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)