To where is the money being redirected?
A long list of cutbacks to government programs will directly and negatively affect the people of Siskiyou County. That list include slashes to Medicaid, National Weather Service/NOAA, Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA), Dept. of Education, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Endangered Species Act, Affordable Care Act payments to doctors and hospitals, and support for education programs that address the nursing shortage. Cutbacks are touted to clean up "waste fraud, and abuse", but regardless of the truth or falsity of that, the question remains: where does the saved money go? One well-known place is toward tax cuts largely benefitting the rich and superrich. But much of those "savings" are also being applied to promote military action, including in places that pose no military threat to the US, like Venezuela. The US has already begun the attacks with a series of illegal extrajudicial killings of people (now more than 80) on fishing boats, claiming without any public evidence that they are drug-carriers.
On this topic, we quote here from an excellent interview (edited here for brevity) by Amy Goodman on DemocracyNow.org on November 14 with long-time journalist Juan Gonzalez , an expert on U.S./Latin American politics, professor at Rutgers University, and Senior Fellow at the University of Illinois Chicago
AMY GOODMAN: Juan, you were in Panama for the U.S. invasion. This was during President George H.W. Bush. You certainly know and have studied and have been there throughout Latin America when it comes to U.S. foreign policy. Can you talk about your observations of what’s happening here with these extrajudicial killings of scores of people?
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: ...The largest aircraft carrier in the world, the USS Gerald Ford, has just arrived in the Caribbean with another 5,000 troops and several other battleships accompanying it.
We now have 15,000 U.S. troops in the region, thousands of them based in Puerto Rico. The government has reopened Roosevelt Roads Naval Base, which they had closed, and U.S. planes at the old Ramey Air Force Base in Aguadilla. All of these soldiers are not there to hang out. They’re there to take military action. We have to be clear. Even though the government hasn’t announced it, it’s clear that this is what’s coming.
Our government is embarking on a totally unprovoked military assault and regime change operations in Latin America. The Trump administration has openly accused not one, but two Latin American presidents of drug dealing without any proof — Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and Gustavo Petro of Colombia — and threatened to kill Maduro. This is a bizarre return to the gunboat diplomacy of the early 20th century, and the big prize being not democracy or not stopping drug trafficking, but grabbing the Venezuelan oil fields, the largest oil reserves in the world.
The problem is, this is not the old Latin America that the U.S. could bully at will. The countries of the region are today independent sovereign states. For most of South America, the U.S. is no longer even the main trading partner. China is. Next door to Venezuela is Colombia, the country that for more than 50 years was involved in the longest-running civil war in the region’s history and has perhaps the largest number of veteran left-wing guerrillas in Latin America’s history. The governments of Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Honduras, Cuba and Nicaragua will not just quietly accept U.S. aggression on Venezuela.
President Maduro has appealed for international volunteers to come to Venezuela to oppose any U.S. invasion. And you can bet that perhaps thousands of young Cubans, Nicaraguans, Colombians and other Latin Americans will do just that.
AMY GOODMAN: Juan, you mentioned that you have Venezuela, the largest oil producer in Latin America, that the U.S. is targeting. Then, to everyone’s shock, including many in his own administration, Trump announced he’s going to attack Nigeria, which is Africa’s most populous country and the largest oil producer in Africa. He said that the attack would be vicious and sweet. And then, you go back to Iraq, one of the largest oil producers in the Middle East, before the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 after 9/11, which Iraq had nothing to do with.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yes, it’s a clear continued policy of the United States to control, control oil production as much as it can, as it continues — as the Trump administration continues on this crazy, bizarre attempt to corner as much oil supply as they can, as it continues to deny the existence of the climate change or the climate catastrophe we face.
That concludes the interview. But here are some additional historical observations we might add to Juan Gonzalez's remarks above. Venezuela has been on the US target list for an invasion ever since socialist Hugo Chavez was democratically elected as President in Venezuela in 1998. But apart from a US-sponsored coup attempt in 2002, Washington has not threatened a full scale military attack on Venezuela until the current U.S. aircraft carrier-based buildup in the Caribbean. Why now? The decades-long delay is likely because of the US military had been occupied with attacking Iraq and Afghanistan for most of the intervening years. The US military, in its typical attacks on poor but resource-rich countries since WWII, is not set up for more than two "hot" wars at a time. Ironically, Venezuela was essentially saved from being attacked because of the ongoing (and ultimately losing) US wars against the Middle East. That period is now over. The drive by the US government to dominate internationally, in service of private extractive industries to secure natural resources like oil and minerals, continues, but just with a shift of location. Unfortunately, government domestic services to ordinary people will be pushed farther back in the line - unless we can successfully demand and achieve a fundamental and radical change in policy.