Sunday, July 19, 2020

Keep the Electoral College and abolish the corrupt billionaire financed two-party system




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:


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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