A Profile in Courage

Democrats, liberals, progressives—call them what you will—don’t really do foreign policy. Sure, if cornered, they’ll spout a few choice talking points, and probably find a way to make them all about bashing President Donald Trump—ignoring the uncomfortable fact that their very own Barack Obama led and expanded America’s countless wars for eight long years.

This was ever so apparent in the first two nights of Democratic primary debates this week. Foreign policy hardly registered for these candidates with one noteworthy exception: Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard—herself an (anti-war) combat veteran and army officer.--ex-Maj. Danny

If he does nothing else in his career but be a powerful voice for peace, Danny Sjursen will have served his country well.


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Why Not Liz?

To avoid being divided and conquered in 2020, progressive voters must choose between Warren and Sanders, their two leading, if not only, alternatives to the Democrats’ establishment candidate. Are there strategic differences between them relevant to making that choice that are accessible now?--RH

A lengthy and cogent case for Liz Warren. I always argued that Bernie's leap onto Hillary's lap was stupid and denigrated all the goodness that his base conjured before his misdeed.

He didn't listen to me.  Imagine that...


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Going After Kurt Schrader and Others

Since getting to Congress a decade ago, “moderate” Democrat Kurt Schrader has defeated Republican opponents by comfortable margins that grew to double digits. As for primary challenges, the closest one fell short by more than 40 percent. But 2020 could be quite different. Schrader’s slightly blue district — which includes much of the Willamette Valley and the Oregon coast — will see a primary contest pitting the incumbent against a self-described progressive with an electoral toehold on the southern outskirts of Portland.

Mark Gamba, now in his fifth year as the mayor of Milwaukie (pop. 20,000), is running to replace Schrader. “He likes to pretend that he’s reaching across the aisle to get things done,” Gamba told us, “but it almost always goes back to the corporations that back him financially.” Schrader, a longtime member of the Blue Dog Coalition, gets a lot of money from corporate interests, including from the Koch Industries PAC. Last year, only one House Democrat was ranked higher on “key issues” by the US Chamber of Commerce. During 2017 and 2018, one-third of Schrader’s House votes were aligned with Trump. And like Trump, he’s not a defender of young Dreamers who have grown up undocumented in this country; he was one of a few dozen House Democrats to oppose the 2010 Dream Act.

Gamba intends to make climate a central issue of the campaign to unseat Schrader — who, he says, “has been notably absent on any substantive climate policy.” A professional photographer who often went on assignment for National Geographic, Gamba advocates for “a Green New Deal or some other powerful response to climate change which is broad-reaching, deep and meaningful.” (Only four House Democrats have a lower lifetime environmental score than Schrader.) Gamba also supports Medicare for All, while his opponent “is quietly but actively opposing Medicare for All or any law that actually cuts into the profits of the pharmaceutical and insurance industries.”

Some of Gamba’s other campaign priorities include “beginning to rectify the vast and growing income inequity by increasing the taxes on the rich including capital gains; protecting the unions which have been slowly and purposefully eroded; beginning to slow the spending on the military-industrial complex; dramatically increase funding for education: pre-K through college.” If all that sounds like a certain political revolution, it’s no coincidence. “I endorsed and campaigned for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary,” Gamba recalls. In that primary, Sanders came out well ahead of Clinton in the district Gamba hopes to represent in Congress.--NS, et al.

This article highlights 15 corporate Dems that need to be put out to pasture.  A Sanders-like "revolutionary" steps up in Oregon to take out Kurt Schrader.


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Grenfell Tower

A divided population is more easily controlled. It turns its venom on itself. The march of corporate totalitarianism intends to transform all of us into serfs regardless of our religious beliefs or ethnicity. It skillfully manufactures scapegoats—immigrants, Muslims, black people and others of color, dissidents, the poor—so the rising fury of a betrayed population will vent against a demonized target. This disease is as far advanced in Britain, which looks set to get the Trump-like Boris Johnson as prime minister, as it is in the United States. It is spawned by the same ideology, neoliberalism, and the same corporate forces that have seized political and economic power and orchestrated social inequality. These forces are, to us and to the ecosystem that we depend on for life, forces of death. The Grenfell fire is a harbinger of a day when greed will rule, human life will be cheap and the rule of law will be meaningless. Those who lost friends and family in the fire, or who witnessed the disaster, know a truth about corporate power that the rest of us must quickly learn.--CH

The Grenfell fire two years on.


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Made Me Laugh

Hillary is a rightwing Democrat or, to hear liberal pundits tell it, a “pragmatic progressive” or “progressive pragmatist” or whatever their favored euphemism happens to be. Biden is a rightwing Democrat too — they call him a “moderate” or a “centrist.” To distinguish him from Hillary and other influential Clintonites, it would be more helpful if they called him a “doofus.”--AL

Andrew Levine is not your usual stodgy old entrenched-leftist academic.  He can be hilarious, and often is.

The whole enchilada.


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Scheer Intelligence

“I’d like to think that I was always bold on active duty,” Sjursen tells Scheer in the latest installment of “Scheer Intelligence,” “but the reality is that I was censoring myself. You know, there is a degree of fear and harassment, and it’s very passive-aggressive stuff. But the book was a labor of love [that] tears apart the notion of American exceptionalism that brought us to Iraq, to a folly."--DS

Robert Scheer interviews the former Maj. Danny, who will soon have his doctorate in history


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We Cannot Forget

Just after dawn on March 16, 1968, a company of U.S. Army infantrymen, led by Capt. Ernest Medina and spearheaded by Lt. William Calley, entered the small hamlet of My Lai in Quang Ngai province, South Vietnam. The villagers, mostly women and children, had no idea what was coming that day. If they had, they’d have fled.

Despite facing zero resistance and finding only a few weapons, Calley ordered his men to execute the entire population. In all, some 500 Vietnamese civilians were executed, including more than 350 women, children and babies. Other senior leaders in the chain of command had advised the soldiers of Charlie Company that all people in the village should be considered either Viet Cong or VC supporters. Medina and Calley were ordered to destroy the village. They did so with  brutal precision and savagery.--Maj. Danny

People my age and older cannot forget.

I argued that I was a pacifist and conscientious objector in front of my draft board comprised of World War II veterans whom I didn't know. I lost that argument. I went off to college with a student deferment in my pocket. I was in the first draft lottery. I won with a middling high number. Deferments were wiped away. Then Nixon abolished the draft. I'd escaped. 

Five years later, I was a community organizer watching television in Maine. Saigon was falling and helicopters were ferrying people from rooftops to aircraft carriers offshore.  It was the end of "peace with honor." The U.S had spread death and destruction in Southeast Asia for nothing.

It was the beginning of whatever it is we have become today.

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rp thomas

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Racial Nightmare

It has been more than 30 years since a rape and attempted murder occurred in New York City that became known as the Central Park Jogger case. The crime itself was indescribably vicious; the miscarriage of justice that followed—with five African American and Latino boys who became known as the Central Park Five framed for the crime and sent to prison—remains a blight on the criminal justice system. The five boys spent years behind bars, losing their youth in the process. Eventually, their convictions were vacated after the actual perpetrator confessed in jail. His confession was supported by irrefutable DNA evidence. When the teens were first arrested, Donald Trump, then a New York real estate developer, actively campaigned for the death penalty for the young defendants, taking out full-page ads in all of New York City’s major newspapers. To this day, ignoring all evidence, President Trump maintains that they are guilty.--AG and DM

I watched this earlier in the week.  It is, as the authors of this piece say, essential viewing. A liberal use of Trump's racism fits nicely into the narrative, and excellent acting by the young cast is inspiring.


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A Return from Holiday

I've been on holiday.  I visited most of the other planets in our solar system and some far away beyond your imagination. Anyway, I'm back now, no wiser, but perhaps healthier. Like any cheap political philosopher in memory, I failed to glean much from the lies humanoids tell each other. Next year I think I'll go to Spain and call it good.


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