WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME
MICHELLE ALEXANDER: It's Not Enough to Just Deplore Horrific Violence
I know many people believe that our criminal justice system can be “fixed” by smart people and smart policies. President Obama seems to think this way… But if we’re serious about having peace officers — rather than a domestic military at war with its own people — we’re going to have to get honest with ourselves about who our democracy actually serves and protects. Consider this: Philando Castile had been stopped 31 times and charged with more than 60 minor violations — resulting in thousands of dollars in fines — before his last, fatal encounter with the police.
Alton Sterling was arrested because he was hustling, selling CDs to get by. He was unable to work in the legal economy due to his felony record. His act of survival was treated by the police as a major crime, apparently punishable by death. How many people on Wall Street have been arrested for their crimes large and small — crimes of greed and fraud that nearly bankrupted the global economy and destroyed the futures of millions of families? How many politicians have been prosecuted for taking millions of dollars from private prisons, prison guard unions, pharmaceutical companies, oil companies, tobacco companies, the NRA and Wall Street banks and doing their bidding for them. More
Legal Experts Raise Alarm over Shocking Use of 'Killer Robot' in Dallas
As news emerges that police officers in Dallas, Texas used an armed robot to kill the suspected shooter in Thursday night's ambush, experts are warning that it represents a sea change in police militarization that only heightens risks to human and constitutional rights. Dallas Police Chief David Brown said Friday morning during a press conference that police "saw no other option but to use our bomb robot and place a device on its extension for it to detonate" where the suspect had taken refuge in a parking garage as police tried to negotiate with him, adding that he was "deceased as a result of detonating the bomb." More
DPPer Rosemary Kean delivered a sermon last Sunday at the First Church of Boston
After centuries of being divided by race, we have an opportunity now to work to close that division with a strong racial justice movement. Without a strong racial justice movement that involves white America, it is doubtless that certain criminal justice and police reforms will be enacted only to disappear by the next iteration of white supremacist policies, which we, because our lives are not involved in a deep and caring way with black and brown families and neighborhoods, will only realize has happened after the damage is done. Read it all here
Are We in for Another Increase in Military Spending?
Certainly most Americans are not clamoring for heightened investments in war and war preparations… Actually, it appears that, when Americans are given the facts about US military spending, a substantial majority of them favor reducing it. Between December 2015 and February 2016, the nonpartisan Voice of the People, affiliated with the University of Maryland, provided a sample of 7,126 registered voters with information on the current US military budget, as well as leading arguments for and against it. The arguments were vetted for accuracy by staff members of the House and Senate appropriations subcommittees on defense. Then, when respondents were asked their opinion about what should be done, 61 percent said they thought US military spending should be reduced. The biggest cuts they championed were in spending for nuclear weapons and missile defense systems. When it comes to this year’s presumptive Presidential candidates, however, quite a different picture emerges. More
After Sanders Endorses Clinton, 'Political Revolution' Faces Hard Choices
For the past months, the Democratic Party, particularly corporate Democrats, clamored for Bernie Sanders to quit the presidential race or endorse Hillary Clinton. He continued his campaign and competed in all 50 states. He challenged the inevitability of Clinton as a nominee, forcing her to stave off his “political revolution.” But now, Sanders has endorsed Clinton, and the Democratic Party can breathe a sigh of relief going into the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. The critical question of the moment is what the endorsement means for the “political revolution.” To paraphrase what Socialist Seattle City council member Kshama Sawant said at the People’s Summit nearly one month ago, how can the “political revolution” move forward if tens of millions of people, who are angry at the corporate establishment and both the Republican and Democratic Parties, are urged to support a corporate establishment candidate like Hillary Clinton? More
What the Democratic Party Platform Tells Us About Where We Are on War
Bill Clinton’s Labor Secretary Robert Reich described the platform draft as providing “a relatively easy way for so-called mainstream and centrist Democrats to make progressive Democrats feel included without really changing the status quo or ruffling feathers on Wall Street.” Platform language, he said, is “still just rhetoric.… It reveals the current limits of what is acceptable political discourse inside the party.” … But it does show that committed and strategic movements can have impact. The sections of the platform on Wall Street and tax reforms, in particular, are much bolder than those in the 2012 draft… But it is on the platform’s dealing with issues of war and peace, militarism and diplomacy, Palestine and Israel, that both the potential and the limitations of social movements are most clear. Discussion of today’s US wars—with thousands of ground troops, warplanes and pilots, drone bombers, special forces, CIA paramilitaries, and so many more now actively at war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, and beyond, with thousands dying and millions displaced, with hundreds of billions of dollars squandered on these wars—was virtually absent during the platform debates. More
The Progressive Platform Gains Are Significant—But The Political Revolution Isn’t Stopping There
While the platform is likely the most progressive ever, with enormous thanks to Bernie and his supporters, it will likely stop short of satisfying the tens of thousands who campaigned for him and the 12 million who voted for him. There is no proposal to end fracking; Medicare for all was voted down; and the platform does not support an end to new Israeli settlements in Gaza or the West Bank… The future of the political revolution, however, goes far beyond the platform, rules, convention or even the 2016 election. In the next two weeks, Bernie Sanders will begin to describe how his massive organization of millions can function beyond this moment and help build a movement for social and economic change. More
CORNEL WEST: Obama has failed victims of racism and police brutality
This November, we need change. Yet we are tied in a choice between Trump, who would be a neo-fascist catastrophe, and Clinton, a neo-liberal disaster. That’s why I am supporting Jill Stein. I am with her – the only progressive woman in the race – because we’ve got to get beyond this lock-jaw situation. I have a deep love for my brother Bernie Sanders, but I disagree with him on Hillary Clinton. I don’t think she would be an “outstanding president”. Her militarism makes the world a less safe place. Clinton policies of the 1990s generated inequality, mass incarceration, privatization of schools and Wall Street domination. There is also a sense that the Clinton policies helped produce the right-wing populism that we’re seeing now in the country. And we think she’s going to come to the rescue? That’s not going to happen. More
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NEW WARS / OLD WARS – What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
Report Shows How War Profiteers Are Now Refugee Profiteers
Border Wars: The Arms Dealers Profiting from Europe's Refugee Tragedy, released jointly by the European Stop Wapenhandel and Transnational Institute (TNI) on Monday, outlines arms traders' pursuit of profit in the 21st century's endless conflicts. "There is one group of interests that have only benefited from the refugee crisis, and in particular from the European Union's investment in 'securing' its borders,'" the report finds. "They are the military and security companies that provide the equipment to border guards, the surveillance technology to monitor frontiers, and the IT infrastructure to track population movements." The report shows that "far from being passive beneficiaries of EU largesse, these corporations are actively encouraging a growing securitization of Europe's borders, and willing to provide ever more draconian technologies to do this." In the past decade, the report says, corporate players have viewed intractable Middle East warfare as a windfall: "Several large international arms companies cited instability in the Middle East to assure investors about future prospects for their business. The arms companies are assisted by European governments, which actively promote European arms in the region and are very reluctant, to say the least, to impose stricter arms export policies." More
Double game? Even as it battles ISIS, Turkey gives other extremists shelter
Turkey has defended its policy of giving refuge to exiled supporters of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood government, which was overthrown in a coup in 2013. But among those offered shelter in Turkey are leaders of the Egyptian group Gamaa Islamiya, , whose members carried out murderous attacks against tourists in Egypt in the 1990s and were later tied to multiple plots to kill Americans… Such permissive policies stand in contrast to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s newly assertive stance against the Islamic State, the group suspected in last month’s Istanbul airport attack that killed 45 people. Erdogan has moved to tighten lax border controls that allowed terrorist recruits and contraband to flow from Turkey into Iraq and Syria, and last week he vowed a further crackdown against a group that he called “not Islamic.” … Yet Erdogan has taken a softer line toward Jabhat al-Nusra, one of several Islamist groups that Turkish officials supported during the early years of the Syrian civil war before formally breaking with it under Western pressure in 2014. In a speech last month, Erdogan repeated his suggestion that the “terrorist” label was inappropriate for Jabhat al-Nusra’s Islamist rebels, who, after all, also are at war with the Islamic State. More
NATO agrees to reinforce eastern Poland, Baltic states against Russia
NATO leaders agreed on Friday to deploy military forces to the Baltic states and eastern Poland for the first time and increase air and sea patrols to reassure allies who were once part of the Soviet bloc following Russia's seizure of Crimea from Ukraine. The 28-nation Western defence alliance decided to move four battalions totalling 3,000 to 4,000 troops into northeastern Europe on a rotating basis to display its readiness to defend eastern members against any Russian aggression… President Barack Obama said the United States would deploy about 1,000 soldiers in Poland under the plan "to enhance our forward presence in central and eastern Europe". Germany will lead the battalion in Lithuania, Britain in Estonia and Canada in Latvia. Other nations such as France will supply troops. More
Time to rethink NATO
Donald Trump angered the D.C. establishment when he said that NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance, may be obsolete and the U.S. should reassess its spending on the alliance. Hillary Clinton has used Trump’s comments as another example that he is a dangerous, loose cannon. But Trump has brought up an issue worth exploring and this month, when NATO will hold its Annual Summit in Warsaw, Poland on July 8-9, is an excellent opportunity to do so. Indeed, activists are planning to show up on in Warsaw during the Summit and in New York City there will be a demonstration on July 9 in Times Square. Formed in the early years of the Cold War, 1949, with the United States, Canada, Portugal, Italy, UK, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, and France, by 1952 this post-WWII alliance included Greece and Turkey, and had rejected the Soviet Union’s request to join. In 1956, when West Germany was admitted to NATO membership, the USSR formed the Warsaw Pact in response and the Cold War was then on, full-blown… With the recent breakup of the old paradigm after the UK just left the European Union, there may be a new opening for change. It has been reported that Germany and France have been talking about ending the sanctions on Russia imposed after the Ukraine events and are now recommending a less aggressive posture for NATO. More
"NATO versus the EU? "
Many Europeans remain highly ambivalent about whether it is NATO, or the E.U., that better represents their own geopolitical concerns. NATO is at heart an American institution, the E.U. is not. Indeed any real back-door influence the U.S. had in the E.U. came from the ever-loyal United Kingdom (which is why Brexit is such a disaster for the U.S. in Europe.)… Washington is uncomfortable in watching the E.U., as an economic and political organization, work closely with Russia. Indeed Germany, given its location, history and power, will be the quintessential European interlocutor with Russia — and thus most likely the major voice of reason and balance in East-West relations. Germany, more than any other European power, will also bear the brunt of any potential hostilities with Russia. That is why the German foreign minister himself made cautionary comments a few weeks ago that NATO’s largest ever military exercises off Poland since 1991 constituted provocative saber-rattling towards Russia. In this sense, then, Washington’s geopolitical agenda has in fact served to undermine the E.U. Washington strongly urged the immediate inclusion of as many former states of the East Bloc as possible in the E.U., seeking to glue them into a hopefully more anti-Russian Western “bloc.” More
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