Stephen Semler
The Intercept
Thu, 11 May 2023 06:00 UTC – SOTT net
© Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images
US President Joe Biden • Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman
Jeddah Security and Development Summit • Jeddah, Saudi Arabia • July 16, 2022
Since President Joe Biden came into office in 2021, he has described a “battle between democracies and autocracies” in which the U.S. and other democracies strive to create a peaceful world. The reality, however, is that the Biden administration has helped increase the military power of a large number of authoritarian countries. According to an Intercept review of recently released government data, the U.S. sold weapons to at least 57 percent of the world’s autocratic countries in 2022.
Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has been the world’s biggest weapons dealer, accounting for about 40 percent of all arms exports in a given year. In general, these exports are funded through grants or sales. There are two pathways for the latter category: foreign military sales and direct commercial sales.
The U.S. government acts as an intermediary for FMS acquisitions: It buys the materiel from a company first and then delivers the goods to the foreign recipient. DCS acquisitions are more straightforward: They’re the result of an agreement between a U.S. company and a foreign government. Both categories of sales require the government’s approval.
Country-level data for last year’s DCS authorizations was released in late April through the State Department’s Directorate of Defense Trade Controls. FMS figures for fiscal year 2022 were released earlier this year through the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency. According to their data, a total of 142 countries and territories bought weapons from the U.S. in 2022, for a total of $85 billion in bilateral sales.
How many of those countries were democracies, and how many were autocracies? That question can be answered by comparing the new U.S. arms sales data to political regime data from the Varieties of Democracy project at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, which uses a classification system that’s called Regimes of the World.
The system classifies regimes into four categories: closed autocracy, electoral autocracy, electoral democracy, and liberal democracy. For a country to be classified as a democracy, it must have multiparty elections and political freedoms that make those elections meaningful. According to this methodology, the dividing line between democracies and autocracies is whether a country’s leaders are accountable to their citizens through free and fair elections.
Of the 84 countries codified as autocracies under the Regimes of the World system in 2022, the United States sold weapons to at least 48, or 57 percent, of them. The “at least” qualifier is necessary because several factors frustrate the accurate tracking of U.S. weapons sales. The State Department’s report of commercial arms sales during the fiscal year makes prodigious use of “various” in its recipients category; as a result, the specific recipients for nearly $11 billion in weapons sales are not disclosed.
The Regimes of the World system is just one of the several indices that measure democracy worldwide, but running the same analysis with other popular indices produces similar results. For example, Freedom House listed 195 countries and for each one labeled whether it qualified as an electoral democracy in its annual Freedom in the World report. Of the 85 countries Freedom House did not designate as an electoral democracy, the United States sold weapons to 49, or 58 percent, of them in fiscal year 2022.
These findings contradict Biden’s preferred framing of international politics as fundamentally a struggle in which the world’s democracies, led by the United States, are on “the side of peace and security,” as he called it in last year’s State of the Union address. Opposing the United States and its democratic allies are the autocracies that collude to undermine the international system, Biden has stated. In a speech in Warsaw last year, he said the battle between democracy and autocracy is one “between liberty and repression” and “between a rules-based international order and one governed by brute force.” The White House’s 2022 National Security Strategy adds, “The most pressing strategic challenge facing our vision is from powers that layer authoritarian governance with a revisionist foreign policy.”
Despite that rhetoric, a review of the new data suggests instead a business-as-usual approach to weapons sales. Former President Donald Trump based his arms sales policy primarily on economic considerations: corporate interests above all else. In his first foreign trip as president, he traveled to Saudi Arabia and announced a major arms deal with the repressive kingdom. Trump’s business-first approach resulted in a dramatic upturn in weapons sales during his administration.
© The Intercept
In Biden’s first full fiscal year as president, weapons sales from the United States to other countries reached $206 billion, according to the State Department’s annual tally, which uses an opaque but seemingly broader accounting of yearly FMS and DCS figures; Biden’s first-year total surpasses the Trump-era high of $192 billion. The multibillion-dollar effort to train and equip Ukraine doesn’t fully explain the dramatic rise in total arms sales last year, let alone to autocracies. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine didn’t occur until five months into fiscal year 2022, and much of the assistance from the United States to Ukraine took the form of grants (not sales) and the transfer of materiel from Pentagon stockpiles through the presidential drawdown authority.
Rather, the new figures reveal the continuity between Republican and Democratic administrations. While Biden signaled early on that his arms sales policy would be based primarily on strategic and human rights considerations, not just economic interests, he broke from that policy not too long after entering office by approving weapons sales to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other authoritarian regimes.
Comment: The ‘big guy’ is gunning for sales.
See Also:
- Best of the Web: The extreme center: How the neocons went woke
- Ireland visit was to make sure ‘Brits don’t screw around’ – Biden
- How far the Grey Lady has fallen: The New York Times runs cover for Biden’s CIA director, Jeffrey Epstein
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What is Title 42? What the end of the border policy means for the US
Ashlyn Messier
Fox News
Thu, 11 May 2023 11:59 UTC – SOTT net
© Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post/Getty Images
The Biden administration has promised stricter immigration policies with the end of Title 42.
With the clock winding down on Title 42, there are many questions circulating about what the end of the policy means for the United States’ border security.
The policy was one instated by the Trump administration in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and has been in place since. With its expiration upon us, the immigration policy is going to look different for the United States, with migrants already lining up to enter the country.
Here are some commonly asked questions about Title 42 answered.
- What was the Title 42 policy?
- What does Title 42 expiring mean?
- What is the difference between Title 42 and Title 8?
https://www.sott.net/embed/wa57Y_-rHf-OupqHmIlRD_bzsxS
1. What was the Title 42 policy?
Title 42 dates back to 2020 under the Trump administration. This policy allowed US officials to turn away migrants who came to the U.S.-Mexico border because of health concerns. This was established during the pandemic and was put in place to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
Prior to Title 42, migrants would cross the border, enter the country and were screened. They were then often released into the United States while they waited for their immigration case to be heard. This changed after Title 42, as migrants were sent back over the border. Under Title 42, U.S. officials sent over two million migrants back.
Under Title 42, if individuals were deported, they did not face any penalties, leading many to try entering the country multiple times.
Title 42 continued under the Biden administration with some changes while COVID-19 was still considered to be a national emergency. May 11 marked the day that the pandemic was no longer a national emergency, which in turn, marked the end of Title 42.
What does Title 42 expiring mean?
Title 42 officially ends on Thursday, May 11 at 11:59 p.m. With Title 42 ending, the country has been expecting a large volume of migrants attempting to cross the border. In preparation, 1,500 active-duty troops were sent to the U.S.-Mexican border to assists Border Patrol agents.
What is the difference between Title 42 and Title 8?
Title 8 is the immigration law that has been reinstated due to the expiration of Title 42. At its core, Title 8 outlines polices for migrants who are entering the United States. It outlines guidelines they must meet to do so and penalties they could face for not following the policy. Since Title 42 has ended, the country will be going back to pre-pandemic immigration policies, in other words Title 8 of the U.S. Code.
The Biden administration has warned of stricter penalties for illegal border crossing under Title 8.
One of the biggest changes under Title 8 compared to Title 42 is what happens to those who cross the border illegally. An individual who illegally enters the country under Title 8 multiple times could face criminal charges.
Comment: NYC anticipates a new wave of migrants as Title 42 expires. McAdams is under fire:
https://www.sott.net/embed/MieiNhiwMR4GPk8xEaaMl7uJSRF
NYC officials are reviewing plans to block off large sections of the street to aid the thousands of migrants seeking shelter in New York.
The memo suggested placing shipping containers or foldable tiny homes of 420 square feet in the streets to house the homeless migrants who arrive in the city. Being on the street bed would provide access to water, sewer and electricity and could then support trailers or modular/prefabricated housing – a two-bedroom, and it’s a foldable unit that can be deployed on site.
The office of Mayor Eric Adams did not say whether the city would move forward with the reported plan outlined in the memo, but it did tell Fox News Digital that officials were considering all options.
The city reached its limit for available temporary migrant housing, forcing them to use unconventional measures in order to deal with the situation. Fabien Levy, press secretary to Adams said:
“We’ve been clear that the burden of caring for asylum seekers shouldn’t fall on any one city alone. We have reached our limit of new shelters that we can open right now, and we currently have no other option but to temporarily house recent arrivals in gyms. With Title 42 set to be lifted this week, we expect more to arrive in our city daily. We are considering a multitude of options, but, as we’ve been saying for a year, we desperately need federal and state support to manage this crisis.”
Gov. Kathy Hochul, D-N.Y., declared a state of emergency Tuesday evening ahead of the Trump-era policy’s expiration, after already dealing with the 60,000 migrants who arrived in NYC from the southern border.
Counties in the New York suburbs, such as Orange County and Rockland counties, also declared a state of emergency after hearing of state Democrat plans to bus migrants to upstate counties across the Empire State.
“We’re closely monitoring the situation as the lifting of Title 42 approaches. We’ve already seen a massive increase of asylum seekers arriving in recent days and seeing over 500 asylum seekers entering our care on some days.”
On top of struggling to house the multitude of migrants seeking asylum in the state under their “right to shelter” law, immigration appointments in New York are reportedly booked out until 2033, meaning many migrants may not see an immigration judge to discuss their stay for another a decade.
Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, recently said during an immigration hearing:
“It’s a little concerning that some of them have to wait to 2033 just to appear before you, and then they have to get another two to three years before they even go to an immigration judge.”
According to sources at the Customs and Border Protection, officials are apprehending about 10,000 illegal migrants daily, but are expecting even larger numbers in the coming days.
See Also:
- Nazi Germany’s defeat… but a pause for fascism as NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine demonstrates
- Türkiye and Syria planning roadmap to rebuild ties – Russia
- FBI stonewalls Congress over informant file alleging Biden took bribes as vice president
Picture of the Day
BIG BROTHER in the 21. Century 