WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME
Today, Friday, October 5
EMERGENCY PROTEST:
BOSTON SAYS STOP KAVANAUGH!
The Senate is closing in on a final vote for Kavanaugh's appointment. The only thing that can stop him is mass action and demonstrations across the country saying loud and clear WE WON'T STAND FOR THIS! We will rally at the State House downtown and then march to the Boston Courthouse for a final rally. Tell all your friends, coworkers, and family!
Let's show the Senate that #MeToo and the women's movement is a force to be reckoned with.
Let's show the Senate that #MeToo and the women's movement is a force to be reckoned with.
Presumption of Innocence Is for Privileged Men Like Brett Kavanaugh, Not for Young Men of Color
Since the hearings, Republicans have rushed to explain and defend Kavanaugh’s furious testimony, framing his rage as the rational response of an innocent man falsely accused. Some conservatives have even abdicated the pretense of Kavanaugh’s innocence, writing articles arguing that “Kavanaugh should be confirmed to the Supreme Court even if he’s guilty.” The standard by which we should judge Kavanaugh, they seem to say, is beyond guilt or innocence. It’s something more. It’s beyond credibility. He’s literally beyond a reasonable doubt… How horrible is it for one extremely powerful man to be barred from ascending to an even higher, more influential position — at least while a credible claim of assault is investigated? Is it more horrible than condemning five minors to death without due process, 11 days after their arrest? A concern for “due process” was no bar against Trump’s public ire then… Trump finds it unconscionable that Kavanaugh — raised in a wealthy family, sent to a prestigious prep school, admitted to Yale as a legacy student, plucked to sit on the second most powerful court in the land (without ever having spent a day as a judge), and now nominated to the Supreme Court — might not get exactly what he wants. More
BRETT KAVANAUGH AS A SYMBOL OF WHITE GRIEVANCE
The political fight over whether to seat Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court -- a man who has been accused of sexual assault and was nominated by a man who has bragged about sexual assault -- seems, to most people anyway, to be a fight primarily about gender. But if you flip on Fox News these days, you would think this battle is largely about race, and that white men are being subject to false rape allegations to perpetuate some kind of anti-white oppression — an inverse of the way false rape accusations were used as pretext for lynching black men in the late 19th and early 20th centuries… To be clear, there's no doubt that race — as well as class, education, wealth and family connections — has always been a part of this story. Many commentators have written and discussed the way that Kavanaugh's life growing up surrounded by immense privilege shielded him from all sorts of consequences for misbehavior. But that makes the race angle Fox is peddling even harder to swallow, since the kind of privilege that Kavanaugh enjoyed is rare even among white men, only a handful of whom are positioned to attend fancy prep schools and gain legacy admission to an Ivy League college. More
Judge blocks Trump’s efforts to end Temporary Protected Status for 300,000 immigrants
On Wednesday night, a federal judge in California put a hold on the administration’s plans to stop renewing the legal status of 300,000 people living in the US from El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua and Sudan. All four countries were set to lose Temporary Protected Status over the next year — meaning that immigrants who’d lived in the US for years and often decades would be forced to leave or risk deportation. The more than 1,000 Sudanese living in the US with TPS, for example, were set to lose their legal status on November 5, 2019 — barely a month from the ruling granting them a reprieve… At some point, it’s likely that the TPS case will make its way to the Supreme Court, where the administration will likely prevail — if it has appointed a conservative justice by then. In the meantime, the TPS holders who were forced to make plans to leave the country or slink into the shadows after decades in the US now have some hope they’ll be able to stay — but even less certainty about how long that will be. More
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NEW WARS / OLD WARS – What Could Possibly Go Wrong
As Isis is defeated, the Trump administration targets Iran
The exaggeration of “the Iranian threat” by the Trump administration this week at the UN General Assembly in New York was very like what was being said about Iraq fifteen years earlier. The National Security Advisor John Bolton threatened that “the murderous regime and its supporters will face significant consequences if they do not change their behaviour. We are watching, and we will come after you.” The US military intervention in Syria, previously targeting Isis, will in future be directed against Iranian influence. US policy in Syria and Iraq has been likened to playing chess while mistaking the knight for the bishop and thinking that castles move diagonally. The US has decided to retain a military force in northeast Syria in order to thwart Iranian ambitions, but the country most affected by this is not Iran but Turkey. The US can only stay in this part of Syria in alliance with the Syrian Kurds, whose de facto state, which they call Rojava, Turkey is pledged to eliminate. More
TRUMP’S MARCH TO WAR WITH IRAN
There is a very real possibility that Donald Trump will start a new war in the Middle East. If that’s not his intention, then his administration is doing a damn good job of faking it… War would not in any conceivable scenario lead to the establishment of a popular, democratic, and pro-Western government in Iran. With war would come chaos… On October 3, Bolton commandeered the White House podium to announce that the administration is cutting diplomatic ties even further. The United States has terminated, he said, the 1955 Treaty of Amity—a basic diplomatic accord that regulates economic and consular ties between America and Iran… The day Trump abandoned the Iran anti-nuclear accord, Bolton signaled that “what comes next” would be “a much broader resolution of the malign behavior that we see from Iran.” He quickly established an Iran Action Group to coordinate activities across agencies. The operation appears modeled on the White House Iraq Group created by the Bush administration to sell the public on the invasion of Iraq. More
How the Tentacles of the U.S. Military Are Strangling the Planet
The United States military has a staggering 883 military bases in 183 countries. In contrast, Russia has 10 such bases—8 of them in the former USSR. China has one overseas military base. There is no country with a military footprint that replicates that of the United States. The U.S. bases in Japan are only a small part of the massive infrastructure that allows the U.S. military to be hours away from armed action against any part of the planet. There is no proposal to downsize the U.S. military footprint. In fact, there are only plans to increase it. The United States has long sought to build a base in Poland, whose government now courts the White House with the proposal that it be named Fort Trump. Currently, there are U.S.-NATO military bases in Germany, Hungary and Bulgaria with U.S.-NATO troops deployments in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania… In mid-November, in Dublin, Ireland, a coalition of organizations from around the world will hold the First International Conference Against US/NATO Military Bases. This conference is part of the newly formed Global Campaign Against US/NATO Military Bases. More
Erik Prince, in Kabul, pushes privatization of the Afghan war
More than a year after his plan to privatize the Afghan war was first shot down by the Trump administration, Erik Prince returned late last month to Kabul to push the proposal on the beleaguered government in Afghanistan, where many believe he has the ear — and the potential backing — of the U.S. president. Prince swept through the capital, meeting with influential political figures within and outside the administration of President Ashraf Ghani. “He’s winning Afghans over with the assumption that he’s close to Trump,” said one well-informed Afghan, adding that many of Prince’s ideas feed into frustration with and within the Afghan military, particularly given its high casualty rate. But Prince also sparked what Ghani, in a statement Thursday, condemned as “a debate” within the country over “adding new foreign and unaccountable elements to our fight.” “Under no circumstances,” the statement said, will Afghanistan “allow the counterterrorism fight to become a private, for-profit business.” More
THE SAUDI LOBBY JUGGERNAUT AND THE US WAR IN YEMEN
It was May 2017. The Saudis were growing increasingly nervous. For more than two years they had been relying heavily on U.S. military support and bombs to defeat Houthi rebels in Yemen. Now, the Senate was considering a bipartisan resolution to cut off military aid and halt a big sale of American-made bombs to Saudi Arabia. Fortunately for them, despite mounting evidence that the U.S.-backed, supplied, and fueled air campaign in Yemen was targeting civilians, the Saudi government turned out to have just the weapon needed to keep those bombs and other kinds of aid coming their way: an army of lobbyists. That year, their forces in Washington included members of more than two dozen lobbying and public relations firms… Fast forward to late 2018 and that very same lobby is now fighting vigorously to defeat a House measure that would end U.S. support for the Saudi war in Yemen. They’re flooding congressional offices with their requests, in effect asking Congress to ignore the more than 10,000 civilians who have died in Yemen, the U.S. bombs that have been the cause of many of those deaths, and a civil war that has led to a resurgence of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP. More
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