Not sure I want to be a Democrat anymore

In North Carolina’s 4^th Congressional District Democratic Primary, a young Muslim woman is running for the Democratic nomination. If elected, the Nida Allam would be the youngest woman ever elected to Congress and its first Pakistani-American member. She is a progressive, who worked for Bernie Sanders in 2016 and later served a term as third vice chair of the NC State Democratic Party.

NC’s 4^th CD is a safe seat, encompassing Durham and Chapel Hill, so the winner of the Democratic primary will be a shoo-in in November. Up to the beginning of April, Allam, a Durham County Commissioner, had a big local fundraising lead over her two opponents, North Carolina state Sen. Valerie Foushee and Clay Aiken, singer-turned-activist. 

At this point, major national groups have jumped in, both in terms of endorsements, and more importantly, money. Some, like Emily’s List, are closely associated with the establishment wing of the Democratic party. Additionally, it has been revealed that the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), had bundled more than half of Foushee’s $320,000 early April campaign haul and AIPAC’s “super PAC, United Democracy Project, has purchased $720,000 in airtime for TV ads promoting Foushee’s personal story and work” (Huffington Past). Please note that AIPAC has also endorsed 80% of the Republican members of Congress who opposed the certification of the 2020 presidential election results.

Another big donor in support of Foushee’s campaign is Protect Our Future, a super PAC funded by a cryptocurrency billionaire. Conclusion: some of the most reactionary forces and big money are joining together to ensure that another progressive voice is kept out of Congress.

And it’s not just NC. The Jessica Cisneros campaign in Texas has seen national establishment opposition to her efforts to unseat one of the most conservative Congressmen in the House.

Those allied with the corporate/neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party, the centrists, the old guard, whatever you want to call them, continue to squander resources to fight the progressives, resources that would be better spent fighting Republicans.

The progressive wing of the party, which has been pushing a program that is both absolutely necessary to meet the crises we face and popular, particularly among younger voters, is being marginalized by any means available in order to please the Party’s corporate donors and, supposedly attract upper middle class white suburbanites. It has consistently failed to fight for the needs of working-class Americans and marginalized rural and urban communities. It has failed to aggressively stand up to Republican dog whistle attacks. 

It seems to me that the Democratic Party on the national, state and local levels is moribund. At the last New Hanover County party meeting on Zoom, it looked like some 85-90% of the participants were over 60. New voter registration, here and in most places in the country, is overwhelmingly “unaffiliated”, despite the clear movement of the Republican Party towards fascism. Young people do not see the Democratic Party as a viable alternative, perhaps because it isn’t.

For the time being I plan to stay and fight for the progressive alternative to the corporate leadership, but I left the Party once before, in 1968, when Humphrey was nominated on a platform to continue the Vietnam War and the more I look at the current situation (including the US actions with regard to Ukraine) the more I see 1968 all over again. History repeats …

(Note: I plan to post a series of articles I am working on that traces the history of “The Empire of Liberty”, aka US imperialism, from its origins until today. I hope you will stay tuned.)

For more information on how this is coming down in NC, check out this article from Huffington Post.  https://www.huffpost.com/entry/big-money-north-carolina-democratic-primary_n_6269afc5e4b029505dedaeb1

BTW, it’s not too late to make contributions to the Congressional campaigns of two progressives.

Nida Allam at https://nidaallam.com/

Jessica Cisneros at https://jessicacisnerosforcongress.com/

 

US goals in Ukraine

“U.S. wants Russian military ‘weakened’ from Ukraine invasion, Austin says” (WAPO, 4/25/22)

“U.S. to send diplomats back to Ukraine, pledges support in protracted war” (WAPO, 4/25/22)

The Austin referred to in the first headline from the Washington Post is the US Secretary of Defense. He was accompanied by US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, on an official visit to Ukraine, to make clear that the US will continue to back the Ukrainian military.  

There apparently was no discussion of negotiations, because the US government leadership doesn’t want the war to end. Why would it? The war is justifying massive increases in US military spending (both to supply Ukraine and, in even greater amounts, at home) and Lockheed Martin and the other “merchants of death” are riding high. Better yet, it is doing so without any American body bags being off loaded from C5As (for those of you too young to remember the Vietnam War, those were the military transport planes, built by, you guessed it, the Lockheed Corporation, which, on their return trips from Southeast Asia, brought back the young Americans who died in the war).

The war in Ukraine has also had another collateral benefit for the Biden administration. It pushes their failure to deal effectively with the COVID pandemic and the climate warming crisis, both at home and abroad off the front page. It provides the talking heads of the US media a convenient excuse to bury the alarming news of a planet on fire (“no more water, the fire next time”) and continuing lack of effective dissemination of the COVID vaccines worldwide. It provides cover for those “Democrats” who have opposed The Green New Deal, critical infrastructure spending, etc., on the grounds of cost, reminiscent of the “guns or butter” debates that shut down the Great Society legislation in the late 1960s. History, it appears, does repeat and when we fail to learn from history, we are destined to repeat it.

On the diplomatic front, the war has allowed the US to push other European countries, who are not NATO members, to join, so as to be under our “protective umbrella”, which I might add is mostly nuclear in nature. And, it has led to other NATO members pledging to increase their “defense” (read military) budgets, in order to purchase more weapons from US corporations. BTW, I have a question for the readers: How do you tell the difference between former US government officials and lobbyists for the “defense” industry. Hint: There isn’t any. (see article by Matt Taibbi below)

Yes, the US is willing to help the Ukraine fight to the last Ukrainian because it can benefit from this proxy war. It doesn’t even try to hide that fact.

 

From TK News by Matt Taibbi

When is a TV news interview not just an interview?

Leon Panetta was the nation’s top security official under Barack Obama, famous for his hangdog eyes and soft-spoken, equivocating defenses of torture and assassination of Americans while serving as both Secretary of Defense and CIA director. That was years ago. Today, he’s a senior counselor at Beacon Global Strategies, which represents a host of security companies, including famed munitions maker Raytheon. In Matt Orfalea’s booming video above, we see Panetta on a recent CNN broadcast stumping for Raytheon products like Javelin and Stinger missiles, with host Bianna Golodryga saying only that he “was America’s defense secretary and CIA director.” Orfalea goes on to capture how Panetta and other military “experts” chant WEAPONS WEAPONS WEAPONS over and over like they’re trying to open magic treasure chests, their commercial ties never revealed.

As war rages, there will be officials on TV with sincere opinions about how the U.S. can help Ukraine. Very often, however, what you’re watching is a paid lobbyist plugging for a weapons maker.

Joe Biden last week authorized another $800 million in military aid to Ukraine. This second major tranche of weapons came on the heels of weeks of passionate advocacy from former national security officials calling for heavy spending on reinforcements. Somewhere in the past, these commentators usually have impressive credentials. However, the more recent jobs of these commentators are often paid gigs helping military contractors “achieve their business objectives.” This phenomenon was embarrassing before Iraq, but the last months have seen near-total saturation of the airwaves by such figures. ...

 

Medicare is the new cash cow for insurers

Below is an article from Just Care. It describes how the federal government is continuing the privatization of Medicare bit by bit. (see my 11/30/21 post, Danger, Will Robinson, Danger!!!) At a time when it should be obvious that we desperately need expansion of public health care, what we are getting is the exact opposite.

Has the massive health care industry, which accounts for roughly 20% of our gross domestic product, improved the health of ordinary Americans? Here are a few relevant facts:

• The US spends approximately twice as much per capita on health care as other developed nations 
• The US ranked 46th in the world in life expectancy before COVID-19, just below Estonia and Cuba
• The US has seen a decline in life expectancy starting in 2014 (well before COVID). It is the only nation in the developed world to see such a decline. (As a result of COVID, some developed countries did see a decline in 2020, but they all recovered in 2021 - that is, except the US)
• The US infant mortality rate is double that of most European countries and higher than that of Cuba and Serbia.
• A December 2021 poll found 46% of insured adults struggled to afford out-of-pocket costs and 29% have not taken medicine as prescribed because it’s too expensive.

For those of us who have been demanding Medicare for All, I wouldn't be surprised to see the medical insurance profiteers joining our ranks, now that they have figured out how to make even more profits from Medicare, profits that are guaranteed by our tax dollars.

I have made a few edits in the article for brevity and clarity. The edits are in italics.

Medicare is the new cash cow for insurers

April 13, 2022 

by Wendell Potter

In a move generally ignored by most media outlets, the Biden administration this week made the shareholders of a small number of for-profit health insurers much richer.

The insurers’ new cash cow is the federal government’s Medicare program, which has become increasingly privatized since former president George W. Bush signed the Medicare Modernization Act into law in 2003. That law is best known for establishing the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit (without allowing the government to negotiate lower prices for the drugs like insulin). It was largely written by lobbyists for pharmaceutical and health insurance companies to ensure an ongoing stream of billions of dollars in profits.

Of even greater significance to the insurance industry, though, was a provision of that law that took a languishing private alternative to Medicare–known until 2003 as Medicare+Choice–and began throwing enormous sums of money at private insurers to entice them into participating in what became known as Medicare Advantage plans.

In various ways, the federal government since 2003 has overpaid private insurers hundreds of billions of dollars as an incentive to continue offering those plans. And every year, the federal Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has given those insurers raises (paid for by increasing the Medicare Medical Insurance deduction from the Social Security benefits), to the point that Medicare Advantage plans–which were touted by many politicians as a way to save taxpayers money–actually cost the government considerably more per enrollee than traditional Medicare.

This week, CMS announced that private insurers would get one of the biggest raises in the history of the Medicare Advantage program–8.5%. That was even more than the 7.9% increase CMS had previously signaled it would approve and that had triggered outrage among many health care reform advocates and some members of Congress.

Investors were so pleased that yesterday morning they rushed to buy shares of Anthem, Centene, Cigna, Humana, and UnitedHealth Group, all of which are traded on the New York Stock Exchange and all of which are big players in the Medicare Advantage marketplace.

The biggest winner was the biggest Medicare Advantage player of all – and the biggest for-profit insurer – UnitedHealth. United’s stock price hit an all time high of $526.97 yesterday before settling down to close at $517.76 a share. That’s around $500 a share more than what a share of the company’s stock was worth when Congress passed the Medicare Modernization Act in June 2003.

This helps explain why you see so many Joe Namath commercials on TV every fall during the Medicare Advantage open-enrollment period. Insurers spend billions of taxpayer dollars on misleading ads designed to lure as many seniors as possible into their plans.

It also explains why the big health insurers are now getting far more of their revenues from government programs (which means from taxpayers) than from private paying customers.

Last year, the six biggest health insurers made more than $60 billion in profits, fueled in large part by the money they now take in from Uncle Sam. Reviewing 12 years of those companies’ financial disclosures since the Affordable Care Act was signed into law reveals that almost 90% of their collective gains in health plan enrollment came from government programs, mostly Medicare.

Keep in mind that most of the additional money CMS plans to give Medicare Advantage plans will go to just a few for-profit insurers, all of which have reported record profits over the past few years. And as Kaiser Family Foundation researchers have found, almost half of Americans enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans are in plans operated by United and Humana.

The rapid growth of Medicare Advantage plan enrollment since 2003 has been nothing short of remarkable, doubling over the past decade. This year, more than 28 million people–45% of the total Medicare population–were enrolled in a Medicare Advantage plan.

It is long past time for members of Congress to start paying attention to how a handful of health insurers are depleting the Medicare Trust Fund in their ongoing quest to make their shareholders richer.

 

A Comparison - The US and Russia on Human Rights and International Law

When it comes to abiding by the principles of international law and order, the US and 
Russia can rightly be classified as rogue states, who reserve the "right" to use or threaten the use of force in any situation they deem necessary to protect their interests. The US is also the world's top arms dealer, with Russia a distant second. And, don't forget that the US has 750 military bases in 80 nations and territories around the world; Russia has about 20 bases, most of them in former Soviet Republics.

From "RootsAction", April 20, 2022

Neither the United States nor Russia is a party to the International Criminal Court – and the United States punishes other governments for supporting the ICC.

Both the United States and Russia defy the rulings of the International Court of Justice.

Of 18 major human rights treaties, Russia is party to only 11, and the United States to only 5, as few as any nation on Earth: https://indicators.ohchr.org.

Both nations violate treaties at will, including the United Nations Charter, Kellogg Briand Pact and other laws against war.

While most of the world upholds disarmament and anti-weapons treaties, the United States and Russia refuse to support and openly defy major treaties.

There is a problem in world leadership.

Russia’s horrific invasion of Ukraine – as well as the previous years of U.S./Russian struggle over Ukraine, including U.S.-backed regime change in 2014, Russia's annexation of Crimea, and the mutual arming of conflict in Donbas -- highlight this problem in global leadership.

Russia and the United States stand as rogue regimes outside the Landmines Treaty, the Arms Trade Treaty, the Convention on Cluster Munitions (prohibiting their use, production and transfer), and many other treaties. Russia stands accused of using cluster bombs in Ukraine today, while U.S.-made cluster munitions have been used by Saudi Arabia near civilian areas in Yemen.

The United States and Russia are the top two dealers of weaponry to the rest of the world, together accounting for a majority of weapons sold and shipped. Meanwhile most places experiencing wars manufacture no weapons at all. Weapons are imported to most of the world from a very few places.

Neither the United States nor Russia supports the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Neither complies with the disarmament requirement of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and the United States actually keeps nuclear weapons in five other nations and considers putting them into more, while Russia has talked of putting nuclear weapons in Belarus and recently seemed to threaten their use over the war in Ukraine.

The United States and Russia are the top two users of the veto power at the UN Security Council, each frequently shutting down democracy with a single vote.

US wants war crimes tribunals for the Russian invasion, but ...

 

The US has always prided itself as supporting and enforcing the concept of a “rules-based order” of international law. But when it comes to enforcement by any kind of international organization, it has adamantly excluded itself from their jurisdiction. If there were a Nobel Prize for hypocrisy, the US government and its compliant media would be the overwhelming choice (except that the US government would, of course, veto the selection).

The war in Ukraine presents an example of this hypocrisy, both in terms of its coverage by the media and the demands that the aggressors be tried as war criminals. While the horrendous actions of the Russian government and military should be condemned, in many respects they pale in significance to actions by the US and its NATO allies in the last 20+ years (and, if we go back further, to the Vietnam War, the Korean War, and the use of nuclear weapons on Japan at the end of WWII, all of which resulted in massive numbers of civilian deaths).

As reported in a recent article by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies in Nation of Change,

“Mosul in Iraq was the largest city that the United States and its allies reduced to rubble in that campaign, with a pre-assault population of 1.5 million. About 138,000 houses were damaged or destroyed by bombing and artillery, and an Iraqi Kurdish intelligence report counted at least 40,000 civilians killed.

“Raqqa, which had a population of 300,000, was gutted even more. A UN assessment mission reported that 70-80% of buildings were destroyed or damaged. Syrian and Kurdish forces in Raqqa reported counting 4,118 civilian bodies. Many more deaths remain uncounted in the rubble of Mosul and Raqqa. Without comprehensive mortality surveys, we may never know what fraction of the actual death toll these numbers represent. 

Yet neither of these (and there are many, many more) clear cut violations of the “rules-based order” are mentioned alongside of the coverage of the Russian atrocities in Ukraine. In fact, the U.S. and its allies have dropped over 337,000 bombs and missiles on nine countries since 2001 alone. Lost in the “fog of war” promoted by the US media is this comparison: the first 24 days of Russia’s bombing of Ukraine were less destructive than the first day of U.S. bombing in Iraq in 2003. To the media and much of the American public “Shock and Awe” was a beautiful sight, much like the fireworks on the 4^th of July, not a deadly violation of “rules-based order”.

We are rightfully horrified when we see civilians killed by Russian bombardment in Ukraine, but not quite so horrified, when we hear that civilians are killed by U.S. forces or American weapons in Iraq, Syria, Yemen or Gaza. The Western corporate media play a key role in this, showing us corpses in Ukraine, but not equally disturbing images of people killed by U.S. or allied forces. Most of these atrocities fly totally under the radar, to use a military metaphor.

While it is the media’s hypocrisy that creates different reactions to the crimes committed in modern warfare depending on the nation involved and the color of the victims of these crimes, it should be stated that it is even more hypocritical for a nation that refuses to sign international treaties for the prosecution of war criminals, to demand that other nations be charged with war crimes. The US has steadfastly refused to ratify the treaty establishing the International Criminal Court which is where war crimes would be tried. It has demanded exceptions for itself with regard to the Genocide Convention, which was the first human rights treaty adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations, and other international treaties that define a “rules-based order”.

It is the only country that has rejected a decision by the Word Court. When the court ruled that the US was guilty of unlawful use of force in Nicaragua in 1986 and ordered it to pay reparations, the US government responded by ignoring the court AND escalating the conflict. Then in the American Service-Members' Protection Act of 2002 (aka the Hague Invasion Act), Congress, with the support of both Republicans and Democrats, authorized the President to use the American military to free its service members or those of any allied country who might be taken for trial in the Hague, Netherlands.

Conclusion: the “rules-based order”, one which the US had a major hand in defining and has been demanding others abide by, does not apply to the US. Why? Because the US has the power to enforce it on the others and to prevent it from being enforced on itself. That power is guaranteed by spending almost $800 billion dollars or more of our tax dollars on “defense”, defense not of the American homeland and its citizens, but of the US “Empire of Liberty”, not to mention US corporate interests  abroad (or are they one and the same thing?)

The question remains, how did this come about. The standard explanation is that world leadership was thrust on a reluctant United States by the fact that it was spared the devastation of WWII and by the expansion of communism. A recent reading of an excellent book by Stephen Wertheim, Tomorrow the World, has inspired the historian in me to look once again into the rise of the US “Empire of Liberty” and its true nature. I will share my musings as I go along the path – starting in the beginning, the year 1607.

 

 

Dr Martin Luther King, Breaking the Silence (1967)

We recently passed a milestone, which was not noted by our politicians and press, but is critical to understanding the world around us today. On April 6, 1967 - 55 years ago, Dr King delivered an address, Beyond Vietnam - A Time to Break the Silence. Although he was criticized by many, including some of his ardent supporters, Dr King remained steadfast in his opposition to the Vietnam War and US military intervention. He also drew the connections to the underlying features of American society.

In the speech he identified the pervasive presence of the “giant triplets” of racism, materialism, and militarism. He described the Vietnam War as “but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit.”  This malady still persists in the widespread inequality and crippling poverty that pervade what is still the world’s richest nation, in the enormous gap between the "developed" countries and the Global South, and in our country’s continuing appetite for war to maintain US hegemony, whether waged directly or through proxies. From our halls of government to our compliant media there is a refusal to recognize this relationship of racism, materialism, and militarism, each drawing on and sustaining the others.

The US has long claimed the mantel of the "Empire of Liberty", first declared by Thomas Jefferson in 1780. In the next few weeks I will try to examine this claim, or, more accurately, justification, in light of our history. In the meanwhile, I have included a link, where you can hear (preferably) or read the entirety of Dr King's speech. Change a few of the names, and it could have been delivered on April 6, 2022. 

https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm

Pollution of our water is necessary to combat global warming???

News from The Intercept (my comments in italics)

“CHEMOURS HAS OFFERED a novel argument in defense of one of its toxic PFAS chemicals, known as GenX: that the compound, which causes cancer and other health effects in lab animals and was released by the company into the drinking water of hundreds of thousands of people (just upstream from where I live), is necessary for the fight against climate change.

“Chemours, a chemical company that was spun off from DuPont in 2015, made the case for GenX as an environmental good in response to a toxicity assessment of the chemical that the Environmental Protection Agency finalized in October … Chemours’ attorneys asked the agency to weaken its threshold, arguing that GenX is necessary for the country’s transition away from fossil fuels.

“Chemours’s chemistries are critical to achieving the United States’ energy transition and decarbonization ambitions,” attorneys from the firm Arnold & Porter wrote, going on to note that GenX is used in the process of creating compounds called fluoropolymers, which are used to make lithium-ion batteries used in electric cars, membranes used for water purification, and hydrogen from renewable sources.

“The company, which makes GenX in its plant in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and uses the chemical at its facilities in New Jersey and West Virginia, also insisted that continued domestic production is important for U.S. energy independence: “There are often no domestically manufactured alternative replacement products available for these mission-critical applications.”

“According to Chemours, which reported net sales of $6.3 billion last year, restrictions on GenX are not just a threat to the company’s bottom line … The company’s attorneys argued that the “EPA’s Toxicity Assessment, unless corrected, has the potential to cause significant harm to Chemours as well as to the broader United States economy.”

 

The last sentence is very telling. Big corporations routinely assert that their well-being and the of the “broader United States economy” are one and the same. It’s an interesting extrapolation from neoliberalism and was central to the ideas of the Austrian economist, Friedrich Hayek (author of The Road to Serfdom), and the Chicago School of Milton Friedman.

In his response to Hayek, Karl Polanyi posited that capitalism had reversed the traditional relationship of the economy to society. In precapitalist eras, the economy was organized to serve society, but under capitalism, society serves the interests of the economy. Polanyi’s book, The Great Transformation, although written almost 80 years ago, should be on everyone’s reading list, as we look at neoliberalism and its consequence, runaway inequality.

Where has all the money gone (again)

If you follow the mainstream media as you source of news (rather than entertainment, which is what it actually is) you may not have seen much about the proposed 10% increase in the Pentagon’s war budget, a byproduct of the war in Ukraine. Note that this is being more than matched by some of our key allies in NATO (UK, Germany & France). This comes on top of what they and the US already spend, which in 2020 was just under $1 trillion, as compared to Russia, which spent a measly $62 billion in 2020. It puzzles me how the Russians plan to take over the rest of Eastern Europe, if they were to win the war in Ukraine, as some have posited, without spending a lot more. 

In another under-reported story, it appears that the budget for 2023 includes $7.5 billion for Project Artemis, which would return American astronauts to the Moon as early as 2025, and land the first woman and person of color on the Moon.

Here’s where it gets interesting. In another wonderful example of 3P (public-private partnership) NASA is not building the rockets, etc. itself, but contracting out the entire project. And who has been fighting over the big bucks’ contract – Jeff Bezos and his Blue Origin and Elon Musk and his Space-X.

So, to be clear, the US government is about to shell out $7.5 billion to one of the two richest individuals in the world, who I might add pay a much lower percentage of their income in taxes than your average waitress, to do something the government has already shown it can do very well.

I realize that $7.5 billion is chicken feed compared to the $500,000,000,000 that will accrue to the “defense” industry (aka, Masters of War) as a result of 2023 Pentagon budget (yes, approximately 1/2 of the Pentagon's budget goes directly to Lockheed Martin, et al), but it could go a long way to combatting COVID-19 in the Global South. And that would be money well spent on defending the American people and the world as a whole.

Not so random numbers, documenting runaway inequality

 From Forbes 36 Annual World’s Billionaire List. Over 1,000 global billionaires have become a lot wealthier over the past year; the 20 richest billionaires alone are now worth a combined $2 trillion, up from $1.8 trillion the year before. This means that the 20 richest billionaires average $100,000,000,000 each in net worth and saw their wealth increase $10,000,000,000 last year.

To put that in context, if a household making $50,000 a year saved every penny of that, building just a one-billion-dollar nest egg would take 20,000 years. Humans invented fire 20,000 years ago.

While I doubt that a family with an income of $50,000 would be able to save any pennies in today’s economy, you do have to pity the poor billionaires who have to pay $75,000 a night to stay in the penthouse suite in NYC’s Mark Hotel, not to mention the outrageous cost of a joy ride in space.

On the other end of the scale, the average poverty rate in the 363 counties where the COVID-19 death rate was highest, was 45%. The difference in medium income between those counties and the counties with lower death rates was $23,000. I’m willing to bet that the 363 counties with the highest death rates also had a much high percentage of families without medical insurance, but I can’t find any takers.

All of which points to the need for a tax on the wealth of the billionaire class. Since their wealth is increasing at 10% per year, an annual 5% wealth tax shouldn’t be too “taxing”.

And we could use that money to pay for Improved Medicare for All. I call that a win-win. 

Not all news is bad. From Inequality.org

Last Monday two very disparate groups gathered in Washington, D.C., both boldly focused on confronting the ravages of runaway inequality.

Reverend William Barber and the Poor People’s Campaign came to D.C. to unveil landmark new research. A Poor People’s Pandemic Report, their new paper, tracks the intersections of poverty, race, and Covid-19 via an interactive county-level map — and shows clearly that poverty has not been “tangential to the pandemic, but deeply embedded in its geography.”

A few blocks away, at the Patriotic Millionaires Oligarchs vs. All of Us conference, experts, movement leaders, and proud class traitors gathered to examine the unjust systems created by and for America’s richest. Extreme concentrations of wealth don’t just protect immoral systems and policies, argued keynoter Abigail Disney. These giant fortunes degrade wealthy people themselves, fostering greed, selfishness, and isolation.

War Is Not a Performance

Those opening words from the article below captured my attention. It appears that some in the entertainment industry have joined with the mainstream media (which itself is more about entertainment than serious reporting and analysis) in selling us the "new" cold war, one that we can cheer on from the sidelines.. As Eskow notes, this hype with regard to the war in Ukraine can only lead to one of two awful outcomes - a protracted proxy war in Ukraine between the Russians and the West (and make no mistake about it, there is little if any support for the US/NATO outside of the US and NATO) the purpose of which would be to bleed Russia dry ("we" will fight to the last Ukrainian) or an escalation to nuclear war. There is only one way out of here, and it requires to US/NATO to stop the cheerleading and enable the Ukrainians to negotiate, without our preconditions or interference. They've proved quite capable on the battlefield, and I think they will do the same at negotiating an end to this war.

Ukraine is Not a Stage for American War Fantasies – Richard (RJ) Eskow

War is not a performance. Ukraine is not a stage. The death and destruction aren’t happening to so we can "take a stand" and feel better about ourselves. It is real, and we should all be thinking about how to stop it as quickly and effectively as possible.

That may seem obvious, but a concert promoter’s marquee (First They Came For … Ukraine) and shopping-mall posters reflect a war fever that’s become all too prevalent in the West.

The words, “First They Came For ... Ukraine,” have been splashed above ads for upcoming concerts by the Lumineers, Tears For Fears, country singer Dierks Bentley and a host of other musical acts and comedians. The promoter behind the concerts and the posters is Washington DC-based I.M.P. Concerts. Its venues include the 9:30 Club, where the area’s 80’s punk scene produced bands like Minor Threat and Fugazi, as well as larger ones like the Anthem and the Meriwether Post Pavilion.

There are many ways to condemn Putin’s brutality and support the Ukrainian people. We should do that, just as we should condemn war crimes in Afghanistan and Yemen and support the people there. But why these words? Why “First”? The language is coarse and melodramatic and distorts the truth. The implication is that, in the age-old words of those who sell us war, “if we don’t fight them there, we’ll have to fight them here.”

That kind of talk produces an endorphin rush, the way a good rock and roll riff does. And it allows us to pretend that we are taking part in a great drama of survival. But it shuts down our ability to do the kind of clear thinking that will save lives. It makes the crisis about us, not the victims. We can all feel like we’re in a great darkened auditorium, waving our cigarette lighters with thousands of like-minded souls. War fevers, like concerts, are a collective experience. And now, we’re all so high on conflict that we can’t find the exit.

But Putin’s invasion doesn’t pose a threat to Western Europe, and it certainly doesn’t pose a threat to us here in the United States. It’s not a “first.” It’s a singular horror that is brutal, cruel, and must be ended as quickly as possible.

We now know that Putin will not win the easy victory he imagined. So does he. That leaves only a handful of possible outcomes. The first is that the West uses Ukraine to wage a proxy war against Russia, wearing it down economically and militarily at the cost of Ukrainian lives. This approach, based on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, appears to be the favorite of the military-industrial complex.

As Anatol Lieven, Sarang Shidore, and Marcus Stanley write, “U.S. politicians and former government officials refer frequently to the possibility of making Ukraine ‘Putin’s Afghanistan,’ indicating that many in Washington see a protracted conflict as a live option.” (The fact that Afghanistan became "our Afghanistan" for twenty years seems to have escaped them.)

Wittingly or not, that's the kind of posture these signs encourage. They build emotional support for a brutal and protracted struggle – one in which American are, in the words of a retired US diplomat, “fighting to the last Ukrainian.”

Another outcome would be a rapid and unexpected escalation between the United States and Russia, perhaps after rising war fever in the United States leads to a no-fly zone and direct military confrontation. That’s likely to end in nuclear war. That would threaten us here. In fact, it would annihilate us.

The only other option – the one we should all be demanding – is a negotiated settlement that stops the killing. That’s what these groups are calling for, and it’s the only realistic solution for Ukraine. As Lieven et al. conclude, “It is urgently necessary that the Biden administration and the U.S. Congress give their full support to a peace process that will bring about an early end to the war on terms that will safeguard Ukrainian sovereignty and independence.”

Zelensky has already said he’s willing to concede to many of Putin’s demands, including territorial concessions and some neutrality for Ukraine. Putin undoubtedly had more in mind, but a face-saving resolution could be the best way to end the bloodshed.  Unfortunately, some NATO states are already threatening to tie Zelensky’s hands at the negotiating table, and the US won’t give him authority to end sanctions against Russia. While they sing Zelensky’s praises, they are depriving him of the diplomatic tools he needs to save his country.  

War fever is everywhere, and the heated rhetoric is having real-world consequences. Instead of defusing tensions, the US, Great Britain and Australia are accelerating plans to build hypersonic missiles that will trigger a new arms race and amplify the existential threat of nuclear war. White House reporters have become fervent advocates for armed confrontation between the US and Russia.  In many American circles it has become impossible to argue for diplomacy, even in private. Most politicians won't even broach the subject.

Meanwhile, the conflict is causing severe shortages of fertilizer, as well as grain, which will trigger devastating food shortages in poorer parts of the world (and inflation in the wealthier ones). Sanctions, as well as war, are targeting the poorest of the poor.

We shouldn’t care about Ukrainians because they’re “first.” We should care about them because they’re human. And the way to help them live is through negotiation. But war has become a rush, a performance, a glittering show with lasers and smoke bombs. And if the spectacle isn’t real, why stop before the encore?

As for the phrase on that marquee: most readers will recognize it from a poetic re-working of comments from the German pastor Martin Niemöller:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

To speak for the Ukrainians, we need to speak for diplomacy. This show must not go on.

A Small Earthquake on Staten Island

Below is an opinion piece from the New York Times by Paul Krugman. While I'm not a big fan of Krugman, in this case he hits the nail right on the head. 

However, what is missing in this analysis of decline of organized labor and the insane runaway inequality the US has experienced, is reference to the changes in capitalism in the last 50 years. These changes have been described as "financial stripmining" by the Labor Institute's Les Leopold. Leopold documents the increasing domination of the economy by financial institutions (banks, insurance companies, private equity corporate raiders and the stock market) and its consequences for American workers. In the US today, financial institutions account for more than 30% of all profits, up from less than 15% as late of 1984. This, despite the fact that the financial sector accounts for less than 6% of all jobs.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      For more information on the many causes of runaway inequality, check out Leopold's book "Runaway Inequality: An Activist's Guide to Economic Justice". If you let me know, I will be happy to send you a free copy of the book, courtesy of the North Carolina NAACP.

The italicized copy in the text below is my commentary.                                                                                                                  

A Small Earthquake on Staten Island – Paul Krugman

I grew up in a relatively equal society, at least as far as incomes were concerned. Obviously, there were class differences in 1974, the year I graduated from college; some jobs paid much better than others, some people were rich while others were desperately poor. But for most Americans these differences were much narrower than they are today.

It was an era in which many though not all blue-collar jobs offered solidly middle-class incomes and lifestyles. Labor productivity in the early 1970s was less than half what it is today, but the average hourly wage of nonsupervisory workers, adjusted for inflation, was as high then as it was on the eve of the pandemic (in other words, wages haven't increased at all). And while the economic elite lived well, it was nothing like the extravagance we now take for granted. In 1973, C.E.O.s at major corporations were paid about 23 times as much as their workers; now the ratio is 351 to 1.

At the time, we took a broadly middle-class society for granted, imagining it was the natural condition of an advanced economy. Clearly, however, it wasn’t.

So what made that relative equality possible? A large part of the answer, surely, is that back then America still had a strong union movement. There is overwhelming evidence that in their heyday unions had a powerful effect in reducing inequality, both by raising their own members’ wages and by setting pay norms even for nonunion workers.

Which is why what happened on Staten Island last week — when workers at an Amazon fulfillment center voted by a wide margin to unionize — may be hugely significant.

I often encounter people who assume that the decline and fall of America’s private-sector unions — which represented 24 percent of private-sector workers in 1973, but only 6 percent last year — was an inevitable consequence of economic change. After all, weren’t the big, powerful unions concentrated in manufacturing? And weren’t they fated to lose power both because manufacturing declined as ashare of employment and because international competition sapped their bargaining power?

But other countries have remained highly unionized —  two-thirds of Danish workers are union members — even while experiencing deindustrialization comparable to what has happened here.

After all, why should unionization be mainly restricted to manufacturing? If I had to describe a company that would make an especially good target for unionization, it would be something like this: It would be a large company, with a lot of market power because it doesn’t face strong competition either at home or from abroad. It would also be a company that can’t credibly threaten workers with outsourcing their jobs to lower-cost locations if they unionize, because its business model depends on having most workers close to its customers.

It would, in short, be a company that looks a lot like Amazon. Consumers may experience Amazon as a sort of immaculate, untouched-by-human-hands experience: You click on a button and stuff appears on your doorstep. But the reality is that Amazon’s business success depends less on the quality of its website than on a huge network of fulfillment centers located close to major markets — like the one on Staten Island — that make it possible to quickly deliver a wide variety of products. The need to maintain this network is why Amazon employs more than a million workers in the United States, making it the second-largest private employer, after Walmart.

So why aren’t Amazon and Walmart workers represented by unions the way General Motors workers were when G.M. was America’s largest private employer? The answer, surely, is mainly political. The great unionization of U.S. manufacturing took place during the New Deal era, when federal policy was pro-union. (Note: The pro-union policies of the New Deal were in large part the product of the growth of the labor movement during the early years of the Great Depression. The CIO for example was created the same year as the National Labor Relations Act was passed - 1935) The shift of the U.S. economy from manufacturing to services took place during an era of right-wing dominance, with federal policy hostile to unions and willing to turn a blind eye to hard-line — and sometimes illegal — tactics used by employers to block unionization drives. Indeed, Amazon aggressively fought to block a pro-union vote on Staten Island.

But it failed.

Now, maybe this labor victory was a fluke. It comes as Amazon workers in Alabama appear to have narrowly rejected a union. But maybe, just maybe, it represents a turning point.

You don’t have to romanticize unions to realize that a revival of unionization would, in multiple ways, make America a better society. Unions can, as I said, be a powerful force for equality. They could also reduce the craziness of U.S. politics.

I don’t just mean union members are far more Democratic-leaning than otherwise similar voters, although given the QAnonization of the G.O.P. I think it’s fair to call that a step toward sanity.

Beyond that, however, unions appear to be an important source of political information for their members, potentially helping voters to focus on real policy issues as opposed to, say, the existential threat posed by woke Disney.

OK, I’m making a big deal out of what so far is a small event. But if America manages to steer itself toward becoming a more equal, less insane polity, future historians may say that the turn began on Staten Island.

 

War, What’s It Good For? Absolutely Nothing

War, What’s It Good For? Absolutely Nothing. This song, written and performed by Edwin Starr (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01-2pNCZiNk) during the height of the Vietnam War, captured the sentiment of millions worldwide. It represented the repulsion of the mostly young people in the antiwar movement to the daily horrors of that war, and the desire to end the use of war in the pursuit of professed “national interests”. It was also clearly expressed in another song of the era, “Give Peace a Chance” by John Lennon and The Plastic Ono Band (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3_0GqPvr4U ).

The only problem is that these heartfelt songs failed to get at the causes behind the war in Vietnam and other wars the US would wage as part of the “Cold” War (or perhaps more accurately WWIII). In doing so, they glossed over both the questions of who benefits from war (it turns out war is good for somethings and somebodies) and what we need to do to “give peace a chance”, since peace is NOT simply the absence of war.

War is definitely not good for children and other living things. First and foremost, the current war in the Ukraine is not good for the Ukrainian people, whose soldiers and civilians are being killed and whose country is being devastated; it is not good for the young Russian soldiers, sent to fight and die in a foreign country without knowing why (just like the American boys, who were sent to fight and die Vietnam) because if they knew why they wouldn’t go, nor is it good for the Russian civilians on whom the sanctions imposed by the US and NATO will have the greatest impact.

And, it is not good for the rest of us. Most immediately, the fallout from the war will include increases in the price of food and energy that will disproportionately impact marginalized communities and nations in the Global South. In the longer run, increased spending for war will divert resources from meeting people’s needs everywhere. A truly repugnant example is the looming cut to the US’s meager commitment for expanding global access to the COVID-19 vaccine. More money for war precludes money to defend us all from the plague.

So, who is war good for?

In the current situation even though the US is not a participant – wait a minute, that’s not accurate. When you provide arms to one side in a war and provide them with training and intelligence and when you impose draconian sanctions on the other, can you still claim that you are not a participant? I think not.

Reload: In the current situation, even though the US is not yet shooting down Russian planes to enforce a “no fly zone”, big corporations are lining up at the government trough for more billion-dollar contracts to supply not only the US military, but those of our allies in NATO, not to mention such wonderful democracies as Saudi Arabia, whose war in Yemen had produced the largest humanitarian crisis in the world, prior to the war in Ukraine, with 24.1 million people needing humanitarian aid and tens of thousands facing starvation, according the United Nations. Didn’t see much about that in the press in the last month, did we?

As I write, the Biden administration is about to ask Congress for at least $30 billion more in military spending, which Congress, not to be outdone, is likely to increase. The US is government is also ramping up its plans to upgrade the its ICBMs at the estimated cost of $364,000,000,000 before cost overruns. (Check out my Nov. 1 ,2021 post, Playing Russian Roulette with a Nuclear Holocaust).

Some of $$$ are to replace the weapons that are headed for the Ukraine, so that it can defend itself. But, given that some of the forces in the Ukrainian military are neo-fascists, one question that should be raised is what happens if these forces get their hands on the weapons the US is providing. Didn’t the US provide weapons to the mujahideen fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, which later ended up in the hands of the Taliban? It’s called “blowback”, and when you are THE major arms supplier to the world, which the US is, it means more profits for the “Masters of War” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEmI_FT4YHU), regardless of who ends up with the guns. BTW, the weapons being supplied to Ukraine are far, far more deadly than your father’s M-16s.

So, to begin the weapons industry stands to benefit “bigly” from this and every other war no matter which side the US comes down on, and it is almost axiomatic that if there is a war anywhere, the US will come down on one side or the other. It has to do with American “interests” (see below).

But the Masters of War are not alone. As the current war illustrates, the bottom lines of big businesses not directly related to the war industries also benefit from war. Just take the fossil fuel industry (or other extractive industries) who can raise prices on their products and reap massive profits, because of the “shortage” of these commodities while their “costs” of production didn’t necessarily rise. (Note, this is analogous to what happened with the “supply chain” inflation as a result of the pandemic.)

Look for runaway inequality to get a big boost from the war in Ukraine, as it has from the pandemic. The wealth of America’s billionaires increased $1.7 trillion (1/8^th of which went to one man – Elon Musk) from March of 2020 to March of 2022. It seems that big business and their wealthy owners never met a crisis they couldn’t exploit. While a few members of Congress are proposing something akin to an excessive profits tax, Republicans and their fellow corporate Dems will make sure these proposals go nowhere.

But there is one more way that the capitalist class in the US and their Western European allies benefit from wars and it gives us a much better understanding of why we have wars and how to resist. To put it simply, the wars they support involve maintaining and expanding their ability to exploit the people and resources of countries beyond their borders. To understand war in last 200 years, it is necessary to see the economics behind the guns and how the conflicts between dominant capitalist empires and those aspiring to replace or limit them have shaped our history. Put simply, it is necessary to understand imperialism.

Today’s dominant empire is the United States with its junior partners in Western Europe and East Asia. It is being challenged by China and its junior partner, Russia. To understand the war in Ukraine and global conflicts in 2022, we need go back and look at the history of how the US became what I will refer to as The Empire of the Good (as opposed to those it has deemed the Evil Empires) and how it has, through warfare, created the most extensive empire the world has ever seen and what the costs of that empire are.

FYI: Here is what the Biden administration wants to spend almost $1 trillion on: 

·         $773 billion for the Pentagon specifically;

·         $34.4 billion for nuclear weapon modernization;

·         $24.7 billion for missile “defense” programs;

·         $24.5 billion for the space force program;

·         $6.9 billion for the European Deterrence Initiative (aka boosting U.S. military presence in Europe); and 

·         $1.8 billion for expanding U.S. military presence in the Indo-Pacific region.”

 

Next up, “From the beginning: How the roots of the American Empire were laid well before 1776”.

In the meanwhile, enjoy the music.