Tag: American Empire

Check Out an Intelligent Conversation About the US War with Russia in Ukraine (Yep, It’s a Needless Proxy War Threatening Nuclear Annihilation)

Below is as worthwhile conversation between Judge Andew Nepolitano and Professor John Mearsheimer about the current war in Ukraine.

Mearsheimer opens by explaining the two competing perspectives on this war. He then explains why the prevailing Western/US perspective is not only wrong-headed but extremely dangerous.

The US public is the #1 financier of this needless bloodbath — to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. It is well worth your time to hear what Professor Mearsheimer has to say.

After listening, I urge you to call your elected representatives and urge them to insist that (1) all parties to the conflict begin immediate peace negotiations, and (2) the US stop funding Ukrainian weaponry and intelligence.

America’s Obsession with War Has Made Us a Divided Nation

I am thinking back to that childhood adage about the hypocrisy of pointing fingers. Remember? When I point my finger at someone else, I always have three fingers pointing back at myself.

Funny how we tend to forget the wisdom of childhood.

Instead of pointing fingers, let’s look in the mirror and pay attention to our own faces.

Today Andrea Mazzarino, co-founder of Brown University’s Costs of War Project, has an article at TomDispatch analyzing the domestic blowback of

Andrea Mazzarino

America’s addiction to perpetual war.

A nation cannot keep itself on a continual war footing, as American has done for the past 20 years, without infecting its citizenry with a self-destructive “us vs. them, where’s the enemy?” attitude. It foments tribalism which spreads like a disease.

Those killer drones will come home to roost.

The article is titled “How War Divides Us.” Below is an excerpt:

As many Americans condemn Russia for its grim invasion, it’s easy to forget that for more than two decades now, others in our world have viewed our post-9/11 foreign policy in much the way we now view Russia’s — as imperialist and expansionist. After all, the U.S. invaded two countries, while using the 9/11 attacks to launch a war on terror globally that metastasized into U.S. counterterror activities in 85 nations.

This has, in fact, been the violent American century, but even less recognized here is how our war on terror helped cause us to turn on one another. It injected fear and the weaponry that goes with it into a country where relatively prosperous, connected communities like mine would have had the potential to expand and offer other Americans far more robust support.

If we don’t find a way to pay more attention to why this didn’t happen and just how we did so much negatively to ourselves, then a police-state mentality and its potential companion, civil war (like the ones we’ve seen in countries we sought to “democratize” by force of arms) may, in the end, become the deepest reality of an ever more polarized America. Of that, Donald Trump is but a symptom.

You can read the entire article here.

Clinton/Rice Interview Demonstrates Both Parties Are Equally Imperialistic

Jon Stewart recently had a joint interview with Hilary Clinton (former Democratic Secretary of State for the Obama administration) and Condoleezza Rice (former Republican Secretary of State for the Bush administration).

Below I have posted the full interview followed by two excellent analyses from a couple of my favorite news commentators: Kristal Ball (former journalist for MSNBC; currently cohost of the independent news program, Breaking Points) and Briahna Joy Gray (lawyer and political consultant with a profession pedigree too long to list here).

If you can’t watch the entire interview, I encourage you to check out both of the following commentaries. In addition to Ms. Gray’s and Ms. Ball’s excellent insights, I will add a few observations of my own:

  1. Both Clinton and Rice illustrate the inevitably corrupting effects of power and political success. The hypocrisy, self-justification, and dissimulation demonstrated by these women is astounding.  Their apparent obliviousness to the jarring disconnect between their past actions and their current “explanations” makes one wonder if a professional diagnosis of “sociopath” is a job requirement for all federal Secretaries of State.
  2. There are no differences whatsoever between Democrats and Republicans when it comes to US foreign policy. The US political establishment is monolithic on this score. Everyone is equally imperialistic, arrogant, and utterly indifferent to the extensive damage America leaves in its wake as we blithely cruise from one catastrophe to another “policing” the rest of the world.
  3. Women become warmongers as easily as men.
  4. This interview strengthens my belief in the Christian doctrine of Original Sin.
  5. Christians who understand themselves as citizens of the kingdom of God will realize that we cannot align ourselves with either of our major political parties and that the military-industrial complex stinks of fire and brimstone.

Here is the Stewart interview:

Below is Briahna Joy Gray:

Here is Kristal Ball:

 

 

Enough Already with the Royal Family

The Harvard history professor, Maya Jasanoff, has written three books about the British Empire. Over at the Washington Post, she has published an

Professor Maya Jasanoff

article discussing the recent coverage of the death of Queen Elizabeth II. It is titled, “Mourn the Queen, Not the Empire.”

Similar articles can be written — actually, many have been written already — about the long history of the American Empire.

Below is an excerpt (all emphasis is mine):

“The end of an era” will become a refrain as commentators assess the record-setting reign of Queen Elizabeth II. Like all monarchs, she was both an individual and an institution. She had a different birthday for each role — the actual anniversary of her birth in April and an official one in June — and, though she retained her personal name as monarch, held different titles depending on where in her domains she stood. She was as devoid of opinions and emotions in public as her ubiquitous handbags were said to be of everyday items like a wallet, keys and phone. Of her inner life we learned little beyond her love of horses and dogs — which gave Helen Mirren, Olivia Colman and Claire Foy rapt audiences for the insights they enacted. . .

. . . What you would never know from the pictures — which is partly their point — is the violence that lies behind them. In 1948, the colonial governor of Malaya declared a state of emergency to fight communist guerrillas, and British troops used counterinsurgency tactics the Americans would emulate in Vietnam. In 1952 the governor of Kenya imposed a state of emergency to suppress an anticolonial movement known as Mau Mau, under which the British rounded up tens of thousands of Kenyans into detention camps and subjected them to brutal, systematized torture. In Cyprus in 1955 and Aden, Yemen, in 1963, British governors again declared states of emergency to contend with anticolonial attacks; again they tortured civilians. Meanwhile, in Ireland, the Troubles brought the dynamics of emergency to the United Kingdom. In a karmic turn, the Irish Republican Army assassinated the queen’s relative Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India (and the architect of Elizabeth’s marriage to his nephew, Prince Philip), in 1979.

We may never learn what the queen did or didn’t know about the crimes committed in her name. (What transpires in the sovereign’s weekly meetings with the prime minister remains a black box at the center of the British state.) Her subjects haven’t necessarily gotten the full story, either. Colonial officials destroyed many records that, according to a dispatch from the secretary of state for the colonies, “might embarrass Her Majesty’s government” and deliberately concealed others in a secret archive whose existence was revealed only in 2011. Though some activists such as the Labour M.P. Barbara Castle publicized and denounced British atrocities, they failed to gain wide public traction.

Click here to read the entire article.

Trump Said It Out Loud: Take Syria’s Oil

I hope that no one still imagines that the US has military forces in Syria because we want to bring the people democracy.

The real story in such foreign interventions is always about American hegemony, American power, American exploitation of other nations’ resources.

That simple fact has always been apparent in Syria, but now it is undeniable.

The Washington Post recently published a major story detailing America’s permanent occupation of Syria’s oil fields. The article, written by Liz Sly, is titled “America’s Hidden War in Syria.”

Below is an excerpt:

U.S. troops will now stay in Syria
indefinitely, controlling a third of the
country and facing peril on many fronts.

RAQQA, Syria — This ruined, fearful city was once the Islamic State’s capital, the showcase of its caliphate and a magnet for foreign fighters from around the globe.

Now it lies at the heart of the United States’ newest commitment to a Middle East war.

The commitment is small, a few thousand troops who were first sent to Syria three years ago to help the Syrian Kurds fight the Islamic State. President Trump indicated in March that the troops would be brought home once the battle is won, and the latest military push to eject the group from its final pocket of territory recently got underway.

In September, however, the administration switched course, saying the troops will stay in Syria pending an overall settlement to the Syrian war and with a new mission: to act as a bulwark against Iran’s expanding influence. 

That decision puts U.S. troops in overall control, perhaps indefinitely, of an area comprising nearly a third of Syria, a vast expanse of mostly desert terrain roughly the size of Louisiana.

The Pentagon does not say how many troops are there. Officially, they number 503, but earlier this year an official let slip that the true number may be closer to 4,000. Most are Special Operations forces, and their footprint is light. Their vehicles and convoys rumble by from time to time along the empty desert roads, but it is rare to see U.S. soldiers in towns and cities.

The new mission raises new questions, about the role they will play and whether their presence will risk becoming a magnet for regional conflict and insurgency.

Read the entire article here.

The Colonizer and the Colonized

Albert Memmi, born in Tunis in 1920, was a Tunisian intellectual who grew

FRANCE – JULY 02: Albert Memmi, author, at home in Paris, France on July 02, 2004. (Photo by Marc GANTIER/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

up in his native land under French colonialism. He would eventually become a philosophy professor in Paris and write a best-selling autobiographical novel, The Pillar of Salt.

In 1956, he wrote a fascinating book titled The Colonizer and the Colonized, in which he insightfully describes the lasting effects of colonization on both those who conquer a foreign land, as well as those who are conquered.

The folks who study the history of colonization sometimes say that colonization is not an event but a structure. In other words, the people with the power build a social system intended to protect their power.

That colonial system does not come down until everyone, both the colonizers and the colonized together, decide that the old power structure must end.

Both Israel and the United States are colonial powers. Memmi’s analysis offers a penetrating description of both societies.

Memmi describes modern Israeli society to a T.

I believe he also sheds light on the inner resources of those Americans who embrace the ideologies of White Supremacy, American Exceptionalism and Nationalism, particularly Christian Nationalism.

And what about the American urge to control foreign governments and their economies around the world?

Below is a short excerpt for your consideration:

Accepting the reality of being a colonizer means agreeing to be a nonlegitimate privileged person, that is, a usurper. To be sure, a usurper claims his place and, if need be, will defend it by every means at his disposal. This amounts to saying that at the very time of his triumph, he admits that what triumphs in him is an image which he condemns…to possess victory completely he needs to absolve himself of it and the conditions under which it was attained…He endeavors to falsify history, he rewrites laws, he would extinguish memories – anything to succeed in transforming his usurpation into legitimacy.

How? How can usurpation try to pass for legitimacy? One attempt can be made by demonstrating the usurper’s eminent merits, so eminent that they deserve such compensation. Another is to harp on the usurped’s demerits, so deep that they cannot help leading to misfortune. His disquiet and resulting thirst for justification require the usurpers to extol himself to the skies and to drive the usurped below the ground at the same time…

With all his power he must disown the colonized while their existence is indispensable to his own. Having chosen to maintain the colonial system, he must contribute more vigor to its defense than would have been needed to dissolve it completely. Having become aware of the unjust relationship which ties him to the colonized, he must continually attempt to absolve himself. He never forgets to make a public show of his own virtues, and will argue with vehemence to appear heroic and great…

He cannot help but approve discrimination and the codification of injustice, he will be delighted at police tortures, if the necessity arises, will become convinced of the necessity of massacres…The mechanism is practically constant. The colonial situation manufactures colonialists, just as it manufactures the colonized…

Every colonial nation carries the seeds of fascist temptation in its bosom.

What is fascism, if not a regime of oppression for the benefit of a few?…The human relationships have arisen from the severest exploitation, founded on inequality and contempt, guaranteed by police authoritarianism. There is no doubt in the minds of those who have lived through it that colonialism is one variety of fascism…

It is no more surprising that colonial fascism is not easily limited to the colony. Cancer wants only to spread. The colonialist can only support oppressive and reactionary or, at least, conservative governments. He tends towards that which will maintain the current status of his homeland, or rather that which will more positively assure the framework of oppression.

Aziz Rana, “Left Internationalism in the Heart of Empire”

Dissent magazine recently published a fascinating article by Aziz Rana, a professor of Constitutional law and political development at Cornell Law School.

The article is titled, “Left Internationalism in the Heart of Empire.”

Looking at this present moment in world history, professor Rana says that no one on the American political spectrum, neither the right nor the left, Republicans nor Democrats, is prepared for a looming future where the US will inevitably lose its unipolar power over world affairs.

The problem is that both the Right and the Left have been equally invested in the maintenance and expansion of American Empire, to the detriment of the rest of the world.

Both ends of the political spectrum have been equally blind to the policy constraints of America’s cookie-cutter approach to foreign policy, built around the long-entrenched, Manichean bromides of (1) Exceptional America is always working benevolently for the good, and (2) Anyone opposing America’s policies abroad must be on the side of evil.

What is needed now, Rana argues, is a genuinely Leftist International order, which frankly strikes me as a far more “Christian” way to view world affairs than anything the US has done in the past.

Below are a few excerpts from the article, though I recommend reading it all:

American leftists need an internationalist vision that universally and effectively joins anti-imperial and anti-authoritarian ethics.

The global international order seems to have entered what political theorist George Shulman has called an “interregnum.” The post–Second World War framework organized around U.S. international leadership is unraveling, but it remains unclear what will come next. As Shulman put it last year, channeling Gramsci, “the old gods are dying, the new ones have yet to be born.” To a significant degree, this unraveling is a product of American policymaking failures—whether destructive wars of choice in the Middle East, neoliberal practices that have promoted financial instability alongside extremes in wealth and immiseration, or internal political dysfunctions that have undermined any coherent strategy for dealing with a global pandemic. . .

. . . Across most of the political spectrum, policymakers and commentators largely embrace the essential goodness of the security state as it is currently constituted. The idea that the U.S. government is a benevolent historical agent with the potential to establish a pacific and stable world community is a central feature of establishment foreign policy—including among American liberals. As this view would have it, whatever the flaws within U.S. society—whether racism, sexism, or class inequality—at root American institutions are more or less just, and are organized around principles of liberty and self-government. American liberalism thus offers a clear vision of internationalism: the security interests pursued by bipartisan policymakers are coterminous with the world’s interests.

All of this justifies a presumptive political exceptionalism about how the United States operates on the world stage. Most liberals today would be hesitant to sign on to a strong account of such exceptionalism—that Reaganite cultural argument about the unique greatness of the country. Regardless, they would by and large agree that in a world of coequal nation-states in which no one has the real ability to enforce existing arrangements, it often falls on the United States to serve as the ultimate backstop of global security. It is therefore acceptable for the state to step inside and outside of established legal constraints if doing so helps ensure that the system functions and survives. American liberal internationalists acknowledge that the United States sometimes gets things wrong, even disastrously so—as with Vietnam or the second Iraq War—but these episodes are treated as particular follies of an otherwise legitimate and moral security project.

In response, many democratic socialists offer a general critique of U.S. primacy and faith in the objectives of the national security state. Such left activists question a rosy story of the postwar order. They note that U.S. violations of foreign self-determination were the overarching reality of the Cold War era. The period saw direct involvement or complicity in truly staggering forms of mass violence across large swathes of the world, including countless coups, political assassinations, and small-scale interventions. Rather than generating a stable and prosperous community of liberal democracies, U.S. power often encouraged economic exploitation and illiberal authoritarianism (as in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Greece, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Indonesia, and South Africa, to name just a handful of client states). . .

. . . The U.S. promotion of privatization and the starving of state institutions in Europe and elsewhere, alongside policies like NATO expansion, not only funneled money into a corporate-military framework but also fed a mix of economic oligarchy and belligerent ethno-nationalism—conditions ripe for a takeover by a despot like Putin. Yet none of that historical analysis answers the question of what should be done now.

The national security establishment, liberals included, has a straightforward answer: the U.S. security state should intervene through its classic toolkit, with some combination of aggressive sanctions and militarized confrontation. For defenders of American primacy, the inevitable global fact of bad actors means that each outbreak of overseas instability is new proof of the necessity of U.S. exceptionalism. In the immediate wake of previous strategic blunders—in Vietnam, in Central America, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Libya—there may be handwringing about past misbehavior. But faith in the unique responsibility of the United States means that with every new threat history essentially starts afresh. Rebooting the security apparatus takes precedence over thinking systematically about why the recent past has been littered with so much failure. . 

You can read the entire article here.

Imperialist Biden Reverses Trump’s Policy on Somalia

Did you know that we have US troops fighting and dying in the African country of Somalia? Well, we do.

President Trump had begun the process of withdrawing those troops and

US Marines in Mogadishu, Somalia

bringing them home. One of his foreign policy decisions that I supported.

But president Biden has reversed that decision and is redeploying US troops to the African country, just as a good imperialist country should. And the US is nothing if not an imperialistic beast with an endless appetite for dominating and interfering in other nations whenever, wherever we choose.

Below is an article from the GrayZone by T. J. Coles. It is titled “A History of Naked Imperialism Continues as Biden Approves Somalia Redeployment.”

Below is an excerpt:

Biden has reversed Donald Trump’s withdrawal of US forces from Somalia and will redeploy Special Operations Forces. It is just the latest move in a long history of destructive US-UK meddling in the Horn of Africa.

Almost as soon as the administration of President Joseph Biden announced a redeployment of US Special Operations Forces to Somalia on May 16, the Western media began to spin the intervention.

As the BBC framed it, Biden’s deployment would “support the fight against militant group al-Shabab” (sic). The intervention coincides with the re-election of former Somalian President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, who governed between 2012 and ‘17.

Similarly, the New York Times (NYT) reported that “Biden has approved a Pentagon request for standing authority to target about a dozen suspected leaders of Al Shabab, the Somali terrorist group that is affiliated with Al Qaeda.”

But are these motives true? Does Washington really want merely to defeat al-Shabab? Is al-Shabab actually linked to al-Qaeda and, if so, to what degree? As usual, the mainstream state-corporate media reportage is missing context and reference to international law.

As we shall see, the context behind the US redeployment is naked imperialism using counterterrorism as the latest in a long line of excuses to interfere in the politics of the strategically-significant country on the Horn of Africa. In terms of international law, signatories of the UN Charter have legal responsibilities to gain authorization from the Security Council before launching military operations –– something the Biden administration and its predecessors have never done in Somalia, or anywhere else, for that matter.

Click here to read the entire piece.

A War Foretold in Ukraine

Years ago I was arrested in downtown Chicago for protesting against NATO, an organization that OUGHT to have been disbanded immediately after the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

Its continuous expansion eastward, creeping threateningly country by country toward Russia’s western border, has triggered the current war between Russia and Ukraine — exactly as many had warned.

NATO is continuing its eastward expansion by embracing more Russian neighbors as it is poised to welcome Finland and Sweden into the western, military alliance.

Smart people will recognize the additional threats to European stability found at the heart of these new, senseless memberships being pushed by the US government.

Unfortunately, however, our current crop of foreign policy leaders demonstrate that high SAT scores do not necessarily translate into the considerable wisdom needed to engage in foreign affairs with even a modicum of humility, foresight, and restraint.

How many more times will we throw fuel onto the Ukraine/Russian fire while wringing our bloody hands in feigned innocence and refusing to take any responsibility for our criminal instigations?

As with so many problems in this world, the roots of this war can be traced back to America’s lust for world dominance. Rather than sit down and talk with others about how we might share the global pie, we can’t help but connive in hostile, surreptitious strategies for consuming more and more of the pie for ourselves.

Allow me to add — especially on this 4th of July weekend — that it is much easier for the thoughtful Christian to recognize and identify one’s own nationalistic foolishness — such as belittling Russians, valorizing Ukrainian Nazis, and waving the American flag while imagining that American intervention is the exemplary solution to this world’s problems — once we grasp what it means to “seek FIRST God’s kingdom and his righteousness.”

Once my priorities are properly arranged around the supreme priority of learning to be like Jesus and elevating my KINGDOM CITIZENSHIP above every other loyalty,  I will see excessive patriotism and all forms of nationalism for what they are — IDOLS waiting to be burned in the fires of kingdom living.

Below is an excerpt from a recent article titled “NATO and a War Foretold” by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies, published in Counterpunch.

The entire article is well worth reading as it walks through the history of expert, authoritative warnings against NATO expansion, the very thing we continue to do:

. . . This was indeed a war foretold. Thirty years of warnings and predictions turned out to be all too accurate. But they all went unheeded by an institution that measured its success only in terms of its own endless expansion instead of by the security it promised but repeatedly failed to deliver, most of all to the victims of its own aggression in Serbia, Afghanistan and Libya.

Now Russia has launched a brutal, illegal war that has uprooted millions of innocent Ukrainians from their homes, killed and injured thousands of civilians and is taking the lives of more than a hundred Ukrainian soldiers every day. NATO is determined to keep sending massive amounts of weapons to fuel the war, while millions around the world suffer from the growing economic fallout of the conflict.

We can’t go back and undo Russia’s catastrophic decision to invade Ukraine or NATO’s historic blunders. But Western leaders can make wiser strategic decisions going forward. Those should include a commitment to allow Ukraine to become a neutral, non-NATO state, something that President Zelenskyy himself agreed to in principle early on in the war.

And, instead of exploiting this crisis to expand even further, NATO should suspend all new or pending membership applications until the current crisis has been resolved. That is what a genuine mutual security organization would do, in sharp contrast to the opportunistic behavior of this aggressive military alliance.

But we’ll make our own prediction based on NATO’s past behavior. Instead of calling for  compromises on all sides to end the bloodshed, this dangerous Alliance will instead promise an endless supply of weapons to help Ukraine “win” an unwinnable war, and will continue to seek out and seize every chance to engorge itself at the expense of human life and global security.

While the world determines how to hold Russia accountable for the horrors it is committing in Ukraine, the members of NATO should do some honest self-reflection. They should realize that the only permanent solution to the hostility generated by this exclusive, divisive alliance is to dismantle NATO and replace it with an inclusive framework that provides security to all of Europe’s countries and people, without threatening Russia or blindly following the United States in its insatiable and anachronistic, hegemonic ambitions.

Click here to read the entire piece.

Chris Hedges: No Way Out but War

Chris Hedges’ most recent editorial at Scheerpost is titled “No Way Out But War.”

As thorough and prescient as ever, Mr. Hedges catalogues the many ways in

Chris Hedges

which the American political-corporate-industrial establishment — a thoroughly bipartisan, insatiable behemoth — is destroying our country through the pursuit of endless wars.

None of our wars are “wars of necessity,” as if there has ever been such an ugly but cuddly beast. No. American wars are unnecessary wars of imperial aggression, pure and simple.

And this includes the current war in Ukraine, for which the US bears a sizeable load of responsibility.

Below is an excerpt from Mr. Hedges’ article. All emphasis is mine:

Permanent war has cannibalized the country. It has created a social, political, and economic morass. Each new military debacle is another nail in the coffin of Pax Americana.

The United States, as the near unanimous vote to provide nearly $40 billion in aid to Ukraine illustrates, is trapped in the death spiral of unchecked militarism. No high speed trains. No universal health care. No viable Covid relief program. No respite from 8.3 percent inflation. No infrastructure programs to repair decaying roads and bridges, which require $41.8 billion to fix the 43,586 structurally deficient bridges, on average 68 years old. No forgiveness of $1.7 trillion in student debt. No addressing income inequality. No program to feed the 17 million children who go to bed each night hungry. No rational gun control or curbing of the epidemic of nihilistic violence and mass shootings. No help for the 100,000 Americans who die each year of drug overdoses. No minimum wage of $15 an hour to counter 44 years of wage stagnation. No respite from gas prices that are projected to hit $6 a gallon.

The permanent war economy, implanted since the end of World War II, has destroyed the private economy, bankrupted the nation, and squandered trillions of dollars of taxpayer money. The monopolization of capital by the military has driven the US debt to $30 trillion, $ 6 trillion more than the US GDP of $ 24 trillion. Servicing this debt costs $300 billion a year. We spent more on the military, $ 813 billion for fiscal year 2023, than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined.

We are paying a heavy social, political, and economic cost for our militarism. Washington watches passively as the U.S. rots, morally, politically, economically, and physically, while China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, and other countries extract themselves from the tyranny of the U.S. dollar and the international Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a messaging network banks and other financial institutions use to send and receive information, such as money transfer instructions. Once the U.S. dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency, once there is an alternative to SWIFT, it will precipitate an internal economic collapse. It will force the immediate contraction of the U.S. empire shuttering most of its nearly 800 overseas military installations. It will signal the death of Pax Americana.

Democrat or Republican. It does not matter. War is the raison d’état of the state. Extravagant military expenditures are justified in the name of “national security.” The nearly $40 billion allocated for Ukraine, most of it going into the hands of weapons manufacturers such as Raytheon Technologies, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing, is only the beginning. Military strategists, who say the war will be long and protracted, are talking about infusions of $4 or $5 billion in military aid a month to Ukraine. We face existential threats. But these do not count. The proposed budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in fiscal year 2023 is $10.675 billion. The proposed budget for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is $11.881 billion. Ukraine alone gets more than double that amount. Pandemics and the climate emergency are afterthoughts. War is all that matters. This is a recipe for collective suicide. . .

. . .The 57 Republicans who refused to support the $40 billion aid package to Ukraine, along with many of the 19 bills that included an earlier $13.6 billion in aid for Ukraine, come out of the kooky conspiratorial world of Trump. They, like Trump, repeat this heresy. They too are attacked and censored. But the longer Biden and the ruling class continue to pour resources into war at our expense, the more these proto fascists, already set to wipe out Democratic gains in the House and the Senate this fall, will be ascendant. Marjorie Taylor Greene, during the debate on the aid package to Ukraine, which most members were not given time to closely examine, said: “$40 billion dollars but there’s no baby formula for American mothers and babies.”

“An unknown amount of money to the CIA and Ukraine supplemental bill but there’s no formula for American babies,” she added. “Stop funding regime change and money laundering scams. A US politician covers up their crimes in countries like Ukraine.”

Democrat Jamie Raskin immediately attacked Greene for parroting the propaganda of Russian president Vladimir Putin.

Greene, like Trump, spoke a truth that resonates with a beleaguered public. The opposition to permanent war should have come from the tiny progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which unfortunately sold out to the craven Democratic Party leadership to save their political careers. Greene is demented, but Raskin and the Democrats peddle their own brand of lunacy. We are going to pay a very steep price for this burlesque.

You can read the entire article here.