One out of every 34 Americans who earned wages in 2008 earned absolutely nothing — not one cent — in 2009.
The stunning figure was released earlier this month by the Social Security Administration, but apparently went unreported until it appeared today on Tax.com in a column by Pulitzer Prize-winning tax reporter David Cay Johnston.
It's not just every 34th earner whose financial situation has been upended by the financial crisis. Average wages, median wages, and total wages have all declined — except at the very top, where they leaped dramatically, increasing five-fold.
Phi Beta Iota: Most of the weapons being used by the cartels do NOT come from US gun shops. They come from the Latin American militaries who have received large shipments of “older” weapons and ammunition from the US, and then turned around and sold them to the cartels. Just as the US is indirectly funding the Taliban in Afghanistan, it is indirectly enabling the cartels with weapons. Furthermore, to imagine that with the money they have the cartels cannot “order in” anything they wish from the Chinese, Israeli, or Russian arsenals, is naive in the extreme. As many or more are dying violent deaths every day in this region as in Iraq or Afghanistan. In our view, the current era of politicians (1981-date) is going to be held accountable for four major strategic blunders, all of them deliberate:
1. Elective invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq on top of irresponsible military cuts and acquisition pathologies
2. Willful acceptance from Bush Senior onwards of the willful destruction of the US economy for the benefit of a few led by Goldman Sachs, Citi-Bank, and Morgan
3. Ignoring the depth and extent of the Southwest Border instability and threat to local communities
4. Ignoring the imminent clean water crisis across the entire region as well as across America
These photographs were taken on an 852-mile, 72-hour trip across the Southwest border, from San Diego, California to Arizona and back. Many citizens from the United States and Mexico have never seen the line that divides and defines their countries, marked by walls, barbed wire fences, U.S. Border Patrol checks and, increasingly, controversy.
A recent article in Christian Science Monitor on military health care costs identified, in microcosm, the battle we face in the coming years in defending the military community’s sunk investment in its future.
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After citing all DoD’s arguments that it’s being “eaten alive” by “unsustainable” military health care cost increases, the reporter had the courtesy of quoting me on the other side of the argument:
“’There’s a fundamental difference between social insurance programs open to every American and military benefits earned by decades of service and sacrifice,’ said Steve Strobridge, director of Governmental Relations for MOAA.
“What Mr. Strobridge raises here is a moral issue: Should the military be treated differently than nonmilitary America when it comes to pay and benefits? The armed forces put their lives, limbs, and mental health on the line for the safety of the country, or they potentially do. On a practical level, you need strong benefits to recruit and maintain a strong, all-volunteer military.”
And then came this kicker:
“But here’s another moral angle: Sacrifice goes with the territory of being in the armed services, and the military budget needs serious cutting. Should sacrifice not also extend to the defense of the nation’s financial health if it’s in critical danger?”
And there’s the problem. Sacrifices already endured are assigned no value. It’s the budget shrug: “They volunteered, didn’t they?”
Every 15 years or so, that indifference leads to cuts that eventually wreck retention — and then national leaders have to pull out all the stops and spend even more to solve the military manpower crisis they refused to prevent.
The real issue is, “How much is it worth for the country to be able to defend itself?”
Phi Beta Iota: With all due respect to MOAA, the real issue is NOT “what price defense” but rather “how best to defend.” There are three simple solutions to the military and and benefits problem that do NOT require reductions:
1. Restore the universal draft including immigrants and including a mid-career “sabatical” between military and private sector. This bonds the nation–one boot camp, three choices: Armed Forces, Peace Corps, Homeland Service.
2. Establish Constitutional honest government tht does not lead the Republic into elective wars for ideological and private reasons on the basis of (most recently) 935 documented lies. The same honest government can be expected to end the acquisition of things we do not need (e.g. missile defense in Poland, J-22, new nuclear submarine) at costs we cannot afford.
3. End the fiction that future Medicare costs re unfunded. They are only unfunded because a corrupt Congress in cahoots with a corrupt Administration (both parties) has forbidden price negotiation. The minute we restore honest government current and future Medicare costs come down to 1% (ONE percent) of what we pay now.
Thomas Jefferson: A Nation's best defense is an educated citizenry.
Russell Ackoff: Stop trying to do the wrong things righter; do the right things.
Robert Steele: The truth at any cost reduces all other costs.
You can only hope that the very preliminary peace efforts in Afghanistan bear fruit before long. But for evidence that the United States is letting its claim to greatness, and even common decency, slip through its fingers, all you need to do is look at the way we treat our own troops.
The idea that the United States is at war and hardly any of its citizens are paying attention to the terrible burden being shouldered by its men and women in uniform is beyond appalling.
Bob Herbert
We can get fired up about Lady Gaga and the Tea Party crackpots. We’re into fantasy football, the baseball playoffs and our obsessively narcissistic tweets. But American soldiers fighting and dying in a foreign land? That is such a yawn.
I would bring back the draft in a heartbeat. Then you wouldn’t have these wars that last a lifetime. And you wouldn’t get mind-bending tragedies like the death of Sgt. First Class Lance Vogeler, a 29-year-old who was killed a few weeks ago while serving in the Army in his 12th combat tour. That’s right, his 12th — four in Iraq and eight in Afghanistan.
I believe Obama's schtick during his campaign for president was to subtly encourage his adversaries to impale themselves of the horns of their own contradictions. This kind of strategy can be particularly effective in the all-important moral dimension of an election, or indeed, any other kind of conflict. To be sure, Obama had the help of widespread disgust with Bush, as well as an exquisitely timed, terrible financial meltdown, but the parallels in his campaigns against Hillary Clinton and John McCain suggest he had an instinctive feel for gaining leverage by using what reformers in the Pentagon called the Motherhood and Mismatch, or M&M, strategy. (See my CounterPunch essay on that theme.) But to date, his strategy for governance has failed utterly to live up to that brilliance. He blew at least two stunning opportunities that seemed designed in heaven for a decisive M&M strategy. He capitulated to a morally bankrupt establishment by bailing out the banksters and then caving in to the insurance companies on health care reform.
Obama now has a third opportunity, and like his campaigns against Clinton and McCain, it is partly the result of his own making, be it accidental or deliberate. As Ira Chernus shows in a persuasively argued 19 October essay, Israel's hypocrisy in the so-called peace process has reached stunning proportions. The Palestinians are going out of their way to accommodate Israel in the so-called peace talks, but each time the Palestinians sell out their patrimony by caving in to a new Israeli demand — like recognizing Israel as a Jewish state as opposed to recognition of Israel per se, the Israelis up the ante by inserting poison pills aimed at queering any deal — like saying that settlement expansion in East Jerusalem will not be part of a settlement freeze because East Jerusalem is a part of Israel, a claim not recognized by international law, the United States, or Europe, and then acting as if Israel is the injured party.
Great Britain's cuts, particularly to its nuclear forces, are the canary in the defense budget mine. Just as massive deficits forced the conservative UK government to cut deep into its military programs, the United States will soon have to choose: update its force structure or cling to obsolete Cold War posture?
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U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is going through his own budget pain, now choosing which weapons to cut in an effort to save some $100 billion over the next five years. The Pentagon budget has doubled since 2001, rising an average of seven percent a year. This budget growth is expected to slow to only 1 percent in the near future, and even that may be unsupportable. Something's got to give. To preserve vital conventional military forces, the service chiefs will likely have to cut into the $54 billion spent each year on nuclear weapons-related programs.
Phi Beta Iota: DoD needs to fall back to $500 billion a year, and wean itself of contractors at the same time that it creates a long-haul Air Force, a 450-ship Navy, and a military-based multinational Peace Corps.
Suspected by Congress of being linked to the Chinese army, Huawei is working in the U.S. in partnership with Amerilink, which is headed by a former U.S. Navy admiral.
Trusted third party – In a few weeks’ time the U.S. telecoms operator Sprint Nextel is due to award the $2 billion 7-year contract for the development of its 3G network in the United States. To strengthen its chances of winning the lucrative deal, China’s Huawei Technologies, which is regularly suspected of having links to the Chinese People’s Liberation
Army (IOL 619 ), has placed a joint bid with Amerilink, a small U.S. company founded in 2009. The company employs fewer than 20 engineers and is headed by William Owens, a former vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Amerilink acts as the interface between Huawei and potential U.S. clients. If Huawei were to win the Sprint contract, Amerilink would handle the integration of Chinese equipment in the U.S. operator’s network.
Powerful support – U.S. parliamentarians have been Huawei’s most vociferous opponents: they prevented the Chinese group from buying the U.S. telephony company 3Com in 2008. To defend its partner in Congress, Amerilink recently added two Democrat personalities to its board of directors, the former World Bank president James Wolfenson and Richard Gephardt, president of the House of Representatives ’ Democratic group from 1989 to 2003.
