All the Ways America Is "Exceptional"

That last "American Exceptionalism" post here yesterday got me thinking. In fact, I've been thinking about it for some time. So on that thought, let's have a list of some of the biggest things we're "number one" at, America.

• We pay more for health care as a percentage of GDP than any other nation
• Only nation wherein people go bankrupt for healthcare costs
• Only nation with the highest amount of bankruptcies due to healthcare costs
• More guns than any other nations, per capita
• More shootings than any other nation
• More killings, homicides than any other nation
• Spend more--far, far more--than any other nation on guns and bombs and weapons, calling it "defense." We spend 7 times more on the military than any other nation on the planet. Worse,  U.S. military spending is greater than the military spending of China, Russia, Japan, India, and the rest of NATO combined
• We have more foreign military bases than any other nation; Empire much?
• We have more citizens incarcerated, in prisons, than any other nation
• We have the highest percentage of the population that is obese
• We have the highest divorce rate
• Highest rate of illegal drug use in the world
• More reported murders than any other nation
• More total crimes committed in the US than anywhere else in the world
• We have more student loan debt than any other country and finally, at least here and now, 
• We have the most complicated tax system in the world
• Biggest Weapons exporter in the world
• We kill more people with drones, presently, than any other nation; Some of what our big "defense" budget gets us, I'm sure

But wait. There's more. There's more of our positions in the world and these are things we're not number one at:

• The U.S. ranks 23rd in gender equality
• The U.S. ranks 33rd in internet download speeds
• The U.S. ranks 46th in freedom of the press
• The U.S. ranks 26th in child well-being
• The U.S. ranks 24th in literacy
• The U.S. ranks 19th in perceived honesty
• The U.S. ranks 27th in leisure and personal care
• The U.S. ranks 17th in happiness
• The U.S. ranks 9th in retirement security
• The U.S. ranks 99th in peacefulness
• The U.S. ranks 24th in freedom from corruption
• The U.S. ranks 16th in manufacturing compensation costs
• The U.S. ranks 29th in intellectual property protection
• The U.S. ranks 23rd in wage distribution
• The U.S. ranks 10th in purchasing power of minimum wage
• The U.S. ranks 11th in minimum wage

Don't get me wrong.  I like this place America. There are some things, plenty, I guess, we're doing well or right at. But the fact is, we need to take a good, hard, long look at ourselves and maybe, hopefully, work on changing and improving.

Let's do this.

Links:

The Myth of American Exceptionalism

The myth of American exceptionalism 

Myth of American Exceptionalism 

American Exceptionalism Is a Dangerous Myth

NUMBER ONE? 20 Shameful Categories In Which America Leads

One Is The Loneliest Number - America Is Number One At Things We Shouldn't Brag About

Robert Reich: Is America Becoming a Third World Country?

What Most Americans Don't Know About Our National Defense Budget--But Should

There is an excellent, even important article out presently at Alternet I wish all adult, voting-age Americans would read. It is this.

How to Blow $700 Billion and Lose Wars

A Guide to America's Exploding Defense Budget and Military Failure

Step 1: Buy the most expensive weapons in history. Step 2: Don’t use them, since they mostly don’t work

And before any military patriots or just disbelievers dismiss the article, out of hand, before reading it, they should know it's written by a Veteran and who served in Iraq, on the ground. It's not from some "Left Wing" "librul" they can or should dismiss.

A bit from the article:

This year, President Trump signed the largest defense budget in our history: $700 billion. The budget includes $13.7 billion for 90 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, which according to CNN are “in service and mission capable only 26 percent of the time.” Not a single F-35 jet has yet to see combat duty.

The budget will provide $4.5 billion for the construction of a new Ford class aircraft carrier, $450 million for three Littoral Combat Ships, $4 billion for two new guided missile destroyers, $5.5 billion for two new Virginia Class submarines, and tens of billions more for upgrades and repairs on various aircraft and naval vessels. Two of the guided missile destroyers already in service were involved in deadly collisions with cargo ships in the western Pacific last year. A Navy investigation revealed that for all of the hundreds of billions spent on defense, there was apparently not enough in the budget to provide for adequate training in standing watch and driving Navy combat ships...

He finishes the article perfectly, to me. It's something I've been saying for some time.

Fifteen years in Iraq. Seventeen years in Afghanistan. There is no end in sight.

From 2011 to today, 2018, we more than doubled our national defense budget from 354 billion dollars to 700 billion.

We have no new enemies. No new group has attacked us or is attacking. Or is going to.

We are weakening, actually weakening our nation with all this absurd, obscenely expensive and very wasteful spending.

Understand this:

Our defense budget is very huge, very bloated and very wasteful and is actually making the nation weaker.  Not stronger.

What are we going to do about this, America?

Links:

The Secret Side of Military Spending & The Wastes of War

We Are Spending a Trillion on War 

and We Need to Own Up to It

The 10 Most Blatantly Wasteful Defense Items

Note this next article is from the American Conservative magazine:

Expanding the Military Budget Is 

Wasteful and Unnecessary'

Pentagon buries evidence of $125 billion 

in bureaucratic waste

The F-35: A Weapon That Costs More 

Than Australia

What People Don't Understand About Our National Defense Spending

What too many people, too many Americans don't understand or realize about our obscene, absurd, very bloated and extremely wasteful defense spending.

It's actually making us weaker, as a nation.

We Warned About a New Airport

From the Star yesterday.

Out of the gate, KCI delay and rising costs 

are red flags for the airport

We could have spent far less and redone our existing, very convenient terminals, saved a great deal of money, done the fiscally responsible thing and, oh yeah, not trashed the environment by throwing away existing facilities but no, let's do this.

Let's blow more than a billion dollars, instead.

Enjoy those higher, much higher airline ticket prices, too, kids.

Quote of the Day -- On Defense--and Deficit--Spending

"For 40 years we were led to think of the Russians as godless, materialistic and an evil empire. When the Cold War ended, we suddenly discovered that Russia was a poor Third World country. They had not been equipped to take over the world. In fact, they were just trying to improve a miserable standard of oppressive living, and couldn't. They had to spend too much on arms build-up. We didn't win the Cold War; we bankrupted the Russians. In effect, it was a big bank exhausting the reserves of a smaller one."

--Norman Mailer

And now, we're doing it to ourselves. That is, we are bankrupting ourselves, honestly, spending obscene amounts on "defense", far outspending any and every other nation on the planet.

And for no good reason.

What Actually Happened in Iraq

What the government, lead largely by the Republicans and Right Wing, actually did in Iraq.

The best hour and fifteen minutes you can spend, learning about your government and our spending.



Our defense spending is what is bankrupting America. That and giving corporate welfare in the billions of dollars.

Why We Need To Cut the Defense Budget

The fact is, our Defense Department budget is not just large but huge. It's bloated, truth be told. It's famously beyond what any other one nation spends, many times over, it's wasteful, it's actually unaccounted for and downright immoral. It ends up actually weakening us. Professor Reich, once again, educates us Americans.

Whom Will We Honor Memorial Day? (Guest Post)

Because no one has said it better than Howard Zinn :

Whom Will We Honor Memorial Day?

Published on June 2, 1976 in the Boston Globe and republished in The Zinn Reader with the brief introduction below.

Memorial Day will be celebrated … by the usual betrayal of the dead, by the hypocritical patriotism of the politicians and contractors preparing for more wars, more graves to receive more flowers on future Memorial Days. The memory of the dead deserves a different dedication. To peace, to defiance of governments.

In 1974, I was invited by Tom Winship, the editor of the Boston Globe, who had been bold enough in 1971 to print part of the top secret Pentagon Papers on the history of the Vietnam War, to write a bi-weekly column for the op-ed page of the newspaper. I did that for about a year and a half. The column below appeared June 2, 1976, in connection with that year’s Memorial Day. After it appeared, my column was canceled.

* * * * *

Memorial Day will be celebrated as usual, by high-speed collisions of automobiles and bodies strewn on highways and the sound of ambulance sirens throughout the land.

It will also be celebrated by the display of flags, the sound of bugles and drums, by parades and speeches and unthinking applause.

It will be celebrated by giant corporations, which make guns, bombs, fighter planes, aircraft carriers and an endless assortment of military junk and which await the $100 billion in contracts to be approved soon by Congress and the President.

There was a young woman in New Hampshire who refused to allow her husband, killed in Vietnam, to be given a military burial. She rejected the hollow ceremony ordered by those who sent him and 50,000 others to their deaths. Her courage should be cherished on Memorial Day. There were the B52 pilots who refused to fly those last vicious raids of Nixon’s and Kissinger’s war. Have any of the great universities, so quick to give honorary degrees to God-knows-whom, thought to honor those men at this Commencement time, on this Memorial Day?

No politician who voted funds for war, no business contractor for the military, no general who ordered young men into battle, no FBI man who spied on anti-war activities, should be invited to public ceremonies on this sacred day. Let the dead of past wars he honored. Let those who live pledge themselves never to embark on mass slaughter again.

“The shell had his number on it. The blood ran into the ground…Where his chest ought to have been they pinned the Congressional Medal, the DSC, the Medaille Militaire, the Belgian Croix de Guerre, the Italian gold medal, The Vitutea Militara sent by Queen Marie of Rumania. All the Washingtonians brought flowers .. Woodrow Wilson brought a bouquet of poppies.”

Those are the concluding lines of John Dos Passos angry novel 1919. Let us honor him on Memorial Day.

And also Thoreau, who went to jail to protest the Mexican War.

And Mark Twain, who denounced our war against the Filipinos at the turn of the century.

And I.F. Stone, who virtually alone among newspaper editors exposed the fraud and brutality of the Korean War.

Let us honor Martin Luther King, who refused the enticements of the White House, and the cautions of associates, and thundered against the war in Vietnam.

Memorial Day should be a day for putting flowers on graves and planting trees. Also, for destroying the weapons of death that endanger us more than they protect us, that waste our resources and threaten our children and grandchildren.

On Memorial Day we should take note that, in the name of “defense,” our taxes have been used to spend a quarter of a billion dollars on a helicopter assault ship called “the biggest floating lemon,” which was accepted by the Navy although it had over 2,000 major defects at the time of its trial cruise.

Meanwhile, there is such a shortage of housing that millions live in dilapidated sections of our cities and millions more are forced to pay high rents or high interest rates on their mortgages. There’s 90 billion for the B1 bomber, but people don’t have money to pay hospital bills.

We must be practical, say those whose practicality has consisted of a war every generation. We mustn’t deplete our defenses. Say those who have depleted our youth, stolen our resources. In the end, it is living people, not corpses, creative energy, not destructive rage, which are our only real defense, not just against other governments trying to kill us, but against our own, also trying to kill us.

Let us not set out, this Memorial Day, on the same old drunken ride to death.

--Howard Zinn in the Memorial Day article that led the Boston Globe to cancel his column in 1976.

Small Government? Cut Government Spending?

Anyone who has ever complained about "big government" or that our government spends too much and that we should cut spending needs to see this video over 8 minutes and 18 seconds.



The fact is, we need to cut Defense spending. What we spend is obscene, the amount we spend is obscene, it's bloated, it's wasteful, it's unaccounted for, it's immoral it can easily be argued and it actually ends up  actually weakening the nation.

Who and What's Bankrupting America?

The corporations and wealthy are bankrupting America, for one, what with all the tax deductions they buy themselves from their---our----legislators, with campaign contributions. They get to write off untold "expenses." Even "Big Oil", one of the most profitable industries in the nation and world, and then they offshore profits, on top of it.

The other culprit bankrupting America?

Look no further than the obscene, bloated, wasteful, nearly completely unaccounted for, utterly immoral defense budget:

How we spend too much on "Defense" and what we should do about it

From Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry's ice cream:



Our defense budget is huge, bloated, grossly over-funded, wasteful, unaccounted for, wildly immoral, unsustatinable and ends up weakening the nation, ultimately, in very real terms.

Let's get started.

Our Obscene, Huge, Immoral Defense Spending

Think our government spends too much? 

Sure you do.

So let's cut the spending that is the biggest, most wasteful, most irresponsible segment of all that spending. 

Fight to cut funding for the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD). It's absurdly bloated, it's immoral, it's obscene, it isn't even accounted for, they get so much money. They cannot and do not even account for all they get and spend.

Like

One More Reason for a New, Single-Terminal Airport

Yessir, here we are. Yet one more reason for a new, single terminal airport at KCI, tearing down and walking away from our existing terminals:

FLASH MOBS!



Think about it!

As it stands now, with those pesky, ultra-convenient, already-built terminals we have and enjoy, with a gleaming, shiny, new single terminal, the airport authority could hire people like this and film a "spontaneous" dancing, flash mob. And if you're lucky enough to be there, you'll get to see and enjoy it.

Worst case scenario?  You'll get to watch it, after the fact, on KMBC-TV and KCTV-5 "news", along with the daily YouTube catch-up and cat and dog video segments.

It'll go viral and JUST THINK OF ALL THE GREAT MEDIA ATTENTION KANSAS CITY AND KCI WILL GET.

Sure, it'll cost us millions and it's stupid to tear down good, working, again, convenient, existing buildings--that we actually enjoy and appreciate--and it's horrible for the environment, what with throwing two entire terminals in a dump somewhere and the airlines don't want or recommend it and, oh, sure, our price per ticket of flying in and out of that new airport will go WAY up, as other cities that have done this have learned, to their shame, expense and frustration but...

WE'LL HAVE FLASH MOBS!!

AND A SHINY NEW AIRPORT!

Breaking news on Southwest Airlines' take on our airport

According to Missouri Representative Sam Graves Facebook page today:

At today's KCI Terminal Advisory Group meeting, Southwest Airlines officials cautioned that a new terminal is "unlikely to significantly increase non-stop flights or passenger demand" and could be "so expensive that it drives up costs and drives away airlines." 

It's as they're saying, as we've said all along, if we build it, they won't necessarily come.

Could we put nails in this coffin now?

Please?

When your only tool is a hammer...

...every problem looks like a nail:

America, the world's warmonger.


Link to watch "War Made Easy" (2007): http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/war_made_easy/

Another case of "Imagine if..."

The Insanity that is US Defense Spending

And we can't begin to even touch Defense spending, in spite of all this insanity, in spite of their losing and not being able to account for millions and billions of dollars, annually.

I tell you, our Defense budget is weakening us, not making or keeping us stronger.

New York City imitates Kansas City, for once

They now want to tear down their airport, too.

Final push to save landmark 'flying saucer’ terminal

What part of "public meeting" don't these people get?

So the Mayor's panel on deciding what we're going to do with our airport met yesterday for the first time and it was reported to be a public meeting--but they threw two people out who wanted to be there?

Seriously?

From the Kansas City Star today:

Public gets first input as KCI study panel meets

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2013/06/06/4276925/kci-task-force-says-it-will-try.html#storylink=cpy

Kansas City’s airport study panel held its first public meeting Thursday and said its goal will be to recommend the best airport to serve the region now and for future generations.     

     

Commission co-chairman Bob Berkebile said he hopes the group can issue its recommendations before the end of the year.

But already the initiative has been embroiled in a minor controversy. Two people were excluded from the public meeting at Union Station.

Dan Coffey, a member of a group gathering petition signatures against a new airport terminal, said he and a colleague were unfairly prevented from attending the meeting.

Coffey said that he had been gathering petition signatures in front of Union Station before the meeting but that security told him to leave. When he then tried to attend the task force meeting, security told him he had to leave and he did. Coffey said he was never told what law he was violating or why he had to leave. So it's a "public meeting" but you throw the public out? Then, get this: Union Station Kansas City Inc. issued a statement later saying that Union Station is not a public building and does not allow petition signing inside on any issue. The statement said the petitioners refused to move to a public area outside the building, so security and Kansas City police officers helped move them to a public area.

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2013/06/06/4276925/kci-task-force-says-it-will-try.html#storylink=cpy

 We all thought it was a public building, didn't we? Yet they throw the ones they don't want in there, out? And they called it a "public meeting." Yet they want and expect the people's input and trust on all this? Seriously? It's surely not getting off on the proverbial "right foot" here, is it?

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2013/06/06/4276925/kci-task-force-says-it-will-try.html#storylink=cpy

Southwest Airlines---expands??

Yessiree, I read it just this afternoon on none other than our own Kansas City International Airport's Facebook page:

Southwest Airlines restarted service to Oakland and Seattle-Tacoma this week. Book your flight to the West coast soon!

Imagine that.  And we didn't even have to tear down a terminal to get it.

Link:  http://www.facebook.com/Southwest?fref=ts