Day: January 14, 2020

Closing Thought–14Jan20

Should the US Troops be used to protect a foreign dictatorship?

Why would I ask that question?

Trump said in an interview with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham the day before that he had pressured Riyadh to compensate the U.S. for a recent deployment to the Middle East. 

“We have a very good relationship with Saudi Arabia. I said, listen, you’re a very rich country. You want more troops? I’m going to send them to you, but you’ve got to pay us. They’re paying us. They’ve already deposited $1 billion in the bank,” he said.

https://thehill.com/homenews/house/477837-amash-accuses-trump-of-selling-military-support-to-saudi-arabia

Seriously?

Should our troops be used to protect another country?

What happened to all the training and weapons paid for by the Saudis?

If the Saudis cannot defend themselves then where did that money go that was suppose to bem for weapons and training?

Our military has enough on their plate to launch into a mercenary force at the whim of a president.

This is bullshit….and a large pile of steaming BS…..

But let’s be real…most Americans have NO use for the Saudis…..

Everything that happens in the US-Iran relationship is profoundly structured by America’s longtime alliance with Saudi Arabia, a major regional rival of Iran.

That US-Saudi alliance has long been an unquestioned priority of the Washington foreign policy community, though in recent years elite support for Saudi Arabia has come under strain because of the humanitarian disaster in Yemen and the Saudis’ murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, whose children are American citizens. But even by the standards of American presidents, Donald Trump has clung unusually tightly to the Saudis while sharing nothing with the public about his financial relationship with the Saudi government.

It’s also worth noting that while a strong alliance with Saudi Arabia has long been a mainstream position for American foreign policy elites, it’s very unpopular with the American public.

https://www.vox.com/2020/1/6/21050019/saudi-arabia-poll-unpopular

I Read, I Wrote, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

The Last Dem Debate

Before the voting begins….this time there will be only 5 candidates on the stage……it will be mostly corporatists with a liberal and a radical thrown in…..but the one thing they all have in common…..they are lily white.

The lineup for Tuesday’s Democratic debate in Iowa is set, and this time it’s a manageable list: Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Bernie Sanders, Tom Steyer, and Elizabeth Warren. Notice anything different from the previous debates? As NPR points out, this lineup lacks even one person of color. The last debate included Andrew Yang, but he failed to make the cut this time. As such, this is the “smallest, whitest” debate yet, per Politico. Warren, for one, is making an issue of it. “We started out with such an importantly diverse field, a field that had lots of different voices, lots of different perspectives,” she said last week, after the lineup was official.

“For me the particularly hard day was the day that (Sen.) Kamala Harris … was dropping out of the race because of money and that same day a billionaire bought his way onto the debate stage,” she said, taking a jab at Steyer. Yang and another nonwhite candidate, Cory Booker, have been pushing for changes in how the party determines who qualifies for the debates, which involves a combination of polling and fundraising metrics. Tuesday’s will be the seventh of 12 such contests. After Tuesday, the next one will be Feb. 7 in New Hampshire

This could be an interesting debate….we have Pete sniping at Biden, Warren pushing on Bernie and Steyer is in there….

I am hoping that we will finally have a foreign policy debate after the actions committed by the president…..but we will just have to wait and see…..

As usual I will offer my analysis of the evenings entertainment tomorrow……my candidate will not be representative but at least she is still plugging away and her support seems to be holding.

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I Read, I Wrote, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Biden And Mayor Pete

Seems the media has found the two most favorite candidates to promote…Biden which is not surprise and Mayor Pete which is a bit of a surprise until you look deeper and see that he, Pete, is of the same ilk as Biden….both are Corporatist….big money Dems….

To listen to them both and one can see that the Corporatism and militarism are going hand in hand….

Eager to hedge their bets, Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg have offered merely tactical critiques of President Trump’s decision to kill Qassim Suleimani. In sharp contrast to Elizabeth Warren and especially Bernie Sanders, the gist of the responses from Biden and Buttigieg amounted to criticizing the absence of a game plan for an atrocious game that should never be played in the first place.

Many journalists have noted that only in recent days has foreign policy become prominent in the race for the 2020 nomination. But what remains to be addressed is the confluence of how Biden and Buttigieg approach the roles of the U.S. government in class war at home and military war abroad — both for the benefit of corporate elites.

Let’s be clear: More than 50 years ago, when Martin Luther King Jr. bravely condemned “the madness of militarism,” he was directly challenging those who included the political ancestors of the likes of Buttigieg and Biden — Democratic politicians willing to wink and nod at vast death and destruction, courtesy of U.S. taxpayers, equivocating while claiming that the war machinery would operate better in their hands.

Biden and Buttigieg Are Showing How Corporatism and ‘the Madness of Militarism’ Go Together

Foreign policy has been sadly missing from most of the Dem debates but I have the feeling that the next on before the primaries begin will be a focused foreign policy.

Maybe then we can find some light between the so-called “centrists”…..I think not but I am open to the possibility.

Just a side note if one is thinking of a Biden vote…..40m years ago he wanted to cut social security…..

As early as 1984 and as recently as 2018, former Vice President Joe Biden called for cuts to Social Security in the name of saving the program and balancing the federal budget. Last week, Sen. Bernie Sanders highlighted Biden’s record on Social Security in prosecuting the case that Biden isn’t the most electable candidate. The issue could be raised again in Tuesday night’s debate.

After a Sanders campaign newsletter continued the attack on Biden’s Social Security record, the Biden campaign complained to fact-checkers at Politifact that his comments were being taken out of context. Placed in context, however, Biden’s record on Social Security is far worse than one offhand remark. Indeed, Biden has been advocating for cuts to Social Security for roughly 40 years.

And after a Republican wave swept Congress in 1994, Biden’s support for cutting Social Security, and his general advocacy for budget austerity, made him a leading combatant in the centrist-wing battle against the party’s retreating liberals in the 1980s and ’90s.

https://theintercept.com/2020/01/13/biden-cuts-social-security/

And this is the guy that pretends he is a progressive….

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I Read, I Wrote, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

I Want American Troops Home

I am one of those shameless antiwar people that thinks diplomacy should replace bullets and drones as a foreign policy tool.

I also like so many others are weary of the troops being used to police the world……our troops are stationed all over the globe and not one of them is there to protect the US homeland…..they are there to protect regimes and such….

The military of the United States is deployed in more than 150 countries around the world, with approximately 170,000 of its active-duty personnel serving outside the United States and its territories.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/06/us-military-bases-around-the-world-119321

Just in the Middle East we have approaching 100,000 troops…..

The U.S. has maintained a costly presence in the Middle East for decades, with at least 60,000 troops currently stationed around the region, according to United States Central Command

https://www.axios.com/where-us-troops-deployed-middle-east-5e96fdb2-c7ba-4f26-90b4-7bf452f83847.html

But an article by John Whitehead says it better than my puny attempts…..

It’s time to bring our troops home.

Bring them home from Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. Bring them home from Germany, South Korea and Japan. Bring them home from Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Oman. Bring them home from Niger, Chad and Mali. Bring them home from Turkey, the Philippines, and northern Australia.

That’s not what’s going to happen, of course.

The U.S. military reportedly has more than 1.3 million men and women on active duty, with more than 200,000 of them stationed overseas in nearly every country in the world. Those numbers are likely significantly higher in keeping with the Pentagon’s policy of not fully disclosing where and how many troops are deployed for the sake of “operational security and denying the enemy any advantage.” As investigative journalist David Vine explains, “Although few Americans realize it, the United States likely has more bases in foreign lands than any other people, nation, or empire in history.”

Don’t fall for the propaganda, though: America’s military forces aren’t being deployed abroad to protect our freedoms here at home. Rather, they’re being used to guard oil fields, build foreign infrastructure and protect the financial interests of the corporate elite. In fact, the United States military spends about $81 billion a year just to protect oil supplies around the world.

Come Home, America: Stop Policing the Globe and Put an End to Wars-Without-End

Enough is enough!

Time to use our resources to rebuild this country and let others worry about their problems.

This election will do NOTHING to stop them march of endless wars…..because the voter will pick the candidate that has his/her hands deep into the M-IC pockets.

Be Smart!

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I Read I Wrote, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”