No presidential candidate talks about disability rights. We're not an
important enough constituency. As for listening to political speeches, I
tend not to. I understand that Bernie is doing political organizing and I
do, occasionally, read summries of what he's said, jusst to see if there's
been a change.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Tuesday, July 14, 2015 10:49 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] What Are Foreign Military Bases For?
This morning on Flash Point, Bernie Sanders spoke for an hour. The speech
was recorded in Wisconsin, before a large crowd. The two items missing on
his otherwise Stirling speech was any discussion regarding Disability
Rights, and our Foreign Policy. We need to take Bernie at his word and get
some major grass roots push going on turning his head.
You might be able to hear the entire speech by going to:
90.7 KSER | Independent Public Radio
www.kser.org/
The program is called, Flash Point. It would be on Tuesday, July 14.
Result details
KSER
Mornings and Afternoons on KSER ... Democracy Now! is a daily progressive,
nonprofit, independently syndicated news hour that airs on more than 1,250
radio,
television, satellite channels. >
*************
US Marines in Kuwait. (photo: US Navy)2001.
What Are Foreign Military Bases For?
By David Swanson, David Swanson's Blog
13 July 15
If you're like most people in the United States, you have a vague
awareness that the U.S. military keeps lots of troops permanently
stationed on foreign bases around the world. But have you ever
wondered and really investigated to find out how many, and where
exactly, and at what cost, and to what purpose, and in terms of what
relationship with the host nations?
A wonderfully researched new book, six years in the works, answers
these questions in a manner you'll find engaging whether you've ever
asked them or not. It's called Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases
Harm America and the World, by David Vine.
Some 800 bases with hundreds of thousands of troops in some 70
nations, plus all kinds of other "trainers" and "non-permanent"
exercises that last indefinitely, maintain an ongoing U.S. military
presence around the world for a price tag of at least $100 billion a
year.
Why they do this is a harder question to answer.
Even if you think there is some reason to be able to quickly deploy
thousands of U.S. troops to any spot on earth, airplanes now make that
as easily done from the United States as from Korea or Japan or
Germany or Italy.
It costs dramatically more to keep troops in those other countries,
and while some base defenders make a case for economic philanthropy,
the evidence is that local economies actually benefit little -- and
suffer little when a base leaves. Neither does the U.S. economy
benefit, of course.
Rather, certain privileged contractors benefit, along with those
politicians whose campaigns they fund. And if you think military
spending is unaccountable at home, you should check out bases abroad
where it's none too rare to have security guards employed purely to
guard cooks whose sole job is to feed the security guards. The
military has a term for any common SNAFU, and the term for this one is
"self-licking ice cream."
The bases, in many cases, generate an enormous amount of popular
resentment and hatred, serving as motivations for attacks on the bases
themselves or elsewhere -- famously including the attacks of September 11,
Bases around the borders of Russia and China are generating newlikely.
hostility and arms races, and even proposals by Russia and China to
open foreign bases of their own. Currently all non-U.S. foreign bases
in the world total no more than 30, with most of those belonging to
close U.S. allies, and not a single one of them being in or anywhere
near the United States, which would of course be considered an
outrage.
Many U.S. bases are hosted by brutal dictatorships. An academic study
has identified a strong U.S. tendency to defend dictatorships where
the United States has bases. A glance at a newspaper will tell you the
same. Crimes in Bahrain are not equal to crimes in Iran. In fact, when
brutal and undemocratic governments currently hosting U.S. bases (in,
for example, Honduras, Aruba, Curaçao, Mauritania, Liberia, Niger,
Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Chad, Egypt, Mozambique,
Burundi, Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Yemen, Qatar, Oman, UAE,
Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, Israel, Turkey, Georgia,
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Thailand, Cambodia, or
Singapore) are protested, there is a pattern of increased U.S. support
for the government, which makes eviction of the U.S. bases all the
more likely should the government fall, which fuels a vicious cycle
that increases popular resentment of the U.S. government. The U.S.
began building new bases in Honduras shortly after the 2009 coup.
Vine also tells a troubling story of the U.S. military's alliance with
the Camorra (the mafia) in Naples, Italy, a relationship that has
lasted from World War II to the present, and which fueled the rise of
the Camorra -- a group reportedly deemed reliable enough by the U.S.
military to protect nuclear weapons.
The smaller bases that don't house tens of thousands of troops, but
secretive death squads or drones, have a tendency to make wars more
The drone war on Yemen that was labeled a success by President Obamadisastrous.
last year has helped fuel a larger war.
In fact, I want to quibble with Vine's account of the birth of Base
Nation, because I think the facilitation of the worst war ever was
involved. Vine gives the history of the U.S. bases in Native American
lands, starting in
1785 and very much alive today in the language of U.S. troops abroad
in "Indian territory." But then Vine dates the birth of the modern
base empire to September 2, 1940, when President Franklin Roosevelt
traded Britain old ships in exchange for various Caribbean, Bermudan,
and Canadian bases to be used in or after the war he was supposedly
not planning on. But I'd like to back the clock up a little.
When FDR visited Pearl Harbor (not actually part of the United States)
on July 28, 1934, the Japanese military expressed apprehension.
General Kunishiga Tanaka wrote in the Japan Advertiser, objecting to
the build-up of the American fleet and the creation of additional
bases in Alaska and the Aleutian Islands (also not part of the United
States): "Such insolent behavior makes us most suspicious. It makes us
think a major disturbance is purposely being encouraged in the
Pacific. This is greatly regretted."
Then, in March 1935, Roosevelt bestowed Wake Island on the U.S. Navy
and gave Pan Am Airways a permit to build runways on Wake Island,
Midway Island, and Guam. Japanese military commanders announced that
they were disturbed and viewed these runways as a threat. So did peace
activists in the United States. By the next month, Roosevelt had
planned war games and maneuvers near the Aleutian Islands and Midway
Island. By the following month, peace activists were marching in New
York advocating friendship with Japan.
Norman
Thomas wrote in 1935: "The Man from Mars who saw how men suffered in
the last war and how frantically they are preparing for the next war,
which they know will be worse, would come to the conclusion that he
was looking at the denizens of a lunatic asylum." The Japanese
attacked Wake Island four days after attacking Pearl Harbor.
In any case, Vine points to the uniqueness of World War II as a war
that has never been ended, even after the Cold War was said to have
ended. Why have the troops never come home? Why have they continued to
spread their forts into "Indian Territory," until the U.S. has more
foreign bases than any other empire in history, even as the era of
conquering territory has ended, even as a significant segment of the
population has ceased thinking of "Indians" and other foreigners as
subhuman beasts without rights worthy of respecting?
One reason, well-documented by Vine, is the same reason that the huge U.S.
base at Guantanamo, Cuba, is used to imprison people without trials.
By preparing for wars in foreign locations, the U.S. is often able to
evade all kinds of legal restrictions -- including on labor and the
environment, not to mention prostitution. GIs occupying Germany
referred to rape as "liberating a blonde," and the sexual disaster
area surrounding U.S. bases has continued to this day, despite the
decision in 1945 to start sending families to live with soldiers -- a
policy that now includes shipping each soldier's entire worldly
possessions including automobiles around the world with them, not to
mention providing single-payer healthcare and twice the spending on
schooling as the national average back home. Prostitutes serving U.S.
bases in South Korea and elsewhere are often virtually slaves. The
Philippines, which has had U.S. "help" as long as anyone, provides the
most contractor staff for U.S. bases, cooking , cleaning, and
everything else -- as well as likely the most prostitutes imported to
other countries, like South Korea.
The most isolated and lawless base sites include locations from which
the U.S. military evicted the local population. These include bases in
Diego Garcia, Greenland, Alaska, Hawaii, Panama, Puerto Rico, the
Marshall Islands, Guam, the Philippines, Okinawa, and South Korea --
with people evicted as recently as 2006 in South Korea.
In hundreds of other sites where the population was not evicted, it
might wish it had been. Foreign bases have been environmentally
Open-air burns, unexploded weaponry, poisons leaked into the groundone:
water
--
these are all commonplace. A jet fuel leak at Kirkland Air Force Base
in Albuquerque, N.M., started in 1953 and was discovered in 1999, and
was more than twice the size of the Exxon Valdez spill. U.S. bases
within the United States have been environmentally devastating, but
not on the scale of those in some foreign lands. A plane taking off
from Diego Garcia to bomb Afghanistan in 2001 crashed and sank to the
bottom of the ocean with some
85
hundred-pound munitions. Even ordinary base life takes a toll; U.S.
troops produce over three times the garbage each as local residents
in, for example, Okinawa.
Disregard for people and the land and the sea is built into the very
idea of foreign bases. The United States would never tolerate another
nation's base within its borders, yet imposes them on Okinawans, South
Koreans, Italians, Filipinos, Iraqis, and others despite huge protest.
Vine took some of his students to meet with an official at the U.S.
State Department, Kevin Maher, who explained to them that U.S. bases
in Japan were concentrated in Okinawa because it was "the Puerto Rico
of Japan" where people have "darker skin,"
are "shorter," and have an "accent."
Base Nation is a book that should be read -- and its maps seen -- by
everyone. I wish Vine did not write "Russia's seizure of Crimea" when
referring to a free and open and legal vote, especially in the context
of a book about military bases. And I wish he did not only use selfish
points of reference in terms of financial tradeoffs. Of course the
United States could be transformed for the better with the redirection
of military spending, but the United States and the world both could
be. It's that much money.
But this book will be an invaluable resource for years to come. It
also includes, I should note, an excellent account of some of the
resistance struggles that have in some cases shut bases down or scaled
them back. It's worth noting that just this week, in the first of two
necessary rulings, an Italian court has ruled for the people, against
the U.S. Navy's construction of communications equipment in Sicily.
Just this month, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff published "The
National Military Strategy of the United States of America -- 2015."
It gave as justification for militarism lies about four countries,
beginning with Russia, which it accused of "using force to achieve its
goals," something the Pentagon would never do! Next it lied that Iran
was "pursuing" nuclear weapons, a claim for which there is no
evidence. Next it claimed that North Korea's nukes would someday
"threaten the U.S. homeland." Finally, it asserted that China was
"adding tension to the Asia-Pacific region." This "Strategy" admitted
that none of the four nations wanted war with the United States.
"Nonetheless, they each pose serious security concerns," it said.
So, one might add, does each of the U.S. foreign bases. Vine's book
ends with some excellent proposals for change, to which I would add only
Smedley Butler's proposed rule that the U.S. military be forbidden to2001.
travel more than 200 miles from the United States.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not
valid.
US Marines in Kuwait. (photo: US Navy)
http://davidswanson.org/node/4825http://davidswanson.org/node/4825
What Are Foreign Military Bases For?
By David Swanson, David Swanson's Blog
13 July 15
f you're like most people in the United States, you have a vague
awareness that the U.S. military keeps lots of troops permanently
stationed on foreign bases around the world. But have you ever
wondered and really investigated to find out how many, and where
exactly, and at what cost, and to what purpose, and in terms of what
relationship with the host nations?
A wonderfully researched new book, six years in the works, answers
these questions in a manner you'll find engaging whether you've ever
asked them or not. It's called Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases
Harm America and the World, by David Vine.
Some 800 bases with hundreds of thousands of troops in some 70
nations, plus all kinds of other "trainers" and "non-permanent"
exercises that last indefinitely, maintain an ongoing U.S. military
presence around the world for a price tag of at least $100 billion a
year.
Why they do this is a harder question to answer.
Even if you think there is some reason to be able to quickly deploy
thousands of U.S. troops to any spot on earth, airplanes now make that
as easily done from the United States as from Korea or Japan or
Germany or Italy.
It costs dramatically more to keep troops in those other countries,
and while some base defenders make a case for economic philanthropy,
the evidence is that local economies actually benefit little -- and
suffer little when a base leaves. Neither does the U.S. economy
benefit, of course.
Rather, certain privileged contractors benefit, along with those
politicians whose campaigns they fund. And if you think military
spending is unaccountable at home, you should check out bases abroad
where it's none too rare to have security guards employed purely to
guard cooks whose sole job is to feed the security guards. The
military has a term for any common SNAFU, and the term for this one is
"self-licking ice cream."
The bases, in many cases, generate an enormous amount of popular
resentment and hatred, serving as motivations for attacks on the bases
themselves or elsewhere -- famously including the attacks of September 11,
Bases around the borders of Russia and China are generating newlikely.
hostility and arms races, and even proposals by Russia and China to
open foreign bases of their own. Currently all non-U.S. foreign bases
in the world total no more than 30, with most of those belonging to
close U.S. allies, and not a single one of them being in or anywhere
near the United States, which would of course be considered an
outrage.
Many U.S. bases are hosted by brutal dictatorships. An academic study
has identified a strong U.S. tendency to defend dictatorships where
the United States has bases. A glance at a newspaper will tell you the
same. Crimes in Bahrain are not equal to crimes in Iran. In fact, when
brutal and undemocratic governments currently hosting U.S. bases (in,
for example, Honduras, Aruba, Curaçao, Mauritania, Liberia, Niger,
Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Chad, Egypt, Mozambique,
Burundi, Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Yemen, Qatar, Oman, UAE,
Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, Israel, Turkey, Georgia,
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Thailand, Cambodia, or
Singapore) are protested, there is a pattern of increased U.S. support
for the government, which makes eviction of the U.S. bases all the
more likely should the government fall, which fuels a vicious cycle
that increases popular resentment of the U.S. government. The U.S.
began building new bases in Honduras shortly after the 2009 coup.
Vine also tells a troubling story of the U.S. military's alliance with
the Camorra (the mafia) in Naples, Italy, a relationship that has
lasted from World War II to the present, and which fueled the rise of
the Camorra -- a group reportedly deemed reliable enough by the U.S.
military to protect nuclear weapons.
The smaller bases that don't house tens of thousands of troops, but
secretive death squads or drones, have a tendency to make wars more
The drone war on Yemen that was labeled a success by President Obamadisastrous.
last year has helped fuel a larger war.
In fact, I want to quibble with Vine's account of the birth of Base
Nation, because I think the facilitation of the worst war ever was
involved. Vine gives the history of the U.S. bases in Native American
lands, starting in
1785 and very much alive today in the language of U.S. troops abroad
in "Indian territory." But then Vine dates the birth of the modern
base empire to September 2, 1940, when President Franklin Roosevelt
traded Britain old ships in exchange for various Caribbean, Bermudan,
and Canadian bases to be used in or after the war he was supposedly
not planning on. But I'd like to back the clock up a little.
When FDR visited Pearl Harbor (not actually part of the United States)
on July 28, 1934, the Japanese military expressed apprehension.
General Kunishiga Tanaka wrote in the Japan Advertiser, objecting to
the build-up of the American fleet and the creation of additional
bases in Alaska and the Aleutian Islands (also not part of the United
States): "Such insolent behavior makes us most suspicious. It makes us
think a major disturbance is purposely being encouraged in the
Pacific. This is greatly regretted."
Then, in March 1935, Roosevelt bestowed Wake Island on the U.S. Navy
and gave Pan Am Airways a permit to build runways on Wake Island,
Midway Island, and Guam. Japanese military commanders announced that
they were disturbed and viewed these runways as a threat. So did peace
activists in the United States. By the next month, Roosevelt had
planned war games and maneuvers near the Aleutian Islands and Midway
Island. By the following month, peace activists were marching in New
York advocating friendship with Japan.
Norman
Thomas wrote in 1935: "The Man from Mars who saw how men suffered in
the last war and how frantically they are preparing for the next war,
which they know will be worse, would come to the conclusion that he
was looking at the denizens of a lunatic asylum." The Japanese
attacked Wake Island four days after attacking Pearl Harbor.
In any case, Vine points to the uniqueness of World War II as a war
that has never been ended, even after the Cold War was said to have
ended. Why have the troops never come home? Why have they continued to
spread their forts into "Indian Territory," until the U.S. has more
foreign bases than any other empire in history, even as the era of
conquering territory has ended, even as a significant segment of the
population has ceased thinking of "Indians" and other foreigners as
subhuman beasts without rights worthy of respecting?
One reason, well-documented by Vine, is the same reason that the huge U.S.
base at Guantanamo, Cuba, is used to imprison people without trials.
By preparing for wars in foreign locations, the U.S. is often able to
evade all kinds of legal restrictions -- including on labor and the
environment, not to mention prostitution. GIs occupying Germany
referred to rape as "liberating a blonde," and the sexual disaster
area surrounding U.S. bases has continued to this day, despite the
decision in 1945 to start sending families to live with soldiers -- a
policy that now includes shipping each soldier's entire worldly
possessions including automobiles around the world with them, not to
mention providing single-payer healthcare and twice the spending on
schooling as the national average back home. Prostitutes serving U.S.
bases in South Korea and elsewhere are often virtually slaves. The
Philippines, which has had U.S. "help" as long as anyone, provides the
most contractor staff for U.S. bases, cooking , cleaning, and
everything else -- as well as likely the most prostitutes imported to
other countries, like South Korea.
The most isolated and lawless base sites include locations from which
the U.S. military evicted the local population. These include bases in
Diego Garcia, Greenland, Alaska, Hawaii, Panama, Puerto Rico, the
Marshall Islands, Guam, the Philippines, Okinawa, and South Korea --
with people evicted as recently as 2006 in South Korea.
In hundreds of other sites where the population was not evicted, it
might wish it had been. Foreign bases have been environmentally
Open-air burns, unexploded weaponry, poisons leaked into the groundone:
water
--
these are all commonplace. A jet fuel leak at Kirkland Air Force Base
in Albuquerque, N.M., started in 1953 and was discovered in 1999, and
was more than twice the size of the Exxon Valdez spill. U.S. bases
within the United States have been environmentally devastating, but
not on the scale of those in some foreign lands. A plane taking off
from Diego Garcia to bomb Afghanistan in 2001 crashed and sank to the
bottom of the ocean with some
85
hundred-pound munitions. Even ordinary base life takes a toll; U.S.
troops produce over three times the garbage each as local residents
in, for example, Okinawa.
Disregard for people and the land and the sea is built into the very
idea of foreign bases. The United States would never tolerate another
nation's base within its borders, yet imposes them on Okinawans, South
Koreans, Italians, Filipinos, Iraqis, and others despite huge protest.
Vine took some of his students to meet with an official at the U.S.
State Department, Kevin Maher, who explained to them that U.S. bases
in Japan were concentrated in Okinawa because it was "the Puerto Rico
of Japan" where people have "darker skin,"
are "shorter," and have an "accent."
Base Nation is a book that should be read -- and its maps seen -- by
everyone. I wish Vine did not write "Russia's seizure of Crimea" when
referring to a free and open and legal vote, especially in the context
of a book about military bases. And I wish he did not only use selfish
points of reference in terms of financial tradeoffs. Of course the
United States could be transformed for the better with the redirection
of military spending, but the United States and the world both could
be. It's that much money.
But this book will be an invaluable resource for years to come. It
also includes, I should note, an excellent account of some of the
resistance struggles that have in some cases shut bases down or scaled
them back. It's worth noting that just this week, in the first of two
necessary rulings, an Italian court has ruled for the people, against
the U.S. Navy's construction of communications equipment in Sicily.
Just this month, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff published "The
National Military Strategy of the United States of America -- 2015."
It gave as justification for militarism lies about four countries,
beginning with Russia, which it accused of "using force to achieve its
goals," something the Pentagon would never do! Next it lied that Iran
was "pursuing" nuclear weapons, a claim for which there is no
evidence. Next it claimed that North Korea's nukes would someday
"threaten the U.S. homeland." Finally, it asserted that China was
"adding tension to the Asia-Pacific region." This "Strategy" admitted
that none of the four nations wanted war with the United States.
"Nonetheless, they each pose serious security concerns," it said.
So, one might add, does each of the U.S. foreign bases. Vine's book
ends with some excellent proposals for change, to which I would add only
Smedley Butler's proposed rule that the U.S. military be forbidden to
travel more than 200 miles from the United States.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
