Chris Hedges's Blog, page 144

Richard Cohen Will Not Be Missed

Writing his farewell column, retiring Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen (9/23/19) recalls:

Flying into Cairo for the first time, I looked out the window. A sandstorm obscured the pyramids, but I envisioned them anyway and could not get over the fact that I was being paid to see them.

That sums up Cohen’s career pretty well: It was his job to witness monumental matters; he didn’t actually see them, but wrote about them anyway—and got paid to do it.

The theme of Cohen’s final column was how lucky he’s been in his career. And it’s been lucky for us at FAIR, too, I guess—few in the media business have provided us with as much material over the years as he as.

Who can forget his history-defying declaration that “for most Americans, race has become supremely irrelevant” (FAIR.org, 5/5/09)—followed four years later by his pining for a politician brave enough to “acknowledge the widespread fear of crime committed by young black males” (FAIR.org, 7/16/13)? This is the same Richard Cohen who defended businesses refusing black customers on the grounds that “white assailants are rather hard to find in urban America” (Washington Post, 9/7/86)—and wrote that   “people with conventional views must repress a gag reflex” when they see that New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has an interracial family (FAIR.org, 12/3/14).

Cohen (Washington Post, 10/25/10) maintained that sexual harassment allegations against Clarence Thomas should be forgotten, writing, “We all did and said terrible things when we were young”—which seemed like a backhanded acknowledgement of the time he was moved out of the Post newsroom because of “inappropriate behavior” toward a female colleague (FAIR.org, 11/8/16).

It was Cohen who declared that “only a fool—or possibly a Frenchman” could doubt Colin Powell’s assurances that Iraq still had weapons of mass destruction (Washington Post, 2/6/03). Undaunted by error, years later he had an ethnic insult handy to dismiss Iranian assurances that they were not trying to make a nuclear bomb: “These Persians lie like a rug,” he insisted (FAIR.org, 9/29/09).

There was a deep strain of cluelessness that ran through Cohen’s writing, a “Not The Onion” quality that was hard to imitate. Perhaps my favorite example (FAIR.org, 8/9/11) is when he related an anecdote about Franklin Roosevelt crying when he heard about migrant children’s lack of Christmas toys—proof that the patrician president “could connect to the less fortunate.” Cohen contrasted this with Obama’s reaction “when the stock market fell more than 500 points last week and the image that night was of the president whooping it up at his birthday party…. He does not seem to care.” But you could always count on Richard Cohen to stick up for the more fortunate.

Judy Garland at the End of Her Rope and Her Rainbow

Many over the age of 50 know Judy Garland as Dorothy Gale of “The Wizard of Oz.” Or perhaps the emotional cabaret singer celebrated as “The Elvis of the gays.”

In the future, it is likely that the actress and singer will be remembered as Renee Zellweger portrays her in “Judy.” Wraith-thin, with geological layers of eyeliner and mascara encrusting birdlike eyes, her bravura vibrato plays on the heartstrings of all within earshot. Zellweger’s embodiment of the woman whose creativity was fueled by her own self-destruction presents Garland as Hollywood’s sacrificial lamb to the celebrity gods.

Rupert Goold’s biopic opens in 1968. Accompanied by her school-age children, Lorna and Joey, Garland—financially insolvent and emotionally spent after a performance—is denied the keys to her suite in a Los Angeles hotel. She hails a cab, pops some pills, and takes the kids to the home of their father, Sid Luft (Rufus Sewell), who thinks she’s an unfit mother and demands primary custody. He’s right, but she doesn’t want to lose them.

She accepts a gig in London at The Talk of the Town, where she hopes to make enough money to pay for a house. In an astonishingly tender scene, Garland reassures her anxious children that when she returns, the three of them will live in a closet together.

Zellweger delivers such a nuanced and stunning portrait of the artist at the very end of her rope—not to mention her rainbow—that only in retrospect did I notice the gaudy frame surrounding it. At dramatic points, the film flashes back to show how the bright-eyed girl born Frances Gumm was used and abused by MGM Studios and became Judy Garland, this gimlet-eyed amphetamine and alcohol addict.

So immediate is Zellweger’s portrayal that the flashbacks seem almost redundant. Yet they do indicate how the studio systematically eroded her ego by reminding her that she was not pretty enough or thin enough, encouraging her dependence on amphetamines to lose weight and stay alert on set. Pushing her to do something about that nose. Encouraging her to act onscreen and off. In one chilling scene—metaphorically if not literally factual—the studio stages a birthday pool party for her in order to provide pictures to the press, all the while insisting that she not to eat the cake or get her hair wet.

“Judy” is a cautionary tale for the Me Too generation. It’s critical of the Hollywood patriarchy that “managed” Garland by playing on her insecurities, sympathetic to the singer’s feelings that others—studios and ex-husbands alike—profited from her talents while keeping her dependent on their iron whims. From the age of 12, she was the meal ticket of her family of origin. Behold this indentured servant supporting her clan without ever developing her own internal structure and discipline.

Based on Peter Quilter’s play “The End of the Rainbow” and adapted to the screen by Tom Edge, Goold’s movie is handsomely made, edited and costumed. Like the adult Garland, the tone is profound without being maudlin, witty without being comic.

In this drama, in which there is no line between backstage and onstage, Zellweger’s feat is to convince us that Garland soldiered on, squaring shoulders and standing fast, singing her consoling songs, while all the while the world she once knew was consumed and reconfigured by earthquakes small and large. She neither resembles nor sings like Garland, but Zellweger nails her style and soul. And that glorious wit.

Military Suicides Jump to Record High

WASHINGTON—Military suicides surged this year to a record high among active duty troops, continuing a deadly trend that Pentagon officials say is frustrating and they are struggling to counter.

The Army, Navy and Marine Corps all saw the rate of suicides go up as well as the overall numbers, with only the Air Force showing a decrease, according to data released by the Pentagon Thursday. Suicides among members of the Reserves and the National Guard also grew.

The difficulties involved in identifying service members with possible problems and finding ways to prevent suicides were underscored earlier this month when the Navy reported that three crew members who served on the USS George H.W. Bush took their own lives within a week.

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Asked about the deaths in the crew of the aircraft carrier, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said, “I wish I could tell you we have an answer to prevent further, future suicides in the Armed Services. We don’t. We are caught up in what some call a national epidemic of suicide among our youth.”

The number of suicides across the military increased from 511 in 2017 to 541 in 2018. According to the Pentagon, the most at-risk population is young enlisted men, and at least 60 percent of the time they chose a gun as their suicide method. Army suicides went from 114 to 139, while the Marines went from 43 to 58 and the Navy went from 65 to 68. The Air Force dipped from 63 to 60.

“Our numbers are not moving in the right direction,” said Elizabeth Van Winkle, director of the Pentagon’s office of force resiliency. She said that most of the military rates are comparable to civilians, but added, “that’s hardly comforting.”

Military and defense leaders expressed dismay and a resolve to do more to increase resilience in the force, train service members how to handle stress better and encourage troops to seek help when they need it. Van Winkle said the military is also looking at increasing efforts to train troops on the safe storage of firearms and medication. She said there are no consistent rules or regulations across the department and the services requiring gun locks or other controls on firearms, but that some states or bases have their own restrictions.

She and Karen Orvis, director of the suicide prevention office, said recognizing service members who may be struggling or at risk of taking their own lives is very difficult, and that sometimes suicide is a sudden, impulsive decision with little warning. They said it’s difficult to identify reasons for suicide because there are so many stresses that could contribute.

They also acknowledged that service members are reluctant to come forward and seek help, because they worry that it could affect promotions or security clearances. And military leaders said they must all work harder to address those perceived roadblocks.

“Just as we talk about physical fitness, marksmanship, training and education, Marines must also be comfortable discussing life’s struggles, mental wellness and suicide,” said Gen. David Berger, commandant of the Marine Corps. “We must create a community where seeking help and assistance are simply normal, important decisions Marines and sailors make.”

This year for the first time, the Pentagon included statistics for suicides by military spouses and dependents. Van Winkle said the most recent numbers available were for 2017, but officials are working to get better at collecting family data.

According to the report, there were 186 families that had suicides — 123 were spouses and 63 were dependents between the ages of 12 and 23.

The vast majority – nearly 70 percent – were female spouses under the age of 40, while 70 percent of the dependent suicides were males. About half of the dependents who died by suicide were at least 18 years old and, for those younger than that, most of the deaths were youth between 15 and 17.

Whistleblower Probe Tests GOP’s Alliance with Trump

WASHINGTON—One Republican hadn’t read the whistleblower’s complaint. Another called President Donald Trump’s conversation with the Ukraine leader “thin gruel” for any impeachment effort. A third said the whole thing was “blown way out of proportion.”

And yet, as more details emerged about what the president said and the efforts to shield it from view, Republicans were straining Thursday under the uncertainty of being swept up in the most serious test yet of their alliance with the Trump White House.

The quickly moving events caught Republicans off stride. While Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell stayed silent throughout the day, other Republicans easily defended the president and some simply shrugged it off.

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Impeachment Isn’t the High-Stakes Gamble Pelosi Thought



by Juan Cole

















The Problem With Impeachment



by Chris Hedges

















The Case for Impeachment Goes Way Beyond Ukraine



by

“It’s just the president being President Trump,” said Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis.

But amid the jumble were signals, ever so slight, that the tumult of the Trump presidency may have entered a new phase for the party that’s being defined, enthusiastically for some, reluctantly for others, by his tenure.

“We owe people to take it seriously,” Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., a onetime Trump rival who is now member of the Intelligence Committee.

“Right now, I have more questions than answers,” he said. “The complaint raises serious allegations, and we need to determine whether they’re credible or not.”

Others past and potentially future presidential hopefuls, Sens. Mitt Romney of Utah and Ben Sasse of Nebraska, also voiced cautious concern in recent days with the same term: “troubling.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the president engaged in nothing short of a “cover-up” as Democrats turned their laser focus on the Ukraine matter as central to their impeachment probe. Thursday brought striking new revelations about the extent to which the White House sought to “lock down” Trump’s call.

One certainty was that Congress and the White House are now squaring off for a rare, if not historic, impeachment investigation that will consume both sides and deepen the political divide ahead of the 2020 election.

Pelosi called it a “sad week” in which she, siding with the vast majority of House Democrats, dropped her reluctance to launch an impeachment inquiry of the president.

“This is nothing that we take lightly,” she said.

Pelosi read from the whistleblower’s declassified complaint of Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky after he asked him to investigate Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

“This is a cover-up,” she said. “The actions taken by this president lifts this into whole new terrain, whole level of concern about his lawlessness.”

As the House plunges into an impeachment inquiry, Republican leaders found themselves once again unable to strike a consensus in the face of extraordinary actions coming from the White House that now seem the norm.

McConnell opened the Senate without mentioning the whistleblower’s complaint and declined to engage when reporters asked about it in the halls.

The House Republican leader, Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, defended the White House decision to “lock down” the details of Trump’s call by putting all the records of it on a separate computer system.

“Could I see why you’d want to put it on a more secure server?” McCarthy asked. “I think in the world of technology today, yeah, people should secure what’s going forward.”

The defense of the separate computer system at the White House was striking for Republicans who joined Trump in pursuing information on Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server during her time as secretary of state.

Yet the restraint being shown by other Republicans gave nod to the seriousness of the situation and what is yet to come in the impeachment inquiry.

“There are a lot of questions, absolutely,” said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine.

Asked about the separate computer system at the White House, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said, “We’re going to have to ask questions about that.”

The complaint released Thursday morning alleges that Trump abused the power of his office to “solicit interference from a foreign country” in next year’s U.S. election. Trump has denied doing anything wrong.

In the nine pages, the unnamed whistleblower acknowledges not hearing the president’s call first-hand but receiving information about it from “multiple U.S. officials.”

Much of what the whistleblower recounts from the president’s July 25 call tracks with a transcript released Wednesday by the White House.

Johnson, who made several trips himself to meet with Ukraine’s new president, including his inauguration in May, brushed off critics “impugning all kinds of nefarious motives here.”

The chairman of the Homeland Security Committee as well as a leader of the Senate’s Ukraine Caucus, said it was all blown out of proportion. He talked to Trump before and after those trips and said the president doesn’t think he did anything wrong.

“I take what President Trump is saying at face value,” Johnson said. Trump, he said, was consistently concerned about corruption in Ukraine and wanted European allies to step up with more foreign aid. “None of this came as a surprise to me.”

One Trump ally, Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., said, “There is absolutely nothing in this phone call that rises to the level of that (impeachment).”

It was a common refrain from other Republicans. Perdue said that from his own talks with Trump, it’s clear that he’s “moving on.”

And several leading Republicans joined Trump in casting doubts about the whistleblower.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said, “I wouldn’t want to make too quick of a conclusion when you’re reading something that somebody heard somebody else say second-hand or third-hand.”

As Democrats dive into impeachment proceedings, Pelosi said the information about the president’s call “removed all doubt that we should move forward.”

The Ukraine question will now become the central focus of the Intelligence Committee headed by Rep. Adam Schiff of California, a former federal prosecutor, and perhaps the House’s most effective investigator.

Schiff said the whistleblower “has given us a roadmap for our investigation.”

The committee is planning to talk to the whistleblower and probe what role Attorney General William Barr and Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, had in the matter.

Months after the close of former special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of the 2016 election, as well as the House’s own ongoing investigations into Trump’s administration and business dealings, the impeachment probe is now just beginning.

Pelosi said the president “betrayed his oath of office, our national security and the integrity of our elections.” She would not put a timeline on the investigation. “We have to have an inquiry to further establish the facts.”

___

Associated Press writers Alan Fram, Andrew Taylor, Mary Clare Jalonick and Matthew Daly contributed to this report.

Children to Adults: ‘Do Your Job So We Have a Future’

On Friday, my 12-year-old son carried his handmade cardboard protest sign to one of the thousands of climate strikes around the world, along with five of his classmates. His sign read, “Where you gonna hide from the hell you made?” This die-hard rock ’n’ roll fan had tapped an obscure song by his favorite band—Queen—called “White Man,” about the genocide of Native Americans, and picked out the perfect line to describe his rage at our human-made climate crisis.

My angry preteen was one of an estimated 4 million people who marched all over the planet Friday in what is considered the largest climate change-related protest action in history. The size and scope of the Global Climate Strike was breathtaking. According to Vox, “There were over 2,500 events scheduled in over 163 countries on all seven continents.” In New York City alone, which is where the United Nations climate conference was held Monday, a whopping 250,000 people showed up for an event that had been permitted for 5,000 attendees. And at events the world over, young people, outraged at the folly of adults, dared us to do better.

In Los Angeles, I spoke with youth organizers who had obtained a permit for only a few hundred people but were overwhelmed by thousands who showed up for the cause. A tall, lanky boy with bleached-blond hair introduced himself to me as 15-year-old Landen Ramirez, one of the organizers and co-founders of Youth Climate Strike LA. Looking exhausted as he stopped briefly to speak with me, the 11th grader from Acton Academy in Venice Beach said, “It’s been quite a roller coaster. This is so important to me because nobody else is organizing—politicians, CEOs and the big corporations perpetuating this mess.”

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Saving the Planet Means Overthrowing the Ruling Elites



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As kids around the world have been doing for the past year, Ramirez has been leading a regular march—through downtown Los Angeles and to City Hall—of about a hundred of his fellow students on the second Friday of every month, demanding climate action. Echoing the words we have heard from teen climate activist Greta Thunberg, Ramirez said, “I am a child, but the adults are acting childish here. So I have to pick up their slack, because nobody is going to defend my future if I don’t.”

As I walked through the crowd, several things struck me: The crowd was diverse, with plenty of black and brown folks intermingled with white Angelenos. It was also age-diverse, with kids as young as 6 alongside grandparents in their 70s. On the event stage, the diversity was just as impressive, with indigenous youth leaders dominating the opening proceedings. One named Haatepeh, a 21-year-old with the International Indigenous Youth Council, explained that the chant he sang onstage was a “traditional water song that we sing to honor water, because all animals are made of water, and we are paying homage to it.”

The refrain “water is life” came out of the seminal Standing Rock water protection movement aimed at the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline. That movement was a new chapter in Native American activism and was centered on the protection of earth’s resources and climate justice. Haatepeh sees indigenous wisdom as critical to the youth-led climate movement, saying, “We’ve known how to live with our earth in a balanced way without causing too much damage and pollution for thousands of years. … We’ve always known how to work with the land—not domesticate it, but work with it side by side.”

Another organizer of Friday’s strike in Los Angeles was 16-year-old Jesus Villalba Gastelum, a cheerful kid with long, dark hair tied in a ponytail, who explained that his family hailed from a small town in Mexico that had been hit by a drought. “I’m an immigrant,” he said, “if you can’t tell by my beautiful complexion, and I understand that migration is a very important part of the situation right now where we need to survive.” The recent record-breaking Hurricane Dorian brutally showcased just how big an issue migration will be in the coming years, as people displaced by climate change from the Bahamas seek refuge in the U.S.

There was a time not too long ago when protests against climate change were dominated by white and relatively privileged activists, a situation that appears to have shifted dramatically. Villalba Gastelum said that is because “a lot of the green movement before this was a lot of white people saying only ‘go vegan.’ ” But, he added, “A lot of our peoples have been living off the land and eating meat for thousands of years, and we haven’t had this problem until now.”

The “go vegan” sentiment was present at the Friday march, with one white woman repeatedly interrupting speakers onstage. Actress Jane Fonda lost her temper at the woman during her speech, telling her to “be quiet,” and explaining that it is more important to “change our economic and social systems.”

Today, the climate movement is much broader than the “go vegan” crowd. Villalba Gastelum expressed relief over Friday’s turnout, saying, “Five months ago, I thought I was the only one who cared, until we finally got people out.” He was both worried and exalted over the turnout, given that he and others had applied for a city permit for just one block, estimated to hold about 3,000 people. At the moment I was speaking with him, climate strike attendees had filled at least three blocks.

Kids like Ramirez and Villalba Gastelum are deeply worried about climate change, and they have good reason to view politicians and other leaders as having buried their heads in the sand, or simply kicking the can down the road year after year. After decades of climate scientists warning politicians to do something, there are now barely 11 years left to take action before irreversible climate change is estimated to kick in. “The worst-case scenario is that the majority of the human population becomes extinct by 2100, including me and my family,” Ramirez said.

When President Donald Trump made a brief appearance at Monday’s critically important climate-related United Nations conference, a screen grab of Thunberg glaring at him went viral. The expression on her face symbolized all of humanity’s children delivering a death stare to the world leader who is most emblematic of climate-related criminal negligence. Thunberg’s powerful speech at the U.N., where she tearfully admonished the gathered leaders with three words—“How dare you?”—was widely covered in the news, much to Trump’s chagrin. The president shockingly retweeted an article about her speech with the sarcastic comment: “She seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see!” Thunberg trolled Trump right back, changing her Twitter bio to quote him.

There is a reason men like Trump feel so threatened by kids like Thunberg that they publicly and shamelessly try to bully them. Children not only have the scientific facts on their side, but the moral clarity to demand change.

One adult I ran into at Friday’s strike who seems to get it is actor Don Cheadle. Wearing a T-shirt that read, “The young people will win,” Cheadle told me, “I’m here to support the young people.” He explained that in the face of political inaction, “We have to try to pull on the levers wherever they exist and try to raise a din and make our voices heard.” Cheadle was emphatic that the media and politicians focus on young voices over those of adults, suggesting that presidential candidates consider turning over their debate time onstage to kids demanding climate action.

Ramirez’s message to grown-ups is “to please grow up and do your job. I am supposed to be taking a test [at school] right now, and I’m going to fail it.

“But at the end of the day,” he added, “This climate crisis is more important for me, and it needs to be addressed by somebody, and if you all aren’t going to do it, I have to.”

The Problem With Impeachment

Impeaching Donald Trump would do nothing to halt the deep decay that has beset the American republic. It would not magically restore democratic institutions. It would not return us to the rule of law. It would not curb the predatory appetites of the big banks, the war industry and corporations. It would not get corporate money out of politics or end our system of legalized bribery. It would not halt the wholesale surveillance and monitoring of the public by the security services. It would not end the reigns of terror practiced by paramilitary police in impoverished neighborhoods or the mass incarceration of 2.3 million citizens. It would not impede ICE from hunting down the undocumented and ripping children from their arms to pen them in cages. It would not halt the extraction of fossil fuels and the looming ecocide. It would not give us a press freed from the corporate mandate to turn news into burlesque for profit. It would not end our endless and futile wars. It would not ameliorate the hatred between the nation’s warring tribes—indeed would only exacerbate these hatreds.

Impeachment is about cosmetics. It is about replacing the public face of empire with a political mandarin such as Joe Biden, himself steeped in corruption and obsequious service to the rich and corporate power, who will carry out the same suicidal policies with appropriate regal decorum. The ruling elites have had enough of Trump’s vulgarity, stupidity and staggering ineptitude. They turned on him not over an egregious impeachable offense—there have been numerous impeachable offenses including the use of the presidency for personal enrichment, inciting violence and racism, passing on classified intelligence to foreign officials, obstruction of justice and a pathological inability to tell the truth—but because he made the fatal mistake of trying to take down a fellow member of the ruling elite.

Yes, Trump pressured Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to give him dirt on Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, and there probably is some. Yes, it appears the U.S. president withheld roughly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine in order to exert leverage over that government. Yes, he attempted to block the release of the whistleblower report that detailed his conduct. Yes, this is a violation of the law, one that many Democrats in Congress see as an impeachable offense.

But this kind of dirty quid pro quo is the staple of politics and international relations. Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence official, was hired to dig up dirt on Trump and Russia by Fusion GPS, a research and intelligence firm under contract to investigate Trump by Perkins Coie, a law firm working for the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Four decades ago, Ronald Reagan’s campaign manager, William Casey, asked the Iranians not to free the American hostages held in Tehran until after the November presidential election to hurt incumbent Jimmy Carter, according to Gary Sick, Carter’s chief aide on Iran. The American hostages were released the day Reagan was inaugurated, in January 1981.

Hillary Clinton, as far as we know, was never on the phone to Steele. Reagan, as far as we know, was never on the phone to the Iranian president. Trump’s fatal mistake was that he was overt in his request and he made it himself. This kind of underhanded pressure to damage political opponents requires skillful hints, secret meetings, carefully calibrated pressure and total deniability. Trump is too clueless to play the game. Because of this he looks set to join the exclusive club of presidents who were impeached—Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton.

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by Chris Hedges

















The Only Solution to America's Political Crisis



by Paul Street

















We’ve Reached Peak Political Absurdity



by Paul Street

Trump, however, will not go quietly into this good night. He will attempt to bring the whole rotten edifice down with him. And he may succeed.

“The Democrats thrive on silencing and intimidating his supporters, like YOU, Friend,” reads a fundraising appeal for Trump that was sent out immediately after the impeachment inquiry was announced this week. “They want to take YOUR VOTE away. President Trump wants to know who stood with him when it mattered most.”

But fundraising from a looming impeachment proceeding will be benign compared with what I think will come next. Trump’s rhetoric, as the pressure mounts, will become ever more incendiary. He will, as he has in the past, openly incite violence against the Democratic leadership and a press he brands as “the enemy of the people.”

There is no shortage of working-class Americans who feel, with justification, deeply betrayed and manipulated by ruling elites. Their ability to make a sustainable income has been destroyed. They are trapped in decaying and dead-end communities. They see no future for themselves or their children. They view the ruling elites who sold them out with deep hostility.

Trump, however incompetent, at least expresses this rage. And he does so with a vulgarity that delights his base. I suspect they are not blind to his narcissism or even his corruption and incompetence. But he is the middle finger they flip up at all those oily politicians like the Clintons who lied to them in far more damaging ways than Trump. Trump was weaponized to stick it to the man. Polls in the 2016 presidential election showed that 53 percent of Trump supporters were motivated by dislike of Hillary Clinton and only 44 percent said they were motivated by support for Trump.

“People no longer voted for candidates they liked or were excited by,” Matt Taibbi writes in “Insane Clown President: Dispatches From the 2016 Circus.” “They voted against the candidates they hated. At protests and marches, the ruling emotions were disgust and rage. The lack of idealism, and especially the lack of any sense of brotherhood or common purpose with the other side (i.e., liberals and conservatives unable to imagine a productive future with each other, or even to see themselves as citizens of the same country), was striking.”

Impeaching Trump would be seen by his supporters as an effort to take away this primal, if ineffectual, form of defiance. It is yet another message to the disenfranchised, especially those in the white working class, that their lives, their concerns, their hopes and their voices do not matter. This huge segment of the population, as Trump is aware, is heavily armed. There are more than 300 million firearms in the hands of U.S. civilians, including 114 million handguns, 110 million rifles and 86 million shotguns. The number of privately owned military-style assault weapons—including the AR-15 semi-automatic rifles used in the massacres at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., and the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.—is estimated at 1.5 million. The United States has the highest rate of gun ownership in the world, an average of 90 firearms per 100 people. Mass shootings in the U.S. take place at a rate of one or more per day on average.

Economic, social and political stagnation, coupled with a belief that our expectations for our lives and the lives of our children have been thwarted, breeds violence. Trump, fighting for his political life, will use rhetorical gasoline to set it alight. He will demonize his opponents as the embodiment of evil. He will seek to widen the divisions and antagonisms, especially around race. He will brand his political opponents as irredeemable enemies and traitors. He will demand omnipotence, the power of a dictator. Many of those for whom he is a cult leader will seek to give it to him. For when the magical aura of Trump’s power is attacked, those in the Trump cult feel attacked. He is an extension of them. Trump embodies the yearning by millions of Americans, especially those in the Christian right, for a cult leader.

The efforts by the Democratic Party and much of the press, including CNN and The New York Times, to remove Trump from office, as if our problems are embodied in him, will backfire. Our social, cultural, economic and political crisis created a demagogue like Trump. These forces will grow more virulent if Trump is impeached. The longer we fail to confront and name the corporate forces responsible for the misery of over half the U.S. population and our broken democracy, the more the disease of cultism will spread. It was the seizure of power by corporations that vomited up Trump. And it will be only by freeing ourselves from corporate rule, by rebuilding our democratic institutions, including the legislative bodies, the courts and the media, that we can roll back from the abyss.

If we do not succeed in overthrowing corporate power, the explosive devices mailed to Trump critics and leaders of the Democratic Party, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, along with George Soros, James Clapper and CNN, allegedly by Cesar Sayoc Jr., an ex-stripper and fanatic Trump supporter who was living out of his van, will become an acceptable form of political expression. Such assassination attempts will, if left unchecked, eventually succeed. Anarchic lawlessness and tit-for-tat forms of political murder will swiftly turn the United States into a failed and terrifying state.

Are Democrats Sitting on a Separate, Explosive Whistleblower Charge?

House Ways and Means Chairman Rep. Richard Neal is reportedly sitting on a credible and “potentially explosive” whistleblower complaint alleging that President Donald Trump attempted to influence an IRS audit of his tax returns.

On Wednesday, as much of the public’s attention focused on a whistleblower complaint regarding Trump and Ukraine, HuffPost reported that a federal employee in July approached the House Ways and Means Committee with evidence the president “tried to corrupt an Internal Revenue Service audit of his personal tax returns.”

Neal, a Democrat from Massachusetts, has refused to discuss the tax whistleblower’s claims in public, opting instead to use the official’s allegations to strengthen the Ways and Means Committee’s legal effort to obtain Trump’s tax returns.

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But now that House Democrats are moving forward with a formal impeachment inquiry against Trump, progressives are demanding that Neal break his silence on the whistleblower complaint and give the public as much information as possible about another potential abuse of power by the president.

“If the House Ways and Means Committee believes that Donald Trump has unduly influenced the IRS, they have a duty to make the public aware of this blatant act of corruption,” Ryan Thomas, spokesperson for progressive advocacy group Stand Up America, told Common Dreams.

In a brief filed in a Washington, D.C. federal court last month, the House Ways and Means Committee said it received “unsolicited communication” from a federal employee on July 29 detailing “credible allegations of ‘evidence of possible misconduct’—specifically, potential ‘inappropriate efforts to influence’ the mandatory audit program.”

HuffPost reported that the committee’s filing “provided no further detail about the whistleblower, but in a footnote, Democrats offered to tell U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden all about it in private.”

Instead of making a public fuss about a potentially explosive whistleblower allegation about Trump’s taxes, Democrats quietly offered to share it with a federal judge overseeing their tax return lawsuit.

— Arthur Delaney (@ArthurDelaneyHP) September 25, 2019

“A spokesman for the committee said this week that McFadden, a Trump nominee who donated to the Trump 2016 campaign and volunteered for the Trump presidential transition, has so far not asked to hear more about the whistleblower,” according to HuffPost.

Jeff Hauser, director of Revolving Door Project, an anti-corruption group, told HuffPost that publicizing the tax whistleblower’s complaint could strengthen the case for impeachment.

“The House Ways and Means Committee must figure out a way to make the public aware of the serious cause to worry that the IRS might have been corrupted by Trump,” Hauser said.

It Doesn’t Get More Illegal Than a War With Iran

This piece originally appeared on AntiWar.com.

Fifty two years ago, Martin Luther King, Jr. broke with the white liberal establishment, the Lyndon Johnson administration, and the U.S. military when he bravely declared America “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” King, now canonized, sanitized, and co-opted even by his conservative opponents paid a heavy price for his brutal honesty and Vietnam War opposition. He died, just a year later, wildly unpopular and under extensive FBI surveillance by the very government that now celebrates him with a national holiday. How quickly Americans have forgotten that part of the King legacy.

I must admit it was odd, then – if not altogether surprising – this week, that it took the president of a purported American enemy, Iran’s Hassan Rouhani, to speak a fresh and King-like bit of discomfiting truth. The United States, he correctly, if inconveniently, noted, is today the main “supporter of terrorism” in the Middle East. Specifically, and undeniably, he – his own nation’s flaws aside – observed that at least since 9/11 (if not before) everywhere the US has deployed its military, from West Africa to South Asia, it has shattered societies, caused countless deaths, and often empowered or supported the very Islamists it’s ostensibly combating.

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All this came on the heels of President Trump’s ludicrously bellicose tweet that America is “locked and loaded” to strike Iran in the wake of the Islamic Republic’s alleged role in a damaging attack on the Saudi oil industry. Trump has already upped the ante, foolishly announcing the deployment of ever more US troops to Saudi Arabia. Of course last time American soldiers garrisoned the home of Islam’s two holiest cities, an obscure scion of a wealthy Saudi construction magnate took such umbrage that he declared and waged war on America. The young man’s name was Osama bin Laden.

Maybe Trump will strike or invade Iran on the Saudi’s behalf; maybe he won’t. The man is so lazy, uninformed, and erratic that is genuinely difficult to predict his next move. What we do know is he’s already sent Iran-hawk Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to kowtow to the Saudi and Emirati theocrats and coordinate a response that suits these rather nefarious “partners.” I’ve written extensive reports demonstrating why war with Iran would be militarily disastrous, regionally cataclysmic, and diplomatically foolhardy. Yet that’s not my point today. Rather, I’ve recently got to thinking that the whole charade in the region feels like a chaotic bar fight in the ghetto.

If it, in fact, were, it’d go something like this. Saudi Arabia is America’s petulant little brother, apt to act tough and posture because his big brother is a huge guy with a big reputation on the block. The United Arab Emirates is the Saudi’s best friend with a serious Napoleon complex. Both want to gain respect and assert themselves at the bar. Problem is there’s this other, older fellow, Iran, ethnically distinct from the two friends, who’s had the nerve to muscle in on their drug (read: oil) trafficking trade.

The two young friends, counting on the support of big brother, have been threatening, isolating, Iran, and backing its enemies for years. Finally, an exasperated and cornered Iran seems to (allegedly) have sent their own little friend with a chip on his shoulder, a Yemeni Houthi, to throw and land a punch right in the Saudi’s gut. Surprised, in pain, and scared, the Saudi and his Emirati buddy initially retreat, run home, and beg the big brother, America, to tramp back to the bar and get revenge. Which is precisely where matters stand now. What unfolds remains to be seen, but what’s certain, is that America feels the need to do something to maintain his street cred.

That flippant, if accurate, analogy aside, something else is lacking from the story; something extremely vital but rare: historical context. Because the inconvenient truth is that since at least 1953, the US – with the aid of its Saudi and Emirati allies – has usually been the aggressor, has waged a veritable war on Iran’s government and people. Seen in this light, consider it the view from Tehran, one begins to understand the hostility and desperation of the Iranians. Consider just a few historical highlights.

Way back in 1953, after a democratically elected and popular Iranian prime minister had the audacity to nationalize the nation’s oil – then under monopoly control by UK corporations – the American CIA and British M16 fostered a coup, toppled Prime Minister Mossadeq, and imposed the rule of a vicious king, or shah, for 26 years. Then, after the Iranian people had the comeuppance to revolt in 1979, kicking out the brutal shah, the US isolated Iran and even backed an invasion and eight year war waged by the Islamic Republic’s sworn enemy, Saddam Hussein’s dictatorial Iraqi regime. During that war – which killed some half million Iranians – the US even quietly sank much of Iran’s small navy, and an American ship, the USS Vincennes, shot down an Iranian civilian airliner, killing all 290 aboard. Afterwards, the ship’s commander received a medal, and then President George W. Bush, declared he would “never apologize” for his country’s actions.

Fast forward to the war on terror, and the US military invaded and indefinitely occupied the countries on both of Iran’s flanks. President George W. Bush even grouped Iran with a sordid trio of nations he labeled an “axis of evil;” and serious neoconservative officials threw Iran on the short list for future regime changes, with one reportedly quipping that everyone wants to go to Baghdad but “real men want to go to Iran.” Then, when an isolated and threatened Iran showed even an inkling of interest in a nuclear program, Washington smacked crippling sanctions on the Islamic Republic. Sanctions, remember, are a form of economic warfare and always, always, hit the poorest people hardest, largely sparing wealthy elites. No one mentioned that Israel has illegally and (not so) secretly produced hundreds of nuclear missiles for decades now.

Most recently, Trump unilaterally pulled out of an Obama-era nuclear deal between Iran and six other powerful nations, even though his own intelligence services admitted that Iran had complied with the agreement. Since then, Trump’s hawkish, Iran-obsessed, series of national security advisers have threatened war whilst Washington reimposed even more stringent economic sanctions that threaten to bankrupt Tehran and impoverish the Iranian people. This, predictably, has had the counterproductive effect of drawing Iran’s many moderates closer to government hardliners in a typical burst of national solidarity. Then came the strike on Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities, claimed, not by Iran, but by Tehran’s loosely affiliated Yemeni Houthis.

Nevertheless, most US citizens either don’t know or don’t care about this sordid history and still refuse to acknowledge legitimate Iranian grievances. It’s really not the American way, after all. So on the war drums beat and the metaphorical bar fight seems ready to escalate. Thing is, my experience in New York blue-collar bars has taught me that when little brothers or smaller friends start fights and expect your support, matters rarely end well. Neither will the current maelstrom in the Persian Gulf. Mark my words…

Joe Biden’s Remarks About Mike Pence Should Be Disqualifying

When Joe Biden told an audience that Mike Pence “is a decent guy,” Pence had already been vice president for more than two years. After the comment drew fierce criticism, Biden responded that he’d said it “in a foreign policy context”—an odd effort at damage control, given that Pence has publicly backed every one of President Trump’s countless abhorrent policies, whether foreign or domestic.

Now, with impeachment in the air and the remote but real possibility that Trump might not end up running for re-election, Biden’s attitude toward Pence and Republicans overall should get a closer look.

That he could call Pence “a decent guy” after loyally serving as Trump’s highest-ranking henchman illuminates a lot about Biden’s style—and substance. His praise of Pence’s purported decency was not atypical. Biden has long praised racist Republican senators and defended his past collaborations with them.

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And Biden has been effusive in expressing warmth toward the notorious man who preceded him as vice president. “I really like Dick Cheney for real,” Biden said while speaking at George Washington University in October 2015. “I get on with him, I think he’s a decent man.”

Such statements speak volumes about Biden’s standards of decency and about his suitability to be the Democratic presidential nominee. At a time when elected Republicans in Washington have amply shown themselves to be depraved sycophants to Trump—no matter how viciously vile and deadly his policies—Biden still wants to pretend that those GOP stalwarts can be brought into the fold of democratic civility, from the current vice president on down.

Insisting that “history will treat this administration’s time as an aberration,” Biden contended during a campaign swing in Iowa a few months ago: “This is not the Republican Party.” He went on to cite his bonds with “my Republican friends in the House and Senate.”

The latest polling tells us that Biden should no longer be called the “frontrunner” for the nomination. (Elizabeth Warren’s numbers are now at least as strong.) On Wednesday, Politico pointed out: “Biden’s descent has been months in the making, the result of continuous fire from progressives, questions about his age and stamina, a drumbeat of negative coverage over lackluster debate performances and frequent misstatements, according to pollsters and party insiders.”

But Biden still has plenty of aces in the hole—including corporate media outlets that go easy on him and wealthy donors who lavish high-dollar fundraisers on him to shore up a largely AstroTurf campaign. There’s a big market among mainstream political journalists and Wall Street types for the reach-across-the-aisle blather that Biden supplies.

Biden’s praise for Pence has a perverse logic. “His pitch is that with Trump gone, things—and Republicans—will return to ‘normal,'” CNN pundit Chris Cillizza wrote. When Biden spoke to a gathering of lobbyists and donors in early summer, he sounded an upbeat note about the basic character of Republican leaders. “With Trump gone you’re going to begin to see things change,” Biden said. “Because these folks know better. They know this isn’t what they’re supposed to be doing.”

Biden is campaigning with the central claim that he’s the most qualified candidate to restore bipartisan cooperation after defeating Trump. As if Republicans should be wooed more than fought, Biden likes to portray typical GOP leaders as honorable—a pretense that is in harmony with calling Mike Pence “a decent guy” regardless of his absolutely despicable record.

Biden apparently views that approach as helpful to winning the White House. And it’s certainly in sync with Biden’s own record of teaming up with Republicans. But whether progressives support Bernie Sanders (as I do) or Elizabeth Warren or one of the other candidates, it’s essential to recognize—and avert—the dangers posed by the Biden for President campaign.

Progressives often feel that they’re on the outside of electoral politics, looking in. Corporate news media routinely reinforce that impression, treating progressive activism as invisible or inconsequential. But Politico‘s latest assessment—that Biden’s steep fall in the polls is partly due to “continuous fire from progressives”—tells us something important.

The Pentagon’s New Reform Plan Is Just Another Scam

For the Pentagon, happy days are here again (if they ever left). With a budget totaling more than $1.4 trillion for the next two years, the department is riding high, even as it attempts to set the stage for yet more spending increases in the years to come.

With such enormous sums now locked in, Secretary of Defense (and former Raytheon lobbyist) Mark Esper is already going through a ritual that couldn’t be more familiar to Pentagon watchers. He’s pledged to “reform” the bureaucracy and the spending priorities of the Department of Defense to better address the latest proposed threats du jour, Russia and China. His main focus: paring back the Pentagon’s “Fourth Estate” — an alphabet soup of bureaucracies not under the control of any of the military services that sucks up about 20% of the $700 billion-plus annual budget.

Esper’s promises to streamline the spending machine should be taken with more than the usual grain of salt. Virtually every secretary of defense in living memory has made similar commitments, with little or nothing to show for them in terms of documented savings. Far from eliminating wasteful programs, efforts pursued by those past secretaries and by Congress under similar banners have been effective in only one obvious way: further reducing oversight and civilian control of the Pentagon rather than waste and inefficiency in it.

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Examples of gutting oversight under the guise of reform abound, including attempting to eliminate offices focused on closing excess military bases and sidelining officials responsible for testing the safety and effectiveness of weapon systems before their deployment. During the administration of President Bill Clinton, for instance, the slogan of the day — “reinventing government” — ended up, in Pentagon terms, meaning the gutting of contract oversight. In fact, just to repair the damage from that so-called reform and rebuild that workforce took another $3.5 billion. Gordon Adams, former associate director for national security and international affairs at the White House Office of Management and Budget, noted accurately that such efforts often prove little more than a “phony management savings waltz.”

Secretary of Defense Esper has also pledged to eliminate older weapons programs to make way for systems more suited to great power conflict. Past efforts along these lines have meant attempts to retire proven, less expensive systems like the A-10 “Warthog” — the close-air-support aircraft that protects troops in combat — to make way for the over-priced, underperforming F-35 jet fighter and similar projects.

Never mind that a war with either Russia or China — both nuclear-armed states — would be catastrophic. Never mind that more effort should be spent figuring out how to avoid conflict with both of them, rather than spinning out scenarios for fighting them more effectively (or at least more expensively). Prioritizing unlikely scenarios makes for a great payday for contractors, but often sacrifices the ability of the military to actually address current challenges. It takes the focus away from effectively fighting the real asymmetric wars the U.S. has been fighting since World War II. It leaves taxpayers with massive bills for systems that almost invariably turn out to be over cost and behind schedule. Just as an infamous (and nonexistent) “bomber gap” with the Soviet Union was used by the Pentagon and its boosters to increase military spending in the 1950s, the current hype around ultra-high-speed, hypersonic weapons will only lead to sky’s-the-limit expenditures and a new global arms race.

Esper’s efforts may end up failing even on their own narrow terms. Reforming the Pentagon is hard work, not only because it’s one of the world’s largest bureaucracies, but because there are far too many parochial interests that profit from the status quo. Under the circumstances, it matters little if current spending patterns aren’t aligned with any rational notion of what it would take to defend the United States and its allies.

A Revolving-Door World

The Department of Defense regularly claims that it has implemented “efficiencies” to ensure that every penny of your tax dollars is being wisely spent. Such efforts, however, are little more than marketing ploys designed to fend off future calls for cuts in the Pentagon’s still-ballooning budget. Here are just two recent examples of this sadly familiar story.

In September 2018, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report stating that the Department of Defense had provided insufficient evidence that $154 billion in alleged “efficiency savings” from fiscal years 2012 to 2016 had been realized; the department claimed credit for them anyway.

Just this month, the GAO came to a similar conclusion regarding a proposed Pentagon reform plan that was to save $18.4 billion between fiscal years 2017 and 2020. Its report stated that the Pentagon had “provided limited documentation of… progress,” which meant the GAO “could not independently assess and verify” it. Consider that a charitable way of suggesting that the Department of Defense was once again projecting a false image of fiscal discipline, even as it was drowning in hundreds of billions of your tax dollars. The GAO, however, failed to mention one crucial thing: even if those alleged savings had been realized, they would simply have been plowed into other Pentagon programs, not used to reduce the department’s bloated budget.

Esper and his colleagues have argued that it will be different this time. In an August 2nd memo, his principal deputy, David Norquist, stated that “we will begin immediately and move forward aggressively… The review will consider all ideas — no reform is too small, too bold, or too controversial to be considered.”

Even if Esper and Norquist were, however, to propose real changes, they would undoubtedly run into serious interference within the Pentagon, not to mention from their commander-in-chief, President Donald Trump, a man determined to plough ever more taxpayer dollars into the military, and from members of Congress in states counting on jobs generated by the military-industrial complex. Inside the Pentagon, on the other hand, resistance to change will be spearheaded by officials who previously held jobs in the defense industry or hope to do so in the future. We’re talking, of course, about those who have made use of, or will make use of, the infamous “revolving door” between weapons companies and the government. Consider that the essence of the military-industrial complex in action.

Such ties start at the top. During the Trump administration, the post of secretary of defense has been passed from one former defense industry figure to another, as if it were literally reserved only for key officials from major weapons makers. Trump’s first secretary of defense, retired General James (“Mad Dog”) Mattis, came to the Pentagon straight from the board of General Dynamics, a position he returned to shortly after leaving the department. Interim Secretary Patrick Shanahan, who followed him, had been an executive at Boeing, while current Secretary Esper was Raytheon’s former chief in-house lobbyist. The Pentagon’s number three official, John Rood, similarly comes courtesy of Lockheed Martin. And the list only goes on from there.

This has been a systemic problem in Democratic and Republican administrations, but there has been a marked increase in such appointments under Donald Trump. A Bloomberg Government analysis found that roughly half of the Obama administration’s top Pentagon officials had defense contractor experience. In the Trump administration, that number has reached a startling 80%-plus.

That revolving door, of course, swings both ways. Defense executives come into government, where they make decisions that benefit their former colleagues and companies. Then, as retiring government officials, they go to work for defense firms where they can use their carefully developed government contacts to benefit their new (or old) employers. This practice is endemic. A study by the Project On Government Oversight found 645 cases in which the top 20 defense contractors hired former senior government officials, military officers, members of Congress, or senior legislative staff as lobbyists, board members, or senior executives in 2018 alone.

There is, of course, nothing new about any of this. The late Senator William Proxmire (D-WI) pinpointed the problem with the revolving door back in 1969:

“The easy movement of high-ranking military officers into jobs with major defense contractors and the reverse movement of top executives in major defense contractors into high Pentagon jobs is solid evidence of the military-industrial complex in operation. It is a real threat to the public interest because it increases the chances of abuse… How hard a bargain will officers involved in procurement planning or specifications drive when they are one or two years from retirement and have the example to look at over 2,000 fellow officers doing well on the outside after retirement?”

Such revolving-door hires and former defense executives in government remain a powerful force for the status quo in Pentagon spending. They exert influence as needed to keep big-ticket weapons programs like the F-35 combat aircraft up and running, whether they are needed or not, whether they work as promised or not.

For his part, President Trump has repeatedly bragged about his role in promoting defense-related employment in key states, both from Pentagon budget increases and the sale of arms to repressive regimes like Saudi Arabia. In March, he held a one-hour campaign-style rally for workers at a tank plant in Lima, Ohio, at which he typically suggested that his budget increases had saved their jobs.

As for Congress, when the Army, in a rare move, actually sought to save a modest amount of money by canceling an upgrade of its CH-47 transport helicopter, the Senate struck back, calling for funding that the Pentagon hadn’t even requested in order to proceed with the program. The reason? Protecting jobs at Boeing’s Philadelphia-area factory that was scheduled to carry out the upgrades. Unsurprisingly, Trump seems fine with this congressional initiative (affecting the key battleground state of Pennsylvania), which still needs to survive a House-Senate conference on the defense bill.

The bottom line: Donald Trump is likely to oppose any changes that might have even the smallest impact on employment in states where he needs support in election campaign 2020. Defense industry consultant Loren Thompson summed up the case as follows: “We’re too close to the presidential election and nobody [at the White House] wants to lose votes by killing a program.” And keep in mind that this president is far from alone in taking such a stance. Similar reelection pressures led former President Jimmy Carter to increase Pentagon spending at the end of his term andcaused the George H. W. Bush administration to reverse a decision to cancel the troubled V-22 Osprey, a novel part-helicopter, part-airplane that would later be implicated in crashes killing dozens of Marines.

“We Won’t Get Fooled Again”

What would a genuine Pentagon reform plan look like? There are areas that could easily yield major savings with sufficient political will and persistence. The most obvious of these might be the Pentagon’s employment of more than 600,000 private contractors, many of whom do jobs that could be done by government civilians for less. Cutting that work force to “only” about half a million, for example, could save more than a quarter of a trillion dollars over the next decade, as noted in a recent report by the Center for International Policy’s Sustainable Defense Task Force (of which both authors of this article were members).

Billions more could be saved by eliminating unnecessary military bases. Even the Pentagon claims that it has 20% more facilities than it needs. A more reasonable, restrained defense strategy, including ending America’s twenty-first-century forever wars, would make far more bases redundant, both at home and among the 800 or so now scattered around the planet in an historically unprecedented fashion. Similarly, the president’s obsession with creating an expensive Space Force should be blocked, given that it’s likely only to increase bureaucracy and duplication, while ensuring an arms race above the planet as well as on it.

Real reform would also mean changing how the Pentagon does business (not to speak of the way it makes war). Such savings would naturally start by simply curbing the corruption that comes from personnel in high positions who are guaranteed to put the interests of defense contractors ahead of those of taxpayers and the real needs of American security. (There are also few restrictions on formerofficials working for foreign governments and almost no public disclosure on the subject.) The Project On Government Oversight found hundreds of Pentagon officials leaving for defense industry jobs, raising obvious questions about whether decisions they made were in the public interest or meant to advance their own future paydays.

Real reform would close the many loopholes in current ethics laws, extend cooling-off periods between when an official leaves government and when he or she can work for an arms contractor, and make far more prominent information about when retired national security officials switch teams from government to industry (or vice versa). Unfortunately, since Esper himself has refused to pledge not to return to the world of the corporate weapons makers after his stint as secretary of defense, this sort of reform will undoubtedly never be part of his “reform” agenda.

One outcome of his initiative, however, will definitely not be money-saving in any way. It will be to boost spending on high-tech systems like missile defense and artificial intelligence on the almost laughable grounds (given the past history of weapons development) that they can provide more military capability for less money. Whether you look at the Navy’s Ford aircraft carriers — the first two costing $13.1 billion and $11.3 billion — or the Air Force’s aerial refueling tanker (which has taken nearly two decades to procure), it’s not hard to see how often vaunted technological revolutions prove staggeringly costly — far, far beyond initial estimates — yet result in smaller, less effective forces. As longtime Pentagon reformer Tom Christie has pointed out, to really change the acquisition system would require building in significantly more discipline. That would mean demonstrating the effective and reliable use of new technology through rigorous field-testing before advancing fragile weapons systems to the production stage, ensuring future maintenance and other headaches for troops in combat.

There is, in addition, a larger issue underlying all this talk of spending reform at the Pentagon. After all, Esper’s “reforms” are visibly designed to align Pentagon spending with the department’s new priority: combatting the security challenges posed by Russia and China. Start with one crucial thing: these challenges have been greatly exaggerated, both in the Trump administration’s national defense strategy and in the report of the industry-led National Defense Strategy Commission. That document, when you analyze its future math, even had the nerve to claim that the Pentagon budget would need to be boosted to nearly $1 trillion annually within the next five years, reports Taxpayers for Common Sense.

Russia has much to answer for — from its assistance to the Syrian army’s ongoing slaughter of civilians to its military meddling in the affairs of Ukraine — but the response to such challenges should not be to spend more on ships, planes, and advanced nuclear weapons, as current Pentagon plans would do. In reality, the economy and military of Russia, a shaky petro-state only passing for a great power, are already overshadowed by those of the U.S. and its NATO allies. Throwing more money at the Pentagon will do nothing to change Russian behavior in a positive fashion. Taking measures that are in the interests of both countries like renewing the New START nuclear reduction treaty and beginning new talks on curbing their massive nuclear arsenals would be extremely valuable in their own right and might also open the door to negotiations on other issues of mutual concern.

China’s challenge to the U.S is significantly more economic than military and, if those two nations wanted to make the planet a safer place, they would cooperate in addressing the threat of climate change, not launch a new arms race. Genuine reform of the Pentagon’s massive budget is urgently needed, but rest assured that Secretary of Defense Esper’s claims about implementing real changes to save taxpayer dollars while making the U.S. military more effective are the equivalent of bestseller-list Pentagon fiction. The motto of Congress, not to speak of the White House and the public, with respect to the Pentagon’s latest claims of fiscal probity should be “we won’t get fooled again.”