Forget about Ancient Sparta, Attila the Hun, Hernán Cortés, Julius Ceasar, Alexander the Great, Adolf Hitler, and all of the conquerors that terrified the world with colonial aspirations and a psychopathic lust for blood. None of these ever imagined a $1.5 trillion military budget. President Donald Trump requested that grotesque figure, but don’t give him the kudos—our “fois gras” military machine is a US tradition that predates us all.

The US war machine has scaled Orwellian heights to achieve a virtual blank check to spend on death. For we, stateside, have built a culture entirely at the service of warfare, with myths, stories, and platitudes hardwired into the brains of 349 million people extolling war, not as a necessity, but as ritual, as cleansing, as meditation, and as redemption. We are bombing schools and hospitals to secure the rapture, for the war industry in the apocalyptic end times has been tasked with the creation of biblical events. A recent Huffpost piece by Brandi Buchman quotes US soldiers’ allegations of lunatic fringe Evangelical propaganda from haranguing superiors:

"They (US soldiers) are promised a 200-mile-long river that is four-and-a-half feet deep filled with nothing but the blood that their weaponized version of Jesus will spill at the Battle of Armageddon."

Thus, war in the Middle East has morphed from the sterile narrative of fighting for freedom and democracy, to the more spectacular notion that US military force has been mobilized to serve Christian prophecy. A military budget cannot achieve the pinnacle of a trillion dollars without a highly evolved story telling industry to prime the population to either enthusiastically back each aggressive nationalistic paroxysm of violence, or to (at the very least) passively capitulate. Think of the advent of apocalyptic biblical warfare as a means of addictive escalation—the nation has gone from coffee and cigarettes to cocaine and crystal meth.

The war propaganda machine in the US is a ceaseless, multifaceted contraption that includes legacy media, the educational system, and the entertainment industry. A nation does not eviscerate tens of millions of “enemy” civilians without first laying a meticulous foundation of brainwashing. I can run the tapes backward to a moment in my own childhood, riveted to the black and white TV absorbing the 1955 Disneyfied tale of Davey Crockett at “The Alamo.” There is Davey outsmarting a gambler, beating up an “Indian,” and bringing both along as conscripts to fight for an Independent Texas. Crockett met his end at the Alamo, but the manner of his death will never be resolved. Did he surrender to Mexican forces (and face execution) or did he die fighting to the death, wielding his exhausted rifle like a club, and falling from a bullet while standing on a hill comprised of Mexican corpses? Of course, the Disney version has Davey Crockett swinging his rifle madly against a vast onslaught of faceless Mexican soldiers as the background song plays out:

"The story books say they were all cut low.But the truth of it is that this just ain’t so,The spirits will live and their legends grow,so long as we remember the Alamo."

The film ends with the inscription: “March, 6, 1836, Liberty and Independence Forever.”

Regarding the Alamo, Raul Ramos wrote (in the context of the 2019 effort to remove confederate monuments):

"It’s not that the Spanish-built presidio should be demolished or stashed away in some remote museum. The story of the Alamo should be widely studied—but it should be the real history, the one that intersects with and embodies the nation’s history of enforcing a racial order through violence, and the campaigns of white supremacy and slavery that accompanied America’s expansion. The Alamo’s history and myth belong to a war that was inspired, in part, by the drive for slavery, and by a belief in the superiority of whites and their divine right to conquer lands. The Alamo is where the campaign of southern slavery and Native American genocide migrated west and expressed itself in the demonization of Mexicans. It came to symbolize belonging, or, more accurately, defining who belongs and who doesn’t. Rather than being remembered for its historical context, the Alamo represents a litmus test for entry into participation and membership in civic society: Accept the dominant myth, or be marginalized."

The Alamo became a rallying cry, a foundational component of the emerging concept of “manifest destiny”—the ideological core of the most expansive colonial settler state in all of history. But for me it is personal—Davey Crocket at The Alamo inducted me into US war culture at the age of 7. I had my faux coon skin cap, my “smoke gun” that emitted a loud crack and a puff of smoke. The cocking mechanism on this “toy” sometimes snapped shut violently, and many children endured a trip to the ER to have a few stitches to repair a bloody thumb. I remember that well 71 years later.

Every child in the US has a story of this sort, a rendezvous with military propaganda (disguised as amusement) at a defenseless early age. War is implanted into our fragile subconscious at the very dawn of our awareness. But we are not largely destined to embrace warrior culture in the sense of the mythical Davey Crockett, but, rather, we have been trained to get out of the way. American warfare since Vietnam has aspired to be fought by gadgets that attack civilians from the sky. For most of us military patriotism means politely deferring to veterans with a muttered, “Thank you for your service.” We who do not enlist balance personal fear with the idea that war participation manifests the purest virtue.

Vietnam exposed a quiet ambivalence in public opinion—the American people have no stomach for massive body counts of US soldiers, and yet poll after poll reveals an atavistic longing for military strength. A Gallup poll taken last February showed that 64% of respondents felt that it was important for the US to have the most powerful military on Earth. While the US military budget is larger than the combined military budgets of the next nine highest spending nations, Gallup polling seldom shows more than a third of people complaining that spending is too high.

The public is little more than a shadow of the media culture. In 2014 William A. Galston lamented about President Barack Obama’s minor military funding cuts in a piece posted on The Brookings Institute (a centrist, Democratic Party-adjacent think tank) website. Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) recent proposal to cut military spending by a token 10% fell 88-11 in a Senate vote in which both parties reflexively succumbed to orthodox US jingoism. War is not a partisan issue. We all come together to praise and feed the military. US political performance art might be seen as a slavish competition to grovel before the war industry.

There is, however, a new and sudden trickle of hope—Trump’s ham-fisted version of imperialism allows for the public to witness the unflattering inner machinery, the leaking guts of the wounded military organism. The ongoing war in Iran offers something brand new—a nation with a $9 billion military budget has just thrashed a country with a trillion dollar war budget. The US defeat at the hands of Iran is unprecedented—while the US hasn’t won a significant war in 80 years, we have never suffered a defeat with comparable financial consequences. The Iran war, according to Reuters, has a disapproval rating of a staggering 63% of the electorate. The economic fallout from the bungled attack on Iran threatens to escalate to the point of financial collapse in future months. We all live within walking distance of a filling station offering $6 diesel—and that runaway price will almost certainly expand and double, threatening to strangle the US commercial transport system. Mass hunger looms.

We also have American Israel Public Affairs Committee approval ratings at an all-time low and Trump’s approval ratings at catastrophic and utter decline—ostensibly due to his war in Iran. There may never have been a time in US history so ripe for an attack on military spending and militarism.

War once had such an esteemed role in human progress that even the peaceful transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson, could not wholly dismiss its virtues:

"The student of history acquiesces the more readily in this copious bloodshed of the early annals, bloodshed in God’s name too, when be learns that it is a temporary and preparatory state, and does actively forward the culture of man. War educates the senses, calls into action the will, perfects the physical constitution, brings men into such swift and close collision in critical moments that man measures man. On its own scale, on the virtues it loves, it endures no counterfeit, but shakes the whole society, until every atom falls into the place its specific gravity assigns it."

Emerson believed that war would become obsolete, but I doubt that anyone from the mid 19th century could have imagined that war would one day be the cornerstone of societal and biological collapse. No other era has been forced to see war with the unflinching clarity that this moment demands.

War elevates the need for oil and oil demands war. The oil industry, the military-industrial complex, Big Tech, and mass media have all been structurally conjoined at the intersection of war. War is where capitalist profits interface with mass psychology.

But the gig is up. Public opinion has shifted as Trump and his goons have driven the war machine off of a cliff.

Climate sustainability abides no compromise with war. We are on the cusp of extinction, and war is the primary driver. The US, under Trump, has taken war out of the closet and decoupled it from its patriotic slogans and jingoistic habits. It’s all about the oil, stupid. War has followed the magnet of fossil fuels unerringly to the Middle East. And to compound the predicament, war is environmentally filthy, annually burning more fossil fuels in aggregate than most nations. The US military coughs as much CO2 into the atmosphere yearly as the nation of Portugal. War is also the gauge of our fossil fuel addiction, for US leaders have spent decades murdering millions to procure it.

We all have our psychological histories, our childhood encounters with Disney’s Alamo, with the domino theory, with Saddam Hussein’s invisible weapons of mass destruction. We have reverentially gawked at our father’s and grandfather’s WWII uniforms hanging in the attic, but we all need to thank Trump for creating history’s most transparent war machine. The US military needs to be gutted, cut out like a metastasizing lesion. The patient heaves at death’s door. Do we merely watch?

---

Phil Wilson is a retired mental health worker who has written for Common Dreams, Counterpunch, Resilience, Current Affairs, The Future Fire, The Hampshire Gazette, and other publications. Phil’s writings are posted regularly at Nobody’s Voice.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

[Find the web link for this article in the comments]

See less

 

 Norway completely transformed its correctional system around a simple yet radical principle: "normalization." Instead of punitive cells and heavy guards, maximum-security facilities resemble quiet campus dormitories. Inmates live in private rooms with natural light, prepare their own daily meals, learn practical skilled trades, and interact with unarmed officers trained in social coaching rather than physical intimidation.

By structuring daily life inside prison to mirror normal society as closely as safety allows, the system prevents individuals from becoming hardened by institutional isolation. Ex-offenders re-enter the workforce with genuine job skills, emotional stability, and community support networks—driving re-offending rates down to the lowest in the world and creating safer neighborhoods for everyone.

See less

Most discussions about the Democratic Party in this election cycle focus on the remarkable rise of progressive Democrats (such as Florida state Rep. Angie Nixon, a democratic socialist who yesterday scored an upset win in the Democratic contest for the Florida Senate).

An equally big story is the remarkable decline of corporate Democrats.

Some Democrats worry about this. My old friend Democratic strategist James Carville compares the current wave of progressive primary wins to progressive campaigns in 2016 — especially that of Bernie Sanders — that he believes fractured the Democratic coalition.

“Bernie Sanders is the reason that Donald Trump is president,” Carville said recently, claiming that Bernie’s primary challenge to Hillary Clinton convinced voters in battleground states that establishment Democrats were no different from establishment Republicans, thereby weakening her prospects in the general election.

Even if James is right about 2016 (and I don’t believe he is) his assessment is irrelevant now because we’re at a radically different point in American politics than we were 10 years ago.

The silver lining on the dark storm cloud of Trump and his detestable regime is that it has exposed the greed, venality, cupidity, and corruption of America’s corporate elite.

Trump has allowed the CEOs of giant corporations and the titans of Wall Street to do whatever they want as long as they suck up to him. And he’s providing all sorts of corporate welfare to those who generously bribe him — no-bid government contracts, exclusive licenses, tax loopholes, tariff exemptions, use of public lands, and permission to become even bigger monopolies.

Trump has thereby unveiled a truth about corporate America that for many years has been hidden behind a soothing blanket of corporate PR bullsh*t about social responsibility, corporate charity, and “trickle-down” economics.

That truth is the captains of corporate America are so rapacious that they’re willing to throw average working Americans under the bus to make billions more.

Corporate avarice under Trump has become so blatant and corporate America’s contempt for the needs of average Americans so flagrant that most Americans are now catching on.

They’re voting for progressive Democrats not because they want socialism, support the Democratic Socialists of America, or reject candidates called “moderate.”

They’re voting for candidates whom they believe will fight to make housing, food, healthcare, and childcare affordable to average working families. And who’ll take on Trump’s billionaire backers, CEOs, and Wall Street titans who are rigging the economy against them.

Much of the corporate media won’t tell this story. When Dr. Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan’s Democratic primary over Haley Stevens, the media overflowed with accounts of how much smaller El-Sayed’s margin of victory was than polls had predicted.

Yet the most remarkable thing about El-Sayed’s victory was that he won despite being dramatically outspent by super PACs arrayed against him.

Stevens benefited from tens of millions of dollars in outside spending, including the largest investment in a senatorial race ever made by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which traditionally supports pro-Israel candidates but in recent election cycles has supported candidates most favored by corporate America. AIPAC’s ads in favor of Stevens and against El-Sayed never even mentioned Israel.

Outside super PACs poured an estimated $54 million to $60 million into backing Stevens and opposing El-Sayed, compared to only about $5 million for El-Sayed. Pro-Stevens groups outspent El-Sayed on TV advertising alone by more than 12 to 1 ($26.9 million to $2.1 million) in the closing weeks. An average of $95 was spent for every vote against El-Sayed versus just $9 per vote for him.

The race between Stevens and El-Sayed was a proxy fight over the future of the Democratic Party. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer backed Stevens and encouraged donors to back her campaign, as did other corporate-aligned politicians such as Michigan senator Gary Peters. On the other hand, Sen. Bernie Sanders and U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez supported El-Sayed, as did progressives such as Sens. Chris Van Hollen and Elizabeth Warren.

El-Sayed justifiably made a campaign issue out of how much corporate money was backing his rival. He argued that Democrats should reject corporate influence and embrace an agenda that helps average Americans. His campaign centered on providing Medicare for All, lowering prescription drug costs, and banning corporate PAC money. “We’re in a situation right now where the rich keep getting hyper-rich on the backs of figuring out how to monetize everyday people,” El-Sayed told AP during a Sunday afternoon march, as his supporters chanted behind him, “Money out of politics! Money in your pockets!”

El-Sayed’s victory marked a turning point for the corporate wing of the Democratic Party.

I saw the start of the corporate Democrats in the early 1980s, when Democrats in congress began drinking from the same campaign funding trough as the Republicans, mostly from big corporations.

“Business has to deal with us whether they want to or not” crowed Democratic Rep. Tony Coelho, who then headed the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Democrats had controlled Congress since 1955, and assumed they’d continue to run the House for years. They thought they could take advantage of their seemingly permanent power to raise cash for their campaigns.

Coelho’s Democrats soon achieved a rough parity with Republicans in contributions from corporate and Wall Street campaign coffers, but it proved a Faustian bargain as big corporations and Wall Street gained increasing influence in the party. It is a truism in politics as in nature: One dares not bite the hands that feed.

Corporate Democrats thereafter stopped the Democratic Party from pursuing an agenda that would have dramatically helped America’s working class.

To be sure, over the last three decades Democrats have scored some important victories for working families — the Affordable Care Act, an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Family and Medical Leave Act, for example.

Yet they’ve done little to alter the widening economic inequalities that have taken a huge toll on working-class families.

Both Clinton and Barack Obama ardently pushed for free-trade agreements, for example, but didn’t provide the millions of blue-collar workers who thereby lost their jobs means of getting new ones that paid at least as well.

They also stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the white working class. Clinton and Obama failed to reform labor laws to impose meaningful penalties on companies that violated them, or to enable workers to form unions with a simple up-or-down vote.

In his 1992 campaign, Clinton promised such reform but once elected didn’t want to buck corporate Democrats by spending political capital on it. In his 2008 campaign, Obama made the same promise but never acted on it.

Partly as a result, union membership sank from 22 percent of all workers when Clinton was elected president to fewer than 10 percent today, and the working class lost bargaining leverage to get a share of the economy’s gains.

The Obama administration also protected Wall Street from the consequences of its gambling addiction through a giant taxpayer-funded bailout but left millions of underwater homeowners to drown.

Both Clinton and Obama allowed antitrust enforcement to ossify — with the result that large corporations have grown far larger and major industries far more concentrated.

And they turned their backs on campaign finance reform. In 2008, Obama was the first presidential nominee since Richard Nixon to reject public financing in his primary and general election campaigns. And he never followed up on his reelection campaign promise to pursue a constitutional amendment overturning Citizens United v. FEC, the 2010 Supreme Court decision that opened the floodgates to big money in politics.

What happens when you combine free trade, shrinking unions, Wall Street bailouts, growing corporate monopoly power, and the abandonment of campaign finance reform? You get an economy favoring the wealthy and a political system favoring the powerful, while workers without college degrees suffer declining real wages and dwindling job security.

John F. Kennedy was the last Democratic president to depend on the votes of working-class Americans while losing the votes of white, college-educated Americans by 2 to 1. Sixty years later, Joe Biden depended on the votes of college-educated Americans while losing the votes of the white working class by 2 to 1. Kamala Harris lost the working class by an even larger margin.

Trump has exposed the venality and cupidity of corporate America, while large swaths of the working middle class struggle to make ends meet. As a result, Republicans appear likely to face some major defeats in the midterm elections. Corporate Democrats are on the defensive because their campaign cash isn’t working the way it used to.

Now, finally, the Democratic Party has an opportunity to once again become the party of working Americans, as it was under Franklin D. Roosevelt, rather than the party of corporate America. It is more urgent than at any time since the Great Depression that Democrats act on this opportunity.

---

Robert Reich is professor emeritus of public policy at Berkeley and former US secretary of labor. His latest book is the No. 1 New York Times best-seller, "Coming Up Short."

[Find the web link for this article in the comments]

See less

 

 

Heather Cox Richardson

It took him about five minutes and a pencil to see through the biggest financial fraud in human history.

It took the United States government nine more years to catch up — and even then, they only caught up because the criminal turned himself in...

His name is Harry Markopolos. And he is the man nobody would listen to.

Born in 1956 in Erie, Pennsylvania, into a Greek family that ran restaurants, Harry grew up counting things — obsessing over numbers, patterns, anything that could be measured. That mind eventually carried him to Boston, where he worked as a financial analyst at an investment firm called Rampart, spending his days doing the intricate math of the markets.

His bosses had a problem. A rival fund kept beating them, badly. It belonged to a man named Bernard Madoff — Wall Street royalty, a former chairman of the NASDAQ stock exchange, one of the most trusted names in all of finance. Madoff's fund did something that seemed almost magical: it made money every single month. One or two percent, month after month, year after year, up and up, apparently never losing a dime. Everyone adored him.

So Rampart handed Harry the numbers and gave him a simple assignment: figure out how Madoff was doing it, so we can copy him.

Five minutes was all it took.

Harry knew Madoff's supposed strategy inside and out, because Harry traded that very strategy himself, every day. And he knew one thing for certain: it does not produce a smooth, straight line. Real markets go up and down. Always. But Madoff's returns didn't wobble at all. They just climbed, in a perfect, steady, forty-five-degree line, as if the ordinary chaos of the market did not apply to him at all. Nothing in the real world moves like that. Nothing.

So Harry dug deeper. Madoff claimed he protected his fund using a particular options strategy. So Harry sat down and calculated how many of those options contracts existed at all — in the entire market, on the whole planet. There weren't nearly enough. For Madoff's story to be true, he would have needed more options than existed on Earth.

The trades weren't real. And only one explanation fit: Madoff wasn't investing the money at all. It was a Ponzi scheme — the oldest con there is. You take cash from new investors, use it to pay fake "profits" to the older ones, and pocket the rest for yourself. It works like a charm, right up until too many people ask for their money back at once.

And this, Harry realized with mounting horror, was the biggest Ponzi scheme ever built.

So he did exactly what a citizen is supposed to do. He took his findings to the Securities and Exchange Commission — the government agency created for the sole purpose of catching this exact kind of crime.

In May of 2000, he sent them his evidence. Nothing happened.

In 2001, he sent it again. Nothing.

In November of 2005, he wrote it all up in a detailed report with a title that left nothing to the imagination: "The World's Largest Hedge Fund Is a Fraud." He laid out roughly thirty separate red flags, with all the math spelled out so plainly that anyone could check it themselves. He handed them a complete roadmap.

Nothing.

He tried again in 2006. And again in 2008. Five times, across nine long years, Harry Markopolos brought the evidence to the people whose entire job was to act on it — and five times, he was ignored. At one point, SEC officials even sat down with Madoff himself. He charmed them, and they went away satisfied.

And all the while, Harry was afraid. Deeply, seriously afraid. He had uncovered a multi-billion-dollar crime, and he believed a man with that kind of money and that many powerful clients could make a person disappear. He bought a handgun. He checked underneath his car before he drove it. He changed his route home. He tried to keep his own name off the paperwork, terrified of what might happen to his family. For years, he watched his back and waited for someone in authority — anyone — to take him seriously.

Nobody did.

And then, in December of 2008, the financial crisis hit. Panicked investors rushed to pull their money out all at once — and with no fresh cash coming in to pay them, Madoff's scheme finally caved in on itself. Cornered, Madoff confessed the whole thing to his own sons. And his sons walked straight to the FBI.

When the dust settled, nearly sixty-five billion dollars, on paper, had vanished into thin air. Tens of thousands of victims — retirees, charities, universities, ordinary families — watched their life savings disappear overnight.

The SEC had not caught him. Harry's nine years of desperate warnings had not caught him. In the end, the only reason Bernie Madoff was caught at all is that Bernie Madoff turned himself in.

In February of 2009, Harry Markopolos finally got his moment. He sat down before Congress and did not hold back. He told the lawmakers, memorably, that the SEC "roars like a mouse and bites like a flea." If you took the entire SEC staff and flew them to Fenway Park, he added, they still wouldn't be able to find first base.

He never received a single penny for any of it. The government's whistleblower reward program didn't even exist yet — it was created in 2010, after Madoff's arrest. Harry always said that was fine. He'd done it, he said, for his country.

Bernie Madoff was sentenced to a hundred and fifty years in prison, where he died in 2021.

And Harry Markopolos — the quiet math geek from Erie who saw the whole thing in five minutes, proved it with arithmetic a schoolchild could follow, begged the government to act five separate times, and lived in fear for his life while they did nothing — was, in the end, proven completely, absolutely right.

Had you ever heard of Harry Markopolos? Tell us below.

Follow us Lost in Yesterday

See less

 

How to Start an LLC (9 Step Guide)

How to Start an LLC (9 Step Guide)

 

 

 

KEEP SUPER IMPORTANT INFO ALSO SENT TO dannadanna1205@gmail.com

 

LLC Report when due every year. After filed, make sure yearly reports are also filed.
 

                A tale as old as time.