A View From The Left -WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

A National Call for a Moral Revival and the New The Poor People's Campaign

The mass meeting at Boston’s historic Trinity Church on October 19…   signaled the kickoff of a modern civil rights movement and launch of a new Poor People’s Campaign. We were revitalizing what the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had started before his assassination.  In the 1960’s, Dr. King had surprised many by adding opposition to the Vietnam War to the civil rights campaign he was leading. The same linkage of struggle on behalf of the poor, with opposition to militarism, is now a logical path.  Reverends Liz Theoharis and William J. Barber II, leaders of the Poor People’s Campaign, took the stage at Trinity Church and both spoke with a prophetic fire. We must challenge systemic racism, poverty, voter suppression, environmental destruction, and militarism, they argued. Wars increase social upheaval and hurt the poor. Instead, invest in schools, affordable housing, job training, and healthcare for all.   More

Inspired by Martin Luther King Jr, a new civil rights leader takes center stage

The 54-year-old pastor from North Carolina is not just here to preach – this is the start of what he hopes will be a nationwide movement to complete the work that King could not. It is the first organised campaign of civil disobedience in the Donald Trump era. It’s aim? To bring about a “moral revival across the US”…  Barber – who co-chairs the campaign with the Rev Dr Liz Theoharis, a pastor from New York City – hopes to sign up 1,000 people in 25 states and DC for a season of civil disobedience in the spring of next year. Protesters will stage sit-ins at state capitols and in the US Congress under a “moral agenda” encompassing a host of issues, from LGBTQ and voting rights to immigration reform and access to healthcare. The campaign will not say yet how many people have signed up, but it has partnered with dozens of local groups across the country to avoid what Barber describes as “helicopter leadership”. “Liz and I are almost like a travelling course of theology and public activism, and then we turn it over to the anchor groups in each of the states,” he says.  It is perhaps the most ambitious civil rights campaign since the 60s, and will be underpinned by Barber’s work inNorth Carolina, where he served as president of the NAACP state chapter for more than a decade before resigning earlier in the year to take on this national role.    More

Republicans/Neocons Push for Massive Military Spending and Global Domination

Congress is working to spend more on bolstering military capabilities than it has in years, but that's not enough for neoconservative war hawks who see escalating global military might as central to protecting national interests, despite years of seemingly endless war.  The American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an influential neoconservative think tank with close ties to the architects of the invasion of Iraq and other Bush administration wartime policies, released a report last week calling for a sweeping expansion of the nation's global military footprint and budget increases at the Pentagon that would exceed congressional caps by $672 billion over the next five years.   More

Congress Just Voted to Destroy the Safety Net to Deliver Tax Cut to the Rich

The GOP-controlled House of Representatives on Thursday narrowly passed a Senate-approved budget resolution that moves Republicans one step closer to their ultimate goal of delivering massive tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans and imposing "grotesque" and "heartless" cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and other life-saving safety net programs…  Despite insistence from President Donald Trump and the GOP that their budget is pro-working class, analysis after analysis has shown that their proposals would in fact raise taxes on many middle class families while sending an enormous windfall—$1.5 trillion over the next decade—to the top one percent.  Meanwhile, notes Vox's Dylan Matthews, "the federal welfare state would be rolled back in just about every dimension."  "All non-Medicare health programs would see a cut of $1.3 trillion, or nearly 30 percent, by 2027," Matthews adds. "Medicare would be cut too, to the tune of $473 billion. There is $1 trillion over 10 years in mystery cuts to mandatory programs, cuts that would in practice almost certainly hurt programs for the poor."    More

In case you missed it. . .

“TAX REFORM” LIES: A Scorecard

Modern conservatives have been lying about taxes pretty much from the beginning of their movement. Made-up sob stories about family farms broken up to pay inheritance taxes, magical claims about self-financing tax cuts, and so on go all the way back to the 1970s. But the selling of tax cuts under Trump has taken things to a whole new level, both in terms of the brazenness of the lies and their sheer number. Both the depth and the breadth of the dishonesty make it hard even for those of us who do this for a living to keep track.    More

AFL-CIO 2017 Convention Resolution:

WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER

[…]WHEREAS, it is vital that the workers and our unions promote a foreign policy independent of the political interests and foreign policy of Wall Street and corporate America;  THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that the AFL-CIO promotes and advocates for a foreign policy based on international solidarity of all workers, mutual respect of all nations and national sovereignty, and calls upon the president and Congress to make war truly the last resort in our country’s foreign relations, and that we seek peace and reconciliation wherever possible; and 

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the AFL-CIO calls upon the president and Congress to bring the war dollars home and make our priority as a nation rebuilding this country’s crumbling infrastructure, creating millions of living wage jobs and addressing human needs such as education, health care, housing, retirement security and jobs. . .    More

Disaster Capitalists Take Big Step Toward Privatizing Puerto Rico’s Electric Grid

The federally appointed control board announced that it intends to put the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, or Prepa — the island’s sole, beleaguered power utility — under the direction of an emergency manager.  Months before either hurricanes Maria or Irma struck, the board had been enthusiastic about the prospect of privatizing Prepa, which is $9 billion in debt. Oversight board chair José B. Carrión III was explicit about one of Zamot’s main goals shortly after he was brought on: to “privatize the Electric Power Authority as soon as possible,” as he told the Puerto Rican newspaper Metro at the end of August.   In June, four of his seven colleagues on that control board wrote a Wall Street Journal op-edcalling openly to privatize Prepa, and in July they contracted with the consultancy firm McKinsey to — among other things — draw up “detailed privatization/corporatization plans supported by financial models and market engagement.”    More

In Victory for Standing Rock Sioux, Court Finds That Dakota Access Pipeline Violated Law

The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe won a significant victory today in its fight to protect the Tribe’s drinking water and ancestral lands from the Dakota Access pipeline.  A federal judge ruled that the federal permits authorizing the pipeline to cross the Missouri River just upstream of the Standing Rock reservation, which were hastily issued by the Trump administration just days after the inauguration, violated the law in certain critical respects.  In a 91-page decision, Judge James Boasberg wrote, “the Court agrees that [the Corps] did not adequately consider the impacts of an oil spill on fishing rights, hunting rights, or environmental justice, or the degree to which the pipeline’s effects are likely to be highly controversial.”    More

THE FAMILY THAT BUILT AN OPIOID EMPIRE OF PAIN

In the past, doctors had been reluctant to prescribe strong opioids—as synthetic drugs derived from opium are known—except for acute cancer pain and end-of-life palliative care, because of a long-standing, and well-founded, fear about the addictive properties of these drugs…  Purdue launched OxyContin with a marketing campaign that attempted to counter this attitude and change the prescribing habits of doctors. The company funded research and paid doctors to make the case that concerns about opioid addiction were overblown, and that OxyContin could safely treat an ever-wider range of maladies. Sales representatives marketed OxyContin as a product “to start with and to stay with.”  … Since 1999, two hundred thousand Americans have died from overdoses related to OxyContin and other prescription opioids. Many addicts, finding prescription painkillers too expensive or too difficult to obtain, have turned to heroin. According to the American Society of Addiction Medicine, four out of five people who try heroin today started with prescription painkillers.    More

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NEW WARS / OLD WARS – What Could Possibly Go Wrong

STEPHEN KINZER:

How to End the Endless War

The upcoming vote — if House leaders let it happen — will be about far more than Yemen. It is a test of whether Congress will continue allowing presidents to make decisions that push the United States into war, or whether it will awaken from its constitutional coma and assert its own right to do so. More than 200 years ago, when President Thomas Jefferson asked for authorization to send warships to fight pirates in North Africa, he said presidents are “unauthorized by the Constitution, without the sanction of Congress, to go beyond the line of defense.” Does that principle still apply, or does today’s rapidly changing “threat matrix” mean that Congress should stay out of the business of war? This question lies behind the upcoming congressional vote on Yemen.    More

H.Con.Res.81 – “Directing the President pursuant to section 5(c) of the War Powers Resolution to remove United States Armed Forces from unauthorized hostilities in the Republic of Yemen” with 38 cosponsors, including McGovern, Capuano and Clarke from Massachusetts.

WHY WERE US SOLDIERS EVEN IN NIGER?

President Trump’s inexplicable fight with the widow of a Green Beret who was killed in Niger has sparked a political firestorm that shows no signs of dying down. It’s also brought new attention to a little-known aspect of Washington’s ongoing war on terror: The Pentagon is rapidly expanding its presence in Africa and is now engaged in military operations — including active combat — in more than half a dozen African countries…  The missions rely on a broad array of legal authorities but have one particularly important thing in common: They have never been specifically authorized by Congress, let alone discussed and debated by the American public.   More

Senators Stunned to Discover We Have 1,000 Troops in Niger

The death of four U.S. Special Operations Forces troops in Niger has generated a raucous conversation about how presidents should comfort bereft Gold Star families.  But, quietly, it’s fueling a more difficult debate than whether a phone call or a letter suffices in the aftermath of tragedy; mainly, why were U.S. troops in the country in the first place, and does Congress need to exert more authority when it comes such deployments?  Many lawmakers assiduously duck these questions. But on the Sunday shows, several were forced to address them in the aftermath of four soldiers dying under still-mysterious circumstances near the small town of Tongo Tongo. In the process, two powerful Senators tacitly admitted that they hadn’t even known the extent of U.S. involvement in Niger in the first place.    More

Ukraine Expects Trump to Approve Arms Deliveries

Multiple current and former officials and congressional aides tell FP that the president is deciding on the dispatch of lethal aid for Ukraine, which is mired in a three-year conflict with Russian-backed separatists in the eastern part of the country. Sources say the defensive arms could include sniper rifles, counter-artillery radar, air defense hardware, and possibly even Javelin antitank missiles.  If the United States were to finally send arms to Ukraine, it would mark a significant shift in U.S. policy — and a dramatic departure from Trump’s campaign rhetoric. Ahead of the Republican National Convention in July 2016, the Trump team worked to make sure the platform would not include a call to arm Ukraine.   M