Anti War: Thread

[grarpamp]

The Democrats Are Now The War Party

https://www.mintpressnews.com/chris-hedges-democrats-now-war-party/283114/

The Democrats position themselves as the party of virtue, cloaking
their support for the war industry in moral language stretching back
to Korea and Vietnam, when President Ngo Dinh Diem was as lionized as
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

All the wars they support and fund are “good” wars. All the enemies
they fight, the latest being Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi
Jinping, are incarnations of evil. The photo of a beaming House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Kamala Harris holding up a
signed Ukrainian battle flag behind Zelensky as he addressed Congress
was another example of the Democratic Party’s abject subservience to
the war machine.

The Democrats, especially with the presidency of Bill Clinton, became
shills not only for corporate America but for the weapons
manufacturers and the Pentagon. No weapons system is too costly. No
war, no matter how disastrous, goes unfunded. No military budget is
too big, including the $858 billion in military spending allocated for
the current fiscal year, an increase of $45 billion above what the
Biden administration requested.

The historian Arnold Toynbee cited unchecked militarism as the fatal
disease of empires, arguing that they ultimately commit suicide.

There once was a wing of the Democratic Party that questioned and
stood up to the war industry: Senators J. William Fulbright, George
McGovern, Gene McCarthy, Mike Gravel, William Proxmire and House
member Dennis Kucinich. But that opposition evaporated along with the
antiwar movement. When 30 members of the party’s progressive caucus
recently issued a call for Biden to negotiate with Putin, they were
forced by the party leadership and a warmongering media to back down
and rescind their letter. Not that any of them, with the exception of
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have voted against the billions of dollars
in weaponry sent to Ukraine or the bloated military budget. Rashida
Tlaib voted present.

The opposition to the perpetual funding of the war in Ukraine has come
primarily from Republicans, 11 in the Senate and 57 in the House,
several, such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, unhinged conspiracy
theorists. Only nine Republicans in the House joined the Democrats in
supporting the $1.7 trillion spending bill needed to prevent the
government from shutting down, which included approval of $847 billion
for the military — the total is boosted to $858 billion when factoring
in accounts that don’t fall under the Armed Services committees’
jurisdiction. In the Senate, 29 Republicans opposed the spending bill.
The Democrats, including nearly all 100 members of the House
Congressional Progressive Caucus, lined up dutifully for endless war.

This lust for war is dangerous, pushing us into a potential war with
Russia and, perhaps later, with China — each a nuclear power. It is
also economically ruinous. The monopolization of capital by the
military has driven U.S. debt to over $30 trillion, $6 trillion more
than the U.S. GDP of $24 trillion. Servicing this debt costs $300
billion a year. We spend more on the military than the next nine
countries, including China and Russia, combined. Congress is also on
track to provide an extra $21.7 billion to the Pentagon — above the
already expanded annual budget — to resupply Ukraine.

    “But those contracts are just the leading edge of what is shaping
up to be a big new defense buildup,” The New York Times reported.

    “Military spending next year is on track to reach its highest
level in inflation-adjusted terms since the peaks in the costs of the
Iraq and Afghanistan wars between 2008 and 2011, and the second
highest in inflation-adjusted terms since World War II — a level that
is more than the budgets for the next 10 largest cabinet agencies
combined.”

The Democratic Party, which, under the Clinton administration
aggressively courted corporate donors, has surrendered its willingness
to challenge, however tepidly, the war industry.

    “As soon as the Democratic Party made a determination, it could
have been 35 or 40 years ago, that they were going to take corporate
contributions, that wiped out any distinction between the two
parties,” Dennis Kucinich said when I interviewed him on my show for
The Real News Network.

    “Because in Washington, he or she who pays the piper plays the
tune. That’s what’s happened. There isn’t that much of a difference in
terms of the two parties when it comes to war.”

In his 1970 book “The Pentagon Propaganda Machine,” Fulbright
describes how the Pentagon and the arms industry pour millions into
shaping public opinion through public relations campaigns, Defense
Department films, control over Hollywood and domination of the
commercial media. Military analysts on cable news are universally
former military and intelligence officials who sit on boards or work
as consultants to defense industries, a fact they rarely disclose to
the public. Barry R. McCaffrey, a retired four-star army general and
military analyst for NBC News, was also an employee of Defense
Solutions, a military sales and project management firm. He, like most
of these shills for war, personally profited from the sales of the
weapons systems and expansion of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

On the eve of every congressional vote on the Pentagon budget,
lobbyists from businesses tied to the war industry meet with Congress
members and their staff to push them to vote for the budget to protect
jobs in their district or state. This pressure, coupled with the
mantra amplified by the media that opposition to profligate war
funding is unpatriotic, keeps elected officials in bondage. These
politicians also depend on the lavish donations from the weapons
manufacturers to fund their campaigns.

Seymour Melman, in his book “Pentagon Capitalism,” documented the way
militarized societies destroy their domestic economies. Billions are
spent on the research and development of weapons systems while
renewable energy technologies languish. Universities are flooded with
military-related grants while they struggle to find money for
environmental studies and the humanities. Bridges, roads, levees,
rail, ports, electric grids, sewage treatment plants and drinking
water infrastructures are structurally deficient and antiquated.
Schools are in disrepair and lack sufficient teachers and staff.
Unable to stem the COVID-19 pandemic, the for-profit health care
industry forces families, including those with insurance, into
bankruptcy. Domestic manufacturing, especially with the offshoring of
jobs to China, Vietnam, Mexico and other nations, collapses. Families
are drowning in personal debt, with 63 percent of Americans living
paycheck to paycheck. The poor, the mentally ill, the sick and the
unemployed are abandoned.

Melman, who coined the term “permanent war economy,” noted that since
the end of the Second World War, the federal government has spent more
than half its discretionary budget on past, current and future
military operations. It is the largest single sustaining activity of
the government. The military-industrial establishment is nothing more
than gilded corporate welfare. Military systems are sold before they
are produced. Military industries are permitted to charge the federal
government for huge cost overruns. Massive profits are guaranteed. For
example, this November, the Army awarded Raytheon Technologies alone
more than $2 billion in contracts, on top of over $190 million awarded
in August, to deliver missile systems to expand or replenish weapons
sent to Ukraine. Despite a depressed market for most other businesses,
stock prices of Lockheed and Northrop Grumman have risen by more than
36 and 50 percent this year.

Tech giants, including Amazon, which supplies surveillance and facial
recognition software to the police and FBI, have been absorbed into
the permanent war economy. Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle were
awarded multibillion-dollar cloud computing contracts for the Joint
Warfighting Cloud Capability and are eligible to receive $9 billion in
Pentagon contracts to provide the military with “globally available
cloud services across all security domains and classification levels,
from the strategic level to the tactical edge,” through mid-2028.

Foreign aid is given to countries such as Israel, with more than $150
billion in bilateral assistance since its founding in 1948, or Egypt,
which has received over $80 billion since 1978 — aid that requires
foreign governments to buy weapons systems from the U.S. The U.S.
public funds the research, development and building of weapons systems
and purchases them for foreign governments. Such a  circular system
mocks the idea of a free-market economy. These weapons soon become
obsolete and are replaced by updated and usually more costly weapons
systems. It is, in economic terms, a dead end. It sustains nothing but
the permanent war economy.

    “The truth of the matter is that we’re in a heavily militarized
society driven by greed, lust for profit, and wars are being created
just to keep fueling that,” Kucinich told me.

In 2014, the U.S. backed a coup in Ukraine that installed a government
that included neo-Nazis and was antagonistic to Russia. The coup
triggered a civil war when the ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine, the
Donbass, sought to secede from the country, resulting in over 14,000
people dead and nearly 150,000 displaced, before Russia invaded in
February. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, according to Jacques Baud,
a former NATO security advisor who also worked for Swiss intelligence,
was instigated by the escalation of Ukraine’s war on the Donbass. It
also followed the Biden administration’s rejection of proposals sent
by the Kremlin in late 2021, which might have averted Russia’s
invasion the following year.

This invasion has led to widespread U.S. and E.U. sanctions on Russia,
which have boomeranged onto Europe. Inflation ravages Europe with the
sharp curtailment of shipments of Russian oil and gas. Industry,
especially in Germany, is crippled.  In most of Europe, it is a winter
of shortages, spiraling prices and misery.

    “This whole thing is blowing up in the face of the West,” Kucinich
warned. “We forced Russia to pivot to Asia, as well as Brazil, India,
China, South Africa and Saudi Arabia. There’s a whole new world being
formed. The catalyst of it is the misjudgment that occurred about
Ukraine and the effort to try to control Ukraine in 2014 that most
people aren’t aware of.”

By not opposing a Democratic Party whose primary business is war,
liberals become the sterile, defeated dreamers in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s
“Notes from the Underground.”

A former convict, Dostoevsky did not fear evil. He feared a society
that no longer had the moral fortitude to confront evil. And war, to
steal a line from my latest book, is the greatest evil.