Welcome to Suspicious Angels

On March 28, 2026, POTUS announced to a war-weary American electorate and the rest of the world—”The U.S. military began major military operations in Iran. The U.S. military has undertaken a massive and ongoing operation to prevent this very wicked, radical dictatorship from threatening America and our core national security interests…

A brief look down the historical runway.

In 2016, as he was campaigning for the presidency (his first term) he made the America First pledge to his MAGA base—”We will stop racing to topple foreign – and you understand this – foreign regimes that we know nothing about, that we shouldn’t be involved with.”

In 2020 he doubled down on that promise—”We’ve spent $8 trillion in the Middle East, and we’re not fixing our roads in this country?… How stupid is it? And we’re not fixing our highways, our tunnels, our bridges, our hospitals, even.”

In 2024, at every campaign stop on the way to his second term, he described himself as the “president of peace” and diving deeper into delusion predicted that he would end the Ukrainian conflict within “24 hours.”  

Even before his presidential ambitions surfaced, he was busy singing the same tune. In 2011, Obama was his target—”Our president (Obama) will start a war with Iran because he has absolutely no ability to negotiate. He’s weak and he’s ineffective.” Same war, different president.

He reiterated his “president of peace” mantra in his November 2024 victory speech—”I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars,” A year after entering the White House, he sent the military to Venezuela, Yemen, Nigeria, Syria, Somalia, currently Iran in addition to his strikes on boats in the Pacific and Caribbean that have resulted in the deaths of well over 100 innocent civilians. Putting icing on the cake in a Truth Social post on March 6, Trump boasted that “Cuba would be next.”

And let’s not forget his fantastical plan to seize (aka annex) Greenland “We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security…It’s so strategic…

With President Trump reaching new heights of lunacy, his every utterance betraying a man who has left the real world for a private paradise where does that leave most Americans? Can they mount the enthusiasm and energy to challenge their government’s misdeeds in the streets of major cities? Will it make any difference? Subjects we’ll tackle in this post. But first a brief look at the highways and byways of the empire’s history of mindless aggression against countries they foolishly and tragically thought would be “pushovers” for a US takeover either by regime change or total destruction. One has only to remember the long history of unsuccessful invasions of Vietnam, Afghanistan (20 years of failed war making), Libya (destroying a thriving economy) and Iraq (murdering the sovereign leader and never finding the illusory WMD’s) and it becomes apparent that the current emperor’s conduct of foreign policy is part of a “grand” old American tradition.

How have people responded to these blunders? In past failed wars of aggression Americans had a rich history of displaying their disagreements with the empire’s power elites.

Americans are not a particularly warlike people, although they do have their moments of blood thirsty enthusiasm for one or another of the empire’s wars of choice. At least initially, at the first hint of war, cries of “USA, USA” dominate the news media and are celebrated by the Washington elites as a stirring affirmation of American democracy at work. That moment passes as the body bags start arriving at Dover Air Force base in Delaware. Chants of “USA, USA” transmogrify into “Hell, No We Won’t Go”   But even with the threat of mandatory service gone the way of 23 skidoo (aka get lost), Americans quickly saw how wars were the BFFs of the 1% who amplified their fortunes while the 99% did the fighting and dying and saw their lives upended by the economic consequences of another “glorious war”.

Americans have a rich history of going public with their protests against the wars of choice the US has started. Lest you think the coming of age of twenty-first century young people was the great awakening, over ninety years ago US student activism was alive and well as hundreds of thousands of students participated in anti-war demonstrationss, protesting the gathering war clouds of World War II, a repeat of World War I.

Even World War II saw its share of protest activity particularly before the Pearl Harbor attack in December, 1941. “The Yanks Are Not Coming” argued thousands of demonstrators gathered in cities like Los Angeles and New York for peace rallies opposing American involvement in European conflicts. The Korean war which President Truman dragged the US into in 1950 saw relatively tame protests unlike the vigorous protests which accompanied succeeding wars. Polling indicated that although 36,574 (US Department of Defense) young Americans died while fighting in a civil war that was none of America’s business, public opinion remained closely divided with slightly more than half (56%) thinking the war was not worth fighting. What happened in that war to the self-described most powerful armed forces in history was repeated in all subsequent wars the US started. Despite destroying most of North Korea, the U.S. was unable to achieve victory. President Eisenhower was forced into an armistice to stop the slaughter of American troops.

The Vietnam War was a high-water mark in Americans taking to the streets to vent their outrage. The demonstrations started mainly on college campuses to protest the draft (1.8 to 2.2 million American men were drafted from 1964 to 1973) “No, No, We Won’t Go” became a popular refrain. As the revulsion against the senseless brutality that highlighted US conduct of the war (for example the 1968 US massacre of 300 unarmed old men, women and children in the Vietnam village of My Lai), protests against the war multiplied. On November 15, 1969 a massive demonstration, Moratorium to End the war in Vietnam, was attended by over 500,000 anti-war activists in cities throughout the country and the world. Other demonstrations and rallies occurred including 50,000 people who stormed the Pentagon on October 21, 1967.

Before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, many Americans knew Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction as the politicians including the president were claiming. They also knew that the US government, along with its vassals (the UK being the most outspoken cheerleader) were lying us into this war.  On February 15, 2003, millions of people in 600 cities worldwide took to the streets to protest. In NYC 200,000 demonstrated outside the U.N., three million in Rome, 750,000 in London. Protests be damned the U.S went on to fight and lose) this misbegotten war.

Which brings us to the present catastrophe —a war of aggression against Iran (according to international law a war of aggression is “the supreme international crime”— American Justice Robert Jackson, chief prosecutor at Nuremberg). Using the now familiar American playbook —a surprise attack war launched in the midst of peace negotiations on a country (Iran) that was negotiating in good faith, the US attacked Iran on February 28.

The war has been going on for over a month and the streets of most American cities are eerily quiet. It appears that many Americans are okay with this latest example of misdirected U.S. aggression. The polls bear this out. According to a March 9 Quinnipiac University National Poll only 53% of voters oppose the war against Iran, while 40 percent support it.  New polls (3/26) show that opposition to the war has remained steady despite the economic pain Americans are feeling.

After the Vietnam war and the end of the draft, the participation of young people, the main drivers of the peace movement, dwindled. An organized youth movement against the war on terror (2001) never really materialized. Why, you may ask? Reasons abound. Since 1973 when Nixon abolished the draft, those of draft age no longer fearing Uncle Sam’s clarion call, have turned to other what they consider more personal and immediate problems. Student loan debt being numero uno for over one-half of students today. These unfortunates owe an average of $32,000-$40,000. In the Vietnam era, the average student debt was $1,100 ($7,500 in today’s dollars). Burdened with a mandatory loan payment that averages $400+ monthly, the fate of a war fought thousands of miles away is hardly a major worry. Besides these young people have heard war drums beating since they were born. The empire had already started (and lost) two major wars (Afghanistan and Iraq) and at least four “little” wars (Syria, Libya, Somalia, Yemen) Another war in a country most of them couldn’t find on a map? Not interested. Finally like the majority of American adults they have other worries closer to home —the stratospheric costs of healthcare, the rising cost of food, the unaffordability of housing, the difficulty of living in a country controlled by 950+ billionaires with the highest level of income inequality among G7 nations as well as among the most unequal developed countries in the world.

What’s the problem, you may ask, of living in a country addicted to war with a president who has jumped the shark and descended into “malignant narcissism” (phrase coined by Eric Fromm to describe Hitler).In America’s unending pursuit of guns over butter with a trillion-dollar war chest (soon to be $1.5 trillion) militarized foreign policy has permeated our domestic policy. Storm troopers are loose on American streets, masked and armed to the teeth whose brutality has already caused the deaths of two Americans peacefully protesting the invasion of brutalized “policing” in their city. How about Trump’s Secretary of Defense who calls himself the Secretary of War describing the U.S. negotiating strategy under Trump— “when he [Trump] sends his war fighters out…he unties their hands [getting rid of such pesky regulations as the Geneva Convention and International Law]… to destroy the enemy as viciously as possible… We negotiate with bombs…” On the domestic side, although only about 7% of the general U.S. population are veterans, 20% are in domestic police forces across the U.S. many of them drawing on their foreign military service to handle community law enforcement.

Even before this calamitous show of unprecedented aggression, since 9/11 every U.S. president has been a war monger choosing to finance aggressive foreign policy goals over social welfare policies like universal healthcare, fixing America’s shabby infrastructure, providing free education for every American student, tamping down out of control costs in housing and every other aspect of Americans’ daily life.

We are all affected by U.S. leaders’ normalization of invasions into other countries (Venezuela and Iran current examples) in the form of preemptive war.

Ron Paul saw the danger of a continuous drift of U.S leaders into the madness of war over a decade ago in 2012 in his Farewell Address to Congress:

Undeclared wars are commonplace. Tragically our government engages in preemptive wars with no complaints from the American people. Sadly, we have become accustomed to living with the illegitimate use of force by government. To develop a truly free society the issue of initiating force must be understood and rejected. We ignore him at our peril.

P.S. On March 29 and March 30, the American people saw the cliff their leaders were driving them over and hit the streets protesting violence and war both oversea and domestically. Millions assembled in towns and cities across the U.S. in peaceful protests. What they want is what most Americans want — leaders committed to peace and justice across the globe. It would be quite a change after decades of wrongheaded decisions made by leaders whose only mission is to create an American empire and enrich their cronies. The Doomsday Clock is set at 85 seconds to midnight. We haven’t much time to save the planet.

Back in the bad old days of the Big Pharma COVID-19 get rich quick scam, Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart wanted a Covid test. If he weren’t a congressman, he would have had to get a note from his doctor for which he would be billed the equivalent of an office visit, call a testing site to make an appointment, drive to the site and wait in his car for (if he’s lucky) about two hours. Days or weeks later, he would get his results, provided he hadn‘t already died. Diaz-Balart merely walked down the Capitol hallway to a two-room suite of offices with the innocuous title Office of the Attending Physician (OAP). He was waited on immediately, the test was administered and in minutes, he learned he was positive. His total cost? Zero.
[2021 as the Big Pharma-induced COVID frenzy was gathering momentum]

He’s co-chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and a beneficiary of single payer healthcare, two good reasons for Rep. Diaz-Balart to champion Medicare-for-all. Instead, he’s a vocal opponent of what he labels “socialized medicine” (aka Medicare for All) — “The Members of this Conference [Hispanic Caucus] … will not support a bill that is being forced down America’s throat and that will take America down the path to bankruptcy.” You will note there are exceptions to every rule a bloviating congress person lays down. In Diaz-Balart’s case, the exception is — you guessed it — himself and his BFFs.

Rep. Diaz-Balart, along with every member of Congress, is the recipient of single payer government health insurance. Guess what? It’s not socialized medicine when Congress has it. The Office of the Attending Physician (OAP) is a full-blown hospital with branches all over Capitol Hill run by dozens of navy doctors, nurses and technicians. It has been described by a former OAP staffer as “the best healthcare on the planet.”

Not surprisingly Rep Diaz-Balert is not the only member of Congress whose hypocrisy is killing Americans. A far bigger fish, Nancy Pelosi [net worth $248 million] a Democrat who should know better but doesn’t, the first woman speaker of the House and the most powerful woman in the U.S. has a “simple” solution for the millions of Americans whose children don’t have enough to eat, whose bills, including rent, go unpaid, stuck in miles-long lines for free food or stuck in a minimum wage job. It’s not Medicare-for-All. Instead, the Former Speaker and her Republican successor, along with former President Barack Obama are singing the praises of Obamacare (named after its creator) —overpriced crappy health insurance which wouldn’t help them even if they weren’t broke. Average price of an Obamacare plan in 2024? $6,000 per year with deductibles (amount you have to fork over before your insurance kicks in ranging from $5,000-$8,000 per year). Amount each Congress person has to pay for “the best healthcare on the planet?” $648 per year. Zero deductibles. It’s pretty cushy all-inclusive medical care that includes coronavirus testing, flu vaccines, lab work, physicals, Xrays, and referrals to specialists. What’s more for the cheapest members non-payment doesn’t stop them from enjoying the service. Try that one out on your insurance company.

The OAP may be virtually free to members of Congress but someone has to pay the $4.9 million price tag (2025). Look in the mirror. You and every other tax payer is on the hook for the free ride given to Congress.

This year it was of $4.9 million. In 2020 when pandemic hysteria forced country-wide closures, 22.5 million Americans lost their jobs and their healthcare. In response Congress passed the CARES Act, a nothing burger for people who most needed relief but a boon for Congress as they furtively tucked into the budget bill a $400,000 subsidy to OPA.

Members of Congress live on an entirely different planet from the rest of us. The legislators we send to Congress generally wind up as millionaires if they’re not when they get there. The vast majority of both the Senate and House of Representatives has a net worth exceeding $1 million. Only 18% of the 132.6 million American households (2024-25) are worth one million or more. There’s no single payer concierge-level healthcare plan for them.

Typically, politicians do a lot of handwringing when the topic of single payer health insurance is raised as an alternative to employer-provided health insurance — “[with Medicare-for-all] we will no longer have private insurance as we know it. And that means that 149 million Americans will no longer be able to have their current insurance…I think it’s a bad idea.”

What’s so bad about employer-provided healthcare? Almost everything. For openers in a system, unique in the developed world, where healthcare is tied to employment, workers must toe the line or risk not only their jobs but their healthcare. Even with employers paying some of the cost (less each year), health insurance company greed has taken a larger and larger chunk out of workers’ paychecks. Over the last decade, employees’ share of premiums has risen by 71%. (Kaiser Family Foundation). Workers’ wages have not kept up. Real wages (after accounting for inflation) have been stagnant for the last four decades. The overall effect —while employees’ wages remain static, they are constantly paying out more for their health insurance. At the same time, insurance companies are flush with profits.

The inequality underlying U.S. healthcare is stunning— a single payer virtually free healthcare delivery system for elected representatives and a free-market, profit-oriented health industry boondoggle enriching healthcare oligarchs for the rest of us. The one paid for by American taxpayers but not offered to them is a luxurious on-call service, the other, employer-provided healthcare, fails to fulfill even modest healthcare needs. Obamacare, the third tier of the failed U.S. healthcare system, is a hodgepodge of unaffordable costs and substandard care. You don’t have to imagine a situation where the people are forced to pay for the most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet reap little benefit. You’re living it. The present healthcare system based on private profiteering cost American taxpayers $5.2 trillion (estimated) in 2024. Don’t forget the U.S. spends more on health care than any other country yet still ranks last among wealthy nations in overall performance, particularly in access to care and health outcomes. Is it any surprise that the American people face the shortest life expectancies in the developed world?

Bottom line: The U.S. healthcare system is a miserable failure and a total disgrace. It’s time to pick up a broom and sweep out the phonies (aka elected officials) who keep the present healthcare system chugging along and then elect men and women who will fight to make healthcare in the U.S. a human right. But like Diogenes, searching for an honest man (or woman) with a torch in broad daylight, our quest for integrity in a world of pretense is probably doomed.

Healthcare as a human right not a privilege is cherished by people lucky enough to live in almost every advanced country on the planet.  Not so lucky are the people who live in the richest, most powerful country in the world where healthcare is a privilege not a right. As of 2024, 8% of Americans (26 million) have no medical insurance and find the doors to medical providers closed to them. They are not the only victims of this brutal privatized, for-profit health uncaring system. One-third of Americans have health insurance, but are woefully underinsured. Unable to afford “premium” plans, they are stuck with bargain basement plans that offer only a modicum of benefits but still include larcenous premiums, high deductibles (often $10,000 or more) and over-the-top co-pays. How inadequate is a healthcare system when 50% of its intended beneficiaries finds it “difficult to afford healthcare” [Kaiser Family Foundation]?

Medical debt is the leading cause of all bankruptcies in the US. Compare that to other wealthy nations where medical bankruptcies are rare to non-existent. In the U.K. only 8.2% of bankruptcies are due to medical debt [World Population Review, 2025]

You may wonder why the U.S. is the only wealthy country where people can go bankrupt trying to save their lives. Without national “single payer” healthcare, Americans have to pay whatever the chiselers who run the privatized system demand. In a single payer system, the government finances healthcare through taxes.

In this wildly overpriced wasteland, private equity outlaws and financial terrorists have transformed what used to be the “healing profession” into private fiefdoms where Americans’ hard-earned dollars feather the nests of the gangsters who run them. In 2024, Andrew Witty, CEO of United Healthcare, the largest health insurance company in the U.S., took home the munificent compensation of $26,339,215. Guess whose pocket it came out of?  Yours. He is part of a pantheon of wildly overcompensated healthcare hooligans whose personal fortunes are baked into the U.S. $5 trillion “healthcare” bill.

What does the U.S. consumer receive for $5 trillion? Are they healthier than other people? Is privatized healthcare cheaper? No on both counts, Americans are stuck with poorer health outcomes, like lower life expectancy, the highest death rate for avoidable and treatable conditions, the highest maternal and infant mortality rates and among the highest suicide rate in the developed world. Americans are dangerously overweight (twice the recommended average) and have the highest rate of chronic conditions. During the pandemic, with only 4% of the world’s population, 1.2 million Americans died, more than in any other country. By comparison, India, the most populous country in the world (1.46 billion people) had 533,600 deaths—about half the number in the U.S. The conclusion is inescapable: the U.S. pays the most but fares the worst.

“We don’t consume a lot more health care than other countries.” We just pay a lot more for each thing.” [Dr. Atul Grover, executive director of the nonprofit AAMC Research and Action Institute] The invasion of private equity, over $1 trillion in investments since 2015, has resulted in sky rocketing costs accompanied by a decline in quality, “[Private equity firms] seek returns on their investment [in healthcare] as high as possible as quickly as possible, then rush to sell off that investment and go on to their next conquest.” [Professor John McDonough, Harvard School of Medicine]

As the U.S. population began to age and the average American got sicker and sicker, greedy investors quickly began to see a new market promising quick and easy profits. They began scooping up physician practices (5,779 in 2023 up from 816 in 2012), one-third of emergency rooms and 460 hospitals (22% of for-profit hospitals). They also have a significant presence in nursing homes, even fertility clinics.

When profit becomes part of every medical decision whether it’s ordering expensive, often unnecessary, tests and procedures, or prescribing expensive medications when less expensive options are available, it’s the patient who suffers. One study found that Medicare patients at private equity-owned hospitals suffered a 25% increase in hospital-acquired complications compared to Medicare patients at hospitals not owned by private equity. [Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) December 26, 2023]. Other studies have found that generally healthcare quality declines and costs skyrocket when private equity takes over.

Isn’t a failing health care system the ultimate life and death issue that calls for elected officials to step up to the plate? Apparently not when major reforms like single payer healthcare would be vehemently opposed by their real constituency, the men and women who control U.S. healthcare through powerful lobbies, major corporations and gigantic financial interests. After all, why should congress care about your health need when unlike you, being in congress entitles them to single payer healthcare? As their real concern is keeping their jobs, business as usual means getting a slice of the $23 million “healthcare professionals” throw into their campaign pots annually and the $16 million that big pharma chips in. Isn’t that how pay-to-play politics works in banana republics?

If congress is unwilling to go against the demands of its paymasters what about the sitting president? In 2010 when President Obama introduced a reworked version of a tired old Republican healthcare proposal and renamed it The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), he was particularly eloquent with his lying falsehoods—“It’s [Obamacare]…[that’s] going to make sure that nobody…loses everything…because they’re sick.”  Consider: over two-thirds of bankruptcies are due to astronomical medical bills. As to the assertion that “[Obamacare] makes quality, affordable healthcare not a privilege but a right.” [Statement on whitehouse.gov], at least 75% of those filing for medical bankruptcy had health insurance.

It gets worse. When Joe Biden became president in 2020, he said the quiet part out loud: he would veto Medicare-for-all if it ever came to his desk.

What’s the moral of this saga? The Democratic party even its progressive wing will never grow a backbone stiff enough to go up against wealthy and powerful elites that oppose single-payer healthcare. Until and unless America joins the rest of the developed world with a national healthcare system, Americans will continue to be the sickest people on the planet.

You may be stuck in an expensive and underperforming privatized health care system but Congress and the President have Medicare-for-all. Looking to learn more? Check out Congress has Single Payer Health Insurance —Why Don’t You?