Flannel Shirt

Maybe if they limit voting to landed gentry...

The Republicans in Texas do not disappoint.

Just two hours after the Supreme Court reasoned that discrimination is not rampant enough in Southern states to warrant restrictions under the Voting Rights Act, Texas is already advancing a voter ID law and a redistricting map blocked last year for discriminating against black and Latino residents. Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott issued a statement declaring that both measures may go into effect immediately, now that there is no law stopping them from discriminating against minorities.

 

In 2012, the Justice Department blocked these measures under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Federal courts agreed that both the strict voter ID law and the redistricting map would disproportionately target the state’s fast-growing minority communities. Still, Texas filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court over the Voting Rights Act case complaining that the DOJ had used “abusive and heavy-handed tactics” to thwart the state’s attempts at voter suppression.

In the case of the new electoral map, a panel of federal judges found that“substantial surgery” was done to predominantly black districts, cutting off representatives’ offices from their strongest fundraising bases. Meanwhile, white Congress members’ districts were either preserved or “redrawn to include particular country clubs and, in one case, the school belonging to the incumbent’s grandchildren.” The new map was also drawn in secret by white Republican representatives, without notifying their black and Latino peers. After the court blocked the map, the legislature approved small changes to appease Democratic lawmakers last week. Now that they are free to use the old maps, however, Gov. Rick Perry (R) could simply veto the new plan and use the more discriminatory maps.

The strict photo ID requirement blocked by the DOJ and a federal court would require Texans to show one of a very narrow list of acceptable photo IDs. Expired gun licenses from other states are considered valid, but Social Security cards and student IDs are not. If voters do not have an ID — as many minorities, seniors, and poor people do not — they must travel at their own expense, produce their birth certificate, and in many cases pay a fee to get an ID.

Thanks to the Supreme Court, the DOJ no longer has any power to block these laws, even with the backing of federal judges who found blatant discrimination. Under the remaining sections of the Voting Rights Act, individuals may sue to kill these measures, but only after they have gone into effect and disenfranchised countless Texans of color.

According to the 2010 Census, non-Hispanic whites have become a minority in Texas, down from 52.4 percent to 45.3 percent of the population. Latinos have accounted for 65 percent of the state’s population growth over the past decade. Projections show that the eligible voter pool will shift to roughly 44 percent white voters and 37 percent Hispanic voters by 2025. Faced with this demographic reality, conservatives have alternated between changing their messaging to appeal to Latino voters, who overwhelmingly supported Democrats in 2012, and making it harder for them to vote.

It is only a matter of time before other states with voter ID laws and other election law changes blocked by the DOJ last year follow Texas’ example. Besides Texas, the attorney generals of Alabama, Arizona, South Dakota, and South Carolina argued that the Voting Rights Act was getting in the way of their ability to enact discriminatory laws.

Excellent essay

Why hasn't the mainstream noted the government's oppressive surveillance before now? Because it was focused on the underclasses. Thus:

For decades now, I’ve seen the aftermath of botched drug raids; early morning mayhem in which police, using mauls and wearing body armor, smash through the front doors of ghetto homes, guns drawn, shouting for sleeping residents to drop to the ground.  I’ve seen raids of sixteen or eighteen addresses come up empty for drugs and weapons at more than half of those locations. And of course, I’ve seen raiding officers drop a copy of the signed, documented and perfectly legal probable cause on the rowhouse floor, gather equipment, and walk out of homes from which they recovered no evidence of criminality.

“Are you gonna fix my door?” is always a stunned resident’s first question.

“You need to call the city for that,” is always the ready, ambiguous reply.

What poor and working-class communities routinely endure within the very constitutional construct of our drug war makes the wails of indignation over this NSA data-mining astonishing and embarrassing to me. And no, before you get wound up prematurely and choose the too-easy, I-didn’t-read-deep-enough argument, I am not saying that overreach in other realms of the criminal justice system justifies overreach anywhere else.

After all, no one is suggesting that we do away with court-approved search warrants for domestic crime suppression. Or dialed-numbered recorders. Or interrogation rooms. Or informants. Or just about any other law enforcement asset that can be used properly and misused egregiously.  Oh, more people are now complaining about the excesses of the drug war, to be sure.  But all of us understand that the existing legal weapons and strategies are there for all crimes — for murder, for rape, for robbery, for burglary. Hell, if a crew of detectives were pulling cell numbers off a tower to identify and arrest a rampaging serial rapist — and traipsing through the phone metadata of ten thousand other citizens to do it — we’d do more than applaud; we’d buy the film rights. We are comfortable with a certain level of intrusion involving all previous weapons of law enforcement, and even the use of phone metadata as it can be utilized.  Why, I wonder.  And why has this particular law enforcement intervention– no less legal as it was proposed to the FISA court — engaged the worst fears of many.

 

Women dressed as badgers chase fascists through the streets of London

Really.

A rally by extremists from the British National Party and the English Defence League was dwarfed by opposition campaigners staging rival protests in London on Saturday 1 June.

Shortly after lunch, a die-hard core of around 50 BNP and EDL supporters was confronted outside parliament by hundreds of activists from anti-extremist groups including Unite Against Fascism and Hope Not Hate.

But in the event, both groups were upstaged by agitators of a different stripe. Decked out from head to toe in black and white, the group that won the day were campaigning neither for race war nor ethnic equality, but an end to the government's cull on badgers.

And it was the pro-badger campaigners who appeared to steal a march on the political activists.

Young women dressed in fake fur were seen chasing doughty nationalist supporters down London's Whitehall as a large number of security forces in iridescent jackets looked on from police lines.

Led by Queen guitarist Brian May, protesters in fancy dress demanded an end to the government's cull of badgers, brought in to stop the spread of bovine tuberculosis.

They chanted: "Smash the cull! Smash the BNP!"

BNP candidate Clifford Le May was left with a bloody nose after being caught up in a rival enclave of human rights activists.

The BNP's leader, Nick Griffin, had earlier backed down on his threat to defy a police ban and march on Woolwich after the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby. Rigby's family had issued a statement appealing for calm.

Police invoked powers under the Public Order Act to force demonstrators to move back from Old Palace Yard, demanding activists from all sides return to their pre-arranged areas.

At least 58 anti-extremist campaigners were arrested during the course of the afternoon, most of them for obstructing the path of the BNP and EDL, who had been granted permission to march by the police.

"It's a shame we can't just cull the EDL and let the badgers march. Who wouldn't want to see marching badgers!" said protester Ian Power on Twitter.

 

Oh snap!

A little bit of irony here.

It sounds like a bad joke out of the Twilight Zone but it’s all too real. Syria’s minister of information told official media that Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan “should resign” if he “is unable to pursue non-violent means” to end growing protests.  Syria’s Minister of Information Omran al-Zoubi “added that Erdogan leads his country in a terrorist way and is destroying the civil character of the Turkish people, reiterating that the Turkish people's demands do not deserve all this violence,” notes the report by SANA.

Erdogan was once an ally of President Bashar al-Assad, but turned against him after the Syrian regime violently suppressed protests, a move that led to a violent civil war that has killed at least 80,000 people, reports Reuters. As tone deaf as the comments by Assad’s comments may be, what is going on in Turkey right now is no laughing matter. Thousands of protesters gathered to reoccupy a central park in Istanbul after police violently attacked peaceful protesters who wanted to prevent the construction of a shopping mall at Taksim Gezi Park, reports Bloomberg. The protests were about the park, which has long been a site of political protest, but now have become “the fiercest anti-government demonstrations in years,” according to Reuters, and protesters are calling for Erdogan to resign.  

Interesting Infographics on tax havens

If you want to know where Mitt and his constituency hide their money, check this out.

There you go

There it is. 

And here.

COMMENT:  A Texas Tea Party leader has spilled the beans, explic­itly artic­u­lat­ingthe clas­si­cal fas­cism of the Tea Party.

With the excep­tion of the name, there is noth­ing new about these folks.

 “Texas Tea Party Leader Pro­motes Fas­cist Party as ‘Pro-Constitution, Pro-America’” by David Edwards; The Raw Story; 3/19/2013.

EXCERPT: A tea party leader in Texas is defend­ing his pro­mo­tion of the Amer­i­can Fas­cist Party as some­thing he thought was “pro-Constitution, pro-America.”

James Ives, who was listed as the pres­i­dent of the Greater Fort Bend County Tea Party in 2011, con­firmed to The Texas Tri­bune on Mon­day that he had made a pro­mo­tional video for the Amer­i­can Fas­cist Party and advo­cated tea party prin­ci­ples on a Fas­cist Party mes­sage board.

In the video, a man who looks like Ives sits in front of a Fas­cist Party logo wear­ing a uni­form with yel­low shoul­der patches. Another photo shows a uni­formed man sit­ting in front of a fas­cist cross. The blog that inspired Nor­we­gian mass shooter Anders Behring Breivik describes fas­cist solar crosses as “sym­bolic rep­re­sen­ta­tions buried deep in the regions of the brain where the pri­mal responses to stim­uli are rage, awe, and fear.” . . . 

. . . “From my point of view, it was all pro-Constitution, pro-America,” Ives explained to the Tri­bune. “I never did any­thing… There really weren’t enough peo­ple involved to be a gath­er­ing, let alone a rally. It was basi­cally a scat­ter­ing of peo­ple across the con­ti­nent just complaining.”

The tea party leader claimed that he his par­tic­i­pa­tion in the Fas­cist Party was part of an effort to write a novel about what he thought was a cabal. But instead of writ­ing that novel, Ives wrote on the mes­sage board about how build­ing the Fas­cist Party in Amer­ica was “our spirit, our calling.”

“It will be our great­est chal­lenge, and our sweet­est vic­tory, to finally sur­pass this dark men­ace, this numb­ing threat from the shad­ows, and replace it with the pure sun­beam that is our Fas­cist Faith, our Fas­cist Truth,” Ives wrote.

Too big to fail now too big to jail

I used to be disgusted, now I try to be amused.

For several hours, top officials from the Treasury Department, Federal Reserve and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency were on the defensive, as member after member [of the Senate] accused them of slapping banks on the wrist for regular and repeated violations of anti-money laundering laws, including the complete lack of criminal prosecutions for those involved.

"If you're caught with an ounce of cocaine, the chances are good you're going to jail," said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) at the Banking Committee hearing. "Evidently, if you launder nearly $1 billion for drug cartels and violate our international sanctions, your company pays a fine and you go home and sleep in your own bed at night."

Much of the ire was directed toward the government's December decision to levy a $1.9 billion fine against HSBC for years of money laundering for Mexican drug cartels and violating sanctions by doing business in nations including Iran, Libya, Sudan, Burma and Cuba. 

Despite repeated warnings, the deal reached by the Justice Department did not include any criminal charges against the institution or individuals.

Further drawing lawmakers' ire were comments made by Attorney General Eric Holder on Wednesday. 

Holder told the Senate Judiciary Committee he was concerned that the size of some banks had made prosecuting them difficult because their downfall could damage the financial system and economy.

Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) contended that this claim suggested that "we have a prosecution-free zone for large banks in America."

"Does this create a fundamental concern about a fair system of justice across America?" he asked.

"Yes," responded Federal Reserve Governor Jerome Powell.

Regulators tried to defend their actions, pointing out that the HSBC fine was the largest they had ever levied against a financial institution, and suggested the Justice Department was the proper place to direct complaints.

"We of course were working on this investigation with the Justice Department, but at the end of the day it is the Justice Department's sole prerogative," said David Cohen, the Treasury's under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence.

"The Justice Department makes that decision. We play a role," agreed Powell. "When they make these decisions, they make them themselves."

Regulators noted that they would not have the power to take dramatic action like revoking a bank's charter to do business in the United States without a criminal conviction. And pursuing criminal charges is the Justice Department's call.

But senators remained critical of the response from financial regulators. 

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), who chaired the hearing, reminded them that beyond fines, regulators still had other tools they could use, like issuing injunctions or barring individuals from working in the field — tools they were not utilizing.

"There are things short of simply punting this to the Justice Department," he said, accusing regulators of playing "pass the potato" with responsibility.

A growing number of lawmakers in both parties have become increasingly concerned about whether large financial institutions are becoming "too big to jail." The Justice Department has said it consults with experts on the economic impact of bringing charges, and Holder's comments indicated federal prosecutors were worried about dropping the hammer on banks because of negative collateral damage in markets and the economy.

Under questioning, Cohen told members that the Justice Department asked for the Treasury's assessment on the economic impact of bringing charges against HSBC but the Treasury declined to offer an opinion.

"We told the Justice Department that we weren't in any position to offer any meaningful assessment," he said.

Powell said the Fed was not specifically asked about the economic impact. Thomas Curry, the Comptroller of the Currency, said he discussed revoking the bank's charter with the Justice Department, but did not offer an economic assessment.

"Our position was that that's a criminal justice determination that's left to the discretion of the Justice Department," he said.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) suggested the matter would not end at the close of the hearing, requesting the DOJ officials be summoned before the committee to explain their rationale for not pursuing criminal charges. Warner said he would take up the matter with the committee's chairman, Sen. Tim Johnson (D-S.D.), who attended another hearing.

The hearing was almost exclusively attended by Democrats, but members ranging from liberal favorites like Warren to more business-friendly ones like Warner were unanimous in criticizing the regulatory response to banks' bad behavior.

The lone Republican who attended the hearing, Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), joined in the lambasting.

"You would think there would be one hell of a penalty," he said.

At one point, he joked that he and Warren should open a bank that handles just money laundering for drugs and terrorism.

"I think we can make a killing that way, and no danger of prosecution," he said.

The government's secret war on its citizens

Before drones there was J. Edgar.

It was most surprising to come across the following entry at the website for the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses for Terrorism (known by the acronym START), which is run by the Department of Homeland Security out of the University of Maryland.According to DHS, START is one of their “centers of excellence,” an academic center sponsored by the DHS’s Science and Technology Directorate.

The webpage concerns the “Terrorist Organization Profile” for the Secret Army Organization, a right-wing terrorist group in the early 1970s, a group START writes was “possibly funded by the FBI.”

According to START, “The Secret Army Organization (SAO), a right-wing militant group based in San Diego, was active from 1969 to 1972. They targeted individuals and groups who spoke out against the Vietnam War, especially those who organized public demonstrations and distributed anti-war literature.”

Indeed, if we could turn the clock back to June 1975, we would read an article in the New York Times, “A.C.L.U. Says F.B.I. Funded ‘Army’ to Terrorize Antiwar Protesters.”

According to the Times, the ACLU compiled a 5,000 page report on the SAO, a group of former Minutemen and other right-wingers and violent home-grown fascists, for the benefit of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, “alleging the Federal Bureau of Intelligence recruited a band of right-wing terrorists and supplied them with money and weapons to attack young antiwar demonstrators.”

But that’s not all, the SAO engaged in bombing and attempted assassination, and guess whose house the weapons turned up in? But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s let the DHS’s “Center of Excellence” inform us of this important episode in our history, which came, by the way, after the FBI claimed they had stopped their Cointelpro program of disruption of the Left.

Assassination Attempt, FBI Agent Hides the Weapon

From START’s SAO webpage:

The report also stated that the SAO planned to kidnap and murder protestors of the 1972 Republican National Convention, which was to be held in San Diego before being relocated to Miami Beach. An assassination attempt of Dr. Peter Bohmer, professor at San Diego State University, and Paula Tharp, reporter for the San Diego Street Journal, brought about the arrests of several SAO members who later acknowledge an FBI connection. During the investigation, the gun used in the assassination attempt was found in the home of FBI agent Steven Christiansen, who was subsequently identified as a SAO contact. In 1973, Godfrey, testifying as an FBI informant, claimed he received up to $20,000 in weapons and a $250 per month income from the FBI to recruit new SAO members and provide information to agents. He also testified to the criminal acts of several SAO operatives, including fellow leader Jerry Lynn Davis. Official statements from the FBI claimed no involvement with the SAO, and no agents were prosecuted.

The story of the SAO is a forgotten piece of contemporary history that is directly relevant to a number of current issues, including the prosecution of the bogus “war on terror,” and the FBI’s role in it; the debates about government participation in and legalization of assassination of its own citizens; and government surveillance of and attacks upon dissent in this country.

It also could be considered a prime example of the historical amnesia that plagues our times, an amnesia hastened by disinterest by the major media, cheered on by government agencies none too interested in accountability for government overreach or even criminality.

Links to the President

According to the Ann Arbor Sun at the time, the ACLU tagged the SAO as “an interagency apparatus organized ‘at the direction of Richard M. Nixon.’”

Reportedly the link to Nixon came via Watergate burglar Donald Segretti, who affidavits claimed had given funds and military hardware to SAO to disrupt the 1972 GOP convention in San Diego. (The convention was subsequently moved to Miami Beach.)

But it was the FBI who seems to have been operationally in charge.

From the Sun: “SAO operative Jerry Lynn Davis, who once participated in the CIA’s Bay of Pigs invasion, revealed that [admitted FBI informant Howard Barry] Godfrey had regularly supplied the SAO with money and weapons on behalf of the FBI.”

A newspaper office was attacked. A car firebombed. Informants infiltrated, while meetings were monitored. There were plans to poison the punch at antiwar meetings. A theater was bombed. Bulletins were published on how bulletins on “how to make booby traps, how to use ammonium nitrate in high explosives,” And then, there was the assassination plot, or rather plots, as the SAO bungled one assassination attempt after another to kill a left-wing professor at San Diego State.

How It Went Down, and the Cover-up

 

A 1973 article by Richard Popkin at Ramparts described the threats and the attack, when an SAO hitman with a FBI-paid driver tried to kill an American college professor on January 6, 1972, solely because of his political views and activism.

But first, we should realize this was not the first of the assassination plans. An Associated Press articleat the time described another failed plot that had yet another FBI informant, Gilbert Romero, and a San Diego undercover cop kidnapping Peter Bohmer and taking him to Tijuana, and setting him up to be killed by Mexican police. The New York Times wrote that the ACLU report included testimony from a FBI informant, John Raspberry, who said in the winter of 1971-72, the FBI approached him to kill Bohmer. For some reason, the attack never took place.

According to Popkin, Godfrey “was assigned to [FBI] agent Steve Christianson, to whom he reported verbally every day, Godfrey was to work on the militant right wing, and was paid two hundred fifty dollars per month by the FBI.”

Popkin continued, “Apparently, Godfrey himself was among the more dangerous elements in the SAO, and [FBI] agent Christianson among the more dangerous eminences grises of the operation…. Godfrey admitted that he had driven the car from which another SAO member, George Hoover, had fired into Bohmer’s house, wounding Paula Tharp. Subsequently, he had taken the weapon to Christianson, who had hidden it for six months. (This was evidently insufficient grounds for the FBI to take disciplinary action against agent Christianson. He continued as Godfrey’s contact until the bombing of the Guild Theatre, at which point he was removed by L. Patrick Gray himself…)”

The START page on SAO commented dryly on the aftermath of the botched assassination. “The SAO became inactive after the assassination case drew much public attention to the group’s operations,” DHS’s Center for Excellence reports. “The testimony of Godfrey against SAO members resulted in prison terms for a significant portion of the San Diego group. Of course, if the SAO was actually FBI-run, the notoriety drawn to the case would have been the impetus to dissolve the group.”

No kidding?

Bohmer’s Story

I think it’s appropriate to give the last words here to Peter Bohmer himself, who survived the attack and while he lost his job at San Diego State, the victim of a witchhunt, went on to join the faculty at Evergreen at Evergreen State College in Washington.

A few words about CoIntelpro before I come back to my story. It is short for counterintelligence program. Cointlepro was/is a program coordinated by the FBI to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize” individuals and groups…. Although Cointelpro officially ended in 1971, it has continued although in a somewhat less extreme form without the name up to September 11th 2001. Since then we are going backwards towards more police powers, infiltration and framing of activists….

Although no group I worked in San Diego planned or carried out any violent actions, and many groups were purely educational; 20 people I knew in these groups turned out to be police or FBI agents or informers, many worked for both. They worked hard to cause divisions among individuals and groups. Some but not all were provocateurs…. the FBI visited my employer, SDSU to get me fired, they visited landlords where I lived to get us evicted. They opened my mail, and monitored my checking accounts. We got anonymous phone calls about people being agents who I am sure weren’t….

FBI sponsored groups did firebombings, slashed tires of my cars, continual death threats, put out a wanted poster on me distributed in San Diego in 1971. The Secret Army Organization or (SAO) a group financed from FBI funds and led by an FBI informant, shot into a collective I lived in with the bullet permanently injuring a member of the collective, Paula Tharp in January 1972.

Howard Barry Godfrey, a well-paid FBI informant and head of the Secret Army Organization (SAO) admitted almost a year later in court to driving the car the night of the shooting but claimed another SAO member did the actual shooting. After the shooting into my house, other FBI agents in San Diego covered up the crime and hid the evidence such as the gun used in the shooting. The head of the FBI in LA, working with SD FBI, at this time was Richard W. Held who has been involved in the cases against many activists and political prisoners such as Judi Bari, Leonard Peltier and Geronimo Pratt.

After the shooting, threats and harassment continued. After the Secret Army Organization began threatening liberals as well as radicals and bombed a pornography theater where some police were present, the San Diego police demanded that the FBI reveal their informants in the SAO and the SAO were arrested in the summer of 1972 on numerous charges. Government lawyers hired by the FBI claimed various privileges such as not having to reveal much of the behavior because of security concerns. The full FBI involvement in this attempted murder didn’t come out although one FBI agent was forced to resign. Godfrey, the FBI informant and provocateur in the Secret Army Organization (SAO) didn’t go to prison although two other members of the SAO did.

Anyone remember the Symbionese Liberation Army? You may have missed this story on their connection to the CIA.

Oreos?

Luckily, she stayed away from the Chips Ahoys. And we're talking heavy jail time for the Pepperidge Farm stuff.

Walmart is moving forward with felony charges against an employee of an Indiana store who admitted to eating “multiple” Oreo cookies because she said that she couldn’t afford to pay for them with her salary.

A Portage Police Department report obtained by The Smoking Gun on Thursday said that Penny Winters had been arrested after a Walmart investigation determined she was guilty of theft.

According to the report, Walmart Asset Protection Manager Kenneth Moreno told police that the company had reviewed surveillance video after an open bag of Oreo cookies was found in the store.

“Mr Moreno advised that upon back-tracking the video footage from the location in which the wrapper was located, he was able to observe Ms. Winters select the package of cookies, open it, and proceed to consume multiple cookies during her work shift without paying for said items,” the report said.

When confronted, Winters allegedly explained that she had been eating food from the Portage store and her previous job at an Arizona Walmart for years because she could not afford to pay. Winters provided Walmart with a “voluntary statement form spelling out her transgressions.”

Winters’ son explained to WBBM that his mother could not afford to pay for the items because she only made a wage of $11.40 an hour after working for Walmart for eight years.

Winters is charged with one count of felony theft and could be sentenced to jail if found guilty.

It depends on what you call welfare

It Republicans want to start cutting the welfare state, Representative Ellison has some suggestions where it could start. 

Appearing on “The Young Turks” Thursday, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) agreed with Republicans that cuts are needed to restore the nation’s fiscal outlook, but he wants to look in the last place conservatives are interested in curtailing: corporate welfare.

“If Republicans want to have a conversation about cuts, we should have a conversation about cuts,” Ellison, a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, told host Cenk Uygur. “Let’s start with Medicare Part D and say, ‘If you want to save money, you want to cut the deficit, let’s let there be competitive bidding for Medicare Part D prescription drugs. That would save about $150 billion.”

He added that eliminating oil, gas and coal tax breaks and subsidies would leave “another $100 billion” in government coffers. Ellison also suggested that America’s nuclear arsenal could be trimmed down to save even more money.

“My point is, if Republicans want to do cuts, we should do cuts, but we’re not going to hurt America’s working class and poor to do it.”

Excluding items Social Security and Medicare, which are paid for by participants, the government spent about $16.5 billion in 2011 on actual welfare, better known as the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program, according to budget numbers compiled by the Congressional Research Service.

Conversely, the U.S. spent about $100 billion on corporate welfare in 2012 — defined as individual subsidies to corporations or industry groups — according to the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute.

We can also follow Ron Paul's advice and bring the boys home from the 130 nations around the world where we have troops. 

I have to admit, I didn't know that there were 130 nations in the world. But it doesn't take an Einstein to figure out that we put the weight of our military in places where black, gooey liquid can be pumped out of the ground, so maybe not getting into wars in places in the Mideast where they don't want us might be a better solution. Of course, the military hasn't been under the control of Congress since 1963.