HOW TO PAY FOR TRUMP'S $54 BILLION DEFENSE SPENDING INCREASE--A MODEST PROPOSAL

On Monday, February 27, President Trump announced his new "public safety and national security" budget. The centerpiece is a $54 billion raise for the military, to be paid for by an equal package of cuts to social, educational, environmental, health and other "non-essential" government programs. The Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of State reportedly are first in line at the chopping block.

David Koch, worth $39.6 billion--Will he be the first to pitch in?
Credit: Gage Skidmore

Unfortunately, $54 billion in cuts to those programs will do some serious damage. As quoted in the NYT article cited above, longtime Republican budget specialist Bill Hoagland comments "I don't know how you take $54 billion out without wholesale taking out entire departments."

In other words, boosting our safety and security by pumping up our military muscle will inflict a lot of pain on school children and their teachers, workers, poor people, disabled people, the unemployed, and those of us who have gotten used to clean air and water, safe food and drugs, and a functioning federal government.

However, there's a simple way to come up with $54 billion, and one that will only impact fewer than two dozen people rather than hundreds of millions of us. Why not ask Trump, his cabinet members, and his billionaire backers to help out?

A few minutes of online research shows that Trump and his cabinet are worth around $13 billion. If we add in just the top dozen Trump supporters--billionaires like the Koch brothers, Robert Mercer, Peter Thiel and Sheldon Adelson, all of whom pumped a lot of cash into his campaign--we find that they're worth around $163 billion. So Trump, his cabinet, and twelve of his biggest backers have a combined worth of $176 billion.

Given their obvious patriotism, and the fervent support for Trump demonstrated by their generous contributions to his election, I'm sure that these munificent ladies and gentlemen would be happy to contribute, say, 30% of their net worth to pay for the bigger and better armed forces we so urgently need. That would neatly cover the $54 billion Trump has earmarked, and, remarkably, all of those noble donors would still be incredibly rich.

Nor will their generosity go unrewarded if Trump's proposed tax cuts become law. According to Forbes, the wealthiest one-tenth of one percent of the population will receive 24 percent of the $6.2 trillion in tax cuts, or just under $1.5 trillion, and will see their after-tax income increase by 14.2 percent. With that $1.5 trillion pie to divide up, I'm guessing it would not be long before those generous billionaires will be even richer than before. Talk about a win-win solution!

Ladies and gentlemen of the billionaire class, please consider this an open invitation, not just to Trump, his cabinet and his top dozen supporters, but to all 540 U.S. billionaires. With your combined worth of $2.4 trillion, just think of what you can accomplish.

Who will be the first to step up? Bill, Warren, Jeff, Mark, Larry, Michael, Charles, David, Larry, Jim, Alice, Sheldon . . .?

"SHOCK AND AWE" COMES HOME--WHAT TO EXPECT AFTER JANUARY 20

I hope I'm wrong, but . . .

I've been re-reading Naomi Klein's 2007 book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. In it, Klein details how for the last three decades powerful disciples of radical-free-market economist Milton Friedman have perfected the art of seizing on chaos, crises and disasters to implement their agendas of deregulation and free trade, privatization and the gutting of the social safety net while those who are impacted or might resist are still reeling and disorganized.

Klein opens the book with an enlightening story about Hurricane Katrina, which struck in August, 2005, killing more than 1200 people and wreaking more than $100 billion in property damage. Even while thousands of its victims were still struggling to survive, Friedman was urging his moneyed and powerful acolytes to seize the moment to advance one of their pet projects--privatizing education. The result was that most of New Orleans' public schools were never re-opened, thousands of teachers lost their jobs, their union and their legal protection, and the entire public education system of New Orleans was the victim of a quick and thorough takeover by voucherized charter schools. And that was only one of the many ways in which the catastrophe was turned into a fantastic profit opportunity for the few while the people of New Orleans were re-victimized.

Interestingly, Republicans are now using New Orleans as a poster child for school privatization nationwide.

Flooding from Hurricane Katrina--What a Great Opportunity!--Credit US Navy

Klein goes on to discuss many other instances of what she calls disaster capitalism, such as the murderous history of Chile under Pinochet; Russia under Yeltsin and Iraq after the 2003 "shock and awe" invasion by the United States under George Bush. Many of these forced transformations took place outside the U.S., but some, such as the surge of the surveillance state following 9/11, happened right here at home.

Shock and Awe: Operation Desert Storm/Credit ultradesktop.us

On January 20, 2017, all the pieces will be in place for a massive, multi-front assault on the entire public sphere. We will have a president who has a deep authoritarian streak, whose main motives seem to be self enrichment and self aggrandizement, and who has little or no respect for the rule of law; a cabinet filled with billionaire capitalists, a congress dominated by tea partiers and other conservatives drooling to demolish pretty much everything that's been implemented to help ordinary people since the New Deal, and a Supreme Court that will soon be dominated by the right.

How likely do you think is that this energized and empowered collection of conservatives will advance their programs in a studied, thoughtful way, for example consulting with stakeholders--that's all of us--considering implications and alternatives, and negotiating in good faith with the opposition?

It's much more likely--to my mind almost a certainty--that they will launch a simultaneous attack on every front with the most radical versions of their plans. Name an issue or program you care about--the environment, energy, climate change, healthcare, consumer protection, financial regulation, education, labor, immigration, civil rights, reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, surveillance, torture, taxation, separation of church and state, freedom of speech, a free press, voting rights, gun control, Social Security, Medicare, Obamacare, Planned Parenthood, the EPA, NASA--and expect legislation, litigation or presidential fiat to slash it, gut it, kill it or push it as far to the right as can be imagined.

And not one issue or program at a time, but all at once and as soon as possible.

As I wrote in the days after the election:

. . . things appear normal. But in New York and Washington, angry, arrogant men and women are circling like wolves, salivating as their time draws near. For them, life is a zero-sum game that they have won. That makes the rest of us losers, and in their world losers deserve no more than scorn. Women and children, Muslims and Mexicans, journalists and Jews--and who knows who else--beware, because the knives are out.

The newly empowered threaten that undesirables will be registered and tracked, millions deported and the press whipped to heel. People will need to watch what they say. Torture-lovers will be re-empowered; drillers, extractors and polluters will run free, climate and environment be damned. Schools must be privatized. Obamacare must go, along with Medicare, Planned Parenthood and women's right to choose. Discrimination by Christians against the LGBTQ community or others will be legalized along with discrimination against Muslims. NASA will be ordered not to monitor the Earth, but the NSA will monitor us all. The rich will have their tax cuts and sooner or later the deficit hawks will have theirs. We know who will bleed; it will not be the billionaires.

Their goal is a simple one--use shock and awe to overwhelm and rout any resistance in order to radically reshape America. The means to do it are in their hands. And the people who will be in charge after January 20 are not the kind to use power with moderation.

I very much hope I'm wrong, but it sure looks like a deluge to me.

Storm Front Approaching / Credit Jonny Ross

Note (1/7/2017): I was wrong--thinking that the storm would hit after Trump's inauguration on January 20. Media Matters reports that Trump has scheduled his first press conference in months for January 11. His cohorts in the Senate, led by Mitch McConnell, have scheduled six confirmation hearings for the same day. A beautiful example of overloading the opposition, the press and the public. The Office of Federal Ethics points out that the early hearing date has overwhelmed their staff, leaving them with inadequate time for the necessary ethics reviews, made worse in that many of the nominees have not provided financial and other information.

Shock and awe has come home.

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For a similar, more detailed analysis of the coming "shock doctrine blitzkreig" by attorney and commentator Miles Mogulescu, click here.

And for an update on how the deluge has progressed in the first 10 days of Trump's reign, read this piece by William Rivers Pitt.

CLIMATE SCIENTISTS TAKE TO THE STREETS TO PROTEST TRUMP AND HIS CABINET

When hundreds of scientists leave their labs and take to the streets to protest, you can bet that something serious is going on.

Scientists rally for climateSan Francisco, 12/13/16/Credit: ClimateTruth.org

What led hundreds of scientists to rally in the streets of San Francisco on December 13 was the realization that president-elect Trump is filling his cabinet with climate-change deniers and fossil-fuel advocates. 

For the scientists, the risks of inaction, or worse yet, backward steps with respect to global climate change are simply to great to ignore. Floods, fire, famine, food shortages, forced migration and increased political instability loom if the US and the rest of the world fail to move aggressively away from our current carbon-based economy.

The technology is already available, it's the political will that's lacking. These courageous scientists went way beyond their comfort zone to alert us. Take a look at what they did and why they did it at this link:

https://act.climatetruth.org/sign/standupforscience_rallyvideo/?t=2&akid=5553.97426.1jsCnq