Editor’s note: Join Peace in Ukraine rallies nationwide March 18-19, and in Washington, DC at the White House Saturday, March 18 at 1:00 p.m. EST. Go to peaceinukraine.org to learn more.
On a morning in late February, cars lined up for a mile for free food from an area food bank in Hazel Green, Kentucky. As the Washington Post reported, the elimination of pandemic emergency food stamp benefits is hitting people in Kentucky and across the country. People lined up for food in Kentucky told the Post they can afford to eat only once a day now, or said they had to reserve expensive items like meat only for the family teenagers. Many Kentucky senior citizens saw their monthly food stamp benefit drop from $281 to $22 last year after the state emergency ended in May.
Over the past year, 18 states, including Kentucky, ended official states of emergency and rescinded the Covid food benefit. Congress decided in December that the extra food help would end this month (March) for the other 32 states, as well as the District of Columbia, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Guam. The cuts will affect 31 million Americans, including more than a half million in Kentucky. Meanwhile, food prices continue to rise.
The “post-pandemic” cuts nationally affect more than food, the Post reported. “Over the past 18 months, the federal government has halted enhanced unemployment benefits and ended pandemic-era child tax credits. It is in the process of rolling back an adjustment to Medicaid that boosted enrollment, putting millions of Americans at risk of losing coverage.”
President Biden has declared that the federal Covid emergency ends on May 11. Among other things, that will mean school lunches will end for 30 million kids whose families otherwise made a little too much money to qualify. It will also mean 27 million people will lose their health insurance, one third of them children. Bear in mind that nearly half the U.S. population lived in poverty and millions were hungry and homeless before the pandemic.
But while the government is increasing poverty for millions of us, it is guaranteeing billions in increased income for investors in some corporations and industries who are profiting handsomely from the war in Ukraine.
As Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies reported at codepink.org in February, the combined effect of Western oil and gas sanctions on Russia and the sabotage of the Nordstream pipeline created windfall profits for the Western oil and gas industry.
For 2022, Codepink reported: “…Western oil companies laughed all the way to the bank to deposit $200 billion in profits: ExxonMobil made $56 billion, an all-time record for an oil company, while Shell made $40 billion and Chevron and Total gained $36 billion each. BP made ‘only’ $28 billion, as it closed down its operations in Russia, but it still doubled its 2021 profits.” (Codepink also noted that the Saudis, the Norwegians, and even the Russians made higher oil and gas profits last year.)
U.S. liquefied natural gas suppliers are replacing Europe’s former supply of Russian natural gas with fracked gas from the United States, at about four times the prices U.S. customers pay. German industry is set to pay about 40% more for energy this year than it did in 2021. And of course, American consumers continue paying through the nose for gasoline, heat and electricity.
U.S. arms makers are also profiting obscenely from the war. Leading the pack are the “big five” U.S. weapons makers: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and General Dynamics. “Most of the weapons so far sent to Ukraine have come from existing stockpiles in the United States and NATO countries,” said Codepink. “Authorization to build even bigger new stockpiles flew through Congress in December, but the resulting contracts have not yet shown up in the arms firms’ sales figures or profit statements.”
Congress authorized “‘wartime’ multi-year, no-bid contracts to ‘replenish’ stocks of weapons sent to Ukraine, but the quantities of weapons to be procured outstrip the amounts shipped to Ukraine by up to 500 to one. Former senior Office of Management and Budget official Marc Cancian commented, ‘This isn’t replacing what we’ve given [Ukraine]. It’s building stockpiles for a major ground war [with Russia] in the future,’” Codepink reported, adding: “Since weapons have only just started rolling off production lines to build these stockpiles, the scale of war profits anticipated by the arms industry is best reflected, for now, in the 2022 increases in their stock prices: Lockheed Martin, up 37%; Northrop Grumman, up 41%; Raytheon, up 17%; and General Dynamics, up 19%.”
What is most alarming and dangerous is that the U.S. and Europe are continuing to fuel the war with new arms shipments, which is increasing the risk of nuclear war. No one will win such a war. It is a threat to not only humanity’s existence, but to all of life.
A government that truly cares about both its own people and all those being injured and killed in the war, would immediately stop the arms sales and end the war through negotiation; stop the energy profiteering; and shift money from war spending to end homelessness, hunger and poverty in this country and abroad. It would take even more participation, organization and pressure from the people to make this happen.
Join Peace in Ukraine rallies nationwide March 18-19, and in Washington, DC at the White House Saturday, March 18 at 1:00 p.m. EST. Go to peaceinukraine.org to learn more.
