WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

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WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

The Paris attacks also unleashed an ugly reaction here in the USA.  From racist vigilante violence to the barely sane Republican candidates, from the keyboard warriors of the Right and the punditocracy to the halls of Congress, many were opportunistically targeting Muslim Americans and the weakest of the weak: refugees from US-initiated or supported wars in the Middle East.  The statements by Republican Governors (including our own in Massachusetts) that they refused to accept Syrian refugees and the resolution in the House with the same intent were largely symbolic as only a tiny number of Syrians have been allowed into the US.  But it is hateful symbolism. Donald Trump announced, without understanding the irony, that Muslim-Americans should be issued special IDs and that perhaps their mosques should be closed.

 

Of course, in reality, if we want to help Syrians, we should stop enabling international radical fighters to destroy their country – and we need to pressure our supposed allies Turkey and Saudi Arabia to do the same. (See below)

 

 

ISLAMOPHOBIA SURGES ON THE RIGHT

The policies being pushed by Republicans—particularly by those campaigning to be president—have reached a new low, and the ugliness driving them is unmistakable. These aren’t dog whistles any more: many on the right now explicitly support a government policy of explicit discrimination on the basis of religion. And the silence from the rest of America’s conservatives is deafening…  Whatever you make of Bush’s Manichean worldview and the follies of the policies he pushed in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, his active stance against anti-Muslim bigotry acted as a bulwark against hate that, in the absence of such leadership, has run rampant.  From there, the persistent campaign of bigoted right-wing activists was allowed to flourish, albeit with some pushback but obviously not enough… So now we have arrived a point where the leading GOP contender for the party’s presidential nomination, Donald Trump, said he “would certainly implement” a program to track Muslims in a national database. Not refugees, mind you, and not immigrants, but Americans who’ll be designated by the state as adherents to a particular faith.   More

 

House Ignores Obama’s Veto Threat in Demanding Tougher Screening for Refugees

President Barack Obama, who has vowed to bring at least 10,000 refugees of Syria’s civil war into America next year, has already promised to veto the GOP-led House bill. But with nearly 50 of Obama’s fellow Democrats voting for the proposal, the White House’s resettlement plans has shaky support in the wake of last week’s terror attacks in Paris that killed 129 people… “Our duty is to protect the American people,” said House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.). The proposal, which passed the House by 289 to 137, “increases the standards to keep those who want to do us harm out,” McCarthy said… “That somehow they pose a more significant threat than all the tourists who pour into the United States every single day just doesn’t jive with reality,” Obama said in Asia, where he is traveling.   More

 

From the Mass delegation, only Reps. Keating and Lynch voted with the Republican majority on this issue.

Roll call of vote is here: http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2015/roll643.xml

 

Dems vow to wage refugee filibuster

Senate Democrats will filibuster legislation halting the resettlement of Syrian refugees in the United States, after it passed the House on Thursday one vote short of a veto-proof majority.  Republicans think they have a slam-dunk political winner and predict Democrats will pay a price for blocking the measure, which has strong bipartisan support. Forty-seven Democrats voted for it in the lower chamber.  But Senate Democrats believe they can flip the issue by shifting the debate to the roughly 20 million people who come into the country each year through the Visa Waiver Program. They also want to put Republicans on the spot by forcing a vote on a provision to bar people on the terrorist watch list from buying guns.   More

 

Bernie Sanders is right: The top 0.1 percent have as much as the bottom 90 percent

In appealing to the principles of freedom and "economic rights," in a phrase of Roosevelt's that Sanders quoted… Sanders also cited a remarkable statistic: 0.1 percent of American families enjoy almost as much as wealth 90 percent of the rest of the country put together.  In 2014, just 160,000 families, each with a net worth in excess of $20.6 million, counted themselves among the wealthiest 0.1 percent of households. Together, they owned nearly as much as everyone from the very poor to the upper middle class combined -- 90 percent of the country, some 145 million families in total… As shown in the chart above, wealth was not always so unevenly distributed in the United States, but since the middle of the Reagan administration, wealth has gradually become concentrated in the hands of a few.   More