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WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME
A Shutdown for the 99 Percent, Concierge Government for the 1 Percent
Over Christmas, the shutdown threatened to stop the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, from issuing flood insurance certificates. According to federal law, FEMA must provide flood insurance certifications before banks may issue federally backed mortgages to prospective homeowners living in federally designated floodplains — even in areas that FEMA has determined should not be built on due to high risk of flooding. The National Flood Insurance Program of 1968 ensures that FEMA has the ability to issue and pay out claims for the insurance. Without the certificates, roughly 40,000 closings a month would be at risk, resulting in millions in lost revenue for banks and mortgage companies. So it came as no surprise when interest groupssuccessfully lobbied a bipartisan congressional cohort to temporarily reauthorize the NFIP through May on the eve of the shutdown. The stopgap bill was signed into law by Trump on December 21, hours before the federal government shuttered. More
America Needs Economic Rights. Now Is the Time to Push for Them.
Seventy-five years ago today, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt used his State of the Union address to declare that the government should guarantee a basic floor of well-being. Political rights alone, he argued, could not assure “equality in the pursuit of happiness,” he argued. “True individual freedom cannot exist without security and independence. Necessitous men are not free men.” FDR was calling for a second Bill of Rights—an Economic Bill of Rights—that would include the right to employment, housing, education, health care, and an economy free of unchecked corporate and monopoly power… This moment demands a framework for upending the structures that are driving inequality today. An agenda focused on realizing economic rights could do just that. More
BILLIONAIRES vs. LA SCHOOLS
Unlike many labor actions, the Los Angeles teachers’ strike is not really about wages or benefits. At its core, this is a struggle to defend public schools against the privatizing drive of a small-but-powerful group of billionaires. The plan of these business leaders is simple: break-up the school district into thirty-two competing “portfolio” networks, in order to replace public schools with privately run charters. As firm believers in the dogmas of market fundamentalism, these influential downsizers truly believe that it’s possible to improve education by running it like a private business. Not coincidentally, privatization would also open up huge avenues for profit-making — and deal a potentially fatal blow to one of the most well-organized and militant unions in the country, the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA). As union leader Arlene Inouye explains, “This is a struggle to save public education; the existence of public education in our city is on the line.” More
Richard Ojeda on the LA Teachers Strike: “Don’t Make Us Go West Virginia on You”
I’ll never forget the day we saw a Kentucky teacher post a picture of a rally sign that read: “Don’t make us go West Virginia on you!”
On Tuesday, I found myself with a whole lot more pissed-off teachers, this time in Los Angeles, California. After trying to negotiate a contract for more than a year, LA teachers have decided to go West Virginia… The teachers in West Virginia, LA, Oklahoma, Arizona, Kentucky, Colorado, and more are saying something radical with their actions. They are saying that every single child of this nation is worthy. The poor kids. The immigrant kids. The special needs kids. The holler kids. They all deserve a safe place, with dedicated professionals. A place to thrive. A place to explore. A place to be treated as the human beings they are, rather than a problem to be dealt with or another faceless name on an overstuffed roster. Underfunding, privatizing, demonizing teachers, these are all tactics used to destroy a public education system that helped to build the middle class. I often say that the elites of this nation better take care, because if we get to a place in this country where there’s only the dirt poor and the filthy rich, the dirt poor will eat the filthy rich. The teachers strikes are a warning shot. More
IT’S TIME FOR FEDERAL WORKERS TO GET SICK
We have now entered uncharted territory, the longest government shutdown in U.S. history. As President Donald Trump hesitates to call for a state of emergency, which prominent members of his own party oppose and which courts would likely find unconstitutional, a resolution to this standoff is elusive. That brings us to a possibility that would have been unthinkable only a week ago—that collective action by federal workers might be the most plausible mechanism at hand to free the nation from the impasse in which we now are mired. This partial shutdown can continue only as long as hundreds of thousands of federal workers cooperate with it by working without pay, and often having to do more because many of their colleagues have been furloughed. What if the stress levels these workers are enduring began to sicken them in numbers large enough to impede an array of vital functions, including air travel? More
Tuesday, February 12: The TIPS People’s Summit, TPS holders urgently need our support!
We’re just two weeks into 2019, and it’s as if the holidays never happened. Our government is shut down and in turmoil over delusional demands for a border wall. Dreamers are anxiously waiting to hear whether the U.S. Supreme Court will fast-track a case and abruptly end DACA.,And led by the National TPS Alliance, immigrants with Temporary Protected Status in Massachusetts and across the nation are preparing for a major day of action in Washington, D.C., on February 12 to call for legislation to qualify them for green cards.
Over 435,000 people – 12,000+ in Mass. alone – depend on TPS, a special humanitarian program that enables people from countries affected by violence or disasters to live and work legally in the U.S. Protections can be extended for as long as a country remains unsafe, but the Trump administration has been systematically dismantling the program, directly against the advice of its diplomats and experts.
1. Call or email your U.S. Senators and member of Congress today!
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Wants To Raise Taxes On The Rich — And Americans Agree
Freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently captured headlines in her “60 Minutes” interview when she said the U.S. should raise taxes on a portion of the income made by America’s top earners; the idea is that once a person had made at least $10 million in a single year, every dollar coming in after that would be taxed at a rate of up to 70 percent. Many have dismissed the idea, saying it would be too radical and would damage the economy. But the Democratic representative from New York might have hit on something voters want.
A new poll from The Hill and Harris X found that 59 percent of registered voters supported imposing a 70 percent tax rate on every dollar over the 10 millionth a person earns in a year. (Tax rates that apply only to income over a certain threshold are called marginal tax rates.) The idea even received bipartisan support: 71 percent of Democrats, 60 percent of independents and 45 percent of Republicans said they were in favor. More
United States Doesn't Even Make Top 20 on Global Democracy Index
According to the 2018 edition of The Economist Intelligence Unit's Democracy Index, the U.S. doesn't even make the list of top 20—its demonstrably "flawed democracy" notching it the 25th spot. The ranking is based on 60 indicators spanning five interrelated categories: electoral process and pluralism; civil liberties; the functioning of government; political participation; and political culture. Each category gets a 0-10 score, with the final score being the average of those five. Topping out the index are Norway, Iceland, Sweden, New Zealand, and Denmark. More
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NEW WARS / OLD WARS – What Could Possibly Go Wrong
MEDIA WORRIED US WON’T OCCUPY SYRIA FOREVER
Here is a letter I wrote to the Globe:
The Globe gets it wrong about Syria, but of course it is not alone. Nearly the entire bi-partisan pundit universe and the permanent national security consensus is always “We don’t want our troops to be in (fill in a Middle East country) forever, but this is the wrong time to withdraw. . .”
Four Americans died in a suicide bombing in Manbij not because ISIS was strong, -- this could have been the work of a handful of people -- but because our troops were there in Syria for no rational cause.
The simple truth is that the Middle East is in turmoil largely because the US has been intervening there non-stop for decades. Our alliance with Saudi Arabia promoted the spread of violent Wahhabi Islam and led to the creation of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Our invasion of Iraq was the proximate cause for the rise of ISIS. And the billions of dollars we spent trying to overthrow the government of Syria supplied terrorist groups with a flood of weaponry from the US and its allies.
Removing US troops from Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan will not immediately solve all the problems in the Middle East, but at least we will stop pouring gasoline on the regional fires. This is the indeed right time to start disentangling our country from these costly, illegal and counterproductive military interventions far from home.
The alternative is the forever war we have been fighting for the past generation, costing thousands of American lives – and many times more of the locals – and wasting trillions of dollars
NO, US TROOP DEATHS IN SYRIA DON'T CONTRADICT DEFEAT OF ISIL
Once the insurgency is defeated, as ISIL was, there can be remnants that devolve into small terrorist cells and take revenge for their defeat by committing terrorism. In essence, the First Wave of the Ku Klux Klan was former Confederate soldiers who had been defeated but now formed a secret society to push back emancipated African-Americans and Jews and Catholics considered ‘carpetbaggers’ in the South. You still have some terrorism by the so-called ‘Real IRA,’ which rejects the Mitchell settlement, but they are a tiny and largely irrelevant group…. Trump’s mean-spirited denial of reconstruction aid to Raqqa is a much better predictor of an ISIL resurgence than a few roadside bombs. And that should be the question. How to reconstruct Eastern Syria so as to forestall a return of radicalism that might become a base for terrorism against, e.g. Europe? A couple thousand US troops are not what will solve the problems one way or another, at this phase of the struggle. Trump may or may not be doing the right thing to pull out the troops. He is definitely doing the wrong thing by declining to put resources into reconstruction. More
Let's Expose Congress Members for the Warhawks They Are
But the militarist elites don’t care what the people—especially Trump’s supporters—want. As far as they’re concerned, they alone know what’s good for America. Or so they’d have us believe. In reality, whether they’re election-obsessed legislators or ratings-obsessed media moguls, these interventionists all serve the same corporate masters. They play politics even when lives—both of U.S. troops and countless civilians—are at stake… This is yet another reason the life-and-death decisions of war and peace must be decided in public—not in the West Wing or corporate boardrooms, but rather on the floors of the Senate and the House of Representatives. If the bipartisan crowd of congressional members who’ve been so critical of Trump’s proposed Mideast withdrawals sincerely believe that more war is the answer, let them cast their vote accordingly. More
Trump on Iran: A Lie That May Lead to War
On the first work day of the new year, President Trump held a cabinet meeting that was open to the press and consisted mostly of a rambling monologue by the president about border walls and assorted other topics. Toward the end of the proceedings, Trump castigated anew the “horrible Iran nuclear deal” and asserted that the agreement “in eight years, gives Iran the legal right to have nuclear weapons.”
No analysis or research by fact checkers is needed to see the bald-faced nature of that lie. The text of the nuclear deal—formally, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—explicitly says the opposite. It’s right up front in paragraph iii of the preamble: “Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons.” This obligation is permanent. It reaffirms Iran’s prior obligation as a party to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty not to acquire nukes. More
PLEASE SIGN LETTER FOR PEACE IN KOREA
