Category Archives: Politics

Military Budget/Size and the Likelyhood of a Coup on U.S. Soil

Politics, Uncategorized, , ,

Brazil, with the 5th largest country in area size and the 5th largest population, has the 14th largest military and 11th largest military budget. Practicing conscription, this military has not been in conflict with its neighbors since 1870, nor has it been in conflict with any other country since 1945. It has had four coups d’etat and accompanying military dictatorships, the last of which ended in 1985.

United States, with the 4th largest area and the 3rd largest population, has the second largest military and the largest military budget. A volunteer military since the 1970s, this military has been in conflict with or in other countries for 224 of it’s 241 years of independence, including up to the present. It has never had a coup.

North Korea, with the 97th largest area and the 48th largest population, has the 4th largest military and is rumored to spend up to a third of its total income on defense expenses. A conscript military, this country has been in a formal, tightly-held state of war with South Korea since 1950. It has long been ruled by its military through the Kim family.

Comparing between these countries, I’m wondering what sort of role these militaries play in relation to their national populations. Are disproportionately-large militaries and larger military budgets a way to mollify and pacify the public? Are military adventures a way to distract us, as the Argentine military tried to do by invading the Falkland Islands (much to their failure at British hands) while Argentina was under a brutal military dictatorship?

If a military has no conflict abroad or natives to pacify, does that military become restless and more likely to lash out at its civilian government through a coup?

What if we in the U.S. pulled back all of our overseas military installations and detachments, ended the international War on Terror and Drugs, scaled down our military budget from its massive $597B to something like India’s $56B, move more active duty folks to reserve duty, recycled our excess of F-16s and other wasted weaponry, closed some of our excess of domestic bases?

If we did all of that and shifted all of that expenditure to other areas, that might benefit more of our working class, although we’d still have to weather the blowback from the craters we’ve made internationally.

But I fear that our military leaders, if reduced in power, scope and range of conflict, will turn against our civilian government. I fear that a reduced, internationally-neutral military will initiate a coup d’etat in the name of correcting the course of civilian government.

This happens way too much in other countries which have not seen conflict between sovereign countries for an extended time.

And this is ironic for me to say since I live on a military base, lol!

 

Working Families Party

Politics, Uncategorized,

You know what’s interesting about the Working Families Party? They’re a national party without a formal national structure beyond a national staff and an advisory board.

No national convention, no campaign fundraising committees, no national committee of state delegates.

Their primary focus, in the 10 states where they operate, is working on state politics. Their endorsements of Bernie Sanders in the Dem primary and Hillary Clinton in the general were their first presidential endorsements​, and presidential endorsements may be a rarity for the WFP.

But I like that. The WFP doesn’t need a major party-like structure when it is mostly focused on state politics. We need that sort of focus here in GA, a focus on building power for our 99%.

The Dems can worry about national politics. But maybe the WFP can help fix our state politics.

While we’re getting our schadenfreude on about the Trump supporter’s husband being deported, other Trump supporters remain vocally resentful and spiteful against the husband for not going through the immigration process.

Because 10 years is, in their view, “plenty of time to become legal”, when it actually isn’t.

Their rage against illegal/undocumented immigrants, against the idea of amnesty, against the idea of open borders knows no bounds, not even among their fellow Trump supporters’ families.

Isolationism and xenophobia, of which we have plenty, is a destructive crusade. What will the end of this crusade look like after we deport all the undocumented immigrants? Who else has to go? Who else will the inner regime behind the American mask deport?

 

Georgia Democrats Are Useless Right Now

Politics, Uncategorized, , ,

At the rate we’re going, Democrats will always be in the minority in GA.

  • We will always be fighting the predominant party from an inferior position.
  • We will never win the majority of either house of the General Assembly.
  • We will be eternally held hostage by right-wing bigot legislators.
  • We’ll never field competent competition in “deep red districts”.
  • We’ll never reform the State Constitution.
  • We’ll never get public accommodations-related civil rights passed.
  • We’ll forever stay a red welfare state.
  • We’ll let “religious” business owners turn away all possible demographics as customers, employees, associates because of things they can’t change.
  • We’ll recriminalize abortion.
  • We’ll erase separation of religion and state.
  • We’ll further erase separation of corporation and state.

But stay in your “safe seats”, Georgia Democrats, and ignore rural seats at your peril.

Know your place, Georgia Democrats. Be useless.

On Tuesday night, James K. Knowles—the inept, whitesplaining, cop-coddling, Mike Brown-denigrating mayor of Ferguson, Mo.—was re-elected. He beat out Ella Jones, a black woman and member of the City Council, by fewer than 600 votes. This is just a few weeks after Tishaura Jones, the city treasurer, lost her bid to be St. Louis mayor by a mere 888 votes.

These results are disgraceful, inexcusable and ultimately frightening. The entire black population of metro St. Louis is in the sunken place, and I don’t think even Rod of the T.S. Mutha&^%-A could get them out.

via Ferguson, Mo., Stays in the Sunken Place: Re-Elects Failed Mayor

The Phoenix John Brown Gun Club. The Huey P. Newton Gun Club of Dallas. The Socialist Rifle Association. Redneck Revolt. New Black Panthers. Brown Berets. Liberal Gun Club.

I’ve only held and used a gun once. It seems like the in-thing to ditch gun control and just go stockpile some ammo.

I also think about the admonishments who blame gun control and “identity politics” for Democrats losing so much power to reactionaries in “Middle America”/”white working class America”.

Maybe this left-wing gun culture should be embraced in the same way the GOP has embraced right-wing gun culture?

How do you think this will play out?

George Chidi is right.

Let me state the obvious: whoever is responsible for storing material under the interstate that could melt a bridge had better still be in prison when Eleby gets out.

The Department of Transportation bears the true burden for this disaster. And that may be why state investigators quickly made an arrest of someone who doesn’t work in a business suit.

The second-day news stories weren’t looking at the chain of command, working their way down from GDOT Commissioner Russell McMurry, trying to figure out who had the legal authority to allow high-density plastic conduit to be stored under the highway.

Instead, it’s the easy story — pictures of the black guy in an orange jumpsuit that they’ve done a thousand times before. And, because it’s easy to report, everyone reported it, burying the real questions under a wave of sensational news about an alleged crackhead burning down I-85.

via Sure. Blame The Crackhead. – GeorgiaPol

So Mexico has had universal healthcare since 2012.

How was this “corrupt”, “poor” country able to muster the ideological, philosophical strength to do what we can’t? How is it that Americans go into Mexico regularly to receive healthcare at a fraction of the U.S. cost?

Is it Mexico’s Catholic values? Is it the lack of severe racial stratification, the comparative lack of self-identifying Afro-Mexicans in most of the country, and the refusal to include Black people in the Mexican census since the 1910s?

How?

Equal Rights Amendment Passed by Nevada

Politics, Uncategorized, , , ,

Today I found out that the ERA was ratified by Nevada last week, even though it’s after the deadline. It’s the first ratification to pass since the 35th ratification in Indiana in 1977.

The history of the ERA’s passage is one which is extremely complicated and is a zeitgeist of the latter 20th century’s constitutional amendments and our reticence to pass new amendments. With Nevada’s latter-day passage, the “three-state strategy” of NOW becomes a “two-state strategy”.

I’m assuming that Illinois, with a Democratic majority in both houses (but also a Republican governor​), may be the next state to experience a full fight for the ERA. But even Illinois’ Democratic Party has been tough to budge in favor of the ERA.

But after Illinois, which state? The fight for the ERA may likely stall against GOP majorities in both houses of state legislatures in most of these states. They’re all in the South.

 

How “Southern Baptist” Pastors Created the Modern Republican Party

Politics, Uncategorized, ,

Just read an article about how the Southern Baptist Convention is part-and-parcel of the #SouthernStrategy, as well as the SBC’s aid in the rise of Trumpism.

After reading this, I wonder how the SBC is able to retain so much political power that even the Roman Catholic Church, the only Christian organization with a larger parishioner size in the U.S. than the SBC, can find themselves at odds with them on several economic and immigration-related issues.

  • There are 33 million Baptists in the U.S., 16 million of whom are members of SBC-affiliated congregations throughout the U.S. (as of 2013) but the highest rates of which are concentrated in Texas, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida and Tennessee.
  • The SBC provides funding to six seminaries, and the SBC’s state convention affiliates provide funding to nearly 50 universities and colleges in 19 states.
  • At the same time that the South was going through the end of Jim Crow and its immediate aftermath, the SBC was in the throes of its Fundamentalist Takeover.

All of this is crucial in understanding where the SBC is right now.