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

WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

THE HIDDEN COSTS OF AMERICA'S WARS

…the detachment many Americans feel in relation to those post-9/11 wars is matched -- even fed -- by the opacity of government information about them. This no doubt stems, at least in part, from a cultural trend: the demobilization of the American people. The government demands nothing of the public, not even minimalist acts like buying war bonds (as in World War II), which would not only help offset the country’s growing debt from its war-making, but might also generate actual concern and interest in those wars. (Even if the government didn't spend another dollar on its wars, our research shows that we will still have to pay a breathtaking $8 trillion extra in interest on past war borrowing by the 2050s.)  … Congress has largely been demobilized when it comes to America’s wars (though not when it comes to pouring ever more federal dollars into the U.S. military)…  The idea that it might be possible to work toward ending this country’s “forever wars” was essentially unmentionable.  Such a conversation could only come about if Americans -- particularly young Americans -- were to become passionate about stopping the spread of the war on terror, now considered little short of a “generational struggle” by the U.S. military.      More

Massachusetts Workers need a Higher Minimum Wage and Paid Family Medical Leave!

Massachusetts Peace Action helped collect the necessary signatures to put both the $15/hr minimum wage and a Paid Family Medical Leave Act for the Commonwealth on the 2018 ballot. Now RaiseUp is mounting a massive People's Lobby campaign to press the Legislature to do its job and pass both of these measures which the people so clearly support through the regular legislative process. Join the Massachusetts Peace Action team supporting  RaiseUp Massachusetts!

VIETNAM’S LESSONS AND THE U.S. CULTURE OF VIOLENCE

It should be kept in mind that the American gun culture, with its accompanying violence, is not new. The 2014 book Gun Violence and Public Life documents this history. If anything has changed from the 1960s to today it is that the public now has access to military grade weapons. What also existed then as now is a culture of bigotry and racism. In the 1960s this was just being confronted by the Civil Rights Movement. It all made for an explosive mix that carried over to influence perceptions of and behavior toward the Vietnamese…  The lessons of Vietnam, and a greater awareness of the massacres that occurred during this war, speak to the need to reform U.S. culture – to make it less violent and more tolerant. Thus the Vietnam experience should be incorporated into the current debate about guns in America. It would be a major achievement if the 1968 slaughter at My Lai could help stop today’s slaughter on the streets of the U.S.     More

What no politician wants to admit about gun control

Congress's decision not to pass background checks is not what's keeping the US from European gun violence levels. The expiration of the assault weapons ban is not behind the gap. What's behind the gap, plenty of research indicates, is that Americans have more guns. The statistics are mind-blowing: America has 4.4 percent of the world's population but almost half of its civilian-owned guns. Realistically, a gun control plan that has any hope of getting us down to European levels of violence is going to mean taking a huge number of guns away from a huge number of gun owners.  Other countries have done exactly that. Australia, for example, enacted a mandatory gun buyback that achieved that goal, and saw firearm suicides fall as a result. But the reforms those countries enacted are far more dramatic than anything US politicians are calling for — and even they wouldn't get us to where many other developed countries are.     More

AGAINST “NATIONAL SECURITY CITIZENSHIP”

No part of the vision statement for the Movement for Black Lives received as much immediate mainstream pushback as its stinging repudiation of U.S. foreign policy. Its demands, which included a call for military and security divestment, permanent opposition to the War on Terror, and a declaration of solidarity with Palestinians, generated criticism about specific policies (especially with respect to Israel and Palestine) and about the perceived disconnect between police brutality toward black citizens and U.S. military practices in distant lands. The implication was that by extending their vision beyond the national borders, black freedom activists were combining issues that were not inherently connected and better left to the security experts.  Moreover, critics were uncomfortable with the statement’s rejection of one of the most common mechanisms for outsider groups to gain inclusion in U.S. life: national security citizenship. By this I mean the idea that one shows one’s worthiness for membership by supporting—and being willing to fight and die for—the security policies of the state.   More

A Supreme Court Decision To Gut Public Sector Unions Could Backfire on the Right

Janus v. AFSCME, which begins oral arguments on February 26, is the culmination of a years-long right-wing plot to financially devastate public-sector unions. And a Supreme Court ruling against AFSCME would indeed have that effect, by banning public-sector unions from collecting mandatory fees from the workers they are compelled to represent. But if the Court embraces the weaponization of free speech as a cudgel to beat up on unions, the possibility of other, unintended consequences is beginning to excite some union advocates and stir fear among conservative constitutional scholars.  The ruling could both wildly increase workers’ bargaining power and clog the lower courts with First Amendment challenges to routine uses of taxpayer money. At a minimum, it has the potential to turn every public sector workplace dispute into a constitutional controversy—and one Midwest local is already laying plans to maximize the chaos this could cause.   More

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NEW WARS / OLD WARS – What Could Possibly Go Wrong

STOP TRUMP'S PUSH PREPARING FOR NUCLEAR WAR

It is now more imperative than ever that we act to help block the plans of Donald Trump and his generals to recklessly launch a new nuclear weapons arms race. The Trump-Pentagon Nuclear Posture Review supersedes conventional policy by expressly declaring the intention to launch nuclear weapons to counter conventional, non-nuclear military aggressions and even non-military cyber-attacks.The new “strategy” proposes the creation of entirely new weapons systems and capabilities designed for “tactical” – or “limited” – nuclear war. These include new “low yield” nuclear weapons launched from submarines and cruise missiles fired from the air. Heightening the stakes, it is impossible for other nations to distinguish a nuclear from a conventional weapon once fired, which could lead to nuclear retaliation by an adversary in response to a US conventional attack.

Please help us limit the President's nuclear powers by contacting your congressperson today.

Pentagon seeks massive boost in bomb budget for Iraq and Syria

The Donald Trump administration is seeking nearly $2 billion in precision-guided weapons for the Iraq and Syria battlefields, as the US-led coalition fighting the Islamic State (IS) faces increased threats from forces loyal to Bashar al-Assad. That’s 20% more than the Pentagon spent on munitions in all Middle East war zones in 2017.  A spokeswoman for the Joint Chiefs of Staff told Al-Monitor that the Pentagon has requested $1.8 billion to replace expended munitions — including precision-guided bomb kits, small diameter bombs and Hellfire missiles — used in 2017 to help liberate Mosul and Raqqa. The spending boost for munitions is driving the US budget for the anti-IS mission to $15.3 billion for fiscal year 2019, a 15% jump over the $13 billion requested for the current year.     More

Urging Peace Talks, Open Letter From Taliban Asks American People to Recognize Total Failure of 16-Year War

Two and half weeks after President Donald Trump rejected the idea of peace talks with Taliban, the militant group published an open letter to the American people urging them to pressure their government to end the occupation of Afghanistan, now in its 17th year, and engage in peace talks.  The letter, published on the group's website, denounces the Bush administration's justification for launching the invasion, as well as the Trump administration, which "again ordered the perpetuation of the same illegitimate occupation and war against the Afghan people."  … Ongoing failure for U.S. troops is ensured, the group argues. "If the policy of using force is exercised for a hundred more years and a hundred new strategies are adopted, the outcome of all of these will be the same as you have observed over the last six months following the initiation of Trump's new strategy."

The U.S. Returns to 'Great Power Competition,' With a Dangerous New Edge

The Trump administration’s new National Defense Strategy is being touted as a sea change in U.S. foreign policy — a shift from the “war on terrorism” to “great power competition,” a line that would not be out of place in the years leading up to World War I…  Certainly the verbiage about Russia and China is alarming. Russia is routinely described as “aggressive,” “revisionist,” and “expansionist.” In a recent attack on China, U.S. Defense Secretary Rex Tillerson described China’s trade with Latin America as “imperial,” an ironic choice of words given Washington’s more overtly imperial history in the region…  The problem with designating “great powers” as your adversaries is that they might just take your word for it and respond accordingly.     More

A PARANOID AMERICA IS GREATLY EXAGGERATING RUSSIAN POWER

Russia stealing an American election? Russia as the great threat? This is the language of paranoia. Russian hackers might have had an impact on the 2016 US election. Putin might indeed have wanted a benevolent US president in the White House. All those things might have been true. But is Russia really a threat to the United States? That part of the story is based on a hallucination…  Sluggish growth in Western economies has led not only to the emergence of all kinds of economic contradictions, but to the return of a ‘Cold War mentality.’ The West, it is suggested, believes that its problems can be resolved by force. This is what the Chinese and the Russians resist. They want to jointly push back against any assertion of uni-polarity by the United States and its allies.  But it remains a defensive statement. Neither China nor Russia is making a push to become the global powerhouse. They are merely seeking to rebalance a world order that has – since the end of the Cold War – tilted unhealthily towards the United States.     More