End War and Cut Defense, Not Social Services

Dear Senator Feinstein,

Received your email response to my letter regarding social safety net programs. Part of your letter is true—defense spending has risen 74% over the past 10 years and entitlements (mainly Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid) by 32% while federal revenue from taxes has dropped 18% (thanks to the Bush/Obama tax cuts), our federal debt is $1.6 trillion (as opposed to a surplus before the disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq) and our current fiscal path is unsustainable. The facts are true but the fallacy, the Big Lie that all you Republicrat deficit hawks keep repeating is that entitlements are the major problem. No matter how many times it’s repeated, they’re not. Social Security and Medicare are both self-sustaining programs funded by separate clearly identified payroll taxes and kept in trust funds separate from general revenue. They are not part of the budget nor are they part of the deficit. Without doing a thing to either program, Social Security would remain solvent until 2033 and Medicare until 2024. This is NOT a crisis and to repeat the Republican mantra that these programs must be “reformed” i.e., cut back or better yet, eliminated, is to be complicit in the Big Lie. Minor adjustments would make these programs solvent indefinitely. “Spending for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid currently account for 42% of federal outlays, and these three programs alone are projected to account for half of all federal outlays by 2021.” Once again, the problem is not the programs but the bloated and rising profit margins of the insurance, hospital and drug industries, the abandonment of a single payer health program by President Obama, and the failure of Congress to control healthcare costs including legislation specifically prohibiting Medicare from negotiating lower drug prices. As you point out, Senator, Defense outlays have risen 74% and minimal research shows national defense expenditures account for over 50% of federal outlays, yet Congress will not consider cuts to the bloated Pentagon budget. The stupid, immoral, unnecessary and unending War on Terror has already cost nearly $2 trillion, the Bush tax cuts at least that amount but all we hear out of Washington is cut entitlements and discretionary spending. This is wrong-headed, immoral and not the problem. End war and cut defense, not social services. It’s not only the right thing to do, it’s the only moral thing to do.

cc: Representative Pelosi

      Senator Boxer

      President Obama

Obama Plays Poker With Boehner

Dear Mr. President,

You raise the threshold for higher taxes from $250,000 to $400,000 and Boehner immediately counters with $1 million. This is not a poker game, Mr. President, the future of the country is at stake here. The idea is not to keep raising Boehner but to call his bluff. Some say you’re negotiating with yourself, others say you’re showing good faith by compromising. I say you’re either a conservative Republican austerity hawk at heart or just plain stupid. Either way, your pattern is consistent: campaign on one platform, then immediately abandon it and give the Republicans everything they want. Even the New York Times editorial got a bit exasperated this morning and lamented that you were not a “more combative negotiator.” Not only did you agree to keep the tax rate on dividends, a major source of income for the 1%, at 20% instead of raising it to 39.6%, but you agreed to the Republican idea of cutting millions of seniors’ Social Security checks by using a new cost of living index, the Chained CPI. As if that wasn’t bad enough, you proposed slashing more than $400 billion from federal health care, namely Medicare and Medicaid. But Medicare is not a budget problem. Medicare is funded by a separate tax on wages and stored in a separate trust fund. The problem is that Republican legislation prohibits negotiating lower rates with big pharma and their bloated profit margins. And why did you put Social Security on the chopping block anyway? Social Security is not part of the budget problem either; it’s not part of the budget; it’s an entitlement program funded by a separate tax on every wage-earner and employer and kept in a separate trust fund. How did Social Security suddenly merge into the federal budget? Betrayal after betrayal. And your proposed $100 billion cut to Defense? Another sham; it amounts to no more than $10 billion a year, a drop in the bucket that can be more than offset by buying 800 fewer F-35s or maybe not buying engines for some of them. You’ve embraced the Republican fallacy of cutting spending for what? So the rich can get yet another pass? And then the final straw, another article buried on the inside pages of this morning’s Times, “Congressional Negotiators Drop Ban on Indefinite Detention of Citizens, Aides Say.” I couldn’t help but wonder if you were behind that one, too. Your pattern has not changed, you are still the most effective evil, and anyone who voted for you and thought otherwise is delusional or a fool or both.

Budget Austerity: F-35 Fighter Jets Without Engines

Dear Mr. President,

This morning’s New York Times called your latest budget proposal “a new offer…to resolve the pending fiscal crisis” (aka “fiscal cliff”, the imaginary disaster if the Bush tax cuts are rolled back and automatic spending cuts occur). Reading the details of your new plan, I got the feeling of déjà vu again—you’re saying one thing and doing just the opposite. Your new plan, almost identical to Boehner’s, includes $800 billion in direct cuts to federal programs, half from cuts in federal health care, plus $122 billion from Social Security by changing the cost-of-living calculation to a chained CPI so seniors feel the pain. And your plan to raise taxes on the rich is a charade: the top tax rate of 39.6% is up a whopping 4.6%? And it only applies to incomes above $400,000 rather than the original $250,000? The article goes on to point out that the current income level where the top tax rate kicks in is $388,350, which means the rich actually got a tax break of $11,650 before they pay higher taxes. That’s sick, Mr. President, giving the 1% a tax break under the guise of taxing the rich. But it’s also your MO. A real tax on the rich would be a marginal tax rate like France’s 75% for incomes over $1.3 million, or 90% like it was back in Eisenhower’s time, or 75% in Nixontimes or 70% before Reagan slashed taxes on the rich in half. Even Business Insider, not exactly a liberal news site, is surprised at your “caving” on income tax rates since the polls are strongly in favor of your original plan and against the Republicans’. (As I keep saying, you’re the best president the Republicans have ever had.) Another article in today’s Times, reports that the Pentagon will resume payments to “our Pakistani partners” for guarding the Afghan border—$688 million for the past 6 months, in addition to the $1.5 billion a year in nonmilitary aid and $2 billion a year in military aid. This, in spite of their “growing nuclear arsenal” and move to make their nuclear weapons more portable. (Why are we not threatening Pakistan with sanctions like we do Iran?) In another article, the Pentagon signed a contract on Friday with Lockheed for 32 more F-35 fighter jets at a cost of $3.5+ billion. Without engines! Engines are now extra? No wonder their profit is doubling on this contract. All this while healthcare, education and social services are cut and our infrastructure crumbles. War profiteers prosper while the rest of us suffer and our president betrays us once again.

$39 Billion For What?

Dear Mr. President,

On Saturday I received a 2-page letter from The White House in response to my foreign policy letters. It dwells at length on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—“…the tide of war is finally turning. The war is Iraq is over. The number of troops in harm’s way has been cut in half….In Afghanistan we have begun a transition to Afghan responsibility for security, and we have a clear path to fulfill our mission.” Yes, the war in Iraq is over after 8 years and a trillion dollars and nothing accomplished except to inflict horrific death and destruction; we left behind a country in tatters with a government neither democratic nor an ally which wants nothing more to do with us. Meanwhile, your “smart” war in Afghanistan also accomplished nothing except to create more hatred, death and destruction on another people and culture we neither understand nor respect, squandering even more hundreds of billions of dollars in a senseless unwinnable war and saddling that country with one of the most corrupt governments in the entire world. Karzai and his government of crony criminals is commonly referred to by diplomats and generals alike as VICE, Vertically Integrated Criminal Enterprise, where gold and cash is being smuggled out in suitcases, boxes, even shrink wrapped bundles of cash on pallets, at an alarming rate—estimated at $4.5 billion last year—in anticipation of the U.S. pullout and return of the Taliban. Sunday’s local paper carried an AP article, “US military reports upbeat on Afghan war progress” cites Maj. Gen. Robert Abrams reporting “astounding” progress in the Kandahar region where Afghan forces are now “dominating,” but the lead editorial in today’s New York Times calls the same report “bleak” and says it’s pointless to keep 68,000 troops there until the end of 2014. The editorial states that we’ve spent $39 billion to train and equip a 350,000 man combined army and police force with a 20% desertion rate, with most recruits illiterate, and with only 1 of 23 army brigades capable of operating on their own without our help. And $39 billion is only a tiny portion of what we’ve spent on war over the past decade—easily near $2 trillion—while at home, education, health care, social services and infrastructure are starved for lack of funds and our cities and citizens face a bankrupt future. Have you learned nothing, Mr. President? What will it take for you to send a letter admitting that all wars are dumb wars, that every war devastates both sides.

Tears For the Children, All the Children

Dear Mr. President,

The time for platitudes and tears is over. The time for “meaningful action” (your words) is way overdue. An editorial in today’s local paper reads: “This time President Obama had to wipe away tears as he spoke of the slaughter of ‘beautiful little kids’ at a Connecticut elementary school. His White House statement was otherwise indistinguishable from what he said after the carnage in Aurora, Colorado, Tucson, Ariz.; and from various other gun massacres that have become… a part of American life.” Just what does “meaningful action” mean, anyway? Are you finally ready to take a risk and challenge the NRA and the myth they promote that the 2^nd Amendment guarantees the right to own military assault rifles and handguns that fire 6 rounds per second and hold high-capacity magazines? Yesterday, a friend went to a Big 5 Sporting Goods store to buy shoes. At the register, she had to reach over a large display of bullets and pepper spray to pay for her purchase. Big 5’s weekly ad features an entire page of rifles, knives, bullets and scopes on sale this week: a .223 caliber rifle, the same caliber rifle carried by Adam Lanza to Sandy Hook Elementary School, and James Holmes into a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, is on sale for only $339.99; bullets for almost any type of pistol or rifle are on sale too, depending on the caliber and quantity, 30 to 50 cents a bullet. Adam Lanza, James Holmes, Jared Loughner are only the latest in a long list of mass murderers here at home, unhampered in arming themselves for war against the public by any regulation or legislation. Senator Feinstein’s gun control law of 1994, the result of yet another massacre on July 1, 1993, at 101 California here in San Francisco, expired in 2004; Congress failed to renew it and there’s been no public discussion since. The slaughter continues, the same stunned amazement, the same cries of How can this happen? with each shooting, politicians mouthing the same platitudes—and nothing happens as a result. As for those tears you wiped away at your news conference yesterday—I’ll believe they’re not crocodile tears when I see them shed for all the “beautiful little kids” your Hellfire missiles killed in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Afghanistan. I’ll believe it when I see the wars end, the CIA disbanded and the end of Kill List Tuesdays, when I see military weapons outlawed, and constitutional protections and the rule of law restored. Until then, no more crocodile tears, Mr. President.