Mixed Messages

At the same time the U.S. is supplying weapons and cash to Israel to arm and fund its war against Gaza, it is dropping food supplies to the Gazans who are starving as a result.

What’s Left 2: We’re a Rich Country. Let’s Act Like It.

            Lyndon Johnson, cautioned that his support of the Civil Rights Act was too bold and politically risky, famously responded: “What else is the presidency for?”

            The United States of America is one of the richest, if not the richest, nation-state in the history of the world. It also is the most unequal. So its people live in misery and squalor. What else is a country’s spectacular wealth for, other than to provide a high standard of living for its citizens?

            A Leftist economic programme should begin with the government’s budget. How should revenues be collected, and from whom? How should the money be spent? The Left must articulate a holistic approach to the federal budget.

            According to the U.S. Treasury’s website: “The federal government collects revenue from a variety of sources, including individual income taxes, payroll taxes, corporate income taxes, and excise taxes. It also collects revenue from services like admission to national parks and customs duties.” This came to $4.44 trillion in 2023. The biggest source of this cash bonanza was income taxes.

            In addition, states and cities took in about $2 trillion.

            $6 trillion is, to state the most obviously obvious thing in the world, a staggering enormous amount of money. Yet we rarely take a beat to take in that fact.

            Part of the reason is that it doesn’t feel like we live in a rich country with a huge amount of taxes coming into its coffers. It sure doesn’t look like one. People sleep on the streets. Factories are abandoned. Schools are worn. Hospitals are chaotic, understaffed and depressing. Storefronts are boarded up. Litter abounds. Bridges collapse, subways derail, doors fall off airplanes, high-speed rail and free college and affordable healthcare are for other countries.

            Why can’t we have nice things? One can blame cycles and systems: late-stage capitalism, the duopoly, the corrupt revolving door between business and the government officials who are supposed to regulate them. Fundamentally, the answer boils down to bad priorities. The people in charge would rather spend our money on the things that they care about than what we want and need: sending weapons to other countries instead of feeding the poor, tax breaks for corporations rather than treating young men addicted to opioids, building more prisons in lieu of hiring social workers.

            Reordering a society’s social and economic priorities is a complex task. To keep things relatively simple let’s set aside the comparatively lesser and infinitely more diffuse state and local budgets in order to focus upon the federal budget—round it up to $5 trillion—as the principal engine in the Left’s proposed shift of the U.S. to a country that puts people first. Further to the goal of simplification let’s assume that overall revenues remain flat in real terms adjusted for inflation—no tax cuts or hikes, no significant changes in tariffs like a trade war.

            The most recent U.S. military budget, for 2024, comes in at $886 billion—by far the biggest expense, and greater than all other federal spending combined. And that’s radically understating the real cost of militarism. As the socialist journal Monthly Review calculates, when you include costs associated with medical and other expenses related to veterans, debt service on deficit spending for old wars and military aid to foreign countries, the real number doubles. So the actual 2024 total is closer to $1.6 trillion.

            Recognizing that nothing makes us less safe than a forward, aggressive military posture in which U.S. forces and proxies are stationed around the globe. They are sitting ducks and provocateurs. A Left worthy of its name favors a military apparatus capable of defending the U.S.—nothing more, nothing less. We need missile defenses, border protections, a naval force to protect our coasts, the kind of domestically-focused armed forces that could have effectively responded to the 9/11 attacks. Given our exceptionally secure geographical situation, surrounded by two vast oceans and directly bordered only by two nations, both close allies, we can get defense—the real thing, not what the hegemony we buy with the Department of Defense—on the cheap.

            Chalmers Johnson, the academic and great critic of the American empire, called the Pentagon to ask for a list of its overseas bases; not only could they not produce such a list, they could only estimate the number. (It’s 800, more or less.) Not knowing how many bases you are is a major sign of overextension. So is the reaction, when learning that one of your country’s soldiers has been killed in combat, of surprise that we were in that nation in the first place. We should close every last one and bring every last soldier and sailor home.

            Brazil, a regional superpower that is bigger than the contiguous 48 states, has a military budget of $20 billion. That’s a rounding error, 2.5% of ours. Of course, Brazil doesn’t wage wars or plant bases on the opposite side of the planet—and neither should we. We can spend that 97.5% of that $1.6 trillion on stuff that helps rather than kills.

            Next week, a look at other federal budget expenses the Left should slash so we can redirect those precious funds to addressing our wants and needs.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

Believe What I Do, Not What I Say

Biden administration officials claim that Russia has dastardly plans to invade Eastern Europe unless it is stopped in Ukraine. If they really believed that, however, they wouldn’t be hesitant to send whatever weapons and troops were required to stop them. That overheated rhetoric is just a pose. Which is why the US has given Ukraine just enough weapons to keep fighting but never to win.

Ken Burns Is Here

Like the fisherman’s wife in the fairy tale, Ukraine keeps asking for more. More money, more weapons, more missiles, now more tanks. Reports say that they are now asking for U.S. fighter jets. Anyone familiar with the history of escalation that led to disaster in the Vietnam war, not to mention Afghanistan and Iraq, knows how this game ends.

Committed

Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks journalist who published revelations about US war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, is closer to being extradited to the United States to face espionage charges in a kangaroo court. Meanwhile, the criminals he exposed live comfortable lives.

Get Rid of the Guns and Send Them to Ukraine

It shouldn’t be that surprising to President Biden and other Americans that guns are so popular in the United States. After all, the United States is the biggest arms dealer in the world by far. The U.S. recently sent $40 billion in military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine. After the war ends, you can be sure that random violence and terrorism will escalate in a country awash in proxy-supplied weaponry in the same way that it has in places like Afghanistan.

Biden is Giving $40 Billion to Ukraine. Here’s What That Money Could Do Here.

            On top of the $2 billion it already sent to Ukraine, the Joe Biden Administration has asked Congress to ignore its previous request for a $10 billion to pay for updated COVID-19 vaccines for American citizens (pandemic? what pandemic?) and send an additional $33 billion to Ukraine instead. The House of Representatives not only obliged, but authorized more than Biden wanted, $40 billion.

            The U.S. Congress does this with military spending all the time. They live to please!

            Every Democratic congressman voted “yes” to send weapons to a country that has “several hundred monuments, statues, and streets named after Nazi collaborators,” according to The Forward. That even includes AOC’s “Squad,” who claimed to be progressive.

            In the Senate, a rare voice of opposition was raised by libertarian Republican Rand Paul. “We don’t need to be the sugar daddy and the policemen of the world,” Paul remarked. For his trouble, Paul was bizarrely accused of “treason” by online commenters who suggested that his surly Kentucky neighbor should assault him again. All Paul wanted was a week to go over exactly where all that money is going.

            Whatever you think of the crisis in Ukraine, Paul has a point. A week isn’t going to make any difference. We should distrust bullies who tell us there’s no time to think, hurry up, shut up, do what we tell you. The total lack of debate in Washington, and in the news media, over the quick transfer of $40 billion to a country that is not a U.S. ally, has a grim human rights record and recently banned a bunch of political parties and opposition cable news channels, ought to prompt some sort of discussion. First and foremost, we ought to consider just how much money $40 billion is and what it could do here in the United States, for Americans.

            The $40 billion we are sending to Ukraine will not change the outcome of the war. The United States would never commit enough money or ground troops to do that because it would risk World War III with Russia. The $40 billion will buy a lot of weapons and ammunition that will kill Russians and Ukrainians—nothing more, nothing less.

            So how much, exactly, is $40 billion?

Here in the United States, here are some of the things that $40 billion could do:

            A $2,000 scholarship for every college student.

            A $6,000 scholarship for every college student who is officially in poverty.

            $72,000 to every homeless person.

            $2,400 to every veteran.

            $410,000 to every public school.

            $1.3 million to every public high school. It could be used to buy books and other equipment, fix broken infrastructure, build something new for the kids. $1.3 million would pay the salaries of 20 new teachers for 10 years.

            $500 to each American family. I pledge to use my $500 not to kill any Russians or Ukrainians.

            $420 to every cat. That’s a lot of kibble and litter. Cats don’t kill Russians or Ukrainians.

            $2 million each to every person wrongfully convicted of a murder they didn’t commit.

            Give a new, fully-loaded car to a million people.

            Give a sweet, fully-loaded Macbook Pro laptop to 10 million people.

            Give a sweet new TV to 100 million people.

            Everyone who currently subscribes to Netflix gets three years for free.

            Every adult gets a free subscription to the Washington Post digital edition for three years.

            Every adult gets 15 free tickets to the actual, real, in-person, not-at-home movies.

            $40 billion would repair almost all of the 220,000 bridges in the United States that need to be repaired and replace all of the 79,500 that need to be replaced. Add the $2 billion we already sent to Ukraine and you can delete the word “almost.”

            $40 billion would buy Twitter.

            $86,000 for everyone raped over the last year.

            $7,000 to help the caregivers of everyone suffering from dementia.

            It would hire 50,000 journalists for 20 years. There are only 6,500 now.

            $4,000 to every self-identified Native American and Alaska Native. It’s not nearly enough considering what has been done to them, but it’s better than the current nothing.

            What if, for some strange reason, we don’t want to use that $40 billion to help our own people right here at home, one out of nine of whom is officially poor—some of whom are actually starving? While the inclination to shovel money at other countries while so many of our own citizens are suffering is nearly impossible to understand, some people (the President, several hundred members of Congress) have such a mindset and therefore must be addressed.

            If we’re looking for a country in dire need of, and richly deserving of, $40 billion, we need look no further than Afghanistan.

            Afghanistan, which the U.S. brutally occupied for 20 years after invading without just cause, is suffering from the biggest humanitarian crisis in the world. Half its population—20 million people—is suffering from “acute hunger,” according to the UN. The nation collapsed because the U.S. pulled the plug on the economy when it withdrew, imposed draconian economic sanctions in a fit of spiteful pique and seized $7 billion in Afghanistan government funds. Biden has promised a little aid, though none has shown up in Kabul.

From the Intercept: “A senior Democratic foreign policy aide, who was granted anonymity to openly share his thoughts on the Biden administration’s actions, said the policy ‘effectively amounts to mass murder.’ According to the aide, Biden ‘has had warnings from the UN Secretary General, the International Rescue Committee, and the Red Cross, with a unanimous consensus that the liquidity of the central bank is of paramount importance, and no amount of aid can compensate for the destruction of Afghanistan’s financial system and the whole macro economy.’”

Democrats recently joined Republicans to vote no on a modest proposal to study the effect of U.S. sanctions against the Afghan people.

            Then again, we really do need that COVID money.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of a new graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer.” Order one today. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

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