WARS
ABROAD, WARS AT HOME
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"
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
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
The 
current situation in Korea, and calls on our
members and supporters to take the following actions to stop the provocative
US-S. Korean war drills in Korea:
Hugh Thompson Chapter 91 in San Diego
CA
In a recent article, historian and retired
Colonel Andrew Bacevich raised six questions that have been ignored in the 2016
presidential race. Most notably, he says, "Nearly 15 years after this 'war' was
launched by George W. Bush, why hasn’t 'the most powerful military in the
world,' 'the finest fighting force in the history of the world’ won it? Why
isn't victory anywhere in sight?" 
Participants are needed for the 2016 NGO
Conference to be held in South Korea in late May/early June. The planning
committee is also seeking participants. 
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