On Wednesday, Joe Biden’s transition team announced the nominee for deputy secretary of defense, the second-highest position in the Pentagon. Biden chose Kathleen Hicks for the job, a former Obama administration official whose most recent employer is the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
CSIS is a hawkish think tank funded by some of the country’s top weapons makers, including Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman. CSIS also receives generous contributions from various governments. The think tank’s top government donors include the United Arab Emirates, the US, Japan, and Taiwan.
Since her time in Obama’s Pentagon, Hicks has been busy authoring policy papers and op-eds for CSIS that call for more US involvement around the world. In August, Hicks co-authored a piece for The Hill that slammed President Trump’s plan to cut troop numbers in Germany, a plan Biden could call off.
If he makes it through Senate confirmation, Retired Army Gen. Lloyd Austin will be Hicks’ immediate superior. Austin oversaw President Obama’s Middle East policy as head of US Central Command from 2013 to 2016 and currently sits on the board of Raytheon.
The transition team also announced on Wednesday the nomination of Colin Kahl for undersecretary of defense for policy, another high-level Pentagon spot. Kahl is another Obama-era official who served as the national security advisor to then-Vice President Joe Biden from 2014 to 2017.
While Kahl has previously worked for the Center for a New American Security, another hawkish arms industry-funded think tank, his appointment could be a good sign for the incoming administration’s Iran policy. In 2017, Kahl wrote an op-ed for Foreign Policy defending the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, known as the JCPOA, an agreement Kahl had a role in negotiating.
In 2018, reports claimed that aides to President Trump hired a private spy firm with ties to Israeli intelligence to dig up dirt on Kahl and Obama-era official Ben Rhodes over their role in crafting the nuclear deal.
It just gets ‘better and better’,eh hippies?
Where is the Green Deal?
Hope?
Thought?
Prayer?
i think we are f…. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/21381c47e163f2843c7db0b357b0b0f2209c7a06030d2e00df09e186981f7e18.jpg
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Hicks will have to lead the general by the nose around the Pentagonal Puzzle Palace, 23,000 employees with axes to grind, looking for a new offensive somewhere to ‘make the U.S. safer,’ ‘protect our freedom,’ etc.
Biden’s just playing coy. He knows the republicans will deny any of his nominees so he’s keeping all the doves, that he really wants in his administration, under wraps. Not believable? How about good cop/bad cop? No? Maybe just giving the neocons enough rope to hang themselves with? Or maybe he’s just another lousy president just like the one leaving office(maybe).
but she’s a woman. all that matters according to Biden
How long do we have to continue pretending that presidents actually make such decisions. More decisions are made by Council on Foreign Relations than a president.
But then, all appointees on CFR represent corporate interests, and by that I mean some real flesh and blood tycoons, in an image of Elon Musk, the fellow who thinks he is brilliant at everything. Except that NASA had to put a foot down to finally get astronauts flying again.
So, the super-humans, whose superiority is based on milking federal coffers, have their ministers sitting in all the prominent bodies, and dispense their wisdom.
And we still think those puppets, the elected i ones, actually make decisions, and whatever they do we justify in our minds with the need to play partisan politics.
We need no parties, no advisors, no elections. Select people from telephone books. No parties, just people.
Parties are not in Constitution.
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