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Democrats, Neoconservatives Unite In Support Of Strikes In Syria As Trump Launches Attack
Amidst growing calls for greater military action in Syria in response to an alleged chemical attack, the United States military launched more than fifty Tomahawk missiles at the al-Shayrat airfield near Homs. Democrats along with neoconservatives, who long pushed for U.S. military forces to topple President Bashar al Assad's regime, advocated for military force in response to alleged chemical attack.
Apr 07, 2017
Amidst growing calls for greater military action in Syria in response to an alleged chemical attack, the United States military launched more than fifty Tomahawk missiles at the al-Shayrat airfield near Homs. Democrats along with neoconservatives, who long pushed for U.S. military forces to topple President Bashar al Assad's regime, advocated for military force in response to alleged chemical attack.
Former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton called for strikes on airfields in Syria. "Assad had an air force and that air force is the cause of most of the civilian deaths as we've seen over the years and as we saw again in the last few days."
"I really believe we should have and still should take out his airfields and prevent him from being able to use them to bomb innocent people and drop sarin gas on them," Clinton added.
David Wade, who was the chief of staff for John Kerry when he was secretary of state, also called for airstrikes on "Assad regime targets" that "could inject urgency into the struggling international effort to bring about a political solution to the Syrian crisis through peace talks."
"Russia and Iran have stubbornly stuck with Assad, but Assad is a burden in their balance sheets, and they might be willing to engage in a diplomatic process that creates safe zones or humanitarian corridors or maybe over time builds towards some kind of managed transition," Wade suggested.
Colin Kahl, former deputy assistant to President Barack Obama, asserted the "upside of a strike" would be "that it rattles Assad and encourages the regime and its backers to move toward a ceasefire or a settlement out of fear of additional strikes. But that will only work if the administration is willing to conduct additional strikes as necessary, and if it has a comprehensive diplomatic play ready to go capitalize on the opportunity." But Kahl acknowledged there was a "non-trivial risk" of mission creep and Trump would need a plan that went beyond "discrete military action."
Like Clinton, Jessica Ashooh, a scholar with the pro-intervention think tank, the Atlantic Council, wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post urging "targeted, punitive strikes against the Assad regime to degrade his capability to harm his own people." The strikes could be used to reignite the "stalled peace process."
Democratic lawmakers reacted to the attack by complaining that Trump did not consult Congress first. However, the objection did not include any statements against the missile attack itself.
Neoconservative Elliott Abrams, a former official in President George W. Bush's administration, said, "Obama did nothing at all year after year to save the lives of Syrians. Now Trump has to match his rhetoric with something concrete."
"If President Trump takes appropriate action against Assad, this #NeverTrumper will of course support him. He's the president, not merely 'Trump,'" Bill Kristol, a neoconservative and editor at large for The Weekly Standard, proclaimed on Twitter.
Neoconservative James Woolsey, a former CIA director, said on CNN, "Assad is kind of Iran's poodle in this whole world, and I think it would be really important to plan--whether they carry it out is another serious matter--but to plan for a major military strike against the parts of the Iranian infrastructure that are headed toward nuclear weapons."
"On their way in or their way out, if our forces do use airpower against Iran, it would be possible to use airpower to knock out some of the Syrian facilities, too," Woolsey added.
Woolsey would have Trump seize the moment to opportunistically engage in the kind of attack neoconservatives have been dreaming about since they launched their Project for a New American Century (PNAC) in the late 1990s and openly advocated for global U.S. military domination.
Few were as pleased to see Trump attack Assad as Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham were. They said, "We salute the skill and professionalism of the U.S. armed forces who carried out tonight's strikes in Syria. Acting on the orders of their commander-in-chief, they have sent an important message: the United States will no longer stand idly by as Assad, aided and abetted by [Vladimir] Putin's Russia, slaughters innocent Syrians with chemical weapons and barrel bombs."
Earlier, Graham said he did not think Trump should seek authorization from Congress. He said he did not want Congress to "screw it up" like they did in 2013. "My advice to the president is: 'Just do it.'"
But as journalist Vijay Prashad documented, how does the world definitively know what happened in Khan Shaykhun?
Nearly all media reports source claims related to the origin of the attack to "opposition activists," who are against Assad and have wanted the U.S. to take more significant measures to overthrow Assad for years.
There are multiple instances in the war, where concerns have been raised about al Qaida affiliates possessing chemical weapons. When Syrian military have claimed to be hit with toxic gas, the world has shrugged because they have no sympathy for regime soldiers. They neglected to grapple with the stark problem of jihadist groups with chemical weapons in Syria.
"The international community must urge a thorough investigation of these events before rushing either to a forensic judgment about what happened and to a response--particularly a military response--in retaliation," Prashad urged. "Sober heads need to prevail. War is rarely the answer. Particularly when we don't as yet know the question."
However, despite an investigation in its nascent stages, world leaders have determined there is no dispute. Assad did it, even if it makes no sense from a strategic standpoint to gas civilians when winning a war and give the opposition a massive propaganda victory.
The Obama administration, along with Democrats and Republicans, faced a similar moment on August 21, 2013, when a sarin attack occurred just outside of Damascus. The administration believed the attack was committed by the Syrian government. Obama was forced to confront remarks he made about a "red line" that, if crossed, would change U.S. policy.
But in 2015, journalist Seymour Hersh exposed the flaws in the official narrative around the attack and linked the sarin back to Turkish intelligence, which shipped chemical weapons components to "anti-government rebels."
Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern wrote:
In Antakya, senior Turkish, Qatari and U.S. intelligence officials were said to be coordinating plans with Western-sponsored rebels who were told to expect an imminent escalation in the fighting due to "a war-changing development." This, in turn, would lead to a U.S.-led bombing of Syria, and rebel commanders were ordered to prepare their forces quickly to exploit the bombing, march into Damascus, and remove the Assad government.
A year earlier, The New York Times reported that the Antakya area had become a "magnet for foreign jihadis, who are flocking into Turkey to fight holy war in Syria." The Times quoted a Syrian opposition member based in Antakya, saying the Turkish police were patrolling this border area "with their eyes closed."
A bill, the Authorization for the Use of Military Force Against the Government of Syria to Respond to Use of Chemical Weapons, was drafted and pushed by the Obama administration in the Senate and the House. Overwhelmingly, citizens were opposed to increased intervention. Representative Alan Grayson estimated the "margin among Democrats right now in the House [was] four-to-one against. The margin among Republicans [was] over 10-to-one against."
There was opposition across party lines with Democrats like Senator Tom Udall contending pursuing this policy would move the U.S. toward "greater involvement in the Syrian civil war and an increasing regional conflict."
"This is a very complicated sectarian civil war. Some of the rebels share our values and want an open society. Many others are allied with al Qaida and a greater threat to the United States than President Assad ever was. U.S. military involvement, no matter the limits at this point, will likely only pull us towards greater involvement, and with no clear endgame," Udall stated.
A deal negotiated by the U.S. and Russia to turn over chemical weapons stockpiles for destruction and to sign on to the Chemical Weapons Convention averted proposed military operations. It also spared Obama defeat in the House.
The same arguments against intervention, which moved the public to oppose war in 2013, remain valid. In fact, the public should want to know for certain that al Qaida-linked militants, which control the area where the attack occurred, were not responsible before the U.S. further retaliates against Assad and draws the U.S. deeper into the Syrian conflict.
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Congress Sinks to New Depths
The sad state of American democracy – from the presidential race to Congress – is easy to lament as something beyond correction, but change is possible if the electorate starts taking citizenship seriously
Oct 19, 2016
We might have thought the Congress of the United States hit rock bottom in 2011, when it nearly drove the country into a sovereign debt default. It was averted in time, but Standard and Poor's still downgraded America's debt rating. Or was rock bottom the government shutdown of 2013? Or was the low point reached in the summer of 2016, when the Senate refused to perform its constitutional duty to consider a Supreme Court nominee, and left a court vacancy in the midst of several important judicial decisions?
No, Congress achieved its nadir of dysfunction at the end of September, with how it handled its first veto override of Barack Obama's presidency. The bill in question is the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA), which narrows the scope of foreign sovereign immunity from the jurisdiction of U.S. courts: a state involved in the death of U.S persons becomes liable for court claims. The bill was intended as relief for the next of kin of those killed in the September 11, 2001 terror attacks.
Because the likeliest target of a lawsuit over the 9/11 attacks was the government of Saudi Arabia, the administration had already issued a veto threat back in April: rescinding sovereign immunity would immensely complicate foreign relations, could subject the United States to similar suits, and might result in the Saudis pulling their estimated $750 billion of investments out of American financial markets.
Congress was not about to take this affront to its institutional majesty lying down, and accordingly overrode Obama's veto by the overwhelming votes of 348 to 77 in the House and 97 to1in the Senate.
Instantly, buyer's remorse set in, accompanied by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's and House Speaker Paul Ryan's plaintive wails that it was all Obama's fault for not telling them the implications of JASTA forcefully enough - despite the fact that the administration had already threatened a veto for precisely the reasons that now weighed so heavily upon the members, and despite the fact that the whole thing was Congress's bright idea, not Obama's.
And, incidentally, when have the Republicans, who control both chambers, ever refrained from doing something because Obama thought it was a bad idea? Typically, he is a reverse barometer for their course of action. One suspects Obama's actions or lack of them were irrelevant to Congress's instant regret.
After the override vote, did the House and Senate leadership offices receive calls from some well-placed entities on Wall Street reminding them that the Saudis' pulling their investments out of New York might kill the golden goose, as well as dampen the financial services industry's appetite to attend fundraisers? I'll leave further speculation to the reader.
This is not the place to analyze the merits or demerits of JASTA. Perhaps the moral and jurisprudential arguments override the principle of sovereign immunity - but Congress obviously never weighed the balance of those interests in a deliberative fashion, as it was constitutionally intended to do. Instead, members wanted cheap credit for associating themselves with 9/11 victims, and all other considerations be damned.
Selling the Saudis Weapons
The cherry on the cake of this tragicomedy is the fact that only a few days before approving JASTA, the Senate agreed to a $1.15 billion sale of weapons to the very same government of Saudi Arabia that it now wants to subject to lawsuits on the grounds that it is presumptively involved in terrorism!
JASTA is only the tip of the legislative iceberg. Congress simply hasn't done its job: it has not agreed to a budget resolution - the most basic blueprint for spending - since 2009, and the last time all appropriations bills were enacted by Oct. 1 (the beginning of the new fiscal year) was in 1996. Partly this is just laziness, and the growing preference of members to pontificate via press release and sound byte rather than doing the public business.
But it is hard to interpret some of it as anything other than malign intent. Congress, like any halfway awake newspaper reader, has known for the last six months that the Zika virus was an immanent menace. Yet funding for public health measures were held hostage until late September by the insistence that the measure could only pass when paired with cuts to Planned Parenthood: in other words, poorer women would not be allowed to obtain fetal screening for potential health problems, including Zika.
The Zika funding only passed when it became clear even to the most addled member of Congress that the majority of the public preferred action on public health to ideological grandstanding.
It is all too easy for the American people to throw up their hands and sigh, "Congress! There go the two parties again! Like kids in a schoolyard!" Notice how the criticism, like rain, falls on the just and the unjust alike, implying that the sad state of Congress is inevitable. There are three answers to this criticism.
First, the American people need to take greater responsibility for the people they elect. When they send a representative to Congress, it is a serious business bound up with maintenance of constitutional government. The notion of "sending a message" or "shaking things up" by inflicting a Louis Gohmert, or a Steve King, or an Alan Grayson on the country, is immature and unworthy of a serious body politic. Congress is a legislative body, not WrestleMania.
Second, there is plenty of blame to go around on a bipartisan basis - note that the veto override votes in both Houses were overwhelming. And, yes, politicians of both parties are beholden to corporate special interests. Nevertheless, the source of Congress's extreme dysfunction lies predominantly in one party.
Self-Fulfilling Prophecies
For decades, the Republican Party has been damning government - established by the very Constitution that the party claims to revere. They promise to clean up the mess in Washington, and then proceed to throw sand in the gears of any possibility of orderly governance.
The resulting increased disarray then becomes their rationale to be reelected: a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is apparently a convincing argument for millions of low-information voters who want to shrink government to a size that it can be drowned in a bathtub, but also want their Social Security checks delivered on time, and with the customary cost-of-living increase.
Finally, democracies, like civilization itself, are inherently fragile. The self-brainwashing of millions of Americans by habitual exposure to the right-wing media-entertainment complex has replaced social trust with resentment, vitriol, and the perpetual hunt for scapegoats. This process has been faithfully reproduced in the actions of Congress.
At one time the inequitable political treatment of different parts of the country suffering from natural disasters would not have occurred to anyone. But with the seating of the Tea Party faction in Congress in 2011, that changed. Tornadoes in Joplin, Missouri, and Tuscaloosa, Alabama, were promptly addressed, but Red State Republicans dragged their feet in addressing 2012's Superstorm Sandy. Why? It affected predominantly Democratic constituencies.
The same syndrome repeated itself this year: September's inundations in Louisiana were speedily tackled, but Republicans only grudgingly included funding to solve the Flint, Michigan water crisis to avoid being blamed for another government shutdown, even though the contamination had been a nationally known issue for a year.
This kind of endemic bad faith within our national legislature provides abundant evidence that the problem in our governing institutions is not confined to nominating the occasional lunatic to be a presidential candidate. The rot extends to Congress, the focus of the very first article of the Constitution and, as James Madison believed, the premier instrument of popular self-government.
It is well past time to clean up Congress. The first step is for the electorate to understand that choices have consequences, and that voting is a serious responsibility - not just for president, but down the ballot as well.
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"Print the Money": Trump's "Reckless" Proposal Echoes Franklin and Lincoln
“Print the money” has been called crazy talk, but it may be the only sane solution to a $19 trillion federal debt that has doubled in the last 10 years. The solution of Abraham Lincoln and the American colonists can still work today.
May 14, 2016
"Reckless," "alarming," "disastrous," "swashbuckling," "playing with fire," "crazy talk," "lost in a forest of nonsense": these are a few of the labels applied by media commentators to Donald Trump's latest proposal for dealing with the federal debt. On Monday, May 9th, the presumptive Republican presidential candidate said on CNN, "You print the money."
The remark was in response to a firestorm created the previous week, when Trump was asked if the US should pay its debt in full or possibly negotiate partial repayment. He replied, "I would borrow, knowing that if the economy crashed, you could make a deal." Commentators took this to mean a default. On May 9, Trump countered that he was misquoted:
People said I want to go and buy debt and default on debt - these people are crazy. This is the United States government. First of all, you never have to default because you print the money, I hate to tell you, okay? So there's never a default.
That remark wasn't exactly crazy. It echoed one by former Federal Reserve ChairmanAlan Greenspan, who said in 2011:
The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default.
Paying the government's debts by just issuing the money is as American as apple pie - if you go back far enough. Benjamin Franklin attributed the remarkable growth of the American colonies to this innovative funding solution. Abraham Lincoln revived the colonial system of government-issued money when he endorsed the printing of $450 million in US Notes or "greenbacks" during the Civil War. The greenbacks not only helped the Union win the war but triggered a period of robust national growth and saved the taxpayers about $14 billion in interest payments.
But back to Trump. He went on to explain:
I said if we can buy back government debt at a discount - in other words, if interest rates go up and we can buy bonds back at a discount - if we are liquid enough as a country we should do that.
Apparently he was referring to the fact that when interest rates go up, long-term bonds at the lower rate become available on the secondary market at a discount. Anyone who holds the bonds to maturity still gets full value, but many investors want to cash out early and are willing to take less. As explained on MorningStar.com:
If a bond with a 5% coupon and a ten-year maturity is sold on the secondary market today while newly issued ten-year bonds have a 6% coupon, then the 5% bond will sell for $92.56 (par value $100).
But critics still were not satisfied. In an article titled "Why Donald Trump's Debt Proposal Is Reckless," CNNMoney said:
[T]he federal government doesn't have any money to buy debt back with. The U.S. already has $19 trillion in debt. Trump's plan would require the U.S. Treasury to issue new debt to buy old debt.
Trump, however, was not talking about borrowing the money. He was talking about printing the money. CNNMoney's response was:
That can cause inflation (or even hyperinflation), and send prices of everything from food to rent skyrocketing.
The Hyperinflation that Wasn't
CNN was not alone in calling the notion of printing our way out of debt recklessly inflationary. But would it be? The Federal Reserve has already bought $4.5 trillion in assets, $2.7 trillion of which were federal securities, simply by "printing the money."
When the Fed's QE program was initiated, critics called it recklessly hyperinflationary. But it did not even create the modest 2% inflation the Fed was aiming for. QE was combined with ZIRP - zero interest rates for banks - encouraging borrowing for speculation, driving up the stock market and real estate. But the Consumer Price Index, productivity and jobs barely budged.
While the Fed has stopped its QE program for the time being, the European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan have jumped in, buying back massive amounts of their own governments' debts by simply issuing the money. There too, the inflation needle has barely budged. As noted on CNBC in February:
Central banks have been pumping money into the global economy without a whole lot to show for it other than sharply higher stock prices, and even that has been on the downturn for the past year.
Growth remains anemic, and worries are escalating that the U.S. and the rest of the world are on the brink of a recession, despite bargain-basement interest rates and trillions in liquidity.
Helicopter Money Goes Mainstream
European economists and central bankers are wringing their hands over what to do about a flagging economy despite radical austerity measures and increasingly unrepayable debt. One suggestion gaining traction is "helicopter money" - just issue money and drop it directly into the economy in some way. In QE as done today, the newly issued money makes it no further than the balance sheets of banks. It does not get into the producing economy or the pockets of consumers, where it would need to go in order to create the demand necessary to stimulate productivity. Helicopter money would create that demand. Proposed alternatives include a universal national dividend; zero or low interest loans to local governments; and "people's QE" for infrastructure, job creation, student debt relief, etc.
Simply buying back federal securities with money issued by the central bank (or the U.S. Treasury) would also get money into the real economy, if Congress were allowed to increase its budget in tandem. As observed in The Economist on May 1, 2016:
Advocates of helicopter money do not really intend to throw money out of aircraft. Broadly speaking, they argue for fiscal stimulus--in the form of government spending, tax cuts or direct payments to citizens--financed with newly printed money rather than through borrowing or taxation. Quantitative easing (QE) qualifies, so long as the central bank buying the government bonds promises to hold them to maturity, with interest payments and principal remitted back to the government like most central-bank profits.
As Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, wrote in response to the debt ceiling crisis in November 2010:
There is no reason that the Fed can't just buy this debt (as it is largely doing) and hold it indefinitely. If the Fed holds the debt, there is no interest burden for future taxpayers. The Fed refunds its interest earnings to the Treasury every year. Last year the Fed refunded almost $80 billion in interest to the Treasury, nearly 40 percent of the country's net interest burden. And the Fed has other tools to ensure that the expansion of the monetary base required to purchase the debt does not lead to inflation.
An even cleaner solution would be to simply void out the debt held by the Fed. That was the 2011 proposal of then-presidential candidate Ron Paul for dealing with the debt ceiling crisis. As his proposal was explained in Time Magazine, today the Treasury pays interest on its securities to the Fed, which returns 90% of these payments to the Treasury. Despite this shell game of payments, the $1.7 trillion in US bonds owned by the Fed is still counted toward the debt ceiling. Paul's plan:
Get the Fed and the Treasury to rip up that debt. It's fake debt anyway. And the Fed is legally allowed to return the debt to the Treasury to be destroyed.
Congressman Alan Grayson, a Democrat, also endorsed this proposal.
Financial author Richard Duncan makes a strong case for going further than just monetizing existing debt. He argues that under current market conditions, the US could actually rebuild its collapsing infrastructure by just printing the money, without causing price inflation. Prices go up when demand (money) exceeds supply (goods and services); and with automation and the availability of cheap labor in vast global markets today, supply can keep up with demand for decades to come. Duncan observes:
The combination of fiat money and Globalization creates a unique moment in history where the governments of the developed economies can print money on an aggressive scale without causing inflation. They should take advantage of this once-in-history opportunity . . . .
Returning the Power to Create Money to the People
The right of government to issue its own money was one of the principles for which the American Revolution was fought. Americans are increasingly waking up to the fact that the vast majority of the money supply is no longer issued by the government but is created by private banks when they make loans; and that with that power goes enormous power over the economy itself.
The issue that should be debated is one that dominated political discussion in the 19thcentury but that few candidates are even aware of today: should creation and control of the money supply be public or private? Donald Trump's willingness to transgress the conservative taboo against public money creation is a welcome step in opening that debate.
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