Academic hawk Ashton Carter Obama's likely choice for new defense secretary

Ashton Carter is now widely seen as Obama's choice for defense secretary after Obama's reportedly more favored candidate Jeh Johnson of Homeland Security and others indicated they were not interested in the position.

Carter has plenty of experience in government, the private sector, as well as academia. Although a Democrat, he was active during the Bush era: During the Bush administration, he was also a member of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's International Security Advisory Board, co-chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's Policy Advisory Group, a consultant to the Defense Science Board, a member of the National Missile Defense White Team, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on International Security and Arms Control. Carter was responsible for oversight of a number of very expensive weapons development projects that included the F-35. Although many claim he was quite active in attempting to cut costs, others note that there were still questionable weapons programs on Ashton's watch.
 In response to Ashton's constant criticisms of defense spending reductions caused by the sequester conditions, Lawrence Korb of the Center for American Progress said: "Carter grossly exaggerates the reduction to the level of defense spending caused by the budget control act. Sequestration resulted in part from the inefficient and unsound choices the Pentagon has made over the past decade, much of it occurring on Carter's own watch,"
Ashton strongly supports a policy of pre-emptive military action. In 2006 he suggested that the Bush administration should attack North Korea before it developed an intercontinental ballistic missile. He is very much concerned with the development of Weapons of Mass Destruction WMD's. He even wanted the war on terror to be renamed as a war on WMDs. Ashton argued that the Iraq war was justified because at the time the administration thought that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. He is also hawkish on Iran and favors military action if diplomacy does not work. He would not even allow a civilian Iranian program which he claims would still be a threat to the region.
On the other hand, Ashton is all for the US modernizing its nuclear weapons and there are plans for huge expenditures in the area. Joe Cirincione of Project Ploughsares notes that Ashton will be in a tough spot: “He inherits plans for spending $1 trillion on new nuclear weapons over the next 30 years but not the money to pay for them. He doesn't want to cut the contracts, but he can't afford them either."
Given his hawkish stance and promotion of defense spending Ashton appeals to many Republicans including John McCain, who will be next chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee. McCain told Bloomberg that Carter and he had similar ideas on several different issues saying of Carter: “Working together, if you are not having to fight the Pentagon, if you’ve got the leader actively working towards the same goal, that’s immensely helpful."
 Ashton is a typical representative of the revolving door that sees senior government officials go into the corporate world and then back again. In Ashton's case the door led back into academia as well: In between his government appointments, he has served as the chairman of the Harvard Kennedy School's global affairs faculty and as co-chair of its Preventative Defense Project. Carter also has extensive experience in the corporate world, having served as a senior partner at Global Technology Partners, a member of the board of trustees for the MITRE Corporation, and an adviser to Goldman Sachs.[24] He also serves on the the Advisory Boards of MIT's Lincoln Laboratories and the Draper Laboratory. As of September 2014, Carter was serving as a senior executive director at the Markle Foundation. Carter's work at Markle is focused on "advancing transformative strategies that use technology and globalization to help all Americans flourish in the economy of a networked world." These connections serve to link corporate profit, academia, and government policy.

John McCain criticizes Supreme Court decision to grant corporations rights to free speech

While prominent Democrats and their defenders regularly lambaste the Supreme Court decision that corporations are people in the Citizens United case, it is rather surprising to find a prominent Republican also taking a very jaundiced view of the decision.

  However the former Republican presidential nominee John McCain claims to be very worried by the decision. McCain noted that billionaire Sheldon Adelson may contribute up to 100 million to support the campaign of Mitt Romney through a Super Pac. While it is unusual for Republicans to worry about donations to their own party, McCain is also worried that the decision will allow unions to finance the Democrats. However the unions do not have the deep pocket of large U.S. corporations.

McCain said:“I’m not only worried about him, I’m worried about may others,”“I’ve always been concerned about the labor unions who take money from their union members and without their permission, contribute to causes that they may not support. So am I concerned about the incredible amount of money that’s washing around? Yeah.”

McCain continued in criticism of the Supreme Court decision:: “I think there will scandals as associated with the worst decision of the United States Supreme Court in the 21st century,” Since Adelson earns some of his billions from a foreign casino McCain even suggested that his donations involved foreign money entering the campaign.

McCain's musings may not sit well with Romney and his supporters. Romney himself has said that corporations are people. McCain's gloss on his statement is that Romney was saying simply that they are made up of people. For more see this article.

McCain adviser lobbied for Georgia

This is from McClatchy.
This is a good glimpse of some of the relationships between corporate America and U.S. foreign policy. Authoritarian tendences are apparently OK in Georgia but not in Russia! Independence is OK in Kosovo from Serbia but not South Ossetia or Abkazia from Georgia. And of course independence was just hunky dory in Ukraine, Georgia, etc. from the Evil Empire of the former USSR..

Top McCain adviser lobbied for nation of Georgia
By Greg Gordon, McClatchy NewspapersFri Aug 8, 7:28 PM ET
WASHINGTON — John McCain's top foreign policy adviser, Randall Scheunemann , lobbied for the nation of Georgia for four years, including for about a year after he joined the Republican senator's presidential campaign staff in early 2007.
Georgia has paid Scheunemann's firm, Orion Strategies, LLC , nearly $900,000 since 2004, including $200,000 for an eight-month contract that began on May 1 , two weeks after McCain issued a strong statement criticizing Russia and supporting Georgia .
Scheunemann took a leave from lobbying for Orion in March, two months before McCain barred active lobbyists from serving on his staff. He's still listed as Orion's president and owner.
Reached by phone, Scheunemann declined comment and referred a reporter to the campaign.
Asked about Scheunemann's lobbying connections, McCain campaign spokesman Tucker Bounds said that the Arizona senator's interest in Georgia "predated" his first visit to the republic in 1997. He said that McCain "has spoken for years about Russian policies that threaten the sovereignty of its neighbors, from Estonia to Ukraine to Georgia ."
Bounds said that McCain returned to Georgia in 2002 to urge then-president Eduard Shevardnadze to conduct free and fair elections, and when those "badly flawed elections" led to a revolution, McCain became a strong supporter of newly elected President Mikhail Saakashvili .
Orion's filings with the Justice Department's Foreign Agents Registration Office indicate that Scheunemann and his partner, Mike Mitchell , had more than 40 phone conversations and meetings with McCain, his Senate chief of staff Mark Salter and his foreign policy aide Richard Fontaine , on behalf of Georgia , which is seeking membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization .
The briefings picked up in the summer of 2006, when Scheunemann briefed McCain and his aides several times before McCain took another trip to Georgia , this time with Republican Sens. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia , Lindsey Graham of South Carolina , Mel Martinez of Florida , Richard Burr of North Carolina and John Sununu of New Hampshire . Scheunemann joined them in Georgia , where they met with Saakashvili.
Saakashvili has been criticized for authoritarian tendencies following a crackdown on demonstrators last year, but McCain has been a staunch ally, sternly criticizing Moscow for its backing of pro-Russian, separatists.
On April 17 of this year, McCain issued a stern statement assailing " Russia's moves to undermine Georgian sovereignty." Two weeks later, Georgia gave Orion a $200,000 contract extension.
After Russian tanks rolled into the breakaway region of South Ossetia Friday amid fighting between Georgian troops and the separatist rebels, McCain called for an immediate Russian pullout and urged the Bush administration to request an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council .

McCain on Iraq!

I am sure that one could collect quotes of this sort from Bush that are much worse! Hilary has a bad memory about her trip to Bosnia too!

from the Institute for Public Accuracy]

"I believe that success will be fairly easy."
-- John McCain (9/24/02, CNN)

"I believe that we can win an overwhelming victory in a very short
period of time."
-- John McCain (9/29/02, CNN)

"The American people ... were led to believe that this would be some
kind of a day at the beach which many of us, uh, fully understood
from the very beginning would be a very, very difficult undertaking."
-- John McCain (8/22/06, CNN)

"I knew it was probably going to be long and hard and tough. And
those that voted for it and thought that somehow it was going to be
some kind of an easy task, then I'm sorry they were mistaken. Maybe
they didn't know what they were voting for."
-- John McCain (1/4/07, MSNBC)

McCain's Havana connection!

So it seems that even McCain's Cuban interrogator in Vietnam supports Obama. I wonder if that will be used as an argument against Obama! Not surprisingly McCain shows no remorse about the civilian casualties he caused in bombing Hanoi. Not surprisingly Barral does not paint a flattering picture of McCain.

Washington Post - March 11, 2008
AR2008031003141_pf.html>

In Havana, A Page From McCain's Past
Restaurateur Displays Story Of Interview With POW
By Manuel Roig-Franzia

HAVANA -- At first glance, the trophy wall in the Cactus on 33rd
restaurant seems to follow a standard local formula.

Framed photo of heroically posed rebel. Check.

Rusty rifle. Check.

Signed postcard from Ernesto "Che" Guevara. Check.

But there, among the routine, lies a surprise: a copy of a faded, 38-
year-old article from Granma, the Cuban Communist Party newspaper. On
the page is a photo of Fernando Barral, a Cuban psychologist turned
restaurateur, sitting at a well-appointed coffee table in Hanoi. He
is interviewing a square-jawed, sandy-haired U.S. prisoner of war. A
prisoner of war named John McCain.

That a nearly four-decade-old photo of a U.S. POW would become a
restaurant prop in this seaside capital stands as testament to
Havana's time-warp vibe and its enduring anti-U.S. sentiments. More
than just a place where vintage American cars rumble and spit smoke,
Havana can feel like a city that refuses to let go of the Cold War,
where spies and conspiracy theories and intrigue are as much a part
of daily life as rum, cigars and the rhythms of son music.

The Granma clipping in Barral's restaurant, dated Jan. 24, 1970,
recalls one of the defining periods of McCain's life, his 5 1/2 years
as a prisoner of war after his Navy jet was shot down over North
Vietnam. The tale of that photo and how an obscure Cuban psychologist
came to interview McCain -- now a 71-year-old U.S. senator from
Arizona and the presumptive Republican presidential nominee -- rouses
the echoes, curiosities and suspicions of another era.

There is no doubt that the two men met in Hanoi in January 1970.
Their accounts of the basic outlines of the meeting are almost
identical.

McCain briefly mentions his encounter with Barral in his 1999
autobiography, "Faith of My Fathers," calling him "a Cuban
propagandist, masquerading as a Spanish psychologist and moonlighting
as a journalist." McCain wrote that Barral concluded he was "a
psychopath," but Barral said in an interview that he never reached
that conclusion. A McCain campaign spokesman did not respond to
several interview requests on the subject.

The Spanish-born Barral is now 79 and retains a lispy Madrile¿o
accent even though he has lived nearly a half-century in Cuba. Barral
said McCain was "boastful" during their interview and "without
remorse" for any civilian deaths that occurred "when he bombed
Hanoi." McCain has a similar recollection, writing in his book that
he responded, "No, I do not" when Barral asked if he felt remorse.

Barral kept his original notes from the interview in a bound
Vietnamese notebook with yellow flowers on the cover.

He said he kept the article about the interview tucked away for
decades, most recently stashing it in the small living quarters
behind the six-table restaurant he runs inside a creaking mansion in
the Playa neighborhood, 15 minutes from downtown Havana.

After hearing of McCain's campaign about six months ago, Barral said,
he hung the clipping in his restaurant, an archetypal Cuban paladar
-- a small, privately owned restaurant sanctioned by the state --
with dining tables in the living room, arched wooden doors, wrought-
iron grates and tile floors. Hardly anyone noticed the clipping until
a few days ago, he said, when a reporter spotted it among the Che
memorabilia.

Barral, who shuffles slightly when he walks and entertains visitors
with a gruff sense of humor, said his route to the 1970 encounter
with McCain winds through pre-Civil War Spain, Argentina, Hungary and
Cuba.

His grandfather was a Spanish anarchist and his father was a
socialist killed in the Spanish Civil War. He immigrated to Argentina
with his mother when he was 11. There, he said, he befriended the
young Guevara, who was the same age.

Barral was later expelled from Argentina because of his communist
activism, he said. He fled to Hungary, where he studied medicine.
Shortly after Fidel Castro took power in Cuba in 1959, he served as
interpreter for a Cuban delegation visiting Hungary.

Barral sent greetings to Guevara and soon accepted the revolutionary
icon's offer of a home and job in Cuba -- a copy of the invitation is
on Barral's restaurant wall. Barral -- who said he speaks Spanish,
French, Hungarian and Italian, and understands English -- said that
in those days "Cuba represented this fresh vision, where everything
was possible."

In 1967, he won an essay contest with a piece about "The
Revolutionary Attitude." He keeps the yellowed telegram announcing
his victory in his archives. First prize was a 40-day trip to North
Vietnam for what he called "scientific research" about the North
Vietnamese and their ability to resist U.S. forces.

"In that time, North Vietnam was the tops in our eyes in Cuba,"
Barral said. "It was the best example of a country confronting
imperialism."

The trip was delayed until 1969, he said. Once in Hanoi, he conducted
field research, eventually concluding that U.S. forces were
underestimating the North Vietnamese. That's when he had the idea of
interviewing a U.S. POW -- to "find out," he said, "how the enemy
thinks."

Cuban diplomats in North Vietnam told him to say he was a Spanish
psychologist, even though he hadn't lived in Spain since he was 11.
At that time he was not a Cuban citizen, though he is now, he said.

The interview lasted between 45 minutes and an hour, Barral recalled.
He said the men met at the offices of Hanoi's Committee for Foreign
Cultural Relations, while McCain said in his book that the interview
took place in a hotel.

McCain was escorted to the interview from the infamous "Hanoi
Hilton," a prison where American servicemen were tortured and lived
in miserable conditions. Barral said he does not know why his North
Vietnamese handlers chose the cultural center as the site for the
interview. But the location did not bother Barral because he wasn't
interested in the conditions of the prison, merely in finding out
what "the enemy" was thinking.

Barral said he conducted a cursory medical examination and found that
McCain had difficulty rotating his arms. McCain told him that he had
not been subjected to "physical or moral violence," Barral noted at
the time.

In his small, precise handwriting, Barral noted that cookies,
candies, teacups, oranges and cigarettes were on the table. McCain,
who had suffered multiple fractures after ejecting from his plane,
walked in leaning on a cane, Barral said.

Quickly dispensing with the pro forma name, rank and serial number,
the men talked about McCain's family, his aspirations and the
shootdown of his plane, according to Barral's notes. In his book,
McCain writes that Barral asked "rather innocuous questions about my
life, the schools I had attended and my family."

"He was only interested in talking about himself," Barral recalled.
"He had a big ego."

The son and grandson of U.S. Navy admirals, McCain lamented in the
interview that "if I hadn't been shot down, I would have become an
admiral at a younger age than my father," Barral's notes state.
Barral said McCain boasted that he was the best pilot in the Navy and
that he wanted to be an astronaut.

"He felt superior to the Vietnamese up there in his plane, with all
his training," Barral recalled.

McCain did not ask questions about news from abroad, Barral said, but
did ask the psychologist to get a message to his then-wife, Carol
McCain, and provided her address in Orange Park, Fla.

"Tell her I'm well," Barral noted McCain saying. "Tell her I wish her
all the best and that she shouldn't worry about me."

Though McCain says he did not discuss military matters with Barral, a
U.S. commander in the prison later issued an order forbidding U.S.
POWs to be interviewed by visitors, McCain wrote in his book. The
decision was "a sound one, even though it deprived me of further
opportunities to demonstrate 'my psychic equilibrium' to disapproving
fraternal socialists, not to mention the extra cigarettes and
coffee," McCain wrote.

Barral's interview with the son and grandson of U.S. admirals was
considered a huge coup and "newsworthy," according to the 1970 Granma
article. The communist party newspaper ran a close-up of McCain's
face on its front page.

"I'm not sure if it was for propaganda purposes," Barral said
recently of the 1970 interview. "But I accept it if I was an
instrument for propaganda."

Barral's life since that flash of celebrity has unspooled like that
of many Cubans. He retired with a tiny pension in the mid-1980s and
said he barely had enough money to get by until opening his paladar
in the mid-1990s.

His family, like those of almost all Cubans, is fractured. One of his
sons, Ernesto Barral, became a successful doctor after fleeing the
island, making the unsubstantiated claim that he windsurfed to Florida.

Barral said he follows U.S. politics in clippings sent to him from
friends and relatives abroad, and has taken a shine to Sen. Barack
Obama (D-Ill.) because he "represents change."

"I don't know if McCain would be a good president," Barral said. "And
I don't care."
___________________

McCain supports Bush veto re torture.

This is from thinkprogress. This is just an excerpt from a longer article. In spite of his own experience of torture in Vietnam and his past criticism of the use of torture it seems political expediency is more important than principle. McCain can expect more support from Bush cohorts.

“I said there should be additional techniques allowed to other agencies of government as long as they were not” torture. “I was on the record as saying that they could use additional techniques as long as they were not cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment,” McCain said.

“So the vote was in keeping with my clear record of saying that they could have additional techniques, but those techniques could not violate” international rules against torture.

But the vote was not “in keeping” with McCain’s unclear record on torture; in the past, McCain called waterboarding a “terrible and odious practice” that “should never be condoned in the U.S.”

McCain is trying to have it both ways. He claims the CIA should not use “cruel” or “unusual” interrogations, but he is defending Bush’s veto, a clear approval of waterboarding.

Furthermore, what are these “additional techniques” outside the Field Manual that McCain thinks the CIA needs? Marty Lederman noted that the CIA can currently use “stress positions, hypothermia, threats to the detainee and his family, severe sleep deprivation, and severe sensory deprivation.”

A veto would mean the “CIA will continue to assert the right to use all of these techniques.” In standing with Bush’s veto, does McCain, a former prisoner of war, support these types of harsh interrogations, too?

John McCain: Long term visionary

This is from Scholars and Rogues. Of course even if the US will be there this long there will be no permanent bases. Even the Ice Age was not permanent!


And while the caucus thingie was going on, GOP contender John McCain, who about tied for third among Republicans in Iowa, had something quite startling to say about Iraq while campaigning in New Hampshire today. He interrupted someone recalling that President Bush envisions U.S. forces in Iraq for 50 more years with, “Maybe a hundred [years].” He continued, “That’s fine with me, I hope that would be fine with you, if we maintain a presence in a very volatile part of the world where al-Qaeda is training and equipping and recruiting and motivating people every single day.”

David Corn asked McCain about his assertion afterward and says McCain told him American troops “could be in Iraq for ‘a thousand years’ or ‘a million years,’ as far as he was concerned.” Hey, why not shoot for a googolplex, Senator? You gotta think big.

McCain's flip-flop on Ethanol

This comes from this website.

Castro doesnt need to run in Iowa so I guess he is safe! The corn farmers and the big grain companies profit from the subsidies for ethanol production. Whatever happened to the beloved free market! How is it the World Bank and IMF get after Iraq for all those below market subsidized prices for gas but the US can subsidize ethanol?




John McCain’s Ethanol Flip-Flop
I knew that McCain had flip-flopped on this issue. The upcoming issue of Fortune tells the tale:

McCain's farm flip

It's a pretty good lesson on how tough it is to oppose ethanol and get yourself elected president, since Iowa has one of the first presidential caucus. So, despite McCain's long track record of criticizing ethanol, suddenly it's the thing to do.

Some excerpts from the article that I found interesting:



John McCain has a problem with alcohol - ethyl alcohol, to be precise.

Ethyl alcohol is the fuel better known as ethanol, and over the years, the Arizona senator has made a habit of ripping ethanol subsidies as corporate pork for agribusinesses like Archer Daniels
Midland.

McCain has argued that government support for ethanol actually raises gasoline prices. He has claimed ethanol does nothing to make the U.S. more energy independent. He has even questioned the science behind making fuel from corn - contending that ethanol provides less energy than the fossil fuels consumed to produce it.

But for a front-runner - one presumably interested in getting his as-yet-undeclared 2008 Republican presidential campaign off to a winning start - opposing ethanol is political lunacy.

Iowa, home to the first-in-the-nation presidential caucus, is the biggest corn-growing state in the country, and in Iowa ethanol isn't just another campaign issue. It's the cash cow, the golden goose and the fountain of economic youth all wrapped up in one.


This is how something that is good for Iowa, but not necessarily for the rest of us, can become national policy.

More:


Against this backdrop, it's obvious why McCain's past ethanol opposition is such an albatross. Fact is, criticizing ethanol is hard even for scientists these days.

At a recent BP-sponsored ethanol roundtable, University of California at Berkeley engineering professor Tad Patzek - whose anti-ethanol research McCain has invoked - so riled Roger Conway, the director of energy policy for the very pro-ethanol U.S. Department of Agriculture, that Conway told the foreign-born Patzek to "go back to Poland." (Conway denies making the remark, but four other participants confirm he did, including pro-ethanol scientist Michael Wang of the Argonne National Laboratory.)

Here's the before and after. The before:



For a politician like McCain, the stakes go far beyond a little name-calling. When McCain ran for president in 1999 and 2000, he barely campaigned in Iowa, knowing that his anti-ethanol stance wouldn't cut it in corn country.

Four years later, McCain hadn't changed his tune. "Ethanol is a product that would not exist if Congress didn't create an artificial market for it. No one would be willing to buy it," McCain said in November 2003. "Yet thanks to agricultural subsidies and ethanol producer subsidies, it is now a very big business - tens of billions of dollars that have enriched a handful of corporate interests - primarily one big corporation, ADM. Ethanol does nothing to reduce fuel consumption, nothing to increase our energy independence, nothing to improve air quality."

Even the most slippery politician would have a tough time wriggling away from a statement as unequivocal as that one, yet McCain's Straight Talk Express has been taking some audacious detours during recent trips to Iowa.

The after:



"I support ethanol and I think it is a vital, a vital alternative energy source not only because of our dependency on foreign oil but its greenhouse gas reduction effects," he said in an August speech in Grinnell, Iowa, as reported by the Associated Press.

"Well, at least now we know he's serious about running for president," quips Brown University presidential politics expert Darrell West, upon being told of McCain's ethanol about-face.

And the money quote:



"You can't trash ethanol and expect to win in Iowa," says Schmidt. "You can't continue to say the same things McCain said - even if you believe they're true."

What to do? Maybe some other states need to move their primaries ahead of Iowa's to stop them from having a disproportionate impact on national politics.
Labels: ethanol, Iowa, John McCain

posted by Robert

Juan Cole on McCain

This is just a part of a much longer article at Cole's website. Cole has a good analysis of the positive spin that McCain has been putting on events in Iraq.

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

McCain Checks into Cloud Cuckooland
116 Iraqis Killed in Day of Carnage

Senator John McCain has contracted Rumsfeld's Disease. This malady consists of a combination of bad temper, misuse of language to obfuscate reality, and a Panglossian optimism in the face of stubborn, sanguinary facts on the ground.

McCain, for instance, hailed that deployment of Iraqi brigades "at or above 75% of their programmed strength"! Put another way, a quarter of the Iraqi troops ordered to Baghdad technically speaking went AWOL instead! If a quarter of all US troops ordered to Iraq fled to Canada or refused to leave their home base, that would be a catastrophe. But McCain manages to deploy weasel words to make this incredible statistic seem a positive thing. Moreover, even his basic facts may be wrong. Last I knew, one of the Iraqi brigades ordered to Baghdad only came at half strength