Tag Archives: USA

Let’s put an end to the “war on drugs” that has ruined so many lives

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Katrina vanden Heuvel, “Why It’s Always Been Time to Legalize Marijuana,” The Nation, 30 October 2013

“Marijuana is indeed a gateway drug,” quips Sanho Tree of the Institute for Policy Studies. “It’s a gateway drug to the Oval Office!” Indeed. From Bill Clinton’s “I didn’t inhale it” through George W. Bush’s “I was young and foolish” to Barack Obama’s teen years in the Choom Gang (“I inhaled frequently—that was the point”), the last three presidents have more or less owned up to breaking America’s drug laws.
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Defense Contractors Profit Despite Sequestration And Shutdown

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Hayes Brown, “Defense Contractors Profit Despite Sequestration And Shutdown,” Think Progress, 24 October 2013

Defense contractors have managed to not only stay afloat but also thrive in a climate of government closure and massive cuts to the Pentagon’s budget, continuing to rake in billions upon billions of dollars in profits. Continue reading →

The Nearly $1 Trillion National Security Budget

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Chris Hellman and Mattea Kramer, “War Pay,” TomDispatch, 22 May 2012

Here, then, is a simple question that, for some curious reason, no one bothers to ask, no less answer: How much are we spending on national security these days? With major wars winding down, has Washington already cut such spending so close to the bone that further reductions would be perilous to our safety?

In fact, with projected cuts added in, the national security budget in fiscal 2013 will be nearly $1 trillion — a staggering enough sum that it’s worth taking a walk through the maze of the national security budget to see just where that money’s lodged.
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The militarization of U.S. police forces

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Michael Shank and Elizabeth Beavers, “The militarization of U.S. police forces,” Reuters, 22 October 2013

Police departments in Boise and Nampa, Idaho, each acquired an MRAP, as did the force in High Springs, Florida. The offer of war-ready machinery, at practically no cost, has proven hard to resist for local police departments. Increasingly, they are looking like soldiers equipped for battle.

The growing similarity between our domestic police forces and the U.S. military is a result of the Pentagon’s 1033 Program. This allows the Defense Department to donate surplus military equipment and weapons to law enforcement agencies. In addition to the frightening presence of paramilitary weapons in American towns, the program has led to rampant fraud and abuse. …
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Drone strikes killing more civilians than U.S. admits

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Craig Whitlock, “Drone strikes killing more civilians than U.S. admits, human rights groups say,” The Washington Post, 22 October 2013

Two influential human rights groups say they have freshly documented dozens of civilian deaths in U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, contradicting assertions by the Obama administration that such casualties are rare.
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Big Win for Defense Industry

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Cora Currier, “In Big Win for Defense Industry, Obama Rolls Back Limits on Arms Exports,” ProPublica, 14 October 2013

The United States is loosening controls over military exports, in a shift that former U.S. officials and human rights advocates say could increase the flow of American-made military parts to the world’s conflicts and make it harder to enforce arms sanctions.

Come tomorrow, thousands of parts of military aircraft, such as propeller blades, brake pads and tires will be able to be sent to almost any country in the world, with minimal oversight – even to some countries subject to U.N. arms embargos. U.S. companies will also face fewer checks than in the past when selling some military aircraft to dozens of countries. …
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Blowing Up Asteroids: The Latest Excuse to Keep Nuclear Stockpiles?

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Douglas Birch, “Blowing Up Asteroids: The Latest Excuse to Keep Nuclear Stockpiles?,” Center for Public Integrity, 16 October 2013

“It was a really bizarre thing to see that these weapons designers were willing to work together—to build the biggest bombs ever,” said Melosh, an expert in space impacts who has an asteroid named after him.

Ever since, he has been pushing back against scientists who still support the nuclear option, arguing that a non-nuclear solution—diverting asteroids by hitting them with battering rams—is both possible and far less dangerous.

But Melosh’s campaign suffered a setback last month when Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz signed an agreement with Russia that could open the door to new collaboration between nuclear weapons scientists in everything from plutonium-fueled reactors to lasers and explosives research. Continue reading →

NSA snooping exposed by Snowden breaches international law

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Ryan Gallagher, “The World’s Policeman Is Looking Mighty Guilty,” Slate, 17 October 2013

Participating in the session was a judge who has served in the European Court of Human Rights for 15 years, a former United Nations special rapporteur on human rights and counterterrorism, and a London-based international law professor. All three agreed that the scope of the surveillance revealed in the Snowden leaks constituted violations of both European and international laws and treaties.
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Pentagon Spent $5 Billion on Weapons on the Eve of the Shutdown

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John Reed, “Pentagon Spent $5 Billion on Weapons on the Eve of the Shutdown,” The Washington Post, 01 October 2013

The Pentagon pumped billions of dollars into contractors’ bank accounts on the eve of the U.S. government’s shutdown that saw 400,000 Defense Department employees furloughed.

All told, the Pentagon awarded 94 contracts yesterday evening on its annual end-of-the-fiscal-year spending spree, spending more than five billion dollars on everything from robot submarines to Finnish hand grenades and a radar base mounted on an offshore oil platform. To put things in perspective, the Pentagon gave out only 14 contracts on September 3, the first workday of the month.
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4% of Population Dead as result of US sanctions, wars

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Juan Cole, “The American Genocide Against Iraq: 4% of Population Dead as result of US sanctions, wars,” 10/17/2013

So the US polished off about a million Iraqis from 1991 through 2011, large numbers of them children. The Iraqi population in that period was roughly 25 million, so the US killed or created the conditions for the killing of 4% of the Iraqi population.
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U.S. fiscal failure warrants a de-Americanized world

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Liu Chang, “U.S. fiscal failure warrants a de-Americanized world,” Xinhua, 13 october 2013

As U.S. politicians of both political parties are still shuffling back and forth between the White House and the Capitol Hill without striking a viable deal to bring normality to the body politic they brag about, it is perhaps a good time for the befuddled world to start considering building a de-Americanized world. …
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The shutdown isn’t really a shutdown!

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David Sirota, “GOP’s massive fraud: The shutdown isn’t really a shutdown!,” Salon, 06 October 2013

Of course, there is an insidious method to the madness of government shutdowns. In general, the dividing line between what gets shut down and what doesn’t is a similar dividing line between what America’s political culture typically venerates as The State and what that culture lambasts as The Government. Consider what will not be shut down: Continue reading →

The Kosovo Precedent

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Franklin C. Spinney, “Syria in the Crosshairs,” CounterPunch, 27 August 2013

The inestimable Diana Johnstone ably dissected the illegalities and subterfuges of the Kosovo adventure in numerous articles over the years — her latest being “US Uses Past Crimes to Legalize Future Ones” on 26 August in Counterpunch.

Today, I want to address the stupidity of the Kosovo precedent from a somewhat different angle.

Not only was the Kosovo adventure illegal, it was also a case study in the failure of US precision strike doctrine. One would think the Obama White House would be sensitive to this, because the reasons for the failure are again evident in the metastasizing targets lists governing the conduct of the drone wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Continue reading →

Civil-military relations haven’t been this bad in decades

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MicahZenko, “The Soldier and the State Go Public,” Foreign Policy, 25 September 2013

Washington has found itself in a crisis over the proper relationship between senior civilian and military officials. This has played out in recent op-eds (“A War the Pentagon Doesn’t Want“) and articles (“Some U.S. Military Officers Not Happy With Syrian War Prep“), which have been countered by other op-eds (“No Military Consensus on Syria” and “U.S. War Decisions Rightfully Belong to Elected Civilian Leaders, Not the Military“). It’s a tension that shows little sign of abating, regardless of how the Syria issue plays out: Underlying forces seem guaranteed to make it worse.
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MLK’s vehement condemnations of US militarism are more relevant than ever

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Glenn Greenwald, “MLK’s vehement condemnations of US militarism are more relevant than ever,” The Guardian, 21 January 2013

The civil right achievements of Martin Luther King are quite justly the focus of the annual birthday commemoration of his legacy. But it is remarkable, as I’ve noted before on this holiday, how completely his vehement anti-war advocacy is ignored when commemorating his life (just as his economic views are). By King’s own description, his work against US violence and militarism, not only in Vietnam but generally, was central – indispensable – to his worldview and activism, yet it has been almost completely erased from how he is remembered.
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Nuke the Budget

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Tom Z. Collina, “Nuke the Budget,” Foreign Policy, August 9 2013

Consider this: The Pentagon, as directed by Congress, must dramatically cut its budget. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel warns the projected cuts are so large that they would “break” key parts of the military’s national security strategy, and even then “the savings fall well short” of meeting the $500 billion 10-year target.

At the same time, President Barack Obama, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Pentagon have determined that the United States has more strategic nuclear warheads than it needs to deter potential threats and can therefore reduce the deployed stockpile by up to one-third, to about 1,000 warheads. Hagel supported even deeper nuclear reductions before he was tapped to head the Pentagon.

Perfect target for budget cuts, right? Wrong, says Hagel, who has taken the U.S. nuclear weapons budget off the chopping block, all $31 billion per year of it. …
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How Buck McKeon created a global drone enterprise

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Tara McKelvey, “How Buck McKeon created a global drone enterprise,” BBC News Magazine, 2 August 2013

Many countries, including China and Israel, make drones. Yet the US is the world’s leader in creating technology for drones and in promoting their use – for both military and civilian purposes. The interest in drones in the US crosses political lines, with both Democrats and Republicans investing in the aircraft. …

Less well known, however, is the fact that drones are used in the civilian airspace over the US, UK and Europe.

It is a growing, if under-reported, trend. Many of the drones used in Pakistan, along with those sent to Afghanistan, now have a permanent home in the US. These drones are turned over to civilians who work for the federal Customs and Border Protection agency, police departments, and other government offices.

The story of how drones became a robust niche in domestic law enforcement – and part of the commercial world as well – is rooted in Washington DC. Indeed, the rise of the drone can be traced in part to one man, Howard “Buck” McKeon.

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There Is No Good Drug War

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Maya Schenwar, Interview “There Is No Good Drug War,” Truthout, 31 July 2013

Twenty years ago, when acclaimed neuroscientist Carl Hart began studying drugs, he was motivated by a desire to help communities like the one in which he grew up: poor communities of color that had been, he believed, ravaged by the crack “epidemic.” The media craze around crack headlines was swirling to a fever pitch at the time – the late ’80s and early ’90s – and, Hart writes, “I became utterly convinced that crack cocaine was the cause of everything that I now saw as wrong with the neighborhood.”

However, nothing is that straightforward, in the world or in High Price, and Hart’s work in the lab called into question some of his most deeply rooted assumptions.
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