William D. Hartung and Mandy Smithberger, Director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy - truthout
Stephan: We don't have enough money to help the homeless, or provide daycare for working mothers and fathers, or take care of the elderly but, boy, do we have money for war, and the destruction of other countries. Doesn't that make you feel just grand? No? Me either.
Credit: Airman 1st class Valerie Seelye/ U.S. Air Force
In its latest budget request, the Trump administration is asking for a near-record $750 billion for the Pentagon and related defense activities, an astonishing figure by any measure. If passed by Congress, it will, in fact, be one of the largest military budgets in American history,topping peak levels reached during the Korean and Vietnam Wars. And keep one thing in mind: that $750 billion represents only part of the actual annual cost of our national security state.
There are at least 10 separate pots of money dedicated to fighting wars, preparing for yet more wars, and dealing with the consequences of wars already fought. So the next time a president, a general, a secretary of defense, or a hawkish member of Congress insists that the U.S. military is woefully underfunded, think twice. A careful look at U.S. defense expenditures offers a healthy corrective to such wildly inaccurate claims.
Now, let’s take a brief […]
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MATT TAIBBI, - Rollingstone
Stephan: Here is yet another take on the military-industrial complex. That giant sucking sound you hear is your tax dollars being sucked into the maw of this most rapacious sector of the American economy. No wonder there is no money to create social wellbeing in the United States; it is all going to war, death, and destruction.
Illustration by Victor Juhasz/Rolling Stone
A retired Air Force auditor — we’ll call him Andy — tells a story about a thing that happened at Ogden Air Force Base, Utah. Sometime in early 2001, something went wrong with a base inventory order. Andy thinks it was a simple data-entry error. “Someone ordered five of something,” he says, “and it came out as an order for 999,000.” He laughs. “It was probably just something the machine defaulted to. Type in an order for a part the wrong way, and it comes out all frickin’ nines in every field.” Nobody actually delivered a monster load of parts. But the faulty transaction — the paper trail for a phantom inventory adjustment never made — started moving through the Air Force’s maze of internal accounting systems anyway. A junior-level logistics officer caught it before it went out of house. Andy remembers the incident because, as a souvenir, he kept the June 28th, 2001, email that circulated about it in the Air Force accounting world, […]
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Stephan A. Schwartz, editor - The Schwartzreport
Stephan: When the Founders wrote the Constitution and created impeachment they specifically had in mind exactly the situation we face today: a president who came into office through the agency of a foreign power, with which he cooperated.
Although there seems to be remarkably little concern or even understanding of what is happening at the top of the federal government of the United States, the reality is we are now in a Constitutional crisis unlike any in American history. Donald Trump and the Republican Party are attempting to restructure our democracy and void our Constitution. We have never before been in a situation like this and, so, I am dedicating today's SR to some of the major issues.
Some of these tropes: We now have two cabinet officers, the Attorney General and the Secretary of the Treasury who at defying the Congress. We have a president who is laying track for staying in office regardless of election outcomes, and the president is telling former members of his administration to ignore Congressional subpoenas.
We need millions of people out in the streets, in order to give the Democrats the backbone they need to do their duty; the Republicans have completely abandoned their sense of duty. This is not about politics. If Trump gets away with this from this day forward a president, any president, can do as they like without fear of any opposing force. That would mean the end of democracy in America, and we would become overtly a fascist state.
Don't stand around with your thumb in your mouth. Speak up, stand up.
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CHRISTINA ZHAO , - Newsweek
Stephan: Speaker Nancy Pelosi is on record as saying that in 2018, and now in the upcoming 2020 elections she is concerned that unless the Democrats win overwhelmingly that Trump might not honor the election results. Apparently, Trump is, indeed, thinking down those lines.
President Donald Trump on Sunday retweeted Liberty University President Jerry Falwell’s post, calling for the first term of his presidency to be extended by two years “as pay back for time stolen by this corrupt failed coup.”
“After the best week ever for @realDonaldTrump – no obstruction, no collusion, NYT admits @BarackObama did spy on his campaign, & the economy is soaring. I now support reparations-Trump should have 2 yrs added to his 1st term as pay back for time stolen by this corrupt failed coup,” Falwell — a longtime Trump supporter — tweeted on Saturday, apparently in reference to the controversies surrounding special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on possible Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
The president retweeted the message on Sunday afternoon.
Trump then posted two tweets later that evening touting his successes in office and claiming that Democrats have stolen two years of his presidency with collusion allegations that “we will never be able to get back.”
“Despite the tremendous success that I have had as President, including perhaps the greatest ECONOMY and most successful first two years of any President in history, […]
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Alan Rappeport, - The New York Times
Stephan: Steven Mnuchin is one of the worse grifters in an administration of grifters, and his defiance of what is actually a pretty straightforward law that has never before been challenged in this way, is one of the many ways in which Trump and his grifters are laying siege to American democracy.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin Credit: Sarah Silbiger/The New York TimesWASHINGTON — The Treasury Department said on Monday that it would not release President Trump’s tax returns to Congress, defying a request from House Democrats and setting up a legal battle likely to be resolved by the Supreme Court.
WASHINGTON — The Treasury Department said on Monday that it would not release President Trump’s tax returns to Congress, defying a request from House Democrats and setting up a legal battle likely to be resolved by the Supreme Court.
Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, wrote in a letter to Representative Richard E. Neal, Democrat of Massachusetts and the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, that Mr. Neal’s request for the tax returns “lacks a legitimate legislative purpose” and that he was not authorized to disclose them. The decision came after weeks of delays as Mr. Mnuchin said that his department and the Justice Department needed to study the provision of the tax code that Democrats […]
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