Category: News

As anyone exposed to a whiff of news media knows, Republicans and Democrats are more divided than ever. They just can’t come together like they used to, goes the cliché.

But this week, they did come together. Republican Paul Ryan and Democrat Patty Murray hashed out a budget deal to avoid automatic sequestration cuts. It was a genuine “compromise,” as the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart quipped.

As has been widely reported, the real motivator in this “compromise” was the supposedly “dire” cuts in defense spending. There have been vociferous warnings from Congress and the Pentagon that sequestration will weaken America by taking an ax to national defense and leaving us vulnerable to attack.

Obviously that’s nonsense. The U.S. could cut its defense budget in half, unthinkably more drastic than sequestration, and still outspend China, which is the U.S.’s next highest spending competitor.

As a 2011 report from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments found, while the source of growth in annual defense budgets since 2001 has been mostly (54%) due to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, much of the rest has been spent on wasteful superfluous weapons technology, bloated salaries and benefits plans, and expensive peacetime operating costs for the 900-plus military bases in 130-plus countries around the world.

Continue reading “The Parties Come Together to Save the Military-Industrial Complex”

On Obama’s first day in office, he signed an executive order restricting current and former lobbyists from working in his administration. From the very beginning, the President has wiggled around this measure, as people like Tim Carney at the Washington Examiner have meticulously documented.

But at this point it seems like the President is getting lazy. An absolutely must-read piece at the New York Times reports that John Podesta, founder of the liberal think-tank Center for American Progress (CAP) – an organization the Times calls “a virtual external policy arm of the Obama administration” – has deep ties to corporate rent-seekers who benefit from favorable government policies and has now been hired as an adviser to the President.

The defense contractor Northrop Grumman gave money to the left-leaning Center for American Progress, founded by John D. Podesta, as the nonprofit group at times bemoaned what it called the harmful impact of major reductions in Pentagon spending.

Pacific Gas and Electric sent in a donation as Mr. Podesta championed government incentives to promote solar energy and other renewable sources that the California company buys more of than nearly any other utility.

The pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly was also a donor because of what it said was the Center for American Progress’s advocacy for patients’ rights — and just as the debate heated up in Washington over potential cuts to the Medicare program that covers Lilly’s most profitable drugs.

Mr. Podesta, named a senior adviser to President Obama, is not currently a lobbyist and therefore does not have to worry about the Obama administration’s self-imposed ban on hiring lobbyists to administration jobs. But he will nonetheless arrive at the White House after having run an organization that has taken millions of dollars in corporate donations in recent years and has its own team of lobbyists who have pushed an agenda that sometimes echoes the interests of these corporate supporters.

Podesta has served on the corporate boards of clean energy companies and defense contractors whose “future…depends in part on…policies set by the government and heavily promoted by the White House.”

So “Obama adviser” John Podesta’s corporate ties to the defense, energy, and pharmaceutical industries is a vital asset for those companies hoping to get government handouts. Obama ain’t even shy about it anymore.

This kind of revolving door machine is a big part of the reason corporate welfare sectors like the defense industry have an outsize influence in Washington and continue to get paid exorbitant amounts of taxpayer money for weapons systems that even the Pentagon says it doesn’t want or need and for a military budget that exceeds most of the rest of the world’s defense budgets combined.

Read the full report here.

Last March – before Edward Snowden revealed the NSA’s sweeping collection of phone and other data – Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said no such operation existed. Now, a group of ex-national security officials urge President Obama to fire Clapper.

MEMORANDUM FOR: The President
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
SUBJECT: Fire James Clapper

We wish to endorse the call by Rep. James Sensenbrenner Jr., Chair of the Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security, Committee on the Judiciary, that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper should be removed and prosecuted for lying to Congress. “Lying to Congress is a federal offense, and Clapper ought to be fired and prosecuted for it,” the Wisconsin Republican said in an interview with The Hill. “The only way laws are effective is if they’re enforced.”

Sensenbrenner added, “If it’s a criminal offense – and I believe Mr. Clapper has committed a criminal offense – then the Justice Department ought to do its job.

This brief Memorandum is to inform you that we agree that no intelligence director should be able to deceive Congress and suffer no consequences. No democracy that condones such deceit at the hands of powerful, secretive intelligence directors can long endure.

It seems clear that you can expect no help from Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, to which Clapper has apologized for giving “clearly erroneous” testimony, and who, at the height of the controversy over his credibility, defended him as a “direct and honest” person.

You must be well aware that few amendments to the U.S. Constitution are as clear as the fourth:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

Continue reading “Obama Urged to Fire DNI Clapper”

Here in Switzerland, the train chugs along nicely between Geneva and Lausanne. The Alpine mountain range desperately fights to make its presence known despite the irritating persistence of low- hanging clouds. A friend had just introduced me to the music of J.J. Cale, but my thoughts were moving faster than the speed of the train. Time is too short to sleep, but never long enough to think.

It has been nearly a week since I embarked on a speaking tour in French-speaking countries of Europe. The trip was more difficult than I thought it would be, but also successful. I am here to talk about Gaza, to explain Arab revolutions and to remind many of their moral responsibility towards Palestine and Arab nations. For six months prior to that date, I lived and worked in the Middle East. Soon after I had arrived, Egypt entered into a most disheartening new phase of violence and chaos. Despite the suffering and bloodletting, the fresh turmoil seemed to correspond more accurately to the greatness of the fight at hand. The Jan 25 revolution was declared victorious too soon.

For me, the turmoil in Egypt was more than a political topic to be analyzed or a human rights issue to be considered. It was very personal. Now, my access to Gaza is no longer guaranteed. Gaza, despite its impossible reality and overwhelming hardship, was the last space in Palestine in which I was allowed to visit after 18 years of being denied such access. It was the closest place to what I would call home.

My travel companion informs me that we have ten minutes to Lausanne. I wish it was much longer. There is so much to consider. My sorrow for Gaza and its suffocating siege, for Palestine and its denied freedom is now part of a much larger blend of heartbreaks over Arab peoples as they struggle for self-definition, equality, rights and freedom. No, hope will never be lost, for the battle for freedom is eternal. But the images in my head of the numerous victims in this war – especially children who barely knew what war is even about in the first place – are haunting.

I went back in the Middle East hoping to achieve some clarity. But at numerous occasions I felt more confused. I don’t know why I get bewildered feelings every time I am back in the Middle East. I only refer to the Middle East when I write in English. In Arabic, it is ‘al-watan al-Arabi’, the Arab homeland. We were taught this as children, and knew of no other reference but that. Among Arab friends, I sound juvenile when I say the ‘Arab homeland’. No one there makes that reference anymore.

Continue reading “From the Middle East to Lausanne: Arabic Thoughts Amidst the Alps”

When U.S. leaders and pundits talk about NATO, they describe it as the linchpin of world security and the manifestation of Western liberal values. In other formulations, the U.S. is graciously bestowing a kind of welfare program to its allies in the form of security and protection throughout the European continent because, well, that’s just how much we care about our fellow man.

In reality, NATO is about U.S. control and domination, and a recent report at Foreign Policy demonstrates this fact quite well. Apparently Turkey, a NATO member, has been trying to finalize a deal with a Chinese company to build its first long-range air and missile defense system. This infuriated officials in Washington to the point that they drew up legislation that would ban Chinese-built missile defense systems within NATO. Subtle, I know.

Turkey stunned U.S. officials in September when it reached a provisional deal worth up to $3.4 billion with a Chinese company blacklisted in the United States to build Turkey’s first long-range air and missile defense system. Monday, Congress drew a line in the sand over it: If the 2014 U.S. defense spending bill goes through as proposed, it will ban the use of U.S. funding to integrate Chinese missile defense systems with U.S. or NATO systems, effectively making it impossible for Turkey to operate Chinese equipment with many partner nations.

The provision is one of many hardball tactics in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), and is clearly aimed at short-circuiting Turkey’s plan. Turkey, which entered NATO in 1952, indicated it favored the Chinese company, China Precision Machinery Export-Import Corporation, in part because some components would be built in Turkey, providing a boost to the country’s economy. U.S. and NATO officials strenuously objected to Turkey’s plan, warning that Turkish companies involved in building components for the Chinese system could face U.S. trade sanctions.

It looks like Turkey’s rationale for dealing with the Chinese company mirrors perfectly U.S. rationales for selecting defense corporations to build weapons and defense systems – namely, that it enhances the security of the nation and boosts the economy by creating jobs. But that is a prerogative Turkey doesn’t have, apparently.

The other aspect of this is that Turkey’s willingness to deal with a Chinese company in particular probably irked U.S. officials profoundly. China is a rising superpower and its expanding global influence, especially on military and foreign policy matters, is terrifying to U.S. policymakers intent on maintaining the position of sole superpower, or to put it in Pentagon-ese, hegemony.

As this controversy demonstrates, NATO is not about helping keep our allies safe and strong. International relations scholar Christopher Layne, in his book The Peace of Illusions, describes NATO as “the instrument through which Washington exercise[s] its continental preeminence.” It is essential to U.S. grand strategy, he writes, to “prevent” member countries “from following an independent foreign or security policy.” If countries do attempt to demonstrate independence, Washington views it as “a direct assault on U.S. hegemony.”

NATO ensures a U.S.-run system of control over much of history’s most strategically important geography. It is not a charitable welfare program.

The House of Representatives is currently considering putting forth a vote on additional sanctions on the Iranian economy. Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif has declared unequivocally that additional sanctions would mean “the entire deal is dead.”

Well, that seems to be the point. This piece in Al Monitor authored by Daniel Kurtzer and Thomas Pickering, two former U.S. diplomats, along with former Iranian diplomat Seyed Hossein Mousavian, spells it out in plain English:

[I]f the West does not lift the specified sanctions or, worse, should US Congress or another country actually impose greater sanctions during this six-month period, it will be a clear sign that the West is not interested in a negotiated deal and that the United States has not distanced itself from a policy of regime change.

I argued something similar in a piece for Al Jazeera back in September. On the road to high-level diplomatic negotiations, Washington’s biggest obstacle was in convincing Iran we weren’t solely after regime change. Typically, rival states don’t engage in good faith negotiations if one is convinced the other is out to destroy their regime.

But Congress is doing everything in its power to make sure not to disabuse the Iranians of this view. They say it will strengthen the West’s negotiating hand, as if they are pretending not to hear the Iranians saying explicitly that talks will fall apart if more sanctions are imposed.