Month: June 2015

For the sake of the economy, end mass incarceration

by Gaius Publius

I’ve become fascinated by the Robert Reich video series, The Big Picture: 10 Ideas to Save the Economy. (Their homepage is here;  check it out if you want to watch the whole set.)

This is the tenth, about mass incarceration in the U.S., and how that hurts not only the people it wrongly jails, but the economy as well. Watch:

As Reich says in the film:

Instead of locking people up unjustly, and then locking them out of the economy for the rest of their lives, we need to stop wasting human talent and open doors of opportunity … to everyone. 

Note, in the list of “what to do,” the Ban the Box recommendation. I hadn’t thought of that, but it’s necessary.

By the way, I’m told he does all of his own illustrations; it’s one of the things about his teaching that make his classes so popular.

That and the content, of course.

GP

.

The NRA gets back on point

by digby

Just wow:

“And he voted against concealed-carry. Eight of his church members who might be alive if he had expressly allowed members to carry handguns in church are dead. Innocent people died because of his position on a political issue.”

That is an NRA board member talking about one of the Charleston massacre victims, State Senator Reverend Clementa Pinckney. Seriously. They are blaming him for the massacre. Evidently they are sticking with their story that if only people had been armed at their prayer meeting they could have seen this coming and taken out the shooter before he could kill anyone. Clairvoyance comes with concealed carry, you see. Turns average Americans into comic book super heroes with the ability to read minds and stop time. So if those people had been armed the only person who would have been shot and killed was the “bad guy.”

The idea that being armed will stop gun violence is ridiculous. Not to mention the fact that I’m pretty sure what he’s suggesting — that black people arm themselves and start shooting white people who threaten them — isn’t what his NRA constituency has in mind. They seem pretty clear on the fact that the black guys are always the “bad guys.”

I don’t know how much more of this fatuous garbage I can take.

A confederacy of lunatics
by Tom Sullivan

I’m sitting in upstate South Carolina processing the Charleston mass shooting. I’m watching clips from politicians — conservative politicians — doing their damnedest not to say anything on camera that would alienate their political base. Or replaying talking points for their base that reinforce the toxic world view that produces people such as the alleged shooter, Dylann Roof.

Sen. John McCain was at least enough of a leader in 2008 to publicly disagree with the woman who said she was afraid if Barack Obama, “an Arab,” got elected. The crowd of supporters booed McCain when he said Obama was a good and decent man:

“Come on, John!” one audience member yelled out as the Republican crowd expressed dismay at their nominee. Others yelled “liar,” and “terrorist,” referring to Obama.

At Crooks and Liars, Susie Madrak yesterday posted footage of former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) speaking in South Carolina in March failing to do the same, using the word “tyrant” and having the chutzpah to talk about Obama’s “complete lack of leadership.” Madrak writes:

And just watch this video. This woman is a South Carolina teacher, and she’s plain batshit crazy. Listen to her! Straight out of InfoWars. And does Santorum talk to the woman, try to calm her down? Hell, no.

Instead, he validates her concern (while artfully avoiding actually leaving a record of anything that could be used against him later) and even whips it up!

Santorum yesterday acknowledged that hate might have been a factor in the Charleston mass shooting, but immediately pivoted to a right-wing talking point, characterizing it as part of a broader assault on “religious liberty.”

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham appearing on The View downplayed race as a factor in the shooting and chose Santorum’s spin. Asked if it was a hate crime or just someone mentally disturbed:

“Probably both,” he replied. “There are real people out there that are organized to kill people in religion and based on race. This guy is just whacked out.”

“But it’s 2015, there are people out there looking for Christians to kill them,” Graham added. “This is a mean time we live in.”

He said, showing more concern not to upset his base than for the victims.

Do Santorum and Graham believe Roof drove two hours from Eastover to Charleston just to find Christians to kill … in South Carolina? That he entered a city filled with Christian churches — and Graham knows just how many — and shot up this particular church for no particular reason?

Former South Carolina governor, Congressman Mark Sanford appeared on All In with Chris Hayes last night and danced around the fact that Roof wore a jacket with white supremacist symbols and displayed a confederate flag on his car. Hayes asked if there wasn’t a connection between the confederate flag on the car and the one flying on the state capitol grounds, and not a half staff, Hayes noted. Sanford replied carefully [Timestamp 2:00], “To another population in this state, it’s a symbol of heritage, it’s a symbol of states’ rights, it’s a symbol of ‘my great-great grandfather died’ in some battle in Manassas or Bull Run or who knows where.”

More pandering to local mythology. The Civil War was about states’ rights the way Voter ID is about election integrity.

Challenged about the association of the alleged shooter with symbols of white supremacy and the local resistance that’s “keeping that flag rooted in that soil,” Sanford answered, “This devilish creature was an outlier.”

As Sanford well knows, there are places in South Carolina where you can find the stars and bars flying on poles right beside the road. As a warning about who is not welcome? Perhaps that is another reason why black Americans now see race relations as one of the nation’s most pressing problems. Something we really need to talk about, as Charlie Pierce wrote yesterday:

We should speak of it as an assault on the idea of a political commonwealth, which is what it was. And we should speak of it as one more example of all of these, another link in a bloody chain of events that reaches all the way back to African wharves and Southern docks. It is not an isolated incident, not if you consider history as something alive that can live and breathe and bleed. We should speak of all these things. What happened in that church was a lot of things, but unspeakable is not one of them.

These massacres are not madness. Madness is a dodge. Unless it is the madness of a culture built on violence and obsessed with it. President Obama put the madness argument to rest in a clip Rachel Maddow played last night from an earlier massacre. Addressing the argument that these shootings are not a gun problem, but a mental health problem, he said [Timestamp 8:10]:

“The United States does not have a monopoly on crazy people … And yet we kill each other in these mass shootings at rates that are exponentially higher than anyplace else.”

Yesterday, conservative politicians again went out of their way to assure us that the perpetrators of such atrocities are lunatics, even as the would-be leaders tiptoed carefully and visibly in the press so as not to upset the very confederacy of lunatics they have found so politically useful, have carefully cultivated as their political base, and now themselves fear to confront.

If we cannot talk about race hatred and violence in this country, maybe we can talk about that.

Yep it’s all about sexy time


by digby

Pope Plays Politics While Europe And America Are in a Moral Free Fall

Richard A. Viguerie, Chairman ConservativeHQ.comhttp://www.conservativehq.com/

Pope Francis’ message on global warming was a confusing distraction that dilutes his great moral authority and leadership at a time when it is desperately needed to combat real – and present – crises in the Church and in Western culture.

The encyclical, Laudato Si, On The Care Of Our Common Home lends the weight of the Papacy’s authority to the idea of man-made global warming at a time when not only is there more and more evidence that has come forth that global warming is a natural phenomenon, but that there is increasing concern that government “solutions” are keeping people in poverty.

To me this encyclical is most troubling because it comes at a time when Catholics, indeed Christians of all denominations, are facing persecution including torture and death (including crucifixions) in virtually every Muslim majority country and China, as well as a host of moral and spiritual challenges.

While the Pope fiddles with one controversial political issue that is not at the core of spiritual matters, our spiritual culture is burning.

Not the least of these challenges is the increasing secular pressure for the Church to abandon its scriptural teachings on sexual morality, including homosexuality and marriage in favor of acceptance of same-sex “marriage” and other practices directly contradicted by Church doctrine and scripture.

Yet in advance of the vote to legalize same-sex “marriage” in majority Catholic Ireland, the Pope was silent and never put the weight of his authority behind the Church’s scriptural teaching that marriage can only be between one man and one woman.

Likewise, the Church and Western Christian culture face a host of secular challenges to the culture of life that is central to Church doctrine and Christian teaching, but the Pope has yet to lend the weight of an encyclical to this daily battle.

In recent decades most Cardinals, Bishops, Priests, Sisters have abandoned the teaching of morals.

When was the last time you heard a sermon on the need to follow God’s teachings on divorce, adultery, sex outside of marriage, pornography, illegal drugs, treatment of spouses, children, parents, etc., etc.

In America and Europe the popular culture including entertainment (movies, TV books, magazines, and the Internet) is a modern day Sodom and Gomorrah. Most colleges are moral cesspools where the hook-up culture and casual sex is an accepted, even expected part of college life.

In case you haven’t noticed, the clergy sees, hears, and knows few sins.

Which means, for the most part, Catholic leaders have surrendered to the anti-religious left and abandoned the field of battle. The people, without moral leaders, are falling victim to the lure of the Golden Calf.

Pope Francis and the Catholic Church fail to realize that they are in a life and death struggle with secularists.

It will certainly come as a surprise to most clergy when they realize that the Left for decades has lied about their true agenda. Their agenda was never – no discriminations against homosexuals, civil unions or same sex marriage.

The liberals’ true agenda is to destroy religion.

And let us not forget the socialist roots of the Green movement that spawned the demand that we accept man made global warming without debate.

Today, we’re seeing the Obama Administration working to change the First Amendment from guaranteeing freedom of religion to freedom of worship. Meaning, you will be allowed to worship God for an hour or so on Sunday inside a church, but you won’t be permitted to take and certainly not act on your faith outside of the four walls of the church.

Remember, it was only a few weeks ago that Hillary Clinton said, “Laws have to be backed up with resources and political wills. And deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.”

The world cries out for the Pope’s leadership on fundamental moral issues, but this encyclical is a misguided distraction from the moral free fall facing Western Civilization.

I love this. As Christians are being crucified in the middle east the Pope is wasting his time worrying about climate change when he should be concentrating on the most important issue facing the world: sexual morality.

This is from Richard Viguerie, professional conservative movement organizer and con man so I assume they know, just as Madison Avenue knows, that sex sells.

Did you feel that tremor go through the Village?

by digby

This is why:

Forty-seven percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents now identify as both socially liberal and economically moderate or liberal.

This is compared with 39% in these categories in 2008, when there was last an open seat for their party’s nomination, and 30% in 2001.

I don’t think the political establishment knows what to do with this. Ever since the late 1960s it has been an article of faith that the country is conservative and that liberal is a dirty word.

*These things are fluid, of course, and what people mean when they identify as liberal or conservative may be very individual. But there is something significant in the fact that Democrats are no longer afraid of the liberal label.

.

Just a little shaming ritual to make them feel better

by digby

Amanda Marcotte writes about this op-ed in the Times in which a woman discusses the fact that you have to go before a tribunal to justify your reasons for wanting an abortion in Israel.  The piece is chilling but as Marcotte points out, it’s hardly unique.

In fact, the process of needing to get approval for an abortion is surprisingly common in a lot of Western European countries. In England, abortion is paid for by the National Health Service, but a woman has to get two doctors to sign off on the claim that she will be physically or mentally hurt by continuing the pregnancy. In Germany, it’s a similar story: Women need a doctor to claim mental distress, undergo counseling, and wait three days for the procedure. Same thing in Italy, where a doctor must detail a woman’s reasons for abortion and she has to wait a week to reflect. New Zealand, Finland, Switzerland: Requiring a woman to cough up a reason deemed acceptable enough by third parties is really standard practice. France used to have a similar law, but it was changed last year on the grounds that it’s sexist to have policies that carry the built-in assumption that women aren’t capable of making this choice on their own and need someone else to decide if their reasons are good enough.

She points out that these laws rarely result in denial of abortion and addresses the fact that when conservatives bring up these laws they rarely mention that abortion is also easily accessible and extremely affordable in those countries.

To me this just seems like a sort of prurient shaming ritual. At least in the US they are upfront about the desired result — the want to coerce women into changing their minds about having abortions. If abortions are routinely allowed then I can’t see what the purpose of doing this is except to humiliate women into divulging the details of their private lives to strangers for reasons that don’t make a lot of sense to me.

And as Marcotte says:

There’s something very telling, though, about requiring women to tap-dance a little to earn an abortion, particularly when no one would dare suggest—for good reason—that women have to ask for permission to give birth. It shows that attitudes about abortion are actually shaped by attitudes about sex and gender roles. Women are supposed to want babies, and if they don’t, they’re supposed to be apologetic and do penance for defying their “natural” role.

I think that’s right. There is this assumption that women are having abortions for frivolous reasons, but that belief collides with the idea that women are human beings with a right to self-determination. The anti-choice fanatics would like to be able to simply deny that they have that right and force them to give birth against their will under all circumstances. But there’s obviously some discomfort with that among other, less clear-headed anti-abortion folks so they’ve developed a ritual shaming mechanism that allows women to have human rights but requires them to humiliate themselves to exercise them. It serves the purpose of allowing women to have practical control while perpetuating the broader sex and gender roles that keep them in their place.

.

Violence R Us

by digby

Via Chris Hayes on twitter, I was reminded of this:

The following figures are from the OECD for deaths due to assault per 100,000 population from 1960 to the present. As before, the most striking features of the data are (1) how much more violent the U.S. is than other OECD countries (except possibly Estonia and Mexico, not shown here), and (2) the degree of change—and recently, decline—there has been in the U.S. time series considered by itself. Note that “assault” as a cause of death does not distinguish the mechanism of death (gunshot, stabbing, etc).

These figures don’t say anything about gun violence (which I think we can assume is unconscionably high) and it says nothing about racial violence which is one of our spcialties. Just violence. It is who we are. And we seem to think it’s just the natural state of the world.

You can read all about the methodology here.

Blind leading the blind

by digby

Lindsey Graham: Charleston Shooter May Have Been ‘Looking for Christians to Kill’ http://t.co/DMdqVRq3Tc (VIDEO) pic.twitter.com/L5cH2mZovi

— Mediaite (@Mediaite) June 18, 2015

Via Wonkette, there’s more:

Fox News’s The Five had a little memory problem Monday, accusing the Department of Homeland Security of completely imagining that rightwing extremists pose any threat to U.S. Americans, because as we all know, the only real terrorists are the Islamic ones. Most of the panel dismissed the DHS’s recent report on the threat from “Sovereign Citizens” and other far-right groups as a pathetic attempt to avoid offending Muslims by pretending that anyone else does terrorism in U.S. America.

Wingnuts So Mad About Report On Right-Wing Terrorism, They Just Might Shoot Something
Greg Gutfeld explained that in looking for possible rightwing extremists, DHS was chasing after “nonexistent threats,” like maybe “armed Lutherans laying siege on a Hot Topic in a mall? I don’t think so!” (He is the group “comedian.”) But then Juan Williams lost the script, noting that there were indeed domestic terrorists, too: “Oklahoma City? How about the Atlanta Olympic bomber?”

Eric Bolling — he’s the douchey ex-jock-looking one — was on it: “You got two. You got two over four decades,” which is rather interesting math for a “financial expert,” since OKC was in 1995 and the Atlanta Olympics bombing was in 1996. We suppose that the other three attacks by Atlanta bomber Eric Rudolph — two on abortion clinics and one on a gay nightclub — don’t actually count, since no one was killed. Of course, even “four over two decades” would only have included the examples Williams named.

Bolling then challenged Williams to give even a single example “from the last seven years” of a “rightwing or ‘Christian Crusade’” terror attack, and Williams replied by citing the 2009 assassination of Dr. George Tiller: “I remember a doctor getting shot in his church…”

“An abortion clinic shooting, you’re calling that a terrorist attack?” Bolling asked.

“What would you call it?” Williams countered.

“A lunatic who murdered someone,” Bolling said.

Jesus, if  that guy wasn’t a terrorist nobody is.

Wonkette goes on to name a whole bunch of violent right wing terrorist acts they’ve covered over just the past year:

Including this one which seems not have made even the slightest impact on anyone:

Jerad and Amanda Miller, the super-patriots who gunned down a couple of cops and a lady who was going to Wal-Mart in Vegas yesterday, may have bragged constantly to all their neighbors about their guns and about how they’d been hanging at Bundy Ranch with fellow super-patriot Cliven Bundy…

There’s a much longer list at the link.

These people run around in total hysteria over the notion that some nutball Islamic “lone wolf” might commit an act of violence and they don’t see or care about the terrorist violence we have been living with every day. In fact, they support the underlying grievances and help promote them.

.

Corporations paid senators a small bundle to Fast-Track the TPP bill

by Gaius Publius

While we’re waiting for the Fast Track drama to deliver its next non-final event, I thought I’d offer some background. The big money behind the scenes is paying a lot to get this bill past the goal line (but as you’ll see, not a whole lot).

The Guardian offers this report (my emphasis):

Here’s how much corporations paid US senators to fast-track the TPP bill

A decade in the making, the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is reaching its climax and as Congress hotly debates the biggest trade deal in a generation, its backers have turned on the cash spigot in the hopes of getting it passed.

“We’re very much in the endgame,” US trade representative Michael Froman told reporters over the weekend at a meeting of the 21-member Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum on the resort island of Boracay. His comments came days after TPP passed another crucial vote in the Senate.

That vote, to give Barack Obama the authority to speed the bill through Congress, comes as the president’s own supporters, senior economists and a host of activists have lobbied against a pact they argue will favor big business but harm US jobs, fail to secure better conditions for workers overseas and undermine free speech online.

Those critics are unlikely to be silenced by an analysis of the sudden flood of money it took to push the pact over its latest hurdle.

Keep in mind that this is just the Senate, and it only includes what’s known. Still, some numbers:

The US Senate passed Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) – the fast-tracking bill – by a 65-33 margin on 14 May. Last Thursday, the Senate voted 62-38 to bring the debate on TPA to a close.

Those impressive majorities follow months of behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing by the world’s most well-heeled multinational corporations with just a handful of holdouts.

Using data from the Federal Election Commission, this chart shows all donations that corporate members of the US Business Coalition for TPP made to US Senate campaigns between January and March 2015, when fast-tracking the TPP was being debated in the Senate:

• Out of the total $1,148,971 given, an average of $17,676.48 was donated to each of the 65 “yea” votes.
   
• The average Republican member received $19,673.28 from corporate TPP supporters.
   
• The average Democrat received $9,689.23 from those same donors. 

The best dollarocracy money can buy. Or the world’s most expensive deliberative body. Or something.

Here are some numbers for individual senators, especially those running for re-election:

The amounts given rise dramatically when looking at how much each senator running for re-election received.

Two days before the fast-track vote, Obama was a few votes shy of having the filibuster-proof majority he needed. Ron Wyden and seven other Senate Democrats announced they were on the fence on 12 May, distinguishing themselves from the Senate’s 54 Republicans and handful of Democrats as the votes to sway.

• In just 24 hours, Wyden and five of those Democratic holdouts – Michael Bennet of Colorado, Dianne Feinstein of California, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Patty Murray of Washington, and Bill Nelson of Florida – caved and voted for fast-track.
   
• Bennet, Murray, and Wyden – all running for re-election in 2016 – received $105,900 between the three of them. Bennet, who comes from the more purple state of Colorado, got $53,700 in corporate campaign donations between January and March 2015, according to Channing’s research.
   
• Almost 100% of the Republicans in the US Senate voted for fast-track – the only two non-votes on TPA were a Republican from Louisiana and a Republican from Alaska.
   
• Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, who is the former US trade representative, has been one of the loudest proponents of the TPP. (In a comment to the Guardian Portman’s office said: “Senator Portman is not a vocal proponent of TPP – he has said it’s still being negotiated and if and when an agreement is reached he will review it carefully.”) He received $119,700 from 14 different corporations between January and March, most of which comes from donations from Goldman Sachs ($70,600), Pfizer ($15,700), and Procter & Gamble ($12,900). Portman is expected to run against former Ohio governor Ted Strickland in 2016 in one of the most politically competitive states in the country.
   
• Seven Republicans who voted “yea” to fast-track and are also running for re-election next year cleaned up between January and March. Senator Johnny Isakson of Georgia received $102,500 in corporate contributions. Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, best known for proposing a Monsanto-written bill in 2013 that became known as the Monsanto Protection Act, received $77,900 – $13,500 of which came from Monsanto.
   
• Arizona senator and former presidential candidate John McCain received $51,700 in the first quarter of 2015. Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina received $60,000 in corporate donations. Eighty-one-year-old senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who is running for his seventh Senate term, received $35,000. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, who will be running for his first full six-year term in 2016, received $67,500 from pro-TPP corporations.

Stunning. Blatant. Yet if you look at the dollars paid and compare that to the “take” each of these corporations — Monsanto, Goldman Sachs, Pfizer and others — would realize from not just TPP, but TTIP and TISA, the trade-in-services agreement, it’s a pittance. Pennies on the dollar. Low by orders of magnitude.

Our Senators Need an Agent

Let’s say thirty massive corporations, including banks and pharmaceuticals, could expect, say, $1 billion in increased revenue over some number of years from these deals — a dollar number I think is off by a lot, by the way. At the top of this piece, the total in combined “donations” mentioned was just over $1 million.

Doing the math, our senators get just 0.1%, or one one-thousandth, of the take. That’s nothing. Crumbs. Waiters get more. Agents get more. Our senators, bright as they are, can’t negotiate. Perhaps they should … well … form a union so they could bargain from strength.

But at the very least, they need an agent. As a public service, I offer myself. I could immediately increase the slice they get by a factor of ten and still not cut into more than 1% of the predators’ pie. Monsanto desperately needs Congress to rake in its monster haul. So does Eli Lilly. Come on, senators. They need you more than you need them.

It’s time for pro-TPP senators to get what they really deserve. Don’t you think?

(A version of this piece appeared at Down With Tyranny. GP article archive here. TPP archive here.)

GP

.

“A nightmare for civil liberties”
by Tom Sullivan

The FAA, drone opponents, and Amazon.com testified Wednesday before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform on a proposed rule for opening the national airspace to unmanned aircraft systems (UAS). Clogging the air with drones both large and small, private, commercial, police, and military poses a logistical, regulatory, and privacy challenge. Or maybe a nightmare.

People poised to make money off the commercial technology want their licenses now, and they think the FAA is taking too long to think. The military and the FAA’s NextGen program have been at odds over delays in adapting its proposed, new air traffic control system to include a fleet of military drones it was not designed for. A single U2 spy plane flying in and out of Los Angeles air space last year crashed the local traffic control system. But whateva. Reapers gotta reap and Predators gotta prey.

Most of the focus yesterday was on how soon an Amazon drone will be able to deliver a six pack to your doorstep for the big game. (And it’s still cold!)

The Guardian reports:

The limitations of the licenses would hurt Amazon, the company’s vice-president of global public policy, Paul Misener, told Congress. Misener said his company was actively working to make drone delivery a reality and that the rule’s restriction on operating drones out of the user’s line of sight would hamper progress. “Our respectful disagreement with the FAA is that we believe that kind of operation can be considered right now,” he said.

Harley Geiger of the Center for Democracy and Technology warned the assembled legislators that they must heed privacy concerns before making the skies free for drones.

“Here is a nightmare scenario for civil liberties: a network of law enforcement UAS [unmanned aircraft systems] with sensors capable of identifying and tracking individuals monitors populated outdoor areas on a constant, pervasive basis for generalized public safety purposes. At the same time, commercial UAS platforms record footage of virtually anyone who steps out of her home, even if the individual remains on private property. This may seem an unlikely future to some. However, few existing laws would stand in the way, and the public does not yet trust the discretion of government or the UAS industry to prevent such scenarios from approaching reality,” he said.

Clearly an alarmist, that last guy. I mean, beer. Oh, right.

Persuant to the directives of the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012, the agency named six centers across the country for testing the integration of UAS into the national airspace. The FAA also established a National Center for Excellence, a consortium of over a dozen university drone research programs based at Mississippi State University:

The Alliance for System Safety of UAS through Research Excellence (ASSURE) is supposed to help the FAA find ways to safely combine drones with current manned aircraft.

The research areas initially will include technology to allow aircraft to detect and avoid each other, how to fly safely at low altitudes, and how to work with air traffic control.

The National Center for Excellence is headed up by Maj. Gen. James O. Poss (ret.), who in 2011 talked up using drones equipped with a really neato electronics pod called Gorgon Stare for surveilling entire cities:

With the new tool, analysts will no longer have to guess where to point the camera, said Maj. Gen. James O. Poss, the Air Force’s assistant deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. “Gorgon Stare will be looking at a whole city, so there will be no way for the adversary to know what we’re looking at, and we can see everything.”

But that could never happen in the land of the free when the Reapers come home. Oh, right.

In other drone news:

Forty-five former US military personnel, including a retired army colonel, have issued a joint appeal to the pilots of aerial drones operating in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria and elsewhere, calling on them to refuse to carry out the deadly missions.

In a joint letter, the retired and former military members call on air force pilots based at Creech air force base in Nevada and Beale air force base in California to refuse to carry out their duties. They say the missions, which have become an increasingly dominant feature of US military strategy in recent years, “profoundly violate domestic and international laws”.

“At least 6,000 lives have been unjustly taken by US drone attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, the Philippines, Libya and Syria. These attacks are also undermining principles of international law and human rights,” the authors write.

But, you know, beer.

(h/t Barry)