[via nakedcapitalism.com]
Yves Smith: Of course we know the answer to how Congress sets its priorities. No one wants to lose donations or cause their friends in Virginia to lose sleep wondering how they’ll pay for their kids’ college tuition. Even so,
the New York Times has finally deigned to notice that the US is an outlier, in an obviously bad way, on childcare spending. Gee, one wonders why.
In fairness, this post gives useful detail on America’s over the top military spending and how it manages never to come up for debate. However, it unfortunately also takes up the balanced budget myth.
Why Does Congress Fight Over Childcare But Not F-35s?
By Medea Benjamin, cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace and author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran and Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher with CODEPINK and the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq
President Biden and the Democratic Congress are facing a crisis as the popular domestic agenda they ran on in the 2020 election is held hostage by two corporate Democratic Senators,
fossil-fuel consigliere Joe Manchin and
payday-lender favorite Kyrsten Sinema.
But the very week before the Dems’ $350 billion-per-year domestic package hit this wall of corporate money-bags, all but 38 House Democrats voted to hand over more than double that amount to the Pentagon. Senator Manchin has hypocritically described the domestic spending bill as “fiscal insanity,” but he has voted for a much larger Pentagon budget every year since 2016.
Real fiscal insanity is what Congress does year after year, taking most of its discretionary spending off the table and handing it over to the Pentagon before even considering the country’s urgent domestic needs. Maintaining this pattern, Congress just splashed out
$12 billion for 85 more F-35 warplanes, 6 more than Trump bought last year, without debating the relative merits of buying more F-35s vs. investing $12 billion in education, healthcare, clean energy or fighting poverty.
The 2022
military spending bill (NDAA or National Defense Authorization Act) that passed the House on September 23 would hand a whopping $740 billion to the Pentagon and $38 billion to other departments (mainly the Department of Energy for nuclear weapons), for a total of $778 billion in military spending, a $37 billion increase over this year’s military budget. The Senate will soon debate its version of this bill—but don’t expect too much of a debate there either, as most senators are “yes men” when it comes to feeding the war machine.
Two House amendments to make modest cuts both failed: one by Rep. Sara Jacobs to strip
$24 billion that was added to Biden’s budget request by the House Armed Services Committee; and another by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for an across-the-board
10% cut(with exceptions for military pay and healthcare).
After adjusting for inflation,
this enormous budget is comparable to the peak of Trump’s arms build-up in 2020, and is only 10% below th e
post-WWII record set by Bush II in 2008 under cover of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It would give Joe Biden the dubious distinction of being the fourth post-Cold War U.S. president to militarily outspend every Cold War president, from Truman to Bush I.
In effect, Biden and Congress are locking in the $100 billion per year arms build-up that Trump justified with his
absurd claims that
Obama’s record military spending had somehow depleted the military.
As with Biden’s failure to quickly rejoin the
JCPOA with Iran, the time to act on cutting the military budget and reinvesting in domestic priorities was in the first weeks and months of his administration. His inaction on these issues, like his deportation of thousands of desperate asylum seekers, suggests that he is happier to continue Trump’s ultra-hawkish policies than he will publicly admit.
In 2019, the Program for Public Consultation at the University of Maryland conducted
a study in which it briefed ordinary Americans on the federal budget deficit and asked them how they would address it. The average respondent favored cutting the deficit by $376 billion, mainly by raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations, but also by cutting an average of $51 billion from the military budget.
Even Republicans favored cutting $14 billion, while Democrats supported a much larger $100 billion cut. That would be more than the
10% cut in the failed Ocasio-Cortez Amendment, which
garnered support from only 86 Democratic Reps and was opposed by 126 Dems and every Republican.
Most of the Democrats who voted for amendments to reduce spending still voted to pass the bloated final bill. Only 38 Democrats were willing to
vote against a $778 billion military spending bill that, once Veterans Affairs and other related expenses are included, would continue to consume
over 60% of discretionary spending.
“How’re you going to pay for it?” clearly applies only to “money for people,” never to “money for war.” Rational policy making would require exactly the opposite approach. Money invested in education, healthcare and green energy is an investment in the future, while money for war offers little or no return on investment except to weapons makers and Pentagon contractors, as was the case with the $2.26 trillion the United States
wasted on
death and destruction in Afghanistan.
A study by the Political Economy Research Center at the University of Massachusetts found that military spending creates fewer jobs than almost any other form of government spending. It found that $1 billion invested in the military yields an average of 11,200 jobs, while the same amount invested in other areas yields: 26,700 jobs when invested in education; 17,200 in healthcare; 16,800 in the green economy; or 15,100 jobs in cash stimulus or welfare payments.
It is tragic that the only form of
Keynesian stimulus that is uncontested in Washington is the least productive for Americans, as well as the most destructive for the other countries where the weapons are used. These irrational priorities seem to make no political sense for Democratic Members of Congress, whose grassroots voters would cut military spending by an average of $100 billion per year
based on the Maryland poll.
So why is Congress so out of touch with the foreign policy desires of their constituents? It is well-documented that Members of Congress have more close contact with well-heeled
campaign contributors and corporate lobbyists than with the working people who elect them, and that the “unwarranted influence” of Eisenhower’s infamous Military-Industrial Complex has become
more entrenched and more insidious than ever, just as he feared.
The Military-Industrial Complex exploits flaws in what is at best a weak, quasi-democratic political system to defy the will of the public and spend more public money on weapons and armed forces than the world’s next
13 military powers. This is especially tragic at a time when the wars of
mass destruction that have served as a pretext for wasting these resources for 20 years may finally, thankfully, be coming to an end.
The five largest U.S. arms manufacturers (Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics) account for 40% of the arms industry’s federal campaign contributions, and they have collectively received $2.2 trillion in Pentagon contracts since 2001 in return for those contributions.
Altogether, 54% of military spending ends up in the accounts of corporate military contractors, earning them $8 trillion since 2001.
The House and Senate Armed Services Committees sit at the very center of the Military-Industrial Complex, and their
senior members are the largest recipients of arms industry cash in Congress. So it is a dereliction of duty for their colleagues to rubber-stamp military spending bills on their say-so without serious, independent scrutiny.
The
corporate consolidation, dumbing down and corruption of U.S. media and the isolation of the Washington “bubble” from the real world also play a role in Congress’s foreign policy disconnect.
There is another, little-discussed reason for the disconnect between what the public wants and how Congress votes, and that can be found in a
fascinating 2004 study by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations titled “The Hall of Mirrors: Perceptions and Misperceptions in the Congressional Foreign Policy Process.”
The “
Hall of Mirrors” study surprisingly found a broad consensus between the foreign policy views of lawmakers and the public, but that “in many cases Congress has voted in ways that are inconsistent with these consensus positions.”
The authors made a counter-intuitive discovery about the views of congressional staffers. “Curiously, staffers whose views were at odds with the majority of their constituents showed a strong bias toward assuming, incorrectly, that their constituents agreed with them,” the study found, “while staffers whose views were actually in accord with their constituents more often than not assumed this was not the case.”
This was particularly striking in the case of Democratic staffers, who were often convinced that their own liberal views placed them in a minority of the public when, in fact, most of their constituents shared the same views. Since congressional staffers are the primary advisors to members of Congress on legislative matters, these misperceptions play a unique role in Congress’s anti-democratic foreign policy.
Overall, on nine important foreign policy issues, an average of only 38% of congressional staffers could correctly identify whether a majority of the public supported or opposed a range of different policies they were asked about.
On the other side of the equation, the study found that “Americans’ assumptions about how their own member votes appear to be frequently incorrect … [I]n the absence of information, it appears that Americans tend to assume, often incorrectly, that their member is voting in ways that are consistent with how they would like their member to vote.”
It is not always easy for a member of the public to find out whether their Representative votes as they would like or not. News reports rarely discuss or link to actual roll-call votes, even though the Internet and the Congressional
Clerk’s officemake it easier than ever to do so.
Civil society and activist groups publish more detailed voting records.
Govtrack.uslets constituents sign up for emailed notifications of every single roll-call vote in Congress.
Progressive Punchtracks votes and rates Reps on how often they vote for “progressive” positions, while issues-related activist groups track and report on bills they support, as CODEPINK does at
CODEPINK Congress.
Open Secretsenables the public to track money in politics and see how beholden their Representatives are to different corporate sectors and interest groups.
When Members of Congress come to Washington with little or no foreign policy experience, as many do, they must take the trouble to study hard from a wide range of sources, to seek foreign policy advice from outside the corrupt Military-Industrial Complex, which has brought us only endless war, and to listen to their constituents.
The
Hall of Mirrorsstudy should be required reading for congressional staffers, and they should reflect on how they are personally and collectively prone to the misperceptions it revealed.
Members of the public should beware of assuming that their Representatives vote the way they want them to, and instead make serious efforts to find out how they really vote. They should contact their offices regularly to make their voices heard, and work with issues-related civil society groups to hold them accountable for their votes on issues they care about.
Looking forward to next year’s and future military budget fights, we must build a strong popular movement that rejects the flagrantly anti-democratic decision to transition from a brutal and bloody, self-perpetuating “war on terror” to an equally unnecessary and wasteful but even more dangerous arms race with Russia and China.
As some in Congress continue to ask how we can afford to take care of our children or ensure future life on this planet, progressives in Congress must not only call for taxing the rich but cutting the Pentagon–and not just in tweets or rhetorical flourishes, but in real policy.
While it may be too late to reverse course this year, they must stake out a line in the sand for next year’s military budget that reflects what the public desires and the world so desperately needs: to roll back the destructive, gargantuan war machine and to invest in healthcare and a livable climate, not bombs and F-35s.
There have been a few links on this site this week about ivermectin. Including a very well done discussion of the most important extant trials.
I would like to add a few things from my own experience about this drug. And where we are right now. In my area, we are again having what appears to be the early stages of yet another surge of COVID. This time, it is clearly involving many fully vaccinated and even boostered patients. And they are very ill. This is not a joke. In these patients, the vaccines have clearly failed in their mission. Seeing the tide coming in, even Dr. Fauci had to admit as such this week.
We supposedly have the new Pfizer drug (more on that in a second) and we now have the monoclonal antibody therapy. Unfortunately, the supply of the Pfizer drug is non-existent. And we have very limited supplies of the antibody drug. That drug is reserved for only patients that are high-risk and already very ill. Just so you can understand the magnitude of this issue – 68% of the patients who received the antibodies this week in my area were fully vaccinated, many boostered (I do not have that exact %). The other 32% were the unvaccinated. Again – the vaccinated patients are now getting sick enough to be in the “high-risk” group to get antibodies.
I do not believe anyone anticipated we would be in this situation with a fairly significant majority of the population vaccinated – but here we are. And now because of the severe staffing shortages and other issues, it is very important to do all we can to keep people out of the hospital safely.
As I have stated repeatedly, my experience in previous surges with this infection have demonstrated to my own eyes that Ivermectin is very capable of doing this. That is pretty much the only area in which I use it – patients who are positive whether ill or not get started on it immediately in addition to all of their primary contacts. Despite the months of propaganda from MSNBC and the CDC ( don’t take the horse dewormer y’all) , I have yet to have a single person have one issue with this medication. The same cannot be said for the vaccines. However, as is the case in every single viral infection in human medicine, once people are sick enough to be in the hospital, almost nothing works well. One of the agents we have been using, remdesevir, seems to do absolutely nothing beneficial that I can tell and often damages the patients. To be brief at that point of hospital admission – it is 100% support. It is critical to deal with patients early and strong in their illness.
I will say again – I was a very young doctor in the AIDS crisis working in an inner city hospital surrounded by dying AIDS patients at every turn. A very similar story was playing out at the time – and I guess WISDOM is the ability to learn from the mistakes of the past and never let them fool you again.
Pneumocystis carinii – the scourge of AIDS before we had effective anti-virals is the agent that killed the vast majority of my patients back then. Often abbreviated PCP. It causes a severe pneumonia. This bug is most definitely NOT a bacteria. In the 1980s it was thought to be a protozoa like ameba – however now we consider it more like a fungus ( I am not going into that here – suffice it to say it is NOT a bacteria). Interestingly, there were all kinds of agents in the 80s and early 90s for this agent that were actually doing far more damage than good to people – IV and inhaled pentamidine is the most common. And this drug was making mountains of cash for Big Pharma. From the front lines, various docs across the country started using a very old patent-expired ANTI-BACTERIAL called BACTRIM. 2 cents a pill. This had been used for decades at the time mainly in the treatment of urine infections. And docs all over America noticed how well it was working for PCP. All anecdotal – but vigorously shared. We had all had one too many cardiac arrests with the pentamidine. Some papers here and there appeared. All minimal studies because that is all you could really do as a lone wolf at the time. But overwhelming efficacy and minimal safety issues were noted. And then Dr. Fauci sent out the wolves. He and others were very busy promoting vaccine research, and antivirals that were very toxic, and keeping the pentamidine money train going. I sat through one conference after another deriding the use of BACTRIM as a pee pill by NIH experts sent to quell the rebellion. “How dare you use a bacterial agent against this protozoan fungus – the drug is not even in the right class”. The ridicule coming from these people at times was overwhelming. All kinds of papers and statistical manipulation was belched forth to try to subvert the evildoers. But the drug actually worked. And the doctors using it noted it. And persisted. And over the next few years, despite the NIH, Bactrim became the drug of choice for PCP – and still is to this day. I have not written a prescription for pentamidine in decades. Not even sure they still make it.
Therefore, was born an innate skepticism of Big Pharma and indeed of Dr. Fauci, in an entire generation of young doctors in this country.
One huge difference back then is we did not have the odious presence of the pathological liar Rachel Maddow and the morons at the NYT to poison the medical discourse. We did not have Big Pharma owning our entire media landscape with their ad dollars ( that did not start until the mid 1990s hat tip to the assholes Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton). We did not have facebook and twitter and youtube to censor anything that was said about bactrim or pentamidine. We had ourselves, our colleagues, our wits, and our experience and our intellect. It was a much better world.
Unlike so many on both sides of the ivermectin issue which appear to be religious zealots, I came by my usage of this drug by doing a deep dive into the actual science. I was initially quite skeptical. But reading the basic science and some of these clinical trials made me feel very comfortable in trying it. The safety profile is so good that using it in this kind of crisis would be unethical. I am not alone in that assumption. Despite what the talking heads say on TV, every medical ethics conference I have been to about this topic, EVERY SINGLE ONE, to this day continue to state it is UNETHICAL not to use it.
Earlier this year, I attended a few conferences where the pharmacodynamics were discussed and the clinical trials discussed. It was there I learned from a PharmD that I know and trust that Big Pharma was starting their anti viral trials for COVID. And the candidates he had seen HAD EXACTLY THE SAME COURSE OF EFFECT ON COVID AS THE BASIC MEDICINE TRIALS WERE TELLING US ABOUT IVERMECTIN. Let me say that again – at least some of the Big Pharma agents being evaluated had the exact same effect on COVID as Ivermectin. I could not believe that at the time. Because this research is proprietary, it was unavailable to be looked at. But I did share this with the COVID brain trust back then. But here we are – on the verge of having this released – and indeed – THE PFIZER DRUG INHIBITS EXACTLY THE SAME PROTEASE INHIBITOR AS IVERMECTIN. The only difference is that ivermectin seems to be active against multiple other parts of COVID that this new Pfizer drug does not touch.
And where do the American people get to learn this? From Rachel Maddow? Sean Hannity? Chris Cuomo? The Paper of Record the NYT? The New Yorker? – Our elected officials? NO TO ALL – We get to learn this from a retired nurse in Great Britain and a comedian in his garage studio – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xROICA8Hr7I
Please note – the discussion that the nurse gives is the Cliffs note version of what I have been hearing for months. He makes it very easy to understand.
We are a corrupt and unserious nation. That includes my profession. They have managed to propagandize this issue for long enough now that the very word ivermectin is now radioactive. And just in time for the new 800 dollar a course Pfizer drug to hit the market – and there are others from other companies right behind them. Pigs feeding at the trough.
Where are the promised trials? I have been waiting all year. As a non-zealot, I would love to know one way or the other what the efficacy of ivermectin is……Will likely never know at this point. The cash register is just 2 steps away.
If you are high risk, get vaccinated. If you feel you are sick with COVID or are newly positive – get in touch with your doc. At my practice, we are now hitting it with all we have. I now have many patients demanding this approach. The Joe Rogan and Aaron Rodgers screeds from the MSM have done nothing but profoundly increase this desire. Antibodies if available. Ivermectin and fluvoxamine. And all the usual OTC. If you are vaccinated, do not assume there is a halo of protection – there most certainly is not. Continue to be diligent. Lose weight, sleep well, do all you can to decrease your stress level. Protect your vulnerable.