic policy-making process. Our elected officials owe us their allegiance, not the defense-industry giants that make such hefty campaign contributions while beefing up lawmakers’ stock portfolios.

Isn’t it time to end the national-security version of spending unlimited in Washington?

Julia Gledhill writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She is an analyst at the Center for Defense Information at the Project On Government Oversight.
William D. Hartung is also a TomDispatch regular, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He is the author most recently ofPathways to Pentagon Spending Reductions: Removing the Obstacles.

Copyright ©2022 Julia Gledhill and William D. Hartung — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 12 September 2022
Word Count: 2,169
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Has the Trump Supreme Court gone rogue? The evidence mounts. Certainly, its recent judicial blitzkrieg has run roughshod over a century’s worth of settled law.

A woman’s right to get an abortion? Gone (at least as a constitutionally protected civil right). Meanwhile, voting rights are barely hanging on, along with the 1965 Voting Rights Act that gave them life. State legislatures, so the court ruled, may no longer rein in the wanton availability of firearms and so the bloodshed will inevitably follow. Climate catastrophe will only get closer as the Supremes have moved to disarm the Environmental Protection Agency’s efforts to reduce carbon emissions. Religion, excluded from the public arena since the nation’s founding, can now invade the classroom, thanks to the court’s latest pronouncement.

This renegade court is anything but finished doing its mischief. Affirmative action may be next on the chopping block. Gerrymandering, long an ignoble tradition in American political life, could become unconstrained if the Supremes decide to exempt such practices from state court judicial review. And who knows what they are likely to rule when every election not won by the Republican Party may be liable to a lawsuit.

Donald Trump’s three appointments to the court — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett — cemented in place a rightward shift in its center of gravity that had begun decades earlier. Ever since, in 1986, President Ronald Reagan appointed William Rehnquist, a staunch conservative, as chief justice, the court has only become ever more averse to regulating business, even as it worked to reduce the power of the Federal government.

Don’t forget that it essentially appointed George W. Bush president in 2000 by ruling that Florida couldn’t conduct a recount of the vote, though it seemed likely that Al Gore would prevail and enter the Oval Office. And even after Rehnquist passed away, the court’s 2010 Citizens United decision granted corporations the same free speech rights as people, further eroding democracy by removing limitations on their campaign contributions.

This march to the right was in stark contrast to the earlier deliberations of the court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren. The Warren court was, of course, best known for its landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision striking down public school segregation. It would also become the judicial centerpiece of a post-World War II liberal order that favored labor unions, civil rights, government oversight of business, and the welfare state.

Historically speaking, however, the Warren Court was the exception, not the one cobbled together by Donald Trump and effectively, if not officially, presided over by Justice Clarence Thomas. The Supremes were born to be bad.

Enshrined in the Constitution

From the beginning, the Supreme Court was conceived as a bulwark against excessive democracy, as indeed was the Constitution itself.

During the years leading up to the 1787 constitutional convention in Philadelphia, the country was in a chronic state of upheaval. Local insurrections against heavy taxation, land and currency speculators, and merchant-bankers had called into question the security and sanctity of private property. Local legislatures proved vulnerable to take-over by the hoi polloi who felt free to cancel debts, print paper money, stop evictions, and oust elites from their accustomed positions of power.

Various impediments to this kind of “mobocracy” were baked into the Constitution, including the electoral college for presidential votes and the indirect election of senators by state legislatures (until the 17th amendment was ratified in 1913). The Supreme Court was just another such obstacle.

Founding Father James Madison typically saw that court as protection against “factious majorities” at the state and local level that might threaten the rights of property-holders. Fearing “passionate majorities,” he went so far as to propose a joint executive-judicial council with veto power over all legislation.

That idea went nowhere. Still, the principle of “judicial review” — the power of the court to have the last say on the constitutionality of legislation — although not made explicit in the Constitution was implicit in the way the founding fathers sought to reign in democratic impulses. French author Alexis de Tocqueville in his nineteenth-century classic, Democracy in America, typically recognized the special status accorded to judicial elites, describing them as America’s “high political class.“

At first, the Supreme Court’s services weren’t needed as a guardian of vested interests and its presence was muted indeed. It met in the basement of the Capitol and, between 1803 and 1857, struck down only two federal statutes. (Compare that to the 22 it struck down between 1992 and 2002 alone.)

The court would, however, establish an enduring reputation for conservatism thanks to its infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision. By a 7-2 majority, the justices declared all Black people — free or enslaved — to be non-citizens. They also ruled that, even if a slave made his or her way to a free state, he or she would remain the property of the slave owner and declared that no territory under U.S. jurisdiction could prohibit slavery.

Dred Scott is generally considered to be the most egregious decision in the court’s 250 year history. That ruling was, however, in keeping with its basic orientation: to side with propertied interests, not the unpropertied; slave-owners, not slaves; and industrialists and financiers rather than with those who worked for and depended on them.

Gatling-gun injunctions and yellow dog contracts

After the Civil War, the court became ever more aggressive in defending the interests of the powerful. There was a need for that as, once again, the powerless threatened the status quo.

Reconstruction — the period immediately after the Civil War when the Federal government imposed martial law on the former Confederate states — empowered ex-slaves to militantly exercise their rights to full civil and political equality under the 14th and 15th amendments. Desperate farmers in the Midwest, on the Great Plains, and in the South were then mobilizing to protect themselves from predatory banks, railroads, and commodity speculators. Industrial workers were engaged in pitched battles with their employers, confrontations that elicited widespread sympathy in cities and towns across the country.

“Passionate majorities” needed chastening and the court met the challenge. It launched an era, much like our own, of “judge-made law” that would last from the late 1880s into the 1920s.

Early on, the Supremes declared a civil rights act unconstitutional. Later, in Plessy v. Ferguson, they made segregation constitutionally legitimate via the doctrine of “separate but equal” and so helped restore elite white rule in the South. By ensconcing segregation, they also ended the hopes aroused by the Populist movement for an alliance of black and white rural poor against predatory banks and landlords.

The populist fervor of that era led some state legislatures to adopt laws regulating railroad rates and the fees charged by grain-elevator operators, while challenging corporate monopoly power over the vital necessities of life. Initially, the court tread carefully. Soon enough, however, the justices shed that reticence, using the power of judicial review to wipe such laws off the books. With a distinct touch of irony, they concluded that, in the eyes of the law, corporations were indeed persons and so entitled to the very civil rights guaranteed to ex-slaves by the 14th amendment (“rights” presumably denied them under state regulatory statutes).

Regulating business, the justices suggested, was tantamount to confiscating it. As one railroad lawyer had argued before the court, such regulation was “communism pure and simple.” From that same perspective, the court found a federal law establishing an income tax unconstitutional. (It took the 16th amendment, passed in 1913, to make the income tax national law.)

Industrial capitalism accumulated its wealth by subjecting the lives of millions of workers to abject misery: poverty, overwork, danger, disease, and profound indignity. It would prove a bloody affair, igniting confrontations between workers and their bosses more violent than anywhere else in the western world. As those workers began organizing collectively, their middle-class allies occasionally succeeded in passing relevant laws for minimum wages, outlawing child labor, putting a ceiling on the work hours an employer could enforce, and making the workplace safer or, at least, compensating those injured on the job.

The justices of the Supreme Court, some of whom had once been lawyers for the railroad, iron, and steel industries, knew just what to do in response to such democratic challenges to the prerogatives of capital. While the right to strike might be honored in theory, the court issued injunctions to stop such strikes from happening so often that the era became known (after the early machine gun of that time) for its “gatling-gun injunctions.” That term was used in part as well because such rulings could be enforced by the Army or its state militia equivalents, not to mention the imprisonment and heavy fines often involved. During one such bloody encounter, William Howard Taft, then an Ohio judge, later president, and finally chief justice of the Supreme Court, complained that federal troops had “killed only six of the mob as yet. This is hardly enough to make an impression.”

To rub yet more salt in the wound, such injunctions were often justified under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890. Originally designed to break up monopolies, it would be used far more frequently to bust strikes (and sympathy boycotts) on the grounds that they were “conspiracies in restraint of trade.” The court repeatedly enjoined “secondary boycotts“; that is, supportive actions by other unions or groups sympathetic to striking workers. It also struck down a Kansas statute that banned “yellow dog contracts” — agreements promising that they would never join a union that many workers were forced to sign on being hired.

Laws that attempted to ameliorate the harshness of working-class life were treated with similar disdain. New York state, for example, passed one banning cigar making in tenement workshops as a danger to workers’ health. The court saw otherwise, treating such tenement dwellers as independent contractors who had freely chosen their way of life.

New York also tried to limit the hours bakers could work to 10 a day and 60 a week. At the time, they were normally compelled to work 75 to 100 hours weekly in ill-ventilated cellars of tenement bakeries where breathing in the flour was a danger to their lungs. The justices begged to differ. In Lochner v. New York — named after the bakery owner who sued the state — they refused to recognize any threat to the well-being of bakers who, in the eyes of the court, had freely contracted to work on those terms. They were after all as free as their employers to strike a bargain or choose not to work.

The freedom of contract was then the reigning judicial orthodoxy, inherited ironically enough from the long struggle against slave labor. Unlike slavery, free labor allegedly enjoyed an equality of standing in any contractual relationship with an employer. Laws or unions which interfered with that “freedom” were rendered nugatory by the Court and it didn’t matter how obvious it was that the imputed equality between owners of capital and the men and women compelled to work for them was illusory.

The only laws of that sort which passed muster were those protecting women and child laborers. The justices considered such workers inferior and dependent, and so, unlike men, unable to freely enter into relations of contractual equality. In the case of women, there was the added danger of jeopardizing their maternal role. Still, consider it an indication of just how reliant businesses had then become on child labor that even a federal law that controlled the ages and hours children could work was, in the end, struck down by the Supreme Court.

The court v. the people

By the turn of the twentieth century, the outcry against “judge-made law,” the willful manipulation of the Constitution to shore up endangered bastions of wealth and power, had grown ever stronger. Some more recent scholars have found the court’s rulings then not as one sided as its reputation suggests, but contemporaries certainly didn’t share those doubts.

When the Supreme Court overturned an income tax law, a dissenting justice vividly described its decision as a “surrender to the moneyed classes.“

Similarly, in 1905, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes broke with his colleagues when they ruled in the Lochner case, noting that “the 14th amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics.” (Spencer was then the world’s foremost proponent of social darwinism and a staunch defender of free-market economics.) A few years later, future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis cuttingly noted that “to destroy a business is illegal. It not illegal to lower the standard of the working man’s living or to destroy the union which aims to raise or maintain such a standard. A business is property… A man’s standard of living is not property.”

Other voices were also being raised in alarm over the coming of a “judicial oligarchy.” Politicians from former president Theodore Roosevelt to perennial Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene Debs began denouncing “the rogue court.” When he ran again for president in 1912 as the candidate of the Bull Moose, or Progressive Party, Roosevelt declared that the people are “the ultimate makers of their own Constitution” and swore that Americans would not surrender that prerogative to “any set of men, no matter what their positions or their character.” His rival for the party’s nomination, Wisconsin senator Robert LaFollette, typically offered this observation: “Evidence abounds that… the courts pervert justice almost as often as they administer it.” There existed, he concluded, “one law for the rich and another for the poor.“

Calls for reform back then should sound eerily familiar today. Populist presidential candidate James Weaver urged that Supreme Court justices be elected and lifetime terms abolished. A bill introduced in Congress proposed that a majority of both houses should have the power to recall and remove a judge from office. Another demanded a super-majority of justices — seven out of nine — be required to invalidate a law. Roosevelt argued that there should be popular referenda on the court’s decisions. The Socialist Party demanded that the Supreme Court’s power to review the constitutionality of federal laws be done away with and all judges elected for short terms.

Still, the court prevailed until the Great Depression of the 1930s. President Franklin Roosevelt, however, passed new laws regulating business and finance, as well as a national minimum wage and maximum-work-hours statute, while legalizing the right to join a union. Together with yet another uprising of beleaguered industrial workers in those years, this would shift the balance of power. Even then, the Supreme Court justices at first succeeded in nullifying key pieces of Roosevelt’s economic recovery legislation, while Democrats at the time, (as today), talked about adding new justices to the court.

In the end, however, the national trauma of a capitalism seemingly on the verge of collapse, the weight of changing public opinion, and the aging out of some of the justices ended the dominion of the Lochner court.

“The race question”

During the long years of opposition to that court, little of the criticism touched on “the race question.” How to account for that? From the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century to Roosevelt’s New Deal, Americans were preoccupied with “the labor question” (as it was then called) — that is, how to deal with the great social divide between capital and labor opened up by industrialization.

The silence when it came to the no less striking racial bias of the Supreme Court speaks to a ubiquitous national blindness on matters of racial justice then. Of course, segregation was settled law at the time. In the words of a justice deciding the Plessy case, white supremacy was “in the nature of things.” (Sound familiar?) So, too, the relative weakness of mass movements addressing the racial dilemma during the Lochner court years was striking, making the issue easier to ignore.

The Supreme Court’s original responsibility was, as James Madison once put it, to guard against the “tyranny of the majority.” African-Americans were, of course, a long-tyrannized minority.

However, on that subject the Lochner court went AWOL, even by its own standards. If the “minority” in question happened to be a corporation, it, of course, needed the court’s protection. Not so fortunate were millions of ex-slaves and their descendants.

Eventually, a different Supreme Court, the one overseen by Chief Justice Earl Warren, faced the “race question.” Indeed, it expanded civil rights and civil liberties generally by making racial segregation illegal in public schools, increasing the constitutional rights of defendants, outlawing state-sponsored school prayer, and creating the groundwork to legalize abortion.

Times had changed. Civil rights for African-Americans (about which Roosevelt’s New Deal did little) became an increasing concern during and after World War II. Growing civil rights organizations and a then-powerful labor movement began to press the issue ever harder. By the time the Warren Court made its celebrated 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, race had become a “question,” just as the “labor question” had in the New Deal era.

Before then, pressure alone, however muscular, had not produced a shift in the high court’s approach as the Lochner court so amply demonstrated. Segregation had, after all, become entrenched as a way of life endorsed by local white legislatures. Southern commercial interests in particular — plantation owners, textile manufacturers, and raw material producers — depended on it.

Beyond those circles, however, segregation had become increasingly repellent in a culture ever more infused with the multi-ethnic sympathies and cosmopolitanism of the New Deal era. In beginning the dismantlement of legal segregation, the Warren court would not, in fact, threaten the country’s central institutions of power and wealth which, if anything, had by then come to find American-style apartheid inimical to their interests.

Justice is supposed to be nonpolitical, but that has never been the case. What was once termed the “counter-majoritarian” mission of the court — to discipline “passionate majorities” — produced great wrongs in the era of the gatling-gun injunction as had also been true earlier. The Warren court, however, was the exception. It achieved the very opposite results, even as it relied on the same constitutional logic (the civil rights enshrined in the 14th amendment) the Lochnercourt had in thwarting mass movements for justice and equality.

Today’s Supreme Court is more than Donald Trump’s creation. It’s the result of a long counter-revolution against the political, economic, and cultural reforms of the New Deal, as well as of the labor, civil rights, women’s, and gay liberation movements of the last century.

Sadly, those are the “passionate majorities” the court now seems all too determined to squelch and in that it stands in a long American tradition, though one most of us had forgotten in the Warren years. One thing should be obvious by now: if the country is ever to live up to its democratic and egalitarian promise, the tyranny of the Supreme Court must be ended.

Steve Fraser writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is the author of Mongrel Firebugs and Men of Property: Capitalism and Class Conflict in American History. His previous books include Class Matters, The Age of Acquiescence, and The Limousine Liberal. He is a co-founder and co-editor of the American Empire Project.

Copyright ©2022 Steve Fraser — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 06 September 2022
Word Count: 3,145
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Honestly, if you had described this America to me more than half a century ago, I would have laughed in your face.

Donald Trump becoming president? You must be kidding!

If you want a bizarre image, just imagine him in the company of Abraham Lincoln. I mean, really, what’s happened to us?

Not, of course, that we haven’t had bizarre politicians in Washington before.  I still remember watching the mad, red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy on our new black-and-white television set in April 1953.  He was a brute and looked it (though, to my nine-year-old mind, he also seemed like every belligerent dad I knew). Still, whatever he was, he wasn’t president of the United States. At the time, that was former World War II military commander Dwight D. Eisenhower.

And whatever McCarthy might have been, he wasn’t a sign of American (or planetary) decline. The Donald? Well, he’s something else again. In some ways, he could be considered the strangest marker of decline in our history. After all, when he entered the Oval Office, he took over a country whose leaders had long considered it the greatest, most powerful, most influential nation ever.

Think of him, if you will, as the weirdest seer of our times. To put him in the context of the science fiction I was reading in the previous century, he might be considered a genuine Philip K. Dick(head).

As I wrote in April 2016 in the midst of Trump’s initial run for the presidency, he was exceptional among our political class and not for any of the obvious reasons either. No, what caught my attention was that slogan of his, the one he had trademarked in the wake of Mitt Romney’s loss to Barack Obama in 2012: Make America Great Again, or MAGA. The key word in it, I realized then, was that again. As I noted at the time, he was unique in a presidential race not just as a bizarre former TV personality or even a successful multiple bankruptee, but as “the first person to run openly and without apology on a platform of American decline.” In his own way, he had his eye — and what an eye it was! — on a reality no other politician in Washington even dared consider, not when it came to the “sole superpower” of planet Earth. He was, after all, insisting then that this country was no longer great.

Trump proved to be a one-of-a-kind candidate (not that he wouldn’t have been without that MAGA slogan). And as we now know, his message, which rang so few bells among the political class in Washington, rang all too many in the (white) American heartland. In other words, Donald Trump became the prexy of decline and what a decline it would be! According to one recent survey, half of all Americans, in this increasingly over-armed country of ours, have come to believe that an actual civil war is on the way in the near future.

Think of the miracle — if you don’t mind my using such a word in this context — of Donald Trump’s presidency this way: in some sense, he managed to turn not just Republicans but all of us into his apprentices. And those years of our apprenticeship occurred not just in an increasingly crazed and violent America, but on an ever stranger, more disturbed planet.

Yes, once upon a time I read sci-fi novels in a way I no longer do and felt then that I was glimpsing possible futures, however weird. But believe me, what’s happening today wouldn’t have passed as halfway believable fiction in the late 1960s or early 1970s.

So, let me say it again: honestly, Donald Trump?

Our Liz

Having lived through the antiwar movement of the 1960s and 1970s (often enough in the streets) and the madness of the American war of destruction in Vietnam, it’s strange to spend my waning years in a country where the main protest movement, the Trumpist one, represents a nightmare of potential destruction right here at home. And by “right,” of course, I mean wrong beyond belief. It’s led, after all, by a superduper narcissist who wouldn’t qualify as a fascist only because he prefers fans to followers, apprentices to jackbooted thugs. As the events of January 6, 2021, showed, however, he wouldn’t reject them either. In an earlier moment, in fact, he urged such thugs to “stand back and stand by.”

You know that you’re in a world from hell when the heroine of this moment is the politically faithful daughter of a former vice president who, along with President George W. Bush, used the 9/11 attacks to usher us into wars of aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as into the expansive Global War on Terror — who, that is, remains an unindicted war criminal first class. Keep in mind as well that, before she became our Liz, she voted against impeaching President Trump in 2019 and voted for his programs (if you can faintly call them that) a mere 93% of the time.

And mind you, all of this is just scratching the surface of our world from hell.

Not even in my worst nightmares of half a century ago was this the American world I imagined. Not for a day, not for an hour, not for a second did I, for instance, dream of American school guards armed with assault rifles. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

I was born, of course, into an America on the rise in which you could still imagine — it seems ridiculous to use the word today — progress toward a genuinely better world of some sort. That world is evidently now something for the history books.

Think of Donald Trump as an all-too-literal sign of the times at a moment when about 70% of Republicans consider the last election to have been stolen and Joe Biden an illegitimate president. Perhaps 40% of them also believe that violence against the government can sometimes be justified. This in a country that had long fancied itself as the greatest of all time.

And if you really want a little sci-fi madness that would, in the 1960s, have blown my mind (as we liked to say then), consider climate change. As we argue like mad about the last election, while Trumpists pursue local secretary-of-state positions (not to speak of governorships) that could give them control over future election counts, as Americans arm themselves to the teeth and democracy seems up for grabs, let’s not forget about the true nightmare of this moment: the desperate warming of this planet.

Yes, “our” Earth is burning in an all-too-literal way — and flooding, too, with “superstorms” in our future. And don’t forget that it’s melting as well at a rate far more extreme than anyone imagined once upon a time. Recent research on the Arctic suggests that instead of warming, as previously believed, at a rate two to three times faster than the rest of the planet, it’s now heating four times as fast. In some areas, in fact, make that seven times as fast! So, in the future, see ya Miami, New York, Ho Chi Minh City, Shanghai, and other coastal metropolises as sea levels rise ever faster.

Kissing the planet goodbye?

Honestly, you’d hardly know it in parts of this country and among Republicans (even if that party’s key figures were, once upon a time, environmentalists), but this planet is literally going down — or maybe, in temperature terms, I mean up — in flames.

Greenhouse gases continue to pour into the atmosphere and certain heads of state, like Donald Trump in his White House days, remain remarkably dedicated to emitting yet more of them. The Mexican president is one example, the Russian president another. And you no longer have to turn to science fiction to imagine the results. An unnerving sci-fi-style future is becoming the grim present right before our eyes. This summer, for instance, Europe has seen unparalleled heat and drought, with both Germany’s Rhine River and Italy’s Po River drying up in disastrous fashion. And just to add to the mix, parts of that continent have also seen storms of a startling magnitude and staggering flooding.

Meanwhile, China has been experiencing a devastating more-than-two-month-long set of heat waves with record temperatures and significant drought, all of which has proved disastrous for its crops, economy, and people. And oh yes, like the Rhine and Po, the Yangtze, the world’s third-largest river, is drying up fast, while the heat wave there shows little sign of ending before mid-September. Meanwhile, the American southwest and west continue to experience a megadrought the likes of which hasn’t been seen on this continent in at least 1,200 years. Like the Rhine, Po, and Yangtze, the Colorado River is losing water in a potentially disastrous fashion, while the season for heat waves in the United States is now 45 days longer than in the 1960s. And that’s only to begin recording planetary weather catastrophes. After all, I haven’t even mentioned the ever-fiercer wildfires, or megafires, whether in Alaska, New Mexico, France, or elsewhere; nor have I focused on the increasingly powerful hurricanes and typhoons that have become part of everyday life (and destruction and death).

So, isn’t it a strange form of science fiction that, in response to such a world, such a crisis, one that could someday signal the end of civilization, the focus in this country is on Donald Trump and company? Don’t you find it odd that the two greatest greenhouse gas emitters and powers on the planet, the United States and China, have responded in ways that should appall us all?

Joe Biden and his top national-security officials have continually played up the dangers of the rise of China, put significant energy into developing military alliances against that country in the Indo-Pacific region, and functionally launched a new Cold War, more than 30 years after the old one went to its grave. In addition, Nancy Pelosi, a number of other congressional representatives, and even state ones have pointedly visited the island of Taiwan, purposely infuriating the Chinese leadership. Meanwhile, the U.S. Navy has ever more regularly sent its vessels through the Taiwan Strait and aircraft carrier task forces into the South China Sea.

For its part, China’s officialdom, while continuing to push the building of coal-fired power plants, has recently launched military demonstrations of an escalating sort against Taiwan, while preparing to join Vladimir Putin’s Russia for the second year in a row in “military exercises,” even as the war in Ukraine, a first class carbon disaster, goes on and on and on. At the same time, furious about those Taiwan visits from Washington, China’s leaders have essentially cut off all relations with the U.S., including any further discussions about how to cooperate in dealing with climate change.

So, a second cold war amid a growing climate disaster? If you had put that into your sci-fi novel in 1969, it would undoubtedly have seemed too absurd a future to be publishable. You would have been laughed out of the room.

Admittedly, the history of humanity has largely been a tale of the triumph of the unreasonable. Still, you might think that, as a species, we would, at a minimum, not actively opt for the destruction of the very planet we live on. And yet, think again.

At least the Biden administration did recently get a bill through Congress (despite the opposition of every Trumpublican) that dealt with global warming in a reasonably significant way and the president may still invoke his executive powers to do more. It’s true as well that the Chinese have been working hard to create ever less expensive alternative energy sources. Still, none of this takes us far enough. Not on this planet. Not now.

And keep in mind that, were a desperate and disparate America to elect Donald Trump again in 2024 (by hook or crook), the country that historically has put more greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere than any other land, might be kissing the planet we’ve known goodbye.

Believe me, it’s strange to find myself remembering a long-gone world in which the major destruction was happening thousands of miles away in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. I mean, that was bad enough to get me into the streets then. Now, however, the destruction we’re significantly responsible for is happening right here, right where you and I both live, no matter where that might be.

What we’re watching is a tragedy of an unparalleled sort in the making for our children and grandchildren, which leaves me sad beyond words. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a sci-fi novel I’d rather not read and a sci-fi life I’d rather not be living.

Tom Engelhardt created and runs the website TomDispatch.com. 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 ©2022 Tom Engelhardt— distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 29 August 2022
Word Count: 2,122
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Here’s the big question in Jock Culture these days: Is the Kingdom of Golf being used to sportswash the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia? Or is it the other way around? After all, what other major sport could use a sandstorm of Middle Eastern murder and human-rights abuses to obscure its own history of bigotry and greed? In fact, not since the 1936 Berlin Olympics was used to cosmeticize Nazi Germany’s atrocities and promote Aryan superiority have sports and an otherwise despised government collaborated so blatantly to enhance their joint international standings.

Will it work this time?

The jury has been out since the new Saudi-funded LIV Tour made an early August stop at the Trump National Golf Course in Bedminster, New Jersey. (That LIV comes from the roman numerals for 54, the number of holes in one of its tourneys.) And I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that it was hosted by a former president so well known for flouting golf’s rules that he earned the title Commander-in-Cheat for what, in the grand scheme of things, may be the least of his sins.

That tournament featured 10 of the top 50 players in the world. They were poached by the Saudis from the reigning century-old Professional Golfers Association (PGA), reportedly for hundreds of millions of dollars in signing bonuses and prize money. It was a shocking display for a pastime that has traded on its image of honesty and sportsmanship, not to mention an honor system that demands players turn themselves in for any infractions of the rules, rare in other athletic events where gamesmanship is less admired.

No wonder our former president hailed the tour as “a great thing for Saudi Arabia, for the image of Saudi Arabia. I think it’s going to be an incredible investment from that standpoint, and that’s more valuable than lots of other things because you can’t buy that — even with billions of dollars.”

The tournament was held soon after Joe Biden gave that already infamous fist bump to crown prince and de facto Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman. The two events radically raised bin Salman’s prestige at a moment when, thanks to the war in Ukraine, oil money was just pouring into that kingdom, and helped sportswash the involvement of his countrymen in the 9/11 attacks, as well as the brutal murder and dismemberment of Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

Deals they couldn’t refuse

The buy-off money came from the reported $347 billion held by the Public Investment Fund, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. Top golfers were lured into the LIV tour with sums that they couldn’t refuse. A former number-one player on the PGA tour, Dustin Johnson, asked about the reported $125 million that brought him onto the Saudi tour, typically responded by citing “what’s best for me and my family.”

Phil Mickelson, the most famous of the LIV recruits and a long-time runner-up rival of Tiger Woods, justified his reported $200 million in a somewhat more nuanced fashion. In a February interview at the website The Fire Pit Collective, he admitted that Saudi government officials are “scary motherfuckers,” have a “horrible record on human rights,” and “execute people… for being gay.” Yet he also insisted that the LIV was a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape how the PGA Tour operates.”

Family needs and the supposed inequities of the PGA’s previously hegemonic universe were the explanations a number of golfers used to justify biting the hand that had fed them for so long. Meanwhile, Tiger Woods, the greatest recipient of PGA largesse and probably the greatest golfer of our time, if not any time, reportedly turned down an almost billion-dollar offer with sharp words for those who had gone for the quick cash.

The PGA obviously agreed and barred any golfer who took up the Saudi offers from its tournaments. In response, some of them promptly sued the PGA.

The Kingdom of Golf

On the face of it, creating a Kingdom of Golf might not seem like a crucial thing for a morally challenged monarchy to do. After all, golf isn’t exactly a charity or a social justice campaign that’s likely to signal your virtue. It’s just a game whose players use sticks to swat little balls into holes in the ground while strolling around. It’s not even good exercise and far less so if you’re driving the course in a motorized cart or hire a caddie to carry your sticks. And it gets worse. After all, the irrigation water and poisonous chemicals necessary to keep the playing fields luxuriantly green at all times are abetting ecological disaster.

Golf symbolized reactionary greed even before the Saudis entered the picture. For starters, its competitors are among the only professional athletes ranked purely by the cash prizes they’ve won. And the leading golfers invariably earn far more from endorsements and speaking engagements. The sport’s almost comic upper-class snootiness sometimes seems like an orchestrated distraction from the profound racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism lodged in its history and, even today, the discrimination against women that still exists at so many of the leading country clubs that sustain the game.

Golf has long been retrograde, exclusionary, and money-obsessed. To put that in perspective, the estimated revenue of the Professional Golf Association in 2019 was $1.5 billion — and it boasts a non-profit status that’s sometimes been questioned. Lucrative as it is, it also proved distinctly vulnerable to an attack by an oil-soaked autocracy that, in warming up to invade golf, had already invested in Formula One racing, e-sports, wrestling, and its most recent controversial purchase, a British Premier League soccer team (which provoked protests from fans and Amnesty International).

Still, the Saudis’ move on golf was even bolder, more ambitious, and somehow almost ordained to happen.

Unlike football and baseball, which are convenient amalgams of socialism for the owners (in their collusive cooperation) and dog-eat-dog capitalism for the players and other personnel, golf is more of a monarchy along the lines of, um, Saudi Arabia. Until the LIV Tour came along, the main PGA tour, that sport’s equivalent of the major leagues, had been all-powerful in its control over both golfers and venues.

Over the years, golfers have indeed complained about that, but except for Greg Norman, a 67-year-old Australian former champion, not too loudly. Now a highly successful clothing and golf-course-design entrepreneur, Norman is called the Great White Shark for his looks and aggressive style. No wonder he’s now the CEO of LIV Golf and the ringleader of the campaign to recruit the top pros to play in the breakaway tour.

Norman denies that he answers to the crown prince, but his attempts to distance himself from that ruthless Saudi ruler are not taken seriously by most observers of golf, including the Washington Post’s Sally Jenkins, who wrote:

Let’s be frank. LIV Golf is nothing more than a vanity project for Norman and his insatiable materialism — and an exhibition-money scam for early-retiree divas who are terrified of having to fly commercial again someday. By the way, the supposed hundreds of millions in guaranteed contracts for a handful of stars — has anyone seen the actual written terms, the details of what Phil Mickelson and Dustin Johnson will have to do to collect that blood-spattered coin, or is everyone just taking the word of Norman and a few agents trying to whip up commissions that it’s all free ice cream?

One of the best sports columnists, Jenkins may seem excessive in her attack on Norman, but the passions that golf and Saudi Arabia have raised separately only increase in tandem. On the one hand, there’s the outrage when it comes to Saudi Arabia’s murderous human-rights abuses and Washington’s continuing complicity with the regime, thanks in particular to its ongoing massive arms sales to that country. (The latest of those deals, largely Patriot missiles sold to that country for $3 billion, feels distinctly like a kind of bribery.)

On the other hand, there’s the long-standing resentment of golf as a symbol of rich, white, male supremacy. In fact, it’s still seen as a private meeting place to create and maintain relationships that will lead to significant political and business decisions, the sports equivalent of, um, Saudi missile deals.

The pro golfers profiting from the current bonanza may not engender much sympathy, but the derision for their materialism should, at least, be put in context. Until the LIV came along, they had next to no options in their sport and few of them made Mickelson- or Johnson-style money. Worse yet, their lonely gunslinger lifestyles made unionization at best the remotest of possibilities, especially for figures deeply wired into the corporate community through their sponsorship deals.

The Saudi golf coup (because that’s indeed what it is) has taken place at an interesting juncture for the sport and its two most compelling figures, Trump and Tiger, who have indeed played together, both seeming to enjoy the trash talk that went with the experience.

Tiger in twilight

Tiger, who is now in steep decline, has long been the face of the sport at its most accomplished, captivating, and richest despite, or perhaps because of, his paradoxical nature.

His first auto accident in 2009 revealed a tortured soul involved a maelstrom of sexual infidelities and occasioned a re-evaluation of his mythic rise. No surprise then that he’s struggled ever since, briefly regaining his form before more accidents and surgeries diminished his dominance.

As long as he continued to show up and hit a ball, popular interest in the game was sustained and the PGA’s grip held firm. As he diminished, however, so did public fascination with golf.

In a way, he had been Tiger-washing the sport. It was hard to sustain a critique of golf’s retrograde and exclusionary nature, however justified, while it hid behind his Black face. Of course, that vision of golf was already wearing thin when Tiger refused to define himself as African-American, preferring “Cablinasian” — meant to reflect his racial mix of Caucasian, Black, (American) Indian, and Asian.

With Tiger, at 46, fading as an active force, PGA golf had already become vulnerable to a coup long before the Saudis and The Donald appeared on the scene. And who could have been a handier guy for those Middle Eastern royals than one with such experience in coups, even if his first try, with all those armed deplorables, failed on January 6, 2021.

This time around, though, Trump had millionaires with golf clubs, Middle Eastern oil royalty, and the equivalent of bottomless sacks of PAC money.

And, of course, with Trump involved, anything could happen. The first time he was infamously linked to sports, in the early 1980s as the owner of the New Jersey Generals of the upstart United States Football League (USFL), he managed to destroy his own organization in what would emerge as his signature style of reckless, narcissistic malfeasance. An early Trump lie (in an interview with me, no less) was that the USFL would continue its summer schedule so as not to interfere with the National Football League’s winter one. Within days of that statement, he led a lawsuit aimed at forcing a merger of his league and the National Football League. It ended badly for Trump and the USFL.

This time around, Trump has said that the LIV Tour would avoid scheduling tournaments in conflict with major PGA events. That will probably turn out to be anything but the case, too. So how will his latest foray into Jock Culture play out? Will the PGA beat back the Saudi coup (maybe by raising its prize money) or will the Saudis burnish their global image through a sport undeservedly renowned for integrity and class?

And what about the Commander-in-Cheat? If only this Saudi enterprise would leave him too busy on the links (not to speak of fighting off jail in connection with those purloined secret documents of his) to run for the presidency again in 2024.

Ultimately, whether Saudi Arabia or golf gets sportswashed, it’s Trump we need to rinse out of our lives.

Robert Lipsyte writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated) and is a former sports and city columnist for the New York Times. He is the author, among other works, of SportsWorld: An American Dreamland.

Copyright ©2022 Robert Lipsyte — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 18 August 2022
Word Count: 2,010
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