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

WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

 

Tell Congress a Message: Vote for the People's Budget in March!

Each year, the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) offers an alternative budget resolution to the “austerity” budgets supported by the House Majority and Speaker Ryan. The People's Budget offers a solid blueprint to:

• Invest more than $1 trillion in housing, education, transportation, clean energy and safe water to create millions of jobs
• Prevent cuts, restore social spending and reduce poverty by half in 10 years
• Increase educational opportunities, provide Pre-K and debt-free college for all
• Increase, not cut, Social Security and health care
• Close corporate tax loopholes, tax Wall Street speculation and raise taxes on the top 2%
• Redirect wasteful Pentagon spending and direct to peoples needs, ending Pentagon pork and the overseas contingency "slush fund" 

The People's Budget is backed by hard numbers and research by the Economic Policy Institute.

Send your message to Congress here.

 

INVESTING IN PEOPLE MATTERS: A Black Man’s perspective on The People’s Budget

If adopted by Congress, The People’s Budget would reduce poverty by half in ten years, fund DOJ programs that reduce recidivism, and provide investment in communities of color. While many argue that investing in law enforcement and prisons increase safety and promote law and order, the evidence proves otherwise…  True crime deterrence relies on our ability to provide opportunities (mental health services, drug treatment, employment, etc.) to all members of society; this is why investing in people matters.  To solve the challenges created by the historic marginalization of the urban poor, and current trends in criminal justice policy, we must stop dealing with social challenges such as homelessness, mental illness, drug abuse, and poverty through incarceration.  Instead, we must recognize the value of all members of our society and addresses social issues in a humane and thoughtful way.  The People’s Budget is a good first step in reducing the nation’s incarceration rate and increasing access to opportunity for all.    More

 

FBI Orders High School Teachers To Report Anti-Government Students

Labeled “Preventing Violent Extremism in Schools,” the guidelines instruct educators to look for loosely-defined indicators that a student could be a threat. “Talking about traveling to places that sound suspicious,” “using code words or unusual language,” “using several different cell phones and private messaging apps,” and “studying or taking pictures of potential targets (like a government building),” are all listed as potential warning signs.  Educators note that many of these so-called indicators are too broad to be effective, as they could be applied to almost any teenager. Other indicators seem specifically geared toward targeting Muslims.  “In practice, schools seeking to implement this document will end up monitoring Muslim students disproportionately,” Arun Kundnani, a professor at New York University, told AlterNet.   More

 

Survey: AMERICAN VOTERS WOULD CUT DEFENSE SPENDING BY AT LEAST $12B

While some Republican presidential candidates have called for increased defense spending, a new survey shows that a majority of American voters would actually decrease it by at least $12 billion.  They would also cut the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and one aircraft carrier, showed the survey, which was conducted by the University of Maryland's non-partisan Program for Public Consultation, between Dec. 20 and Feb. 1.   "There's been some surprise that there hasn't been more support for increases, particularly on the Republican side...given how much the Republican candidates have emphasized that," said the survey's director, Dr. Steven Kull.  In the survey, a representative sample of approximately 7,000 registered voters across the country were given detailed, non-partisan information vetted by congressional staffers and experts about the 2016 defense budget.  The majority trimmed the 2016 defense budget by $12 billion, including cutting $4 billion for ground forces, $3 billion for nuclear weapons, $2 billion for air power, $2 billion for naval forces and $1 billion for missile defense.   More

 

F-35: Trillion Dollar Warplane’s Radar Doesn’t Work

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of austerity, it was the age of a trillion dollar warplane that no one could make work.   The financial sink hole known as the F-35 continues to fail the most basic flight and sensor tests. The warplane, estimated to have a total cost around $1.5 trillion, has already come up short in simulated dogfights with the F-16. Yes, the new and improved model is worse than a plane introduced in 1978… Now, The Guardian is reporting the plane’s radar does not operate effectively and often requires the pilots to “turn it off and on again.” Might that be important for a fighter jet?  … The costs continue to spiral on this trillion dollar turkey. Even if the plane worked, no one needs it nor does it fulfill any current combat missions, such as striking terrorist groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda which have no air force.   More

 

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PRIMARY SEASON . .  after Michigan

 

The Transformative Power of Democratic Uprisings

Bernie Sanders's insurgent presidential campaign has opened up a debate about how social change happens in our society. The official version of how progress is won -- currently voiced by mainstream pundits and members of a spooked Democratic Party establishment -- goes something like this: politics is a tricky business, gains coming through the work of pragmatic insiders who know how to maneuver within the system. In order to get things done, you have to play the game, be realistic, and accept the established limits of debate in Washington, D.C… Social change is seldom either as incremental or predictable as many insiders suggest. Every once in a while, an outburst of resistance seems to break open a world of possibility, creating unforeseen opportunities for transformation…  The beauty of impractical movements is that they confound established expectations about the political future, which means it’s difficult to predict when and where new outbreaks of defiance and hope will succeed in capturing the public imagination.   More

 

Why Bernie Sanders’s Win in Michigan Is Huge

…we have a vivid reminder of how much the Sanders message matters. And why it remains far too early to declare the nomination contest over. As FiveThirtyEight’s Harry Enten admits, to find an upset on the same scale as what Sanders achieved in Michigan, you’d have to go back over 30 years. Those polls that put Illinois and Ohio out of Sanders’s reach look a lot less reliable today. And if Sanders wins in those states, it won’t be his viability as a candidate that is in question.    More

 

Majority US Public Opinion is Mocked by the Ongoing Presidential Election

Most Americans continue to favor real national health insurance on the single-payer Canadian model over corporate health insurance; large-scale government job programs over “deficit reduction;” a significant “peace dividend” to move federal resources from the giant Pentagon budget to meeting social needs; serious environmental regulation and protection over the destruction of livable ecology; and a significantly more democratic distribution of wealth and income.  The United States’ unelected and interrelated “deep state” dictatorships of money and empire go back long before Trump cam on the scene as a serious presidential candidate. They have always given a cold response to such popular sentiments: So what? Who cares?   More

 

Washington Post Ran 16 Negative Stories on Bernie Sanders in 16 Hours

In what has to be some kind of record, the Washington Post ran 16 negative stories on Bernie Sanders in 16 hours, between roughly 10:20 PM EST Sunday, March 6, to 3:54 PM EST Monday, March 7—a window that includes the crucial Democratic debate in Flint, Michigan, and the next morning’s spin… All of these posts paint his candidacy in a negative light, mainly by advancing the narrative that he’s a clueless white man incapable of winning over people of color or speaking to women. Even the one article about Sanders beating Trump implies this is somehow a surprise—despite the fact that Sanders consistently out-polls Hillary Clinton against the New York businessman.   More

 

Andrew Bacevich: Why Is No Candidate Offering an Alternative to Militarized U.S. Foreign Policy?

Well, if we look at the remaining Republican candidates, they are all clearly different flavors, but they’re all militarists. I would certainly evaluate Secretary Clinton as an exceedingly hawkish Democrat. Her principal achievement, if you want to call it that, as secretary of state was in pushing the intervention in Libya, which has produced catastrophic consequences.  Senator Sanders, however, is largely—it seems to me, hasn’t laid out his position. One might anticipate that given his general left-leaning view of the world, that he might be somewhat less inclined to rely on U.S. military power, might be more willing to consider alternatives to military power, but he has not yet, at least to my knowledge, really spelled out in detail where he stands on these matters. And frankly, I wish he would. I think he—I think he needs to, in order to move his candidacy beyond the economic and social justice themes that have been the core of his campaign thus far.   More

TWILIGHT OF THE NEOCONSERVATIVES?

The once-fringe neoconservative movement, in the space of a few short years, had seized first their party's intellectual power centers, then its legislative agenda, and now the commanding heights of American leadership itself. Against all odds, they had won.  Today, less than two decades after seizing the Republican Party, they are on the verge of losing it. The party's two leading presidential candidates, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, are promising to break from neoconservatism — and voters seem to be responding.  Neoconservatives are fighting back, but they're losing. Republican elites might still support them, but the voters do not seem to…  Neoconservative party elites are now announcing they will vote against Trump if he wins the primary, and that they may even leave or seek to divide the party itself. But it appears possible it is the party that is leaving them.    More

 

Hedge Funds Pumping Money into 2016 Election

Hedge fund managers are upping their game in this election season, with Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton and Republican Ted Cruz the biggest beneficiaries, Reuters' review of Federal Election Commission filings found. "About $47 million has been lavished on presidential candidates and lawmakers and the political action committees that support them by two dozen of the industry's top managers in the first 13 months of this election season," the news agency reports. In fact, hedge fund managers are on track "to more than double the amount they gave in the 2012 election campaign."   More