Biden continues the perpetual wars

Joe Biden has launchd his first airstrike, against targets in Syria, killing 22 people.

The Pentagon’s chief spokesperson, John Kirby, said the location of the strikes was used by Kataeb Hezbollah and Kata’ib Sayyid al-Shuhada, two Iraqi pro-Iran groups operating under the Hashd umbrella. “This proportionate military response was conducted together with diplomatic measures, including consultation with coalition partners,” Kirby said. “The operation sends an unambiguous message: President Biden will act to protect American and coalition personnel. At the same time, we have acted in a deliberate manner that aims to de-escalate the overall situation in eastern Syria and Iraq.”
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Mary Ellen O’Connell, a professor at Notre Dame Law School, criticised the US attack as a violation of international law. “The United Nations charter makes absolutely clear that the use of military force on the territory of a foreign sovereign state is lawful only in response to an armed attack on the defending state for which the target state is responsible,” she said. “None of those elements is met in the Syria strike.”

Once again, the US sends its troops into other countries and when they are attacked, claims it must retaliate in self-defense. It is part of the persistent mindset that pretty much the whole world is American territory so they are never invaders, only other countries are.
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McConnell begins groveling again to Trump

Just when you thought that Mitch McConnell could not sink any lower in political grubbing, he does. After the attack on on the US Capitol building on January 6th, McConnell made a speech on the floor of the senate and wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal unequivocally placing the blame on Trump. But when asked if he would support Trump if he became the party’s nominee in 2024, he gave a resoundingly affirmative answer.
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The Neera Tanden controversy reveals bipartisan corrupt politics

I have already discussed the awful record of Neera Tanden who has been nominated by Joe Biden to the powerful position of the head of the Office of Management and Budget. There are signs that her nomination is in trouble. But instead of focusing on that record, criticisms of her have centered on her late-night rage tweeting, resulting in her now trying to walk away from them saying, “My language and my expressions on social media caused hurt to people, and I feel badly about that. And I really regret it and I recognize that it’s really important for me to demonstrate that I can work with others… I would say social media does lead to too many personal comments and my approach will be radically different.”

Really? She only now realized the toxic effects of social media? Tanden did not say these things as an impulsive adolescent who has since matured and learned better. She made those vicious attacks on people as part of advancing her reactionary agenda and fully conscious of what she was doing, and is only sorry for them because they might jeopardize her nomination to an important post. Her apology is utterly disingenuous. Norman Solomon writes how the media and some left-leaning Democratic-supporting groups such as MoveOn are turning a blind eye to her faults and urging support for her.
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Bernie Sanders on raising the minimum wage

Bernie Sanders is holding a senate hearing on why the federal minimum wage should be raised to $15 per hour.

US taxpayers should not be “forced to subsidize some of the largest and most profitable corporations in America”, Bernie Sanders told a Senate hearing on Thursday.

As Congress debates the first rise in the minimum wage in over a decade, the Vermont senator said he had “talked to too many workers in this country who, with tears in their eyes, tell me the struggles they have to provide for their kids on starvation wages” even as the chief executives of companies including McDonald’s, Walmart and others take home multi-million dollar pay packages.

Executives from Walmart and McDonald’s were invited to the hearing, titled Should Taxpayers Subsidize Poverty Wages at Large Profitable Corporations?They declined to appear.
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The horrendous conditions in meatpacking plants

Crusading journalist, novelist, and one-time socialist candidate for governor of California in 1934, Upton Sinclair wrote a novel The Jungle in 1906 that lifted the veil off the horrendous working and living conditions of the workers in the Chicago meatpacking industry in Chicago. Upton’s novel focused on the lives of the recent immigrants from Eastern Europe who took these jobs because they had little choice. He had gone undercover as a worker in the stockyards to experience first-hand the conditions. His novel caused an outcry and led to reforms.

I had not realized that it was Sinclair who wrote that well known aphorism, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”. Sinclair could be considered as one of the originators of the of the movement we now know as democratic socialism.

He also said:
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Hopeful covid-19 statistics

Despite the sombre milestone of 500,000 deaths being passed, the numbers in the US continue to move in a good direction. The average number of daily deaths and the number currently hospitalized have now dropped to about the values that they had at their peak in April of last year. We still have some way to go before we reach the lowest values that were arrived at around July. I just hope people will not relax but continue to be vigilant and follow the guidelines for safety.

Seeking justifications for war

Unless one is a pacifist who opposes all wars on principle and is willing to live with the consequences, one is faced with the difficult problem of deciding when wars are justified and when they are not. The search for criteria for ‘just wars’ has evolved over time but while much of that effort has focused on finding legal rules, modern warfare has exposed the need for moral rules that go deeper. In a review of a new book Asymmetric Killing: Risk Avoidance, Just War, and the Warrior Ethos by Neil Remic, Anand Gopal writes about the criteria that had been in place.

We have been conditioned to judge the merit of today’s wars by their conduct. The United Nations upholds norms of warfare that, among other things, prohibit such acts as torture, rape, and hostage-taking. Human-rights groups and international lawyers tend to designate a war “humane” when belligerents have avoided harming civilians as much as possible.

But now modern remote controlled warfare that leaves one side immune from any casualties has changed the calculus. Gopal starts out by looking at what happened to the city of Raqqa as a result of sustained aerial bombardment by the US .
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