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Big Military Spending Boost Threatens Our Economy and Security

Monday July 17, 2017

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On Friday the House overwhelmingly approved a massive increase in military spending, passing a $696 billion National Defense Authorization bill for 2018. President Trump’s request already included a huge fifty or so billion dollar spending increase, but the Republican-led House found even that to be far too small. They added another $30 billion to the bill for good measure. Even President Trump, in his official statement, expressed some concern over spending in the House-passed bill.
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Democrats Gone Mad: The Year of Living Stupidly

Sunday July 16, 2017

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For more than a year now, the collective US ruling class, with Democratic Party and corporate media operatives in the vanguard, has frozen the national political discourse in a McCarthyite time warp. A random visit to a July 26, 2016, issue of the New York Times reveals the same obsession as that which consumes the newspaper today: “Following the Links from Russian Hackers to the US Election,” “Spy Agency Consensus Grows That Russia Hacked DNC.” A year later, the allegations persist, piled ever higher with innuendo and outright nonsense. However, proof of the predicate act -- that Russia, not Wikileaks, penetrated the DNC -- remains totally absent.

What is the purpose of this torture-by-media? Clearly, the Trump White House has been crippled by the tsunami that never ebbs, but the Democrats have not been strengthened in the process, and the corporate media’s standing among the public erodes by the day. A poll conducted last month showed majorities of voters want Congress to ease up on Russia investigations and get to work on healthcare, terrorism, national security, the economy and jobs. Almost three out of four respondents to the Harvard-Harris poll said lawmakers aren’t paying attention to the issues that are important to them -- including 68 percent of Democrats. Sixty-two percent of voters say there is no hard evidence of White House “collusion” with Russia, and 64 percent think the investigations are hurting the country.

“That two out of three Americans believe the so-called ‘mainstream’ press is full of fake news -- including a majority of Democrats.”

The non-stop vilification of Russia and Trump has seriously backfired on the corporate media. Another poll by Harvard-Harris, conducted back in May, showed that two out of three Americans believe the so-called “mainstream” press is full of “fake news” -- including a majority of Democrats. The Russiagate blitzkrieg, designed to delegitimize Trump and demonize Vladimir Putin, has exacerbated an already existing crisis of legitimacy for the entire US political system. “Every major institution from the presidency to the courts is now seen as operating in a partisan fashion in one direction or the other,” said poll co-director Mark Penn.
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20th Anniversary, Asian Financial Crisis: Clinton, The IMF And Wall Street Journal Toppled Suharto

Saturday July 15, 2017

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On August 14, 1997, shortly after the Thai baht collapsed on July 2nd, Indonesia floated the rupiah. This prompted Stanley Fischer, then the Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund and presently Vice Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, to proclaim that “the management of the IMF welcomes the timely decision of the Indonesian authorities. The floating of the rupiah, in combination with Indonesia’s strong fundamentals, supported by prudent fiscal and monetary policies, will allow its economy to continue its impressive economic performance of the last several years.”

Contrary to the IMF’s expectations, the rupiah did not float on a sea of tranquility. It plunged from a value of 2,700 rupiahs per U.S. dollar to lows of nearly 16,000 rupiahs per U.S. dollar in 1998. Indonesia was caught up in the maelstrom of the Asian Financial Crisis.

By late January 1998, President Suharto realized that the IMF medicine was not working and sought a second opinion. In February, I was invited to offer that opinion and was appointed as Suharto’s Special Counselor. Although I did not have any opinions on the Suharto government, I did have definite ones on the matter at hand. After nightly discussions at the President’s private residence, I proposed an antidote: an orthodox currency board in which the rupiah would be fully convertible into and backed by the U.S. dollar at a fixed exchange rate. On the day that news hit the street, the rupiah soared by 28% against the U.S. dollar on both the spot and one year forward markets. These developments infuriated the U.S. government and the IMF.
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Obama's AWOL Antiwar Protest

Saturday July 15, 2017

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Barack Obama campaigned for the presidency in 2008 as a peace candidate. He signaled that he would fundamentally change America’s course after the reckless carnage unleashed by the George W. Bush administration. However, by the end of Obama’s presidency, the United States was bombing seven different foreign nations.

But Obama’s warring rarely evoked the protests or opposition that the Bush administration generated. Why did so many Bush-era anti-war activists abandon the cause after Obama took office?

One explanation is that the news media downplayed Obama’s killings abroad. Shortly after he took office, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize — not because of anything that he had achieved, but because of the sentiments he had expressed. Shortly after he accepted the Peace Prize, he announced that he would sharply increase the number of American troops in Afghanistan. Much of the media treated Obama’s surge as if it were simply a military campaign designed to ensure that the rights of Afghan women were respected. The fact that more than 2,000 American troops died in Afghanistan on Obama’s watch received far less attention in the press than did the casualties from Bush’s Iraq war.

In early 2011, popular uprisings in several Arab nations spurred  a hope that democracy would soon flourish across North Africa and much of the Middle East. Violent protests in Libya soon threatened the long-term regime of dictator Muammar Qaddafi, who had become a US ally and supporter in recent years. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other advisors persuaded Obama to forcibly intervene in what appeared to be a civil war.
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Tucker Carlson, Neocon Slayer

Friday July 14, 2017

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Oh, it was glorious fun, yielding the kind of satisfaction that us anti-interventionists rarely get to enjoy: not one but two prominent neoconservatives who have been wrong about everything for the past decade – yet never held accountable – getting taken down on national television. Tucker Carlson, whose show is a shining light of reason in a fast-darkening world, has performed a public service by demolishing both Ralph Peters and Max Boot on successive shows. But these two encounters with evil weren’t just fun to watch, they’re also highly instructive for what they tell us about the essential weakness of the War Party and its failing strategy for winning over the American people.
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Aleppo and Mosul: A Tale of Two Liberated Cities

Friday July 14, 2017

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The Iraqi city of Mosul. The Syrian city of Aleppo. Both "liberated" in recent months from radical jihadist terror groups. But while one anti-terrorist operation has been lauded in the West, the other was fiercely denounced.

The very different ways in which the respective 'liberations' were portrayed tells us much about the way war propaganda works in the so-called free world.

For the last few days we've been fed triumphant reports on western news media about the 'liberation" of Mosul from ISIS. US President Donald Trump issued a White House Statement congratulating the Iraqi authorities in which the words "liberation" or "liberated" appeared three times.

Everyone, it seems, wants to get credit for the successful military operation. The Independent newspaper reported how a Pentagon official said that ISIS had been defeated because of Barack Obama's "training strategies." The liberation of Mosul has been sold to us as a great victory. Which, at face value, it undoubtedly is. Who, after all, would like to see the brutal terrorizing butchers of the Islamic State retain territory? But what’s noticeable is how the cost of ‘liberation’ has been glossed over, even though it has been very high indeed.

Airwars researchers, for instance, estimate that between 900 and 1,200 civilians have been killed by US-led coalition and artillery strikes during the eight-month operation, and that "many hundreds of even thousands more may have died in coalition actions."
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Return of Pentagon Mercenaries Worries US Active Duty Military

Friday July 14, 2017

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During the time that US Defense Secretary James Mattis and National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster are reviewing the US military policy in Afghanistan, The New York Times ran a story on July 10, 2017 that exposed a threat that will upend US defense strategy and return it to a bitter past. The Times story was centered around the following paragraph:

“Erik D. Prince, a founder of the private security firm Blackwater Worldwide, and Stephen A. Feinberg, a billionaire financier who owns the giant military contractor DynCorp International, have developed proposals to rely on contractors instead of American troops in Afghanistan at the behest of Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s chief strategist, and Jared Kushner, his senior adviser and son-in-law, according to people briefed on the conversations.”

The history of Blackwater and Dyncorp is one of heinous war crimes in Iraq and the Balkans and massive fraud involving US taxpayers’ money in military forays around the world. After coming under investigation for his activities as Blackwater’s chief, Prince, whose sister is Donald Trump’s Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, sold the company and moved his mercenary operations offshore to Abu Dhabi.

Prince’s Abu Dhabi-based company, Reflex Responses (R2), has been recruiting and training forces from around the world, particularly from Colombia, Chile, Honduras, South Africa, and Romania as mercenaries for Abu Dhabi’s crown prince Sheik Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahayan. There is a strict prohibition on hiring Muslim military personnel since they cannot necessarily be relied upon to kill fellow Muslims.
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US Taxpayers Will be ‘Crying in Their Beers’ When Iraqi Reconstruction Bill Arrives

Thursday July 13, 2017

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The neocons and the military-industrial complex are rubbing their hands with glee over profits to be made from Iraqi reconstruction, but that cannot be said of the US taxpayer who must foot the bill, says Ron Paul Institute Executive Director Daniel McAdams.

After Amnesty International had published a report accusing the US coalition of partial responsibility for mass civilian casualties, Major General Rupert Jones, the deputy commander of the international anti-ISIS coalition, criticized the findings, calling the allegations disrespectful and naive.

“It strikes me as being written by people who simply have no understanding of the brutality of warfare. But we should be absolutely clear who were deliberately killing civilians,” Jones told the Telegraph.

RT: How much legitimacy is there to support the permanent basing of US troops in Iraq following the military operation in Mosul that has left much of the city in ruins?

Daniel McAdams: There is absolutely no consensus in Congress; there has been no new authorization. The ground is very shaky legally for the US to permanently base troops there.
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Can Tillerson Referee The Qatar/Saudi Crisis?

Thursday July 13, 2017

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson walked away from the Middle East empty-handed this week, as his efforts to mediate the Qatar/Saudi crisis failed to bear fruit. The dispute is the most serious between the two sides in some time, but how much of it was brought on by the meeting in May between a new and very aggressive heir to the Saudi throne and President Donald Trump? Both are very aggressive toward Iran, and the conflict is being framed in pro- versus anti-Iran terms. Where do things go? Tune in to today's Liberty Report...
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Mosul: Another 'Mission Accomplished'

Wednesday July 12, 2017

From February to June, an estimated 5,800 civilians have been killed in Mosul by US coalition airstrikes, a significant escalation in civilian deaths over the previous US Administration. With Mosul now "liberated" by US and Iraqi military forces, there is virtually nothing left of the city. Now we are told that we have to spend more billions of dollars rebuilding the city that we just destroyed, and once again training new Iraqi military forces to make up for all those killed in this campaign. Does this sound like a sensible US foreign policy? Tune in to today's Liberty Report...
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