Pro-war parties running America
Early on a recent Tuesday morning, the U.S. Senate agreed on a rare but amazing bipartisan feat — namely, to forward a $95 billion bill to massively subsidize the puttering U.S. economy! Oh, wait, keen citizens ask: Isn’t that a bill designed merely to finance sending bombs, missiles and other WMDs to Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan and beyond?
No, in reality, as Secretary of State Antony Blinken shamelessly boasted to Congress, probably 90% of that aid package comes right back to the U.S.A. However, what Blinken conveniently omitted was that the tens of billions of dollars are actually destined to obscenely fatten up the coffers of America’s arms manufacturers’ CEOs.
And, no, not a single penny was allocated to America’s homeless folks, nor to cover health insurance for the 30 million-plus families who can’t afford Medicare, and absolutely zero dollars to seriously address the existential threat of climate calamities that are already fueling wildfires, causing devastating floods and whipping up destructive hurricanes!
As the old saying goes, put your money where your mouth is! In this case, it’s crystal clear where the top priority of both Democratic and Republican parties is: to aggressively ramp up arms shipments across four corners of our planet in order to “stove pipe” violence and genocide, as vicarious measures to sustain the fast-receding neocon and neolib fantasy of keeping Uncle Sam as the “sole superpower” of a uni-polar world!
Never mind that polls show an overwhelming majority of American public favoring ceasefires in both Palestine and Ukraine (and China has never threatened to “invade” Taiwan), the vast majority of Wall Street-funded congressional members are tone-deaf to the public’s fundamental concerns.
Perhaps that’s why, in 2024, the real American public interest in global peace and domestic tranquility cannot find any political expression of these deeply felt values in either one of the pro-war parties running Washington.
Danny H.C. Li
Keaau
Republicans and abortion rights
Watched Sir Lies-a-Lot on TV the other night — Sen. Lindsey Graham repeating the tired accusation that Democrats support abortion right up to the moment of birth.
He then accused Hillary Clinton of lying when she warned that birth control would be next on the Republican agenda.
With great earnestness, he insisted that of course Republicans would never limit birth control, as long as it is legal and safe, a point he repeated several times.
Hmmm. Safe and legal. Why does this remind me of mifepristone, which has been “safe and legal” for decades. Though the FDA approved the drug, and there’s much research showing it to be safe, a Trump appointee in Texas has ruled it is not safe and should not be legal.
Be warned.
Phyllis Hanson
Keauhou