July 23, 2021

Medicare for All Rallies in 50 Cities Show Big Support for Universal Health Care

Members of National Nurses United union members wave "Medicare for All" signs during a rally in front of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America in Washington, D.C, calling for "Medicare for All" on April 29, 2019.

BY
C.J. Polychroniou, Truthout
PUBLISHED
July 23, 2021

The United States is one of the richest countries in the world, yet its poverty rates are higher and its safety nets are far weaker than those of other industrialized nations. It is also the only large rich country without universal health care. In fact, as Noam Chomsky argued in Truthout, the U.S. health system is an “international scandal.”

Why is the U.S. an outlier with regard to health care? What keeps the country from adopting a universal health care system, which most Americans have supported for many years now? And what exactly is Medicare for All? On the eve of scheduled marches and rallies in support of Medicare for All, led by various organizations such as the Sunrise Movement, Physicians for a National Health Program, the Democratic Socialists of America and concerned citizens throughout the country, the interview below with Peter S. Arno, a leading health expert, sheds light on some key questions about the state of health care in the United States.

Peter S. Arno is senior fellow and director of health policy research at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and a senior fellow at the National Academy of Social Insurance. Among his many works is his Pulitzer Prize-nominated book, Against the Odds: The Story of AIDS Drug Development, Politics & Profits.


C.J. Polychroniou: U.S. health care is widely regarded as an outlier, with higher costs and worse outcomes than other countries. Why are health care expenditures in the U.S. significantly higher than those of other industrialized countries? And how do we explain poor health outcomes, including life expectancy, compared to most European nations?

https://truthout.org/articles/medicare-for-all-rallies-in-50-cities-show-big-support-for-universal-health-care/

July 23, 2021

Military Justice Reform Adopted Into Annual Defense Bill

The entirety of Sen. Gillibrand’s bill has landed in the NDAA. But supporters worry that the political hurdles are far from over.

BY AMELIA POLLARD JULY 23, 2021

After nearly a decade of wrestling with the political whims of the military’s version of #MeToo, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s (D-NY) military justice reform bill has secured another potential path to ratification by making its way into the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The NDAA is a must-pass policy measure typically adopted in December. But it’s also a notorious target for political deals, and can be unreliable ground for even popular measures.

Gillibrand has worked diligently on legislation that would bring all non-military felonies out of the traditional chain-of-command process and have them pursued by independent prosecutors. The legislation was triggered by a high-profile epidemic of sexual assault in the military, where victims struggled to bring their assaulters to justice.

Despite securing an impressive 66 co-sponsors for the bill this legislative session, Gillibrand and Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA), who teamed up to rally support, still faced a block on the Senate floor, ultimately preventing a stand-alone vote. As the Prospect reported last month, that block came in an unexpected form: from Senate Armed Services Committee chair Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI).

https://prospect.org/politics/military-justice-reform-adopted-into-annual-defense-bill/

July 23, 2021

Eight Months Later, A Vigilante Shooting Over A Trump Sign Divides Topeka

Two white men in Kansas shot into a car of Latino teenagers and went home. Almost a year later, neither shooter is in custody.

Akela Lacy

July 22 2021


GRAINY BLACK-AND-WHITE security footage shows a backyard with a shed and a modest deck framed on either side by statuettes of a dog and an owl. Lights glow in the distance from neighboring homes, street lamps, and passing cars. It’s a quiet night — Halloween 2020.

Several minutes into the video, a light on the side of the shed flashes on, and four people run by. One appears to be limping slightly. A woman walks out of the house onto the deck, looking in the direction of the running figures. Abruptly, she turns and goes back into the house. A minute or so passes. The shed light turns back on as two figures run through the frame in the opposite direction. The woman runs across the yard to open the shed door, and the video ends.

The woman didn’t know it at the time, but she had witnessed the aftermath of a shooting. Earlier that night in Topeka, Kansas, two men — then-39-year-old Army veteran and Walmart employee Robert Sinner and his then-34-year-old brother, Justin — had confronted a car full of five teenagers they thought took a Donald Trump sign from a used auto lot near their house. The Sinners live around the corner from the car dealership; the day before the shooting, the owner of the lot, Rick Wright, told them that the teenagers had been repeatedly taking his Trump sign.

It appears that the Sinners were expecting a conflict when they approached the teenagers the next evening. According to court filings, they claim that they noticed a group of people “behind their house” trying to steal the Trump sign. The Sinners were armed with a handgun and a rifle when they approached the car, according to a police report, and when the boys tried to drive off, the men started shooting. They fired more than 30 shots, continuing after the car had driven away and putting one of the boys in the intensive care unit for 10 days with a bullet in his back. A crash followed, and two other boys were taken to the emergency room with gunshot wounds. The Sinners claimed that the boys had tried to run them over and clipped Justin with the side of the car.

https://theintercept.com/2021/07/22/topeka-shooting-halloween-trump-sign/

July 21, 2021

Anti-Trust VICTORY For Progressives, Kanter Nomination Deals Another BLOW To Silicon Valley

The Hill
1.21M subscribers
Ryan Grim and Rachel Bovard react to President Biden's nomination of Jonathan Kanter to lead antitrust at the DOJ. They also discuss the arrest of Trump ally, Thomas Barrack, for lobbying then-President Trump on behalf of the UAE.

July 21, 2021

How the US military got rich from Afghanistan

( Recall how Trump sold himself as the change/anti-war candidate? Another lie some still believe )

From Korea onwards, falloffs in spending have lasted little longer than the parades for returning troops

July 19, 2021

FROM THE MAGAZINE
Written by
Andrew Cockburn


The departure of American troops from Afghanistan is being lamented (or hailed — see the Chinese press, passim) as a defeat. But this is a shortsighted attitude, at least from the point of view of the US military and the multitude of interested parties who feed at its trough. For them, the whole adventure has been a thumping success, as measured in the trillions of taxpayer dollars that have flowed through their budgets and profits over the two decades in which they successfully maintained the operation.

The truth of this was forcefully brought home to me once by a friend of mine who, as a mid-level staffer, attended a conclave of senior generals discussing Donald Trump’s Afghan mini-surge back in 2018. As he related the conversation, they were unanimous that the move would make absolutely no difference to the war, ‘but,’ they happily agreed, ‘it will do us good at budget time’.

Years before, Col. John Boyd, the former Air Force fighter pilot who famously conceived and expounded a comprehensive theory of human conflict, had pointed out that there was no contradiction between the military’s professed mission and its seeming indifference to combat success. ‘People say the Pentagon does not have a strategy,’ he said. ‘They are wrong. The Pentagon does have a strategy. It is: “Don’t interrupt the money flow, add to it.”’

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/pentagon-rich-afghanistan-military-budget/

July 21, 2021

Secret NYPD Document Teaches Cops To Illegally Raid Sealed Records

Police are running roughshod over a half-century-old law preventing access to the sealed arrest records of 3.5 million people.

Nick Pinto
July 21 2021, 8:00 a.m.

THE NEW YORK Police Department has been training its officers to break a long-standing law that bars police from snooping in the sealed arrest records of millions of innocent people, according to court papers filed in a lawsuit last week.

The news comes in a class-action lawsuit concerning the police department’s practice of flouting a state law designed to protect people from discrimination, harassment, and further legal consequences over old arrests that didn’t result in a conviction. The Bronx Defenders, a public defense organization, brought the legal action against New York City and the NYPD.

Defense lawyers in New York say they regularly find NYPD printouts of their clients’ old sealed arrests in prosecutors’ paperwork, and police sources often leak the sealed arrest histories of people killed by police and political enemies to the media. The leak of Eric Garner’s sealed arrest history after he was killed by police in 2014, for example, is now the subject of a judicial inquiry.

The flouting of the records law results in the perpetuation of a racist regime of harassment in which bad arrests lead to more bad arrests, a “garbage-in, garbage-out” cycle, said Niji Jain, a lawyer with the Bronx Defenders’ impact litigation practice and one of the attorneys on the case.

https://theintercept.com/2021/07/21/nypd-secret-training-sealed-arrest-records/

July 20, 2021

Chomsky: Republicans Are Willing to Destroy Democracy to Retake Power

June 16, 2021

Today’s Republican Party is an extremist force that no longer qualifies as a mainstream political party and is surely not interested in participating in “normal” politics. In fact, today’s GOP is so wrapped around extreme and irrational beliefs that even Europe’s far-right parties and movements, including Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, seem conventional in comparison.

The GOP’s political identity has been dramatically shaped by former President Donald Trump, but these recent shifts would not have been possible if there weren’t already an array of groups across U.S. society and culture (including white supremacists, right-wing Evangelical Christians and Second Amendment activists, to name just a few) that have long embraced extremist and “proto-fascist” views about the way the country should be governed and the values that it should hold. For them, Trump was and remains America’s “great white hope.” In this context, Trump’s voting base — which continues to believe in the idea of a stolen election and to support Trump-led GOP efforts to stamp critical race theory out of schools and restrict voting rights — speaks volumes about the anti-democratic and threatening nature of today’s GOP.

In the interview that follows, world-renowned scholar and activist Noam Chomsky explains what has happened to the Republican Party and why even more than democracy is at stake if the “proto-fascist” forces inspired by Trump return to power.

C.J. Polychroniou: Over the course of the past few decades, the Republican Party has gone through a series of ideological transformations — from traditional conservatism to reactionism and finally to what we may define as “proto-fascism” where the irrational has become the driving force. How do we explain what has happened to the GOP?

https://truthout.org/articles/chomsky-republicans-are-willing-to-jeopardize-human-survival-to-retake-power/