Posts by Jon Talton

What is are these "entitlements" I keep reading about? Just today, Rupert's Wall Street Journal had a headline that stated, "White House targeting entitlement limits." This must be a good thing, because, really, feeling entitled is an unattractive trait. If applied to our tax dollars, a sense of entitlement is downright unpatriotic.

Are they the $1.8 trillion given to defense contractors since 2006, including $400-billion-and-counting for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, intended as as an "affordable" mass-production jet that is now 70 percent over budget? Are they the huge subsidies that the fossil fuel industries receive from American taxpayers? (Worldwide, burning up the planet is being subsidized at a rate of $2 trillion).

Speaking of entitlements, don't forget the $3.4 trillion in corporate profits that are allowed to be parked elsewhere. This allowed these companies to avoid paying taxes that maintain the commons which allowed them flourish in the first place. Public policy tilted to make the rich richer, rather than encouraging them to create companies and jobs? Don't forget carried interest for hedge-fund financiers. And it's not just the rich — our entire society is tilted to heavily subsidize sprawl and single-occupancy vehicles traveling on roads that do not pay for themselves in basic ciphering, much less their costs in climate change. Surely these and more are what is meant when we hear of "entitlements," "cutting entitlements" and "entitlement reform."

By Emil Pulsifer, Guest Rogue

I
recently shared a table with a stranger.  He was mature, educated, and
gets his news from a variety of sources including MSNBC, CNN, C-SPAN, and
others.  We discussed a variety of topics ranging from the need to address
climate change, to the development of alternative energy sources and campaign
finance reform.  Yet, when it came to budget policy he could do no better
than to repeat the common wisdom that in order to address the "$16
trillion debt" a mix of spending cuts and tax increases are
necessary, and that tax increases could not target the wealthy exclusively
because "even if you confiscated all of the income of the rich it wouldn't
be enough to fix the problem."  Medicare would have to bear the brunt
of the spending cuts, he said.  These claims are all
elements of the meme promoted by "responsible" media organizations, but in many respects they happen to be wrong.

There
is certainly room for spending cuts in the current budget, in
particular the bloated Defense Department.  In 2011,
"national defense" spending totaled 4.7 percent of the U.S.
economy. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, when Clinton era "peace
dividends" reached their peak, national defense spending was just 3.0
percent of GDP.  See Table 8.4 of this report.

The
Cold War is over: The Soviet Union no longer exists, and China has irrevocably
converted to gung-ho capitalism. There is simply no excuse for this level
of "defense" spending. In 2011, U.S. GDP was $15 trillion
dollars. If national defense spending had been at Clinton era levels as a
percentage of GDP, the savings in that year alone would have been 1.7 percent
of GDP or roughly $250 billion dollars. Extend this over 10 years and the
savings would total $2.5 trillion, or slightly more than the $2.4 trillion
total savings touted by Republican Alan Simpson and Democrat Erskine Bowles in
their new debt reduction plan. And because we're talking about
defense spending as a percentage of GDP, and GDP is expected to grow, this
actually underestimates the dollar savings by about a third. Sure, there
is already supposed to be some savings in coming years from the military
drawdown in Afghanistan, but Congress may not allow this: Already there is a
bipartisan movement afoot to restore the much smaller $43 billion in military
sequestration cuts due to take effect this year. 

I knew a young woman in the early 1980s who was a Trotskyite, or so she said. Even then, at the dawn of the Age of Reagan, a real political spectrum existed in America. The remains of the New Left were there. Both parties had conservatives, centrists and liberals. Compromise and rationality still produced legislation that got the people's business done. The quiet coup of the oligarchy was in its infancy.

Where we stand today? I had finished my regular stint on the local public radio station and heard the NPR program To The Point begin. It was all about the budget deficit and federal debt. And not really about that, but concern over whether President Obama's "charm offensive" to reach out to Republicans would succeed. That the GOP has been captured entirely by extremists was never mentioned, nor that the House members in safe seats would never compromise no matter how much Mr. Obama tried to "meet them halfway," the holy grail of our opinion makers and elites. That the deficit and debt are far from our most pressing issues was never debated. Didn't we just have an election that supposedly settled this matter? And this is the intelligent media.

I can understand most Americans tuning out. The nation is asleep, being date-raped after imbibing a cocktail of plutocratic-engineered ignorance, reactionary dogma, economic hard times, media malpractice and electronic distractions. The "center" is far to the right. "Progressives" are largely trying to conserve the basic social compact from the 20th century, once embraced by the mainstream of both parties. Few of them are seeking real change. The Occupy "movement" — who? Totskyites are all gone, too, but reality is sneaking into our national Arizona Room carrying an ice axe much more potent than the one that did in Leon Davidovich.

Whatever his other "out there" political views, Sen. Rand Paul's filibuster was thrilling. It was thrilling merely as a civics lesson: This is how filibusters were done before the 1980s, where a senator had to take and hold the floor, maybe with the help of other senators, maybe alone. Sometimes it was in the service of an immoral cause, as with Strom Thurmond's epic 24 hour and 18 minute stand against the 1957 Civil Rights Act. Others acted in the interests of republican govenment, as with Bernie Sanders' filibuster opposing extension of the Bush tax cuts. Even if you think Paul's was a stunt, it showed how we should insist that senators actually take the floor and defend their position, rather than telling the Majority Leader they will deny him the 60 votes for cloture and calling it a filibuster.

It was thrilling because, if only for a few hours and largely on social media, it broke out national spell of stupid. President Obama, our constitutional-law professor, has taken as casual an approach to civil liberties as his predecessor, perhaps even more so. Paul wrote a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder asking him about the drone program and whether it could be used by the president, without due process, to kill American citizens on American soil. Instead of a simple "no," Holder, who has refused to extend the rule of law to the big banks, implied that the president indeed held this power. This is an outrage. It is fundamentally unconstitutional. Where the hell were the supposed "liberal Democrats"? It was left to the usually kooky Rand Paul to actually act like an American senator in the best tradition of the office.

Finally, it was interesting in the way it scrambled the usual hard partisan lines and momentarily forced open some minds, revealed character. Paul's support and criticism came from across the spectrum. Chief among his critics were wealthy Republican John Sidney McCain III and his cocker spaniel Lindsey Graham. Why do these men have any standing on any topic, especially national security? Both remain unapologetic supporters of the war in Iraq, apparently still believing those "weapons of mass destruction" are still there, somewhere. John McCain is the best the Republican Party has as a senior statesman? It's a sick joke.

Jon Stewart has so degraded the usefulness of profanity with his unending use of partly bleeped F-words that I am forced to fall back on the oaths of my parents' generation: Let the goddamn sequester happen. I am so sick of the crazy fanatics called Republicans and their willingness to inflict great damage on the country, really do anything, only to hurt a man they see as an illegitimate president, a man who represents everything they loathe: Intellectual, cosmopolitan, urban, open-minded, tolerant, black and doesn't know his place. I am as sick of the president, who is squandering his mandate, doesn't know how to use it. He continues the Bush assault on our civil liberties, extends the drone war, won't tell the American people the truth and won't bring the banksters to justice. He named one to be Treasury Secretary. And is Chuck Hagel the only Republican he can find to be Defense Secretary? Let the goddamn sequester happen.

Speaking of the Defense Department, why don't we call it by its historic name: The War Department (and, yes, dear careful reader, I know there was also a Department of the Navy and where would the Air Force fit…hang with me)? This would at least be straightforward about its purpose, using serious language that might give us pause. Aside from the damage of the Great Recession, one reason we face the dreaded deficit and debt is two unfunded wars. Mr. Obama is prosecuting imperial ass-whippings around the globe even now, creating more new terrorists than we kill. We are "pivoting" to the Pacific, to pick a fight with our Chinese banker. We spend more on war than the next 13 powers combined. The F-35 fighter will cost at least $396 billion — that alone would expand our passenger rail system by 300 times — and the thing is still not airworthy. Our new $13.5-billion-a-pop Gerald R. Ford class carriers will be target practice for some Chinese kid guiding a missile. We have too many flag officers and too many mooching, corrupt contractors. Even if not a single blade of grass on an officers' golf course goes untended, let the goddamn sequester happen.

Let the sequester happen and keep it going. Ever since Ronald Reagan ran for the presidency, politicians have gotten ahead by claiming "government is the problem." And voters accept this as they accept their Social Security checks, Medicare benefits, safe food and drugs, freeways and roads to drive on, in vehicles powered by gasoline kept artificially cheap by federal subsidies, armies and fleets, live in a Sun Belt made habitable by federal initiatives from the TVA to the SRP, survive airplane flights thanks to government air traffic control…and they think government is the problem. A people this stupid and corrupt deserves the real-life experiment of seeing whether they really are rugged individualists who don't need no gub'ment. Bring it on. I especially look forward to letting the net-taker red states actually live the Ayn Rand fantasy they rave about. I can imagine how LBJ, whatever the statues say, would ensure that all the military cuts befell states that voted against him and especially the districts of members of Congress who defied him.

Do you ever wonder about the acts committed in our name and the blowback that will be inevitable? After all, Osama bin Laden didn't spring fully formed as a madman from the head of Jove, nor did the terrorist organizations that continue his work. While their roots are complex, one big cause is that America has spent decades meddling around the world in conflicts it ill understands and whose consequences we rarely think through. Bin Laden was one of "our S.O.B.s" in Afghanistan when we were trying to bleed the Soviets. So were Saddam Hussein, the Shah of Iran, Hosni Mubarak, Noriega of Panama and the House of Saud, the latter's extreme Islam helping radicalize the Middle East. What did we want? "Stability." Cheap oil. Anything Israel wants. No matter the long-term dangers or injustices inflicted on millions. When 9/11 happened, we were shocked, shocked. Aren't we always a force for good?

One feels compelled to quote John Quincy Adams at length about what America's role should be in the world: "Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of
monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own…She well knows that by once
enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlet on her brows would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of freedom and independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an imperial diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world; she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit…. Her glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind."

Now our march is the worldwide drone war of Mr. Obama. We kill whom we want, where we want, without due process, in violation of international law. Maybe we get a terrorist. We certainly kill women and children, too. Just another day as global hegemon. We could be leading the global effort to stop the worst of climate change. Instead, we're just bumbling imperialists. Someday this will come back on us.