On Tuesday, May 13, the Wisconsin Defense Industry Council (WDIC) held their inaugural WDIC Annual Conference at The Ingleside Hotel in Pewaukee. Inside the conference, defense contractors and lobbyists met to increase the defense industry’s footprint in Wisconsin. Outside, members of the Milwaukee Anti-War Committee, Peace Action Wisconsin, and other community organizations gathered in protest. At the same time, a coordinated disruption was planned inside the conference, where a die-in was staged, resulting in two arrests and several others escorted out. This action is part of an ongoing campaign to expose the WDIC’s role in expanding the war economy in Wisconsin.

Close Military Bases, Not Embassies

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, April 20, 2025
https://worldbeyondwar.org/close-military-bases-not-embassies/

In U.S. culture and media, where it’s one’s duty to pretend that the military budget and everything that goes with it does not exist, one could hardly be blamed for thinking that the closure of embassies actually meant a full departure.

And one could hardly be blamed for thinking this a positive development. Those embassies have steadily been transformed over the decades into weapons dealerships, military sidekicks, and dens of spies. (The CIA may yet point out to Trump how many embassy employees are CIA and make him an offer he can’t refuse.) It’s hard sometimes to imagine other functions. In fact, in U.S. culture, withdrawing the U.S. military from a place is usually called “isolationism” as if militarism were the only way to interact with people. But that’s the one thing that’s not ending in Africa or anywhere else.

The U.S. government is cutting off all sorts of aid, but not what it calls “military aid” or “defense aid” — meaning the U.S. military giving money and training to other countries’ militaries (never mind all the trainees who do coups). Go here, pick a year, and click on “Department of Defense.”

Most of Africa has been loaded up with U.S.-made weapons, and there’s been no indication of a halt to that (despite the planned closure of the dealerships). Go here and scroll back through the years.

The blue countries below are the ones without U.S. troops:

The red countries below have had U.S. wars or military interventions over the past 80 years:

The red countries below are under illegal U.S. sanctions:

Maintaining the militarism but dropping even the pretense of anything else is not progress.

Ways to relate to people other than through mass slaughter include cooperation on environment, healthcare, migration, and international law; and actual aid. Such approaches can be perverted into “soft power” and used for ulterior purposes. Eliminating them is asking for trouble, for hostility, for misunderstanding, for incapacity to handle any conflict through anything other than bombs and missiles. As everywhere else on Earth, the people of Africa have no widespread interest in competing with Donald Trump’s greedy business interests, but do have an interest in peace.

PREPARED REMARKS: Sanders Speech on Senate Vote to Block $8.8 Billion Sale of Heavy Bombs to Israel

April 3, 2025

https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/prepared-remarks-sanders-speech-on-senate-vote-to-block-8-8-billion-sale-of-heavy-bombs-to-israel/

WASHINGTON, April 3 – After filing Joint Resolutions of Disapproval (JRDs) to block the sale of two of the most egregious Trump Administration offensive arms sales to Israel, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) today rose to bring the JRDs up for a vote by the full Senate.

The sales would provide almost $8.8 billion more in heavy bombs and other munitions to Netanyahu, including more than 35,000 massive 2,000-pound bombs.

Biden Lied about the Risk of Nuclear War

By Ann Batiza

As Adam Entous wrote on March 29, 2025, in the New York Times, “The Secret History of the War in Ukraine”, the Biden administration lied to us constantly about the real threat of nuclear war. The quote below from Entous’s article, based on 300 interviews, shows how the Biden administration knew they were operating with a 1 in 20 or 1 in 10 chance that their actions in Ukraine would lead to a nuclear response from Russia, with that soaring to a 50/50 chance if the Ukrainians were successful.

535 Days: Where Is Your Line?

By James Hinden

I, James Hinden, am a writer you don’t know behind a screen, telling you how to think. You, the reader, are new to this page - you have to be, because so am I. The majority of what will be written here going forward will have a fair amount of humor built in to make otherwise heavy (or ADHD-unfriendly) topics more palatable. This piece isn’t one of them - there's nothing to laugh at in genocide. On that positive note, let’s begin.

THE NATION MAGAZINE

How Biden’s Foreign Policy Destroyed His Presidency

January 17, 2025

Jeet Heer

https://www.thenation.com/article/world/biden-gaza-legacy-foreign-policy/ 

Why I’m voting against the military budget

Bernie Sanders
Sat 8 Dec 2024

Today in America, 60% of our people live paycheck to paycheck, 85 million people are uninsured or underinsured and 21.5 million households are paying more than 50% of their income on housing. We have one of the highest rates of childhood poverty of almost any developed country on Earth, and 25% of older adults are trying to survive on $15,000 a year or less. In other words, the United States has fallen far behind other major countries in protecting the most vulnerable, and our government has failed millions of working families.

But while so many Americans are struggling to get by, the United States is spending record-breaking amounts of money on the military. In the coming days, with relatively little debate, Congress will overwhelmingly pass the National Defense Authorization Act, approving close to $900bn for the Department of Defense (DoD). When spending on nuclear weapons and “emergency” defense spending is included, the total will approach $1tn. We now spend more than the next nine countries combined.

I don’t often agree with Elon Musk, but he is right when he says the Pentagon “has little idea how its annual budget of more than $800bn is spent.” The Department of Defense is the only government agency that has been unable to pass an independent audit. It recently failed its seventh attempt in a row and could not fully account for huge portions of its $4.126tn in assets.

Very few people who have researched the military-industrial complex doubt that there is massive fraud, waste and cost over-runs in the system. Defense contractors routinely overcharge the Pentagon by 40% – and sometimes more than 4,000%. For example, in October, RTX (formerly Raytheon) was fined $950m for inflating bills to the DoD, lying about labor and material costs, and paying bribes to secure foreign business. In June, Lockheed Martin was fined $70m for overcharging the navy for aircraft parts, the latest in a long line of similar abuses. The F-35, the most expensive weapon system in history, has run up hundreds of billions in cost overruns.

Today, as a result of massive consolidation in the industry, a large portion of the Pentagon budget now goes to a handful of huge defense contractors like Lockheed Martin, RTX, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman. That consolidation has been extremely profitable for the industry: since 2022, these four contractors have brought in $609bn in revenues, including $353bn in US taxpayer funds, and recorded $57bn in profits. During that same period, they have spent $61bn on dividends and stock buybacks to make their wealthy stockholders even richer.

These defense contractors also provide their CEOs with exorbitant compensation packages. In the last three years for which information is available, these companies paid their CEOs more than $257m combined – with annual salaries that are about 100 times more than the secretary of defense and 500 times more than the average newly enlisted service member.

How does this happen? How do we keep handing huge amounts of money to companies that routinely overcharge the American taxpayer and often engage in fraud? The answer is not complicated. These companies – like the drug companies, insurance companies, Wall Street and the fossil fuel industry – spend millions on campaign contributions and lobbying. In the recent election cycle, defense contractors spent nearly $251m on lobbying and contributed almost $37m to political candidates. Surprise, surprise! Most members of Congress vote for greatly inflated military budgets with few questions asked.

The lack of accountability at the Department of Defense is not just costing American taxpayer dollars. It’s costing lives. The United States is providing many billions of dollars to help defend Ukraine from Putin’s invasion. When defense contractors said they couldn’t ramp up production without more taxpayer support, Congress repeatedly appropriated emergency funding, with roughly $78.5bn going to buy equipment and services from the major defense contractors.

How did those “patriotic” companies respond? They jacked up prices. RTX increased prices for Stinger missiles from $25,000 in the 1990s to $400,000 in 2023. Lockheed Martin and RTX raised the price of the Javelin missile system from about $263,000 per unit just before the war to $350,700 this year. Similar price hikes took place for Patriot missiles and other weapons. And make no mistake: every time a contractor pads its profit margins, fewer weapons reach the frontlines. The greed of these defense contractors is not just costing American taxpayers; it’s killing Ukrainians.

The United States needs a strong military, but we do not need a defense system that is designed to make huge profits for a handful of giant defense contractors. We do not need to spend almost a trillion dollars on the military, while half a million Americans are homeless and children go hungry.

In this moment in history, it would be wise for us to remember what Dwight D Eisenhower, a former five-star general, said in his farewell address in 1961: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” What Eisenhower said was true in 1961. It is even more true today.

I will be voting against the military budget.

Saturday, November 9, 2024

THE COMPATIBILITY OF MATERIAL AND MORAL ARGUMENTS: BERNIE SANDERS MEETS REV. WILLIAM BARBER

 Harry Targ

(The essay below was written in January 2018, I found it by accident and decided to repost it as we move beyond the 2024 elections. The ideas of Sanders and Barber still make sense to me as a vision and basis for tactics and strategy. November 9, 2024).

An article appeared recently on the internet announcing a public conversation to be held January 19, 2018 at Duke University between Senator Bernie Sanders and Rev. William Barber. The discussion, “The Enduring Challenge of a Moral Economy: 50 Years After Dr. King Challenged Racism, Poverty, and Militarism,” will be moderated by Duke University Chapel Dean Luke A. Powery.

As prior dialogues between them suggest, this conversation will not be a debate but an articulation of parallel theoretical and practical insights about politics by two of the most compelling progressive leaders today.

At root, but not in so many words, Sanders offers a narrative about a class society in which one class, the one percent, exploit and oppress another class, the 99 percent. Implicitly this dynamic is driven by the pursuit of profit. For him the antidote to this system is democracy and socialism.

The Sanders vision draws from the Marxist theoretical tradition but more importantly it is infused with the historic US tradition of populism and the socialism of such prominent and diverse political leaders as Eugene V. Debs, Jane Addams, and Dr. Martin Luther King.

Sanders prioritizes in his analysis, the capitalist system, autocratic political institutions, “false” ideologies that only recognize individuals, not communities or society, and institutionalized greed and immorality. Change, he believes, requires the mobilization of the 99 percent in the electoral arena and the streets to transform societal institutions.

Rev. Barber’s Moral Mondays movement, begun over a decade ago, was inspired by the dramatic rightward shift in North Carolina (and later national) public policies which effectively increased poverty, diminished access to health care and education, suppressed the right to vote, and in other ways attacked workers, people of color, women, and gays. Moral Mondays catalyzed a variety of groups who were morally outraged about the substantial increase in varieties of pain and suffering of vast majorities of people. And Rev. Barber realized that while groups and communities were angry over a variety of issues, their concerns overlapped. He was convinced that various angry constituencies could be brought together to collectively challenge an immoral system that hurt everybody; workers, people of color, women, LBGTQ individuals, and people of spiritual or secular traditions. Thus, the idea of “fusion politics” was articulated.

Moral Mondays was initiated by the spiritual community and it was motivated by the basic proposition that what was happening to people’s lives was immoral. Rev. Barber, therefore, built a movement based upon ethical systems derived from constitutional and/or theological premises that promoted social justice, human rights, and human dignity.

The Sanders campaign was grounded in material reality: economic exploitation, profit seeking at the expense of human development, and the maintenance of an economic system based on institutionalized avarice. Rev. Barber’s campaign was based on an ethical reality; that is that exploitation, poverty, racism, sexism, and homophobia were morally wrong. Although the basic constituents of each campaign varied (Sanders supporters tended to come from the working class, labor, and young people interested in socialism while Barber’s constituencies included leading civil rights organizations, faith communities, and issue-oriented advocacy groups) the constituencies overlapped.

At the dawn of 2018 (now 2025), most human beings, workers, people of color, women, gays, and almost everyone alive who lives in a physical space threatened by environmental change, have a stake in resisting the shift toward an apocalyptic economic, political, cultural, militaristic, and environmental universe. They could support a vision of a new society that prioritizes community over individualism, participatory democracy over authoritarianism, and human solidarity over hate.

Consequently, the movements coming out of the two currents (Our Revolution out of the Sanders candidacy and the New Poor People’s Campaign out of Moral Mondays) should join hands in a common struggle. Analyses of public troubles can begin with stances on political economy or public immorality but they cover the same ground AND they propose the same solution; a caring, participatory, just society.

So the vision of this latest dialogue between Senator Sanders and Rev. Barber should be inspirational. It should stimulate both communities to act in unity.

That is the political task of 2025 and beyond.