American Exceptionalism: Part II

Read Part I Here

The United Nations Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), regulating the international trade in conventional arms -- from small arms to battle tanks, combat aircraft and warships -- entered into force on Christmas Eve, December 24, 2014. It had been signed by 130 countries (including the U.S.) and ratified by 60, ten more than it needed to become effective. The United States was not, however, among the countries that ratified the ATT.

The treaty establishes standards for the global trade in conventional weapons, with the goal of preventing such weapons from being sold to those who would use them to commit genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. Congressional Republicans were strongly opposed to the global treaty. You might even say they were up in arms about it. In fact, 50 senators sent President Obama a letter expressing their opposition to the ATT, including every Republican except one, plus five Democrats worried about backlash from the NRA.

Some have called for the Obama Administration to "unsign" the treaty; something George W. Bush did in 2002 when he renounced U.S. obligations as a signatory to the 1998 Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court (ICC). It was just as well that he did so, given the recently released Senate Report on the Bush Administration's execrable program of torture and extraordinary rendition during the Iraq War. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Tenet in the dock at the ICC at The Hague might cast an unfavorable light on America's human rights record.

But I digress. This little essay is about how Congressional Republicans, concerned more about currying favor with arms dealers, legal and illegal, and the broader Military Industrial Complex, along with their NRA quislings, have, with malice aforethought, killed any attempt to reign in the international arms trade. Their intransigence has doomed untold millions of people from Syria to Nigeria and beyond to death and destruction. On the other hand, it has made millionaires and billionaires of people like Adan Khashoggi, and Pierre Konrad Dadak, who threatened to put anyone who crossed him, "in a jar."

Overseas weapons sales by the United States comprise more than three-quarters of the global arms market, valued at $85.3 billion in 2011. America is without peer when it comes to supplying the world, especially developing countries, with the means to murder, maim, and mutilate. And in this, we are speaking only of reported arms sales. Illegal trafficking of firearms -- the weapons that end up in the bloody hands of Boko Haram, Al-Shabaab, Al-Qa'ida, and the ever popular Islamic State -- very probably rivals that of the legal trade. The bottom line is the bottom line, i.e., we are dealing with a hugely profitable business.

Republicans have always been known as the party of big business. And the arms trade is just that. Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Boeing are far and away the top three arms-producing companies in the world. In fact, the United States has a larger share of the worldwide arms market than the rest of the world combined and double the market share of all of the Western Europe OECD combined. Indeed, in this respect, America is exceptional.

Republicans argue that America’s arms trade is part and parcel of the implementation of its foreign policy, and should not be subject to the whims of a U.N. secretariat consisting of a ‘bunch of foreigners.’ In this regard, the non-partisan Congressional Research Service has said,

"Whereas the principal motivation for arms sales by key foreign suppliers in earlier years might have been to support a foreign policy objective, today that motivation may be based as much, if not more, on economic considerations as those of foreign or national security policy."

Still, Republicans have other reasons besides money and money to rail against the treaty. Listen to their ‘speechifying’ on the Senate floor and you’ll hear them lament a further intrusion into the inalienable rights of “patriotic Americans” -- the Arms Trade Treaty violates our Second Amendment right to “keep and bear arms.” Top NRA lobbyist Chris Cox said the treaty represents, "blatant attacks on the constitutional rights and liberties of every law-abiding American." The thing is, that’s just not true. No international treaty overrides our Constitution. Period. So the Second Amendment argument is bogus and that brings us back to the real argument, MONEY. Republicans value money. Life? Not so much.

ISIS Mass Execution. Where do they get their weapons?

The GOP's Impeachment Talk -- Criminally Negligent

Texas Representative (R-27) Blake 'Fat Face' Farenthold recently told constituents at a town hall meeting that there would be enough votes in the House to impeach President Obama, but the bill would  die in the Senate. A swell of disappointment rumbled across the crowd, many of whom were wondering why, if the House could vote to overturn 'Obamacare' for the umpteenth time, they couldn't go ahead and waste more time and money voting to impeach Obama.

Farenthold in his PJs -- what else would you wear at a pajama Party?

Fat Face isn't the only Republican congressman talking impeachment. It's a real crowd pleaser at conservative/Tea Party town halls across the country during this year's August recess. And representatives like Fat Face and Kerry "You're just a paycheck to me" Bentivolio (R-MI), who told a constituent that he'd "love to write the bill" impeaching Obama. Bentivolio, who invented a new territory called "American Somolia," gave up his part-time gig playing Santa Claus to run for congress and is now looking for something fun to do.

Bentivolio with his Reindeer

House Republicans shouldn't give up hope. At least two Republican senators, Ted Cruz (TX) and Tom Coburn (OK) believe the President must have done something "perilously close" to impeachable.

The impeach Obama movement actually has traction with conservatives, and not just the fringe nut jobs. Regular middle-of-the-road Republican nut jobs are on the impeachment band wagon, some hanging from highway overpasses waving their impeach Obama banners.

Of all the wacko House Republicans riling up their constituencies over President Obama's "unprecedented attack on the American constitution," perhaps the most egregious is Representative Steve Stockman of [you guessed it] Texas (R-36). Stockman issued a statement following President Obama's promise to take up gun control after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook, saying, "I will seek to thwart this action by any means necessary, including but not limited to eliminating funding for implementation, defunding the White House, and even filing articles of impeachment." Stockman is an ignorant blowhard, but unfortunately so are many in his base and his message resonates with them.

Stockman with BFF Ted Nugent

So as Republican congressmen make the rounds during their break from doing absolutely nothing while in session, and speak to Tea Party and gun group rallies across the nation, some in the enthusiastic crowd, especially those with concealed carry permits, may be fingering their weapon of choice and mumbling, "If it were up to me..."

God help us if one of these Second Amendment fanatics takes it upon himself to attempt to "impeach" President Obama from the barrel of a gun. If that were to happen, members of congress who are trumpeting this impeachment bullshit should be tried for criminal negligence, censured, and banned from political office for life.

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An indictment of us all

I write this prior to knowing the outcome of the George Zimmerman trial, because for me, the outcome is immaterial. Why? Because it isn’t Zimmerman who’s on trial in Sanford, FL. It’s us, all of us, and the culture reflected in what we believe and how we act on those beliefs.

The Trayvon Martin case is an indictment of an American gun culture steeped in a vigilante ethos made manifest in “stand your ground laws,” infected with a paranoia so severe that Second Amendment fanatics would rather see guns in the hands of the mentally ill, criminals, and terrorists than accede to universal background checks, and tolerated by a US Congress more interested in their reelection prospects than in the safety of their constituents.

Finally, this case is an indictment of all of us who fail to act to overcome the influence and intransigence of the NRA and the cowardice of Congress. If we do nothing to prevent the shooting death of another child, another adult, another human being, then we will all be found guilty.

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Culture War: Taking the Fight to the NRA

Jim Porter, the NRA's New President

I hardly ever agree with anything the National Rifle Association says, but the organization has elected a new president, James W. Porter II, an Alabama attorney, and he said that the NRA and its masters and minions are in a “culture war” with the rest of America. I agree with that.

The culture that Porter is defending is one that doesn’t accept the result of the last two presidential elections and sees Barack Obama as a “fake president” intent on imposing a “European socialistic, bureaucratic type of government,” and denying patriotic Americans their constitutional rights. It is a culture that tellingly, doesn’t accept the result of the Civil War, or as Porter calls it, “the War of Northern Aggression.”

Porter is rallying to the defense of a culture that believes the Second Amendment means exactly the same thing today as it did more than two centuries ago when, lacking a standing army, a federal law, the Militia Act of 1792, mandated every eligible man purchase a military-style gun and ammunition for his service in the citizen militia. The purpose of the militia was to protect the United States from invasion from any foreign nation or Indian tribe. Today, the NRA promotes itself as arming its members with “standard military firearms” not to defend our country against foreign aggressors, but to use against our own “tyrannical” government. No wonder they won’t accept any limits on what firearms they can own.

The NRA is well known for its ability to mix myth with faulty logic to argue against any incursion in what they see as the inalienable right any individual American to bear arms of any kind, anytime, anywhere, and ‘stand their ground’ no matter how many Americans are killed every year (about 32,000). It doesn’t matter whether it’s a mass shooting of children at Sandy Hook, or an accidental shooting by one 5-year-old of his 2-year-old sister in Kentucky, the NRA’s response is always the same. This deplorable gun violence is a necessary cost of the right to bear arms unfettered by even the most reasonable gun control measures. Dead kids are collateral damage for the NRA and members of a culture where facts are considered a hindrance to a belief system permeated by paranoia.

From a Children's Defense Fund Report

But it would be a mistake to see the NRA as crazy extremists. They are more than that. The NRA is a shill for a gun industry whose only moral imperative is profit. That’s one of the reasons the NRA opposes the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty. Despite NRA rhetoric, the treaty doesn’t dictate domestic gun laws and would have no bearing on Americans’ Second Amendment rights. But it might effect the $70-billion international arms trade, and American arms dealers, who dominate the market, don’t want to have their dealings with warlords and their child soldiers, and terrorists who turn their US weapons back on Americans, subject to governmental scrutiny.

So I say, yes Mr Porter, we Americans who believe in ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,’ who want to see our children grow to be productive members of a society of people who care about each other, rather that a society of ‘us against them,’ we Americans are in a war with you and your organization and we intend to win. And we’ll win at the ballot box, without guns, because that’s the American way, Mr. Porter.

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Guns That Don't Kill People

 It’s truly troubling to read the letters from dismayed NRA supporters. Leave it to “bleeding heart liberals” to exploit the shooting deaths of a couple of dozen children and adults at Sandy Hook Elementary (and a few thousand other shooting deaths since then) to promote so-called “sensible” gun control.

We feel for gun owners who’ve accumulated an impressive collection of firearms, only to realize that their guns don’t kill people. How can they be expected to “stand their ground” armed only with non-killing semiautomatics? And when marauding gangs intent on pillage, rape and murder attack them in their homes, these patriots can use their crates of ammunition only as barricades, and their non-people killing guns as blunt instruments.

More vexing still for our “well regulated militia” is the realization that protecting the constitution (or selected parts thereof) is immeasurably more difficult without guns that kill people. For how can they hold back the “jack-booted government thugs” bent on wresting the last vestiges of their freedoms from their cold, dead hands?

Perhaps the NRA’s campaign to stop the study of gun violence was ill-advised. Some additional research might have shown that guns do indeed kill people, even gun owners. Now wouldn’t that be ironic?

Since the Newtown shooting, 2,857 people have been

shot to death in America as of March 21, 2013.

Americans own over 300 million guns, about one

gun for every man, woman, and child in the nation. 

Between 1955 and 1975, the Vietnam War killed over 58,000 American soldiers; less than the number of civilians killed with guns in the U.S. in an average two-year period.

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