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Category: War and Peace

Anti-Personnel Landmines: U.S. President Joe Biden Said He Wouldn’t, But He Did

Bruce Gerencser 8 Comments
joe biden warmonger

President Joe Biden seems hellbent on stoking the flames of war, both in Ukraine/Russia and Palestine before he leaves office. It is hard not to conclude that Biden is a warmonger — one who urges or attempts to stir up war. Instead of trying to broker peace between Ukraine and Russia, Biden stokes the war by giving Ukraine increasingly sophisticated offensive weapons. U.S. armaments have slaughtered countless Russian soldiers — many of whom are conscripts. Recently, Biden permitted Ukraine to use U.S.-provided missiles in Russia. Russia’s response was to shoot a new kind of ICBM missile armed with a conventional warhead into Ukraine. These missiles could be armed with nuclear warheads.

Anti-personnel land mines are indiscriminate weapons that kill and maim civilians, and especially children, for generations after wars end. These weapons cannot distinguish between civilians and combatants as required by international humanitarian law.

Hichem Khadhraoui, executive director of the Center for Civilians in Conflict

In 2022, Biden released the following statement about changes in U.S. policy on anti-personnel landmines:

Today, the Biden-Harris Administration is announcing important policy changes to U.S. Anti-Personnel Landmine policy. After conducting a comprehensive policy review, the United States is joining the vast majority of countries around the world in committing to limit the use of anti-personnel landmines (APL).These changes reflect the President’s belief that these weapons have disproportionate impact on civilians, including children, long after fighting has stopped, and that we need to curtail the use of APL worldwide. They also complement longstanding U.S. leadership in the clearance of landmines and other explosive remnants of war.
 
The new commitment announced today will align U.S. APL policy outside of the Korean Peninsula with the key requirements of the Ottawa Convention – the international treaty prohibiting the use, stockpiling, production, and transfer of APL – which has more than 160 parties, including all of our NATO Allies. This means that the United States will:

  • Not develop, produce, or acquire APL;
  • Not export or transfer of APL, except when necessary for activities related to mine detection or removal, and for the purpose of destruction;
  • Not use APL outside of the Korean Peninsula;
  • Not assist, encourage, or induce anyone, outside of the context of the Korean Peninsula, to engage in any activity that would be prohibited by the Ottawa Convention; and
  • Undertake to destroy all APL stockpiles not required for the defense of the Republic of Korea.

Additionally, the United States will undertake diligent efforts to pursue materiel and operational solutions to assist in becoming compliant with and ultimately acceding to the Ottawa Convention, while ensuring our ability to respond to contingencies and meet our alliance commitments. 

The new policy announced today represents a further step to advance the humanitarian aims of the Ottawa Convention, and to bring U.S. practice in closer alignment with a global humanitarian movement that has had a demonstrated positive impact in reducing civilian casualties from APL.   

Even as the United States takes this further step, the unique circumstances on the Korean Peninsula and the U.S. commitment to the defense of the Republic of Korea preclude the United States from changing anti-personnel landmine policy on the Korean Peninsula at this time.  As the United States commits to continuing our diligent efforts to pursue material and operational alternatives to APL, the security of our ally the Republic of Korea will continue to be a paramount concern.

World Leader in Humanitarian Mine Action

The United States is the world’s single largest financial supporter of steps to mitigate the harmful consequences of landmines and explosive remnants of war around the world, including through land clearance and medical rehabilitation and vocational training for those injured by these weapons.  Since the United States Humanitarian Mine Action Program was established in 1993, the United States has provided over $4.2 billion in aid in over 100 countries for conventional weapons destruction programs. Through this assistance, the United States has:

  • Helped 17 countries become free from the danger of landmines;
  • Provided assistive devices and other rehabilitation services to over 250,000 people in 35 countries through the U.S. Agency for International Development-managed Leahy War Victims Fund.

This vital U.S. assistance has helped post-conflict countries consolidate peace and set the stage for reconstruction and development.  Clearance efforts and victim assistance programs return land and infrastructure to productive use and assist in the rehabilitation and reintegration into society of survivors of mine and explosive remnants of war incidents.
 
— end of statement

This statement is little more than the Biden Administration’s attempt to gaslight the American people; presenting the United States as being aligned with 160 other nations in banning anti-personnel mine use. Of course, the U.S. is NOT a signatory to the Ottawa Convention! Biden wants to tell the rest of the world what to do, but reserves the right to use anti-personnel mines.

Ukraine is a signatory of the Ottawa Convention. Explain to me, then, Biden casting aside what he said in 2022 and sending anti-personnel mines to Ukraine to use in their war against Russia. Explain to me, then, Ukraine’s use of these mines in direct contravention of the Convention they signed in 2022.

Politico reports:

Human rights groups are fiercely criticizing President Joe Biden’s decision to give Ukraine anti-personnel land mines as it fights off a Russian invasion.

The decision reverses a pledge Biden made to limit the use of such land mines in 2022. It comes as Biden prepares to leave office and reflects mounting U.S. concerns over Russia’s battlefield gains in eastern Ukraine.

But although the type of land mine the Biden team is handing to Ukraine has certain safeguards, rights groups nonetheless warned that the weapons pose special and long-term dangers.

“Anti-personnel land mines are indiscriminate weapons that kill and maim civilians, and especially children, for generations after wars end,” said Hichem Khadhraoui, executive director of the Center for Civilians in Conflict advocacy group. “These weapons cannot distinguish between civilians and combatants as required by international humanitarian law.”

Ben Linden, a top official with Amnesty International USA, said, “It is devastating, and frankly shocking, that President Biden made such a consequential and dangerous decision just before his public service legacy is sealed for the history books.”

The Biden administration defended the move on multiple grounds. It noted that the types of mines it is providing are “non-persistent,” meaning they become inert after a time.

“They are electrically fused and require battery power to detonate. Once the battery runs out, they will not detonate,” said a U.S. official, who was granted anonymity to candidly explain the administration’s choice.

The Biden administration in July 2023 began to supply Ukraine with cluster munitions that had been held in large numbers in U.S. military stockpiles since the end of the Cold War, but which the United States had previously been barred from sending. But it held off on sending anti-personnel land mines, such as the ones it is sending now, which can be effective in stopping massed infantry assaults that Ukraine is likely to face from thousands of North Korean troops that have arrived in the Kursk region of Russia, but can be left on the battlefield for generations, potentially long after the conflict is over.

More than 50,000 square miles of Ukraine needs to be searched for land mines and explosives, according to Ukrainian government estimates, an area larger than England.

Biden in 2022 issued a new policy to bar the U.S. use or transfer of anti-personnel mines outside of the Korean peninsula. This came after then-President Donald Trump in 2020 undid Obama-era restrictions on U.S. land mine uses.

The latest decision underscores growing unease within the Biden administration over the desperate battlefield situation as Russia makes slow and costly but incremental gains against Kyiv’s forces in eastern Ukraine.

The land mine decision follows another Biden reversal: He recently agreed to let Ukraine use American-supplied long-range missiles for strikes deep inside Russia following months of pressure from Ukraine and its strongest supporters in the West.

In providing the mines, Biden said to Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, “Hey Volod. How ya doing, buddy? Hunter says, Hi! Please don’t use these in Russia or Ukrainian civilian areas. Promise, pinky swear?” Zelenskyy replied, with fingers crossed behind his back, “I promise, Uncle Joe.”

Here’s what I know about war. Nations start with high ideals, promising to adhere to international law such as the Geneva Conventions and making appeals to just war theory. The longer wars go on and political and military leaders become more desperate for victory, international law falls by the wayside and warring nations use any and every means to win — including dropping atomic bombs on Japanese civilians in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, firebombing citizens in Dresden and Tokyo, and dropping napalm on helpless Vietnamese.

The United States has a long, continuous history of military intervention, violence, and bloodshed. Biden’s actions are unsurprising. He is just another president in a long line of presidents who think war begets peace. This is a delusional lie; one that warmongers use to convince themselves that they are good people.

Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.

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You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.

Are Pro-Palestinan College Protesters Anti-Semetic?

Bruce Gerencser 5 Comments
college protests texas

By Howard Winant, Used with Permission from Common Dreams

Like the Black movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement, the movement for a free Palestine is global, not just a U.S. domestic movement. Central to the movement is opposition to the war on the civilian population of Gaza, rightly labeled genocidal. This combines with ongoing opposition to the slower-moving but still brutal Israeli offensive against Palestinians in the West Bank.

Yes, the destruction of Gaza was in reaction to the unprecedented and unjustifiable October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas (rightly labeled terrorist) on Israeli civilians. But there is no equivalence between these two criminal acts, at least not in quantitative terms. To equate them is to engage in ideological posturing, not credible political analysis. Indeed the parallel between the terms “genocide” and “terrorism” is a lot more intelligible.

I have been told by family members I have in Israel that “all Palestinians are terrorists” (full disclosure: I am Jewish and the child of survivors of the Shoah), but I don’t think they really believe that; they are expressing their rage rather than thinking deeply. I’m sure some Palestinians would say that Zionism equals genocide, but I don’t think they really believe that either. They are expressing their rage rather than thinking deeply.

The student-led movement for a free Palestine is not antisemitic. Thousands of Jewish students have joined it. Hundreds of rabbis and cantors too, as well as leaders of Jewish organizations and prominent Jews across U.S. society and beyond. Despite fervent attempts to stigmatize anti-Zionism as anti-Jewish, despite strident efforts on Israel’s part to merge its national identity with Judaism itself, or indeed with Jewish culture and ethnicity, despite the wildly inappropriate calls from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the U.S. to crack down on student protest, Israel does not represent all Jewish people or types of Jewishness. So the movement for a free Palestine is not a movement to destroy Israel and expel Jews. Everybody knows that the Israeli Jewish population is not going anywhere, any more than the Palestinians are. The phrase “from the river to the sea” is frequently used both by both Palestinians and Israelis. The movement for a free Palestine and the Israeli peace movement (small but important) should demand that that language be rearticulated so that it applies to both peoples.

Efforts to repress the student movement for a free Palestine will never succeed. It is too big and too broad. It is part of a worldwide struggle for justice. It is a working-class and poor people’s movement. It is an anti-racist movement and a feminist movement. It is an anti-colonialist movement, connected to the long struggle against European empires and the U.S. empire. It closely resembles the movements against South African apartheid and the Black Lives Matter movement, among many others.

It is not an accident that attacks on the movement have concentrated on repressing student voices. As they have so many times before, students have shown that they are our leaders in struggles for freedom, equality, and democracy. As has been true so many times before, opposition to the movement is concentrated among the wealthy and the right wing. It is wealthy donors who play the most significant role in opposing freedom for Palestinians, pressuring universities to prohibit pro-Palestinian speech and seeking to curtail nonviolent student protests. It is right-wing politicians who have become the new “snowflakes,” madly canceling students and faculty for the “antisemitism” of criticizing Israel. Not just the students, but the university itself is their frequent target.

Notably, universities were already under sustained attack before October 7, indeed long before that awful day. Universities are one of the most central institutions in society. They have not yet effectively been brought under the control of the wealthy, of anti-democratic governments and political parties, of racist and sexist power structures, and of repressive religiously based groups. This is because universities are institutions where knowledge and culture are produced, where democratic debate happens, where the wisdom of the past is preserved and studied, and where youth are able to develop their ideas and skills. Even though attacking universities is attacking their own children and destroying the futures of their own country, U.S. holders of wealth and power are willing to carry out those attacks, because they feel threatened by their own children’s views of the world. They fear the future they themselves are creating: one of permanent warfare, global heating and ecocide, and planetary apartheid. They hate being reminded, especially by their own kids, of their hypocrisy and violence.

The movement for freedom in Palestine shows us what a different future looks like. The movement demands university divestment from the Israeli warfare state and from Israeli apartheid. It calls out the oligarchs who threaten their own type of divestment, threatening to withdraw their funding from Penn, or Harvard, or the University of California, my own professional home. Let them go! Let them support Bob Jones University or Bari Weiss’ ridiculous University of Austin. Let them subsidize notorious political hacks like Christopher Rufo and political poseurs like Rep. Elise Stefanik (D-N.Y.). By and large rich donors’ funding is based on a hunger for prestige, not on any commitment to education. They seek tax write-offs. They subsidize their businesses through their donations. They hardly care about poor or working-class students, and even less about the humanities, arts, and social sciences, which are the fields where most undergraduate students major, and where the future of civilizational knowledge resides. Higher education is a public trust; it cannot be entrusted to the rich. As elsewhere in the world, it should be financed by the public, not greedy and blind billionaires.

The movement for freedom in Palestine is a new kind of movement, because it is not siloed. Students supporting freedom in Palestine have learned from Palestinians. Many have noted the connections between the Black Lives Matter movement and Palestinian freedom struggles. For example, in 2014 after the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Palestinians who had long experience with the repressive police tactics of the Israelis taught Black protesters how to resist militarized police repression. (Meanwhile the Anti-Defamation League ferried U.S. cops to Israel to learn torture techniques practiced upon Palestinians.)

Movements resisting U.S. ecocide, like the Oceti Sakowin water protectors in the Standing Rock reservation, as well as anti-pipeline protesters and other climate justice activists, have learned from the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank defending their land against settlers who cut down their olive groves and destroy their water wells. U.S. feminists have learned from Palestinian women, like the then 17-year-old Ahed Tamimi, who in 2018 slapped an Israeli soldier as he tried to enter her family’s house in the occupied West Bank town of Nabi Saleh. U.S. LGBTQ activists have repudiated Israeli “pinkwashing” to express their support for Palestinians. U.S. doctors and nurses are supporting their Palestinian counterparts, reacting in horror as Israel has destroyed every hospital and health facility in Gaza. U.S. educators are supporting Palestinian scholars and teachers as Israel has blown up every university in Gaza, and has razed schools in the West Bank. People in the U.S. who take their religion seriously, rather than using it to score political points, recognize that Israeli policies imposing mass starvation would make Jesus weep. And Rabbi Hillel, and the Prophet Mohammed, and Mohandas K. Gandhi too. What would Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. say about Israeli policy in Gaza?

The movement for the freedom of Palestine, led by students, has emerged at long last as the leading political current in the worldwide struggle for freedom in general. Just as the student-led Black freedom movement led the global freedom struggle in the years after World War II, joined by anti-colonial movements and the student-led anti-Vietnam War movement, the movement for the freedom of Palestine has taken its place in the struggle’s leadership today. Or course the movement has its flaws: There are unsavory allies like Hamas and Iran whose politics hardly coincide with those of the student movement; Jewish students get harassed on campus just as Muslims do; not only Islamophobia but antisemitism lives on in the U.S., notably on the Christian right where the Quran is defiled and Rev. Hagee praises Hitler as an avatar of the Rapture.

But we have to look at the big picture: Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. Israel/Palestine can become a safe home for both Jews and Arabs. The student movement for the freedom of Palestine teaches us that the people of the world demand social justice everywhere, including in the Middle East. Mass murder solves nothing.

Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.

Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.

You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.

Is World War III Looming on The Horizon?

Bruce Gerencser 4 Comments
WW III

— By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies, Naked Capitalism, Are We Stumbling Into World War III in Ukraine?

President Biden began his State of the Union speech with an impassioned warning that failing to pass his $61 billion dollar weapons package for Ukraine “will put Ukraine at risk, Europe at risk, the free world at risk.” But even if the president’s request were suddenly passed, it would only prolong, and dangerously escalate, the brutal war that is destroying Ukraine.

The assumption of the U.S. political elite that Biden had a viable plan to defeat Russia and restore Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders has proven to be one more triumphalist American dream that has turned into a nightmare. Ukraine has joined North Korea, Vietnam, Somalia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and now Gaza, as another shattered monument to America’s military madness.

This could have been one of the shortest wars in history, if President Biden had just supported a peace and neutrality agreement negotiated in Turkey in March and April 2022 that already had champagne corks popping in Kyiv, according to Ukrainian negotiator Oleksiy Arestovych. Instead, the U.S. and NATO chose to prolong and escalate the war as a means to try to defeat and weaken Russia.

Two days before Biden’s State of the Union speech, Secretary of State Blinken announced the early retirement of Acting Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, one of the officials most responsible for a decade of disastrous U.S. policy toward Ukraine.

Two weeks before the announcement of Nuland’s retirement at the age of 62, she acknowledged in a talk at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) that the war in Ukraine had degenerated into a war of attrition that she compared to the First World War, and she admitted that the Biden administration had no Plan B for Ukraine if Congress doesn’t cough up $61 billion for more weapons.

….

The imperative must be to chart a path back from this hopeless but ever-escalating war of attrition to the negotiating table that the U.S. and Britain upended in April 2022 – or at least to new negotiations on the basis that President Zelenskyy defined on March 27, 2022, when he told his people, “Our goal is obvious: peace and the restoration of normal life in our native state as soon as possible.”

Instead, on February 26, in a very worrying sign of where NATO’s current policy is leading, French President Emmanuel Macron revealed that European leaders meeting in Paris discussed sending larger numbers of Western ground troops to Ukraine.

Macron pointed out that NATO members have steadily increased their support to levels unthinkable when the war began. He highlighted the example of Germany, which offered Ukraine only helmets and sleeping bags at the outset of the conflict and is now saying Ukraine needs more missiles and tanks. “The people that said “never ever” today were the same ones who said never ever planes, never ever long-range missiles, never ever trucks. They said all that two years ago,” Macron recalled. “We have to be humble and realize that we (have) always been six to eight months late.”

Macron implied that, as the war escalates, NATO countries may eventually have to deploy their own forces to Ukraine, and he argued that they should do so sooner rather than later if they want to recover the initiative in the war.

The mere suggestion of Western troops fighting in Ukraine elicited an outcry both within France–from extreme right National Rally to leftist La France Insoumise–and from other NATO countries. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz insisted that participants in the meeting were “unanimous” in their opposition to deploying troops. Russian officials warned that such a step would mean war between Russia and NATO.

But as Poland’s president and prime minister headed to Washington for a White House meeting on February 12, Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski told the Polish parliament that sending NATO troops into Ukraine “is not unthinkable.”

Macron’s intention may have been precisely to bring this debate out into the open and put an end to the secrecy surrounding the undeclared policy of gradual escalation toward full-scale war with Russia that the West has pursued for two years.

Macron failed to mention publicly that, under current policy, NATO forces are already deeply involved in the war. Among many lies that President Biden told in his State of the Union speech, he insisted that “there are no American soldiers at war in Ukraine.”

However, the trove of Pentagon documents leaked in March 2023 included an assessment that there were already at least 97 NATO special forces troops operating in Ukraine, including 50 British, 14 Americans and 15 French. Admiral John Kirby, the National Security Council spokesman, has also acknowledged a “small U.S. military presence” based in the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv to try to keep track of thousands of tons of U.S. weapons as they arrive in Ukraine.

But many more U.S. forces, whether inside or outside Ukraine, are involved in planning Ukrainian military operations; providing satellite intelligence; and play essential roles in the targeting of U.S. weapons. A Ukrainian official told the Washington Post that Ukrainian forces hardly ever fire HIMARS rockets without precise targeting data provided by U.S. forces in Europe.

All these U.S. and NATO forces are most definitely “at war in Ukraine.” To be at war in a country with only small numbers of “boots on the ground” has been a hallmark of 21st Century U.S. war-making, as any Navy pilot on an aircraft-carrier or drone operator in Nevada can attest. It is precisely this doctrine of “limited” and proxy war that is at risk of spinning out of control in Ukraine, unleashing the World War III that President Biden has vowed to avoid.

The United States and NATO have tried to keep the escalation of the war under control by deliberate, incremental escalation of the types of weapons they provide and cautious, covert expansion of their own involvement. This has been compared to “boiling a frog,” turning up the heat gradually to avoid any sudden move that might cross a Russian “red line” and trigger a full-scale war between NATO and Russia. But as NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg warned in December 2022, “If things go wrong, they can go horribly wrong.”

We have long been puzzled by these glaring contradictions at the heart of U.S. and NATO policy. On one hand, we believe President Biden when he says he does not want to start World War III. On the other hand, that is what his policy of incremental escalation is inexorably leading towards.

U.S. preparations for war with Russia are already at odds with the existential imperative of containing the conflict. In November 2022, the Reed-Inhofe Amendment to the FY2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) invoked wartime emergency powers to authorize an extraordinary shopping-list of weapons like the ones sent to Ukraine, and approved billion-dollar, multi-year no-bid contracts with weapons manufacturers to buy 10 to 20 times the quantities of weapons that the United States had actually shipped to Ukraine.

Retired Marine Colonel Mark Cancian, the former chief of the Force Structure and Investment Division in the Office of Management and Budget, explained, “This isn’t replacing what we’ve given [Ukraine]. It’s building stockpiles for a major ground war [with Russia] in the future.”

So the United States is preparing to fight a major ground war with Russia, but the weapons to fight that war will take years to produce, and, with or without them, that could quickly escalate into a nuclear war. Nuland’s early retirement could be the result of Biden and his foreign policy team finally starting to come to grips with the existential dangers of the aggressive policies she championed.

….

Reuters Moscow Bureau reported that Russia spent months trying to open new negotiations with the United States in late 2023, but that, in January 2024, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan slammed that door shut with a flat refusal to negotiate over Ukraine.

The only way to find out what Russia really wants, or what it will settle for, is to return to the negotiating table. All sides have demonized each other and staked out maximalist positions, but that is what nations at war do in order to justify the sacrifices they demand of their people and their rejection of diplomatic alternatives.

Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.

Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.

You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.

Is it Time for Congress to Resurrect the Truman Committee on War Profiteering?

Bruce Gerencser 3 Comments
war profiteering

By Bret Wilkins, Used with Permission from Common Dreams

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders has a novel way to stop military-industrial complex profiteers from “bilking the American people”—and it’s actually over 80 years old.

In an article published Tuesday in The Atlantic, Sanders (I-Vt.) called for a revived Truman Committee—a World War II-era bipartisan congressional panel “designed to rein in defense contractors, closely oversee military contracts, and take back excessive payments.”

“America’s national priorities are badly misplaced,” the senator asserted. “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. We apparently have unlimited amounts of money for nuclear weapons, fighter planes, bombs, and tanks. But somehow we can’t summon the resources to provide healthcare for all, childcare, affordable housing, and other basic needs.”

“The United States remains the world’s dominant military power,” the senator continued. “Alone, we account for roughly 40% of global military spending; the U.S. spends more on its military than the next 10 countries combined, most of whom are allies. Last year, we spent more than three times what China spent on its military.”

Sanders noted that nearly half of the approximately $900 billion the U.S. will allocate for military spending this year “will go to a handful of huge defense contractors enjoying immense profits,” with many weapons companies profiting handsomely off sales to Ukraine, which is struggling to repel a two-year Russian invasion.

In what Sanders called a “particularly egregious example” of war profiteering, RTX Corporation—formerly Raytheon—has increased the price of its Stinger shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles by 600% to $400,000 since the early 1990s.

The senator continued:

It’s not just RTX. The stocks of American arms manufacturers have surged: Northrop Grumman’s share price increased 40% by the end of 2022, and Lockheed Martin’s by 37%. In 2022, the federal government awarded Lockheed Martin more than $45 billion in unclassified contracts. The company returned about one-quarter of that amount to shareholders through dividends and stock buybacks, and paid its CEO $25 million.

“There’s a name for all this: war profiteering. There’s a solution too,” Sanders stressed. “Congress should resurrect the Truman Committee.”

“These companies’ greed is not just fleecing the American taxpayer; it’s killing Ukrainians,” he contended. “A contractor padding its profit margins means that fewer weapons reach Ukrainians on the frontlines. Corporate greed is helping [Russian President] Vladimir Putin.”

Sanders highlighted the U.S. Department of Defense’s six consecutive failed audits, including the most recent one last December, in which the Pentagon was unable to fully account for nearly two-thirds of its $3.8 trillion in assets.

“It should therefore come as no surprise that defense contractors routinely overcharge the Pentagon—and the American taxpayer—by nearly 40-50%,” he wrote. “One company, TransDigm, overcharged by 4,451%.”

“But despite billions in fines for fraud or misconduct, the contracts never seem to dry up,” Sanders said. “That may be down to America’s system of legalized bribery: A share of the profits from these lucrative contracts will flow back to politicians who gladly accept millions in campaign contributions to make sure the defense budget is always flush.”

“According to the watchdog group OpenSecrets, defense contractors spent nearly $140 million lobbying the federal government last year,” he noted. “Millions of dollars more go directly to members of Congress in campaign contributions from companies, individuals, and political action committees linked to the defense industry.”

“Congress must put an end to this form of corporate welfare,” Sanders argued. “The best way to do that is to reinstate the Truman Committee on war profiteering so that we can end corporate greed in the defense industry. A windfall profits tax could help achieve this end as well.”

Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.

Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.

You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.

Biden Continues to Preach Up the Myth that War is Good for the U.S. Economy

Bruce Gerencser 8 Comments
war is hell

We send Ukraine equipment sitting in our stockpiles. And when we use the money allocated by Congress, we use it to replenish our own stores… equipment that defends America and is made in America: Patriot missiles for air defense batteries made in Arizona; artillery shells manufactured in 12 states across the country — in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas; and so much more.

— U.S. President Joe Biden

William Hartung, a writer for Salon, writes:

Joe Biden wants you to believe that spending money on weapons is good for the economy. That tired old myth — regularly repeated by the political leaders of both parties — could help create an even more militarized economy that could threaten our peace and prosperity for decades to come. Any short-term gains from pumping in more arms spending will be more than offset by the long-term damage caused by crowding out new industries and innovations, while vacuuming up funds needed to address other urgent national priorities.

The Biden administration’s sales pitch for the purported benefits of military outlays began in earnest last October, when the president gave a rare Oval Office address to promote a $106-billion emergency allocation that included tens of billions of dollars of weaponry for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. MAGA Republicans in Congress had been blocking the funding from going forward and the White House was searching for a new argument to win them over. The president and his advisers settled on an answer that could just as easily have come out of the mouth of Donald Trump: jobs, jobs, jobs.

Lest you think that Biden’s economic pitch for such aid was a one-off event, Politico reported that, in the wake of his Oval Office speech, administration officials were distributing talking points to members of Congress touting the economic benefits of such aid. Politico dubbed this approach “Bombenomics.” Lobbyists for the administration even handed out a map purporting to show how much money such assistance to Ukraine would distribute to each of the 50 states. And that, by the way, is a tactic companies like Lockheed Martin routinely use to promote the continued funding of costly, flawed weapons systems like the F-35 fighter jet. Still, it should be troubling to see the White House stooping to the same tactics.

Yes, it’s important to provide Ukraine with the necessary equipment and munitions to defend itself from Russia’s grim invasion, but the case should be made on the merits, not through exaggerated accounts about the economic impact of doing so. Otherwise, the military-industrial complex will have yet another never-ending claim on our scarce national resources.

While it can be argued that war is good for the military-industrial complex, filling the coffers of arms manufacturers with billions and billions of dollars, we must ask whether this sort of spending is good for Americans as a whole. Taxpayers directly fund the U.S. military machine. The Israeli bombs falling on innocent Palestinians are bought and paid for by you and me. When we see gruesome pictures of war carnage and death, we must not avert our eyes from our handiwork. We are to blame. Until we force elected officials to change spending priorities, the U.S. government will continue to spend over a trillion dollars a year on defense and security. The total amount of money is limited, so what we fund reveals our priorities; our moral and ethical values.

Hartung adds:

The official story about military spending and the economy starts like this: the massive buildup for World War II got America out of the Great Depression, sparked the development of key civilian technologies (from computers to the internet), and created a steady flow of well-paying manufacturing jobs that were part of the backbone of America’s industrial economy.

There is indeed a grain of truth in each of those assertions, but they all ignore one key fact: the opportunity costs of throwing endless trillions of dollars at the military means far less is invested in other crucial American needs, ranging from housing and education to public health and environmental protection. Yes, military spending did indeed help America recover from the Great Depression but not because it was military spending. It helped because it was spending, period. Any kind of spending at the levels devoted to fighting World War II would have revived the economy. While in that era, such military spending was certainly a necessity, today similar spending is more a question of (corporate) politics and priorities than of economics.

In these years Pentagon spending has soared and the defense budget continues to head toward an annual trillion-dollar mark, while the prospects of tens of millions of Americans have plummeted. More than 140 million of us now fall into poor or low-income categories, including one out of every six children. More than 44 million of us suffer from hunger in any given year. An estimated 183,000 Americans died of poverty-related causes in 2019, more than from homicide, gun violence, diabetes, or obesity. Meanwhile, ever more Americans are living on the streets or in shelters as homeless people hit a record 650,000 in 2022.

Perhaps most shockingly, the United States now has the lowest life expectancy of any industrialized country, even as the International Institute for Strategic Studies reports that it now accounts for 40% of the world’s — yes, the whole world’s! — military spending. That’s four times more than its closest rival, China. In fact, it’s more than the next 15 countries combined, many of which are U.S. allies. It’s long past time for a reckoning about what kinds of investments truly make Americans safe and economically secure — a bloated military budget or those aimed at meeting people’s basic needs.

What will it take to get Washington to invest in addressing non-military needs at the levels routinely lavished on the Pentagon? For that, we would need presidential leadership and a new, more forward-looking Congress. That’s a tough, long-term goal to reach, but well worth pursuing. If a shift in budget priorities were to be implemented in Washington, the resulting spending could, for instance, create anywhere from 9% more jobs for wind and solar energy production to three times as many jobs in education.

As for the much-touted spinoffs from military research, investing directly in civilian activities rather than relying on a spillover from Pentagon spending would produce significantly more useful technologies far more quickly. In fact, for the past few decades, the civilian sector of the economy has been far nimbler and more innovative than Pentagon-funded initiatives, so — don’t be surprised — military spinoffs have greatly diminished. Instead, the Pentagon is desperately seeking to lure high-tech companies and talent back into its orbit, a gambit which, if successful, is likely to undermine the nation’s ability to create useful products that could push the civilian sector forward. Companies and workers who might otherwise be involved in developing vaccines, producing environmentally friendly technologies, or finding new sources of green energy will instead be put to work building a new generation of deadly weapons.

The United States faces serious domestic problems, yet the only thing that seems to matter to both Republican and Democratic politicians alike is maintaining our standing as the world’s most powerful military, threatening mayhem, violence, and death to any nation-state that dares to threaten our status as the biggest, baddest bully the world has ever known. As a result, virtually every aspect of American life is in decline. From potholes to poorly paid teachers to crumbling infrastructure to runaway medical costs to homelessness to a frayed social safety net, we are in a world of hurt. All of these serious problems (and others) could be fixed by reallocating federal spending, starting with a substantial cut to military spending. Until we are willing to rein in military and security spending, we will NEVER fix the various domestic issues we currently face. There’s money for one or the other, but not both. When given a choice to feed the hungry, house the homeless, and fix crumbling infrastructure or continue our wars and military incursions in countless countries, the choice is clear.

Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.

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If Joe Biden Loses the 2024 Presidential Election, This Will Be One of The Reasons Why

Bruce Gerencser 11 Comments
genocide joe biden

Israel continues its genocidal slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. Israeli armed forces and bombs have killed over 25, 000 Palestinians — most of whom are civilians. President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Andrew Blinken, and White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre continue to pretend that Israel’s murderous actions are justified; that Israel is just defending itself.

Now it seems that President Biden and his fellow warmongers want to expand the conflict in the Middle East to Yemen and the Houthis — both of whom are proxies for Iran. It would not surprise me to wake up one day and find out that the United States has dropped bombs not only on the Houthis, but Iran itself. This, of course, would spark a regional war that could result in thousands of casualties and horrific property and infrastructure destruction. Successive administrations had a hard-on for Iran, going back to the days when George H.W. Bush illegally invaded Iraq and Kuwait in the Gulf War. Biden’s approach to the Middle East is not that much different from that of the presidents who preceded him. Unwilling to stand up to Israel and its American supporters, Biden refuses to call out Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people. From illegal settlements, apartheid practices, and violence against innocent civilians, Biden says not a word, thinking that doing so is in his political best interest. What Biden will learn on election day is that he grossly underestimated American anger towards his callous, indifferent response to the plight of the Palestinian people. These angry Americans, many of whom are younger adults, vote. Biden’s actions have also outraged Arab-Americans, leading some Arab leaders to suggest that Biden risks losing their votes if he doesn’t change course.

Over the weekend, Representative Nancy Pelosi only made matters worse by saying that pro-Palestinian demonstrators were working on behalf of Russia’s president, Vladamir Putin, and called for some of them to be “investigated” by the FBI:

For them to call for a cease-fire is Mr. Putin’s message. Make no mistake, this is directly connected to what he would like to see. Same thing with Ukraine. It’s about Putin’s message. I think some of these protesters are spontaneous and organic and sincere. Some, I think, are connected to Russia.

When asked if she believed the protesters were “Russian plants,” Pelosi replied:

Seeds or plants. I think some financing should be investigated. And I want to ask the F.B.I. to investigate that.

After being called out for her anti-American, anti-First Amendment sentiments, Pelosi, in classic Capitol Hill fashion tried to cover her ass by releasing the following statement:

Speaker Pelosi has always supported and defended the right of all Americans to make their views known through peaceful protest. Speaker Pelosi is acutely aware of how foreign adversaries meddle in American politics to sow division and impact our elections, and she wants to see further investigation ahead of the 2024 election.

I hate to tell the former speaker of the House, but her bare ass is still showing. Suggesting that protesters of any stripe should be investigated by the FBI is reminiscent of the days of Edgar Hoover and Donald Trump’s presidency from 2016-2020; days when law enforcement and the power of the state were used to stifle dissent and protest.

Nihad Awad, The Council on American-Islamic Relations national executive director, condemned Rep. Pelosi’s statement:

Her comments once again show the negative impact of decades of dehumanization of the Palestinian people by those supporting Israeli apartheid. Instead of baselessly smearing those Americans as Russian collaborators, former House Speaker Pelosi and other political leaders should respect the will of the American people by calling for an end to the Netanyahu government’s genocidal war on the people of Gaza.

While losing the Arab vote — less than one percent of Americans are Arab — alone won’t cost Biden the election, added to an increasing number of disaffected younger Americans, it could tip the election in favor of the Republican Party. Biden has time to course correct, but I have no confidence that he will do so, or if he does, it will be too little too late, much like Hillary Clinton did in the 2016 presidential election.

Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.

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Are You an Antisemite if You Oppose Israel’s Apartheid Policies?

Bruce Gerencser 6 Comments
Palestinian children 2

“Antisemitism is hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against Jews. This sentiment is a form of racism, and a person who harbors it is called an antisemite.” Wikipedia

I have no hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against Jews. Not one scintilla. I have never uttered one word that could be considered antisemitic, yet in recent weeks I have been accused of hatred for the Jewish people. Evidently, unless you blindly and without reservation support the military, political, and religious objectives of Israel, you are guilty of antisemitism.

Defenders of Israel love to use the “antisemite” label to cut off all discussion about Israel’s eight-decade-long apartheid practices. During the United States’ immoral wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, President George W. Bush famously tried to cut off all discussion and debate by saying “You are either for us or against us.” Who wants to be considered un-American during a time of war, right? This is exactly what is happening now with Israel’s war against Palestine. Either you are on Israel’s side or you are an enemy of the Jewish people.

I am against all war. As a pacifist, I see war as a failure of human imagination; an inability to solve conflicts without violence. While I grudgingly admit that self-defense is, on rare occasions necessary, few wars are prosecuted for self-defense reasons. When nation-states wage indiscriminate war, the result is always failure. There are other ways to settle conflicts, but we humans tend to take the easy way out by using violence, bloodshed, and carnage to settle our disagreements. That’s what Hamas did, and that is what Israel is currently doing.

Peace in the Middle East is possible, but until the West sees Israel as part of the problem, peace is impossible. Israel must be held accountable for their crimes (as must Hamas), and as long as they are given a pass, blood will continue to flow in the streets. Driven by Bible verses, Israel will not stop until they take ALL the land God promised to Israel in the Old Testament. There’s no room for a two-state solution, and as long as that is true, Palestinians will continue to push back against Israel’s apartheid practices.

As long as dead children keep piling up in Gaza, I will not turn a blind eye to Israel’s murderous behavior. Further, I hold the United States and President Joe Biden responsible for the war. As long as Israel has the U.S. standing with them and funding their military, they will continue to do what they are doing. Cut off the money and tell Israel that we will NOT defend them if they expand this war to Lebanon and Iran. As long as their bully big brother stands behind them in support, the bloodshed will continue and could lead to the deaths of American soldiers.

Call me an antisemite all you want, but I will continue to care about the deaths of children and other innocents far more than I care about being labeled a Jew-hater.

Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.

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Benjamin Netanyahu’s Genocidal War Plan Against Palestine

Bruce Gerencser 33 Comments
israel palestinian war

Over the weekend, Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a stirring speech to the Israeli people about Israel’s war against Palestine. Netanyahu made it clear that the conflict is a religious war.

Common Dreams reports:

“The biblical reference to Amalek is genocidal,” noted one theologian after the prime minister invoked an ancient enemy. “The Bible commands to wipe out Amalek, including women, babies, children, and animals.”

Human rights defenders on Monday accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of an “explicit call to genocide” after he delivered a televised address calling Israel’s imminent invasion of Gaza a “holy mission” and invoked an ancient mythical foe whom the God of the Hebrew Bible commanded the Israelites to exterminate.

Declaring the start of a “second stage” of Israel’s war on Gaza—which he described as a “holy mission”—Netanyahu said that “you must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible.”

According to the Hebrew Bible, the nation of Amalek was an ancient archenemy of the Israelites whose extermination was commanded by God to Saul via the prophet Samuel.

Netanyahu believes that Israel must do to the Palestinians what the genocidal God of the Old Testament commanded Saul to do to the Amalekites:

Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass. (I Samuel 15:3)

Is this not exactly what Israel is presently doing in Gaza? How then, does their slaughter of Palestinians not constitute genocide or war crimes?

Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.

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Bruce’s Ten Hot Takes for October 19, 2023

Bruce Gerencser 11 Comments
hot takes

President Biden says we must hold Russia, Iran, and Hamas “accountable.” No one bothers to ask who will hold the United States accountable.

Biden continues to say Hamas doesn’t represent Palestinians. Are we sure about that?

Biden says the United States opposes all forms of hate. Really? What about our own hate; hate that left hundreds of thousands of people dead in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Americans are building the “arsenal of democracy,” Biden says. Evidently, democracy comes through violence and bloodshed.

American leaders wrongly assume that our form of democracy, with its commitment to militarism and capitalism, is the cure for what ails the world.

Why can’t the U.S. military pay with available funds for arming Ukraine and Israel? Instead billions will flow from our coffers to fund war as Republicans tirelessly work to cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and SNAP. American children will go hungry while weapons manufacturers get rich.

When it comes to military weaponry, there’s no such thing as defensive weapons. Defensive bullets and bombs kill just like offensive ones do. Dead is dead.

If it is morally wrong to slaughter Jewish children, it is morally wrong to bomb, shoot, maim, and kill Palestinian children.

It’s disheartening to see Biden conflate the Ukraine War with the war between Israel and Palestine. And then throw in Iran to get an “axis of evil.”

Ron Klain, former Biden chief of staff, says there are a lot of weapons in the world. No shit, Sherlock. And who is the largest arms dealer in the world? The United States.

Bonus: Joe Biden might believe in a “two state solution,” but Israel doesn’t. It is the only solution, but seventy-five years later, we are no closer to a sovereign Palestine. In 1948, Britain gave Israel land that belonged to the Palestinians. Does anyone seriously think Israel will remove their illegal settlements from occupied Palestine, and allow the Palestinian people to chart their own future?

A Child . . . Is a Child . . . Is a Child

Bruce Gerencser 2 Comments
palestinian children

Children have always suffered the most from human thirst for dominance, power, and control. Governments and political leaders regret their deaths in war, but see them as necessary collateral damage in their quest for real estate. Fundamentally, the war between Israel and Palestine is about a promise the Jewish God allegedly made to a storybook character named Abraham. Thousands of years later, Israel demands the world accept as fact that God gave them all the land (and more) that currently makes up Palestine and Israel. Countless people have died and will continue to die as Isaac and Ismahel continue to fight over whom the land belongs to.

Israeli and Palestinian children bleed and die without difference. Yet, for some reason, many Americans think Palestinian children “deserve” suffering and death; that they must pay the price for the sins of others. Of course, this should not surprise us. The Old Testament is a written record of God commanding his chosen ones — Israel — to slaughter his (their) enemies. Why should we expect Israel to do anything differently today? Hamas can be brought to justice without destroying Palestine, but Israel has no interest in doing so. Much like the United States did after 9-11, Israel plans to kill anyone and everyone — including children and civilians — who stands in their way of destroying Hamas (and by extension, Palestine).

And so Israeli and Palestinian children will continue to die.

Thousands of miles away, Ukrainian and Russian children will continue to die.

Syrian children will die.

Yemeni children will die.

African children will die, both from war and starvation.

The world says it cares about children, but the actions of major world powers and militia leaders alike suggest that children are an inconvenience; their deaths are a necessary consequence of humankind’s endless fight over real estate.

Americans wept over the children killed on 9-11, yet when it comes to Afghan, Iraqi, and Palestinian children, their deaths are considered necessary consequences of the war.

As long as the blood of innocents flows in the streets, don’t tell me about the justness of your war and the greatness and rightness of your God. All I see are bloody hands.

Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.

Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.

You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.