The bipartisan overriding of US President Donald Trump's veto of a sweeping military policy bill shows that both Republican and Democratic lawmakers are beholden to the Deep State, says a former US Senate foreign policy analyst.
James Jatras, a former Senate foreign policy adviser in Washington, made the remarks in a phone interview with Press TV on Saturday while commenting on a decision by Republicans to join Democrats in overriding Trump’s veto of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the bill that authorizes US military spending and outlines Pentagon policy.
With 81 of the 100 senators voting, the Republican-controlled Senate approved the $740 billion bill to fund the military for the 2021 fiscal year.
The Democratic-controlled House had already voted to overturn the veto.
The override on Friday delivered the first such blow to Trump just weeks before he leaves office.
“The overriding of President Trump's veto on the so-called National Defense Authorization Act, aside from just one more humiliation he will suffer on his way out of office, is illustrative of the fact that the Republican and Democratic establishments have a total lock on what is a huge money-making machine for the various contractors and personnel that are profiting from the business of global domination,” Jatras told Press TV.
“This money has very little to do with defending the United States, and everything to do with projecting American power around the globe against countries like Iran and Russia and Venezuela and North Korea, that really has very little to do with defending the United States, but it does enrich the structures that have been built up over the decades that people refer to variously as the military-industrial complex — the deep state,” he added.
The Washington-based analyst predicted that such corrupt mechanism would eventually lead to a huge domestic crisis, fleecing the middle class to enrich the top brass.
“The bottom line is this establishment is not going away until we reach some sort of huge crisis unfortunately domestically in this country,” Jatras said.
“But as for the time being, there will continue to be a great sucking mechanism pulling wealth out of essentially the middle class of this country and putting it into the pockets of the very well-positioned and well-connected.”
The US Senate approved the massive annual military budget amid forecasts of a new Cold War last month.
According to Reuters, Trump refused to sign the NDAA into law because it did not repeal certain legal protections for social media platforms and included a provision stripping the names of Confederate generals from military bases.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the congressional veto vote “a resounding rebuke to President Trump’s reckless assault on America’s military and national security.”
Pelosi said Trump was using his last days in office to sow chaos and that the veto override would end his desperate and dangerous sabotage.
Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate majority leader, had praised the bill and urged senators to pass the legislation, calling it “a serious responsibility."
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