The Chris Moeller Archives

Government as an obscenity

For Democrats, impeachment is a distraction that allows the party to fall in line behind Donald Trump and the Wall Street fat cats and military-industrial state that serve as the political base for both the president and his political “opposition.” While they were busy lining up impeachment articles before the news media in the middle of a primary season, Congressional Democrats voted in favor of Trump’s NAFTA Part 2 this week, and a key House panel approved a plan to repeal the provision of the Trump tax law that put a higher tax burden on wealthy homeowners-- the cap on the write-off from their federal tax bill. Yes, the more expensive your house, the bigger your tax break, going forward. Congratulations.

Even more offensively, Congress is voting this week for a $22 billion defense budget increase over fiscal year 2019. It’s an authorization in full of $738 billion to grow the empire at the point of violent attack-- and yes, last week President Trump cut food stamps. Gone from the military funding bill is a provision that would have prohibited U.S. military support for the Saudi war on Yemen, and one that would have banned the sale of air-to-ground munitions to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The Saudis have evidently weathered the political storm that formed 14 months ago when their royal sovereign ordered the cold-blooded murder of a Saudi-born United States citizen named Jamal Khashoggi.

This is what #resistance looks like in Washington D.C. It’s a town where Donald Trump called the Clinton Foundation “the most corrupt enterprise in political history”-- after he donated to it. It’s a town where any and all progressive action can be killed without even getting past the “progressive” political party. Dozens of potentially-impeachable offenses have been committed by the president, but none of them have warranted impeachment hearings up until now except for the one connected to Trump digging up dirt on the Biden family financial hustle in Ukraine. Uncle Joe is the only Trump victim that matters.

In other war news this week, the president has signed an executive order defining Jewish people as a nationality (rather than a religious group) for the purposes of federal civil rights law, a move brazenly designed to chill free speech and punish political criticism of the apartheid state of Israel on college campuses. The new definition of anti-Semitism would include comparing “contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.” The measure is anti-Semitic by its very nature because it assumes that Jews in the U.S. are a separate nationality-- effectively ex-pat citizens of Israel rather than American.

And still in other war news, the Washington Post delivered to readers this week the “Afghanistan Papers,” a detailed account of how the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations have been deliberately misleading the American public about the level of military and state-building progress in Afghanistan since 2002. Make no mistake about it-- this is nothing less than the Pentagon Papers Redux, exposure of a Vietnam-era-level of government deceit. The new “Papers” paint a picture of yet another long, expensive, and unnecessary war against brown people, another one that has no military solution, and most importantly, a government that has privately known for nearly twenty years that there is no military solution. What it is instead then is mass murder.

The Afghanistan War-- the Democrats’ war-- the Obama war-- has now cost nearly a trillion dollars, with the true cost being an additional trillion. What will be the result of this Washington Post exposition? I’ll refer you back to the $22 billion defense budget increase for fiscal year 2020.

posted by CM @ 9:03 PM