Sonali Kolhatkar , - Alter Net / Independent Media Institute
Stephan: America's wealth inequality is obscenely immoral. On one end of the spectrum you have a handful of men so rich they can run their own space programs, at the other end about 40% -- roughly 140 million Americans -- as this report lays out, are in poverty or one stress away from poverty. As I noted the other day the difference between CEOs and the median for workers is 670 to 1. And from this wealth inequality, like metastasizing cancers, flows most of the poor U.S. social outcome data.
The federal poverty line struggles to capture the economic hardship that half of Americans face.
Newspaper headlines are warning of rising inflation and the possibility that voters will respond to it by punishing Democrats in the midterm elections this fall. But there are few, if any, headlines about the enormous numbers of Americans who are low-income and poor—a travesty in one of the world’s wealthiest nations.
The problem of poverty is marked by several factors, the first of which is a deeply flawed government indicator of who qualifies as poor. Measured by the federal poverty line, about 37 million Americans live below the poverty line—that’s about 11 percent of the population.
Stephan: This trend, I think, is one of the most dangerous shaping our future. We have a significant percentage of White people -- and it is almost all White people -- who already see themselves as being in a war. And violence is part of war. The Republican paramilitary is a serious threat to democracy in America.
A Trump supporter holds a Trump flag inside the US Capitol Building near the Senate Chamber on January 06, 2021 in Washington, DC. Credit: Win McNamee / Getty
It’s campaign season, which means Republican candidates for office wielding weapons and threatening to use them.
Here’s U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, looking like an extra in a straight-to-DVD Western.
J.R. Majewski, a Republican candidate for Congress in Ohio, ran an ad (since taken down for copyright issues) in which images of President Joe Biden, Minnesota U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar and Colin Kaepernick (?!) are flashed on the screen, and then Majewski casually walks around with a rifle and says he’ll “do whatever it takes to return this country back to its former glory.”
Blake Masters, the Trump-endorsed U.S. Senate candidate in Arizona, builds his own guns and recently showed one off on social media with the caption: “I will remind everyone in Congress what ‘shall not be infringed’ means.”
It’s an especially sinister message, given that Masters’ potential opponent is U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly, whose wife former Rep. Gabby […]
Stephan: The United States spends more on the military-industrial complex than the next seven countries, and that includes both China and Russia, taking their budgets together. The question that should be asked, in my opinion, is: Doe this unique huge sum get us a military seven times better than theirs? One thing we know for sure, it is incredibly profitable for the corporations in the game. Lockheed Martin, Raytheon Technologies, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman should be noted particularly.
The Senate bill would authorize the purchase of two more Arleigh Burke-class destroyers. U.S. Navy / Getty
The Senate Armed Services Committee approved its version of the fiscal 2023 National Defense Authorization Act Thursday after adding more than $44 billion to the Biden administration’s request, sending the annual defense policy bill to the full Senate for consideration.
The bill would authorize $817.3 billion for the Defense Department. It also would authorize $29.7 billion for defense-related programs at other agencies and endorse another $10.6 billion in other congressional committees’ national security authorizations. The tally for the Pentagon is 5.7 percent more than the amount requested by President Joe Biden, and 5.4 percent more than Biden said he wanted for national security programs overall.
The proposed increases, which congressional appropriators would have to back before they become law, would amount to a roughly 10 percent boost for the Defense Department and other national security programs over the fiscal 2022 enacted level, not counting supplemental aid for the Ukraine war effort.
The committee approved the legislation by a 23-3 vote but did not reveal how each […]
Stephan: The Saudis are medieval religious drug dealers, as described in this excellent piece. What interests me about Saudi Arabia, is what happens to them after about 2040 when much of the developed world will have no internal combustion engine vehicles on their roads. That's only 18 yearsand it is going to be a trend, not a single event.
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Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salma Credit: Bernd von Jutrczenka / Picture-Alliance / DPA / AP
After more than a week of indecision, the Biden administration has confirmed that the president will travel to Saudi Arabia next month to meet with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the country’s ruler. When I spoke with bin Salman—known universally as MBS—in December, he all but dared President Joe Biden not to meet with him. He told me that Biden’s job is to look out for American interests, and that if Biden thought that meant pissing off Saudi Arabia, then he should give that theory a try and see what happens. “Go for it,” MBS said to me in English, which he speaks well but not perfectly. I believe the idiom he was searching for was “make my day.”
As a candidate, Biden called MBS a “pariah.” The Mario Cuomo line about campaigning in poetry and governing in prose applies here: Biden undoubtedly continues to dislike MBS. But the United States does not exist in some ethereal realm of gumdrops and friendship bracelets, and […]
Stephan: Texas today is essentially a fascist racist state, and like all authoritarian fascist states, the police are not held responsible for anything. That said, the blatant cover-up going on, 19 kids and two teachers were murdered while the police stood in the hallway wetting themselves with fear, is notable. The government at every level is participating in a cover-up but bits and pieces of information about the massacre still get out, and every leak -- here is the latest -- makes the police, and particularly police chief Pedro Arredondo, look ever more incompetent and fear-driven. I think it is important to always remember these were mostly Hispanic kids. If this had been predominantly White kids you can be sure this level of cover-up would not be happening, even in Texas.
Uvalde, Tx police car
The has been another bombshell report about the law enforcement response to the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
“Surveillance footage shows that police never tried to open a door to two classrooms at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde in the 77 minutes between the time a gunman entered the rooms and massacred 21 people and officers finally stormed in and killed him,” the San Antonio Express-Newsreported, citing “a law enforcement source close to the investigation.”
After initially repeatedly misleading the public about the police response, authorities have gone silent, leaving the public to find out more though leaks.
“Investigators believe the 18-year-old gunman who killed 19 children and two teachers at the school on May 24 could not have locked the door to the connected classrooms from the inside, according to the source. All classroom doors at Robb Elementary are designed to lock automatically when they are closed so that the only way to enter from the outside is with a key, the source said. Police might have […]
