Sweden, Finland joining NATO to get ‘Free Stuff’

NATO should have been disbanded in 1991 upon the dissolution of the Soviet Union. But au contraire, the US goosed NATO membership from 16 at the time, to 30, in their effort to degrade the newly weakened Russia, while expanding its dominance over Europe; indeed the world.

But 31 years of expanding NATO up to Russia’s borders turned deadly in 2008 when Russia smacked down NATO wannabe Georgia for counting on US and NATO to support their incursion into Russian leaning breakaway Georgian provinces.

Learning nothing from that debacle, the US decided to wage war upon Ukraine democracy, supporting a coup against the democratically elected, Russian leaning Ukraine president in 2014. That led to civil war between the new ultranationalist, US brokered Ukraine government, and the Russian leaning Donbas region of Ukraine. 14,000 dead there provoked the Russian invasion to end Ukraine brutality and secure Russia’s borders against NATO expansion. Criminal yes, but completely predictable.

That inspired long neutral Sweden and Finland to apply for NATO membership. Russia is zero threat to both; indeed all of Eastern and Western Europe outside of the Ukraine orbit. But it does give Sweden and Finland an opportunity to get in on the billions of free stuff Uncle Sam keeps stuffing into the pockets of NATO member governments.

How much? Prior to the Russian invasion which the US provoked, over $5 billion a year of US treasure rained down on those nations to house our 75,000 troops sitting around with nothing to do than to support US unipolar dominance over Europe. When Trump proposed a measly drawdown of 10,000 troops in Germany, the German government went ballistic, calling it ‘deplorable’ and ‘completely unacceptable.’ The only red they saw was not Russian, it was the German bottom line.

Sweden and Finland want to do what the other 28 European NATO members do….use their treasure for domestic needs while Uncle Sam funds their national defense against a phantom enemy. The US spends 3.6% of GDP on military while the NATO freeloaders average under 2%. Only Greece spends like a drunken US sailor at 3.6%, but that is to counter its arch local enemy and fellow NATO member Turkey, not the dreaded Russian Bear.

Speaking of Turkey, let’s hope they successfully block NATO membership for Sweden and Finland over their charge both offer too much support for the Kurdish insurgents Turkey is at eternal war against. Supporting 28 countries with free stuff is 28 too many.

Time to draw down, not squander up.

Perpetual war spending rockets northward; Life enhancing spending droops south

The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is a misnomer.

It would be more fitting to call it the National Perpetual War Authorization Act (NPWAA). The 62nd version is taking shape in Congress and guess what? Like the Fifth Dimension song, it’s going ‘Up, Up and Away’, but not in a beautiful balloon, more like an F-35 or killer drone.

The 2022 NPWAA was a gargantuan $778 billion. President Biden asked for a whopping $35 billion increase for fiscal 2023. That wasn’t good enough for Congress. The House and Senate are fighting over who can add more squandered treasure to the ’23 Perpetual War budget. So far the Senate is ahead, adding $45 billion versus the House’s measly $38 billion over Biden’s proposed increase. At $851 billion and $858 billion respectively, the two branches will likely settle for at least $854 billion.

How does that compare, for example, to combatting climate change instead of combatting the hapless countries our country is destroying with bombs and sanctions? Our total budget in controlling a real, imminent existential threat to our survival is just $45 billion, about just 60% of the likely Perpetual War budget increase of $76 billion.

A lot of Americans are getting wealthy and powerful from our obscene, grotesque military spending. Will they consider it worth it when their kids and grandkids inherit a war ravaged, unlivable planet?

Peace Coalition ponders 70 year search for end to Korean War

Peace activist Alice Slater of New York addressed the West Suburban Peace Coalition Educational Forum via Zoom Tuesday nite on the topic: North Korea and Nuclear Weapons.

Slater, who joined the peace movement in 1968 to support Sen. Gene McCarthy’s quest to unseat President Johnson and end the Vietnam War, has focused her career on eliminating nuclear weapons. A board member of World Beyond War, Slater worked with the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize for promoting successful negotiations birthing the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

Her focus Tuesday dealt with the now 72 year long Korean War which the US refuses to sign a peace treaty over tho hostilities ended 69 years ago. As with many international crises, the US imposes draconian economic and political sanctions; then refuses any negotiated relief till its target gives in to every US demand. With Korea that requires North Korea to give up its entire nuclear program of roughly 50 nukes and now ICBM’s that could reach the US.

But North Korea has learned well the lesson of duplicitous US conduct following end of nuclear programs by both Libya and Iraq only to be subjected to regime change and war as their reward. Don’t expect North Korea to give up its nukes anytime soon; indeed ever. Till the US understands that, it may well extend the Korean War for another 70 years.

Slater urged attendees to visit koreapeacenow.org and join the effort to achieve the long overdue end to the Korean War which, while inactive for decades, has the potential to erupt like a slumbering volcano. In particular, contact your representative and senators to support H.R. 3446, the Peace on the Korean Peninsula Act.

I first learned about the Korean War as a six year old in 1951. Here I am 71 years on still pondering the folly of this unresolved, unnecessary US war that killed millions. Its end would be a neat item to check off my bucket list. But first, it needs to be on Uncle Sam’s.

Key terms left out of the Trib’s redlining article: Capitalism and institutional racism

The article ‘What does ‘redlining’ in 1940s Chicago have to do with today’s Black exodus from the city? Plenty, new study suggests’, while informative, fails to place the near 90 year issue in its proper context.

That would be the nexus between capitalism and institutional racism in which government and business conspired to make enormous profits while destroying neighborhoods and relegating minorities to those destroyed communities.

The Residential Security Maps drawn up by the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) actually go back to a 1935 directive of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB) which directed the HOLC to draw up those maps in 1940.

Once federally mandated institutional racism was drawn up by the government, private banking and home loan institutions took their cue from the Fed, resulting in nine decades of disinvestment which turned Chicago’s South and West Sides into violent urban wastelands. Whites living there also took the Fed’s cue, moving west toward green and blue lined areas where housing loans were readily available to those with the right color.

American capitalism had a couple more surprises for the residents left behind. Virtually no jobs or vital community resources but unlimited guns. There’s no Constitutional Amendment guaranteeing employment, a decent food store or nearby hospital. Two good food giants, Aldi Foods and Whole Foods, just announced ‘outta here’ to food deprived folks on Chicago’s South Side.

But there is one allowing guns galore to flood into the hands of dispossessed youngsters and confirmed criminals to ignite a daily shooting gallery claiming over 2,000 annual dead or wounded victims in Chicago alone. The 2nd Amendment, originally written to allow white Southern militias to hunt down runaway slaves and suppress slave rebellions, is now used to turn minority communities into free fire zones.

All of us of good will must take note and act. Until we do, the destruction of the inner cities and the debasement of our entire culture will live on.

 West rightly fed up with US proxy war against Russia

The Chicago Tribune once again begins its editorial history of the Russian Ukraine war on February 24, 2022, the day Russia launched its criminal war on Ukraine.

That allows the Trib, in its July 14 editorial “In the long haul against Putin, the West must not succumb to Ukraine war fatigue”, to present the war as “unprovoked”. It further justifies the preposterous charge that “A victory for Putin in Ukraine would embolden the Russian leader to set his sights farther westward, onto eastern European nations within the NATO fold, such as Poland, Romania and the Baltic states.”

A media outlet as storied and historic as the Tribune owes its readership a full explanation, however unpleasant, of decades of US, NATO provocations that led to the current war.

While those provocations began 31 years ago with refusal of the US to halt eastward NATO expansion after the Soviet Union disbanded, they escalated in 2008 when the West floated NATO membership to Ukraine and Georgia. That was a red line of provocation to Russia they’ve been warning us to withdraw now for 14 years.

The past eight, beginning with the US inspired and supported coup against Russian leaning Ukraine president Victor Yanukovych in 2014, have been a virtual demand by the West for Russia to attack. That was because it unleashed a civil war between the new central government and Russian speaking Ukrainians in the Donbas. To unify Ukraine under a pro West, anti Russian national identity, the Donbas Ukrainians were brutalized, indeed murdered by the US brokered anti-Russian government elevated to power by that coup. Coupled with the threat of NATO placing weapons and troops on Russia’s borders, Russia framed the crisis as an existential threat they decided, after years of warning, to defend against.

This makes current US support for Ukraine simply a continuation of the proxy war against Russia going back to that 2014 coup. Rather than save Ukraine lives, it sentences thousands more to a needless death so the US can inflict a defeat upon Russia.

A sensible policy would promote negotiations to achieve a neutral, NATO free Ukraine to protect Russia’s borders, and autonomy for Donbas to end Ukraine central government warfare upon those beleaguered Ukrainians.

The people of European NATO countries and the US understand this, which explains their Ukraine war fatigue. They understand the war has no connection to their national self-interests, nor that of any other country outside of Ukraine. They further realize Ukraine could easily have avoided attack had they simply rejected NATO overtures and refrained from waging war against their own people on Russia’s border.

Indeed, the now likely endless proxy war driving up gas, food and other prices results from their governments boxing them into a war that can’t be won short of nuclear destruction, much less one that should not have been provoked in the first place.

The sensible citizenry will never heed the false claims of their governments which have squandered their credibility with lies, erasure of pertinent facts and hysteria of a new Hitler, Stalin world conqueror to eradicate.

The Ukraine war fatigue the Trib laments is here to stay with the people. Time for Ukraine war fatigue to reach US and Western European governments and the media, including the Trib, to set up the negotiating table for sensible, compromise fostering diplomacy.

Walt Zlotow

President, West Suburban Peace Coalition

Glen Ellyn IL

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TRIB EDITORIAL

In the long haul against Putin, the West must not succumb to Ukraine war fatigue

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s barbaric, indiscriminate bombing of apartment buildings, schools and other civilian targets in Ukraine hasn’t waned. In Kharkiv, the country’s second largest city, recent Russian missile strikes have hit a school, a shopping center and apartment buildings. Elsewhere in eastern Ukraine, Russian fighter jets have been dropping cluster bombs on villages, raining shrapnel onto wooden cottages and killing anyone unfortunate enough to be outside at the wrong moment.

These latest reports of civilian carnage, however, haven’t drawn the same degree of disgust and indignation from America and its European allies that was seen in the early weeks of the war. Why?

It appears as if Ukraine war fatigue is seeping into the collective consciousness of the West.

Nearly five months after Putin’s audacious, unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, the conflict increasingly looks like a grinding, bloody stasis that could endure for many more months, if not years. The Kremlin has refocused its troops and resources on the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, after grossly miscalculating that it could roll through the capital, Kyiv, with relative ease. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s forces defied skeptics and held off Putin’s initial attempt to blitzkrieg his way across the country, but, at the current level of support, they can’t match the firepower that the Russians have in the Donbas.

For Ukraine, the war is existential. Putin has made it clear he believes Ukraine has no right to its own sovereignty and belongs firmly under the shadow of Kremlin rule. For his part, the Russian leader can’t reverse course now. He has wholly committed himself to a despotic, high-stakes gambit that risks lasting harm to his country’s economy and to the beleaguered Russian people.

So far Ukraine has been buoyed by the steadfast unity that America and its allies in Europe have mustered against Putin’s belligerence. Western leaders have just added bans on the import of Russian gold to a long list of sanctions that hamstring Russia’s energy sector and financial institutions, and take aim at Putin’s oligarch allies. The U.S. and other NATO nations have also tried to keep Ukraine’s military well-supplied — recent shipments of U.S.-built, multiple-rocket launchers known as HIMARS (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System) have proved to be particularly effective against Russian military targets.

Lately, though, murmurs of “Ukraine fatigue” have been coursing through Europe.

Nathalie Tocci, director of Italy’s Institute of International Affairs, recently told Los Angeles Times columnist Doyle McManus that in Europe, Ukraine fatigue “is here already. The pain (from sanctions) is far higher in Russia than in the West, of course, but our tolerance of pain is lower. So the question is which curve is steeper — Russia’s ability to wage war or our ability to endure economic pain.”

French President Emmanuel Macron certainly raised concerns about a crack in Western unity when he said in June that the West should take care to avoid trying to “humiliate” Russia. Macron and other European leaders may be getting nervous about this fall, when their countries’ dependence on Russian natural gas for heating becomes painfully vulnerable to Putin’s hand on the shut-off Valve.

Even in the U.S., Ukraine fatigue may be setting in. An Associated Press poll in May found that the majority of Americans prioritized limiting damage to the U.S. economy over imposing effective sanctions against Russia. That was in May. With inflation now reaching a four-decade high of 9.1%, the share of Americans disengaging from the crisis in Ukraine is likely to grow.

That would prove costly for America and the rest of the world, particularly in the long run. A victory for Putin in Ukraine would embolden the Russian leader to set his sights farther westward, onto eastern European nations within the NATO fold, such as Poland, Romania and the Baltic states. Putin has repeatedly demonstrated a resolve to capitalize on Western disunity. He not only thrives on dissent within Western nations, he desperately needs it.

Putin is banking on Western nations to grow weary of the conflict in Ukraine and disengage. He has no qualms about sacrificing thousands of lives of Russian soldiers, or about allowing sanctions to ratchet up the hurt on the lives and livelihoods of millions of Russians. He is fully prepared to outlast the West.

And if the U.S. and its European allies allow their resolve to ebb, he will.