Why Bernie is Voting Against the Military Budget

Bernie Sanders
Sat 8 Dec 2024

Today in America, 60% of our people live paycheck to paycheck, 85 million people are uninsured or underinsured and 21.5 million households are paying more than 50% of their income on housing. We have one of the highest rates of childhood poverty of almost any developed country on Earth, and 25% of older adults are trying to survive on $15,000 a year or less. In other words, the United States has fallen far behind other major countries in protecting the most vulnerable, and our government has failed millions of working families.

But while so many Americans are struggling to get by, the United States is spending record-breaking amounts of money on the military. In the coming days, with relatively little debate, Congress will overwhelmingly pass the National Defense Authorization Act, approving close to $900bn for the Department of Defense (DoD). When spending on nuclear weapons and “emergency” defense spending is included, the total will approach $1tn. We now spend more than the next nine countries combined.

I don’t often agree with Elon Musk, but he is right when he says the Pentagon “has little idea how its annual budget of more than $800bn is spent.” The Department of Defense is the only government agency that has been unable to pass an independent audit. It recently failed its seventh attempt in a row and could not fully account for huge portions of its $4.126tn in assets.

The advent of Jesus in our lives

This is my homily for today, the 2nd Sunday of Advent, Cycle C.  Today's readings are here.

Revisions to CLC Models

 Thanks for your discussion of my draft

Models for Reinventing Commonweal Local Communities

Below the break are my revisions of three sections.  

I added "spiritual " to the Grassroots Movement Model to emphasize the religious aspect of CLCs They have the potential to be far more than academic discussions groups or social meetings with good company. To help define CLCs as a religious movement I quote verbatim from the Commonweal website. I then viewed CLCs in light of Francis Joy of the Gospel, again quoting verbatim from that document. 

The paragraph from Francis provided me with a great lead into the Network of Communities model. We are all members of many communities and each of them deserver their form of "missionary impulse capable of transforming everything." Just as Francis says there is not one way of doing parish, there is not one way of doing CLCs

Finally in the Virtual Commonweal Local Communities, I tried better to communicate that I want a virtual dimension to CLCs which would be similar to what we have here at NewGathering. In some ways this model should be located right after Network of Communities Model. However, that step would likely be too great for most of the Cleveland CLC members as well as the Commonweal Staff. I use the Circle of Friends model to justify shutting down their blog. On their website they emphasize the decidedly local nature of each CLC. This essay strongly supports that. Hopefully they will understand virtual as a dimension of every community rather than an alternative to local communities. So I want everyone to think of various physical models before thinking about their virtual dimension. Like Francis I am interested in a "missionary impulse capable of transforming everything, but I also recognize the value of small steps. 

What do you think of CLCs as a means of evangelizing the church and the world in the spirit of Pope Francis? That is where I am headed after I see how more people handle this essay.

Notre Dame victorious

If you want to take a break from the murder of insurance CEOs, mayhem of Trump appointments, overthinking AI Jesus, and whatever else is wrecking your Advent, you might want to look at one of the specials about the renovation of Notre Dame over on YouTube. 

I watched the official re-opening live for awhile this afternoon, but some of the little documentaries available are really more interesting. Just a few observations:

Notre Dame is a celebration of human skill, patience, and brute-strength labor stretched to their limits--from the painters with teensy little brushes gradually adding paint to a corner of a mural to construction workers dozens of feet in the air pounding shims in place with sledge-hammer-sized mallets to hold up the vaulted ceilings. About 2,000 people from around the world worked to complete the restoration. 

Work never really stops on a cathedral. Notre Dame took two centuries to build in its original form. But every generation adds things to the cathedral--murals, stained glass, monuments, an organ, bells, chandeliers, tombs. As old things like the exterior statues and gargoyles wear away, new things replace them. A cathedral is a conversation about the divine from one generation to the next. 

The Middle Ages were not gloomy, stolid, and gray. A cathedral is meant to pull in light, not deflect it. Notre Dame's new restored white stone interior and stained glass show that. So do the murals depicting scenes from Scripture, from French history, from the lives of important saints. Everywhere there is vivid color, movement, and joy in our earthly life, even as the spire and towers point us toward life in Heaven.

The completion of Notre Dame brackets two pandemics. Three years after it was completed in 1345, the Black Death arrived in Parish. Much of the work on Notre Dame's current restoration took place in the wake of the COVID pandemic. You don't have to be a Catholic or a Christian to to see the survival of the cathedral as a testament to human endurance, and certainly a place to pray (or hope if prayer isn't your thing) that people will hang on for another millennium. 

Hoping you all can take a few minutes to enjoy the restoration. Happy Advent.

A Turning Point?

By now everyone has heard about the killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson by an as-yet unknown assassin. The articles about this and the hunt for the shooter are all over the news sites, so I won't link them, because it is not really what this post is about.

My first thought on reading about it was, that's too bad, and sympathy for his family and a prayer for his soul.  Then I looked at some of the comments on social media, and was shocked.  People are really, really angry with the for-profit insurance/healthcare industry. Not really shocked about that, it has been simmering for a long time, just surprised that people didn't even take a breath before jumping into the anger.

In no way would I ever condone the murder in cold blood of anyone.  But what I do hope is that the incident makes everyone stop and think about our healthcare system. It is said that corporations are beefing up security for their executives in response to this incident.  But there is a different kind of anger here.  People are ordinary, simmering along, angry at greedy corporations.  But there is boiling over, white hot anger at systems which deny healthcare, or make it unavailable because of financial issues to people.  (Maybe they should have thought about that more carefully before voting?)

My hope for something of a silver lining to this tragedy is that it makes the new administration coming in think harder about messing with Medicare, Medicaid, and trying to further privatize them. and still attempting to destroy the ACA, where millions of people get their healthcare coverage, even if it is at times too expensive and inadequate.  Really, the best that I can hope for is that all the anger keeps them from making things worse.  And going forward, makes people more receptive in the next election to public options, and reforms of the system to make our healthcare system equal to that of most industrialized nations.

AI Jesus

It was inevitable, I suppose, that some Christians somewhere would eventually gin up an AI Jesus to play with. And here it is in a Catholic chapel, St. Peter's in Lucerne, Switzerland, where an computer-generated "Jesus-like" image sits behind the screen in a confessional and "talks" to people.

The so-called Deus-in-machina project was described this way in an AP report:

"... people really talked with him in a serious way. They didn't come to make jokes," said chapel theologian Marco Schmid, who spearheaded the project. Most visitors were aged 40 to 70, and more Catholic respondents found the experience stimulating than did Protestant.

Schmid was quick to point out that the AI Jesus ... was an artistic experiment to get people thinking about the intersection between the digital and the divine, not substitute for human interaction or sacramental confessions with a priest, nor was it intended to save pastoral resources.

"For the people it was clear that it was a computer ... It was clear it was not a confession," Schmid said. "He wasn't programmed to give absolution or prayers. At the end, it was more summary of the conversation." 

The Lame Duck Period

 

There is a lot that can happen during a president's lame duck period.  

There is a good article on the Axios site:

Lame duck president: What Biden can do in last days in White House

And some comments from me.

Commonweal Local Communities 2.0

 On Sunday, November 17, I received an e-mail message that I had not seen in more than three years "New Member for your Commonweal Local Community." He happens to be a biology researcher at John Carroll. A woman religious on their staff is on our mailing list but attended only one meeting. Several members who were very active live in the immediate area. The time has come to stir up our membership list and the staff at Commonweal to rethink CLCs.

I have posted on the Cleveland Commonweal Local Community website my analysis of our 29 months of meetings before the pandemic as well as a menu of ideas (models) for reinventing CLCs. One can use any combination of the models. They are not all mutually exclusive although some go together better than others. The presumptions is that we can and should have more than one group. 

Besides starting a discussion among our own members, I am going to ask Commonweal to send e-mails to all my counterparts in the other 50 CLCs with a link to our website asking for their experience before and after the pandemic as well as their ideas of "reinventing CLCs"

Hopefully it will stimulate rethinking at Commonweal, but you will notice that I have not including any advice to Commonweal in the presentation. Our CLC became too dependent upon the CLC website to generate new members. I do not want our members to get the idea they can just wait until Commonweal creates CLC 2.0.

I would appreciate your opinions of the various models. Which ones might work and why?  Which are problematical and why?

 Models for Reinventing Commonweal Local Communities