America’s national priorities are badly misplaced. Our country spends, with almost no debate, nearly $1 trillion a year on the military while at the same time ignoring massive problems at home.
Defense Contractors Are Bilking the American People
The Atlantic: Two Men Running to Stay Out of Prison
Liz Cheney warns US ‘sleepwalking into dictatorship
Robert Kagan: A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.
…We can expect more of this when the war against the “deep state” begins in earnest. According to Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), there is a whole cabal determined to undermine American security, a “Uniparty” of elites made up of “neoconservatives on the right” and “liberal globalists on the left” who are not true Americans and therefore do not have the true interests of America at heart. Can such “anti-American” behavior be criminalized? It has in the past and can be again.
So, the Trump administration will have many avenues to persecute its enemies, real and perceived. Think of all the laws now on the books that give the federal government enormous power to surveil people for possible links to terrorism, a dangerously flexible term, not to mention all the usual opportunities to investigate people for alleged tax evasion or violation of foreign agent registration laws. The IRS under both parties has occasionally looked at depriving think tanks of their tax-exempt status because they espouse policies that align with the views of the political parties. What will happen to the think-tanker in a second Trump term who argues that the United States should ease pressure on China? Or the government official rash enough to commit such thoughts to official paper? It didn’t take more than that to ruin careers in the 1950s.
Their panic just shows how out of touch they are with the working class! As for Kagan, there’s so much more that I could say, but for now I’ll just roll my eyes! 🙄
Because of Joe Biden’s career-long consistent neoconservatism — he never met a U.S. invasion or coup that he didn’t didn’t like and didn’t assist to happen — he is losing all three of America’s current wars, and each one of them (each of which he inherited from the prior Administrations, because at least since 1980 all U.S. Presidents have been neocons) is a proxy-war by a U.S. client-state or “colony” against an enemy that the U.S. Government has long wanted to “regime-change” (i.e., to take control over):
Biden’s America is now losing three wars simultaneously.
H/T: Unorthodox Truth
Amid the sordid crimes of the American Empire, running from the Mexican-American War under Polk to the Forever Wars that have marked the 21st century, there have been a few brave souls who have stood as the nation’s conscience. These dissidents have repeatedly mounted principled opposition to plunder, torture, and conquest. The roll call of anti-imperialist heroes includes Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, W.E.B. Du Bois, Helen Keller, Martin Luther King Jr.,
The Surprisingly Durable Myth of Donald Trump, Anti-ImperialistNoam Chomsky,Bernie Sanders, and Barbara Lee.
Related:
Trump’s Actual Record in Office (From Anti-imperialist Perspective)
Nick Fischer is Adjunct Research Fellow of the School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies at Monash University, Melbourne. He answered some questions about his book Spider Web: The Birth of American Anticommunism.
Q&A with Spider Web author Nick Fischer (archived)
To counteract the Soviet influence in Europe, at the end of WWII the United States created a network of pro-American elites. Thus, the CIA financed the Congress for Cultural Freedom in which many European intellectuals participated. Among the most distinguished ones were Raymond Aron and Michel Crozier. Responsible for designing an anti-communist ideology welcomed by the conservative right as well as the socialist and reformist left of Europe during the Cold War, these networks were reactivated by the Bush administration. Today, they are the European sounding board of American conservatives.
When the CIA financed European Intellectuals
Related:
Tom Braden, Real-Life Dad Behind ‘Eight Is Enough’ and ‘Crossfire’ Pundit, Dies
As a CIA official in the early 1950s, Mr. Braden was head of the International Organizations Division, which promoted anti-communism by secretly funding groups including the AFL-CIO and the National Student Association, sending the Boston Symphony Orchestra on a European tour and publishing Encounter magazine. After Ramparts magazine exposed the CIA’s system of funding anti-communist front organizations all over the globe, Mr. Braden defended the program in an article in a 1967 issue of the Saturday Evening Post. He said the secret program was his idea.
Foundations representing nearly every former president from Herbert Hoover to Barack Obama released a joint letter on Thursday calling on Americans to engage in civil political discourse, and to remember that tolerance and respect are key to peaceful coexistence.
Presidential centers issue rare call to maintain civil discourse, protect democracy
CHIUL, Guatemala − Life in Bartolo Báten’s village has been defined by corruption: A teacher who can’t get a job at the school until she pays a bribe. A water project that runs out of money before the pipes reached town. Sick residents who can’t afford the medicine that’s available elsewhere.
Insurgent candidate tells Guatemalans: Stay, don’t go to the U.S. This time, they’re listening. (archived)
Related:
Seven Decades After Guatemala Coup, Bernardo Arévalo Sees a Dramatic Rise (Will Freeman, CFR)
Arévalo and Semilla are centrists—but in a country where politics habitually skews right, they are often described as center-left. “Semilla has a social democratic element, but its program is centrist, and it also has some center-right followers,” said Lucas Perelló, a political scientist who has spent time studying the party’s formation. Arévalo says he wants to gradually universalize existing social assistance programs to include a greater share of poor Guatemalans, reduce the cost of medicines and healthcare, and link isolated parts of the country through new infrastructure—doable tasks, given Guatemala’s exceptionally low share of debt as GDP, and necessary ones, given the country’s soaring poverty and malnutrition rates.
On security issues, another major concern for Guatemalans, Arévalo promises to increase state presence in crime hotspots, reclaim jails from gangs, and use intelligence-gathering to dismantle mafias. He says Bukele’s anti-gang strategy is not applicable to Guatemala. He is also critical of human rights abuses in Venezuela and Nicaragua and Putin’s war on Ukraine and has no stated plans to recognize China over Taiwan. Asked for a leader he admires, he named the ex-president, José Pepe Mujica, of Uruguay, where he was born during his father’s exile.
Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is still going strong at the box office, returning to the #2 spot, after one week in third place, still behind heavy Mattel Barbie but now up to $264 million gross just in USA.
Press coverage continues constant, including new praise and firm complaints (often in the same article). Here’s one hit, from Stars & Stripes no less, claiming the film really underplays the role of female scientists on bomb project.
When First Foreign Reporter Arrived In Hiroshima – and Then Got Kicked Out of Japan
Related:
How Oppenheimer and other 1945 leaders saw the future — and what really happened
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 
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