MEDICARE FOR ALL MAKES CENTS

(TRILLIONS OF THEM)

Public “Medicare for All” Saves U.S. Taxpayers 1.5 Trillion Dollars

(The Real News.com)

"Contrary to Michael Bloomberg and former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, potential 2020 Presidential candidates, a completely public health care program could save taxpayers 1.5 trillion dollars, says Prof. Robert Pollin of PERI at UMass, Amherst and Adam Gaffney, President of Physicians for a National Health Program."

NO NUKES NADER

The other nuclear elephant in the room is nuclear power. The construction and utilization of nuclear power plants has been bolstered by huge government subsidies. We tax payers not only made that industry possible, we are on the hook to clean up the mess if a plant melts down. And of course the fallout of decades of toxic waste accumulation will be with us for what....thousands of years?

Nuclear power should be phased out, but it's being touted as the solution to the ongoing climate catastrophe. It was a mistake, it doesn't make sense anymore. But don't take my word for it, check out the following interview with Dr. Gregory Jaczko.

Nukes Are No Answer To Climate Crisis

(Ralph Nader Radio Hour)

"Ralph spends the entire hour with physicist and former Chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Dr. Gregory Jaczko, talking about his book “Confessions of a Rogue Nuclear Regulator.”

 THE BLIND LEADING THE DOOMED

Tomgram: James Carroll, How Many Minutes to Midnight?

"Consider it a marriage made in hell. Start with the groom, Donald Trump, the man who once wondered why in the world we make nuclear weapons if we can’t use them; who wouldn’t rule out using nukes, even in Europe; who insisted that a president should be “unpredictable” on the subject; who suggested that it might not be “a bad thing for us” if Saudi Arabia, Japan, and South Korea all became nuclear powers; who threatened North Korea with “fire and fury like the world has never seen” before he became a chummy correspondent with its dictator; and who called for a nearly 10-fold increase in the U.S. nuclear arsenal (among many other, often contradictory, comments he’s made on nuclear matters).

Now, think about the bride, National Security Advisor John Bolton, a “statesman” who never saw a nuclear agreement he didn’t want to nuke. Those included President Richard Nixon’s Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, President Bill Clinton’s Agreed Framework with North Korea, President Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal (all of which he helped to deep-six), and most recently President Ronald Reagan’s Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces, or INF, Treaty (a pact that had actually resulted in thousands of ready-to-use nuclear weapons being scrapped). With the help of his neocon bro, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Bolton recently succeeded in sticking a knife directly in the back of that treaty. He’s undoubtedly now eying the New START treaty, which put limits on long-range nukes and is up for renewal in 2021. (The president has already called it “one of several bad deals negotiated by the Obama administration.”)

As TomDispatch regular and former Boston Globe columnist James Carroll points out today, the first new member of Trump's and Bolton's nuclear family, a “low-yield” nuke, was only recently born and given the less-than-apocalyptic name, W76-2. It looks as though, in nuclear terms, they are headed for a grim version of connubial bliss. To mix a metaphor or two in the fashion of our president, you might even think of that first progeny of theirs as a minute hand on a ticking clock heading for midnight. Tom" 

Doomsday Redux The Most Dangerous Weapon Ever Rolls Off the Nuclear Assembly Line

(James Carroll at Tom Dispatch.com)

"Last month, the National Nuclear Security Administration (formerly the Atomic Energy Commission) announced that the first of a new generation of strategic nuclear weapons had rolled off the assembly line at its Pantex nuclear weapons plant in the panhandle of Texas. That warhead, the W76-2, is designed to be fitted to a submarine-launched Trident missile, a weapon with a range of more than 7,500 miles. By September, an undisclosed number of warheads will be delivered to the Navy for deployment.

What makes this particular nuke new is the fact that it carries a far smaller destructive payload than the thermonuclear monsters the Trident has been hosting for decades -- not the equivalent of about 100 kilotons of TNT as previously, but of five kilotons. According to Stephen Young of the Union of Concerned Scientists, the W76-2 will yield “only” about one-third of the devastating power of the weapon that the Enola Gay, an American B-29 bomber, dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Yet that very shrinkage of the power to devastate is precisely what makes this nuclear weapon potentially the most dangerous ever manufactured. Fulfilling the Trump administration’s quest for nuclear-war-fighting “flexibility,” it isn’t designed as a deterrent against another country launching its nukes; it’s designed to be used.  This is the weapon that could make the previously “unthinkable” thinkable."

NO PEACE FOR US

American plutocrats and their media puppets peddle conflict. The main stream media and our most powerful politicians, are paid well to love war.

Legendary Talk Show Host Phil Donahue on the Silencing of Antiwar Voices in U.S. Media 

(Democracy Now.org)

That our national leaders enthusiastically support an industry whose purpose is slaughter and destruction, makes them evil in my book. The military is not only paid for by our tax dollars, it receives the lion's share, yet its primary purpose is to serve the interest of corporations. Corporate interests are not de facto the interests of American citizens. A rational assessment of the "successes" of the Military Industrial and Surveillance Complex, show that there aren't any, unless you directly cash in on its fiscal excesses or benefit from foreign interventions, because you cash in on the rape of foreign natural resources.

The U.S. is orchestrating a coupe in Venezuela to exploit its resources. It's another illegal foreign intervention intended to prop up a failing world-wide capitalist system, its mission to serve the oligarch's here and abroad.

Regime Change Made in the USA
(Consortiumnews.com)

We who pay for war suffer because our money might have paid for domestic programs and infrastructure, soldiers suffer and die for corporate profit, not public safety, and we are unwittingly responsible for the war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated in our names. As a nation we have caused the murder and torment of many millions, wasting lives and resources to serve Mammon.

The Origins of That Eisenhower 'Every Gun That Is Made...' Quote

(US News.com)

***

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone.

It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.

It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.

It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.

We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.

We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.

This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."

-President Dwight Eisenhower

***

"War is a Racket.org"

 -Major General Smedley D. Butler

Serious journalists, conscientious politicians, and anti-war activists are marginalized, silenced by the drum beat for endless profitable wars. Profitable for a few, as it will likely bankrupted America. Our hegemony will collapse like the British Empire and the Soviet Union.

Exclusive: The Pentagon’s Massive Accounting Fraud Exposed
How US military spending keeps rising even as the Pentagon flunks its audit.
(The Nation.com) 

Sadly, comedians have increasingly become the voice of reason. Even more sadly, comedians, like other media pundits, are often co-opted by the consolidated corporate media machine, so their messages serve only the status quo, adding bits of humor to the propaganda they're pushing. Despite a glibbly voiced desire to be co-opted by a million dollar salary, the comedian Jimmy Dore seems to be fighting the good fight.

Morning Joe Attacks Tulsi For Opposing War

&

MSNBC “Terrified Of Anti-War Voices” Says Fired Anti-War Host Phil Donahue

(Jimmy Dore)

***

The damage that the Military Industrial and Surveillance Complex has done to our country is literally incalculable, all in the name of serving us and democracy around the world. Corporately driven armed conflict is the tragedy that not only defines most of our history, but will likely be the last word as the human race extinguishes itself.

Material World: The military contribution to climate change
(World Socialism.org)

War critics become victims of ridiculous smears, lose their jobs, and suffer the intense scrutiny of the surveillance state. As a nation we're encouraged to believe that war is peace. Military intervention has been transformed into both our preferred method for providing humanitarian aid and a means to secure the safety of American citizens. Overwhelming evidence over many decades has proven that military activity not only causes catastrophic human suffering, it results in blow back that fuels the hostility directed at us

Waging peace must become a top priority. All the money in the won't buy us a new planet, if we destroy this one.

RALPH NADER INTERVIEW

Ralph Nader Debunks “Spoiler Vote” Shaming (Part 1)

(Jimmy Dore on YouTube)

* * * * *

25 Ways the Canadian Health Care System is Better than Obamacare
(Nader.org)

"Costly complexity is baked into Obamacare. No health insurance system is without problems but Canadian-style single-payer— full Medicare for all— is simple, affordable, comprehensive and universal.

In the early 1960s, President Lyndon Johnson enrolled 20 million elderly Americans into Medicare in six months. There were no websites. They did it with index cards!"

PLANT THE SEEDS OF CHANGE

The state of the planet and the looming food crisis

(On Contact with Chris Hedges)

"Nil Zacharias, co-author with Gene Stone, Eat for the Planet, explains to journalist Chris Hedges how industrialized animal farming is at the heart of the environmental crisis, using excessive clean water and contributing more to pollution of air and water than the transportation sector. The solution, he argues, is for the individual to embrace veganism."

GLENN GREENWALD

As Democratic Elites Reunite With Neocons, the Party’s Voters Are Becoming Far More Militaristic and Pro-War Than Republicans

(The Intercept.com)

"EXCERPT:

At the same time, Democratic policy elites in Washington are once again formally aligning with neoconservatives even to the point of creating joint foreign policy advocacy groups (a reunion that pre-dated Trump). The leading Democratic Party think tank, the Center for American Progress, donated $200,000 to the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute and has multi-level alliances with warmongering institutions. By far the most influential liberal media outlet, MSNBC, is stuffed full of former Bush/Cheney officials, security state operatives and agents, while even the liberal stars are notably hawkish (a decade ago, long before she went as far down the pro-war and Cold Warrior rabbit hole which she now occupies, Rachel Maddow heralded herself as a “national security liberal” who is “all about counterterrorism”).

All of this has resulted in a new generation of Democrats, politically engaged for the first time as a result of fears over Trump, being inculcated with values of militarism and imperialism, trained to view once-discredited, war-loving neocons such as Bill Kristol, Max Boot and David Frum and former CIA and FBI leaders as noble experts and trusted voices of conscience. It’s inevitable that all of these trends would produce a party that is increasingly pro-war and militaristic, and polling data now leaves little doubt that this transformation – which will endure long after Trump is gone – is well under way."

* * * * *

Reporter Quits Over NBC’s Devotion To War
(Jimmy Dore on YouTube)