Masters of War
Patrick Martin: ‘Trump budget to fund wider wars by slashing domestic spending’, wsws.org
“The budget outline issued by the Trump administration Thursday morning is a blueprint for social counterrevolution. It proposes a massive increase in spending on military operations and domestic repression, while slashing domestic social programs by as much as 30 percent and eliminating dozens of agencies and programs outright.
The document deals only with discretionary spending, funds that must be appropriated each year by Congress, accounting for about one-quarter of the $4 trillion that the US government will spend in the fiscal year that begins October 1.
The budget leaves open the fate of the remaining $3 trillion in federal spending, which includes payments under entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and food stamps, as well as other legally required payments, such as interest on the national debt.”
(The very long and hideous rest is here.) Martin lists the 19 federal agencies jettisoned entirely, but I hope he knows that disappearing USAID (aided by the CIA) would be a benefit to the rest of the world that doesn’t happen to be ‘under NATO’s umbrella’. Martin also claims that ‘After criticism by congressional hawks like Senator John McCain, and pushback from the military brass, the Pentagon’s budget will rise to $639 billion.” I haven’t seen that elsewhere, unless he means Herr T’s supplementary budget of however-many billions to…fight IS™. His take that T’s increasing the military budget is a sop to the deep state military for his (ahem) former promise to ‘get along with Russia’ and giving back the CIA’s right to drone ‘targets’ at will is as well. He don’t want no frickin’ deep state military or CIA coup against him, does he?
Finian Cunningham at RT expressed it: ‘Trump dons ‘full-metal-jacket’ in embrace of war economy’
TRNN says ‘Trump’s Budget Shreds the Social Safety Net; President Donald Trump’s 2018 budget so far reflects Steve Bannon’s agenda to ‘deconstruct the administrative state’
Yes, Wenonaha Hauter: ‘Guns Trump Butter in White House Budget’, Counterpunch.
“Our food, water and climate are under attack in this budget, which will heat the planet, slash our environmental protections, and starve communities of needed resources to remain healthy and thriving.
Trump’s budget, as expected, is a gut punch to protections to our food, water, environment and communities—including the rural communities that helped put him in the White House.”
Chris Floyd‘s March 17 ‘Useless Eaters and Ethnic Purity: the Trump/Bannon War for Biological Nationhood’. He opens with:
“The Trump regime has defended its plan to cut the “Meals on Wheels” program by saying it “doesn’t show any results.” What kind of “results” are they talking about? The program delivers meals to shut-ins; the shut-ins eat the meal; they don’t starve to death. That is the result, and it happens all day every day. It is one of the most “resultful” programs in existence. But notice that the Trumpists aren’t saying we can’t afford the program; they are clearly saying it’s not delivering the results they want to see. And what are the only “results” produced by not delivering meals to the sick and shut-in who can’t provide for themselves? THEY WILL DIE.” then closes with:
“For the moment, it doesn’t look like actual systematic mass extermination is on the cards; so perhaps we can call their present approach the “Semi-Final Solution.” But who knows what wonders await us down the line. As the late, great Leonard Cohen said: “I’ve seen the future, brother: it is murder.”
Here’s a bit of a counter-factual, FWIW. As in: “We’ll see what happens down the road to DHS as far as cuts”. But why make any cuts? Oh; to skinnify the budget.
Chuckles Schumer said the budget would kill the middle class. Well yes, but how about the wretchedly poor underclass, Chuck? The hungry, the bleeding, those poor parents who can’t afford ‘school choice’, or the children whose families are utterly dependent on the food served at their school programs, including before and after school and so many others of the Pauper Class?
Sure this is Trump’s opening gambit, and he’ll be open to some tweaks, but remember, Chuckles: in May after the ‘Offishull’ budget arrives, eight D Senators will have to cross the aisle to vote it into policy. We’ll watch what you do, not what you say as you rail against it, then fold in TINA-ness.
Will you and your comrades object to the increase in the military budget (past posturing that is)? Becuse make no mistake: again all hopes to the opposite, this is a War President, now prosecuting, extending, and expanding not only Obama’s wars, but with an assured even larger ‘presence’ in Africa, as per General Thomas Waldhauser’s recent plea to Congress to end the budgetary constraints facing Africom in the ‘Scramble for Africa’ (wsws.org) and the proxy wars he’s frantic about. Yeah, rule by the oligarchy has always been; your darlin’ Clinton would have been close to the same.
“We’re only there for the mine-sweeping, not guarding the port from the evil Rossians!”
“So many ter’ists, so little time! And money! Pay up, Frau Merkel, as we can do more!”
Africom Retweet from National Patriotic (p)Rressitutes:
@SpiritAmerica : Some great background information from @NPR on why #Flintlock17 is an important exercise in #Chad
From a Revolutionary War deserter (“It ain’t my fight, you know? Don’t own no slaves. Ain’t gonna die so they can get rich selling cotton.) era egalitarian:
Newton Knight: “From this day forward we declare the land north of Pascagoula Swamp, south of enterprise and east to the Pearl River to the Alabama border, to be a Free State of Jones. And as such we do hereby proclaim and affirm the following principles. Number one, no man ought to stay poor so another man can get rich. Number two, no man ought to tell another man what you got to live for or what he’s got to die for. Number three, what you put in the ground is yours to tend and harvest and there ain’t no man ought to be able to take that away from you. Number four, every man is a man. If you walk on two legs, you’re a man. It’s as simple as that.”
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
i’m having a hard time getting worked up about this b/c obviously & most importantly it doesn’t affect me personally, except in an abstract “butterfly flaps its wings and presto tsunami in the indian ocean” kind of way.
this is the agenda. the new deal & great society were bribes. now they are being taken away. pieces at a time.
it is awful. but the status quo ante was pretty frickin’ awful already.
of course WD & co know this. so the owners are accelerating the devolution of the state’s starvation level benefits to the unproductive members of society. HRC was not going to do differently, except in a mascara sort of way.
what’s the tipping point? when do “people” get fired up? a quarter of us are unemployed…maybe if we could all get together…somehow…
we’ve talked about when the tipping point might come. i reckon when it comes it will be global, not local. as for comments on why i care, they’ll have to wait cuz: loads of weekend chores.
but here; let’s see if this riles you up:
“Rima Khalaf, the head of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA). resigned today after she was asked to withdraw a report her agency published earlier this week that stated Israel is an “apartheid regime.” “The secretary-general demanded yesterday that I withdraw the report, and I refused,”Khalaf told reporters at a press conference in Beirut today, according to the Middle East Eye. “It was expected that Israel and its allies would put enormous pressure on the United Nations secretary general to renounce the report,” she also said, according to Reuters. Then Khalaf stated that the United Nations “had scrubbed the report from its website.”
I can’t “shoot my spit wads from the cheap sits” any faster. they’ve started charging for paper!
tomorrow for responses to both comments. family and extended family come first, of course. sleep well, dream well if possible. mr. wd brought home some CBD raw herbal capsules; supposed to help one sleep and benefit in other ways (less pain, help ya not walk like a drunken moose, etc.?) ;-).
yep, shit’s been fooked up for a long time for a hella lot of amerikans, but it’s about to get worse for the poor, for one thing. it will impact some of my friends and family, but if all the poor can stand as our extended families, them as well.
the block grant bidness just changed…because work makes people feel proud, even if they’re too debilitated to er…work, and will transition the slackers into the labor force.
“The House Republican health care plan picked up an important endorsement Friday from leaders of an influential bloc of ultra-right representatives after President Trump agreed to proposals to impose work requirements on Medicaid beneficiaries and to allow states to accept federal block granting of the program.
Medicaid provides insurance coverage to roughly 60 million recipients, including the poor, the disabled, pregnant women and some elderly people. Under Obamacare, Medicaid was expanded to allow 11 million previously uninsured “able-bodied” adults without children to enroll in the program.
The House bill proposes to end this expansion, which was implemented in 31 states, by 2020, with some Republicans calling for it to end as soon as January 1, 2018. The additional provisions endorsed this week by Trump, adding work requirements and allowing states to turn the program into a block grant rather than an entitlement, would force even more people off the program or limit their benefits.
“Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Tom Price and Seema Verma, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), sent a letter to state governors Tuesday saying they are open for states to apply for waivers to add work requirements, as well as premiums and co-pays for Medicaid to ration care. Such waiver requests were denied under the Obama administration.”
the hit to NOAA is largely directed at their satellites, without which data er…climate change ramifications? and there’s no way to go back and retrieve real-time data in the future. this iteration of Liar-in-Chief ‘infrastructure man’ not only didn’t include any mention of those boondoggles in his budget proposal, but cancelled projects underway in rural amerika. when questioned, T’s Team said ‘more later on infrastructure, you’ll love it!!!’ or close to that.
loads of money for devos and her charter voucher schools rubbish, loads of laid off teachers, *Unionized*public service employees (UPSEU), yanno, the ones whose pensions are disappearing rapidly, tra la la.
HUD cuts, low-income college grants, ah…so lovely, all of it. and yes, the claim is that since the military will be the beneficiary of all that ‘needless funding’, Rs will try to go how wild on deleting funding to projects that have been sorta in the works under O (“SS is on the table), i expect more PO privatization which O and his Dems never, ever addressed.
so as herr T ramps up the wars of regime change he swore he wouldn’t, sets his eyes on iran and north korea, D’s and their scribes to the Nato Imperium will be more like this hilarious example of b’s:
‘Red Scare Redux: “Russian Weapons Stocked Right Up At NATO’s Border!”’
“A Washington Post news piece on the current NATO budget spat remarks:
Russia, for its part, keeps tanks and missiles stocked right up against the NATO border.
Now, that’s truly threatening of Russia and DANGEROUS!
How did that come to be?”
ah, well, i gotta go peel roasted poblanos, take care of some other chores and correspondence…
sure, it all should hasten an anticapitalist revolution, but will it? or will it soon enough? folks around the planet are gettin’ plenty steamed up, we an only hope their rage is pointing at the True Culprits of our increased immiseration.
on edit: this cartoon epitomizes what i was trying to say about michael hayden’s visit with stephen colbert.
pretty awful list. if you are able to take medicine, you must be able to hold down a job.
what shall we ever do? what about encouraging the local youth to stage a mass robbery of the local Safeway’s & CVS? set it up word of mouth, no social media & get as many kids as possible to walk in & start taking stuff.
I was talking to a homeless diabetic amputee wheel-chair bound vet begging outside of the local Safeway/CVS and suggested that he & his homeless homies go burn down D.C. city hall. I mean, why not? if that’s too radical, how about all of you planting yourselves on the steps outside the mayor’s office? set up camp there?
none of us have anything to lose. the local “minority” youth are headed one of 3 places: prison, McDonald’s, or the military. society has no need for them. the homeless vet dude, same deal. tossed on the crap heap.
no need for camps & ovens. just cut off the Medicaid & let nature take its course.
just spit balling here. but “playing by the ‘rules'”? meh.
apologies; i don’t seem to be getting emails from my bill gates provider. but yeah, the budget proposal could be featured in a long bumper sticker:
“killing the inconvenient expendables more quickly
in the name of manifest hegemonic destiny”
that fails, but you get my drift. cool idea camping out in front of the mayor’s office, save for Police Policy and Better Practices. oh, yes, millions, billions more for police and DHS, iirc.
ah, the poor fellow; my heart goes out to him. prolly stuffed with ptsd, as well, eh? ah yes: playing by the rulez. although i don’t recall denis conroy, this seems to sum up “what’s going on”. hard to just clip a couple paragraphs, but:
“On closer examination, the superlative-ridden cant of the new ‘lot’ is strangely similar to the superlative-ridden cant of the old ‘lot’. Over time, the American two-party system had morphed into a binary cancer of sorts, pursuing progress through military conquest while sharing the same disciplines that control the public’s support for Empire building. Becoming ever more bellicose and pumped-up with greed and power, the so-called American democratic spirit died an ignominious death when the war-machine set about consigning country after country to a dystopian hell. The American democratic spirit was apparently disposable like everything else!
The hollow men and women who ghoulishly occupied the institutions that curated disciplines that allowed money, militarism and media, unregulated licence to plunder the globe for profit, brought dystopia, not democracy, to millions of innocent people across the world. The millions of little brown bodies destroyed or maimed happened to be in the way, their resources were needed to afford more penthouses for blowhards back home!”
but your comment reminded me of this:
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/03/21/jack-m21.html
a little stroll down plantation & cotton field memory lanes to remind us what the slavocracry was, and is, up to.
“In response, the northern Democrats, led by Jackson’s vice president and successor, Martin Van Buren of New York, attempted to dissolve the class issue into a vague anti-elitist and, for the first time in US history, racist politics. The northern Democrats acted through the new species of career politician, the sprawling “Penny press,” made possible by developments in printing technology, and the most popular form of entertainment of the day, blackface minstrelsy, which lampooned Whigs, abolitionists, free blacks and slaves.”
“for the first time”? I find that impossible to believe. in any case, lots of good info here though their unequivocal praise of Jefferson & Lincoln…and their Hegelian certainty that history is marching forward, not backwards, sideways or diagonal…eh, might as well believe in Jeebus or whatever. anyway, I guess “weaponized” entertainment & press have been around a while. thanks Democrats.
that aside, my new favorite quote:
“Inspirational visit, I have to tell you. I’m a fan”-DT visiting A Jackson’s ancestral manse. yep Old Hickory. uh huh. big fan. what do you think Old Hick would say of Meals on Wheels?
love yer new name, shoplifters unite!
“The question is, of all presidents, why does the White House seek to drape Trump in the mantle of
Andrew Jacksonthe old indun killer? but really, i only made it halfway thru the piece and then began to scan.that northern blacks were still not allowed to vote during those times says a lot, no? ‘defied a court injunction’ against grabbing the SW tribal lands was new to me, as well. what would old hick say about meals on wheels would be about what he said about indian removal:
“Humanity has often wept over the fate of the aborigines of this country. . . . To follow to the tomb the last of his race and to tread on the graves of extinct nations excite melancholy reflections. But true philanthropy reconciles the mind to these vicissitudes as it does to the extinction of one generation of people to make room for another.”
on edit: “survival of the fittest! if slaves and injuns were fit to rule, they’d be the masters”
that is quite a quote from uncle Hick. there were a number of things I did not know about in that wsws piece.
“Are there no churches? are there no almshouses? have they no families?” or some kind of BS like that is prolly what he’d say about feeding the elderly et al.
I like the Trump quote about his visit to AJ’s family home cuz it’s something he could have said about a trip to a Little Caesar’s Pizza Parlor. “inspiring business model, I confess i’m a huge fan.” cannot even fake some hint of reflection or the slightest depth. visiting the pyramids or the real Taj Mahal is about as meaningful as a trip to the food court.
i should have remarked on your love of that quote; i guess as i’d seen it before, the punch had been out of it earlier. yes, it was great history, and another one at the site i’m using for my coming diary has a hella lot, as well. again, so much i hadn’t known or connected the dots about.
now your dickensian parody might have come from hick, but srsly is afoot w/ the T plans afoot. ‘are there no workhouses’? ‘yes, get off yer skanky asses so you an earn your snap, medicaid, etc. will one require having a job to get one’s SS next? wish i could remember which social safety net programs under O required work. but oh, T’s budget proposal axed…wait for it: job training. doesn’t flipping burgers at mcDogfood take some training? walmart greeter? guess not really. mr. wd adores the woman who mans the door there when he goes on saturdays.
on edit: i just started a nicholas nickeby series, speaking of which.
Given the 1680 law in Virginia defined the rights of “Indians”, “Negroes”, and “whites”, it was hardly the first time racist politics was used for power.
Maybe the first time was about blackface as the means. If it was 1836 or 1840, the main whig opponent was William Henry Harrison, who was born on a Virginia plantation, was pro-slavery, moved to Ohio, ran his farm without slaves, joined Whig politics. Van Buren Democrats casting the slur of the Whigs being nigger-lovers (what that minstrel blackface communicated) against Harrison is kinda curious in retrospect. But not out of order with the culture of New York politics.
The success of the penny press depended on cheap magazine rates and the extension of post offices and postal stage roads.
Weaponized media first appeared in the 1800 election between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. And the 1804 election between Jefferson and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. Hard cider and peach brandy had been there since the pre-Revolution colony elections. But the newspaper wars in 1800 and 1804 were brutal and did go after Sally Hemings.
Until 1948, the Democrats were what remained of the plantation aristocrat party. World War II co-opted in the ethnic urban (southern and eastern Europe) working class and anti-railroad farmers. With Grant in 1868, the capitalists gained sway with the Republican Party. In 1876, the capitalist Republicans and ex-Plantation capitalist Democrats ran a fusion government that restored the ex-Plantation capitalists to state and local power. Jim Crow the trickster minstrel character of the early 1800s became Jim Crow the trickster laws reinstituting slavery in fact without the name in the 1890s and violently defended in the World War I period and the 1920s-1960s.
Guess DT thought Old Hick’s Hermitage was good (for it’s time) but didn’t measure up to a Trump property.
Old Hick would probably wonder why local communities didn’t put their elders in extended family houses as “Aunt so-and-so”. And didn’t slaveowners provide some sustenance for elderly slaves? He wouldn’t get the “wheels” bit. The guy stood conflicted between the feudalism implicit in plantation capitalism and the financial capitalism that was his main headache as a planter. Why he hated banks…and bank power.
ha, ha. THD made a funny or two at the end; good on ya. ooof, i needed a chuckle or three. and thanks a lot for the history, much of it new to me. most especially that ‘the 1680 law in Virginia defined the rights of “Indians”, “Negroes”, and “whites”. flies in the face of the meme that ‘race’ was only defined later than that. and cripes, i’d forgotten about sally hemmings.
but let’s see thomas rice himself bein’ the dancin’ jim crow: