Medicare for All

Judging The Biden Administration Not By Words, But By Deeds

/ went2thebridge / Leave a comment

A displaced family in Marib, Yemen, carries a winter aid package back to their shelter. Source: UN

Those keeping an eye on the foreign policy scorecard for the Democratic regime just installed in Washington DC are noticing ominous actions which are only slightly concealed by soothing words.

  • An announcement that U.S. support for the Saudi’s brutal war on Yemen would end was couched in weasel words. Yemeni professor Shireen Al-Adeimi, who teaches in Michigan, teamed up with crack investigative reporter Sarah Lazare to parse the details of what this could mean for the long suffering civilian population of Yemen.
  • One of the first acts of the new administration was sending more U.S. troops into Syria where the long running civil war/proxy war has already caused untold suffering. Bruce Gagnon of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in space explains the context.
  • The Pentagon sent troops into Norway for the first time but Norway then canceled the military exercises planned because of a spike in COVID-19 infections. As reported in Military.com: 
    • “Last year’s iteration of Cold Response, another major NATO exercise, was also significantly scaled back due to the pandemic. Training in and around the Arctic Circle has been a priority for NATO forces to counter Russia in the region.” My comment: what could go wrong?
  • The new administration announced this week they are keeping the Trump administration’s Space Force as a new branch of the military. Of course they are.

Biden’s cabinet and his pick for USAID are neoliberal and neocon warhawks so all of the above was entirely predictable.

Meanwhile, although Congress easily passed a $750+ billion Pentagon budget recently, they can’t agree on pandemic relief for the millions teetering on the verge of eviction and starvation in the U.S.

And those of us who want the COVID-19 vaccine are still waiting. Ok, that one’s not on Biden yet. A family member who works at a leading research hospital told me the general consensus is three months turnaround time for national level health care planning and execution to be guided by science. 

But most of us understand that, without reining in the military budget, we’ll never get Medicare for All and, without universal health care, the pandemic is likely to be a very long event. 

As in, retirees like me may not live long enough to see the end of it. Or of the planned endlessness of the “war on terror.”

Insatiable Greed And A $600 Slap In The Face

/ went2thebridge / Leave a comment

Fascism got a bad name in the 20th century because of the mass genocide of the Holocaust, plus the rapacious colonialism (redundant, I know) of the Japanese imperial project. For decades since, teenagers have snarled “fascist” at parents enforcing curfew in reference to the violent policing that accompanied the rise of a white supremacist party in Germany.

But it was Mussolini, the dictator of Italy, that actually had it right: “Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”

In other words, the precise system of government we have in the United States today.

Over the last several decades we have watched as corporate power captured, not only our legislative and executive branches of national government, but the judiciary as well. 

The predictable outcome of our descent into fascism is the passage and enforcement of laws designed to benefit our corporate overlords at the expense of the literally starving and homeless people.

During any crisis of the last several decades, the already wealthy have prospered while the already impoverished have perished before our very eyes with little to no government intervention. I think Hurricane Katrina is when I first realized that the federal government would stand idly by, fat with our tax dollars, while the poor drowned and starved. FEMA like so many other federal agencies was designed to enrich corporations while the matriarch of the Bush clan toured refugees being housed in a sports stadium and pronounced on network television, “And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this, this is working very well for them.”

The fact that so many of the “underprivileged” were Black was undoubtedly a factor in their abandonment by government of, by, and for the wealthy. Kanye West increased his fame when he said live on network television at the time: “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.” 

So, failure to attend to the common good is nothing new. But it is accelerating mightily under the cover of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Other wealthy countries have managed the health crisis by recognizing that staying home is containment, and subsidizing people to stay home — including staying housed — is good health policy.

But the US Congress is in session this weekend struggling over whether to pass a relief bill that would provide $600 one time payments after sending a measly $1200 once months ago. (Note: I know at least one Black working mother who never even received that payment.)

Currently 1/3 of people in the U.S. report they are struggling to meet basic expenses such as rent, food, and utilities.

The uptick in memes and slogans advocating violent revolution is significant in my social media feeds.

A sampling includes this one with one of the planet’s rapacious billionaires as poster boy:

Also:

But more specifically, Congress is in the crosshairs. Sample tweets:

I also saw but cannot now find one that said, “The next stimulus is hidden inside in your member of Congress like a piñata.”


Meanwhile reformers are insisting on a floor vote in the House on the wildly popular Medicare for All that our elected representatives will not even consider.


Fascists, drunk on power, always think the future is theirs. I think they’re wrong about that.