I reread Chris Hedges talk on Rosa Luxenburg which I posted last Sunday.
Apparently, it was one of the talks given at the Left Forum. I read it very
carefully because he was talking about revolutionary change. He was talking
about the blow back from violence so we don't want to use violence. He
talked about how a strong small leadership group may seize power and become
dictdatorial so we want to prevent that from happening. He said that change
is part of history and we can't control history. Change needs to come from
the people so we need to take every opportunity to use situations in order
to organize and teach people. Well, I hear all of that and I suppose if one
is energetic and has the time, faith and hope, and resources, one could
dedicate one's life to that endeavor. The rest of us?
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Sunday, May 29, 2016 8:35 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Defense Department Is Ruining America:
Big Budgets, Militarization and the Real Story Behind Our Asia Pivot
The question is, how do we take back the government seized by the
military/industrial complex?
Carl Jarvis
On 5/29/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
its deck-25 to 30 fighter jets.
Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org) Home > The Defense
Department Is Ruining America: Big Budgets, Militarization and the
Real Story Behind Our Asia Pivot
________________________________________
The Defense Department Is Ruining America: Big Budgets, Militarization
and the Real Story Behind Our Asia Pivot By Patrick Smith [1] / Salon
[2] May 28, 2016 You have to tip the cap to Defense Secretary Carter.
People in Washington spin things as a matter of course, as Ben Rhodes,
President Obama's deputy national security advisor, just explained in
that New York Times profile considered in this space [3] a few weeks
ago. The spin is the thing. But never mind all that. Ashton Carter
spins aircraft carriers, and right before your eyes.
There he was last month, a few weeks before Obama's current swing
through Asia, on the flight deck of the John C. Stennis as it passed
through a narrow strait in the South China Sea hard by the People's
Republic's territorial waters, pronouncing in the somber tones these
people favor that China is militarizing the western Pacific.
TheStennis, you need to know, is a nuclear-powered supercarrier that
forward-deploys for indefinite periods with a strike group of escort
vessels attending it. It travels with eight squadrons of attack craft on
Think about that for a sec. For my money Carter gave us one of theSo what? What about those Yankees?
quintessential moments of the Obama presidency with that brief tableau.
Then
think about this:
A week before this occasion Carter attended 10 days of joint military
drills in the Philippines-the first time a Sec Def has done so in the
decades these things have been held. A week after it, our Ash sent
half a dozen A-10 Thunderbolts, heavily armed jets designed to support
ground troops, to buzz the Scarborough Shoal, which is among the
disputed land formations in the South China Sea over which Beijing and
other Asian nations claim sovereignty.
"The United States intends to continue to play a role out here that it
has for seven decades," Carter proclaimed aboard the Stennis. It
reminded me of Bush II's famous "Mission Accomplished" moment aboard a
carrier in 2003, except that Carter stayed in mufti. John Wayne could
hardly have got more of the O.K. Corral into these remarks.
In the good old days of frightening confrontation between the U.S. and
the socialist bloc-a time dearly missed by people such as Ash
Carter-the non-West used to call this kind of talk "hysterical." It
was then and it is now. But here is the thing: The Chinese were the
only ones who seemed to notice that Carter was trying to turn daytime
into night. I know no one in our great country who gave any thought to
Carter's bluster about China's assertive military while standing on an
aircraft carrier near the Chinese coast. Beijing subsequently barred
the Stennis from docking in Hong Kong-a highly unusual move on China's
part, Hong Kong having been a port of call for U.S. vessels for decades.
We will pay for our failures to pay attention to the world around usmuch).
and our place in it, and do not say no one warned you. We are, indeed,
already paying-a point to which I will return.
Here is an interview [4] with Foreign Minister Wang Yi that Al
Jazeera's Ahmed Mansour conducted four days after Carter's Stennis moment.
Given that most Americans are no longer capable of rational
conversation devoid of ideological charge, one must strip the names
out before considering the merits of any non-American's comment. Do
so, then think it through.
China is currently knee-deep in disputes over sovereignty in the South
and East China Seas. These questions are complex and at various stages
in the long process of international adjudication. Keep this in mind
while considering the merits of Wang's remarks. Keep also in mind that
non-aggression and non-interference have been among the principles of
international conduct China has asserted since Zhou Enlai's day. Then
bring to mind the record on these scores of the nation that pays Ash
Carter's salary.
For the record, my own view of the sovereignty questions lying between
China and Japan on the one hand, and China and various Southeast Asian
nations on the other, is that solutions are to be found in
condominiums: international status and administration for these specks
of land, atolls and outcrops of rocks and joint development of the
resources beneath them. The thought was raised during talks some years
ago between Beijing and Tokyo on the Diaoyu or Senkaku islands (in
Mandarin and Japanese respectively), but it subsequently disappeared
beneath the waves. We will have to see.
*
Carter's long swing through Asia last month was effectively advance
work for Obama's, which began a week ago. The president's trip took
him to Vietnam and Japan and is one leg of his farewell world tour.
Beginning with his March visits to Cuba and Argentina, Obama's foreign
itinerary this year will take him from Saudi Arabia, Britain and
Germany (last month) to Canada (June), Poland (a NATO summit in July),
China and Laos (multilateral summits in September) and Peru in
November (for another summit).
Between them, Obama and his defense secretary tell us a couple of
important things about American foreign policy, policy across the
Pacific in particular and still more particularly the president's
"pivot" to Asia (a word that now requires Dramamine there has been so
much pivoting these past few years, albeit that none of it amounts to
Let us consider these lessons-pivoting from one to the other, of course.to Vietnam.
The first thing to note is that militarization in the western Pacific
is not this administration's concern. Neither is international law.
Ash Carter's stage-set appearance on the Stennis last month was
monumentally miscalculated in this respect-and consequently told us
all we need to know about Washington's true preoccupation. This is
simply stated. America's policy cliques are all for a militarized East
Asia: They have made it so for the seven decades Carter noted. They
simply do not want anyone challenging this status quo.
What did Obama just do during his week in the region? In Hanoi he
announced that he would lift the longstanding ban on American arms sales
And fair enough in one way: Why should we discriminate against themust live with them.
Vietnamese when we sell arms to 180 other nations? Our defense
contractors await your business: This is all Obama had to say, apart
from the obnoxious correctives on human rights and press freedom
American leaders will never stop insisting upon when traveling in
nations that do not share our lapsing standards in both spheres.
The Japan visit was far more complex. Obama had re-enlisted the
Japanese in our seven-decade military dominance in the Pacific -known
in the Japanese case as the "security umbrella"-when Prime Minister
Abe visited Washington last year. So that was out of the way; even a
nationalist such as Abe-grandson of a war criminal-bows yet before the
victors in 1945. But a finer line this president has rarely walked. It
only looked like a mission of peace.
Apart from an apparently unremarkable Group of Seven session, the
centerpiece of Obama's visit was a tour of Hiroshima, which Truman
leveled in 1945 with the world's first and only wartime detonation of
an atomic bomb. No, there would be no apology, of course: The argument
that Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved lives, while highly questionable and
wholly hypothetical in any case, still holds to justify a prima facie
war crime. Obama's hours in Hiroshima were intended to underscore his
commitment to nonproliferation, but it would be hard to measure the
immensity of this president's
hypocrisy:
The defense secretary he named last year has long been a prominent
proponent of a sweeping, expensive renovation of America's
nuclear-weapons stockpiles, and this now proceeds apace. Once again,
night is supposed to be day.
Obama had a brief sit-down with Abe, but the Japanese premier spent
all of it berating the president for a former Marine's murder (yet
another) of a Japanese woman in Okinawa shortly before Obama's
arrival. Highly embarrassing, of course. Abe could not care less about
the sentiments of Okinawans, as anyone who understands Japan will
know. But the American military installations in Japan's southernmost
islands are 1.) the single largest component of the U.S. presence in
the western Pacific and 2.) unambiguously against the will of those who
Obama was fully cognizant of the former point. It would be hard to saydiscuss.
whether our progressive leader or Abe was more indifferent to the latter.
I go back to Carter's unintentionally interesting assertion aboard the
Stennis: We have been predominant in the Pacific since 1945 and we
will not let this change. The policy cliques, you have to surmise, are
incapable even of seeing, let alone accepting, the turning of
history's wheel.
Washington could, theoretically, address China's emergence as a
regional and, indeed, global power imaginatively. But this implies the
presence of trained diplomats, and so theory must remain only theory.
In practice, Washington is into neo-containment at the other end of
the Pacific. It is a policy doomed to failure. (Michael Sullivan, the
NPR man out there, actually used the phrase "containment of China" in
a broadcast the other day. But only once, so far as I can tell, given
that this ranks high among the
unsayables.)
Pivot to the second lesson.
*
Who makes policy in Washington?
This has long been an interesting question and will continue to be
one. It is important for paying-attention people to keep asking it. As
Andrew Bacevich noted in the interview published in this space over
the previous two weeks, all is always in flux among the policy
cliques. Power is fluid, flowing now one way and now another.
But there are fewer mysteries on this point now than there may have
been when Barack Obama took office. I still cannot tell whether this
man stands four-square behind the foreign policies executed during his
watch or if he is merely the acquiescing front man, as Bush II was,
listening to discussions conducted above his head. The historians will
have to sort that out. But this now seems plain: Whatever his thoughts
on the matter, he does not actually make the kind of policies we now
associate with him. That falls ever more consistently to the Pentagon
and its allies in the intelligence and national security agencies.
The Pacific was bound to deliver this lesson more legibly than any
other region. And it just did. This is what Ash Carter and Obama have
put on display over the course of the last couple of months.
Apart from a brief period immediately after the Japanese surrender,
the story of American policy in Asia from the Occupation onward has
been one of progressive militarization. This process went emphatically
into high gear after the Chinese Revolution in 1949. The "Who lost
China?" arguments that ensued more or less wiped out a generation of
thoughtful diplomats trained in Asian languages, cultures, histories,
and so on. As the Cold War went on, so did the gutting of the State
Department's ranks; by the Reagan years the process was complete.
There is no question that China's emergence-economic, diplomatic,
political-challenges the U.S. and the rest of the world to think
through the proper responses. This is among the truly large questions
of our time. But anyone who thinks those running policy now-or having
the biggest sway over it-are up to this task is as unaware of the
complexities at work as Carter plainly is. Questions of history and
culture need to be addressed. China's ambition to "stand up," as Mao
memorably put it, reflects a wound to national pride dating to the
Opium Wars in the 1840s. One may or may not hold such realities in any
regard, but they are part of what drives the Chinese, and no number of
aircraft carriers in the South China Sea will make them go away.
It is useful to consider just who Ashton Carter is. He was trained as
a nuclear physicist and taught at Harvard. Also trained in
international affairs and global security, he has sat at the
intersection of science and strategy his entire career. America's
nuclear weapons program has been an abiding interest at least since
Bill Clinton's Defense Department hired him as assistant secretary in
1993. Obama inherited him, as he did Robert Gates, and put Carter in
charge of the Pentagon's acquisitions and technology.
Here
I pause: How wrong is it to give someone previously assigned to
shopping among the defense contractors the power to set policy?
Very, in my view. Conflict of interest is woven into everything Ash
Carter does. In this respect, his appointment as Sec Def suggests
something very disturbing about the true locus of power among those
now setting foreign policy in Washington.
He is a man of science, of means, in a sphere wherein a great deal
more is needed. He is not a "what" man or, far less, a "why" man. He
is a "how" man and nothing more. He is versed in method, not purpose.
Nobody with even a slight grasp of China and Asian history-or history
in general-could possibly stand on an aircraft carrier in the middle
of a locally conflicted region and say the things Carter did last
month. He evinces no sense of his own recklessness.
If you follow Carter's movements, it becomes plain he is a man with a
mission. Two, indeed, for he is doing the same thing across the
Atlantic as he is across the Pacific: Conjure an adversary, maintain
tensions at the highest possible level, militarize all possible
responses to the conjured adversary. Remember the two-front war
Pentagon planners, and defense contractors behind them, longed for as
the Cold War wound down? Ash Carter's apparent intent is to make the
dream come true.
*
We already pay for Ashton Carter and our failure to address all he
stands for, as earlier mentioned. Let me conclude with one small story
explaining one way this is so.
William Hartung directs the Arms and Security Project at the Center
for International Policy in Washington. The other day he posted an
excellent essay on the TomDispatch web site entitled "The Pentagon's
War on Accountability." It is a an astonishing review of just how the
only government institution that refuses to be audited-and gets away
with it, preposterously-hides literally countless billions in secret
slush funds, off-budget weapons programs, cost overruns, "deterrence
funds," dishonest accounting, no accounting and, of course, deception.
The figures Hartung publishes are blood-boiling: They run to the
trillions. Hartung's piece is here [5].
I printed it out, filed it and moved on through a pile of accumulated
reading. The next item happened to be my local sheet, called Norfolk Now.
On
its front page was a report on this year's budget hearing. Ordinarily
among the big events in my village-things get quiet here, indeed-it
lasted two minutes and 11 seconds this year, just long enough for the
vice-chairman of the finance committee to announce there was no budget to
Connecticut being critically broke, it turns out that Hartford, theits deck-25 to 30 fighter jets.
capital, had just sent the state's 169 towns letters concerning what
is called the Education Cost Sharing grant, meaning the amount the
state provides to support local school systems. Norfolk's school
budget is $4.2 million a year; the state usually covers $380,000 of
it. The letters explained that there were two plans under discussion:
One cuts the state's ECS grant to $55,000; the other cuts it to zero.
"There's no question we're in deep sneakers," the chairman of the
finance board told Norfolk Now's intrepid reporter. I had not heard
the expression, but it gets the point across well enough.
We are all in deep sneakers. There is no question of this. There is no
question of the straight line to be drawn between this village's
school budget and the Pentagon's. There is no question that the
Defense Department is not defending America so much as ruining it.
Patrick Smith is the author of "Time No Longer: Americans After the
American Century" [6] was the International Herald Tribune's bureau
chief in Hong Kong and then Tokyo from 1985 to 1992. During this time
he also wrote "Letter from Tokyo" for the New Yorker. He is the author
of four previous books and has contributed frequently to the New York
Times, the Nation, the Washington Quarterly, and other publications.
Share on Facebook Share
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Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/patrick-smith
[2]
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orld_of_survivalist_cuisine/
[3]
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ly_tel l_the_truth_about_the_obama_administration/
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Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org) Home > The Defense
Department Is Ruining America: Big Budgets, Militarization and the
Real Story Behind Our Asia Pivot
The Defense Department Is Ruining America: Big Budgets, Militarization
and the Real Story Behind Our Asia Pivot By Patrick Smith [1] / Salon
[2] May 28, 2016 AddThis Sharing ButtonsShare to FacebookShare to
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You have to tip the cap to Defense Secretary Carter. People in
Washington spin things as a matter of course, as Ben Rhodes, President
Obama's deputy national security advisor, just explained in that New
York Times profile considered in this space [3] a few weeks ago. The
spin is the thing. But never mind all that. Ashton Carter spins
aircraft carriers, and right before your eyes.
There he was last month, a few weeks before Obama's current swing
through Asia, on the flight deck of the John C. Stennis as it passed
through a narrow strait in the South China Sea hard by the People's
Republic's territorial waters, pronouncing in the somber tones these
people favor that China is militarizing the western Pacific.
TheStennis, you need to know, is a nuclear-powered supercarrier that
forward-deploys for indefinite periods with a strike group of escort
vessels attending it. It travels with eight squadrons of attack craft on
Think about that for a sec. For my money Carter gave us one of theSo what? What about those Yankees?
quintessential moments of the Obama presidency with that brief tableau.
Then
think about this:
A week before this occasion Carter attended 10 days of joint military
drills in the Philippines-the first time a Sec Def has done so in the
decades these things have been held. A week after it, our Ash sent
half a dozen A-10 Thunderbolts, heavily armed jets designed to support
ground troops, to buzz the Scarborough Shoal, which is among the
disputed land formations in the South China Sea over which Beijing and
other Asian nations claim sovereignty.
"The United States intends to continue to play a role out here that it
has for seven decades," Carter proclaimed aboard the Stennis. It
reminded me of Bush II's famous "Mission Accomplished" moment aboard a
carrier in 2003, except that Carter stayed in mufti. John Wayne could
hardly have got more of the O.K. Corral into these remarks.
In the good old days of frightening confrontation between the U.S. and
the socialist bloc-a time dearly missed by people such as Ash
Carter-the non-West used to call this kind of talk "hysterical." It
was then and it is now. But here is the thing: The Chinese were the
only ones who seemed to notice that Carter was trying to turn daytime
into night. I know no one in our great country who gave any thought to
Carter's bluster about China's assertive military while standing on an
aircraft carrier near the Chinese coast. Beijing subsequently barred
the Stennis from docking in Hong Kong-a highly unusual move on China's
part, Hong Kong having been a port of call for U.S. vessels for decades.
We will pay for our failures to pay attention to the world around usmuch).
and our place in it, and do not say no one warned you. We are, indeed,
already paying-a point to which I will return.
Here is an interview [4] with Foreign Minister Wang Yi that Al
Jazeera's Ahmed Mansour conducted four days after Carter's Stennis moment.
Given that most Americans are no longer capable of rational
conversation devoid of ideological charge, one must strip the names
out before considering the merits of any non-American's comment. Do
so, then think it through.
China is currently knee-deep in disputes over sovereignty in the South
and East China Seas. These questions are complex and at various stages
in the long process of international adjudication. Keep this in mind
while considering the merits of Wang's remarks. Keep also in mind that
non-aggression and non-interference have been among the principles of
international conduct China has asserted since Zhou Enlai's day. Then
bring to mind the record on these scores of the nation that pays Ash
Carter's salary.
For the record, my own view of the sovereignty questions lying between
China and Japan on the one hand, and China and various Southeast Asian
nations on the other, is that solutions are to be found in
condominiums: international status and administration for these specks
of land, atolls and outcrops of rocks and joint development of the
resources beneath them. The thought was raised during talks some years
ago between Beijing and Tokyo on the Diaoyu or Senkaku islands (in
Mandarin and Japanese respectively), but it subsequently disappeared
beneath the waves. We will have to see.
*
Carter's long swing through Asia last month was effectively advance
work for Obama's, which began a week ago. The president's trip took
him to Vietnam and Japan and is one leg of his farewell world tour.
Beginning with his March visits to Cuba and Argentina, Obama's foreign
itinerary this year will take him from Saudi Arabia, Britain and
Germany (last month) to Canada (June), Poland (a NATO summit in July),
China and Laos (multilateral summits in September) and Peru in
November (for another summit).
Between them, Obama and his defense secretary tell us a couple of
important things about American foreign policy, policy across the
Pacific in particular and still more particularly the president's
"pivot" to Asia (a word that now requires Dramamine there has been so
much pivoting these past few years, albeit that none of it amounts to
Let us consider these lessons-pivoting from one to the other, of course.to Vietnam.
The first thing to note is that militarization in the western Pacific
is not this administration's concern. Neither is international law.
Ash Carter's stage-set appearance on the Stennis last month was
monumentally miscalculated in this respect-and consequently told us
all we need to know about Washington's true preoccupation. This is
simply stated. America's policy cliques are all for a militarized East
Asia: They have made it so for the seven decades Carter noted. They
simply do not want anyone challenging this status quo.
What did Obama just do during his week in the region? In Hanoi he
announced that he would lift the longstanding ban on American arms sales
And fair enough in one way: Why should we discriminate against themust live with them.
Vietnamese when we sell arms to 180 other nations? Our defense
contractors await your business: This is all Obama had to say, apart
from the obnoxious correctives on human rights and press freedom
American leaders will never stop insisting upon when traveling in
nations that do not share our lapsing standards in both spheres.
The Japan visit was far more complex. Obama had re-enlisted the
Japanese in our seven-decade military dominance in the Pacific -known
in the Japanese case as the "security umbrella"-when Prime Minister
Abe visited Washington last year. So that was out of the way; even a
nationalist such as Abe-grandson of a war criminal-bows yet before the
victors in 1945. But a finer line this president has rarely walked. It
only looked like a mission of peace.
Apart from an apparently unremarkable Group of Seven session, the
centerpiece of Obama's visit was a tour of Hiroshima, which Truman
leveled in 1945 with the world's first and only wartime detonation of
an atomic bomb. No, there would be no apology, of course: The argument
that Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved lives, while highly questionable and
wholly hypothetical in any case, still holds to justify a prima facie
war crime. Obama's hours in Hiroshima were intended to underscore his
commitment to nonproliferation, but it would be hard to measure the
immensity of this president's
hypocrisy:
The defense secretary he named last year has long been a prominent
proponent of a sweeping, expensive renovation of America's
nuclear-weapons stockpiles, and this now proceeds apace. Once again,
night is supposed to be day.
Obama had a brief sit-down with Abe, but the Japanese premier spent
all of it berating the president for a former Marine's murder (yet
another) of a Japanese woman in Okinawa shortly before Obama's
arrival. Highly embarrassing, of course. Abe could not care less about
the sentiments of Okinawans, as anyone who understands Japan will
know. But the American military installations in Japan's southernmost
islands are 1.) the single largest component of the U.S. presence in
the western Pacific and 2.) unambiguously against the will of those who
Obama was fully cognizant of the former point. It would be hard to saydiscuss.
whether our progressive leader or Abe was more indifferent to the latter.
I go back to Carter's unintentionally interesting assertion aboard the
Stennis: We have been predominant in the Pacific since 1945 and we
will not let this change. The policy cliques, you have to surmise, are
incapable even of seeing, let alone accepting, the turning of
history's wheel.
Washington could, theoretically, address China's emergence as a
regional and, indeed, global power imaginatively. But this implies the
presence of trained diplomats, and so theory must remain only theory.
In practice, Washington is into neo-containment at the other end of
the Pacific. It is a policy doomed to failure. (Michael Sullivan, the
NPR man out there, actually used the phrase "containment of China" in
a broadcast the other day. But only once, so far as I can tell, given
that this ranks high among the
unsayables.)
Pivot to the second lesson.
*
Who makes policy in Washington?
This has long been an interesting question and will continue to be
one. It is important for paying-attention people to keep asking it. As
Andrew Bacevich noted in the interview published in this space over
the previous two weeks, all is always in flux among the policy
cliques. Power is fluid, flowing now one way and now another.
But there are fewer mysteries on this point now than there may have
been when Barack Obama took office. I still cannot tell whether this
man stands four-square behind the foreign policies executed during his
watch or if he is merely the acquiescing front man, as Bush II was,
listening to discussions conducted above his head. The historians will
have to sort that out. But this now seems plain: Whatever his thoughts
on the matter, he does not actually make the kind of policies we now
associate with him. That falls ever more consistently to the Pentagon
and its allies in the intelligence and national security agencies.
The Pacific was bound to deliver this lesson more legibly than any
other region. And it just did. This is what Ash Carter and Obama have
put on display over the course of the last couple of months.
Apart from a brief period immediately after the Japanese surrender,
the story of American policy in Asia from the Occupation onward has
been one of progressive militarization. This process went emphatically
into high gear after the Chinese Revolution in 1949. The "Who lost
China?" arguments that ensued more or less wiped out a generation of
thoughtful diplomats trained in Asian languages, cultures, histories,
and so on. As the Cold War went on, so did the gutting of the State
Department's ranks; by the Reagan years the process was complete.
There is no question that China's emergence-economic, diplomatic,
political-challenges the U.S. and the rest of the world to think
through the proper responses. This is among the truly large questions
of our time. But anyone who thinks those running policy now-or having
the biggest sway over it-are up to this task is as unaware of the
complexities at work as Carter plainly is. Questions of history and
culture need to be addressed. China's ambition to "stand up," as Mao
memorably put it, reflects a wound to national pride dating to the
Opium Wars in the 1840s. One may or may not hold such realities in any
regard, but they are part of what drives the Chinese, and no number of
aircraft carriers in the South China Sea will make them go away.
It is useful to consider just who Ashton Carter is. He was trained as
a nuclear physicist and taught at Harvard. Also trained in
international affairs and global security, he has sat at the
intersection of science and strategy his entire career. America's
nuclear weapons program has been an abiding interest at least since
Bill Clinton's Defense Department hired him as assistant secretary in
1993. Obama inherited him, as he did Robert Gates, and put Carter in
charge of the Pentagon's acquisitions and technology.
Here
I pause: How wrong is it to give someone previously assigned to
shopping among the defense contractors the power to set policy?
Very, in my view. Conflict of interest is woven into everything Ash
Carter does. In this respect, his appointment as Sec Def suggests
something very disturbing about the true locus of power among those
now setting foreign policy in Washington.
He is a man of science, of means, in a sphere wherein a great deal
more is needed. He is not a "what" man or, far less, a "why" man. He
is a "how" man and nothing more. He is versed in method, not purpose.
Nobody with even a slight grasp of China and Asian history-or history
in general-could possibly stand on an aircraft carrier in the middle
of a locally conflicted region and say the things Carter did last
month. He evinces no sense of his own recklessness.
If you follow Carter's movements, it becomes plain he is a man with a
mission. Two, indeed, for he is doing the same thing across the
Atlantic as he is across the Pacific: Conjure an adversary, maintain
tensions at the highest possible level, militarize all possible
responses to the conjured adversary. Remember the two-front war
Pentagon planners, and defense contractors behind them, longed for as
the Cold War wound down? Ash Carter's apparent intent is to make the
dream come true.
*
We already pay for Ashton Carter and our failure to address all he
stands for, as earlier mentioned. Let me conclude with one small story
explaining one way this is so.
William Hartung directs the Arms and Security Project at the Center
for International Policy in Washington. The other day he posted an
excellent essay on the TomDispatch web site entitled "The Pentagon's
War on Accountability." It is a an astonishing review of just how the
only government institution that refuses to be audited-and gets away
with it, preposterously-hides literally countless billions in secret
slush funds, off-budget weapons programs, cost overruns, "deterrence
funds," dishonest accounting, no accounting and, of course, deception.
The figures Hartung publishes are blood-boiling: They run to the
trillions. Hartung's piece is here [5].
I printed it out, filed it and moved on through a pile of accumulated
reading. The next item happened to be my local sheet, called Norfolk Now.
On
its front page was a report on this year's budget hearing. Ordinarily
among the big events in my village-things get quiet here, indeed-it
lasted two minutes and 11 seconds this year, just long enough for the
vice-chairman of the finance committee to announce there was no budget to
Connecticut being critically broke, it turns out that Hartford, the
capital, had just sent the state's 169 towns letters concerning what
is called the Education Cost Sharing grant, meaning the amount the
state provides to support local school systems. Norfolk's school
budget is $4.2 million a year; the state usually covers $380,000 of
it. The letters explained that there were two plans under discussion:
One cuts the state's ECS grant to $55,000; the other cuts it to zero.
"There's no question we're in deep sneakers," the chairman of the
finance board told Norfolk Now's intrepid reporter. I had not heard
the expression, but it gets the point across well enough.
We are all in deep sneakers. There is no question of this. There is no
question of the straight line to be drawn between this village's
school budget and the Pentagon's. There is no question that the
Defense Department is not defending America so much as ruining it.
Patrick Smith is the author of "Time No Longer: Americans After the
American Century" [6] was the International Herald Tribune's bureau
chief in Hong Kong and then Tokyo from 1985 to 1992. During this time
he also wrote "Letter from Tokyo" for the New Yorker. He is the author
of four previous books and has contributed frequently to the New York
Times, the Nation, the Washington Quarterly, and other publications.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [7] Error!
Hyperlink reference not valid.[8]
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/economy/defense-department-ruining-america-big
-budge ts-militarization-and-real-story-behind-our-asia
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/patrick-smith
[2]
http://www.salon.com/2014/11/09/the_end_of_the_world_diet_inside_the_c
razy_w
orld_of_survivalist_cuisine/
[3]
http://www.salon.com/2016/05/10/did_the_new_york_times_just_accidental
ly_tel l_the_truth_about_the_obama_administration/
[4]
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/05/china-militarising-south-china-s
ea-fm-
160516120252938.html
[5]
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176144/tomgram%3A_william_hartung%2C_h
ow_to_ disappear_money%2C_pentagon-style/#more
[6] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0300176562//?tag=saloncom08-20
[7] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on The Defense ;
Department Is Ruining America: Big Budgets, Militarization and the
Real Story Behind Our Asia Pivot [8] http://www.alternet.org/ [9] ;
http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
