A New Yorker-Themed Look at Recent Topics of Interest

I. The Costs of War
"The increase in military spending in the past two years alone is greater than the entire military budget of Russia. And that's before the massive increases proposed by the strategy committee. " As its solution, the National Defense Strategy Committee calls for increases in Pentagon spending of 3 to 5 percent for at least for the next five years. According to calculations by Taxpayers for Common Sense, the high end of this range would mean a Pentagon budget of an astonishing $972 billion by 2024 --" [1]

The "Costs of War Project at Brown University estimates the full price of the United States's post-9/11 wars at $5.9 trillion -- a stunning figure when you consider that the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond have caused more harm than good.

II. The Fateful AMI Meeting
The owner of the American Media Inc., the parent company of the "National Inquirer," has admitted that the company paid off former "Playboy" model, Karen McDougal, to squelch her account of an alleged affair with Donald Trump. The owner, David Pecker, has admitted that the $150,000 payment "was to suppress the model's story so as to prevent it from influencing the election." AMI also admitted that McDougal was not allowed to  publicize damaging allegations about the candidate before the 2016 presidential election. Donald Trump, Michael Cohen and David Pecker were at the meeting where Pecker agreed to help with negative stories about Trump's relationships with women by, among other things, to assist the campaign in identifying such stories so they could be purchased and their publication avoided. The Southern District of New York has had a non-prosecution agreement with AMI.

III. The GOP Reverse on Prosecution of the President
During the Monica Lewinski affair, the GOP argued that even the President had to be subject to a civil lawsuit while serving in the White House. The GOP also contended that President Clinton had to answer a lawful subpoena and testify before a grand jury. He had to be held accountable because the rule of law didn't make exceptions, not even for the President. Even a single call from the White House to the Treasury Department was interpreted as obstruction of the Watergate investigation and brought before the grand jury. Now the GOP never talks about the rule of law, except in regard to Hillary Clinton.

IV. Investigating the 2017 Inaugural Committee
The Manhattan U.S. Attorney's office is investigating Trump's 2017 inaugural committee for possible misuse of funds; also, it is examining whether some of the committee's donors gave money in exchange for political favors that could run afoul of federal corruption laws. The inaugural committee has publicly identified vendors accounting for $61 million of the $103 million it spent, and it hasn't provided details on those expenses. Trump spent much more on his inaugural that Obama spent on his.

V. Technologies of Surveillance
"Technologies of surveillance that seem relatively innocuous at first can take 20, or 40, or 100 years to reveal their more insidious potential -- by which point they have long since insinuated themselves into our daily lives, so that there is often very little we can do about them." "Corporate surveillance has consistently troubled working Americans, but state surveillance was viewed more ambiguously by many, at least in the early 20th century." ]2]

"Progressives hope to use state power to create a more just and equitable society, but they also fear the erosions of privacy that something as simple as a Social Security number [being publicly revealed] can cause." Katie Fitzpatrick says that "we need to couple our calls for increased state programs with  a forceful opposition to the institutions and practices that threaten our privacy."

VI. A Leadership Mandate
[Rep.] "Ocasio-Cortez's staff began circulating a proposal that calls for a select House committee to 'develop a detailed national, industrial, economic mobilization for the transition of the United States's economy.' " "The fallout from the Great Recession and the looming threat of climate change have exposed bipartisan free-market dogmas as woefully ill-equipped to deal with the crises we face today." [3]

VII. Asymmetric Warfare
"Today, right-wing sites account for an increasingly large portion of political-news sources, and they abide by no known rules of journalism." "The right-wing of the media ecosystem behaves precisely as the echo chamber models predict -- exhibiting high insularity, susceptibility to information cascades, rumor and conspiracy theory, and a drift toward more extreme versions of itself." [4]

In their 2016 book, "Asymmetric Politics," scholars Matt Grosenrran and David Hopkins, write that the conservative movement simultaneously undermined popular faith in both academe and journalism among its supporters, while building and reinforcing Republican reliance on alternative ideological information sources."

ADDENDUMS:
*A study released this past summer found that nearly half of current federal judges have attended a two-week Koch brothers-funded boot camp on economics, and that  attendance has had a measurable effect on their rulings.

*Vice President Mike Pence was unable to identify a single living U.S. president who told President Trump that they, individually, supported a border wall.

*President Trump told Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan to stop publicly releasing watchdog reports on the military.

Footnotes:
[1] William D. Hartung, "The Costs of War," The Nation, December 17/24, 2018.

[2] Katie Fitzpatrick, "Always Watching," The New Yorker, December 3, 2018.

[3] Kate Aronoff, "A Mandate for Left Leadership," The New Yorker, December 3, 2018.

[4] Eric Alterman, "Asymmetric Warfare," The New Yorker, December 3, 2018.