For historical reasons, Europe has long resided in the strategic shadow of the United States, which itself has underwritten decades of globalization and rapidly expanding prosperity. But the global balance of power is rapidly shifting, leaving Europe increasingly exposed.
The European Union, and particularly Germany, have yet to rise to the challenge posed by the United States’ retreat from global leadership. But, given the new competition from China, together with Russia’s renewed great-power aspirations, Western countries must find a way to cooperate more closely.
To that end, five issues seem vital.
The first is Germany’s relationship with the US, which is now under severe stress. The elephant in the room is Germany’s failure to increase its annual defense spending to 2% of GDP, as agreed at the 2014 NATO summit in Wales. For obvious historical reasons, Germany is hesitant to become Europe’s de facto military power. Were it to meet its spending commitment, it would be allocating €80 billion ($89 billion) per year to the Bundeswehr, which is €46 billion more than what France spends.
Still, to do its part within the alliance without raising fears in Eastern Europe, Germany could spend 1.5% of its GDP on materiel and personnel, while committing an additional 0.5% to fund NATO’s operations in the Baltics and in Poland. That would both bolster the eastern member states’ ability to defend themselves against Russian aggression and demonstrate Germany’s willingness to shoulder more responsibility.
The second big issue is US-EU relations. The immediate challenges facing America and Europe have changed over the past seven decades. Most recently, Russia has expanded its sphere of influence into Crimea, eastern Ukraine, and the Sea of Azov, and China has begun to assert economic and technological dominance in Eurasia.
At the same time, Western democracies are struggling to deal with disruptions caused by globalization, migration, technology, and climate change. Amid deteriorating economic security and social cohesion, populist and nationalist movements have exploited voters’ anxieties by promising to defend the homeland against cosmopolitan elites and the multilateral institutions that have underpinned politics and economics since World War II.
Notwithstanding populist rhetoric, economic globalization has in fact created prosperity and reduced poverty, and opened up new development opportunities around the world. But without the West’s support, this system cannot be sustained. What we need now to open up new possibilities for the world order is a globalization of civil society, and to remind people and communities that the state is still capable of acting effectively. That starts with investing more in education, research, and infrastructure, while striking a balance between cross-border cooperation and respect for cultural idiosyncrasies.
This brings us to the third issue: Russia. Here, the EU’s pursuit of a balanced policy has created friction within the transatlantic alliance, as exemplified by the tensions over Nord Stream 2, a joint Russian-German pipeline project. In the German government’s view, Nord Stream 2 is fundamentally an economic issue. After all, German, French, and other European companies have invested heavily in the project; in any case, it would be a grave political mistake to intervene in the private European gas market.
The liberalization of the gas market has indeed allowed for a tremendous expansion of Europe’s energy supply. Ultimately, companies, following market signals, should decide from whom they buy their gas. But nor can Europeans ignore threats to the political independence of neighboring countries such as Ukraine – which Nord Stream 2 bypasses. On balance, a better way to secure Europe’s energy supply would be to expand and further integrate Europe’s natural-gas infrastructure, while building more terminals for liquefied natural gas. That way, no country – be it a member state or close partner – could be held hostage as a result of its dependence on Russian energy.
The fourth issue is China, which has made clear that it seeks a revision of the international balance of power. For its part, the Trump administration rightly challenged China on trade. There can be no “fair trade” when a country that does not play by the same rules as everyone else organizes two-fifths of the global economy. China lavishes subsidies on its industries, limits access to its markets, and routinely violates intellectual-property rights. Moreover, China’s model of authoritarian state capitalism poses a double challenge, because it represents both economic competition and an alternative political model. As such, the EU and America urgently need to devise clear, mutually agreed rules for dealing with China.
The fifth major issue is Europe’s role in the wider world. If Europe does not wake up to the realities of the new Sino-American rivalry, it could find itself in a position of geopolitical irrelevance. In fact, there are already signs of Europe’s declining global significance. Wars and conflicts along the European periphery are increasingly being decided by other powers, with Europe playing no discernible role in their resolution.
Europe’s reluctance to assert itself has a historical dimension. For good reasons, the EU has long resided beneath the US security umbrella, with the Union effectively remaining on the sidelines. But that geopolitical conception of Europe is an American artifact, based on the Marshall Plan. As NATO’s first secretary-general, Hastings Ismay, famously put it, the purpose of NATO was “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”
Much has changed since the 1950s. Today, we Europeans are only gradually beginning to understand that we must adapt to the geopolitical realities of the twenty-first century. The Atlantic era is giving way to the Pacific era. Europeans must harbor no illusions that all will turn out well on its own. Now is the time to muster the courage and the will to take responsibility for our strategic interests.
“Go Outside!” President Macron Filmed Yelling At Israeli Police In Jerusalem Church Altercation
On Wednesday French President Emmanuel Macron toured Jerusalem’s Old City with a police escort as he attended the Fifth World Holocaust Forum in Israel.
He especially wanted to visit the Church of St Anne, just like some of his predecessors, given it’s specially designated as French sovereign territory since being gifted by the Ottoman Empire to France in 1856. The church is considered the best preserved Crusader church in the region, and dates back to 1138. By popular belief it enshrines the home of the Virgin Mary and her parents.
But President Macron’s trip to the French national treasure was marred when he personally entered a spat with Israeli security, berating at least one Israeli officer to “Go outside, please!” in English.
French President Emmanuel Macron gets testy with Israeli police in the church of Sainte Anne, Old City of Jerusalem. pic.twitter.com/14NjxLPvLA
It’s unclear precisely what the Israeli security entourage did to provoke the rare and bizarre incident, but the historic Roman Catholic church is located in East Jerusalem — on the occupied Palestinian side which is also the Muslim Quarter of the walled city.
According to the BBC, “Mr Macron accused officers of violating rules that prevent them from entering the Crusader-era Church of St Anne, which is considered French territory.”
“I don’t like what you did in front of me. Go outside, please,”he warned them in English. “Nobody has to provoke.”
Video of the Wednesday testy exchange went viral in the hours after it happened. Macron appeared to be directing his wrath at a uniformed Israeli police officer.
Still frame of video from the incident at the front of St. Anne’s Church in Jerusalem, via the BBC.
Macron referenced agreed up rules asserting control of the place as French territory: “I’m sorry, but we know the rules. Nobody, nobody has to provoke, nobody. We keep calm,” the 42-year old French president said.
He also turned to a plainclothes security officer, attempting to calm the situation: “We had a wonderful walk. You did a great job in the city. I do appreciate it guys.”
He followed with: “Please respect the rules as they are for centuries. They will not change with me. I can tell you, OK?” And then he moved forward unimpeded into the church.
A spokeswoman for the Elysée Palace later told CNN the altercation involved a tense exchange between French and Israeli security, likely involving physical shoving, with the Israeli Foreign Ministry remaining mum immediately following the incident:
“St. Anne belongs to France in Jerusalem. It is up to France to protect these places in this city. The Israeli security forces wanted to enter while security was being provided by French security services. The president reacted to an altercation between the Israeli and French security forces at the time of entering Saint Anne in order to end it, and to remind everyone of the rules that apply,” the spokeswoman said.
France leader Emmanuel Macron got into a heated argument with Israeli forces during his visit to Jerusalem, mirroring a similar incident involving former leader Jacques Chirac in 1996 pic.twitter.com/3PgIDScRSt
A similar incident had actually played out in 1996 when French President Jacques Chirac toured St. Anne’s.
St. Anne’s Church with the French national flag flying over it in Jerusalem, file image.
In that episode, which created an international incident for which the Israeli Foreign Ministry issued an apology, Chirac was angered when Israeli security shoved local Muslims and journalists that were among the entourage.
This week sees the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi Auschwitz death camp by the Soviet Red Army. But the momentous event is being overshadowed by renewed attempts by the Polish authorities – aided by American and German officials – to shift the blame for the Second World War on to the Soviet Union.
The grimly deceptive German maxim “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“Works Sets You Free”) adorning the iron-gate entrance to Auschwitz through which millions of prisoners passed on their way to death, could be subtitled today with the more honest phrase “Wahrheit Macht Frei” (“Truth Sets You Free”).
Because what is going on in the Polish commemoration of Auschwitz and claims about the origins of the Second World War more generally is an appalling distortion of history to suit current geopolitical interests in the West of undermining Russia. Concealing or denying the causes of war only traps the world into repeating war.
Rather than being given a full place of honor for the liberation of the extermination camp in southern Poland on January 27, 1945, by the Soviet army, today Moscow is being sidelined despite its crucial role in crushing the Nazi regime and all its horrors.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has reportedly declined to attend the 75th anniversary in Poland. Russia will be represented by its ambassador to the country. Putin is attending an equivalent event in Israel, and at that alternative commemoration will be afforded due prominence to mark the liberating achievement of Russia’s predecessor, the Soviet Union. It is understandable why the Russian president decided to give the event in Poland a miss because of the toxic claims made recently by Warsaw and other Western states concerning allegations that the Soviet Union colluded with Nazi Germany in instigating the war.
This distortion of history has even gained an official status when the European Parliament – after Polish and Baltic state lobbying – adopted a resolution last September in which the Soviet Union is cast as equally culpable along with the Nazi Third Reich for starting World War II.
When President Putin slammed that resolution as “nonsense” and went on to point out Poland’s own documented collaboration with Nazi Germany, the current Polish government, along with German and American diplomats, doubled down on the accusations impugning Moscow for having partial responsibility for the worst conflagration in history.
Those Polish and Western accusations stem from the historical Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact which was signed on August 23, 1939, one week before the Nazis invaded Poland. Thus it is claimed that Stalin’s detente with Hitler emboldened the latter to launch the war.
As Radio Free Europe reported: “German envoy Rolf Nikel and US Ambassador to Poland Georgette Mosbacher both said on December 30 that Germany and the Soviet Union colluded to start the war in 1939 that led to the death of tens of millions of people on continental Europe.”
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Moraweicka denounced Putin’s version of history as “lying… trampling the memory of those events. Poland must stand up for the truth, not for its own interests but for the sake of of what defines Europe.”
That’s quite an audacious feat of historical distortion.
The motives for such re-writing of history are obvious. Germany can unburden some of its war guilt for terrorizing Europe with its fascist genocide.
By implicating the Soviets in Nazi horror, the Americans and their rightwing surrogates in Poland and the Baltic states can breath some air into the stale, breathless claims of “Russian aggression” towards modern-day Europe. That twist is especially odious given that the Soviet Union suffered the most out of any nation from Nazi barbarity, with up to 25 million dead and tens of millions more wounded.
Poland has perhaps the most to gain from falsifying history. Its own shameful past of colluding with the Nazi regime before and during the war is, it is anticipated, whitewashed and shoved down the memory hole.
The people lining up to disparage Russia over alleged Soviet complicity with Nazi Germany claim, ironically, that Putin is “rewriting history” by referring to Soviet records and propaganda.
One of the finest scholarly accounts of the period from the First World War until the late 1930s and the outbreak of war is the work by British historian AJP Taylor, entitled ‘The Origins of the Second World War’ (published 1961). Taylor is no “fellow-traveller” of the Soviet Union. His study is a consummate exercise in objective scholarship.
The Russian perspective is substantially corroborated by Taylor (and other Western historians, see for example this recent essay by Michael Jabara Carley). The Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact on the eve of the war’s outbreak was a desperate attempt by Moscow to keep the Third Reich at bay. Because, as Taylor points out, the Western powers, in particular Britain and France and Poland, had consistently rebuffed Soviet appeals to form a collective European security pact against Nazi Germany.
Britain, France and Poland looked the other way when Hitler annexed Austria in 1936 and invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938. The Fuhrer’s manifesto in ‘Mein Kampf’ and his various ranting speeches during the 1930s explicitly targeted the Soviet Union and European Jewry for annihilation in a Final Solution.
Polish ministers during this period shared the Nazi contempt for Soviet and Jewish people. The case of Polish Ambassador in Berlin Josef Lipski proposing to Hitler in 1938 a scheme to deport European Jews to Africa is indisputable.
What Polish authorities today are compelled to deny is the objective historical record which assigns complicity to their predecessors in unleashing the Nazi monster. The fact Auschwitz and other Nazi extermination camps are on Polish territory does not seem to give these virulent Russphobes any pause for thought. The fact that the Soviet Red Army saved millions of Poles from Nazi barbarity – a barbarity that their vain, deluded political leaders emboldened – is perhaps the clearest example of how “Lies Do Not Set You Free”.
US Navy To Revive Flak Cannons To Combat Drone Attacks
The proliferation of unmanned aircraft has frightened the U.S. Navy into developing a powerful airburst round to knock drones out of the sky, reported Military.com.
The precision airburst munition, similar to anti-aircraft flak rounds used in World War II, is being designed to combat drones that are targeting warships at sea.
The new round is compatible with the Littoral Combat Ship’s (LCS) 30mm deck gun.
“We’re looking at another round called the proximity round, which detects the drone as it approaches and then blows up,” Kevin Knowles, who works on Northrop Grumman’s LCS and unmanned surface vessel programs, said Tuesday at the Surface Navy Association conference. “It’s not a radar system, but it’s something similar. That’s what we’re looking at for drones.”
Knowles said it’s nearly impossible to hit a drone with a solid round, that’s why the Navy is reviving old technology with a modern twist to combat unmanned aircraft.
The LCS has two Mk44 Bushmaster II 30mm chain guns that can fire 100 to 200 rounds per minute.
Last summer, Iran flew a drone, undetected, over a U.S. aircraft carrier strike group transiting the Strait of Hormuz.
Three years into the Trump administration, we see a clear pattern forming. The Obama administration implemented labor rules that make the labor market less flexible, often at the expense of smaller businesses, but in ways that made unions happy. The Trump administration then takes these rules away. The latest example is the dismantling of the Obama Labor Department’s joint employer rule.
As the new Secretary of Labor Eugene Scalia and the Office of Management Director Mick Mulvaney explained recently in The Wall Street Journal, “When joint employment exists, two separate companies are responsible for ensuring that workers receive the federally mandated minimum wage and overtime pay. Two companies are responsible for ensuring the proper records are kept. And two companies can be taken to court if it’s alleged that those responsibilities have not been met.”
The question is: When is there actually joint employment? From 1958 to 2015, joint employment was said to exist when two employers are “not completely disassociated” from each other. This needlessly vague phrasing was only worsened by the Obama administration’s attempted clarification. A 2015 ruling by the National Labor Relations Board, followed by a 2016 legal interpretation adopted by the Labor Department, expanded joint employment to any business with “indirect influence” over another company’s employment terms and conditions.
That was a big deal for a wide range of franchise, subcontract, and supplier business models. These diverse business forms were forced into a one-size-fits-all model of “joint employment,” thus opening them up to legal troubles caused by their contractors and franchisees. For instance, under this rule, Subway—the biggest franchise by far in the United States in terms of number of stores at 23,647—can be sued for the lack of labor compliance at any of its independently owned stores across the country. Even if you have little sympathy for big business, think about all the self-employed contractors and subcontractors affected by the rules.
As Walter Olson of the Cato Institute wrote at the time, “What do advocates of these changes intend to accomplish by destroying the economics of business relationships under which millions of Americans are presently employed? For many, the aim is to force much more of the economy into the mold of large-payroll, unionized employers, a system for which the 1950s are often (wrongly) idealized.”
This classification is also very costly. A study by economist Ronald Bird for the Chamber of Commerce concluded that the expanded rule costs businesses between $17.2 billion and $33.3 billion a year—mostly to protect themselves against legal actions rather than on tighter labor compliance.
Bird also documented how the Obama rule forced many national brands to distance themselves from their franchisees out of fear of being sued and shifted many training and software responsibilities to the franchisees. Unfortunately, franchisees, which are smaller businesses, are often not as well equipped to handle such responsibilities or do so at costs as low as those achieved by larger companies. Thus, their total cost of doing business rises. Despite franchisee efforts to shield themselves from abusive legal actions, there has been a 93 percent increase in lawsuits against franchise businesses since the rules made such lawsuits more lucrative.
Enter the Trump administration and its new rule, which specifies that a company cannot be considered a joint employer simply because it has the contractual power to control workers employed by another party. Instead, there has to be “some actual exercise of control.” This is good news because stable and predictable rules, compared to unstable and vague ones, are clearly more conducive to all aspects of life, including the franchise business.
Not surprisingly, after spending millions of dollars fighting for the Obama-era rules, unions are upset by this recent change. The Obama rule had opened up deeper pockets for lawsuits to pick and, more importantly from a financial standpoint, opened the unions up to many more potential members.
But for now, we celebrate. As Olson recently wrote on the Trump rule, “This is an important win for economic freedom, as well as for the legal reality that a supply or contractual relationship between two firms is by no means the same thing as a merger between them.”
Three years into the Trump administration, we see a clear pattern forming. The Obama administration implemented labor rules that make the labor market less flexible, often at the expense of smaller businesses, but in ways that made unions happy. The Trump administration then takes these rules away. The latest example is the dismantling of the Obama Labor Department’s joint employer rule.
As the new Secretary of Labor Eugene Scalia and the Office of Management Director Mick Mulvaney explained recently in The Wall Street Journal, “When joint employment exists, two separate companies are responsible for ensuring that workers receive the federally mandated minimum wage and overtime pay. Two companies are responsible for ensuring the proper records are kept. And two companies can be taken to court if it’s alleged that those responsibilities have not been met.”
The question is: When is there actually joint employment? From 1958 to 2015, joint employment was said to exist when two employers are “not completely disassociated” from each other. This needlessly vague phrasing was only worsened by the Obama administration’s attempted clarification. A 2015 ruling by the National Labor Relations Board, followed by a 2016 legal interpretation adopted by the Labor Department, expanded joint employment to any business with “indirect influence” over another company’s employment terms and conditions.
That was a big deal for a wide range of franchise, subcontract, and supplier business models. These diverse business forms were forced into a one-size-fits-all model of “joint employment,” thus opening them up to legal troubles caused by their contractors and franchisees. For instance, under this rule, Subway—the biggest franchise by far in the United States in terms of number of stores at 23,647—can be sued for the lack of labor compliance at any of its independently owned stores across the country. Even if you have little sympathy for big business, think about all the self-employed contractors and subcontractors affected by the rules.
As Walter Olson of the Cato Institute wrote at the time, “What do advocates of these changes intend to accomplish by destroying the economics of business relationships under which millions of Americans are presently employed? For many, the aim is to force much more of the economy into the mold of large-payroll, unionized employers, a system for which the 1950s are often (wrongly) idealized.”
This classification is also very costly. A study by economist Ronald Bird for the Chamber of Commerce concluded that the expanded rule costs businesses between $17.2 billion and $33.3 billion a year—mostly to protect themselves against legal actions rather than on tighter labor compliance.
Bird also documented how the Obama rule forced many national brands to distance themselves from their franchisees out of fear of being sued and shifted many training and software responsibilities to the franchisees. Unfortunately, franchisees, which are smaller businesses, are often not as well equipped to handle such responsibilities or do so at costs as low as those achieved by larger companies. Thus, their total cost of doing business rises. Despite franchisee efforts to shield themselves from abusive legal actions, there has been a 93 percent increase in lawsuits against franchise businesses since the rules made such lawsuits more lucrative.
Enter the Trump administration and its new rule, which specifies that a company cannot be considered a joint employer simply because it has the contractual power to control workers employed by another party. Instead, there has to be “some actual exercise of control.” This is good news because stable and predictable rules, compared to unstable and vague ones, are clearly more conducive to all aspects of life, including the franchise business.
Not surprisingly, after spending millions of dollars fighting for the Obama-era rules, unions are upset by this recent change. The Obama rule had opened up deeper pockets for lawsuits to pick and, more importantly from a financial standpoint, opened the unions up to many more potential members.
But for now, we celebrate. As Olson recently wrote on the Trump rule, “This is an important win for economic freedom, as well as for the legal reality that a supply or contractual relationship between two firms is by no means the same thing as a merger between them.”
Call it a colossal victory for a Pentagon that hasn’t won a war in this century, but not for the rest of us. Congress only recently passed and the president approved one of the largest Pentagon budgets ever. It will surpass spending at the peaks of both the Korean and Vietnam wars. As last year ended, as if to highlight the strangeness of all this, the Washington Postbroke a story about a “confidential trove of government documents” — interviews with key figures involved in the Afghan War by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction — revealing the degree to which senior Pentagon leaders and military commanders understood that the war was failing. Yet, year after year, they provided “rosy pronouncements they knew to be false,” while “hiding unmistakable evidence that the war had become unwinnable.”
However, as the latest Pentagon budget shows, no matter the revelations, there will be no reckoning when it comes to this country’s endless wars or its military establishment — not at a moment when President Donald Trump is sending yet more U.S. military personnel into the Middle East and has picked a new fight with Iran. No less troubling: how few in either party in Congress are willing to hold the president and the Pentagon accountable for runaway defense spending or the poor performance that has gone with it.
Given the way the Pentagon has sunk taxpayer dollars into those endless wars, in a more reasonable world that institution would be overdue for a comprehensive audit of all its programs and a reevaluation of its expenditures. (It has, by the way, never actually passed an audit.) According to Brown University’s Costs of War Project, Washington has already spent at least $2 trillion on its war in Afghanistan alone and, as the Post made clear, the corruption, waste, and failure associated with those expenditures was (or at least should have been) mindboggling.
Of course, little of this was news to people who had read the damning reports released by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction in previous years. They included evidence, for instance, that somewhere between $10 million and $43 million had been spent constructing a single gas station in the middle of nowhere, that $150 million had gone into luxury private villas for Americans who were supposed to be helping strengthen Afghanistan’s economy, and that tens of millions more were wasted on failed programs to improve Afghan industries focused on extracting more of the country’s minerals, oil, and natural gas reserves.
In the face of all this, rather than curtailing Pentagon spending, Congress continued to increase its budget, while also supporting a Department of Defense slush fund for war spending to keep the efforts going. Still, the special inspector general’s reports did manage to rankle American military commanders (unable to find successful combat strategies in Afghanistan) enough to launch what, in effect, would be a public-relations war to try to undermine that watchdog’s findings.
All of this, in turn, reflected the “unwarranted influence” of the military-industrial complex that President (and former five-star General) Dwight Eisenhower warned Americans about in his memorable 1961 farewell address. That complex only continues to thrive and grow almost six decades later, as contractor profits are endlessly prioritized over what might be considered the national security interests of the citizenry.
The infamous “revolving door” that regularly ushers senior Pentagon officials into defense-industry posts and senior defense-industry figures into key positions at the Pentagon (and in the rest of the national security state) just adds to the endless public-relations offensives that accompany this country’s forever wars. After all, the retired generals and other officials the media regularly looks to for expertise are often essentially paid shills for the defense industry. The lack of public disclosure and media discussion about such obvious conflicts of interest only further corrupts public debate on both the wars and the funding of the military, while giving the arms industry the biggest seat at the table when decisions are made on how much to spend on war and preparations for the same.
Media Analysis Brought to You by the Arms Industry
That lack of disclosure regarding potential conflicts of interest recently came into fresh relief as industry boosters beat the media drums for war with Iran. Unfortunately, it’s a story we’ve seen many times before. Back in 2008, for instance, in a Pulitzer Prize-winning series, the New York Timesrevealed that the Pentagon had launched a program to cultivate a coterie of retired-military-officers-turned-pundits in support of its already disastrous war in Iraq. Seeing such figures on TV or reading their comments in the press, the public may have assumed that they were just speaking their minds. However, the Timesinvestigation showed that, while widely cited in the media and regularly featured on the TV news, they never disclosed that they received special Pentagon access and that, collectively, they had financial ties to more than 150 Pentagon contractors.
Given such financial interests, it was nearly impossible for them to be “objective” when it came to this country’s failing war in Iraq. After all, they needed to secure more contracts for their defense-industry employers. A subsequent analysis by the Government Accountability Office found that the Pentagon’s program raised “legitimate questions” about how its public propaganda efforts were tied to the weaponry it bought, highlighting “the possibility of compromised procurements resulting from potential competitive advantages” for those who helped them.
While the program was discontinued that same year, a similar effort was revealed in 2013 during a debate over whether the U.S. should attack Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime. You probably won’t be surprised to discover that most of the former military figures and officials used as analysts at the time supported action against Syria. A review of their commentary by the Public Accountability Initiative found a number of them also had undisclosed ties to the arms industry. In fact, of 111 appearances in major media outlets by 22 commentators, only 13 of them disclosed any aspect of their potential conflicts of interest that might lead them to promote war.
The same pattern is now being repeated in the debate over the Trump administration’s decision to assassinate by drone Iranian Major General Qassem Suleimani and other Iran-related issues. While Suleimani clearly opposed the United States and many of its national security interests, his killing risked pushing Washington into another endless war in the Middle East. And in a distinctly recognizable pattern, the Intercept has already found that the air waves were subsequently flooded by defense-industry pundits praising the strike. Unsurprisingly, news of a potential war also promptly boosted defense industry stocks. Northrop Grumman’s, Raytheon’s, and Lockheed Martin’s all started 2020 with an uptick.
Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Representative Jackie Speier (D-CA) have offered legislation that could shut down that revolving door between the major weapons makers and Washington for good, but it has met concerted resistance from Pentagon officials and others still in Congress who stand to benefit from preserving the system as is. Even if that revolving door wasn’t shut down, transparency about just who was going through it would help the public better understand what former officials and military commanders are really advocating for when they speak positively of the necessity for yet another war in the Middle East.
Costly Weapons (and Well-Paid Lobbyists)
Here’s what we already know about how it all now works: weapon systems produced by the big defense firms with all those retired generals, former administration officials, and one-time congressional representatives on their boards (or lobbying for or consulting for them behind the scenes) regularly come in overpriced, are often delivered behind schedule, and repeatedly fail to have the capabilities advertised. Take, for instance, the new Ford class aircraft carriers, produced by Huntington Ingalls Industries, the sort of ships that have traditionally been used to show strength globally. In this case, however, the program’s development has been stifled by problems with its weapons elevators and the systems used to launch and recover its aircraft. Those problems have been costly enough to send the price for the first of those carriers soaring to $13.1 billion. Meanwhile, Lockheed Martin’s F-35 jet fighter, the most expensive weapons system in Pentagon history, has an abysmal rate of combat readiness and currently comes in at more than $100 million per aircraft.
And yet, somehow, no one ever seems to be responsible for such programmatic failures and prices — certainly not the companies that make them (or all those retired military commanders sitting on their boards or working for them). One crucial reason for this lack of accountability is that key members of Congress serving on committees that should be overseeing such spending are often the top recipients of campaign contributions from the big weapons makers and their allies. And just as at the Pentagon, members of those committees or their staff often later become lobbyists for those very federal contractors.
With this in mind, the big defense firms carefully spread their contracts for weapons production across as many congressional districts as possible. This practice of “political engineering,” a term promoted by former Department of Defense analyst and military reformer Chuck Spinney, helps those contractors and the Pentagon buy off members of Congress from both parties. Take, for example, the Littoral Combat Ship, a vessel meant to operate close to shore. Costs for the program tripled over initial estimates and, according to Defense News, the Navy is already considering decommissioning four of the new ships next year as a cost-saving measure. It’s not the first time that program has been threatened with the budget axe. In the past, however, pork-barrel politics spearheaded by Senators Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) and Richard Shelby (R-AL), in whose states those boats were being built, kept the program afloat.
The Air Force’s new bomber, the B-21, being built by Northrup Grumman, has been on a similar trajectory. Despite significant pressure from then-Senator John McCain (R-AZ), the Air Force refused in 2017 to make public or agree upon a contract price for the program. (It was a “cost-plus,” not a “fixed price” contract, after all.) It did, however, release the names of the companies providing components to the program, ensuring that relevant congressional representatives would support it, no matter the predictably spiraling costs to come.
Recent polling indicates that such pork-barrel politics isn’t backed by the public, even when they might benefit from it. Asked whether congressional representatives should use the Pentagon’s budget to generate jobs in their districts, 77% of respondents rejected the notion. Two-thirds favored shifting such funds to sectors like healthcare, infrastructure, and clean energy that would, in fact, create significantly more jobs.
And keep in mind that, in this big-time system of profiteering, hardware costs, however staggering, are just a modest part of the equation. The Pentagon spends about as much on what it calls “services” as it does on the weaponry itself and those service contracts are another major source of profits. For example, it’s estimated that the F-35 program will cost $1.5 trillion over the lifetime of the plane, but a trillion dollars of those costs will be for support and maintenance of the aircraft.
Increasingly, this means contractors are able to hold the Pentagon hostage over a weapon’s lifetime, which means overcharges of just about every imaginable sort, including for labor. The Project On Government Oversight (where I work) has, for instance, been uncovering overcharges in spare parts since our founding, including an infamous $435 hammer back in 1983. I’m sad to report that what, in the 1980s, was a seemingly outrageous $640 plastic toilet-seat cover for military airplanes now costs an eye-popping $10,000. A number of factors help explain such otherwise unimaginable prices, including the way contractors often retain intellectual property rights to many of the systems taxpayers funded to develop, legal loopholes that make it difficult for the government to challenge wild charges, and a system largely beholden to the interests of defense companies.
The most recent and notorious case may be TransDigm, a company that has purchased other companies with a monopoly on providing spare parts for a number of weapon systems. That, in turn, gave it power to increase the prices of parts with little fear of losing business — once, receiving 9,400% in excess profits for a single half-inch metal pin. An investigation by the House Oversight and Reform Committee found that TransDigm’s employees had been coached to resist providing cost or pricing information to the government, lest such overcharges be challenged.
In one case, for instance, a subsidiary of TransDigm resisted providing such information until the government, desperate for parts for weapons to be used in Iraq and Afghanistan, was forced to capitulate or risk putting troops’ lives on the line. TransDigm did later repay the government $16 million for certain overcharges, but only after the House Oversight and Reform Committee held a hearing on the subject that shamed the company. As it happens, TransDigm’s behavior isn’t an outlier. It’s typical of many defense-related companies doing business with the government — about 20 major industry players, according to a former Pentagon pricing czar.
A Recipe for Disaster
For too long Congress has largely abdicated its responsibilities when it comes to holding the Pentagon accountable. You won’t be surprised to learn that most of the “acquisition reforms” it’s passed in recent years, which affect how the Department of Defense buys goods and services, have placed just about all real negotiating power in the hands of the big defense contractors. To add insult to injury, both parties of Congress continue to vote in near unanimity for increases in the Pentagon budget, despite 18-plus years of losing wars, the never-ending gross mismanagement of weapons programs, and a continued failure to pass a basic audit. If any other federal agency (or the contractors it dealt with) had a similar track record, you can only begin to imagine the hubbub that would ensue. But not the Pentagon. Never the Pentagon.
A significantly reduced budget would undoubtedly increase that institution’s effectiveness by curbing its urge to throw ever more money at problems. Instead, an often bought-and-paid-for Congress continues to enable bad decision-making about what to buy and how to buy it. And let’s face it, a Congress that allows endless wars, terrible spending practices, and multiplying conflicts of interest is, as the history of the twenty-first century has shown us, a recipe for disaster.
“The 2-Child Policy Has Failed”: China’s Birth Rate Hits Record Low As Growth Slows
China finally abandoned its controversial one-child policy in November 2013. But more than six years later, millions of Chinese couples are still unwilling to have a second child. And that’s a huge problem for the Communist Party, whose legitimacy in the eyes of the public depends on its ability to deliver on promises of unbridled growth and prosperity.
And who can blame them? Entrenched behaviors die hard, and after the government’s brutal treatment of citizens who defied its policy (which was initially imposed to ward off famine), we can sympathize with Chinese who simply believe that having two children isn’t in keeping with the fundamentals of patriotic socialism with Chinese characteristics.
But as the FT reported this week, issues of culture and perception aren’t the only reasons Chinese women are still refusing to have more than one child. As we reported last week, Chinese GDP growth slowed in 2019 to its weakest level in 29 years…
…proving unequivocally that Beijing’s massive credit stimulus hasn’t done much, if any, good.
Meanwhile, official statistics agencies reported that China’s birth rate dropped to 1.05%, a record low. That’s equivalent to 10.5 births per thousand Chinese.
The UN expects China’s population, the largest of any country in the world, to start declining by the end of this decade.
It’s the latest sign that the ‘two child policy’ is now considered an abysmal failure – so much so that party functionaries are apparently unafraid of discussing this fact with the Western press.
Weng Wenlei, vice-president of the Shanghai Women’s Federation, a government body, said birth rates in Shanghai had plunged despite efforts to relax China’s population control. She said births in the city had fallen “swiftly” following a brief recovery in 2016, when China began allowing couples to have two children.
“This suggests [the two-child policy] has failed to serve its intended purpose,” said Ms Weng. “Consistently low birth rate will have a negative impact on Shanghai’s social and economic development.”
Leftists in the US love to complain about the costs associated with having a baby, even for couples who have insurance. But even in a society where most of the people’s health-care needs are met by the state, Chinese citizens are still put off by the cost of care.
Josephine Pan, a Shanghai-based data analyst, abandoned plans to have a second child after spending half of her family’s monthly salary of Rmb20,000 ($2,900) on her seven-year-old son. “It costs a fortune to raise a child,” said Ms Pan, 41, who after giving birth gave up her decade-long hobby of buying designer bags. “I couldn’t afford a second one.”
Women in China are still reluctant to have children, even with the state promising cash handouts to couples who have two children, because they fear more children will hurt their careers.
As in the west, a growing number of Chinese women are reluctant to have babies because they fear children would hurt their career. Chinese employers have a tradition of discriminating against pregnant workers as many female staff face demotion, if not unemployment, after returning from maternity leave.
“I don’t want to risk my career to have a second child,” said Lucy Zhang, a Beijing-based newspaper editor with a five-year-old daughter. “I have worked so hard to get to where I am now.”
All signs suggest that public sentiment is firmly entrenched against breeding. Surveys carried out in Shanghai and Shanxi province last year suggested that the number of women willing to have a second child is languishing between 10% and 25%. Furthermore, only 6.7% of women in Shanghai who are of child-bearing age and also possessed a local residence permit, or hukou, gave birth to a second child in 2018.
“Raising a child takes so much time and energy,” said Mary Xu, a Shanghai-based magazine editor who has a three-year-old daughter. “I have had enough.”
China bulls in the west argue that the Communist Party exercises such an unshakeable hold on the economy that they simply won’t allow for a systemic debt cross-default. But as the party struggles to contain capital outflows, the country’s reliance on monetary stimulus is finally pushing up against the boundaries of what’s possible.
To be sure, China isn’t the only country struggling with population shrinkage: 27 countries have fewer people now than in 2010. The UN expects 55 nations, including China, to experience declines between now and 2050. Most of these are countries have developed economies, a status that China has only recently achieved.
A declining population places inevitable constraints on economic growth. And as China’s momentous rate of growth slows, its economy will come to resemble a frog sitting in a pot of water on a hot stove.
For investors hoping to increase their exposure to China at a time of slowing growth, when the Chinese economy faces myriad difficulties, slowing population growth might create an opportunity in China’s domestic government bond market, according to one of WSJ’s Heard on the Street columnists.
Numerous studies suggest that a shrinking population should cause real rates to fall. And of course we have a real-world example of this phenomenon in Japan, where government bond prices have never been higher. Of course, this doesn’t necessarily guarantee that the Chinese bond market will follow suit. But it’s certainly some worthwhile food for thought.
This impeachment fiasco is merely the latest in a never-ending series of distractions, distortions, and political theater aimed at diverting the public’s attention from the sinister advances of the American Police State.
Don’t allow yourselves to be distracted, diverted or mesmerized by the cheap theater tricks.
This impeachment spectacle is Shakespearean in its scope: full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Nothing is the key word here.
Despite the wall-to-wall media coverage, nothing will change.
Mark my words: the government will remain as corrupt and self-serving as ever, dominated by two political factions that pretend to be at odds with each other all the while moving in lockstep to maintain the status quo.
So President Trump’s legal team can grandstand all they want about the impeachment trial being “an affront to the Constitution” and “a dangerous perversion of the Constitution,” but that’s just smoke and mirrors.
You know what is really “an affront to the Constitution”? The U.S. government.
We’ve been losing our freedoms so incrementally for so long—sold to us in the name of national security and global peace, maintained by way of martial law disguised as law and order, and enforced by a standing army of militarized police and a political elite determined to maintain their powers at all costs—that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started going downhill, but we’re certainly on that downward trajectory now, and things are moving fast.
The republic has fallen.
The Deep State’s plot to take over America has succeeded.
The American system of representative government has been overthrown by a profit-driven, militaristic, corporate oligarchy bent on total control and global domination through the imposition of martial law here at home and by fomenting wars abroad.
Even now, we are being pushed and prodded towards a civil war, not because the American people are so divided but because that’s how corrupt governments control a populace (i.e., divide and conquer).
These are dangerous times.
These are indeed dangerous times but not because of violent crime, which remains at an all-time low, or because of terrorism, which is statistically rare, or because the borders are being invaded by foreign armies, which data reports from the Department of Homeland Security refute.
No, the real danger that we face comes from none other than the U.S. government and the powers it has granted to its standing armies to rob, steal, cheat, harass, detain, brutalize, terrorize, torture and kill American citizens with immunity.
The danger “we the people” face comes from masked invaders on the government payroll who crash through our doors in the dark of night, shoot our dogs, and terrorize our families.
This danger comes from militarized henchmen on the government payroll who demand absolute obedience, instill abject fear, and shoot first and ask questions later.
This danger comes from greedy, power-hungry bureaucrats on the government payroll who have little to no understanding of their constitutional limits.
This danger comes from greedy politicians and corporations for whom profit trumps principle.
You want to know about the state of our union? It’s downright scary.
Consider, if you will, all of the dastardly, devious, diabolical, dangerous, debilitating, deceitful, dehumanizing, demonic, depraved, dishonorable, disillusioning, discriminatory, dictatorial schemes inflicted on “we the people” by a bureaucratic, totalitarian regime that has long since ceased to be “a government of the people, by the people and for the people.”
Americans have no protection against police abuse. It is no longer unusual to hear about incidents in which police shoot unarmed individuals first and ask questions later, such as the 16-year-old teenager who skipped school only to be shot by police after they mistook him for a fleeing burglar. Then there was the unarmed black man in Texas “who was pursued and shot in the back of the neck by Austin Police… after failing to properly identify himself and leaving the scene of an unrelated incident.” And who could forget the 19-year-old Seattle woman who was accidentally shot in the leg by police after she refused to show her hands? What is increasingly common, however, is the news that the officers involved in these incidents get off with little more than a slap on the hands.
Americans are little more than pocketbooks to fund the police state. If there is any absolute maxim by which the federal government seems to operate, it is that the American taxpayer always gets ripped off. This is true, whether you’re talking about taxpayers being forced to fund high-priced weaponry that will be used against us, endless wars that do little for our safety or our freedoms, or bloated government agencies such as the National Security Agency with its secret budgets, covert agendas and clandestine activities. Rubbing salt in the wound, even monetary awards in lawsuits against government officials who are found guilty of wrongdoing are paid by the taxpayer.
Americans are no longer innocent until proven guilty. We once operated under the assumption that you were innocent until proven guilty. Due in large part to rapid advances in technology and a heightened surveillance culture, the burden of proof has been shifted so that the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty has been usurped by a new norm in which all citizens are suspects. This is exemplified by police practices of stopping and frisking people who are merely walking down the street and where there is no evidence of wrongdoing. Likewise, by subjecting Americans to full-body scans and license-plate readers without their knowledge or compliance and then storing the scans for later use, the government—in cahoots with the corporate state—has erected the ultimate suspect society. In such an environment, we are all potentially guilty of some wrongdoing or other.
Americans no longer have a right to self-defense. In the wake of various shootings in recent years, “gun control” has become a resounding theme. Those advocating gun reform see the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms as applying only to government officials. As a result, even Americans who legally own firearms are being treated with suspicion and, in some cases, undue violence. In one case, a Texas man had his home subjected to a no-knock raid and was shot in his bed after police, attempting to deliver a routine search warrant, learned that he was in legal possession of a firearm. In another incident, a Florida man who was licensed to carry a concealed firearm found himself detained for two hours during a routine traffic stop in Maryland while the arresting officer searched his vehicle in vain for the man’s gun, which he had left at home. Incidentally, the Trump Administration has done more to crack down on Second Amendment rights than anything the Obama Administration ever managed.
Americans no longer have a right to private property. If government agents can invade your home, break down your doors, kill your dog, damage your furnishings and terrorize your family, your property is no longer private and secure—it belongs to the government. Likewise, if government officials can fine and arrest you for growing vegetables in your front yard, praying with friends in your living room, installing solar panels on your roof, and raising chickens in your backyard, you’re no longer the owner of your property.
Americans no longer have a say about what their children are exposed to in school. Incredibly, the government continues to insist that parents essentially forfeit their rights when they send their children to a public school. This growing tension over whether young people, especially those in the public schools, are essentially wards of the state, to do with as government officials deem appropriate, in defiance of the children’s constitutional rights and those of their parents, is reflected in the debate over sex education programs that expose young people to all manner of sexual practices and terminology, zero tolerance policies that strip students of any due process rights, let alone parental involvement in school discipline, and Common Core programs that teach students to be test-takers rather than critical thinkers.
Americans are powerless in the face of militarized police. In early America, citizens were considered equals with law enforcement officials. Authorities were rarely permitted to enter one’s home without permission or in a deceitful manner. And it was not uncommon for police officers to be held personally liable for trespass when they wrongfully invaded a citizen’s home. Unlike today, early Americans could resist arrest when a police officer tried to restrain them without proper justification or a warrant—which the police had to allow citizens to read before arresting them. (Daring to dispute a warrant with a police official today who is armed with high-tech military weapons and tasers would be nothing short of suicidal.) As police forces across the country continue to be transformed into outposts of the military, with police agencies acquiring military-grade hardware in droves, Americans are finding their once-peaceful communities transformed into military outposts, complete with tanks, weaponry, and other equipment designed for the battlefield.
Americans no longer have a right to bodily integrity. Court rulings undermining the Fourth Amendment and justifying invasive strip searches have left us powerless against police empowered to forcefully draw our blood, strip search us, and probe us intimately. Accounts are on the rise of individuals—men and women—being subjected to what is essentially government-sanctioned rape by police in the course of “routine” traffic stops. Remember the New Mexico man who was subjected to a 12-hour ordeal of anal probes, X-rays, enemas, and finally a colonoscopy—all because he allegedly rolled through a stop sign?
Americans no longer have a right to the expectation of privacy. Despite the staggering number of revelations about government spying on Americans’ phone calls, Facebook posts, Twitter tweets, Google searches, emails, bookstore and grocery purchases, bank statements, commuter toll records, etc., Congress, the president and the courts have done little to nothing to counteract these abuses. Instead, they seem determined to accustom us to life in this electronic concentration camp.
Americans can no longer rely on the courts to mete out justice. The U.S. Supreme Court was intended to be an institution established to intervene and protect the people against the government and its agents when they overstep their bounds. Yet through their deference to police power, preference for security over freedom, and evisceration of our most basic rights for the sake of order and expediency, the justices of the Supreme Court have become the architects of the American police state in which we now live, while the lower courts have appointed themselves courts of order, concerned primarily with advancing the government’s agenda, no matter how unjust or illegal.
Americans no longer have a representative government. We have moved beyond the era of representative government and entered a new age, let’s call it the age of authoritarianism. In fact, a study conducted by Princeton and Northwestern University concluded that the U.S. government does not represent the majority of American citizens. Instead, the study found that the government is ruled by the rich and powerful, or the so-called “economic elite.” Moreover, the researchers concluded that policies enacted by this governmental elite nearly always favor special interests and lobbying groups. It is not overstating matters to say that Congress, which has done its best to keep their unhappy constituents at a distance, may well be the most self-serving, semi-corrupt institution in America.
In other words, we are being ruled by an oligarchy disguised as a democracy, and arguably on our way towards fascism: a form of government where private corporate interests rule, money calls the shots, and the people are seen as mere subjects to be controlled. Rest assured that when and if fascism finally takes hold in America, the basic forms of government will remain: Fascism will appear to be friendly. The legislators will be in session. There will be elections, and the news media will continue to cover the entertainment and political trivia. Consent of the governed, however, will no longer apply. Actual control will have finally passed to the oligarchic elite controlling the government behind the scenes. Sound familiar? Clearly, we are now ruled by an oligarchic elite of governmental and corporate interests. We have moved into “corporatism” (favored by Benito Mussolini), which is a halfway point on the road to full-blown fascism. Corporatism is where the few moneyed interests—not elected by the citizenry—rule over the many.
History may show that from this point forward, we will have left behind any semblance of constitutional government and entered into a totalitarian state where all citizens are suspects and security trumps freedom. Even with its constantly shifting terrain, this topsy-turvy travesty of law and government has become America’s new normal. From Clinton to Bush, then Obama and now Trump, it’s as if we’ve been caught in a time loop, forced to re-live the same thing over and over again: the same assaults on our freedoms, the same disregard for the rule of law, the same subservience to the Deep State, and the same corrupt, self-serving government that exists only to amass power, enrich its shareholders and ensure its continued domination.
Elections will not save us.
I haven’t even touched on the corporate state, the military industrial complex, SWAT team raids, invasive surveillance technology, zero tolerance policies in the schools, overcriminalization, or privatized prisons, to name just a few, but what I have touched on should be enough to show that the landscape of our freedoms has already changed dramatically from what it once was and will no doubt continue to deteriorate unless Americans can find a way to wrest back control of their government and reclaim their freedoms.
There can be no denying that the world is indeed a dangerous place, but what the president and his cohorts fail to acknowledge is that it’s the government that poses the gravest threat to our freedoms and way of life, and no amount of politicking, parsing or pandering will change that.
It is easy to be diverted, distracted and amused by the antics of politicians, the pomp and circumstance of awards shows, athletic events, and entertainment news, and the feel-good, wrapped-in-the-flag evangelism that passes for religion today.
What is far more difficult to face up to is the reality of life in America, where unemployment, poverty, inequality, injustice and violence by government agents are increasingly norms, and where “we the people” are at a distinct disadvantage in the face of the government elite’s power grabs, greed and firepower.
The Constitution doesn’t stand a chance against a federalized, globalized standing army protected by legislative, judicial and executive branches that are all on the same side, no matter what political views they subscribe to: suffice it to say, they are not on our side or the side of freedom.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the powers-that-be want us to remain distracted, divided, alienated from each other based on our politics, our bank accounts, our religion, our race and our value systems. Yet as George Orwell observed, “The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.”
You either believe in freedom or you don’t. It’s that simple.
Everything else is just a deadly distraction. As Orwell observed in 1984:
“All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice.”
Automation Nation: Walmart Deploys Robots To 650 Additional Stores
America’s largest retailer/employer is adding shelf-scanning robots to 650 more stores by August, expanding its total robotic fleet to 1,000 stores, reported Bloomberg.
Walmart’s push for robots comes at a time when labor-costs are eating into profits. The company will have trouble passing increased costs to consumers; it will have to embrace automation on the front and back end of stores to drive labor costs lower, which will, in return, lead to a significant amount of its workforce slashed by 2030.
The U.S. unemployment rate lingers at several decades low and risks reversing as rising employment costs have led to a decline in job openings at the start of 2020. This could suggest the labor market has lost momentum, and rising costs have forced employers to stop hiring. Like Walmart, other companies will have to adopt automation and artificial intelligence to replace low-skilled workers to drive costs down.
C-suite executives at Walmart are ahead of the trend, some have argued they’re creating the trend, with the widespread adoption of robots in stores.
CEO Doug McMillon has said automation in stores is a way to improve store performance and lower labor costs.
Walmart has adopted automation in stores for the last decade — most of the 4,750 U.S. stores have self-checkout kiosks, doing away with humans ringing up items for customers.
A recent report via McKinsey & Co. found about 50% of all retail jobs will be slashed in the coming years because of automation.
As we’ve mentioned before, automation will displace at least 20 million U.S. jobs by 2030, with food service, retail, transportation, and warehousing being the industries most affected with job losses.
If you’re currently employed in one of these industries – now would be the time to get reskilled for a high-demanding job.
