SANDERS, WARREN, OCASIO-CORTEZ, AND OTHER LAWMAKERS SIGN PLEDGE TO END AMERICA'S ''FOREVER WARS''

[Donkees]

March 4 2019, 11:35 a.m.

Excerpt:

EIGHT MEMBERS OF Congress have taken a pledge to work to bring ongoing U.S. global military conflicts to a “responsible and expedient” end, the result of a first-of-its kind lobbying effort by military veterans on Capitol Hill.

The pledge was written and organized by a group called Common Defense, made up of veterans and military families, that advocates for scaling back U.S. military commitments overseas. Common Defense boasts of more than 20,000 veteran members in all 50 states, and it threw its endorsement behind almost 30 candidates in the last midterm election cycle.

All of the signatories so far are members of the Democratic caucus, and most of them are associated with the left wing of the party: Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren; Omar and other freshmen Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ro Khanna, and Rashida Tlaib; and Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair Mark Pocan.


Members of Common Defense meet with Sen. Bernie Sanders in Washington, D.C., on March 1, 2019. Photo: Ryan Harvey/Common Defense


https://theintercept.com/2019/03/04/common-defense-congress-forever-wars-pledge/

[Lunabell]

1. Bout damned time

The endless war machine needs to stop.

[Nanjeanne]

2. Wonderful. Can you imagine if cable news spent three minutes on it?

[Donkees]

3. Excerpt: The Military-Industrial-Media Complex

AUGUST 1, 2005

One way or another, a military-industrial complex now extends to much of corporate media. In the process, firms with military ties routinely advertise in news outlets. Often, media magnates and people on the boards of large media-related corporations enjoy close links—financial and social—with the military industry and Washington’s foreign-policy establishment.

Sometimes a media-owning corporation is itself a significant weapons merchant. In 1991, when my colleague Martin A. Lee and I looked into the stake that one major media-invested company had in the latest war, what we found was sobering: NBC’s owner General Electric designed, manufactured or supplied parts or maintenance for nearly every major weapon system used by the U.S. during the Gulf War—including the Patriot and Tomahawk Cruise missiles, the Stealth bomber, the B-52 bomber, the AWACS plane, and the NAVSTAR spy satellite system. “In other words,” we wrote in Unreliable Sources, “when correspondents and paid consultants on NBC television praised the performance of U.S. weapons, they were extolling equipment made by GE, the corporation that pays their salaries.”

https://fair.org/extra/the-military-industrial-media-complex/