Biden seeks renewal of warrantless spying powers

Kevin Reed

The Biden administration has mounted a campaign urging Congress to renew provisions of a US law that legalizes secret, warrantless surveillance of individuals and organizations all over the world on the grounds of “national security” interests.

President Joe Biden [AP Photo/Patrick Semansky]

On Tuesday, senior White House officials called on Democrats and Republicans in Congress to reauthorize Title VII of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), especially its Section 702, before it expires on December 31, 2023.

Although the American political and media establishment will not say so, it is well known that FISA Section 702 was passed in 2008 to provide a legal fig leaf for secret US intelligence and FBI surveillance of the electronic communications of people both inside and outside the country.

This secret spying activity, which compels the cooperation of communications service providers and internet and social media platforms in a conspiracy against fundamental Constitutional rights, was exposed in detail for the first time by Edward Snowden in 2013.

As explained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Section 702 authorizes the US government to routinely collect and search the online communications of innocent Americans “without a warrant through what are commonly called ‘upstream’ and ‘PRISM’ (now called ‘downstream’) surveillance.” These activities violate Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures.

The details of PRISM were disclosed by Snowden in a series of documents that indicated it is “the number one source of raw intelligence used for NSA analytic reports.” The program enables the National Security Agency (NSA) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to gather targeted electronic communications from the major internet service providers on demand without a warrant, store them in massive databases and search through them as they see fit.

In a letter dated February 28 to the four leaders of the Senate and House, Attorney General (AG) Merrick Garland and Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Avril Haines say the prompt renewal of the surveillance law is urgent because it has “proven invaluable again and again in protecting American lives and U.S. national security.”

However, the examples given by AG Garland and DNI Haines of the effectiveness of Section 702 are taken straight from the propaganda list of enemies of US imperialism such as “conventional and cyber threats posed by the People’s Republic of China, Russia, Iran and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.”

While the examples provided contain no details of the lives that were supposedly saved through illegal spying, the joint letter does say that Section 702 was used to carry out the “successful operation against Ayman al-Zawahiri in 2022.” That is, the extrajudicial targeted drone assassination of al-Zawahiri in a suburb of Kabul, Afghanistan by the CIA in the early morning of July 31, 2022.

The letter reads like a public relations statement and includes the obligatory justification of the FISA law due to its “comprehensive system” designed by Congress to “ensure this irreplaceable intelligence tool protects the privacy and civil liberties of U.S. persons has worked.”

It says that US citizens need not worry about the illegal surveillance because, “Section 702 can only be used to target individual non-US persons located outside the United States, it may not be directed against Americans at home or abroad, or any person, regardless of nationality, known to be located in the United States.”

However, given the nature of electronic communications as a global phenomenon, such assurances are completely irrelevant, and specifically targeting individuals from other countries, even if it were technically possible, is also a violation of their basic rights in any case.

The Biden administration officials give a sketchy description of the procedures of the FISA law, including the functioning of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) and its annual “comprehensive review of the program.” FISC almost never denies a request for warrantless surveillance—after nearly 40 years of its existence, the court approved 99.998 percent of the applications—effectively making it a rubber stamp for the intelligence agencies.

The letter goes on to say that FISC has consulted with outside advisors on multiple occasions “as it exercises its rigorous and ongoing oversight of the U.S. Government’s implementation of and compliance with these procedures.” AG Garland and DNI Haines also claim that their respective offices “scrutinize all Section 702 collection decisions, review U.S. person queries, and evaluate and take remedial action to address identified incidents of non-compliance.”

However, as numerous oversight and compliance reports have shown, those performing the surveillance have routinely violated the procedures of the FISA law and continued to carry out queries and electronic spying on US citizens, claiming that such crimes were an inadvertent mistake. No one has ever been charged or prosecuted for these violations of the US Constitution. 

There is no doubt that the urgency behind the White House campaign for Congress to act on the renewal of Section 702 is motivated by the geostrategic aims of the Biden administration and connected with the war against Russia in Ukraine, and the intensification of the military provocations against China.

The first version of the FISA law was passed in 1978 following the revelations of the domestic spying operation carried out by the White House of Richard Nixon in the years prior to and during the Watergate crisis that began in 1972. Forty-five years later, the FISA law has been converted into its opposite and has become an indispensable element of the US imperialist military-intelligence apparatus both at home and overseas.

One need only review the biography of White House intelligence director Haines to see that those who are requesting reauthorization of illegal spying under the cover of Section 702 are themselves criminals who belong behind bars. 

Before President Biden nominated Haines for Director of National Intelligence, the first woman to hold the position, she had built up a resume of lawlessness as a legal hack for the US State Department during the Bush administration (2003-2006) and then with the Obama Administration (2008-2010).

In 2013, Haines was selected by Obama as Deputy Director of the CIA where in 2015 she protected the intelligence personnel involved in the hacking of the computers of Senate staffers who were writing the Intelligence Committee’s report on CIA torture. Haines played a major role in redacting the Senate report, allowing only 525 of the 6,700 pages in the document to be released to the public.

During her years in the CIA, Haines worked directly with then-Director John Brennan in selecting individuals for targeted drone killings. She wrote the legal policies, guidelines and procedures for carrying out the drone attacks that resulted in the murder of innocent civilians.

Financial markets signal more interest rates hikes to come

Nick Beams

Financial markets are sending out clear signals that while it may not proceed at the same rapid pace as last year, when there were four consecutive interest rate hikes of 0.75 percentage points (75 basis points), the US Federal Reserve and other major central banks will continue to tighten monetary policy.

The initial gloss put on the rate hike decisions was the need to “fight inflation.” As that fiction is increasingly exposed, the real objective stands out more clearly. That is the further suppression of wages, already well below the rate of price increases, by slowing the economy and inducing a recession if that proves necessary.

In conditions where large sections of the European working class are pressing forward with wage demands in the face of the highest price rises in four decades, European Central Bank (ECB) president Christine Lagarde has made clear the driving force behind the higher interest rate regime of all the central banks.

Last week, as the ECB prepares for its next interest rate increase later this month, she said the central bank was “looking at wages and negotiated wages very, very closely.”

Isabel Schnabel, a German representative on the ECB’s executive board and a spokesperson for what is regarded as the “hard line” of that country’s finance capital sector, said wage growth of 4 to 5 percent—less than half the current rate of European inflation—was “too high to be consistent with our 2 percent inflation target.”

Wage suppression is long-term policy of the ECB with its chief economist Philip Lane remarking last November that “even after energy and pandemic factors fade… wage inflation will be a primary driver of price inflation over the next several years.”

Fed chair Jerome Powell has also made it increasingly clear the suppression of wages is the objective of the US central bank, even as he has acknowledged that pay increases are not the cause of inflation.

Speaking to reporters after the latest meeting of the Fed’s policy-making body at the beginning of February he said: “You don’t see [a wage-price spiral] yet. But the whole point is… once you see it, you have a serious problem. That’s what we can’t allow to happen.”

In other words, strikes and other forms of industrial action by workers to even maintain their living standards must be suppressed at all costs. Here the Fed, as with other central banks, is working in tandem with the trade unions which play the role of industrial policemen.

For a brief period, the financial markets inclined to the view that with the reduction of the rate rises first to 50 basis points and then to 25, the Fed might be easing its rate tightening cycle and the days of cheap money, which have sent stock markets to record highs, may be coming back, at least in some form.

But those hopes have largely been dispelled in light of data which have continued to show that what the Fed characterises as a “tight” labour market remains, along with remarks by members of its policy-making body that it is not done.

On Wednesday the yield, or interest rate, on the benchmark US Treasury bond rose to above 4 percent for the first time since last November in anticipation of higher interest rates from the Fed.  Yields rose again yesterday, along with a rise in the value of the dollar on currency markets.

Rates on the 10-year bond are now at their highest point in around a decade. The yield on the two-year Treasury note rose to 4.89 percent, its highest level in 16 years. Significantly it meant that yield curve inversion—a situation where, contrary to normal experience, the rates at the shorter end of the market are higher than those at the longer end—was at its steepest in 42 years.

Yield curve inversion is widely regarded as an indicator of a developing recession.

In its analysis of the market shift, the Financial Times (FT) noted: “Expectations have changed drastically over the past month after releases of hotter-than-expected US economic data. Investors at the start of February anticipated that rates would peak at just under 5 percent in the second quarter.”

Now the belief is that the Fed rate will rise from its current range of 4.5-4.75 percent to 5.5 percent by the third quarter. A rate of increase of this size is expected to increase unemployment by hundreds of thousands.

The main set of data impacting on market expectations came from the Labor Department which reported early in February that the unemployment rate fell to a new low, “potentially extending upward pressure on wages,” as the Wall Street Journal commented.

At the same time inflation is not receding, with the latest data showing that the Fed’s key measure, the personal consumption expenditure price index, increased in January.

In a recent article, the FT cited comments by an economist, Bill Diviney, at the financial firm ABN Amro, which spelled out the class logic of the policies being pursued by finance capital.

“Given tight labour markets, it is clear that central banks want to see convincing signs that the economy is turning down and subsequently that unemployment will turn up,” he said.

In the recent period, as it has become glaringly obvious, both from statistics and the experiences of life for billions of people the world over, that wages are not the cause of inflation, and there is no wage-price spiral, attempts are being made to put forward the claim that the central bank agenda is a mistake, the result of a misdiagnosis.

Economist Dr Jim Stanford of the Australia Institute has calculated on the basis of Australian Bureau of Statistics data that 69 percent of Australian inflation is due to profit gouging by corporations.  Calculations in other major economies would no doubt show the same results.

His conclusion is that the focus of the Reserve Bank of Australia on wage restraint, and by implication that of every other central bank is “misplaced.”

What flows from such an analysis is that if the facts of economic life are brought to light, then this policy can be corrected.

This is false. The central banks have not made a mistake. They are pursuing a consciously directed class-war agenda against the working class on behalf of the corporate and financial elites.

The handing out of trillions of dollars to the financial markets since the 2008 crisis by the central banks, a process accelerated with the onset of the pandemic in 2020, together with the refusal by the ruling elites to eliminate COVID-19, lit the fires of inflation.

They have been further stoked by massive government war spending in all major countries and profit gouging by the giant food and energy corporations and now the central banks are seeking to make the working class pay for the deepening global crisis through unending cuts in real wages.

The Coup in Israel

Mel Gurtov

Israel has always been touted as America’s most reliable friend in the Middle East, a bastion of democracy in a region dominated by autocracies. Now that picture is fraying as the far-right coalition of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu takes power.

Beholden to the bloc called Religious Zionism, Netanyahu is pursuing a far-right agenda on two fronts: further chipping away at the Palestinians’ fundamental rights of citizenship and property, and pushing for so-called judicial reform. Let’s look more closely at the latter issue, the most dangerous threat today to Israel as a democracy.

Judicial Dismemberment

Arguing that Israel’s Supreme Court is “the most activist court on the planet,” Netanyahu is targeting the judiciary in a way that promises an end to Israel’s democratic experiment, not to mention dismissing plausible charges against him of corruption that are before the high court. His agenda would essentially put the Supreme Court at the mercy of the executive branch.

While Netanyahu argues that the reforms would mean more “balance” between the prime minister, the Knesset (parliament), and the courts, in fact they would remove most checks on Netanyahu’s power. This is because a bare majority of the Knesset — 61 out of 120 seats, which Netanyahu’s coalition has — would be able to override any Supreme Court decision and thereby legislate whatever the far right wants without fear of judicial oversight.

That essential check on the prime minister’s power would be eliminated because Netanyahu would be able to appoint justices and judicial watchdogs—appointments that have traditionally been made by independent bodies.

This descent into authoritarianism has contributed to a new round of violence in the West Bank between Israeli settlers and Palestinians. It’s the usual story: a killing by one group is used to justify a killing by the other.

This latest cycle has led to a vigilante-style “pogrom,” as some are calling it, by settlers, who torched a Palestinian town as revenge for the shooting of two Israelis, which was in revenge for . . . and so on. I have to think that this escalation of violence is linked to the widespread despair among Palestinians and Israelis alike over Netanyahu’s embrace of absolutism.

Dire Warnings

Isaac Herzog, Israel’s president—a largely ceremonial post, but one that does carry moral weight—issued a grave warning January 24. He declared:

“The democratic foundations of Israel, including the justice system, and human rights and freedoms, are sacred, and we must protect them and the values expressed in the Declaration of Independence. The dramatic [judicial] reform, when done quickly without negotiation, rouses opposition and deep concerns among the public.”

He added, “The absence of dialogue is tearing us apart from within, and I’m telling you loud and clear: This powder keg is about to explode. This is an emergency.” Herzog is conferring with all sides, desperately seeking a pause in submission of legislation to the Knesset.

Indeed, it is an emergency. In a biting op-ed in the New York Times, Thomas Friedman quotes Netanyahu’s former attorney general, the man who brought charges of fraud and bribery against Netanyahu, as saying: “If there is no independent judiciary, it’s over. It’s a different system of government.” The ruler will “have prosecutors of his own, legal counsels of his own, judges of his own. And if these people have personal loyalty to him, there is no supremacy of the law. This is a sinkhole. We’ll all be swallowed up by this.”

Ehud Barak, the former prime minister, and army chief of staff, has warned of a “constitutional crisis.” He urged a response in the tradition of Gandhi and Martin Luther King—nonviolent protest, a “duty” when government “breaks the rules of the game and stands contrary to the country’s own fundamental norms and value system.”

Protest

The far-right’s false reform effort amounts to a coup, and about 60 percent of the Israeli public has come to that conclusion. So have former leaders of Mossad, the military, and business.

Massive rallies against the proposed changes have already occurred as the legislation makes its way through the Knesset. This is a big deal: Israel’s position as a democracy in the midst of Middle East autocracies will be gravely undermined, and once again US ties to Israel—already plagued by Israeli repression of the Palestinians over many decades—will be tested.

Friedman asked President Biden for a comment on the coming judicial changes in Israel and got this response:

“The genius of American democracy and Israeli democracy is that they are both built on strong institutions, on checks and balances, on an independent judiciary. Building consensus for fundamental changes is really important to ensure that the people buy into them so they can be sustained.”

Very diplomatic intervention, but hardly a stirring cry for resistance. No US administration has ever gone beyond verbal chastisement of Israel for violations of human rights or undemocratic practices.

As of today, the Israeli opposition is fighting an uphill battle, as the ruling coalition is determined to steamroller the judicial legislation through parliament. The Labor Party leader expressed the opposition’s anger, saying:

“dialogue is only possible with a complete freezing of legislation accepted by all parts of the coalition, and preserving the red lines of an independent legal system in Israel. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis didn’t take to the streets to end up as a stamp of kosher certification for [the far right’s] principles. This is the time to escalate the protest, until democracy prevails.”

The global context for Netanyahu’s Israel is the rise of illiberal democracies elsewhere—in Erdogan’s Turkey and Orban’s Hungary, for example, and in Bolsonaro’s Brazil and Trump’s America.

These regimes, with democratic facades that hide assaults on courts, the press, and free elections, reflect aggrandizing political power at the expense of civil liberties, independent institutions, and civil society.

That is what Israelis who are taking to the streets are really fighting for. They should have not only our personal support but the support of liberals and progressives in Congress.

Greece’s worst train disaster kills at least 40

Robert Stevens

The worst train disaster in Greek history has claimed the lives of at least 40 people with dozens of people still unaccounted for.

A passenger train, on route from Athens to Thessaloniki, crashed head-on into a freight train shortly before midnight Tuesday, outside the town of Tempe in central Greece. The passenger train was reportedly travelling at between 140 km/h (87 mph) and 160 km/h (99 mph), and the freight train at 100 km/h.

Debris of trains lie on the rail lines after a collision in Tempe, about 376 kilometres (235 miles) north of Athens, near Larissa city, Greece, Wednesday, March 1, 2023. A passenger train carrying hundreds of people, including many university students returning home from holiday, collided at high speed with an oncoming freight train before midnight on Tuesday. [AP Photo/Giannis Papanikos]

The passenger train was travelling north after leaving Larissa station, and the freight train travelling south from Thessaloniki to Larissa. After the collision, the mangled train fell into a field alongside the tracks.

Eight rail employees were among the dead, including the two drivers of the freight train and the two drivers of the passenger train, according to Greek Railroad Workers Union President Yannis Nitsas.

The fire brigade said Wednesday that 66 of the estimated 85 people injured in the collision had been taken to hospitals in Larissa. Six are in intensive care.

The rescue operation required 150 firefighters, using 17 vehicles and four cranes. Forty ambulances were mobilised. Around 200 people who suffered minor injuries or were unharmed were taken by bus to Thessaloniki.

Many of the around 350 passengers onboard were students returning home to Thessaloniki—Greece’s second city has a large university population—after holidays during Greek Orthodox lent. Greek Reporter said, “The head of the emergency unit in Larissa hospital, Apostolos Komnos, said most of the dead were young people, in their 20’s.”

On collision the first four carriages of the passenger train were derailed. The first two carriages caught fire and were 'almost completely destroyed,” and “no longer exist”. said regional governor of the Thessaly region, Kostas Agorastos.

With first two carriages crushed, the third carriage—the restaurant car—vaulted over them and caught fire. There were reports of passengers being flung through train windows. Some bodies were found as far as 40 metres from the railway line.

Survivor Angelos told AFP, “It felt like an earthquake… I saw scenes of horror in the first carriages. I'm still shaking.”

Another survivor, Stergios Minenis, told Reuters, “We heard a big bang… We were turning over in the carriage until we fell on our sides and until the commotion stopped. Then there was panic. Cables, fire. The fire was immediate. As we were turning over we were being burned. Fire was right and left.

“For 10, 15 seconds it was chaos. Tumbling over, fires, cables hanging, broken windows, people screaming, people trapped.”

“I've never seen anything like this in my entire life. It's tragic. Five hours later, we are finding bodies,” a rescuer told AFP.

Chief coroner at Larissa’s general hospital Roubini Leontari said Wednesday that 35 bodies are “right now are in the morgue while the transfer of other bodies is continuing… Some bodies were completely carbonized and are unrecognizable, for the most part it is young people”.

The BBC reported, “The local fire department previously said the train car which caught fire hit temperatures of 1,300C (2,370F), while Larissa's mayor Apostolos Kalogiannis has indicated some of those who died would only be identifiable via DNA testing.”

Greece’s previous worst train crash occurred in 1972, when people died in a head-on collision between two trains, also near Larissa. When the final death toll is made, it could top the 80 people who died in a high-speed derailment in Spain in 2013, after a train overturned near Santiago de Compostela. The deaths already exceed by far the last comparable head-on collision on the European rail network in 2016, in Bad Aibling in Germany killed 12 people. 

Greece’s New Democracy (ND) conservative government has declared three days of national mourning.

The political fallout was immediate with Minister for Infrastructure and Transport Kostas Karamanlis resigning Wednesday afternoon. The heads of the privatised Hellenic Railways Organisation and its project branch ERGOSE also stood down.

It is not possible at this stage to identify the immediate causes of the tragedy, but is it known that both trains had been travelling towards each other on the same line for several kilometres. The 27.3 kilometre section of track in which the crash occurred was double-tracked and had automatic controls installed, but switching and signaling were still being controlled manually.

A 59-year-old station master was arrested in Larissa and charged with involuntary manslaughter by negligence, unintentionally causing mass bodily harm by negligence and dangerous interference with transport. The station master denies any wrongdoing and reportedly said the accident was down to possible technical failure. The station master took up his position 40 days ago, after a year’s training.

Whatever the immediate causes, pinning responsibility on a single individual is a cover-up.

Many understand that the causes run much deeper in a society in which basic services and infrastructure has been massively degraded or destroyed over the past 15 years of scorched-earth austerity carried out by successive governments, including SYRIZA (Coalition of the Radical Left). Thessaloniki’s student associations have demanded a full investigation with no “cover-up”. On Wednesday evening protesters gathered outside the headquarters of Hellenic Trains in Syggrou Avenue in the capital Athens. One banner read, “It was not a mistake, nor an unfortunate moment, their profits are placed above life”. Another read, “Our dead, their profits”.

The protest was brutally attacked by riot police using stun grenades and tear gas, with the demonstration moving on towards parliament.

As the attack was taking place Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said in a televised address, “Everything shows that the drama was, sadly, mainly due to a tragic human error.”

Commenting on the dire state of the rail network between Greece’ s two largest cities, train drivers' association president Kostas Genidounias told ERT, “Nothing works. Everything happens manually throughout the Athens-Thessaloniki network. Neither the indicators, nor the traffic lights, nor the electronic traffic control work.” Nikos Tsikalakis, leader of the main rail workers union, told Radio ENA that there are only 750 rail employees nationally, far below the required 2,000 plus.

The Guardian reported, “On measures including overall fatalities per kilometre, Greece’s rail safety record has been the worst in the EU over the past decade, according to statistics from the EU railway agency – although this is easily skewed by its small network, about 2% of the UK’s size. A high proportion of deaths have been track workers rather than passengers.”

During half of that period, Greece’s former state rail network and rolling stock company have been under private ownership, the result of an ongoing €55 billion euro mass sell-off of state assets demanded by the European Union, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and financial institutions during an austerity offensive carried out by successive governments led by ND, the social democratic PASOK and SYRIZA (in office from 2015-19).

In June 2010, as savage austerity measures worsened, rail workers held a nationwide 24-hour strike against a proposed privatisation of 49 percent of the state rail network, TrainOSE, which was to launch a three-year programme of privatisations in exchange for onerous loan terms from the EU and IMF.

The privatisation of TrainOSE eventually took place under SYRIZA in 2017 with Ferrovie Dello Stato Italian—the Italian state-owned railway holding company—buying Greece’s railway for just €45 million euros. This was followed by the newly privatised TrainOSE paying an equally knockdown purchase price of €22 million for the state rolling stock maintenance business EESSTY in 2018. More than five years after privatisation, safety systems are still not fully automated on Greece’s antiquated rail network.

There have been many warnings that a serious incident could take place as a result of cuts and a failure to implement the required technology. Less than a month ago, referring to two recent train accidents on the same line, a circular from the train drivers union to its members read, “We are not going to wait for an “upcoming train disaster” to see them [government, rail company] shed crocodile tears…”

Google Black Founders Fund Africa 2023

Application Deadline: 26th March 2023

About the Award: Through the Google for Startups Black Founders Fund Africa, we are supporting early-stage Black-founded startups and startups that are benefitting the Black community on the continent. We want to bridge the existing fundraising gap for Black startup founders in Africa’s fast-growing technology landscape. This non-dilutive $3 million fund is allocated across a pipeline of 50 investable startups in Africa. The fund is open to all startups that meet the criteria, with priority given to Google for Startups Accelerator and Partner program alumni. This fund will be given along with mentorship support and Google platform credits to help the startups grow.

Type: Entrepreneurship

Eligibility: A startup that is:

• Headquartered in Africa or has a legal presence on the continent
• Building for Africa and a global market
• Creating jobs, has growth potential to raise more funding, and making an impact

With a founding team that is:

• Diverse, with at least one Black C-level founding member
• Directly supporting the Black community

Technical requirements:

• Technology startups with a live product in market or business where technology is core to their ability to scale (not for consultancies or not-for-profits)
• Compatibility with Google products—our products can accelerate their growth

Eligible Countries: Botswana, Cameroun, Cote D’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zimbabwe.

Number of Awards: Not specified

Value of Award: Each startup will receive either $50,000 or $100,000. Funding varies according to each startup’s product development stage, current needs, and how much they’ve already raised.

How to Apply: To apply, visit the program page at https://goo.gle/ApplyforBFFAfrica and learn more about the eligibility criteria and how to apply. Applications are open now and will close on March 26!

• It is important to go through all application requirements in the Award Webpage (see Link below) before applying.

Visit Award Webpage for Details

The Cost of the Nation’s Endless Wars

John W. Whitehead

“Autocrats only understand one word: no, no, no. No you will not take my country, no you will not take my freedom, no you will not take my future… A dictator bent on rebuilding an empire will never be able to ease the people’s love of liberty. Brutality will never grind down the will of the free.”

—President Biden

Oh, the hypocrisy.

To hear President Biden talk about the Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, you might imagine that Putin is the only dictator bent on expanding his military empire through the use of occupation, aggression and oppression.

Yet the United States is no better, having spent much of the past half-century policing the globe, occupying other countries, and waging endless wars.

What most Americans fail to recognize is that these ongoing wars have little to do with keeping the country safe and everything to do with propping up a military industrial complex that has its sights set on world domination.

War has become a huge money-making venture, and the U.S. government, with its vast military empire, is one of its best buyers and sellers.

America’s part in the showdown between Russia and the Ukraine has already cost taxpayers more than $112 billion and shows no signs of abating.

Clearly, it’s time for the U.S. government to stop policing the globe.

The U.S. military reportedly has more than 1.3 million men and women on active duty, with more than 200,000 of them stationed overseas in nearly every country in the world.

American troops are stationed in Somalia, Iraq and Syria. In Germany, South Korea and Japan. In Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Oman. In Niger, Chad and Mali. In Turkey, the Philippines, and northern Australia.

Those numbers are likely significantly higher in keeping with the Pentagon’s policy of not fully disclosing where and how many troops are deployed for the sake of “operational security and denying the enemy any advantage.” As investigative journalist David Vine explains, “Although few Americans realize it, the United States likely has more bases in foreign lands than any other people, nation, or empire in history.”

Incredibly, America’s military forces aren’t being deployed abroad to protect our freedoms here at home. Rather, they’re being used to guard oil fields, build foreign infrastructure and protect the financial interests of the corporate elite. In fact, the United States military spends about $81 billion a year just to protect oil supplies around the world.

The reach of America’s military empire includes close to 800 bases in as many as 160 countries, operated at a cost of more than $156 billion annually. As Vine reports, “Even US military resorts and recreation areas in places like the Bavarian Alps and Seoul, South Korea, are bases of a kind. Worldwide, the military runs more than 170 golf courses.”

This is how a military empire occupies the globe.

After 20 years of propping up Afghanistan to the tune of trillions of dollars and thousands of lives lost, the U.S. military may have finally been forced out, but those troops represent just a fraction of our military presence worldwide.

In an ongoing effort to police the globe, American military service people continue to be deployed to far-flung places in the Middle East and elsewhere.

This is how the military industrial complex, aided and abetted by the likes of Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and others, continues to get rich at taxpayer expense.

Yet while the rationale may keep changing for why American military forces are policing the globe, these wars abroad aren’t making America—or the rest of the world—any safer, are certainly not making America great again, and are undeniably digging the U.S. deeper into debt.

War spending is bankrupting America.

Although the U.S. constitutes only 5% of the world’s population, America boasts almost 50% of the world’s total military expenditure, spending more on the military than the next 19 biggest spending nations combined.

In fact, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety.

The American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth.

Since 2001, the U.S. government has spent more than $4.7 trillion waging its endless wars.

Having been co-opted by greedy defense contractors, corrupt politicians and incompetent government officials, America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $32 million per hour.

In fact, the U.S. government has spent more money every five seconds in Iraq than the average American earns in a year.

Future wars and military exercises waged around the globe are expected to push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053.

Talk about fiscally irresponsible: the U.S. government is spending money it doesn’t have on a military empire it can’t afford.

Unfortunately, even if we were to put an end to all of the government’s military meddling and bring all of the troops home today, it would take decades to pay down the price of these wars and get the government’s creditors off our backs.

As investigative journalist Uri Friedman puts it, for more than 15 years now, the United States has been fighting terrorism with a credit card, “essentially bankrolling the wars with debt, in the form of purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds by U.S.-based entities like pension funds and state and local governments, and by countries like China and Japan.”

War is not cheap, but it becomes outrageously costly when you factor in government incompetence, fraud, and greedy contractors. Indeed, a leading accounting firm concluded that one of the Pentagon’s largest agencies “can’t account for hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of spending.”

Unfortunately, the outlook isn’t much better for the spending that can be tracked.

A government audit found that defense contractor Boeing has been massively overcharging taxpayers for mundane parts, resulting in tens of millions of dollars in overspending. As the report noted, the American taxpayer paid:

$71 for a metal pin that should cost just 4 cents; $644.75 for a small gear smaller than a dime that sells for $12.51: more than a 5,100 percent increase in price. $1,678.61 for another tiny part, also smaller than a dime, that could have been bought within DoD for $7.71: a 21,000 percent increase. $71.01 for a straight, thin metal pin that DoD had on hand, unused by the tens of thousands, for 4 cents: an increase of over 177,000 percent.

That price gouging has become an accepted form of corruption within the American military empire is a sad statement on how little control “we the people” have over our runaway government.

Mind you, this isn’t just corrupt behavior. It’s deadly, downright immoral behavior.

Americans have thus far allowed themselves to be spoon-fed a steady diet of pro-war propaganda that keeps them content to wave flags with patriotic fervor and less inclined to look too closely at the mounting body counts, the ruined lives, the ravaged countries, the blowback arising from ill-advised targeted-drone killings and bombing campaigns in foreign lands, or the transformation of our own homeland into a warzone.

That needs to change.

The U.S. government is not making the world any safer. It’s making the world more dangerous. It is estimated that the U.S. military drops a bomb somewhere in the world every 12 minutes. Since 9/11, the United States government has directly contributed to the deaths of around 500,000 human beings. Every one of those deaths was paid for with taxpayer funds.

The U.S. government is not making America any safer. It’s exposing American citizens to alarming levels of blowback, a CIA term referring to the unintended consequences of the U.S. government’s international activities. Chalmers Johnson, a former CIA consultant, repeatedly warned that America’s use of its military to gain power over the global economy would result in devastating blowback.

The 9/11 attacks were blowback. The Boston Marathon Bombing was blowback. The attempted Times Square bomber was blowback. The Fort Hood shooter, a major in the U.S. Army, was blowback.

The U.S. military’s ongoing drone strikes will, I fear, spur yet more blowback against the American people.

The war hawks’ militarization of America—bringing home the spoils of war (the military tanks, grenade launchers, Kevlar helmets, assault rifles, gas masks, ammunition, battering rams, night vision binoculars, etc.) and handing them over to local police, thereby turning America into a battlefield—is also blowback.

James Madison was right: “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” As Madison explained, “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes… known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.”

We are seeing this play out before our eyes.

The government is destabilizing the economy, destroying the national infrastructure through neglect and a lack of resources, and turning taxpayer dollars into blood money with its endless wars, drone strikes and mounting death tolls.

Clearly, our national priorities are in desperate need of an overhauling.

At the height of its power, even the mighty Roman Empire could not stare down a collapsing economy and a burgeoning military. Prolonged periods of war and false economic prosperity largely led to its demise. As historian Chalmers Johnson predicts:

The fate of previous democratic empires suggests that such a conflict is unsustainable and will be resolved in one of two ways. Rome attempted to keep its empire and lost its democracy. Britain chose to remain democratic and in the process let go its empire. Intentionally or not, the people of the United States already are well embarked upon the course of non-democratic empire.

This is the “unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex” that President Dwight Eisenhower warned us more than 50 years ago not to let endanger our liberties or democratic processes.

Eisenhower, who served as Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, was alarmed by the rise of the profit-driven war machine that emerged following the war—one that, in order to perpetuate itself, would have to keep waging war.

We failed to heed his warning.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, war is the enemy of freedom.

As long as America’s politicians continue to involve us in wars that bankrupt the nation, jeopardize our servicemen and women, increase the chances of terrorism and blowback domestically, and push the nation that much closer to eventual collapse, “we the people” will find ourselves in a perpetual state of tyranny.