Wednesday, May 15, 2024

MAY 15, 2024
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Photograph Source: Cantelar Antimperialista – CC BY 4.0

Taking note of International Workers’ Day, several Latin American news sources this year cited José Martí’s 1886 essay “A Terrible Drama;” two of them republished it, here and here. There Martí reports on events in Chicago in 1886 and the fate of the so-called Haymarket Martyrs – seven labor journalists and agitators railroaded to prison and given death sentences. Another received a 15-year prison term.

Martí, who would become Cuba’s national hero, was living in exile in the United States. He relates how strikes for the eight-hour day were underway on May 1, 1886 in Chicago and nationwide, how the Chicago police killed one striker and wounded others on May 3, and how a mass protest against police violence took place the next day in the Haymarket area. There, a bomb exploded, seven policemen and four workers were killed, and dozens were wounded.

The court lacked evidence that the defendants, anarchist by inclination, were involved in the violence of May 4. Martí describes the execution of four of them and the suicide of another. An appeals court judge commuted the sentences of two defendants to life in prison. In 1893, Illinois Governor John Altgeld pardoned those two and the remaining prisoner.

The Socialist International in 1889 declared May Day to be an annual celebration of labor militancy.

José Martí’s account, “A Terrible Drama,” is a foundational contribution to the history of the U.S. labor movement. Martí defended working people – U.S. workers in his writings, and Cuban workers in words and deeds, from 1886 on. The combination of author and story points to a connection between U.S. labor activism and workers’ struggles in Cuba. Its time has come.

The U.S. economic blockade of Cuba, lasting decades, has led to shortages, misery, and despair. Nations of the world voting annually in the United Nations General Assembly overwhelmingly condemn the blockade. It violates international law.

Domestic opposition to U.S. policies on Cuba, while persistent, vigorous at times, principled, on-target, and diverse, has fallen short. U.S. government measures aimed at destabilization remain in force. Upping power of the people with labor combativeness would make a difference.

Unions and labor activists know how to organize and how to confront recalcitrant political and economic leaders. They will be active on Cuba’s side, once they realize that working people’s struggles in the two countries are linked, or so our theory goes. In addition:

• Labor unionists involved in struggle count on unity, the power of numbers, and sometimes solidarity from counterparts, often from abroad.
• The current Cuban Revolution is the product of a revolutionary tradition. U.S. workers confronting their own government on Cuba would be expressing solidarity with a revolution whose progenitor, Jose Martí, defended U.S. workers fighting for the eight-hour day. They would be paying back.
• Social revolution and ordinary labor struggles are battles of ideas. The writings of Martí, maximum leader of Cuba’s early revolution, speak to Cuban and U.S. workers alike. In that way they are connected.

Martí wrote about working people and their lives. He contributed greatly to the ideas and substance of revolutionary struggle in Cuba and also defended African-descended and poverty-stricken Cubans with a seemingly unqualified egalitarianism. For example:

• “And let us place around the star of our new flag this formula of love triumphant: ‘With all, and for the good of all.’”
• “A nation having a few wealthy men is not rich, only the one where each of its inhabitants shares a little of the common wealth. In political economy and in good government, distribution is the key to prosperity.”
• “In Cuba there is no fear whatever of racial conflict. A man is more than white, black, or mulatto. A Cuban is more than mulatto, black, or white … True men, black or white, will treat each other with loyalty and tenderness for the sake of merit alone.”

Workers are oppressed

Responding to the Haymarket affair in his “A Terrible Drama,” Martí reflects upon the situation of U.S. working people:

“The nation is terrified by the increased organization among the lower classes … Therefore the Republic decided … to use a crime born of its own transgressions as much as the fanaticism of the criminal in order to strike terror by holding them up as an example …. Because of its unconscionable cult of wealth, and lacking any of the shackles of tradition, this Republic has fallen into monarchical inequality, injustice, and violence …

“In the recently emerging West … where the same astounding rapidity of growth, accumulating mansions and factories on the one hand, and wretched masses of people on the other, clearly reveals the evil of a system that punishes the most industrious with hunger, the most generous with persecution, the useful father with the misery of his children – there the unhappy working man has been making his voice heard.”

Martí’s “A Terrible Drama” appeared in La Nación newspaper in Buenos Aires in January 1888, some 19 months after the Haymarket events. The delay may have stemmed from Martí’s ambivalence about the anarchist leanings of the accused. Previously published segments of his report do appear under the title “The First of May, 1886” in historian Philip Foner’s anthology of Martí’s writings published in 1977. Excerpts follow:

“Enormous events took place in Chicago, but rebellion exists throughout the nation. In the United States … a firm and active struggle has been in preparation for years … …[T]hings are not right when an honest and intelligent man who has worked tenaciously and humbly all his life does not have at the end of it a loaf of bread … or a dollar put away, or the right to take a tranquil stroll in the sunlight… Things are not right when the one who in the cities … lives a contemplative life of leisure so exasperating to the miner, the stevedore, the switchman, the mechanic, and to every wretched person who must be content with seventy-five cents day, in raw winter weather …Things are not right if shabby women and their pallid children must live in tenement cubicles in foul-smelling neighborhoods. …The reasons are the same. The rapid and evident concentration of public wealth, lands, communication lines, enterprises in the hands of the well-to-do caste that rules and governs has given rise to a rapid concentration of workers. Merely by being gathered together in a formidable community which can, at one stroke, extinguish the fires in the boiler and let the grass grow under the wheels of the machinery, the workers are able successfully to defend their own rights against the arrogance and indifference with which they are regarded by those who derive all their wealth from the products of the labor they abuse.”

Deeds and words

Martí acted on behalf of working people. He organized Cuba’s independence struggle that culminated in war with Spain in early 1895. Under his leadership, the process became a social revolution.

From exile in New York, Martí outlined goals, strategies, and methods. Traveling widely, he arranged for Cuban exiles in the United States, Central America, and the Caribbean – many of them workers, many African-descended – to select the revolution’s leadership, provide funding and supplies, and approve goals and proposals. Martí persuaded the military heads to accept civilian leadership. He created and edited the independence movement’s newspaper Patria.

Aware of U.S. aspirations to dominate Cuba and the entire region, Martí led in confronting U.S. imperialism – never good for workers. In 1891 he wrote “Our America,” an essay demonstrating commonalities among diverse peoples inhabiting all the land extending from the Rio Bravo (the Rio Grande) south to Patagonia. Martí highlighted their shared cultural and political orientations that set them apart from U.S. and European societies.

In a letter to a friend shortly before he was killed in battle on May 19, 1895, Martí insisted that: “It is my duty … to prevent, by the independence of Cuba, the United States from spreading over the West Indies and falling, with that added weight, upon the other lands of Our America.”

Attacking military installations of the Batista regime on July 26, 1953, revolutionaries led by Fidel Castro were honoring José Martí, born 100 years earlier. For Castro, Martí was “the Apostle of Independence … whose ideas inspired the Centennial Generation and today inspire and will continue to inspire all of our people more and more.”

For the sake of justice and in view of connections with Cuban workers, U.S. working people would do well to press upon their government the necessity to end the blockade of Cuba. Labor unions, the principal means for expression of workers’ sentiment and power, have prime responsibility in this regard.

They would be acting as did West Coast dockworkers who blocked arms shipments to Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship, cargo arriving from apartheid-ridden South Africa, and, recently, arms shipments bound for Israel. U.S. unionists actively opposed their government’s support for authoritarian El Salvador in the 1980s and supported Iraqi workers after the U.S. invasion there. They collaborated with Mexican miners and other workers over many years. Recently U.S. unions issued statements and approved resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.

W.T. Whitney Jr. is a retired pediatrician and political journalist living in Maine.

Biden Said Putin Killed Navalny; He Didn’t

There are plenty of very real things to criticize Russian President Vladimir Putin for, not least of which is invading Ukraine. But lying (in this instance) may not be one of them.

Putin lied when he said Russia was not going to invade Ukraine. But, wrong though the invasion may have been, it is not unprecedented for a leader not to telegraph an invasion. Putin may also have been hoping to avoid an invasion up to the last moment, had the United States agreed to negotiate NATO expansion, or if Ukraine had agreed to negotiate the Minsk Accord to protect ethnic Russians in their country.

Putin, for all his flaws, may not be a leader who habitually lies about his foreign policy goals. In her book Russia, China and the West in the Post-Cold War Era, Suzanne Loftus argues that, at least when it comes to Russia’s grand strategy, Putin can generally be taken at his word; “it is safe to assume that what Russia says its goals are can mostly be accepted as true.” She bases her conclusion on a comprehensive 2021 RAND study by Samuel Charap and his colleagues that found that, with the exception of Ukraine, “its stated grand strategy mostly reflects how the country behaves internationally.” The RAND study found that Russia’s “revealed” grand strategy is not fundamentally different from its “stated” grand strategy and that what Putin says about Russia’s grand strategy is generally a “reliable predictor” of what Russia will do.

In two recent critical events, the West accused Putin of lying. In both events, he was not.

On June 13, 2022, Putin announced that Russia and Ukraine had “reached an agreement in Istanbul” and that the agreement had been initialed by both sides. Four days later, he held up the draft agreement and showed it to a delegation of African leaders. Skeptics in the political West replied that if Putin really had a draft agreement, he would not just wave it in the air from a distance, he would publish it as proof that he had tried to negotiate a peace.

But the skeptics were wrong, and Putin was telling the truth. First reported in the mainstream media by Foreign Affairs in August 2022, Fiona Hill and Angela Stent wrote, “According to multiple former senior U.S. officials we spoke with, in April 2022, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement.”

Not only American officials, but Ukrainian delegates to the talks, including Oleksiy Arestovych and Oleksandr Chalyi, also confirm the existence of the draft treaty.

But the draft agreement that Hill and Stent reported has now been seen by at least three Western sources. On March 1, The Wall Street Journal was able to confirm that the “draft peace treaty” does exist because they “and others familiar with the negotiations,” have “viewed” it.

On April 16, 2024, Samuel Charap of RAND and Sergey Radchenko of John Hopkins University, were able to write a report in Foreign Affairs after they “closely scrutinized two of these drafts.” The drafts were dated April 12 and April 15. Charap and Radchenko write that “in the midst of Moscow’s unprecedented aggression, the Russians and the Ukrainians almost finalized an agreement that would have ended the war.”

And on April 26, the German paper Die Welt reported that they had “the original document.” Consistent with the draft Charap and Radchenko saw, the “17-page document” obtained by Die Welt was a “draft agreement that both warring parties had negotiated by April 15, 2022.” According to the report, “Kyiv and Moscow largely agreed on conditions for an end to the war. Only a few points remained open. These were to be negotiated personally by Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyj at a summit meeting.” According to the Die Welt report, “Even though key points remained open, the draft agreement shows how close they were to a possible peace agreement in April 2022.”

The second event was the February 16, 2024 death of Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny. Though Putin denied any involvement in Navalny’s death, the Western political and media choir convicted him of it. Though U.S. President Joe Biden admitted that, “we don’t know exactly what happened,” that did not stop him from saying in a televised statement, “Make no mistake: Putin is responsible for Navalny’s death.” Acting on that conviction, the United States imposed more than five hundred new sanctions on Russia.

There were a number of reasons to await a judgement from the intelligence community before rushing to judgement against Putin.

The first was that Navalny could no longer realistically been seen as a threat to the regime. University of Kent Russia scholar Richard Sakwa reports that, “Despite his prominence and high name recognition, his polling support remained in the single digits.” In 2021, only 19% of Russians approved of Navalny’s activities, and less than 5% thought him trustworthy. “Navalny,” Putin biographer Philip Short says, “remained more a gadfly than a national leader.” By January 2024, a month before his death, Navalny’s approval rating had sunk to lower than 1%, according to Denis Volkov, director of the independent Russian polling Levada Center.

But, though his elimination right before the Russian elections could do little to help Putin, it could, at that time, hurt him. Putin was polling very high. His pre-election approval rating in December 2023 was over 80%. One independent poll, taken at the end of December, pegged the number at 83%. The suspicion that Navalny’s death cast over his character is the last thing Putin needed at a time when things were going very well.

And now The Wall Street Journal has reported that “U.S. intelligence agencies have determined that Putin likely didn’t order Navalny to be killed at the notoriously brutal prison camp in February.” Though the Journal contorts itself, saying “[t]he assessment doesn’t dispute Putin’s culpability for Navalny’s death, but rather finds he probably didn’t order it at that moment,” it reports that the finding that Putin likely didn’t order Navalny’s death “is broadly accepted within the intelligence community and shared by several agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the State Department’s intelligence unit.”

“The U.S. assessment,” The Wall Street Journal reports, “is based on a range of information, including some classified intelligence, and an analysis of public facts, including the timing of his death and how it overshadowed Putin’s re-election,” a public fact that could have been given greater consideration at the time.

In both the death of Navalny and the claim that a draft peace treaty existed, the United States and its partners were quick to portray Putin as a liar. Both portrayals advanced American interests in the war: the first by strengthening the picture of Putin as a brutal killer and by increasing sanctions on Russia and the second by strengthening the picture of Putin as a leader who is not serious about negotiations. But both were wrong.

Ted Snider is a regular columnist on U.S. foreign policy and history at Antiwar.com and The Libertarian Institute. He is also a frequent contributor to Responsible Statecraft and The American Conservative as well as other outlets. To support his work or for media or virtual presentation requests, contact him at tedsnider@bell.net.

What Is Self-Determination?

People go on quite a bit about self-determination these days. Some decry the denial of self-determination to “the Palestinians.” Others insist that only “the Jewish people” can have the right to self-determination between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Israel passed a law declaring that principle in 2018.

Unfortunately, I see too little thought behind the term self-determination. What is it? What self are we talking about? What is determination?

This and the related issue of nationalism are big topics with an unsurprisingly big literature. I will resist talking about nations and nationalism. Karl Deutsch got it right: “A Nation … is a group of persons united by a common error [fiction might have been the better word] about their ancestry and a common dislike of their neighbors.” I also appreciate Ernest Gellner‘s insight: “Nationalism begets nations.” It’s not the other way around. Moreover, individuals, often with power agendas, beget nationalism. Finally, nationalism begets more nationalism because disliked neighbors may feel the need to respond.

Here, I just want to help clarify the terms. If I do my job, I am confident I will offend everyone on some thorny controversies.

Let’s start with self. I know what that usually means. Persons are selves. (Persons don’t have selves.) Everyone knows what it means to be a self and to be self-conscious The self-evident needs no elaboration.

Determination in one sense refers to the process and outcome of human action. We determined what would happen by doing what we did. Or we tried to. A person can determine an outcome for himself (I determined I would get a haircut today) or for someone else (I determined that you would get a haircut today). We’d want to call only the first example of self-determination. We could also call it self-ownership, a felicitous phrase.

What distresses me as an ethical and methodological individualist — a libertarian — is that I don’t see the term being used this way. The priority is the group, the nation, the people, and the like. Where are the persons?

A group has no self; it comprises many selves — as many as it has members. What makes it a group can be a range of common interests or traits and continuing relations; they might have customs, mores, expectations, roles, rules, and more. But none of that keeps the group from being a collection of individuals. When a group decides, we mean that the members decide. The group does not literally decide.

When we say a group is dispossessed of its land or subjected to genocidal aggression, the crimes are against individuals. Individuals should not be reduced to mere members, representatives, or symbols. This is not to minimize genocide. The point is to keep the spotlight where it belongs: on individuals, who can live or die and without whom no group exists. If a group is important, it’s because it is important to the individuals who comprise it. They may regard their association as crucial to the lives they wish to live. But they are still individuals. They decide (unless the state or someone else interferes). They value. They are the group.

If individuals, however many, peacefully, freely, and regularly associate, establishing a culture, customs, and rules of governance, we can say as a matter of convenience that the group exercises self-determination. If they are invaded and then drive the invaders away, we can say the group has restored its self-determination. But we must be careful: a group tyrannized by one of “its own” or by a democratic majority is no more self-determined than a group tyrannized by an outsider or a majority of outsiders. What counts are individuals, their values, and the nature of their associations.

Democracy is not self-determination!

So the principle of self-determination cannot be directly applied to nations or peoples, such as “the Jewish people,” “the Palestinian people,” etc. — only to persons. Woodrow Wilson is best associated with the phrase national self-determination though he did not use it in his Fourteen Points speech during World War I. He didn’t help things. Strictly speaking, there is no right of national self-determination. (And remember, nation is a political, not a metaphysical, concept.) Only persons — not states, nations, or “peoples” as such — have the right to exist.

The need to re-individualize self-determination seems relevant to current controversies. Putting individuals first may produce overlooked approaches to peaceful resolutions.

Methodological individualism seems unassailable — what is there besides persons, their property, and their relationships? Coercive government interference sows problems. Equally unassailable is ethical individualism. Who would oppose societies of thoroughly free and voluntary associations, starting with respect for individuals and their property? Speak up or forever hold your peace.

Sheldon Richman is the executive editor of The Libertarian Institute and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com. He is the former senior editor at the Cato Institute and Institute for Humane Studies; former editor of The Freeman, published by the Foundation for Economic Education; and former vice president at the Future of Freedom Foundation. His latest books are Coming to Palestine and What Social Animals Owe to Each Other.

Jackson State and Forgotten History

This originally appeared on May 15, 2015

Many of us have heard the song, most of those probably know its famous backstory: “Tin soldiers and Nixon’s coming/We’re finally on our own/This summer I hear the drumming/Four dead in Ohio” sang Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young in 1971. The Kent State shootings – done by National Guard soldiers with live ammo are famous. The photo of the teenager screaming over one of the bodies of the four victims is one of the photos of the 20th century. It’s all so ‘60s – even if it happened May 4, 1970.

On Friday, some 11 days after Kent State, another Vietnam war protest on a campus turned deadly. At Jackson State University in Mississippi, a junior at the college and a passing highschool senior were killed by police who were responding to out of control protests. Twelve other people were also injured when some of the 75 local and state police fired more than 400 rounds at the crowds. Nobody seemed to know why they did exactly, with the police saying they had been threatened in various ways. Nobody was ever punished for the killings at Kent State or at Jackson State.

Neither at the time, nor 45 years later did the Jackson State killings have the same effect on people that Kent state did. (Not that middle America was terribly worried about the Kent State killing either, since 58 percent of them decided the students were to blame.) Perhaps they simply were overpowered by the loudness of Kent state, and a similar incident with a smaller body count was doomed to appear as just aftershocks. Yet, it seems unjust to forget one and sing about the other.

More forgotten anniversaries dot May. Wednesday was the 30th anniversary of the Philadelphia Police Department dropping a firebomb on the home of the MOVE group. Unsurprisingly in this nation of strong legal and social protections for police, nobody was ever punished for this act which lead to the deaths of 11 people (including five children) and burned out an entire city block.

Perhaps not surprising either is how often MOVE is ignored in favor of bigger horrors such as the raid and subsequent fire at the Branch Davidians’ compound outside Waco, Texas in 1993. (Since 30 years is a nice, round journalist’s number, however, there was some mainstream remembrance of MOVE this year. Plus the whole cops are finally a story thing.)

You could suggest that the victims of both Jackson State and MOVE were black and left, and therefore the patriot movements and militia types who were the strongest advocates of not forgetting something like Waco weren’t interested in keeping their names alive in the latter case. However, it’s never quite as simple as that. We know, if we’re paying attention, that some people are more valued than others in America. And sometimes – often, in cases of police misconduct and brutality – that lack of value does fall on racial lines. Blacks “acting up” must have done something to “deserve” a reaction from the state, or its armed actors – especially if they had any kind of criminal record. Whites can be excused as mentally ill, or upset, or childish, depending on their sins. But it’s rarely just about race. After all, Kent State was a left rallying cry, and continues to be a seminal moment in the anti-Vietnam protests. Why not, then Jackson?

A little known fact about the Davidians is that about a third of the victims were black. There were also Hispanics and Asians present. It was a diverse group, not the clichéd collection of overly armed white people on edge.

This is not made clear perhaps because the faces of the victims of the siege – beyond arguable cult leader David Koresh’s lily-white one – were kept so far away from cameras, they hardly exist now in memory. Hell, I’m not militia member, but I knew about Waco years before I found out about MOVE. And my first response to hearing about MOVE was wondering why I didn’t know about it earlier. Perhaps because Timothy McVeigh didn’t mention MOVE as motivation for the Oklahoma City Bombing. Perhaps because something in the events of Waco and Ruby Ridge captured people’s cultural attention better than with MOVE.

Sometimes there’s a logic behind why some historical events are remembered more strongly than others. The wartime sinking of the Lusitania is more historically significant than that of the Titanic three years earlier in 1912. However, even before James Cameron made one of the highest grossing movies of all time about that doomed ship, Titanic stuck in our heads more. The Lusitania sunk in 15 minutes. The Titanic was virgin, luxurious, and sunk in two and a half hours – just long enough for countless instances of great human drama to play out. (Plus, that whole ham-fisted hubris thing about the damn thing being “unsinkable.”)

This is all right. You cannot control what events not just strike people, but stay in their heads and hearts for years, and what is turned into song, story, and film. It’s not some empirical thing. But danger does lie in the fact that if you remember some deaths, and not others, you are suggesting that some lives matter more than others.

In America, we know that this is true. Well, not true, but commonly accepted. I’ve often grimly joked that a good mathematician should be able to figure out how many foreign people equal one regular American, and how many Americans equal one cop, or one soldier. The victims of the Oklahoma City Bombing matter more than those of Waco for myriad reasons. One is that the Branch Davidians were kept far away from the press, while Oklahoma City left us with haunting photos like this one. Photos matter to memory. There’s a reason the news doesn’t show graphic photos from drone warfare, or from the wars America has started. Even coffins of American soldiers is taboo. It’s not that the average person is dying to look at what war really is, but that they should be made to look if they want to know about news or about history.

Another reason Oklahoma City matters more than Waco is that law enforcement causing death can be a shame, but it can’t be an outrage in the same way a terrorist attack like Timothy McVeigh’s was. Never mind if McVeigh killed fewer children, he was a terrorist. He admitted his evil ends, and law enforcement pleads good intentions, and therefore the latter is let off the hook and the former is just a monster.

So certain things are memorable, and certain folks’ deaths are rallying cries and others are lost to history. And that would be natural if it weren’t helped along so much by the biases of a warmongering state. We can barely get people to remember the some 4,000 American soldiers who died in the Iraq war. That is a tragedy, but one to ignore in preparation for the next terrible threat. The million Iraqis who died thanks to America’s war are nothing. They are certainly not a folk song, or a even a famous photograph. They are an error on a balance sheet, a pity, an aside. Two at Jackson State, a million in Iraq, hundreds of thousands in the Philippines – every death can be forgotten if it is inconvenient for the powerful to remember.

Lucy Steigerwald was a contributing editor for Antiwar.com. She has also written for Reason, Playboy.com, the Washington Post.com, The New Republic, and other outlets. Follow her on twitter @lucystag.

Washington DC: The Unaffordable and Unecessary War Capital of the World

Ultimately, there is no mystery as to why the Forever Wars go on endlessly. Or why at a time when Uncle Sam is hemorrhaging red ink a large bipartisan majority saw fit to authorize $95 billion of foreign aid boondoggles that do absolutely nothing for America’s homeland security.

To wit, Washington has morphed into a freak of world history – a planetary War Capital dominated by a panoptic complex of arms merchants, paladins of interventionism and Warfare State nomenklatura. Never before has there been assembled and concentrated under a single state authority a hegemonic force possessing such unprecedented levels of economic resources, advanced technology and military wherewithal.

Not surprisingly, the world’s War Capital is Orwellian to the core. Its endless pursuit of war is always and everywhere described as the promotion of peace. Its jackboot of global hegemony is gussied-up in the form of alliances and treaties ostensibly designed to promote a “rules-based order” and collective security for the benefit of mankind, not simply the proper goals of peace, liberty, safety and prosperity within America’s homeland.

Unfortunately, the whole intellectual foundation of the enterprise is false. The planet is not crawling with all-powerful would-be aggressors and empire-builders who must be stopped cold at their own borders, lest they devour the freedom of all their neighbors near and far.

Nor is the DNA of nations infected with incipient butchers and tyrants like Hitler and Stalin. They were one-time accidents of history and fully distinguishable from the standard run of everyday tinpots which actually do arise periodically. But the latter mainly disturb the equipoise of their immediate neighborhoods, not the peace of the planet.

So America’s homeland security does not depend upon a far-flung array of alliances, treaties, military bases and foriegn influence operations. The whole framework of Pax Americana and the Washington based promotion and enforcement of a “rules-based” international order is an epochal blunder.

In that regard, the founding fathers got it right more than 200 years ago during the infancy of the Republic. As Brian McGlinchey recently noted,

Let’s review some key excerpts of Washington’s foreign policy guidance, starting with the principle he put above all others:

“Nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated.”

With this guidance, Washington echoed the wisdom of other American founders. Thomas Jefferson urged “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.” John Quincy Adams approvingly said, “[America] has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings… She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”

Needless to say, peaceful commerce is invariably far more beneficial to nations large and small than meddling, interventionism and military engagement. In today’s world it would be the default state of play on the international chessboard, save for the Great Hegemon on the banks of the Potomac. That is to say, the main disturbance of the peace in today’s world is invariably fostered by the self-appointed peacemaker, who, ironically, is inherently the least threatened large nation on the entire planet.

That is to say, the United States is essentially invulnerable to conventional military invasion and occupation. On the North American continent its $28 trillion GDP towers over the combined $3.8 trillion GDP of its Mexican and Canadian neighbors by more than 7X.

And on either shore arise the vast Atlantic and Pacific moats, which are even greater barriers to foreign military assault in the 21st century than they so successfully proved to be in the 19th century. That’s because today’s advanced surveillance technology and anti-ship missiles would consign an enemy armada to Davy Jones’ Locker nearly as soon as it steamed out of its own territorial waters.

The fact is, in an age when the sky is flush with high tech surveillance assets a massive conventional force armada couldn’t possibly be secretly built, tested and mustered for surprise attack without being noticed in Washington. There can be no repeat of the Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, Hiryu, Shokaku and Zuikaku strike force steaming across the Pacific toward Pearl Harbor sight unseen.

As a practical matter, even America’s ostensible “enemies” have no offensive or invasionary capacity at all. Russia has only one aircraft carrier—a 1980s era vessel which has been in dry-dock for repairs since 2017 and is equipped with neither a phalanx of escort ships nor a suite of attack and fighter aircraft – and at the moment not even an active crew.

Likewise, China has just three aircraft carriers – two of which are refurbished rust buckets purchased from the remnants of the old Soviet Union, and which carriers do not even have modern catapults for launching their strike aircraft.

Indeed, invasion of the American homeland would require a massive conventional armada of land, air and sea-based forces many, many times larger than the military behemoth that is now funded by Washington’s $900 billion defense budget. The logistical infrastructure that would be needed to control the vast Atlantic and Pacific Ocean moats surrounding North America and to sustain an invasion and occupation force of the US mainland is so mind-mindbogglingly vast as to be scarcely imaginable.

For want of doubt, the graphic below compares Washington’s 11 carrier battle groups, which cost about $25 billion each including their escort ships, suites of aircraft and electronic and missile capabilities. But self-evidently, none of the non-NATO countries shown in the red area of the graphic – China, India, Russia or Thailand – will be steaming their tiny 3, 2 and 1 carrier battle groups toward the shores of either California or New New Jersey any time soon. Any invasionary force that had any chance of surviving a US fortress defense of cruise missiles, drones, jet fighters, attack submarines and electronics warfare would need to be 100X larger.

Yet there is no GDP in the world – $2 trillion for Russia, $3.5 trillion for India or $18 trillion for China – that is even remotely close in size to the $50 to $100 trillion GDP that would be needed to support such an invasionary force without capsizing the home economy.

At the same time, the 11 US carrier battle groups, which will cost upwards of $1.2 trillion over the next decade, would have no role in a continental Fortress America defense at all. They would be sitting ducks in the blue waters, and far less effective than aircraft and missile defenses based in the North American interior.

In short, these massively expensive forces have no purpose other than global power projection and the conduct of wars of invasion and occupation abroad. That is, they are military accoutrements of the War Capital, not even remotely relevant to a proper Fortress America defense.

In today’s world the only theoretical military threat to America’s homeland security is the possibility of nuclear blackmail. That is to say, a First Strike capacity so overwhelming, lethal and effective that an enemy could simply call out checkmate and demand Washington’s surrender.

Yet there is no nation on earth that has anything close to the First Strike force that would be needed to totally overwhelm America’s triad nuclear deterrent, and thereby avoid a retaliatory annihilation of its own country and people if it attempted to strike first. After all, the US has 3,700 active nuclear warheads, of which about 1,770 are operational at any point in time. In turn, these are spread under the sea, in hardened silos and among a bomber fleet of 66 B-2 and B-52s – all beyond the detection or reach of any other nuclear power.

For instance, the Ohio class nuclear submarines each have 20 missile tubes, with each missile carrying an average of four-to-five warheads. That’s 90 independently targetable warheads per boat. At any given time 12 of the 14 Ohio class nuclear subs are actively deployed, and spread around the oceans of the planet within a firing range of 4,000 miles.

So at the point of attack that’s 1,080 deep-sea nuclear warheads to identify, locate and neutralize before any would be blackmailer even gets started. Indeed, with respect to the “Where’s Waldo?” aspect of it, the sea-based nuclear force alone is a powerful guarantor of America’s homeland security.

And then there are the roughly 300 nukes aboard the 66 strategic bombers, which also are not sitting on a single airfield Pearl Harbor style waiting to be obliterated, but are constantly rotating in the air and on the move. Likewise, the 400 Minutemen III missiles are spread out in extremely hardened silos deep underground. Each missile currently carries one nuclear warhead in compliance with the Start Treaty, which would also need to be taken out by would be blackmailers.

Needless to say, there is no way, shape or form that America’s nuclear deterrent can be neutralized by a blackmailer. And the best thing is that the nuclear triad will cost only about $75 billion per year to maintain over the next decade, including allowances for periodic weapons upgrades.

As shown below, therefore, the heart of America’s military security requires only 7% of today’s massive military budget. Indeed, the heart of the nuclear deterrent – sea-based ballistic missiles – is estimated by CBO to cost just $188 billion over the next decade, or 1.9% of the $10 trillion national defense baseline.

10-Year Cost Of US Strategic Nuclear Deterrent Per CBO Estimates, 2023 to 2032

Here’s the thing. The actual cost of the national security budget is $1.3 trillion per year. Yet if you allow an ample $250 billion per year for a Fortress America continental defense and $75 billion for the triad strategic deterrent, the question recurs. Where does all the rest – $975 billion – go?

As we will amplify in the next article, it goes to the War Capital’s pursuit of global military and political hegemony and to fund the deferred cost of past overseas policing operations, neither of which were and are necessary for America’s homeland security. And beyond that, tens of billions more slop-over into pure budget maintenance: That is, military contractor lobbying and bribes, think tank studies and advocacy programs and NGO and national security agency propaganda and influence operations all around the planet.

Still, just consider the implications of the chart below. About $346 billion of the $1.3 trillion national security budget is for veterans compensation, health and other benefits. These programs serve upwards of 6.2 million disabled veterans and dependents and 9.2 million enrollees in the Veterans health care system.

Yet absent all the unnecessary wars that have occurred since the Cold War went into full force in 1948-1949, the US would have only 60,000 veterans of foreign wars today, of which just 11,448 ar currently receiving disability benefits. Even when you add in their dependents, the total of WWII era vets receiving disability compensation is just 34,265 or 0.6% of the total beneficiary roll of 6.159 million.

At average compensation and health care cost of $35,000 per beneficiary, the total cost would be $1.2 billion currently and barely $10 million per year by 2035 when only 311 WWII vets are projected to remain.

That’s right. The FY 2024 cost of veterans benefits owing to unnecessary wars, such as the 1.385 million Vietnam vets on disability and the 3.37 million Gulf War vets receiving disability payments and VA health care, is $345 billion.

And that deferred cost figure for the Forever Wars amounts to 116% of China’s current $298 billion defense budget, 425% of India’s $81 billion, 480% of Russia’s $72 billion (pre-Ukraine) 595% of Germany’s $58 billion and 690% of South Korea’s $50 billion military budget, notwithstanding the madman who rules across the DMZ.

Yet it only gets worse from there. By the end of the 10-year budget window, the $550 billion baseline cost of veterans benefits will amount to 50,000 times more than what a Fortress America homeland security policy would have generated over the past seven decades.

Needless to say, that begs the question for Part 2: Why in the world has Washington become the War Capital of the World, generating hideously excessive costs that the taxpayers of America neither benefit from nor can remotely afford?

David Stockman was a two-term Congressman from Michigan. He was also the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan. After leaving the White House, Stockman had a 20-year career on Wall Street. He’s the author of three books, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America, TRUMPED! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin… And How to Bring It Back, and the recently released Great Money Bubble: Protect Yourself From The Coming Inflation Storm. He also is founder of David Stockman’s Contra Corner and David Stockman’s Bubble Finance Trader.

The Kindness of Strangers?

SCOTUS VS THE PEOPLE

by Philip A. Faruggio / May 14th, 2024

I was channel surfing the other evening and watched the Supreme Court’s new case concerning homeless encampments, etc. What got me was how the government’s lawyer kept explaining how the homeless situation was being handled. HIs retort was that Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs) have been unsuccessful in giving the necessary helping hand to this burgeoning crisis throughout our nation, especially in most cities. Is it me or isn’t it the responsibility of Uncle Sam to use our tax dollars to help address the needs of our homeless? The justices all acknowledged that many of our nation’s homeless are mentally ill individuals, discounting to some extent the millions of others who just cannot afford to pay for shelter. Well, think about this: How many of us who do not own a home can actually afford the outrageous rents the “land lord” charges? I say “land lord” because the term comes from feudalism when the “lord of the manor” owned the rental property for his serfs. Go and get the fine Claude Berri 1993 French film Germinal and see how this feudal arrangement played out. Disgusting!

The case at issue for this Supreme Court is The City of Grants Pass vs. Johnson. Via the internet this is a thumbnail of the case:

The legal issue is whether they can fine or arrest people for sleeping outside if there’s no shelter available. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has deemed this cruel and unusual punishment, and this case is a pivotal challenge to that ruling.
The high court declined to take up a similar case in 2019. But since then, homelessness rates have climbed relentlessly. Street encampments have grown larger and have expanded to new places, igniting intense backlash from residents and businesses. Homelessness and the lack of affordable housing that’s helping to drive it have become key issues for many voters.

So, even the monopoly media is realizing how terrible the homeless situation is. Who gets hurt, in addition to someone who becomes homeless, but the local community? No one wishes to see so many poor souls out in the open, or hidden within the brush, to fend for themselves. Funny how the court does all it can to dance around the solution.

For all those good religious folks who attend their places of worship and echo that we are all our brother’s keeper: do something about it! Start telling your wonderful (yeah, right) elected officials to start increasing the taxing of the Super Rich, AKA Mega Millionaires and Billionaires. When JFK took office the top federal income tax rate was 90%. Over the years it dropped down to 78%, 71%, 50% all the way down to 39% and now at 37%. Do you think perhaps that our Super Rich fellow Americans have it damn good now? You bet your $1,000,000 and up home or shall I call it estate? My plan, the Farruggio Millionaire Flat Surtax Plan, would generate many of the funds needed to not only build affordable housing, but help treat the millions of mentally ill fellow citizens who cannot get the care needed to exist properly. My plan is to have a flat surtax of 50% on any income over 1 million dollars, with NO deductions… period! The first $one million would be taxed at the present rate, with any and all deductions allowed now. The other money would go directly to Uncle Sam to subsidize the homeless and mentally ill… or both. Do you think it is unreasonable for someone now earning $5 or $10 million (or a few $billion) a year to keep HALF that money TAX FREE?

On top of that teepee we need to stop the 50% of our discretionary spending that goes for our War Industries. How about spending 25% and use the remainder of the hundreds of billions of dollars saved to be directed for other social net needs? President Eisenhower, in his farewell address, called it what it was then and still is, a Military Industrial Complex. And the way it has always worked is simple, just follow the money. The House of Representatives just passed another bill for $95 billion in aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. Some estimates are that about half of that money is going into the pockets of US weapons manufacturers and other assorted War related businesses. During the Vietnam debacle whenever a Huey helicopter was destroyed the manufacturer.

Bell Helicopter, sold another one to Uncle Sam for $1 million. In the kill zone of Iraq in 2003, a US Apache Helicopter cost Uncle Sam around $30 million. Today, these vehicles can run from $60 million to over $130 million… of your tax dollars for more of our phony wars and aggressions. How many homeless and or mentally ill Americans can an Apache subsidize?

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Philip A Farruggio is regular columnist on itstheempirestupid website. He is the son and grandson of Brooklyn NYC longshoremen and a graduate of Brooklyn College, class of 1974. Since the 2000 election debacle Philip has written over 500 columns on the Military Industrial Empire and other facets of life in an upside down America. He is also host of the It’s the Empire… Stupid radio show, co produced by Chuck Gregory. Philip can be reached at paf1222@bellsouth.net. Read other articles by Philip.

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