Congress

Congress Passes Massive $778 Billion NDAA

December 16, 2021 Dave DeCamp, AntiWar.com. Educate! Congress, Joe Biden, NDAA, Pentagon Budget

On Tuesday, the Senate passed the massive $778 billion National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) in a vote of 89 to 10. The legislation is a compromise version of the NDAA that was already passed by the House and now just needs President Biden’s signature to become law. Congress added $25 billion more to the spending bill than Biden requested. The bill authorizes $740.3 billion for the Pentagon, $27.8 billion for the Energy Department’s nuclear weapons program, and $9.9 billion for “Defense-related Activities Outside NDAA Jurisdiction.” In September, the House passed a different version of the NDAA that included an amendment from Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) that would have ended US support for the war in Yemen, but the measure was stripped from the compromise version.

CIA Sex Crimes

December 14, 2021 John Kiriakou, Consortium News. Educate! C.I.A., Congress, Criminal Justice and Prisons, Sexual Abuse

Buzzfeed reported on Dec. 1 that over the past 14 years, the C.I.A. has amassed credible evidence, including confessions, that 10 employees and a contractor committed sex crimes against children and that only one was ever charged with a crime. The evidence the C.I.A. released to Buzzfeed in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit shows that the 10 employees and one contractor committed crimes including child rape, the purchase of violent child pornography, and viewing as many as 1,400 photos of nude children on a C.I.A. computer while overseas on a work assignment. The contractor had arranged to have sex with an undercover F.B.I. agent who he thought was a child. The only C.I.A. officer prosecuted for child sex crimes had also mishandled classified information.

How Congress Loots The Treasury For The Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex

December 7, 2021 Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies, Popular Resistance. Educate! Congress, Military Budget, Military Industrial Complex, Pentagon

Despite a disagreement over some amendments in the Senate, the United States Congress is poised to pass a $778 billion military budget bill for 2022. As they have been doing year after year, our elected officials are preparing to hand the lion’s share - over 65% - of federal discretionary spending to the U.S. war machine, even as they wring their hands over spending a mere quarter of that amount on the Build Back Better Act. The U.S. military’s incredible record of systematic failure—most recently its final trouncing by the Taliban after twenty years of death, destruction and lies in Afghanistan—cries out for a top-to-bottom review of its dominant role in U.S. foreign policy and a radical reassessment of its proper place in Congress’s budget priorities.

Potential Legislation On China Amounts To A New Cold War

December 2, 2021 Aída Chávez, Black Agenda Report. Educate! China, Congress, New Cold War, Wars and Militarism

Congress is itching to pass a sweeping bipartisan package that threatens to enshrine a new Cold War, this time against China, and they’re counting on the American public’s inattention to get it through by the end of the year. After months of stalling in the House, and a failed attempt to attach the legislation to the annual defense bill, majority leader Chuck Schumer and Speaker Nancy Pelosi struck a deal this week for a bicameral conference on the anti-China legislation. The US Innovation and Competition Act is a massive piece of legislation purporting to make the United States more “competitive” with China economically, politically, and technologically. Mainstream media outlets and lawmakers have framed the bill as the most expansive industrial policy legislation in US history, and as being crucial for countering China’s economic rise.

Amid Overdose Crisis, Public Health Groups Urge Congress To Pass Life-Saving Bills

December 1, 2021 Julia Conley, Common Dreams. Create! Congress, Harm Reduction, Opioid crisis, Public Health

Two weeks after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released sobering statistics showing a record-breaking number of drug overdoses in the U.S. in the first year of the coronavirus pandemic, more than 260 advocacy groups called on lawmakers Tuesday to urgently pass public health proposals to mitigate the crisis. Led by the Drug Policy Alliance, People's Action, the National Harm Reduction Coalition, and VOCAL-NY, the organizations said the unprecedented number of overdoses in the 12-month period ending in April 2021 was "grim, but not unexpected" considering the criminalization of drug use in the United States and lack of resources for people with drug use disorders.

Why There Are So Few Whistleblowers

November 26, 2021 Melvin Goodman, Counter Punch. Educate! Accountability, Congress, Legal System, Whistleblowers

Adam Schiff’s new book, “Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could,” makes a strong case for the importance of whistleblowing, particularly in these fractured times. Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, argues that his committee is “uniquely dependent on whistleblowers” because of the “classified nature” of its work. Without whistleblowers, the congressional intelligence committees would be “almost completely reliant on the intelligence agencies to self-report,” according to Schiff. A whistleblower in the intelligence community cannot go to the press, so they must have “access to Congress” or the “whole system fails.”

Reining In The Pentagon

November 11, 2021 Mandy Smithberger And William Hartung, Tom's Dispatch. Educate! Congress, Pentagon, Pentagon Budget, Wars and Militarism

Even as Congress moves to increase the Pentagon budget well beyond the astronomical levels proposed by the Biden administration, a new report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has outlined three different ways to cut $1 trillion in Department of Defense spending over the next decade. A rational defense policy could yield far more in the way of reductions, but resistance from the Pentagon, weapons contractors, and their many allies in Congress would be fierce. After all, in its consideration of the bill that authorizes such budget levels for next year, the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives recently voted to add $25 billion to the already staggering $750 billion the Biden administration requested for the Pentagon and related work on nuclear weapons at the Department of Energy.

How Democrat Progressives Got Out-Maneuvered By Their Corporate Wing

November 8, 2021 Jack Rasmus, Z Net. Educate! Congress, Democrats, Infrastructure Bill, oligarchy

This past week, November 1 to 6, this writer wrote a daily running commentary on the developments in Congress, as the corporate wing of the Democrat Party maneuvered US House progressives into a corner over voting on the Infrastructure and Reconciliation (Build Back Better) spending bills. Ever since the two the bills—Infrastructure and Reconciliation— were first raised together last March 2021, progressives in the Democrat Party have been steadily driven into making concession after concession, reducing their proposals in a vain attempt to get the party’s corporate wing (represented in Senate by Manchin & Sinema and in the House by Cuellar and friends) to agree to some reduced cost Reconciliation bill.

The ‘Smoke And Mirrors’ Billionaires Tax

October 29, 2021 Jack Rasmus, ZNet. Educate! Congress, Democrats, Infrastructure Bill, Taxes

With the introduction of these two ‘smoke and mirrors’ tax measures, negotiations enter the ‘end game’ phase of the corporate strategy to beat back the two stimulus bills—the traditional Infrastructure Bill (now $0.55T new spending reduced from $2.3T) and the Human Infrastructure/Reconciliation Bill (now $1.75T reduced from $3.5T). The strategy to slash the level of spending in both bills has been driven behind the scenes by the corporate wing of the Democrat party, with Senators Manchin and Sinema as their negotiating ‘point persons’. The strategy has always been to cut the magnitude of spending on both bills so deeply that it would not require actual tax hikes on corporations and wealthy individuals of any significance. What was left in terms of reduced spending levels could then be funded by means of various ‘smoke & mirrors’ measures—i.e. by moving money around from other current programs or by transferring funds from other government slush funds.

Three Ways To Cut $1 Trillion From The Pentagon

October 10, 2021 Lindsay Koshgarian, National Priorities Project. Educate! Congress, military spending, Pentagon Budget, Wars and Militarism

Today the Congressional Budget Office released a new report, “Illustrative Options for National Defense Under a Smaller Defense Budget,” that outlines three different options for cutting funding for the Department of Defense by $1 trillion, or 14 percent, over the next ten years. The report makes clear that the United States has options for reducing spending on the Pentagon – without sacrificing security. It outlines three different options for how the United States could reallocate Pentagon resources to meet the current military strategy for less. “The U.S. military budget is now higher than it was at the peak of the Vietnam War, the Korean War, or the Cold War. This report shows that there are viable options for immediate, substantial reductions to the Pentagon budget,” said Lindsay Koshgarian, Program Director of the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Why Does Congress Fight Over Childcare But Not F-35s?

October 7, 2021 Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies, Popular Resistance. Educate! Congress, Iran, Pentagon Budget, weapons

President Biden and the Democratic Congress are facing a crisis as the popular domestic agenda they ran on in the 2020 election is held hostage by two corporate Democratic Senators, fossil-fuel consigliere Joe Manchin and payday-lender favorite Kyrsten Sinema. But the very week before the Dems’ $350 billion-per-year domestic package hit this wall of corporate money-bags, all but 38 House Democrats voted to hand over more than double that amount to the Pentagon. Senator Manchin has hypocritically described the domestic spending bill as “fiscal insanity,” but he has voted for a much larger Pentagon budget every year since 2016. Real fiscal insanity is what Congress does year after year, taking most of its discretionary spending off the table and handing it over to the Pentagon before even considering the country’s urgent domestic needs.

IEN On Bipartisan Infrastructure Package And Build Back Better Act

October 1, 2021 Indigenous Environmental Network. Resist! Biden administration, Congress, False Solutions, Infrastructure Bill

Let us be frank. As communities on the frontlines of the climate crisis and fossil fuel extraction, our situation is dire. While we experience unparalleled disaster in the form of floods, fires, droughts, Missing & Murdered Indigenous Peoples and state-sanctioned violence against Indigenous and Black communities, the crisis at the so-called border, and other results of climate chaos, we know U.S. elected leadership is in the position to redirect course on behalf of Mother Earth and future generations. The truth is, Congress promised our communities they would work to solve the climate crisis and environmental justice once we elected them into office, but instead, we see them fighting to fund fossil fuels and false promises masquerading as climate solutions to the tune of billions of dollars.

Abolish The Debt Ceiling Before It Commits Austerity Again

September 30, 2021 Josh Bivens, Working Economics Blog. Educate! Congress, Debt, Debt Ceiling, Finance and the Economy

The U.S. Treasury draws on banking accounts at the Federal Reserve to fund federal governmental activities—remitting paychecks to federal government employees, sending Social Security checks, reimbursing doctors for treating Medicare-covered patients, paying defense contractors and interest to bondholders, and so on. These accounts are fed on an ongoing basis by both tax revenues and the proceeds from selling bonds (debt). But, because the United States has a statutorily imposed limit of how much outstanding debt is allowed, once this limit is reached on issuing new debt, Treasury can no longer sell bonds and deposit these proceeds, and hence accounts at the Federal Reserve will dwindle as they are now only fed by ongoing taxes, which are insufficient to cover all spending.

Reconciling The Reconciliation Bill: A Preview

September 28, 2021 Jack Rasmus, Counterpunch. Educate! Congress, Democrats, Infrastructure, Infrastructure Bill

This past week maneuvers within the Democratic party intensified over the content and magnitude of the two pending fiscal stimulus bills–the Infrastructure Bill (with $550B of net new spending) and the Reconciliation Bill ( with initial $3.5T ‘human infrastructure & climate change’ spending). While the maneuvering appears as a deep difference of views between progressives in the US House and Senate demanding both bills pass simultaneously and Democrat Senators, Manchin and Sinema in that body blocking both bills in current form, the actual conflict is really between the corporate wing of the Democratic party (in both the Senate and House) vs. the wing that sees passage of both bills in current form as necessary to ensure a sustained economic recovery in 2022–and thus the Democrats retaining majorities in the House and Senate in the November 2022 midterm elections.

Climate Justice Must Be A Top Priority For Labor

September 22, 2021 Peter Knowlton and John Braxton, Labor Notes. Strategize! climate crisis, Congress, Infrastructure Bill, Labor Unions

Today’s existential crisis for humanity is the immediate need to shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy. All of us have to. Everywhere. For workers and for our communities there is no more pressing matter than this. We need to begin a discussion among co-workers, creating demands and acting on them at the workplace and bargaining table. We need to show up at local union meetings, central labor councils, and town halls supporting demands that move us toward a fossil fuel-free future. At the same time, we need to protect the incomes and benefits of workers affected by the transition off of fossil fuels and to make sure they have real training opportunities. And we need to restore and elevate those communities that have been sacrificed for fossil fuel extraction, production, and distribution.

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