In these states, Democrats are finally realizing that they need to go big in their support of unions. It is not enough to tepidly suggest that they might undo the worst of bad policies in a state like Wisconsin. They have to undo the legacy of neglect that weakened unions even before Walker launched his Act 10 assault on public-employee unions in 2011 and his so-called "right-to-work" attack on private-sector unions and their members in 2015.

Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial nominee Tony Evers is getting specific on labor issues. "Tony opposes Act 10, Right-to-Work and changes made by the GOP to Wisconsin's prevailing wage laws," his campaign declares. "He also would support repealing legislation that eliminates the opportunity for local communities to pass living wages and other pro-worker protection policies."

The party's nominee for lieutenant governor has a campaign biography that begins by explaining that "Mandela Barnes, a Milwaukee native, was born in the city's poorest and the nation's most incarcerated zip code. The difference for him was opportunity. He was raised in a middle class union household..." He continues:

I am running for Lieutenant Governor to continue amplifying the collective voices of workers organizing to build power and raise wages. ... Wisconsin deserves leaders who will stand in solidarity with workers. During the Fight for Fifteen, I was grateful for the opportunity to march the picket lines alongside low-wage workers and speak out at rallies demand $15 as a wage floor for all workers. As Lieutenant Governor, I will both push legislation to improve the standard of living for all workers and show up to march the picket line when workers make the call.

Review copies are out. And it explains why Trump has been in full meltdown in recent weeks:

President Donald Trump's closest aides have taken extraordinary measures in the White House to try to stop what they saw as his most dangerous impulses, going so far as to swipe and hide papers from his desk so he wouldn't sign them, according to a new book from legendary journalist Bob Woodward.

Woodward's 448-page book, "Fear: Trump in the White House," provides an unprecedented inside-the-room look through the eyes of the President's inner circle. From the Oval Office to the Situation Room to the White House residence, Woodward uses confidential background interviews to illustrate how some of the President's top advisers view him as a danger to national security and have sought to circumvent the commander in chief.

Many of the feuds and daily clashes have been well documented, but the picture painted by Trump's confidants, senior staff and Cabinet officials reveal that many of them see an even more alarming situation - worse than previously known or understood. Woodward offers a devastating portrait of a dysfunctional Trump White House, detailing how senior aides - both current and former Trump administration officials - grew exasperated with the President and increasingly worried about his erratic behavior, ignorance and penchant for lying.

Chief of staff John Kelly describes Trump as an "idiot" and "unhinged," Woodward reports. Defense Secretary James Mattis describes Trump as having the understanding of "a fifth or sixth grader." And Trump's former personal lawyer John Dowd describes the President as "a fucking liar," telling Trump he would end up in an "orange jump suit" if he testified to special counsel Robert Mueller.

"He's an idiot. It's pointless to try to convince him of anything. He's gone off the rails. We're in crazytown," Kelly is quoted as saying at a staff meeting in his office. "I don't even know why any of us are here. This is the worst job I've ever had."

Trump irritated he wasn't interviewed by Woodward for upcoming book

CNN obtained a copy of Woodward's book, scheduled for release September 11. The explosive revelations about Trump from those closest to him are likely to play into the November midterm election battle. The book also has stunning new details about Trump's obsession with the Russia probe, describing for the first time confidential conversations between the President's lawyers and Mueller. It recounts a dramatic session in the White House residence in which Trump failed a mock Mueller interview with his lawyers.

Woodward sums up the state of the Trump White House by writing that Trump was an "emotionally overwrought, mercurial and unpredictable leader." Woodward writes that the staff's decision to circumvent the President was "a nervous breakdown of the executive power of the most powerful country in the world."

Circumventing the President

The book opens with a dramatic scene. Former chief economic adviser Gary Cohn saw a draft letter he considered dangerous to national security on the Oval Office desk.

The letter would have withdrawn the US from a critical trade agreement with South Korea. Trump's aides feared the fallout could jeopardize a top-secret national security program: the ability to detect a North Korean missile launch within just seven seconds.

Woodward reports Cohn was "appalled" that Trump might sign the letter. "I stole it off his desk," Cohn told an associate. "I wouldn't let him see it. He's never going to see that document. Got to protect the country."

Cohn was not alone. Former staff secretary Rob Porter worked with Cohn and used the same tactic on multiple occasions, Woodward writes. In addition to literally stealing or hiding documents from Trump's desk, they sought to stall and delay decisions or distract Trump from orders they thought would endanger national security.

"A third of my job was trying to react to some of the really dangerous ideas that he had and try to give him reasons to believe that maybe they weren't such good ideas," said Porter, who as staff secretary handled the flow of presidential papers until he quit amid domestic violence allegations. He and others acted with the acquiescence of former chief of staff Reince Priebus, Woodward reports.

Woodward describes repeated attempts to bypass Trump as "no less than an administrative coup d'etat."

The Russia obsession

Woodward's book relies on hundreds of hours of taped interviews and dozens of sources in Trump's inner circle, as well as documents, files, diaries and memos, including a note handwritten by Trump himself. Woodward explains that he talked with sources on "deep background," meaning he could use all the information but not say who provided it.

His reporting comes with the credibility of a long and storied history that separates this book from previous efforts on Trump. The author and Washington Post journalist has won two Pulitzer Prizes, including one for his coverage of the Watergate scandal that led to President Richard Nixon's resignation.

In one revelatory anecdote, Woodward describes a scene in the White House residence. Trump's lawyer, convinced the President would perjure himself, put Trump through a test - a practice interview for the one he might have with Mueller. Trump failed, according to Dowd, but the President still insisted he should testify.

Woodward writes that Dowd saw the "full nightmare" of a potential Mueller interview, and felt Trump acted like an "aggrieved Shakespearean king."

But Trump seemed surprised at Dowd's reaction, Woodward writes. "You think I was struggling?" Trump asked.

Then, in an even more remarkable move, Dowd and Trump's current personal attorney Jay Sekulow went to Mueller's office and re-enacted the mock interview. Their goal: to argue that Trump couldn't possibly testify because he was incapable of telling the truth.

"He just made something up. That's his nature," Dowd said to Mueller.

The passage is an unprecedented glimpse behind the scenes of Mueller's secretive operation - for the first time, Mueller's conversations with Trump's lawyers are captured.

"I need the president's testimony," Mueller said. "What was his intent on Comey? ... I want to see if there was corrupt intent."

Despite Dowd's efforts, Trump continued to insist he could testify. "I think the President of the United States cannot be seen taking the fifth," Trump said.

Dowd's argument was stark: "There's no way you can get through these. ... Don't testify. It's either that or an orange jump suit."

What he couldn't say to Trump, according to Woodward, was what Dowd believed to be true: "You're a fucking liar."

Trump's insults and humiliation

Throughout the book, Woodward portrays the President as a man obsessed with his standing in the media and with his core supporters. Trump appears to be lonely and increasingly paranoid, often watching hours of television in the White House residence. "They're out to get me," Trump said of Mueller's team.

Trump's closest advisers described him erupting in rage and profanity, and he seemed to enjoy humiliating others.

"This guy is mentally retarded," Trump said of Sessions. "He's this dumb southerner," Trump told Porter, mocking Sessions by feigning a southern accent.

Trump said that Priebus is "like a little rat. He just scurries around."

And Trump demeaned former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani to his face, when Giuliani was the only campaign surrogate willing to defend then-candidate Trump on television after the "Access Hollywood" tape, a bombshell video where Trump described sexually assaulting women.

"Rudy, you're a baby," Trump told the man who is now his attorney. "I've never seen a worse defense of me in my life. They took your diaper off right there. You're like a little baby that needed to be changed. When are you going to be a man?"

Trump's predecessors are not spared either. In a conversation with Sen. Lindsey Graham, Trump called President Barack Obama a "weak dick" for not acting in Syria, Woodward reports.

National security concerns

Woodward's book takes readers inside top-secret meetings. On July 27, 2017, Trump's national security leaders convened a gathering at "The Tank" in the Pentagon. The goal: an intervention to try to educate the President on the importance of allies and diplomacy.

Trump's philosophy on diplomacy was personal. "This is all about leader versus leader. Man versus man. Me versus Kim," he said of North Korea.

His inner circle was worried about "The Big Problem," Woodward writes: Trump's lack of understanding that his crusade to impose tariffs could endanger global security.

But the meeting didn't go as planned.

Trump went off on his generals. "You should be killing guys. You don't need a strategy to kill people," Trump said of Afghanistan.

He questioned the wisdom of keeping US troops in South Korea.

"So Mr. President," Cohn said to Trump, "what would you need in the region to sleep well at night?"

"I wouldn't need a fucking thing," the President said. "And I'd sleep like a baby."

After Trump left the Tank, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson declared: "He's a fucking moron." The book provides the context for the now-infamous quote that marked the beginning of the end for Tillerson's tenure. Tillerson tried to downplay the dispute -- "I'm not going to deal with petty stuff like that," he said at a news conference after NBC reported the remark - but he was ultimately fired via tweet.

Woodward also quotes an unnamed White House official who gave an even more dire assessment of the meeting: "It seems clear that many of the president's senior advisers, especially those in the national security realm, are extremely concerned with his erratic nature, his relative ignorance, his inability to learn, as well as what they consider his dangerous views."

A recurrent theme in Woodward's book is Trump's seeming disregard for national security concerns because of his obsession with money - trade deficits and the cost of troops overseas.

In meeting after meeting, Trump questions why the US has to pay for such a large troop presence in South Korea.

"We're doing this in order to prevent World War III," Mattis, the defense secretary, bluntly explained to Trump at one January 2018 meeting, which prompted Mattis to tell close associates afterward that Trump had the understanding of a "fifth or sixth grader."

Trump still wasn't convinced. "I think we could be so rich if we weren't stupid," he later said in the meeting, arguing the US was being played as "suckers," Woodward reports.

The 'Ernest Hemingway' of Twitter

Trump's tweets - and his infatuation with Twitter - are a theme throughout the book. Woodward reveals that Trump ordered printouts of his tweets and studied them to find out which ones were most popular. "The most effective tweets were often the most shocking," Woodward writes.

Twitter was a source of great consternation for national security leaders, who feared - and warned Trump - "Twitter could get us into a war."

Appalled by some of his more outrageous posts, Trump's aides tried to form a Twitter "committee" to vet the President's tweets, but they failed to stop their boss.

Priebus, who was blindsided when Trump announced his firing on Twitter, referred to the presidential bedroom as "the devil's workshop" and called the early morning hours and Sunday night - a time of many news-breaking tweets - "the witching hour."

Trump, however, saw himself as a Twitter wordsmith.

"It's a good thing," Trump said when Twitter expanded its character count to 280, "but it's a bit of a shame because I was the Ernest Hemingway of 140 characters."

'A zoo without walls'

Finally, "Fear" is filled with slights, insults and takedowns from both family and staff that speak to the chaos, infighting and drama that Trump allows to fester around him.

Both Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump are targeted by the inner circle.

There is a pointed shot at Ivanka from the President's now-ostracized chief strategist Steve Bannon, who frequently clashed with the first daughter and her husband.

"You're nothing but a fucking staffer!" Bannon screamed at Ivanka at a staff meeting, according to Woodward. "You walk around this place and act like you're in charge, and you're not. You're on staff!"

"I'm not a staffer!" she shouted back. "I'll never be a staffer. I'm the first daughter" - she really used the title, Woodward writes - "and I'm never going to be a staffer!"

Two of the harshest comments in the book are directed at Trump and come from his chiefs of staff.

After Trump's Charlottesville, Virginia, controversy, in which he failed to condemn white supremacists, Cohn tried to resign but was instead dressed down by Trump and accused of "treason."

Kelly, who is Trump's current chief of staff, told Cohn afterward, according to notes Cohn made of the exchange: "If that was me, I would have taken that resignation letter and shoved it up his ass six different times."

Scientists, journalists, environmentalists and others who draw the connection between increasing wildfires and global warming often face a backlash. It's not climate change; it's lightning, careless smokers or campers, poor forestry management, industrial activity or sparks from vehicles, bad government...

One doesn't negate the other. Wildfires have many causes, and more than one factor is fuelling increases in the number and intensity of fires worldwide. But hotter, drier weather increases the risk.

Forestry practices and urban development are among the contributors to wildfires. Even preventing fires can increase risk, as low-intensity natural fires clear out undergrowth, often leaving larger trees standing. Suppressing wildfires means more undergrowth, dead trees and other vegetation build up, creating fuel for even larger fires. Smaller trees can spread flames to the forest canopy.

After clear-cut logging or fires, companies often plant single species close together, eliminating trees like aspen and birch, which are less fire-prone and create shade and moisture. Some commonly planted species, such as lodgepole pine, are also susceptible to pine beetle attacks.

University of British Columbia scientist Lori Daniels told Vancouver Is Awesome that "a forest full of mixed species and mixed densities of those species" is more resistant to intense fires and provides more nutrients and less fuel to the ecosystem.

But some researchers argue that because fire suppression resources and technologies and logging practices haven't changed much over the decades, while wildfires have rapidly increased in number and intensity, climate change is likely the primary factor.

Even the mountain pine beetle outbreaks that have devastated B.C. forests are a result of both management practices and climate change. Cold winters once killed off many of them, but warmer winters and earlier spring weather allowed them to survive and thrive.

Forestry must be re-evaluated in light of the increasing awareness not only of its role in wildfires but of the way forests function. Peter Wohlleben's The Hidden Life of Trees and the book I wrote with Wayne Grady, Tree: A Life Story, examine emerging science regarding the complexity and interconnectedness of healthy forest ecosystems. Forests are far more than stands of timber, uniformly planted to maximize profits.

It's important to improve the way we manage and utilize forest resources, but we also have to consider the major role climate change plays in wildfires. As the world warms, precipitation patterns change, winters are drier in many areas, snowmelt occurs earlier and forests dry out. The fire season is growing rapidly in many parts of the world, including the U.S. and Canada - by much as 80 days over three decades in the Rocky Mountains - and significantly more area burns every year.

Regardless of the direct causes, climate change is making things worse. A recent Portland State University study found a warmer world even increases the risk of lightning-ignited fires. "We think that by having warmer oceans and warmer temperatures in general, we're going to see higher evaporation and heat transfer, and thus higher frequency of convective storms that in turn results in more lightning-ignited fires," said study co-author Andres Holz.

The consequences are devastating. Death and compromised health from smoke and particulate matter; home and property damage, especially as urban areas encroach further into wildlands; erosion and flooding as trees no longer hold soils and hillsides in place; contaminated drinking water; increasing insect infestations; destruction of important carbon sinks like the boreal forest... And as forests burn, they emit greenhouse gases, heating the world even more.

All of this is incredibly expensive. Canada and the U.S. spend billions every year to fight fires, and those costs are rising. Destroyed or damaged property, resource losses and health-care costs related to fires are increasing as well. Loss of wildlife and habitat is also a serious concern.

We can do a lot to prevent fires: avoid campfires and other burning when risks are high, improve forestry practices, better manage buffers between urban and forested areas, maybe even let some smaller fires burn.

Monday is Labor Day and, on Tuesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee will begin hearings into the nomination and inevitable confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to a lifetime position on the Supreme Court of the United States. Much of the attention- rightly-will be drawn to Kavanaugh's dreadful history on reproductive rights, as well as to whatever is stashed away in the 100,000 documents that the administration* is keeping buried regarding what Kavanaugh did during the torture years under President George W. Bush. But it shouldn't be overlooked that his record on labor issues is every bit as retrograde as any other part of his Federalist Society bona fides. From Mother Jones:

Kavanaugh joined two other Republican-appointed judges in a unanimous 2012 ruling in favor of the Trump Organization, after company executives asked the NLRB to throw out the results of a union election at Trump Plaza, arguing that support from politicians had introduced bias. As a July Bloomberg article points out, in 2015 Kavanaugh sided with the management of Sheldon Adelson's Venetian Casino Resort in a similar case, authoring a majority opinion upholding the casino's First Amendment right to summon police to issue citations to union protesters trespassing on company property.

One of Kavanaugh's most high-profile dissents of NLRB authority was in a 2014 case against SeaWorld's Florida theme park involving events depicted in the documentary Blackfish. When a killer-whale trainer died during a live show in 2010-the second death at the location-the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) launched an investigation that found the theme park had willfully endangered its employees. The DC Circuit upheld the decision of a Department of Labor administrative judge, who ruled the theme park had violated OSHA guidelines and imposed a $7,000 fine. In his dissent, Kavanaugh said OSHA was uncharacteristically trying to "stretch its general authority." He said the SeaWorld employees' position was no different than any other occupation where workers consent to put themselves in danger, comparing their work to tiger taming and football.

"When should we as a society paternalistically decide that the participants in these sports and entertainment activities must be protected from themselves-that the risk of significant physical injury is simply too great even for eager and willing participants?" he asked, calling the "physical risk...among the greatest forms of personal achievement for many who take part in these activities."

From 1897 until approximately 1937-the end date is a matter of some dispute-the court's relation to labor was defined by the horrendous decision in Lochner v. New York. Citing "freedom of contract" as a constitutional right, the decision was used through the decade to strike down all manner of regulations touching on business large and small. (Lochner itself was about working conditions in bakeries.) Unions, of course, came along with the deal. In Adair v. United States, the Court struck down a law that would have made it illegal for a company to fire employees for trying to organize.

Employees of Woolworth's hold a sign calling for a 40 hour work week in New York 1937.

Make no mistake. There is a strong strain of modern conservatism that is openly nostalgic for the Lochner Era; Rand Paul made the case a part of his campaign for president in 2016. Mark Joseph Stern, writing in Slate, argues that the recent anti-labor Janus decision is Lochner revisited. Stern quotes Justice Samuel Alito's opinion in Janus:

"...into the 20th century, every individual employee had the 'liberty of contract' to 'sell his labor upon such terms as he deem[ed] proper.'" To support this proposition, he cites 1908's Adair v. United States-a defining decision of the Lochner era. Both Lochner and Adair rested on the premise that the Constitution protects an individual's right to sell his labor at any cost. This doctrine trammeled minimum wage and maximum hour rules, as well as laws safeguarding workers' right to unionize. Janus restores this premise in a slightly altered form, replacing "liberty of contract" with "associational freedoms." The upshot is the same: Laws designed to benefit labor's ability to act collectively are inherently suspect.

But there is stirring out in the country. Pro-union candidates are winning primaries, the latest being Andrew Gillum in Florida. In Wisconsin, both Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tony Evers and his running mate, Mandela Barnes, are running specifically against rolling back the anti-union measures enacted by incumbent Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage this particular midwest subsidiary. In Seattle, as the Seattle Times reports, unions are preparing to celebrate the centennial of the great 1919 general strike in that city with a renewed sense of purpose.

"We've been needing to catch up for quite a while," he said, standing beside a job site where he runs the man lift, the orange elevators that take workers up an under-construction building. "They just came back with the same type of an offer as other years, and it's just time not to let that happen again."

Late last week, equipment was moving again at several job sites where the union reached agreements with individual contractors, but as of Friday morning, the majority of Seattle cranes were still "put to bed" and no broader agreement had been reached. Sooner or later, though, all of this energy is going to run up against a federal court system, and a Supreme Court, that is going to be marbled all the way through with judges who've come up on the same assembly-line as Brett Kavanaugh. In the history of this country, there has not been an expansion of the middle-class without a strong, vibrant union presence. That doesn't change just because factories move to Mexico, or because of robots. There simply is no other way for wages to rise generally other than having the people receiving those wages bargain collectively for them. That Labor Day is still a holiday at all, I guess, is something for which we can give thanks. The attack on labor itself begins again on Tuesday.
(c) 2018 Charles P. Pierce has been a working journalist since 1976. He is the author of four books, most recently 'Idiot America.' He lives near Boston with his wife but no longer his three children.

The United States spends about five times what China does on its military. And it spends more just on its military bases in other people's countries than any country other than itself or China spends on its entire military. The United States keeps troops in almost every country on earth, including in 800 to 1,000 major military bases outside the United States. The rest of the world's nations combined (most of them U.S. allies and weapons customers) keep a couple of dozen foreign bases total. Imperialism is a uniquely U.S. illness, although everybody suffers the damage.

Ireland is a nation legally bound to maintain neutrality but actively assisting in the crimes of U.S. wars. This coming 11/11 is Armistice Day 100, and while Trump has been dissuaded from holding a weapons parade in Washington, he's apparently headed for France and Ireland. Come on, France, put the weapons away! Don't welcome fascists! Come on, Ireland! You can scare him off! Threaten to arrest him!

"We Serve Neither King nor Kaiser, But Ireland," it said 100 years ago on the facade of Liberty Hall in Dublin as the Irish successfully refused to be drafted into a British war. "We Welcome Neither President Nor Imperial Buffoon" might be a good new banner to promote a Trump-free Ireland.

Within days of Trump's possible visit, and of worldwide celebrations of peace and the movement to abolish all war on Armistice Day 100, I'll be taking part, along with people from all over the globe, in a conference at Liberty Hall on November 16-18 to discuss efforts to close down U.S. and NATO military bases.

If you're like most people in the United States, you have a vague awareness that the U.S. military keeps lots of troops permanently stationed on foreign bases around the world. But have you ever wondered and really investigated to find out how many, and where exactly, and at what cost, and to what purpose, and in terms of what relationship with the host nations?

Some 800 bases with hundreds of thousands of troops in some 70 nations, plus all kinds of other "trainers" and "non-permanent" exercises that last indefinitely, maintain an ongoing U.S. military presence around the world for a price tag of at least $100 billion a year.

Why they do this is a harder question to answer, but when Trump, of all people, vaguely gestured toward the remote possibility of allowing peace and reunification in Korea, the United States Congress immediately and indignantly jumped in to save us all from such a calamity, forbidding the removal of U.S. troops from Korea.

U.S. media consumers learn about the removal of the entire population of the island of Diego Garcia to facilitate the construction of a U.S. military base on their home through reports that overwhelmingly stress the "strategic" necessity of the base. (This is a case before the International Court of Justice this week.)

Even if you think there is some reason to be able to quickly deploy thousands of U.S. troops to any spot on earth, airplanes now make that as easily done from the United States as from Korea or Japan or Germany or Italy or Diego Garcia. That's clearly not a complete explanation of the motives behind U.S. base world.

It costs dramatically more to keep troops in other countries, and while some base defenders make a case for economic philanthropy, the evidence is that local economies actually benefit little - and suffer little when a base leaves. Neither does the U.S. economy benefit, of course. Rather, certain privileged contractors benefit, along with those politicians whose campaigns they fund. And if you think military spending is unaccountable at home, you should check out bases abroad where it's none too rare to have security guards employed purely to guard cooks whose sole job is to feed the security guards. The military has a term for any common SNAFU, and the term for this one is "self-licking ice cream."

The bases, in many cases, generate an enormous amount of popular resentment and hatred, serving as motivations for attacks on the bases themselves or elsewhere - famously including the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Bases around the borders of Russia and China are generating new hostility and arms races, and even proposals by Russia and China to open foreign bases of their own. Currently all non-U.S. foreign bases in the world total no more than 30, with most of those belonging to close U.S. allies, and not a single one of them being in or anywhere near the United States, which would of course be considered an outrage.

Many U.S. bases are hosted by brutal dictatorships. An academic study has identified a strong U.S. tendency to defend dictatorships where the United States has bases. A glance at a newspaper will tell you the same. Crimes in Bahrain are not equal to crimes in Iran. In fact, when brutal and undemocratic governments currently hosting U.S. bases (in, for example, Honduras, Aruba, Curaçao, Mauritania, Liberia, Niger, Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Chad, Egypt, Mozambique, Burundi, Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Qatar, Oman, UAE, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, Israel, Turkey, Georgia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Thailand, Cambodia, or Singapore) are protested, there is a pattern of increased U.S. support for the government, which makes eviction of the U.S. bases all the more likely should the government fall, which fuels a vicious cycle that increases popular resentment of the U.S. government. The U.S. began building new bases in Honduras shortly after the 2009 coup.

The smaller bases that don't house tens of thousands of troops, but secretive death squads or drones, also have a tendency to make wars more likely. The drone war on Yemen that was labeled a success by President Obama has helped fuel a larger war.

The U.S. government's pursuit of domination and conquest once built bases in Native Americans' lands, and now in many other places referred to as "Indian territory." In the 20th century, U.S. imperialism went global. When FDR visited Pearl Harbor (not actually part of the United States) on July 28, 1934, the Japanese military expressed apprehension. General Kunishiga Tanaka wrote in the Japan Advertiser, objecting to the build-up of the American fleet and the creation of additional bases in Alaska and the Aleutian Islands (also not part of the United States): "Such insolent behavior makes us most suspicious. It makes us think a major disturbance is purposely being encouraged in the Pacific. This is greatly regretted."

Then, in March 1935, Roosevelt bestowed Wake Island on the U.S. Navy and gave Pan Am Airways a permit to build runways on Wake Island, Midway Island, and Guam. Japanese military commanders announced that they were disturbed and viewed these runways as a threat. So did peace activists in the United States. By the next month, Roosevelt had planned war games and maneuvers near the Aleutian Islands and Midway Island. By the following month, peace activists were marching in New York advocating friendship with Japan. Norman Thomas wrote in 1935: "The Man from Mars who saw how men suffered in the last war and how frantically they are preparing for the next war, which they know will be worse, would come to the conclusion that he was looking at the denizens of a lunatic asylum." The Japanese attacked Wake Island four days after attacking Pearl Harbor.

Supposedly World War II has ended. Why have the troops never come home? Why have they continued to spread their forts into "Indian Territory," until the U.S. has more foreign bases than any other empire in history, even as the era of conquering territory has largely ended, even as a significant segment of the population has ceased thinking of "Indians" and other foreigners as subhuman beasts without rights worthy of respecting?

One reason, well-documented by David Vine in his book Base Nation, is the same reason that the huge U.S. base at Guantanamo, Cuba, is used to imprison people without trials. By preparing for wars in foreign locations, the U.S. is often able to evade all kinds of legal restrictions - including on labor and the environment, not to mention prostitution. GIs occupying Germany referred to rape as "liberating a blonde," and the sexual disaster area surrounding U.S. bases has continued to this day, despite the decision in 1945 to start sending families to live with soldiers - a policy that now includes shipping each soldier's entire worldly possessions including automobiles around the world with them, not to mention providing single-payer healthcare and twice the spending on schooling as the national average back home. Prostitutes serving U.S. bases in South Korea and elsewhere are often virtually slaves. The Philippines, which has had U.S. "help" as long as anyone, provides the most contractor staff for U.S. bases, cooking, cleaning, and everything else - as well as likely the most prostitutes imported into other countries, such as South Korea.

The most isolated and lawless base sites include locations from which the U.S. military evicted the local population. These include bases in Diego Garcia, Greenland, Alaska, Hawaii, Panama, Puerto Rico, the Marshall Islands, Guam, the Philippines, Okinawa, and South Korea - with people evicted as recently as 2006 in South Korea.

During World War II the U.S. Navy seized the small Hawaiian island of Koho'alawe for a weapons testing range and ordered its inhabitants to leave. The island has been devastated. In 1942, the U.S. Navy displaced Aleutian Islanders. President Harry Truman made up his mind that the 170 native inhabitants of Bikini Atoll had no right to their island in 1946. He had them evicted in February and March of 1946, and dumped as refugees on other islands without means of support or a social structure in place. In the coming years, the United States would remove 147 people from Enewetak Atoll and all the people on Lib Island. U.S. atomic and hydrogen bomb testing rendered various depopulated and still-populated islands uninhabitable, leading to further displacements. Up through the 1960s, the U.S. military displaced hundreds of people from Kwajalein Atoll. A super-densely populated ghetto was created on Ebeye.

On Vieques, off Puerto Rico, the U.S. Navy displaced thousands of inhabitants between 1941 and 1947, announced plans to evict the remaining 8,000 in 1961, but was forced to back off and - in 2003 - to stop bombing the island. On nearby Culebra, the Navy displaced thousands between 1948 and 1950 and attempted to remove those remaining up through the 1970s. The Navy is right now looking at the island of Pagan as a possible replacement for Vieques, the population already having been removed by a volcanic eruption. Of course, any possibility of return would be greatly diminished.

Beginning during World War II but continuing right through the 1950s, the U.S. military displaced a quarter million Okinawans, or half the population, from their land, forcing people into refugee camps and shipping thousands of them off to Bolivia - where land and money were promised but not delivered.

In 1953, the United States made a deal with Denmark to remove 150 Inughuit people from Thule, Greenland, giving them four days to get out or face bulldozers. They are being denied the right to return.

Between 1968 and 1973, the United States and Great Britain exiled all 1,500 to 2,000 inhabitants of Diego Garcia, rounding people up and forcing them onto boats while killing their dogs in a gas chamber and seizing possession of their entire homeland for the use of the U.S. military.

The eviction of the people of Palestine through the creation and constant militarization of Israel is in many ways parallel to these other instances of U.S. military base construction.

The South Korean government, which evicted people for U.S. base expansion on the mainland in 2006, has, at the behest of the U.S. Navy, in recent years been devastating a village, its coast, and 130 acres of farmland on Jeju Island in order to provide the United States with another massive military base.

In hundreds of other sites where the population was not evicted, it might wish it had been. Foreign bases have been environmentally disastrous. Open-air burns, unexploded weaponry, poisons leaked into the ground water - these are all commonplace. A jet fuel leak at Kirkland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, N.M., started in 1953 and was discovered in 1999, and was more than twice the size of the Exxon Valdez spill. U.S. bases within the United States have been environmentally devastating, but not on the scale of those in some foreign lands. A plane taking off from Diego Garcia to bomb Afghanistan in 2001 crashed and sank to the bottom of the ocean with some 85 hundred-pound munitions. Even ordinary base life takes a toll; U.S. troops produce over three times the garbage each as local residents in, for example, Okinawa.

Disregard for people and the land and the sea is built into the very idea of foreign bases. The United States would never tolerate another nation's base within its borders, yet imposes them on Okinawans, South Koreans, Italians, Filipinos, Iraqis, and others despite huge protest.

Good grief, there certainly seems to be a whole lot of important Tibetan Buddhist lamas coming to visit NorCal these days. Perhaps they are here to show their compassion for us after all these horrible wildfires. In any case, Tenzin Lungtok, the seventh Ling Rinpoche, just gave a talk to the U.C. Berkeley community on the importance of happiness and compassion -- and here's my full report on the event (including my excellent commentary of course). Sorry that it's so long but Ling Rinpoche had a lot of important stuff to say.

BTW, the seventh Ling Rinpoche is a direct reincarnation of the Dalai Lama's senior tutor who died in 1983 -- so this Ling Rinpoche is rather young, only 33 years old.

The very first thing he talked about was Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Shocker!

"They live in conditions that are very poor, very wretched over there." Yeah, they do -- thanks to the USA, which caused all that misery in the first place. And even now, American war profiteers seem to be desperate to start even more new "wars" and to also keep the same old tired ones going.

"And in the United States itself there is no war," Ling Rinpoche continued, "but there are many problems in the mind here, even among the wealthy." Especially among the wealthy. Some of those guys are bat-dookie cray-cray!

"Is all this happening because of karma, and is thus unavoidable?" Apparently not. "In fact there are things we can do to change all this for the better -- we can become patient, tolerant and satisfied with what we have. But here in America there is the problem of greed." No shite, Sherlock.

"Attitudes like greed create problems, and because of these problems we simply don't have minds that are capable of contentment." Apparently kindness is the key to contentment. "And if we can't find what we want by kindness, we may turn to lies and violence -- and also to trying to keep others from getting what they want as well, in order to feel more superior to them." Rinpoche may be on to something here. That does seem to be America's main attitude right now. Our neighbors are homeless and dying of hunger? Hurray! Now we're better than them.

"And because of greed, then we lie, we steal, we kill." This is starting to sound very familiar as well. What's mine is mine and what's yours is mine too -- that seems to be Washington's main approach to governance in the last five decades. Or is it six? Or seven? I myself have devoted my life to protecting justice against greed. Greed is the main predator on justice? Why am I not surprised.

Then Rinpoche goes on to say that this all-about-me attitude basically sucks eggs. "It is a narrow way of thinking." For sure. No future there.

"Fighting and arguing with others is a major part of this type of thinking. Naturally we all want happiness -- there's nothing wrong with that. But we don't know what we need to do to be happy." Yeah, well. Americans could begin by not financing the slaughter of babies in Syria, Gaza and Yemen. That would be a good start.

"We need to make our minds more open and expansive." Snap! "Not just thinking about ourselves. We need to be more concerned with the world in general." This is good stuff. But then, oops, my pen ran out of ink. New pen please! Hope I am getting this all down correctly.

"If our attitude is more open and expansive, we can stop problems and achieve far-reaching goals." World peace would be a good goal, right? This is where you are spozed to nod your head up and down, America. But apparently not.

"If you have an expansive attitude, things go better." Narrow thinking? Not good. "The results are always problems." Just look at the swamp that America has created in Afghanistan -- and Flint.

"A lack of contentment and blaming others is a large cause of our problems." The immigrants did it! The Russians did it! Not. "If we learn to take responsibility for our own blame, problems can be solved. Otherwise our minds become distracted away from seeing what is actually good -- distracted by greed and desire."

Then he talked about work. "People here do it for salaries, housing, cars, etc. They don't even think about if they are actually enjoying their work." How many Americans are stuck in yucky boring dead-end jobs? But I myself have a job that I like right now -- I'm working on becoming a better person. And also trying to be more patient with jerks.

"Morality is good," he continued. "Morality, concentration and wisdom." Hmmm. Perhaps it is time for Americans to start choosing their leaders because they are wise. Nah. Never happen. But maybe it could....

"Technological development is not enough to enjoy a good life. Look at all the people in more developed countries who are not happy." And also look at all those happy people in that technological desert Bhutan for instance, far happier than us. "Of course technology does help -- but in a limited way. To obtain far-reaching advances, we really need to develop the qualities of the mind." Xfinity and Apple won't make us happy. Not really. Let's place our bets on kindness instead.

"For example the kindness of our parents, our teachers and our friends have done more for us than technology." We would never have even reached adulthood without their kindness. That type of kindness is even more better than gold-plated toilets and really fast cars. "Loving kindness is priceless." And it's harder to come by as well.

"There is too much violence, crime and war in the world. Whether you accept religion or not, loving kindness and compassion are important. Affection for others. With these tools, all the problems in our world could be solved. And we could all receive real, genuine happiness. No more problems in the world." Boom. Done and dusted. Works for me.

"If you see something, if you see an injustice, do something. Of course we should protest if someone does something wrong -- but not hate them. And we should feel even more compassion for people who lack kindness." Because they are losers, duh!

"And if you have made mistakes in your life before? Then take that occasion to learn from them. And treat others as you would treat yourself." Unlike what Christian hypocrites in Washington do today. "And be kind to yourself as well -- but avoid self-cherishing because that only leads to anger." Bottom line? "We depend on all others for our happiness."

Then someone asked about what to do when comparing oneself unfavorably to all those beautiful people on TV? "Then just turn off the TV," he said with a smile.

And during the Q&A that followed, I too couldn't resist standing up. "I always make all my decisions based on whether or not what I was planning to do might benefit the most sentient beings. So thank you for coming here today because hearing your talk definitely benefited more sentient beings than if I had just sat home and watched TV." He smiled at this too. "But my question is, what do you see happening in the future -- say five or ten years from now?"

Ling Rinpoche answered that he was not a soothsayer or fortune teller but that the way to a better future is, "Don't be attached to the results. Just do what you can, try to keep benefiting all -- and then act!"

I was so impressed with this young guy who speaks like a wise old man that I grabbed up one of those traditional white offering scarves that you are supposed to give to lamas and ran after him to the elevator like some desperate Beatles fan from the '60s. "Wait! Wait!" I cried. But the elevator closed in my face -- but then me and my friend went off to buy tacos on Telegraph Avenue and got all greedy for guacamole.

PS: We also ran into a Palestinian friend of mine on the Avenue who told us that Israeli colonialists were now offering money to Palestinian Israelis in Jerusalem if they would move off to that hell-hole the "settlers" have now created on the West Bank. Hey, that's way better than just straight-up murdering them, right? Although I do gotta admit that Palestinian Israelis living in the West Bank are a hecka lot vulnerable to getting murdered. Money won't change that fact either. James Brown nailed it.

Dear Richter Kavanaugh,

Congratulations, you have just been awarded the "Vidkun Quisling Award!" Your name will now live throughout history with such past award winners as Marcus Junius Brutus, Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, George Stephanopoulos, George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Prescott Bush, Sam Bush, Fredo Bush, Kate Bush, Kyle Busch, Anheuser Busch, Vidkun Quisling, and last year's winner Volksjudge John (the enforcer) Roberts.

Without your lock step calling for the repeal of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, your pro business, pro one percent, anti-American stance, Yemen, Syria, Iran and those many other profitable oil wars to come would have been impossible! With the help of our mutual friends, the other "Rethuglican Whores" you have made it possible for all of us to goose-step off to a brave new bank account!

Along with this award you will be given the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Golden Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds presented by our glorious Fuhrer, Herr Trump at a gala celebration at "der Fuhrer Bunker," formally the "White House," on 09-28-2018. We salute you Herr Kavanaugh, Sieg Heil!

Signed by,
Vice Fuhrer Pence