WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

DONALD TRUMP AND THE NEXT CRASH

A quarter of the way into 2018, shadows of 2008 are already emerging. Only two months ago, the Dow logged its worst single-day point decline in history before bouncing back with vigor. In the meantime, the country whose banks caused the last crisis faces record consumer and corporate debt levels and a vulnerable geopolitical global landscape.  True, the unemployment rate is significantly lower than it was at the height of the financial crisis, but for Main Street, growth hasn’t been quite so apparent. About one in five U.S. jobs still pays a median income below the federal poverty line. Median household income is only up 5.3% since 2008 and remains well below where it was in 1998, if you adjust for inflation. Workforce participation remains nearly as low as it's ever been. Meanwhile, the top 1% of American earners saw their incomes go up by leaps and bounds since the Fed started manufacturing money -- to more than 40 times that of the bottom 90%...  So, today, we stand near -- how near we don’t yet know -- the edge of a dangerous financial precipice. The risks posed by the largest of the private banks still exist, only now they’re even bigger than they were in 2007-2008 and operating in an arena of even more debt.   More

TEACHING A LESSON: Class Conflict in Red State America

Teachers in red-state America are hard at work teaching us all a lesson. The American mythos has always rested on a belief that this country was born out of a kind of immaculate conception, that the New World came into being and has forever after been preserved as a land without the class hierarchies and conflicts that so disfigured Europe.  The strikes, rallies, and walkouts of public school teachers in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, soon perhaps Arizona, and elsewhere are a stunning reminder that class has always mattered far more in our public and private lives than our origin story would allow. Insurgent teachers are instructing us all about a tale of denial for which we’ve paid a heavy price…  Despite their past history of working-class rebelliousness, the sight of teachers striking (and sometimes even breaking the law to do so) still has a remarkable ability to shock the rest of us. Somehow, it just doesn’t fit the image, still so strong, of the mild-mannered, middle-class, law-abiding professionals that public school teachers are supposed to be.    More

'May Day' Militancy Is Needed to Create the Economy We Need

In most of the world, May Day is a day for workers to unite, but May Day is not recognized in the United States even though it originated here. On May 1, 1886, more than 300,000 workers in 13,000 businesses across the US walked off their jobs for the first May Day in history. It began in 1884, when the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions proclaimed at their convention that workers themselves would institute the 8-hour day on May 1, 1886. In 1885 they called for protests and strikes to create the 8-hour work day. May Day was part of a revolt against abusive working conditions that caused deaths of workers, poverty wages, poor working conditions and long hours…  The future is more than re-legalizing unions and raising wages and benefits, it is building wealth in the population and creating structural changes to the economy. This requires a new economy where workers are owners, in worker cooperatives, so their labor builds power and wealth.

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NEW WARS / OLD WARS – What Could Possibly Go Wrong

Congress Offers a Bipartisan Blank Check to Trump for War

The Corker-Kaine bill would institutionalize the inverse of that. It would essentially rubber stamp the president’s authority, for instance, to continue the ongoing shooting wars in at least seven countries where the U.S. is currently dropping bombs or firing off other munitions. Worse yet, it provides a mechanism for the president to declare nearly any future group an “associated force” or “successor force” linked to one of America’s current foes and so ensure that Washington’s nearly 17-year-old set of forever wars can go on into eternity without further congressional approval.  By transferring the invocation of war powers to the executive branch, Congress would, in fact, make it even more difficult to stop a hawkish president from deploying U.S. soldiers ever more expansively. In other words, the onus for war would then be officially shifted from a president needing to make a case to a skeptical Congress to an unfettered executive sanctioned to wage expansive warfare as he and his advisers or “his” generals please.   More

On the other hand, a bipartisan group of House members are urging the Senate to re-assert the Congressional authority on waging war – 15 coogners, including only McGovern so far from our state; and Mass State Sen. Barbara L'Italien (candidate for the open seat being vacated by Nikki Tsongas) has filed Resolution SD.2488 instructing our Congressional delegation to vote limits on the President’s authority to launch a nuclear strike.

Army Special Forces Secretly Help Saudis Combat Threat From Yemen Rebels

For years, the American military has sought to distance itself from a brutal civil war in Yemen, where Saudi-led forces are battling rebels who pose no direct threat to the United States.  But late last year, a team of about a dozen Green Berets arrived on Saudi Arabia’s border with Yemen, in a continuing escalation of America’s secret wars.  With virtually no public discussion or debate, the Army commandos are helping locate and destroy caches of ballistic missiles and launch sites that Houthi rebels in Yemen are using to attack Riyadh and other Saudi cities…  They appear to contradict Pentagon statements that American military assistance to the Saudi-led campaign in Yemen is limited to aircraft refueling, logistics and general intelligence sharing.    More

The Iran crisis presents a bigger danger to peace than North Korea

The Iran crisis is truly dangerous in a way that was never quite true of the North Korea crisis. In Korea, we are talking of a peace agreement that would replace the Panmunjom Armistice of 1953, but there has been no war going on there for 65 years, though there have been a few sporadic clashes. Compare this with the position of Iran which is a rival for influence with the US in a ferocious war in Syria and one that in Iraq that is currently receding, but could easily blaze up again…  Short of diplomatic options, the White House might view military action against Iran as an increasingly attractive approach. The Iran and North Korea crises are very different but in both cases Trump is behaving as if the US is turning into a stronger power when, thanks to his leadership, it is becoming a weaker one.    More

US Public Support for Iran Deal Returns to Record High

With 10 days to go until a deadline for President Donald Trump to decide whether to keep the United States in the Iranian nuclear agreement, public backing for the deal matched a record high in a nationwide poll that also shows net support at its highest level…  Net public support is at a record level — 30 percentage points — in the most recent survey. The share of voters opposing the deal — 26 percent — is at the lowest point since Morning Consult began tracking the topic in August 2015.  Sixty-eight percent of Democrats and 51 percent of independents said they support the deal, which has been pilloried by Republicans since its inception. GOP voters were split: Forty-six percent backed the deal and 42 percent opposed it. The poll carries a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.    More

NETANYAHU: Don't look here where we'reshooting children, look over there at Iran

Netanyahu instanced no evidence at all that Iran is out of compliance with the 2015 deal, and UN inspectors continually have affirmed that Tehran *is* in compliance. His allegation that Iran’s recent missiles are designed to be fitted with warheads is simply false.  So why try to put Iran on the front burner of American war-making? It is a desperate attempt on Netanyahu’s part to divert world attention from the ongoing Israeli Apartheid discrimination against the stateless Palestinians, which it militarily occupies (directly with jackboots and colonial settlers on the West Bank, indirectly with military encirclement and the sniping of innocent protesters in Gaza).    More

Netanyahu claims 'Iran lied' about its nuclear program, but Israel has been lying for decades

Iran’s nuclear archive doubtless looks like a neighborhood lending library compared to Israel’s nuclear archive.  But Israel doesn’t sign conventions, it doesn’t allow inspections and it lies. It mocks and winks – 60 years of continuous nuclear lies. In fact, it has never said a single true word about its nuclear program. It’s all for peaceful purposes, just as Iran claims its nuclear program is. The Dimona reactor was built for lifesaving PET/CT scans at Ichilov Hospital’s nuclear medicine department.  Israel is allowed to lie. Israel is a special case. “Israel won’t be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East,” Shimon Peres said. He was proud of making up this claim, which was the fraud of the century. What is Israel’s policy of nuclear ambiguity if not a series of refusals to tell the truth?  …Can Israel, a fairly violent and aggressive country – in fact, one of the most violent and aggressive in the world today – really convince anyone that nuclear weapons are safe in its hands?    More

Here's something stunning: buried in the text is the information that this was a poll only among Israeli Jews, who make up 75% of the Israeli population.  Imagine a poll of white Christians only that was reported just as “Americans”. . .

44% OF ISRAELIS SUPPORT STRIKE ON IRAN’S NUCLEAR FACILITIES

The prospective replacement of Rex Tillerson with Mike Pompeo clears one of the last apparent hurdles between Donald Trump and his destruction of a significant diplomatic achievement that has been squarely in the interests of the United States, of nuclear nonproliferation, and of the containment of conflict in the Middle East…  . Pompeo also has a long record of Islamophobia and Iranophobia that is more visceral than cognitive. The extreme to which Pompeo is willing to go to act on his obsession about Iran is perhaps best illustrated by his tendentious and irregular effort—taking a page from the playbook of those who sold the Iraq War to the American public—to conjure up an alliance between Iran and al-Qaeda, even though no such alliance has existed and those two players are on opposite sides of most sectarian and geopolitical divides that matter.    More