anna spies

canisfamiliaris:

On average, wealthy countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development spend 2.5% of their economic output on their militaries. The U.S. devotes 5.1% of its economic activity on “defense,” but that only counts the Pentagon’s annual budget. It doesn’t include military and homeland security spending tucked into other areas of the federal budget. Just a few examples: the costs of maintaining our nuclear arsenal are part of the Department of Energy budget; caring for veterans is in the Department of Veterans’ Affairs budget; foreign military assistance falls under the State Department’s budget. It also doesn’t include the costs of maintaining troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those conflicts will run us $170 billion this year — enough to offer insurance to 35 million low-income people or provide renewable energy to 100 million households, according to the national priorities project. 

For their tax dollars — or euros — they get universal health care, deeply subsidized education (including free university tuition in many countries), modern infrastructure, good mass transit, and far less poverty than in the U.S. 

The U.S. outspends everyone on military, but among the 20 most developed countries in the world, the United States is now dead last in life expectancy at birth, it has the highest infant mortality rate — 40% higher than the runner-up — it leads in the percentage of the population who will die before reaching age 60, and more than 50% of U.S. children need food stamps at some point during their childhoods. Perhaps the U.S. has their priorities in the wrong place.

And people ask me why I moved?

(And before everyone gets up in arms, Europe is far from perfect and the EU tends to be a wasteful beast. However, I’ll still take living here over living there any day.)

danielextra:

Kai Wright’s excoriation of President Obama in his editorial in COLORLINES, lays bare and clear how POTUS’ rhetorical maneuvering belies what makes America great. Wright’s piece is so terrific, I’ve included it in its entirety below.

Osama Bin Laden, evil incarnate, has justified so, so much American violence in the 21st century. We have launched two wars and executed God knows how many covert military operations in the ethereal, never-ending fight he personafies. We have made racial profiling of Muslim Americans normative, turned an already broken immigration system into an arm of national defense, and reversed decades worth of hard-won civil liberties while pursuing him, dead or alive. We have abandoned even the conceit of respect for human rights in places stretching from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo Bay in the course of hunting him down. Now, finally, the devil is dead.

Upon the news of this victory, crowds gathered in front of the White House and at Ground Zero to chant “U.S.A.! U.S.A!” It was as if we’d just won an Olympic hockey game, rather than capped a decade worth of war and recession with a singular act of violence.

“Today’s achievement is a testament to the greatness of our country and the determination of the American people,” the president declared. “We are once again reminded that America can do whatever we set our mind to,” he concluded, after insisting that the execution represents justice. “That is the story of our history, whether it’s the pursuit of prosperity for our people, or the struggle for equality for all our citizens; our commitment to stand up for our values abroad, and our sacrifices to make the world a safer place.”

How perverse. President Obama is the leader of a nation in which justice is but a distant dream for millions of residents. He leads a nation that can afford billions of dollars annually for war but cannot feed the nearly 18 million children who lived in homes without food security in 2009. And yet, the Nobel Peace Prize winner can fix his mouth to say that killing a man on the other side of the globe provides proof of America’s exceptionalism.

The gap between rhetoric and reality has long been a defining trait of American life. Lies about our values have shielded us from the brutal facts of our nation ever since we built it on the back of genocide and slavery. But it is in times like these that the dissonance becomes unbearable.

The president says we can do anything we want because we can kill. We could not stop poverty rates from spiraling upward to a record-setting 14.3 percent of Americans in 2009, but we can kill so we are exceptional. One in four black and Latino families live below the poverty line now, and as a result America’s child poverty rate—one in five kids—is the second worst among rich nations, behind Mexico. But we can kill, so we are great.

Fourteen million Americans are out of work, nearly a third of them for more than a year. The Depression-like jobs crises in black neighborhoods around the country have become so acceptable as to be literally unremarkable in national news media. When overall joblessness inched downward in March, the fact that black unemployment increased, again, was greeted with callous shrugs from the White House to CNN. But America is exceptional because we can kill.

Our economy is defined by greed. The top 1 percent of earners take home a quarter of income in this country. Wall Street banks are logging record profits while the Treasury Department professes helplessness at the fact that tens of millions of people are still losing their homes to those banks. Because of that foreclosure crisis, the stunning racial wealth gap—the typical black family has a dime for a dollar of wealth held by its white counterpart—will surely grow worse. The White House is paralyzed with inaction in the face of all of these challenges. But it can kill, so we are great.

We have the world’s most expensive health care system, and yet in 2009 infant mortality in the U.S. was higher than in 29 other countries and the worst among rich nations. Why? In large part because the infant mortality rate is so high among black and Latina women. We cannot find justice for them, but we can kill and call it justice.

We have a $14 trillion deficit. A massive giveaway to defense contractors lurks inside that number—a transfer of public funds that has been justified, in ways both explicit and implicit, by the evil visage of Osama Bin Laden. And now, Washington is as likely as not to make up the loss by taking apart the safety net that once created something like economic justice in America. But the president would like us to agree that we are great because we can kill.

“May God bless the United States of America,” Obama declared last night, a sentiment echoed by so many today. Indeed. But the familiar refrain feels to me more like an urgent plea for forgiveness than the triumphant war cry that it is.

(c) Kai Wright/Colorlines

[Photo credit: AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais]

Worth reading in full.

(via abcsoupdot)

I really don’t understand how women can continue to be/support Republicans.