The new Democrats, especially with the presidency of Bill Clinton, became shills not only for corporate America, but the arms industry. The massive military budget, $858 billion in military spending allocated for fiscal year 2023, is an increase of $45 billion over the Biden administration's budget request, and nearly $80 billion more than the amount appropriated by Congress for the current fiscal year.
How much of the $858 billion authorized by the FY2023 NDAA will be transferred to military contractors? I estimate $452 billion.
Scott Ritter, Andrew Bacevich, Caitlin Johnstore, John LaForge, Medea Benjanmin, Patrick Lawrence and Marcy Winograd talk about the war between Russia and Ukraine. Was it avoidable? Is it a proxy war? Will there be a winner? Is the nuclear threat real? and more.
"Broad in its scope yet concise, this is an important nonconformist interpretation of American history." Kirkus Reviews
In fact, it’s now reasonable to ask whether an international community connected by a consensus of norms and rules, and capable of acting in concert against the direst threats to humankind, exists. Sadly, if the responses to the war in Ukraine are the standard by which we’re judging, things don’t look good.
Now we have the Ukraine case, and we need not bother with “ample reason.” It is open-and-shut evident at this point that we witness two wars as the Armed Forces of Ukraine face off with the Russian military. There is the presented war, the meta-war, you might say, and there is the waged war, the war taking place on the ground, nothing meta about it.
Imagine then if you had a vantage point from outer space:You would see a massive dark cloud circling the tiny and fragile earth. No one would escape the effects.
Why hasn’t more attention been paid to these extremely dangerous weapons that are the most likely to be used?
The online discussion features analysis from organizers in hotspots on the ground in Africa and from others with uncompromising and lucid views on the state of affairs in Africa and strategies to get the “U.S. Out of Africa” and “Shut Down AFRICOM.”
For the Biden administration, a commitment to peace is a poor substitute for the benefits of securing another $13 billion in aid for Ukraine contained in legislation meant to fund the U.S. government. Moving money from the public coffers to the pockets of the defense companies that pay the bills for both parties is always seen as good bipartisan policy.
To be fair, the Nuland-Kagan mom-and-pop shop is really only a microcosm of how the Military-Industrial Complex has worked for decades: think-tank analysts generate the reasons for military spending, the government bureaucrats implement the necessary war policies, and the military contractors make lots of money before kicking back some to the think tanks — so the bloody but profitable cycle can spin again.
What makes Tierney’s triumphant militarist smut so annoying isn’t how he’s wrong, it’s how he’s right. You can take issue all you like with his use of the word “left” to describe liberal supporters of capitalism and empire who just want the empire to be a bit less embarrassing and maybe forgive their student loans, but that’s the fault of the generations of psyops that have gone into sabotaging the left and destroying its memory, not Tierney’s.
