Tuesday, December 22, 2020

Conservatives Hopping Mad About Foreign Aid Bundled With Pandemic Relief Bill

Congressional "leaders" McConnell and Pelosi have net worth of $34 million and $110+ million, respectively.

Twitter is awash today with conservatives railing against the huge outlays on foreign aid found in the funding bill bundled with the pandemic "relief" bill.  

Some of the hashtags are kind of fun, like #VetoThePorkulus.

But, it's hard to tell if conservatives and other US taxpayers realize how foreign aid works as corporate welfare, mostly benefitting weapons and "security" manufacturers. Some in Congress clearly get this and don't go along to get along. From last year but just as applicable today:



Let's say Israel, one of the wealthiest nations on the planet, gets $500 million in "aid" this time around. Here's how that vast sum breaks down in the bill the president is expected to sign:

2 SEC. 8072. Of the amounts appropriated in this Act
3 under the headings ‘‘Procurement, Defense-Wide’’ and
4 ‘‘Research, Development, Test and Evaluation, Defense-
5 Wide’’, $500,000,000 shall be for the Israeli Cooperative
6 Programs: Provided, That of this amount, $73,000,000
7 shall be for the Secretary of Defense to provide to the Gov-
8 ernment of Israel for the procurement of the Iron Dome
9 defense system to counter short-range rocket threats, sub-
10 ject to the U.S.-Israel Iron Dome Procurement Agree-
11 ment, as amended; $177,000,000 shall be for the Short
12 Range Ballistic Missile Defense (SRBMD) program, in-
13 cluding cruise missile defense research and development
14 under the SRBMD program, of which $50,000,000 shall
15 be for co-production activities of SRBMD systems in the
16 United States and in Israel to meet Israel’s defense re-
17 quirements consistent with each nation’s laws, regulations,
18 and procedures, subject to the U.S.-Israeli co-production
19 agreement for SRBMD, as amended; $77,000,000 shall
20 be for an upper-tier component to the Israeli Missile De-
21 fense Architecture, of which $77,000,000 shall be for co-
22 production activities of Arrow 3 Upper Tier systems in
23 the United States and in Israel to meet Israel’s defense
24 requirements consistent with each nation’s laws, regula-
25 tions, and procedures, subject to the U.S.-Israeli co-production

The bottom line is that Israel and many other countries are told they can order weapon systems and the US taxpayer will pick up the tab. A jobs program for the US, no? Well, no, not if the weapons systems are actually manufactured in Israel. But that's a special feature of our special relationship with Israel. Not the case in "aid" to Sudan, Egypt, Ukraine, Pakistan and the others.

To tweet that #CongressIsBroken in response to business as usual begs the question, Did you not think it was broken before? 

Because none of this is new. Or maybe people are still clinging to the notion that the job of Congress is to represent the people. This may be true on paper but the facts are completely different in 2020. 

Congress represents its corporate campaign donors, the fat cats who will enrich them in a multitude of ways if they remain loyal servants.

Corporate media work overtime to make sure that this fealty to wealth seems inevitable. It's not, but it is extremely profitable for media. Big ad buys translate to vast amounts of "earned" media that favors the wealthy candidate over the ordinary citizen seeking to represent the people by serving in Congress.

Many corrupt systems that seemed inevitable came crashing down because they weren't sustainable. Our current system is not sustainable in the face of a public heath crisis and climate emergency bearing down on us all.


May the $600 slap in the face prove to be the system's undoing.

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