Given his erratic behavior, from daily Twitter eruptions to upping his tally of lies by the hour, it’s hard to think of Donald Trump as a man with a plan. But in at least one area — reshaping the economy to serve the needs of the military-industrial complex — he’s (gasp!) a socialist in the making.
BEIJING – China has expressed serious concern about the new United States military budget, which explicitly notes the U.S.’ “long-term strategic competition with China” as a top priority and raises the government’s annual investment in the military to an unprecedented $716 billion – an exponentially higher budget than that of any other defense department across the world.
The Russian and US delegations led by Putin and Trump met for a working lunch in Helsinki, Finland on July 16, 2018 [PPIO]
Russian President Vladimir Putin has hailed his summit with US President Donald Trump as a first step to clearing tensions between their two countries and denied any role in the 2016 presidential election.
“Of course, numerous problems persist, and we have failed to clear the backlog in full, it was impossible to do this, but I believe we have made the first important step in that direction,” he told reporters.
Putin and Trump met at the 25th APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting in Vietnam in November 2017 [PPIO]
Russian president Vladimir Putin met his US counterpart Donald Trump with a slight advantage in Helsinki, Finland on Monday.
That would be a World Cup advantage.
Putin was in attendance at the Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow where in a dramatic finale to what many agree has been the most successful World Cup in years, France defeated Croatia 4 to 2.
In their opening sit-down in front of the press in Helsinki, Trump reiterated his tweet from the previous evening:
The first day of the NATO summit is now in the books and while NATO members clearly have some deep differences (US/Germany) what has come out of the summit is that despite all their internal bickering, the outdated and bloated alliance is still united and ready to adopt more robust “measures” aimed against Russia.
Imagine for a moment a scheme in which American taxpayers were taken to the cleaners to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars and there was barely a hint of criticism or outrage. Imagine as well that the White House and a majority of the politicians in Washington, no matter the party, acquiesced in the arrangement. In fact, the annual quest to boost Pentagon spending into the stratosphere regularly follows that very scenario, assisted by predictions of imminent doom from
I’m in my mid-thirties, which means that, after the 9/11 attacks, when this country went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq in what President George W. Bush called the “Global War on Terror,” I was still in college. I remember taking part in a couple of campus antiwar demonstrations and, while working as a waitress in 2003, being upset by customers who ordered “freedom fries,” not “French fries,” to protest France’s opposition to our war in Iraq.
Mark my words, America’s war spending will bankrupt the nation. For that matter, America’s war spending has already bankrupted the nation to the tune of more than $20 trillion dollars.
The Military-Industrial Complex has loomed over America ever since President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of its growing influence during his prescient farewell address on Jan. 17, 1961. The Vietnam War followed shortly thereafter, and its bloody consequences cemented the image of the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC) as a faceless cadre of profit-seeking warmongers who’ve wrested control of the foreign policy.
On November 3, professor John Mearsheimer made a short and stunning presentation at “U.S. Foreign Policy in the Trump Era: Can Realism and Restraint Prevail?” conference held at George Washington University in Washington, DC. In the unipolar world after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he claimed, realists urged nonintervention and staying out of conflicts and countries that “really don’t matter much.”
