Nationally, official Census numbers show 9% of seniors in poverty. Among children, 22% — 15.6 million — live in poverty.
. . . . . . .
A 2011 analysis by the Urban Institute, a public policy and research center, found public spending per child was $11,300 over the course of a year. The spending included federal and state programs for education, health such as Medicaid and nutrition, social services and housing. The report said some of those programs are being cut as states wrestle with dwindling budgets. By comparison, public spending on seniors was about $24,800 per person, mostly in federal funding for Social Security and Medicare.
Phi Beta Iota: The US Budget is not based on a coherent strategic model, on a national strategy, or even on any fundamentals such as save the children, preserve the water. How a nation treats its children can be a reasonable predictor of the future of that nation.
Special Operations forces have long enjoyed an elite position in the United States military, and achieved something like folk-hero status when Navy Seals killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan last May. The admiration is well-deserved, but an article in Monday’s Times drew attention to the power they’ve accrued of late, and raised questions about just how much independence they should have.
Carol Giacomo, who covers foreign affairs for the editorial board, says that the Obama administration has increasingly made Special Operations Forces its military tool of choice to handle threats overseas. It plans to rely on them even more widely as it draws down conventional troops from Afghanistan.
Eventually, Special Ops Forces will make up the bulk of any residual force left in Afghanistan, hunting down militants and helping train Afghan security forces. Administration and military officials are also talking about using them in regions where they have not operated in large numbers for the past decade, including Asia (the Philippines, specifically), Africa and Latin America.
The article on the front page of Monday’s Times reported that the top Special Operations officer, Adm. William H. McRaven, is now seeking authority to move his forces faster and outside of normal Pentagon deployment channels. The proposal has not been fully explained publicly but The Times reported that it would give him more autonomy to position his forces and their equipment where intelligence and global events indicate they are most needed.
Among congressional, staff—who have not yet been briefed on the proposal—there are questions about how such new authority might affect operations. “What problem are they trying to solve?” one aide asked. A Pentagon official, who spoke on background, insisted that Admiral McRaven “is not trying to fix something that’s broken. The proposal is anticipating what the future will be for these guys and getting ahead of it.”
The Pentagon official stressed that Admiral McRaven “is not looking for complete autonomy unanswerable to anybody” and that Special Operations Forces would still be ordered on specific missions by the regional four-star commander. But one concern is that the new plan would cut out the State Department. In the past, some ambassadors in crisis zones have opposed increased deployments of Special Operations teams, and they have demanded assurances that diplomatic chiefs of missions will be fully involved in their plans and missions.
The “global war on terror” has been used to justify a lot of things. But not everything changed on Sept. 11, 2001. Civilian control of the military is one thing that did not change. I can’t imagine a circumstance under which it should.
A confusing controversy between the United States and Egypt is unfolding. It has already raised tensions in the relationship between the two countries to a level that has not existed for decades. It results from moves by the military government in Cairo to go forward with the criminal prosecution of 43 foreigners, including 19 Americans, for unlawfully carrying on the work of unlicensed public interest organizations that improperly, according to Egyptian law, depend for their budget on foreign funding. Much has been made in American press coverage that one of the Americans charged happens to be Sam LaHood, son of the present American Secretary of Transportation, adopting a tone that seems to imply that at least one connected by blood to an important government official deserves immunity from prosecution.
Washington has responded with high minded and high profile expressions of consternation, including a warning from Hilary Clinton that the annual aid package for Egypt of $1.5 billion (of which $1.3 billion goes to the military) is in jeopardy unless the case against these NGO workers is dropped and their challenged organizations are allowed to carry on with their work of promoting democracy in Egypt. And indeed the U.S. Congress may yet refuse to authorize the release of these funds unless the State Department is willing to certify that Egypt is progressing toward greater democratization. President Obama has indicated his intention to continue with the aid at past levels, given the importance of Egypt in relation to American Middle Eastern interests, but as in so many other instances, he may give way if the pressure mounts. The outcome is not yet clear as an ultra-nationalistic Congress may yet thwart Obama’s seemingly more sensible response to what should have been treated as a tempest in a teapot, but for reasons to be discussed, has instead become a cause celebre.
The Americans charged are on the payroll of three organizations: International Republican Institute (IRI), Democratic National Institute (DNI), and Freedom House. The first two organizations get all of their funding from the U.S. Government, and were originally founded in 1983 after Ronald Reagan’s speech to the British Parliament in which he urged that help be given to build the democratic infrastructure of newly independent countries in the non-Western world put forward as a Cold War counter-measure to the continuing appeal of Marxist ideologies. From the moment of their founding IRI and DNI were abundantly funded by annual multi-million grants from Congress, either directly or by way of such governmental entities as the U.S. Assistance for International Development (USAID) and the National Endowment for Democracy. IRI and DNI claim to be non-partisan yet both are explicitly affiliated with each of the two political parties dominant in the United States, with boards, staffs, and consultants drawn overwhelmingly from former government workers and officials who are associated with these two American political parties. The ideological and governmental character of the two organizations is epitomized by the nature of their leadership. Madeline Albright, Secretary of State during the Clinton presidency, is chair of the DNI Board, while former Republican presidential candidate and currently a prominent senator, John McCain, holds the same position in the IRI. Freedom House, the third main organization that is the target of the Egyptian crackdown also depends for more than 80% of its funding from the National Endowment for Democracy and is similarly rooted in American party politics. It was founded in 1941 as a bipartisan initiative during the Cold War by two stalwarts of their respective political parties, Wendell Wilkie and Eleanor Roosevelt.
Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you –
Ye are many – they are few.
They are everywhere these days, a symbol of cause-based marketing at its most profitable. But are those little pink breast cancer ribbons really making any difference at all in the fight against breast cancer, or are they merely a crafty tool to funnel billions of dollars into an industry that thrives on the never-ending quest to supposedly discover a cure?
The new film Pink Ribbons, Inc., which recently made its debut in theaters across Canada, takes a hard look at all the pink ribbon mania and asks some serious questions about what it is actually accomplishing. Acclaimed filmmaker Lea Pool does a marvelous job exposing the corporate agenda behind those little pink ribbons, and her findings are sure to shock millions.
Little known to many, for instance, is the fact that the original breast cancer ribbon was created by a woman named Charlotte Haley, now 68 years old, as an awareness tool to expose the fact that the National Cancer Institute (NCI) spent virtually none of its budget on cancer prevention. Today, that ribbon, which was originally a salmon color, has been hijacked by corporations and turned pink for the purpose of raising gobs of money in the name of “finding a cure.”
“Raising money has become the priority, regardless of the consequences,” said one woman interviewed for the film, concerning what all the breast cancer hullabaloo is really about. “If people actually knew what was happening, they would be really pissed off,” added another woman.
While we have shown some quite fascinating infographics (here and here) from the folks at Demonocracy, this one may be the most informative. Because while everyone knows by now that if the global “bailout” to preserve the insolvent ponzi were to be paid in crisp, physical $100 bills, the amount of money required would fill countless skyscrapers, and only pales compared to the the amount of money needed to fund the insolvent welfare state which at last check was at over a quarter of a quadrillion, it is another less appreciated aspect of the daily US spending routine that is arguably just as big an offender when it comes to endless wanton spending: the cost of war. Below we present just that, in a series of simple, easy to understand charts that even Nobel peace prize winners should grasp.
