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10 May 21
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Andy Borowitz | Millions Ask Facebook to Ban Their Relatives
Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
Borowitz writes: "In a petition signed by a staggering number of the platform's users, millions are asking Facebook to ban their relatives."
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As American troops depart, winding down a twenty-year intervention, Afghans are forced to reckon with the question of whether their government can stand on its own against the Taliban. (photo: Adam Ferguson/The New Yorker)
William Astore | Pulling the Plug on the War Machine
William Astore, TomDispatch
Astore writes: "Why don't America's wars ever end?"
Here’s the strange thing: almost 20 years into a series of chaotic, staggeringly expensive, failing wars across significant parts of the planet, the U.S. military — “the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known” (George W. Bush), aka “the finest fighting force that the world has ever known” (Barack Obama) — continues to eat taxpayer dollars as if they were nothing at all. According to the Costs of War Project, the U.S. has sunk almost $2.3 trillion dollars into the failed Afghan War from which it’s now retreating and a minimum of $6.4 trillion into all the major conflicts of the Global War on Terror (not even counting future costs caring for the war’s vets). And all of this happened in years in which little indeed went into American domestic infrastructure. And yet, even as it leaves Afghanistan, the Biden administration is actually upping the already stratospheric Pentagon budget, and Republicans in Congress, who normally fight spending a cent on anyone other than corporations and billionaires, are urging the president to spend even more. Worse yet, the American public generally seems remarkably satisfied with such spending. Somehow, what the U.S. military machine has done over all these years just never seems to sink in here.
The latest polling figures show that only 14% of Americans saw this country’s “defense” efforts (as they’re always called, despite those “forever wars” in distant lands) as too much and would like to see military spending lowered. Half of all Americans consider the U.S. defense posture “just right” and 35% would like more of the same (up from 25% last year). In January, a Gallup poll indicated that 74% of Americans were “very or somewhat satisfied with the nation’s military strength and preparedness” and, in that context, the military always has a sky-high positive image in polling here — and it only rose in pandemic year 2020.
It’s as if Americans were simply not living in the world that the U.S. military was operating in and, in a sense, as retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and TomDispatch regular William Astore, who runs the Bracing Views blog, suggests today, they may not be. That military and the “industrial complex” that goes with it may, in fact, represent another universe entirely, one that Americans look at from afar as if it were all happening to someone else — as, in a sense (ask the Afghans, Iraqis, or Somalis), it is.
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
hy don’t America’s wars ever end?
I know, I know: President Joe Biden has announced that our combat troops will be withdrawn from Afghanistan by 9/11 of this year, marking the 20th anniversary of the colossal failure of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to defend America.
Of course, that other 9/11 in 2001 shocked us all. I was teaching history at the U.S. Air Force Academy and I still recall hushed discussions of whether the day’s body count would exceed that of the Battle of Antietam, the single bloodiest day of the Civil War. (Fortunately, bad as it was, it didn’t.)
Hijacked commercial airliners, turned into guided missiles by shadowy figures our panicky politicians didn’t understand, would have a profound impact on our collective psyche. Someone had to pay and among the first victims were Afghans in the opening salvo of the misbegotten Global War on Terror, which we in the military quickly began referring to as the GWOT. Little did I know then that such a war would still be going on 15 years after I retired from the Air Force in 2005 and 80 articles after I wrote my first for TomDispatch in 2007 arguing for an end to militarism and forever wars like the one still underway in Afghanistan.
Over those years, I’ve come to learn that, in my country, war always seems to find a way, even when it goes badly — very badly, in fact, as it did in Vietnam and, in these years, in Afghanistan and Iraq, indeed across much of the Greater Middle East and significant parts of Africa. Not coincidentally, those disastrous conflicts haven’t actually been waged in our name. No longer does Congress even bother with formal declarations of war. The last one came in 1941 after Pearl Harbor. During World War II, Americans united to fight for something like national security and a just cause. Today, however, perpetual American-style war simply is. Congress postures, but does nothing decisive to stop it. In computer-speak, endless war is a feature of our national programming, not a bug.
Two pro-war parties, Republicans and Democrats, have cooperated in these decades to ensure that such wars persist… and persist and persist. Still, they’re not the chief reason why America’s wars are so difficult to end. Let me list some of those reasons for you. First, such wars are beyond profitable, notably to weapons makers and related military contractors. Second, such wars are the Pentagon’s reason for being. Let’s not forget that, once upon a time, the present ill-named Department of Defense was so much more accurately and honestly called the Department of War. Third, if profit and power aren’t incentive enough, wars provide purpose and meaning even as they strengthen authoritarian structures in society and erode democratic ones. Sum it all up and war is what America now does, even if the reasons may be indefensible and the results so regularly abysmal.
Support Our Troops! (Who Are They, Again?)
The last truly American war was World War II. And when it ended in 1945, the citizen-soldiers within the U.S. military demanded rapid demobilization — and they got it. But then came the Iron Curtain, the Cold War, the Korean War, fears of nuclear Armageddon (that nearly came to fruition during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962), and finally, of course, Vietnam. Those wars were generally not supported — not with any fervor anyway — by the American people, hence the absence of congressional declarations. Instead, they mainly served the interests of the national security state, or, if you prefer, the military-industrial-congressional complex.
That’s precisely why President Dwight D. Eisenhower issued his grave warning about that Complex in his farewell address in 1961. No peacenik, Ike had overseen more than his share of military coups and interventions abroad while president, so much so that he came to see the faults of the system he was both upholding and seeking to restrain. That was also why President John F. Kennedy called for a more humble and pacific approach to the Cold War in 1963, even as he himself failed to halt the march toward a full-scale war in Southeast Asia. This is precisely why Martin Luther King, Jr., truly a prophet who favored the fierce urgency of peace, warned Americans about the evils of war and militarism (as well as racism and materialism) in 1967. In the context of the enormity of destruction America was then visiting on the peoples of Southeast Asia, not for nothing did he denounce this country as the world’s greatest purveyor of violence.
Collectively, Americans chose to ignore such warnings, our attention being directed instead toward spouting patriotic platitudes in support of “our” troops. Yet, if you think about it for a moment, you’ll realize those troops aren’t really ours. If they were, we wouldn’t need so many bumper stickers reminding us to support them.
With the military draft gone for the last half-century, most Americans have voted with their feet by not volunteering to become “boots on the ground” in the Pentagon’s various foreign escapades. Meanwhile, America’s commanders-in-chief have issued inspiring calls for their version of national service, as when, in the wake of 9/11, President George W. Bush urged Americans to go shopping and visit Disney World. In the end, Americans, lacking familiarity with combat boots, are generally apathetic, sensing that “our” wars have neither specific meaning to, nor any essential purpose in their lives.
As a former Air Force officer, even if now retired, I must admit that it took me too long to realize this country’s wars had remarkably little to do with me — or you, for that matter — because we simply have no say in them. That doesn’t mean our leaders don’t seek to wage them in our name. Even as they do so, however, they simultaneously absolve us of any need to serve or sacrifice. We’re essentially told to cheer “our” troops on, but otherwise look away and leave war to the professionals (even if, as it turns out, those professionals seem utterly incapable of winning a single one of them).
You know that yellow “crime scene” tape the police use to keep curious bystanders at bay? Our government essentially uses “war scene” tape to keep the curious among us from fathoming what the military is doing across so much of the world. That “tape” most often involves the use of classification, with everything that might matter to us designated “secret” or “top secret” and not fit for our eyes to see. This cult of secrecy enables ignorance and reinforces indifference.
Anyone like a Chelsea Manning or a John Kiriakou who seeks to cut that tape and so let ordinary citizens examine any of our war crime scenes in all their ugliness is punished. You, John Q. Public, are not supposed to know of war crimes in Iraq. You, Jane Q. Public, are not supposed to know of CIA torture programs. And when you don’t know, and even when you do (if only a little), you have no ability to question this country’s warlords in any rigorous fashion. You have no ability to resist wars vigorously and you know it, so most likely you won’t act — as so many once did in the Vietnam era — to stop them.
For a self-styled democracy that should abjure such conflicts, war has instead become both omnipresent, omni-absent (if you’ll let me invent a word for our strange situation), and oddly mercenary in these disunited states of ours. Borrowing a line from The Godfather, war isn’t personal in America, it’s strictly business. Basically, this country has its very own powerful warlords, even if they don’t have personal names, just collective ones — like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon. In those wars of “ours” lies undeniable evidence that corporations are indeed citizens, as the Supreme Court declared in 2010 by judicial fiat in the eerily named “Citizens United” case. As a result, America’s corporate warlords are now a new kind of ultra-powerful citizen. Think of them as warped versions of Marvel superheroes, collectively profiting from incessant conflict.
Did I say America no longer has citizen-soldiers? Of course, America has them. In place of old-style heroes like Alvin York (from World War I) or Audie Murphy (from World War II), we now have “heroes” like Citizen Raytheon and Citizen Boeing. Remember, as Mitt Romney reminded us, “corporations are people, my friend.”
Your Views on War Don’t Matter — Or Do They?
As I think about war, American-style, certain phrases pop into my head from the Catholic catechism: is now and ever shall be, world without end, Amen. Apply that to America’s global conflicts and you’ve captured the grim reality of this forever-war moment, even if President Biden is now trying to get U.S. combat troops out of one of them (and others are looking fervently for ways to continue fighting it). Worse yet, behind the scenes, that “world without end” invariably threatens to become a world with an end as the Pentagon persists in building yet more nuclear weapons — the phrase of the moment is “modernizing the nuclear arsenal” — while pursuing an antagonistic new cold war with China and Russia.
Referring to Catholic doxology in this fashion may seem heretical to some, but thought about another way, it’s all too appropriate, as war in some sense is a widely shared cult, if not a religion, in America. Too many people believe in it, even worship it. Signs of this include the transformation of anyone who wears a military uniform into an automatic hero. People sacrifice their children to that cult. And even if you or your children choose not to serve (as so many Americans do), or if you’re among those rare citizens who vociferously protest against our wars, your tax dollars nevertheless feed a war machine that’s always cranking away, well-lubricated by our endless cash contributions.
While our coins still say “In God We Trust,” the god our nation’s leaders profess to trust is most assuredly a warrior, not the prince of peace. Under the circumstances and against a backdrop of perpetual war, no one should be surprised that this country is increasingly wracked by conflict and rent by violent impulses.
Common sense informed by history tells us that war is terror, atrocity, and murder. More than a few of America’s sons and daughters have indeed been transformed by war into murderers overseas — and that’s before “our” troops come home, haunted by deadly experiences and their physical and moral wounds. Yet despite their pain, despite those wounds, America’s war machine rumbles on, sowing the dragon’s teeth of future conflicts through vast weapons sales abroad and further military deployments that so often are justified, bizarrely enough, as helping to prevent war.
Of course, we’d like to think of our country as a shining city on a hill, but to others we must seem more like a citadel bristling with weaponry, a colossus of war. And sadly enough, too many of our fellow Americans in that citadel would rather be militarily strong and wrong than pacifically meek and right.
That grim reality was summed up for me by an offhand comment from that self-styled lord of war, then-Vice President Dick Cheney. Early in 2008, his administration’s invasion and occupation of Iraq having cratered and with casualties mounting, he was reminded that public opinion in this country had turned against that war and people wanted it to end. “So?” Cheney replied.
Who cares if the people are against war? For that matter, who cares about right and wrong? What matters is what the national security state wants and what it wants is war till the end of time.
What is to be done? I see two possible paths for this country. One is to work to find ways to end all our wars and the massive global military presence that goes with them. In the process, we would begin to dismantle our imperial war machine and so hobble the military-industrial complex and its warlords. The other is the path this country remains on (despite Joe Biden’s inclination to end the Afghan War). If followed, it will continue to allow the petty Caesars among us to rage until this imperial power finally collapses under the weight of its military excesses and failures. One path would lead to a possible restoration of democracy and citizen empowerment as America’s founders intended; the other will undoubtedly terminate in the chaos of slow-motion collapse in a world threatened by nuclear annihilation.
There is no fate but what we make, said Sarah Connor in the Terminator movies. What’ll it be, America? Do we have the collective courage to make a better fate for ourselves by pulling the plug on the war machine?
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel Frostlands (the second in the 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.
William Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and professor of history, is a TomDispatch regular and a senior fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network (EMN), an organization of critical veteran military and national security professionals. His personal blog is Bracing Views.
A memorial for George Floyd. (photo: Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)
Families Call for UN to Launch Inquiry Into Police Killings of Black Americans
Ed Pilkington, Guardian UK
Pilkington writes: "The families of 165 victims of police brutality in the US are calling on the United Nations to set up an independent inquiry into the ongoing scourge of police killings of Black men and women."
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Daniel Goldman of Arlington, Va., holds the transgender flag at a demonstration outside the Supreme Court on Oct. 8. (photo: Michael S. Williamson/WP)
Biden Prohibits Health Care Discrimination Against Transgender People
Amy Goldstein, The Washington Post
Goldstein writes: "The Biden administration said Monday it would provide protections against discrimination in health care based on gender identity and sexual orientation, reversing a policy of its predecessors that had been a priority for social conservatives and had infuriated civil liberties advocates."
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A parking lot turned shelter in Las Vegas. (photo: ANSA)
There's Federal Money Available to House the Homeless. No One's Taking It.
Adam Mahoney, Grist
Mahoney writes: "FEMA is reimbursing cities that want to relieve homelessness, but only 23 local governments have signed up."
wo weeks after the United States began its first coronavirus lockdown in March 2020, then-President Donald Trump instructed the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, to reimburse cities, counties, and tribes for 75 percent of costs related to housing homeless people in unoccupied hotels, as well as administering COVID-19 tests to those without housing. When Joe Biden assumed the presidency in January, he increased coverage to include fees related to vaccinating homeless populations and also guaranteed that reimbursements would now retroactively cover 100 percent of related expenses.
In theory, the program would both curb the spread of the novel coronavirus and also protect the more than 580,000 people experiencing homelessness at any given time from the variety of threats that come without steady access to housing. For the 225,000 homeless people living without formal shelter of any kind on a given night, encounters with extreme weather events, pollution, and policing can be uniquely deadly.
But as Winter Storm Uri descended upon the U.S. South in mid-February, leaving millions of people without water and electricity across at least seven states, more than half of Texas’ 500,000 hotel rooms were unoccupied and not a single municipality in the state had requested funds to house people living on the streets. As temperatures in the Lone Star State dropped to 20 degrees F, dozens of unhoused people were left frostbitten and hospitalized and at least six were found dead.
Texas wasn’t the only place where localities neglected the program. According to reimbursement request records released to Grist after a Freedom of Information Act request, one year into the program only 23 local governments, including one federal tribe, had submitted funding requests. Roughly 80 percent of the requests, which altogether total just over $600 million, came from just four major urban counties: Los Angeles County, California; Denver County, Colorado; Cook County, Illinois; and King County, Washington. (The data is current as of April 7; a comprehensive list of the requesters is available here.)
Of the top 10 major metropolitan areas with the highest levels of homelessness per capita, according to data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, only three submitted reimbursement requests.
Officials from New York City, where nearly 15 percent of all unhoused people in the U.S. shuffle through the city’s vast shelter system, did not respond to Grist’s requests for comment about why the city did not participate in the program to relieve the threats posed by congregate living during the pandemic. But leaked reports show that dysfunction within city leadership led to the city passing on funds while COVID-19 spread through at least 94 percent of the city’s shelters, and 60 people living in the facilities died.
In San Francisco, where there are more than 8,000 people experiencing homelessness on a given night, county leaders hinted at the possibility of taking advantage of the funding following Biden’s increased coverage, but no requests had been submitted as of April 7. San Francisco officials did not respond to Grist’s requests for comment.
The program and its funding were made available through the 1988 Stafford Act, a federal law designed to help facilitate a uniform federal approach to state and local disaster relief. Unlike other coronavirus funding, the program is not earmarked for a certain dollar amount, so FEMA resources can be scaled to meet all eligible needs. But like other coronavirus relief programs, this particular deployment of the Stafford Act is a temporary fix, set to end on September 30.
Interviews with policy experts and municipal leaders suggest that poor governing relationships between federal and local governments, a difficult reimbursement process, and decentralized planning left the program to be largely ignored — and the country’s unsheltered population unprotected from the spread of COVID-19 and a slew of recent severe weather events.
John Beard, a former city council member in Port Arthur, Texas, learned the inner workings of FEMA’s reimbursement process while helping to lead his city out of the destruction caused by Hurricane Harvey in 2017. He said the processes to obtain federal funding favor large cities and undermines the reason the money was made available in the first place: to help people no matter where they live. Larger cities that have regular communication with the federal government are more likely to know of the many different funding options available, he told Grist.
“It’s a failure at the federal level to not get [the money] out to the cities, because they know which cities need it the most,” Beard said. “And it’s a failure by cities for not amplifying their needs and making the requests.”
“A lot of cities simply don’t have the wherewithal or resources,” he added. “Bigger cities can afford consultants who spend every day searching for funding opportunities, but smaller cities don’t have anybody watching the clock, so everyday paperwork expires and funds dry up.”
Steve Sanders, a former director of the sustainable communities program at the nonprofit Institute for Local Government, said that, with too many issues and not enough resources, many localities prioritize areas where there is a widely understood economic benefit or a powerful constituency to satisfy — neither of which is obviously the case when it comes to providing housing to those without.
“The reality is development decisions are based on return on investment — and these aren’t flashy investments,” Sanders said. “When there is scarce political power for the key actors who care about the underlying issues of environmental justice and housing justice, don’t bet on seeing positive outcomes.”
Three jurisdictions with some of the country’s highest rates of homelessness — Honolulu, Hawaii, and California’s San Diego and Santa Cruz Counties — told Grist that they were either unaware of the FEMA program’s existence or declining to use it. All three jurisdictions had locally funded homeless projects in place during the pandemic. In Santa Cruz County, people qualifying for California’s public assistance program were offered subsidized hotel rates if they were experiencing homelessness.
In Honolulu and San Diego County, leaders used the federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, or CARES Act — which appropriated $12 billion to be used for homelessness and rent support — to extend their shelter services and make COVID-19 testing and vaccination more accessible to unhoused residents. However, the $12 billion was spread over a wide range of activities, including everything from mortgage assistance and home rehabilitation to the maintenance of traditional shelters, meaning it’s unclear how much actually went toward providing safe, private housing for those without shelter. After Grist’s correspondence with San Diego County, reports surfaced that the county plans to utilize the FEMA program to “free up” CARES money to be used for other social services.
Even in cities that took advantage of FEMA funding during the program’s first year, success was fleeting. In Los Angeles, at the program’s peak only around 4,300 individuals — less than seven percent of people experiencing homelessness in the county — were housed before county leaders withdrew their support for the program altogether. In Washington state’s King County, where Seattle is located, critics have argued that the government continues to leave federal funds on the table, and suburban opposition has slowed program implementation.
For other cities, a complex reimbursement process has made it extremely difficult to receive funds, according to Rajan Bal, a campaign manager at the National Homelessness Law Center.
“It’s a complicated application process that hasn’t necessarily been conveyed as best and easy as it should be, especially under Trump,” Bal told Grist. Bal said that initially there was confusion around which populations of people qualified for housing; it was unclear if those temporarily displaced by disasters or people experiencing temporary, transitional homelessness qualified for support. (Current guidelines say they do.)
FEMA and White House officials did not respond to Grist’s requests for comment.
While Bal believes the FEMA program has had some effectiveness as a temporary solution, he said that municipalities should be “using the opportunity to inject local communities with cash to provide more housing solutions for people right now, as a springboard to combat the long term homelessness crisis and protect this vulnerable population from freezing or melting on the streets.”
This way, he said, jurisdictions can follow San Diego County’s lead and free up other funding streams, such as CARES funding, to pay for other social services and move toward funding more permanent housing solutions such as supportive housing, which allows people experiencing chronic homelessness the opportunity to have their own space while still receiving social support services.
Instead, Bal continued, many municipalities are pursuing policies such as encampment sweeps that are exposing unhoused people to coronavirus and potentially even landing them in jail.
“There are elected officials actively pursuing the criminalization of homelessness and are actively choosing not to use available funding sources like FEMA reimbursement for shelters,” he said. “They’re spending taxpayer dollars to criminalize people instead of relying on these options that address homelessness.”
Unhoused people are disproportionately threatened by air pollution, toxic waste, and severe weather, so solutions have to be direct and targeted, said Beard, the former city council member whose Southwest Texas region has experienced an uptick in homelessness since Hurricane Harvey.
“At the end of the day, there is money to help people and it’s going unclaimed,” the former politician said. “Elected officials are chosen to look out for people, but there is help readily available and they let it slip past.
A young Palestinian man is treated after being struck by a rubber-coated bullet in the back of the head. (photo: Ibrahim Husseini/Al Jazeera)
ALSO SEE: Nine Palestinians Killed by Israeli Air Strikes on Gaza
Jerusalem: 300 More Palestinians Wounded by Israeli Police at Al-Aqsa Mosque
Ibrahim Husseini, Al Jazeera
Husseini writes: "Palestinians described the flash raid launched by Israeli security forces on Monday on the Al-Aqsa compound that wounded hundreds of people, as fears intensified violence could escalate during a march by Israeli nationalists."
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Interior Secretary Deb Haaland visits Bears Ears National Monument near Blanding, Utah, in April. (photo: Rick Bowmer/AP)
The Biden Administration Has a Game-Changing Approach to Nature Conservation
Benji Jones, Vox
Jones writes: "The America the Beautiful initiative could redefine US conservation as we know it."
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