America’s Priorities: Money For Wars, Not Maternity Care!

Sulfabittas News reports on major Caribbean and global political developments affecting Jamaica and the wider region...

God King Trump Wages War Like Don Quixote Chasing 

Windmills While 1,100 U.S. Counties Lack Maternity Care

Hospitals!

Over 1,100 American counties have no maternity healthcare clinics even as President Donald Trump waste billions of dollars on illegal regime-change wars.

By Norris R. McDonald, DIJ, Author & Economic Journalist

Norris R. McDonald 

The Middle East is on fire again. Following America and Israel’s attack on Iran and the killing of the Islamic Republic’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the backlash has already started. Iran attacks American military bases, embassies in 10 Arab nations.

When war beckons, American politicians 

don't ask: "How to pay for it.?”

They simple cheer, run up the massive debt and cut poor people out the budget.

The current Middle East crisis is no exception. It is a revealing case study in national priorities.

What is the background to this crisis?

THE ROOTS OF AMERICA’S IRAN CONFRONTATION

The roots of U.S.-Iran confrontation stretch back decades. American C.I.A regime-change policies helped shape the present crisis. In 1979 the Islamic Revolution overthrew the CIA-backed Shah Reza Pahlavi. Today’s escalation therefore sits atop a long history of intervention, sanctions, covert operations, and proxy conflict.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian resistance against Israel’s illegal occupation and annexation of the lands is an unsettled issue that goes back to the 1944 partition of their land.

American intervention in the Middle East, strengthens and facilitates Israel’s illegal occupation, land-grabbing polices and most recently, the genocide in Gaza.

Trump’s America today, that is shamelessly masquerades as a moral arbiter of peace, has destabilized the world, from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean and now the Middle East.

This interventionist policy was on show in the brazen attack on Venezuela to control its oil and, in the kidnapping of President Nicolas Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores. It also includes a brutal imposition of a food and oil embargoes on Cuba.

POOR PEOPLE CUT OUT OF THE US BUDGET

My dear friends, wars of conquest, appear to be the very reason for America’s existence.

With an annual expenditure of over US$800 billion, the United States spends more on its military than most nations.

On the flip side, when it comes to meeting human needs of its citizens that is never accepted as national priority.

This contrast is not merely budgetary, it is immoral.

More than 40 million Americans live in poverty. Millions more hover just above it. Medical debt remains one of the leading causes of personal bankruptcy. 

Over 15 million Americans remain uninsured following reductions in healthcare subsidies under the Affordable Care Act.

Rural hospitals are closing at alarming rates due to reimbursement pressures and funding gaps. Community health centers struggle to remain solvent. Yet major defense contractors report record revenues, and weapons manufacturers see stock prices surge during periods of geopolitical tension.

This is what economists call opportunity cost. Every dollar committed to sustained military expansion is a dollar unavailable for preventive care, maternal health infrastructure, or rural hospital stabilization.

Policymakers often deny a direct trade-off. They argue that defense and domestic spending occupy separate lanes. But budgets are finite political documents. Priorities are reflected in allocation speed, political will, and legislative urgency.

WHEN WAR COMES HOME

Nevertheless, America’s wars, especially in the Middle East, have extreme negative consequences on people’s pocketbooks throughout the world.

The Middle East controls a significant share of global petroleum exports. Instability drives oil price spikes. Higher oil prices ripple outward — raising transportation costs, food prices, electricity bills, and inflationary pressure.

Oil prices have now spiked to US$73 dollar per barrel with the potential to reach US$100 per barrel.

For fragile economies such as Jamaica this is extremely bad news. The hidden tax of war driven oil-spikes is paid at grocery stores, gas stations, in light bills and other basic costs.

THE MATERNITY CRISIS AS POLICY FAILURE

My dear friends, we are in truly challenging times. But if one wants a clear illustration of distorted priorities, an example is America’s maternity care crisis.

Right now, while god king Trump, wages war like Don Quixote chasing windmills, America has more than 1,100 counties without maternity healthcare hospitals clinics. And that is just one example of misplaced priorities.

Women dying from pregnancy is in the United States exceeds that of other wealthy nations.

In the case of pre-eclampsia, and other life-threatening conditions that require rapid intervention, minutes matter. But, by closing maternity health clinics America has created what is called “maternity care deserts” – places that are as bleak as the barren wilderness, where pregnancy appears to be a disease and not a life-changing opportunity for family development.

Pregnant women often travel hours to deliver. Some give birth in transit. Some lose infants before reaching care.

Healthcare executives may earn compensation packages exceeding US$60 million annually, even as community clinics disappear.

Wars are profitable for empires, millionaires and billionaires; maternity clinics are not.

Clearly, if maternal survival were treated as a national security issue, funding streams would reflect it. Emergency appropriations would stabilize obstetric care in under served counties.

THE MORAL CHOICE, WAR PROFITEERS OVER PEOPLE

Strip away partisan rhetoric and the question becomes unavoidable: What is government for?

Is it primarily an instrument of global dominance and strategic leverage? Or is it a guarantor of human security at home — healthcare access, maternal survival, food stability, and dignified work?

Is it to expand influence, topple regimes and dominate rival powers? Or is it to ensure that mothers survive childbirth, that children receive medical care, that workers earn livable wages and that communities remain stable?

History teaches that empires decline not merely because of external enemies, but because they neglect foundations at home.

Budgets are moral documents. They reveal what a nation values most urgently.

The present Middle East crisis is a mirror. It reflects a governing philosophy in which military escalation activates immediate consensus, while maternal health remains negotiable.

Money for wars. Maternity wards closing. Rapid mobilization for regime change. Pregnant women driving across county lines in search of care.

These are not unrelated phenomena. They are the product of strategic choices.

The moral choice is stark. Oh yes! Money for war, not healthcare. Funding for regime change, not prenatal clinics.

Really, is this a society organized around human justice?

I think not!

That is just the bitta truth.

About the Author

Norris R. McDonald is an author, respiratory therapist, and economic journalist whose work focuses on political economy, public health, healthcare systems, and global public policy. He is a regular contributor of public commentary and analysis for the Jamaica Gleaner, where he examines the intersection of economics, governance, social justice, and development in Jamaica, the Caribbean, and the Global South.

With professional training in respiratory care and decades of frontline healthcare experience, McDonald brings a clinical and evidence-based perspective to issues such as maternal mortality, health inequities, pharmaceutical policy, and healthcare access. His journalism blends data-driven analysis with historical and cultural context, particularly around Black communities, post-colonial development, and structural inequality.

McDonald is also the publisher of Sulfabittas Newsmagazine on Substack, where he produces investigative features, long-form essays, and geopolitical commentary on global power dynamics, economic sovereignty, and emerging multipolar realities.

Corruption Is Economic Violence — And Jamaica Is Paying the Price

Sulfabittas News reports on major Caribbean political and global developments affecting Jamaica and the wider region.

Corruption as economic violence—class contrast and national consequences.

By Norris R. McDonald | SULFABITTAS NEWS

Jamaica may be recording a decline in murders, and that development is rightly welcomed. Any measurable reduction in violent deaths represents relief for families and communities that have endured decades of trauma. However, while public discourse remains focused on street-level criminality, the country continues to confront a deeper and more structurally destabilizing crisis: the persistent expansion of white-collar crime and the normalization of elite impunity.

A nation cannot meaningfully address crime if its concern is limited to the actions of the marginalized while large-scale financial irregularities proliferate within the upper reaches of the state and corporate sector. When procurement abuses are treated as administrative lapses rather than prosecutable offences, when investigations stretch across years without resolution, and when meaningful asset recovery remains rare, the problem transcends governance inefficiency. It becomes systemic economic harm.

A Dangerous Imbalance in National Attention

This contradiction should trouble every serious observer of Jamaica’s political economy. A society cannot confront crime while limiting its focus to the desperate and dispossessed, even as vast financial irregularities quietly multiply in the corridors of influence. When white-collar wrongdoing is absorbed into routine procedure, the country begins to misread its own danger, celebrating visible improvements while ignoring the deeper mechanisms that reproduce scarcity, inequality, and distrust.

Corruption as Economic Violence

Corruption should not be viewed merely as an ethical lapse or an unfortunate feature of political culture. It is better understood as a material process that redistributes wealth upward while eroding the state’s capacity to serve its citizens. Each inflated contract, each manipulated concession, and each unexplained budgetary overrun represents a transfer of collective resources into private hands. The cumulative impact of these transfers is borne not by the beneficiaries of corruption, but by ordinary Jamaicans who face deteriorating services and rising living costs.

The human cost: corruption manifests as hardship, weakened services, and rising costs.

This is why corruption constitutes a form of economic violence. It does not manifest in nightly crime reports, yet its consequences are visible in overcrowded classrooms, under-resourced clinics, unsafe roads, unreliable water supply, and persistent wage stagnation. These are not isolated failures of management; they are downstream effects of fiscal leakages that accumulate year after year.

The Asymmetry of Justice

The contrast between how street crime and white-collar crime are treated further compounds public frustration. Lower-income Jamaicans routinely face swift arrest and harsh punishment for minor infractions, while high-level financial irregularities often languish in extended audits and administrative reviews that rarely culminate in criminal convictions. This asymmetry sends a powerful social message about whose actions are considered intolerable and whose are negotiable.

Empirical evidence already illustrates the magnitude of the problem. In one recent fiscal year, Jamaica’s Auditor General flagged more than J$20 billion in procurement breaches, cost overruns, and unsupported payments across multiple ministries and public bodies. These findings represent only the portion of leakage that is formally documented. They do not capture sophisticated forms of under-invoicing, transfer pricing, inflated consultancy fees, or concessionary giveaways that escape routine audit processes. Yet despite the scale of these irregularities, criminal prosecutions remain rare, asset recovery even rarer, and administrative sanctions minimal. The signal transmitted to society is unmistakable: large-scale theft conducted through institutional channels carries little personal risk.

Disaster Recovery and the Politics of Reconstruction

The devastation caused by Hurricane Melissa in western Jamaica underscores the stakes involved in public financial management. Large-scale disasters require rapid mobilization of resources for reconstruction, infrastructure repair, and social support. Billions can be allocated within relatively short periods, creating both opportunity and risk. In an environment already strained by fiscal leakage, disaster recovery becomes a test of national integrity: whether funds will be spent transparently, competitively, and in the public interest.

The problem is not episodic. Over the past decade, cumulative audit reports and parliamentary oversight reviews have repeatedly identified tens of billions of Jamaican dollars in unresolved financial irregularities, ranging from abandoned capital projects to unexplained advances and persistently breached procurement rules. In this context, every new disaster allocation becomes vulnerable not only to logistical delay, but to absorption into an already porous fiscal architecture.

Corruption, Class, and Development

Corruption ultimately functions as a class-based economic distortion. It does not rely on overt coercion, yet it systematically disadvantages those with the least political access. Rising electricity rates, increased transport costs, higher food prices, and utility adjustments do not occur in isolation. They are frequently connected to structural inefficiencies and procurement practices that reflect deeper governance failures, with the poor and middle class effectively paying twice: once through taxation and again through diminished service quality.

Elite impunity: when accountability does not reach the conference room, development weakens.

Accountability as a Development Imperative

Reducing street violence remains essential, and progress achieved in that area should not be dismissed. However, any national crime strategy that excludes white-collar accountability is incomplete. Handcuffs cannot remain conceivable only in inner-city communities while boardrooms remain insulated from scrutiny. Equal enforcement of the law is not hostility to success; it is the foundation of legitimate development, credible governance, and democratic trust.

Ultimately, Jamaica’s future will not be determined solely by whether murders rise or fall in any given year. It will be determined by whether the society is willing to dismantle a political economy in which economic power routinely shields wrongdoing while poverty is criminalized. A country cannot tax its way out of corruption, nor can it police its way around elite impunity. Development requires more than growth targets and fiscal discipline; it requires a credible architecture of accountability that treats theft of public wealth as the serious crime it is. Until such an architecture is firmly established, the corruption economy will continue to drain national possibility, quietly but relentlessly, even as Jamaicans are asked to endure still more sacrifice in the name of stability.

Norris R. McDonald is an Author, Respiratory Therapist, and Economic Journalist who writes public commentary on political economy, public policy, and health systems, and publishes SULFABITTAS NEWS.

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The Myth of the Black Ancestral Curse: Religion, Race, and the Psychological Legacy of Slavery!

by Norris R McDonald (Author)

GET THE BOOK HERE: 👉 https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Black-Ancestral-Curse-Psychological-ebook/dp/B0F3ZQFJJL

How Zohran Mamdani and Gen Z Shocked New York’s Political Elite!

The ‘Bitta’ Truth: Zohran Mamdani and Gen Z’s Political Earthquake

By Norris R. McDonald
Author | Economic Journalist | Human Rights Activist (SULFABITTAS NEWS, MODIFIED)

Norris R. McDonald

Zohran Mamdani’s landslide victory was not just a mayoral upset — it was a political rupture. In one election, Gen Z delivered its most decisive blow yet to America’s billionaire-dominated political system.

The Ugandan-Indian Democratic Socialist didn’t merely defeat New York’s political old guard — he dismantled it. By openly confronting donor-class politics, entrenched party power, and foreign-policy hypocrisy, Mamdani exposed how hollow establishment politics has become.

This election wasn’t driven by fear. It was driven by justice, peace, economic dignity, and a generation unwilling to inherit a broken system in silence.

It is the loudest political thunderclap Gen Z has ever dropped on America’s billionaire-controlled political system.

A self-declared Democratic Socialist with Ugandan-Indian roots, Mamdani didn’t just defeat New York’s political old guard — he humiliated it. By openly challenging donor-class politics, Zionist lobbying, and foreign-policy cowardice, Mamdani exposed how hollow both major parties have become.
The election was not about fear. It was about justice, peace, economic dignity, and political courage.

How a 34-Year-Old Democratic Socialist Beat New York’s Establishment 

At just 34 years old, Zohran Mamdani achieved what many believed was impossible: he defeated establishment Democrats, including Andrew Cuomo, to become Mayor of New York City.

His campaign was powered by grassroots organizing, not corporate donations. It united a broad coalition of young voters, immigrants, working-class families, and even disillusioned MAGA voters who are tired of billionaire domination and performative politics.

Mamdani’s victory sends a clear message: America’s political establishment no longer speaks for the people.

Gen Z’s Rebellion Against Corporate and Donor-Class Politics

This election represents a decisive rejection of policies that favor corporate interests over human lives. For decades, poor and middle-class Americans have been sidelined while millionaire and billionaire donors dictated domestic and foreign policy.

Mamdani’s platform challenged this corruption head-on, with progressive positions on healthcare, climate justice, workers’ rights, and social and economic equality.

These issues resonate deeply in a political system where campaign donors, not voters, shape outcomes.

 Challenging Zionist Lobbying and Foreign-Policy Cowardice

Mamdani’s historic victory carries enormous political symbolism. Throughout his campaign, he openly criticized U.S. foreign policy, particularly Israel’s actions in Gaza, which he courageously labeled “genocide.”

Unlike establishment politicians, Mamdani refused to retreat from a human-rights-based position, even under intense pressure from powerful lobbying groups.

Despite coordinated attacks from AIPAC and political elites who attempted to smear him as antisemitic, Mamdani earned support from 43% of New York’s Jewish voters, rejecting the false claim that opposition to Zionism equals antisemitism.

What Mamdani’s Win Means for America’s Political Future

Mamdani’s success reveals a profound shift in American politics. Traditional alliances between U.S. politicians and Zionist lobbying groups are no longer guaranteed.

Even within the MAGA movement, cracks are forming. Influential figures such as Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Marjorie Taylor Greene have begun openly questioning America’s unconditional fealty to Zionism and endless foreign wars.

This cross-ideological reckoning proves one thing: a political movement rooted in human rights transcends party lines.

Zohran Mamdani’s victory is not just a win for New York. It is a warning to America’s political elite.

Gen Z has entered the arena — and they are not asking for permission.

The empire is trembling.

[ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Norris R McDonald, is an Author, Respiratory Therapist and Economic Journalist who writes public commentary features for The Jamaica Gleaner. He writes on critical issues regarding Political Economics, Health Care & Public Policies, Black Culture and, World Affair. He also Publishes

SULFABITTAS NEWSMAGAZINE on SUBSTACK]