BP - Is the Budget Deal Really an Austerity Budget?

BP - Meet America's Biggest Welfare Queens

TYT - Middle Class Benefits Targeted By Washington Post

TYT - Politicians Caught On Mic Discussing Shutdown Strategy

TYT - How Republicans Win On Budget Cuts

TRNN - Gov't Shutdown Reflects Struggle Within Capitalist Republican Elite

TRNN - US Military Contractors Celebrate Record High Profits and Stock Prices

TRNN - New Orleans Lost Half Its Black Population Since Hurricane Katrina

A Huge Stinking Black Hole

Trey Smith

US spending on intelligence has doubled since 9/11, with the National Security Agency and the CIA taking the biggest share, according to the top secret budget leaked by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Details of the $52.6bn request for 2013 by America's 16 spy agencies were revealed by the Washington Post on Thursday.

The NSA has requested $10.45bn from Congress, while the CIA is asking for $14.7bn. The NSA has long been regarded as the most productive of the spy agencies, so the higher spending by the CIA is one of the biggest surprises in the four-volume, 1,452-page budget.
~ from US Intelligence Spending Has Doubled Since 9/11, Top Secret Budget Reveals by Ewen MacAskill and Jonathan Watts ~

Utilizing this entry -- 2013 United States Federal Budget -- it is just amazing how much the federal government spends on spying when compared to actual societal needs. For example, while $52.6 billion is earmarked for "intelligence gathering", the Department of the Interior (National Parks and such) only gets $13.5 billion and the Environmental Protection Agency comes in with a meager $8.9 billion! Here we are facing environmental calamity and the spy budget is 6 times greater than the EPA.

Talk about mixed up priorities!!

But the picture is even worse if you add in all the costs of the military-intelligence-industrial complex (MIIC).

• Department of Defense: $672.9 billion
• Department of Veteran Affairs: $139.7 billion
• Department of Homeland Security: $55.4 billion
• National Intelligence Program: $52.6 billion
• Interest on the National Debt: $246 billion (most all of the interest is for past "unpaid for at the time" wars)

All told, the MIIC claimed a minimum of $1.16 trillion for FY 2013. (I say "minimum" because I'm certain that portions of other department's budgets also serve the needs of the MIIC.) Compare this minimum figure to the totality of the Department of Education's budget of $71.9 billion.  We open up the bank vault to pay for military aggression and spying, while stiff arming the educational needs of our citizens.

And again, look at the wide chasm between expenditures for MIIC versus the poor EPA.  The difference is almost ONE TRILLION FRICKING DOLLARS.  It's like for every penny the EPA gets, the MIIC receives 100 and more.  This represents insanity -- pure and simple.

Don't Like Them Dismal Numbers? Change 'Em!

Trey Smith

A while back I presented to you another miniseries featuring George Orwell's novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, as a backdrop to what is going on in the US today. If you will remember, one of the posts had to do with the Ministry of Truth. That's where the story's protagonist, Winston Smith, worked. His job was to rewrite history so that it matched up perfectly with Big Brother's current political agenda. For example, if a few years back Big Brother had predicted x and instead y occurred, all references to x were scrubbed from history and replaced with y. In this way, Big Brother's prognostications always turned out to be right on the nose.

Keep this theme in mind as you read the following snippet by Dr. jack Rasmus posted at CounterPunch.

Facing the prospect of a 2nd quarter GDP report showing economic growth less than 1% (some professional forecasting services predict as low as 0.5%), and a year to year growth of the US economy likely to come in at barely 1% – compared to a 2011-12 already tepid 1.7% – today [July 31] the Obama administration will announce a major revision of how it calculates GDP which will bump up GDP numbers by as much as 3% according to some estimates. That’s one way to make it appear the US economy is finally recovering again, when all other fiscal-monetary policies since 2009 have actually failed to produce a sustained recovery.

Today’s GDP definition revision is not the first time that politicians, failing in their policies, have simply rewritten the numbers to make the failure ‘go away’. But this time, the GDP revisions will be made going all the way back to 1929. So watch for the slowing US economy GDP numbers from last October 2012 onward to be significantly revised upward.

Instead of an actual, paltry 0.4% GDP growth rate in the fourth quarter of 2012, a weak 1.6% in the first quarter 2013, and the projected 0.5%-1% for the 2nd quarter 2013 — all the numbers will be revised higher in the coming GDP estimate for the 2nd quarter 2013. The true GDP growth rate of the most recent April-June 2013 period, projected as low as 0.5% by some professional macroeconmic forecasters, might not thus get reported.

Did you notice the truly Orwellian aspect to this change? Not only is the Obama administration changing the numbers so today's picture magically will appear rosier, but they concurrently are rewriting 84 years of history at the same time!  Before we know it, the old calculations will disappear as if they never existed in the first place.

We've been down a similar road before. Unemployment used to be calculated one way -- a far more accurate way -- but the new formula hides a lot of the actual depressing numbers. This is why, in some months, the creation of jobs doesn't keep up with population growth and yet the unemployment rate magically decreases.

For a long time, people have said that the truth is in the numbers. Sadly, this is not accurate. When you know how to cook the calculations and formulations, you can turn numbers on their heads and most people will be none the wiser!

The War Machine Keeps Rolling Along

Trey Smith

Spending cuts have been applied by Congress to both military and non-military spending.

In my view, the military cuts are much too small and the non-military cuts should not exist at all. In the view of most liberal organizations, the military cuts -- like the military spending and the military itself -- are to be ignored, while the non-military cuts are to be opposed by opposing all cuts in general.

But, guess what?

The spending limits on the military are being blatantly violated. Both houses of Congress have now passed military budgets larger than last year and larger than is allowed under the sequester.

Meanwhile the sequester is being used to cut away at all that is good and decent in public policy.

In fact, the House Appropriations Committee proposes to make up for its violation of the law on military spending levels by imposing yet bigger cuts to non-military spending. And what's the harm in that if all cuts are equally bad?

The sequester, like the anti-torture statute, the war crimes statute, the Fourth Amendment, the First Amendment, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, or the U.N. Charter, turns out to be one of those optional laws.
~ from Sequester Optionally Applied Only to Good Things by David Swanson ~

National politics has become little more than smoke-and-mirrors. Shared sacrifice? Not really. Equal standing before the law? Nope. Leakers not tolerated at all? Depends on whether it is deemed by the powerful to be a good leak or a bad leak. Constitutional protections recognized? Don't make me laugh.

You want to know why Congress doesn't hold the Obama administration's feet to the fire re the NSA scandal? Because they just as wantonly break the law too. As Swanson shows, they have upped the ante on the military-industrial complex when, by law, they are prohibited from doing so.

Hey, but who can stop them?

The old adage is true. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

TYT - Booz Allen Collects 100 Billion American Emails A DAY

Context Matters

Trey Smith

Conservatives have never been enthralled with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). They don't like the IRS because this agency collects taxes from rich people and big corporations, their primary donors. So, anytime they can find a reason to attack the IRS, they will do so with great vigor. Their underlying aim is to shrink this agency which concurrently will shrink government overall.

This goes a long way toward explaining why the IRS is under the gun right now. First, there was the brouhaha over the IRS handling of conservative political organizations like various Tea Parties. Now comes revelations that the IRS has spent too much on training and conferences in the past several years. One particularly egregious example is over $50,000 for a Star Trek spoof video connected to one conference in 2010.

While I agree that this appears to be a poor outlay of federal funds, what I find just as disturbing is the lack of context in media reports. When looking at figures for conferences and training of one federal agency, it begs the question: How does this compare with other federal agencies or corporations of a similar size?

Saying that the IRS spent a total of $50 million over a period of years for conferences and trainings is hard to get a handle on in isolation. Is this more or less than one might expect? We don't know the answer to this question because I have yet to see anyone put that amount in context. When you have an agency with thousands of employees and you feel it is important that they receive adequate training, it is going to cost in the millions of dollars. There is no way around this.

So, rather than focus on numbers in isolation -- numbers meant to elicit a particular emotive response from the masses -- it would be more helpful to delve deeper into the numbers. But conservatives aren't interested in delving deeper into the numbers because, in comparison to the training and conference budgets of say the FBI, CIA or the Department of Defense (federal agencies they are madly in love with), $50 million may not be so astounding. In fact, it may or may not be that large of a figure at all.

TYT - Cashing In On Students

What They (Really, Really, Really) Intended All Along

Trey Smith

Step into my time machine. We are going back to those frenetic days of...late February 2013. Having supposedly made a deal with the devil during the negotiations over raising the debt ceiling in 2011, it was time for Congress and the White House to face the music. Looming before them was this thing called the sequester, an almost across-the-board significant reduction in federal spending. Supposedly the sequester was like a doomsday machine -- one that neither political party would want to see deployed.

As this article from CBS news reported back then, "Everybody bought in, but nobody wants to claim ownership." Both political parties worked fervently to try to pin the blame for the sequester on the other. While the blame game took center stage, neither party made much of any effort to avoid the deadline and so the sequester went through as scheduled.

Since that time, no one has tried to reverse it. In fact, it is no longer an important issue in the beltway anymore. It is accepted by both parties as a given. This lack of interest should tell us something. It should tell us that the sequester is not something they genuinely wanted to avoid; it is what they really, really, really intended all along.

You see, they simply couldn't come out to say this. While politics predominantly is controlled by and for the elites, average American voters do play a key role. If the electorate becomes sufficiently upset, then the chance theoretically exists that they might throw their support to renegade candidates. That might mean that some members of the ruling junta could be voted out of office and replaced with enough individuals to muck up the system that patently favors the elites.

So, they had to create a spectacle. They had to create the illusion that neither party wanted the sequester and was forced into it by the recalcitrance of the other. The leaders of the [ostensible] two sides clamored up on their soapboxes to wage a war of rhetoric. They threw around their words like darts. They huffed and they puffed and eventually did nothing. And so, austerity came to America like a wolf in sheep's clothing. The American people got leveled by it before they even knew what hit them.

This gambit was a bit of a gamble, but the elites had already succeeded with a dry run experiment and so they were really confident that they could pull this off.

The experiment? Back during the mid-term elections after Obama's "stunning" victory, the GOP came up with a strategy to retake the House of Representatives. On the campaign trail, the number one issue of their candidates was jobs, jobs, jobs. Elect us, they said, and getting this nation back to work will be our number one priority. This tack worked. The GOP easily took back the House. Once back in the majority, the GOP advanced numerous issues, but the one issue they never got around to addressing was.......jobs. To this day, they have introduced NO legislation that directly addresses the employment crisis.

Of course, they blamed the Democrats for this "failure" and the Democrats blamed them. Both sides engaged in a war of words, but just as they would later do with the sequester, both sides accepted a lack of meaningful jobs legislation as a given. In no time at all, the issue disappeared from the radar screen.

I hope you are able to discern a pattern here. The sequester is not some train wreck that either the Democrats or Republicans truly tried to avoid. It was an elaborate masquerade that has succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Now that they know that this strategy works, there will be more train wrecks on the horizon that they somehow won't be able to "avoid" either and they will keep engaging in this charade UNTIL the public awakens from its collective stupor!

Without Warning

Trey Smith

As the Federal Times recently reported, sequestration includes an 8.2 percent cut to the National Weather Service. According to the organization representing weather service employees, that means there is “no way for the agency to maintain around-the-clock operations at its 122 forecasting offices” and also means “people are going to be overworked, they’re going to be tired, they’re going to miss warnings.”

Summarizing the problem, the American Institute of Physics put it bluntly: “The government runs the risk of significantly increasing forecast error, and the government’s ability to warn Americans across the country about high impact weather events, such as hurricanes and tornadoes, will be compromised.”

The good news is that the National Weather Service station in Norman, Okla., had a warning in effect for 16 minutes before the most recent Oklahoma City tornado hit. That’s better than the 13 minute average so, thankfully, more people probably had more time than usual to evacuate or find safe shelter.

But what about the next time around? Will we be as ready as we can and should be? The answer is maybe not.

Though the past few years saw a record number of billion-dollar weather cataclysms, the weather service remains a perennial target for budget cuts and already has nearly a 10 percent employment vacancy rate — and those realities may be damaging its long-term ability to warn the public about severe weather events.
~ from Anyone Regret Slashing National Weather Service Budget Now? by David Sirota ~

By now, we all know the mantra of conservatives: Shrink government. Government, they say, is the problem. So, we need to cut it to the bone.

But this government they desperately want to eviscerate is responsible for a host of things that helps to keep average Americans safe and healthy. If we do away with workplace safety inspectors, then workplaces become unsafe. If we do away with food inspectors and/or food safety regulations, then our food supply becomes unsafe. If we do away with safeguards to protect the air, water and land, they will become unsafe too. And, as David Sirota points out, if we cut back on funds available to the National Weather Service, we may not be adequately warned the next time a climate catastrophe is upon us.

In the aftermath of the recent tornado in Moore, Oklahoma, the President pledged whatever federal support the State of Oklahoma needed. Interestingly enough, the state's Republican Governor -- a member of one of the political parties that wants to shrink government -- Mary Fallin graciously accepted. The irony here is palpable! When tragedy strikes, those who want to shrink government almost never turn away federal government assistance. In fact, they sometimes complain of not receiving all they desire.

It's almost like they are saying, "Shrink government, but not when you're dealing me!"

What Could Be Coming Around the Next Bend

Trey Smith

Now that we're into May, people around the nation are starting to feel the impacts of the federal budget sequester that went into effect on March 1. There is a story by Tim Murphy at Mother Jones that offers a state-by-state look at some of the services being reduced or cut completely.

During the lead up to March 1, we were told that there was much handwringing in Washington as leaders from BOTH parties tried to forge a compromise that might avert the sequester.  That is difficult to take seriously because, now that the sequester has become a reality, little work is being done -- unless it involves inconvenienced business travelers -- to try to mitigate or reverse the situation.

Folks, what we have here is austerity, American-style.  If you want some idea what could be coming around the next bend, all we have to do is to take a look at what is happening in Europe, that region that got a head start on us in the austerity craze.

Unemployment in the euro zone hit another record in March, climbing for the 23rd consecutive month, with no end in sight to the economic and social catastrophe gripping Europe.

The unemployment figures came as hundreds of thousands of people marched throughout Europe and Greek workers launched a one-day general strike in opposition to the austerity measures being carried out across the continent.

The official unemployment rate in the 17-member euro zone hit 12.1 percent, the highest level on records dating back to 1995, according to figures published Tuesday by Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union. This is an increase of 1.1 percentage points from a year earlier.

There were 19.21 million people unemployed in the euro area, a number that has grown by 1.72 million in the past year.

The countries that have undertaken the most savage austerity measures — Greece, Spain and Portugal — posted Depression-era unemployment rates, with 27 percent of the population of Greece officially unemployed, followed by Spain with 26.7 percent and Portugal with 17.5 percent.

Do you remember the mantra of Republicans when they took back the majority from the Democrats in the US House? They told us that their #1 priority was the unemployment problem. Well, neither they nor the Democrats have chosen to tackle that issue and, if we follow the same trajectory as Europe, the "official" unemployment rate is set to become a lot worse in the coming months than it is today.

But don't you fret none. Wall Street is flying high! Isn't that what really matters anyway?

When Budgets Don't Matter

Trey Smith

Here in the US, we are facing a slew of crises.

Our vaunted education system is a shadow of its former self, but we can't do anything about it now because of the massive federal budget deficit.

Unemployment -- whether you go with the government's watered down figures or the more accurate ones -- has decimated communities because less people are paying taxes or spending money they don't have to pump up local economies. It is a serious problem, but we can't do anything about it now because of the massive federal budget deficit.

We are speeding towards a head-on collision with climate catastrophe, and though some recognize the peril our society may soon face, we can't do anything about it now because of the massive federal budget deficit.

Our infrastructure is crumbling beneath our feet. Our roads are strewn with potholes. Tens of thousands of bridges need upgrades. The list goes on and on. We need to get to work on it post haste, but we can't do anything about it now because of the massive federal budget deficit.

Everywhere we look, no matter the immediacy of the crisis, we are told again and again that we can't do anything about it now because of the massive federal budget deficit...except when it comes to the expansion of the national police state! Then, as Andrew Levine surmises, budget deficits don't matter.

Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of militarized police arrayed against a lone wounded kid who, it turns out, was bleeding almost to death under a tarp covering a boat in someone’s driveway?

Austerity got left behind. Millions for the illusion of “homeland security,” not one penny for anything that actually makes people better off!

Of course, there is one other area in which it doesn't matter either -- the prosecution of imperialistic war. In those two areas, the sky's the limit. Everywhere else? Thwarted by the federal budget deficit.

Why Austerity, You Ask

Trey Smith

According to a report just released by the highly-respected Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), world military expenditures in 2012 totaled $1.75 trillion.

The report revealed that, as in recent decades, the world’s biggest military spender by far was the U.S. government, whose expenditures for war and preparations for war amounted to $682 billion — 39 percent of the global total.

The United States spent more than four times as much on the military as China (the number two big spender) and more than seven times as much as Russia (which ranked third). Although the military expenditures of the United States dipped a bit in 2012, largely thanks to the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, they remained 69 percent higher than in 2001.

U.S. military supremacy is even more evident when the U.S. military alliance system is brought into the picture, for the United States and its allies accounted for the vast bulk of world military spending in 2012. NATO members alone spent a trillion dollars on the military.

Thus, although studies have found that the United States ranks 17th among nations in education, 26th in infant mortality, and 37th in life expectancy and overall health, there is no doubt that it ranks first when it comes to war.
~ from Investing in War by Lawrence S. Wittner ~

This is why. 

The US, in particular, invests far more money in destroying lives than in sustaining them. Actually, invest isn't the right word. We borrow money to destroy lives and then more lives are compromised when it comes to pay back the money. While the President and leaders of both corporate political parties talk about cutting one program that adds nothing to our growing deficit -- Social Security -- none of them is talking about significant cuts to THE program that drives the deficit more than anything else.

And it's only going to get worse from here on out.

Another Deadly Explosion

Trey Smith

On the heels of the bombs at this week's Boston Marathon, another explosion has killed and injured over 100. This one took place in West, Texas at a fertilizer plant.

Despite being located within a short walk of a nursing home, school and residential buildings, West Fertilizer Co. in central Texas had no blast walls and had filed no contingency plan to the Environmental Protection Agency for a major explosion or fire at the site.

It remains unclear what safety measures, if any, were required of the company or whether West Fertilizer failed to comply. But on Wednesday night, the company's fertilizer complex in West, Texas - population, 2,600 - exploded with such force that 60 to 80 homes were flattened, the school and nursing home took heavy damage and at least 14 people were killed, authorities said.

In a 2011 filing with the EPA, the operators of West Fertilizer told regulators that a typical emergency scenario at the facility that holds anhydrous ammonia could result in a 10-minute release of the substance in gas form. That chemical, used as a fertilizer, is toxic to inhale but is not considered highly flammable or explosive, and the safety plan did not envisage any blast scenario.

Not considered highly flammable? Just take a look at this Wikipedia page that outlines the number of serious disasters involving ammonium nitrate. While not all of these accidents involved explosions, a good number did. So, how could the operators of this Texas plant so easily minimize the risks?

According to an article in The Guardian,

The last visit to the plant by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which ensures workplaces are safe for America's 7 million employees, was in 1985 when it noted one serious violation and two other violations.

This is what happens when you restrict funds for needed government services. We literally have thousands of facilities across the nation that store a variety of chemical compounds and yet, due to the minimal number of OSHA regulators, they are visited only once in a blue moon. In other words, our countryside is dotted with lax safety plans and potentials for more deadly explosions!

Of course, the vast majority of these explosions and incidents won't impact the health and safety of the elite -- those who profit monetarily from not spending money on safeguards. You're not going to find a fertilizer plant next to a gated community! These sorts of plants are situated in poorer neighborhoods. For example, almost 1 in every 5 people who reside in West, Texas is below the federal poverty line!

One other comment about this tragedy. When we look at what happened in Boston, we say it was a premeditated and callous act, but we too often term what happened in West as little more than an unfortunate accident. Is that necessarily the case? The operators of this plant were storing nearly 300 tons of a volatile chemical and yet had no safety plans that dealt with a fire. While the owners most probably didn't want their plant to explode -- lost profits -- the lack of a safety plan certainly could be called callous, at least in terms of the health, safety and well-being of those who worked at or lived in close proximity.

~

After writing this post last night, I read Dave Lindorff's column this morning which follows much the same theme.

...the entire health and safety regulatory apparatus of the US, from the federal level to the states and right down to local government, has been effectively neutered by corporate interests, who have used everything from threats of relocating to campaign contributions and outright bribes of officials and elected representatives to buy or win the right to basically operate as unsafely as they like, free of supervision.

As a result, regulation of dangerous plants and factories in the US these days is essentially nonexistent.

That, to me, is a kind of terrorism, and it is far more dangerous to the health and safety of the American people than any foreign or domestic terrorist or terrorist organization.

Yet the bulk of the American people are focusing their fears on terrorists from abroad, or in some cases here at home, not on the corporate suites where the real evil and the real danger lies.

Until we Americans wake up and insist that our elected officials and the regulatory bureaucrats they appoint, actually act in the public interest and not in the interest of the moneyed corporate elite (booting out those that betray us), we will increasingly all pay the price as plants blow up or leak toxic gas, as oil and gas companies wantonly pollute our water tables with carcinogenic toxins, and as nuclear power plants dump isotopes into our environment, all in the interest of profits.

The real terrorists in our midst are not men with knapsacks and white baseball caps who plant homemade bombs. They are not swarthy terrorists from the Middle East. Rather, they are the mostly white men (and women) in business suits on Wall Street and Main Street who callously use their wealth to subvert the political system to their short-term advantage, causing common-sense safety and health precautions to be ignored, or getting those laws watered down or outright canceled.