The Ukraine war has been a boon to the war economy. (Photo: Pexels | алесь-усцінаў)
For those in charge of U.S. national security, the central challenge is identifying threats and determining how to counter them. The Biden administration has cast China and Russia, in that order, as the major threats to U.S. security.
China is a “pacing challenger”; whereas, Russia is an “acute” challenger. Those rather odd designations mean, in plain English, that the administration considers China, once called a “peer competitor,” an all-encompassing threat, not just military but also political, economic, and technological. Russia has been downgraded from the Trump years. It is a military threat, but not on par with China.
Here’s how the Biden-Harris “National Security Strategy” paper (October 2022) puts it:
“The People’s Republic of China harbors the intention and, increasingly, the capacity to reshape the international order in favor of one that tilts the global playing field to its benefit, even as the United States remains committed to managing the competition between our countries responsibly. Russia’s brutal and unprovoked war on its neighbor Ukraine has shattered peace in Europe and impacted stability everywhere, and its reckless nuclear threats endanger the global non-proliferation regime.”
At first glance, the Biden-Harris paper seems to say that the Russian threat is actually far more serious than the threat from China. Russia, not China, is carrying out a war of aggression, condemned as such by the United Nations. China requires managed competition; whereas, Russia is a belligerent that has “impacted stability everywhere” and poses a global nuclear threat. China, the paper says, seeks to “become the world’s leading power” and has both the intent and the capability to “reshape the international order.” Russia is said to be pursuing “an imperialist foreign policy with the goal of overturning key elements of the international order.” Is that a distinction without a difference?
Despite all the contentious issues between the U.S. and China, they are not at war; whereas, to all intents and purposes the U.S. is at war with Russia, which not only “has shattered peace in Europe” but has shown that destroying Ukraine is just part of its mission to undermine the Western alliance. Those are the reasons the U.S. is heavily invested in defending Ukraine: tens of billions of dollars in military aid, military training of Ukrainians, supply of advanced weapons capable of hitting targets in Russia, and sanctions on Russian officials and trade. In the Asia-Pacific, the U.S. strategy does not rest on war-fighting scenarios but on deterrence of China, marked by strengthening security partnerships, particularly with Taiwan, Japan, and Australia. Engaging either adversary, whether through negotiations or transactions, is not a priority. We worry that Russia will use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine. We don’t worry, according to the president, that China will invade Taiwan, much less deploy a nuclear weapon. The U.S. has brought NATO into the Ukraine war, with allies supplying arms, advisers, intelligence sharing, and financial and political support. But Russia’s supposed strategic partner, China, has not provided Russia with military assistance for the war.
As the war moves closer to its first anniversary, U.S. and NATO involvement gets deeper — more military assistance of all kinds, such as a reported doubling of Ukraine soldiers trained, Patriot missiles, and HIMARS rocket launchers — and prospects for a negotiated settlement with Putin become more remote. In fact, the more successful the Ukrainians are in prosecuting the war, the greater the outside aid to Ukraine — but also, the greater the risk of expansion of the war. If Ukraine’s forces succeed at ousting Russia from more of its territory, Putin might react by escalating the use of force, such as use of a nuclear weapon. An unidentified Biden administration official recently made just such a suggestion. That prospect would present the U.S. and NATO with an entirely new challenge, one that might make them full-fledged combatants.
In the U.S. Congress, one finds declining enthusiasm for supporting Ukraine, but plenty of enthusiasm for confronting China. With Republicans about to control the House of Representatives, its far-right members are anxious to reduce aid to Ukraine. Their line of argument closely follows Moscow’s narrative on the war.
But when it comes to dealing with China, a Cold War-style consensus has formed among House members across the political spectrum. Republicans are forming a Select Committee on China that will assuredly take a very hard line, going beyond what the Biden administration has already decided — such as banning TikTok.
Republicans want Democrats’ support, the committee’s chair (Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin) saying: “We want the Democrats to nominate serious, sober people to participate, because defending America from Chinese Communist Party aggression should not be a partisan thing.” You can bet plenty of Democrats will apply. After all, isn’t TikTok a greater threat to national security than Russian aggression and election interference?
And let’s not forget the bread and butter of the threat business: the weapons and money for the Pentagon and military contractors. The New York Times reports: “Military spending next year is on track to reach its highest level in inflation-adjusted terms since the peaks in the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars between 2008 and 2011.”
In a spirit of bipartisanship that national security always prompts, Congress has voted for a record $858 billion in military spending. That’s $45 billion more than the president requested.
The war in Ukraine has been a boon to the permanent war economy. One specialist finds that U.S. military contractors will receive about 40 percent of the latest round of military aid to Ukraine (about $47 billion). Please note: All these spending decisions have been made with virtually no debate.
Mel Gurtov, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is professor emeritus of political science at Portland State University and blogs at In the Human Interest.
World War III beckons. (Photo: Doberman84 | Dreamstime.com)
Mihail Kogălniceanu, Romania — “The U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division has been deployed to Europe for the first time in almost 80 years amid soaring tension between Russia and the American-led NATO military alliance. The light infantry unit, nicknamed the “Screaming Eagles,” is trained to deploy on any battlefield in the world within hours, ready to fight.” — CBS News, October 21, 2022
Anyone can see it coming, right there on mainstream news. Writers don’t need to warn of the worst because the worst is already unfolding in front of us all.
The U.S. “Screaming Eagles” have been deployed three miles from Ukraine and are ready to fight the Russians. World War III beckons. God help us.
It all could have been different.
When the Soviet Union fell on December 25, 1991, and the Cold War ended, NATO could have disbanded, and a new security arrangement that included Russia could have been created. But like the Leviathan it is, NATO went in search of a new mission. It grew, excluding Russia and adding Czechia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Lithuania, Estonia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, Latvia, Poland, and Slovakia. All without an enemy. It found small enemies in Serbia and Afghanistan, but NATO needed a real enemy. And eventually it found/created one: Russia.
It is evident now that the Eastern European countries who sought NATO membership would have been better protected under a security arrangement with Russia as a member. But that would leave the war industry without an enemy and, accordingly, without profits. If military contractors don’t generate enough war profiteering, they send in their lobbyists by the hundreds to pressure our elected representatives toward hot conflict. And so, for the sake of profit, the “Screaming Eagles” have landed, hovering three miles from the Ukraine border, waiting for the order to go in. And we, the people, the human beings spanning this planet, wait to learn if we will live or die in a game of brinkmanship.
We should have a say in this matter, this business of the fate of our world. It’s obvious we can’t leave it up to our “leaders.” Look where they’ve led us: Another land war in Europe. Haven’t they taken us here twice before? This is strike three for them, and quite possibly for us.
If we all live through this proxy war the U.S. is fighting with Russia, we must fully realize our power as members of the masses and be relentless in pursuit of global systemic change.
In the U.S., the Authorization for Use of Military Force passed in 2001 (AUMF) must be repealed, the powers of war must return to a Congress answerable to the people and not weapons manufacturers, NATO must be disbanded, and a new global security system must be created which dismantles armaments as it increases peace and security through education, nonviolent resistance, and unarmed civilian protection. As for weapons manufacturers, those Masters of War, those Merchants of Death, they must return their gluttonous profits and pay for the carnage they wreaked. Profit must be taken out of war once and for all. Let them “sacrifice” for their country; let them give instead of take. And let them never again be placed in positions of such influence.
Do the planet’s eight billion inhabitants have more power than a handful of corporations and the politicians in their pockets to accomplish all this? We do. We just need to stop leaving it on the table for the greedy ones to snatch.
If more incentive is needed, here’s another line from the same CBS story cited above:
“The ‘Screaming Eagles’ commanders told CBS News repeatedly that they are always ‘ready to fight tonight,’ and while they’re there to defend NATO territory, if the fighting escalates or there’s any attack on NATO, they’re fully prepared to cross the border into Ukraine.”
I didn’t agree to this, none of it, and I’m guessing neither did you.
If it’s war with Russia and nuclear weapons are used, we all will perish. If Russia is somehow “defeated” or turned away from Ukraine, the war profiteers have us in an even tighter vise.
We have seen nonviolent movements succeed when people unite. We know how they are organized and deployed. We too can be “ready to fight tonight” in our nonviolent way, resisting all authority dragging us into war and repression. It is truly in our hands.
We have the power to make peace. But will we? The War Industry is betting we won’t. Let’s “cross the border” and prove them wrong.
Brad Wolf, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a former community college dean and executive director/co-founder of Peace Action Network of Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Ukrainian squad trained by Tim Scalita on combat life-saving techniques and battlefield tactics.
Scalita is wearing sunglasses next to the soldier sitting on the vehicle. (Photo: Courtesy Tim Scalita)
Two weeks ago in Lviv, Ukraine, Tim Scalita stepped out of his hotel, propped up his phone for a FaceTime call, and fired up a cigarette.
“It’s a nice town,” he says. “The Russians have been blowing it up a little bit the past couple of days, but nothing too terrible, mainly just aiming for power stations.”
He’d been in Ukraine for just under two weeks, ready to pitch in as a combat medic. Scalita has the experience. He did it in the U.S. Navy, including working with the Marines in Afghanistan a few years ago.
He’s a Memphian who is a writer and indie filmmaker. Now he’s been in Ukraine about a month and is near the town of Dnipro with a mostly Canadian tactical medical evacuation team. “We have trained two Battalions on combat life-saving techniques as well as battlefield tactics,” he said early this week. “We are basically training the front to fight and care for the injured soldiers until we can arrive and extract the wounded and transport them to the hospital.”
In the four weeks he’s been in Ukraine, there have been some false starts, a few surprises, and plenty of rigorous training. He’s gotten to know his team and he’s observed a country that sometimes seems perfectly normal until the air-raid sirens split the air. He’s been ready to get at it, although the worn-out (but accurate) phrase “hurry up and wait” has been fully realized. Until he finally got to Dnipro with his team, it was all about the logistics, sometimes hit or miss. Early in March, he posted his intentions.
Tim Scalita (Photo: Samuel Sutherland)
The Journey March 9th Facebook entry: My military friends. How do I get to the Ukraine?
It was on that date that a Russian air strike hit a maternity hospital in the port city of Mariupol. “Children are under the wreckage,” raged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. “This is an atrocity!” Scalita also felt the rage then, as well as days later when Russian forces bombed a theater/shelter in the same city, killing about 300 people. News reports say the Russians are making at least two attacks a day on the country’s healthcare infrastructure.
“The moment they started blowing up civilian targets,” he says, “I was like, you know what? I have skills. I was a corpsman with the Marines in Afghanistan and I was very good at my job. And I don’t have a family. There’s no reason I shouldn’t be doing this.”
He didn’t dawdle.
March 20th Facebook entry: I’m making it official. As soon as my passport comes in (which will be a few weeks) I’m leaving for the Ukraine. They are in desperate need of experienced field medics and I refuse to do nothing while the innocent are being slaughtered.
Scalita didn’t want to wait around for the passport to come through, so he contacted U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Memphis) to see if the process could be expedited.
March 30th Facebook entry: Passport came in. Thank you Congressman Cohen for pushing it through.
But there was still more to be done, not the least of which was acquiring funding to deal with travel and equipment. And he is planning for an indeterminate stay in hostile territory.
April 3rd Facebook entry: Central BBQ is buying my plane ticket to Poland!
Scalita has been working at the catering kitchen at Central BBQ. The restaurant’s Elizabeth and Craig Blondis stepped up to effectively be his sponsor, providing the ticket and some money for gear — medical supplies, flak jacket, helmet, safety equipment — and other expenses.
It was coming together.
April 15th Facebook entry: Alright guys. Hard going away party at Hi Tone lower bar starting 8ish. Honestly last chance for most of you to see me before I’m off to save the world.
April 21st Facebook entry: And I’m off! See you when I see you.
Now, in the first week of May, Scalita says, “I’m feeling pretty good. My goal was to get here, join the Legion and be a combat medic.”
The International Legion of Territorial Defense of Ukraine was founded on February 27th, three days after the Russian invasion. News reports say that up to 20,000 volunteers from around the world have signed up.
Scalita followed the instructions on the organization’s website but it didn’t take long to encounter bumps in the road. The first one was immediately after he landed in Poland where he was to be met by Legion representatives.
April 22nd Facebook entry: Hitch hiking into Ukraine like a boss. The Legion apparently no longer picks up in Poland. I have to enter the country on my own. They need to update the website.
From there, things didn’t improve much.
April 25th Facebook entry: Not going to lie. Conditions in the Legion camps are pretty terrible. Apparently the one I’m in is the Hilton compared to the others and it should be criminal. Things like drinking water we have to buy ourselves.
From left: Speedy (French Canadian), Harry Bennett (U.S.), Zach England (Canadian), Samuel Sutherland (Canadian), Chase Webb, Sean Malone (U.S.), Tim Scalita (U.S.) (Photo: Samuel Sutherland)
Plan B Scalita finally got to meet with Legion officials and told them he was there to work as a medic.
“They said, ‘Ah, a combat medic — that’s great. So, you want to join a special ops team and go behind enemy lines and kill Russians in their sleep?’ And I’m like, no — gotta save lives when stuff’s blowing up. That’s my thing. And they’re like, ‘Cool, cool, cool. So you want to go behind enemy lines and kill Russians in their sleep?’”
Scalita assured them that he was not interested in commando infiltrations. He’d already trained with them doing interminable fire team drills in the swamps, but he could see they didn’t put a priority on what he was offering. “I’m sure once I’m on the front line, I may not have a choice in certain situations, where I have to pull a trigger on somebody. But I didn’t come to fight another man’s war. I came to make sure everyone gets home okay.”
Disappointed, he ditched the Legion, gathered up his gear, and went looking for a Plan B.
On a FaceTime call two weeks ago, he said, “At the moment, I’m waiting. Tomorrow there’s a paramedic team coming in from Canada that I’m going to join. We’ll be taking casualties from the front line and then rushing them to aid stations and hospitals.”
Scalita is hoping the arrangement will work out, but everything is fluid. “There’s a lot of uncertainty, especially with a lot of these paramedic groups,” he says. “They come in and they’re like, oh, we’re only here for a month. And I’m like, I plan on staying here at least till Christmas. I want to go to London for Christmas and then go home.”
Tim Scalita filming one of his video projects in 2021 (Photo: Courtesy Tim Scalita)
On the Ground Meanwhile, he’s been gathering impressions and memories as he hurries up and waits for his opportunity to get into the field. Over the last several days, Scalita has been sending his impressions and observations.
For one thing, the language barrier, he says, has been intimidating. “People do speak a decent amount of English here, so I’m not completely lost, but it’s still just strange. It’s like I’d rather take on a legion of Russian soldiers than go to the grocery store, because all I can do is point and hand cash.”
And yet Scalita was surprised at how un-foreign things often seem. “It looks like everywhere,” he said. “I was expecting to land in Poland and it just be like this alien landscape. But it all looks like Pennsylvania. Driving through Poland and coming into Ukraine and it looks exactly like everywhere I’ve ever been.”
When Scalita’s team finally came to Lviv, it looked like his Plan B was going to happen. “We met up at the Dream Hostel in Lviv,” he said. “Let me tell you, it was nice to have some guys to hang out with. I met with the whole team at an outdoor cellphone kiosk a block or so from the hostel. The streets were teeming with, honestly, the most beautiful people I’d ever seen. I don’t think myself a super attractive person, but I never felt more butt-ugly.”
The team leader is a Canadian named Zach England. “He was happy to have a corpsman on his team and I was glad to have the gig,” Scalita said. “The gig: hard/high-risk extraction of casualties from active engagements on the front. I will be one of two medics to receive the casualties. We will have a driver and two to four shooters depending on the vehicle. We race in, receive, and run like hell to the nearest field hospital.”
Soon, the team would be on a train to Dnipro. “The bonding was good and honestly important, because a situation arose that needed to be addressed, and this next part is important,” Scalita said. “Especially for people who are thinking of coming over here.”
One of the team members was Farva, a nickname in reference to the movie Super Troopers. “He was showing disturbing signs of not having the mental stability needed for the task ahead,” Scalita said. “This began to be recognized by others days before it became very obvious the more he drank. It came to a decision that he would be reassigned when we arrived to Dnipro. He was obviously upset, so as a stranger to the situation and as a ‘doc,’ I sat him down one-on-one and explained that a team must feel safe with their teammates and trust that their teammates are there for the team. Our concern is that he was looking for a blaze of glory in which to leave this world. We refuse to facilitate that. To be successful, we must be professional. Being he was a former Marine, he trusted me enough to listen and understood. He is now with a humanitarian aid group, and I hope he finds peace in it.
“I only go into great detail on that story because I’ve read accounts, and since I’ve been in Ukraine I’ve encountered twice now, those who come here with ill intentions. They either want to just kill people out of blood thirst or see it as a good opportunity to take their own life and be remembered a hero and not the person they see themselves as.”
“My Heart Goes Out for the Lost” Meanwhile at the train station, Scalita noted that there are many tents and services for refugees coming from the east. “And a lot of volunteers which we were thankful for. A couple of good people brought us up to the military lounge where we were well fed and allowed to store our gear while we waited for the train. They also helped with our tickets. They fed us a feast of spaghetti with meatballs and pickled radishes. The mixture didn’t work. It was interesting. They also brought fresh bread, apples, potatoes, and individually wrapped sandwiches to take with us on the train. We were all very thankful.”
As they were waiting, Scalita got his first call for “doc.” “At first I thought I was being summoned to come out for a smoke and chat, but once I was outside I saw that on the platform two tracks over was a man holding another man having a seizure. We rushed across the tracks. The convulsions had stopped by the time I got to him. The man holding him, I would come to learn, was his brother who was trying to protect his head, which is really all you can do at that point. I checked his vitals and then asked about the medics. It was obvious from his disheveled state that the man didn’t have any meds with him. They took me to the doctor who was at the aid station where I learned the man had been there for days and had had many seizures but refused treatment, and that pretty much tied my hands as well. I left my guys with him in case they needed an extra hand with him. He was coming around and after a few minutes was able to continue on his own. We then just returned to the lounge.”
The team finally boarded the train and headed out. “It was nice,” Scalita said. “It was my first time on a cross-country train ride. We were able to secure spaces together on the sleeping car. But when it came time to sleep, I remembered why I love living alone. People snore, and did they. The volume was unrealistic and I seemed to be the only one who couldn’t sleep through it. Utterly maddening. I got a couple hours after everyone started to wake up, but it wasn’t long before we arrived in Dnipro. Once off the train, we set up in the parking lot and waited for our ride. There was a similar relief setup at the train station, but we found ourselves being approached by people that aggressively pleaded for money. We tried our best to lead them to the tents but they weren’t interested. That’s when we noticed people giving these poor people food and supplies and they would hide what they received and just continue to beg for money. I thought back to the man at the train station. Then I thought back to the homeless in Memphis and realized that you can’t help everyone no matter how much you wish you could. I was reminded that it’s a hard world even without this terrible war. My heart goes out for the lost.”
In Dnipro Finally, the team got transport to a hospital and Scalita noticed the differences between Lviv, an old and beautiful city, and Dnipro. “It has a nice downtown but is a poorer area. The people are just as nice and were very welcoming to us as volunteers coming to help against Russian aggression. They tell of the horrors committed to them and their loved ones by the Russian soldiers. The stories of the rape of women and children are true and terrible. The stories of murdering civilians are true. It’s in their eyes.”
Such a situation is also a call for introspection.
“I read that there are a lot of American vets over here because we all feel like we need a little redemption from Iraq and Afghanistan,” Scalita said. “I mean Iraq, which is now widely accepted was a horrible and illegal war, was basically what Russia is doing to Ukraine. We did to Iraq, and the irony is not lost on anybody here. And the way that Afghanistan ended, which was the only way it was going to end. When I was there in 2012, they were just like, oh, what’s gonna happen when America leaves? And we’re like, ‘You’re toast. They’re waiting in Northern Pakistan.’ It was inevitable. A lot of us are looking for a little bit of redemption. We don’t exactly feel like the good guys, so we would very much like to be the good guys now, you know?”
And that has become just another part of Scalita’s motivation. “Our spirits are good although we are tired. We are a good group and have more that will be joining our team as the conflict continues. Let’s hope it ends soon. Glory to Ukraine and to its heroes.”
Editor’s Note: We will follow Tim Scalita throughout his tour in Ukraine.
Sure, your grandparents loved you, but did they love you enough to put a picture of you and your siblings on the bottom of an ashtray? I think not. Check, and mate, my friend.
If you look at the photo accompanying this column, you’ll see me (middle) and my brothers mugging for the camera in clothes made by my stepmom. It was taken in the 1960s, probably for Easter, and was on the wall in my parents’ house for a long while. I’m guessing they must have given a copy to my paternal grandparents, at least one of whom thought, “Hey, I’ll put this in the bottom of an ashtray so I’ll think of the boys whenever I crush out a Camel.”
My sister found the ashtray in a long-unopened box last week and sent me a picture of it. It was truly a “WTF?” moment, and we had a good laugh over the phone. But that’s because we were looking at it through the social mores of 2022 rather than those of 60 years ago, when smoking was acceptable and decorative ashtrays of one sort or another were displayed in most people’s houses. My grandfather was a physician and smoked like a wet campfire all his life. Having an ashtray with a photo of his grandkids was probably normal back then. I assume. I hope.
I shared the photo with my brothers and the rest of my family via social media and we had a good laugh — or at least some good emojis and text exchanges. These kinds of familial artifacts are like archeological finds, evoking memories long buried. We shouldn’t take them for granted.
I wonder, for example, how much family memorabilia was destroyed in Luhansk, Ukraine, last week, when a Russian tank pulled up in front of a home for the aged and opened fire, killing 56 elderly people. “They just adjusted the tank, put it in front of the house, and started firing,” an official told The New York Times. Lives and memories lost forever in the rubble.
These stories keep emerging. It’s like an enormous, crushing boulder, seemingly unstoppable. Each day brings new tales of horror, of bombed schools, of proud, once-vibrant cities being blasted apart block by block, of Ukrainian civilians being put in trucks and shuttled back to camps in Russia.
Almost as horrifying are the Americans who support this evil or who look for rationalizations or suggest providing an “off-ramp” for Putin. This would include the Republican senators who were fine with former President Trump withholding arms and supplies from Ukraine for political purposes, and who are now hypocritically raging that President Biden isn’t sending enough. Marsha Blackburn, I’m looking at you.
We’re way past the time to let domestic politics have any part in this struggle. This is a pivotal moment in world history. Are we big enough as a country to rise to the occasion? Or do we waste our energy hating the president of Mar-a-Lago or shouting, “Let’s Go, Brandon”?
Maybe, instead, we should be thinking about how many families have been destroyed by Vladimir Putin’s forces in attacks on more than 50 hospitals. Hospitals! And about how many lives and families have been ended or ruined because of cruel attacks on apartment buildings, schools, grocery stores, and homes? If it helps humanize the situation, maybe think about how much family memorabilia has been left behind by the 10 million Ukrainians displaced from their homes by this merciless, unprovoked assault on their country.
A crucible is coming. We can’t keep appeasing a murderous sociopath with the lives of innocents, hoping he will stop if we keep enough Big Macs and credit cards from his people. How many more civilians have to die before we realize the Russian leader just doesn’t care? What is the level of evil we will tolerate before we call his bluff, before we finally put Vladimir Putin’s picture in the ashtray of history?
“Don’t forget about us,” Jerry Dutkewych, the first director of the U.S. Peace Corps in Ukraine, said to me as I stood up to leave my exit interview in August of 1997. At 23, it was hard to know what role my time in Ukraine would play in my life. I could hardly imagine that almost 25 years later the whole world would be lit up with the blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag. Ukraine is showing the world how its years of nation-building and democratization have led to a united and dedicated resistance to autocracy and aggression. In a time when our own democracy has seemed on the brink, Ukraine is reminding us what it means to fight for freedom and justice.
Since 1992, the United States Peace Corps has sent thousands of volunteers to Ukraine, more than most countries in the world. I was in the fifth group and was one of the first Americans that my neighbors, students, and English teacher colleagues had ever met. I taught English in a high school in the southern city of Mykolaiv. I learned both Ukrainian and Russian (Mykolaiv was a predominately Russian-speaking city). It was the first time I had encountered life in a bilingual environment, and that experience ended up shaping my career as a linguist, for which I am very grateful.
As Peace Corps volunteers, we were there for both economic and political reasons. The country was in major transition — poverty and hunger were prevalent in some regions, the elderly were suffering without regular welfare payments, businesses were trying to privatize, teachers were changing the way they taught, organized crime and human trafficking were on the rise, and heroin addiction, AIDS, and suicide were all problems that everyday citizens were dealing with, some for the first time. Some people were nostalgic for the more stable days of the USSR, but they were also hopeful about new contact with the West and the opportunities for new business ties, trade, travel, and education. Ukraine was looking West, and we were there to help in the small ways that we could.
During my two years, I had many conversations with Ukrainians about the changes in their country, comparing what life was like in the U.S. I talked to people about anything they wanted to know — religion, homelessness, or who my favorite author was. I helped my English teacher colleagues write a textbook and my friends, who were musicians, translate their lyrics.
I remember one afternoon in particular when the German language teacher came and sat down in my classroom. “We don’t know how to do democracy,” she said. “We have never had a democracy.” But Ukraine and Ukrainians have proven that they do, in fact, know how to do democracy and do it well. They have protested rigged elections, fought for their rights to trade with the EU, and maintained a free press and free speech despite consistent pressure from the Kremlin. They have cautiously promoted language policies that valorized the Ukrainian language and sought to unify the country while at the same time including rights for Russian speakers.
Ukraine is the borderland of Europe (the word literally means “on the border”). It sits between Russia and all of the democracies that make up the so-called West. The country is a battleground — economically, politically, and socially. Ukrainians have been required to disagree with their own kin to create the country they have become, to fight their own Slavic neighbors for their freedom. And by doing so, they are protecting us all.
In 1994, the United States and Russia signed a treaty with Ukraine that promised Ukraine protection in return for the removal of nuclear missiles back to Russia. That treaty was broken in 2014 when Russia took Crimea, and we did not come to help. That is part of the reason why we are where we are today — on the brink of a larger war, engagement of NATO, the EU, and possibly the U.S. As historian Allan Lichtman has put it, “the West’s failure to defend Ukraine will go down as one of the great mistakes of history.”
We will always remember Ukraine for the bravery and strength they have shown this week. We will remember the heroism of everyday citizens, the defense of Kyiv against all odds, and President Volodymyr Zelensky going into battle with his troops. Ukraine deserves our full support. For me personally, I realize that it was a mistake to not return to that place that provided me a better education than all of my years in college and graduate school. I will be returning to Ukraine to visit my former host sister and students as soon as I can.
Lyn Wright is an associate professor of applied linguistics in the English Department at the University of Memphis. She is a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (Ukraine) and former Fulbright Fellow (Russia).
The tanks rolling on Ukraine have arrived at Tennessee gas pumps.
AAA, the auto club and gas price watcher, said average gas prices in Tennessee have jumped 15 cents in the last week. Prices have jumped 35 cents in the last month and 94 cents over the last year.
The latest increase, AAA said, is directly connected to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The move roiled the oil market with crude spiking over $100 per barrel before settling back into the mid-$90 range.
“Russia’s invasion and the responding escalating series of financial sanctions by the U.S. and its allies have given the global oil market the jitters,” said Megan Cooper, AAA spokeswoman. “Like the U.S. stock market, the oil market responds poorly to volatility. This serves as a reminder that events on the far side of the globe can have a ripple effect for American consumers.”
AAA said U.S. gas stocks decreased by 600,000 barrels last week to a total of more than 246 million barrels. Gas demand rose slightly here at the same time. Together, lower supply and higher demand are expected to continue to push gas prices higher.
Tennessee ranks seventh among U.S. states for the largest weekly increase. The highest 10 percent of pump prices across the state are around $3.69 for regular unleaded. The lowest 10 percent are around $3.19, AAA said.
Memphis had some of the least expensive gas prices in the state with an average price of $3.40. Nashville had the highest at around $3.53 per gallon.
Credit: AAA
The lowest gas price in the Memphis area is the Kick Stop in Horn Lake on Goodman Road. A gallon of regular was listed there at $2.89 per gallon, according to the Gas Buddy website. This was followed by the Marion, Arkansas Walmart ($2.95) and the Memphis Exxon on Perkins ($2.95).
To cut your fuel bill, AAA suggests limiting your drive time, removing excess weight in your car, driving conservatively, and consider paying cash as some retailers charge more for customers using cards.
Was it only a little more than three months ago when President Trump was loudly disparaging countries that hadn’t controlled the coronavirus — like China, Italy, Greece, and Germany? When the president of the mighty United States was smugly banning travel from China and the European Union?
Well, yes, actually, it was. I know it’s hard to keep up with such things when every day brings six new scandals, but on March 12th, in a nationally televised speech, the president unilaterally and abruptly announced that the United States would ban travelers from Europe, following an earlier ban on travel from China.
At the end of his 10-minute speech, Trump added this amazingly arrogant and stupid prediction: “The virus will not stand a chance against us.”
Actually, COVID-19 now stands a better chance against the United States than against any other country on the planet. Along with Brazil and Russia (two other countries with incompetent leaders), the United States is now a raging epicenter for the COVID pandemic. With 4 percent of the world’s population, the U.S. has 25 percent of the world’s coronavirus cases — and 25 percent of the world’s coronavirus deaths. The infection level in this country is rising at an unprecedented rate, as several Republican governors scramble to close down their states after arrogantly and stupidly opening them for business as infection rates were rising — following our “stable genius” president’s lead.
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee gets a special “I’m Extra Stupid” award for even now not allowing the state’s mayors to require masks in their cities. (And for pushing through an illegal and unenforceable abortion ban bill. But I digress.)
Science is so overrated, apparently. Karma, unfortunately, is not.
Thanks to this administration’s incompetent response to the global pandemic, my wife, a French citizen, can no longer go visit her family — nor can millions of other Americans who want to do business or take vacations or visit family in Europe. Now, we are a shithole country, banned from traveling to civilized societies.
Several other significant stories have broken recently, collapsing on top of each other like a tower of Jenga blocks, each a stunner that would have destroyed any presidency before this one.
The president’s personal lawyer, aka Attorney General Bill Barr, has been stepping all over the justice system — getting friends of the president out of stiff sentences, releasing them from jail, and firing the attorney general in the Southern District of New York (who happened to be handling several cases involving Trump and his allies). Barr’s behavior was so egregious it caused longtime Justice Department prosecutors to turn whistleblower. But, meh, now it’s just another small explosion in Trump’s media minefield. A mere diversion.
Then CNN broke a story from Trump officials who had witnessed the president’s phone calls with foreign leaders. Here’s a sample: “In hundreds of highly classified phone calls with foreign heads of state, President Donald Trump was so consistently unprepared for discussion of serious issues, so often outplayed in his conversations with powerful leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Erdoğan, and so abusive to leaders of America’s principal allies, that the calls helped convince some senior U.S. officials — including his former secretaries of state and defense, two national security advisers, and his longest-serving chief of staff — that the president himself posed a danger to the national security of the United States, according to White House and intelligence officials intimately familiar with the contents of the conversations.
“The calls caused former top Trump deputies — including national security advisers H.R. McMaster and John Bolton, Defense Secretary James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and White House chief of staff John Kelly, as well as intelligence officials — to conclude that the president was often ‘delusional,’ as two sources put it, in his dealings with foreign leaders.” CNN.com
One final detail: Our president called German Chancellor Angela Merkel “stupid.” Merkel, it should be noted, has a doctorate for her thesis on quantum chemistry.
Okay, so Trump screwed up the coronavirus response and got us banned from Europe; his AG is deconstructing the Justice Department; he’s stupid, ill-informed, and abusive on phone calls with foreign leaders. A pretty devastating week, right?
Oh, wait, I forgot to mention that little thing where Trump was informed that Russia had set up a cash bounty hunt with the Taliban on U.S. combat troops in Afghanistan — and ignored it.
The president at first denied he’d been informed about it. The next day, The New York Times, citing two U.S. intelligence officials, reported that the information was in Trump’s daily briefing on February 27th. The White House spokesperson then responded that the administration was still considering its options.
The United States has become a banana republic, run by a narcissistic grifter, the kind of guy who blithely posts a video of a man shouting “white power” and then goes to play golf. We have a vice president who again this week praised the president’s response to the pandemic as “wonderful.” We have an administration run by incompetent toadies and lobbyists. And we have the entire leadership of a major American political party marching in lockstep with it all, as if blindfolded.
I’ve run out of faith that the American democratic institutions that have guided the country past the pitfalls of nefarious leaders and human inadequacy for 250 years are going to put the brakes on Donald Trump. Except for maybe the election process. Maybe. At this point, our only hope seems to be to survive this idiot until November and vote him out, along with his corrupt enablers. Only then can we begin the long and painful recovery from this unprecedented disaster of an administration.
I’ve got a confession to make. I’m in the Secret Society. You know the one I’m talking about. Fox News and Congressman Devin Nunes have outed us now, so there’s no use in denying it. They’ve uncovered how the nefarious “deep state” — the FBI, the U.S. Department of Justice, and the liberal mass media — is secretly working to take down our peerless leader, President Donald J. Trump.
Fox and Nunes have had help, of course — from patriotic Russian bots, Julian Assange, and from the president himself, who was the first to point out that the institutions we once trusted — to keep us safe from enemies foreign and domestic, to insure justice is served, and to inform the public — are all now in cahoots with one goal: to destroy the president’s plan to Make America Great Again.
At our Secret Society meeting last week (I could tell you where it was, but I’d have to have you killed by an FBI agent), there was much concern about this. Several of our leaders actually said they thought the jig might be up.
First to speak was Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller, who, let’s be honest, is one of our ringleaders. He told us the bad news — that the president and his minions were onto us. “They’ve figured out that Jim Comey, Andrew McCabe, Rod Rosenstein, and I are lifelong Republicans in name only,” he said. “As you know, all of us really work for Barack Obama, the One True Kenyan …”
Chants arose in the hall — “THE ONE TRUE KENYAN! THE ONE TRUE KENYAN!” — but Mueller raised his hand, asking for silence.
“Yes, Obama is our leader, and he gave us a single instruction when he left office …”
“Take Down Trump!” we chanted. “Take Down Trump!”
“Yes, but I have to be honest with you,” Mueller continued. “That task is getting more and more difficult. Trump is getting rid of us, one by one. If he can take me out, all is lost.”
Then CNN’s Wolf Blitzer took the podium. “My secret friends,” he began, “those of us manning The Situation Room are doing our best to get out damning information about this White House, but it’s getting tougher. Sean Hannity is on to us. Jeanine Pirro is chewing my butt like a pitbull. Tucker Carlson is one sharp cookie, despite that stupid bow tie. And don’t even get me started on Ann Coulter. He, er, she is a force to be reckoned with! Our measly ‘facts’ and ‘breaking news stories’ about Trump’s Russian connections don’t seem to faze these people. We’re calling in fresh pundits every day, but it doesn’t seem to matter.”
Gloom descended upon the room.
Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein then stepped forward, concern clearly etched on his face. “As we planned,” he said, “I’ve tried from the start to skew this investigation to bring down President Trump. First by appointing my friend, Robert, who despite his heroics in Vietnam and decades of service to presidents of both parties, is, as we all know, secretly a crook and a liberal — and one of our best, at that. But we are facing obstacles that we never dreamed of. This patriotic coalition of white supremacists, Russian bots, right-wing media, corporate billionaires, the NRA, and amoral Republican Congressmen may simply prove too much for us.
“Nothing seems to matter, any more,” he continued. “Trump can do anything. Yesterday, he decided to just flat refuse to enforce a Russian sanctions bill passed by Congress by a combined vote of 517-5! How does any president get away with that? It’s crazy. He just ignores legislation passed by Congress, destroys environmental regulations, tweets insane and verifiable lies, raves about an impossible-to-build wall, and still, we can’t stop him. He can have an affair with a porn star — A PORN STAR! — and the evangelicals just love him more. It. Just. Doesn’t. Matter. I’m starting to believe that there is nothing we can do to stop this guy. … I’m sorry.”
The room fell silent as the perfectly diverse crowd stared into their cups of Peruvian chai latte. After a few moments, we all began to head for the doors, exchanging hugs and the Secret Society handshake. For me, it was a somber flight back to Memphis. It seemed an inescapable dark age was descending. I couldn’t even get through my Vanity Fair. Norway, I thought. Maybe Norway.
There may still be a misguided sense of loyalty among Republicans both locally and elsewhere, that fealty to the party requires looking the other way at the rapidly onrushing perils that threaten the country as a result of the tragi-comedy known as the Trump administration. It is worth examining some of the more recent threats to Americans’ life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness:
It seems a dead-level certainty that sometime this week, perhaps even before this issue of the Flyer comes off the press, President Trump will announce some fateful alteration in this nation’s observance of and commitment to the international Paris Agreement on climate change.
Either Trump is prepared to withdraw the United States from the terms of the Agreement, or he intends to soften our commitment to it in such a way that it comes to the same thing. That much seems clear from the President’s recent domestic actions in disavowing one previously adopted environmental safeguard after another and granting the fossil-fuel industry free rein to resume polluting the atmosphere with massive amounts of carbon dioxide. The net result of that will likely be to accelerate the ravages of ongoing climate change — one species of which, last weekend’s violent windstorm and downpour, Memphians are even now attempting to recover from.
Beyond weather catastrophes themselves, though, Trump’s attitude has also invited the ongoing contempt and alienation from nations long allied with the United States and now, as witness the aftermath of last week’s NATO meetings, preparing to go their own way.
And the breakdown of NATO, an alliance already at risk from its cumulative nonstop disparagement by candidate and now President Trump, would leave its member nations, including the United States, vulnerable to increasing pressure from the resurgent and expansionist Russia of Vladimir Putin. The case can certainly be made that a measure of cooperation between Russia and the United States is necessary to combat Islamist terrorism, but Trump’s policy seems obviously aimed at something larger and more recklessly transformative than that.
Although various governmental investigations are belatedly underway into the meaning of Trump’s undeniable, unrelenting, secretive, and potentially illegal devotion to Putin and Russia, these inquiries are just now moving in a dangerously lumbering fashion. What’s holding them back is a lack of significant participation from Trump’s own Republican Party — participation like that from Tennessee’s GOP Senator Howard Baker and others that helped resolve the Watergate crisis of a generation ago.
Another Tennessee Republican, Senator Bob Corker, has lately begun to vent serious misgivings about the Trump administration’s course of action, and that’s a start. But too many other members of the President’s party are holding themselves back from the prospect of remedial action. While there’s still time, key Republicans can reconsider their reluctance and provide real service to the nation by holding the President to account. If they don’t, they could end up reaping, not the gratitude of their fellow citizens to themselves and their party, but the whirlwind itself.
Buried in the back pages of the newspapers these past two weeks by the Olympics, and now pushed offstage almost entirely by the Democratic Convention in Denver, the mega-crisis in the Caucasus — where Russia responded earlier this month to Georgian sabre-rattling over ending the autonomy of two ethnic Russian regions within its borders by invading the former Soviet republic — took a turn for the worse Tuesday, when Russian President Dmitry Medvedev formally recognized the “independence” of those regions (South Ossetia and Abkhazia). Predictably, Secretary of State Condi Rice blustered about this “regrettable” move on the part of Medvedev and his mentor, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who may well be welcoming these two mini-states into the Russian Federation before the first snows fall on Moscow.
And what can the U.S., as “the world’s only superpower,” do about this blatant violation of international law? Not much, thanks to the fact that our military forces are overextended in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Not that what the Russians are doing is anything less than reprehensible. But when Nicholas Sarkozy, president of France and the EU president, speaks out against the “outrage” of Russia’s bullying of Georgia, the world listens. When the architect of our own country’s miserably flawed foreign policy speaks, the world chuckles.
“The territorial integrity and borders of Georgia must be respected,” pontificated George W. Bush Tuesday. Right you are, Mr. President. Just like you respected the territorial integrity and borders of Iraq in the spring of 2003, launching an equally unprovoked war against an equally sovereign state left equally defenseless against the military might of a stronger power.
There is, however, one important difference between Russian aggression against Georgia and your aggression against Iraq, Mr. Bush: The Russian army is already headed home, while ours is still pounding sand in a country where so much American blood, treasure, and national honor has and continues to be lost.
“Tourists” and their Dollars
Tourism spending is supposed to support the financing of FedExForum, the convention center, the Bass Pro Pyramid, the fairgrounds, Beale Street, and Elvis Presley Boulevard near Graceland. Add to that the day-to-day operations of the Memphis Zoo, the Memphis Redbirds, the Children’s Museum, and many others.
Tourists, in other words, are really loaded. They’re sleeping in $100-$200 hotel rooms, eating expensive meals, and buying $50 tickets. And they’re oblivious to the price of gasoline, unlike the rest of us. The truth, of course, is that “tourism” spending includes a lot of local spending, too. The revenue streams that support our sports and entertainment projects are fed by taxes that would otherwise go into state or local coffers. And if the state rebates the taxes, you can bet someone in Nashville is keeping track and debiting the Memphis account somewhere along the line.
When public officials say they’re building major projects without using general funds or property taxes, they are fudging. The general fund would be more robust and Memphis property taxes — the highest in Tennessee — would be lower if financiers didn’t play their shell games. One way or another, it’s all public tax money.
CNN.com 