We’re Spending Trillions
on Weapons and War. Let’s Spend It on Health Care.
The
money needed to fund Medicare for All is there. It always has been. PABLO K /
GETTY IMAGES
July 17, 2019
We
can’t afford it!
This will mean higher taxes!
It’s anti-American!
This will mean higher taxes!
It’s anti-American!
This is but a taste of the nonsense you can expect to endure
over the coming 16.5 months as the nation hurtles toward an electoral reckoning
with the Trumpian monstrosity that was unleashed in 2016.
Of course, Republicans will spray this cheese into the wind at
every opportunity, partially because the deliberately inaccurate vision of
“socialism” they’re peddling will cost their wealthy benefactors a miniscule
percentage of their fortunes, and partially because they still envy how much
red-baiting TV time Sen. Joe McCarthy got back in the day.
Nowhere will this fraudulent bugaboo version of “socialism” be
deployed more often than in the ongoing debate over reforming health care. The
so-called “radical” Medicare for All plan championed by Sen. Bernie Sanders
during and after his 2016 presidential campaign has become the go-to health care reform idea
for most of the 2020 Democratic contenders, including several candidates at the
front of the pack.
This has a number of individuals, specifically those who
profit wildly from the current expensive mayhem system, breaking out in
full-blown chicken-skin. Luckily for them but not so much for us, they have
large media megaphones through which they can make their discontent heard.
“The for-profit health industry is aware that support for a
national health system like Medicare for All has risen in recent years,” writes Michael Corcoran for Truthout,
“along with unprecedented grassroots energy. Moreover, health care costs rank
as the biggest concern among Americans. Resistance is almost entirely driven by
the for-profit health industry, which works to portray the illusion of
widespread opposition to — and fear of — a national health system. Corporate
media outlets have helped them tremendously along the way.”
The pushback against Medicare for All is not solely relegated
to the Republicans, the for-profit health care industry, and their allies in
the media. According to reports, a top aide to House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi gave private assurances to a clutch of insurance executives back in
February that Medicare for All is doomed under her stewardship, despite the
fact that it is supported by a huge majority of
Democratic voters and more than half of Republican voters. Millennials love it to pieces, and could turn out in
droves if they get a chance to vote for it in the general election.
Socialism
is a publicly funded health care system that does not ruin the many for the
profit of the few.
Former Vice President Joe Biden, the if-you-believe-the-polls
frontrunner for the nomination and the clear establishment candidate, is
dipping his toes very lightly into Medicare for All while attacking
progressives for even considering the idea. Biden’s $750 billion health
care plan is essentially Obamacare 2.0 and includes the “public option” that was memorably discarded
when the Affordable Care Act was first assembled.
“I think one of the most significant things we’ve done in our
administration is pass the Affordable Care Act,” said Biden at a recent event in New
Hampshire. “I don’t know why we’d get rid of what in fact was working and move
to something totally new.”
Senator Sanders, who has not retreated one inch from his 2016
health care proposals, is having none of it. “We cannot continue to tinker
around the edges while 80 million Americans lack health insurance or are
underinsured with high premiums, copays and deductibles,” he said in response to Biden’s criticisms.
“We believe that health care is a human right,” said Sanders
in Philadelphia on Monday, “and we are going to fight for a system that is
based on human needs, not corporate profits.”
Beyond his competitors for the nomination who subscribe to
various versions of his Medicare for All plan, Sanders also enjoys a number of
high-profile allies in Congress. Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida
Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley are all fierce advocates
for the policy. Trump’s recent eruption of tactical racism has elevated
the profile of “The Squad” even further, enhancing their ability to argue the
position to a wider audience.
We
can all afford to be healthy if we redirect misplaced priorities away from
killing people with expensive machines toward a system that is about keeping
people alive and well.
Never forget: Sanders got rousing cheers from a Fox News town
hall audience in April when he explained his Medicare for All proposal to them.
Support for this policy knows no partisan boundaries when it is laid out to
voters directly, without passing it through the media filter of the for-profit health
care industry. Speaker Pelosi and former Vice President Biden can’t, or won’t,
accept this fact on its face, but it is fact nonetheless.
Which brings us back to the money needed to pay for these
ideas, and to our grossly misplaced national priorities. The version of
“socialism” Sanders and the others are offering is New Deal economics for the
21st century: Public money used for the greater public good. Period, end of
file.
“Socialism” functions as a slur for those who miss the
politics of the Cold War, but for others, it is bedrock common sense: This form
of socialism is already practiced widely in the U.S. even as it is thoroughly
taken for granted.
It is stop signs at intersections, clean water, highways,
college scholarships, public schools, libraries, plowed streets, the Hoover
Dam, firefighters, a thousand other things everyone uses to their benefit every
day, and yes, socialism is also a publicly funded health care system that does
not ruin the many for the profit of the few.
As for the money, well, that’s where those grossly misplaced
national priorities come in.
The defense contractor Northrop Grumman, at the behest of the
U.S. Air Force, has begun assembling the next generation of stealth weapons
technology, the B-21 bomber. No one outside Northrup Grumman has seen the thing
yet, but available reports suggest the bomber will
be capable of carrying more ordnance — including a variety of nuclear-armed
weapons — farther than any prior flying war platform ever has before.
“The Air Force has big plans for the B-21,” writes Kyle Mizokami for Jalopnik,
“planning to purchase 100 bombers to replace the B-2 Spirit and B-1B Lancer, at
a cost of $656 million each in 2019 dollars. The service has hinted it would
like up to 75 more, and one think tank, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary
Assessments, suggested the service buy as many as 288 bombers.”
Math time: $656 million x 100 planes = $65.6 billion. $656
million x 175 planes = $114.8 billion. $656 million x 288 planes = $188.9
billion.
Estimated cost for the famously fragile F-35 Joint
Strike fighter program: $1.5 trillion and rising.
Estimated cost of the so-called “war on terror”: $6
trillion and rising.
I am sensing a pattern here.
The price of a single B-21 bomber could fully fund Meals
on Wheels for more than 65 years. The cost of the F-35 Joint Strike fighter
program could fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance
Program (SNAP) program for more than 22 years. The cost of the “war on terror”
could fund the Temporary Assistance for Needy
Families (TANF) program for more than 345 years.
According to the House Medicare for All caucus, that program
will costsomewhere between $28-32 trillion over 10
years. That comes out to about $3 trillion per year, which means the “war on
terror” budget alone could have covered the first two years. Add more than six
months to that with the F-35 and B-21 funding, and we’re just getting started.
The Pentagon has requested $718 billion for its fiscal 2020
budget, an increase of $33 billion from 2019. The total annual cost of the CIA, NSA and the national
security state is estimated to be around $1.25 trillion. Fossil fuel
subsidies amount to around $649 billion per
year. The list goes on, and on.
And that’s not counting all the “lost” Pentagon money we’re not
supposed to know about. We know, and we would like it back.
There is a vast amount of money to be found in the hidden
corners of the federal budget, and the rest can be acquired by taxing the
wealthy and corporations. To say we can’t afford Medicare for All, simply put, is
to lie.
The Air Force wants to call the B-21 “The Raider” as an homage
to Doolittle’s Raiders, who launched an audacious bombing attack against Japan
shortly after Pearl Harbor. Me? I think they should call it “The Vitamin,”
especially in all their advertisements, because the copy writes itself: “B-21,
a healthy cash supplement for Northrup Grumman.”
Call it socialism for the warmakers, and I am heartily tired
of it. We can all afford to be healthy if we redirect those misplaced
priorities away from killing people with expensive machines, and
toward a system that is actually about keeping people alive and well.
Making a buck off the backs of the sick, the injured and the
elderly is an idea whose time has come and gone. Ending that ruthless practice
is part of the dreaded “socialism” Sanders and the others are talking about.
Tell a friend.
This article has been updated.
Copyright © Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
William Rivers Pitt is a senior
editor and lead columnist at Truthout. He is also a New
York Times and internationally bestselling author of three
books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn’t Want You to Know, The Greatest Sedition Is Silenceand House of Ill Repute: Reflections on War, Lies, and
America’s Ravaged Reputation. His fourth book, The Mass Destruction of Iraq: Why It Is Happening, and
Who Is Responsible, co-written with Dahr
Jamail, is available now on Amazon. He lives and works in New
Hampshire.
How Biden’s Secret 2002
Meetings Led to War in Iraq
Sen.
Joe Biden speaks to the press after Senate luncheons, October 1, 2002.TOM
WILLIAMS / ROLL CALL / GETTY IMAGES
July 28, 2019
Even though former Vice President Joe Biden’s favorability
has declined following the first Democratic
debate, he remains largely considered the frontrunner by many mainstream media
outlets and pundits for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Early in the first debate, Sen. Bernie Sanders mentioned how
Biden had supported the Iraq War and that he had voted against it. Biden
responded that he now wanted to see the U.S. out of Afghanistan. Yet Biden’s
role was more sinister than that.
In 2002, Biden was the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee. Following 9/11, he conducted the “Hearings to Examine Threats, Responses and Regional
Considerations Surrounding Iraq” on July 31 and August 1, 2002.
At the time, Biden classified the meeting as secret and did
not allow public review or attendance. The media largely did not cover this
meeting. With the exception of the late Sen. Paul Wellstone (a committee
member), the people invited to attend and give a submission were not on record
as being against the war. Notably absent from the hearing was Scott Ritter, the
former United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq.
In September 2002, Biden spoke before the Senate and made a case
for war against Iraq. He followed that with a nearly one-hour Senate discourse supporting the war on October
9, 2002. It was Biden’s inference in this Senate presentation that suggested
Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) threat in mainstream discourse.
When the transcript of the September 2002 Senate meeting first
became available, I downloaded it. As someone who had worked on weapons systems
and had as high as a top-secret clearance, I had experience with infrared
missiles, inertial reference navigation systems, global positioning systems and
radar for use in both military vehicles and ground-firing howitzers, as well as
conventional and nuclear missiles and bombs. I also had unrestricted access to
the classified library of the U.S. Navy and knew of other proposals in the
military by U.S. defense industries. I figured that if there were to be anyone
qualified to assess a threat, I was certainly in the running.
So I downloaded the file in October 2002 and set about to read
the 275-page document word by word. I easily spent a couple of weeks doing it.
Review of the entire transcript revealed there was no real evidence whatsoever
that Iraq was a threat to the U.S. or was in possession of WMDs. Shouldn’t we
expect a reference to satellite data, perhaps? Or discussions about facilities
that inspectors were being kept from? Or maybe special nuclear sensors that had
tripped?
Nothing in the transcript provided any evidence that Iraq was
a threat. It was all historical and conjecture about the meaning of Saddam
Hussein’s speeches. Nothing technical was even mentioned that required my
familiarity with weapon systems. Instead, words and meeting dialogs that
Hussein had with his engineers were interpreted as evidence that he had WMD and
that his engineers were motivated to the extreme.
For example, Khidir Hamza, once Iraq’s leading nuclear
physicist, discussed posturing by Hussein regarding weapons inspectors as
validation of WMD. He also referred to Hussein’s past experience with chemical
weapons and alleged purchase of radioactive materials. Hamza had retired from
the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission in 1989 and left Iraq in 1994.
Biden conducted a secret meeting in which his star witness
hadn’t been in Iraq for eight years. He concluded Iraq was a threat in spite of
evidence to the contrary. The mainstream media cooperated by not even reviewing
the transcript of this meeting at the time.
Can we trust someone in the White House who so irresponsibly
pushed the U.S. down the path for war and irreversibly tarred our image on the
world stage as a nation that did not follow the rule of law?
Formerly an electronics engineer
for the Naval Air Warfare Center-Weapons Division, Jim Bronke spoke out against
the Iraq War in 2003 as a member of Military Families Speak Out. Bronke is
currently retired from engineering and chair of the SW Michigan Green Party.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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