Kongaz

Power does not rest in the Congress. It does not rest in the courts. It does not even rest in the imperial presidency. It rests in the hands of Wall Street financiers, Silicon Valley, private equity firms, the fossil fuel industry, the predatory health care and pharmaceutical giants, agribusinesses and, most of all, the war industry. No mainstream politician, including Bernie Sanders, dares utter a word against our entrenched militarism. If you do, you end up like Ralph Nader, who was turned into a pariah by a compliant media and our corporate-indentured political parties. Nader spoke the truth. He paid for his honesty. We are about to witness the largest increase in war spending in American history with a proposed $1.5 trillion budget. The average taxpayer already shells out over $4,000 a year to the war industry as consumer and environmental agencies are dismantled, health care and education are defunded and programs such as Medicaid and food stamps (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) are slashed. The new Pentagon budget will hand $58.5 billion to artificial intelligence and military command-and-control centers and see the effective merging of the United States and Israeli military industrial complexes. Seventy-four percent of the increase in the proposed $1.5 trillion budget will go to private contractors, including those who are building massive data centers on military bases. None of this is good for us or good for the planet. The Pentagon, powered by the fossil fuel industry, is the world’s largest institutional polluter, emitting an estimated 66 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2024. Americans, meanwhile, struggle with rising prices — nearly 30 percent of people go into debt to buy groceries. An estimated 114,174. Americans die each year due to lack of health insurance or inadequate health care while a single-payer universal health care system could cover every American, save more than 100,000 lives a year, and reduce annual health expenditures by $1.04 trillion, or nearly 20 percent. Twenty-five percent of Americans are functionally unemployed. The minimum wage remains frozen, despite Democratic Party promises to raise it, at $ 7.25 an hour. The elites use war not only for personal enrichment, but to stifle class conflict. War, as W.E.B. Du Bois said, diverts the poor from their real interests. It funnels national frustrations into the “heroic” battle against a common enemy. The nationalist cant, with its endemic racism, seduces those who are alienated or on the margins of society into feeling they suddenly belong. It entices them to sacrifice themselves for a “noble” cause. They become the architects of their own enslavement. They march like sheep into war’s purgatory. By the time they wake up, it is too late. They are cast aside, as so many of our veterans have painfully discovered, like human refuse. But as a tactic to consolidate power and enrich the billionaire class, it is unbeatable. Wars will only be curtailed, if not halted, when we nationalize the weapons industry and dramatically reduce the military budget. Until then, nothing, absolutely nothing, will change. Indeed, things will only get worse. No one in Congress — or any other branch of government — will do this for us. The masters of war sitting in the boardrooms of Boeing, General Dynamics or Northrop Grumman are not praying for peace in the Middle East or coexistence with China and Russia. The generals — who build their careers by orchestrating wars and post military careers enriching themselves working for defense contractors — are not seeking a cessation of global conflicts. They are seeking hundreds of billions in taxpayer dollars and government debt to fuel the self-defeating cycle of endless war. The corporate vultures — especially the war makers — are, as I write, descending on Congress. They are meeting with Democratic Party leaders and holding out promises of millions in cash. They will corrupt, neutralize and compromise most. They will destroy the careers of the very few who refuse to do their bidding. They hold the real power. They have no intention of surrendering it. The manufacturing of weapons systems and the waging of war are the chief activities of the U.S. government. It is no longer one among other means of advancing the national interest. War and violence are how we speak to the rest of the world. The “shadow world,” — as the author Andrew Feinstein calls it in his book on the global arms trade — is defined by staggering levels of corruption, deception and senseless death. It is lawless and unregulated. Its criminal activities, cannibalization of national budgets and secrecy are sanctified in the name of “national security.” Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon Technologies), Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems, Leonardo, Airbus, Rheinmetall and ThyssenKrupp, along with Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Palantir, Goldman Sachs, Citibank and Exxon, are the state. We, including our political class, are the vassals. Read my my full column, 'The Enemy at Home' on Substack at the link below:

The Democrats may have taken control of the House and the Senate, they may have humiliated Donald Trump and the Republican Party, but the real fight is only beginning. It is not simply a battle to hold the corrupt Trump regime to account, something that can only be done if the Democrats are willing overcome their reluctance to carry out impeachment proceedings against the president. It is also a battle to sweep away the corporate-indentured hierarchy of the Democratic Party, including Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries. The Democratic Party since the presidency of Bill Clinton, who gave us the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the greatest betrayal of the working class since the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, and gutted New Deal-era welfare programs such as the Aid to Families with Dependent Children, is a more polished version of corporate and oligarchic rule, abjectly subservient to the war machine, the Israel lobby and their funders in the billionaire class. The country is broken. Corruption, in both parties, is endemic. Federal agencies have been hollowed out and destroyed. The courts, including the Supreme Court, have been handed over to right-wing ideologues. The working class is crippled with debt peonage and substandard wages. Constitutional norms and protections have been erased. Billionaires, including Trump, pay little to no income tax. The 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court ruling, which allows big business to fund their hand-picked candidates, sustains a system of legalized bribery. The public may clamor for a raise in the minimum wage, Medicare for All, regulation of the big banks and private equity firms, an end to arms shipments to Israel and campaign finance reform, but no one in the leadership of the Democratic Party listens or cares. They serve their paymasters. Will cutthroat capitalism, sold to us under the sanitized name of neoliberalism, be allowed to continue to impoverish the citizenry and funnel wealth upwards into the hands of the 1 percent? Will corporations be regulated and policed? Will corporate criminals be brought to trial? Will our democracy be restored? Or will the grotesque sight of a trillionaire, Elon Musk, gutting federal agencies and pouring hundreds of millions into elections to try and control the outcome be normalized? The handful of politicians who attempt to confront the corruption and the devastation visited on the American working class through deindustrialization and deregulation, such as Bernie Sanders, see their campaigns sabotaged by the Democratic Party leadership, including Barack Obama. We must demand that progressive candidates, including Michigan senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed and Maine’s Troy Jackson, build coalitions to oust the Democratic Party leadership, raise the minimum wage, enact universal health care, prosecute corporate crime and impeach Trump. It will be up to us. The Democratic Party hierarchy will see the results not as a repudiation of Trump, but an endorsement of the flaccid and ineffectual position of a party that stands for little and fights for less. This would be yet another betrayal by the Democrats of voters. It would keep alive the very real prospect of another fascist, one better organized and more intelligent, taking the White House in two years. Of course, this fight will mean not only jettisoning a corrupt Democratic Party leadership, but turning on the mega-donors, lobbyists and corporations that fund and control the Democratic Party. The effort to wrest the party back from the hands of corporations and oligarchs will be vicious and difficult. It will require us to rely on the power of mass movements to sever these bonds. Nothing else will work. If we fail, our anemic democracy will not be saved by these midterm elections, but doomed.