Tuesday, July 30, 2019

We’re Spending Trillions on Weapons and War. Let’s Spend It on Health Care./How Biden’s Secret 2002 Meetings Led to War in Iraq



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 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-CortezRashida TlaibIlhan 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 KnowThe 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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