The best "defense" money can buy? (a follow up to my Nov. 1st post)

Tired of NOT seeing very much in the main stream media about the three quarters of a trillion-dollar defense budget Congress is getting ready to pass? A budget that is $25 billion MORE than what the war machine (oops, I meant the Pentagon) requested. Apparently, it’s not a story worthy of anything but a passing reference.

First, let’s get something straight – this is NOT a defense budget. It’s a WAR budget. In the late 1940’s as part of the optics during the build-up for the Cold War, the name of the War Department was changed to the Defense Department. What didn’t change was its mission – to make the world safe for US (and its Western European allies) businesses and to prevent revolutionary movements, in what was then called the Third World and is now known as the Global South, from resisting continued exploitation by the old colonial powers or by their proxy, the US.

When I think of defense, I conjure up an image of a protector, don’t you? Thus, if the Congress was interested in spending this money on defending us, they could take a small part of that $750,000,000,000 (and it would take a very small part) to fund a universal, worldwide COVID vaccine program. COVID has already killed 250 times more Americans than the 9/11 attacks and the failure to vaccinate the world’s population guarantees that new variants will continue to kill Americans in large numbers.

They could take another small part of that $750,000,000,000 to eliminate world hunger and an even tinier part to resettle refugees fleeing both natural and manmade disasters (read GLOBAL WARMING) and conflict (read WARS). A much saner solution to the refugee crises than building a wall.

Now that I’m divvying up the WAR budget, I’m excited to take an even larger chunk for a “pet” project of mine (and many millions of folks a lot younger than I) namely saving the world from global warming. Taking money from the WAR machine is a win-win proposition. The military is one of the biggest contributors to global warming, so cutting their budget will reduce that, as well as greatly increase the funds available for a Green New Deal.

The US is now on track to spend more on its war machine than the next 11 or 12 countries in the world combined (up from 7 or 8 only 20 years ago), and most of them are supposedly our allies. Really, now, what are we afraid of? An invasion? (Side bar – the last real invasion of the United States was in 1812, although there was a rumor a couple of years ago that the Nicaraguans were planning to invade, a sort of Bay of Pigs in reverse).

In a recent interview with a Democratic candidate for Congress in our area, I asked him to explain why we should be spending this outrageous sum, and his flippant response was “because we are the largest economy in the world, we need to spend more on our military”. (Sidebar - there is a grain of truth here, even if he had no idea what it was.) He followed it up with a comment to the effect that we need to provide this outlay for the pay and benefits of our soldiers. Obviously, he hasn’t taken a course in elementary logic, nor has he done his homework on the military budget. Only about 23% of the $750,000,000,000 goes to military personal in terms of pay and benefits. You can probably guess where most of the rest goes.

And what do we get for that $$$? A series of failed wars, coups that destabilize countries and whole regions for decades, and wars and bombing campaigns that have killed millions of people. This bloated WAR budget does not make us any safer, but it does result in chronic underfunding of infrastructure and social services at home. I would call that a lose-lose situation.

So how do the WAR machine and the merchants of death (i.e., the Military-Industrial Complex) get away with this? More on this in future posts (but here is a hint – reread the first sentence of the post.)

Danger, Will Robinson, Danger!!!

 

While the Biden Administration, Congress and the mainstream media are focused on discrediting the proponents of single payer healthcare, Wall Street investors are quietly moving to privatize Medicare and Medicaid to complete their control over the entire medical system.

If you are on Medicare, you have probably been bombarded with advertisements for Medicare Advantage, which is one of the insidious ways that Medicare is being undermined. Now comes the Direct Contracting model, with so-called Direct Contracting Entities (DCEs), which get paid monthly by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to cover a specified portion of a patient's medical care—a significant shift from traditional Medicare's direct reimbursement of providers. These “middlemen” will now control what treatments are available and to whom. And they will extract profits for their investors by – you guessed it – finding ways to deny care.

What is even more outrageous is that this change to someone’s Medicare or Medicaid coverage can be done WITHOUT the knowledge of the individual! Wall Street and private equity firms are salivating over the prospect. Rather than allowing patients to go to providers directly as they do under traditional Medicare, DCEs invite insurers and investors to step in and interfere with the care that we get. Billed as a way for Medicare to cut costs, it turns over to these private entities the role of rationing healthcare.

The Direct Contracting model was introduced under Trump, but has been allowed to proceed, for the most part, under the Biden administration, despite a few voices raised in Congress. Currently a group of physicians from around the nation is working to grab the notice of lawmakers, the Biden White House, and the public by traveling to Washington, D.C. and demanding that the Health and Human Services Department immediately stop the experiment, known as Direct Contracting (DC).

Healthcare represents approximately 18% of the GDP. With Big Pharma, large private health insurance providers, and the privatizing and consolidation of hospitals and physicians’ groups all under the control of “investors”, they have turned to Medicare and Medicaid to squeeze even more profit out of ordinary Americans and into the pockets of the 1%.

Think about it this way. The term “for profit healthcare” explains what it is all about – the “profit” comes first and the “healthcare” is whatever is left over.

A conspiracy? or just the normal functioning of vulture capitalism? or both?

From The Intercept

"A ruthless vulture hedge fund called Alden Global Capital is buying up and gutting newspapers all over the country, including some of the nation’s most storied publications.

"Their strategy is simple: Strip the newspaper to bare bones. Cash in on existing subscribers and advertisers. Watch profits go up — and journalism die.

"After the Chicago Tribune was acquired by Alden Global Capital, the paper’s prestigious downtown office was traded in for one the size of a Chipotle. And a quarter of its newsroom staffers — including decorated reporters and photographers — no longer work there.

"This is just one recent example of the struggles the journalism industry is facing. Since 2008, nearly two-thirds of newsroom jobs at U.S. newspapers have vanished. And the coronavirus pandemic has made the situation even worse: Newsrooms cut over 16,000 jobs in 2020, the worst year on record.

"Journalism is the lifeblood of a vibrant democracy. Every time a journalist is taken off the beat, it becomes easier for politicians and corporations to get away with lying to voters and enriching themselves at the public expense."

Where has all the money gone...?

From the American Prospect - An excellent summary of the origin of runaway inequality and what we  can begin to do about it.

Building Back Better Through Taxing Stock Buybacks

For the past four decades—ever since Ronald Reagan’s appointees to the Securities and Exchange Commission changed a rule and opened a floodgate— stock buybacks have been a major contributor to the misshaping of the American economy.

When the top executives of a publicly traded corporation decree that their company will buy back a set amount of the company’s shares, it increases the values of the remaining shares, since the underlying value of the company remains the same but the number of outstanding shares decreases. As those same top executives tend to be very handsomely rewarded for increases in the price of the company’s shares, buying back stock is a legal and apparently painless way of making themselves m-f–ing rich. Nice work if you can get it.

The practice of buying back shares went all but unnoticed by economists until the middle of the last decade, when University of Massachusetts economics professor William Lazonick documented that the sum total of buybacks by the corporations on the S&P 500 over the preceding decade approximated the sum total of their profits. Rather than investing in new equipment or research and development or (God forbid) wage increases, America’s corporate sector was buying back its own stock, to the advantage of their leading executives and their shareholders (chiefly, of course, large shareholders), and to the detriment of, well, the economy at large. Lazonick published his findings in the Harvard Business Review and has continued to cover this subject through a host of articles in the Prospect and other publications.

Over the past decade, the S&P 500 have repurchased more than $5 trillion of their own stock, and the rate of repurchasing is steadily increasing: They’re pledged to buy back $1 trillion in this year alone. According to a New York Times analysis, Apple devoted $423 billion on buybacks over the past decade, while spending just $233 billion on capital expenditures and R&D.

It makes perfect sense, then, that a one percent tax on corporate buybacks is part of the Build Back Better bill that the House has passed and sent to the Senate. Over the next decade, the tax is expected to yield roughly $124 billion to pay for climate investments, workforce development and such that our corporations wouldn’t get around to on their own.

Harold Meyerson

Heather Cox Richardson's Thanksgiving Message (too good not to share)

November 25, 2021 

Heather Cox Richardson

7 hr ago

2,174

263

I started these letters completely inadvertently on September 15, 2019, after I happened to see House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff's (D-CA) angry letter to then–acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire on September 13, noting that the committee knew a whistleblower had made a complaint and demanding that Maguire produce that complaint as required by law. As a political historian, I saw that for what it was: an accusation from a member of the legislative branch that someone in the executive branch had very clearly broken a specific law. That was huge, way different than the general complaints around at the time that, for example, then-president Trump must be violating the emoluments clause of the Constitution, an accusation that was vague enough that it was terribly hard to address.

Two days later, on September 15, a yellow jacket sting made me cancel my afternoon plans, and as I sat waiting to make sure I didn’t react badly to the sting, I used the time to write on my Facebook page where I had been posting once a week or so for years. I wrote about the history of the previous month and mentioned the issue of the missing whistleblower’s complaint. That post got swamped with people asking so many questions that I wrote another, and then another.

And so the Letters from an American were born.

Over the past two years, this has become a team project. While I do the legwork of explaining the politics of these crisis times, my heroic editors keep my writing clean and factual.

But this project really belongs to you who read it. It was your voice that created the project, you who inspire me when I am so dead tired I fall asleep sitting up, and you who bring in related material and ask questions and correct my stupid errors. Above all, it is you who are helping to model what we so desperately need in America: a respectful community based in facts, rather than in anger and partisanship, a community that can defend our democracy and carry it into a new era.

I am honored to be walking this road alongside all of you. You are smart, funny, kind, talented, insightful, creative, and principled.

And I am so very proud of what we are building together.

Thank you, for all of it.

Happy Thanksgiving.

 

Who'd a Thunk?

The federal government has mandated COVID vaccinations for all employees, except those who have sought exemptions on religious grounds.  Compliance with the mandate varies widely from agency to agency. The Education Department had just a few dozen exemption requests, while the Bureau of Prisons had thousands. Can't quite get my head around this. Is it because folks working in the prison system are that much more religious than educators?

Cartoon du Jour (from Facebook)

Playing Russian Roulette with a Nuclear Holocaust

 

What if I were to tell you that the US government could save hundreds of billions of dollars and make us and the rest of the world a lot safer at the same time, you might think I’d been hit on the head with, well, an ICBM. That’s an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, in case you aren’t familiar with our stockpile of nuclear weapons delivery systems.

 

The US currently has 400 of them, all sitting in silos in the Midwest. They are armed with multiple warheads, which means they could literally wipe out thousands of targets (which sounds innocuous until you realize that those “targets” are mostly cities with millions of human beings living in them) around the world in a couple of hours and probably usher in a “nuclear winter”. I have to wonder if that’s the solution the Pentagon has for the problem of global warming.

 

If that isn’t crazy enough, they are all on hair-trigger alert. Because of their vulnerability, if there is any indication that the US might be under nuclear attack by a foreign power, the President would have approximately 30 minutes to decide whether to “use them or lose them”. The problem is that once launched, they cannot be called back. This scenario has almost played out on more than one occasion over the past 50 years. So far, the trigger has not been pulled, but in essence, we’ve been playing nuclear Russian roulette for all these years.

 

It should be clear that these weapons pose a grave threat of an “accidental” nuclear holocaust. But what is also true is that they are totally unnecessary as a deterrent to nuclear attack from Russia or China (or anyone else, for that matter). That’s because the US also has huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons aboard bombers and submarines. Because these weapons are mobile, they are not vulnerable to a first strike attack by an enemy and therefore do not have to be launched on warning. Thus, eliminating all land-based ICBMs, would still leave the US with a massive nuclear deterrent. While this still means depending on the strategy of Mutually Assured Destruction to prevent nuclear holocaust (with the appropriate acronym MAD), it at least takes the finger off the trigger.

 

According to Gen. James E Cartwright, former vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff “By scrapping the vulnerable land-based missile force, any need for launching on warning disappears.” And the world becomes a lot safer place for our children and grandchildren, here and around the world.

 

What about the billions of $$$ in savings? It turns out that the military wants to modernize the ground-based nukes with a new generation of ICBMs named the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent, or GBSD. The cost? An estimated $364 billion on top of the spending to maintain the current stock of ICBMs during the transition. Northrop Grumman has already been awarded $13.3 billion for “engineering and manufacturing development”. (Note: Northrop Grumman stock is up almost 20% over the last year.)

 

Unfortunately, this is only the tip of the iceberg. For more detail, check out Andrew Cockburn’s new book, “The Spoils of War”. In the book Cockburn aptly quotes one Pentagon weapons designer in the 1960s telling new hires that they would be making “weapons that don’t work to meet threats that don’t exist.” This, at the height of the Cold War! It’s bad enough to waste our tax money on things that don’t work (try another Northrop boondoggle, the B-2 stealth bomber, which cost over $2 billion each in 1990 dollars for the 21 actually produced and which wasn’t “stealth” at all). But to see society’s wealth squandered on weapons that make us LESS safe is the height of insanity.

 

We would be better served if they just poured the money down the drain. Or they could use it to offset some of the costs of Build Back Better, hopefully mollifying Senators Manchin and Sinema.

Thought for the day

 

Thoughts of Michael Moore

 

Insurrectionist Envy

Deep down, we wish we had their guts (minus the insanity & violence)

Michael Moore 1 hr ago 86 36

Fasten your seatbelts. I have something I want to say. Something I probably shouldn’t. Right now it’s just you and me here. The security cameras are turned off. The NSA guy who monitors my calls, Fred, has taken the day off. I’m glad, because I need to say something to you and I need you to admit you’ve been thinking the same thing, too.  

Aside from the violence, aside from their despicable racism and misogyny, aside from the fact that we vehemently oppose everything they stand for — the truth is, that deep down in your soul, as you watched what your eyes could not believe was happening, admit to me that in that appalling moment on January 6, 2021, you were — how do I say it —  jealous that it was the fascists who had risen up, and not us long before now. Again, not jealous of the unforgivable violence they unleashed. Rather, I’m suggesting that there’s a small piece of you and me that has wished for just once in our lives we had that kind of courage, that resolve, that rage of conscience and commitment to just not effing put up with this shit any longer. 

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Deep, deep down we ask ourselves why didn’t we do this when there was a real theftof an election in November of 2000? We did not storm the barricades of the hanging chads in Florida. We did not surround the Supreme Court when they handed the White House to the man who lost.  

We did not storm the Pentagon in August of 1964 on the day after Lyndon Johnson lied to the American people, telling us that the Vietnamese had attacked one of our ships in the Gulf of Tonkin.

And last week, as the Republican politicians in Texas declared their ownership of the reproductive organs of all women in Texas, we the majority did not rush to Austin and nonviolently encircle the state capitol building, take down the Texas flag, and refuse to leave until they removed their filthy hands from the bodies of the 173 million American women they wish to control. We are just months away from the Supreme Court’s own grubby hands doing just that — and what, my friends, are we going to do about that? Right now the Trump Court should be quivering in their boots, not from fear of our violence (we are nonviolent), but simply because they know WE are the majority, WE elected a House, a Senate, a President who believe what WE believe — and as long as this barely remains a Democracy and there are millions more of us than there are of them, they need to fear our wrath, the wrath of this Democracy, that WE are nonviolently coming for them and WE are not leaving until they back down from their stated desire to declare women 3/5 of a man. 

The National Guard and the police will not be as accommodating when the left rises up. (Photo by Roberto Schmidt /AFP via Getty)

But they do not fear us. They will not only force the majority gender to give birth by edict, to make women reproductive slaves against their will, they and their fascist minority will continue to eliminate voting rights, suppress the vote of Black and Hispanic Americans, force the poor to work for $7.25 an hour, force our students to be saddled with 30 years of student debt, force millions of single parents to leave a sick child at home alone because there is no day care, and force many of you to die a lonely and broken death because tens of millions of you don’t have the resources to pay a goddamn specialist to heal you and let…you…live. 

Why wouldn’t ANY of these assaults on our lives, our bodies, our children not make us get up right now and nonviolently storm the Capitol? THIS IS OUR LIFE! THESE ARE OUR CHILDREN! If the State is going to use its power to physically hold you down to forcibly birth a baby against your will — I mean, please, people! What exactly will it take to make you and millions of others run down Pennsylvania Avenue screaming bloody murder and nonviolently prohibiting those Justices from entering that Court building?!

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Tens of thousands of you have been wrongly turned away from the voting booth, stripping you of your constitutional right to elect YOUR representatives. You’ve been shown the door, tossed to the curb like the garbage they say you are. Why is it not your very next move - and we, your neighbors, OUR very next move - to put on our Viking headgear and run like wild men and women with the force of hundreds of thousands of us, nonviolently storming the chambers of our state Capitols and NOT LEAVING until they give us back our voting rights?

We all talk a good line about climate and the environment and the destruction of our planet — but really folks, if you TRULY and ABSOLUTELY believed that the end of the world is near, you’d be right now running and screaming down the middle of the West Side Highway like your hair was on fire, on your way to Wall Street with nonviolent clubs in your hands, or storming down Grand Boulevard to General Motors HQ in Detroit to shut them the fuck down, or flying like crazed banshees down Market Street in San Francisco to PG&E and nonviolently show them what it would look like for their executives to be without power, or a million of us in the Potomac on anything that floats and nonviolently surround Joe Manchin’s yacht and tow that bastard away, safely, so he doesn’t cause harm to anyone else. 

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You would do that, wouldn’t you, because you believe the earth is at its end, because you believe women’s bodies are their own and no one else’s, because you believe the police do not have the right shoot a Black kid in the back and laugh about it later, and because you believe your sick baby has a HUMAN RIGHT to see a doctor! And for THAT you would join MILLIONS in the street, right now, to demand that this State violence, these corporate attacks on WE the people must end and we will not relent until this madness ends. 

But you and I will not do that. Why? Because we’re afraid? Because if the planet isn’t worth dying for, then the planet won’t be worth living on. That’s the ultimate fight and it’s been that way throughout history, throughout all the struggles to make people free. And if your children, your control of your reproductive organs, your right to vote, and the death of this planet aren’t worth the fight, then let’s just say that out loud, be honest with ourselves and get back to arresting the hooligans of January 6th because that’ll show ‘em — and it will make us feel better about ourselves because we would never do what they did! And because we will not rise up, well, the shame of knowing that about ourselves and revealing it to the White Supremacists who at least have the courage of their sick convictions — that’s just too much to bear. In the summer of 2020 we showed the world the largest nationwide demonstrations ever and the murderous cop was sent to prison and Trump was sent packing — and then what? So all we have left to do is throw Steve Bannon in jail? And then we can get back to the real fight of recycling our pop bottles, putting some solar panels on our roofs and whatever else our environmental leader Mike Bloomberg and his Sierra Club tell us to do? Because we all know, deep, deep down, the fix is in, our Democracy is in shreds, Black Lives don’t really matter and it’s too late now to stop Planet Earth from spinning off into the sunset of its demise because we ignored the real radical environmentalists and the teenage student from Sweden and went with the sell-outs instead. All this, because we secretly admire how the Right fights, wins, stands their ground, and never backs down. Even when they KNOW there are far many more of us than there are of them. They don’t care. This is THEIR country and we can either go eff ourselves or just go whine in the corner, wringing our hands about how “we’re going to lose the House and the Senate next year! And Trump will be back in 2024!” By the Democrats failing to deliver on most of Biden’s promises, we may depress the vote in 2022 and make that our self-fulfilling prophecy. Yes, we secretly admire the Right — not because of their bigotry and fascism, but because they get the job done. 

Aides arrive with ballots boxes to certify the Electoral College votes on January 6th, 2021. In 2001 and 2017, this process resulted in the candidate with fewer votes winning the White House, but with minimal protest. (Photo By Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call via Getty)

We could get the job done, too. But that would require all of us going back out into the streets like we did after the murder of George Floyd, following the lead of our youth, and women and people of color. And we would have to be relentless and never leave those streets or the offices of our governors, or the other halls of power. And we must finally look like we fucking mean business — out with the filibuster!Eliminate the Electoral College! Four new permanent seats on the Supreme Court (because when they made it nine seats in 1869, we had only 39 million people in the country and now we have 333 million — nine is not enough Justices to handle the backlog of cases in a nation that is now almost nine times larger!). We need to get serious, have it our way and if some kids end up nonviolently breaking a few windows at the neighborhood branch of Chase Bank, then so be it. When we win, and we hold true power, we promise to replace those windows free of charge, because that’s how liberals roll. 

How did we get to this place where an overwhelmingly conservative, caucasian and male group of citizens -- many of them well-off, snobby and as entitled as the former President they were fighting on behalf of -- how have they become America’s radical insurrectionists? Maybe it should not have come as a surprise; white, male rage at progressive changes is not new —and January 6th was the latest manifestation.

The real question I want to raise with you today is this: if we truly believe what we say we believe, and if our warnings about the peril we are in are all true  then wouldn’t we have brought our Nation’s Capital to its knees by now? Shouldn’t we have grinded the wheels of the apparatus to a halt, and done so, many times over? How many more times can we declare a state of emergency, or claim that the next election is the most important of our lifetime, but yet not be willing to storm the gates of power, be they financial, political or military, and thus make them all shiver in fear? 

In short: where is our insurrection?

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Rachel Dawn 5 min ago Partly I think we have been satisfied by our little “victories”… electing the first African-American President, convicting the man who murdered George Floyd, getting Trump out of the White House, getting the majority in the Senate. We’re too lazy to fight for more. Things aren’t that bad for us white privileged people… why should we stick our necks out for our black and brown brothers and sisters? We need to start caring for all of us. Maybe that will be the day we non-violently storm the Capitol.  Reply

Joe Bacon 6 min ago The corrupted Supreme Court has sent a clear signal that they will kill Roe. They won't stop there. They will overturn Obergefell, Griswald, Loving and I would not put it past them to overturn the Brown decision as well. They are going to take us back to Jim Crow.  Is that the breaking point?  Or will it take the corrupted court to kill Social Security and Medicare to finally wake people up from the narcosis of Ayn Rand's selfishness?  1Reply

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In The End, Bin Laden WonHe couldn’t have done it without us Michael Moore Sep 7 320 64 The Miracle of Kabul | Episode 208: Rumble w/ Michael MooreListen now (63 min) | Thank You President Biden Michael Moore Aug 26 234 198 See all  Ready for more? © 2021 Michael Moore. See privacy, terms and information collection notice Publish on Substack Michael Moore is on Substack – the place for independent writing