Capitalism, corporations, Trump – unavoidable facts, systemic contradictions

This is the first part of a four-part article, two in this post, and 3 and 4 respectively in the following two posts. The goal in the first three parts is to connect how capitalism, mega-corporations, and the Trump administration are shaping our economy in ways that are ultimately unsustainable and unjust, and, in the fourth part, to exam two proposals for how to change significant parts of this powerful alignment.

In this first part, I document some facts on mega-corporations in our capitalist system and how they typically operate with no concern about the effects of their decisions on people and environments. In the second part, I focus on some of the ways that mega-corporations, corporations generally, and their allies, influence government policy, especially – but not only – at the national level. In the third part, I consider how Trump and his right-wing political and corporate allies are working to consolidate this power in ways that are beneficial to them. Finally, I consider some proposals on how this corporate-capitalist arrangement may be changed.

Part 1: Corporate dominance in the U.S. Economy

There is no doubt that we have a capitalist economy dominated by mega-corporations that measure their success by their profits and the value of their stocks compared to those of their domestic and foreign competitors. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a megacorporation as “a huge and powerful corporation.” You get some sense of the size of these corporations from the numbers generated each year by Fortune magazine in its “Fortune 500” list of the largest corporations in the economy. In the magazine’s list for 2017, the magazine finds that “Fortune 500 companies represent two-thirds of the U.S. GDP [gross domestic product], $2 trillion in revenues, $890 billion in profits, and $19 trillion in market value, and employ 28.2 million people worldwide” (http://fortune.com/fortune500/list). The corporation with the most revenues in 2017 is Walmart, with $485.8 billion in revenues. The corporation with the most profits in 2017 is Apple, with $45.7 billion. The biggest corporations have more assets than most nations. According to Quora, there are 220 U.S. “firms” with revenues of $2 billion or more (https://www.quora.com/Forbes-400-How-many-companies-in-the-world-generate-over-US-1-billion-in-annual-revenue).

Here’s another way of thinking about the role played by mega-corporations. The domination of industry-specific markets by a few large corporations is defined as an oligopoly. In the U.S. economy, most industries are oligopolies. We have an economy in which virtually all industries and markets are dominated by a few mega-corporations. According to Wikipedia, “An oligopoly (from Ancient Greek ὀλίγος (olígos), meaning ‘few’, and πωλεῖν (polein), meaning ‘to sell’) is a market form wherein a market or industry is dominated by a small number of sellers (oligopolists). Oligopolies can result from various forms of collusion which reduce competition and lead to higher prices for consumers. Oligopoly has its own market structure.” Wikipedia continues: “With few sellers, each oligopolist is likely to be aware of the actions of the others. According to game theory, the decisions of one firm therefore influence and are influenced by decisions of other firms. Strategic planning by oligopolists needs to take into account the likely responses of the other market participants” (https://en/wikipedia/wiki/Oligopoly).

Tim Wu throws further light on this form of corporate concentration in an article for The New Yorker entitled “The Oligopoly Problem” (https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-oligopoly-problem). He refers to Barry Lynn’s 2011 book Cornered “which carefully detailed the rising concentration and consolidation of nearly every American industry since the nineteen-eighties.” Lynn’s chief finding is that dominance by two or three firms “is not the exception but increasingly the rule.” Wu gives this example, among others: “while drugstores seem to offer unlimited choices in toothpaste, just two firms, Procter & Gamble and Colgate-Palmolive, control more than eighty percent of the market….” Wu argues that there should be more government regulation of such arrangements.

What about the large number of small businesses?

Okay, there are gigantic corporations. What’s new? Well, you may have heard the opposite. One of the principal myths in our culture is that small businesses are the real dynamic force in the economy? It’s a myth that serves to detract people from the real source of economic power. DMDataBases identifies 18.2 million businesses in the economy, including proprietary businesses, partnerships, and corporations. Their number excludes the over 9 million businesses counted by the IRA that are offshore “shell companies” that have “no significant assets or operations,” that is, tax havens. According to DMData’s estimates, 92.5 percent of the businesses employ under 25 employees. Indeed, 73.6 percent have only 1-4 employees (http://dmdatabase.com/databases/business-mailing-lists/how-many-businesses).

While there are a lot more smaller businesses than the mega- or large-corporations listed by Fortune, small businesses are not major independent forces in the U.S. economy. Small businesses tend to be connected to, and dependent on, large corporate producers through (1) franchises (e.g., gas stations; fast-food restaurants; various types of “chain” stores like CVS drug stores), (2) sub-contracting arrangements, such as the non-unionized auto-parts manufacturers have with the major auto corporations. Small businesses whose products are locally produced are dependent on consumers, many of whom earn their income through employment in the corporate-connected system. There are, to be sure, some small business entrepreneurs whose businesses started in garages and became huge corporations. Take the cases of Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Amazon, and Google (https://www.americanexpress.com/small-business/openforum/articles/6-incredible-companies-that-started-in-a-garage). But they are the exceptions to the rule. And, further, individual entrepreneurial success here and there does not alter the reality of corporate dominance, but is absorbed into it.

The systemic constraints on corporations

We must also never lose sight of the fact that even the largest corporations operate in a capitalist economy that imposes systematic constraints on even the largest players. That is, corporations of all sizes operate in a system that structures and channels their actions and behavior in certain relatively predictable ways. Of course, some play the game better than others. At the same, the system is not absolute in limiting what corporations can do – or how much governments can alter economies or limit corporate crime and predatory activities. Nonetheless, corporations today dominate all major industries in the U.S.

The constraints

In the capitalist economy we have, there is constant pressure on even the largest corporations to worry about competition for market share and value, now increasingly from foreign as well as domestic competitors. Thus, the mega-corporations continuously engage in massive sales efforts to sell their products and services, endlessly looking for ways to hold onto and expand their markets. They need good sales and profits to have the means to attract and hold onto experienced executives and skilled personnel, to be organizationally and technologically up-do-date, to keep a good credit rating, and to acquire promising smaller and innovative businesses.
Further, all corporations, including the biggest, are forever looking for ways to lower the costs of doing business. This includes the outsourcing of jobs to low-wage subcontractors or individual contract employees in the U.S. or through supply chains internationally, often involving contractors or sub-contractors using low-wage labor. Many corporations also invest vast sums abroad in countries that offer low-wage non-unionized workers and free-enterprise investment zones. This aspect of the capitalist system is examined in-depth by John Smith in his book Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: Globalization, Super-Exploitation, and Capitalism’s Final Crisis (published 2016).

The never-ending pressures to meet Wall Street’s expectations also gives top management the incentive to lower labor costs through the mechanization or automation of production, the effect of which is to reduce opportunities for jobs that provide decent wages and benefits but buttressing the corporation’s bottom line. This issue is examined by Martin Ford in his book Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, or Martin Ford’s The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future. This trend of increasing automation also points to one of the fundamental contradictions of capitalism, that is, the tendency of the system to produce more and more with fewer workers. The eventual outcome is that at some point, nationally and internationally, there will not be enough consumers to purchase what is produced. Let’s return to the present.

The challenges vary to some extent from industry to industry. However, whether it is in banking, fossil fuels, insurance, pharmaceuticals, military weapons, high-tech, private prisons and detention, security and surveillance, retail, wholesale, transportation, you name it, the basic systemic characteristics generally apply:

• private ownership (sometimes by many thousands of shareholders)
• actual control by top management, not workers, not the outside board members, not government, not affected citizens (https://www.thoughtco.com/corporate-ownership-vs-management-1147907)
• the primacy of profits, typically without regard to the human, public, or environmental consequences
• the growth imperative, that is, the need for the corporation to grow or risk going out of business, seeing top executives being replaced, or being taken over by another corporation
• the constant search for cost-cutting efficiencies (e.g., the replacement of workers with labor-saving technologies),
• the displacement of negative externalities (e.g., pollution of all sorts, carbon emissions, radioactive wastes, nitrogen run off into waterways from the overuse of non-organic fertilizers) onto the public to pay for or live with in what sometimes become “sacrificial or dead zones,” “super-fund” sites, deforested woodlands, polluted air, and contaminated water sources.

The externalizing of costs – the normalization of destructive behavior
Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury, Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal, and author, writes on how our system of capitalism is a “looting machine,” because it “can impose the majority of the costs associated with its economic activities on outside parties and on the environment,” that is, the costs are “externalized” (http://counterpunch.org/2017/04/26/the-looting-machine-called-capitalism).

Roberts refers to the dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico from agricultural chemical run-off and from the toxic wastes spewed by chemical plants and oil refineries along the lower parts of the Mississippi River and Texas coastline. He also refers to how capitalism’s carbon-based economy produces global warming and ocean acidification. And such activities don’t cost the corporations a cent. Roberts also gives the example of the “outsourcing” of jobs, as an externalized cost that affects not only workers who lose jobs but results in negative effects that ripple through the public sector in, for example, lower tax revenues. He main point is that the costs to workers and the public greatly exceed any profits earned by the corporate outsourcers, but either the taxpayers end up paying the bill or the negative effects are left to continue and sometimes multiply. Roberts writes:

“Now consider the external costs of offshoring the production of goods and services that US corporations, such as Apple and Nike, market to Americans. When production facilities in the US are closed and the jobs are moved to China, for example, the American workers lose their jobs, medical coverage, careers, pension provision, and often their self-respect when they are unable to find comparable employment or any employment. Some fall behind in their mortgage and car payments and lose their homes and cars. The cities, states, and federal governments lose the tax base as personal income and sales taxes decline and as depressed housing and commercial real estate prices in the abandoned communities depress property taxes. Social security and Medicare funding is harmed as payroll tax deposits fall. State and local infrastructure declines. Possibly crime rises. Safety need needs rise, but expenditures are cut as tax revenues decline. Municipal and state workers find their pension at risk. Education suffers. All of these costs greatly exceed Apple’s and Nike’s profits from substituting cheaper foreign labor for American labor. Contradicting the neoliberal claims, Apple and Nike’s prices do not drop despite the collapse in labor costs that the corporations experience.”

Great power is frequently abused

Corporate executives often engage in activities that violate relevant statutes and law in their efforts to advance the interests of their companies or their own individual interests. The literature on corporate- and white-collar crime provides abundant documentation. The unending competition, the endless pursuit of profit and growth, the self-rewarding status that executives achieve when their corporations do well, and the opportunities to deviate from the rules to maintain a corporation’s market advantages, create the context for deviant or criminal behavior by some. Indeed, Russell Mokhiber, editor of Corporate Crime Reporter, identifies in a 2007 speech “twenty things you should know about corporate crime” (http://www.alternet.org/story/54093/twenty_things_you_should_know_about_corporate_crime). Among Mokhiber’s points are these:

“Corporate crime inflicts far more damage on society than all street crime combined.” – the banks that caused the housing crisis and 2008-09 Great Recession

“Corporate crime is often violent crime” – e.g., the number of people who die every year on the job or from occupational diseases, contaminated food, hazardous consumer products

“Corporate criminals are the only criminal class in the United States that have the power to define the laws under which they live” (see the next section)

“Corporate crime is underprosecuted….”

Another egregious example of corporate misconduct, if it is not criminal, is the drug industry’s involvement in the current opioid crisis. This was revealed in a segment of the CBS program “Sixty Minutes” on October 17, as host Bill Whitaker interviewed “whistleblower Joe Annazzisi” on this crisis and how drug industry lobbyists and Congress derailed the federal government’s Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) efforts to stop drug distributors from pumping vast quantities of opioids into US communities (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ex-dea-agent-opioid-crisis-fueld-by-drug-industry-and-congress). The following CBS account captures the gist of the story.

“Rannazzisi ran the DEA’s Office of Diversion Control, the division that regulates and investigates the pharmaceutical industry. Now in a joint investigation by 60 Minutes and The Washington Post, Rannazzisi tells the inside story of how, he says, the opioid crisis was allowed to spread — aided by Congress, lobbyists, and a drug distribution industry that shipped, almost unchecked, hundreds of millions of pills to rogue pharmacies and pain clinics providing the rocket fuel for a crisis that, over the last two decades, has claimed 200,000 lives.”

Part 2 – The multi-faceted political impact of the corporations and their billionaire allies

Why are corporations interested in influencing and shaping government policies

There is a lot at stake from their perspective. Government tax policies influence how much after-tax profits corporations will have, though corporations are famous for finding ways to reduce or avoid taxes (https://itep.org/the-35-percent-corporate-tax-myth). Government regulatory policies can, if strong, increase the costs of doing business or, if weak, can reduce these costs. Think of patent regulations, the host of environmental regulations, occupational safety and health regulations, and so forth. Under present circumstances, corporations that pollute the environment are, as mentioned in Part One, often able to externalize these costs, that is, pass them onto government and taxpayers to clean up or not clean up. Investigators at ProPublica found evidence of the Trump administration’s efforts to “scale back government regulations” in various executive-branch agencies by “secretive teams” comprised of “political appointees with deep industry ties and potential conflicts [of interest].” ProPublica “identified 71 appointees, including 28 with potential conflicts, through interviews, public records and documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.” Who are they?

“The appointees include lawyers who have represented businesses in cases against government regulators, staff members of political dark money groups, employees of industry-funded organizations opposed to rules and at least three people who were registered to lobby the agencies they now work for.”

Here are three more examples of why corporations’ have significant interests in shaping government policies. One, government spending programs can offer corporations opportunities to obtain lucrative government contracts, sometimes cost-plus contracts. A foreign policy emphasizing military interventions mean profits for weapons’ manufacturers. The Trump administration and Congress have just increased the military budget by tens of billions of dollars, while at the same time escalating the number of US troops in Afghanistan, threatening North Korea with “obliteration,” taking steps to undermine the treaty with Iran, conducting major military exercises through NATO on the Eastern European borders of Russia, and increasing US naval presence in the South China Sea. Two, trade policies can also have advantages for corporations engaged in international sales and production. Three, the government’s management of public land can determine whether corporations engaged in the extraction of fossil fuels, other minerals, and timber, have access to such resources, often at very little cost.

On the latter point, the Senate Republicans and the Trump administration are pushing as part of the current budget negotiations to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in the northeast corner of Alaska for oil drilling. This is an area of 19.6 million acres that has been set aside to conserve fish and wildlife populations and habitats, fulfill international fish and wildlife treat obligations, provide the opportunity for the continued subsistence by local residents, and to ensure water quality and quantity within the refuge (https://www.fws.gov/refuge/Arctic/about.html).

At the same time, the Republicans and Trump are already opening the National Petroleum Reserve, located west of the Refuge. Dino Grandoni reports for The Washington Post (Oct. 26, 107), the National Petroleum Reserve is a massive stretch of land of 23 million acres. The government is selling off 900 tracts of land in this reserve. And Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke “is taking steps toward removing the protection for [other] parts of the reserve currently off limits.” Wikipedia has a “page” on the National Petroleum Reserve, noting that it represents “the largest tract of undisturbed public land in the United States.” In 2010 the United States Geological Survey estimated that there were 896 million barrels of oil and 53 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in the region. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Petroleum_Reserve%E2%80%93Alaska).

The methods by which corporations influence government

The mega-corporations have an arsenal of methods for influencing and shaping governments policies. The mega-corporations play a decisive role in shaping government policies directly by financially supporting their favored candidates in electoral contests, through large lobbying efforts to shape and influence relevant legislation, through their own public relations departments, and by having their own executives or those who are ideologically supportive appointed to policy-relevant positions in the President’s cabinet, to other executive-branch agencies, or to agency-advisory boards. They contribute to the Republican National Campaign Committee and other Republican Party organizations. They join in supporting organizations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, and industry-specific trade associations like the fossil fuel industry’s American Petroleum Institute. The list of trade associations is long, as you can see at: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_industry_trade_groups_in_the_United_States.

They contribute to Super PACs anonymously. Open Secrets describes them as “a relatively new type of committee that arose following the July 2010 federal court decision in a case known as SpeechNow.org v. Federal Election Commission (http://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/superpacs.php?cycle=2018). In technical terms, super PACs are known “as independent expenditure-only committees” that “may raise unlimited sums of money from corporations, unions, associations and individuals. These PACs can then “spend unlimited sums to overtly advocate for or against political candidates,” though they cannot legally coordinate their spending with that of the candidates they benefit. The top 10 Super Pacs on the list by “total raised” for the 2018 political cycle include,” include 5 “conservative” and 5 “liberal.” The largest two by far are “conservative”: the Congressional Leadership Fund and the Senate Leadership Fund.

Mega corporations spend massively on political advertising, often in ways that hide their identities. They also support efforts to advance their agenda ideologically, as well as politically, through their support of conservative or right-wing think tanks. Conservapedia has a list of the American conservative and libertarian think tanks that includes, among others, American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation, Hudson Institute (http://www.conservapedia.com/List_of_conservative_and_libertarian_think_tanks).

Additionally, mega-corporations and their allies support public relations firms, fund the careers of corporate-friendly scientists and “experts,” and organize and fund faux grassroots groups. Not the least, they buy the services of the most prestigious law firms. And, politically, they benefit from the Fox TV network and a host of right-wing radio programs.

Their billionaire soul mates

The political impact of corporations is complemented by the political involvement of billionaires, virtually all of whom are connected to corporations directly as top executives or members of corporate boards, through stockholdings, or who own large businesses that have not been incorporated, such as Cargill and Koch Industries.

For example, consider the case of the Koch Industries. According another Wikipedia page on “Koch Industries” is a conglomerate. It owns “Invista, Georgia-Pacific, Molex, Flint Hills Resources, Koch Pipeline, Koch Fertilizer, Koch Minerals, Matador Cattle Company and recently Guardian Industries.” What do they do? They are “involved in industries such as the manufacturing, refining, and distribution, petroleum, chemicals, energy, fiber, intermediates and polymers, minerals, fertilizers, pulp and paper, chemical technology equipment, ranching, finance, commodities trading, and other ventures and investments.” The Wikipedia account also notes that “the firm employs about 60,000 people in the United States and another 40,000 in 59 other countries” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_Industries).

Additionally, in 2013–2015, “Forbes listed it as the second largest privately held company in the United States (after Cargill), with an annual revenue of $115 billion. If Koch Industries were a public company in 2013, it would have ranked 17 in the Fortune 500.

Wikipedia also has a “page” on the Kochs and their political activities (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Political_activities_of_the_Koch_brothers&oldid=722119237). The two brothers, Charles and David, own 84 percent of Koch Industries.

According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index of the world’s 500 richest people, Charles Koch was 12th with 47 billion in net worth and David Koch was 13th also with $78 billion (https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires).

They are ultra-conservative in their outlook and favor a very limited central government, maximum deregulation, and low taxes. They have supported political candidates and policies that want to maximize the access and use of all domestic fossil fuels. They are among the leading forces in their denial that climate change is a problem. Their fossil fuel investments and their polluting companies help to explain this retrograde ideology.

Reporting for The Center for Media and Democracy, Alex Kotch writes:

“Libertarian billionaires Charles and David Koch have long opposed federal power and federal spending. Koch Industries is one of the nation’s biggest polluters and has been sanctioned and fined over and over again by both federal and state authorities. In response, the Kochs have launched a host of ‘limited government’ advocacy organizations and have created a massive $400 million campaign finance network, fueled by their fortunes and those of their wealthy, right-wing allies, that rivals the two major political parties” (http://www.exposedbycmd/org/2017/03/23/kochs-bankroll-movement-rewrite-constitution).

The Koch’s have family foundations, support think tanks. They were they initial supporters of the Cato Institute and key donors to the Federalist Society, as well as many other right-wing organizations. Their main political advocacy group is the Americans for Prosperity Foundation.
The are big financiers of right-wing Republican candidates. Robert Elliott reports, with some additional details, that the political and policy network led by the Koch Brothers plan to spend as much as $400 million in 2018 midterm elections (http://time.com/4652743/donald-trump-koch-brothers-400-million). Charles Koch is quoted: “We should use this opportunity [with Republican control of Washington] as an opportunity to help us really move forward in advancing the country toward a brighter future….We may not have an opportunity again like we have today.”

In their efforts last year, Roberts writes, “the Koch-backed candidates won in seven of the eight up-for-grabs U.S. Senate races.” This year, the Koch network has “staff on the ground in 36 states.” But they are involved in many politically-relevant ways in pushing a neo-liberal agenda of low-taxation, deregulation, privatization, are mounting a movement in the states to pass a constitutional amendment that would compel the federal government to balance the budget, the effects of which would bankrupt government social-welfare programs and drastically affect the majority of Americans.

They oppose the idea of a single-payer health care system, according to Wikipedia. They gave grants worth a total of $236 million to conservative groups, “like the Tea Party and organizations which opposed the Affordable Care Act in 2012 election.” They push their free-market ideology supporting programs “on more than 300 college campuses,” and have given educational grants “to nearly 270 U.S. colleges and universities ‘for projects that explore how the principles of free enterprise and classical liberalism promote more peaceful and prosperous society.’”

The Kochs are not alone. There are hundreds of billionaires and multi-millionaires who financially support a right-wing, Republican Party, agenda. This reality has been covered in great detail in such books as these:

• Richard L. Hasen, Plutocrats United: Campaign Money, the Supreme Court, and the Distortions of American Elections
• Linda McQuaig and Neil Brooks, Billionaire’s Ball: Gluttony and Hubris in an Age of Epic Inequality
• Greg Palast, Billionaires and Ballot Bandits: How to Steal Elections in 9 Easy Steps
• Nomi Prins, It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bailouts, Bonuses, and Backroom Deals from Washington to Wall Street
• Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

Corporate-Republican Ties get Stronger

Corporations have always disproportionately favored the Republican Party. However, most mega-corporations are opportunistic and have contributed to and continue to contribute to both major parties. In recent years, though, corporations in most industries have increasingly tilted their political resources toward the Republican Party. The reasons are easy enough to understand. The Republican Party is a party that favors the most corporate-friendly agenda, including extensive deregulation, privatization (e.g., of the Post Office, of Social Security, of Medicare). The party favors lowering corporate taxes and free trade. It advances policies that allow for the unhindered extraction and use of fossil fuels, a “muscular” military policy, and in opening profitable opportunities in government spending on surveillance of citizens and the detention of hundreds of thousands of “illegal” immigrants in for-profit prisons. It is also the party that often opposes policies that would strengthen workers’ rights and occupational safety and health regulations or raise the federal minimum wage. The Republican Party is also strongly disposed to supporting any policy that reduces the size of the government, with big exceptions for programs that benefit the corporations and the rich. Trump is now a great facilitator of the right-wing Republican agenda. This means high levels of military spending, subsidies and tax loopholes for fossil fuel corporations, lower tax rates for upper-income individuals and families, little effective regulation of pharmaceutical corporations and an emphasis on deregulation generally. Of course, Trump’s bellicose language toward immigrants is in accord with the positions of the Republican Party.

The Republican Party’s links to radical right groups

There’s more to be said about the contemporary Republican political juggernaut. The Republican Party is also abetted by opportunistic political alignments with single-issue groups like the National Rifle Association (NRA) and right-wing groups, such as, fundamentalist-oriented religious groups.

Take the NRA. The goal of this national organization is to oppose all attempts at gun regulation. The NRA’s principal justification is based on its controversial interpretation of the Second Amendment which doesn’t enjoy the support of most Americans. Nonetheless, it is one of the most powerful lobbying forces in the U.S. According to a report by Louis Jacobson for Politifact, the NRA made contributions to candidates, parties and leadership political action committees of $13 million between 1998 and 2016, plus spending $144.3 million on “outside expenditures” (e.g., campaign ads), and $45.9 million on federal lobbying. It totals $203.2 million (http://politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2017/oct/11/counting-up-how-much-nra-spends).

Most of the NRA’s political efforts favor the Republican Party. The NRA is funded significantly by firearms producers. Here is what the Violence Policy Center found.

“Until recently, the NRA claimed that it had no financial ties to the gun industry — despite the fact that its own publications, statements, and even awards ceremonies proved otherwise. As documented in the VPC report Blood Money II: How Gun Industry Dollars Fund the NRA, the firearms industry has donated between $19.3 million and $60.2 million to the NRA since 2005.
“The NRA’s so-called “corporate partners” in the gun industry are the nation’s top-selling manufacturers of firearms and accessories. One of the companies that has donated a million dollars or more to the NRA is Remington Outdoor Company (formerly Freedom Group), manufacturer of the Bushmaster assault rifle used at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Other top donors to the NRA include gunmakers Smith & Wesson, Beretta USA, Springfield Armory, and Sturm, Ruger & Co; as well as accessories vendors MidwayUSA and Brownells” (http://www.vpc.org/investigating-the-gun-lobby/blood-money).

What about the religious right’s association with the Republican Party? The religious right wants the U.S. to be a “Christian nation” with a fundamentalist persuasion, and as such a nation that gives special privileges and expresses higher regard in official documents, public ceremonies, and pronouncements for the Christian faith than other religious groups. Fundamentalists vote Republican and the Republican Party welcomes and cultivates their support. They share a commitment, for example, in having a Supreme Court that will overturn Roe vs. Wade. And it looks like they have one.

In an opinion piece for The New York Times titled the “passion of southern Christians,” Margaret Renkl captures the implicit, if not always explicit, viewpoint of the fundamentalist viewpoint, more extreme and less veiled in the South but also present in fundamentalist religious circles and constituencies in other parts of the country.

“Republicans now have what they’ve long wanted: the chance to turn this into a Christian nation. But what’s being planned in Washington will hit my fellow Southerners harder than almost anyone else. Where are the immigrants? Mostly in the South. Which states execute more prisoners? The Southern states. Which region has the highest poverty rates? The South. Where are you most likely to drink poisoned water? Right here in the South. Where is affordable health care hardest to find? You guessed it? My people are among the least prepared to survive a Trump presidency, but the ‘Christian’ president they elected is about to demonstrate exactly what betrayal really looks like….” (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/08/opinion/the-passion-of-southern-christians.html?_r=0).

Mike Lofgren makes an provocative point in an article titled “GOP Insider: How Religion Destroyed My Party” (https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/gop-insider-how-religion-destroyed-my-party). He refers to “cheap grace,” and how often it allows those with fundamentalists beliefs to find a sense of being forgiven by “God” by simply having a belief in Christ as their savior. This tolerance, Lofgren argues, also spills over into politics and the un-Christian behavior of some of the elected Republican Party officials in Washington. Here’s how it puts it.

“The religious right’s professed insistence upon ‘family values’ might appear at first blush to be at odds with the anything but saintly personal behavior of many of its leading proponents….I have never ceased to be amazed at how facts manage to bound off people’s consciousness like pebbles off armor plate. But there is another, uniquely religious aspect that also comes into play: the predilection of fundamentalist denominations to believe in practice, even if not entirely in theory, in the doctrine of ‘cheap grace,’ a derisive term coined by the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. By that he meant the inclination of some religion adherents to believe that once they had been ‘saved,’ not only would all past sins be wiped away, but future ones too – so one could pretty much behave as before. Cheap grace is a divine get-out-of-jail-free cards. Hence the tendency of the religious base of the Republican Party to cut some slack for the peccadilloes of candidates who claim to have been washed in the blood of the Lamb to overlook a politician’s foibles, not matter how poor an example he or she may make, if they publicly identify with fundamentalist values.”

Perhaps the best recent example of cheap grace is when President Trump spoke last year(Oct. 2017) on moral values to a standing ovation at the Values Voter Summit (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/14/trumps-religious-right-hypocricy-values-voter-summit). Journalist Daniel Jose Comacho reports on this event, writing:

“There’s nothing moral about a president who is an alleged sexual predator. There’s nothing pro-family about a president intent on separating immigrant families. Religious freedom is a misnomer for a president who is hell-bent on discriminating against Muslims and the free speech of journalists and athletes.”

And Comacho adds there is nothing moral about defining a fetus as a person, while “remaining pro-guns, pro-death penalty, and pro-war,” and supporting police misconduct and brutal treatment of African-Americans, or threatening the health care of tens of millions of Americans, or the “heartless” attitude of Trump toward hurricane-ripped Puerto Rico, or his blasé talk about using nuclear weapons to obliterate North Korea or teaching Iran a lesson once and for all. With all this, Trump has become a leading, if only opportunistic, voice for the values of fundamentalist religious groups across the nation. They are an important political constituency for right-wing, Republican candidates as well as for Trump.

Efforts to consolidate Republican power at the state level – Gerrymandering and voter suppression

In the November 2016 elections, the Republicans had astounding success in state elections in winning control of both legislative chambers in 32 states, and, in 24 of these states, also elected Republican governors (https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/barbara-hollingsworth/after-winning-7-more-seats-gop-dominance-state-legislatures).

Even before this, Republicans had enough control in enough states in 2010 to gerrymander congressional districts in their favor. This, as you know, was also true in Ohio.

Presently, many Republican-controlled states are engaging in widespread voter-suppression activities to reduce the votes of populations that tend to vote for the Democratic Party. Editors at The New York Times penned at editorial on this subject titled “Republicans and Voter Suppression” on April 3, 2016. They write: “…Republican lawmakers around the country have already enjoyed plenty of success erecting obstacles between the ballot box and the most vulnerable voters, especially minorities, students, and the poor that tend to vote Democratic.” They refer to voter-identification laws as one example (www.nytimes.com/2016/06/06/opinion/republicans-and-voter-suppression.html?_r=0).

Priorities USA finds in its research that “[v]oter suppression and strict ID laws are spreading rapidly around the country” (https://www.scribed.com/documents/347821649/Priorities-USA-Voter-Suppression-Memo?irgwc….)

The article continues: “according to the Washington Post, ‘before 2006, no state required photo identification to vote on Election Day.’” This has changed. “Today [after 2016 elections] 10 states have this requirement. And, moreover, “a total of 33 states – representing more than half the nation’s population – have some version of voter identification and suppression rules on the books.” The principal justification for these laws is that there is widespread voter fraud. There is no good evidence that this is the case. Priorities USA writes:

“…the evidence is clear that these laws are not only unnecessary but also serve as an obstacle preventing racial and ethnic minorities from participating in their fundamental right to vote and be a part of the democratic process.”

Priorites USA also conducted research on the voter turnouts, comparing states with “strict” voter-id laws to states with “non-strict” voter-id laws. They find, in their words, “As a result, we can say with confidence that adding strict identification requirements had significant negative effects on voter participation during the 2016 election.” The found specifically that “total turnout increased in states where ID laws did not change between 2012 and 2016 elections, but decreased in states where ID laws changed to strict.” The strict voter-id states, where “voters without acceptable ID must vote on a provision ballot and take additional steps after Election Day for it to be counted” include: GA, IN, KS, MS, TN, VA, WI, AZ, ND, OH.

Implications?

When you combine the Republican control of the state legislatures and governorships with Republican control of the White House and both houses of the U.S. Congress, add their widespread efforts to pass laws that suppress the votes of Democratically-leaning populations, and further add the vast resources that corporations and the rich are putting into electoral politics, Republicans appear to have a better than average chance of retaining their political control. This outcome is made more likely by the current absence of decisive leadership in the Democratic Party and the absence of a clear and compelling agenda put forth by the Democratic Party.

And given the present economic and political realities, it is unlikely that corporations are going to give up any of their advantages voluntarily for the sake of, for example, stemming the disastrous climate changes that are unfolding, or supporting policies that advance economic equity and justice, or supporting change that democratize how corporations are run, or supporting policies that accelerate the adoption of a green economy, or supporting a genuinely progressive tax system, or joining efforts to prioritize diplomacy over a militaristic foreign policy.

At the same time, there are counterforces, examined by such writers as James Gustave Speth in his book America the Possible, and Gar Alperovitz’s America Beyond Capitalism, and Cynthia Kaufman’s Getting Past Capitalism. There are some businesses committed to their employees and communities. There are progressive Democrats in the U.S. Congress. There are a growing number of progressively-minded people running for political office. There are states and local governments that are advancing forward-thinking public policies that aim at achieving fairer opportunities for their constituents. There are many progressive organizations, foundations. There are social movements that are struggling to change government policies and reign in corporate power. And furthermore, there are some millions of citizens who have democratic and egalitarian values, whether implicit or explicit, and who represent constituencies or potential constituencies for a progressive agenda. So, the outcomes desired and being advanced by mega-corporations and very rich are not going unchallenged and have yet to be written in stone.

The Military-Industrial Complex Grows,
Finding more ways to use nuclear bombs, Part 3
Bob Sheak

The 2018 Nuclear Posture Review: Background

Wikipedia provides some background on the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Posture_Review).

The first NPR was released in 1994 while Clinton was president and in the aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union, when there was talk of a “peace dividend” and the military budget was reduced for a few years. NPRs are not done every year. The second was made public in 2002 during the Bush administration, and then another one in 2010 while Obama was president. The present NPR, for 2018, is only the fourth in this series.

Obama’s nuclear posture review: a mixed bag

The purpose of the NPRs is to identify plans for nuclear deterrence and nuclear weapons capabilities and to ensure “they are aligned to address today’s threats.” The emphasis is on improving the organization of the nuclear “command and control,” assessing the adequacy of the nuclear arsenal to maintain strategic stability and deterrence, proposing how to improve nuclear capabilities, extending assurance to U.S. allies and partners, identifying which nations or non-state groups pose threats, and describing the status of previous nuclear-arms agreements and goals of nuclear non-proliferation and nuclear arms control. Wikipedia gives this short summary of the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review, issued by the Obama administration.

“President Barack Obama’s 2010 Nuclear Posture Review was preceded by high expectations because of his 2009 speech in Prague, Czech Republic where he prominently outlined a vision of a world without nuclear weapons. His NPR was hoped by observers to make concrete moves toward this goal. The finished 2010 policy renounces development of any new nuclear weapons such as the bunker-busters proposed by the Bush administration, and for the first time rules out a nuclear attack against non-nuclear-weapon states who are in compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. This rule pointedly excludes Iran and North Korea.”

Robert Circincione is an author and president of the Ploughshares Fund who served as secretary of state’s International Security Advisory Board under Obama. His book, Nuclear Nightmares: Securing the World Before It is Too Late, offers a comprehensive analysis of the nuclear situation as of 2013. He writes at length at what the Obama administration attempted to achieve in its nuclear policy. The following quote from the book gives one a sense of what Obama and his administration were trying to do.

“It was not until April 2010…that the framework for the new approach was fully erected. After several delays in external and internal negotiations, the Obama administration ushered in its plan for a strengthened nonproliferation regime with three dramatic developments in eight days: the revamped Nuclear Posture Review on April 6, the New START agreement on April 8 [ratified by the Senate 71-26], and the Nuclear Security Summit on April 12-13. The Nuclear Posture Review explicitly reduced the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. security policy. The new START treaty, signed by Obama and Russian president Dmitry Medvedev in Prague, was the most important strategic arms reduction treaty in twenty years, restoring critical inspection and verification mechanisms and lowering the level of permitted strategic weapons by one-third. The Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, D.C., gather fifty leaders, including thirty-seven heads of state and the heads of the United Nations and the European Union, for the largest- most senior-level conference ever held on nuclear policy. It produced an action plan to secure global stocks of highly enriched uranium and plutonium over the next four years, including immediate steps by many of the participating nations to reduce or eliminate their material stocks” (p. 39).

Where we stand now

The New START agreement, which is a legally binding, verifiable agreement, “limits each side to 1,550 strategic warheads deployed on 700 strategic delivery systems (ICBMs, SLBMs and heavy bombers), and limits deployed and nondeployed launchers to 800….The Treaty limits take effect seven years after entry into force, and the treaty will be in effect for 10 years, or longer if agreed by both parties” (https://www.armscontrol.org/print/2556).

As of now, prior to the possible implementation of New Start, the total U.S. stockpile of nuclear warheads, according to the Federation of American Scientists, is 7,290, including 1,790 strategic warheads ready to be launched, 2,700 on “reserve,” and 2,800 retired warheads awaiting dismantlement (http://fas.org/issues/nuclear-weapons/status-world-nuclear-forces). The warheads on hair-trigger alert status and can be launched within minutes of a detected – or misidentified – nuclear attack.
There were other relevant developments on the nuclear-weapons front during the Obama years, including the agreement with Iran on ending its nuclear power program. Both the New Start Agreement and the Iran nuclear deal are under the crosshairs of the Trump administration.

The major point, though, is that Obama and his administration were pushing in the direction of nuclear arms control and reduction in some ways, though they faced a hostile, obstructionist, uncompromising Republican opposition in the U.S. Congress. But Obama also hedged his bets and succumbed in at least one major way to the military spending hawks and the Department of Defense, supporting a program for “modernizing” the U.S. nuclear bomb arsenal at a huge cost. Overall, in the years after Russia and the U.S. signed New Start, there has been “a return to Cold War-style military exercises and weapon productions, according to Janice Sinclaire writing for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (http://thebulletin.org/press-release/25-years-start9690). Sinclaire writes: “On the U.S. side, the nuclear arsenal reduction has plateaued around 4,700 [ready to be launched and on reserve] with no immediate signs of continued disarmament.” Trump’s 2018 Nuclear Posture Review augurs poorly for the future, as he and his administration have embraced a full-speed ahead approach to the development of new types of nuclear warheads and delivery systems as well as favoring and getting huge increases in the overall military budget. This latter point was developed in Part 2 of this post.

Trump’s Nuclear Posture Review – MORE

How does Trump’s 2018 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) define the issues? I’ll be drawing on the “executive summary” of the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review (https://media.defense.gov/2018/Feb/02/2001872877/-1/-1/1/EXECUTIVE-SUMMARY.PDF). In many ways, as I’ve indicated, it echoes the major themes of the 2018 National Defense Strategy discussed in Part 2 of this multi-part email.

The NPR advances the argument that “global threat conditions have worsened markedly since the most recent 2010 NPR, including increasingly explicit nuclear threats from potential adversaries” [i.e., North Korea]. It contends that Russia and China have “added new types of nuclear capabilities to their arsenals.” Iran is identified (wrongly as long as there is an agreement) as a continuing potential nuclear power adversary. And, of course, there is the concern about terrorists, cropping up in more and more places in the Middle East, parts of Africa, Europe, etc. There is no attention paid to the causes of the rise of contemporary terrorism (e.g., Al Qaeda) and how the U.S. support of the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, and the subsequent U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, spurred the growth of terrorist groups or indigenous-resistance. See Andrew J. Bacevich’s book, America’s War for the Greater Middle East.

A basic contention of the NPR is that the best way to deter adversaries and nuclear-capable states from attacking the U.S. or its allies or partners is to greatly expand and modernize the nuclear arsenal. This, the NPR argues, will also reassure “allies and partners” in Europe, Asia, and the Pacific, that we are ready and prepared to protect them with the most advanced and effective nuclear weapons if deemed necessary by the President and the generals who advise him. As it now stands, by the way, the U.S. Congress has no say in this process.

The 2018 NPR maintains that these goals can only be achieved if the U.S. spends more on updating of the nuclear arsenal. This can be done by adding new low-yield warheads to the existing store of nuclear weakens and by strengthening the “strategic nuclear triad,” that is, by modernizing nuclear submarines and arming them with “submarine-launched ballistic missiles,” replacing land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles with new ones, and equipping strategic bombers with the most modern nuclear bombs and air-launched cruise missiles. The NPR provides details on just what specific new nuclear weapons will be produced for each leg of the triad. And, with great hubris and abandon, states “the United States will maintain and enhance as necessary, the capability to forward deploy nuclear bombers and DCA [dual-capable aircraft] around the world.”
Criticisms

Marjorie Cohn, writer and retired law professor who has written copiously on the legal implications of the conduct and policies of the U.S. military, is particularly concerned about how the NPR calls for the development of a new generation of “low-yield” nuclear weapons and how nuclear weapons may be used against non-nuclear attacks on our allies or the United States. Along with many others, she doesn’t see evidence that either China or Russia are threats militarily to U.S. national security (http://truth-out.org/news/item/43460-pentagon-to-allow-nuclear-responses-to-non-nuclear-attacks).
Cohn quotes Gregory Kulacki, China project manager at the UCS Global Security Program and author of a newly released white paper, who writes: “There is no evidence that nuclear weapons are becoming more prominent in China’s military strategy or that China has changed its longstanding no-first-use policy.” Similarly, both Beijing and Moscow have reaffirmed “that nuclear weapons are not ‘first strike’ weapons” but are only a “defensive deterrent.” [This was true as of February 2018.]

What then, Cohn asks, is the meaning of the NPR? It reflects a military-oriented mindset that says continuing American military dominance is the best way of dealing with international threats and conflict. On this point, Cohn quotes Derek Johnson, executive director of Global Zero, the international movement for the elimination of nuclear weapons, who identified the NPR as “a radical plan written by extreme elements and nuclear ideologues in Trump’s inner circle who believe that nuclear weapons are a wonder drug that can solve our national security challenges. They aren’t, and they can’t.”
She makes two other points in building her case against the NPR’s emphasis on spending hundreds of billions on expanding and modernizing the nuclear arsenal. There is some opposition in the U.S. Congress (I’ll say more about this below.) The U.S. has signed on to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that requires signatory nations with nuclear weapons to phase them out. This requires the phasing out of nuclear capacity, not the refurbishing of it. And, Cohn’s other point is that public opinion is on the side of the critics/opponents of the administration’s nuclear policy. She draws our attention to a recent NBC News/Washington Post poll that found sixty percent of Americans don’t trust Trump with nuclear weapons.” Unfortunately, the issue is for most Americans not high on their list of priorities.
Writing for The Guardian, Julian Borger reports that there is alarm being expressed at the NPR’s advocacy for the building of new types of nuclear weapons (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/09/us-to-loosen-nuclear-weapons-policy-and-develop-more-usable-warheads)

Critics are concerned, Borger discerns, that “smaller, more usable, nuclear weapons make nuclear war more likely, “especially in view of what they see as Donald Trump’s volatility and readiness to brandish the US arsenal in showdown with the nation’s adversaries.” Borger quotes Daryl Kimball, the head of the Arms Control Association, who said the NPR is an example of “dangerous, Cold War thinking.” Kimball continues: “The United States already possesses a diverse array of nuclear capabilities, and there is no evidence that more usable weapons will strengthen deterrence of adversaries or compel them to make different choices about their arsenals.”

Hans M. Kristensen, director, Nuclear Information Project, Federation of American Scientists, responds to the NPR by pointing out that the document “provides no evidence that existing capabilities are insufficient, but simply claims that the new capabilities are needed” (https://thebulletin.org/experts-new-nuclear-posture-review11480).

Robert Dodge, physician, peace advocate, and president of Physicians for Social Responsibility Los Angeles, writes that the NPR ignores the extensive evidence documenting the extraordinary potential destructiveness of even smaller nuclear weapons (https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/02/05/trumps-nuclear-doctrine-war-resumes). He makes the point as follows.

“Scientific studies have demonstrated the potential catastrophic global environmental effects following a limited regional nuclear war, using just 100 Hiroshima size weapons that would potentially kill 2 billion people. This new Doctrine [the NPR] proposes the development of two new generations of nuclear weapons including ‘low-yield nukes’, Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles (SLBM) and the long-term development of Submarine Launched Cruise Missiles (SLCM). These ‘low-yield nukes’ are 20 kiloton or the larger Nagasaki size bombs that killed more than 70 thousand people” [because of the immediate explosion, and many more died subsequently from injuries and radiation sickness]. Seemingly ignoring the fact that nuclear weapons are nuclear weapons regardless of size with the same horrific initial devastation and long-lasting radioactive fallout and injuries, these weapons are proposed to demonstrate America’s resolve in deterring nuclear attack.”

The Nation magazine’s Katrina vanden Heuval expresses her opposition to the NPR in an article published in The Washington Post (February 13, 2018). She argues that the Trump administration’s NPR, with all its references to military dominance, new nuclear weapons, the blithe willingness to use nuclear weapons, the dismissal of the inevitable catastrophic consequences, will increase the chances of nuclear war. And this system that is on hair-trigger alert is vulnerable to stumbling into a nuclear war that would “end us all.” This existential danger is made worse by a president who often acts on reckless and thoughtless impulse, is confrontational, and who seems to crave for the opportunity to punish adversaries. And there will be opportunities for Trump and the military brass to start a nuclear war even when there is no real threat. Vanden Heuval refers to “the many accidents and close calls during the Cold War,” when flocks of birds were mistakenly identified as incoming nuclear bombs. And, to make matters worse, the document expands the circumstances in the most general and vague terms under which the U.S. would launch nuclear weapons. She writes:

“The United States reserves the right to unleash nuclear weapons first in ‘extreme circumstances’ to defend the ‘vital interests’ not only of the United States but also of its ‘allies and partners’ – a total of some 30 countries. ‘Extreme circumstances,’ the review states explicitly, include ‘significant non-nuclear attacks,’ including conventional attacks on ‘allied or partner civilian population or infrastructure.’”

Accidental nuclear war

More fingers on the nuclear-bomb button(s)

We all should bear in mind that our nuclear system is prone to misinformation, poor communities, and accidents that could result in the launching of nuclear warheads when there was no real threat. As Daniel Ellsberg reports in his new book, The Doomsday Machine Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, the authority to launch such weapons extend beyond the restless, meandering fingers of Trump. Let me quote Ellsberg at length on this vital point.

“As I discovered in my command and control research in the late 1950s, President Eisenhower had secretly delegated authority to initiate nuclear attacks to his theater commanders under various circumstances, including the outage of communications with Washington (a daily occurrence in the Pacific) or a presidential incapacitation (which Eisenhower suffered twice). And, with his authorization, they had in turn delegated this initiative, under comparable crisis conditions, to subordinate commanders.

“To my surprise, after I had alerted the Kennedy White House to this policy and its dangers, President Kennedy continued it (rather than reverse the decision of the ‘great commander’ who had preceded him). So did Presidents Johnson, Nixon, and Carter. So, almost certainly, has every subsequent president to this day, even though in the past several decades there may have been at least nominal ‘devolution’ to some civilians outside Washington. This delegation has been one of our highest national secrets” (p. 15).

First-use policy

That is, the U.S. nuclear policy is based on a policy for “first use,” which means that the U.S. is prepared to launch nuclear warheads on Russia, China, or some other “enemy” if the President is led to believe that one of our adversaries is about to launch such bombs on the U.S. Ellsberg writes:
“The required U.S. strategic capabilities have always been for a first-strike force: not, under any president, for the U.S. surprise attack, unprovoked or a ‘bolt out of the blue,’ but not, either, with an aim of striking ‘second’ under any circumstances, if that can be avoided by preemption. Though officially denied, ‘launch on warming (LOW) – either on tactical warming of an incoming attack or strategic warning that nuclear escalation is probably impending – has always been at the heart of our strategic alert” (p. 13).

A history of accidental near launches

Again, Ellsberg:

“The strategic nuclear system is more prone to false alarms, accidents, and unauthorized launches than the public (and even most high officials) has ever been aware. This was my special focus of classified investigations in 1958-61. Later studies have confirmed the persistence of these risks, with particularly serious false alarms in 1979, 1980, 1983, and 1995. The chance that this system could explode ‘by mistake’ or unauthorized action in a crisis – as well as by the deliberate executive of nuclear threats – taking much of the world with it, has always been an unconscionable risk imposed by the superpowers upon the population of the world” (p. 16).
Eric Schlosser has written perhaps the most comprehensive and exhaustive account of nuclear accidents in his magisterial book, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety, published in 2013. In a subsequent article on the subject, Schlosser writes on December 23, 2016, after the election of Trump:

“The harsh rhetoric on both sides increases the danger of miscalculation and mistakes, as do other factors. Close encounters between the military aircraft of the United States and Russia have become routine, creating the potential for an unintended conflict. Many of the nuclear-weapon systems on both sides are aging and obsolete. The personnel who operate these systems often suffer from poor morale and poor training. None of their senior officers has first-hand experience making decisions during an actual nuclear crisis. And today’s command-and-control systems must contend with threats that barely existed during the Cold War: malware, spyware, worms, bugs, viruses, corrupted firmware, logic bombs, Trojan horses, and all the other modern tools of cyber warfare. The greatest danger is posed not by any technological innovation but by a dilemma that has haunted nuclear strategy since the first detonation of an atomic bomb: How do you prevent a nuclear attack while preserving the ability to launch one?” (http://www.newyorker.com/news-desk/world-war-three-by-mistake).

Nuclear Winter

This is about an almost unimaginable and horrifying consequence of nuclear war that would lead perhaps to the extinction of humanity, or at least of the destruction of any resemblance of what we know as civilization. I turn again to Ellsberg.

“In 1961 I had learned as an insider that our secret nuclear decision-making, policy, plans, and practices for general nuclear war endangered, by the JCS [Joint Chiefs of Staff] estimate, hundreds of millions of people, perhaps a third of the earth’s population. What none of us knew at the time – not the Joint Chiefs, not the president or his science advisers, not anyone else for the next two decades, until 1983 – where the phenomena of nuclear winter and nuclear famine, which meant that a large nuclear war of the kind we prepared for then or later would kill nearly every human on earth (along with most other species).”\

“It is the smoke, after all (not the fallout, which would remain mostly limited to the northern hemisphere), would do it worldwide: smoke and soot lofted by fierce firestorms in hundreds of burning cities into the stratosphere, where it would not rain out and would remain for a decade or more, enveloping the globe and blocking most sunlight, lowering annual global temperatures to the level of the last Ice Age, and killing all harvests worldwide, causing near-universal starvation within a year or two” (p. 17).
And what has our intellectually and morally challenged President Trump said: “If we have them, why can’t we use them?” (Ellsberg, p. 13)

Some concluding thoughts

We want to be hopeful, but also realistic. When we look for uplifting examples, we do find some. There has successful opposition to America’s nuclear policies in the past. There was a vigorous and successful movement that led the government to end nuclear-bomb testing not so long ago. And that alone gives us the hope that such a movement can be mounted again. Lawrence Wittner, professor of history at SUNY-Albany and author of Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement and other books, offers this recollection:

“The situation was very different in the 1980s, when organizations like the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign (in the United States), the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (in Britain), and similar groups around the world were able to engage millions of people in protests against the nuclear recklessness of the US and Soviet governments – protest that played a key role in curbing the nuclear arms race and preventing nuclear war” (https://original.antiwar.com/lawrence-wittner/2017/04/24/why-is-there-so-little-popular-protests-against-todays-threats-of-nuclear-war).

There were in the 1980s and subsequently nuclear arms control agreements signed by the U.S. and Russia that significantly reduced their respective nuclear weapons stockpiles. The Arms Control Association provides a “glance” at this history, the culmination of which was to substantially reduce the number of warheads and delivery systems on both sides (https://www.armscontrol.org/print/2556).

In the early 1980s, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START 1) was signed by President Reagan and “finally signed in July 1991.” The treaty “required the United States and the Soviet Union to reduce their deployable strategic arsenals to 1,600 delivery vehicles, carrying no more than 6,000 warheads.” The agreement “required the destruction of excess delivery vehicles which was verified using an intrusive verification regime that involved on-site inspections, the regular exchange of information, including telemetry and the use of technical means (i.e., satellites).” The treaty final went into force in December 2001 and then expired on Dec 5, 2009. After START II failed to get Senate ratification, Presidents Clinton and Boris Yeltsin agreed to a framework of START III, including further reductions in strategic warheads to 2,000-2,500 and the destruction of delivery vehicles. On May 24, 2002, Presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin signed the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT), “under which the United States and Russia reduced their strategic arsenals to 1,700-2,200 warheads each.” According to the Arms Control Association, “[t]he treaty was approved by the Senate and Duma and entered into force on June 2, 2003.” It was “replaced by New Start on February 5, 2011,” which, as referred to earlier in this email, is a “legally binding verifiable agreement that limits each side to 1,550 strategic nuclear warheads [not yet achieved] deployed on 700 strategic delivery systems…, and limits deployed and nondeployed launchers to 800.”

Aside from the history of government arms-reductions efforts, there are other positive developments. Here are some random examples.

First, worldwide, the number of nuclear warheads has declined from 70,300 in 1986 to 15,350 in early-2106 (http://fas.org/issues/nuclear-weapons/status-world-nuclear-forces).

Second, according to a report by Reuters correspondent Edith M. Lederer, published in the Washington Post, 122 countries at the United Nations (out of 193) “approved the first-ever treaty to ban nuclear weapons Friday [July 7, 2017] at a U.N. meeting. According to Lederer, “[t]he treaty requires of all ratifying countries ‘never under any circumstances to develop, test, produce, manufacture, otherwise acquire, possess or stockpile nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.” The Netherlands opposed the ban, Singapore abstained, the nine countries known to have nuclear weapons chose not attend the meeting (i.e., the U.S., Russia, Britain, China, France, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel), and the positions of 60 other countries were not identified. The treaty will be opened for signatures in September and come into force when 50 countries have ratified it, according to Whyte Gomez, Costa Rica’s U.N. ambassador. (Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/first-treaty-banning-nuclear-weapons-expected-to-be-adopted/2017/07/07/a3a2a572-62c9-11e7-80a2-8c226031ac2f_story.html?utm_term=.0152c48b36ea)

Third, sixteen Democratic senators signed a letter to Trump expressing their opposition to the NPR (https://www.markey.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Letter%20on%NPR.pdf). They maintained that it was unnecessary for the maintenance of deterrence and is destabilizing to “develop new, more usable low-yield nuclear weapons and reintroduce Cold War-ear weapon systems.” They also express concern that the cost pursuing these new nuclear weapons “will divert resources away from maintaining our conventional military superiority.” In addition, they argue that the NPR runs “counter to America’s obligations under the 1968 Nuclear Proliferation Treaty (NPT), particularly Article VI which commits the U.S. “to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to the cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament.” Finally, the senators are concerned that the NPR “pays only superficial attention to the substantial threat posed by nuclear terrorism and nuclear proliferation.” (Note: Sherrod Brown was not among the signatories.)

Fourth, Gar Smith compiles a list of dozens of organizations that are actively involved in a variety of peace/environmental initiatives in his book, The War and Environment: Reader, an indication that there continues to be a peace movement advocating for reductions in military spending and/or disarmament. They include, for example, U.S. Department of Peace, Plowshares initiatives “calling for the diversion of tax dollars from weapons production to environmental restoration, and the International Institute for Strategic Studies and the Global Campaign on Military Spending, both of which work for reduced military budgets. Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) “has repeatedly introduced a Nuclear Disarmament and Economic Conversion Act (NDECA) requiring the United States to ‘dismantle its nuclear weapons’ and redirect the savings ‘to address human and infrastructure needs such as housing, health care, education, agriculture, and the environment.” And, one last example, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) “is working toward multilateral negotiations for a treaty banning nuclear weapons by engaging in humanitarian, environmental, human rights, peace, and development organizations in more than ninety countries.”
Fifth, the majority Americans surveyed on December 22-28, 2016 by the University of Maryland’s Program for Public Consultation, agreed that the U.S. should not withdraw from the nuclear deal with Iran. The survey found that “nearly two thirds of Americans oppose withdrawing from the Iran deal to negotiate a better one” and prefer continuing “with the deal as long as Iran continues to comply with the terms” (http://iranprimer.usip.org/blog/jan/6/poll-most-americans-oppose-withdrawing-nuclear-deal).

The other side is so powerful

When we look at the national political situation in the U.S., the picture is grim. The Republican-dominated U.S. Congress strongly favors the military and nuclear policies of the Trump administration. They are supported by the big weapons makers, who stand to make enormous profits as military spending on conventional and nuclear weapons and supplies generally rise for the next decades, if the NPR is fully implemented. There are hundreds of communities that benefit from the military-industrial complex, wherever there is a military base or installation or a military weapons weapons/supplier contractor. In addition, there are millions of vets who belong to various veterans’ organizations, organizations that typically can be counted on to support whatever increases in the military budget the president requests. You can include the National Rifle Association to be among the boosters. Then there are the untold number of ordinary Americans who just follow the lead of “the commander in chief,” especially when they have family members who are in military service.

Most people don’t have a clue on how much we have been spending on wars
There is another aspect of this huge socio-political-economic-military force that, if not effectively countered, would move us toward nuclear war. Stephanie Savell works for the Costs of War Project, which is housed at Brown University(http://tomdispatch.org/blog/176386). The goal of the project is “to draw attention to the hidden and unacknowledged costs of our counterterror wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and a number of other countries as well.” The project has come up with a figure of the “actual cost” of the war on terror since 2001: $5.6 trillion. It continues to go up under Trump. It has also estimated the number of war-related deaths in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. As of 2016, “about 14,000 American soldiers and contractors and 380,000 inhabitants of these countries had been killed” directly. Savell adds: “To these estimates, you have to add the deaths of at least 800,000 more Afghans, Iraqis, and Pakistanis from indirect causes related to the devastation caused by these wars, including malnutrition, disease, and environmental degradation.” The project has found that today the “U.S. military is…taking some sort of action against terrorism – a staggering 76 nations, or 40% of the countries on the planet.”

The media have not covered the projects reports. But there is a deeper, more disturbing reality, that is, “the lack of connection between the American public…and the wars being fought in our names in distant lands.” This is also largely true, I think, of all aspects of the military-industrial complex and of U.S. policies regarding nuclear weapons and war. This disconnection from the government’s war machine is in part related to how much of it is done in secrecy. Most citizens don’t know that we have troops in so many countries or how much we are spending on these enterprises. But there are other factors. Savell writes “the government demands nothing of the pubic, not even minimalist acts like buying war bonds (as in World War II), which would not only help offset the country’s growing debt from its war-making but might also generate actual concern and interest in those wars.” And, in the absences of a draft, most citizens do not have family members who have served in the military and even fewer who have had family members who have fought in combat and don’t have to worry personally about being drafted.
Lawrence Wittner picks up on this issue and addresses the question germane to this email, “Why is There So Little Popular Protest Against Today’s Threats of Nuclear War?” (https://original.antiwar.com/lawrence-wittner/2017/04/24/why-is-there-so-little-popular-protests-against-todays-threats-of-nuclear-war). He offers the following reasons:

“One factor is certainly the public’s preoccupation with other important issues, among them climate change, immigration, terrorism, criminal justice, civil liberties, and economic inequality.

“Another appears to be a sense of fatalism. Many people believe that Kim Jong Un [North Korea’s leader] and Trump are too irrational to respond to reason and too autocratic to give way to pubic pressure.

“Yet another factor is the belief of Americans and Europeans that their countries are safe from a North Korean [or other] attack. Yes, many people would die in a new Korean War, especially one fought with nuclear weapons, but they will be ‘only’ Koreans.

“In addition, many people credit the absence of nuclear war since 1945 to nuclear deterrence. Thus, they assume that nuclear-armed nations will not fight a nuclear war among themselves,” though the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review does identify Russia and China as adversaries.

“Finally – and perhaps most significantly – people are reluctant to think about nuclear war. After all, it means death and destruction at an unbearable level of horror. Therefore, it’s much easier to simply forget about it.”

So where does all this leave us?

We should recognize that we live in a highly militarized society that starts wars and continues expending vast resources on un-ending wars and that has a culture that celebrates them in inescapable and myriad displays of patriotism – holidays, sporting events, many other public events, and at schools, along with a media that often reinforces this culture. It also seems reasonable that U.S. foreign policy, war-making, military occupations, special-forces deployments, and weapons sales abroad have played a major role in creating the alienation and despair that, at least in part, create the conditions that feed the growth of terrorists groups and acts around the world.

The best we can do, I suppose, is to seek the truth, support groups that work for peaceful resolutions to conflict, vote for candidates who offer alternatives to the prevalent militaristic policies of the government, and hope these efforts gain momentum and have real effects in our life time.

Military Industrial Complex grows, while
our national security diminishes, Part 2

Bob Sheak, Feb 17, 2018; March 14, 2018

The U.S. federal government budget for 2019, as passed by both houses in the U.S. Congress and signed into law by Trump on Friday, February 9, 2018, is greatly increased over 2018, both on the military and non-military sides of the budget. The focus here continues to be on the military increases and how they are justified. The thrust of my analysis is that the military budget is excessive and that the justifications for it, which will to our misfortune and provide a rationale for continuing increases in the military budget for years to come, increases our chances of going to war, if not nuclear war. I’ll send out Part 3 in a few days that will focus on the Trump administration’s “nuclear weapons” policy.

But before turning to this analysis, I need to touch on another development that, unfortunately but not unsurprisingly, brings some added confusion to the budgetary process in Washington. Just days after this budget deal on February 9 was reached, Trump’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released on February 12 a separate report titled “An American Budget,” a budget that projects the desired fiscal outlays over the coming decade of the Trump administration. The OMB budget essentially repudiates close to one-half of the earlier budget signed into law by calling for steep cuts in a host of non-defense programs. In this 160-page report, the projected budgets for 19 agencies and related programs are considered. Obamacare is “repealed and replaced.” Funding is cut for the “welfare system,” federal student loans, disability programs, retirement programs for federal employees, Medicaid, Medicare, agriculture, and so much more. You can find the text of “An American Budget” at: http://whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/budget-fy2019.pdf. The National Priorities Project offers an analysis of the OMB budget in an article titled “Trump’s FY 2019 Budget Request Has Massive Cuts for Nearly Everything But the Military” (https://www.nationalpriorities.org/analysis/2018/trumps-fy2019-budget-request-has-massive-cuts-nearly-everything-military).

Reflecting its denial or dismissal of human-caused climate change, John R. Platt reports for Truth Out with the title “Fourteen Environmental Programs Eliminated in Trump’s Budget Proposal” (http://truth-out.org/news/item/43558-fourteen-environmental-programs-eliminated-in-trump-s-budget-proposal).

I’m not sure now whether the budget deal signed into law on February 9 will frame and limit the congressional debates and actions over at least the 2019 budget. Given the Republican Party’s right-wing ideology, its commitment to its corporate and upper-class support and its hawkish military policies, there is reason to be concerned that the Republican-dominated U.S. Congress will find ways to renege on their initial support for increases on the non-defense programs and do so with the encouragement of the White House.

Economist Linda J. Bilmes reminds us that the 2019 budget signed into law does end the legislative process. She writes: “…the current deal technically only funds the government through March 23. Congress still must navigate a number of procedural hurdles such as getting the new spending figures into specific appropriations bills (http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/43526-congress-budget-dysfunction-is-more-than-four-decades-in-the-making). This gives Republicans in the congress ample opportunities to gut spending on non-defense programs.

However, there is one thing amidst the political jockeying over the budget that is totally – and unfortunately – clear. Whatever the outcome for the non-defense side of the budget ledger, both the February 9 budget agreement and the OMB (White House) budget proposal call for large increases in the Pentagon budget along with increases in other military-relevant programs. So, the Pentagon will have increases in its base budget of about $82 billion, both in 2019 and 2020. And when all the other military-relevant parts of the budgets are considered, the total outlays will be over a trillion dollars each of these years.

Review of Part 1 on the FY 2018 military budget.

In Part 1 of this essay,I relied on Kimberly Amadeo’s analysis of the costs of the 2018 military relevant parts of the budget (http://www.thebalance.com/u-s-military-budget-components-challenge-growth-3306320).

She is an economic expert, author of several books, President of the World Money Watch, and contributor to The Balance. In her analysis of military sections of the 2018 budget, she included not only the base defense allocation of $574.5 billion for the Department of Defense, but also other budgetary items that have clear military relevance, namely, (1) $64.6 billion for the Overseas Contingency Operations for the fight against the Islamic State group, (2) $173.5 billion for other agencies that have relevance for national defense, including $78.9 billion for the Department of Veterans Affairs, $27.1 billion for the State Department, $44.1 billion for Homeland Security, $9.5 billion for FBI and Cybersecurity in the Department of Justice, and $13.9 billion for the National Security Administration in the Department of Energy, and (3) $12 billion in Overseas Contingency Funds for the State Department and Homeland Security. When Amadeo adds all of the items up, the total is $824.6 billion. Amadeo’s analysis forces us to consider a more extensive set of federal government expenditures on “national security” than one typically finds in government and media reports.

However, as I pointed out in Part 1, the figure for military-relevant expenditures would be even larger than Amadeo estimates if the following are considered: (1) the interest on the growing national debt of over $20 trillion and rising that is linked to past wars and the deployment of special forces around the world, (2) a fuller estimate of VA costs of paying for the long-term care of those traumatized or physically injured in U.S. wars (principally, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan), and (3) the cost to families and communities of having to care for hundreds of thousands of traumatized and physically wounded veterans. The total amount being spent by the federal government on “defense” easily exceeds a trillion dollars this year in FY 2018 and will also for the next two years or more. By the way this estimate does not include how much of the Pentagon’s budget is wasted. See Harry Blain’s article in Foreign Policy in Focus titled “The Scale of Pentagon Waste Boggles the Mind, But Congress Keeps Giving Them More” (http://fpif.org/the-scale-of-pentagon-waste-boggles-the-mind-but-conress-keeps-giving-them-more). Moreover, large sums will be spent on major weapons’ systems that are of unreliable operationally (e.g., F-35 fighter plane) or of dubious strategic value. On this issue, see William Hartung’s article, “2018 Looks Like an Arms Bonanza,” at: http://commondreams.org/views/2018/01/11/2018-looks-arms-bonanza.

And there is another consideration. Amadeo’s estimate of the allocation for the Energy Department does not question the official government estimates on what it is spending – and plans to spend – on the “modernization” of U.S. nuclear weapons, that is, according to official sources, at least $1.2 trillion to $1.7 trillion over the next 30 years, or about $40 billion to $57 billion a year. It’s important also to note that the estimated costs for the nuclear modernization program are based on weak assumptions that do not figure in inflation or that there will not be substantial cost-over-runs and delays. In other words, the final costs for outlays for nuclear weapons are most likely to be much higher than the government’s estimates. This is a topic I’ll take up in Part 3 of the email.

The 2019 and 2020 budgets include hefty increases for the Department of Defense and military-relevant agencies

In the early hours of Friday, February 9, 2018, after a brief five and a half hour shutdown of parts of the federal government, the Senate and House approved a two-year budget, increasing spending by $400 billion over the next two years. The vote in the House was 240 in favor of the budget to 186 opposed. Seventy-three democrats voted in favor of the bill, though a majority of 124 Democrats voted against it. On the Republican side, a strong majority favored the bill, while 67 Republicans voted against it. In the Senate, 71 voted yes and 28 voted no. The overall vote may be viewed as something less than a robust bipartisan bill but nonetheless had some bipartisan, that is more than a little Democratic, support.
The deal was reached when Republican leaders in the Senate and House won Democratic support by including large increases in both military (especially favored by the Republicans) and non-military parts of the budget (especially favored by the Democrats).

To encourage Democratic support in the House, majority leader Paul Ryan announced that he would allow debate on immigration, especially on DACA, in the next week or so. Ryan is quoted, “we will focus on bringing that debate to this floor and finding a solution” (Thomas Kaplan, https://www.nytimes.com/us/politics/congress-budget-deal-vote.html). There is not much time to resolve this issue, since DACA formerly expires in March (Andrew Taylor, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/congress-votes-to-reopen-government-passes-budget-deal). There’s also reason to worry about whether Ryan will fulfill his commitment, given the history of Republican manipulation of and obstruction on immigration policies. As of now, the Republicans will only support DACA if it is included in a larger immigration bill that includes money for Trump’s “wall” and the beefing up of border security forces, an end to family unification, reductions in legal immigration, the continuing deportation of unauthorized (undocumented) immigrants, and perhaps federal government sanctions against sanctuary cities, involving, for example, the withholding of federal funds and/or the incarceration of local officials and residents who provide sanctuary to unauthorized immigrants.

The 2019-2020 budget legislation includes “about $300 billion in additional funding over two years for military and nonmilitary programs,” $165 billion for the military and $131 billion plus for non-defense programs. In addition, there is in the budget “$90 billion in disaster relief in response to last year’s hurricanes and wildfires,” along with “a higher statutory debt ceiling (Kaplan), “a grab bag of health and tax provisions,” and $16 billion “to renew a slew of expired tax breaks that Congress seems unable to kill” (Taylor). The text of the deal is more than 600 pages (Kaplan). The military portion comes to about an $80 billion dollar a year in 2019 and again in 2020.
The budget is expected to increase the federal deficit for just 2019 to $1.2 trillion, continuing the upward trend begun in Trump’s first year, when the deficit was close to $900 billion. The projected deficit for 2019 reflects not only the budget agreement and but also the effect of the recent tax reform, disproportionately geared to the interests of large corporations and the wealthy. Ryan rationalized the rising deficits by emphasizing that the large increases in spending on the military is necessary “to restore our military’s edge for years to come” (Taylor).

But the deficits are an embarrassment to the Republicans because they conflict with the party’s fiscally-conservative philosophy, that is, that the budget should be balanced and the federal government should be kept small, while implicitly maintaining subsidies and tax breaks for their rich and powerful supporters. In an early morning tweet on Friday, February 9, President Trump said he signed the bill, adding: “Our Military will now be stronger than ever before. We Love and need our Military and gave them everything – and more” (Kaplan). In another tweet, the president blamed Democrats for the increases in spending for non-defense programs and said that with more Republicans in Congress such increases would not occur.
The New York Times’ editorial board lambasted Trump and the Republicans for their hypocrisy (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/10/opinion/sunday/republicans-deficit-debt.html.). The editors wrote:

“So much for all that sanctimony about fiscal responsibility. Forever and always, it can now be said that Republican lawmakers care about the federal deficit only when they want to use it to bash Democratic presidents.

“After embracing $1.5 trillion in debt by slashing taxes on corporations and wealthy families in December, the Republican leaders in Congress pushed through a two-year budget deal on Friday that will increase spending by nearly $400 billion. While a lot of that money will be spent on important priorities like disaster relief, infrastructure and education, a big chunk of it will go to an excessive and unnecessary military buildup. Contrast this with the parsimony Republican lawmakers displayed in 2011 when they refused to raise the federal debt limit until President Barack Obama agreed to deep cuts to government programs.”

The editors also emphasized that the U.S. military budget is already larger than it needs to be and that the increases are unnecessary.

“But the deal Mr. Trump approved on Friday also includes a $165 billion increase in military spending over two years, more than the Trump administration had even requested. Military spending will jump to $716 billion in 2019, from $634 billion in 2017. [The military spending here refers to the appropriations for the DOD and for the Overseas Contingency Operations but leaves out other military-relevant items.] In inflation-adjusted terms, that would put the Pentagon’s budget well above the Reagan buildup of the 1980s and nearly as high as in 2010 — the peak of military spending since World War II — when more than 200,000 troops were deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq. Even before this latest increase, the Pentagon’s budget exceeded the combined military spending of the next eight biggest defense spenders globally — a list that includes Russia, China, Saudi Arabia and India.

Not all of the defense increases are of concern or objectionable. The new budget includes increases for active service members, including incentive bonuses, boosts in compensation, and improved health care benefits. At the same time, other items are dubious, including weapons systems that are plagued with operational problems and extravagant and rising costs (e.g., F-35 fight jet, missile defense programs. And the estimated cost of $1.5 trillion or more over 30 years to “modernize” the nuclear arsenal is fueling a new cold war with Russia. And, not the least, the increases in the military budget along with the Republican tax cuts will raise the federal deficit almost twofold to about $1.20 trillion in 2019.

The rationale for increasing the funding for the already massive military spending

There are two recent government documents that give us some idea of what the generals and their advisers at the Pentagon have in mind for how they want to “defend” the nation against foreign threats, state and non-state actors alike, in the near term and for the foreseeable future. The first and more comprehensive of the two documents is the Department of Defense’s “Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United States of America. The 11-page document was released on January 19, 2018. You can find a declassified copy of it at: https://www.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/pubs/2018-National-Defense-Strategy-Summary.pdf. The second document is the Nuclear Posture Review, which focuses on U.S. nuclear policy and plans to “modernize” the nuclear arsenal. You’ll need to google for a copy, though you can find the “executive summary” at: https://media.defense.gov/2018/Feb/02/2001872877/-1/-1/1/EXECUTIVE-SUMMARY.PDF
It went into full effect on February 5, 2018.

The 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS)

The principal justifications for the large increase in military spending are that the U.S. now faces a growing number of enemies, while the “competitive military advantage” of U.S. forces is “eroding” and consequently must be enhanced and modernized to meet the new national security challenges. If the military does not undergo the improvements that are necessary, then, according to the NDS, not only will America’s national security be compromised but the country’s prosperity will be undermined as access to foreign markets and resources are curtailed. Here are the highlights of the NDS.

#1 – The proliferation of enemies

The central point of the NDS is that there is a proliferation of enemies that threaten America’s national security. Russia and China are said to pose a particularly great and growing threat to U.S. geopolitical and military dominance around the world, with the implication that we are now engaged in a new cold war of arms escalation and increasing threats of war. The document describes China and Russia in the most diabolical terms, devoid of context and historical background, implying that a buttressed U.S. military force is the principal, if not the only, way that their aggressive international machinations can be deterred and contained.

“China is a strategic competitor using predatory economics to intimidate its neighbors while militarizing features in the South China Sea. Russia has violated the borders of nearby nations and pursues veto power over the economic, diplomatic, and security decisions of its neighbors.”

“The Central challenge to U.S. prosperity and security is the reemergence of long-term, strategic competition by what the National Security Strategy classifies as revisionist powers. It is increasingly clear that China and Russia want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model – gaining veto authority over other nation’s economic, diplomatic, and security decisions.”

“China is leveraging military modernization, influence operations, and predatory economics to coerce neighboring countries to reorder the Indo-Pacific region to their advantage. As China continues its economic and military ascendance, asserting power through an all-of-nation long-term strategy, it will continue to pursue a military modernization program that seeks Indo-Pacific regional hegemony in the near-term and displacement of the United States to achieve global preeminence in the future. The most far-reaching objective of this defense strategy is to set the military relationship between our two countries on a path of transparency and non-aggression.”

“…Russia seeks veto authority over nations on its periphery in terms of their governmental, economic, and diplomatic decisions, to shatter the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and change European and Middle East security and economic structures to its favor. The use of emerging technologies to discredit and subvert democratic processes in Georgia, Crimea, and eastern Ukraine is concern enough, but when coupled with its expanding and modernizing nuclear arsenal the challenge is clear.”

There are plenty of other enemies identified by the DNS such as North Korea, Iran, and ISIS and other terrorist groups.

“As well, North Korea’s outlaw actions and reckless rhetoric continue to despite United Nation’s censure and sanctions. Iran continues to sow violence and remains the most significant challenge to Middle East stability. Despite the defeat of ISIS physical caliphate, threats to stability remain as terrorist groups with long reach continue to murder the innocent and threaten peace more broadly.”

And:

“Terrorists, trans-national criminal organizations, cyber hackers and other malicious non-state actors have transformed global affairs with increased capabilities of mass disruption…. Terrorism remains a persistent condition driven by ideology and unstable political and economic structures, despite the defeat of ISIS’s physical caliphate.”

#2 – America is increasingly vulnerable to attack

The following quotes from the Strategy say it all: “the homeland is no longer a sanctuary…. whether from terrorists seeking to attack our citizens; malicious cyber activity against personal, commercial, or government infrastructure; or political and information subversion. New threats to commercial and military uses of space are emerging, while increasing digital connectivity of all aspects of life, business, government, and military create significant vulnerabilities.” And the former U.S. military advantage is being challenged and no longer enjoys “uncontested and dominant superiority in every operating domain,” air, land, sea, space, and cyberspace.

#3 – The economic consequences IF U.S. military power is insufficiently bolstered.

“Failure to meet our defense objectives will result in decreasing U.S. global influence, eroding cohesion among allies and partners, and reduced access to markets that will contribute to a decline in our prosperity and standard of living. Without sustained and predictable investment to restore readiness and modernize our military to make it fit for our time, we will rapidly lose our military advantage, resulting in a Joint Force that has legacy systems irrelevant to the defense of our people”.

#4 – There has to be a multi-faceted “strategic approach” to rebuilding U.S. military power.

Most importantly, according to the DNS, the U.S. must build a more lethal military force to support our national security objectives. On this point, the NDS document argues:

“The size of our force matters. The Nation must field sufficient, capable forces to defeat enemies and achieve sustainable outcomes that protect the American people and our vital interests.” All branches of the military must be better funded, prepared for war, modernized in “key capabilities,” innovatively organized regarding command structures and the deployment of forces, prioritizing capacity and capabilities for major combat, and developing an effective global model for “how the Joint Force will be postured and employed to achieve its competition and wartime missions.”

What a critic of the NDS says, capturing many of the concerns being advanced

Robert L. Borosage pens an incisive critique of the NDS for The Nation magazine on January 25, calling it clearly as it is a plan for never-ending war against an ever-growing number of enemies (http://thenation.com/articles/the-pentagons-plan-for-never-ending-war).

Borosage is skeptical that China and Russia pose the great threats to U.S. national security that are described in the NDS and writes this:

“Russia, a decrepit and aging petrostate, isn’t a model for anyone. Its truculence comes in no small part in reaction to our relentless push to extend NATO to its very borders, despite pledges not to do so. China, in contrast, is already a global economic power, offering a model of authoritarian, mercantilist state capitalism. US global corporations and our trade policies fueled its rise, helping it become the world’s manufacturing center. Its influence will inevitably expand; it has the money.”

Whether Borosage underestimates the power of Russia and China in challenging U.S. dominance in the global system or not, the NDS offers the wrong, counterproductive solutions. Instead of increasing the military budget year in and year out, there is an alternative reflected in the long-standing consensus on the political left and among peace groups that there should be much more emphasis on diplomacy, a lessening of the expansion of the U.S. military forces on the borders of these two countries, and a resumption of nuclear arms reductions negotiations.

Borosage makes another important point. He argues that we cannot afford to pay for a military force that is designed to deter and fight wars all over the world. He calls it an imperialist enterprise, that is, that at bottom it is about protecting and advancing U.S. economic interests and less about national security in a military sense and less about finding fair and cooperative relations with especially “developing” countries.

“As if tackling two superpowers wasn’t enough, the Defense Department also plans to counter rogue regimes, ‘defeat terrorist threats to the United States, and consolidate our gains [sic] in Iraq and Afghanistan while moving to a more resource sustainable approach.’ The military will also ‘sustain favorable regional balances of power in the Indo-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East and the Western Hemisphere,’ and ‘address significant terrorist threats in Africa.’”

“This is the imperial view of a global power committed to defending “order” across the globe, a mission beyond the reach and the capacity of even the wealthiest nation and its allies. The NDS acknowledged the need for ‘difficult choices’ to ‘prioritize what is most important,’ but that is exactly what the document does not provide.”

The recent history of U.S. military interventions does not give one reason to be sanguine about the prospects for a national defense strategy that relies less on “lethal force” or one that searches for ways to reconcile international differences and conflicts through non-military means. There is another important fact about the U.S. government’s heavy reliance on military force, that is, the U.S. has not been successful in its pursuit of military solutions. Historian Andrew J. Bacevich has documented this sorry story in his many articles and in a recent book, America’s War For The Greater Middle East. An editor of the Bacevich book writes:

“From the Balkans and East Africa to the Persian Gulf and Central Asia, U.S. forces embarked upon a seemingly endless series of campaigns across the Islamic world. Few achieved anything remotely like conclusive success. Instead, actions undertaken with expectations of promoting peace and stability produced just the opposite.”

Borosage echoes this view and writes that the U.S. military has fought in more places over the course of this century than any country in history. The government has spent trillions of dollars “killing uncounted thousands of people, rained bombs from drones on people in increasing numbers of countries, overthrown governments in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, and dispatched special forces to nearly three-fourths of the countries of the world (149 and counting). And yet, NDS argues, we face an ever-more threatening and dangerous world.” It is incredulous, Borosage contends, that more weapons and troops will change this record of unsuccess. If we continue the same path, building an ever-larger and more lethal military force, there is no reason to expect that the results will be any different. He sums up well what he fears the consequences will be.

“What we are left with is truly dangerous to our security. The military will be tasked with missions it cannot fulfill. It will get more money, but not nearly enough. Real security threats will continue to be ignored [e.g. climate change]. Billions will be wasted on baroque weaponry, while vital domestic investments are starved. The nuclear arms race will be revived. American lives will be lost in wars that continue endlessly, with the United States unwilling to lose and unable to win. We will spend more and more on the Pentagon and find ourselves growing less and less secure. We desperately need a new real security strategy, and a revolt against endless war to give it traction.”

Note: This ends Part 2 of the post on “the military-industrial complex grows.” In Part 3, the last on this topic of the military-industrial complex grows, I’ll focus on the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, what it calls for, and reasons to oppose it.

This is the first of three parts on the military-industrial complex.

The Military-Industrial Complex grows,
amidst endless wars, intensified geo-political competition, degraded environments, and plans for nuclear war: Part 1
Bob Sheak, February 6, 2018; March 13, 2018

Three days before President Eisenhower left office on January 17, 1961, he addressed the “American people” by radio and television. One of the most notable and memorable part of the speech is when the president talks about the political and economic concerns he had about the growth of the military-industrial complex. Here is what he said.

“Until the latest world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

“The conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American Experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

“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.”

“We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with out peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together” (http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=12086).

The speech was given in a troublesome and somewhat unique historical time. Eisenhower was concerned about how we would, as a country, achieve some reasonable balance between national defense, the domestic economy, the material well-being of citizens, and democracy. On thing is clear. He was not saying that the military-industrial complex had to be curtailed. Indeed, he emphasized the country would have to maintain strong military forces and the industrial capacity to ensure their strength. The implication was that this emergent military-industrial complex was going to be a permanent fixture in American society. But, he cautioned, citizens must remain vigilant to keep it from going too far.

Remember this was a time when the cold war had already reached ominous heights. The Soviet Union had nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. On October 4, 1957, the Soviets had launched the first satellite into space. The Korean War had ended in a divided Korea involving a truce, not a peace agreement. And China was now under the rule of a communist party led by Mao Tse-Tung . John Kennedy came into office later that January believing falsely that the U.S. suffered from a “missile gap” vis a vis the Soviets, which became another justification for increasing the military budget.

And then there was Vietnam. According to later revelations in The Pentagon Papers, the U.S. government and military establishment were concerned from the end of WWII that Vietnam should not fall under the control of the nationalist forces in North Vietnam led by the nationalist hero Ho Che Minh. Consequently, Truman and then Eisenhower supported the recolonization of the country by the French after WWII. Then in 1955, after the French occupation was overthrown, the U.S. helped to prevent a democratic vote by Vietnamese from all parts of Vietnam to unify the country and instead supported a puppet and unpopular administration in South Vietnam. After he left office in 1961, the next administrations under Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon (for the first years) were bent on preventing the nationalist/communist regime in North Vietnam from taking control of the entire country. They feared such a turn of events would lead to a “domino effect,” that is, that revolutionary movements in Indonesia and other parts of Southeast Asia that would fall to communists, though better identified as nationalists and anti-colonialists. When developments in Vietnam turned against the U.S. backed regimes, President Johnson and his military advisers lied about an attack on American ships that never took place (the Tonkin Gulf incident), and used it as a pretext to vastly escalate the misbegotten, tragic, brutal, terribly destructive, and costly war. These historical events are captured well in John Marciano’s book The American War in Vietnam: Crime or Commemoration?

In Cuba, revolutionary forces led by Fidel Castro had in 1959 overthrew the Batista-ruled government, which had been favored and supported by the U.S., including the Eisenhower administration. There were also anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, movements in Africa and other parts of the underdeveloped countries of the world (e.g., Indonesia, Central America, Guatemala). From the perspective of Eisenhower and others in leadership positions, the turmoil in the Third World was being caused by an expansionist communist movement under the influence of the Soviet Union. Thus, U.S. foreign/military policies rested on the assumption that the U.S. had to do its utmost to prevent the success of leftist, nationalist, revolutionary forces wherever they emerged, thus giving the U.S. government more plentiful reasons to maintain a powerful U.S. military-industrial complex with both the most modern conventional forces and with a growing arsenal of nuclear weapons.

Bear in mind that the U.S. has always used its military to advance a certain conception of its national interests. U.S. military forces were used to protect the expansion of American colonists into Native American lands, and in the process killing millions. This goes back to the earliest years of the country. This “manifest destiny” is also exemplified in the 1846-1848 U.S. war with Mexico and resultant massive land acquisition that accompanied it – adding 500,000 square miles of Mexican territory to America. The U.S. Civil War was a boon to the incipient U.S. armaments industry. Then there were interventions in the late 19the century in Central America, the Philippines, Hawaii, and elsewhere. The U.S. has never been without a military and an expansionist, imperialistically-leaning foreign policy, though the military-industrial complex, as referred to by Eisenhower, did not emerge fully until during and after WWII. It was then spurred in the late 1940s by the “threat” posed by the Soviet Union and “communism,” the cold war that followed, resting on the lunatic doctrine of “mutual mass destruction, and the anti-colonial upheavals in South America, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Of course, there is the tragedy of 9/11 and the subsequent justifications and lies for invading Afghanistan and Iraq and for mounting a “war against terrorism.”

Underlying it all, the U.S. government has been concerned with protecting and advancing American corporate interests and their access to minerals, fossil fuels, agricultural land, and militarily strategic locations as well as to keeping friendly, often un-democratic governments in power. We can argue about the Marshal Plan. Of course, this dependence on a military-industrial complex is ever-more challenging in a multipolar world in which competition for scarce resources and military advantage involves an increasing number of countries, most importantly China. In this context, resource-rich Africa has become the arena for such competition. Nick Turse gives us some idea of how Africa is the renewed focus of U.S. military involvement in his recent book, Tomorrow’s Battlefield: US Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa. Here’s a sample of what he finds in the years of the Obama administration related to Africa, but one of only a host of places where U.S. was involved in ongoing wars (e.g., Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria), counter-insurgency operations, the proliferation of military bases in over hundred countries, most of them in underdeveloped countries.

“Over the course of the Obama presidency, American efforts on the [African] continent have become ever more militarized in terms of troops, bases, missions, and money. And yet from Libya to the Gulf of Guinea, Mali to [the] camp in South Sudan, the results have been dismal. Countless military exercises, counterterrorism operations, humanitarian projects, and training missions, backed by billions of dollars of taxpayer money, have all evaporated in the face of coups, civil wars, human rights abuses, terror attacks, and poorly coordinated aid efforts. The human toll is incalculable. And there appears to be no end in sight” (p. 184).

The military budget, adjusted for inflation, has gone up and down, since the Eisenhower years, though it has always been a significant part of the federal budget. It rose in the 1960s during the Vietnam War, declined during the 1970s, and rose again during the Reagan years. Then, in the aftermath of the demise of the Soviet Union and during the Clinton years, military spending fell. Then there was a big increase in the Bush years and the first years of Obama, reflecting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. (See http://earlysignal.com/2015/02/14/history-defense-spending-one-chart.)

Where do we stand today with respect to military spending? It’s going up. Kimberly Amadeo provides a detailed account of the fiscal 2018 U.S. military budget, which, based on official sources, is estimated to be $824.6 billion (http://www.thebalance.com/u-s-military-budget-components-challanges-growth-330620).

According to her analysis, the military budget goes beyond what the Pentagon “base” allocation is. She writes that there are three components of the military budget. First, there is the “base budget” of the Department of Defense amounting to $574.5 billion. Second, there is $64.6 billion for the Overseas Contingency Operations for DOD “to fight the Islamic State group.” Third, there are the military-related budgetary allocations to other government agencies, coming to a total of $173.5 billion. The Department of Veterans Affairs is getting $78.9 billion, the State Department $27.1 billion, Homeland Security $44.1 billion, the FBI and Cybersecurity in the Department of Justice $9.5 billion, and the National Security Administration in the Department of Energy $13.9 billion. Amadeo goes on to identify the details on how these various funds are going to be spent. For example: “The Air Force requested $10.3 billion for 70 F-35 Joint Strike aircraft. Overall, the program will cost $400 billion for 2,457 planes.”

She also points out that the expected military expenditures of the U.S. are greater than the military budgets of the next 10 largest government expenditures combined. “It’s four times more than China’s military budget of $216 billion. It’s almost 10 times bigger than Russia’s budget of just $84.5 billion.”

For all of this, Amadeo does not consider all the military-related costs. For one thing, her report is issued before the House and Senate Republicans have come to their final decisions on the Pentagon budget and the news is that they will want to raise the base budget by at least another $70 or $80 billion. She leaves out the military-relevant part of the interest payments on the national debt, some large portion of which is related to past wars. She does not attempt the full cost of treating the psychological trauma and brain injuries suffered by veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Then there is the cost borne by the families and communities of coping with the care of U.S. soldiers with these and other injuries. Amadeo also does not investigate how much land the DOD owns or the effects of military facilities and training on the environment. For example, the government facilities that have been involved in the production of nuclear weapons have all left terrible legacies – and large “sacrifice zones” – that are uninhabitable. Consider just one recent example of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State. The following account is written by Hugh Gustersen for Nuclear News (https://nuclear-news.net/2017/05/26/121249).
“On May 9 [2017], workers discovered a 20-foot-diameter hole where the roof had collapsed on a makeshift nuclear waste site: a tunnel, sealed in 1965, encasing old railroad cars and equipment contaminated with radiation through years of plutonium processing. Potential radiation levels were high enough that some workers were told to shelter in place while others donned respirators and protective suits as they repaired the hole.

“The Hanford complex, which dates back to 1943, produced the plutonium for the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Half the size of Rhode Island, it is often described as the most contaminated place in the United States. Until its last reactor closed in 1987, it churned out plutonium for the roughly 70,000 nuclear weapons the United States built during the Cold War. As the historian Kate Brown documents in her book Plutopia, which explores the uncanny similarities between Hanford and its Soviet counterpart Ozersk, Hanford has been a slow-motion environmental disaster since its opening, constantly excreting radioactive contaminants into the air and water.
“More dangerous than the tunnels are the giant tanks of liquid nuclear waste: 177 of them containing 56 million gallons of radioactive soup whose composition is only approximately known. The contents of some have to be stirred periodically to prevent the formation of hydrogen bubbles that would cause the tanks to explode. One million gallons of this witches’ brew have already leaked into the groundwater from tanks that were built to last only 20 years. The US government projects that it will cost more than $107 billion to clean up the site, with remediation finished by 2060. Few knowledgeable people put much credence in either number.

“It would be nice to say that Hanford is a unique canker on the US nuclear landscape, but it is not. It may be the most contaminated, but it is far from alone. At the Rocky Flats facility outside Denver, where workers fashioned Hanford’s plutonium into cores (or “pits”) for nuclear weapons, there were major fires in 1957 and 1969; each sent plutonium-laced plumes of smoke over nearby communities. Enough plutonium dust gathered in the facility’s ductwork that some worried about a spontaneous criticality event—that is, an accidental and uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction. Eventually President George H.W. Bush closed Rocky Flats in 1992 after an FBI investigation found that the facility was secretly (and illegally) burning nuclear waste in the middle of the night.

“At Ohio’s Fernald plant, which processed uranium for the weapons complex, operators dumped radioactive waste into makeshift pits where it contaminated local groundwater, and blew uranium dust particles out of the smokestacks when the filters failed, as they did with some regularity. Similar stories could be told for the nuclear weapons facilities at Savannah River in North Carolina and Oak Ridge in Tennessee, which hushed up criticality accidents while contaminating nearby air and water.

“There are three reasons these Cold War nuclear facilities turned into such environmental catastrophes. First, the Cold War American state, fixated on winning the arms race, put a premium on beating the Soviets at all costs. Producing uranium, plutonium, and weapons components was a higher priority than protecting the health of nearby residents or the workers at the plants, a disproportionate number of whom died of cancer. Ironically, since 1945, American nuclear weapons, intended to keep the country safe, have mainly killed Americans.

“A second factor was state secrecy. As leading Cold War public intellectuals such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Edward Shils argued, abuse thrives in the dark, and Cold War secrecy provided much cover of darkness to places like Hanford. For decades, government officials and the contractors that ran the plants were able to deflect civilian regulators, nosy journalists, local citizens, even congressmen, by hiding behind the skirts of national security. Officials defined vital nuclear secrets expansively, to include not just the design and deployment details of weapons, but also the secret harms inflicted on Americans through their production. Anyone who revealed the extent of contamination risked losing his clearance or being incarcerated. The harms concealed at production facilities were mostly caused by accidents and bureaucratically ingrained negligence, but they were sometimes deliberate—as in the now infamous 1949 “Green Run,” when Hanford deliberately released a substantial invisible cloud of radioactive iodine and xenon to see how it would disperse.

“Finally, we should not underestimate how novel and complex nuclear technology was in the early decades of the Cold War. Physicists, engineers, and technicians were still learning how the technology worked, how esoteric radioactive materials behaved in a range of conditions, and how toxic waste products were absorbed into the environment. As in any endeavor, you learn by making mistakes. Unfortunately, those mistakes left a legacy of contaminated Cold War production sites around the country that are beginning to look like a permanent archipelago of national sacrifice zones. “Will Hanford ever be cleaned up?” was the title of a 2013 Seattle Times article noting how little progress had been made after spending $36 billion on cleaning the site.”

In short, the national-security policies of the U.S. have had a very significant military thrust. And the influence of the military-industrial complex has played an incredibly large role in the pursuit of missions that often-reflected questionable U.S. geopolitical and corporate interests rather than democratic values, diplomacy, and peace. In a recent article, historian Andrew J. Bascvich writes: “I’m prepared to argue that no nation in recorded history has ever deployed its troops to more places than has the United States since 2001. American bombs and missiles have rained down on a remarkable array of countries. We’ve killed an astonishing number of people.” Why? There are many sources of scholarship and investigative journalism that offer answers. John W. Dower offers an answer in his short book, The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II. Here’s my take.

National security? We’re told by Pentagon officials and most members of the U.S. Congress that it is for national security. The world is becoming more dangerous and volatile. Thus, we need our military to protect the country from foreign enemies, including what they define as rogue nations (e.g., North Korea, Iran), nations that threaten our geopolitical (some say, imperialist) interests and pose an increasing military threat (e.g., Russia, China), and, since 9/11, from terrorists such as ISIS and Al Qaeda in Iraq and other areas in the Middle East, Africa, and parts of Asia.

Additionally, we are told, that the U.S. military must again be prepared to to shore up forces in Afghanistan, where the government remains weak (and corrupt), to stem the growth of the Taliban, an indigenous fundamentalist Islamic movement. This reasoning also applies to Iraq. But there is much more. Indeed, the Pentagon deploys troops or special forces to many “developing nations,” wherever there are weak or failed states threatened by terrorists. In such situations, the U.S. troops advise and support local government military forces, in some situations provide temporary humanitarian support, and/or protect American corporate investments, often involving fossil fuels or other natural resources.

To spread democracy? There is also an idealistic component to the official justification for spending hundreds of billions of dollars on the military and continuously being told that it is not enough. This is perhaps better thought of as a rationalization or cover for the material interests of the military-industrial complex. That is, American leaders tell us that America is a “beacon of liberty” and America’s foreign policy is basically about protecting and advancing “democracy” and “freedom” around the world. We are the good guys. Of course, our history by and large belies such claims.

The reality? In the final analysis, and except perhaps arguably for WWII, the U.S. record in foreign affairs is filled with examples of forced land acquisitions, unwelcomed military interventions that benefited U.S. corporate interests and the interests of often corrupt indigenous elites, wars based on lies, massive carpet-bombing attacks that destroyed cities and took the lives of millions of civilians, and the horrific example of being the only country that has ever dropped atomic bombs on another country. For a sad but remarkably informative account of the long-lingering and awful effects of the atomic bombing of Nakasaki, read Susan Southard’s book Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War.

Our foreign policy, since the late 1940s, has been infused by an uncompromising antagonism, filled with hatred and fear, of the “communist” Soviet Union and China, an un-critical “America first” kind of patriotism, and the enduring assumption that the U.S. is an “exceptional” nation that is energized by self-sacrificing ideals. In a word, the Pentagon and its political supporters have continuously found a supportive culture and many reasons to ask for and get big military budgets to maintain a large military force, along with the deployment of U.S. troops all over the world, the never-ending acquisition of enormous military supplies and the most advanced weapon systems, and until recent decades the production and storage of tens of thousands of nuclear weapons. There are still thousands of nuclear weapons on hair trigger alert, ready to be launched within minutes of a perceived enemy attack or even in the absence of such an attack. The U.S. government has never renounced a “first use” policy, as Daniel Ellsberg reminds us in his recently published book, The Doomsday Machine.

The official view, today as before, is that the U.S. must have a multifaceted military capacity that is able to deter, contain, or destroy the growing number of enemies identified by our political and military leaders.

The critics – What’s the down side? As critics of such policies have long said, and I am a critic, this policy adds to the national debt, drains resources from domestic programs, reduces the importance of diplomacy in foreign relations, leads to a massive military-industrial complex and various unwelcome impacts on government priorities and processes, is filled with inefficiencies and waste (never been independently audited or responsive to audits), destabilizes the countries in which we intervene politically while wreaking vast devastation, contributes enormously to the pollution of environments, and generates widespread antagonism, if not outright hatred, of the U.S., according to international polls. And to top it off, U.S. military policy never stops looking for new enemies, maintaining distrust of old enemies, and looking for justifications for an ever-bigger military-industrial complex.

The critics’ position is based on important but little-considered assumptions, namely, that the Pentagon’s perceived enemies, especially Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, can be approached diplomatically in ways not only to avoid war but also to gradually usher in a mutually agreed process of reduced military expenditures, along with the phasing out of nuclear weapons. And, further, critics argue, reasonably,that the U.S can make better use of its resources by promoting non-military projects that would foster sustainable economic development at home and abroad, stop or severely curtail the U.S. sale of weapons to other countries, reduce the rising number of refugees, and find ways through international organizations like the United Nations to advance diplomatic resolutions to international conflict.

I’ll end here. And, in Part 2, I’ll consider critically what the Trump administration, filled with generals and neo-conservative ideologues, is proposing in the new National Defense Strategy and in Part 3 their proposals in the Nuclear Posture Review. If Trump and his advisers and congressional and corporate and wealthy allies get their way, the military-industrial complex will grow to be larger than ever, tilting the “balance” that Eisenhower talked about some 57 years ago more and more in favor of military priorities at the expense of domestic priorities. And, if not challenged, the threat of war, even nuclear war, will increase by leaps and bounds, though in the meantime the profits will flow to arms makers and the army of Pentagon consultants and contractors.

The argument for gun regulation rests most fundamentally on the premises that the ownership of guns should be regulated, and that gun ownership is not an absolute, unlimited right of citizenship. It is commonsense for most people who think about gun rights and control to exclude children, those with violent criminal records, the certified mentally ill who are a danger to others, from the right to gun ownership, and, more controversially, to limit the places at which people can have weapons. I’ll take up these issues and more in this email. For now, a reasonable position on gun rights is that they must be balanced with public safety concerns. Thomas Gabor, who has studied gun violence and policy for over 30 years in the United States and other countries, concludes that we need to find a “delicate balance” between the two. He states his position, along with other reasons, writing that “[g]un ownership can be a right while every effort is made to ensure that those who pose a risk to public safety cannot easily obtain them” (Confronting Gun Violence in America, p. 32).

However, for decades since the early 1970s, opponents of gun regulation, most prominently the National Rifle Association (NRA), have used their political influence to foster a one-sided interpretation of the Second Amendment to keep the federal government and many states and local governments from adequately regulating access to guns (gun ownership) by private citizens. On this point, Gabor captures the uncompromising position of the NRA and its considerable allies as follows: “…those viewing gun ownership as an inalienable right often see this right as an absolute and will yield little ground regardless of the annual death toll or other evidence pointing to the harm produced by widespread gun ownership” (p. 263). New York Times reporter Greg Weiner illustrates this retrograde viewpoint, reporting on a speech given by Wayne LaPierre, leader of the NRA, at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference. Here’s some of what Weiner reported.
“According to this conception, rights are zones of personal autonomy where the individual owes no explanation and the community has no jurisdiction. This manner of thinking about rights is a serious barrier to reasonable regulations of firearms. The N.R.A. ritually claims the mantle of the Constitution, but the American founders who framed it had a far richer view in which individual rights were subject to considerations of the common good.” (Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/opinion/wayne-lapierres-unconstitutionalism.html?_r=0.)

It remains to be seen whether extreme pro-gun proponents will continue to have as much influence as they’ve had after the mass murder of 17 high-school students on February 15, 2018, at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, which has been followed by organized protests by students for gun regulation and a ban on assault rifles and the AR-15 rifle (the weapon used in the murders), the public’s support for stronger regulation, the increased interest among lawmakers at all levels of government for some kind of gun regulation, and how some corporations have severed their ties to the NRA. It’s too early to tell what the actual effects will be.

In the meantime, Chris Hedges brings our attention to one of the ugly facts about gun ownership in the United State, that is, the country is loaded with a massive number of guns, far more than any other country, and yet, rather than curtail violence, the pervasive availability of guns of all kinds seem to aid and abet it. He refers here to some of the evidence on the widespread ownership of guns (https://www.truthdig.com/articles/guns-and-liberty). “There are some 310 million firearms in the United States, including 114 million handguns, 110 million rifles and 86 million shotguns”.

The number of military-style assault weapons in private hands—including the AR-15 semi-automatic rifles used in the massacres at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., and at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.—is estimated at 1.5 million. The United States has the highest rate of gun ownership in the world, an average of 90 firearms per 100 people.
Writing for Popular Resistance, Eric London refers to evidence on mass shootings and killings and that they are occurring more frequently and with increasing deadliness (https://popularresistance.org/why-are-mass-killings-so-common-in-the-us).

“On February 14, an American horror story played out in southeastern Florida when 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz opened fire at Stoneman Douglas High School, killing 17 people, including 14 students.

“In April 1999, the country was stunned by the mass killing of 13 students and teachers at Columbine High School in Colorado by two students, who then committed suicide. In the course of the past 20 years, eruptions of homicidal violence have become almost commonplace, and the death tolls resulting from such incidents have in many cases far exceeded the terrible loss of life at Columbine. The 2017 attack in Las Vegas resulted in 58 deaths. The 2016 attack at the Pulse nightclub in Florida left 49 dead. The 2014 shooting in San Bernardino cost the lives of 14 people. The 2012 assault at Sandy Hook Elementary School claimed 28 lives. The attack on an audience at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, also in 2012, took 12 lives. The shooting at the Fort Hood Army base in 2009 resulted in 13 deaths.”

“The killings are not only deadlier than in 1999. Such incidents occur much more frequently. Mass killings involving more than four deaths take place every 16 days in the US, 10 times more frequently than in the period between 1982 and 2011, when the average time between mass killings was 200 days.”

One early indication of how government officials will react to the murders in Parkland is how the Florida governor and legislatures have responded to the murders in Parkland. In the aftermath of the mass shooting the high school, the state’s Republican-dominated Senate passed by a vote of 20-18 a package of gun-control measures that includes supports for mental health funding, school security measures, and an option for school districts to decide either to arm some teachers or to arm “other school personnel, including support staff who provide some instructional work, current or former servicemen or JROTC instructors.” The security measures include “raising age restrictions on the purchase of all firearms in the state, banning the purchase and possession of bump stocks (which turn semi-automatic weapons like the AR-15 into fully automatic weapons), and setting a three-day waiting period to buy any gun, including rifles and shotguns, but rejected proposals to ban assault weapons and limit high-capacity magazines. Subsequently, the Florida House followed and passed their own “comprehensive” bill, and, after reconciling it with the Senate’s version, delivered the “reform package” to Governor Rick Scott’s office.

Let’s go back to what the Florida House did. Its gun reform package includes many of the same measures that were included originally in the Senate bill. I rely on a news report by AP reporters Brendan Farrington and Gary Fineout for this information, as reported in the Chicago Tribune (http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/it-florida-governor-gun-control-bill-20180308-story.html).

The House legislation calls for the legal age to buy rifles to be raised from 18 to 21. A waiting period of three days is part of the bill. It includes a “guardian program enabling school employees and many teachers to carry handguns if they go through law enforcement training and their school districts agree to participate.” Other provisions “would create new mental health programs for schools and, this is new, establish an anonymous tip line where students and others could report threats to schools.” The bill “would also ban bump stocks that allow guns to mimic fully automatic fire” and “seek to improve communication between schools, law enforcement and state agencies.”

Florida Governor Rick Scott signed the legislation on March 9, 2018. According to a report by Dan Sweeney, the final legislation includes much of what the state Senate and House had proposed. And, almost immediately, “the National Rifle Association filed a federal lawsuit to block some of it from taking effect” (http://www.msn.com/en-us/florida-gov-rick-scott-signs-sweeping-gun-bill-nra-files-suit/ar-BBK4hxd?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=iehp). For example, the new gun law raises the minimum age to buy rifles from 18 to 21, “which the NRA claims violates the Second Amendment.” The law includes other measures that may be objectionable to the NRA and other gun advocates. The “law extends a three-day waiting period for handgun purchases to include long guns. It bans “bump stocks that allow guns to mimic fully automatic fire.” Here is a list of other provisions of the new gun law, all but the last of which will be of little concern to gun reform opponents like the NRA.

— It allows the arming of school staff who are not exclusively classroom teachers, including librarians, media specialists, coaches and counselors. The program is optional at the discretion of county sheriffs and school district superintendents. Scott disagrees with the idea of arming teachers. He is going to redirect the funds for this program to more law enforcement officers or “school resource officers” at the schools.
— The measure provides $400 million for mental health and school safety programs.
— It requires every school in Florida to have a threat assessment team to meet monthly.
— It establishes the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Commission, which will investigate systemic failures in the Parkland school shooting, and develop recommendations.
— It creates a new legal process to take firearms from people who make violent threats to themselves or others.

Note that a central demand of the students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida – and now among students around the country – is to ban “military” weapons and high-capacity magazines. This apparently is not going to happen in Florida. Note also that a waiting period associated with the process of purchasing a gun is not long enough for gun sellers to obtain full up-to-date information on their potential customers. The idea of arming teachers is by and large not a popular one (see next section), though there is some increasing attention to enhancing school security systems, including having armed security personnel inside or outside school entrances, locked entrance doors with cameras to identify individuals wanting to enter a school, as well as having bullet-proof windows.

Arming teachers?

If the responses of those who oppose gun regulation, for example the likes of Trump, the NRA, and many Republican legislators, continue successfully to achieve their pro-gun goals, we’ll unfortunately end up with fortress-like schools, armed teachers and/or other adults in the schools, fearful children, and, given the record, the chances that minority children in inadequately-resourced schools will end up disproportionately among the victims. Benjamin Balthaser, associate professor of multi-ethnic US literature at Indiana University, South Bend, argues, “arming teachers” will kill education
(http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/43707-arming-teachers-killing-education-why-trump-s-proposal-has-nothing-to-do-with-safety).
He’s worth quoting, as follows.

“Bearing the role of public education in mind, it is self-evident that arming teachers will do little if anything to actually make schools safer. Not only would having multiple shooters increase the confusion and mayhem of a mass shooting, the “good-guy-with-a-gun” theory has been widely debunked, and leads to all kinds of other bizarre questions, such as: Who decides which teachers are armed? Where are the guns stored? Who decides when a teacher can use a gun? What are the penalties for misusing a gun? The practical problems with arming teachers are so abundant, like many of Trump’s gestures of contempt, these ‘solutions’ are not designed to solve real-world problems, but rather to shift the discourse and change the boundaries of what is deemed acceptable in civil society.

“The proposal to arm teachers should not be seen as just a joke. It is not serious as a way to stop violence but is deadly serious about one thing: ending the progressive role of education and educators. The proposal is not about helping students but turning the student-teacher relationship from one of trust and respect into one of violence…. The right [to gun ownership by private citizens] does not imagine teachers wielding weapons so much as weapons remaking teachers”

Henry Giroux echoes these and other concerns (https:www.truth-out.org/news/item/43732-killing-children-in-the-age-of-disposability-the-parkland-shooting-was-about-more-than-gun-violence).

He is troubled by the call to eliminate the ordinary gun-free zones in the public schools by arming teachers for eliminating gun-free zones and arming teachers, when this “comes at a time when many schools have already been militarized by the presence of police and the increasing criminalization of student behaviors.” Giroux continues: “Suggesting that teachers be armed and turned into potential instruments of violence extends and normalizes the prison as a model for schools and the increasing expansion of the school-to-prison pipeline. What is being left out of this tragedy is that the number of police in schools has doubled in the last decade from 20 percent in 1996 to 43 percent today. Moreover, as more police are put in schools, more and more children are brutalized by them. There is no evidence that putting the police in schools has made them any safer. Instead, more and more young people have criminal records, are being suspended, or expelled from school, all in the name of school safety.” Giroux quotes Sam Sinyangwe, the director of the Mapping Police Violence Project, to further document his point.

“The data … that does exist … shows that more police in schools leads to more criminalization of students, and especially black and brown students. Every single year, about 70,000 kids are arrested in school…. [Moreover] since 1999, 10,000 additional police officers have been placed at schools, with no impact on violence. Meanwhile, about one million students have been arrested for acts previously punishable by detention or suspension, and black students are three times more likely to be arrested than their white peers.
Trump’s proposal to arm teachers suggests that the burden of gun violence and the crimes of the gun industries and politicians should fall on teachers’ shoulders, foolishly imagining that armed teachers would be able to stop a killer with military grade weapons, and disregarding the risk of teachers shooting other students, staff or faculty in the midst of such a chaotic moment.”

Brian Moench also brings our attention to what seems to be a commonsense fact, namely, that “teachers with handguns are no match for assault rifles” 2018 (http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/43689-teachers-with-handguns-are-no-match-for-assault-rifles-why-the-trump-nra-plan-doesn-t-work). And Gyasi Ross worries that young African American and Native American students could turn out to be disproportionately the victims of armed teachers (https://www.truthdig.com/articles/arming-teachers-stupidest-racist-idea-going).

“According to a new CBS poll, the nation is split almost nearly in half on whether teachers should carry guns, with 44 percent of Americans saying they support arming more teachers and 50 percent opposing the idea. Even more unexpected is the fact that this is not split along entirely partisan lines. We tend to expect Republicans to stick to the party line in order to keep up their National Rifle Association contributions. But although 74 percent of Democrats oppose arming teachers, the poll shows that 20 percent support the prospect. Egads!

“When I see polls like that, I think of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s quote, “Who’s the more foolish; the fool, or the fool who follows him?” We know this current president’s history of racism and playing fast and loose with the facts. But when we do the same, I wonder if we might be more stupid and racist than our president.

“See, black students are suspended and expelled from school almost four times more often than white students. Native American students represent less than 1 percent of the student population but make up 2 percent of out-of-school suspensions and 3 percent of expulsions. Black and Native American female students also are suspended more often than white boys or girls. These are Department of Education facts.

“Additionally, black and Native American students lack access to experienced teachers. According to the Department of Education, they tend to be disproportionally taught by first-year teachers.

“Finally, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention makes clear that law enforcement kills native people at a higher rate than anyone else. The long and sordid history of law enforcement killing black people at criminal rates is well-documented.”

If Trump, Republican legislators, and the NRA have their way, school districts in communities will have the right, if not the mandate, to arm at least some teachers – and other school personnel. If this is the way the current debate is resolved, the tragic irony is that it will facilitate the manufacture and distribution of yet more guns in a society that already has a surfeit of guns, including semi-automatic and automatic weapons that are designed for war. It will be a boon for the weapons’ makers and a victory for the pro-gun advocates like the NRA and most Republicans. But, in the process, the schools’ basic missions will have been compromised, that is, providing students with the educational foundation to become informed and productive citizens. Indeed, there are already serious problems in the American schools, especially in how they are financed so much by local property taxes, resulting in great inequalities among school systems and in vastly unequal outcomes for students. This issue of an unequal school system has long been of concern and has worsened. See the articles and books of professor of education Diane Ravitch for incisive analyses of the problems and inequalities the school system generally and, in a recent book, the “hoax of the privatization movement.”

One implication is that more could be done to reduce violence in the schools – and elsewhere – by refocusing government priorities on education with the goal of ensuring that all students, wherever they live, whatever the “race” and background, have an opportunity for an excellent education.

In this email, drawing from many sources, I try to advance a position in favor of much stronger gun regulation than one finds across most of the United States. This position rests on the following contentions: (1) the Second Amendment of the Constitution does not call for unregulated gun ownership by citizens; guns have been regulated in the past, that is, there are precedents; (2) the NRA’s absolutist position on gun rights is untenable and beyond the boundaries of what is consistent with the U.S. Constitution; (3) recent federal court decisions do not support legally limitless individual rights to gun ownership, although gun rights are being expanded; (4) state gun laws vary but have tended to favor gun rights, while the United States leads high-income countries by far in rates of gun ownership and violent deaths; (5) the rise of the student movement for gun regulation and the supportive reactions to it challenges the idea that the NRA is invincible; and (6) there is a case for reasonable gun laws, which means limiting access to guns.

#1 – The Second Amendment of the Constitution has not yet been interpreted by the Supreme Court to allow for the completely unregulated gun ownership by citizens.

There are two parts of the Second Amendment. Those who want more gun regulation put their emphasis on the opening phrase of the Second Amendment that refers to “a well-regulated militia.” This phrase suggests that the federal or state governments should play the major role in determining who can own guns. The implication is that regulation of guns for private ownership is not about individual rights but about rules that aim to provide collective security and what is in the common good. Those who want little or no gun regulation focus on the second part of the Amendment, that is, “the right of the people to keep and bear arms.” From the perspective of the contemporary National Rifle Association and other unbridled gun supporters virtually all regulation is anathema and threatens the most fundamental “freedom” of Americans.

What does the historical record say. Through most of US history up through the end of the 20th Century, the courts have found that, as John Atcheson reports, the introductory phrase “a well-regulated militia” constrains, or takes precedence over, the clause ‘the right of the people to keep and bear arms” (https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/02/24/no-founding-fathers-didnt-give-you-right-to-bear-arms).

Atcheson puts it this way: “In short, the individual ‘right’ was contingent on the need to keep a well-regulated militia, and hence it protected the States’ interests in having a militia, not an individual’s right to have and carry a weapon.”

Gabor (cited previously) refers to supporting evidence. He writes:

“In four Supreme Court rulings between 1876 and 1939 and in 37 cases involving challenges to gun laws heard by federal courts of appeal between 1942 and 2001, the courts have consistently set aside these challenges and have viewed the Second Amendment as protecting state militias, rather than individual rights. Thus, with little exception, the first 125 years of ruling by higher courts interpreted the Second Amendment to mean that ‘The people’ collectively have the right to bear arms within the context of a well-regulated militia, rather than for protection against fellow citizens or for other personal reasons. This view of the Second Amendment is consistent with the requirement, in America’s first Constitution, that each state maintain a militia and with the modern Constitution, which provides for both state militias and a standing army” (p. 266).

Now, the official state militias have been long ago abandoned because they were not well funded by the various states. Nonetheless the point is, for most of US history, individual rights to firearms were regulated and limited. Gabor also quotes several Supreme Court justices who expressed support for “militia” preeminence interpretation of the Second Amendment. For example, former chief justice Warren Burger, “a conservative and hunter himself, said in an interview in 1991 on the MacNeill Lehrer News Hour that the focus on the “right to keep and bear arms” has “been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud…on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime” (Gabor, p. 266). As noted above, the interest group he has in mind is the NRA and its increasingly intense efforts to end virtually all restrictions on gun ownership by private citizens.

Remarkably, given the power of the NRA, President Clinton signed a 1994 law banning the manufacture and sale of new assault weapons and high-capacity magazines (holding more than ten rounds of ammunition) – and it remained in in force for ten years until 2004, according to Gabor. The ban was allowed to expire by the US Congress in 2004. Even during the years of the ban, though, the law had “grandfathering provisions” that “allowed weapons and high-capacity magazines already manufactured to continue to be bought and sold, severely undercutting the effectiveness of the ban” (Gabor, pp. 292-293). In short, the ban on assault weapons had at best only very modest effects on reducing violence associated with guns, even from assault weapons. But, even with its flaws, the ban did have some modest, positive effect. In as assessment of the effects of the ban, Christopher Koper, associate professor at George Mason University, surmised the following:

“Although the ban has been successful in reducing crimes with AWs [Assault Weapons], any benefits from this reduction are likely to have been outweighed by steady or rising use of non-banned semiautomatics with LCMs [large-capacity magazines], which are used in crime much more frequently than AWs. Therefore, we cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence [as of 2013]. And, indeed, there has been no discernible reduction in the lethality and injuriousness of gun violence, based on indicators like the percentage of gun crimes resulting in death or the share of gunfire incidents resulting in injury, as we might have expected had the ban reduced crimes with both AWs and LCMs” (https://www.factcheck.org/2013/02/did-the-1994-assault-ban-work).

Nonetheless, it is worth concluding this section that through most of US history there have been federal laws in effect to limit the gun ownership of private citizens, other than for hunting, conservation, certified gun collections (where the guns are inoperable) and sports-related activities, and that the temporary assault ban did have some positive effect. Though it should also be mentioned that the ban did not close other ways by which individual can acquire guns. In addition to the grandfathering loophole and the parts of the gun market that were not covered by the ban, guns could be obtained through private sales (e.g., now through the internet) and at gun shows, both of which remain unregulated. Of course, there has always been an illegal market for guns. George Aisch and Josh Keller report on one aspect of this illegal gun market in their article “Traffikers Get Around State Laws (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/11/12/us/gun-traffikers-smuggling-state-gun-laws.html). Gabor presents evidence that such bans can have some positive effect (pp. 292-293).

#2 – The radical turn of the NRA. Beyond the conscionable and constitutional limits?

The NRA “began an aggressive campaign in the 1970s of promoting the notion that the Second Amendment protected the individual’s right to gun ownership, outside of any service in a militia.” This was a departure from the former view of the NRA, which focused on guns for sport and conservation [e.g., hunting during dear season] while also endorsing gun control laws. What happened? Here’s Carey Shenkman’s explanation.

“The NRA position changed when right-wing anti-government movements of the 1970s inspired mutiny and a rightward turn at an infamous meeting, dubbed the ‘Revolt at Cincinnati.” Unhappy with the group’s moderate positions, the faction that took over the NRA reframed gun control as an infringement on liberty itself. That shift drew more anti-government extremists to identify with the organization. Through the 1990s, fierce gun control debates broke out in Congress in the context of the federal siege in Waco, Texas, which became a subject of NRA meetings and a lightening rod for domestic terror movements” (https://www.truthdig.com/articles/first-amendment-not-second-secure-liberty).

Over the next four decades following the 1970s, gun rights absolutists in the NRA began vigorously promoting research favorable to its viewpoint, making large contributions to the political campaigns of sympathetic political candidates, mobilizing and educating its members, and lobbying for unfettered access to guns by individual citizens, “opposing virtually every form of restriction on gun owners and ownership from municipal bans to the careful screening of owners and scrutiny of dealers” (Gabor, p. 266). Julia Conley draws our attention to one aspect of the NRA’s political influence in her article titled “Lawmakers Opposing Assault Weapons Ban Received 130 Times More Gun Industry Donations Despite public outcry and increased support for stricter gun control measures” (https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/03/08/lawmakers-opposing-assault-weapon-ban-received-130-times-more-gun-industry).

Conley’s sources document how industry money still dominates in Congress. For example:

“Analyzing information from the Center for Responsive Politics, the nonpartisan watchdog group MapLight reported Thursday that representatives in the House who refuse to support a ban on military-style semi-automatic weapons and other assault-style firearms, receive about 130 times more money in campaign donations from pro-gun groups than those who back such regulations.”

For the NRA and its supporters, there is more at stake than simple legal access to guns but the crucial part of a struggle of individual citizens to retain their liberty and freedom from the federal government. They argue that the Second Amendment by itself, if properly interpreted, secures the basic freedom of citizens to express dissent and to enable citizens to protect themselves from a tyrannical state through insurrection if necessary. Carey Shenkman refers to research that finds that three-quarters of gun owners “associate guns with their personal sense of freedom,” and as “a means to protect property and liberty.” Shenkman also quotes NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre’s words from a speech he gave in February (2018), in which LaPierre states that gun control advocates seek to “eliminate the Second Amendment and our firearms freedoms so they can eliminate all individual freedoms.”

The implication is that those who want reasonable gun laws are confronted with a determined, well-financed and -organized opposition, that will go to great lengths to stop virtually any limits on gun ownership by private citizens. For information on where the NRA gets its funding and support, check out the interview on The Real News Network (http://therealnews.org/t2/story:21216:How-Powerful-is-the-NRA%3F).

Ali Watkinsfeb, reporting for the New York Times, gives a recent example of how the NRA has used its political influence to weaken a key government agency charged with the enforcement of existing gun laws, that is, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/22/us/politics/trump-atf-nra.html?_r=0). This is just one example of the organization’s power.

“Now, the A.T.F. is on the verge of a crisis. The agency, which has not grown significantly since its founding in 1973, is about to confront a staffing shortage and is set to lose its tobacco and alcohol enforcement authorities. President Trump has yet to nominate a director to oversee the agency, which has been without permanent leadership for eight of the past 12 years.

“Amid the dearth of leadership and resources, the White House is pushing the A.T.F. to the forefront of its fight against violent crime. In response to the mass shooting at a Florida high school last week, Mr. Trump, who promised to fight violent criminal gangs and illegal guns — two of the A.T.F.’s key missions — announced that he would be relying on the bureau to regulate so-called bump stock accessories.

“But it is all but politically impossible for Mr. Trump, who counts the powerful gun lobby among his most ardent supporters, to strengthen the A.T.F. The National Rifle Association has long sought to hobble the agency in an effort to curb its ability to regulate guns, which the gun lobby has traditionally opposed.

“’Most people in law enforcement know why A.T.F. can’t get a director,’ said Michael Bouchard, a former agent and the president of the A.T.F. Association, an independent group that supports current and former bureau officials. ‘It’s not because of the people. It’s because of the politics.’

“For decades, the N.R.A. has used its sway in Washington to preserve the A.T.F. in its limited capacity. It has aggressively lobbied against nominated directors and pushed Congress to enact restrictions on how the bureau spends money to curtail its ability to regulate firearms and track gun crimes. One funding provision, for example, forbids the A.T.F. from using electronic databases to trace guns to owners. Instead, the agency relies on a warehouse full of paper records.”

There are other reports that reveal the NRA is sometimes will to make exceptions to absolutist gun position. Kali Holloway reports for Alter Net on 5 places that NRA and Republicans want guns banned (http://alternet.org/right-wing/5-places-hypocritical-republicans-ban-guns-their-own-personal-safety).

First, though, Holloway points out that the NRA wants to loosen gun restrictions generally, which they contend disingenuously leads to greater public safety. Holloway cites a Harvard Business School study that finds “in states with overwhelmingly Republican legislative bodies, after mass shootings, ‘the number of laws passed to loosen gun restrictions [increases] by 75 percent.” Bear in mind the number and frequently of mass shootings have been going up. Hence, Holloway continues, they assume falsely that a “more heavily armed populace will ensure American safety,” so there is no need to ban guns or spend resources on gun regulation. However, Holloway writes, and this is her main point, there are five places (at least) where “hypocritical Republicans ban guns in order to ensure their own personal safety,” including: The White House, Republican National Convention, Mar-a-Lago, US Capitol Building, and Republican Town Halls.

And the NRA avoids the evidence when it suits its pro-gun rights purpose. NRA national spokeswoman Dana Loesch appears to have misled a student survivor of the murders in Parkland Florida at a public forum, according to a report by Timothy Johnson, a guns and public safety researcher at Media Matters (http://alternet.org/news-amp-politics/nra-national-spokeswoman-dana-loesch-lied-right-parkland-victims-face). Here’s Johnson’s account.

“Emma Gonzalez, a student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, had a simple question for National Rifle Association (NRA) national spokesperson Dana Loesch during CNN’s gun violence town hall: ‘Do you believe that it should be harder to obtain the semi-automatic … weapons and the modifications for these weapons to make them fully automatic, like bump stocks?’

“Instead of providing the NRA’s well established positions on these questions, Loesch gave a series of dishonest explanations that sought to hide the NRA’s fringe absolutism against gun regulation.

“After some niceties, Loesch purported to answer Gonzalez’s question by saying, ‘I don’t believe that this insane monster should have ever been able to obtain a firearm, ever. I do not think that he should have gotten his hands on any kind of weapon. That’s number one.’

“According to Loesch, ‘This individual was nuts and I, nor the millions of people that I represent as a part of this organization, that I’m here speaking for, none of us support people who are crazy, who are a danger to themselves, who are a danger to others, getting their hands on a firearm.’

“Loesch was lying.

“The NRA opposes adding prohibiting categories to the gun background check system that could have included the Stoneman Douglas gunman. As the NRA’s website states, ‘NRA opposes expanding firearm background check systems, because background checks don’t stop criminals from getting firearms.’ It also opposes a policy called a ‘Gun Violence Restraining Order’ or a ‘Red Flag’ law that has been widely cited as a policy that could have stopped the gunman from having access to firearms. These laws allow family members and law enforcement to petition courts to temporarily remove people’s access to firearms who are a danger to themselves or others.

“Loesch’s dishonesty didn’t stop with that claim. Moments later, while talking about the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), Loesch said, ‘It is not federal law for states to report convictions to the NICS system. It’s not federally mandated.’ Loesch also argued that the states can convict a person, they ‘can adjudicate the mentally unfit,’ but ‘if a state does not report it to the National Crime Information Center, when you run that form, this individual — this madman passed a background check.’ (NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre also used this talking point in his February 22 speech at CPAC.)

“What Loesch failed to mention is that states can’t be required to report disqualifying records because of the outcome of a 1997 NRA-backed lawsuit Printz v. United States.

“The lawsuit was the NRA’s attempt to invalidate the entire national background check system in court before it could be implemented. While the system eventually went into effect, the outcome of Printz damaged its effectiveness, as the Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision in favor of the NRA’s argument that requiring states to perform background checks for a federal system violated the 10th Amendment.

“The ruling also had implications on whether states can be required to submit disqualifying records into the background check system. As the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence explains, ‘Federal law cannot require states to make information identifying people ineligible to possess firearms available to the federal or state agencies that perform background checks’ because ‘case law suggests that a federal statute requiring states to disclose records to the FBI would violate the Tenth Amendment’ due to the Printz ruling.

“So far, none of Loesch’s answers were actually about semi-automatic weapons or bump stocks. Gonzalez then interceded to say, ‘I think I’m gonna interrupt you real quick and remind you that the question is actually, do you believe it should be harder to obtain these semi-automatic weapons and modifications to make them fully automatic, such as bump stocks?’”

The question wasn’t answered.

#3 – Before Parkland, a shift in federal law favoring individual rights of gun ownership – leaves law ambiguous as to what the limits of gun rights are

The Supreme Court began to shift on gun rights, reflecting the conservative-majority in the court. A breakthrough came in 2008 in District of Columbia v. Heller, a decision in which the court ruled 5-4 “that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to possess a firearm for traditionally lawful purposes (e.g., self-defense within the home) in federal enclaves (jurisdictions)” (Gabor, p. 267). However, this decision did not affirm anything like an absolute right to gun ownership. Gabor interprets what the court had in mind.

“Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose: For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues. The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms” (Gabor, 267-268).

The upshot is that, even in recent years, federal law remained at odds with the NRA’s absolutist stance. This may change, as the Supreme Court has move further to the right with Trump’s appointment of Neil Gorsuch. In an article for CNN Politics, Ariane de Vogue quotes Adam Winkler, a professor of Law at UCLA School of Law, who said this about Gorsuch: “Although Gorsuch’s exact views on the Second Amendment remain a mystery, several of his decisions made it harder to keep guns out of the hands of felons.” Hardly uplifting. (Source: https://www.cnn.com/2017/03/20/politics/neil-gorsuch-abortion-religious-liberty-enviornment-guns-control/index.html.)

Even before Gorsuch, the Supreme Court, with its conservative majority, began to expand the rights associated with gun ownership. Veronica Rose, chief analyst at the Office of Legislative Research for the state of Connecticut, provides a summary of a Supreme Court decision that was made after District of Columbia v. Heller (2018). Rose summarizes the McDonald v. Chicago 5-4 decision in 2010, the thrust of which is that the individual states have the right to pass laws that give individual’s the right to keep and bear firearms for lawful uses such as self-defense in one’s home (https://www.cga.ct.gov/2010/rpt/2010-R-0314.htm). Notice the words “such as” open the opportunity of states to expand the rights of gun ownership in any number of ways. Here I’ll quote some key paragraphs from Rose’s account.

“In a five-four split decision, the McDonald Court held that an individual’s right to keep and bear arms is incorporated and applicable to the states through the 14th Amendment’s Due Process Clause. Writing for the majority, Justice Alito observed: “It is clear that the Framers and ratifiers of the Fourteenth Amendment counted the right to keep and bear arms among those fundamental rights necessary to our system of ordered liberty” (p. 31). “The Fourteenth Amendment makes the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms fully applicable to the States.” In a separate concurring opinion, Justice Thomas wrote that the 2nd Amendment is fully applicable to states because the right to keep and bear arms is guaranteed by the 14th Amendment as a privilege of American citizenship.

“The Court did not rule on the constitutionality of the gun ban, deciding instead to reverse and remand the case for additional proceedings. However, the courts decision on the 2nd Amendment makes it clear that such bans are unconstitutional. But, as it held in Heller, the Court reiterated in McDonald that the 2nd Amendment only protects a right to possess a firearm in the home for lawful uses such as self-defense. It stressed that some firearm regulation is constitutionally permissible and the 2nd Amendment right to possess firearms is not unlimited. It does not guarantee a right to possess any firearm, anywhere, and for any purpose.”

Note again that the court decisions employ vague words (“such as”) that open a wide range of undefined circumstances under which citizens have a legal right to purchase and own weapons, all sorts of weapons. Note also that the McDonald decision invokes the Fourteenth Amendment and in context in which lends support to the guns’ rights position. The relevant provision of the Fourteenth Amendment, Section 1, states “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the law.” This is another one of the laws that can be interpreted and applied in several ways but which, with a conservative court, is likely to be interpreted in a way that is favorable to the rights of individual gun owner rather than to public safety concerns.

#4 – State laws on gun ownership – diverse and often lax. May be changing toward some increased regulation of guns after Parkland murderous shooting
While the federal government and the various states can impose some, often ambiguous and often weakly enforced laws, on gun ownership by private citizens, they cannot ban such ownership. Okay, but federal law is vague enough to be applied expansively by the states. The online encyclopedia Wikipedia has a 63-page long review of the gun laws by state that was updated on March 1, 2018 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_the_United_States_by_state).

It’s startling how extensive gun ownership rights are. The law is bewilderingly complex and diverse. Note that in the following summary list of state-level gun ownership laws, there are some issues like arming teachers or other school personnel that have not yet been legislated or addressed by the judicial system. Here’s is what the Wikipedia investigators find generally. There is also a table that includes all the states in alphabetical order and provides details on gun-related laws for each of the states.

• Some [not all] states and localities require that a person obtain a license or permit to purchase or possess firearms.
• Some [not all] states and localities require that individual firearms be registered with the police or with another law enforcement agency.
• All states allow some form of concealed carry, the carrying of a concealed weapon in public.
• Many states [not all] allow some form of open carry, the carrying of an unconcealed firearm in public on one’s person or in a vehicle.
• Some [not all] states have state preemption for some or all gun laws, which means that only the state can legally regulate firearms. In other states, local governments can pass their own gun laws more restrictive than those of the state.
• Some [not all] states and localities place additional restrictions on certain semi-automatic firearms that they have defined as assault weapons, or on magazines that can hold more than a certain number of rounds of ammunition.
• NFA weapons or weapons that are heavily restricted at a federal level by the National Firearms Act of 1934 and the Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986. These include automatic firearms (such as machine guns), short-barreled shotguns, and short-barreled rifles. Some [not] states and localities place additional restrictions on such weapons.
• Some [not all] states have enacted castle doctrines or stand-your-own ground laws, which provide a legal basis for individuals to use deadly force in self-defense in certain situations, without a duty to flee or retreat if possible.
• In some [not all] states, peaceable journey laws give additional leeway for the possession of firearms by travelers who are passing through to another destination.
• Some [not all] states require a background check of the buyer when a firearm is sold by a private party. (Federal law requires background checks for sales by licensed gun deals, and for any interstate sales.)

The evidence establishes that there are states, “red” (Republican) states, that do not even require a license or permit to possess firearms or to register them with the police or other law enforcement agency. And “many states” allow “some form of open carry.” The states with the weakest gun laws and the highest household gun ownership rates, such as Alaska, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Arkansas, also have the highest homicide rates and highest rates of gun deaths. This is well documented by Gabor’s chapter 8: “The Deadliest States.” Indeed, there are many states that don’t place any restrictions on semi-assault weapons or on high-capacity magazines. There are even some states that allow private citizens to own machine guns. Overall, in the states where Republicans control the state houses and legislatures, gun laws allow for easy access to a wide range of weapons and ironically also have the highest rates of deaths and injuries from guns. It’s the opposite in “blue” states like California, New Jersey, Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut. Hawaii, Maryland, and Rhode Island.

What is the law on gun ownership by private citizens in Ohio, where the state house and state legislature are controlled by Republicans? According to the evidence that Wikipedia has compiled, private citizens in Ohio are permitted to openly carry long guns (e.g., rifles) or handguns without a permit if they are 18 years or older. There is no requirement that firearms must be registered or that gunowners must have a license. This means that there is too little time for an authorized gun seller to collect all relevant information on a person before he/she buys a gun, though as I already noted, the federal system that provides information for background checks is inadequate. And, further, there is no law in Ohio governing semi-assault or assault weapons.

On March 1, 2018, Governor John Kasich responded to the mass killing in Parkland, Florida, by announcing a reform proposal aimed, the governor says, at reducing gun violence in Ohio. As reported by Tristan Justice for the Washington Examiner, the proposed reforms are as follows (http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/john-kasich-unveils-gun-reform-proposals-for-ohio/article/2650541).

• Create a gun-violence protection order allowing families and law enforcement to request from a judge to take away guns temporarily from those proven to be a risk for gun violence.
• Update current state law to automatically prohibit those convicted of domestic violence from owning a gun.
• Implement a ban on “bump stocks.”
• Strengthen state law to prohibit gun transactions where one person buys a gun for a felon or someone else who is legally prohibited from possessing a firearm.
• Prohibit sale of armor-piercing ammunition
• Close gaps in background check system to ensure faster delivery of court records to prohibit felons among others prohibited from possessing firearms from buying guns or receiving a concealed-carry permit.

All this is good for those who see a need for more gun regulation. The governor’s proposals are surely in response to the outcry for gun regulation by students from Parkland and around the country. Geez, he calls for an actual ban on bump stocks and on “armor-piercing ammunition” used in AR-15s and other semi- and fully-automatic weapons and wants to strengthen “the background check system.” All of Kasich’s proposals will put him at odds with the NRA, which probably mean that the proposals will have little chance of getting support as long as Republicans dominate the state legislature. Nonetheless, his gun reform proposals should be welcomed because they offer, potentially, better regulation than now exists and, not the least, facilitate a public conversation about existing gun laws and the limits of gun ownership.

Connecticut: a model for gun regulation?

The states that have strong gun regulation are all “blue,” or Democratic, states, including, as mentioned earlier, states like Connecticut, Massachusetts and California, which also have the lowest gun deaths according to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. Anthony Brooks reports that gun-regulation advocates are looking to “Connecticut as a model for gun control?” (http://www.wbur.org/views/2018/03/08/connecticut-gun-laws). Connecticut introduced its gun reform law after the Sandy Hook Shooting, which, according to Wikipedia’s account, “occurred on December 14, 2012, in Newtown, Connecticut, United States, when 20-year-old Adam Lanza fatally shot 20 children between six and seven years old, as well as six adult staff members. Prior to driving to the school, he shot and killed his mother at their Newtown home. As first responders arrived at the school, Lanza committed suicide by shooting himself in the head.”

The Wikipedia section on Sandy Hook notes that “Newtown is located in Fairfield County, Connecticut, about 60 miles (100 km) from New York City. Violent crime had been rare in the town of 28,000 residents; there was only one homicide in the town in the ten years prior to the school shooting.” A report issued by the Office of the Child Advocate in November 2014 is cited by Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Hook_Elementary_School_shooting).

The report “said that Lanza had Asperger’s syndrome and as a teenager suffered from depression, anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder, but concluded that they had “neither caused nor led to his murderous acts.” The report concludes that “his severe and deteriorating internalized mental health problems… combined with an atypical preoccupation with violence… (and) access to deadly weapons… proved a recipe for mass murder”. Lanza used his mother’s Bushmaster XM15-E2S rifle, shot his way through a glass panel next to the locked front entrance doors of the school, and commenced the horrifying shooting spree.

About four months after the murders, on April 4, 2013, Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy, completed the signing of legislation that included “new restrictions on weapons and large capacity ammunition magazines,” according to senior reporter Anthony Brooks (http://www.wbur.org/news/2018/03/08/connecticut-gun-laws). State lawmakers “expanded an assault weapons ban, both the sale and manufacture, including on the AR-15, and outlawed high-capacity magazines” with more than ten rounds of ammunition.

Brooks continues: “They required background checks for the sale of all firearms, tightened gun ownership regulations, and increased funding for mental health and school security.” Subsequently, crime fell, homicides were down, and “violent crime is down here more than anywhere else in the country in the last four years,” Malloy told Brooks. Gun rights critics in Connecticut criticize the law, arguing that a better way to make school safer is to make schools more secure (which is already a part of the law) and give teachers the means to defend themselves. There is little support in Newtown or in the state for arming teachers.

#5 -The rise of the student movement for gun regulation and control. In response to the tragic mass killing at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and the rise of the student movement for gun controls, media reports indicate that a growing number of corporations are withdrawing support from the NRA. For example, Jackie Wattles reports that more than a dozen corporations had severed ties with the NRA within 10 days of the shooting at the high school (http://money.cnn.com/2018/02/25/news/companies/companies-abandoning-nra-list/index.html). Here’s a sample of what she wrote:

“Before last week, membership in the National Rifle Association meant gaining access to a broad range of discounts. From special rates on auto insurance policies to cheaper flights when you booked through its website, the NRA’s discount program offered a lot of perks. But in the wake of a massacre at a Florida high school on February 14, activists flooded social media with calls to end corporate partnerships with America’s most powerful gun lobby.

“Since Thursday, more than a dozen brands severed ties with the organization.”

A headline in the New York Times reads “Walmart and Dick’s Raise Minimum Age for Gun Buyers to 21”. The article is written by Julie Creswell and Michael Corkery (https://www.nytimes.com/2018 /02/28/business/walmart-and-dicks-major-gun-retailers-will-tighten-rules-on-guns-they-sell.html) It’s not only businesses that are acting. Legislators in some states, such as Florida, and some Governors like John Kasich in Ohio, are considering or enacting gun control measures that the NRA does not like. Some states may tighten the rules and procedures they have for doing background checks, require that those who want guns must be have licenses, and increase the age for purchasing firearms. It is would not be surprising to see many states will come up with additional funding to enhance school security. And, if they have not already done so, some states may now consider make it unlawful for certain categories of people from getting guns, such as, those with violent criminal records, with mental illness associated with the threat of violent actions, domestic abusers.

Finding the limits of gun regulation

There is a danger in creating and putting people into stigmatizing classification schemes. So, gun-regulation advocates must be careful about being unfair. Linda Qiu and Justin Bank consider the mental-health issue in an article titled “Checking Facts and Falsehoods About Gun Violence and Mental Illness After Parkland Shooting” (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/16/us/politics/fact-check-parkland-gun-violence-mental-illness.html). Their main finding is that most people with mental illness do not commit violent crimes. They cite the following evidence.

“In an analysis of 235 mass killings, many of which were carried out with firearms, 22 percent of the perpetrators could be considered mentally ill.

“Overall, mass shootings by people with serious mental illness represent 1 percent of all gun homicides each year, according to the book “Gun Violence and Mental Illness” published by the American Psychiatric Association in 2016.

“To be sure, gun violence experts contacted by New York Times reporters have said that barring sales to people who are deemed dangerous by mental health providers could help prevent mass shootings. But the experts said several more measures — including banning assault weapons and barring sales to convicted violent criminals — more effective.

“A 2016 academic study estimated that just 4 percent of violence is associated with serious mental illness alone. “Evidence is clear that the large majority of people with mental disorders do not engage in violence against others, and that most violent behavior is due to factors other than mental illness,” the study concluded.
A 2015 study found that less than 5 percent of gun-related killings in the United States between 2001 and 2010 were committed by people diagnosed with mental illness.

“As John T. Monahan, a professor specializing in psychology and law at the University of Virginia, told The Times: “Two things typically happen in the wake of a mass shooting. First, politicians claim that mental illness is the major cause of violence in America. Then, advocates for people with mental illness respond by denying there is any relationship whatsoever between mental illness and violence. Both groups are wrong. Research shows that the association between mental illness and violence is not strong, but it does exist.”

There is another issue that skirts the legitimate boundaries of gun regulation. There is now some discussion abroad in some states about introducing “red flag” gun laws that would urge teachers, school administrators, other school personnel to pay attention to and perhaps discipline students who exhibit dangerous behavior or talk in person or on twitter or facebook about committing violence to themselves or others. These laws would also encourage students and their parents to do the same. Bennett Leckrone considers this issue in an article forThe Columbus Dispatch and reports that Ohio legislators are considering ways to take guns from at-risk people before they might harm themselves or others (http://www.dispatch.com/news/20180303/ohio-lawmakers-mull-ways-to-take-guns-from-those-showing-red-flag-of-danger).

Jason Hanna and Laura Ly address this topic in an article the title of which captures the thrust of their report, namely, “After the Parkland massacre, more states consider ‘red flag’ gun bills” (https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/07/us/gun-extreme-risk-protection-orders/index.html).

Such a policy would first have to figure out a way to protect first amendment and due process rights, and also avoid over-reacting on racial grounds. When do behavioral problems forecast future violent outbursts. Should government and school authorities encourage a student “tip” system, in which students are encouraged to provide information about another student who is behaving aggressively? It seems reasonable that schools might be better positioned to anticipate such problems if they had trained psychologists and counselors who could intervene and investigate such situations professionally.

The student uprising over guns

Perhaps the most powerful current force for serious gun regulation ever in the United States is manifest recently in the rise of high-school student protests, from Parkland, across Florida and in other states, where scores of students are organizing demonstrations, sometimes confronting legislators directly, and demanding meaningful gun control, including a ban on the AR-15 semi-automatic assault weapons. Among the student activists, a new national organization has emerged called #ArmMeWithSolidarity. Jesse Hagopian and Jesse Muldoon report that this organization, or movement, has organized mass walkouts of schools all around the country, spoken to legislators and the media, and expressed their demands in other ways (https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/03/02/armmewith-solidarity-against-nra-and-militarizing-our-schools).

Expressing the views of many students, some spokepeople for the movement want school safety but not out of the barrel of a gun. Safety comes, they write, “from teachers having the resources they need and students having their needs met at schools.” Emma Gonzalez, a high school senior and survivor of the Parkland shooting, said:

“Teachers do not need to be armed with guns to protect their classes, they need to be armed with a solid education in order to teach their classes…If you want to help arm the schools, arm them with school supplies, books, therapists, things they actually need and can make use of.”

Investigative journalist Dawson Barret provides additional information on the growing student movement to stop gun violence in the schools and reports that the gun lobby is terrified of it. (https://www.truthdig.com/articles/gun-lobby-terrified-neveragain-movement). Barret’s report is worth quoting at length.

“Following the righteous fury of Stoneman Douglas survivors Emma González, David Hogg, Jaclyn Corwin, Cameron Kasky and others (and building on the networks and expertise of existing organizations such as Everytown for Gun Safety), a nationwide, youth-led movement for gun reform is emerging under the social media hashtag “Never Again.”

“There have already been walkouts and other protests at high schools and middle schools in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, Texas, Virginia, and elsewhere. The movement is growing.

“Whether these protests will lead to real change is not yet clear. Young people have very little formal political power. They do not have the money to rival big donors, and they are a terribly ineffective voting bloc. Many cannot vote, and those who can do not do so in large numbers.

“However, teenagers have other strengths, the greatest of which may be a blatant disrespect for the status quo. In this case, they have refused to accept the prevailing wisdom that the National Rifle Association is an invincible bedrock of American political life. They have rejected as foolish older generations’ assurances that there is nothing that can be done to reduce gun violence in this country.

“Judging by the reactions of Gateway Pundit, Fox News, and the NRA leadership, the gun lobby is terrified of #NeverAgain, and it should be.

“Teenagers have been on the front lines of every major U.S. social movement in the last century. Through protest, high school students have succeeded in changing dress codes, desegregating schools and businesses, ending bans on dancing, and forcing the firing (or rehiring) of teachers, coaches and principals. They have won multiple U.S. Supreme Court cases. They have even toppled governments.”

#6 – The US needs reasonable gun laws, which means limiting access to guns.

The existing laws governing individual gun ownership are inadequate and have been so for decades, despite federal and state restrictions. The evidence is indisputable that gun deaths, gun-related homicides, and mass shootings are far greater in the US than in 31other high-income countries (Gabor, pp. 39-40). At the same time, greater gun regulations are associated with a reduction or a lower frequency of these problems of violence. John Donohue, distinguished professor of law at Stanford University, offers an outline of a case for gun regulation (https://www.stanford.edu/2015/09/03/how-us-gun-control-compares-to-the-rest-of-the-world).

First, Donahue’s research team finds that the great majority of Americans, including a majority of NRA members, favor universal background checks. Indeed, 90% of Americans favored such checks after the Newtown school massacre of 2012.

Despite the influence of the NRA, Trump, the Republican Party, the gun manufacturers, the right-wing media, most Americans believe there is a need for gun regulation. Experts and the public agree on how to stop gun violence. Politicians don’t, according to Christopher Ingraham (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/10/02/experts-and-the-public-agree-on-how-to-stop-gun-violence-politicians-dont/?utm_term=.394c3020ba60).

“Despite its reputation as an intractable, deeply divisive issue, there’s a lot of agreement among the American public on gun-control measures.

“The New York Times, for instance, recently surveyed Americans on whether they supported 29 different gun regulations mostly intended to reduce homicides — from familiar policies such as background checks and bans on assault-style weapons to more obscure ones such as limits on the frequency of purchases.

“All but one of those policies had majority support, and most were backed by strong majorities.”

Second, the NRA’s claim that guns reduce crime is belied by the fact that the “US is by far the world leader in the number of guns in civilian hands” and it has by far the highest homicide rate. And “only the tiniest fraction of victims of violent crime are able to use a gun in their defense.” Donohue writes on this point:

“Over the period from 2007-2011, when roughly six million nonfatal violent crimes occurred each year, data from the National Crime Victimization Survey show that the victim did not defend with a gun in 99.2% of these incidents – this is a country with 300 million guns in civilian hands.”
And,

“…a study of 198 cases of unwanted entry into occupied single-family dwellings in Atlanta (not limited to night when the residents were sleeping) found that the invader was twice as likely to obtain the victim’s gun than to have the victim use a firearm in self-defense.”
Donohue and his colleagues at Stanford have also spent years studying the effects of “right to carry” laws (RTC) found “the most compelling evidence to date that RTC laws are associated with significant increases in violent crime – particularly for aggravated assault.” Additionally, they report, the Uniform Crime Reports from 1979-2012 show that, “on average, the 33 states that adopted RTC laws over this period experienced violent crime rates that are 4%-19% higher after ten years than if they had not adopted these laws.”

Third, most other advanced nations make it harder for people to obtain a Glock semiautomatic handgun “or any other kind of firearm.” Donohue lists some examples of other countries that have tighter gun regulations than the U.S. and have much lower violent crime rates. The lesson: Other countries have proven they can protect the public safety with more strict gun regulations – and the U.S. should learn from them.

• Germany: To buy a gun, anyone under the age of 25 has to pass a psychiatric evaluation (presumably 21-year-old Dylann Roof would have failed).
• Finland: Handgun license applicants are only allowed to purchase firearms if they can prove they are active members of regulated shooting clubs. Before they can get a gun, applicants must pass an aptitude test, submit to a police interview, and show they have a proper gun storage unit.
• Italy: To secure a gun permit, one must establish a genuine reason to possess a firearm and pass a background check considering both criminal and mental health records (again, presumably Dylann Roof would have failed).
• France: Firearms applicants must have no criminal record and pass a background check that considers the reason for the gun purchase and evaluates the criminal, mental, and health records of the applicant. (Dylann Roof would presumably have failed in this process).
• United Kingdom and Japan: Handguns are illegal for private citizens.

There are other sources that support Donohue’s international comparisons. Audrey Carlsen and Sahil Chinoy report in an article for the New York Times that is more difficult in all other countries on the list for citizens to obtain a weapon legally than in the United States (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/02/world/international-gun-laws.html?_r=0). And Juliette Jowit and Sandra Laville in London, Calla Wahlquist in Port Arthur, Philip Oltermann in Berlin, Justin McCurry in Tokyo and Lois Beckett in New York report that “The United States’s gun homicide rate is 25 times higher than other high-income countries” (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/mar/15/so-america-this-is-how-you-do-gun-control).

Fourth, according to Donohue, “Australia hasn’t had a mass shooting since 1996.” Prior to that year, there had been 13 mass shootings. The turning point came with “the 1996 Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania, in which a gunman killed 35 individuals using semiautomatic weapons.” The conservative government then introduced and succeeded in implementing tough new gun laws, including the banning of a large array of weapons and the imposition of a mandatory gun buy back. The murder rate fell dramatically and there has not been a mass shooting since 1996. None. Thus, banning an array of high-powered guns did not lead to the loss of individual freedom but to an improvement in public safety.

There is other evidence supporting those who see an urgent need for greater gun regulation. Authoritative research documents how permissive state gun laws are associated with higher homicide rates. Joan Conley, staff writer for Common Dreams reports on a new, sweeping analysis on gun policy from the highly touted RAND Corporation that finds stricter gun laws reduce gun violence, “that laws to prevent children from accessing firearms can decrease suicides and unintentional injuries or deaths,” and “that universal background checks would lead to a drop in suicides and violent crimes.” In the opposite direction, Rand researchers found that “[c]oncealed-carry and stand-your-ground laws—both backed by the NRA—were also found to increase violent crimes” (https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/03/02/what-does-research-nra-doesnt-want-funded-show-gun-restrictions-save-lives).

Two further concerns

First, let me add, there is a claim by the NRA that even semi-automatic weapons, even when equipped with bump stocks, should not be regulated. One way to contest this claim is to help others understand the extraordinary harm to the body that is done by the AR-15 and other military style weapons. When the bullet from one of these weapons strikes a person, bones and soft tissue are obliterated. Even if victims survive, they often have injuries to their organs and bones that will never be healed, often living with pain and disability for the rest of their lives. This issue is expertly addressed by Gina Kolata and C. J. Chivers in an article published in the New York Times titled aptly “Wounds from Miitary-Style Rifles? A Ghastly Thing To See” (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/04/health/parkland-shooting-victims-ar15.html).

Second, take some time to learn about JROTC, that is, military and weapons training in high school and offering uncritical information on U.S. military history and policy by people who often have little academic background.
Pat Elder discusses this program on Democracy Now (online; with accompanying text). The program aired on Feb 21, 2018 and is titled “Inside the US Military Recruitment Program That Trained Nikolas Cruz to Be ‘a Very Good Shot’.” (Source: http://truth-out.org/news/item/43617-inside-the-us-military-recruitment-program- that-trained-nikolas-cruz-to-be-a-very-good-shot)

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A few concluding thoughts

For those who have the time amidst busy lives, amidst unending news about so many crises and situations and people in need of support, and amidst time-demanding important commitments, you might also have some energy and some time to:

Help vote out Republicans and Democrats with high NTA ratings.

Educate people about the Second Amendment and be aware how the conservative Supreme Court could decide to eliminate just about all restrictions on gun ownership.

Investigate the extremist views of the NRA and share the information

Lend some support to the students who are challenging the lack of effective gun regulation and whose schools often need much better government support for their educational missions than they receive.

Identify and support congressional and state legislators who support reasonable gun regulation.

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Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton