The Choice is Clear: HEALTHCARE or WARFARE; the Common Good or Common Destruction

[Orwellian_Ghost]

Healthcare vs. Warfare: The Future Costs of the Afghanistan War

by Jeff Leys

On Wednesday, President Obama will address a joint session of Congress on health care. Later this year he will decide whether to deploy additional troops to the war in Afghanistan, in addition to the 69,000 troops already deployed. The struggle for health care and the struggle to end warfare are inextricably linked. The cost for substantive (though imperfect) health care reform as envisioned in the House of Representatives approach (with the public option) is projected to average $100 billion per year for the next 10 years. The cost to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are projected to cost anywhere from $55 to $100 billion a year. Make a few modest reductions to the baseline military budget and the difference is paid.

The choice is clear: healthcare or warfare; the Common Good or Common Destruction.

Two key developments in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars will likely take place this month. Congress will more than likely pass the Defense Appropriations Bill for Fiscal Year 2010 (which begins on October 1) and General McChrystal will likely request that additional troops be deployed to Afghanistan. The Defense Appropriations Bill contains about $130 billion to wage the wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan through September 30, 2010. General McChrystal is expected to request that 15,000 to 45,000 additional U.S. troops be deployed to Afghanistan—bringing overall U.S. troops levels in Afghanistan to 84,000 to 114,000.



The publication “Inside the Pentagon” reports:

“Now, as the Pentagon weighs the FY-11 base budget and OCO requests submitted by the services on August 14, it is finding the services’ FY-11 OCO requests are larger than expected. Instead of a ‘substantial’ decrease tied to the draw down in Iraq, the OCO total is ‘roughly flat’ compared with FY-10, a Pentagon official said, noting it is only a bit under the FY-10 level.”

In other words, the military services seem to be seeking $120 to $130 billion in war funds for 2011, during a time period when ostensibly the U.S. will be reducing troop levels in Iraq and at a time when much is made about the $100 billion per year projected cost for providing substantive (though not perfect) healthcare reform. (“OCO” is the new term of art for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the abbreviation for Overseas Contingency Operations.)


...

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/09/08-1

[Orwellian_Ghost]

1. A pie chart

[blindpig]

5. Umm, pie

That chart should be on posters, signs,flyers, tattos.....

[Winterblues]

6. A few important things missing from that chart

Interest on our National Debt for instance. It is now about the same level as Defense Spending, and Medicare/Social Security.

[blindpig]

7. That's because it depicts discretionary spending.

Which service on debt is not. It is a depiction of priorities.

[maryf]

10. Whose priorities

is what we have to work on; we gotta cut the pie in a whole new way...We gotta work on getting people to realize they have to demand they are the top priority...

[Overseas]

2. K&R

This is one reason it galls me to hear Democrats talking about making national health insurance "revenue neutral."

If we were really serious about revenue, we would de-privatize our military. We wasted billions by using private contractors. There was rampant war profiteering during the rule of the Bush Cheney Gang that needs to be further exposed, reviewed and ended. There are lots of glaring examples, among the Iraq and Afghan war contracting, of the inefficiency of privatization.

Another benefit of de-privatizing our military is that if we ran out of troops, our mission would need to be clear enough to justify a draft of soldiers.

Furthermore, when regular duties like food service and electrical work are done in-house, soldiers emerge from military service with more broadly applicable skills. You used to be able to learn a trade by serving your country. And if you weren't cut out for combat, you could cook for your fellow soldiers. Or fix the plumbing. Now those services are privately contracted to companies that --whoops-- shocked our soldiers in their showers and served them moldy food. Sloppy services that cost much more than accountable services done in house.

Giving our country national health security should not have to be revenue neutral. It is a clear benefit we desperately need in these times of economic trauma.

[Grinchie]

13. Exactly -- The Military of Pre-Contractor days would have had Soldiers fix the wiring on the spot.

It's amazing to me that people don't realize that one of the more important aspects of a soldiers life is a secure place to shit shower and shave. Not to mention sleep and eat.

The Military used to employ people in profession that ran the gabit of anything your'd find in Civilian life, and these skills would be taken back to the states giving the soldiers a head start.

Heh, now all they care about are killing machines, focused specifically on one specialized task.

[Overseas]

14. Exactly. And having those services done in-house required much higher standards

and cost controls that were accountable to us all. And each function, from peeling potatoes to fixing the shower, was accountable to the supervising officer. With each team member striving for excellence in their various roles. And as we were saying, there were many trades soldiers could learn and take home to successful post-military careers.

Privatization of the military has been really reckless. It has endangered our national security and wasted billions of dollars.

We could finance Medicare for All with the billions we have wasted on the private contracting.

War profiteering used to be a shameful thing. I have been so sad to see it get so little scrutiny. Yes, there have been individual stories-- and we've all been horrified by those tales, but no serious attempt to undo privatization and recognize that on balance it has failed.

[Grinchie]

15. It's no different than Privatized Prisons in my opinion.

Or using Contractors to interrogate prisoners.

It's not like these trades weren't sitting in isolation.. All one has to do is look at a Technical Manual, which number in the thousands for all the branches of the service, and see the amount of time spent on the Curriculum to train to novice grunt into excelling at his assigned trade.

I still use Military TM's from the past for quick reference, and simple explanation of complicated tasks. They are more honorable than any "How To" book you can find in the bookstores today.

The state of the art for many trades was established decades ago, and what we see today is nothing but the same, only with a piece of plastic flair glue onto it to make it more "Rad".

Hell, they now have a technical Manual of "Unconventional Warfare", and strangely enough, the techniques promulgated in the Manual look suprisingly familiar to the Media Shaping foisted upon us everyday my mass media and economic policy.

People are asleep.

[Overseas]

16. Privatization has been really inefficient so far. Wasteful and so open to corruption.

When right wingers say-- Show me one thing the government can do better than the private sector?

I really want to turn the question around-- What government service that has been privatized has done better than the public version?

There may be some things, like some private schools, but then they don't have the same constraints as public schools. And why not improve the public schools? As part of our national security. It saddens me that school funding is dependent upon property taxes in the region so there are great disparities in quality. We really need a better educated populace to survive the 21st century. A Democracy should have more equal educational opportunities and facilities.

We have let ourselves pretend that Cash Rule is somehow a "free market" for far too long now.

[Grinchie]

18. The main thread in Privatization seems to be insulation from Accountability

The lack of accountability is really the main goal, for example, what happens to the Torturer at DynaCorp, or the Loose Triggers at Blackwater when they run amuck? Maybe they get fired, but the Corporation lives on to hire more Psychopaths, and maybe pay a miniscule fine. Hey, we are too big to fail! Nobody else can do the job we do, so stuff it.

Of course they pay ludicrous wages to the Contractors, because they know that breaking the laws is risky, so might as well get paid handsomely in the process.

This mentality goes for the exhorbitant fee's of the CEO's too. They know the risk of playing the fraud game, and by golly they'll be rewarded so they'll have a rainy day fund when the Political conspiritors can no longer protect them from liability.

[Overseas]

19. And yet they argue the opposite -- oh, privatization will introduce competition

and make things more efficient, they say. And what it really does is then initiate a scrambling to see who can dominate the newly opened market with their cash and connections to friends in high places.

Privatization just greases the wheels of the revolving door between congress and the businesses they regulate "on behalf of the American people."

Dick Cheney is the poster boy, eh? He advocated to privatize more military services while he was Secretary of Defense. Then went to work for Halliburton to reap the rewards. Then grabbed the Vice Presidency and further privatized military services for his former associates and their subsidiaries. War profiteering on steroids.

But I'm afraid military privatization won't be reversed. Even when we have so many people out of work and could save a lot of money. Everyone continues parroting the lies-- the private sector can do better. The private sector is more efficient.

The shock of actual war crimes prosecutions of the Bush Gang would help a lot. People could see how much illegal and immoral behavior was foisted onto (and just wildly perpetrated by) our purportedly noble war efforts by private contractors. And see the laws the Bush Gang pushed through to absolve some of them of any responsibility.

But right now the administration may fear that it could not recruit enough soldiers to fill all the combat positions in Afghanistan and Iraq if soldiers were also needed for non-combat posts. They'd need to institute a draft, and that sunk the also misguided unpopular Vietnam war, which prompted Cheney's move to privatize military services in the first place.

[Echo In Light]

3. ALWAYS plenty of $ for sicko empire. NEVER enough $ for altruistic, humanitarian aims.

[rhett o rick]

4. #8.

[windoe]

8. 'Pro Life', "Conservatives'

only their lobotomized followers can believe that.

[Trillo]

9. Understand and tend to agree.

However, it seems we've been shown, both recently over the health insurance reform debate, as well as over the years as insurance has whittled down benefits and increased costs, that:

Health Insurance IS Warfare.

It's not a battle that uses bullets and bombs, but it's still a damn war.

[maryf]

11. Thanks for this!! K&R nt

[Orwellian_Ghost]

12. Bump

[roamer65]

17. The Soviet Union was destroyed by its Afghan war.

So too shall it be for us unless we get out NOW.

[bobbolink]

20. I truly believe that most USians agree with this. The problem is that we haven't succeeded in

connecting with them.

Calling people "Stupid" and dismissing them doesn't a vote make.