Pentagon: More Money for Weapons, Less for Troops

Pay and Benefit Hikes Unsustainable, Officials Warn

by Jason Ditz

A decade of massive annual increases in military spending have given the Pentagon record budgets, but officials are warning that, as financial problems make more hikes unlikely, the pay raises and benefits packages Congress has given to troops are “unsustainable.”

Instead the Pentagon is pushing Congress to decrease the amount of money set aside for troop pay and benefits, and increase the amount it spends on weapons and operations.

Though in practice the Pentagon hasn’t had to balance the enormous health care costs from all its casualties and all the other expenses associated with its two major wars, officials seem convinced that sooner or later those costs will have to be reckoned with instead of being funded with emergency spending and budget hikes.

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Prepare For Obamacare: Practice Self-Care

by Bill Sardi

Question from an LR reader: “I want to ask you what you would prescribe for the US health care system? How much government should be involved, if at all? “What kind of health care system do you think would be the best for our nation?”

Reply:

1. All health insurance plans promote irresponsibility. People just run to the doctor and believe their doctor is responsible for keeping them healthy, not themselves.

2. Health insurance is a ponzi scheme, with the young and healthy paying for the old and chronically ill and those with poor health habits, though I should add that smokers actually cost insurance plans less money over the long haul since they die sooner.

3. With a large pool of money available, the insurance pot gets raided and doctors and hospitals overcharge since there is no market control. There is nothing the plan won’t pay for, no matter how expensive, because the desperate public will demand it. You learn your mother has breast cancer. You will stop at nothing to see she gets the most advanced care, and the more her disease progresses, the more you will demand something be done, even unproven treatment.

4. High-tech care caused Americans to falsely believe their healthcare system is the best in the world, and they want more of it. Fancy imaging technology (cat scans, MRIs), unproven but less invasive particle beam radiation treatment, robotic surgery – all are in huge public demand. A Rand Corporation study showed high-technology is the main driver in the high cost of health care.

We are living a fantasy to believe American government can provide all the high-tech medical care that is available (example: latest New York Times article suggests $5000 disease gene testing for all).

5. About 85% of Americans have health insurance. To provide insurance to the remaining population, largely illegal immigrants, places financial and manpower strains on the delivery of health care that the industry is not prepared for. It was Winston Churchill who said: “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery.”

6. Because other countries provide universal health insurance is only to say the bills are paid. This represents provision (welfare) for doctors and hospitals. The system rewards treatment, not cure. Modern medicine has substituted markers of poor health, such as cholesterol, PSA, blood pressure, rather than true end points, such as survival or being drug free.

While many Americans envy countries that offer universal health care, most universal health care plans will soon fail. The National Health Service in Britain is about to implode.

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What I Learned in Afghanistan – About the United States

by Dana Visalli

I was surprised on my recent trip to Afghanistan that I learned so much…about the United States. I was in Afghanistan for two weeks in March of this year, meeting with a large number of Afghans working in humanitarian endeavors – the principal of a girls’ school, the director of a school for street children, the Afghan Human Rights Commission, a group working on environmental issues. The one thing that all of these groups that we met with had in common was, they were penniless. They all survived on rather tenuous donations made by philanthropic foundations in Europe.

I had read that the United States had spent $300 billion dollars in Afghanistan since the invasion and occupation of that country ten years ago, so I naturally became curious where this tremendous quantity of money and resources had gone. Many Americans had said to me that we were in Afghanistan “to help Afghan women,” and yet we were told by the director of the Afghan Human Rights Commission, and we read in the recent UN report titled “Silence is Violence,” that the situation for women there was growing more violent and oppressive each year. So I decide to do some research.

95% of the $300 billion that the U.S. has spent on its Afghanistan operation since we invaded the country in 2001 has gone to our military operations there. Several reports indicate that it costs one million dollars to keep one American soldier in that country for one year. We will soon have 100,000 troops in Afghanistan, which will cost a neat $100 billion a year.

US soldiers in Afghanistan spend almost all of their time on one of our 300 bases in that country, so there is nothing they can do to help the Afghan people, whose physical infrastructure has been destroyed by the “30-year war” there, and who are themselves mostly jobless in a society in which there is almost no economy and no work.

Some effort is made to see that the remaining 5% of the $300 billion spent to date in Afghanistan does help Afghan society, but there is so much corruption and general lawlessness that the endeavor is largely futile. We were told by a female member of the Afghan parliament of one symbolic incident in which a container of medical equipment that was purchased in the US with US government funds for a clinic in Ghawr province, west of Kabul. It was shipped from the US, but by the time it arrived in Ghawr it was just an empty shell; all the equipment had been pilfered along the way.

Violence against women is increasing in Afghanistan at the present time, not decreasing. The Director of the Afghan Human Rights Commission told us of a recent case in which a ten-year-old girl was picked up by an Afghan Army commander in his military vehicle, taken to the nearby base and raped. He brought her back to her home semiconscious and bleeding, after conveying to her that if she told what had happened he would kill her entire family. The human rights commissioner ended the tale by saying to us the he could tell us “a thousand stories like this.” There has been a rapid rise in the number of self-immolations – women burning themselves to death – in Afghanistan in the past three years, to escape the violence that pervades many women’s lives – under the nine-year US occupation.

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Healthcare Reform Bill Ignores Real Problem – Ron Paul

By Dr. Ron Paul

Following months of heated public debate and aggressive closed-door negotiations, Congress finally cast a historic vote on healthcare late Sunday evening. It was truly a sad weekend on the House floor as we witnessed further dismantling of the Constitution, disregard of the will of the people, explosive expansion of the reach of government, unprecedented corporate favoritism, and the impending end of quality healthcare as we know it.

Those in favor of this bill touted their good intentions of ensuring quality healthcare for all Americans, as if those of us against the bill are against good medical care. They cite fanciful statistics of deficit reduction, while simultaneously planning to expand the already struggling medical welfare programs we currently have. They somehow think that healthcare in this country will be improved by swelling our welfare rolls and cutting reimbursement payments to doctors who are already losing money. It is estimated that thousands of doctors will be economically forced out of the profession should this government fuzzy math actually try to become healthcare reality. No one has thought to ask what good mandatory health insurance will be if people can’t find a doctor.

Legislative hopes and dreams don’t always stand up well against economic realities.

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Open Your Eyes – Music Video by Billy Blaze

Pentagon Report: Still Not Enough Troops in Afghanistan

After Multiple Escalations, Will Enough Ever Be Enough?

by Jason Ditz of Antiwar.com

After 15 months in office President Obama has increased the number of troops in Afghanistan by an almost impossible amount, going from 30,000 (itself the product of an end-of-term escalation by President Bush) to 86,000… with the troop level pushing 100,000 by the end of the summer.

But in what is rapidly becoming the ultimate example of a mission that grows to exceed whatever resources it is given, the Pentagon’s latest report on Afghanistan is warning that they still don’t have enough troops to cover even half of the “key districts” in the nation, let alone the rest of the country.

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Did You Pay Your Taxes? – They Know Where You Live

This is kinda creepy.

Ron Paul Discusses Healthcare Reform

Ron Paul Challenges GOP’s Foreign Policy Agenda

By Doug Bandow

It has been nearly a decade since President George W. Bush chose arrogance over humility as the basis of American foreign policy. The intervening years have not been good for the United States or the Republican Party. As the GOP seeks to take back the White House it needs to conduct a serious foreign policy debate. Republicans should start by listening to Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas).

At the recent Southern Republican Leadership Conference big spending Mitt Romney bested Rep. Paul by just one vote in the popularity contest. Yet Paul eschewed reliance on easy applause lines and challenged the newfound Republican fondness for big militaries and constant wars.

For instance, Paul observed that conservatives, like liberals, enjoyed spending money, only “on different things. They like embassies, and they like occupation. They like the empire. They like to be in 135 countries and 700 bases.”

Similarly, Paul said, conservatives talked about following the Constitution, “except for war. Let the president go to war anytime they want.”

Paul garnered applause from more youthful members of the audience. But boos were heard as well. Many establishment GOP activists appear to have become wedded to a big-government foreign policy.

When Politico polled activists and analysts about why the GOP mainstream was hostile to Paul, James Carafano of the Heritage Foundation complained that “The deliberate self-weakening of America is an invitation to disaster.” Carafano argued that Paul failed to fulfill the constitutional obligation to “provide for the common defense” and that the latter’s vision would not keep America “safe, free, and prosperous.”

Yet Washington’s policy of promiscuous intervention is not providing for America’s “common defense.” Rather, the U.S. is protecting virtually every other nation. That’s one reason why the Pentagon was incapable of defending Americans when the U.S. was attacked on 9/11,

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Ron Paul and the Presidency – It’s Closer than the Media thinks

By Doug Wead

“Control the coinage and the courts, the rabble can have the rest.” – The Princess Irulan in Frank Herbert’s Dune.

Last week was a good week for the so-called “constitutional wing” of the Republican Party, those indomitable Ron Paul people. Okay, sure, the next presidential election is a long way off but a recent snapshot taken by pollsters shows a surprising opening for the Texas congressman, the man who says that the Federal Reserve should be audited. The general public is moving toward Ron Paul, even if most of them don’t even know who he is.

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