Since the election of President Donald Trump there has been
an unprecedented not only bi-party effort to remove America’s elected president
from office but that of a foreign country, Britain. With the assistance of a corrupt media owned
by the billionaires who fund the campaigns for public office, Donald Trump’s
presidency has been attacked as “illegitimate” from the beginning.
Donald Trump came to office by way of winning the Electoral
College votes, in spite of the massive disinformation and outright lies spread
by the billionaire-funded duopoly. Unlike
George W. Bush who the duopoly claims won the 2000 presidency by winning the
Electoral College, which he did not, Trump actually did win the electoral
College. George W. Bush lost the
election in 2000 and lost the Electoral College votes.
In the 2000 election George W. Bush’s brother Jeb was
governor of Florida. As governor of
Florida, along with Jeb’s paramour and Secretary of State Katherine Harris, the
groundwork was laid for a Bush victory. In
spite of caging lists that eliminated thousands of black voters from the voting
rolls, designating thousands more as felons, setting up road blocks to stop
black voters from reaching polling places, a butterfly ballot that placed the
hole to punch for Patrick Buchanan where it should have been for Al Gore, to
closing polling stations in black precincts, Bush still lost.
When Katherine Harris tallied the votes, she declared the
election for George W. Bush, but thousands of complaints were called in to the
election officials complaining of fraud.
Al Gore’s running mate, the much hated Zionist Joe Lieberman who the
Democratic Party forced on Al Gore, immediately conceded losing to Bush, even
though he had no authority to do so. Ignoring
Lieberman’s attempt to sabotage the Gore campaign, Al Gore called for a recount
of the votes and was backed by the Florida Supreme Court.
Once the recount started, the massive amount of fraud in
Florida began to unfold. Republican
operatives were bused into Florida to interrupt and stop the recount from
taking place. In what was called the
Brooks Brothers rebellion, the recount station was bombarded and the people who
were counting the votes were violently attacked shutting down the operation. From Gregory Palast:
Excerpt:
Roger Stone is not just an impotent
trickster
He's a violent, evil man who had a
lot to do with fixing the vote in Florida in 2000
Roger Stone is not just an impotent
trickster. He's a violent, evil man who had a lot to do with fixing the vote in
Florida in 2000. George Bush supposedly officially won the presidency by 537
votes in Florida — just 537 votes! But
178,000 ballots were disqualified, considered unreadable. A hundred and
seventy-eight thousand!!! These were concentrated in Democratic and Black
areas: Jacksonville, Gadsden County, Miami-Dade and Broward.
Miami was “recounting” those
ballots (remember the hanging chads?).
We use the term “recount” but what we really mean is counting ballots that were
never counted in the first place. Al Gore had those ballots. Those were
overwhelmingly Gore ballots. Bush would have lost. So they stopped the count.
And one way to stop the count in Miami was Roger Stone literally led a
riot. He was the instigator of what they called the White Collar Riot (aka
Brooks Brothers riot). They were trying to break windows and smash doors, but
it was white guys in suits led by Roger Stone.
That type of violence elected a president. The Republican
operatives loved it. They figured this guy will do anything we need. And he does.
It's not cute, it’s not little dirty tricks. It is deeply evil vote
manipulation. It's violent and it's racist — and it's Roger Stone.
The Bush campaign brought in outside counsel to sue the Gore
campaign on behalf of Bush claiming recounting the votes was a violation of
Bush’s civil rights. The case was
brought before the U.S. Supreme court, who had no jurisdiction over the Florida
voting system as voting laws fall under the jurisdiction of the state and the
Florida Supreme Court had already ordered the recount.
Nevertheless, five corrupt Republican justices on the U.S.
Supreme Court ruled that “if the votes were to be counted it would have a
devastating effect on a Bush presidency” therefore they declared Bush the
winner. The court further stated that
their decision only pertained to Bush v. Gore and could not be used as a
precedent in any other similar case.
This judgement gave Bush enough electoral votes to win the
election. In other words Bush lost both
the nationwide election and the Electoral College until the Supreme Court
intervened and awarded Bush the presidency.
In the 2016 campaign Trump actually understood the Electoral
College system and fine-tuned his campaign in order to win the Electoral
College votes. Trump stumped across all
of the states directly appealing to the people’s disgust toward the corrupt two
party monopoly that ignores the wishes of the people and serves the interests
of the billionaire class. Trump
capitalized on the corruption of the two party system and ran on a populist
agenda. He went to every state and made
his case.
On the contrary Hillary Clinton’s highly paid campaign staff
concentrated only on states with the largest populations with large Electoral
College votes believing if they could win these few states they would have
enough Electoral Votes to win the day.
The media provided bogus poll data showing Clinton overwhelmingly
leading Trump in order to create a sense of futility on the part of Trump
voters. Their gamble failed.
By ignoring states like that of Wisconsin, where Trump
campaigned more than once, even though the Republican Party of Wisconsin did
not support him, the Clinton campaign lost support. In the end, Hillary got about two million
more votes than Donald Trump but Trump carried more counties across the nation
than Clinton did. From Governing.com:
Excerpt:
Looking Back at Trump's Win in Raw Numbers
The president's victory has been
extensively explored. But a state- and
county-level look at the data offers stunning evidence of just how large the
shifts were in certain places. For
the first half of the year, I was writing the state and gubernatorial chapters
of the Almanac of American Politics 2018, the once-every-two-years,
2,000-page-plus "Bible of politics" that is being released in early
August.
As part of that effort, I gave
special attention to state- and county-level data on last year's presidential
voting patterns, focusing on locations
where Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton did well or poorly compared to their
party's performance in 2012. I found
some interesting results. Let's start by looking at Trump.
Trump's Areas of Strength
In a number of states, Trump's
candidacy resonated so strongly with voters that these places became even
redder across the board than they were in 2012. These states included Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri and West
Virginia. In others, Trump didn't do well enough to win, but he did do well
enough to cut into the Democrats' winning margins.
In Rhode Island, for instance, the winning Democratic margin shrank by
13 percentage points between 2012 and 2016. Similarly, Delaware saw its
margin shrink by eight points; Minnesota, by about seven points; New Hampshire,
by six points; and Nevada, about four points.
Older Voters
Two demographic groups, in
particular, produced notable results for Trump's candidacy. The first is
senior citizens, whose influence was most noticeable in Florida. Trump ran strong in the Interstate 4 corridor
that stretches from Tampa past Orlando.
He flipped from blue to red such counties as St. Lucie and Pinellas, which
includes St. Petersburg. He also saw six-digit raw-vote increases in the
counties of Lee, home to Fort Myers; Pasco; Volusia (Daytona Beach); Polk;
Manatee (Bradenton); Hernando; Sarasota; and Charlotte.
Blue-Collar Voters
The strong affinity between Trump
and non-college educated voters has been extensively explored since the
campaign. But a state-by-state look
offers stunning evidence of just how large the shifts were in certain counties.
One of the best examples of this is
Colorado's Pueblo County, a historically Democratic stronghold that is home to
many blue-collar, religious, gun-friendly voters. Barack Obama won the county by 14 points. This time, though, Trump
won it, albeit narrowly, and even as incumbent Democratic Sen. Michael
Bennet won re-election in the county by about 7,000 votes.
There were similar shifts in
solidly blue states.
In Connecticut, the town of Plainfield, near the border with Rhode
Island, went for Obama by 10 points but backed Trump by 22. Naugatuck,
south of Waterbury, backed Trump by 16. In
New York, Trump won 19 counties that had voted for Obama in 2012. Franklin
County and Oswego County both saw their margins shift by more than 30 points
toward the GOP. Five other counties saw
margins shift by between 20 and 29 points, while another nine shifted by
between 10 and 19 points.
But the more important shifts for Trump -- for his victory in the Electoral College, anyway -- came in
competitive states.
In Maine, Trump won nine counties
in the state, which was eight more than Romney did in 2012. It was enough to
secure an electoral vote (Maine
allocates a portion of its electoral votes by congressional district). The margin in Oxford County shifted 28
points toward Trump; it shifted 25 points in Aroostook County, 24 in Franklin
County, 17 in Kennebec County (Augusta), and 14 in Penobscot County. And it
wasn't just the margins that gave him a victory: In these five counties alone,
the overall level of voter turnout rose by 6 percent over 2012.
In Ohio -- which went from blue to red in 2016 -- Trump's gains were
especially strong in the state's blue-collar northern tier. In seven of
the Obama counties that Trump was able to flip, the margins shifted toward the
GOP by between 12 and 32 points. Even
in some of the counties that remained blue, the Democratic margins narrowed
significantly, shrinking by 25 points in Mahoning County (Youngstown), by
16 points in Lorain County (west of Cleveland), by 14 points in Lucas County
(Toledo) and by seven points in Summit County (Akron).
In many places, Trump outperformed
Romney robustly, such as Stark County (Canton), where a virtual tie in 2012
became a 17-point Trump romp in 2016.
In Pennsylvania, the cumulative
Republican improvement over 2012 in just
five blue-collar counties in western Pennsylvania -- Beaver, Fayette, Greene,
Washington and Westmoreland -- was almost enough by itself to supply Trump's
statewide winning margin in this previously blue state. Trump's margin was
also in the ballpark of his improvement in Luzerne County (Wilkes-Barre) and
Lackawanna (Scranton).
In Wisconsin, another blue-to-red state, Clinton won only about
one-third of the counties Obama had won four years earlier. The swing in
Trump's direction reached 31 points in Forest County, which is located between
Green Bay and Lake Superior.
A Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
analysis found that in Wisconsin
communities of less than 2,000 people, Trump won by 24 points, a margin six
times bigger than Romney's. And while Trump lost the state's metro areas by
five points, the newspaper calculated, he won non-metro areas by 19 points…
Yes, Hillary Clinton couldn’t be bothered to campaign in
States like Wisconsin. Now there are
hews and cries to end the Electoral College.
The Electoral College was a brilliant idea of the founding fathers to
protect the rights of the average Joes to have a say in who governs them. The duopoly is irate that they lost control
of the electoral process in 2017. The
only lessons learned by the governing elite is to eliminate the Electoral
College and restore power to the powerfully connected.
The devastation left behind the Covid-19 pandemic should
have been a wakeup call to the Democratic Party that the American people
desperately need universal healthcare, good paying jobs and affordable housing. But alas, the Democratic Party is too deeply
wedded to big Pharma, big banks and the insurance industry that they don’t give
a flying fig about the American people.
Their pandemic relief package is just another big taxpayer giveaway to
the DNC and RNC’s well-heeled constituents, their campaign donors.
CARES Act and HEROS Act anything but caring or
heroic:
Wall Street based for profit health insurance vs. health
care:
From Jacobin:
Excerpt:
Why Does Nancy Pelosi Want to Subsidize a Brutal For-Profit Health
Insurance Industry?
We desperately need a Medicare
expansion to provide health care to millions. But instead, Nancy Pelosi’s office is backing a health policy reform that is
actually more expensive and will cover less people
— all to placate centrist Democrats and insurance executives.
“It’ll be big” is how speaker Nancy
Pelosi described the next coronavirus bill being discussed in the House of
Representatives. Yet on Tuesday, when
House Democrats unveiled the HEROES
Act, their primary proposal to provide health care was to subsidize
COBRA payments for the unemployed.
This is yet another example of
the Democratic Party thinking small, subsidizing a horrific industry, and
condemning people to suffer at the hands of a morally unjustifiable health care
system…
COBRA is more expensive than even
ACA plans. Premiums for the average
family are currently more than $20,000 per year, making them
unaffordable for most people with jobs, much less the unemployed.
Pelosi deals with this issue
by simply having the government cover the cost while not dealing
with the other weaknesses of COBRA: it is a limited program that will not cover
you if your employer closes shop; it
still forces people to find thousands of dollars to pay for deductibles and
co-pays to actually get care; and it still makes us deal with the cruelty of
private insurers who profit by denying Americans care.
Why claim to go big, yet play the
smallest of ball when it comes to the most fundamental issue during a pandemic
— health care? Especially when other, better options that specifically focus on
health care exist. Progressive Caucus
cochair Pramila Jayapal and more than thirty of her House colleagues introduced
the Medicare Crisis Program Act. Bernie Sanders is introducing a similar
bill in the Senate — legislation that would cover those recently unemployed, and those
who are already uninsured, by expanding Medicare.
Here is the rub — it’s actually
cheaper than subsidizing COBRA. According to the Committee for a
Responsible Federal Budget, a group of conservative deficit scolds, the cost of
this program would be “$150 billion over four months and $400 billion over the
course of a year.”
The driver of this cost is that instead of directly paying for health
care, COBRA is a subsidy to insurance companies. They’re receiving money to
cover people at a time when, ironically, health care demand has fallen off a
cliff.
Representative Ro Khanna noted, “The decision to extend Cobra benefits
instead of providing the unemployed with Medicare or even ACA subsidies is
economic nonsense. Cobra won’t cover those who work for businesses that go
under. Cobra is 25% more expensive than Gold plans on the ACA and much more
than Medicare.”
Furthermore, under COBRA health insurance, companies charge consumers an extra
2-percent administrative fee on top of their premiums. With the
government picking up the tab, the fee is a bonus worth billions of
dollars. As Representative Ilhan Omar
pointed out, “Expanding COBRA would be a
massive giveaway to for-profit insurance companies and leave millions of
Americans uninsured during this pandemic.”
This handout would be grotesque under normal circumstances but becomes
even more obscene when considering the health care industry is actively
gloating about their financial position during this crisis. Anthem’s CFO claims the company will save
money because of people canceling voluntary procedures while Cigna executives
say they are “not expecting a material financial impact.”
Considering these facts, I asked a
member of Congress why they believed Pelosi took this approach. They responded,
“it makes no sense.” They went on to explain that Pelosi’s office
believes Medicare is “bad politics with the moderates” and, furthermore,
expanding the Affordable Care Act in any significant way is “something Blue
Dogs don’t want to litigate.”
Even in a crisis, the first group
standing in the way of universal health care is centrist Democrats. In this
case, they cannot even use cost as an
excuse, since the plan they are proposing is more expensive than a Medicare
expansion.
Their stance here hearkens back to
the strategy that Never-Trump Republican
Bill Kristol proposed in 1993 to defeat the Clinton health care plan. “Passage
of the Clinton health care plan, in any form, would guarantee and likely make
permanent an unprecedented federal intrusion into and disruption of the American
economy — and the establishment of the largest federal entitlement program
since Social Security,” he wrote. “Its success would signal a rebirth of
centralized welfare-state policy at the very moment we have begun rolling back
that idea in other areas.”
Centrists recognize that expanding Medicare now and normalizing its
adoption across age brackets would inevitably lead to growing support for
Medicare for All. In addition, it would begin to put in place mechanisms
that would inevitably make the program’s implementation far easier.
Overt hostility to Medicare for All
is widespread in Washington. Pelosi’s
top health care aide, Wendell Primus, gave a presentation to Blue Cross Blue
Shield executives, just after
Democrats retook the House in 2016, to make it known that Democratic leadership
had no intention of pursuing Medicare for All or other policies
that would cut into their bottom line.
We must recognize that this is not
a fight on the merits of policy. Nancy
Pelosi’s office is backing a more expensive policy that will cover less people,
in order to placate moderates and health insurance CEOs. Of course, no one expects the HEROES Act
to become law as written. Instead, its purpose is to set the parameters for the
next round of negotiations with the Senate and the White House.
What establishment Democrats are
doing is setting the Overton window, boxing
out the most sensible and cost-effective policy option that would deliver
health care to the most Americans, effectively demonstrating that their arguments against Medicare for
All were never made in good faith.
Yes, Pelosi and the Democrats CARES and HEROS Acts is
anything but caring or heroic, it’s a big giveaway to the insurance industry
and to their donors and themselves. They
are hogs at the trough. Also part of
their big giveaway is the Payroll Protection Program sold as a program to help
small businesses retain their staff and survive the loss of income due to the
pandemic.
The payroll protection act:
From Naked Capitalism:
Excerpt:
BANKS STAND TO MAKE $18 BILLION IN PPP PROCESSING FEES FROM CARES ACT
BANKS WILL MAKE out with $18 billion in fees for processing small
business Paycheck Protection Program relief loans during the pandemic,
according to calculations by Amanda Fischer, policy director at the Washington
Center for Equitable Growth, a progressive economic think tank.
That’s money taken directly
out of the overall $640 billion pot of funding Congress allocated
to the program it created as part of the CARES Act. “If we did it through a public institution, there would be [more
than] $140 billion left,” Fischer noted, as opposed to the $130 billion
still up for grabs. The Washington Center for Equitable Growth is releasing an
analysis of the government response to the pandemic as soon as this week.
The fees compensate the banks for
some of the costs that come with processing loans — call center time to handle
business owners’ questions, employee hours spent on processing paperwork for
both loan and forgiveness applications — and some of the risk they shoulder if
any of the loans they extend end up being fraudulent. But there is no credit risk; if business owners who qualified for PPP
loans later default, the Small Business Association takes the hit, not the
banks. “Basically it’s free money,”
Fischer said.
For some banks, this money represents a hefty windfall. New
Jersey-based Cross River Bank’s estimated $163 million haul would be more than
double its net revenue last year. JPMorgan Chase could make $864 million.
The fact that banks are siphoning money off of the relief program is thanks to
the fact that the United States had no existing public infrastructure ready to
quickly get money out to struggling businesses when the pandemic hit. Fischer
characterized it as “a failure of preparedness,” adding, “We should have
invested in better systems…”
But on top of the fact that the
program leaked money to banks, relying on these firms meant an uneven
distribution of funds. One study found that areas served by the
country’s four largest banks — JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citibank, and Bank
of America — underperformed in terms
of how many businesses got PPP funding.
On the flip side, another found that places with large numbers of mid-sized and community banks saw more
businesses get PPP loans.
That meant that whether a small
business received the money it needed to stay afloat depended in large part on
the composition of financial institutions in its area. “That’s a really perverse outcome,” Fischer said.
The other major business relief
program, the Federal Reserve’s Main
Street Lending Program, is also being run through private Wall Street firms.
The Fed contracted with asset management
firms BlackRock and Pimco to help it purchase hundreds of billions of dollars
worth of commercial bonds and short-term borrowings to shore up mid-sized
companies, doing so without
soliciting bids from any other firms.
“This is another example where,
theoretically, it could have been done in-house,” Fischer said. She notes that
the Fed has 23,000 employees, some of whom could have been deployed to purchase
investments for the Fed themselves. Instead, advocates are warning of vast
conflicts of interest in having BlackRock and Pimco do it, as both firms are
also shareholders or bondholders in many of the companies from which they may
buy investments at the behest of the Federal Reserve.
BlackRock can even purchase its own exchange-traded funds.
Financial reform advocates have also warned that BlackRock could use inside
information from the Federal Reserve to make its own proprietary trades.
BlackRock stands to make as
much as $40 million a year from the program through the fees it
will charge for setting up the program and on each bond or loan it purchases.
Still, that’s not a huge windfall for a firm that manages trillions of dollars
in assets. What Fischer sees it accruing is, instead, power. “I imagine
[BlackRock CEO] Larry Fink has [Federal Reserve Chair] Jay Powell on speed
dial,” she said. “If the Fed needs to rely on you to stabilize the entire
economy, then there’s not a lot of
room for them to push back and regulate you rein in your conduct in other
circumstances.”
Instead of using such a privatized
system, governments of other European
countries have just directly paid companies for their payroll costs to keep
them from firing employees. The approach dampened skyrocketing unemployment
numbers in the beginning of the crisis.
In Denmark, businesses simply
applied for money directly from the government’s Danish Business Authority.
“They had the capacity to just, in-house, accept all the applications … and get
money to small businesses in a time-effective way…” Fischer noted that there has been little public outrage over the fact that banks skimmed
PPP money in the form of fees, whether or not it was authorized.
Instead, outrage has been directed at companies and people that
received PPP loans but don’t appear deserving, or the IRS sending stimulus
checks to dead people. The $18 billion captured by banks “is technically above
board,” she noted. “But it’s a much bigger grift than some elderly person
getting a check because their spouse died three months ago.”
Yes indeed, the
two parties rose to the occasion after shutting down the entire economy by
shoveling borrowed cash into the coffers of banks, campaign donors and their
own families and friends while leaving the people to twist in the wind. They did, in their “generosity” give a
portion of the population one-time $1,200 dollar checks which did little to
nothing to help the people, while Wall Street soared on “false” profits propped
up by the Federal Reserve Bank. From
Reason.com:
Excerpt:
The Paycheck Protection Program Is a Mess. Here's Who Is Benefitting
From the Dysfunction.
A program designed to keep workers
on payrolls showered benefits on lobbyists, advocacy groups, and even members
of Congress.
The list of companies and organizations that received loans through the
federal government's flagship coronavirus relief program includes firms linked
to powerful politicians, celebrities, lobbyists, and government spending
hawks. On Monday, the Small Business
Administration (SBA) released a list of organizations that each received more
than $150,000 through the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP).
That program, first approved as
part of the $2.3 trillion CARES Act in late March, allocated $670 billion to purchase loans made by banks to businesses
and non-profits with fewer than 500 employees. The government would forgive
those loans so long as the recipients
spent a certain portion of the money on retaining or hiring back employees.
Politico reports that PPP borrowers included companies owned or founded by members of Congress, as well as the
educational arms of the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Hispanic
Caucus. Several lobbying firms,
technically barred from receiving loans if over half their revenue comes from
lobbying, also benefited from PPP.
On the executive side of things,
the Daily Beast reports that several
companies linked to the family of White House Special Adviser (and President
Donald Trump's son-in-law) Jared Kushner received PPP loans. That list includes Observer Holdings LLC,
a media company once owned by Kushner himself and currently held by an investment firm run by his brother-in-law. The
Beast reports that hotels owned by Kushner Companies, a real estate investment
firm owned by members of Kushner's family, also received PPP loans.
Aspiring presidents have had their
turn at the trough too. Clothing brand
Yeezy, which is owned by rapper and recently announced presidential candidate
Kanye West, received a loan of between $2 million and $5 million. (The SBA
did not release exact loan amounts.)
Even advocacy groups have been cashing in, including some noted critics
of profligate government, spending such as Americans for Tax Reform and the Ayn
Rand Institute (ARI). The latter's
acceptance of government aid provoked a lot of jeering on Twitter about the
alleged hypocrisy at play, although ARI has said since late May that it would
gladly accept PPP loans as an effective return of stolen goods…
The list of PPP beneficiaries also includes progressive watchdogs like
Public Citizen Foundation, the research and litigation wing of Public Citizen
Inc., which received between $350,000 and $1 million from the program…
NBC News reports that 43 Planned Parenthood affiliate
organizations received between $65 million and $150 million in PPP loans.
Congressional Republicans have argued that these affiliates are too closely
tied to the national Planned Parenthood organization to qualify for the small
business program. The SBA has demanded that these affiliates return the PPP
money they received. NARAL Pro-Choice
America Foundation, an advocacy group, and the National Abortion Federation,
which represents abortion providers, also both received PPP loans.
Critical headlines about connected
businesses and lobbyists receiving PPP money has sparked a backlash of sorts
against "PPP shaming." The basic argument here is that so long as
these funds kept employees on an organization's payroll—whatever type of
organization it is—then PPP was a success on its own terms. By accepting
aid, these organizations fulfilled the public purpose of the program…
But there are always trade-offs
when the government spends money, "money printer goes brrr" memes
notwithstanding. Any PPP loan that went to a politically connected lobbying firm or a
billionaire-owned shoe company is a loan that did not go to the
government-shuttered restaurant or similar small business down the street.
All those PPP dollars could have gone towards relief programs better targeted
at the least well off. The money could have also gone straight back into the
hands of taxpayers.
Congress has tried to reform PPP by
passing a law that gives recipients more time and flexibility when it comes to
spending the money received from the program. But Congress has devoted very little time to winnowing down who is
actually eligible for the program in the first place…
Yes, while the American people suffer from lack of
healthcare, lack of nutrition, no jobs and now are being evicted from their
homes because the measly $1,200 checks did little to help them, congress has
been languishing on yet another vacation.
They are due to come back July 20 to possibly pass another emergency aid
package before they leave for their month-long vacation in August. Already they are bickering about being too
generous to the American people.
However there is another constituency that congress has
ensured is engorged with American tax dollars, that is the military industrial
complex. No belt tightening there, no
sir we always have money for spreading war, death and destruction. From Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept:
Excerpt:
How the House Armed Services Committee, in the Middle of a Pandemic,
Approved a Huge Military Budget and More War in Afghanistan
WHILE THE COUNTRY IS SUBSUMED by
both public health and an unemployment crisis, and is separately focused on a
sustained protest movement against police abuses, a massive $740.5 billion military spending package was approved last
week by the Democratic-controlled House Armed Services Committee. The
GOP-controlled Senate Armed Services Committee will almost certainly send the
package with little to no changes to the White House for signing.
As we reported last week, pro-war
and militaristic Democrats on the Committee joined with GOP Rep. Liz Cheney
and the pro-war faction she leads to form majorities which approved one hawkish amendment
after the next. Among those amendments was one co-sponsored by Cheney with
Democratic Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado that impeded attempts by the Trump
administration to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, and another
amendment led by Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., and Cheney which blocked the
White House’s plan to remove 10,000 troop stationed in Germany.
While those two amendments were designed
to block the Trump administration’s efforts to bring troops home, this
same bipartisan pro-war faction defeated two other amendments that would have imposed
limits on the Trump administration’s aggression and militarism: one
sponsored by Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard to require the Trump administration
to provide a national security rationale before withdrawing from the
Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, or INF, signed with the Soviet Union
in 1987, and another to impose limits on the ability of the U.S. to arm and
otherwise assist Saudi Arabia to bomb Yemen.
Perhaps most remarkable is the amount of the military budget itself. It
is three times more than the planet’s second-highest military spender,
China; it is ten times more than the
third-highest spender, Saudi Arabia; it is 15
times more than the military budget of the country most frequently invoked
by Committee members as a threat to justify militarism: Russia; and it is more
than the next 15 countries combined spend on their military. They
authorized this kind of a budget in the midst of a global pandemic as tens of
millions of newly unemployed Americans struggle even to pay their rent.
How does this happen? How do Democrats succeed in presenting an image
of themselves based on devotion to progressive causes and the welfare of the
ordinary citizen while working with Liz Cheney to ensure that vast resources
are funneled to the weapons manufacturers, defense sector and lobbyists who
fund their campaigns?...
This media dynamic is exacerbated
by the journalistic practice of obsessing on the areas where the two parties
squabble, while steadfastly ignoring
the very consequential and numerous areas where they find full agreement —
such as approving close to a trillion dollars in military spending and ensuring
the oldest war in U.S. history continues without end.
When the two parties are in
agreement, as they so often are, this is boring from a media perspective, so it
is typically ignored. This has the dual-propagandistic effect
of creating the appearance that the two parties never agree when they in fact
agree constantly, while also suppressing those vital policies which
receive overwhelming bipartisan consensus…
It was remarkably revealing about
how the U.S. government really functions, who the culprits are, what their motives are in pursuing policies that so blatantly have no
benefit for the people they pretend to represent, and the vast gap between
the image they create for themselves and the reality of what they really do in
Washington.
It is, of course, impossible to
understand how the Congress works without understanding those who wield power
in it. The chair of the House Armed Services Committee selected by Nancy
Pelosi and her caucus is the obscure but powerful Rep. Adam Smith of Washington.
He has a long record of supporting
pro-war policies, from the invasion of Iraq to numerous Bush/Cheney war on
terror transgressions to blocking reform of the NSA after the Snowden reporting
to denouncing the Obama administration’s efforts to reduce the troop presence
in Afghanistan.
When Smith had a progressive challenger in 2018, who criticized him
for this militarism, the defense industry, as my colleague Lee Fang
reported, poured money into his coffers to ensure their loyal pro-war
servant kept his perch as chair of this crucial committee.
A similar episode occurred the same
year when a progressive challenger emerged to run against the former Marine and
Iraq War veteran Jason Crow. House
Majority Leader Steney Hoyer, as Fang also revealed by publishing a secret
recording, tried to bully his opponent out of the race. Crow now joins with Liz
Cheney to continue the war in Afghanistan. PRO-WAR DEMOCRATS WIELD ALL THE POWER FOR MILITARY AND FOREIGN POLICY
BECAUSE THAT IS WHO HOUSE DEMOCRATIC LEADERSHIP SELECTS…
There is a pocket of anti-war and
anti-imperialism resistance on the committee and in the broader Congress,
particularly on the left and to some extent on the isolationist right. But, as the House Armed Services Committee
hearing of last week proves, they are outnumbered by the Adam Smiths, Jason
Crows, and Liz Cheneys who work in bipartisan tandem to ensure their defeat and
maintain a path of endless war for the United States.
And it is impossible to overstate
the central role which the concocted, wildly exaggerated “Russia threat” plays
in all of this. Over and over, the
pro-war committee members from both parties invoked the scary threat of Moscow
and the Kremlin to justify this bloated budget of imperialism and aggression…
So who supports these military budgets and the forever
wars? Is it the members of America’s
military? Do members of the military
feel their sacrifice is worthwhile? All
recent polls say NO! According to
Consortium News:
Excerpt:
More significant and unique is the
recent wave of defiance from normally conservative low- to mid-level combat
veterans, most, though not all, a generation junior to the attention-grabbing
ex-Pentagon brass and suits. There were early signs of a shift among those
post-9/11 boots-on-the-ground types. In
the last year, credible polls showed that two-thirds of veterans believed the
wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria “were not worth fighting,” and 73 percent supported
full withdrawal from the Afghan War in particular. Notably, such rates of
antiwar sentiment exceed those of civilians, something for which there may be
no precedent….
Should the sudden wave of military
and veteran dissent keep rising, it will
invariably crash against the pageantry patriots of Chickenhawk America who
attended that Tulsa rally and we’ll all face a new and critical theater in this
nation’s culture wars. I don’t pretend to know whether such protests will last
or military dissent will augur real change of any sort. What I do know is what
my favorite rock star, Bruce Springsteen, used to repeat before live renditions
of his song “Born to Run”: Remember, in
the end nobody wins, unless everybody wins.
They say your budget reveals your values and your priorities
and no budget shows the values and priorities of the American government better
than the budget for fiscal year 2020.
According to Thomas Schatz, President of Citizens Against Government
Waste the horrendous boondoggle known as the F35 Joint Strike Fighter which
after 20 years of congress shoveling money into the production on a time and
materials basis still doesn’t work.
F35 Joint Strike Fighter give $2.1 billion for Fiscal Year
2020.
Thomas Schatz, President of
Citizens against Government Waste
Congress
has appropriated another $2.1 billion for the F35 Joint Strike Fighter in the
2020 budget. The appropriation for the 22
aircraft goes beyond that requested by the Department of Defense. This earmark represents 13% of all earmark
spending bills for fiscal year 2020.
The
program is 19 years in development, is 9 years behind schedule, the acquisition
costs are almost double the initial estimate, the lifetime operation and
maintenance is almost $1.2 trillion making it the most expensive weapon
system in history. This was the project of the late Senator John
McCain who was Chairman of the Armed Services committee who said “the program
is both a scandal and a tragedy with respect to cost, schedule and
performance.”
When is the last time that congress appropriated more than
asked for, for education, housing, jobs, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid or
any program that actual provides some relief for the American people? When?
Now not the Democratic Party has coalesced around removing
Trump from office for his great sin of wanting to end the endless wars, but
they have been joined by Never Trump
Chicken Hawks. The media has joined
forces to put their clout behind the Zionist warmongering crook, Joe
Biden. From Ted Rall:
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