JOHN FEFFER, Director off Foreign Policy - Institute for Policy Studies - Common Dreams
Stephan: Anyone who lives in a fact-based universe can see, can hardly avoid seeing, that the Covid pandemic has morphed into a disease of the unvaccinated. There is no prior example of this politicization of a lethal health crisis in the last two centuries of American history. If it were not for the fact that this stupidity doesn't just threaten the lives of the stupid, but also threatens the lives of others, particularly children, I would say to the anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, "Good luck, but if your luck doesn't hold, have someone let me know when you die," and get on with my life. Unfortunately, though these people are a threat to everyone around them, and are the reason 20 months into this pandemic 100,000 people a day are contracting this disease.
Anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine protesters holding banners stage a demonstration in Trafalgar Square in London, England on July 24 2021. Credit: Tayfun Salci/Anadolu Agency/Getty
COVID-19 is a deadly virus. Why on earth would anyone go to bat for a pathogen? You’d think that the whole world could unite against a deadly virus. COVID-19 has already sickened over 200 million people around the world and killed over 4 million. It has now mutated into more contagious forms that threaten to plunge the globe into another spin cycle of lockdown.
Avoiding global catastrophe from the more infectious delta variant of COVID-19 doesn’t require a huge commitment from people and governments. Richer countries just have to ensure more widespread availability of vaccines. And individuals have to get vaccinated.
The far right has jumped on the anti-vaccination bandwagon, seized control of the wheel, and is driving the vehicle, al-Qaeda-style, straight into oncoming traffic.
COVID-19 is not an asteroid on a collision course with the planet. It’s not an imminent nuclear war. It’s an invisible enemy that humanity has demonstrated it can beat. It just requires a bit of […]
Stephan: How you noticed, we are 8 months into the Biden administration, and yet none of Trump's orcs has been held accountable, let alone tried in court. But this news about DeJoy suggests things may be about to change.
Postmaster General Louis DeJoy Credit: Screen capture
A leading government ethics watchdog on Wednesday cheered a federal judge’s ruling ordering the United States Postal Service to hand over documents concerning potential conflicts of interest involving embattled Postmaster General Louis DeJoy.
U.S. District Judge John D. Bates on Tuesday granted Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) a full summary judgment (pdf) and ordered the United States Postal Service (USPS) to give the advocacy group seven documents it requested under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
USPS claimed the documents were FOIA-exempt. According toLaw & Crime, “Four of the documents concerned a request for a certificate of divestiture from DeJoy and the remaining three concern his recusal from matters where he may have a conflict of interest.”
Over the past seven years, the USPS has reportedly paid approximately $286 million to XPO Logistics, DeJoy’s ex-employer, and has “ramped up its business” with the company since DeJoy’s appointment as postmaster general. After his appointment, DeJoy continued to hold financial interests in XPO […]
Michael German, Elizabeth Goitein and Faiza Patel, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: I very strongly agree with this exegetic essay. Our problem is not international terrorism, Islamic or anything else. What American faces is a serious internal terrorism problem. One that is growing year by year. I urge you to read this.
‘Terrorism is typically responsible for fewer than 100 fatalities a year – smaller than the number of Americans killed in bathtub accidents. In comparison, there are over 16,000 annual homicides, mostly by firearms.’ Credit: Spencer Platt/Getty
Elizabeth Goitein and Faiza Patel are co-directors and Michael German is a fellow at the Liberty & National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law
This essay is co-published with the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law as part of a series exploring new approaches to national security 20 years after 9/11
The 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks is a natural time to assess our nation’s response over the last two decades and chart a course for the future. Our single-minded focus on defeating terrorist groups claiming to act in the name of Islam over all other priorities, international or domestic, has allowed vulnerabilities to fester.
The biggest problems our nation faces today have little to do with the terrorist groups that have consumed so much of our attention. Far-right militants launched a deadly […]
Stephan: Since the end of the draft, only about 1% of the American population has anything to do with the military. Last year how many dinner parties did you go to where talking about the Afghan war dominated table conversation the way it would have in the 1940s when every family in the country practically was involved with the military in some way. As a result, very few in this country actually have any direct interaction with wars like Afghanistan, and that has allowed the military-industrial complex, as Eisenhower called it, to keep these wars going, and to turn them into preposterous opportunities for profit-making. Two trillion was poured into the sewer of this war; for defense contractors, it was like winning the jackpot.
Mine resistant armored vehicles and other machinery set to be transported out of Afghanistan are seen in the background with a Boeing C-17 Globemaster III cargo plane at Bagram Airfield in Parwan on May 27, 2014. (Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty
As the hawks who have been lying about the U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan for two decades continue to peddle fantasies in the midst of a Taliban takeover and American evacuation of Kabul, progressive critics on Tuesday reminded the world who has benefited from the “endless war.”
“Never has it been more important to end war profiteering.” —Public Citizen
“Entrenching U.S. forces in Afghanistan was the military-industrial complex’s business plan for 20+ years,” declared the Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group Public Citizen.
“Hawks and defense contractors co-opted the needs of the Afghan people in order to line their own pockets,” the group added. “Never has it been more important to end war profiteering.”
In a Tuesday morning tweet, Public Citizen highlighted returns on defense stocks over the past 20 years—as calculated in a “jaw-dropping” analysis by The Intercept—and asserted that “the military-industrial complex got exactly what it wanted out of this war.
Stephan: Let's deal with the real truth of the Afghanistan war, and the effect it has had on America over the last two decades. It is a horrifying story and it explains why we are falling behind China. We spend more on the military than the next seven nations of the world combined. It is amazingly profitable for the military-industrial complex but very detrimental to the nation as a whole.
Chinese workers building a high-speed rail line in 2020. Credit: Li Baozhu/Bloomberg
All the recrimination-filled reporting and commentary about how fast Afghanistan fell to the Taliban after President Joe Biden made the courageous decision to finish withdrawing our troops misses a much more important story.
This story concerns why Americans can’t have nice things anymore while our main economic competitor China does and is investing in a lucrative and influential future.
It’s the story of jettisoning the sensible Powell Doctrine of asking if war is quickly winnable before military action in favor of chronic combat. Endless war creates enormous fortunes for investors in the military-industrial complex, enabled by jingoistic political cowardice in Washington.
For two decades our elected leaders foolishly spent our money trying to impose democracy at the point of a rifle in a country with no democratic culture or tradition.
To date, U.S. taxpayers have spent about $2.3 trillion on an undeclared war that cost 2,448 American troops their lives avenging about the same number of lives lost on 9/11/2001. More than 100,000 Afghans died in the 20-year war.
