The Washington press corps appears to accept that the president was “firing up his base” Friday when he commuted Roger Stone’s sentence of three-and-a-fourth years. That’s probably an assertion of opinion more than fact, though. While presidents do normally base actions on political considerations, Donald Trump is not normal.

It’s a stretch, to say the least, to assume that the president’s base of power likes it when he helps a goombah duly convicted by a jury of his peers. The more likely explanation is that Trump went easy on Stone to maintain his silence about their involvement in an international criminal conspiracy to defraud the American people.

That’s not to say Trump’s decision doesn’t appeal to someone. Believers in something called “QAnon” probably felt that in commuting Stone’s sentence, the president was striking a righteous blow against a nameless and faceless “deep state” that has been trying to bring Trump down since he decided to run for president. According to my friend Amee Vanderpool, “QAnon followers believe this current political struggle will culminate in a fantasy conclusion know as, ‘The Storm.’” Amee went on to say:

This phase involves the military rounding up, imprisoning and even executing anyone who dared to counter Trump or make any moves against him. It’s safe to say that the list includes Democratic politicians, ‘members of the ‘liberal’ media, Hollywood celebrities and other elites that are convenient for Trump supporters to target.

QAnon followers are too small in number to affect this year’s election, but they could have serious effect if Joe Biden is victorious. Amee says the conspiracy theory is making inroads in the Republican Party, because the Republicans are making room for it. Combined with the market incentives of the GOP’s rightwing media allies, QAnon could erode a Biden administration’s credibility among white suburban voters the way birtherism eroded the Obama administration’s credibility among the same. Put all this together to see that things are probably going to get worse before they get better.

Liberals and people deferential to the authority of facts and reason don’t really know what to do when faced with conspiracism, except laugh at it. That’s certainly what most of them did — what I did — during the Obama years. But liberals and others (me) should learn from our mistake, specifically that conspiracy theory isn’t just Living Life in Crazyville. It is the abandonment of the American social contract, a literal betrayal that’s rooted in political weakness.

If you can’t win by normal means, if you can’t win because the truth is against you, then what do you do? You invent a new set of “alternate facts.” Conspiracy theories are leading indicators that parts of a country have decoupled from the rest, and they are heading down the road to serfdom.

Something needs to be done. Victory isn’t enough. If Biden wins, we’re going to witness wholesale amnesia among Republicans, leading to a repeat of the post-2008 era. Not only will conspiricism come back to the fore, poisoning our discourse, and not only will right-wing media weaponize conspiricism against the new administration, poisoning our discourse even more. The GOP will pretend, en masse, as it did after Barack Obama became president, that all the things they did to wreck the economy, devastate public health and shred the moral fiber of our society were Biden’s fault.

For his part, Biden will have great incentive to repeat what Obama did post-2008 — just simply forget what the previous administration did to bring America to the brink of being a failed state. There’s one legitimate reason for this act of willful forgetting. You don’t want to establish a precedent in which politics becomes a crime. But politics can be criminal, as we learned when George W. Bush pushed us into invading a sovereign country that did us no harm after Sept. 11, 2001. Trump’s crimes, moreover, are relatively worse. The whole world changed after 3,000 Americans were murdered. Nothing has changed after Covid-19 killed enough people to equal forty-six 9/11s.

There’s actually another reason to forget. New presidents have their own agendas. They don’t want to get bogged down litigating old ones. Biden, however, isn’t Obama. His shtick is restoration, bringing America back to a state of normalcy and honor, putting the power of government on the side of normal people. If something isn’t done to counteract, or at least counterbalance, the Republican Party’s fascist incentives, Biden can forget about that, even if his party controls both chambers of the Congress. What’s needed is a rededication to the truth, and that requires a new special counsel to establish the whole truth of recent history, starting with Donald Trump’s victory.

Yes, I know Robert Mueller established many of the facts. And yes, the appointment of a new special counsel would be received among Republicans and their rightwing media allies as well as Mueller was. But truth and justice demand it. And anyway, like I said yesterday, the conspiracy that brought Trump to power did not stop. It has been ongoing. It’s most recent manifestation was commuting Roger Stone’s sentence, an act of literal bribery aimed at covering up the cover up of the crime of defrauding the American people of the right to know who they were voting for.

We didn’t know. We still don’t know. Until we do, we can expect more of the same from the Republicans.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

—————-

Released: 14 July 2020

Word Count: 894

—————-

The novel SARS-CoV-2 has roared through the American landscape leaving physical, emotional, and economic devastation in its wake. By early July, known infections in this country exceeded three million, while deaths topped 135,000. Home to just over 4% of the global population, the United States accounts for more than a quarter of all fatalities from Covid-19, the disease produced by the coronavirus. Amid a recent surge of infections, especially across the Sun Belt, which Vice President Mike Pence typically denied was even occurring, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that the daily total of infections had reached a record 60,000. Arizona’s seven-day average alone approached that of the European Union, which has 60 times as many people.

Making matters much worse, the pandemic erupted during the presidency of Donald J. Trump, whose stratospheric self-absorption, ineptitude, denial of science, and callousness have reached heights even his most ferocious critics couldn’t have imagined. His nostrums, including disinfectant, sunlight, and hydroxychloroquine, could be dismissed as comical if they weren’t downright dangerous, encouraging possibly fatal experimentation, while breeding false hopes.

Public health safeguards that should have been initiated early on were neglected, above all testing and contact tracing. At the end of April, when President Trump first crowed that “we are the best in the world in testing,” the U.S. ranked 22nd in tests per 1,000 people in the 36-member Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the club of the globe’s wealthy states. Although testing nationwide had increased from 250,000 a day in early May to a current 571,574, that’s still less than half the number needed to begin to lock down the virus.

By portraying mask-wearing as effete and elitist, even as those who come near him are tested, disparaging social distancing (recall his reckless rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and unmasked Fourth of July celebration at South Dakota’s Mount Rushmore), and downplaying the danger of a second wave of infections, President Trump has been the problem, not the solution. It would be hard to imagine a less suitable helmsman to steer this country out of a public health catastrophe. His eternal spin, tweets, and fulminations about “fake news” can’t obscure the obvious: his administration’s management of the pandemic has been shambolic.

The variability of vulnerability It’s common to hear that we’re all caught in the Covid-19 crisis, that we’re all its victims. Having spread across the country, afflicting people of all backgrounds, it certainly qualifies as a national security crisis, a concept that, militarized for so long now, seems odd when applied to the pandemic. The coronavirus, of course, has neither tanks, nor missiles, nor roadside bombs, and that may help explain the government’s abject failure to plan for and contain it.

Still, take a deeper look at Covid-19’s destructive path and you’ll see that it’s been highly selective in the suffering it’s caused and the lives it’s taken. Adjusted for age, fatalities per 100,000 have been significantly higher for African Americans, Hispanic-Latinx, and Native Americans than for whites across all age groups, as detailed studies demonstrate: for Blacks, 3.6 times higher and for Hispanic-Latinx, 2.5 times. The disparity becomes even greater when the comparison is made by age groups. Ditto hospitalization rates: 40.1/100,000 for whites, 160.7 for Hispanic-Latinx, 178.1 for African Americans, and a whopping 221.2 for Native Americans.

In addition, places with the highest income inequality have had the highest death rates. New York State, which surpasses its counterparts in income disparity, has had a Covid-19 death rate 125 times that of Utah, which has the least inequality. In big metropolitan areas like Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago, where the number of infections has been particularly high, the death rate has unsurprisingly been steepest in low-income communities. People living in such neighborhoods, most of them minorities, are significantly less likely to have health insurance or access to good healthcare services and far more likely to have underlying respiratory ailments including asthma, in part because the air in their communities tends to be more polluted. Poor people also have less chance of surviving Covid-19 because the quality of care in hospitals closely matches the wealth of the neighborhoods they’re in.

National economic statistics help highlight Covid-19’s uneven effects. Thirty-nine percent of those who have lost their jobs since March made less than $40,000 a year compared to 19% of those earning $100,000 or more. In addition, social distancing works for those whose jobs can be done from home, but bus drivers, cabbies, janitors, meatpackers, caregivers, hairdressers, farm workers, home health aides, and the like can’t use Zoom to sever themselves from their workplaces. If you don’t have to work on-site (and can afford grocery deliveries to your doorstep), you’re undoubtedly on the upper rungs of the income ladder. Nearly 62% of those in the 75th income percentile managed to work from home compared to 9.2% of those in the 25th percentile. There are race-based differences as well: 37% of Asian Americans and 30% of whites can work from home versus 19.7% of African Americans and 16.2% of Hispanic-Latinx.

Then there’s age. The CDC reports that 80% of those who died from Covid-19 in the United States were 65 or older. The disease has particularly ravaged the elderly in nursing homes (as well as the personnel staffing them), accounting for about 43% of countrywide deaths attributable to the virus.

The upshot: If you’re old, poor, and African American or Hispanic-Latinx, your chances of infection are especially high and your odds of survival significantly lower. So, no, we aren’t really all in this together, especially since not everybody can easily take elementary safety precautions, certainly not the two million Americans who don’t even have running water at home and so can’t regularly wash their hands, let alone the Navajo, 30% of whom must drive an hour or more to fetch water. Covid-19, anything but blind to color and class, has visibly hit the most vulnerable segments of American society most fiercely.

Devastating the homeless Among those especially hard-pressed to avoid infection and death are people who sleep in shelters, on the street, in deserted buildings, in subway cars, or — and they are perhaps the “lucky” ones — in their own cars. The homeless don’t get all that much Covid-19-related media coverage, in part because they are a sliver of the population (0.2%) and so lack a significant political voice: you won’t find pricey lobbyists working for them in Washington. They can’t even take that most basic precaution advised by medical experts, sheltering in place. To do that, you need dependable shelter, which the homeless, by definition, lack.

If you live in a big city, you can hardly miss the homeless, and you’re undoubtedly familiar with the rituals of passersby. Some simply walk on, perhaps at a slightly quickened pace; others glance at the homeless but ignore, or pretend not to hear, their pleas for help. Some do give them money or food from time to time, knowing that the gesture amounts to slapping a band aid on a serious wound. Even those who see the homeless daily generally know very little about them — who they are, how they ended up on the street, how they manage to survive — and even less about the homeless who, having found a place in a shelter, are out of sight.

While statistics can’t substitute for this lack of knowledge, they can help us grasp the magnitude and nature of homelessness. According to the Department for Housing and Urban Development (HUD), on any given night in January 2019, 560,715 people were homeless. Nearly two-thirds of them lived in shelters. The rest slept wherever they could, often on sidewalks, relying, if in places with cold winters, on steam grates to stay warm. About a quarter of them were deemed “chronically homeless,” which, by the definition HUD adopted in 2015, meant that they had been “living in a place not meant for human habitation, a safe haven, or in an emergency shelter” for 12 months running or for that total over a three-year stretch. Since 2007, when the compilation of data began, homelessness decreased by 12% until 2018-2019 when it rose by 3%, chiefly because of a 16% jump in California. The economic damage done by Covid-19 will, however, ensure yet more future increases.

Four states alone — California, Florida, New York, and Texas — contain nearly half of the homeless. Add Massachusetts, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Washington, and you’ll hit two-thirds. The vast majority of them live in large urban areas, with five — New York County, Los Angeles County, Seattle/King County, San Jose/Santa Clara County, and San Diego County — accounting for 29% of the homeless nationwide. A clutch of cities (in descending order, Washington, D.C., Boston, and New York) have a homelessness rate six times the national figure of 17 per 10,000, with San Francisco barely escaping this list of ill-fame.

So, though homelessness exists in every state, as well as in suburbs and rural areas, spatially it’s highly concentrated — and that concentration is racial, not just spatial. Whites comprise 76% of the American population but only 49% of its homeless. For African Americans, the corresponding figures are 13% and 40%, for Hispanic-Latinx Americans 18% and 21%. Native Americans and Native Alaskans, a mere 1.2% of the population, make up nearly 9% of all homeless people. The homelessness rate is similarly skewed: 66.7 per 10,000 for Native Americans and Native Alaskans, 55 for African Americans, 21.7 for Hispanic/Latinx, 11.5 for whites, and 4 for Asian Americans.

Covid-19 and the homeless From the start, the homeless were among the groups most threatened by the coronavirus. Compared to other adults, a far higher proportion of them have respiratory or cardiovascular illnesses, which increase the risk of being infected and reduce chances of survival. Because of the physical wear and tear produced by exposure to the elements, poor nutrition and hygiene, and the stress of living on the streets or in shelters (while fearing being robbed or assaulted), the state of their health resembles that of people who are two decades older. Moreover, an estimated 38% of the homeless are addicted to alcohol and 26% of them to drugs. Substance abuse can, of course, weaken the body’s immune system, putting the homeless at an added disadvantage in warding off the virus.

Some experts claim that infections and deaths among the homeless have belied the direst predictions. Still, by mid-May, the Covid-19 death rate for New York City had reached 187/100,00. In the city’s homeless shelters, however, it was 291/100,000, or 56% higher. A CDC study covering March and April found that in Boston, San Francisco, and Seattle, 25% of the residents and 11% of the staff in homeless shelters tested positive for the virus.

None of this should be surprising. After all, regular handwashing, hard enough for the homeless who don’t live in shelters, became especially so once bathrooms in places like libraries, restaurants, and bus stations were ever less available as the pandemic revved up. Hand sanitizer can, of course, substitute for water, but not if you don’t have enough money to eat regularly, much less buy such products. Psychological disorders create an added barrier to self-protection as about 25% of the homeless — some studies report even higher numbers — suffer from severe mental illness and fewer than half receive any treatment.

Testing and contact tracing have reduced the virus’s spread substantially in a number of countries, but considering how far behind the U.S. has been in both realms, you can bet that the homeless weren’t anywhere near the head of the line for either. In addition, many of the organizations that care for them lack the money, kits, disinfectants, protective gear, and trained personnel (relying as they often do on volunteers) needed for an effective test-and-trace regimen. Fever and coughing were used as markers for testing early in the pandemic, so those in shelters who exhibited neither symptom but were infected transmitted the virus to others unnoticed. A single individual in a San Francisco shelter, for instance, infected 90 fellow residents and 10 employees before he tested positive.

Not surprisingly, the homeless sleeping rough didn’t rush to such shelters in these months, deterred by news that the coronavirus had hit places particularly hard where people were packed together and slept in close quarters, often in bunk beds. The chances of dodging Covid-19 seemed better on the outside.

Moreover, once infections soared, many shelters went into emergency mode. To implement social-distancing mandates and create space to isolate the infected, they froze new admissions or substantially reduced the number of residents they held. Some even shut down. People seeking beds faced long waiting lists. Meanwhile, cities, already under financial strain from the economic effects of the virus, scrambled to house their homeless in hotels, convention centers, or even in RVs, as the shelters disgorged people, leaving them to fend for themselves. In places like San Francisco’s Tenderloin district (already teeming with the homeless), they sleep on the streets or in makeshift tents, which increased nearly threefold citywide. Before long, cities were overwhelmed by costs, logistics, and lack of space. It was one thing for mayors to insist that the unsheltered homeless would be protected, quite another to foot the bill for hotel rooms and basic amenities in places designated for their housing, not to speak of supervisory staff and security.

Could it get any worse? Covid-19’s staggering economic effects will make it ever harder to manage homelessness, especially if its numbers increase due to an upswing in unemployment. Job losses in this country have already been estimated at up to 40 million and, despite the fall in the June unemployment rate, the virus’s recent surge across significant parts of the country will make matters worse. Another 10 million workers have seen their work hours or wages cut. Put it all together — the unemployed, those whose earnings have been slashed, and those who have simply stopped looking for work — and the real unemployment rate for May reached something like 21%. Unsurprisingly under such circumstances, in June, 20% of renters and 18% of home owners couldn’t make their rent or mortgage payments, while an additional 10% in each category could only pay part of what they owed. Those earning $24,000 or less had the hardest time with 20% of them unable to pay and 18% paying only in part.

Rent strikes have proliferated and many localities have banned the eviction of those who fall behind on their rent due to pandemic-related circumstances. Yet while such moratoriums can be extended, there’s nothing permanent about them. In fact, they have already expired in all or parts of more than a dozen states. Nationally, as many as 23 million renters could face eviction as the fall gets underway and those with low incomes run the greatest risk. Congress included financial assistance (plus a 120-day stay on evictions) for tenants and owners in its March Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Security bill, but that legislation will expire this summer and Senate Republicans are anything but keen to support a follow-up bill.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) have banned home foreclosures until August 31st on mortgages backed by them. More than 30 states have also prohibited the filing of home-foreclosure proceedings against, and the eviction of, owners who haven’t paid their mortgages for Covid-19-related reasons, though the provisions vary greatly with lots of fine print, and not all will last until the end of the pandemic emergency. Once such moratoriums lapse, renters and owners will be on the hook for missed payments.

Together, prolonged unemployment, reduced earnings for those who retain their jobs, and a decline in savings for workers in the bottom 40% — a trend anyway over the past three decades — are likely to increase homelessness, especially if an eviction spiral begins. Columbia University economist Brendan O’Flaherty, who shared his data with me, estimates that the economic downturn caused by the virus could drive the number of homeless to 800,000, an increase of 40% to 45% from 2019.

Homelessness could increase for non-economic reasons as well in the Covid-19 era. Take recent moves to reduce the number of people in American prisons, one of the five top hotspots for the spread of the virus. Three-quarters of the inmates at Ohio’s Marion Correctional Institution, for instance, tested positive for the disease. At the Cummins prison in Arkansas, 891 inmates and 65 employees tested positive. From mid-May to mid-June alone, infections at U.S. prisons doubled to reach a total of 68,000, while deaths rose by 73% to 616 and had reached 651 by July.

In a rush to diminish population density, prisons and jails started releasing certain categories of inmates, though of this country’s 2.1 million prisoners, only about 20,000 have been freed so far, the vast majority from local jails. Keep in mind that people leaving prison have difficulty finding jobs in the best of times, so some of those released to manage the pandemic will undoubtedly find themselves both poverty-stricken and homeless. Even in the pre-pandemic moment, former prisoners were 10 times more likely to become homeless than other Americans and, according to a 2019 study by the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, striking numbers of them end up in homeless shelters soon after their incarceration ends.

In short, as the coronavirus continues to rage, this country is ill-prepared to handle a surge in homelessness, let alone help those already homeless. The pandemic massively increased the federal deficit. The Congressional Budget Office projects that it could reach $3.7 trillion in this fiscal year, while other estimates go as high as $4.3 trillion. Meanwhile, without exception, states face steep drops in revenue.

Sadly, even if the plight of the homeless worsens and their number rises dramatically, it will barely register in the corridors of power. The homeless are a miniscule fraction of the population and have zero political clout. Politicians can safely ignore them, particularly because they know that most voters do and that the media covers homelessness sporadically at best. The homeless, society’s all but invisible castaways, can hope for little at a time when they will need more help than ever.

Rajan Menon writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of International Relations at the Powell School, City College of New York, senior research fellow at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, and a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His latest book is The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention.

Copyright ©2020 Rajan Menon — distributed by Agence Global

—————-

Released: 14 July 2020

Word Count: 3,017

—————-

It’s hard to know where to begin discussing the president’s commutation of Roger Stone’s sentence. So let’s start with what it means. It’s not a pardon. Donald Trump’s goombah is still a felon convicted of witness tampering and lying to the US Congress. He plans to appeal the guilty verdict. “Commutation” merely means he won’t go to jail.

The move was widely expected in Washington. Only the timing was in doubt. The president had hoped to wait until after the election, according to Bloomberg News, but Stone appears to have forced his hand. He feared prison would expose him to the new coronavirus, which can be fatal to people his age (67). Stone told a journalist Thursday that he believed the president would commute his sentence because he stayed quiet while under pressure to cooperate. That statement, given the day before his 40-month sentence was to begin, was widely interpreted to mean: do it now or I start singing.

What tune? Well, probably that Stone was the intermediary between Trump — not his campaign staff, but Trump himself — and Wikileaks. Wikileaks, you’ll recall, is the anti-secrets organization that received tens of thousands of documents stolen from the Democratic National Committee and associates of the Democratic nominee. They were released, most memorably, during the 2016 Democratic National Convention to sow chaos and, later that year, to distract from the grab-’em-by-the-pussy video. This tranche of emails was stolen by Russian intelligence officials working at the personal direction of Vladimir Putin, who was waging a one-sided war against Hillary Clinton.

The link between Trump and the Kremlin has been suggested since before Robert Mueller started investigating Russia’s violation of our national sovereignty. It was clearest after Buzzfeed sued for the release of unredacted portions of his report that involved Stone. “The new revelations are the strongest indication to date that Trump and his closest advisers were aware of outside efforts to hurt Clinton’s electoral chances,” Jason Leopold et al. reported June 19, “and that Stone played a direct role in communicating that situation to the Trump campaign. Trump has publicly denied being aware of any information being relayed between WikiLeaks and his advisers.”

An even stronger hint came from Robert Mueller himself. In reaction to Trump’s spectacularly corrupt decision to commute Stone’s sentence, the former special counsel wrote an op-ed Saturday for the Washington Post in which he explained why Stone was a “central figure” of his investigation: “He communicated in 2016 with individuals known to us to be Russian intelligence officers, and he claimed advance knowledge of WikiLeaks’ release of emails stolen by those [same] Russian intelligence officers.”

In my view, Saturday’s op-ed was the closest Mueller has gotten to saying out loud for everyone to hear that the president was involved in an international criminal conspiracy to defraud the American people — collusion with the enemy, if you will — only he couldn’t quite prove it thanks partly to Stone’s silence. The closest Mueller got to Trump was citing him, unnamed, as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the successful prosecution of his attorney, Michael Cohen. Trump no doubt wants to stay unnamed. Rewarding Stone for his silence was probably the surest way of doing that.

We do not know with certainty whether Stone was the link between Trump and the Kremlin, but all evidence so far points strongly in that direction. (Not to mention the president’s extreme deference to Moscow, including his looking the other way while it pays Taliban militiamen to kill American troops.) Moreover, we do know that Roger Stone knows something the president does not want the American people to know. Otherwise, he would not have risked political fallout from commuting his sentence months before the election. That decision, furthermore, was careful and premeditated and timed. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that going easy on Stone might be part of a conspiracy to defraud the American people that has never actually ended. In this context, what “commutation” means is the covering up of the cover up of a crime.

It’s hard to say what the impact will be politically. It might be just one more insult to add to the pile of reasons to vote Trump out of office. It might be grounds for a second impeachment (though I doubt it). It might be license for the appointment of a new special counsel after the election.

What’s more certain, I think, is that Trump just took all the gas out of efforts to foment (at least the appearance of) a white backlash against Black Lives Matter and protests demanding justice for the murder of George Floyd. Trump himself often calls for “law and order” as if he were candidate Richard Nixon in the late 1960s. Most of his GOP confederates are following suit, accusing activists who are tearing down statues to confederate traitors of being “violent” and “lawless.” All of that is hard to square with a president who flouts conspicuously not only the consequences of the law (Stone’s jury-trial conviction) but the rule of law itself.

In a way, Trump has always been telling us the truth. He has often said his greatest fear is being seen as an illegitimate president. Well, there’s a good reason for that.

He is.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

—————-

Released: 13 July 2020

Word Count: 872

—————-

If you still follow the mainstream media, you’re probably part of the 38% of registered voters who knew something about the op-ed Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) published in the New York Times early in June, exhorting the president to use the Insurrection Act to “restore order to our streets.” This was in response to what he called “anarchy” but others saw as peaceful Black Lives Matter protests. And yet that op-ed was actually less incendiary than an earlier tweet of Cotton’s demanding “no quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters” or his Fox News call to send the 101st Airborne onto the streets of America.

Well!

Anger at the decision to run that op-ed exploded at the Times. While there are certainly grounds for umbrage over giving Cotton’s screed such blue-chip journalistic real estate, the take-away for me was that a senator and military veteran who had sworn to uphold the Constitution in both capacities was demanding that soldiers patrol American streets in that protest moment. I shouldn’t have been surprised, I suppose. Cotton doesn’t seem to have met a fight he doesn’t relish. Still, it got me thinking about what difference, if any, veterans make in Congress when it comes to whether (and how) the U.S. military is sent into battle.

The answer matters now, as many veterans will be on the ballot in November, including the challenger to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. And veterans, we were told, are just what the doctor ordered. Back in 2018, in a Baltimore Sun op-ed promoting the idea of veterans running for Congress, retired four-star Army General Wesley Clark wrote that, because veterans “know the same sense of duty, commitment to results, and the integrity and discipline they have been trained to live by,” they are “uniquely well-positioned to fix” a broken Washington.

High on the list of brokens is American war-making, so I’d like to think that veteran-legislators, when in a position to do something about it, would use those qualities Clark extols to push Congress — and the White House — toward a less belligerent foreign policy. Veterans bring with them the authority of having been there. They know what it means to live with the consequences of congressional actions. They know the costs of war, especially the senseless wars of this century. And, increasingly, they’re fed up. Yet Congress, including its veteran-members, has allowed the U.S. military to stay mired in those conflicts, which continue largely off-stage as if propelled by some mysterious force everyone is powerless to stop.

What, then, has been the actual influence of the veterans now in Congress on this country’s war policy? For the twenty-first century, remarkably enough, the simple answer is: not much. It hasn’t always been this way, though, and could change again. Predicting history in the making is a fool’s errand.

The veteran effect For much of our history, a stint in the military, preferably as an officer, was a useful, even necessary, starting point for a political career. Mitch McConnell, for instance, has acknowledged that he joined the Army Reserve early in his career because “it was smart politically.” (He lasted five weeks before being discharged for an eye condition and possibly thanks to political pull.)

In the military, young men, and more recently young women, practiced leadership skills, engaged in public service, made common cause with people of different backgrounds, and burnished their patriotic résumés, all of which was assumed to prepare them well for political life. That’s changed in recent years as the number of veterans in Congress has fallen significantly, but a change back may be coming as increasing numbers of Americans who fought the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan run for office, while the opinions of veterans more generally have taken a distinctly negative turn on America’s forever wars.

While voters don’t elect veterans just because they’re veterans, polls consistently find that the public has more confidence in the military than in any other American institution. Not everyone who’s been in that military thinks the same way, of course, and veteran status is but one determinant in a politician’s point of view. But a military usually has a powerful influence on its members, shaping their political, social, and decision-making attitudes and their ideas about the use of force as a means of achieving foreign-policy goals. Or so argue political scientists Peter Feaver and Christopher Gelpi who, in their influential book Choosing Your Battles, examined the impact of military experience on this country’s use of force abroad between 1816 and 1992, finding that it made a difference, sometimes a profound one. They concluded that the greater the proportion of veterans in the federal legislative and executive branches — what they termed “the policymaking elite” — the less likely the United States was to initiate wars of aggression. This “veteran effect,” however, was anything but straightforward. While civilian elites were more likely to go to war for ideological, imperial, or moral imperatives, military elites leaned more toward pragmatism and a clearer examination of the situation on the ground as reasons for sending the military into battle.

Both groups, however, were convinced that force works and that the United States goes to war only when provoked (never by being provocative). Moreover, the authors found that, once a war started, the more veterans in leadership roles, the bloodier and longer the use of force, while civilian elites were more willing to place constraints on how the military was used. No surprise there: no military likes civilians telling it how to fight “its” wars, a tension that has appeared in the conflicts launched or supported by every recent administration.

Bear with me now because the research only gets more intriguing. An international study demonstrated that, as the number of women in a national legislature increases, countries are more likely to intervene militarily for humanitarian reasons, but not for other ones. Research also has confirmed that American presidents raised in the South have been twice as likely as other presidents to use force in international conflicts, were less likely to back down militarily, and were more likely to win.

These days, the American public apparently doesn’t care much about veterans in the White House. Not counting George W. Bush’s questionable turn in the Texas National Guard, the last executive who did active military service was Vice President Al Gore. The last two presidential candidates who were veterans — John Kerry and John McCain — lost to civilians and, of the four veterans who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination this year, only Pete Buttigieg got any traction through referring to his military experience (often). For the record, Joe Biden, whose two sons enlisted, avoided the draft via student deferments and asthma, while Donald Trump, who appointed more recent active-duty military officers to senior policy positions than at any time since World War II — before he fired most of them — side-stepped military service with the world’s most famous bone spurs.

Authorizing war While the president as commander-in-chief is empowered to determine how wars are conducted, the Constitution gives the power to declare war to Congress, which has made a formal declaration in only five wars throughout American history. At the end of the (never formally declared) Vietnam War, heated debate over the president’s role in deploying troops led to the passage of the War Powers Act of 1973. Theoretically, it restricts a president from launching a military excursion abroad without informing Congress and getting congressional consent within 60 days. In this century, however, presidents have easily skirted such limitations. (Examples: Barack Obama in his Libyan intervention, Donald Trump in his bombing of Syria.) Meanwhile, Congress itself has funded any number of congressionally undeclared wars since 1973.

In this century, with that all-important power to fund wars, Congress has acted lavishly indeed. The current Pentagon budget, at almost $730 billion, is about 13 times the State Department’s, an indication of what’s truly central (and not) to U.S. foreign policy. Such budgets are authorized by the Armed Services Committees of both houses of Congress. At the moment, veterans make more than half of the Senate’s committee and more than one-third of the House’s.

Still, it’s tricky to judge the role and effect of the post-9/11 crop of veteran-legislators when it comes to influencing American war-making policies, since there are so relatively few of them. Their number has been in decline since the early 1970s, when nearly three-quarters of congressional representatives had been in the military, usually in combat. Now, that number is 17%: 17 veterans in the Senate (excluding five-week McConnell) and 75 in the House (including the nonvoting delegate from the Northern Mariana Islands). They come from 39 states, about two-thirds of them are Republicans, nearly all are white, most were officers, seven are women, and fewer than half were in combat. Small as their percentage may be, it’s still about twice that of veterans in the general population.

In a phone interview last month, Dan Caldwell, former executive director of Concerned Veterans for America, a Koch-affiliated advocacy group, maintained that, while military service informs politicians’ views of war, it’s not a good indicator of their stance on foreign policy. I’ve thought that a better test might be voting patterns on authorizing war — if only such votes existed in recent years. Unfortunately, they’ve been rare indeed.

On September 18, 2001, Congress overwhelmingly approved an authorization for the use of military force, or AUMF, against those the president might determine responsible for the 9/11 attacks, which turned out to mean an invasion of, and never-ending war in, Afghanistan. (Never mind that most of the hijackers who carried out the attacks that day were Saudis.) Everyone in Congress voted for that AUMF except the prescient Representative Barbara Lee (D-CA), who had never served in the military and was concerned that the resolution would offer a blank check for limitless war, just as it proved to do.

The vote in October 2002 for a second AUMF, this one functionally preparing the way for George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq the following spring, was at least modestly more controversial, passing the Senate by a vote of 77 to 23. Of the 38 then-senators who were veterans, 31 supported it. According to the Congressional Research Service, those two authorizations have been invoked ever since to cover at least 41 military actions across significant parts of the Greater Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere. The United States military has not won a sustained peace, nor achieved any of its long-term goals, through a single one of those conflicts.

Tracking congressional action on AUMFs, troop levels, arms sales, and escalating tensions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Niger, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and other countries in Africa and elsewhere requires a finely tuned political GPS, which Congress has hardly had in these years. (Remember when members of the Senate were stunned to discover that this country even had troops in Niger after four of them died in a clash with a terror group there?) In the Trump years, Congress has seemed to grow more active on the subject of America’s global conflicts mainly when annoyed at being openly and insultingly bypassed or slighted. For example, when the administration glossed over the murder of Saudi journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 or when it didn’t alert Congress before the president ordered the assassination of Iranian Major General Qassem Suleimani in a drone strike early this year.

In April 2019, in a rare bipartisan rebuke to President Trump, both houses of Congress invoked the War Powers Act to end U.S. support for the Saudi military and involvement in the ongoing war in Yemen. The president, however, vetoed the resolution and a Republican-controlled Senate failed to override him. As it turned out, none of that really mattered since Secretary of State Mike Pompeo used an emergency provision in the Arms Export Control Act to allow American companies to sell $8.1 billion in arms primarily to Saudi Arabia for use in Yemen. According to the New York Times, Congress has never successfully blocked an arms sale, but that didn’t keep it from trying again that July, sometimes with veteran-members like Ted Lieu (D-CA) in the lead. That resolution was vetoed, too. Steve Linick, until May the Inspector General at the State Department, was said to be investigating that huge arms sale when Trump fired him, reportedly at Pompeo’s urging.

Strange bedfellows On these and other issues of war, nearly all the veterans in Congress simply voted with their party. Yet, in the future, questions of how long to continue this country’s never-ending wars have the potential to forge unexpected alliances among them. That could be true even if they arrive at the same position for different reasons, as I discovered in conversations with some independent-minded veterans.

For instance, Warren Davidson, a West Point graduate, former Army Ranger, and the congressman from a solidly Republican district in Ohio, is one of the few veterans who, contrary to his party, voted consistently in 2019 to end U.S. association with the war in Yemen. He also took a stand this year against a future war with Iran. To understand his reasoning, you need to look at his personal history. He retired from the Army in 2000, in part, he told me, because the lack of a coherent strategy in Kosovo, along with Congress’s refusal to vote on U.S. involvement there, seemed all wrong to him. He cited costly and, to his mind, unnecessary projects, while the troops sent to fight that incursion went in ill-prepared. “I was like, can’t we just focus on what the military exists for? Which is fighting wars.”

Almost two decades later, a war he’s definitely done supporting is the one that started with the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and continues without, as far as he’s concerned, either resolution or a strategy to end it. “I don’t know if we’re going to eventually vote on Afghani statehood,” he jokes to me, before turning serious and adding, “If we’re not going to leave, what are we still doing there?”

I talked as well to Will Goodwin, director of government relations at VoteVets, a political action committee for progressive veteran-candidates who believes that “there’s near universal agreement that the executive branch has far exceeded the intent of the 2002 AUMF.” Yet, to our shared frustration, nothing changes. Last year, VoteVets and Concerned Veterans for America joined in a startling alliance across the right-left divide in veteran politics to push for a rethinking of Washington’s foreign and military policies, beginning with the removal of all U.S. troops from Afghanistan and Syria. Echoing the findings of scholars Feaver and Gelpi, Concerned Vets argues on its website for a new realism and restraint in deploying American military power globally and concludes: “As the greatest nation in the world, America shouldn’t fight endless wars.”

Goodwin and Caldwell each cite a recent Concerned Vets national poll that found 57% of veterans believe this country should be less militarily engaged in conflicts around the world. For a while now, majorities of them have felt that neither the Afghan nor Iraq wars were worth fighting. Among such vets, “interventionist” and “restrained” may be replacing “hawk” and “dove” as the terms du jour, but Caldwell agrees when I suggest that Congress — including many of its veteran-members — is now generally out-hawking the U.S. military. Think of it as the veteran conundrum.

While a voting record tells us something, it can be a reductive way of assessing a politician’s thinking. It doesn’t allow for the long (or, in the case of America’s wars, even longer) game. Much of the reluctance of veteran-politicians to buck their parties on war-making arises from the increasingly divisive partisan politics of this country. Republican politicians, in particular, may fear that an antiwar vote could come back to haunt them and representatives in both parties have loyalties to military contractors who support their campaigns or do business in their districts.

For all that, it’s hard not to add lack of courage to the mix — not exactly the greatest compliment you can pay a military veteran. Coming to terms with the role of war in foreign policy requires serious and sustained attention to a subject many politicians and voters have shown themselves eager to ignore for years now. The reasons for the current state of perpetual war are complex, but they’re not inexplicable. If veteran-legislators were to use their capacity for leadership, Congress could take on its true constitutional responsibility as the custodian of war — and peace — and life in this country could change accordingly.

Nan Levinson’s most recent book is War Is Not a Game: The New Antiwar Soldiers and the Movement They Built. She teaches journalism and fiction writing at Tufts University. This article originated at TomDispatch.com

Copyright ©2020 Nan Levinson — distributed by Agence Global

—————-

Released: 13 July 2020

Word Count: 2,759

—————-

Newt Gingrich is usually, and rightly, blamed for destroying American politics, even more than Donald Trump. The former House Speaker didn’t go to Washington in the 1970s to strike deals. He went there to wage soft civil war against the United States.

But if there’s a close second to the title of America’s Worst Person, it probably goes to someone you never heard of. He’s not a politician. He’s not a pundit or bureaucrat. When it comes to influencing the GOP’s attitude toward taxing, spending and budgets, however, it would be hard to find someone more influential than Grover Norquist.

Norquist is the head of Americans for Tax Reform. The name is a misnomer. It doesn’t want to “reform” taxes so much as get rid of taxes on the very, very rich. Norquist is probably most famous for saying, in 2001, that he doesn’t want to abolish government per se. “I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can … drown it in the bathtub.”

While Gingrich was on the front lines of the soft civil war, armed with lies, slander and disinformation as his weapons of choice, Norquist was in the backrooms, pulling strings, pressing Republicans to pledge to never ever — never ever ever — raise taxes or be punished. The last Republican to raise taxes for the purpose of balancing responsibly the federal budget was George H.W. Bush, the last one-term president.

At some point, it’s hard to say when, Gingrich’s focus on language and Norquist’s focus on policy merged so that the Republicans always sounded like they were being responsible when calling for balanced budgets, but they were in fact being reckless. Why? Responsible budgets consider expenses as well as revenues. You can’t just ignore one if you’re being serious or responsible. Thanks to pressure from Norquist, however, the Republicans pretended revenues didn’t exist. And, alas, the Democratic Party usually went along. The result has been that for years most debates over budgets turned on the question of how much to starve a government of, by and for the people.

To be sure, this pretending was collective. Norquist’s group doesn’t care about the size of government. What it cares about is shoving the tax burden off the shoulders of the very, very rich while at the same time enriching the rich with lucrative contracts. If that means huge deficits, so be it. Similarly, the Republicans don’t care about deficits when Republicans are president. (Yes, Ronald Reagan raised taxes but he left office with the books well in the red.) Deficits only matter when Democrats are in charge.

All of this was clear to anyone paying close attention. Even so, Norquist in particular had plausible deniability on his side. Though budgets were swollen to bursting on account of irresponsible Republican attitudes, he and others could always say, well, we’re spending too much on wasteful expenditures. If we didn’t spend so much of what people don’t need — or on what people have grown dependent on — budgets and the government would be smaller and better. Plausible deniability meant his group always seemed to be at least somewhat principled, even to people paying close attention.

It seems to me the age of plausible deniability is over. Americans for Tax Reform, which was at the center the tea party movement that took over the Republican Party, applied for and received a Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan as part of an effort to stimulate the economy as it reels from the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The guy who wanted to drown the government in a bathtub cried for help while drowning.

You could say, well, that’s OK. Everyone’s facing hard times. But everyone faced hard times during the financial panic of 2007-2008, too. Indeed, Barack Obama, after winning reelection, wanted George W. Bush-era tax cuts on the rich to expire in order to fund a multi-billion dollar jobs program. After 2012, when the GOP lost seats in the Senate, some Republicans felt pressure to play along — until Norquist stepped in. “We’ve got some people,” he said, “discussing impure thoughts on national television.”

The jobs program was shelved, almost certainly prolonging the Great Recession. Yet amid another historic crisis, here we see Grover Norquist of all people with his hand out. It’s not a lot, just $350,000 in forgivable loans. It’s the principle of the thing in that there are not and never have been any principles guiding the fiscal conservative project. Only the idea that government is for the very, very rich, not of, by and for the people.

Norquist isn’t alone, of course. The Republicans were so hostile toward Obama’s economic agenda that they brought the country to the brink of insolvency by refusing to lift the debt limit. And yet Republican members of Congress and the president’s family business got access this month to $660 billion in forgivable PPP money, as did 90,000 well-connected businesses that promised to save zero jobs in the bargain.

Sabotage was good politics when Obama was in charge. With Trump, it’s belly up to the trough. This should matter to white swing voters after the election. The Republicans will try re-upping the con. They will say they fight for them. They don’t. They are waging soft civil war. While that was never obvious, it should be clear now.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

—————-

Released: 10 July 2020

Word Count: 883

—————-

We all of us owe a great debt to Alexander Vindman. The former official at the White House National Security Council told the country that Donald Trump had asked the president of Ukraine for help in winning the 2020 presidential election, indeed, extorted him into a criminal conspiracy to defraud the American people. But more than that, he exposed what might have been the biggest lie of them all — that it wasn’t the Russians who attacked our sovereignty, it was the Ukrainians; and that it wasn’t Trump’s campaign that conspired with foreign saboteurs; it was Hillary Clinton’s.

That last bit was the “false narrative” that finally compelled the former Army colonel, who announced his retirement Wednesday, to testify before the US Congress during House impeachment hearings. He came forward because Trump contravened virtually everything the American intelligence community had concluded about the Kremlin’s “active measures,” conclusions that were enshrined by a Senate panel in a bipartisan report released months after his testimony. While on the phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Vindman caught Trump in the act of fabricating a monstrous lie, an effort to cast himself as the original victim of a witch hunt and ultimate hero in his vindication. It was a monumental effort to erase history.

It might have worked, too, if not for Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman. His patriotism, however, has been costly. According to his attorney, the president led a campaign of “bullying, intimidation, and retaliation” in a bid to force Vindman to choose “between adhering to the law or pleasing a president, between honoring his oath or protecting his career.” His attorney added: “LTC Vindman’s patriotism has cost him his career.”

In other words, he got canceled.

Cancel culture — no quotes — is real. Our history is larded with examples of people attempting to speak truth to power only later to get stomped. Out-groups fighting their way into the American franchise have used the blessings of citizenship — free speech, free assembly, free press, and so on — to argue for greater justice and greater equality. Those arguments were typically yoked to a set of values, such as loyalty and patriotism. It worked sometimes, more often it didn’t, and when it didn’t, it was because people in power found ways of using those same blessings against them.

Vindman is no social reformer, far from it, but he now has a place in the unofficial hall of American heroes driven by conscience to speak out when no one else had the guts to speak out. Yet Vindman is only a recent example. There are, right now, unsung heroes at work in this country speaking out against police officers breaking the law, administrators bending the rules, and corrupt officials seeking to hold power but escape accountability. And most of the time, these unsung heroes remain unsung.

They get canceled. They lose their jobs, they lose their reputations, or worse. You’d think critics of cancel culture, such as the scores of distinguished signatories of a recent letter condemning it, published by Harper’s magazine, would be all over cases like these. You’d be wrong, though. They are not attuned, as they might otherwise be, to the asymmetries of power, asymmetries of risk, characterizing true cancel culture.

Why? Probably because they have a lot of power. All of them are well-known, well-connected, influential. Many were born into affluence. All have places waiting for them in the highest platforms available. And like human beings do when they grow accustomed to the privileges of power, they feel threatened, often quite easily, and when they do, accuse critics of doing things they themselves are doing. Like in-groups have done to out-groups for the entirety of American history, they are gaslighting.

They accuse critics of being intolerant of liberal values like free speech, but what they refuse to recognize, probably due to their station in life, is that their critics are putting liberal values into action. Counter-speech, in other words, is free speech. This is the most important, and mostly unnoticed, aspect of the Harper’s letter. Signatories claim that they are standing against bullying, shaming and authoritarianism, and to a certain extent, I take them at their word. But what they are also doing, consciously or not, is standing against free speech itself, and in standing against free speech, they are in fact bullying, shaming and enabling authoritarianism. This is textbook gaslighting.

Alexander Vindman wasn’t gaslighting. He was gaslighted, though. He was loyal to the United States, the Constitution and the flag. For that, he was called disloyal. He was a true patriot. For that, he was called a traitor. He was hounded out of the White House, denied a deserved promotion, and driven out of a United States Army he dedicated his life to. When we talk about cancel culture, this is what we should be talking about.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

—————-

Released: 09 July 2020

Word Count: 804

—————-

It was June 20th and we antiwar vets had traveled all the way to Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the midst of a pandemic to protest President Trump’s latest folly, an election 2020 rally where he was to parade his goods and pretend all was well with this country.

We never planned to go inside the cavernous arena where that rally was to be held. I was part of our impromptu reconnaissance team that called an audible at the last moment. We suddenly decided to infiltrate not just the perimeter of that Tulsa rally, but the BOK Center itself. That meant I got a long, close look at the MAGA crowd there in what turned out to be a more than half-empty arena.

Our boots-on-the-ground coalition of two national antiwar veteran organizations — About Face and Veterans for Peace (VFP) — had thrown together a rather risky direct action event in coordination with the local activists who invited us.

We planned to climb the three main flagpoles around that center and replace an Old Glory, an Oklahoma state flag, and a Tulsa one with Black Lives-themed banners. Only on arrival, we found ourselves stymied by an eleventh-hour change in the security picture: new gates and unexpected police deployments. Hopping metal barriers and penetrating a sizable line of cops and National Guardsmen seemed to ensure a fruitless trip to jail, so into the under-attended indoor rally we went, to — successfully it turned out — find a backdoor route to those flagpoles.

Once inside, we had time to kill. While others in the group infiltrated and the flagpole climbers donned their gear, five of us — three white male ex-foot soldiers in America’s forever wars and two Native American women (one a vet herself) — took a breather in the largely empty upper deck of the rally. Nervous joking then ensued about the absurdity of wearing the Trump “camouflage” that had eased our entrance. My favorite disguise: a Hispanic ex-Marine buddy’s red-white-and-blue “BBQ, Beer, Freedom” tank top.

The music irked me instantly. Much to the concern of the rest of the team, I’d brought a notebook along and was already furtively scribbling. At one point, we listened sequentially to Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean,” The Beatles’ “Let It Be,” and Queen’s “We Are The Champions” over the arena’s loudspeakers. I couldn’t help but wonder how that black man of, let’s say, complicated sexual orientation, four outspoken British hippies, and a gay AIDs victim (Freddie Mercury) would feel about the way the Trump campaign had their songs. We can guess though, since the late Tom Petty’s family quickly denounced the use of his rock song “I Won’t Back Down” at the rally.

I watched an older white woman in a “Joe Biden Sucks, Nancy Pelosi Swallows” T-shirt gleefully dancing to Michael Jackson’s falsetto (“But the kid is not my son!”). Given that “Billie Jean” blatantly describes an out-of-wedlock paternity battle and that odds were this woman was a pro-life proponent of “family values,” there was something obscene about her carefree shimmy.

A contrast in patriotism And then, of course, there was the version of patriotism on display in the arena. I’ve never seen so many representations of the Stars and Stripes in my life, classic flags everywhere and flag designs plastered on all manner of attire. Remember, I went to West Point. No one showed the slightest concern that many of the red-white-and-blue adaptations worn or waved strictly violated the statutes colloquially known as the U.S. Flag Code (United States Code, Title 4, Chapter 1).

That said, going undercover in Trumplandia means entering a universe in which it’s exceedingly clear that one political faction holds the flag hostage. They see it as theirs — and only theirs. They define its meaning, its symbolism, and its proper use, not to speak of whom it represents. The crowd, after all, was vanilla. (There were more people of color serving beers than cheering the president.)

By a rough estimate, half of the attendees had some version of the flag on their clothing, Trump banners, or other accessories, signaling more than mere national pride. Frequently sharing space with Old Glory were images of (often military-grade) weaponry, skulls (one wearing an orange toupee), and anti-liberal slogans. Notable shirts included: the old Texas War of Independence challenge “Come And Take It!” above the sort of AK-47 assault rifle long favored by America’s enemies; a riff on a classic Nixonian line, “The Silent Majority Is Coming”; and the slanderous “Go To Your Safe Space, Snowflake!”; not to mention a sprinkling of the purely conspiratorial like “Alex Jones Did Nothing Wrong” (with a small flag design on it, too).

The banners were even more aggressive. “Trump 2020: Fuck Your Feelings” was a fan favorite. Another popular one photo-shopped The Donald’s puffy face onto Sylvester Stallone’s muscle-bound physique, a machine gun at his hip. That image, of course, had been lifted from the Reagan-era, pro-Vietnam War film Rambo: First Blood Part II, a fitting accompaniment to Trump’s classically plagiarized Reaganesque rallying cry “Make America Great Again.” Finally, a black banner with pink lettering read “L G B T.” Above the letters, also in pink, were logos depicting, respectively, the Statue of Liberty, a Gun (an M16 assault rifle), a Beer mug, and a profile bust of Donald Trump. Get it?

For our small group of multi-war/multi-tour combat veterans, it was hard not to wonder whether many of these flag-and-weaponry enthusiasts had ever seen a shot fired in anger or sported Old Glory on a right-shoulder uniform sleeve. Though we were all wearing standard black veteran ball-caps and overtly Trump-friendly shirts, several of us interlopers feared the crowd might somehow guess what we actually were. Yet tellingly, the closest we came to outing ourselves — before later pulling off our disguises to expose black “About Face: Veterans Against The War” shirts — was during the national anthem.

Nothing better exemplified the contrast between what I’ve come to think of as the “pageantry patriotism” of the crowd and the more complex “participatory patriotism” of the dissenting vets than that moment. At its first notes — we were still waiting in the arena’s encircling lobby — our whole team reflexively stood at attention, removed our hats, faced the nearest draped flags, and placed our hands upon our hearts. We were the only ones who did so — until, at mid-anthem, a few embarrassed passersby followed our example. Most of the folks, however, just continued to scamper along, often chomping on soft pretzels, and sometimes casting quizzical glances at us. Trumpian patriotism only goes so far.

Our crew was, in fact, rather diverse, but mostly such vets groups remain disproportionately white and male. In fact, one reason local black and native communities undoubtedly requested our attendance was a vague (and not unreasonable) assumption that maleness, whiteness, and veteran’s status might offer their protests some semblance of protection. Nevertheless, my old boss on West Point’s faculty, retired Colonel Gregory Daddis, summed up the limits of such protection in this phrase: “Patriotic” Veterans Only, Please. And just how accurate that was became violently apparent the moment we “unmasked” at the base of those flagpoles.

Approximately three-dozen combat tours braved between us surely didn’t save our nonviolent team from the instant, distinctly physical rancor of the police — or four members of our group from arrest as the climbers shimmied those flagpoles. Nor did deliberately visible veteran’s gear offer any salvation from the instantly jeering crowd, as the rest of us were being escorted to the nearest exit and tossed out. “Antifa!” one man yelled directly into a Marine vet’s face. Truthfully, America’s “thanks for your service” hyper-adulation culture has never been more than the thinnest of veneers. However much we veterans reputedly fought for “our freedom,” that freedom and the respect for the First Amendment rights of antiwar, anti-Trump vets that should go with it evaporates with remarkable speed in such situations.

Three strands of veteran or military dissent Still, the intensity of the MAGA crowd’s vitriol — as suggested by the recent hate mail both About Face and I have received — is partly driven by a suspicion that Team Trump is losing the military’s loyalty. In fact, there’s evidence that something is indeed astir in both the soldier and veteran communities the likes of which this country hasn’t seen since the tail end of the Vietnam War, almost half a century ago. Today’s rising doubt and opposition has three main components: retired senior officers, younger combat veterans, and — most disturbingly for national-security elites — rank-and-file serving soldiers and National Guardsmen.

The first crew, those senior officers, have received just about the only media attention, even though they may, in the end, prove the least important of the three. Many of the 89 former defense officials who expressed “alarm” in a Washington Post op-ed over the president’s response to the nationwide George Floyd protests, as well as other retired senior military officers who decried President Trump’s martial threats at the time, had widespread name recognition. They included former Secretary of Defense and retired Marine Corps General Jim (“Mad Dog”) Mattis and that perennial latecomer, former Secretary of State and Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell. And yes, it’s remarkable that such a who’s-who of former military leaders has spoken as if with one voice against Trump’s abhorrent and inflammatory recent behavior.

Still, a little caution is in order before canonizing a crew that, lest we forget, has neither won nor opposed a generation’s worth of unethical wars that shouldn’t have been fought. Recall, for example, that Saint Mattis resigned his post not over his department’s complicity in the borderline genocide underway in Yemen or pointlessly escalatory drone strikes in Somalia, but in response to a mere presidential suggestion of pulling U.S. troops out of the quicksand of the Syrian conflict.

In fact, for all their chatter about the Constitution, oaths betrayed, and citizen rights violated, anti-Trumpism ultimately glues this star-studded crew together. If Joe Biden ever takes the helm, expect these former flag officers to go mute on this country’s forever wars waged in Baghdad and Baltimore alike.

More significant and unique is the recent wave of defiance from normally conservative low- to mid-level combat veterans, most, though not all, a generation junior to the attention-grabbing ex-Pentagon brass and suits. There were early signs of a shift among those post-9/11 boots-on-the-ground types. In the last year, credible polls showed that two-thirds of veterans believed the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria “were not worth fighting,” and 73% supported full withdrawal from the Afghan War in particular. Notably, such rates of antiwar sentiment exceed those of civilians, something for which there may be no precedent.

Furthermore, just before the president’s controversial West Point graduation speech, more than 1,000 military academy alumni signed an open letter addressed to the matriculating class and blatantly critical of Trump’s urge to militarily crack down on the Black Lives Matter protests. Mainly ex-captains and colonels who spanned graduating classes from 1948 to 2019, they briefly grabbed mainstream headlines with their missive. Robin Wright of the New Yorker even interviewed and quoted a few outspoken signatories (myself included). Then there was the powerful visual statement of Marine Corps veteran Todd Winn, twice wounded in Iraq, who stood for hours outside the Utah state capitol in the sweltering heat in full dress uniform with the message “I Can’t Breathe” taped over his mouth.

At the left end of the veterans’ community, the traditional heart of antiwar military dissent, the ranks of the organizations I belong to and with whom I “deployed” to Tulsa have also swelled. Both in that joint operation and in the recent joint Veterans for Peace (largely Vietnam alumni) and About Face decision to launch a “Stand Down for Black Lives” campaign — encouraging and supporting serving soldiers and guardsmen to refuse mobilization orders — the two groups have taken real steps toward encouraging multi-generational opposition to systemic militarism. In fact, more than 700 vets publicly signed their names (as I did) to About Face’s provocative open letter urging just such a refusal. There were even ex-service members among the far greater mass of unaffiliated veterans who joined protesters in the streets of this country’s cities and towns in significant numbers during that month or more of demonstrations.

Which brings us to the final (most fear-inducing) strand of such dissent: those in the serving military itself. Their numbers are, of course, impossible to measure, since such resistance can range from the passive to the overt and the Pentagon is loathe to publicize the slightest hint of its existence. However, About Face quickly received scores of calls from concerned soldiers and Guardsmen, while VFP reported the first mobilization refusals almost immediately. At a minimum, 10 service members are known to have taken “concrete steps” to avoid deployment to the protests and, according to a New York magazine investigation, some troops were “reconsidering their service,” or “ready to quit.”

Finally, there’s my own correspondence. Over the years, I’ve received notes from distraught service members with some regularity. However, in the month-plus since George Floyd’s death, I’ve gotten nearly 100 such messages from serving strangers — as well as from several former West Point students turned lieutenants — more, that is, than in the preceding four years. Last month, one of those former cadets of mine became the first West Point graduate in the last 15 years to be granted conscientious objector status. He will complete his service obligation as a noncombatant in the Medical Service Corps. Within 36 hours of that news spreading, a handful of other former students expressed interest in his case and wondered if I could put them in touch with him.

Intersectional vets In a moment of crankiness this January, using a bullhorn pointed at the University of Kansas campus, I decried the pathetic student turnout at a post-Qasem Soleimani assassination rally against a possible war with Iran. And it still remains an open question whether the array of activist groups that About Face and Veterans for Peace have so recently stood in solidarity with will show up for our future antiwar endeavors.

Still, the growth across generations of today’s antiwar veterans’ movement has, I suspect, value in itself — and part of that value lies in our recognition that the problem of American militarism isn’t restricted to the combat zones of this country’s forever wars. By standing up for Black lives, pitching tents at Standing Rock Reservation to fight a community-threatening pipeline, and similar solidarity actions, this generation of antiwar veterans is beginning to set itself apart in its opposition to America’s wars abroad and at home.

As both the Covid-19 crisis and the militarization of the police in the streets of American cities have made clear, the imperial power that we veterans fought for abroad is the same one some of us are now struggling against at home and the two couldn’t be more intimately linked. Our struggle is, at least in part, over who gets to define patriotism.

Should the sudden wave of military and veteran dissent keep rising, it will invariably crash against the pageantry patriots of Chickenhawk America who attended that Tulsa rally and we’ll all face a new and critical theater in this nation’s culture wars. I don’t pretend to know whether such protests will last or military dissent will augur real change of any sort. What I do know is what my favorite rock star, Bruce Springsteen, used to repeat before live renditions of his song “Born to Run”: Remember, in the end nobody wins, unless everybody wins.

Danny Sjursen writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is a retired U.S. Army major and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now lives in Lawrence, Kansas. He has written a memoir of the Iraq War, Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. His latest book, Patriotic Dissent: America in the Age of Endless War, will be published in September. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet and check out his podcast “Fortress on a Hill.”

Copyright ©2020 Danny Sjursen — distributed by Agence Global

—————-

Released: 09 July 2020

Word Count: 2,586

—————-

Brian Kilmeade is co-host of “Fox & Friends,” the president’s favorite weekday morning show. Kilmeade is, well — he’s not that bright. To be sure, he’s very good at advancing the party line. Sometimes, though, he gets mixed up. This morning, he tried saying something bad about the Democrats but ended up saying something bad about the Republicans, and in the process, intimating accidentally the truth about the GOP:

Historically, it was the Democratic Party [that was] the party of the [Ku Klux Klan]. It was the Republican Party [that was] the party of Frederick Douglass as well as Abraham Lincoln. So somehow, I guess in the 60s, things all reversed.

All things did indeed reverse more than half a century ago. The Democratic Party’s ruling coalition, which had prevailed since the 1930s, shattered under the weight of the backlash against the Vietnam War and the passing of the Civil and Voting Rights Acts. At the same time, the Republican Party, seeing a power vacuum, traded white liberal conservatives (which was the majority of New England) and Black Republicans for southern segregationists. It has been waging variations of soft civil war ever since.

That wasn’t Kilmeade’s goal. His goal — or that of his newswriters — was influencing the opinion of Republican voters uncomfortable with the president’s overt racism but still desiring to support a Republican. The goal is portraying the Democrats, and by extension Joe Biden, as being just as racist as Donald Trump, or more racist, so that white people who do not want to vote for a racist will feel OK voting for a racist.

This now appears to be acceptable discourse on Fox, which we should take to be indicative of respectable opinion among Republicans. It is a major shift from decades past. It is also a consequence of pragmatic need. Trump, when a candidate, didn’t bother coding the rhetoric of white supremacy the way Republicans had since Richard Nixon courted segregationists successfully in the late 1960s. As long as racism was covert, partisans had plausible deniability on their side. They could talk about what they wanted to. With it now being overt, partisans are forced to find ways to take the offensive. The result is malicious nihilism. Fine, the GOP partisans now say, Trump is a racist. The Democrats are just as bad, though. May as well vote for the Republican.

That Republicans coded white supremacy was itself a concession to gains made by the civil rights movement. To paraphrase Lee Atwater, overt racism used to be a winner, but after the late 1960s, it backfired. Republican rhetoric, therefore, grew more and more abstract, so that “forced busing” became “welfare queens” and became “tax cuts” over time, so that white racists heard one thing while white voters who did not want to support racists heard something else entirely, but both ended up voting Republican. This compromise is sometimes called “racial liberalism” in that the Republican Party played with terms established by someone else, not them, and so that racist politics operated subliminally.

As long as racism was hidden from view — that is to say, from white people who did not want knowingly to support racism — it was all good.

Nils Gilman is correct in saying racial liberalism collapsed in 2016. I’d argue that something related should have collapsed with it, but didn’t: anti-“political correctness” and its various offshoots, including the latest trend, “cancel culture.” It didn’t collapse because legions of people, perhaps half the pundit corps, are invested in exposing liberals and social reformers as hypocrites or worse.

These anti-PC critics say that racism and other forms of sadism can’t possibly be as bad as liberals and social reformers say they are, because racism is longer as bad as it was before 1968. And the reason it’s no longer as bad as it was is because they can’t see it. And because it is no longer as bad as it was, liberals and social reformers must have malign motivations, motivations perhaps on par with authoritarians of the past.

When anti-PC critics look at college students of color who are demanding progress on campus, they don’t see agents of change, they see authoritarians of the kind that led to racial liberalism’s collapse.

They are wrong. What’s more, they are dangerous. The scores of anti-PC critics who signed an open letter published Tuesday by Harper’s, which condemns “cancel culture,” are, consciously or not, aiding and abetting authoritarian energies they say they stand against.

White supremacy is no longer coded. The president is campaigning as a full-on fascist. The evidence of institutional racism leading to the murder of Black men is undeniable. Yet these anti-PC critics are behaving as if Pandora’s box remains closed. In doing this, they are, in effect, doing what Brian Kilmeade and his Fox newswriters are doing: telling white people who do not want to vote for a racist that it’s OK to vote for a racist, because liberals and social reformers are just as bad as Donald Trump.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

—————-

Released: 08 July 2020

Word Count: 832

—————-

The pandemic keeps raging. The economy hasn’t recovered. The president has still done nothing to stop the Kremlin from putting a price on American heads. And white police officers continue to humiliate, harm and murder Black Americans. All of this, and surely more to come, is culminating in an anti-Donald Trump majority coalition.

For their part, the Republicans are in a pickle. They can’t talk about the economy. They can’t talk about what they’ve accomplished, because their accomplishments are forgotten or bad. The 2017 tax cuts are long gone. The recent $2 trillion bailout went to the rich and well-connected more than to normal people. They can talk about judges, sure, but that doesn’t have broad appeal. All they can do is stand by their man.

This state of Republican affairs is being portrayed almost universally as something unique to our time. It’s not. The modern Republican Party has always been the party of “special-interests,” meaning the very, very rich. To the party of the very, very rich, democracy has always been problematic. How do people representing a tiny fraction of the electorate build a majority big enough to win? The answer is familiar to anyone paying attention. They pour gasoline on the white flame of ancient race-hatreds.

That’s not the whole story, though. In a review over the weekend of Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson’s new book, Let Them Eat Tweets, which explicates the politics of the “conservative dilemma” noted above, Franklin Foer identified the key animus of the 1 percent: greed. “Never content with the last tax cut or the last burst of deregulation, American plutocrats keep pushing for more. With each success, their economic agenda becomes more radical and less salable. To compensate for its unpopularity, the Republicans must resort to ever greater doses of toxic emotionalism,” Foer wrote.

Greed, which never quits, combined with bigotry, which never quits, is usually a winning combination in American politics, especially when added to another plutocratic specialty: never-ending intellectual dishonesty and bad faith. Today’s Republicans may be forced to stand by their man, and they may suffer in November as a consequence, but they are hardly hamstrung. They’ll do what they have always done: foment conflict so attention is paid to words, not the persons, things and ideas that words represent. To top it off, a few self-serving liberals can be trusted to join them.

Consider “free speech.” There’s a cottage industry of partisans paid large sums to pay close attention to political activity on college campuses. The result of this investment has been the establishment of a conventional wisdom widely accepted even among university administrators who ought to know better: that free speech is in crisis.

Free speech is not in crisis. Not in the way that “First Amendment warriors” mean. What they mean is that some people, usually “conservative intellectuals,” are being “silenced” by “mobs” of “angry radicals” intolerant of “liberal values.” To be sure, some conservatives are “disinvited” from campus speaking engagements. Some have even seen “angry radicals” throw stuff at their cars. But they are not silenced. First of all, they complain non-stop about their poor treatment, and powerful people take their complaints very seriously. Second, these people have enormous followings on social media, lucrative book contracts or cushy gigs at Washington think tanks. Saying they’ve been “silenced” would be laughable if it were not also conventional wisdom.

There is, however, a real crisis of free speech. It’s the same crisis all out-groups have faced in the history of our country. College students, very often students of color, use their free speech to express views contrary to the interests of those with the power to establish the terms of debate. Put another way, young people of color are establishing new terms, and those invested in the old terms are reluctant to change. That’s fine. That’s what the marketplace of ideas is about. But partisans aren’t paid to let the marketplace work things out. They’re paid to accuse college students of suppressing speech, thus creating conditions in which student speech is effectively suppressed.

This in microcosm is what the Republican Party does in macrocosm — decontextualize, manipulate, distort and decouple words from the things they represent so that good-faith agents of progress can’t be heard on their own terms, so that they always sound more unhinged, revolutionary or even violent than they are, and are thus discredited. Making matters worse is that the Democratic Party has for decades defined its positions according to the Republican Party’s bad-faith arguments. The result has been one step toward greater justice and equality starting from two steps back.

That changed, happily, the moment Donald Trump traded in a dog whistle for a bull horn, to paraphrase Hacker and Pierson. The GOP’s racism, hence the racism of the very, very wealthy, is no longer coded. Joe Biden can’t pivot, but younger Democrats of color, such as Kamala Harris and Tammy Duckworth, can. They are now free to establish new terms of debate. When they talk about “defunding” the police, they don’t talk about it using emotional language disconnected from concrete experience. They talk about it for the purpose of stopping white cops from murdering Black men.

Greed, bigotry, bad faith — there are no limits.

Unless a majority can see them for they are.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

—————-

Released: 07 July 2020

Word Count: 880

—————-

Think of it as a war system that’s been coming home for years. The murder of George Floyd has finally shone a spotlight on the need to defund local police departments and find alternatives that provide more genuine safety and security. The same sort of spotlight needs soon to be shone on the American military machine and the wildly well-funded damage it’s been doing for almost 19 years across the Greater Middle East and Africa.

Distorted funding priorities aren’t the only driving force behind police violence against communities of color, but shifting such resources away from policing and to areas like jobs, education, housing, and restorative justice could be an important part of the solution. And any effort to boost spending on social programs should include massive cuts to the Pentagon’s bloated budget. In short, it’s time to defund our wars, both at home and abroad.

The high cost of police and prisons In most states and localities, spending on police and prisons outweighs what the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., once described as “programs of social uplift.” The numbers are staggering. In some jurisdictions, police alone can account for up to 40% of local budgets, leaving little room for other priorities. In New York City, for instance, funding the police department’s operations and compensation costs more than $10 billion yearly — more, that is, than the federal government spends on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nationwide, more than $100 billion annually goes into policing.

Now, add to that another figure: what it costs to hold roughly two million (yes 2,000,000!) Americans in prisons and jails — roughly $120 billion a year. Like policing, in other words, incarceration is big business in this country in 2020. After all, prison populations have grown by nearly 700% since 1972, driven in significant part by the “war on drugs,” a so-called war that has disproportionately targeted people of color.

The elephant in the room: Pentagon spending In addition to the police and prisons, the other major source of American militarized spending is, of course, the Pentagon. That department, along with related activities like nuclear weapons funding at the Department of Energy, now gobbles up at least $750 billion per year. That’s more than the military budgets of the next 10 countries combined.

Just as prisons and policing consume a startling proportion of state and local budgets, the Pentagon accounts for more than half of the federal government’s discretionary budget and that includes most government functions other than Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. As Ashik Siddique of the National Priorities Project has noted, the Trump administration’s latest budget proposal “prioritizes brute force and militarization over diplomatic and humanitarian solutions to pressing societal crises” in a particularly striking way. “Just about every non-militarized department funded by the discretionary budget,” he adds, “is on the chopping block, including all those that focus on reducing poverty and meeting human needs like education, housing, labor, health, energy, and transportation.”

Spending on the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border and the deportation of immigrants through agencies like ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and Customs and Border Protection totals another $24 billion annually. That puts U.S. spending on police, prisons, and the Pentagon at nearly $1 trillion per year and that doesn’t even include the soaring budgets of other parts of the American national security state like the Department of Homeland Security ($92 billion) and the Veterans Administration ($243 billion — a cost of past wars). Back in May 2019, Mandy Smithberger of the Project on Government Oversight and I had already estimated that the full national security budget, including the Pentagon, was approximately $1.25 trillion a year and that estimate, of course, didn’t even include the police and the prison system!

Another way of looking at the problem is to focus on just how much of the federal budget goes to the Pentagon and other militarized activities, including federal prisons, immigration enforcement, and veterans benefits. An analysis by the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies puts this figure at $887 billion, or more than 64% of the federal discretionary budget including public health, education, environmental protection, job training, energy development, housing, transportation, scientific research, and more.

Making the connection: The 1033 Program Ever since images of the police deploying armored vehicles against peaceful demonstrators in Ferguson, Missouri, hit the national airwaves in 2014, the Pentagon’s program for supplying “surplus” military equipment to local police departments has been a news item. It’s also gotten intermittent attention in Congress and the Executive Branch.

Since 1997, the Pentagon’s 1033 Program, as it’s called, has channeled to 8,000 separate law enforcement agencies more than $7.4 billion in surplus equipment, including Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles of the kind used on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, along with rifles, ammunition, grenade launchers, and night-vision devices. As Brian Barrett has pointed out at Wired, “Local law enforcement responding to even nonviolent protests has often looked more like the U.S. Armed Forces.” Political scientist Ryan Welch co-authored a 2017 study suggesting, when it came to police departments equipped in such a fashion, “that officers with military hardware and mindsets will resort to violence more often and more quickly.”

Under the circumstances and given who’s providing the equipment, you won’t be surprised to learn that the 1033 program also suffers from lax oversight. In 2017, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) created a fake law enforcement agency and was able to acquire $1.2 million worth of equipment through the program, including night-vision goggles and simulated M-16A2 rifles. The request was approved within a week of the GAO’s application.

The Obama administration finally implemented some reforms in the wake of Ferguson, banning the transfer of tracked vehicles, grenade launchers, and weaponized aircraft, among other things, while requiring police departments to supply more detailed rationales describing their need for specific equipment. But such modest efforts — and they proved modest indeed — were promptly chucked out when Donald Trump took office. And the Trump administration changes quickly had a discernible effect. In 2019, the 1033 program had one of its biggest years ever, with about 15,750 military items transferred to law enforcement, a figure exceeded only in 2012, in the Obama years, when 17,000 such items were distributed.

As noted, the mere possession of military equipment has been shown to stoke the ever stronger “warrior culture” that now characterizes so many police departments, as evidenced by the use of Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams armed with military weaponry for routine drug enforcement activities. It’s hardly just SWAT teams, though. The weaponry and related items provided under the 1033 program are widely employed by ordinary police forces. NBC News, for instance, reported that armored vehicles were used at least 29 times in response to Black Lives Matter protests organized since the murder of George Floyd, including in major urban areas like Philadelphia and Cincinnati. NBC has also determined that more than 1,100 Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles have been distributed to local law enforcement agencies under the MRAP program, going to communities large and small, including Sanford, Maine, population 20,000, and Moundsville, West Virginia, population 8,400.

A report from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has similarly documented the use of Pentagon-supplied equipment in no-knock home invasions, including driving up to people’s houses in just such armored vehicles to launch the raids. The ACLU concluded that “the militarization of American policing is evident in the training that police officers receive, which encourages them to adopt a ‘warrior’ mentality and think of the people they are supposed to serve as enemies, as well as in the equipment they use, such as battering rams, flashbang grenades, and APCs [Armored Personnel Carriers].”

Who benefits? Companies in the military-industrial complex earn billions of dollars selling weapons, as well as building and operating prisons and detention facilities, and supplying the police, while theoretically dealing with problems with deep social and economic roots. Generally speaking, by the time they’re done, those problems have only become deeper and more rooted. Take, for example, giant weapons contractors like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Raytheon that profit so splendidly from the sales of weapons systems to Saudi Arabia, weaponry that, in turn, has been used to kill tens of thousands of civilians in Yemen, destroy civilian infrastructure there, and block the provision of desperately needed humanitarian assistance. The result: more than 100,000 deaths in that country and millions more on the brink of famine and disease, including Covid-19.

Such major weapons firms have also been at the front of the line when it comes to benefiting from America’s endless post-9/11 wars. The Costs of War Project at Brown University estimates that the United States has spent over $6.4 trillion on just some of those overseas conflicts since 2001. Hundreds of billions of those dollars ended up in the pockets of defense contractors, while problems in the U.S., left far less well funded, only grew.

And by the way, the Pentagon’s regular budget, combined with direct spending on wars, also manages to provide huge benefits to such weapons makers. Almost half of the department’s $750 billion budget goes to them. According to the Federal Procurement Data System’s latest report on the top recipients of government contracts, the five largest U.S. arms makers alone — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics — split well over $100 billion in Pentagon awards among them in 2019. Meanwhile, those same five firms pay their CEOs a total of approximately $100 million per year, with hundreds of millions more going to other top executives and board members.

Meanwhile, in the Trump years, the militarization of the border has become a particularly lucrative business opportunity, with General Atomics, for instance, supplying ever more surveillance drones and General Dynamics supplying an ever more intricate and expensive remote sensor surveillance system. There are also millions to be made running privatized prisons and immigrant detention centers, filling the coffers of firms like CoreCivic and the GEO Group, which have secured record profits in recent years while garnering about half their revenues from those two sources.

Last but not least is the market for even more police equipment. Local forces benefit from grants from the Department of Homeland Security to purchase a wide range of items to supplement the Pentagon’s 1033 program.

The true bottom line Much has been written about America’s failed post-9/11 wars, which have cost trillions of dollars in taxpayer treasure, hundreds of thousands of lives (American and otherwise), and physical and psychological injuries to hundreds of thousands more. They have also propped up sectarian and corrupt regimes that have actually made it easier for terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS to form and spread. Think of it as the ultimate boomerang effect, in which violence begets more violence, while allowing overseas terrorist organizations to thrive. As journalist Nick Turse has noted with respect to the militarization of U.S. Africa policy, the growth in American military operations on that continent has proceeded rather strikingly in conjunction with a proliferation of new terrorist groups. Put the best light on them and U.S. counterterror operations there have been ineffective. More likely, they have simply helped spawn further increases in terrorist activities in the region.

All of this has, in turn, been an ongoing disaster for underfunded domestic programs that would actually help ordinary Americans rather than squander their tax dollars on what passes for, but obviously isn’t, “national defense.” In the era of Covid-19, climate change, and an increased focus on longstanding structural racism and anti-black violence, a new approach to “security” is desperately needed, one that privileges not yet more bombs, guns, militarized police forces, and aircraft carriers but public health, environmental protection, and much-needed programs for quality jobs and education in underserved communities.

On the domestic front, particularly in communities of color, police are more often seen as an occupying force than a source of protection (and ever since the 1033 program was initiated, they’ve looked ever more like such a force as well). This has led to calls for defunding the police and seeking other means of providing public safety, including, minimally, not sending police to deal with petty drug offenses, domestic disputes, and problems caused by individuals with mental-health issues. Organizations like the Minneapolis-based Reclaim the Block have put forward proposals for crisis response by institutions other than the police and for community-based programs for resolving disputes and promoting restorative justice.

Shifting priorities Sharp reductions in spending on police, prisons, and the Pentagon could free up hundreds of billions of dollars for programs that might begin to fill the gap in spending on public investments in communities of color and elsewhere.

Organizations like the Movement for Black Lives and the Poor People’s Campaign are already demanding these kinds of changes. In its moral budget, a comprehensive proposal for redirecting America’s resources toward addressing poverty and away from war, racism, and ecological destruction, the Poor People’s Campaign calls for a $350 billion annual cut in Pentagon spending — almost half of current levels. Likewise, the platform of the Movement for Black Lives suggested a 50% reduction in Pentagon outlays. And a new youth anti-militarist movement, Dissenters, has called for defunding the armed forces as well as the police.

Ultimately, safety for all Americans will depend on more than just a shift of funding or a reduction in police armaments. After all, George Floyd and Eric Garner — just two of the long list of black Americans to die at the hands of the police — were killed not with high-tech weapons, but with a knee to the throat and a fatal chokehold. Shifting funds from the police to social services, dismantling police forces as they now exist, and creating new institutions to protect communities should be an essential part of any solution in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s presidency. Similarly, investments in diplomacy, economic assistance, and cultural exchange would be needed in order to help rein in the American war machine which, of course, has been attended to in ways nothing else, from health care to schooling to infrastructure, has been in this century. When it comes to both the police and the Pentagon, the sooner change arrives the better off we’ll all be. It’s long past time to defund America’s wars, both abroad and at home.

William D. Hartung writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy and the author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex.

Copyright ©2020 William D. Hartung — distributed by Agence Global

—————-

Released: 07 July 2020

Word Count: 2,378

—————-