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https://theduran.com/how-the-news-media-distort-about-the-cuts-to-medicaid/

How the ‘News’ Media Distort About the Cuts to Medicaid

4 July 2025, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

A typical example is the Politico article, on July 3rd, “Three reasons why Republicans cut Medicaid”, which at its opening asks and answers the question: “why did the GOP slash deeply into the health insurance program in its megabill? Three reasons: [1] Republicans desperately needed money to avoid a big tax increase next year, [2] they wanted to claw back Biden-era policies GOP lawmakers say led to lax eligibility checks and more fraudulent benefit claims and [3] they wanted to curb the Medicaid expansion enacted by then-President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats in the Affordable Care Act.”

Hare’s the far-more-basic and decisive truth, which all of the ‘news’-media — both of Democratic Party billionaires, and of Republican Party billionaires — hide: 

Almost all of the “waste, fraud and abuse” in the U.S. federal Government is in the U.S. military, which consumes over half of all of the funds that the Presdent and Congress each year authorize to and do spend — and even only the Defense Department’s portion of that, which constitutes around two-thirds of America’s annual military spending, wastes (by means of fraud and abuse but especially corruption, which enormusly inflates the costs of America’s weaponry), the vast majority of the waste in the U.S. Government’s annually allocated funds. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency DOGE virtually ignored it, though the U.S. Defense Department is the ONLY federal Department that is SO corrupt that it has NEVER BEEN AUDITED. Instead of Musk (and Trump) focusing on that, they just ignored it and concentrated instead upon ‘waste, fraud and abuse’ in the spending that DOES serve the public (instead of serve merely the investors in firms such as Lockheed Martin, which sell only to the U.S. Government and its allied Governments (such as in NATO and in the Gulf Arab kingdoms and Israel). Those firms know that in order to control their markets they need to control their own Government, the U.S. Government — which they DO control, which is why over half of U.S. federal discretionary spending now is for the military. Only this way can their sales-volumes and the prices of their goods and services continue soaring far higher than for the firms in the rest of the stock market — as they have been doing ever since the Soviet Union ended in 1991 and ‘terrorism’ and other propaganda points became the new focus so as to produce the constant and forever-war American economy that we have had ever since 1991 — the military-industrial complex (MIC) unleashed and running wild and eating up the America that serves the other people, the ones who DON’t own and control those firms (the firms that PROFIT from wars).

Unlike in countries such as Russia and China, which refused to privatise their armaments-manufacturers (the Government owns them by more than 50%), our armaments firms are PRIVATELY owned and controlled — for profit, NOT for the public; for the billionaires, and not to protect the nation against actual enemies. 

For a typical example of how this works, a study published in 2022 by Bernstein Research found (as reported on its page 75) that, for one typical ‘defense’ corporation, Northrop Grumman, its “stock has outperformed the S&P 500 by 451% over the last 10 years.” Furthermore, “Defense stocks … also tend to outperform through recessions and are uncorrelated with inflation.” That’s the type of extraordinary profitability that a corporation which controls its own market normally achieves; and, in the U.S., ‘defense’ stocks started taking off like a rocket in 1991 and have been continuing that astounding growth ever since. The less necessary that a capitalist nation’s military is for protecting the nation, like in the U.S. since 1991 when the Soviet Union ended, the more profitable its military manufacturers are, because the corruption then becomes virtually unlimited (see this and this for the evidence). Right now, the U.S. Government spends 65% — almost two-thirds — of the entire world’s military expenditures — almost twice what all of the world’s 200 other nations together spend. Now, THAT’S corruption, on a massive scale! It’s shown right there, in those numbers.

Right now, the Trump Administration (just like Biden’s had done) has been and is pressuring their colonies (‘allies’) to increase their military expenditures, in order to keep this soaring wealth for their billionaires going. On June 25th, Reuters headlined “NATO commits to spending hike sought by Trump” and reported: “NATO leaders on Wednesday backed the big increase in defence spending that U.S. President Donald Trump had demanded, and restated their commitment to defend each other from attack after a brief summit in the Netherlands.” Continuation of the current U.S.-backed wars and perhaps starting some new ones, will be needed in order to make this happen; and, so, as the U.S. Government has been doing ever since 1945 and especially after 1991 (when the Soviet Union ended), what’s needed is creating international chaos, civil wars, and failed states. But this also means that existing wars must be continued as long as possible. Furthermore, on 8 January 2025, the President-elect Donald Trump indicated that if his previously announced intention for the U.S. to buy Greenland, and the Panama Canal, gets rejected in the negotiations, then he will seize them militarily, because “We need them for economic security.” This means that he uses the military not ONLY for national security (which is the defensive use of it) but ALSO for “economic security” (which is the aggressive use of it — as being an additional tool in order to gain economic advantage against other countries — to use the military in order to acquire new colonies or else to cement one’s rule over existing colonies). And he said there that the same thing might apply also to Canada. So: Denmark, Greenland, Canada, and America’s other colonies, could soon find themselves at war against America — no longer is it only such countries as Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, and North Korea, that the U.S. regime targets. It would mean the utter destruction of international law.

How evil is this? On 22 October 2024, I headlined “How the U.S. Government Became Plain Evil in 1980”, and said of an early U.S. advocate for replacing the purely defensive geostrategy of America’s nuclear weapons (“M.A.D.” to prevent a WW3) by instead an aggressive global-supremacist strategy to ‘win’ such a nuclear war by destroying ‘the enemy’ even more than the U.S. would be destroyed, such as now is the U.S. plan, for its nukes (“Nuclear Primacy” to ‘win’ WW3) — actually for the U.S. Government to take over the entire world:

Advocates of the view that nuclear weapons exist only in order to prevent any need to use them were consequently presented, by him, implicitly, as being now either fools or traitors. He said that MAD simply “ignores the intensely ideological nature of modern international relations. In a world dominated by two such ideological foes as the United States and Soviet Union,” winning is the only moral option. In other words: his neoconservative (purely zero-sum or win-lose no win-win — it’s instead a supremacist) view took seriously ONLY win-lose games, no win-win ones. He was assuming that this was a war between communism versus capitalism, and not a war by the United States rulers in order to win control over the entire planet (as has actually been the case ever since President Truman started the Cold War on 25 July 1945). Then, after the end of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact military alliance in 1991 and America’s refusal to end its NATO anti-Soviet military alliance but instead to expand that alliance right up to Russia’s border and to take up again Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa aim to conquer Russia, something extremely heinous became blatantly apparent about prior U.S. allegations that America’s rulers weren’t, in fact, insanely imperialistic (the ‘anti-communist’ excuse for the Cold War had now clearly been shown to have been just that: an excuse), but no U.S.-and-allied newsmedia called attention to this by-now-(after-1991)-amply-proven fact of the lying U.S. regime’s heinous character; and, so, this nation is, by now, definitely a dictatorship that has effectively controlled all of its newsmedia, too, in order to hide from the public what it was actually trying to achieve — the global dictatorship that America’s rulers have, in fact, been aiming to achieve. Other than in a few small-audience far-outside-the-mainstream newsmedia (such as this one), nobody at all was calling attention to the fact that (and why) NATO is intensely evil and must be abolished immediately. Neoconservatism — advocacy for an all-encompassing U.S. global empire — has virtually 100% control in The West. Western publics have been so surrounded by neoconservative media, they cannot think outside that box, of hatred against ’the enemy’ that America’s billionaires have targeted to ‘regime-change’, whatever that might happen to be at the given moment — but ESPECIALLY now concerning both Russia and China (though capitalism now predominates in both of those U.S.-targeted countries). The evil is, and has always been, imperialism (never really capitalism or communism), but no one in Western media is allowed to call attention to this brute fact, that imperialism is always the enemy, which fact explains international relations today.

All recent American Presidents and Congresses have been purely win-lose, zero-sum, not at all win-win, leaders. It’s now clearly the character of the U.S. Government. Short of there being a Second American Revolution (a domestic U.S. uprising to overthrow and replace it with a win-win one), it will remain America’s Government until its end. It certainly is that way today.

On January 1st, I headlined “UK, Germany, Italy, France, Japan — Likeliest for Economic Crash This Year”, and documented that the 2023 average electricity prices for industrial users ($ per MWh) was $266 in Germany, $63 in Russia, and $60 in China. In U.S., it was $85. The highest price of all was in UK: $420. Germany’s $266 price was the second-highest. In terms of economic competitiveness, China and Russia are the best, and UK and Germany are the worst, of all major countries. How can a country such as Germany compete economically against China, Russia, and U.S.? It can’t. Why? Is it because Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022? Definitely not! It is because the U.S. Government (followed by its obedient colonies in Europe) placed sanctions against Russian energy imports, which were by far the least expensive energy-sources for Europe, because pipelined-in from Russia instead of containerized and then sent by ship (such as from across the Atlantic in America) and rail and truck. In addition, the U.S. Government blew up the Nord Stream pipelines that were to expand gas-imports to Germany from Russia (and that were partially owned by Germany — a supposed ‘ally’ of Germany).

On January 6th, I headlined “The Hidden Lies Behind America’s Destruction of Europe” and described how the U.S. regime had forced its colonies to do this — to commit economic suicide.

And now the American people, with Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” (which the American public loathe), the American people OURSELVES will be swallowed-up by this voracious monster, our billionaires, which is actually bipartisan in America, BOTH of its political Parties. This is the opposite of democracy: Polling proves that vast majorities of the U.S. public detest Trump’s budget-and-tax priorities. Furthermore, an extraordinarily extensive Yale poll of nearly 5,000 Americans, published on June 27th, found that when respondents are informed of what is in Trump’s budget-and-tax bill, only 11% approve, 78% disapprove of it. Would it become law in a democracy? Of course not! This recent polling simply confirms what prior polling has already shown.

On February 14th, the AP headlined “Where US adults think the government is spending too much, according to AP-NORC polling”, and listed in rank-order according to the opposite (“spending too little”) the following 8 Government functions: 1. Social Security; 2. Medicare; 3. Education; 4. Assistance to the poor; 5. Medicaid; 6. Border security; 7. Federal law enforcement; 8. The Military. That’s right: the American public (and by an overwhelming margin) are THE LEAST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on the military, and the MOST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on Social Security, Medicare, Education, Assistance to the poor, and Medicaid (those latter five being the functions the Republican Party has always been the most vocal to call “waste, fraud, and abuse” and try to cut — but those 5 were the most-favored by the American public). Meanwhile, The Military, which actually receives 53% (and in the latest year far more than that) of the money that the Congress allocates each year and gets signed into law by the President, keeps getting, each year, over 50% of the annually appropriated federal funds. Furthermore, the U.S. Defense Department is the only Department of the federal Government so corrupt, so intensely corrupt, that it has never been audited.

Trump is increasing the military and border security, and decreasing education, assistance to the poor, Medicaid, federal law enforcement, and even Social Security and Medicare (the latter two by laying off many of the people who staff those bureaucracies). This Government’s policy-priorities are like the public’s turned upside-down — in other words: are the REVERSE of the public’s — and therefore the U.S. Government right now is a perfect example of a dictatorship. One might say that this is so in only the Executive branch, but it’s not necessarily true: Trump’s bill passed in BOTH houses of the U.S. Congress.

Every national Government that includes public elections between competing politicians has degenerated into control by the richest, because the richest donate more than half of all of the money that is donated to political campaigns, and they can and do aways spend enough on politics to deceive enough voters to vote against any candidate who refuses to be bought, so that only the candidates who are willing to do what their megadonors say — obedient candidates (obedient to the billionaires especially) — will have any real chance to win a major public office. So, if a democracy is to be defined as ONLY a system that includes public elections between competing politicians, then it will always degenerate into an aristocracy of the super-rich, which is a type of dictatorship (sometimes called by such names as “aristocracy,” “oligarchy,” “plutocracy,” etc.), NOT a democracy.

So, that is a phony definition of “democracy” (though it’s the normal way that “democracy” is defined), because a democracy is instead a Government by representatives of each citizen equally, without regard for wealth, religion, ethnicity, or any other attribute — it is (and the term “democracy” can realistically be applied ONLY to) “Equal Justice Under Law” — and it CAN exist but never yet HAS existed (because of that false common definition for it*). A TRUE definition of “democracy” is instead: A democracy is a Government whose policy-priorities are the same as its public’s policy-priorities are. On June 6th, I headlined “How to Create an Authentic Democracy” and described the only type of way that it can even possibly be achieved. I welcome any inputs regarding my proposal, and you can reach me about this definition and associated system via email by clicking here.

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* Documentation of the falsity of the common definition of “democracy” can be found here. Given that the common definition (the one that necessitates public elections by competing politicians) for it is empirically false, the need exists for a true definition of democracy. I have provided in this article what I believe that to be: a Government whose policy-priorities are the same as the public’s policy-priorities are. And I have described here how that could be instituted.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.