30 June 21
Final Day — We Surely Need a Good One
This is the last day of the month, and we are not even close to where we need to be. But we have made up a lot of ground in the past few days, and we do have a chance to keep it close.
Stop for just a moment and throw something in the hat.
In peace and solidarity.
Marc Ash
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29 June 21
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In the final months of the administration, the doggedly loyal attorney general finally had enough.
onald Trump is a man consumed with grievance against people he believes have betrayed him, but few betrayals have enraged him more than what his attorney general did to him. To Trump, the unkindest cut of all was when William Barr stepped forward and declared that there had been no widespread fraud in the 2020 election, just as the president was trying to overturn Joe Biden’s victory by claiming that the election had been stolen.
In a series of interviews with me this spring, Barr spoke, for the first time, about the events surrounding his break with Trump. I have also spoken with other senior officials in the Trump White House and Justice Department, who provided additional details about Barr’s actions and the former president’s explosive response. Barr and those close to him have a reason to tell his version of this story. He has been widely seen as a Trump lackey who politicized the Justice Department. But when the big moment came after the election, he defied the president who expected him to do his bidding.
Barr’s betrayal came on December 1, over lunch in the attorney general’s private dining room with Michael Balsamo, a Justice Department beat reporter at the Associated Press. Also in attendance were the DOJ chief of staff, Will Levi, and spokesperson Kerri Kupec. Balsamo was not told the reason for the invitation. When Barr dropped his bombshell between bites of salad, he mumbled, and Balsamo wasn’t sure that he had caught what the attorney general had said.
“Just to be crystal clear,” Balsamo asked, “are you saying—”
“Sir, I think you better repeat what you just said,” Kupec interjected.
“To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election,” Barr repeated. This time Balsamo heard him.
Balsamo’s story appeared on the AP newswire shortly after lunch ended: “Disputing Donald Trump’s persistent baseless claims, Attorney General William Barr declared Tuesday the U.S. Justice Department had uncovered no evidence of widespread voter fraud that could change the outcome of the 2020 election.”
The story blew a hole in the president’s claims. Nobody seriously questioned Barr’s conservative credentials or whether he had been among Trump’s most loyal cabinet secretaries. His conclusion sent a definitive message that the effort to overturn the election was without merit.
Barr told me that Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell had been urging him to speak out since mid-November. Publicly, McConnell had said nothing to criticize Trump’s allegations, but he told Barr that Trump’s claims were damaging to the country and to the Republican Party. Trump’s refusal to concede was complicating McConnell’s efforts to ensure that the GOP won the two runoff elections in Georgia scheduled for January 5.
To McConnell, the road to maintaining control of the Senate was simple: Republicans needed to make the argument that with Biden soon to be in the White House, it was crucial that they have a majority in the Senate to check his power. But McConnell also believed that if he openly declared Biden the winner, Trump would be enraged and likely act to sabotage the Republican Senate campaigns in Georgia. Barr related his conversations with McConnell to me. McConnell confirms the account.
“Look, we need the president in Georgia,” McConnell told Barr, “and so we cannot be frontally attacking him right now. But you’re in a better position to inject some reality into this situation. You are really the only one who can do it.”
“I understand that,” Barr said. “And I’m going to do it at the appropriate time.”
On another call, McConnell again pleaded with Barr to come out and shoot down the talk of widespread fraud.
“Bill, I look around, and you are the only person who can do it,” McConnell told him.
Levi, the Justice Department chief of staff, had also been urging Barr to contradict Trump’s assertions. But Barr had said nothing publicly to indicate that he disagreed with the president about the election. In fact, the week after the election, he gave prosecutors the green light to investigate “substantial allegations” of vote irregularities that “could potentially impact the outcome” of the election. The move overturned long-standing policy that the Justice Department does not investigate voter fraud until after an election is certified. The theory behind the policy is that the department’s responsibility is to prosecute crimes, not to get involved in election disputes. Barr’s reversal of the policy was interpreted by some as a sign that he might use the department to help Trump overturn the election.
Donald Ayer: Bill Barr’s unconstitutional campaign to reelect the president
But Barr told me he had already concluded that it was highly unlikely that evidence existed that would tip the scales in the election. He had expected Trump to lose and therefore was not surprised by the outcome. He also knew that at some point, Trump was going to confront him about the allegations, and he wanted to be able to say that he had looked into them and that they were unfounded. So, in addition to giving prosecutors approval to open investigations into clear and credible allegations of substantial fraud, Barr began his own, unofficial inquiry into the major claims that the president and his allies were making.
“My attitude was: It was put-up or shut-up time,” Barr told me. “If there was evidence of fraud, I had no motive to suppress it. But my suspicion all the way along was that there was nothing there. It was all bullshit.”
The Department of Justice ended up conducting no formal investigations of voter fraud, but as part of Barr’s informal review, he asked the U.S. Attorney in Michigan about Trump’s claim that mysterious “ballot dumps” in Detroit had secured Biden’s victory in the state.
As proof of fraud, Trump’s allies had pointed to videos showing boxes filled with ballots arriving at the TCF Center, in Detroit, to be counted after the 8 p.m. deadline for votes to be cast. But Barr quickly found that there was a logical explanation. It had to do with how the 662 precincts in Wayne County, home to Detroit, tabulate their votes. “In every other county, they count the ballots at the precinct, but in Wayne County, they bring them into one central counting place. So the boxes are coming in all night. The fact that boxes are coming in—well, that’s what they do.”
Furthermore, Trump performed better against Biden in Detroit than he had against Hillary Clinton in 2016. Biden received 1,000 fewer votes in Detroit than Clinton had, and Trump received 5,000 more votes than he had four years earlier. Trump didn’t lose Michigan because of “illegal” ballots cast in Detroit. He lost Michigan because Biden beat him badly in the suburbs.
Barr also looked into allegations that voting machines across the country were rigged to switch Trump votes to Biden votes. He received two briefings from cybersecurity experts at the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI. “We realized from the beginning it was just bullshit,” Barr told me, noting that even if the machines somehow changed the count, it would show up when they were recounted by hand. “It’s a counting machine, and they save everything that was counted. So you just reconcile the two. There had been no discrepancy reported anywhere, and I’m still not aware of any discrepancy.”
After the lunch with Balsamo, Barr and Levi went to the White House for a previously scheduled meeting with Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. After talking briefly with Meadows, they went upstairs to White House Counsel Pat Cipollone’s office. As they were conferring, one of the counsel’s aides knocked on the door and told Cipollone that the president wanted to see him and then, pointing to Barr, the aide said, “And he is looking for you.”
Barr, Levi, and Cipollone walked to the president’s personal dining room near the Oval Office. Trump was sitting at the table. Meadows was sitting next to him with his arms crossed; the White House adviser Eric Herschmann stood off to the side. The details of this meeting were described to me by several people present. One told me that Trump had “the eyes and mannerism of a madman.”
He went off on Barr.
“I think you’ve noticed I haven’t been talking to you much,” Trump said to him. “I’ve been leaving you alone.”
Barr later told others that the comment was reminiscent of a line in the movie Dr. Strangelove, in which the main character, Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper, says, “I do not avoid women, Mandrake, but I do deny them my essence.” Trump, Barr thought, was saying that he had been denying him his essence.
Trump brought up Barr’s AP interview.
“Did you say that?”
“Yes,” Barr responded.
“How the fuck could you do this to me? Why did you say it?”
“Because it’s true.”
The president, livid, responded by referring to himself in the third person: “You must hate Trump. You must hate Trump.”
Barr thought that the president was trying to control himself, but he seemed angrier than he had ever seen him. His face was red. Barr’s AP interview was dominating every cable news channel except the one Trump was watching. The television in the room was tuned to the right-wing, pro-Trump network One America News, which was broadcasting a committee hearing of the Michigan legislature. The hearing featured disproven allegations of massive election fraud, including the testimony of a woman named Melissa Carone, who had worked at the counting location in Detroit and told the committee, “Everything that happened at the TCF Center was fraud. Every single thing.” The next day, Carone would testify again, next to Rudy Giuliani, during which time she slurred her words and appeared to be drunk. (Carone later denied that she had been drunk.)
“They saw the boxes going in!” Trump yelled, referring to the stories about boxes of illegal ballots being counted.
“You know, Mr. President, there are 662 precincts in Wayne County,” Barr said. Trump seemed taken aback that he knew the exact number. “It’s the only county with all the boxes going to a central place, and you actually did better there this time around than you did last time. You keep on saying that the Department of Justice is not looking at this stuff, and we are looking at it in a responsible way. But your people keep on shoveling this shit out.”
As Trump ranted about other examples of fraud, Meadows continued to sit silently with his arms crossed, his posture suggesting that he, too, was upset by what Barr had done.
“You know, you only have five weeks, Mr. President, after an election to make legal challenges,” Barr said. “This would have taken a crackerjack team with a really coherent and disciplined strategy. Instead, you have a clown show. No self-respecting lawyer is going anywhere near it. It’s just a joke. That’s why you are where you are.”
Interestingly, Trump didn’t argue when Barr told him that his “clown show” legal team had wasted time. In fact, he said, “You may be right about that.”
After going through his litany of claims—stolen ballots, fake ballots, dead people voting, rigged voting machines—Trump switched to other grievances, shouting at Barr for failing to prosecute Biden’s son Hunter. “If that had been one of my kids, they would have been all over him!” he said. By the end of the meeting, Trump was doing almost all of the talking. Why hadn’t Barr released John Durham’s report on the origins of the Russia investigation before the election? Why hadn’t he prosecuted former FBI Director James Comey? Trump was banging on the table. He said that Barr had been worthless.
As Barr left, he was unsure whether he still had a job. Had Trump just fired him? And if not, shouldn’t he quit? Why remain attorney general after what the president had just said to him? His status had been left up in the air.
The next morning, Barr received a call from Meadows. “I think there’s a way through this,” Meadows told him. He could prevent Trump from firing him, but he wanted an assurance from Barr that he wouldn’t resign. “Are you willing to stay?” Meadows asked.
“I’m not going to sandbag you,” Barr said. “I will give you a warning if I’m going to leave, and No. 2, I’ll stay as long as I’m needed.”
Barr almost immediately began to regret his decision to stay. His statement on election fraud did nothing to deter Trump, who was now listening, almost exclusively, to Giuliani and others outside his administration. They were telling him that he was still going to win the election.
Two weeks later, Barr went down to the White House to tell the president that he planned to resign before the end of the year. It was their first meeting since their confrontation. To defuse the tension, Barr had written an effusive resignation letter, which he handed to the president when he got to the Oval Office. The letter praised Trump’s record and played directly into his complaints about how he had been treated by Democrats, saying his efforts “had been met by a partisan onslaught against you in which no tactic, no matter how abusive and deceitful, was out of bounds.”
Trump read the letter while Barr was sitting across from him. “This is pretty good,” he said.
Ronald and Nancy Reagan on the day of his first inauguration as president in 1981. (photo: Getty)
These days, a riven Congress is proving essentially incapable of passing significant legislation, no matter the subject. After all, the 2021 congressional version of the Republican Party believes fervently in no-votes and filibusters. New voting rights legislation? Don’t hold your breath. Improvements on Obamacare, no less a public option? Not on your life (which might indeed be what’s at stake for some Americans). A bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6th assault on the Capitol? Why create an “additional, extraneous commission that Democratic leaders want” (as Senator Mitch McConnell put it)? A major infrastructure package with a truly green heart, rather than a pallid compromise that might not even make it through the Senate? Not a chance in hell (not unless the Democrats can use “reconciliation” and get senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to go along). And so it goes. That’s certainly the recent past and possibly the future, too, as far as the eye (or perhaps I mean the “nay”) can see.
Oh, wait a minute, there is one exception to the rule of the day, week, month, year, and for all we know so many years to come: the Pentagon budget! The party that thinks taxpayer dollars should not be spent on most Americans makes only two exceptions: the rich (who got their super tax cut as the Trump years began) and the military or rather the military-industrial complex. In fact, that’s the only place where congressional Democrats and Republicans seem capable of endlessly agreeing: that the military deserves every tax dollar it desires or that any giant weapons-making corporation might want. “Defense” spending has long been and remains the only truly bipartisan subject in Washington. If you remember, Congress even passed the previous Pentagon budget — 81 to 13 in the Senate — over President Trump’s veto.
The only other exception: anything that can be made to seem like part of a coming new cold war with China, or as Katrina vanden Heuvel put it recently, “In a Washington addled by bitter partisan divides, the call to meet the threat posed by China and Russia forges bipartisan consensus.” Indeed! And the Democrats were, at least, clever enough to get recent bipartisan support for funding a $250-billion science and high-tech infrastructure bill by framing it as an anti-Chinese measure.
In that context, consider the new Biden-era budget not just for the Pentagon but for the full national security state. Today, Pentagon experts and TomDispatch regulars William Hartung and Mandy Smithberger do something that, strangely enough, no one else in the media bothers to do: they actually add up the full national security budget, piece by piece, leaving us with a mind-boggling view of the true financial glories of militarization, American-style. Tom
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
What Price “Defense”?
America's Nearly $1.3 Trillion National Security Budget Isn't Making Us Any Safer
resident Biden’s first Pentagon budget, released late last month, is staggering by any reasonable standard. At more than $750 billion for the Defense Department and related work on nuclear weapons at the Department of Energy, it represents one of the highest levels of spending since World War II — far higher than the peaks of the Korean or Vietnam wars or President Ronald Reagan’s military buildup of the 1980s, and roughly three times what China spends on its military.
Developments of the past year and a half — an ongoing pandemic, an intensifying mega-drought, white supremacy activities, and racial and economic injustice among them — should have underscored that the greatest threats to American lives are anything but military in nature. But no matter, the Biden administration has decided to double down on military spending as the primary pillar of what still passes for American security policy. And don’t be fooled by that striking Pentagon budget figure either. This year’s funding requests suggest that the total national security budget will come closer to a breathtaking $1.3 trillion.
That mind-boggling figure underscores just how misguided Washington’s current “security” — a word that should increasingly be put in quotation marks — policies really are. No less concerning was the new administration’s decision to go full-speed ahead on longstanding Pentagon plans to build a new generation of nuclear-armed bombers, submarines, and missiles, including, of course, new nuclear warheads to go with them, at a cost of at least $1.7 trillion over the next three decades.
The Trump administration added to that plan projects like a new submarine-launched, nuclear-armed cruise missile, all of which is fully funded in Biden’s first budget. It hardly matters that a far smaller arsenal would be more than adequate to dissuade any country from launching a nuclear attack on the United States or its allies. A rare glimmer of hope came in a recent internal memo from the Navy suggesting that it may ultimately scrap Trump’s sea-launched cruise missile in next year’s budget submission — but that proposal is already facing intense pushback from nuclear-weapons boosters in Congress.
In all, Biden’s first budget is a major win for key players in the nuclear-industrial complex like Northrop Grumman, the prime contractor on the new nuclear bomber and a new intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM); General Dynamics, the maker of the new ballistic-missile submarine; Lockheed Martin, which produces sea-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs); and firms like Honeywell that oversee key elements in the Department of Energy’s nuclear-warhead complex.
The Biden budget does retire some older-generation weapons. The only reason, however, is to fund even more expensive new systems like hypersonic weapons and ones embedded with artificial intelligence, all with the goal of supposedly putting the United States in a position to win a war with China (if anyone could “win” such a war).
China’s military buildup remains, in fact, largely defensive, so ramping up Pentagon spending supposedly in response represents both bad strategy and bad budgeting. If, sooner or later, cooler heads don’t prevail, the obsession with China that’s gripped the White House, the Pentagon, and key members of Congress could keep Pentagon budgets high for decades to come.
In reality, the principal challenges posed by China are diplomatic and economic, not military, and seeking militarized answers to them will only spark a new Cold War and a risky arms race that could make a superpower nuclear conflict more likely. While there’s much to criticize in China’s policies, from its crackdown on the democracy movement in Hong Kong to its ethnic cleansing and severe repression of its Uyghur population, in basic military capabilities, it doesn’t come faintly close to the United States, nor will it any time soon. Washington’s military build-up, however, could undermine the biggest opportunity in U.S.-China relations: finding a way to cooperate on issues like climate change that threaten the future of the planet.
As noted, the three-quarters of a trillion dollars the United States spends on the Pentagon budget is just a portion of a much larger figure for the full range of activities of the national security state. Let’s look, category by category, at what the Biden budget proposes to spend on this broader set of activities.
The Pentagon’s “Base Budget”
The Pentagon’s proposed “base” budget, which, in past years, has included routine spending for fighting ongoing conflicts, was $715 billion for fiscal year (FY) 2022, $10 billion more than last year’s request. Despite complaints to the contrary by advocates of even higher Pentagon spending, that represents no small addition. It’s larger, for instance, than the entire budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. No question about it, the Pentagon remains by a long shot the agency with the largest discretionary budget.
One piece of good news is that this year’s request marks the end of the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) account. That slush fund was used to finance the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also included tens of billions of dollars for pet Pentagon projects that had nothing to do with current conflicts.
While off-budget emergency spending has typically only been used in the initial years of a conflict, OCO became a tool to evade caps on the Pentagon’s regular budget imposed by the Budget Control Act of 2011. That legislation has now expired and the Biden administration has heeded the advice of good-government and taxpayer-advocacy groups by eliminating the slush fund entirely.
Unfortunately, its latest budget request still includes $42.1 billion for direct and indirect war-spending costs, which means that, OCO or not, there will be no net reduction in spending. Still, the end of that fund marks a small but potentially significant step towards greater accountability and transparency in the Pentagon budget. Moreover, congressional leaders are urging the Biden administration to seize savings from the ongoing Afghan withdrawal to sooner or later reduce the Pentagon’s top line.
As for what’s in the base budget, there are a number of particularly troubling proposed expenditures that warrant attention and congressional pushback. Spending on the Pentagon’s new Intercontinental Ballistic Missile — known formally as the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent — has nearly doubled in the new proposal from $1.4 billion to $2.6 billion.
This may seem like small change in such a budget, but it’s just a down payment on a system that could, in the end, cost more than $100 billion to procure and another $164 billion to operate over its lifetime. More importantly, as former secretary of defense William Perry noted, ICBMs are “some of the most dangerous weapons in the world” because a president would have only a matter of minutes to decide whether to launch them upon a warning of an attack, greatly increasing the risk of an accidental nuclear war based on a false alarm. In short, the new ICBM is not just costly but exceedingly dangerous for the health of humanity. The Biden budget should have eliminated it, not provided more funding for it.
Another eye-opener is the decision to spend more than $12 billion on the F-35 combat aircraft, a troubled, immensely expensive weapons system whose technical flaws suggest that it may never be fully ready for combat. Such knowledge should, of course, have resulted in a decision to at least pause production on the plane until testing is complete. House Armed Services Committee chair Adam Smith (D-WA) has stated that he’s tired of pouring money down the F-35 “rathole,” while the Air Force’s top officer, General Charles Brown, has compared it to a Ferrari that “you don’t drive to work every day” but “only drive it out on Sundays.”
Consider that an embarrassing admission for a plane once publicized as a future low-cost bulwark for the U.S. combat aircraft fleet. Whether the Air Force, Navy, and Marines, the three services that utilize variants of the F-35, will stay the course and buy more than 2,400 of these aircraft remains to be seen. Count on one thing, though: the F-35 lobby, including a special F-35 caucus in the House of Representatives and the Machinists Union, whose workers build the planes, will fight tooth and nail to keep the program fully funded regardless of whether or not it serves our national security needs.
And keep in mind that the F-35 is only one of many legacies of failed Pentagon modernization efforts. Even if the Pentagon were to acquire its new systems without delays or cost overruns — something rare indeed — its expensive spending plans have already earned this decade the moniker of the “terrible twenties.”
Worse yet, there’s a distinct possibility that Congress will push that budget even higher in response to “wish lists” being circulated by each of the military services. Items on them that have yet to make it into the Biden Pentagon budget include things like — surprise! — more F-35s. The Army’s wish list even includes systems it claimed it needed to cut. That the services are even allowed to make such requests to Congress is symbolic of a breakdown in budgetary discipline of the highest order.
The base budget also includes mandatory spending for items like military retirement. This year’s request adds $12.8 billion to the Pentagon’s tab.
Running Tally: $727.9 billion
The Nuclear Budget
It would be reasonable for you to assume that the Department of Energy’s budget would primarily be devoted to developing new energy sources and combating climate change, but that assumption would, sadly enough, be wildly off the mark.
In fact, more than half of the department’s budget goes to support the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which manages the country’s nuclear weapons program. The NNSA does work on nuclear warheads at eight major locations — California, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico (two facilities), South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas — across the country, along with subsidiary facilities in several additional states. NNSA’s proposed FY 2022 budget for nuclear-weapons activities is $15.5 billion, part of a budget for atomic-energy-related projects of $29.9 billion.
The NNSA is notorious for poor management of major projects. It has routinely been behind schedule and over cost — to the tune of $28 billion in the past two decades. Its future plans seem destined to hit the pocketbook of the American taxpayer significantly, with projected long-term spending on nuclear weapons activities rising by a proposed $113 billion in a single year.
Nuclear Budget $29.9 billion
Running tally: $757.8 billion
Defense-Related Activities
This is a catch-all category, totaling $10.5 billion in the FY 2022 request, including the international activities of the FBI and payments to the CIA retirement fund, among other things.
Defense-Related Activities $10.5 billion
Running tally: $768.3 billion
The Intelligence Budget
There is very little public information available about how the nation’s — count ’em! — 17 intelligence agencies spend our tax dollars. The majority of congressional representatives don’t even have staff members capable of accessing any kind of significant information on intelligence spending, a huge obstacle to the ability of Congress to oversee these agencies and their activities in any meaningful way. So far this year there is only a top-line figure available for spending on national (but not military) intelligence activities of $62.3 billion. Most of this money is already believed to be hidden away in the Pentagon budget, so it’s not added to the running tally displayed below.
National Intelligence activities: $62.3 billion
Running tally: $768.3 billion
The Military and Defense Department Retirement and Health Budget
The Treasury Department covers military retirement and health expenditures that should be in the Pentagon’s base budget. Net spending on these two items — minus interest earned and payments into the two accounts — was a negative $9.7 billion in FY 2022.
Military and Defense Department Retirement and Health Costs: -$9.7 billion
Running tally: $758.6 billion
Veterans Affairs Budget
The full costs of war go far beyond the expenditures contained in the Pentagon budget, including the costs of taking care of the veterans of America’s “forever wars.” Over 2.7 million U.S. military personnel have cycled through war zones in this century and hundreds of thousands of them have suffered severe physical or psychological injuries, ratcheting up the costs of veterans’ care accordingly. In addition, as we emerge from the Covid-19 disaster months, the Veterans Affairs Department anticipates a “bow wave” of extra costs and demands for its services from veterans who deferred care during the worst of the pandemic. The total FY2022 budget request for Veterans Affairs is $284.5 billion.
Veterans Affairs Budget: $284.5 billion
Running tally: $1,043.1 billion
International Affairs Budget
The International Affairs budget includes funding for the State Department and the Agency for International Development, integral parts of the U.S. national security strategy. Here, investments in diplomacy and economic and health activities overseas are supplemented by about $5.6 billion in military aid to other countries. The Biden administration has proposed overall International Affairs funding for FY 2022 at $79 billion.
International Affairs Budget: $79 billion
Running tally: $1,122.1 billion
The Homeland Security Budget
In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was created by throwing together a wide range of agencies, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Transportation Security Agency, the U.S. Secret Service, Customs and Border Protection, and the Coast Guard. The proposed DHS budget for FY2022 is $52.2 billion, nearly one-third of which goes to Customs and Border Protection.
Homeland Security Budget: $52.2 billion
Running tally: $1,174.3 billion
Interest on the Debt
The national security state, as outlined above, is responsible for about 20% of the interest due on the U.S. debt, a total of more than $93.8 billion.
Interest on the debt: $93.8 billion
Final tally: $1,268.1 billion
Are You Feeling Safer Now?
Theoretically, that nearly $1.3 trillion to be spent on national security writ large is supposed to be devoted to activities that make America and the world a safer place. That’s visibly not the case when it comes to so many of the funds that will be expended in the name of national security — from taxpayer dollars thrown away on weapons systems that don’t work to those spent on an unnecessary and dangerous new generation of nuclear weapons, to continuing to reinforce and extend the historically unprecedented U.S. military presence on this planet by maintaining more than 800 overseas military bases around the world.
If managed properly, President Biden’s initiatives on rebuilding domestic infrastructure and combatting climate change would be far more central to keeping people safe than throwing more money at the Pentagon and related agencies. Unfortunately, unlike the proposed Pentagon budget, significant Green New Deal-style infrastructure funding is far less likely to be passed by a bitterly divided Congress. Washington evidently doesn’t care that such investments would also be significantly more effective job creators.
A shift in spending toward these and other urgent priorities like addressing the possibility of future pandemics would clearly be a far better investment in “national security” than the present proposed Pentagon budget. Sadly, though, too many of America’s political leaders have clearly drawn the wrong lessons from the pandemic. If this country continues to squander staggering sums on narrowly focused national-security activities at a time when our greatest challenges are anything but military in nature, this country (and the world) will be a far less safe place in the future.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Ana Maria Moreno Portillo from Guatemala embraces her daughter after they were deported from the U.S., at the Kiki Romero Sports Complex in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, on April 5, 2021. The sports complex was adapted as a shelter because of the growing number of migrants being deported daily. (photo: Christian Chavez/AP)
The case involves people who had been previously deported and, when detained after re-entering the U.S. illegally, claimed that they would be persecuted or tortured if sent back
Over the dissent of three liberal justices, the court held 6-3 that the immigrants are not entitled to a hearing about whether they should be released while the government evaluates their claims.
Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the court that “those aliens are not entitled to a bond hearing.”
The case involves people who had been previously deported and, when detained after re-entering the United States illegally, claimed that they would be persecuted or tortured if sent back. One man is a citizen of El Salvador who said he was immediately threatened by a gang after being deported from the U.S.
An immigration officer determined that the immigrants had a “reasonable fear” for their safety if returned to their countries, setting in motion an evaluation process that can take months or years.
The issue for the court was whether the government could hold the immigrants without having an immigration judge weigh in. The immigrants and the Trump administration, which briefed and argued the case before President Joe Biden’s inauguration in January, pointed to different provisions of immigration law to make their respective cases.
Alito, in his opinion for the court, wrote that the administration’s argument that the relevant provision does not provide for a bond hearing was more persuasive.
In dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer saw it differently. “But why would Congress want to deny a bond hearing to individuals who reasonably fear persecution or torture, and who, as a result, face proceedings that may last for many months or years…? I can find no satisfactory answer to this question,” Breyer wrote.
The federal appeals court in Richmond, Virginia, had ruled in the immigrants’ favor, but other appellate courts had sided with the government. Tuesday’s decision sets a nationwide rule, but one that affects what lawyers for the immigrants called a relatively small subset of noncitizens.
Nancy Pelosi. (photo: Reuters)
The measure passed the House in the last Congress but stalled in the GOP-controlled Senate.
The measure passed the House in the last Congress but stalled in the GOP-controlled Senate. Last year, 72 Republicans voted with Democrats to take the statues down.
Democrats hold a razor thin majority in the Senate and would need 60 votes to advance the bill.
When the measure was reintroduced in the House earlier this year, House Majority Whip James Clyburn, D-S.C., cited the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, in which some Trump supporters paraded Confederate flags and other symbols of hate, as a reason to do away with the statues.
“On January 6th, we experienced the divisiveness of Confederate battle flags being flown inside the U.S. Capitol," Clyburn said in a statement. "Yet there are still vestiges that remain in this sacred building that glorify people and a movement that embraced that flag and sought to divide and destroy our great country. This legislation will remove these commemorations from places of honor and demonstrate that as Americans we do not celebrate those who seek to divide us.”
Under the measure, Taney’s bust would be replaced with one of Thurgood Marshall, the first Black Supreme Court justice. It would also remove statues of those who served in the Confederacy — one of its president, Jefferson Davis, is prominently displayed in Statuary Hall — as well as those of Vice President John C. Calhoun, North Carolina Gov. Charles Brantley Aycock, and Arkansas Sen. James Paul Clarke, all of whom defended slavery, segregation and white supremacy.
The architect of the Capitol will be asked to identify any other statues of those who served in the Confederacy. Removed statues would be returned to states that sent them to the Capitol.
Democrats have tried to remove the memorials to Confederate leaders for years, and their efforts intensified last year as the country wrestled with police brutality and racial intolerance in the wake of George Floyd’s death last year.
Senator Mike Gravel speaks during a presidential candidates forum in 2007, in Washington, D.C. (photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
ALSO SEE: Mike Gravel, Former Alaska Senator
and Anti-War Advocate, Dies at Age 91
ormer Alaska senator Mike Gravel, who died yesterday at age ninety-one, spent much of his political career and public platform trampling institutional niceties, customs, and tradition for the sake of the principles he held dear. Naturally, it earned him hostility, mockery, and dismissal, which persisted even as core parts of his politics have been welcomed into the mainstream.
One need only look at the way two of the country’s most influential newspapers responded to the news of the former senator’s death. For the New York Times, he was “an unabashed attention-getter” prone to “grandstanding,” whose most notable achievement was the Trans-Alaska oil pipeline finished in 1977. For the Washington Post, he was a “gadfly” who achieved “brief renown” when he famously read thousands of pages of the top secret Pentagon Papers into the congressional record. Both stressed the failures of his 2008 and 2020 campaigns, with the Times in particular seeming to delight in telling readers about the infinitesimal votes he was able to muster that first run.
It’s familiar terrain for Gravel. Back in 2007, he was similarly dismissed, despite searing himself into political memory with his brutal assessment of his fellow candidates in that year’s first Democratic debate. Talking into a finely tailored wall of laughter and smiling condescension, Gravel delivered a rare moment of political truth-telling in televised politics:
It’s like going into the Senate. You know, the first time you get there, you’re all excited, and “My god, how did I ever get here?” Then about six months later, you say, “How the hell did the rest of them get here?” And I gotta tell you, after standing up with them, some of these people frighten me. They frighten me. When you have mainline candidates who turn around and say there’s nothing off the table with respect to Iran. That’s code for using nukes.
Gravel concluded by insisting “we should plain get out” of Iraq, that the United States had no right to tell Iraqis how to run their country, and that “the only thing worse than a soldier dying in vain is more soldiers dying in vain.” Later, after then-candidate Barack Obama insisted he’d reserve the right to wage a war on Iran to stop it from acquiring nuclear arms, Gravel pointed to the US government’s own nuclear expansion. “Barack, who do you want to nuke?” he asked. “I’m not planning to nuke anybody right now, Mike, I promise,” Obama replied to much laughter.
Gravel’s decision to forego the customary empty pageantry of the debates earned him instant scorn. “We Do Not Understand What the Hell Mike Gravel Is Talking About,” wrote New York magazine. The New Republic put it at the top of the list of its “most idiotic moments from the 2008 primary debates.”
Yet Gravel was right, as suggested by not only the uptick of thousands of views for his website and campaign videos the appearance garnered, but by the fact that, years later, it’s still the only thing anyone remembers or cares to recall about the entire insipid affair. Obama had said those words. They were code for the threat of nuclear war. And for all the mockery it earned, it was Gravel’s position — that the United States shouldn’t drop a nuke on a far weaker country it had spent decades brutalizing the population of — that was the sensible, moderate one, and Obama’s the extreme, unserious one.
You could almost go down the list of Gravel’s policy ideas that year and see the things that marked him as a kooky sideshow then — from backing marriage equality and immediate withdrawal from Iraq, to opposing the war on drugs and military adventures that sapped resources from the domestic sphere — having somewhere along the way morphed into fairly uncontroversial articles of faith for vast swaths of the US public and commentariat.
Here are a few things you might not have learned about Gravel yesterday because they don’t work as well as punchlines. For all the accusations of grandstanding, Gravel was genuinely morally anguished over Washington’s monstrous war in Vietnam (“We should all cry over it,” he once said), and he regularly flouted meaningless senatorial rules and customs to try and bring it to an end. To this day, no lawmakers have shown close to Gravel’s courage or principles in attempting to use their positions to stop the endless overseas death that emanates from the US Capitol. As one lawyer who had dealt with Gravel on the other side of an issue once put it:
Among his actions were not just using his congressional immunity to publicly release the Pentagon Papers — at the time their publication in the newspapers had been halted by court order — but a host of other unprecedented moves that made him persona non grata in the clubby, decorum-obsessed Senate: working with antiwar activists, paralyzing the Senate with constant procedural delays, and trying incessantly to defund the Vietnam War. In one especially notable moment, he escorted a group of more than a hundred antiwar protesters into the Capitol and outside the Senate chamber to agitate for its end.
But as Gravel said decades later, he wasn’t too bothered about being shunned by the Washington cocktail circuit. When he had first arrived in the Senate, he had gone to one of the prayer breakfasts all his colleagues attended, until he “realized that all these people sitting at the table praying were essentially the warmongering hawks who perpetuated the Vietnam War.”
“And I couldn’t stomach it anymore,” he said.
If not for Mike Gravel, the military draft might never have ended. Gravel spent five months as a one-man wrecking ball trying to topple conscription for the war, and succeeded in filibustering the extension of the draft to death in 1971, partly by reading the Pentagon Papers. Though the draft was narrowly extended over the filibuster a few months later, with sixty-one votes, its earlier defeat at Gravel’s hands marked its days as numbered: with clearly dim prospects of extending it again two years later, Nixon moved in earnest to fulfill his campaign promise of transitioning to an all-volunteer army, and the government dramatically scaled back its draft numbers over the next two years, until the draft lapsed.
Gravel played an important role in establishing what became Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend program, a kind of universal basic income funded off of Alaska’s fossil-fuel exploitation. And he had earlier experienced a meteoric rise to the Alaskan state legislature speakership, where he presided over, among other things, the creation of a rural high school program that let Indigenous kids get local education instead of being shipped off sometimes thousands of miles to other parts of the country.
This doesn’t make him a saint, of course. Gravel was indeed a fierce fighter for fossil-fuel interests in the Senate in the 1970s, and was not immune to fundraising off them and all the sleazy pay-for-play shenanigans that came with that. Yet, ironically, his stubbornness on the matter unwittingly spurred one of the major executive actions of environmental protection in presidential history, and by 2007, he had shifted dramatically on the issue, running on what was then an aggressive climate platform to prevent what he later called “planetary suicide.”
Gravel’s curmudgeonly distaste for the pomp of presidential campaigns, his early virality on the internet, and his willingness to plainly tell the public what no one else had the guts to all doubtless helped clear the way for future dark horse left-wing candidates to not just try it themselves but be taken seriously while doing it. He lived long enough to see the reasonable and morally principled beliefs he once advocated to mockery earn widespread acceptance.
And while he never earned the respect of the political establishment, he passed from this Earth with his conscience untormented by the ghosts of screaming civilians whose lives those in Washington regularly snuff out with their afternoon coffee, as the current president likely just did the very day of Gravel’s passing. And that’s a luxury those who sniggered at him on the debate stage will not get to enjoy.
Hundreds of people remembered slain Roma, Stanislav Tomas, who died in the city a week ago shortly after being arrested by police. (photo: Martin Divisek/EPA-EFE)
Stanislav Tomas died after police knelt on his neck for more than six minutes, an incident that has stirred tensions between the minority and the state.
ome and kill us!” chanted the crowd.
Many beat their fists on their chests as fury and sorrow erupted in front of a crumbling tenement building.
A week earlier on this street in Teplice, a small city close to the Czech Republic’s northern border with Germany, Stanislav Tomas – a 46-year-old Roma man – died after being detained by police.
A video of Tomas’s arrest, during which he initially screams and writhes before ceasing to move as a police officer kneels on his neck for more than six minutes, has spread across Czech social media networks.
Many see similarities with the murder of George Floyd by police in the United States, which sparked massive protests across the globe.
The incident has shone a light once more on the plight of the large Roma communities that live in Central Europe, who face deep discrimination, and often abuse, at the hands of police and authorities. But few expect it to spark any change.
“No Czech Floyd,” Czech police tweeted, dismissing the outrage growing on social media.
Nearly 500 Roma travelled to this dilapidated corner of the city, which is sandwiched between industrial units and a busy highway, to attend a memorial for Tomas on Saturday.
From across the country, as well as Hungary and Slovakia, they quietly trooped past the police cars blocking the roads into the neighbourhood.
Organisers hoped the event would be positive.
“Who hasn’t had a cookie?” called out Josef Miker, a prominent Roma activist who handing out traditional treats.
Flowers and candles filled the pavement in front of the building, most of which is covered with advertisements – companies offering cash for blood donations.
Families sit on blankets spread on the dusty verges behind a nearby filling station.
“We’re glad the police are here,” said 28-year-old Jana. “There have been rumours that the far-right could attack us.”
Speeches, songs and prayers wish Tomas and his family peace, and extol the world to recognise that “Roma are human”.
“The Czech police are racist,” said 38-year-old Milan, who held a large Roma flag – a green and blue field behind a bright red many-spoked wheel.
“We don’t believe anything they say.”
An hour earlier, Simona Tomasova – Stanislav’s sister – met in her cramped kitchen the priest who led the memorial.
She nervously scrubbed chipped cups as she offered coffee.
In the next room, her mother, suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, stared blankly at cartoons.
She does not know that her son is dead.
She has never come to terms with the death of Stanislav’s brother 20 years ago in a car crash.
“I’m waiting for one of her good days,” Simona said tearfully.
Neither does Stanislav’s mother know that the police insist that her son was a repeat offender and drug addict.
They have pointed to a video they say shows Tomas “under the influence” just before they arrived as evidence.
The autopsy, they have added, proves his death was not linked to the police actions but to drugs.
Simona’s face hardened as she pondered these claims.
She was not close to her brother in recent years, but he visited their mother regularly, always arriving with food and gifts, and – she says – he did not take drugs.
The Council of Europe and Amnesty International have called for an independent investigation into the incident, but Tomasova says she expects little result.
‘Rise up Roma!’
“This isn’t the first time the police have killed Roma,” said Jan Cervenak, who travelled from Kutna Hora to attend the memorial. “No one believes them about what happened here.”
Four years ago, just down the road in Zatec, a 27-year-old Roma man died after a struggle with police at a pizzeria; the officers involved faced no disciplinary action.
Reports of casual mistreatment by the police and other authorities are common across the country.
With this in mind, the speeches emanating from a bullhorn roused the crowd. Crimes against the community are listed and justice demanded.
And as the afternoon sun started to beat down on the asphalt and dusty verges, the mood suddenly turned.
With a chant of “Rise up Roma!”, the crowd marched into town, bringing the Saturday afternoon traffic to a halt.
A lone police car was forced to rush away, sirens wailing, as the crowd surrounded the vehicle and beat on the windows.
At the local police station, riot police were waiting.
“We want the truth,” the crowd demanded.
“Stop executions,” they screamed as a man fell to the floor and to be pinned down in a grotesque theatre of Tomas’s arrest.
Meanwhile, police ranks grew agitated.
A sudden downpour spilled from the skies, cooling temperatures on both sides.
All scurried for cover.
Political silence
The Roma in the Czech Republic make up just 2 percent of the country’s 10 million.
Carrying “Roma Lives Matter!” placards, some at the memorial hoped Tomas’s death could provide a political spark.
But while former US police officer Derek Chauvin was sentenced earlier this month to 22.5 years in prison for murdering George Floyd, no one is expecting the policeman that knelt on Stanislav Tomas’s neck to face charges.
There has been a deafening silence from across the political spectrum. Several political parties did not respond to questions from Al Jazeera.
“There’s no political advantage to be gained by supporting the Roma community,” suggested activist Gwendolyn Albert.
Populist Prime Minister Andrej Babis certainly sees little potential. Within two days of Tomas’s death, he expressed his full support for the police.
Someone “respectable” would not have found themselves in that situation, Babis said, suggesting anyone taking drugs and attacking police should not “expect to be treated with kid gloves”.
A state investigation took just four days to conclude that the police acted legally.
It is little wonder that few Roma believe that Tomas’s death could trigger change.
“This tragic incident isn’t going to secure any significant advances for the Roma community,” said Miker, the activist.
At best, he hopes the European Union might now ban police from kneeling on necks.
Like many towns in northern Bohemia, whose mines once kept the Czech industry running, Teplice has problems with drugs, especially methamphetamine.
This is the substance that police say killed Tomas after he was loaded into an ambulance on the sticky afternoon of June 21.
The conditions in which many Roma live in this part of the country are shocking.
The community struggles with discrimination in education, housing and employment. Ghettos, rife with rubbish and disease, scar towns and cities.
Locals at the memorial said Tomas lived in a tent by a stream that runs beneath the highway.
They say he was not a troublemaker or drug addict. He was reportedly looking forward to starting a job as a security guard at a supermarket.
However, their words carry little weight. One local woman, echoing claims made to Czech media, says that police have made witnesses sign agreements not to discuss the incident.
She says people in the neighbourhood are scared of the police.
Simona Tomasova says police forced several witnesses to delete videos of the event from their phones.
With help from her priest and Konexe, she wants to somehow raise the 3,000 euros ($3,570) or so it will cost to have another autopsy carried out.
But Simona has little real faith that her brother will ever get justice.
“We are just Roma,” she shrugs.
An unnamed man slumps over a garbage can as the temperature rises to over 110 degrees in Portland, June 28, 2021. (photo: Kristyna Wentz-Graff/OPB)
ALSO SEE: The 'Heat Dome' Explained:
Why the Pacific North-West Is Facing Record Temperatures
hree days of record breaking heat are taking their toll on Oregonians.
Around 200 Oregonians have visited emergency departments or urgent care centers due to heat-related illness since the heat wave began Friday, according to data published by the Oregon Health Authority.
In Multnomah County alone, 43 people went to emergency departments or urgent care centers due to heat-related illness over the weekend. On a typical June day, there are zero or one cases of heat stroke reported.
The visits this weekend alone represent nearly half the heat illness visits the county typically sees during an entire summer.
In Yamhill County, two people went missing while swimming in the Willamette River on Saturday. In Bend, advocates working at an encampment of people who are homeless found two men dead over the weekend, and suspect they succumbed to the heat. The causes of both men’s deaths are currently under investigation.
“People’s bodies are stressed,” said Dr. Jennifer Vines, the Multnomah County health officer. “My main message is to take this for the serious health threat that this is.”
The heat may have also contributed to a surge in use of emergency services.
On Sunday, Multnomah County EMS received over 410 calls for service — a record number — resulting in about 260 people transported to health care.
By 2:30 p.m. Monday, the temperature at the Portland Airport had reached 113 degrees, breaking the all-time records set over the previous two days. The National Weather Service reported a record-smashing 116 degrees in Salem. In response, health departments across the state are urging people to make a plan for how to stay cool, take advantage of cooling centers, and check on neighbors and family.
Vines said three factors have combined to make the current heat wave a health emergency: the record-shattering high temperatures during the day, the uncharacteristically warm nights that aren’t giving people a real break from the heat, and the unusual timing of the heat wave so early in the summer.
Vines said it takes one to two weeks for our bodies to acclimate to higher temperatures. But this early in the summer, that process of adaptation hasn’t happened yet.
“For such an early extreme heat wave, without that break at night, we knew that this was going to be life threatening. That’s how we talked about it from the beginning,” Vines said.
In Portland, temperatures are almost 40 degrees higher than normal for this time of year. A normal daily high in June is 73 degrees, according to the National Weather Service.
Temperatures became so extreme in Portland that the city halted all MAX light rail trains until Tuesday.
Several of Oregon’s older prisons don’t have air conditioning, putting vulnerable people at significant risk. The Oregon State Penitentiary and the Oregon State Correctional Institution in Salem, as well as the Shutter Creek Correctional Institution near Coos Bay, all rely on “alternative cooling methods” like swamp coolers, fans and “providing access to ice water for [Adults in Custody] and staff,” the Oregon Department of Corrections said in a statement.
“DOC makes every attempt to keep the adults in our custody and employees comfortable during summer heat waves,” the agency said. “Each of our institutions has plans for inclement weather; modifications vary by location based on infrastructure and other dynamics.”
Civil rights attorney Juan Chavez said he’s heard from some people in custody that faucets are only dispensing hot water and fans are moving around the hot air.
“There’s not ice on every unit,” Chavez said. “If there is ice brought to those units, there’s not enough for everybody. And tensions are high. People are rightfully getting concerned for their own health and safety because they can’t protect themselves.”
While temperatures are forecast to relent for much of western Oregon in the afternoon and evening hours Monday, Central and Eastern Oregon will continue to experience near or above 100 degrees for the remainder of the week.
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