The %#% Military Budget

If you can explain to me why the Democrats deserve any consideration more than Republicans after watching the video, you have a very twisted perspective.

There is no way to explain how so many Democrats cointinuetojump up and down cackling "we're better than they are!".

As seen, a budget where the Dems hand Trump more money (over fifty million dollars more), than he had been seeking. This after chastising President Obama for a much smaller amount.

Then the capper where it is shown that lo and behold he money which both parties claimed would not exist for Bernie Sanders' free college for all, does exist- we just blink twice and it miraculously shows up to be allocated to more war mongering.

I've watched it happening for years as the line between Democrats and Republicans has blurred o a point of near invisibility. It sickens me and sickens me more that so many still will not or cannot acknowledge that the United States has for all intents and purposes become a one party nation.

We've got to put a cork in the military cornucopia. We've also got to find some politicians willing to look for avenues of peace.

Go ask all the bad guys to stop being bad guys and if they cooperate, I am sure we could work out a compromise to bring down the defense budget...

We are creating the bad guys. The more citizens we kill, the more angry friends and family we radicalize. If they had a real strategy for all of the simultaneous wars and a real ability to make it better I might cut a little slack. But they are just a wrecking machine over there, not a force for good. Plus, why do they need damn near the whole budget? No country on earth has what they have, but they continue to want more.

It's a vicious circle. The other countries don't spend as much as we do, because we do spend what we do to protect them because they don't spend enough to protect themselves so we have to spend more...

If we stopped spending and defending the world, what do you expect would happen?

If it were a coloring book world, you would be close to right. People are saying, we are in this situation of losing in Afghanistan because Obama did not send in enough troops. They forget he sent in about 100,000 in his first term. Result: not much difference. So he brought many of them back. It's a war we should never have fought at all. We could have sent in a strike force to get at Bin Laden or whatever. But it is not a good goal to spend a lifetime on attrition in a war we did not need in the first place.

In Iraq, we all know now that attacking that country illegally and without the slightest true justification was the sort of mistake Bush SR tried to avoid. Destabilization of the region. Stirring the hornets nest like a fool.

Our actions in Syria are a mind boggling joke, of the unfunniest kind, with a policy there like a weather vane. Whichever way the breezes waft.

There are many other examples, but my brain may start to bleed if I get into it further.

The "world's greatest military" is out everywhere and winning nowhere.
http://billmoyers.com/story/american-military-uncontained/

BY WILLIAM J. ASTORE

This post originally appeared at TomDispatch.

When it comes to the “world’s greatest military,” the news has been shocking. Two fast US Navy ships colliding with slow-moving commercial vessels with tragic loss of life. An Air Force that has been in the air continuously for years and yet doesn’t have enough pilots to fly its combat jets. Ground troops who find themselves fighting “rebels” in Syria previously armed and trained by the CIA. Already overstretched Special Operations forces facing growing demands as their rates of mental distress and suicide rise. Proxy armies in Iraq and Afghanistan that are unreliable, often delivering American-provided weaponry to black markets and into the hands of various enemies. All of this and more coming at a time when defense spending is once again soaring and the national security state is awash in funds to the tune of nearly a trillion dollars a year.

RELATED: WAR & PEACE

President-elect Donald Trump shakes hands with retired US Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis after their meeting at Trump International Golf Club on Nov. 19, 2016 in Bedminster Township, New Jersey. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Trump’s Generals Have Failed Up
BY TOM ENGELHARDT | SEPTEMBER 6, 2017
What gives? Why are highly maneuverable and sophisticated naval ships colliding with lumbering cargo vessels? Why is an Air Force that exists to fly and fight short 1,200 pilots? Why are US Special Operations forces deployed everywhere and winning nowhere? Why, in short, is the US military fighting itself — and losing?


It’s the Ops Tempo, Stupid

After 16 years of a never-ending, ever-spreading global war on terror, alarms are going off in Asia from the Koreas and Afghanistan to the Philippines, while across the Greater Middle East and Africa the globe’s “last superpower” is in a never-ending set of conflicts with a range of minor enemies few can even keep straight. As a result, America’s can-do military, committed piecemeal to a bewildering array of missions, has increasingly become a can’t-do one.

Too few ships are being deployed for too long. Too few pilots are being worn out by incessant patrols and mushrooming drone and bombing missions. Special Operations forces (the “commandos of everywhere,” as Nick Turse calls them) are being deployed to far too many countries — more than two-thirds of the nations on the planet already this year — and are involved in conflicts that hold little promise of ending on terms favorable to Washington. Meanwhile, insiders like retired Gen. David Petraeus speak calmly about “generational struggles” that will essentially never end. To paraphrase an old slogan from ABC’s Wide World of Sports, as the US military spans the globe, it’s regularly experiencing the agony of defeat rather than the thrill of victory.

To President Donald Trump (and so many other politicians in Washington), this unsavory reality suggests an obvious solution: boost military funding; build more navy ships; train more pilots and give them more incentive pay to stay in the military; rely more on drones and other technological “force multipliers” to compensate for tired troops; cajole allies like the Germans and Japanese to spend more on their militaries; and pressure proxy armies like the Iraqi and Afghan security forces to cut corruption and improve combat performance.

RELATED: DEMOCRACY & GOVERNMENT

President Donald Trump looks on during a bilateral meeting with Russia's President Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany on July 7, 2017. (Photo by Mikhail MetzelTASS via Getty Images)
Trump is Not Cause, But Consequence
BY ANDREW BACEVICH | AUGUST 9, 2017
One option — the most logical — is never seriously considered in Washington: to make deep cuts in the military’s operational tempo by decreasing defense spending and downsizing the global mission, by bringing troops home and keeping them there. This is not an isolationist plea. The United States certainly faces challenges, notably from Russia (still a major nuclear power) and China (a global economic power bolstering its regional militarily strength). North Korea is, as ever, posturing with missile and nuclear tests in provocative ways. Terrorist organizations strive to destabilize American allies and cause trouble even in “the homeland.”

Such challenges require vigilance. What they don’t require is more ships in the sea lanes, pilots in the air and boots on the ground. Indeed, 16 years after the 9/11 attacks it should be obvious that more of the same is likely to produce yet more of what we’ve grown all too accustomed to: increasing instability across significant swaths of the planet, as well as the rise of new terror groups or new iterations of older ones, which means yet more opportunities for failed US military interventions.

Once upon a time, when there were still two superpowers on planet Earth, Washington’s worldwide military posture had a clear rationale: the containment of communism. Soon after the Soviet Union imploded in 1991 to much triumphalist self-congratulation in Washington, the scholar and former CIA consultant Chalmers Johnson had an epiphany. What he would come to call “the American Raj,” a global imperial structure ostensibly built to corral the menace of communism, wasn’t going away just because that menace had evaporated, leaving not a superpower nor even a major power as an opponent anywhere on the horizon. Quite the opposite, Washington — and its globe-spanning “empire” of military bases — was only digging in deeper and for the long haul. At that moment, with a certain shock, Johnson realized that the US was itself an empire and, with its mirror-image-enemy gone, risked turning on itself and becoming its own nemesis.

The US, it turned out, hadn’t just contained the Soviets; they had contained us, too. Once their empire collapsed, our leaders imbibed the old dream of Woodrow Wilson, even if in a newly militarized fashion: to remake the world in one’s own image (if need be at the point of a sword).

Since the early 1990s, largely unconstrained by peer rivals, America’s leaders have acted as if there were nothing to stop them from doing as they pleased on the planet, which, as it turned out, meant there was nothing to stop them from their own folly. We witness the results today. Prolonged and disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Interventions throughout the Greater Middle East (Libya, Syria, Yemen and beyond) that spread chaos and destruction. Attacks against terrorism that have given new impetus to jihadists everywhere. And recently calls to arm Ukraine against Russia. All of this is consistent with a hubristic strategic vision that, in these years, has spoken in an all-encompassing fashion and without irony of global reach, global power and full-spectrum dominance.

In this context, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the full scope of America’s military power. All the world is a stage — or a staging area — for US troops. There are still approximately 800 US military bases in foreign lands. America’s commandos deploy to more than 130 countries yearly. And even the world is not enough for the Pentagon as it seeks to dominate not just land, sea and air but outer space, cyberspace and even inner space, if you count efforts to achieve “total information awareness” through 17 intelligence agencies dedicated — at a cost of $80 billion a year — to sweeping up all data on Planet Earth.


President Donald Trump is briefed by Gen. Joseph Votel, commander of US Central Command Commander, during a visit at MacDill, AFB, Florida, Feb. 6, 2017. (DoD photo by D. Myles Cullen/Released/Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff/ flickr CC 2.0)
Prepare, Pursue, Prevail!
BY ANDREW BACEVICH | MARCH 22, 2017
In short, America’s troops are out everywhere and winning nowhere, a problem America’s “winningest” president, Donald Trump, is only exacerbating. Surrounded by “his” generals, Trump has — against his own instincts, he claimed recently — recommitted American troops and prestige to the Afghan War. He’s also significantly expanded strikes and US drone bombing throughout the Greater Middle East, and threatened to bring fire and fury to North Korea, while pushing a program to boost military spending.

At a Pentagon awash in money, with promises of more to come, missions are rarely downsized. Meanwhile, what passes for original thinking in the Trump White House is the suggestion of Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, to privatize America’s war in Afghanistan (and possibly elsewhere). Mercenaries are the answer to Washington’s military problems, suggests Prince. And mercs, of course, have the added benefit of not being constrained by the rules of engagement that apply to America’s uniformed service members.

Indeed, Prince’s idea, though opposed by Trump’s generals, is compelling in one sense: If you accept the notion that America’s wars in these years have been fought largely for the corporate agendas of the military-industrial complex, why not turn warfighting itself over to the warrior corporations that now regularly accompany the military into battle, cutting out the middleman, that very military?


Hammering a Cloud of Gnats

Erik Prince’s mercenaries will, however, have to bide their time as the military high command continues to launch kinetic strikes against elusive foes around the globe. By its own admission, the force recent US presidents have touted as the “finest” in history faces remarkably “asymmetrical” and protean enemies, including the roughly 20 terrorist organizations in the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater of operations. In striking at such relatively puny foes, the US reminds me of the mighty Thor of superhero fame swinging his hammer violently against a cloud of gnats. In the process, some of those gnats will naturally die, but the result will still be an exhausted superhero and ever more gnats attracted by the heat and commotion of battle.


President Donald Trump addresses a joint session of the US Congress on February 28, 2017 in the House chamber of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Donald Trump Goes All In for the Military-Industrial Complex
BY JOHN NICHOLS | MARCH 1, 2017
I first came across the phrase “using a sledgehammer to kill gnats” while looking at the history of US airpower during the Vietnam War. B-52 “Arc Light” raids dropped record tons of bombs on parts of South Vietnam and Laos in largely failed efforts to kill dispersed guerrillas and interdict supply routes from North Vietnam. Half a century later, with its laser- and GPS-guided bombs, the Air Force regularly touts the far greater precision of American airpower. Yet in one country after another, using just that weaponry, the US has engaged in serial acts of overkill. In Afghanistan, it was the recent use of MOAB, the “mother of all bombs,” the largest non-nuclear weapon the US has ever used in combat, against a small concentration of ISIS fighters. In similar fashion, the US air war in Syria has outpaced the Russians and even the Assad regime in its murderous effects on civilians, especially around Raqqa, the “capital” of the Islamic State. Such overkill is evident on the ground as well where special ops raids have, this year, left civilians dead from Yemen to Somalia. In other words, across the Greater Middle East, Washington’s profligate killing machine is also creating a desire for vengeance among civilian populations, staggering numbers of whom, when not killed, have been displaced or sent fleeing across borders as refugees in these wars. It has played a significant role in unsettling whole regions, creating failed states and providing yet more recruits for terror groups.

Leaving aside technological advances, little has changed since Vietnam. The US military is still relying on enormous firepower to kill elusive enemies as a way of limiting (American) casualties. As an instrument of victory, it didn’t work in Vietnam, nor has it worked in Iraq or Afghanistan.

But never mind the history lessons. President Trump asserts that his “new” Afghan strategy — the details of which, according to a military spokesman, are “not there yet” — will lead to more terrorists (that is, gnats) being killed.

Since 9/11, America’s leaders, Trump included, have rarely sought ways to avoid those gnats, while efforts to “drain the swamp” in which the gnats thrive have served mainly to enlarge their breeding grounds. At the same time, efforts to enlist indigenous “gnats” — local proxy armies — to take over the fight have gone poorly indeed. As in Vietnam, the main US focus has invariably been on developing better, more technologically advanced (which means more expensive) sledgehammers, while continuing to whale away at that cloud of gnats — a process as hopeless as it is counterproductive.


The Greatest Self-Defeating Force in History?

Incessant warfare represents the end of democracy. I didn’t say that, James Madison did.

I firmly believe, though, in words borrowed from President Dwight D. Eisenhower, that “only Americans can hurt America.” So how can we lessen the hurt? By beginning to rein in the military. A standing military exists — or rather should exist — to support and defend the Constitution and our country against immediate threats to our survival. Endless attacks against inchoate foes in the backlands of the planet hardly promote that mission. Indeed, the more such attacks wear on the military, the more they imperil national security.

A friend of mine, a captain in the Air Force, once quipped to me: you study long, you study wrong. It’s a sentiment that’s especially cutting when applied to war: you wage war long, you wage it wrong. Yet as debilitating as they may be to militaries, long wars are even more devastating to democracies. The longer our military wages war, the more our country is militarized, shedding its democratic values and ideals.

Back in the Cold War era, the regions in which the US military is now slogging it out were once largely considered “the shadows” where John le Carré-style secret agents from the two superpowers matched wits in a set of shadowy conflicts. Post-9/11, “taking the gloves off” and seeking knockout blows, the US military entered those same shadows in a big way and there, not surprisingly, it often couldn’t sort friend from foe.

A new strategy for America should involve getting out of those shadowy regions of no-win war. Instead, an expanding US military establishment continues to compound the strategic mistakes of the last 16 years. Seeking to dominate everywhere but winning decisively nowhere, it may yet go down as the greatest self-defeating force in history.

How apathetic are people becoming? In the continued attempt to differentiate the parties and either being confused or not giving a hoot, the primaries here in NYC on Tuesday had a turnout of 14% of the registered Democrats.

It's little wonder that the so called leaders go off and do whatever they want when the eligible voters don't properly task them by voting.

14%? And the establishment type Democrats I know in that state are pushing for more exclusionary primaries, to keep out people like me.

Are you a Democrat? if not, why should you have a role in forming the party platform or selecting their candidates?

Which is proof once again that the dividing line between Dems and Repubs has blurred even more.

But not to worry, our current mayor who has been on the edges of scandal throughout term one, is crowing about having picked up 75% of the vote. Back in 2013 he bragged how well he did even though only some 24 or 25% showed up in the general election in November.

Closed primaries are designed so that the Corporate shills can make all the choices and the base votes yes. No thinking allowed.

That is not my real-life experience with the Canadian version of this.

Only party members can vote on party platform and party leadership - and party representation. I feel very strongly that it works well. The parties represent their membership - not some random strangers who pop in occasionally.

Closed primaries. It's the only thing that makes sense.

Were you an active member of the Democratic Party? did you participate in primaries and planning meetings? did corporate reps override you when you spoke in meetings?

In Texas we have open primaries.
I don't quite get a Canadian voter getting involved anyway.

Canada does not have the same issues to overcome as we. You aren't trying to shake off increasing oligarchy and the party resistant to attempts to return the party to core values. Closed primaries is meant to exclude even constructive change, the kind that keeps a party in touch with the people.

Have you been an active member of the party - participated in the events?