“I’m deeply concerned that these strikes could lead to the United States once again being dragged back into the quagmire of long-term military engagement in the Middle East,” Sanders said in a statement.
I was thinking that this may be the most Sanders felt he could say in this climate of hysteria, but then I read on.
Sanders said Friday that Assad is a “war criminal” and the United States should work with the international community to help stop the years-long Syrian civil war.
“The US must work with all parties to reinforce longstanding international norms against the use of chemical weapons, to hold Russia and Syria to the 2013 deal to destroy these weapons and to see that violators are made accountable,” he said.
For me, this is too close an admission that Sanders is just as subject to being gulled by our oligarchs as most of the public seems to be. I think I have realized this for a while about Sanders. He doesn’t make as strong a connection about what the oligarchs are doing to the rest of us in this country and the policies that the oligarchs are foisting all over the world. In Syria, it may be a case of US oil interests fighting with Russian oil interests. The rest of us don’t come out as winners no matter which side carries the day.
Sanders certainly fails to make the connection in his public comments. I wonder if even in his mind does he fail to make the connection? I would find it hard to believe based on his earlier history as Burlington Mayor that he fails to understand.
On Wednesday, the Guardian reported, the Russian Defense Ministry claimed that the poison attack was the result of a Syrian airstrike hitting a “terrorist warehouse” full of “toxic substances.”
I had just heard this from someone at a lunch I just attended. If this were true, then it might not have been an al Qaeda false flag attack that triggered our retaliation against the wrong target. There are certainly going to be more twists in this story than I could ever imagine. One thing may be certain, we don’t have enough factual information to justify firing off dozens of missiles.
The European commission head, Jean Claude Juncker, responded that “he understands efforts to deter future attacks” and that the EU stood ready to play its role in finding a political solution to the crisis.
If the rebels led the gas attack to get the USA to retaliate against the Syrian government, then our retaliation will only encourage more gas attacks by the rebels.
Will the USA take responsibility for encouraging more such gas attacks in the more likely reality that the latest gas attack was by the rebels who wanted to encourage the USA to launch attacks against rebels’ enemy, the Syrian government? Will we gladly accept strikes against our Navy in retaliation for our encouraging these gas attacks war crimes?
I know there is an urge to avoid analysis paralysis in our military response, but to lash out at the victims instead of the perpetrators is a very counterproductive response if the intent is really to protect the lives of the citizens of Syria.
If you see a behavior that seems to you to be counterproductive, perhaps you have misunderstood what that behavior is meant to produce.
What this behavior is meant to produce is the overthrow of Assad and the building of the pipeline through Syria that the Saudi’s so desperately want. The Saudi Arabian government wants a pipeline through Syria to ship their oil directly to the European market. Exxon wants to profit by the opportunity to manage a new pipeline as part of their agreement with Saudi Arabia to manage the oil sales of Saudi Arabian oil. These two want their choice of pipeline in order to cut Russia out of the European market. Russia and Assad of Syria want to build a Syrian pipeline to help ship Russian oil to market.
The lives of people in Syria play no role in the what Exxon and Saudi Arabia want. The Saudis are the biggest backer of terrorism in the world, if you want to know how much they care. One might even say that the USA is complicit in war crimes. What about our corporate media that is paid to cover this all up? Will the citizens of the USA be forgiven beacuse they have plausible deniability, “How were we to know?”
While it’s conceivable that Assad’s military is guilty – although why Assad would take this risk at this moment is hard to fathom – it’s also conceivable that Al Qaeda’s jihadists – finding themselves facing impending defeat – chose to stage a sarin attack even if that meant killing some innocent civilians.
Al Qaeda’s goal would be to draw in the U.S. or Israeli military against the Syrian government, creating space for a jihadist counteroffensive. And, as we should all recall, it’s not as if Al Qaeda hasn’t killed many innocent civilians before.
I don’t think Al Qaeda has to work very hard to draw in the U.S. or Israeli military against the Syrian government. These two governments have been itching to do this anyway. The US CIA has been overthrowing Syrian governments since 1949 at least.
As an aside, I was afraid that this article was going to report a New York Times story recanting their stories about the 2013 attack. That would be a real paradox for me since I don’t believe much of what the New York Times reports on foreign affairs, how could I believe a retraction? To my relief, The New York Times did not retreat by explicit statesent. The retreat comes from omitting the 2013 attack from their summary of all the evil things that Assad has done in Syria.
On the one hand, the VoxEU article does a fine job of assembling long-term data on a global basis. It demonstrates that the corporate savings glut is long standing and that is has been accompanied by a decline in personal savings.
However, it fails to depict what an unnatural state of affairs this is. The corporate sector as a whole in non-recessionary times ought to be net spending, as in borrowing and investing in growth.
You have to ask a deeper question. Why is it that the “natural” state for the corporate sector “as a whole in non-recessionary times ought to be net spending”?
It all comes down to my maxim “What part of no freakin’ customers do you not understand?”
If the efficiencies of automation, cost savings of outsourcing jobs, and unfair tilting of the market toward corporate interests decimate the buying power of your customers, what is there left to invest in?
Corporations aren’t investing in satisfying the needs of an increasing customer base exactly because their prior actions have shrunk the customer base below the break even point of the capacity they already have.
Wouldn’t it be rather insane to invest in more production capacity when you already have too much, and are shutting down some of what you already have?
I just can’t understand why economists are searching to find more trees while they are standing in the middle of a forest. The obvious answers are lying all around them and have been since the 1930s. Why can’t they see them?
We need to remember the short, eloquent explanation of why we have a government.
Whenever a member of Congress or a President proposes a law to enact, check it against this brief explanation of why we have a union for a country.
I think that just asking if it “promotes the general welfare” is the strongest filter their can be. For instance, do tax cuts for billionaires promote the general welfare?
A wide-ranging interview tied to his new book, “The Killing of Osama Bin Laden.”
At the end of the interview there is a discussion about our doing the destruction of the SYrian Government’s arsenal of sarin weapons under the agreement reached between Syria, Russia, and the USA.
Guess what else we know from the forensic analysis we have (we had all the missiles in their arsenal). Nothing in their arsenal had anything close to what was on the ground in Ghouta. A lot of people I know, nobody’s going to go on the record, but the people I know said we couldn’t make a connection, there was no connection between what was given to us by Bashar and what was used in Ghouta. That to me is interesting. That doesn’t prove anything, but it opens up a door to further investigation and further questioning.
The great investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, in two previous articles in the London Review of Books («Whose Sarin?» and «The Red Line and the Rat Line») has reported that the Obama Administration falsely blamed the government of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad for the sarin gas attack that Obama was trying to use as an excuse to invade Syria; and Hersh pointed to a report from British intelligence saying that the sarin that was used didn’t come from Assad’s stockpiles.
I am going to post as a sepaarate post the artcle linked to in this later excerpt.
The great investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, in two previous articles in the London Review of Books («Whose Sarin?» and «The Red Line and the Rat Line») has reported that the Obama Administration falsely blamed the government of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad for the sarin gas attack that Obama was trying to use as an excuse to invade Syria; and Hersh pointed to a report from British intelligence saying that the sarin that was used didn’t come from Assad’s stockpiles.
As I went back to the Strategic Culture article, I realized that I had been sidetracked in reading the Alternet article. There may even be worse stuff later on in the article. I am going to post the Alternet article, and then go back to look at the rest of the Strategic Culture article.
April 6, 2017 12:15 AM.
There is so much more in the original article and the links that I just don’t have the time to track it all down. I’ll have to pass the relay baton to someone else.
Here is the section of Bernie Sanders’ response at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute on March 31, 2017.
We can also make some important improvements in the affordable care act, for example there are parts of this country where there is maybe one insurance company. I think we should have a public option in 50 states in this country.
I think this is where Bernie Sanders negated every good thing he said before. If only he had not said this, I would have gone away remembering why I was such a fervent supporter of Bernie Sanders.
If there is a problem with the private insurance company options on the ACA state marketplaces, and we add a public option, then there will be an almost inevitable adverse selection process. What the private insurance companies always want to do is to insure the people who are least likely to need the insurance, and therefore be the most profitable customers. They will do everything they can to discourage the sick and expensive customers, and give them up to the Public option. The ACA has limited the private insurance companies’ abilities to do this, but you can bet they will find a way. So the costs for medical care for those on the Public Option will necessarily be higher than the ones in the private insurance companies. The politicians who want to cut many people out of the health care system will use these statistics to deceptively convince people that publicly funded health care is inherently more costly than private insurance.
If these politicians manage to convince voters with these deceptive number, they will convince voters to vote against Medicare-for-all, thinking it will be more expensive. However, Medicare insurance premiums will be mandatory for all, and there will be no adverse selection problem with Medicare.
Why should Democrats fight for an interim program that is almost certain to sink their vision for the ultimate program? This is why I specifically went to this event with my placard.
April 2, 2017 – 11:00 PM
Maybe there is a way to put in a public option that will be inoculated from the Republicans claim that it is more expensive than private insurance.This needs a lot of discussion, because I am not sure it will work, but it is an idea.
Explicitly say that the public option is intended to siphon off the high risk people from the private insurance market. This will allow the private market to sell their insurance cheaper. Surely the private insurance companies would be glad to not have to insure the most expensive clients. Also, since private insurance has much higher overhead expenses than the public insurance option, these high risk patients will be treated at less expense to the health care system than if they were insured privately. Every time the Republicans would claim that the costs per capita for the public option were higher (if they were) than the private insurance, we could say, “Yes, we know. That was the intention to take the higher cost patients out of the private market. You want to put the expensive patients that the private market does not want back into the private market?”
Perhaps the private insurance companies will bribe encourage the Republicans not to torpedo the public option.
I have posted this article to the Health Over Profit for Everyone – HOPE Facebook page to see what they think of the idea. They were the ones to raise the issue of the deleterious effects of adverse selection on a public option.
I think that Bernie Sanders made a similar remark in all three venues in Massachusetts on March 31, 2017. Here is the one from the address at the Edward Kennedy Institute.
Let’s not forget it was a Democratic President, not a Republican, who deregulated Wall Street and initiated the beginning of disastrous trade policies.
He never mentioned the name of that Democratic President in any of the three venues. Even after he was introduced by Elizabeth Warren who called Bernie Sanders a “great friend” Remember that Elizabeth Warren was the great friend who wouldn’t endorse Bernie Sanders when she had a chance to change the whole tenor of the primary elections. Instead, Elizabeth Warren eventually came out to endorse Hillary Clinton. In many events during the general election, Elizabeth Warren introduced Hillary Clinton by telling us how Hillary was going to be the major fighter for the middle-class. Apparently, neither Elizabeth Warren nor Bernie Sanders can remember the name of the Democratic President who did those things that have sunk the Democratic Party over the last 8 years.
