It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Tuesday, April 18, 2023
FOR PROFIT HEALTHCARE
US States confront medical debt that’s bankrupting millions
By JESSE BEDAYN
April 12, 2023 The gold dome of the Colorado State Capitol on March 23, 2023, in Denver. In Colorado, House lawmakers approved a measure Wednesday, April 12, that would lower the maximum interest rate for medical debt to 3%, require greater transparency in costs of treatment and prohibit debt collection during an appeals process. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski, File)
DENVER (AP) — Cindy Powers was driven into bankruptcy by 19 life-saving abdominal operations. Medical debt started stacking up for Lindsey Vance after she crashed her skateboard and had to get nine stitches in her chin. And for Misty Castaneda, open heart surgery for a disease she’d had since birth saddled her with $200,000 in bills.
These are three of an estimated 100 million Americans who have amassed nearly $200 billion in collective medical debt — almost the size of Greece’s economy — according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Now lawmakers in at least a dozen states and the U.S. Congress have pushed legislation to curtail the financial burden that’s pushed many into untenable situations: forgoing needed care for fear of added debt, taking a second mortgage to pay for cancer treatment or slashing grocery budgets to keep up with payments.
Some of the bills would create medical debt relief programs or protect personal property from collections, while others would lower interest rates, keep medical debt from tanking credit scores or require greater transparency in the costs of care.
In Colorado, House lawmakers approved a measure Wednesday that would lower the maximum interest rate for medical debt to 3%, require greater transparency in costs of treatment and prohibit debt collection during an appeals process.
If it became law, Colorado would join Arizona in having one of the lowest medical debt interest rates in the country. North Carolina lawmakers have also started mulling a 5% interest ceiling.
But there are opponents. Colorado Republican state Sen. Janice Rich said she worried that the proposal could “constrain hospitals’ debt collecting ability and hurt their cash flow.”
For patients, medical debt has become a leading cause of personal bankruptcy, with an estimated $88 billion of that debt in collections nationwide, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Roughly 530,000 people reported falling into bankruptcy annually due partly to medical bills and time away from work, according to a 2019 study from the American Journal of Public Health.
Powers’ family ended up owing $250,000 for the 19 life-saving abdominal surgeries. They declared bankruptcy in 2009, then the bank foreclosed on their home.
“Only recently have we begun to pick up the pieces,” said James Powers, Cindy’s husband, during his February testimony in favor of Colorado’s bill.
In Pennsylvania and Arizona, lawmakers are considering medical debt relief programs that would use state funds to help eradicate debt for residents. A New Jersey proposal would use federal funds from the American Rescue Plan Act to achieve the same end.
Bills in Florida and Massachusetts would protect some personal property — such as a car that is needed for work — from medical debt collections and force providers to be more transparent about costs. Florida’s legislation received unanimous approval in House and Senate committees on its way to votes in both chambers.
In Colorado, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Massachusetts and the U.S. Congress lawmakers are contemplating bills that would bar medical debt from being included on consumer reports, thereby protecting debtors’ credit scores.
Castaneda, who was born with a congenital heart defect, found herself $200,000 in debt when she was 23 and had to have surgery. The debt tanked her credit score and, she said, forced her to rely on her emotionally abusive husband’s credit.
For over a decade Castaneda wanted out of the relationship, but everything they owned was in her husband’s name, making it nearly impossible to break away. She finally divorced her husband in 2017.
“I’m trying to play catch-up for the last 20 years,” said Castaneda, 45, a hairstylist from Grand Junction on Colorado’s Western Slope.
Medical debt isn’t a strong indicator of people’s credit-worthiness, said Isabel Cruz, policy director at the Colorado Consumer Health Initiative.
While buying a car beyond your means or overspending on vacation can partly be chalked up to poor decision making, medical debt often comes from short, acute-care treatments that are unexpected — leaving patients with hefty bills that exceed their budgets.
For both Colorado bills — to limit interest rates and remove medical debt from consumer reports — a spokesperson for Democratic Gov. Jared Polis said the governor will “review these policies with a lens towards saving people money on health care.”
While neither bill garnered stiff political opposition, a spokesperson for the Colorado Hospital Association said the organization is working with sponsors to amend the interest rate bill “to align the legislation with the multitude of existing protections.”
The association did not provide further details.
To Vance, protecting her credit score early could have had a major impact. Vance’s medical debt began at age 19 from the skateboard crash, and then was compounded when she broke her arm soon after. Now 39, she has never been able to qualify for a credit card or car loan. Her in-laws cosigned for her Colorado apartment.
“My credit identity was medical debt,” she said, “and that set the tone for my life.”
___
Jesse Bedayn is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.
Cleanup begins after freight train derailment, fire in Maine
April 16, 2023 In this photo provided by the Maine Forest Service, several locomotives and rail cars burn after a freight train derailed Saturday, April 15, 2023, in Sandwich Academy Grant Township, near Rockwood, Maine. Three workers were treated and released from a hospital, and Canadian Pacific Railway will be leading the cleanup and track repair, according to officials.
(Maine Forest Service via AP)
SANDWICH ACADEMY GRANT TOWNSHIP, Maine (AP) — Railway owner Canadian Pacific Kansas City is leading cleanup and track repairs following a freight train derailment and fire in Maine that sent three railway workers to the hospital for treatment, officials said Sunday.
The three workers were treated and released Saturday after three locomotive engines and six train cars carrying lumber and electrical wiring went off the track in Somerset County, officials said.
The locomotives and four derailed lumber cars caught fire. Two derailed cars carrying the flammable liquids ethanol and pentamethylheptane, both classified as hazardous materials, escaped the fire and no chemicals spilled, said C. Doniele Carlson, spokesperson for Canadian Pacific Kansas City.
Canadian Pacific Kansas City, created by a merger of Canadian Pacific and Kansas City Southern that was completed Friday, is leading cleanup, salvage and repair, working with state agencies and local fire and rescue, said Jim Britt from the Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry. Workers were removing derailed locomotives and rail cars, cleaning up crash debris and repairing the rail line. It was unclear how long the process would take.
Derailments and railroad safety have been a growing concern nationwide since the fiery Feb. 3 Norfolk Southern derailment outside East Palestine, Ohio, that forced evacuations and created lingering health concerns because of the chemicals released.
Maine officials said Sunday there was no public threat and no evacuations.
The railway and the state blamed the derailment on a washout. But the Federal Railroad Administration, which sent an inspector to the site, suggested it will be weeks before full details of the accident are released.
People were urged to stay away as work continued. The derailment happened near Rockwood, a town of about 300 people on Moosehead Lake, about 90 miles (140 kilometers) northwest of Bangor.
Tax the Patriarchy to Support Women and Families
Taxing the wealthy could support programs like universal childcare. (Photo by Halfpoint Images/iStock via Getty Images) Tax the Patriarchy to Support Women and Families
A new tool from the National Women’s Law Center shows how taxing billionaires could fund "long overdue" investments in the care economy.
While millions of households across the United States are scrambling to file — or extend — their taxes by the April 19th deadline, members of our billionaire class are doing a great deal more smiling than scrambling.
Why? Because the U.S. tax code is built to reward wealth over work and serves big corporate interests over working families.
Trillions of dollars goes untaxed each year, deftly squirreled away by tax professionals hired by the nation’s wealthy and powerful or left untouched because the federal government doesn’t tax wealth as it does income.
Individuals and families can’t solve the care crisis on their own. The economy cannot thrive if mothers, women, and caretakers continue to be crushed by the lack of investments in the care economy.
Over one recent five-year period, a bombshell ProPublica investigation from 2022 revealed, the 25 richest Americans paid a true tax rate of roughly 3.4 percent. This means nurses, teachers, firefighters, and other middle class frontline workers paid a larger share of their income in taxes than America’s billionaires.
Corporations, too, are skilled at avoiding taxation. In 2020, at least 55 of the largest corporations in America paid no federal corporate income taxes despite enjoying substantial pretax profits in the United States.
So what could we fund by creating a tax system where the wealthy (mostly white men) and corporations (mostly led by white men) pay their fair share? We could start by investing in women and families.
In the spirit of tax season, the National Women’s Law Center created an interactive tax calculator that provides examples of how much revenue could be raised by taxing the patriarchy through different tax policies — and how that money could be used to fund public investments in paid leave, child care, and aging and disability care, which all of us need and deserve.
“People sometimes are put off by tax policy,” said Amy Matsui, Director of Income Security and Senior Counsel at the National Women’s Law Center. “We created the tool to show the connection between tax policy and our ability as a nation to invest in people in a concrete, simple, and hopefully fun way.”
“We hope people can use it to start conversations about why taxes matter, and engage their communities in advocacy for a fairer and more progressive tax system,” Matsui added.
According to the calculator, a tax on billionaire wealth could raise a staggering $3 trillion dollars over a ten year period. By contrast, creating a universal child care program where children between ages of 0 and 13 can access high-quality care, child care providers are paid a living wage, and no family pays more than 7 percent of their income for child care is estimated to cost $700 billion over the same ten year period.
Investments in the care economy are long overdue. With a rapidly aging population and fewer care workers due to low wages with few benefits, many economists are sounding the alarm of a care crisis.
Increasing wages for care workers would have a positive impact on racial and gender wealth inequality, as over 90 percent of U.S. home care workers are women, more than half are women of color, and 31 percent are immigrants. Putting more money in these workers’ pockets would bear substantial benefits for the entire economy.
Individuals and families can’t solve the care crisis on their own. The economy cannot thrive if mothers, women, and caretakers continue to be crushed by the lack of investments in the care economy.
President Biden’s budget contains a number of common sense ways to reverse course from the failed strategy of tax cuts for the wealthiest. Chief among them: raising the top income tax rate, raising the corporate tax rate, taxing stock buybacks, and closing some long standing loopholes. These provisions would go far to make the tax code more progressive — and raise revenues to support investments that benefit everyone.
“Our economy is less strong when workers who need care — that is, all of us — have to cobble it together and figure it out on their own,” said Matsui. “Women and families need and deserve robust public investment in the care infrastructure, and we can’t wait any longer.”
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
No one but the terminally naïve should be surprised that security services lie – and that they are all but certain to cover their tracks when they carry out operations that either violate domestic or international law or that would be near-universally rejected by their own populations.
Which is reason enough why anyone following the fallout from explosions last September that ripped holes in three of the four Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea supplying Russian gas to Europe should be wary of accepting anything Western agencies have to say on the matter.
In fact, the only thing that Western publics should trust is the consensus among “investigators” that the three simultaneous blasts deep underwater on the pipelines – a fourth charge apparently failed to detonate – were sabotage, not some freak coincidental accident.
Someone blew up the Nord Stream pipelines, creating an untold environmental catastrophe as the pipes leaked huge quantities of methane, a supremely active global-warming gas. It was an act of unrivaled industrial and environmental terrorism.
If Washington had been able to pin the explosions on Russia, as it initially hoped, it would have done so with full vigor. There is nothing Western states would like more than to intensify world fury against Moscow, especially in the context of NATO’s express efforts to “weaken” Russia through a proxy war waged in Ukraine.
But, after the claim made the rounds of front pages for a week or two, the story of Russia destroying its own pipelines was quietly shelved. That was partly because it seemed too difficult to maintain a narrative in which Moscow chose to destroy a critical part of its own energy infrastructure.
Not only did the explosions cause Russia great financial harm – the country’s gas and oil revenues regularly financed nearly half of its annual budget – but the blasts removed Moscow’s chief influence over Germany, which had been until then heavily dependent on Russian gas. The initial media story required the Western public to believe that President Vladimir Putin willingly shot himself in the foot, losing his only leverage over European resolve to impose economic sanctions on his country.
But even more than the complete lack of a Russian motive, Western states knew they would be unable to build a plausible forensic case against Moscow for the Nord Stream blasts.
Instead, with no chance to milk the explosions for propaganda value, official Western interest in explaining what had happened to the Nord Stream pipelines wilted, despite the enormity of the event. That was reflected for months in an almost complete absence of media coverage.
When the matter was raised, it was to argue that separate investigations by Sweden, Germany and Denmark were all drawing a blank. Sweden even refused to share any of its findings with Germany and Denmark, arguing that to do so would harm its “national security.”
No one, again including the Western media, raised an eyebrow or showed a flicker of interest in what might be really going on behind the scenes. Western states and their compliant corporate media seemed quite ready to settle for the conclusion that this was a mystery cocooned in an enigma.
Isolated and friendless
It might have stayed that way forever, except that in February, a journalist – one of the most acclaimed investigative reporters of the past half-century – produced an account that finally demystified the explosions. Drawing on at least one anonymous, highly placed informant, Seymour Hersh pointed the finger for the explosions directly at the US administration and President Joe Biden himself.
Hersh’s detailed retelling of the planning and execution of the Nord Stream blasts had the advantage – at least for those interested in getting to the truth of what took place – that his account fitted the known circumstantial evidence.
Key Washington figures, from President Biden to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and his senior neoconservative official Victoria Nuland – a stalwart of the murky US, anti-Russia meddling in Ukraine over the past decade – had either called for the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines or celebrated the blasts shortly after they took place.
If anyone had a motive for blowing up the Russian pipelines – and a self-declared one at that – it was the Biden administration. They opposed the Nord Stream 1 and 2 projects from the outset – and for exactly the same reason that Moscow so richly prized them.
In particular, the second pair of pipelines, Nord Stream 2, which was completed in September 2021, would double the amount of cheap Russian gas available to Germany and Western Europe. The only obstacle in its path was the hesitancy of German regulators. They delayed approval in November 2021.
Nord Stream meant major European countries, most especially Germany, would be completely dependent for the bulk of their energy supplies on Russia. That deeply conflicted with US interests. For two decades, Washington had been expanding NATO as an anti-Moscow military alliance embracing ever more of Europe, to the point of butting up aggressively against Russia’s borders.
The Ukrainian government’s covert efforts to become a NATO member – thereby destroying a long-standing mutual and fragile nuclear deterrence between Washington and Moscow – were among the stated reasons why Russia invaded its neighbor in February last year.
Washington wanted Moscow isolated and friendless in Europe. The goal was to turn Russia into Enemy No. 2 – after China – not leave Europeans looking to Moscow for energy salvation.
The Nord Stream explosions achieved precisely that outcome. They severed the main reason European states had for cozying up to Moscow. Instead, the US started shipping its expensive liquified natural gas across the Atlantic to Europe, both forcing Europeans to become more energy dependent on Washington and, at the same time, fleecing them for the privilege.
But even if Hersh’s story fitted the circumstantial evidence, could his account stand up to further scrutiny?
Peculiarly incurious
This is where the real story begins. Because one might have assumed that Western states would be queuing up to investigate the facts Hersh laid bare, if only to see if they stacked up or to find a more plausible alternative account of what happened.
Dennis Kucinich, a former chair of a US Congressional investigative subcommittee on government oversight, has noted that it is simply astonishing no one in Congress has been pushing to use its powers to subpoena senior American officials, such as the secretary of the Navy, to test Hersh’s version of events. As Kucinich observes, such subpoenas could be issued under Congress’s Article One, Section 8, Clause 18, providing “constitutional powers to gather information, including to inquire on the administrative conduct of office.”
Similarly, and even more extraordinarily, when a vote was called by Russia at the United Nations Security Council late last month to set up an independent international commission to investigate the blasts, the proposal was roundly rejected.
If adopted, the UN Secretary-General himself would have appointed expert investigators and aided their work with a large secretariat.
Three Security Council members, Russia, China and Brazil, voted in favor of the commission. The other 12 – the US and its allies or small states it could easily pressure – abstained, the safest way to quietly foil the creation of such an investigative commission.
Excuses for rejecting an independent commission failed to pass the sniff test. The claim was that it would interfere with the existing investigations of Denmark, Sweden and Germany. And yet all three have demonstrated that they are in no hurry to reach a conclusion, arguing that they may need years to carry out their work. As previously noted, they have indicated great reluctance to cooperate. And last week, Sweden once again stated that it may never get to the bottom of the events in the Baltic Sea.
As one European diplomat reportedly observed of meetings between NATO policymakers, the motto is: “Don’t talk about Nord Stream.” The diplomat added: “It’s like a corpse at a family gathering. It’s better not to know.”
It may not be so surprising that Western states are devoted to ignorance about who carried out a major act of international terrorism in blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines, considering that the most likely culprit is the world’s only superpower and the one state that can make their lives a misery.
But what should be more peculiar is that Western media have shown precisely no interest in getting to the truth of the matter either. They have remained completely incurious to an event of enormous international significance and consequence.
It is not only that Hersh’s account has been ignored by the Western press as if it did not even exist. It is that none of the media appear to have made any effort to follow up with their own investigations to test his account for plausibility.
‘Act of war’
Hersh’s investigation is filled with details that could be checked – and verified or rebutted – if anyone wished to do so.
He set out a lengthy planning stage that began in the second half of 2021. He names the unit responsible for the attack on the pipeline: the US Navy’s Diving and Salvage Center, based in Panama City, Florida. And he explains why it was chosen for the task over the US Special Operations Command: because any covert operation by the former would not need to be reported to Congress.
In December 2021, according to his highly placed informant, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan convened a task force of senior administration and Pentagon officials at the request of Biden himself. They agreed that the explosions must not be traceable back to Washington; otherwise, as the source noted: “It’s an act of war.”
The CIA brought in the Norwegians, stalwarts of NATO and strongly hostile to Russia, to carry out the logistics of where and how to attack the pipelines. Oslo had its own additional commercial interests in play, as the blasts would make Germany more dependent on Norwegian gas, as well as American supplies, to make up the shortfall from Nord Stream.
By March last year, shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the precise site for the attack had been selected: in the Baltic’s shallow waters off Denmark’s Bornholm Island, where the sea floor was only 260 feet below the surface, the four pipelines were close together and there were no strong tidal currents.
A small number of Swedish and Danish officials were given a general briefing about unusual diving activities to avoid the danger that their navies might raise the alarm.
The Norwegians also helped develop a way to disguise the US explosive charges so that, after they were laid, they would not be detected by Russian surveillance in the area.
Next, the US found the ideal cover. For more than two decades, Washington has sponsored an annual NATO naval exercise in the Baltic every June. The US arranged that the 2022 event, Baltops 22, would take place close to Bornholm Island, allowing the divers to plant the charges unnoticed.
The explosives would be detonated through the use of a sonar buoy dropped by plane at the time of President Biden’s choosing. Complex arrangements had to be taken to make sure the explosives would not be accidentally triggered by passing ships, underwater drilling, seismic events or sea creatures.
Three months later, on September 26, the sonar buoy was dropped by a Norwegian plane, and a few hours later three of the four pipelines were put out of commission.
Disinformation campaign
The Western media’s response to Hersh’s account has perhaps been the most revealing aspect of the entire saga.
It is not just that the establishment media have been so uniformly and remarkably reticent to dig deeper into making sense of this momentous crime – beyond making predictable, unevidenced accusations against Russia. It is that they have so obviously sought to dismiss Hersh’s account before making even cursory efforts to confirm or deny its specifics.
The knee-jerk pretext has been that Hersh has only one anonymous source for his claims. Hersh himself has noted that, as with other of his famous investigations, he cannot always refer to additional sources he uses to confirm details because those sources impose a condition of invisibility for agreeing to speak to him.
That should hardly be surprising when informants are drawn from a small, select group of Washington insiders and are at great risk of being identified – at great personal cost to themselves, given the US administration’s proven track record of persecuting whistleblowers.
But the fact that this was indeed just a pretext from the establishment media becomes much clearer when we consider that those same journalists dismissive of Hersh’s account happily gave prominence to an alternative, highly implausible, semi-official version of events.
In what looked suspiciously like a coordinated publication in early March, The New York Times and Germany’s Die Zeit newspapers printed separate accounts promising to solve “one of the central mysteries of the war in Ukraine.” The Times headline asked a question it implied it was about to answer: “Who Blew Up the Nord Stream Pipelines?”
Instead, both papers offered an account of the Nord Stream attack that lacked detail, and any detail that was supplied was completely implausible. This new version of events was vaguely attributed to anonymous American and German intelligence sources – the very actors, in Hersh’s account, responsible both for carrying out and covering up the Nord Stream blasts.
In fact, the story had all the hallmarks of a disinformation campaign to distract from Hersh’s investigation. It threw the establishment media a bone: the chief purpose was to lift any pressure from journalists to pursue Hersh’s leads. Now they could scurry around, looking like they were doing their job as a “free press” by chasing a complete red herring supplied by U.S. intelligence agencies.
Which is why the story was widely reported, notably far more widely than Hersh’s much more credible account.
So what did the New York Times’ account claim? That a mysterious group of six people had hired a 50 foot yacht and sailed off to Bornholm Island, where they had carried out a James Bond-style mission to blow up the pipelines. Those involved, it was suggested, were a group of “pro-Ukrainian saboteurs”– with no apparent ties to President Volodymyr Zelenskiy – who were keen to seek revenge on Russia for its invasion. They used fake passports.
The Times further muddied the waters, reporting sources that claimed some 45 “ghost ships” had passed close to the site of the explosion when their transponders were not working.
The crucial point was that the story shifted attention away from the sole plausible possibility, the one underscored by Hersh’s source: that only a state actor could have carried out the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines. The highly sophisticated, extremely difficult operation needed to be concealed from other states, including Russia that were closely surveilling the area.
Now the establishment media was heading off on a completely different tangent. They were looking not at states – and most especially not the one with the biggest motive, the greatest capability and the proven opportunity.
Instead, they had an excuse to play at being reporters, visiting Danish yachting communities to ask if anyone remembered the implicated yacht, the Andromeda, or suspicious characters aboard it, and trying to track down the Polish company that hired the sailing boat. The media had the story they preferred: one that Hollywood would have created, of a crack team of Jason Bournes giving Moscow a good slapping and then disappearing into the night.
Welcome mystery
A month on, the media discussion is still exclusively about the mysterious yacht crew, though – after reaching a series of dead-ends in a story that was only ever meant to have dead-ends – establishment journalists are asking a few tentative questions. Though, let us note, most determinedly not questions about any possible US involvement in the Nord Stream sabotage.
Britain’s Guardian newspaper ran a story last week in which a German “security expert” wondered whether a group of six sailors was really capable of carrying out a highly complex operation to blow up the Nord Stream pipelines. That is something that might have occurred to a less credulous newspaper a month earlier when the Guardian simply regurgitated the Times’ disinformation story.
But despite the security expert’s skepticism, the Guardian is still not eager to get to the bottom of the story. It conveniently concludes that the “investigation” conducted by the Swedish public prosecutor, Mats Ljungqvist, will be unlikely ever to “yield a conclusive answer.”
Or as Ljungqvist observes: “Our hope is to be able to confirm who has committed this crime, but it should be noted that it likely will be difficult given the circumstances.”
Hersh’s account continues to be ignored by the Guardian – beyond a dismissive reference to several “theories” and “speculation” other than the laughable yacht story. The Guardian does not name Hersh in its report or the fact that his highly placed source fingered the US for the Nord Stream sabotage. Instead, it notes simply that one theory – Hersh’s – has been “zeroing on a NATO Baltops 22 wargame two months before” the attack.
It’s all still a mystery for the Guardian – and a very welcome one by the tenor of its reports.
The Washington Post has been performing a similar service for the Biden administration on the other side of the Atlantic. A month on, it is using the yacht story to widen the enigma rather than narrow it down.
The paper reports that unnamed “law enforcement officials” now believe the Andromeda yacht was not the only vessel involved, adding: “The boat may have been a decoy, put to sea to distract from the true perpetrators, who remain at large, according to officials with knowledge of an investigation led by Germany’s attorney general.”
The Washington Post’s uncritical reporting surely proves a boon to Western “investigators.” It continues to build an ever more elaborate mystery, or “international whodunnit,” as the paper gleefully describes it. Its report argues that unnamed officials “wonder if the explosive traces – collected months after the rented boat was returned to its owners – were meant to falsely lead investigators to the Andromeda as the vessel used in the attack.”
The paper then quotes someone with “knowledge of the investigation”: “The question is whether the story with the sailboat is something to distract or only part of the picture.”
How does the paper respond? By ignoring that very warning and dutifully distracting itself across much of its own report by puzzling whether Poland might have been involved too in the blasts. Remember, a mysterious Polish company hired that red-herring yacht.
Poland, notes the paper, had a motive because it had long warned that the Nord Stream pipelines would make Europe more energy dependent on Russia. Exactly the same motive, we might note – though, of course, the Washington Post refuses to do so – that the Biden administration demonstrably had.
The paper does inadvertently offer one clue as to where the mystery yacht story most likely originated. The Washington Post quotes a German security official saying that Berlin “first became interested in the [Andromeda] vessel after the country’s domestic intelligence agency received a ‘very concrete tip’ from a Western intelligence service that the boat may have been involved in the sabotage.”
The German official “declined to name the country that shared the information” – information that helpfully draws attention away from any US involvement in the pipeline blasts and redirects it to a group of untraceable, rogue Ukraine sympathizers.
The Washington Post concludes that Western leaders “would rather not have to deal with the possibility that Ukraine or allies were involved.” And, it seems the Western media – our supposed watchdogs on power – feel exactly the same way.
‘Parody’ intelligence
In a follow-up story last week, Hersh revealed that Holger Stark, the journalist behind Die Zeit’s piece on the mystery yacht and someone Hersh knew when they worked together in Washington, had imparted to him an interesting additional piece of information divulged by his country’s intelligence services.
Hersh reports: “Officials in Germany, Sweden, and Denmark had decided shortly after the pipeline bombings to send teams to the site to recover the one mine that has not gone off. [Holger] said they were too late; an American ship had sped to the site within a day or two and recovered the mine and other materials.”
Holger, Hersh says, was entirely uninterested in Washington’s haste and determination to have exclusive access to this critical piece of evidence: “He answered, with a wave of his hand, ‘You know what Americans are like. Always wanting to be first.’” Hersh points out: “There was another very obvious explanation.”
Hersh also spoke with an intelligence expert about the plausibility of the mystery yacht story being advanced by the New York Times and Die Zeit. He described it as a “parody” of intelligence that only fooled the media because it was exactly the kind of story they wanted to hear. He noted some of the most glaring flaws in the account:
‘Any serious student of the event would know that you cannot anchor a sailboat in waters that are 260 feet deep’ – the depth at which the four pipelines were destroyed – ‘but the story was not aimed at him but at the press who would not know a parody when presented with one.’
Further:
‘You cannot just walk off the street with a fake passport and lease a boat. You either need to accept a captain who was supplied by the leasing agent or owner of the yacht, or have a captain who comes with a certificate of competency as mandated by maritime law. Anyone who’s ever chartered a yacht would know that.’ Similar proof of expertise and competence for deep sea diving involving the use of a specialized mix of gases would be required by the divers and the doctor.
And:
‘How does a 49-foot sailboat find the pipelines in the Baltic Sea? The pipelines are not that big and they are not on the charts that come with the lease. Maybe the thought was to put the two divers into the water’– not very easy to do so from a small yacht – ‘and let the divers look for it. How long can a diver stay down in their suits? Maybe fifteen minutes. Which means it would take the diver four years to search one square mile.’
The truth is that the Western press has zero interest in determining who blew up the Nord Stream pipelines because, just like Western diplomats and politicians, media corporations don’t want to know the truth if it cannot be weaponized against an official enemy state.
The Western media are not there to help the public monitor the centers of power, keep our governments honest and transparent, or bring to book those who commit state crimes. They are there to keep us ignorant and willing accomplices when such crimes are seen as advancing on the global stage the interests of Western elites – including the very transnational corporations that run our media.
Which is precisely why the Nord Stream blasts took place. The Biden administration knew not only that its allies would be too fearful to expose its unprecedented act of industrial and environmental terrorism but that the media would dutifully line up behind their national governments in turning a blind eye.
The very ease with which Washington has been able to carry out an atrocity – one that has caused a surge in the cost of living for Europeans, leaving them cold and out of pocket during the winter, and added considerably to existing pressures that have been gradually de-industrializing Europe’s economies – will embolden the US to act in equally rogue ways in the future.
In the context of a Ukraine war in which there is the constant threat of a resort to nuclear weapons, where that could ultimately lead should be only too obvious.
All my posts are freely accessible, but my journalism is possible only because of the support of readers. If you liked this article or any of the others, please consider sharing it with friends and making a donation to support my work. You can do so by becoming a paid Substack subscriber, or donate via Paypal or my bank account, or alternatively set up a monthly direct debit mandate with GoCardless. A complete archive of my writings is available on my website. I’m on Twitter and Facebook.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilizations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net.
Mainstream Media Turn Coats on ‘National Security’ Leaks
On April 14, the US Department of Justice charged Airman First Class Jack Teixeira with copying and sharing information “connected with” or “relating to” the “national defense.” The government alleges that Teixeira is the man behind “leaks” of classified information which worked their way from the Massachusetts Air National Guard to a Discord chat server for gamers and thence to social media and, finally and unfortunately only very partially, to the US “mainstream” media.
At this point, due to mainstream media’s refusal to do its job, the public doesn’t know very much about the content of the leaked information, but from what we do know, that information had little or nothing to do with any plausible conception of “national defense,” at least where the United States is concerned.
Last time I checked, Ukraine was neither a US state, nor a US territory, nor for that matter located anywhere near the US. US involvement there has nothing to do with “national defense” and everything to do with declining empires raging against the dying of their respective lights at the expense of their subjects. The information not only shouldn’t have been “classified,” it shouldn’t have been compiled or generated. If there’s a crime involved, it was committed at that end, not Teixeira’s.
But that, really, is business as usual. While Julian Assange and Edward Snowden may have been more mindful and purposeful in their disclosures of US government crimes and peccadilloes, Teixeira (if he’s even “guilty”) did America similar service incidental to what sounds like a youthful ego trip.
If the whole incident exposes any new or novel issue, that issue involves the question Nikita Mazurov asks at The Intercept: “Why Did Journalists Help the Justice Department Identify a Leaker?”
In theory, journalism’s job is to inform the public. In practice, “mainstream” journalism has, for at least the last few decades, largely become the government’s stenography pool, reliably reporting every official assertion as fact and seldom asking pointed questions about any subject more important than which politician has been having sex with which porn star.
When there’s an exception, journalists at least bother to “protect their sources.” Someone who “leaks” to the New York Times or Washington Post can reasonably expect those publications to resist outing them even under court order.
But since Teixeira (allegedly) failed to consult the Very Special Important People at the Times or Post (and give them the “scoops” they so love), instead (allegedly) sharing his information with some gamer friends to make himself look cool, mainstream media switched sides.
Instead of investigating the content of the leak, they investigated the leaker, saving the FBI the trouble. Instead of informing the public, they enthusiastically went after someone who did their job for them.
This is not the first time, of course. They threw Assange and Snowden under the bus, too … but only once they’d squeezed all the juice from their “scoops.”
We no longer have to ask whose side “mainstream media” are really on. It’s certainly not the public’s.
Fiscal Insanity: The Government Borrows $6 Billion a Day, and We’re Stuck with the Bill
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / April 16th, 2023
We’re not living the American dream.
We’re living a financial nightmare.
The U.S. government is funding its existence with a credit card.
The government—and that includes the current administration—is spending money it doesn’t have on programs it can’t afford, and “we the taxpayers” are the ones being forced to foot the bill for the government’s fiscal insanity.
According to the number crunchers with the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the government is borrowing roughly $6 billion a day.
As the Editorial Board for the Washington Post warns:
The nation has reached a hazardous moment where what it owes, as a percentage of the total size of the economy, is the highest since World War II. If nothing changes, the United States will soon be in an uncharted scenario that weakens its national security, imperils its ability to invest in the future, unfairly burdens generations to come, and will require cuts to critical programs such as Social Security and Medicare. It is not a future anyone wants.
The bulk of that debt has been amassed over the past two decades, thanks in large part to the fiscal shenanigans of four presidents, 10 sessions of Congress and two wars.
In other words, the government is spending more than it brings in.
The U.S. ranks as the 12th most indebted nation in the world, with much of that debt owed to the Federal Reserve, large investment funds and foreign governments, namely, Japan and China.
Interest payments on the national debt are estimated to top $395 billion this year, which is significantly more than the government spends on veterans’ benefits and services, and according to Pew Research Center, more than it will spend on elementary and secondary education, disaster relief, agriculture, science and space programs, foreign aid, and natural resources and environmental protection combined.
According to the Committee for a Reasonable Federal Budget, the interest we’ve paid on this borrowed money is “nearly twice what the federal government will spend on transportation infrastructure, over four times as much as it will spend on K-12 education, almost four times what it will spend on housing, and over eight times what it will spend on science, space, and technology.”
We’ve been sold a bill of goods by politicians promising to pay down the national debt, jumpstart the economy, rebuild our infrastructure, secure our borders, ensure our security, and make us all healthy, wealthy and happy.
None of that has come to pass, and yet we’re still being loaded down with debt not of our own making while the government remains unrepentant, unfazed and undeterred in its wanton spending.
Indeed, the national deficit (the difference between what the government spends and the revenue it takes in) remains at more than $1.5 trillion.
If Americans managed their personal finances the way the government mismanages the nation’s finances, we’d all be in debtors’ prison by now.
Despite the government propaganda being peddled by the politicians and news media, however, the government isn’t spending our tax dollars to make our lives better.
We’re being robbed blind so the governmental elite can get richer.
In the eyes of the government, “we the people, the voters, the consumers, and the taxpayers” are little more than pocketbooks waiting to be picked.
“We the people” have become the new, permanent underclass in America.
Consider: The government can seize your home and your car (which you’ve bought and paid for) over nonpayment of taxes. Government agents can freeze and seize your bank accounts and other valuables if they merely “suspect” wrongdoing. And the IRS insists on getting the first cut of your salary to pay for government programs over which you have no say.
We have no real say in how the government runs, or how our taxpayer funds are used, but we’re being forced to pay through the nose, anyhow.
We have no real say, but that doesn’t prevent the government from fleecing us at every turn and forcing us to pay for endless wars that do more to fund the military industrial complex than protect us, pork barrel projects that produce little to nothing, and a police state that serves only to imprison us within its walls.
If you have no choice, no voice, and no real options when it comes to the government’s claims on your property and your money, you’re not free.
It didn’t take long, however—a hundred years, in fact—before the American government was laying claim to the citizenry’s property by levying taxes to pay for the Civil War. As the New York Times reports, “Widespread resistance led to its repeal in 1872.”
Determined to claim some of the citizenry’s wealth for its own uses, the government reinstituted the income tax in 1894. Charles Pollock challenged the tax as unconstitutional, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in his favor. Pollock’s victory was relatively short-lived. Members of Congress—united in their determination to tax the American people’s income—worked together to adopt a constitutional amendment to overrule the Pollock decision.
On the eve of World War I, in 1913, Congress instituted a permanent income tax by way of the 16th Amendment to the Constitution and the Revenue Act of 1913. Under the Revenue Act, individuals with income exceeding $3,000 could be taxed starting at 1% up to 7% for incomes exceeding $500,000.
It’s all gone downhill from there.
Unsurprisingly, the government has used its tax powers to advance its own imperialistic agendas and the courts have repeatedly upheld the government’s power to penalize or jail those who refused to pay their taxes.
While we’re struggling to get by, and making tough decisions about how to spend what little money actually makes it into our pockets after the federal, state and local governments take their share (this doesn’t include the stealth taxes imposed through tolls, fines and other fiscal penalties), the government continues to do whatever it likes—levy taxes, rack up debt, spend outrageously and irresponsibly—with little thought for the plight of its citizens.
To top it all off, all of those wars the U.S. is so eager to fight abroad are being waged with borrowed funds. As The Atlantic reports, “U.S. leaders are essentially bankrolling the wars with debt, in the form of purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds by U.S.-based entities like pension funds and state and local governments, and by countries like China and Japan.”
Of course, we’re the ones who have to repay that borrowed debt.
For instance, American taxpayers have been forced to shell out more than $5.6 trillion since 9/11 for the military industrial complex’s costly, endless so-called “war on terrorism.” That translates to roughly $23,000 per taxpayer to wage wars abroad, occupy foreign countries, provide financial aid to foreign allies, and fill the pockets of defense contractors and grease the hands of corrupt foreign dignitaries.
Mind you, that’s only a portion of what the Pentagon spends on America’s military empire.
As Dwight D. Eisenhower warned in a 1953 speech, this is how the military industrial complex continues to get richer, while the American taxpayer is forced to pay for programs that do little to enhance our lives, ensure our happiness and well-being, or secure our freedoms.
This is no way of life.
Yet it’s not just the government’s endless wars that are bleeding us dry.
We’re also being forced to shell out money for surveillance systems to track our movements, money to further militarize our already militarized police, money to allow the government to raid our homes and bank accounts, money to fund schools where our kids learn nothing about freedom and everything about how to comply, and on and on.
There was a time in our history when our forebears said “enough is enough” and stopped paying their taxes to what they considered an illegitimate government. They stood their ground and refused to support a system that was slowly choking out any attempts at self-governance, and which refused to be held accountable for its crimes against the people. Their resistance sowed the seeds for the revolution that would follow.
Unfortunately, in the 200-plus years since we established our own government, we’ve let bankers, turncoats and number-crunching bureaucrats muddy the waters and pilfer the accounts to such an extent that we’re back where we started.
Once again, we’ve got a despotic regime with an imperial ruler doing as they please.
Once again, we’ve got a judicial system insisting we have no rights under a government which demands that the people march in lockstep with its dictates.
And once again, we’ve got to decide whether we’ll keep marching or break stride and make a turn toward freedom.
But what if we didn’t just pull out our pocketbooks and pony up to the federal government’s outrageous demands for more money?
What if we didn’t just dutifully line up to drop our hard-earned dollars into the collection bucket, no questions asked about how it will be spent?
What if, instead of quietly sending in our tax checks, hoping vainly for some meager return, we did a little calculating of our own and started deducting from our taxes those programs that we refuse to support?
by Bill Scheuerman and Sid Plotkin / March 29th, 2023
Capitalism, Marx said, is unceasingly prone to crisis. His observation applies as much to financial capital as to industrial capital, as the recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank of New York attest. In their pursuit of profits, banks make loans that borrowers cannot repay or back the loans with assets that lose value. Why has this scenario become so deeply rooted in American capitalism and what is the state’s role in restabilizing the financial system once the house of cards begins to tremble?
This banking crisis seems to have ebbed as federal regulators decided to guarantee all deposits, regardless of the usual FDIC limits, at these two banks. Meanwhile, the US Federal Reserve Board carefully punted on its recent interest rate hike, hoping to locate a sweet spot between a higher anti-inflationary rate and the need to stabilize a quaking banking system with a lower one. It settled for a modest 0.25% increase. These federal actions are band aids on a gushing wound. Before considering steps government should be taking to avert future banking crises, we need to understand why they happen. The foundation of finance capital is loan credit. This means not only that finance capital and all the economic activities that it supports depend on a faith that mounting loans and debts will be repaid, but that the intangible financial assets used to repay the loans will retain enough of their value to keep the system going. In Silicon Valley’s case, for example, the long-term low-interest government bonds it used to back up its capital lost their value as the Fed raised interest rates to battle inflation and triggered a run on the bank. Put simply, newer government bonds paid more interest so old ones lost value. Depositors followed the money.
Karl Marx brilliantly explained how contradictions of capitalist production fueled emergent crises. For example, as capital replaced labor with technology, both surplus value and the rate of demand for goods would fall, raising barriers to further accumulation. And when capitalists stop accumulating capital, the system grinds to a horrific halt. Think 1929. Frederick Engels drew on Marx’s work to reveal much about the financial aspects of business as usual in Vols 2 & 3 of Capital that he edited, but Marx’s work on this score remained under-developed. Analysis of finance capitalism, a capitalism led by banks and financiers, not industrial corporations, awaited its fuller development in the early 20th century. Rudolf Hilferding’s path breaking work Finance Capital dissected the case of banker dominance in Imperial Germany. For the American variant, however, there was no more acute guide than Thorstein Veblen. His Theory of Business Enterprise (1904) and Absentee Ownership (1923) remain invaluable guides to our current situation. Together, these books clearly chart the transformation from corporate to financial governance of the capitalist class and its changing system of industrial-pecuniary relations. With the advent of the increasingly monopolistic, cartel-like structure of “key industries” such as steel, oil, communications, and automobiles plus establishment of the Federal Reserve Board in 1913, in the two decades that span his analysis, we can see how and why Veblen was impressed by the enhanced governing capacity to manage money values achieved by an informal alliance of extraordinarily concentrated public and private powers, “the general staff of financial strategy.”
But – and this qualification is critical as we stumble in the dark of financial uncertainty in days and months ahead – the impressive growth in finance capital’s governing capacity is and never can be equal to the ephemeral, intangible, and unstable make-believe of asset values. All the computers of all the financial kings’ math whizzes cannot put finite, predictable quantities to values that elude tangible measurement. As Veblen explained:
…The fabric of credit and capitalization is essentially a fabric of concerted make-believe resting on the routine credulity of the business community. It is…conditioned on the continued preservation of this…credulity in a state of unimpaired tensile strength, which calls for eternal vigilance on the part of its keepers. The fabric, therefore, is always in a state of unstable equilibrium, liable to derangement and extensive disintegration…at any point.
In plain language, Veblen summed up his point this way: modern finance is, at its core, “a confidence game…to be played according to the rules governing games of that psychological nature,” like Three-Card Monte on financial steroids played by guys in expensive suits. The only certainty in finance capital is the absence of certainty. Its illusory quality both allows for the grossest forms of sheer inequality and disallows effective governance of the system that fuels such inequality. The only way to manage that contradiction, at least within the terms of capital itself, is to require banks to serve production, not their own financial interests. We need regulations to make banks serve the public, not themselves. That includes a stronger version of the Glass-Steagall rules that Congress adopted in 1935 and then abandoned in 1999, a decision whose effects were soon felt in the tech stock collapse of 2000, in the far greater housing value collapse of 2007-2008, and now again in our more recent financial rumblings and quakes. If we continue to let the financiers play with financial fire, we will all be burned again. This is finance capital’s other great certainty.FacebookTwitterREmail
