News Release Archive - 2018

DAVID VINE, vine at american.edu
CATHERINE LUTZ, Catherine_Lutz at brown.edu

Author of Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World, Vine is professor of anthropology at American University. Lutz is professor at the Watson Institute and Department of Anthropology at Brown University and author of The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle against U.S. Military Posts.

At the U.S. Capitol, on Thursday afternoon, “military experts from across the ideological spectrum will hold a public event to release an open letter arguing for the closure of wasteful, damaging, and unneeded U.S. military bases abroad. … Consensus is growing around a long-overlooked but crucial part of how the United States engages with the world: the nearly 75-year-old strategy of maintaining some 800 U.S. military bases in 80 foreign countries.”

See event livestream/phone-in: zoom.us/j/943926933 / (646) 876-9923 (ID: 943 926 933). Event is scheduled for Nov. 29, 1:00 p.m. ET in the Russell Senate Office Building, Room SR-188.

The open letter is addressed to the Trump administration and Congress and was drafted by the new transpartisan Overseas Base Realignment and Closure Coalition. The Coalition “reflects growing agreement among military experts that reducing the excessive U.S. military footprint could, counterintuitively, make the country safer while saving billions of dollars a year.”

For more information, see: OverSeasBases.net.

The signatories to the letter include “Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, Greens, and Independents. They span a retired army general and other retired military officers; peace advocates; a former GOP member of Congress; Clinton, Reagan, and George W. Bush administration officials; and academics and think tank analysts across the ideological spectrum.”

In addition to Lutz and Vine, scheduled speakers include Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, (U.S. Army, Ret.), former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell; John Glaser, director, Foreign Policy Studies, Cato Institute; Sayo Saruta, director, New Diplomacy Initiative (Japan).

On Wednesday, over 100 U.S. scholars, intellectuals, and activists published an “open letter to Senator Bernie Sanders and invited others to add their names to it. Sanders was working to force a new Senate vote on ending, or at least reducing, U.S. participation in the war on Yemen. Signers of the letter wished to encourage such steps and, in fact, to urge Sanders toward far greater opposition to militarism and support for peace.”

MATTHEW HOH, matthew_hoh at riseup.net
DAVID SWANSON, davidcnswanson at gmail.com
Signers include Hoh, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and Swanson, the director of World BEYOND War and advisory board member, Veterans For Peace. He is a lead organizer for the letter.

Other signers include Christine Ahn, Noam Chomsky, John Dear, Jodie Evans, Margaret Flowers, Kathy Kelly and Ann Wright. Full letter and IDs of signers here. Excerpts from the “Open Letter to Senator Bernie Sanders“:

“Military spending is well over 60 percent of discretionary spending. A public policy that avoids mentioning its existence is not a public policy at all. Should military spending go up or down or remain unchanged? This is the very first question. We are dealing here with an amount of money at least comparable to what could be obtained by taxing the wealthy and corporations (something we are certainly in favor of as well).

“A tiny fraction of U.S. military spending could end starvation, the lack of clean water, and various diseases worldwide. No humanitarian policy can avoid the existence of the military. No discussion of free college or clean energy or public transit should omit mention of the place where a trillion dollars a year is going.

“War and preparations for war are among the top destroyers, if not the top destroyer, of our natural environment. No environmental policy can ignore them.

“Militarism is the top source of the erosion of liberties, and top justification for government secrecy, top creator of refugees, top saboteur of the rule of law, top facilitator of xenophobia and bigotry, and top reason we are at risk of nuclear apocalypse. There is no area of our social life that is untouched by what Eisenhower called the military industrial complex.

“The U.S. public favors cutting military spending.

“Even candidate Trump declared the wars since 2001 to have been counterproductive, a statement that appears not to have hurt him on election day.

“A December 2014 Gallup poll of 65 nations found the United States to be far and away the country considered the largest threat to peace in the world, and a Pew poll in 2017 found majorities in most countries polled viewing the United States as a threat. A United States responsible for providing clean drinking water, schools, medicine, and solar panels to others would be more secure and face far less hostility around the world; that result would cost a fraction of what is invested in making the United States resented and disliked.

“Economists at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst have documented that military spending is an economic drain rather than a jobs program.”

JEHAN HAKIM, hakimjehan at gmail.com
Hakim is chair of the Yemeni Alliance Committee [see on Facebook], which is working with other groups including Just Foreign Policy and Action Corps. The groups noted that Trump last week defended U.S. government support for the Saudi-led war.

The groups just released a statement: “The Senate will likely vote Tuesday on U.S. support for the Saudi Coalition in the Yemen war. As 14 million Yemenis face the world’s worst famine in 100 years, Yemeni-American activists and allies will rally Monday after Thanksgiving at Senate offices across U.S. … [See from CBS News on Sunday: “Bernie Sanders confident bill stopping U.S. support of Saudi Arabia in Yemen can pass.” See Sanders’ recent New York Times oped: “Bernie Sanders: We Must Stop Helping Saudi Arabia in Yemen.”]

“Last week activists in San Francisco and Los Angeles succeeded in obtaining support from House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Adam Schiff for a bill to end U.S. involvement in the Saudi-Houthi war in Yemen. The legislation invokes the War Powers Resolution of 1973 to end all U.S. support for the war in Yemen. Tuesday [Senate Minority Leader] Schumer tweeted his support for the Senate version, SJRes54, but he, Sen. Menendez of New Jersey, and many other senators have yet to co-sponsor the bill.

“The U.S. administration recently announced it would stop refueling Saudi warplanes over Yemen. But the week before Thanksgiving the U.S. House narrowly voted to block debate of a bill to withdraw the U.S. completely from the Saudi Coalition in Yemen. The U.S. continues to provide critical military support and diplomatic cover for Saudi Arabia in Yemen. The Saudi Coalition has stopped the flow of food, medicine, and fuel into Yemen.”

STEPHEN ZUNES, zunes at usfca.edu, @SZunes

Zunes is professor of politics and international studies at the University of San Francisco, where he serves as coordinator of the program in Middle Eastern Studies. He just wrote the piece “Dems Eye Hawkish Eliot Engel to Chair House Foreign Affairs Committee, which states: “Congressman Eliot Engel, Democrat of New York, currently the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, will likely be the choice of the Democratic Party leadership to chair that influential committee when the new Democratic majority comes to office in January. In that role, he will serve as the Democratic Party’s most prominent figure on foreign policy.

“Unfortunately, on many key issues, his views are closer to that of Republicans than the majority of his fellow Democrats. Indeed, the prominent pro-Trump neoconservative activist Morton Klein has praised Engel’s likely ascension to the chairmanship, describing him as someone ‘who fully understands the truth of the Arab-Islamic war against Israel and the West.’

“In order to frighten Americans into supporting a U.S. takeover of Iraq, Engel falsely claimed just prior to the 2002 war authorization vote to invade Iraq that the Iraqi government was still producing chemical and biological weapons. He was among a rightwing minority of Congressional Democrats who voted to authorize the illegal, unnecessary, and predictably tragic U.S. invasion of that oil-rich country.

“More recently, Engel worked successfully to kill a Democratic-sponsored 2017 measure that would have ended U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s bombing of Yemen, which has killed many thousands of civilians and threatens millions more with starvation and disease.

“He was one of only a handful of Democrats to oppose the Iran anti-nuclear agreement. …

“In addition, Engel has opposed the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, has called for expanding NATO to include Ukraine and Georgia, and supports Morocco’s illegal annexation of occupied Western Sahara, insisting that the United States accept Moroccan sovereignty and deny the former Spanish colony the right of self-determination as demanded by the United Nations and the World Court. …

“It is no longer the case that those with the most seniority automatically become committee chairs. Democratic House leaders Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer could decide to appoint a less rightwing chair. Roots Action and other progressive groups have organized a petition to persuade the Democratic Party leadership to not give Engel the chairmanship of the Foreign Affairs Committee, and to appoint someone without such dangerous views.”

The suspension of CNN correspondent Jim Acosta’s White House press pass has caused a major controversy, with a judge Friday morning ruling against the White House and granting CNN a temporary restraining order.

The Wall Street Journal reports Friday morning that “U.S. Is Optimistic It Will Prosecute [WikiLeaks Founder] Assange.”

In “Trump and Big Media: Clash or Collusion?,” Institute for Public Accuracy senior analyst Sam Husseini, who was expelled from the Trump-Putin news conference in Helsinki and locked up, recently wrote that beneath the heated rhetoric, there is a symbiotic relationship between Trump and establishment media. Husseini who covered the Helsinki summit for The Nation, noted, for example, that mainstream outlets at times ignore or even facilitate attacks on WikiLeaks, himself and other non-establishment media. Ironically, CNN invoked a legal precedent established by Robert Sherrill, who also wrote for The Nation and died in 2014, see obituary by Victor Navasky: “A Man Who Never Kissed Ass.”

ExposeFacts, a project of IPA, released a statement by Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg in 2017, “Trump Threats to WikiLeaks ‘Nuclear Option’ Against the First Amendment,” which stated: “Obama having opened the legal campaign against the press by going after the roots of investigative reporting on national security — the sources — Trump is going to go after the gatherers/gardeners themselves (and their bosses, publishers). …

“If journalists and publishers fail to call this out, denounce and resist it — on the spurious grounds that Julian is ‘not a real journalist’ like themselves — they’re offering themselves up to Trump and Sessions for indictments and prosecutions, which will eventually silence all but the heroes and heroines among them.”

JOE EMERSBERGER, jemersberger at aol.com, @rosendo_joe
Emersberger recently wrote the piece “Assange Case Shows Support for Free Speech Depends on Who’s Talking” for the media watch group FAIR. He writes: “The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention concluded in February 2016 that the governments of the UK and Sweden had forced WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange into a condition of arbitrary detention in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he has been since 2012. The group’s press release stated: ‘The expert panel called on the Swedish and British authorities to end Mr. Assange’s deprivation of liberty, respect his physical integrity and freedom of movement, and afford him the right to compensation.’

“Assange has never been charged with a crime in Sweden. At the secret urging of the UK government, Sweden refused for several years to question Assange in London regarding sexual assault allegations. That kept the case in ‘preliminary investigation’ limbo, while Sweden also refused to guarantee that Assange would not be extradited to the United States, where he is likely to face prosecution for his work as a publisher.

“Emails between UK and Swedish officials show that Swedish officials were getting ‘cold feet’ in 2013, and were considering dropping the ‘preliminary investigation’ into Assange, but the UK argued forcefully against it. Last year, Sweden finally dropped the investigation (shortly after it finally agreed to interrogate Assange in London, as it could easily have done years earlier), but the UK has been using the allegation that Assange skipped bail as a way to hold the threat of extradition to the United States over his head.

“In March of this year, Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno made the conditions of Assange’s arbitrary detention much worse. For seven months, Assange has been without any means to directly communicate with the public — in other words, to defend himself from relentless attacks and ridicule in Western media. Moreno has not only cut off Assange’s internet and telephone access, but also severely restricted visits. Moreno has openly stated that he silenced and isolated Assange because he objected to Assange’s political statements, but rather than blast Moreno for trampling Assange’s right to free expression and other basic rights, the international press and prominent ‘human rights’ organizations have responded with silence, distortions and even smirks.”

PIA GALLEGOS, pia at gallegoslaw.com
Chair of the Adelante Progressive Caucus of the Democratic Party of New Mexico, Gallegos is among the authors of the “Democratic Autopsy: One Year Later” report, which was released last month. She is quoted in the recent piece in Salon: “Reflections on a blue wave: How progressive activists drove a historic victory.”

KAREN BERNAL, nekochan99 at hotmail.com, @karenbernal5
Bernal chairs the Progressive Caucus of the California Democratic Party. She wrote the section on social movements in the original Autopsy report, released last year — and co-wrote the section on the future of the Democratic Party.

Norman Solomon, also a co-author of Democratic Autopsy, recently wrote the piece “A Challenge to the New Blue Congress: Govern as Progressives,” which states: “Incantations about the need for so-called moderate policies do little to stimulate a big turnout from the Democratic base — and other voters — oriented to voting against Republican candidates if their opponents draw sharp contrasts between advocacy for economic justice and flackery for de facto oligarchy.

“Surveys show that voters are hungry for genuinely progressive policies that have drawn little interest from mainstream media outlets. For instance, polling of the U.S. public shows:

76 percent support higher taxes on the wealthy.
70 percent support Medicare for All.
59 percent support a $15 minimum wage.
60 percent support expanded tuition-free college.
69 percent oppose overturning Roe v. Wade.
65 percent support progressive criminal justice reform.
59 percent support stricter environmental regulation.

“Yet such popular positions are routinely ignored or denigrated by elite political pros who warn that such programs are too far left for electoral success. The same kind of claims assumed that Bernie Sanders would never get beyond single digits in his 2016 presidential campaign.

“The midterm election results have made Nancy Pelosi the likely next House speaker. Although habitually bashed by Fox News and other right-wing outlets as an ultra-liberal villain, Pelosi has declared allegiance to fiscal centrism and ongoing militarism that forecloses implementing a progressive political agenda.

“In September, as House minority leader, Pelosi precluded any potential left-populist agenda by backing reinstatement of a ‘pay-go’ rule to offset all new spending with tax increases or budget cuts. …

“Pelosi is closely aligned with Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer in obediently saluting President Trump as he boosts military expenditures — which already account for most of the nation’s discretionary spending. Early this year, when Trump proposed an 11 percent Pentagon budget increase over two years, Pelosi proudly declared in an email to fellow House Democrats: ‘In our negotiations, Congressional Democrats have been fighting for increases in funding for defense.’ The office of Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer proclaimed: ‘We fully support President Trump’s Defense Department’s request.'”

GREG LeROY, goodjobs at goodjobsfirst.org, @goodjobsfirst
Also available in New York: Maritza Silva-Farrell, maritza at alignny.org
And in northern Virginia: Roshan Abraham, roshanja at protonmail.com
LeRoy is executive director of Good Jobs First, which examines economic subsidies. They just released a statement: “The taxpayer costs of these two deals is high, both in absolute terms and on a per job basis, contrary to Amazon’s artful spin. Together, we believe they exceed $4.6 billion and the cost per job in New York is at least $112,000, not the $48,000 the company used in a selective and incomplete press release calculation.

“Amazon’s statement contains a classic example of cost-benefit apples and oranges. Citing only one New York state incentive, it says the sum ‘equates to $48,000 per job for 25,000 jobs with an average wage of over $150,000…’ Of course, wages cannot be compared to tax breaks since employees pay only a small percentage of their salaries as taxes to offset the tax breaks. And the cost per job in New York is actually at least $112,000 but that is not a full accounting. …

“Similarly, the Amazon press release omits an entire new campus close to its Arlington site, announced today by Virginia Tech University. It will cost $1 billion and ‘was part of the higher education package affiliated with the proposal that led to the selection of Crystal City in Northern Virginia as one of the two new Amazon headquarters locations,’ according to a Virginia Tech press release.”

See Good Jobs First’s Amazon resources at: goodjobsfirst.org/amazon.

ROBERT NAIMAN, naiman at justforeignpolicy.org, @naiman

Policy director at Just Foreign Policy, Naiman said today: “Tuesday evening, in a classic Nixonian dirty tricks maneuver of the Washington swamp, Paul Ryan’s House Rules Committee approved a rule for consideration of H.R. 6784, the ‘Manage our Wolves Act,’ that would ‘de-privilege’ H. Con. Res. 138, the Khanna-Massie-Smith-Jones-Pocan Yemen War Powers Resolution to end unconstitutional U.S. participation in the Saudi regime’s war-blockade-famine-genocide in Yemen. As of now, the full House is expected to vote on the floor Wednesday afternoon on this rule. If this rule for the consideration of the ‘Manage our Wolves Act’ passes, then H. Con. Res. 138 would be stripped of its ‘privilege,’ that is, stripped of its War Powers Resolution guarantee of a clean up-or-down vote on the House floor.” See from AP: “Quaker Lobby Calls on Congress to End Illegal U.S. War in Yemen.”

Last month, Naiman wrote the piece “Is the Current U.S.-Saudi Relationship ‘Unreformable’?“

The New York Times reports “Amazon Chooses Queens and a Washington Suburb for ‘Second Headquarters.’”

GREG LeROY, goodjobs at goodjobsfirst.org, @goodjobsfirst
LeRoy is executive director for Good Jobs First and is quoted in the New York Times article. His group recently released a statement on Amazon HQ2 site location: “As we documented in a study last April, the Crystal City and Long Island City subsidy offers are among the many HQ2 bids that remain completely hidden. Citizens have no idea what their elected officials have promised to a company headed by the richest person on earth.

“We don’t know what special new subsidies have been promised that will require state or local enactments. We don’t know if gentrification buffers — especially affordable housing — are included. We don’t know if clawbacks or other safeguards are included. We don’t know the cost per job. But we do know that both deals were negotiated in secret, without any public input. We also know that past U.S. ‘megadeals’ have cost an average of $658,000 per job. At that price, taxpayers can never come close to breaking even. Such deals convey a massive transfer of wealth from taxpayers to shareholders.”

The statement noted the efforts of local community groups, which “telegraphed their demands for community benefits shortly after Amazon launched the HQ2 auction at ourhq2wishlist.org.”