Day: April 25, 2025

Bay Of Pigs

I had intended to post this on the anniversary of the attack….but life got in the way as it has often done and it got pushed back and almost forgotten.

As this month comes to a close I would like to reach back in history and write about the US led invasion of Cuba in April of 1961….the invasion force was rather small in the beginning because the US had ruled out using US  troops….A full-scale invasion would have incurred huge US casualties: 40-50,000 according to Department of Defense estimates. There was also public opinion to be considered. Since the introduction of the ‘good neighbor’ policy, US armed intervention was of potential political harm and had been formally ruled out under such commitments as the Charter of the Organization of American States. The US had made political capital during 1956 out of Soviet armed intervention in Hungary and the British-French-Israeli action in Suez. Any involvement in Cuba must be subject to ‘plausible deniability’, with the White House especially untainted by any knowledge or involvement.

Instead the powers decided to use a small force of 1400 men….

The first part of the plan was to destroy Castro’s tiny air force, making it impossible for his military to resist the invaders. On April 15, 1961, a group of Cuban exiles took off from Nicaragua in a squadron of American B-26 bombers, painted to look like stolen Cuban planes, and conducted a strike against Cuban airfields.

However, it turned out that Castro and his advisers knew about the raid and had moved his planes out of harm’s way. Frustrated, Kennedy began to suspect that the plan the CIA had promised would be “both clandestine and successful” might in fact be “too large to be clandestine and too small to be successful.”

Such requirements left Pluto in operational limbo. In the first place, air cover was deemed essential for the invading force to secure the beach-heads; yet control of the skies could not be achieved by the rebels alone. To solve this problem the original landing-site was changed from a point close to the Escambray mountains (good guerrilla territory) to the Bay of Pigs, more difficult terrain for an amphibious operation. Three main groups of rebels existed: insurgents in Cuba killing and sabotaging, but ignored by the CIA; the invasion forces being trained by the CIA mainly in Guatemala, but also within the United States; and the anti-Castro leadership, which divided into two antagonistic groups: the original Batistianos and those who began as Fidelistas, but lost faith in the revolution. The most influential of this disparate trio was the divided leadership, but precisely because of these divisions, their susceptibility to leaks and the unsavory backgrounds of many, such men were cut out of CIA decision-making.

read on….

https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/bay-pigs-invasion

This would be invasion lasted about 24 hours before it broke down and was Kennedy’s first international failure.

For more reading this is an excellent account….

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56808455

And the US has been interfering in international situations ever since.

You would think we could learn from that mistake….

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

 

Not Much Change Since Jefferson

I have heard some call the election of 2024 a sea change in American history…..it was very interesting election but nothing was a sea change….not much was different than any other election in our history.

Let’s step back 200 years to the election of 1800….Jefferson vs Adams….

The most extreme accusations Democrats and Republicans hurl at one another today would be familiar to the Founding Fathers.

In fact, the election of 1800 alone featured almost everything that’s made Donald Trump’s three presidential contests a wild ride.

Accusations of foreign interference?

Check—John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, the candidates in 1800, each thought the other was subservient to a foreign power.

The French Revolution divided Americans as bitterly as any foreign-policy crisis today.

Jefferson’s Republican Party, which is actually the ancestor of today’s Democratic Party, thought Adams and his Federalist Party were monarchists and traitors to the American Revolution because they were pro-British and anti-French.

The Federalists thought Jefferson’s pro-French party was as radical as France’s own revolutionaries: The phrase “godless communists” didn’t exist yet, but Federalists perceived Jeffersonians as atheists who would abolish private property if they got the chance.

Federalists were anti-democratic, said Republicans.

Republicans were against the Constitution, Federalists shot back.

Each side fervently believed the other was “illiberal” and in league with foreign regimes antithetical to America’s principles.

Immigration was a red-hot issue then as well and tied to fears of anti-American influences from abroad.

Under President Adams, Congress raised the number of years a foreigner would have to live in the United States before being naturalized as a citizen.

The Federalist-controlled Congress also gave the president broad powers to deport immigrants—or “aliens,” as they were then called.

How Politics Hasn’t Changed Since Jefferson

You see BS from both sides….same as today….

And the fact that the government is controlled by plutocrats has not change since day one of the republic.

Plutocracy?

Plutocracy is a government controlled exclusively by the wealthy, either directly or indirectly. A plutocracy effectively allows only the wealthy to rule. This can then result in policies exclusively designed to assist the wealthy.

Plutocracy doesn’t have to be a purposeful, overt format for government. Instead, it can be created through the allowance of access to certain programs and educational resources only to the wealthy, thereby making it so that the wealthy hold more sway. The concern of inadvertently creating a plutocracy is that the regulatory focus will be narrow and concentrated on the goals of the wealthy, creating even more income and asset-based inequality.

In a plutocracy, access to political power is limited and requires one either to possess wealth or to have the support of the wealthy by being willing to serve their interests. This may be a matter of official rules and restrictions that explicitly require that a person have some specified level of economic affluence in order to exercise political authority, such as voting or holding public office. However, plutocracy more often arises informally and is implicitly embodied in constitutional, legal, or regulatory measures that create barriers to participation in politics and political life that can be met only through the possession or expenditure of significant wealth.

And this incoming administration will be the most plutocratic of all….and that is saying something….considering all our presidents have had wealth on their side….

Somethings never change….history can teach us that.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Feeding The Insatiable Monster

The monster in question is the War Department….while all departments of the government are being cut to the bone and valuable programs are being sidelined the Pentagon smiles and wants more money.

The eyes of a new generation were opened in an episode that seemed like dark science fiction for those of a certain age, and an unyielding nightmare regardless: a genocide streaming into smartphones around the world in real time. Many American eyes were opened for the first time to the reality not only in Palestine, but in the places in the world that are meant to be forgotten, where the U.S. and its allies may tread at their will and pleasure. At the center of this system of license and aggression is the Department of Defense, as it is now euphemistically named. What we call “defense” spending in the United States is actually spending on weapons and war-making, and it has continued its unabated rise in both red and blue presidential administrations.

The U.S. spends far more on its military than any other country – it spends more than the next nine countries combined, and as a share of GDP, its military spending far outpaces that of other rich countries in the G7 group. The Department of Defense is massive, “with $4 trillion in assets dispersed across fifty states and over 4,500 locations worldwide,” and its sheer size is at the heart of pathological accounting failures in recent years. Last November, the Pentagon flunked its seventh audit in a row, again failing to properly account for its budget – over $800 billion. A Stimson Center policy brief published last July called the Pentagon’s wild spending “a budgetary time bomb set to explode in the next twenty years,” noting the explosion in Pentagon spending in the years since 9/11. “Adjusted for inflation, defense spending has increased more than 48% in just the first 24 years of this century.” The U.S. imperial military is a truly global enterprise. According to data compiled by political anthropologist David Vine at American University, there were about 750 bases outside of the United States as of 2021, scattered throughout the world in 80 countries and colonies. Vine points out that given the “sheer number of bases and the secrecy and lack of transparency” around the information, a complete list is impossible:

https://original.antiwar.com/David_DAmato/2025/04/08/the-all-devouring-machine-pentagon-malfeasance-and-insatiable-empire/

Pentagon has no cuts and no problem getting more than they want…..

So far, the only agency that seems to have escaped the ire of the DOGE is — don’t be shocked! — the Pentagon. After misleading headlines suggested that its topline would be cut by as much as 8% annually for the next five years as part of that supposed efficiency campaign, the real plan was revealed — finding savings in some parts of the Pentagon only to invest whatever money might be saved in — yes! — other military programs without any actual reductions in the department’s overall budget. Then, during a White House meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on April 7th, Trump announced that “we’re going to be approving a budget, and I’m proud to say, actually, the biggest one we’ve ever done for the military . . . $1 trillion. Nobody has seen anything like it.”

So far, cuts to make room for new kinds of military investments have been limited to the firing of civilian Pentagon employees and the dismantling of a number of internal strategy and research departments. Activities that funnel revenue to weapons contractors have barely been touched — hardly surprising given that Musk himself presides over a significant Pentagon contractor, SpaceX.

(counterpunch.org)

Like I said all departments are suffering from the drag of Elmo and his scalpel (DOGE)…and yet the War Department is untouched by all these senseless cuts….they get money shoved up their butts without question…..to illustrate my point….

House Republicans will seek a $150 billion Pentagon spending hike as part of their party-line megabill, according to three people familiar with the process, granted anonymity to describe private deliberations, abandoning a lower defense target and aligning with plans set by their Senate counterparts.

The upward move by the House is a win for defense hawks, who have been pushing to use GOP’s control of Congress and the White House to maximize military spending.

The House Armed Services Committee will debate its portion of Republicans’ reconciliation package next week when lawmakers return from their recess and committees begin to advance their respective sections of the sprawling domestic policy legislation.

A budget framework that cleared both chambers earlier this month proposed $150 billion in additional defense spending on the Senate side, while the House settled for a lower $100 billion Pentagon goal. The instructions for House committees in the budget blueprint, however, can be waived with the same majority vote needed to pass a final bill.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/23/house-gop-pentagon-spending-bump-00307100

It is so sad that the rest of the country means so little to Little Donny and his GOP…..while children go hungry the defense industry gets everything they want, whether needed or not, just to keep the money rolling in for their campaigns (to me it is still a bribe).

When will people come first and not what the Fat Cats want?

Thoughts?

Side note–did you see that after 2 disastrous security breeches Hogsbreath has installed a new internet line to by-pass security?

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had an internet connection that bypassed the Pentagon’s security protocols set up in his office to use the Signal messaging app on a personal computer, two people familiar with the line told the AP. Known as a “dirty” internet line in the IT industry, it connects directly to the public internet where the user’s information and the websites accessed do not have the same security filters or protocols that the Pentagon’s secured connections maintain. The existence of the unsecured internet connection is the latest revelation about Hegseth’s use of the unclassified app and raises the possibility that sensitive information could have been put at risk of hacking or surveillance.

What is this fool’s game?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”