Category Archives: Liberalism

The New York mayoral race

Posted by David Ehrens on 2025-06-25 Comments Off

It is indeed a good thing that New York City voters have chosen NY Assembly member Zohran Mamdani over former governor Andrew Cuomo to be their next mayor. And the left wing of the Democratic Party is pretty darned pleased with themselves, as perhaps they should be.

By all accounts Mamdani mounted an impressive ground offensive, with hundreds of canvassers, many from Mamdani’s Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), deployed to every Borough. His reciprocal endorsement of Brad Lander was also novel, sending the message that at the end of the day it was more important to try something new than to prioritize personal victory.

Andrew Cuomo’s typical Democratic campaign was bankrolled by billionaires Michael Bloomberg, First Amendment enemy and hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, and Alex Karp from Palantir, a company the Trump regime has chosen to spy on Americans. Cuomo was endorsed by Bill Clinton, Ritchie Torres, and Jim Clyburn. In contrast, Mamdani’s funding was grass-roots and his best-known supporters included the United Autoworkers, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Bernie Sanders.

In the general election this Fall, Mamdani will face the winner of the Republican mayoral primary, Curtis Sliwa, the Trump-loving vigilante who founded the Guardian Angels, a rightwing talk show host, xenophobe, and a Rudi Giuliani crony who lost in the 2021 race to outgoing mayor Eric Adams. As for Adams — who went to the MAGA revival tent and was cleansed of Federal Sin by Jesus, or at least the lard-assed grotesquerie impersonating Him — he’s no longer running as a Democrat but will appear on the November ballot as an independent.

The choice before New York voters in November is fairly stark: a glimmer of hope from an essentially decent guy versus a double slice of deep-dish corruption. But never underestimate the abuse that the American voter is willing to inflict on himself. And never underestimate the treachery of the Democratic Party to its own left wing.

Pod Save America’s Jon Favreau, a former speechwriter for Barack Obama, was quick to dismiss Mamdani’s campaign as one of mere style: “I do think it’s worth separating out the style of politics from the policy,” Favreau said. “Because we could have a whole debate about what policy positions can win… but if there’s a center-left candidate who campaigns like Mamdani, that person could be president.”

The Lever’s David Sirota, a former speechwriter for Bernie Sanders, saw Mamdani’s win as an “earthquake” in Democratic politics, and pushed back at Favreau: “This is not a new trick. When liberal elites feel threatened by a winning candidate whose politics could actually challenge capital, they seek to depoliticize the victory and attribute it to vibes, marketing savvy, and brand. It’s a containment strategy: Treat the insurgent’s style as admirable while ignoring — or quietly discrediting — their policy platform. That way, the establishment gets to appropriate the energy without having to endorse the demands.”

But, sorry, Favreau has a point. Although both Mamdani and Lander campaigned openly as critics of Netanyahu, neither was willing to even question the ethno-supremacist Zionist state. This was crystal clear from an interview both gave on Steven Colbert’s talk show where the host made a beeline to a question about Israel of great interest to his liberal audience. His guests’ answers were neither progressive nor socialist. You certainly wouldn’t find any real socialist treading lightly when asked whether Americans have the right to establish a Christian Dominionist state. Nor did Mamdani even utter the word “capital” much less challenge it, as Sirota maintains. Mamdani’s a decent guy but he’s just barely a progressive.

Mamdani, who campaigned with the slogan “Afford to Live & Afford to Dream,” is primarily focused on economic reform, but his track record with such legislation in the state assembly has been consistently undermined by his own party: rent control (nope); free bus transportation (nope); taxing the rich (nope); subsidized childcare (nope); opposing nonprofits that support Israeli settlements (absolutely nope).

Glass-full optimists like Bhaskar Sunkara of the Guardian, who see Mamdani’s win as a new mandate for progressive politics within the Democratic Party, are just fooling themselves.

The truth is: just as the German party Die Linke — which has a platform almost identical to Mamdani’s — has stepped into a social-democratic void created by the right turn of the German SPD, and just as the NDP has stepped into a void created by the right turn of the Canadian Liberals, so too has the DSA similarly stepped into the social-democratic void created by their own party’s war-mongering turn to the right. They think they can steer this militaristic and austerity-loving warship in another direction.

But this is as futile and delusional as a small tugboat trying to turn around an aircraft carrier in high seas. The best the left wing of the Democratic Party can hope for is to fend off attacks on themselves from a growing right wing.

Nevertheless, the Democratic Socialists of America, to which Mamdani belongs and which supported his campaign, still won’t make a “clean break” from the Democrats. Regardless of Mamdani’s ties to a “DSA Caucus” of the Democratic Party, he will continue to face internal opposition from what is an unapologetically (and bare-knuckled) Capitalist party that values warmongers and hedge fund magnates far more than a relatively small minority of idealists who delusionally campaign for it.

So, aside from voters rejecting corruption, Mamdani’s victory was primarily a win for ranked choice voting. The Democratic primary offered an easy choice between an affable 33 year-old who campaigned on “unity” against a politically and personally corrupt machine Democrat who wears the same stinking cologne as the outgoing mayor.

Trump’s and Israel’s tag team war on Iran

Posted by David Ehrens on 2025-06-24 Comments Off

a B-2 getting ready to take off to bomb somebody, somewhere

In most American coverage of the US bombing of Iran, there is an implicit acceptance that Iran “had it coming,” that after all it is a fanatical regime everyone understands is building a bomb to destroy Israel. We can thank Israel and its fleet of lobbyists for this narrative. We can also thank institutions like the New York Times, which endlessly recycle Israel’s talking points. Last week the NYT’s editorial board published a weasel-worded op-ed which contained this:

“A nuclear-armed Iran would make the world less safe. It would destabilize the already volatile Middle East. It could imperil Israel’s existence. It would encourage other nations to acquire their own nuclear weapons, with far-reaching geopolitical consequences.”

Naturally Israel’s own nukes or it’s ongoing genocide of Gazans weren’t mentioned and the article went on to describe the main defect of Israel’s bombing Iran:

“Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has acted to destroy Iran’s capacity to build nuclear weapons without first shoring up allies’ support.”

So according to the NYT editors, it’s not that bombing Iran is unwise or bad — they’ve already told you why they approve — it’s that Israel has thoughtlessly failed to get sufficient American support for its aggression. What the editors of the New York Times want is bloody war — but with an AUMF that specifically includes Iran:

“If Mr. Trump wants the United States to join the Israeli war against Iran, the next step is as clear: Congress must first authorize the use of military force.”

Where Liberals seem to part company from war hawks is solely in objecting to the current inhabitant of the White House doing bombing unilaterally; in their liberal world military savagery requires a war powers resolution — not even passing the Constitutional bar for Congress to actually declare war. In other words; it’s not bad for the United States to attack another country for no good reason; it’s simply how you go about doing it.

But in a post-nuclear world, does anyone think that any nation can responsibly build nuclear weapons without eventually using them?

Not really. Americans almost universally believe restrictions on nuclear weapons should be placed solely on Iran. Not on the U.S. itself, which actually used nuclear weapons on human beings — twice. Not on India, which has become an authoritarian, ethno-nationalist state like Israel or Hungary and frequently rattles sabres at Pakistan, another nuclear power. No restrictions on Russia, China or North Korea, who are serious nuclear rivals. Demanding “no nukes” of any of these three would only serve to highlight our own hypocrisy.

And of course Americans don’t fear the nukes any of the European nuclear powers — the UK or France — who are habitual partners in American and/or NATO-led colonial-imperialist adventures. Nor from Israel — the most reckless, bloodthirsty regime in the Middle East, possessing between 90 and 300 nukes, a nation that over the last 24 months has bombed pretty much every one of its neighbors.

No, somehow in the homogenous Western narrative only Iran must be prevented from having nukes.

Let us recall, however, that China, France, Germany, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom, the EU, the United States, and Iran all signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on July 14, 2015 in Vienna. It came into force on January 16, 2016. The agreement called for Iran’s peaceful use of nuclear technology, placed limits on enrichment, set milestones for verification of peaceful uses of the technology, and provided a path to removing sanctions from Iran. The agreement anticipated “that full implementation of this JCPOA will positively contribute to regional and international peace and security.” And Iran was sticking to it.

Netanyahu has been selling war on Iran for years. He finally closed the deal.

But true to American and Israeli contempt for international agreements and the rule-based order, both objected to the JCPOA so Trump abandoned the agreement in his first term, on May 8, 2018. Despite the U.S. withdrawal from JCPOA, it hypocritically insisted that Iran stick to the agreement even while slapping additional sanctions on Iran in violation of the JCPOA. When Biden became president, he went through the motions of re-joining the agreement. But, like Trump, his goal was to re-negotiate a more restrictive JCPOA than Iran had originally signed, appease Israel’s lobbyists, preserve Trump’s sanctions, and show that Democrats could be every bit the war-mongers as their MAGA brethren. For all his dithering and excuses, Biden could have simply re-committed to the original JCPOA.

There are 32 countries with nuclear programs, and only a handful of them have weapons programs. Despite the Israeli propaganda thrown at us for decades, each time ringing the alarm that Iran is mere weeks away from nuclear weapons, Iran has plenty of legitimate uses for nuclear technology that have nothing to do with weapons or even nuclear power. Especially because of Western sanctions.

Typical commercial uses of nuclear technology include: food irradiation; sterilization of medical instruments and equipment; radiation therapy for insect control and crop protection; inspecting welds and materials in manufacturing; gauging and measurement in various industries; and radioisotope-based analysis for analyzing materials and detecting impurities.

Medical uses include: radiation therapy to treat various types of cancer; nuclear medicine techniques such as PET scans to diagnose and monitor disease; radioisotope-based therapies for targeted cancer treatments, such as thyroid cancer; sterilization of medical instruments and equipment; radio-pharmaceuticals for diagnosing and treating cancers, cardiovascular disease, and neurological disorders; diagnosing and monitoring bone density and osteoporosis; and nuclear medicine research.

Specific radioisotopes often used for cancer treatment include: technetium-99m, for diagnostic imaging and cancer treatment; iodine-131, for thyroid cancer treatment and diagnostic imaging; molybdenum-99, for diagnostic imaging and cancer treatment; samarium-153, for pain relief and cancer treatment; and radium-223, for prostate cancer treatment.

After the US overthrew a secular, democratic Iranian government, it installed Shah Reza Pahlavi. Israel and the US both supported this monster. Iran’s nuclear program was just fine as long as it was in the hands of a US-approved tyrant.

The 32 countries with nuclear technology represent over half the world population. Within these 32 countries (Israel won’t admit to having a nuclear program), there are 440 power plants and all of them require some sort of enrichment or processing. Armenia with 2.1 million people has nuclear power. Other nations under 50 million people with nuclear power include: Argentina; Belgium; Bulgaria; Canada; the Czech Republic; Finland; Hungary; Netherlands; Romania; Slovakia; Slovenia; Spain; Sweden; Switzerland; Taiwan; Ukraine; and the United Arab Emirates.

Of the nuclear weapons states, France, with two-thirds the population of Iran, has 58 nuclear stations. The UK, also two-thirds the size of Iran, has 15.

All of these countries have programs much like the one the US just bombed at the behest of Israel. Miraculously, we have not bombed Switzerland or Canada. Yet.

In all of this is the inconvenient truth that Iran has never had a weapons program. If the Trump administration has any proof that Iran does, they won’t show us. The EU, the IAEA, various U.S. national security assessments, and even an opinion only weeks ago from National Security Advisor Tulsi Gabbard — before Mafia Don Trump leaned on her — was that Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program.

Instead, Trump appears to be getting his “intelligence” from Israel and a small group of dubious “experts”, according to the Independent. These “advisors” include: Stephen Miller; Steve Witkoff, a luxury real estate developer; Steve Bannon; Marjorie Taylor Greene; Lindsay Graham; Tom Cotton; Candace Owens; John Ratliffe, a former CIA director with close ties to Israel; and a pro-Israel general, Michael Erik Kurilla.

When asked on Air Force One about Gabbard’s previous assessment, Trump shot back, “I don’t care what she said. I think they were very close to having it.” Similarly refusing to acknowledge the discrepancy between European and previous U.S. assessments that Iran was not developing nuclear weapons — and Trump’s “experts” — Marco Rubio was asked on “Face the Nation” where Trump’s “intelligence” came from. “It doesn’t matter!” he screamed at news anchor Margaret Brennon. “That’s irrelevant!”

The Israeli-American Council, a front for the Israeli Foreign Ministry, wants to restore the Iranian dictator’s son to power.

For over 30 years American foreign policy makers have been looking for an opportunity to bomb Iran. Recall Senator John McCain singing “Bomb, Bomb Iran” to a Beach Boys tune 18 years ago. In the intervening years there were two Gulf wars — fought on equally spurious intel. Civil liberties were a casualty, a huge surveillance and police state were built, and the power of the President to declare war was handed over to him on a platter by a cowardly Congress using “war powers resolutions” which bypass the Constitutional requirement that it is Congress that declares war.

Ultimately, war hawks and Israel’s lobbyists found a president who didn’t give a damn about war powers resolutions or even Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution. Nor anything else in that wrinkly old document.

The “Art of the Deal” maker simply made a side deal with Israel, and in so doing blindsided the American Congress, lied about a two-week timetable during which Congress might have given him war powers anyway (so much for the New York Times argument), and then had his White Supremacist Crusader-tatted defense chief send B-2’s to bomb Iran.

Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries have been deer in the headlights since the election, unable to get Democrats to fall into line. Some of them — for example, Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, New Jersey Congressman Josh Gottheimer, former Clinton aide Jamie Metzl, and others — actually cheered the illegal bombings and sang Trump’s praises.

California Congressman Rohit Khanna penned a piece in the Nation arguing for support for his bipartisan war powers resolution, which so far has only a small number of cosponsors. In the Senate Tim Kaine of Virginia filed a similar resolution, which does nothing but attempt to claw back powers ceded to the president in previous AUMF agreements, and only in regard to Iran. Congress is neither bold enough nor smart enough to terminate all AUMFs and forcefully exercise its Constitutional rights.

Texas Congressman Al Green did actually file articles of impeachment citing Trump’s usurpation of Congressional powers. Not only is bombing a nation and killing hundreds of civilians without Congressional approval an unconstitutional act, doing so as an professional courtesy for [another] genocidal regime and lying to Congress about it ought to result in impeachment, prison, or the firing squad.

But neither resolutions nor articles of impeachment have accomplished anything more than to give Congress a platform for grand theatre. If we really want to hold criminal presidents accountable, the Department of Justice needs to stop treating them as emperors and to start prosecuting them. But because the Constitution unwisely placed the Department of Justice under the Presidential branch (which Washington felt was too similar to a King), prosecutions of a sitting president are virtually impossible. Any trials of past presidents must be held when a new regime comes to power. For that a simple DOJ memo would suffice.

But none of this alters the insanity and the depravity of bombing Iran in the first place.

A few nights ago I listened to Mehdi Hasan’s interview with Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute. Parsi knows more about Iran than Trump, his kooky Iran war panel, Hegseth, Rubio, Cruz, Schumer, Jeffries, and both Clintons put together. Parsi’s own father was jailed by the Shah and then again by the Ayatollah, so you don’t have to tell him about the sins of the Islamic Republic. Parsi also gave a shorter interview to CBS Mornings.

In both interviews Parsi alluded to the JCPOA, which was doing its job and was something Trump should not have abrogated. And for all the contempt in which Parsi holds the Iranian regime, he nevertheless does not regard Iran as a bunch of fanatical lunatics. Iran’s responses have been measured, restrained, strategic, and its counter-attacks have been measured and proportionate. For example, Iran called the White House to warn the U.S. of the reprisal missiles to Qatar in order to minimize loss of life.

Parsi has a pretty good idea of what comes next. And it’s a completely rational response on Iran’s part. Parsi told CBS Mornings, “I frankly think that what has been done here [by Trump] more or less guarantees that Iran will be a nuclear weapons state five to ten years from now.”

Iran and every other target of American foreign policy and military “intervention” have surely noticed that the only country that the U.S. will not bomb is one with nuclear weapons.

So the bombing of Iran is the result of the conventional wisdom — of both the Dr. Strangeloves and also the liberals who mumble in their sleep that Iran is a “fanatical” state.

Because of ingrained, irrational, and institutionalized American hostility toward Iran, our Israel-influenced refusal to accord Iran’s non-defense nuclear program the same rights as dozens of other nations (especially Israel), or to honor an international agreement both nations signed, Iran has now been forced to start developing nuclear weapons in earnest.

And, now, as Israel and the U.S. contemplate even more bombings, there’s a quick solution for this too.

Iran can simply acquire nukes from Russia.

Once upon a time…

Posted by David Ehrens on 2025-06-21 Comments Off

Let me tell you a story

Once upon a time there was a sheriff’s son… let’s call him Jimmy Lee.

Jimmy Lee lived in an old plantation built by slaves on Indian land, on a lovely lane lined with trees covered in Spanish moss. Jimmy had been given every advantage in a world constructed expressly for people of his complexion. But still he was unsatisfied. There were few rules for a boy like Jimmy Lee. He graduated from killing cats as a tyke, to tipping over Black families’ outhouses as a teen, to beating Black folks up as an adult, even blinding a young man in a particularly violent incident, eventually joining the Klan — all while Daddy Lee groomed him to be the next sheriff.

Daddy Lee had no qualms about stealing from county taxpayers to finance extravagant toys for himself and young Jimmy. The pampered son naturally had a collection of hand guns and semiautomatics, quite the bachelor pad, and Daddy’s old Chevy 454 SS pickup. He was brash and hard-assed. He was the envy of even liberal townfolk.

Jimmy Lee’s Apocalypse 6×6

But now, with all the money Daddy had managed to siphon from the county, good ole Jimmy now also had an Apocalypse 6×6 Dodge Hellcat with 707 horses and a reworked chassis. The goddamn thing looked like a frigging armed personnel carrier and scared the shit out of all the neighbors — which of course was the whole point.

A youthful career of unpunished theft, assault, and arson eventually led Jimmy to home invasions and fraudulent home foreclosures, made possible only through the quasi-legal machinations of Daddy Lee, judicial cronies, and several banks. Within short order Jimmy and his friends had taken ownership of almost half the homes on the other side of the tracks that marked the town’s racial boundary.

Jimmy Lee

One day Jimmy simply broke into a Black doctor’s home, Glock in hand, his masked friends carrying bats, knives and AR-15’s. This time the home owner put up quite a fight but still ended up in the emergency room at his own underfunded Black clinic. The doctor’s friends and neighbors protested, of course, and launched a fruitless legal effort to reclaim the beloved physician’s home from the invaders. They even mounted a boycott of businesses that supported Jimmy Lee and his corrupt father, but legislators labelled them racists and terrorists, enacting dozens of laws to criminalize victims and shield the perpetrators.

The entire system was stacked against them. Even the small town papers always seemed to side with Jimmy Lee or Daddy Lee. Nevertheless, the case became so well-known outside the county and engendered such outrage that a deal was reached — Jimmy Lee would stay in the invaded home, but the doctor and his family got to stay in the basement while everyone but the actual owner decided what was fair. Town liberals heralded this new “two family” arrangement as the best and only viable resolution to such cases — which were quickly multiplying.

Daddy Lee

But the arrangement rankled Jimmy Lee, who believed he was entitled to the entire house. It rankled his pride. It rankled his sense of white superiority and entitlement that this… this clearly inferior doctor was treated with kid gloves and was allowed to stay in Jimmy Lee’s house, albeit in the basement.

As the anger welled up in Jimmy Lee’s veins, he’d periodically stomp down the old wood basement stairs to give the doctor a thrashing to remember. Or he’d kill one of the doctor’s cats, destroy some furniture, or traumatize his children. In his heart of hearts what Jimmy Lee really wanted was to murder them all in the most grotesque manner imaginable. But the time wasn’t quite right.

One day it was the doctor’s turn — long overdue, if you ask me — to erupt in rage. He left his basement and found some of Jimmy’s buddies in their stolen homes and killed them in their beds. Having made his point the doctor went home to his little house — the only home he knew — and waited.

Unfortunately for the doctor, whatever little public sympathy there was for his situation rapidly went up in smoke. Every county deputy, every sheriff and deputy and police officer from every surrounding county — even the state police — were called to the good doctor’s house to deal with him. And of course Jimmy’s Klan buddies showed up too, armed to the teeth.

By the end of the day, the doctor’s house was splinter and ash. The doctor was no more. His children were no more. Every one of his neighbors was no more. All of their houses lay in ruin. The level of destruction was unimaginable. It was like a hundred seasonal hurricanes had blown through the little Southern town.

Jimmy and his Klan buddies — even the forces of “law and order” who had joined in — were so convinced that no one would ever hold them accountable that they filmed the entire orgy of murder and destruction and posted it on social media. And it turned out that they were right — no one ever did hold any of them accountable.

And so, unpunished and undeterred, Jimmy Lee climbed back into his Apocalypse 6×6 modified Dodge Hellcat 707 and turned his gun sights on everyone who had tried to stop him.

The end. Nighty night.

Looking beyond the Democratic Party

Posted by David Ehrens on 2025-06-14 Comments Off

a liberal rally: good vibes but no
demands

We absolutely need more mass mobilizations and protests as the country goes down in flames — especially as America’s own “Il Douchey” makes even more Mussolini moves, criminalizes anti-ICE and anti-genocide protests, violates the Posse Cometatus Act, stages self-congratulatory military parades like a North Korean despot, and as Congressional lackeys like Josh Hawley launch McCarthyite hearings of immigrant groups and the American Left.

I’m just not sure what to make of the “No Kings” events scheduled for June 14th.

No Kings is a project of Indivisible, which in turn is a project of Democratic operatives and former Democratic Congressional aides who decided (in typical Democrat fashion) that the Tea Party movement’s successes could be mimicked. Only thing is, they do it half-heartedly, sporadically and unconvincingly, and they completely lack any program to truly fight back.

There is nothing inherently wrong with attending one of these feel-good events. I’m sure the mainstream press will report that X number of people showed up to protest Trump. But they won’t be able to report on exactly what the organizers had planned – because there is no real plan.

How are Democrats going to challenge and thwart Trump and a MAGA Congress enjoying a temporary and only razor-thin majority? Where is the opposition?

Are any of “No King’s” Democratic organizers about to challenge Chuck Schumer’s increasingly out-of-touch and impotent sputtering and posturing or his go-along-to-get-along collaborationist “strategy”?

Do “No Kings” organizers want to replace the 95 fellow Democrats who sided with Republicans to “express gratitude” to ICE for “protecting” us from those evil gardeners, housekeepers, meat packers, textile workers, and roofers who pay into a system they will never benefit from yet lack the ability to switch borders on whim like Big Business routinely does?

Are “No Kings” organizers calling for a shakeup in their party’s leadership or condemning party members who voted for the Laken Riley Act which actually authorized the crackdown that now these organizers and their duplicitous party claim to be protesting?

No, not for one damned millisecond. The Democratic Party they shill for demonstrates each time their representatives in Congress vote that its values are not substantially different from the Republicans’. At the end of the day, street theater like “No Kings” is nothing but a safety valve, a way to let off a little steam, a cynical mechanism to defuse the righteous anger of working people betrayed by both parties.

We’d all be better-served by not putting all of our eggs in the electoral basket. Neither party represents us in elections and a healthy amount of hell-raising must be done outside the electoral arena.

Join an organization with a real program, dare I say a socialist one. Consider working with the kind of organization that autocrats fear enough to launch witch hunts against. One that grasps better than the toothless, Janus-faced, war-mongering Democrats what the true objectives of America’s lords and masters really are in dismantling every shred of democracy and governance, demonizing our “illegal” friends, coworkers, and neighbors, while rushing us headlong into war after war of aggression and genocide.

In short, if you really want change, friends, start looking beyond the Democratic Party.

Liberalism is finished

Posted by David Ehrens on 2025-03-08 Comments Off

Omar El Akkad's new book "One Day, Everyone Will have Always Been Against This" breaks Western liberalism down to its termite-ridden studs. Straightaway, Akkad introduces his thesis, as well as explaining why so many people have been radicalized by the gauze falling away from their eyes. Or perhaps it's just the contradictions of both capitalism and western liberalism that have never been so glaringly obvious before.

Akkad describes this widespread radicalization as an abrupt "severance" from acceptance of the lies of neoliberalism and neocolonialism. And as an account of the end — actually the West's own abnegation — of its so-called "rules based order." And just as the "rule-based order" is only valued when it serves Western purposes and then is so easily discarded when it's not, Liberalism itself works that way.

This is an account of a fracture, a breaking away from the notion that the polite, Western liberal ever stood for anything at all.

To maintain belief in what is commonly called the rules-based order requires a tolerance for disappointment. It's not enough to subscribe to the idea that there exist certain inflexible principles derived from what in the parlance of America's founding documents might be called self-evident truths, and that the basic price of admission to civilized society is to do whatever is necessary to uphold these principles. One must also believe that, no matter the day-to-day disappointments of political opportunism or corruption or the cavalcade of anesthetizing lies that make up the bulk of most every election campaign, there is something solid holding the whole endeavor together, something greater. For members of every generation, there comes a moment of complete and completely emptying disgust when it is revealed there is only a hollow. A completely malleable thing whose primary use is not the opposition of evil or administration of justice but the preservation of existing power.

History is a debris field of such moments. They arrive in the form of British and French soldiers to the part of the world I'm from. They come to the Salvadorans and Chileans and Iranians and Vietnamese and Cambodians in the form of toppled governments and coups over oil revenue and villages that had to be burned to the ground to save them from some otherwise terrible fate. They arrived at the turn of the twentieth century to Hawaii (the U.S. apologized for the overthrow of the Hawaiian government-almost a hundred years later). They come to the Indigenous population eradicated to make way for What would become the most powerful nation on earth, and to the Black population forced in chains to build it, severed from home such that, as James Baldwin said, every subsequent generation's search for lineage arrives, inevitably, not at a nation or a community, but a bill of sale. And at every moment of arrival the details and the body count may differ, but in the marrow there is always a commonality: an ambitious, upright, pragmatic voice saying, Just for a moment, for the greater good, cease to believe that this particular group of people, from whose experience we are already so safely distanced, are human.

Now, for a new generation, the same moment arrives. To watch the leader of the most powerful nation on earth endorse and finance a genocide prompts not a passing kind of disgust or anger, but a severance. The empire may claim fear of violence because the fear of violence justifies any measure of violence in return, but this severance is of another kind: a walking away, a noninvolvement with the machinery that would produce, or allow to produce, such horror. What has happened, for all the future bloodshed it will prompt, will be remembered as the moment millions of people looked at the West, the rules-based order, the shell of modern liberalism and the capitalistic thing it serves, and said: I want nothing to do with this.

Here, then, is an account of an ending.

Akkad writes about Western complicity with the genocide in Gaza and the complicity of a liberal press that sugar-coats the reality of empire, preferring to write in the passive voice about its crimes, operating in the service of a liberalism that wraps itself in hollow gestures and performative sentiment, lying to itself about the evil that it actually wreaks, while simultaneously lying to itself about its own inherent (and largely non-existent) virtue.

Beyond the high walls and barbed wire and checkpoints that pen this place, there is the empire. And the empire as well is cocooned inside its own fortress of language — a language through the prism of which buildings are never destroyed but rather spontaneously combust, in which blasts come and go like Chinooks over the mountain, and people are killed as though to be killed is the only natural and rightful ordering of their existence. As though living was the aberration. And this language might protect the empires most bloodthirsty fringe, but the fringe has no use for linguistic malpractice. It is instead the middle, the liberal, well-meaning, easily upset middle, that desperately needs the protection this kind of language provides. Because it is the middle of the empire that must look upon this and say: Yes, this is tragic, but necessary, because the alternative is barbarism. The alternative to the countless killed and maimed and orphaned and left without home without school without hospital and the screaming from under the rubble and the corpses disposed of by vultures and dogs and the days-old babies left to scream and starve, is barbarism.

As an Egyptian-Canadian-American, Akkad is fluent in two languages and two cultures. As a young reporter covering the war in Afghanistan, Akkad quickly discovered the limit of truth-telling permitted to journalists – a limit imposed by Western empire:

It may as well be the case that there exist two entirely different languages for the depiction of violence against victims of empire and victims of empire. Victims of empire, those who belong, those for whom we weep, are murdered, subjected to horror, their killers butchers and terrorists and savages. The rage every one of us should feel whenever an innocent human being is killed, the overwhelming sense that we have failed, collectively, that there is a rot in the way we have chosen to live, is present here, as it should be, as it always should be. Victims of empire aren't murdered, their killers aren't butchers, their killers aren't anything at all. Victims of empire don't die, they simply cease to exist. They burn away like fog.

To watch the descriptions of Palestinian suffering in much of mainstream Western media is to watch language employed for the exact opposite of language's purpose — to watch the unmaking of meaning. When The Guardian runs a headline that reads, "Palestinian Journalist Hit in Head by Bullet During Raid on Terror Suspect's Home," it is not simply a case of hiding behind passive language so as to say as little as possible, and in so doing risk as little criticism as possible. Anyone who works with or has even the slightest respect for language will rage at or poke fun at these tortured, spineless headlines, but they serve a very real purpose. It is a direct line of consequence from buildings that mysteriously collapse and lives that mysteriously end to the well-meaning liberal who, weaned on such framing, can shrug their shoulders and say, Yes, it's all so very sad, but you know, it's all so very complicated.

The slippery ethics of the Liberal confuse and disgust Akkad:

I start to see this more often, as the body count climbs — this malleability of opinion. At a residency on the coast of Oregon, i read the prologue to this book; a couple of days later, one of the other writers decides to strike up a conversation.

"I'm not a Zionist," she says. "But you know, I'm not anti-Zionist either. It's all just so complicated."

I have no idea what to say. I feel like an audience at a dress rehearsal.

There's a convenience to having modular opinions; it's why so many liberal American politicians slip an occasional reference of concern about Palestinian civilians into their statements of unconditional support for Israel. Should the violence become politically burdensome, they can simply expand that part of the statement as necessary, like one of those dinner talbes you lengthen to accomodate more guests than you expected. And it is important, too, that this amoral calculus rise and fall in proportion to the scale of the killing.

Akkad signs a petition to drop charges against anti-genocide protesters at an awards ceremony for the Giller Prize, a Canadian literary event supported by a bank with half a billion dollars of investments in Israel:

The letter sets off a small firestorm of newspaper articles and rival open letters. I suppose it makes sense: people were made momentarily uncomfortable at a black-tie gala — someone has to pay.

Watching footage of the demonstration later, what fascinates me isn't the smattering of boos from the audience as the protesters take to the stage, it isn't even the protest itself — it's all the people in that room, so many of them either involved in or so vocally supportive of literature, who keep their heads down, say nothing, wait for it all to just be done. A room full of storytellers, and so many of them suddenly finding common cause in silence.

I am reminded of this in the Democratic Party response to Trump's non-stop bald-faced lies in his "State of the Union" speech. Only one courageous congressman stood up and shouted out in protest (just as only one courageous congresswoman opposed the rush to war after 911). The rest of the combined houses of Congress passively remained in their seats as America's first openly fascist president declared war on every value Americans have traditionally revered. A group of Democratic women donned pink pants suits, a few Democrats held paddles – paddles! really? — expressing some unmemorable version of "tsk tsk."

This calorie-free performance was typical of American Liberalism. This was one more example of Liberalism's amoral incapacity to take a side and fight for it. This is the manifest poverty of Liberalism. And this is precisely what Akkad's book is all about.

Abandon Biden ’24

Posted by David Ehrens on 2024-07-02 No comments

Long before Joe Biden confirmed his cognitive decline and unfitness for the Presidency, his center-right politics, his sale of cluster munitions to the Ukraine, his foreign policy, his coddling of Israel, his turnabout on immigration, inaction on abortion and disinterest in Supreme Court enlargement — all made him an unacceptable choice for a second term. After Gaza, the “uncommitted” movement to punish him in the primaries evolved into a concerted effort to push the Democratic Party to choose another candidate. Thus was born the Abandon Biden campaign.

Ironically, Biden himself has done the most to make the case that Democrats need a different challenger to what, after yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling, may well be an Imperial Presidency.

AbandonBiden24 is a campaign that Muslim and Arab Americans launched in December 2023 in Dearborn, Michigan, to send a strong message to Joe Biden about his complicity in the Gaza genocide.

With AIPAC and a galaxy of Israel lobby and propaganda organizations applying pressure to American politicians, it has been both refreshing and somewhat of a novelty to see American Muslims flexing their political muscles, particularly in a broad community process. I have seen both AbandonBiden24’s Town Hall with alternative presidential candidates and its followup Great Conversation with activists around the country and offer a few observations.

AbandonBiden24 wants to show both parties that Muslim Americans can’t be taken for granted. Republicans lost significant Muslim support after 9/11 and by 2020 a substantial majority of Muslims supported Biden. However, Biden’s blanket (“ironclad”) support for Israel and his blank checks and reckless munitions shipments — all to maintain Israel’s brutal Apartheid system — have soured Muslim voters who resent being put in the position of having to choose between a war criminal or a fascist. They want to punish Biden and want America to know that if the President loses in November it will be precisely because of angry, ignored Muslim voters:

The Abandon Biden strategy is for people of conscience to punish Biden at the ballot box and then take the “blame”–or claim the credit–for his electoral defeat. Punishing a president for his genocide would send a clear signal to the political landscape that genocide is not politically viable. It would create a political earthquake, soliciting a reckoning in the political parties.

Muslims face exactly the same dilemma as white liberals but, seen from the perspective of people who have lost relatives to American bombs, to many Trump is clearly the lesser evil. We saw this view reflected in the Great Conversation. What seemed to be a majority of the Detroit focus group not only regarded Trump as the lesser evil, but advocated voting for him instead of a third-party candidate to ensure the greatest likelihood of defeating the genocidaire-in-chief.

While there is some Muslim support for Trump in Texas and elsewhere, we’ll have to leave it to the pollsters to determine how great it is. It’s clear the GOP is recruiting. One member of the Detroit focus group was obviously in the bag for Trump, and acknowledged being approached by the Trump campaign. And he sounded exactly like he’d ingested every ounce of Kool-Aid they’d poured for him.

For the most part, however, most AbandonBiden24 campaign members appeared to be as distrustful of Republicans as they are of Republicans. When asked about the campaign’s direction, Jaylani Hussain, director of Minnesota’s CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) chapter, replied, “We don’t have two options. We have many options,” but added for clarification, “We’re not supporting Trump.”

What’s not clear is if the Town Hall invitations to third-party candidates indicated real interest in permanently breaking with both parties, or if it was simply a shorter-term strategy to court some of those “many options.”

Toward the end of the Great Conversation, three members of AbandonBiden24 discussed where the campaign might be heading.

Mohammad Ziny is a progressive, leans toward progressive politics, but fears burning bridges with “good” Democrats like Jamal Bowman. He believes the movement should call for a vote for explicitly pro-ceasefire candidates like Cornel West or the Green Party’s Jill Stein. Personally, he would endorse Stein. However, the greatest attraction to the Greens is its “infrastructure” – the fact that it has ballot access in 26 states (compared to Cornel West’s 13). Whether American Muslims would find a permanent home in a predominantly white eco-centric party is a question only they and the Greens can answer.

Kareem Rosshandler from Georgia advocates a “courting all, committing to none” strategy. He advocates keeping options open with both parties, but recognizes that the movement’s complicated relationship to the GOP could frighten liberals. He believes that America has never had the chance to talk about a “Muslim vote” before, and this is a first opportunity. But, as such, how America sees the Muslim vote will be reflected in whether Biden wins or loses. If Biden loses, the movement will have made its point that the Muslim vote counts. If Biden wins, Muslims will be reviled like third parties as election “spoilers.”

Moderator Sadia Tarranum from Minnesota agreed with Ziny on the strategic usefulness of working with the Green Party. But she also agreed with Rosshandler on the need to keep all options open.

The AbandonBiden24 campaign was born of a single goal – to punish Joe Biden for his complicity in slaughtering Palestinians. It first flexed its political muscles in the Democratic primaries, and that muscle has managed to deny between 8% and 20% of the Democratic vote to Biden in over a dozen states. The campaign has become a hostage to its own success and clearly has a mandate to continue – but as what?

* * *

For AbandonBiden24 to succeed as a movement to put Muslims on the electoral chess board, it surely needs a win, as Kareem Rosshandler rightly points out. But more importantly, it needs to know where it is ultimately headed. And with whom.

The ‘Morning After’

Posted by David Ehrens on 2024-06-28 No comments

Is there anyone who watched last night’s Presidential debate who really thinks Joe Biden can survive?

It’s not just Biden’s chances of winning an election I’m talking about. I’m referring to his extremely fragile physical and mental state. Voters have every reason to question whether the walking corpse we saw on CNN’s debate stage last night can see the end of a second term or function any better than what we saw last night. The man is not well, and it’s shocking that the DNC allowed Biden to take the stage in Atlanta — especially after images surfaced of him “frozen” at a Juneteenth celebration on the South Lawn of the White House.

The man most of us saw last night shuffled onto stage and squinted into the cameras, appearing slack-jawed and confused. Speaking in a barely perceptible whisper, Biden often lost the thread of what he was saying, misquoted facts and figures, or mumbled incomprehensible jibberish. Almost as troubling, a clueless and self-unaware Biden insisted his poor performance was due to a head cold, adding “I think we did well.”

In comparison, a practiced Donald Trump spoke in the convincing manner of the sleazy, racist real estate salesman he is. And to those who judge debate performance primarily on appearances, Trump’s incessant lying miraculously did not diminish a pretense of presidential command and competence.

But Biden’s abysmal performance finally grabbed the attention of the liberal pundocracy, long in denial and now terrified. A surprising number of one-time Biden cheerleaders are now calling for candidate Biden to step down, including panicking donors. By and large, however, a timid and unimaginative Democratic establishment is doubling down on support for their guy.

Among the liberal columnists now calling for Biden to voluntarily drop out of the race are: New York Times columnists Thomas Friedman, Frank Bruni, Ezra Klein, Ross Douthat, and Nicholas Kristof; Current Affairs’s executive editor Nathan Robinson; Harold Myerson of the American Prospect; The Slate’s David Faris; and Mehdi Hassan, who jumped from MSNBC to the Zeteo platform. Sacramento Bee opinion writer Robin Epley warned readers that “for the Democrats, only a fresh injection of visible vitality and something more than a minimally-acceptable level of intelligence will save Americans from a second Trump administration.” Presciently, last month Alex Shepherd wrote in the New Republic (“Democrats have a Joe Biden Problem”), warning Democrats to replace Biden on the basis of his consistently awful polling.

But such warnings are nothing new.

A year go The Atlantic acknowledged that “Democrats would like a new presidential candidate. The problem is that the current president is plugging along fine.” But this morning things were not so fine. Franklin Foer’s article in the Atlantic is titled “Someone Needs to Take Biden’s Keys.” Another by Jerusalem Demsas counsels the same: “Dropping Out Is Biden’s Most Patriotic Option.” In February 2023 Michelle Goldberg’s piece in the New York Times, “Biden’s a Great President. He Should Not Run Again,” warned against precisely what debate viewers saw last night.

Despite last night’s fiasco, the Democratic establishment is still not ready to throw in the towel on Biden.

Vice President Kamala Harris, who has an obvious dog in the fight, conceded that Biden had a “slow start” but warned that the election should be decided on the basis of “substance.” California governor Gavin Newsom, a rumored replacement for Biden who was in Atlanta for the debate as a Biden surrogate, dismissed Biden’s replacement: “With all due respect, the more times we start having these conversations, going down these rabbit holes, it’s unhelpful to our democracy, the fate and future of this country, the world. They need us right now to step up and that’s exactly what I intend to do.” Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker, another whispered replacement, tried to cast the debate in the best light for Biden: “Tonight, voters were presented with a clear choice — a president working hard every day to improve the lives of all Americans or a convicted felon, a selfish blowhard looking out only for himself. The contrast between these two men was clear before the debate — it is even clearer now.” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) called rumors of Biden dropping out “bizarre” while Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) dismissed the idea as well. “I’ve heard no credible plan B, and I’m not counting on a plan B.” Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro pooh-poohed replacing Biden, calling only for Democrats to “stop worring and start working.”

But much of the media cheering section is still with Biden.

MSNBC, the Fox News for centrist Democrats, denied that Biden was unfit and said only that Biden had had a bad night, counseling optimism: “Biden still has months to right the ship.” But no one can fault MSNBC for inconsistency: a year ago the network ran a segment denying problems with Biden’s candidacy, letting 2016 runner-up Hillary Clinton tell listeners why he was a great a candidate as she was. The Slate’s Jill Filipovic still supports Biden — but by the thinnest of threads: “That Biden bungled even his party’s strongest issue should be a moment of reckoning –not just for his supporters, of which I am one, but for the man himself.” Robert Reich wrote nothing about Biden’s unfitness, only leaving panicking readers with a panicky lecture on how Trump is exactly like Hitler. Heather Cox Richardson also wrote nothing about Biden’s unfitness, but dissected each of Trump’s lies. Meanwhile, New York Times columnist and Israel hawk Bret Stephens is still betting on Biden but sounds like he’d prefer Republican Elise Stefanik to the Vice President.

And this is only the “morning after.”

We’re going to have to wait a few days or weeks to see if Democrats are capable of moving past their shock and denial to a rational — actually the only possible — response to last night’s disaster. In any rational universe the DNC would replace Biden.

Despite the fact that it’s never been done before so late in the game, a new candidate could soften the rift between centrists and progressives, allay concerns over Biden’s age, address his terrible polling and also his choice of VP, offer a stronger challenge to the many third party candidates in the race, and (providing the replacement is not another zealous Christian Zionist) pacify somewhat the 10-15% of Democrats who voted “undecided” in the primaries because of Biden’s collaboration in Israel’s war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.

But this is a party that doesn’t care, never learns, and never takes responsibility. Blaming voters for Biden’s almost certain defeat in 2024 will be the the DNC’s response to their own irresponsibility. It’s going to be a repeat of 2016 unless the party grownups wake the hell up.

The Poverty of Liberalism

Posted by David Ehrens on 2024-06-24 No comments

“In every American community, you have varying shades of political opinion. One of the shadiest of these is the liberals. An outspoken group on many subjects. Ten degrees to the left of center in good times, ten degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally. So here, then, is a lesson in safe logic.” — Phil Ochs, intro to “Love Me, I’m a Liberal” (1966)

* * *

The New Republic recently ran a series of articles about Liberalism, one of which was authored by Jamie Raskin. The article is accompanied by a photo of “liberals” protesting Trump immigration policies (“no ban, no wall”) — but this was not a picture of liberals illustrating liberal immigration values but of progressives protesting Trumpian policies the party of liberals has now chosen to follow.

This is just one example of an easily-observed phenomenon: that liberals often voice approval for progressive policies while doing the complete opposite. Don’t believe me? Read the Democratic Party Platform, national or Massachusetts versions. It doesn’t matter. Both are filled with voter candy that Democratic legislators then turn around and vote against.

Right out of the gate Raskin admits that “American liberals exist for the most part implicitly — in our work, our arguments, and our values, and not so much in terms of explicit, much less exclusive, political self-identification.” What Raskin acknowledges here is that liberals have certain sentiments but absolutely no coherent political positions — which is much the same thing comedian Lewis Black was getting at when he observed that “Republicans have nothing but bad ideas and Democrats have no ideas.”

Liberals want to have it both ways. They want to be progressives and conservatives, both at the same time. Let’s hear more of what else Raskin has to say:

“We are indeed emphatically liberals because we defend individual liberty, but we are equally progressives because we champion progress for everyone; and these days, we are the closest thing America has to conservatives, too, because we want to conserve the land, the air, the water, the climate system, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, public integrity, judicial independence — everything in society and nature that the party of nihilists and authoritarians wants to destroy.”

I concede that some liberals are inclined to many of these things, but few are inclined to defend, say, the “individual liberty” of Palestinians — or to even criticize their leaders for colluding in a genocide. And the political party that represents liberals has done little to defend any of it. Wasn’t it Biden, for example, who ushered Clarence Thomas into the Supreme Court? Has the Constitution ever been any more than an aspirational document for people who can be satisfied with mere verbiage? Doesn’t this same Wonder Document enshrine gravely undemocratic institutions (the electoral college, the Senate) into law? Have Democrats really defended these institutions that Raskin enumerates with anything nearing the same zeal that the GOP shows in trying to destroy them?

But Raskin was right about the conservatism. While Republicans have become a party of radicals who “violate norms” and would tear our institutions apart if they could, liberal Democrats have become the champions of these decrepit, dysfunctional institutions, including our relatively unchanging American foreign policy. While MAGA Republicans question everything from NATO to provoking Russia and China while focusing on domestic issues, liberal Democrats (according to a Pew Research Center study) are only too happy to expand NATO right up to Russia’s door and spend taxpayer money freely at the arms bazaar.

Tellingly, nowhere in Raskin’s essay does he mention foreign policy, the great Achilles heel of Liberalism — because liberal values exist only in an extremely limited geographical bubble. Move outside the borders of the United States and liberals become the most ardent defenders of empire, war, conquest, and colonialism.

Raskin goes on to assign progressive fights to the liberal scorecard. While the ACLU and the NAACP are no bastions of Bolshevism, to be sure, both struggle with “liberal” Democratic Party policies and inaction. Yet they appear on his “liberal wins” column. But liberals can’t undermine the Ilhan Omars and Rashida Tlaibs in their own party while simultaneously taking credit for their progressive activism.

Quoting John Dewey, Raskin writes that the only cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy; among the ills that sicken our democracy are gerrymandering (still used by Democrats, as I can personally attest since my own Congressional district is still gerrymandered) and voter suppression (Democrats are currently using an entire catalog of dirty tricks to keep third parties off the ballot in numerous states). The real problem with our democracy is that the rules of the game in the Constitution are flawed and undemocratic. And liberals aren’t interested in changing them.

Raskin goes on to slam autocrats like Putin and Orban who shut down papers and use state powers to crush political opposition. Fair enough. But the hypocrisy of his observation — at a time when Democrats have colluded with Republicans in shutting down protests over Gaza and punishing academics and college presidents for permitting critiques of Zionism and colonialism on their campuses — is sickening.

And speaking of Zionism, liberals are apparently great defenders of this 19th Century relic of ethnonationalism that is so popular with the Orbans and Bolsonaros. Our liberal President, on innumerable occasions, has called himself a Zionist. The party of the liberals unhesitatingly gives Israel whatever it needs to keep its supremacist state in place. This in turn undermines liberal claims to defend liberty and fight authoritarianism. The Israeli government that American liberals enthusiastically support is the most far-right in history and includes outright fascists who every week advocate genocide and ethnic cleansing. There is no individual freedom when an entire people is being carpet-bombed and ethnically cleansed. And there is no individual freedom when the liberal state uses its power to crush dissent over unpopular wars and foreign policy. This is as true today as it was in 1968 when liberals were slaughtering VietNamese and beating protesters.

* * *

Presidential candidate Cornel West weighed in on liberalism last year and, like Raskin, has a complicated relationship with it. On the one hand, he easily sees its weaknesses, but he also has a classical liberal orientation toward it:

“The sunny side of liberalism is its defense of these indispensable rights and liberties. The dark side of liberalism is its blindness to the threats of oppressive economic power, its blindness to militarism and imperialism abroad. But it’s very important that we never view liberalism in monolithic, homogenous terms. I hope we’re able to have a kind of dialectical understanding, so we can tease out what we see as valuable in these various liberalisms, and at the same time keep track of faults and foibles.”

Like Raskin, West identifies human dignity as Liberalism’s most important feature. But instead of massive structural change, including change initiated by conflict and the system’s inherent contradictions, West ultimately believes that civics and morality will straighten it all out:

“In Democracy Matters, I wrote a chapter on the deep democratic tradition. The backdrop of this tradition is the dignity of ordinary people. Each one of them has an equal status in the eyes of something more powerful. They have to undergo education, they have to undergo spiritual formation, they have to develop a sense of civic virtue, but it’s their voice. That’s a democratic voice, with a liberal dimension. We started this dialogue saying what? Without liberalism as a prerequisite in terms of rights and liberties, fascism is the alternative; that’s it. Let’s just be honest about it. But then the question becomes: Are we sensitive enough, and do we have the patience to tease out the resources in our own tradition that can serve as a launching pad for alternatives?”

* * *

Writing in the same issue of TNR as Raskin, Sam Adler-Bell observes that:

“Either liberalism is a necessary but insufficient condition for achieving justice and fairness, or else liberalism is an active impediment to these aims, an “ideology,” in Marx’s sense, whose chimerical aspirations naturalize and perpetuate the status quo.” […]

“I often find myself flitting between these two propositions in my writings and commitments. To be frank, I hope the former is true: that universal rights and dignity not only are compatible with but require a scheme of material redistribution to be realized. But in my darker moments, I fear the latter is more true: that individual liberty will always be, first and foremost, the handmaiden of property, that exceptions to liberalism’s universal pretensions can always be found when they imperil the privileges of the propertied class.” […]

“The timidity of liberals, our obsession with getting things right, our worry about going too far, could generously be categorized as thoughtful discrimination. More often than not, however, our wan, philosophical reticence is really some species of self-deception: a primal, conservative fear of disorder, masquerading as principle.”

There’s that conservatism again. And — completely in conflict with justice, fairness, rights, and dignity — the liberal penchant for warmongering and repression has repeatedly surfaced even in relatively enlightened times.

Adler-Bell points out that it was Truman who signed Executive Order 9835, kicking off the [second] McCarthyite era. Likewise LBJ worked with J. Edgar Hoover to repress the American Left, the Black freedom movement, the anti-war movement, and the Civil Rights movement. And —

“As I write, liberals, including President Joe Biden, are wringing their hands — when they’re not ringing the police–over protests by young people who have taken all-too-seriously certain universal propositions: that Palestinian lives are as inviolable as Israeli ones, as worthy of dignity and protection, and as deserving of the right to self-determination.”

And Adler-Bell sure puts his finger on the patient’s pulse when he writes:

“American liberalism, Irving Howe once wrote, cannot escape its “heritage of Protestant self-scrutiny, self-reliance, and self-salvation. Consequently, American liberalism has a strand of deep if implicit hostility to politics per se — a powerful kind of moral absolutism, a celebration of conscience above community, which forms both its glory and its curse.” This strikes me as remarkably true of today’s Democratic Party. Its loudest boosters take for granted that an aura of moral righteousness attends the party’s actions, and that it is every person’s solemn duty of conscience to walk, soberly and somehow alone, beneath its banner. Liberal politics divorces itself from interest, need, and passion; “from the soil of shared, material life,” as Howe put it. In Biden’s message, one hears a stultifying admixture of high moral panic with utter political banality and sloth. Our existential crisis demands prudent equanimity; we are called to frenzied urgency–but not like that.”

This explains, in part, how even a Protestant “radical” like Cornel West can share many of these values.

* * *

Next up to defend liberalism in the New Republic is Robert Kagan. Those who remember this Machiavellian liar and warmonger who pushed the US to invade Iraq also know that neoconservatives like Kagan and Elliot Abrams hold an esteemed place at the Democratic Party’s actual (not professed) foreign policy table. As a well-known neoconservative Zionist apologist who advocates for American domination of the “White Man’s Burden” variety, and for Jewish supremacy in Palestine, Kagan writes that he is appalled that the Supreme Court would defend white Christian supremacy. To some ears this nonsense is not as glaringly inconsistent as it sounds to mine.

* * *

Finally, rounding out the discussion in the New Republic, Jefferson Cowie wonders if Liberalism has any meaning at all:

“First, nobody can truly agree on what the term means, partially because it has rarely existed in the first place in the United States. “American liberalism,” therefore, has proved to be as much of a nostalgia trap as a forward-thinking enlightenment project. And, when liberalism did work in a politically progressive way, it tended to do so best when it transcended its own logic, ironically achieving liberal ends through illiberal means.” […]

“We begin with the nostalgia trap. The best proof of the fact that we don’t know what we are even talking about is the belief that some classical version once defined American history. What must be regarded as, at best, the most blinkered and, at worst, most pernicious interpretation of American history is Louis Hartz’s staggeringly influential The Liberal Tradition in America (1955). Hartz argues that Americans enjoyed the absence of a class-structured feudal past, which also meant little tradition of militant revolution or reaction. Americans were born free, capitalist, and committed to the liberal ideal. Hartz’s flat, conflictless version of history was always in conversation with European socialism more than the American historical record. It stands as a document of its postwar moment, when the United States needed to make sense of itself as hegemon of the “free” world.”

This 1955 view of Liberalism brings us directly to the 1950’s America both Donald John Trump and Joseph Robinette Biden represent. Whether by beefing up NATO or imposing tariffs, or kicking out the immigrants (which both geezers now appear to be in favor of), it’s the bad old America that was. Not the America of the future.

Cowie rattles off several competing views of liberalism, but each falls back on the old, comfortable “more democracy” argument. In naming many of American democracy’s most glaring defects, even Cowie shrinks from pointing out the obvious — that only radical medicine can treat this habitually sick patient. In the end it is liberalism’s “respect for the individual” that each of Liberalism’s advocates presented here falls back upon.

That’s it. That’s all they’ve got. This is what Robert Paul Wolff was getting at when he wrote his brilliant 1968 autopsy report, The Poverty of Liberalism.

The solution, as old math books used to say, “is left as an exercise to the reader.”

The Courage of our Convictions

Posted by David Ehrens on 2024-03-19 No comments

Joe Biden’s and the Democratic Party’s uncritical support for Israel’s war on Gaza will probably cost them the next election. Growing support for third party candidates will also do Biden no favors. Just as the Democrats are taking it on the chin, a broad coalition of well-organized and well-financed far-right and Christian Nationalist organizations have announced a national “reorg” of the judiciary, the Presidency, the civil service, and they have their sights set on far-reaching legislative changes.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and the Trump campaign’s Agenda 47 both represent nothing less than an ambitious, detailed neofascist plan to jettison what’s left of America’s secular democracy and replace it with authoritarian rule and Christian Nationalism.

But if Democrats can’t hold the Presidency, then the damage to American democracy, such as it is, will have come from a party that has failed to capture the confidence of voters and has also managed to alienate even its own members.

Completely divorced from issues of his age, mental fitness and electability, a significant number of Democratic voters are furious that Joe Biden, who describes himself at every opportunity as a Zionist, has been complicit in a deliberate genocide that has moved from destroying an entire population’s housing and slaughtering tens of thousands of civilians, to harrying millions of people all over their open-air concentration camp, to now starving them to death and blocking food and supplies from reaching them.

Channeling outrage among Democrats of conscience, and with no Democratic candidates courageous enough to reject unconditional support for Israel, “Uncommitted” campaigns were organized in several states to use the Democratic primaries themselves to register protest. In Hawaii, over 29% of Democrats voted “Uncommitted” in the presidential primary. In Minnesota that number was almost 19%, in Michigan, 13%. Here in Massachusetts 9.4% of Democrats voted “Uncommitted” to North Carolina’s 12.7%, Colorado’s 8.1%, and Tennessee’s 7.9%.

Even with No Labels still trying to recruit a presidential candidate, there are still plenty of third party challengers: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Green Party’s Jill Stein, Cornel West, a slew of Libertarians who will select a candidate at their May convention, Claudia de la Cruz of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and Joseph Kishore of the Socialist Equity Party, to name a few.

There is something for almost every political taste — and all taste better than the featured entrees of a fascist and an accomplice to genocide.

As both major parties continue to lose faith with the electorate, the percentage of people voting third party has been steadily increasing. In 2012 1% of the popular vote went to the Libertarians and 0.4% to the Green Party. In 2016 the Libertarians received 3.28% of the vote and the Greens 1.07%. In 2024, based on an average of several polls, RFK Jr. would receive 12.4% of the vote, Cornel West 2.4%, and Jill Stein 1.8%.

If you listen to Republicans, America is at a crossroads for white privilege and white domination; only by reinforcing white Christian domination can the nation be saved from Marxists, atheists, diversity programs, and trans children. And if you listen to Democrats, America is at a crossroads for democratic ideals that have only been available to some Americans and never to those of the many nations Democratic presidents have invaded or destroyed.

While I would prefer to not have Project 2025 or Jesus jammed down my throat during a second Trump presidency, I’m no longer convinced that Democrats (like their GOP brethren) really care about, or can convincingly defend, American democracy. I’m also not convinced that American democracy and freedoms are any more important than everyone’s right to a democracy or freedom. Joe Biden’s administration advocates imposing an unelected government on Palestinians, who will remain under Israel’s yoke, as he continues to sell weapons to some of the world’s worst human rights abusers, including Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

If I vote for American democracy and thumb my nose at everyone else’s — as the Democratic Party chides me I must — how is this any different from what MAGA Republicans are asking of America? Aren’t we in this mess because too many politicians have exhibited moral cowardice and hypocrisy while pursuing political expediency and money? And are we really obliged to reward them with our votes?

Nope.

In my next post I’ll look at Project 2025 and Trump’s Agenda 47.

Choices (2024)

Posted by David Ehrens on 2024-01-19 No comments

Although Joseph Robinette Biden, like Donald John Trump, has already been crowned by his party as “the only Presidential candidate who can win,” there are other choices. Not great choices, admittedly, but choices nevertheless.

On March 5th Massachusetts voters will be presented with a ballot with three Democratic Presidential candidates to choose from. If we apply the “lesser evil” principle to these choices — as the Democratic Party insists we must in the general election — then it becomes a choice between Marianne Williamson and Dean Phillips, Biden having disqualified himself by supporting the world’s best-documented genocide.

Let’s consider the candidates in order of their appearance on the 2024 Primary ballot.

Dean Phillips

2024 will be the first Presidential try for Dean Phillips, 54, a Minnesota congressman who made his fortune by inheriting his family’s liquor business and buying Talenti Gelato and Penny’s Coffee.

Phillips has called for Joe Biden to step down. “I would like to see Joe Biden, a wonderful and remarkable man, pass the torch, cement this extraordinary legacy,” Phillips told NBC’s Meet the Press. Phillips worries about Biden’s age: “God forbid the president has a health episode or something happens in the middle of a primary,” he told the Washington Post.

Phillips is a right-of-centrist Democrat who has been endorsed by Andrew Yang, who left the Democratic Party to start his own “Forward” party with former GOP officials. Phillips is a leading member of the Problem Solver’s Caucus, which spun off the No Labels party.

Phillips, like our own MA-CD9 representative Bill Keating, serves on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and has voted with Joe Biden 100% of the time. Voters can reasonably expect only minor deviations from Biden’s ruinous environmental, foreign policy, militaristic, and immigration policies. Interestingly, as an undergraduate Phillips interned with Senator Patrick Leahy, for whom the Leahy laws are named (these prohibit the transfer of weapons to countries like Israel that commit human rights abuses).

Shamelessly pandering to the Far Right, Phillips expunged all references to DEI (“diversity, equity, and inclusivity”) from his campaign website. Phillips, who is Jewish, has accused progressive Democrats of “antisemitism” in regard to Israel. But Phillips laudably also defended Ilhan Omar after Republicans removed her from the Foreign Affairs Committee and has denounced Israel’s carnage in Gaza, calling for an “immediate and mutual ceasefire of large-scale military operations and indiscriminate terror” to be upheld by both sides.

Joe Biden

Biden is a complete non-starter in my view. It’s not merely that Biden is too old; it’s that his policies, like the man himself, are from an era that celebrated America as a global hegemon. Biden’s militarism and foreign policy are dangerous, expensive, and immoral. His policies on immigration, the environment, and his inaction and lack of support of numerous human rights and democratic reforms are inexcusable. Most importantly, Biden is complicit in and actively supporting a genocide, and this is a red line that no one can ignore.

Marianne Williamson

2024 will be Marianne Williamson’s second shot at the Presidency. Williamson, 72, is a motivational speaker who got her start as spiritual leader of the Church of Today. She bristles at being called a “New Age guru” but if the shoe fits…. Williamson has written a slew of self-help books, including a best-seller promoted by Oprah Winfrey, who claimed that she had received 157 miracles after reading Williamson’s book. Williamson has also been a cabaret singer, bookstore owner, and coffee shop owner. She lived in a geodesic dome for a year.

Williamson was raised in the Jewish Conservative tradition but has long identified as a Christian, lecturing at Episcopal, Methodist and Unitarian churches. She explained her dual religious identity, telling Vanity Fair, “A conversion to Christ is not a conversion to Christianity. It is a conversion to a conviction of the heart.”

Williamson’s platform calls for an end to the War on Drugs, a federal minimum wage, reparations for racial injustice, the establishment of a U.S. Department of Peace, and serious efforts to address poverty.

A political profile of William R. Keating

Posted by David Ehrens on 2024-01-15 No comments

The Big Picture

Let’s begin with an unpleasant but glaring truth – nobody is going to easily “flip” Bill Keating’s seat.

As the following political profile shows, William R. (“Bill”) Keating has solid numbers at the voting booth, and his centrist positions are exactly what voters in Massachusetts’s oldest, whitest, less-educated, military-friendly Congressional district appear to want. As a long-time member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Keating is a major beneficiary of the defense industry’s largesse, but he receives far greater support from organized labor. It’s not clear how the union money spigot could be shut off, but this is the thing that would hurt him the most.

Congressional District 9

Massachusetts Congressional District 9 is older and whiter than most of Massachusetts. The median age is 47.3 (20% higher than both US and MA averages) but the mean is 60-69. Likewise, 83% of the district is white (43% higher than the national average and 13% higher than the state average). CD9 is in fact one of the whitest parts of the state. 9.8% of the District is foreign-born, half the rate in the rest of Massachusetts and two-thirds the rate in the US. 6.4% of the population of CD9 are veterans, 1.5 times the rest of Massachusetts and only slightly higher than the national average. 43.3% of the District has a college degree. This is 20% higher than the national average but 10% less than the state average.

Keating’s background

William R. Keating was born in Norwood, Norfolk County, Massachusetts on September 6, 1952. Keating received his B.A. from Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Mass. in 1974, an M.B.A. from Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Mass. in 1982, and his J.D. from Suffolk University, Boston, Mass. in 1985. After passing the bar Keating went to work for the law firm Keating & Fishman. Keating was a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1977-1984, having been elected at the ripe old age of 24. He has been a career politican literally his entire adult life.

After Joseph Timility resigned from the state Senate, Keating won his seat, remaining in the state Senate from 1985-1998. Keating ran on a tough anti-crime platform. He also joined the Joint Public Safety Committee, where he wrote a drug sentencing “reform” package which lowered thresholds for possession “with intent to distribute.” Keating’s legislation was pilloried for being both unncessarily draconian and vague. But his voters loved it.

Keating then advanced his political careerism as Norfolk County, Mass. District Attorney from 1998-2010. Upon taking his oath of office, a third of the Norfolk DA staff either resigned or was fired. He served two terms as DA.

In 2011 Keating was elected as a Democrat to U.S. Congress, where he remains today. He is considered a typical “Massachusetts liberal” and in the 118th Congress Keating voted with President Joe Biden 100% of the time. Keating’s 2022 election cost him $1.36 million and he won 59.2% of the vote, beating Republican challenger Jesse Brown. Keating enjoys donor support from not only defense contractors who benefit from his votes in Congress, but receives support from numerous Massachusetts unions.

Keating sits on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and the House Committee on Armed Services, including the Armed Services Subcommittee on Intelligence and Special Operations.

In the current (119th) Congress, Keating has sponsored a number of bills and resolutions, many related to Russia and Ukraine. See Keating’s full list of sponsored legislation at the end of this report.

Democracy and Transparency

Despite the tremendous amount of money now being spent on elections at all levels and ballot questions in 2012 and 2014 which showed over 70% of Massachusetts voters supporting a Constitutional amendment to restrict rights to natural persons and to take money out of elections, Keating was not a co-sponsor of H.J.Res.48, which would have addressed “Citizens United.”
Other members of the Massachusetts Congressional Delegation — JIm McGovern and even Seth Moulton — co-signed Representatives Bill Pascrell and Debbie Dingell’s letter urging the U.S. Trade Representative’s office to ensure that the NAFTA renegotiation process remains open and transparent. Bill Keating did not.

Health Care

One hundred and sixteen Democrats co-sponsored H.R.676, John Conyers’ Medicare for All Act. Keating was not one of them.
Keating has not endorsed any other public healthcare option.

Worker’s Rights

Keating did not support Worker Rights: H.R.15 – Raise the Wage Act.

Women’s Rights

The Equal Access to Abortion Coverage in Health Insurance (EACH Woman) Act of 2017, H.R.771, sought to defend a woman’s right to choose. Keating did not support it.
Former DNC chair Tom Perez and former DCCC chair Ray Lujan, as well as some in the New Democrat Coalition, of which Keating and Seth Moulton are members, argue for “flexibility” on abortion and against abortion as a litmus test.

Education

Twenty-seven Democrats co-sponsored H.R.1880, the College for All Act. Keating was not one of them.

Taxation

The Inclusive Prosperity Act, H.R. 1144, a Wall Street Speculation fee, is a fraction of a percent tax on stocks, bonds, and financial derivatives that can be used to fund public university tuition and would be offset by tax credits. Keating did not support this.

Consumer

Keating voted YEA with Blue Dog Democrats on H.R. 3192, a Republican bill which reduces transparency for mortgage lending institutions. This bill was a hit with the American Bankers Association, the Chamber of Commerce, and the Home Builders lobby, but it prohibited consumers from suing mortgage lenders who violated Consumer Financial Protection Bureau disclosure requirements under the Truth in Lending Act. Keating doesn’t believe in amnesty for immigrants. Why then an amnesty for mortgage lenders?
Keating also voted YEA with conservative Democrats on H.R. 1737, a Republican bill which neutered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s oversight of Indirect Auto Lending and Compliance with the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. Keating and a minority of House Democrats broke with his own party to vote for Republican sponsored H.R.1737, the Reforming CFPB Indirect Auto Financing Guidance Act. This bill prohibited consumers – particularly minorities – from suing auto lenders who violated Consumer Financial Protection Bureau rules against discrimination in lending. The bill takes the unusual step of preventing disclosures of violations with Freedom of Information Act requests. The NAACP, the Urban League, La Raza, the Consumers Union, and many others, were opposed.

Immigration

Keating is a hard-liner on immigration. From “On the Issues”: “Bill Keating opposes amnesty. As a District Attorney, Bill Keating enforces our laws and believes that everyone must obey them. His office has prosecuted thousands of criminal cases that resulted in defendants being detained for immigration and deportation action. Bill believes that we must secure our borders, and wants to punish and stop corporations that hire workers here illegally. Bill does not support giving people who are here illegally access to state and federal benefits.”
Keating and five other Democrats voted for H.R. 3009, the “Enforce the Law for Sanctuary Cities Act,” a Republican bill to withhold funding for states and municipalities with “sanctuary” policies.
Keating and Blue Dog Democrats voted for H.R. 4038, the “American Security Against Foreign Enemies Act of 2015.” The Republican bill added additional obstacles to the already-onerous screening and vetting of Syrian refugees.
Keating voted YEA on H.R. 3004, “Kate’s Law,” a Republican bill which expands indefinite detention of migrants who repeatedly cross the border. The bill will do nothing to prevent future actions by desperate people but it will increase the number of private prisons in the United States.
During the January Shutdown, only Keating and Stephen Lynch voted for a stopgap spending bill that kept the military happy but threw Dreamers under the bus. The other seven Massachusetts congressman and both U.S. senators voted against it.

Civil Liberties

Keating is no friend of the Fourth Amendment and gets only middling ratings: “Keating supported ‘cybersecurity’ legislation, and opposed defunding the government’s Section 702 surveillance programs (PRISM and Upstream); however, he supports banning backdoor searches on US persons.
Keating voted for the USA FREEDOM Act, which reformed the small amount of government surveillance that occurs under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, and continued to support it even after its reforms were watered down to the point where there was much debate about whether it would do more harm than good to pass it.”
Voted for extending FISA in 2018 – https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/115-2018/h16

Private Prisons

The Justice is Not for Sale Act, H.R.3227, places restrictions on private prisons. At a time Republicans are trying to re-institute discredited justice and prison practices, and pushing privatization, including prisons, schools, and even the war in Afghanistan, Keating did not support this.

Voting Rights

The Automatic Voter Registration Act, H.R. 2840, would make voter registration easier and automatic. Keating did not support this.

Foreign Policy

Politically, Keating is liberal on some domestic issues. However, when it comes to foreign policy, Keating is a pro-NATO, “anti-terror” war hawk who voted to expand both the Patriot Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Keating has worked on providing Ukraine with more weapons and on legislation to sanction Russia and Russian parliamentarians. He has lobbied the EU to have Iran classified as a sponsor of state terror and advocated imposing additional sanctions on it. When Donald Trump ordered the assassination of Iranian General Qassim Soleimani, Keating told Radio Boston it was indeed a US “escalation” but no one was going to mourn the death of a war criminal.

In keeping with Keating’s across-the-aisle militarism and adventurism, he signed a resolution sponsored by far-right Florida Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen in behalf of the Falun Gong, which claimed that Chinese political prisoners from the religious community were having their organs harvested by China. These claims were debunked by the Washington Post and denied by lawyers from the Falun Gong itself.

Keating’s Foreign Policy webpage describes him as a “staunch advocate of human rights and freedom of expression and press.”

Militarism and Foreign Policy

Keating voted NAY on a resolution to bar President Obama from using an AUMF to invade Libya. The resolution would have required Congress to declare war — per the U.S. Constitution. Keating did, however, vote YEA on ending the war in Afghanistan.
Keating was reluctant to support Obama’s and Kerry’s Iran deal (though he was critical of Trump for backing out of it) and has courted the MEK, an exile group which until 2012 was designated a terrorist organization seeking to overthrow and replace the Iranian government with its own “government-in-exile.” Republican and Democratic hawks managed to lift the designation.
Keating is pro-Israel. He has fought international efforts to support a Two State Solution, advocated moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, opposed the use of the word “Palestine” and threatened to cut off U.S. contributions to the U.N. and funding for U.N. refugee efforts because of the international body’s criticism of Israel’s land theft and occupation.
Keating, along with Democratic hawks, sent a letter to Rex Tillerson affirming their support for Trump’s policies on NATO and for Tillerson’s office. Keating shares Republicans’ view that NATO needs to be stronger to oppose Russia and joined Democratic war hawks in passing legislation to prevent a US President from leaving NATO.

Bombing

When President Donald Trump sent 50 Tomahawk missles into Syria on April 6th, 2017, the top five American newspapers ran 18 editorials praising the attack. There was not a single criticism. Sending a barrage of missiles into another nation is without question an act of war. The War Powers Act requires the President to report to Congress within 48 hours of initiating “hostilities.” Defense hawk and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton praised Trump’s attack and urged him to take out Assad’s airfields.

By bombing Syria, CNN’s Farid Zakaria said, Donald Trump had finally “become president.” MSNBC’s Brian Williams called the missiles flying off to do their lethal work “beautiful.” For the most part Democrats didn’t even bother to question whether the Syrian government deserved the attack. The Liberal Atlantic Monthly ran a piece titled Why America Should have Hit Assad Four Years Ago. Keating hopped on the militarist bandwagon, cheering Trump’s deployment of the Raytheon tomahawk missiles, which was in violation of both the AUMF and the U.S. Constitution.

Israel-Palestine

After October 7th, Keating condemned Hamas’s “senseless terrorist attacks” and promised Israel that America had its back. He pooh-poohed any dissention among Democrats over President Biden’s immediate military aid, telling the Boston Globe that the “vast majority” of Democrats support Joe Biden’s stance on helping Israel bomb Gaza.

Rep. Keating has rarely sponsored legislation with the words “Palestine” or “Palestinian” in it. Only one of his resolutions, H.Res.872, which appears to have been authored by the ADL, refers to contemporary Israel. Two other co-sponsored bills commemorate the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, in which Jews built bunkers, smuggled in weapons, and fought the Nazis who had locked them into a section of Warsaw turned into a concentration camp. Otherwise Keating is focused on Europe, particularly Russia and Ukraine.

Donors

Much of Keating’s support comes from organized labor since his domestic policies are much more liberal than his foreign policies. However, ignoring what goes on in the rest of the world, organized labor views the Democratic Party as a partner in transactional politics. This philosophy may be changing, but the union movement is still quite conservative overall.

OpenSecrets tracks Congressional donors. Of the thousands of donors to Keating’s campaigns between 2015 and 202, two defense contractors appear in hi top 20 donors – BAE Systems and Raytheon. Two pro-Israel lobby groups also show up – JStreet and AIPAC. Both AIPAC and BAE are tied for fourth place, along with a number of unions.

Rank	Contributor	Total	Indivs	Pacs
1	Democracy Engine	$15,500.00	$15,500.00	$0.00
2	Thornton Law Firm	$12,600.00	$12,600.00	$0.00
3	JStreetPAC	$10,600.00	$8,100.00	$2,500.00
4	American Federation of State/Cnty/Munic Employees	$10,000.00	$0.00	$10,000.00
4	American Israel Public Affairs Cmte	$10,000.00	$0.00	$10,000.00
4	BAE Systems	$10,000.00	$0.00	$10,000.00
4	Laborers Union	$10,000.00	$0.00	$10,000.00
4	Nelson, Mullins et al	$10,000.00	$2,000.00	$8,000.00
4	Operating Engineers Union	$10,000.00	$0.00	$10,000.00
4	Plumbers/Pipefitters Union	$10,000.00	$0.00	$10,000.00
4	Teamsters Union	$10,000.00	$0.00	$10,000.00
4	United Parcel Service	$10,000.00	$0.00	$10,000.00
13	National Assn of Realtors	$8,000.00	$0.00	$8,000.00
14	Cape Cod Healthcare	$7,950.00	$7,950.00	$0.00
15	American Crystal Sugar	$7,500.00	$0.00	$7,500.00
15	American Federation of Teachers	$7,500.00	$0.00	$7,500.00
15	National Beer Wholesalers Assn	$7,500.00	$0.00	$7,500.00
15	Raytheon Technologies	$7,500.00	$0.00	$7,500.00
15	Sheet Metal, Air, Rail & Transportation Union	$7,500.00	$0.00	$7,500.00
15	United Food & Commercial Workers Union	$7,500.00	$0.00	$7,500.00

According to the Federal Election Commission, which tracks the details of each donation, Keating took money from defense contractors BAE, Boeing, General Dynamics, General Electric, L3 Harris, Lockheed-Martin, Northrop Grumman, OSI Systems, and RTX/Raytheon. This the total haul from these defense contractors and also the Israel Lobby:

Donor	Amount
AIPAC	$22,900
JStreet	$4,000
BAE	$100,500
Boeing	$44,000
General Dynamics	$86,000
General Electric	$27,000
L3 Harris	$1,000
Lockheed-Martin	$326,000
Northrop Grumman	$178,000
OSI Systems	$2,000
RTX / Raytheon	$178,000
TOTAL	$969,400

The American Friends Service Committee’ Investigate project has researched the role of each in either the carpet bombing of Gaza or corporate complicity in Israel’s occupation and Apartheid system.

Contractor	Role in Gaza genocide (AFSC)
BAE	The world’s seventh largest weapons manufacturer, UK company BAE Systems manufactures the M109 howitzer, a 155mm mobile artillery system that the Israeli military has been using extensively, firing tens of thousands of 155mm shells into the Gaza Strip. Some of these shells are white phosphorus bombs, the use of which is forbidden in densely populated civilian areas and potentially amounts to a war crime. BAE also manufactures electronic missile launching kits and other components for Israel’s F-15, F-16, and F-35 fighter jets, which the Israeli Air Force has used extensively in all of its attacks on Gaza, including in 2023. For more information on this company (not including these latest developments) see our company profile on the Investigate database.
Boeing	The world’s fifth largest weapons manufacturer, Boeing manufactures F-15 fighter jets and Apache AH-64 attack helicopters, which the Israeli Air Force has used extensively in all of its attacks on Gaza and Lebanon, including in 2023. Boeing also manufactures multiple types of unguided small diameter bombs (SDBs) and Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) kits, which convert these bombs into precision-guided munitions. Israel has been using these bombs extensively, including in a Nov. 1 bombing of Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp, which killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians and could amount to a war crime, according to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. On Oct. 10 and 22, the Israeli military used bombs equipped with Boeing JDAM kits to carry out what Amnesty International calls “unlawful air strikes on homes full of civilians in the occupied Gaza Strip.” The attacks, which could amount to a war crime, killed 24 people of the al-Najjar family and 19 people of the Abu Mu’eileq family. Immediately after Oct. 7, Boeing expedited delivery of 1,000 smart bombs, and another 1,800 JDAM kits, to Israel. Both deliveries were part of a 2021 order that Israel made during its previous large-scale attack on Gaza. Headquartered in Chicago, the company has important production facilities outside of Los Angeles, Seattle, and St. Louis. For more locations, see this map. For more information on this company (not including these latest developments), see our company profile on the Investigate database.
General Dynamics	The world’s sixth largest weapons manufacturer, General Dynamics, supplies Israel with artillery ammunition and bombs for attack jets used in Israel’s assault on Gaza. The company developed the F-16 fighter jet, although it has been manufactured by Lockheed Martin since 1993. General Dynamics is the only company in the U.S. that makes the metal bodies of the MK-80 bomb series, the primary weapon type Israel uses to bomb Gaza. The bodies of the bombs are filled with explosives by the U.S. military, and then can be made into a guided bomb using Boeing‘s JDAM kits. It is also the only company in the U.S. that makes 155mm caliber artillery shells, which have been used extensively to attack Gaza. One source reported that, by Nov. 25, one Israeli brigade fired some 10,000 such shells using BAE’s M109 howitzer. 155mm shellshave been part of the U.S.’s recent weapons shipments to Israel. The U.S. is planning to send “tens of thousands of 155mm artillery shells that had been destined for Ukraine” to Israel. Their use by Israel, according to Oxfam, is “virtually assured to be indiscriminate, unlawful, and devastating to civilians in Gaza.” On Nov. 13, more than 30 organizations issued a letter opposing the transfer. General Dynamics also partnered with Flyer Defense (see above) to develop an armored patrol vehicle that Israel is testing. On an Oct. 25 call with investors, General Dynamics CFO, Jason Aiken, said, “I think if you look at the incremental demand potential coming out of [the attacks on Gaza], the biggest one to highlight and that really sticks out is probably on the artillery side.” General Dynamics is based outside of Washington, D.C., in Fairfax, Virginia. For more locations, see this map. For more information on this company (not including these latest developments), see our company profile on the Investigate database.
General Electric	The world’s 25th largest weapons manufacturer, General Electric manufactures T700 Turboshaft engines for Boeing‘s Apache helicopters. GE is headquartered in Fairfield, Connecticut. For more information on this company (not including these latest developments), see our company profile on the Investigate database.
L3 Harris	The world’s ninth largest weapons manufacturer, L3Harris manufactures components that are integrated into multiple weapons systems used by the Israeli military in Gaza, including Boeing‘s JDAM kits (see above), Lockheed Martin‘s F-35 warplane (see below), Northrop Grumman‘s Sa’ar 5 warships (see below), ThyssenKrupp’s Sa’ar 6 warships (see below), and Israel’s Merkava battle tanks. For more information on this company (not including these latest developments), see our company profile on the Investigate database.
Lockheed-Martin	The world’s largest weapons manufacturer, Lockheed Martin supplies Israel with F-16 and F-35 fighter jets, which Israel has been using extensively to bomb Gaza. Israel also uses the company’s C-130 Hercules transport planes to support the ground invasion of Gaza. Lockheed Martin manufactures AGM-114 Hellfire missiles for Israel’s Apache helicopters. One of the main weapon types used in aerial attacks on Gaza, these missiles have been used extensively in 2023. Some 2,000 Hellfire missiles were delivered to Israel sometime between Oct. 7 and Nov. 14. On Dec. 28, Lockheed Martin was awarded a $10.5 million contract for continued support for Israel’s fleet of F-35 warplanes. On Dec. 11, the Israeli Air Force used a Lockheed Martin C-130-J Super Hercules aircraft to drop approximately seven tons of equipment to Israeli soldiers engaging in ground attacks in Khan Younis, located in the southern Gaza Strip. This was the “first operational airdrop” that Israel has carried out since the 2006 Lebanon War. On Nov. 9, an Israeli missile hit journalists sitting near Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. The missile was reportedly a Lockheed Martin–made Hellfire R9X missile, a version of the Hellfire that was developed by the CIA for carrying out assassinations. Instead of exploding, the missile shreds its target using blades, allowing for a direct hit without collateral damage. The target in this case was not a military one. The Israeli military also uses Lockheed Martin’s M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS). Used to fire Elbit Systems‘ high-precision AccuLAR-122, the weapon was used by Israel for the first time, since the 2006 war in Lebanon, on Oct. 6, according to the Israeli military. On an Oct. 17 call with investors, Lockheed Martin CEO, Jim Taiclet, “highlighted the Israel and Ukraine conflicts as potential drivers for increased revenue in the coming years.” Lockheed Martin is headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, and has key production sites in Denver, Houston, New Orleans, and San Diego. For more locations, see this map. For more information on this company (not including these latest developments), see our company profile on the Investigate database.
Northrop Grumman	The world’s sixth largest weapons manufacturer, Northrop Grumman supplies the Israeli Air Force with the Longbow missile delivery system for its Apache attack helicopters and laser weapon delivery systems for its fighter jets. It has also supplied the Israeli Navy with Sa’ar 5 warships, which have participated in the assault on Gaza. On Dec. 15, Northrop Grumman was awarded an $8.9 million contract for 30mm MK44 Stretch cannons for the Israeli military, funded by U.S. taxpayers’ money. The weapons will be manufactured in Mesa, Arizona, with an expected completion date of March 2025. Israel uses these guns on its Namer Armored Personnel Carrier, which has been used extensively in Gaza. Northrop Grumman is headquartered in Falls Church, Virginia, and its most important production sites are located in and around Baltimore, Denver, Los Angeles, and San Diego. For more locations, see this map. For more information on this company (not including these latest developments), see our company profile on the Investigate database.
OSI Systems	Israel has installed OSI scanners in several of its illegal military checkpoints in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. According to Who Profits, as of 2020, Rapiscan scanning machines and full body scanners are installed at three military checkpoints in the occupied West Bank, as well as at the entrance to the Western Wall area in occupied East Jerusalem. This equipment is provided through OSI’s exclusive representative in Israel, G1 Secure Solutions (formerly G4S Israel).
RTX / Raytheon	In addition, since 2016, Rapiscan metal detectors have been installed at 10 offices operated by the District Coordination and Liaison Offices (DCO), a unit of the Israeli Ministry of Defense that administers the civilian aspects of the military occupation of the West Bank, such as issuing travel permits to Palestinians.The world’s second largest weapons manufacturer and largest producer of guided missiles, RTX supplies the Israeli Air Force with guided air-to-surface missiles for its F-16 fighter jets, as well as cluster bombs and bunker busters, which have consistently been used against Gaza’s civilian population and infrastructure. RTX subsidiary Pratt & Whitney manufactures engines for F-15 and F-16 fighter jets. As part of a joint venture with Israeli state-owned weapons manufacturer Rafael, RTX makes interceptors for Israel’s Iron Dome air defense system, which have been part of the U.S.’s recent weapons shipments to Israel. On an Oct. 24 call with investors, RTX CEO, Greg Hayes, said, “I think really across the entire Raytheon portfolio, you’re going to see a benefit of this restocking.” RTX moved is headquarters from Waltham, Massachusetts to Arlington, Virginia in 2022. For more locations, see this map. For more information on this company (not including these latest developments), see our company profile on the Investigate database.

Like Keating’s donations from unions, he has received money from the Human Rights Campaign PAC, a group with an LGBTQ+ focus, and NARAL PAC, which has a reproductive rights focus. And like the Democratic Party, the center of gravity for both unions and liberal causes, many progressive organizations apparently can’t see beyond the borders of the United States.

Israel Lobby

According to OpenSecrets Keating has received a total of $26,395 from pro-Israel lobbies (mainly AIPAC and JStreet) since entering Congress. For context, the average of 1404 (past and present Congressional) lifetime Israel lobby donations is a shocking $93,450. On average, Massachusetts Congresspeople received average lifetime totals of $51,740.

As things go, Keating is hardly the worst offender. The suprise in the numbers is now-Senator Ed Markey. As a Representative he received considerable money from AIPAC.

Massachusetts Representative	Total pro-Israel receipts
Auchincloss, Jake	$261,761
Clark, Katherine	$230,549
Markey, Ed	$137,171
Kennedy, Joe III	$97,067
Neal, Richard E	$84,300
Moulton, Seth	$61,636
McGovern, James P	$56,725
Trahan, Lori	$41,688
Capuano, Michael E	$27,500
Frank, Barney	$27,324
Kennedy, Joseph P II	$26,600
Keating, Bill	$26,395
Olver, John W	$21,250
Tsongas, Niki	$14,200
Blute, Peter (Republican)	$9,000
Conte, Silvio (Republican)	$5,000
Moakley Joe	$3,050
Mavroules, Nicholas	$2,550
Tierney, John F	$2,000
Atkins, Chester Greenough	$1,500
Studds, Gerry E	$1,000
Pressley, Ayanna	$5

Average	$51,740

Organized Labor

In terms of the scope of Keating’s donations from unions, the FEC database is the place to look. If Keating has one obvious vulnerability it is the uncritical support he receives from organized labor.

Keating’s Personal Investments

In October 2023 RAWStory investigators Dave Levinthal and Alexandria Jacobson published an article, “Busted: Dem lawmaker with military oversight is playing the market with a military supplier.” The Democratic lawmaker was William R. Keating and the defense contractor was Boeing.

In a House financial disclosure filed the previous month, Keating reported he had purchased up to $50,000 of stocks in Boeing and $848.75 in Caterpillar. Boeing manufactures the Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs) that have been used extensively in Gaza, while Caterpillar notoriously and in flagrant violation of international law provides demolition equipment used to destroy Palestinian homes and infrastructure. Readers may recall that Rachel Corrie was a US activist who was crushed to death by a militarized Caterpillar D9 bulldozer in 2003 when she attempted to block the destruction of a Palestinian home with people still inside it.

When asked about Keating’s investments, a spokesperson said that they “do not influence the congressman’s policy positions.” But Jessica Tillipman, associate dean for government procurement law studies at The George Washington University, described Keating’s investments as a “raging conflict of interest.”

Legislation

Keating has either sponsored or co-sponsored the following legislation throughout his time in Congress:

Resolutions

Keating has either sponsored or co-sponsored the following resolutions throughout his time in Congress:

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Take a hike, Joe

Posted by David Ehrens on 2024-01-12 No comments

I am one of those voters who cares more about foreign policy than making Wall Street great again. Don’t try to sell me Bidenomics when the president hired a war criminal, sent cluster munitions to the Ukraine, fist-bumped a Saudi prince who had an American journalist hacked into pieces, gave Indian fascist Narendra Modi a bear hug, gave the same to Israel’s fascist Prime Minister, and twice bypassed Congress to provide military aid for Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza.

In case you hadn’t noticed: Donald Trump does not have a monopoly on presidential depravity.

This week Biden thumbed his nose at that pesky Constitutional requirement to consult with Congress on US military operations in Yemen, and he has expanded the military budget to obscene levels in order to prepare for a war with China that his own disastrous foreign policy is making much more likely.

The Biden Budget

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party has decided that in a nation of 330 million people there is only one old white guy capable of winning the Presidency. They can’t sell Biden on either charisma or policy, so all they do is shriek about Trump while furiously waving their Bidenomics PowerPoints.

Democrats tell us the danger to America is a war-mongering fascist when their guy is waging wars at an unprecedented pace and defending fascism abroad. Democrats tell us we need Biden to fight creeping American religious nationalism even though Biden himself defends a similar variant and even identifies with it.

With approval ratings in the toilet, Biden is barely acceptable to mainstream white Democrats. But if you ask 83% of Arab-Americans who they’re going to vote for, it’s anyone other than Joe Biden. Similarly, if you ask young voters, 70% disapprove of his support for Israel’s genocidal war. Biden began his presidency with a generous 86% approval rating from Black voters but today that number has declined by 23%. Likewise Biden’s numbers among Hispanic voters have shrunk almost 30% from an initial 72% approval rating to about 42% today.

A Gallup poll this week showed that the damage Biden has done to his approval ratings are not confined to himself. Biden’s losses have translated into losses for the Democratic Party as a whole:

“Democratic identification has now declined by one point in each of the past three years. These declines, and the new low registered in 2023, are likely tied to President Joe Biden’s unpopularity.”

It’s not just Biden’s war-mongering that rankles some of us. Leaving aside Biden’s disgraceful history of racist legislation, fighting desegregation, and demeaning Anita Hill while greasing Clarence Thomas’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, Biden’s lukewarm support for reproductive rights, his refusal to enlarge the Supreme Court, his lack of concern for the environment (including actual expansion of oil drilling), the ease with which Biden threw the poor under the bus during debt ceiling negotiations, and his shameful capitulations to the Far Right over immigration – all point to a man who, as his age might suggest, is living in an alternate reality of the 1980’s when Corvettes ruled the roads and White Men ruled the world.

You can go online and sign a petition to Step Aside, Joe – not that the DNC is ever going to listen to you. The Democratic Party is a private entity run by partially- or non-elected leadership. Biden’s name will be the only one on Democratic primary ballots in Florida, Tennessee, North Carolina, and possibly Massachusetts. According to an article in POLITICO, Massachusetts Secretary of State Bill Galvin can simply add a candidate to the ballot as a figure “recognized by the national media” or may choose not to place them on the ballot “if their party doesn’t put their name forward.” Democracy, you say!

Regardless of how much liberal peer pressure and guilt-tripping is employed to make you assent to the coronation of a candidate complicit in genocide, you don’t owe Joe Biden or the DNC a thing. If the Democratic Party wants to win the Presidency in 2024, it needs another candidate. Plain and simple. But if the DNC sticks with Biden, his entirely predictable loss will have been completely self-inflicted.

We have to talk about Joe Biden

Posted by David Ehrens on 2023-08-21 No comments

It doesn’t take much to keep a 72 year-old man up at night. And caffeine and over-hydration are not what I’m talking about. What worries me is the country’s race toward fascism, cheered on to the amens of fake-Christian nationalists and accompanied by the angry whiteboy tunes of Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town” or Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond.”

But right at the top of my worry list is the Democrat Party’s lack of concern that its presumptive nominee, the current president, is such a bad choice he could actually lose against an opponent with 91 criminal indictments. That’s not just my opinion; it’s a view supported by multiple polls (for example, here and here and here). Joe Biden’s candidacy is such a terrifying prospect that it is irresponsible for the DNC to not be looking for a replacement. And it would be irresponsible not to be writing essays like this one.

Bidenomics

Aside from the fact that he’s not Donald J. Trump — which is really the only reason to vote for him — Biden’s entire campaign is based on “Bidenomics,” a time-worn bag of post-Keynesian tricks for tweaking the economy. By traditional measures that consider inflation, the consumer price index, the health of the investment industry, the value of the dollar, personal debt, consumer spending, or view “employment” generously to include those working three dead-end jobs at a time or “gig economy” jobs without benefits, “Bidenomics” is going gangbusters. Biden’s bag of tricks, according to his PowerPoints and dry talking points, is “working.”

“Bidenomics” is no doubt the product of some genius’s riff on “Reaganomics,” the trickle-down theory that what benefits Big Business must ultimately help the American worker. By now almost everyone knows trickle-down economics was a big lie, what another Republican called “voodoo economics.” And maybe that’s the problem: Americans are simply tired of having their Presidents lie to them about economic policies. Whatever its merits, Bidenomics was destined to fall on deaf ears.

Yet for all the centrist Democratic cheerleading (see examples here or here or here) Americans have not been convinced by Bidenomics’s rosy numbers. The title of a recent article by Monica Potts in FiveThirtyEight says it all: “Biden Says The Economy’s Doing Great. Lots Of His Own Voters Don’t Believe Him.” Americans’ precarious personal finances are rarely acknowledged. It’s not the health of the dollar, the Dow, the Consumer Confidence index, or even inflation that terrifies Americans. Millions of Americans are one medical disaster or one week of unemployment away from complete financial ruin. They can’t afford housing, they can’t afford healthcare, they can’t afford childcare, and they’re struggling to pay off medical debt, credit card debt, and student debt. Both food insecurity and financial hardship are only worsening.

And then there’s Biden himself.

Voters just don’t want Biden

Reflecting America’s misery and hopelessness, Biden’s abysmally low approval ratings from working people shouldn’t come as any surprise. An AP-NORC poll found only 34% of Americans approve of Biden’s economic leadership. 78% say the economy is fair or poor, according to a New York Times Cross-Tabs survey. A Reuters-Ipsos survey found that 69% of Americans think the economy has deteriorated since Biden assumed the Presidency. Biden’s popularity with Black voters has dropped from 82% to 52% in three years. A Yahoo/YouGov poll found that only 27% of Americans thought Biden was fit to be President compared to 31% who felt the same about Trump. Here in Massachusetts, 59% would prefer that Biden never run again.

Why, then, doesn’t the Democratic Party believe any of these people?

Ignoring people, believing pundits

FiveThirtyEight’s Galen Drake and guests made a good-faith effort to explain the disconnect in “Why Americans Aren’t Feeling ‘Bidenomics’.” Jeanna Smialek, who covers the Fed for the New York Times, suggested, “inflation feels worse than the job market feels good.” Axios’s chief economic correspondent Neil Irwin, conjectured that the disconnect was due to diminished earning power. To their credit, they actually looked for missing datapoints to explain the disconnect.

Compared to that, however, liberals seem to be consuming a lot of sweet, empty calories in the many puff pieces written to defend Bidenomics. The New Republic’s Timothy Noah simply pooh-poohed Bidenomics’s critics, asking “What Drives Blind Denial of Economic Good News?” His TNR Colleague Michael Tomasky called Biden a “terrific president” and chastised Democrats for not being enthusiastic enough: “Democrats are walking around in some state of somnolent indifference about Joe Biden. They need to snap out of it.” The American Prospect’s Ryan Cooper asked, “Can Democrats Sell ‘Bidenomics’?” Then proceeded to write off Americans’ lack of enthusiasm for Bidenomics as unchallenged propaganda from the right, claiming: “Most ordinary voters appear to be doing reasonably well in their own personal finances. Witness the consumer confidence index, which recently hit the highest level since January 2022, before the major inflation surge. But then they turn on the news each night and hear dire stories about inflation, supply chain difficulties, housing prices, interest rates, and so on, with little or no consistent pushback from Democrats.”

I’m not so willing to dismiss voters’ own assessments of Biden. They’re the ones voting in 2024, not the pundits.

Biden the faux unionist

For all his “Joey Scranton” shtik, Biden is not, and has never been, a genuine champion of working class Americans. Biden may have had working class parents, but he began his professional life as a lawyer, owns four homes, is worth at least $10 million, and since 1972 has had a guaranteed pension and healthcare from the Senate. In the negative sense that most Americans experience it, Biden has never had to “work” a day in his life.

While “Union Joe” claims to be the most pro-union president in U.S. history, the Revolving Door Project notes Biden’s “encouraging” appointments to key executive positions in his administration — Jennifer Abruzzo to General Counsel of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), Julie Su to Labor Secretary at the Department of Labor. “Unfortunately, the list of the administrations’ pro-labor achievements basically ends there.” The article goes on to mention chronic underfunding of the National Labor Relations Board, his breaking of the rail strike last November, the UAW’s concern about Biden’s reckless funding for non-union automotive startups, and Labor’s absence from trade deal negotiations.

For instance, Biden’s “Build Back Better” program promised to reverse the corporate takeover of trade policy seen in the NAFTA and TPP agreements. But with the new corporate-led Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, Biden’s business-as-usual approach consists of giving an outsized voice to corporations in matters of trade policy.

Biden and the Democrats

As party leader, Joe Biden may be skillfully holding the Democratic “big tent” together with chewing gum, bailing wire, and duct tape. But the tent is a centrist tent, always has been, and always will be. Those of us who are not centrists get cranky when we see that the party could be a much more effective and passionate advocate for average Americans than it is. But face it: the Democratic Party operates on corporate largesse and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) itself just hired a union-busting consultant leading an effort to deprive workers of labor protections. The current DNC Chair is Jaime Harrison, among other things a former lobbyist with the Podesta Group, which services major U.S. corporations. Chris Korge is the DNC’s Finance chair. Korge too is a former lobbyist, fundraiser, and real estate developer.

Mixed signals on Abortion

You might recall that Biden was not endorsed by NARAL in 2019 because of his support for the Hyde Amendment, which bars using federal funds for abortion. Just this year, when asked his views on Roe v Wade (he does feel the Supreme Court “got it right” back then), Biden still couldn’t resist showing where he actually stands: “I’m a practicing Catholic. I’m not big on abortion.” Despite the mixed signals, and to be fair, Biden does actually support abortion and contraception — and NARAL finally endorsed him this year. But with abortion and contraception threatened nationally, an 80 year-old guy with needlessly-vocalized reservations may not be the best choice to fight for reproductive rights for women.

Defending Private Prisons

Despite publicly opposing private prisons, Biden’s administration filed suit against the state of New Jersey citing the “Supremacy Clause” in the Constitution in a case in which New Jersey was trying to get rid of private prisons operated by CoreCivic.

Supporting the Surveillance State

The Biden administration announced its intention to renew Section 702 of the invasive and unconstitutional Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

A long history of racism

Many people have not forgiven Biden for his 1975 anti-busing crusade that the NAACP called “an anti-black amendment”, or his shabby treatment of Anita Hill during Clarence Thomas’s Senate confirmation hearings in 1991. Over a long and damaging career in the Senate, Biden managed to be associated with all types of racist legislation — attaching the death penalty to over 60 crimes, minimum sentencing for nonviolent drug offenses, civil asset forfeiture, and establishing different sentencing for powder vs. crack cocaine. Biden demonized “super-predators” and attacked George H.W. Bush for being soft on crime.

In 2020, when Biden was campaigning, he was asked about undecided Black voters. His reply shocked everyone: “If you’ve got a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.” That same year 500 Asian-Americans asked Biden to take down a racist anti-China ad that his campaign created.

Last year Biden proposed $30 billion in funding to hire more police, a move critics slammed as a betrayal of Black people and one completely hostile to appeals for demilitarizing and slimming police forces. Biden’s DOJ argued that people born in U.S. territories do not have a Constitutional right to U.S. citizenship.

Unsurprisingly, during his presidency Biden’s support from Black and Hispanic voters has been tanking.

Sticking with Trump’s Immigration policies

Biden retained Trump’s restrictive refugee caps as well as Trump’s Title 42 asylum denials (on the basis of public health) longer than necessary.

Botching Student debt relief

After botching version 1.0 of his own student debt relief program, the Supreme Court literally manufactured a plaintiff without standing to gut student debt relief. Biden’s “Plan B” is predicated upon the Department of Education invoking the Higher Education Act to dispose of the debt, a strategy many doubt can work.

Support for criminalizing marijuana

Biden still thinks marijuana is a “gateway drug.”

No support for enlarging the Supreme Court

Both Massachusetts senators and a large number of Senators and House representatives want to expand the Supreme Court. But Biden’s not on board.

Progressive Democrats were not happy about Biden’s cuts to Medicaid, Pell grants, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program in order to resolve the debt ceiling impasse. NAACP President Derrick Johnson warned Congress, “To our many allies and partners in Congress who have claimed to support Black Livers, we are grateful for your past support and need you to know: this is a moment of choosing.” In gutting social programs for the most vulnerable in society, Biden and the Democrats chose wrong.

Foreign policy a complete disaster

Biden’s ambassadors have been plucked mainly from the ranks of corporate lobbyists, big donors, and Big Oil. He just nominated war criminal Elliott Abrams, convicted of lying to Congress, to join the State Department Bipartisan Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy. Biden’s foreign policy is driven by three war hawks: Anthony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, and Victoria Nuland (who most famously was recorded in 2014 ordering up a new Ukrainian president).

Biden’s neocon war whisperers have him continuing to expand NATO, selling cluster munitions to Ukraine, and raising military spending to new and obscene levels. His Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines is another hawk who supports torture and managed to conceal CIA spying on senators from Congress. Biden has continued the secret wars of his predecessors, including weekly drone attacks. He won’t even call the coup in Niger (by US-trained generals) a coup.

There is no authoritarian state Biden won’t praise. From Israel to India, Saudi Arabia, Poland, Hungary, the Philippines, it’s White House visits, state dinners, hugs and fist bumps — even for a Saudi dictator who dismembered a Saudi-American journalist. As long as there is a strategic objective, Biden will turn on the flattery for any authoritarian regime.

Biden blocked resumption of the Iran nuclear deal that Trump abrogated in 2018 by introducing new preconditions and pronouncing the original agreement “dead.” Recently, Biden recklessly placed 3,000 troops on commercial ships in the Persian Gulf, a move that the Washington Post called a “remarkable escalation” with Iran.

The President is betting the ranch on a Saudi-Israeli peace deal which would (besides spinning mendacious fantasies of a Two-State solution) give Saudi Arabia a package of military aid, replenish Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s empty tank of political capital, reduce Saudi flirtations with China, and aim more nukes at Iran. As Fred Kaplan points out in Slate, this is an incredibly stupid idea: “Would the mullahs of Tehran hold still if their mortal enemies in Riyadh suddenly signed accords that gave them nuclear technology and formal military backing from Washington? It is a fair bet that they would accelerate their uranium-enriching programs if just to obtain a deterrent.”

Environmental policy in the dumpster

Biden began his presidency by naming Big Oil appointees to the State Department. He then set about rolling out pipelines, LNG terminals and has permitted more gas and oil exploration on public lands than Trump, including in the Arctic. In May and June 2022 the Biden Administration auctioned off more than 140,000 acres of public land for gas and oil development.

Rather than boosting alternative energy, Biden has embraced carbon capture and carbon accounting schemes that do little to actually reduce environmental CO2. And environmentalists have noticed: “We don’t want to see New Mexico have a continued legacy of sacrifice zones, so we’re here demanding the ending of fossil fuels and investment in renewable energies,” said Julia Bernal, the executive director of Pueblo Action Alliance on the occasion of a Biden visit to New Mexico. “No hydrogen, no carbon sequestration, and no false solutions in general.”

In August, under Biden, US crude oil production actually hit a new all-time high. Food & Water Watch Executive Director Wenonah Hauter blasted Biden’s hypocrisy, especially on methane which is a byproduct of fracking: “If the White House is serious about reducing methane pollution, it should [ban] fracking and [prohibit] the use of methane for heating in new construction. President Biden should also use his executive authority to stop the buildout of new gas infrastructure, ban the export of methane in the form of liquified natural gas, and stop fracking on federal lands as he promised during the campaign. […] So far, White House policies have bolstered the interests of corporate polluters by dramatically increasing fossil fuel permits and aggressively promoting the growth of fracked gas exports – a catastrophic move that will increase methane pollution and keep countries hooked on fossil fuels for decades.”

Disappointingly, Biden’s DOJ maintains that “there is no constitutional right to a stable climate system.” And, even with the world burning and melting, he still won’t declare a climate emergency. This is a president who may talk the talk but says “nah” to the walk.

Biden or not?

These are only a few of the many reasons no one should ever vote for Joe Biden.

But after all of the foregoing, here’s the one and only reason I still may end up voting for him.

I might prefer a particular third-party candidate for his love of all the values I care about — a candidate whose morality and humanity extend even to democracy and human rights outside the United States. A candidate who mercifully drops the American exceptionalist jingoism and instead looks critically at how race, class, and inequality play out in our nation. A man who is actually willing to do something to solve real problems for real people.

Unfortunately, there is absolutely no chance that this principled man will ever win the next election. And there is every chance a fascist will return with his “base” to deliver the coup de grâce to our dying democracy.

Many are calling for Biden to step aside. That includes half of all Democrats. And that includes me. I have hopefully given readers sufficient reason to do the same. However, if and when it becomes clear that no hope for an alternative to Biden remains, I will join in supporting him over the fascist with the spray-on tan and an army of pitchfork, bible, and AR15-wielding nut jobs.

But I hope the Democratic Party will come to its senses long before that happens and select a better, stronger, more appealing, and more principled candidate for President of the United States.

Going after the unicorn vote

Posted by David Ehrens on 2023-06-08 No comments

I realize that some of us are vastly outnumbered by folks who think that Democrats should move to the right to accommodate the swing voter, whoever he may be. Many sins emanate from this strange dogma, not confined to discounting gay, black or women candidates in 2024, a willingness to soften demands so as to appeal to the swing voter, or a failure to defend marginalized Americans — as we saw play out during the budget ceiling negotiations last week.

In fact, most Democrats probably saw last week’s fight as a win for pragmatism and centrism. But I see their conclusion as a gross miscalculation.

Rather than being the party of ideas and principles, the Democratic Party is mainly, as Robert Reich once characterized it, a vast “fund-raising machine” that has lost its way if not its soul. The comedian Lewis Black once quipped that the Democratic Party is the party of “no ideas” while Republicans are the party of “bad ideas.” Black’s joke was only funny because it was true.

Unlike the GOP, which operates on an uncompromising and visceral level (and, it must be conceded, very successfully), Democrats operate like a house thermostat, adjusting a blast of cold here or a jet of hot air there to maintain some abstract perfect “middle” temperature that pleases no one. Ask your spouse if you don’t believe me.

A 2019 study by the Pew Research Center actually looked at this mythological being, the swing voter. It turns out that the 40% of voters who identify as so-called “independents” are not really all that independent. 13%, in fact, are pretty much reliable Republicans while 17% are fairly reliable Democrats. This leaves 7% — mostly young and male — who are politically unmoored.

This should be no great revelation in a polarized political landscape in which the “middle” has largely eroded. And yet it is an article of faith of centrist Democrats.

What’s especially significant, however, is that, of these 7% only a third actually vote, which reduces the actual percentage of “independents” to about 2.3% of the American electorate. Democrats might actually appeal to some of these disaffected young voters if they chose a progressive candidate under 70, but in the last election most of the Democratic Presidential candidates thought they could appeal to the unicorn by bashing the social safety net, going weak on abortion, or alienating minority voters by slamming “identity politics.” Last week the same Democratic centrists alienated minority voters even further, not to mention the left wing of the party.

Steve Phillips is the author of How We Win the Civil War and Brown is the New White. In the latter book he argues, and I agree with him, that it would be a much smarter move to woo reliable Black and Brown voters and progressives than a mythological creature. The numbers are simply better.

Rather than trying to lower themselves to GOP standards, Democrats ought to be doubling-down on issues that distinguish them from Republicans. And redoubling fierce opposition to the fascist train barreling down upon us. Instead, while the Democratic Party insists on poll-testing and calibrating a perfect room temperature, its right wing will likely flirt with RFK Jr. and then end up voting for a GOP candidate.

And — let’s not blame them when they do — some percentage of the Democratic left wing will end up voting for Cornel West out of disgust — a disgust borne out of the Democratic Party’s limp and vacillating policies and neglect. And because West will raise many of the festering issues that Democrats are simply too frightened to deal with.

Join your local Dems

Posted by David Ehrens on 2023-06-02 No comments

While I am especially interested in national political and social issues, I also post things of interest to hometown progressives. And I have no plans to stop doing this. But I hope readers will seek out your local Democratic Party town or city committee for opportunities for engagement. You might be surprised. Or even pleasantly shocked.

It was once the case that up to 60% of all Massachusetts Democratic Town committees were either on life support or had passed away in their beds, leaving only a foul odor where they had once slumbered. Well, Trump changed all that.

If you are a New Bedford Democrat, or even an unenrolled liberal or progressive, get on Richard Drolet’s mailing list. Richard is the co-chair of the NB Dems and is known for both his tireless enthusiasm and his cookies.

If you live in Dartmouth, hats off to the Dartmouth Dems, who worked to get a new sheriff elected, fended off a rightwing crackpot in the School Committee elections, and have a new sense of mission. You can say “hi” tomorrow at the Dartmouth Dems table at NB Pride in Buttonwood Park. Or subscribe to their new online newsletter.

Speaking of which: Democrats across the state are signing up delegates NOW for the September Platform Convention in Lowell. Again, if you live in New Bedford, contact Richard Drolet.. If you live in Dartmouth, contact Jim Griffith or Susan LeClair at links found here.

*Long-time readers know I have many criticisms of both the national and state Democratic Party. Yesterday I voiced my displeasure that so few Democrats rejected negotiating with terrorists over the debt ceiling. But for the time being Democrats are about the only thing standing between us and the neo-fascism taking root in places like Florida.

A Shameful Capitulation

Posted by David Ehrens on 2023-05-31 No comments

There is only one other nation on earth with a budget ceiling. Denmark’s, unlike ours, is set so high that it has never triggered even the threat of a government shutdown. By contrast, since 1960 alone the United States has had 78 mini “crises” over a debt ceiling that is mentioned nowhere in the Constitution but was created in 1917 to make managing wartime economies easier. And we’ve had no end of wartime economies.

What is in the Constitution is Section 4 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which says unequivocally “the validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”

“The validity of the public debt … shall not be questioned.” This is crystal clear: defaulting on public debts is unconstitutional. The sky would not fall and the world economy would not collapse if Republican hardliners had no way of holding Congress hostage. And yet the budget ceiling has become a semi-annual occasion for producing political theater and grandstanding.

The “deal” that the Biden administration has apparently negotiated with Kevin McCarthy, who serves at the pleasure of the GOP’s Freedom Caucus, is being portrayed as a necessary, pragmatic, “best possible” deal by the administration. “It could have been worse” is about the only excuse centrist Democrats can make for this shameful capitulation.

If fiscal responsibility was supposed to be the objective, not much effort was made to generate revenue by rolling back tax breaks for the super-rich or reducing debt by paring down the obscene, marbled fat “defense” budget. The military budget, which together with Homeland Security provisions is now well over a trillion dollars, historically accounts for a major portion of the national debt.

The debt ceiling talks ended in a deal that both the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers praised — even as they called for even more austerity and a second course of regulatory rollbacks.

Instead, the Fiscal Responsibility Act (FRA) imposes (fiscal responsibility = austerity) on those not responsible for debt but who need government help the most. “Responsibility” is only for welfare mothers, not oligarchs, social media barons, agribusiness, the fossil fuel industry, or for defense contractors. Besides the cuts, the FRA places limits on discretionary spending for the next two years — yet none on military spending.

Over 80 programs, many of them social, are having their funding rescinded. Funding for the IRS — long in the GOP’s crosshairs — is also being hit. Pay-Go provisions will hobble government programs, where budget increases here must now be offset with financial cuts there. The Congressional Budget Office has prepared a 17-page summary of the FRA’s main features. Read it and weep.

FRA hits Brown and Black families the hardest, ending the student loan payment pause, adding additional work requirements to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, impacting the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and rolling back environmental protections for communities of color. NAACP President Derrick Johnson issued a statement:

Let’s be clear: while the original intent of the debt ceiling was to solve a practical challenge of paying the nation’s bills during World War I, it has become a weapon used by conservative extremists to hold the lives and livelihoods of Black America – and countless others – hostage. The NAACP calls on Congress and the Administration to end this practice before it can again be used to inflict more harm on Black America.

Progressive Democrats are justifiably unhappy with this gutless, immoral deal.

Among other missed opportunities, President Biden failed to show enough spine with Speaker McCarthy to stand on the Fourteenth Amendment and risk / provoke a revolt by the GOP Freedom Caucus, which would have both highlighted the GOP’s cruelty to voters and divided the GOP.

As for Biden’s hopes for a second term, his age is already a hard sell. But now the negotiator-in-chief has shown himself to be a weak and unreliable defender of America’s most vulnerable citizens. Biden has also dispelled any notion that he has moved to the left over the last two years. Whether Progressive Democrats will forgive him for this capitulation is not yet clear, but the bitter aftertaste of this budget ceiling negotiation will do him no favors in 2024.

The McCarthy era is back!

Posted by David Ehrens on 2023-02-19 No comments

On February 7th, the House Financial Services and Senate Judiciary committees voted on a resolution:

H.Con.Res.9 – Denouncing the horrors of socialism

The resolution was sponsored by Florida House Republican Maria Elvira Salazar, the daughter of Cuban exiles who likely knew Cuban military dictator Fulgencia Batista, who fled to Florida about the same time as they. For Cuban exiles like Salazar’s parents, who lost sweat shops and colonial plantations to agrarian reforms, socialism was all-too easily conflated with a Holocaust.

But just to keep things in perspective, and perhaps as one indicator of just how lopsided wealth in Cuba was before, after the revolution Castro nationalized his own family’s 25,000 acre estate. Plantations like Castro’s family’s were worked by landless farmers living and working in conditions similar to Southern plantations and pre-revolutionary Russian estates. For Cuba’s virulent anti-Communists, plantations and military dictators were the “good old days.”

Salazar’s resolution conflates socialism with totalitarian regimes, famine, mass murder, and places Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro in the same company as Pol Pot and Joseph Stalin. Salazar’s resolution is filled with hysterical hyperbole and concludes with a ridiculous claim found neither in the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution: “Whereas the United States of America was founded on the belief in the sanctity of the individual, to which the collectivistic system of socialism in all of its forms is fundamentally and necessarily opposed: Now, therefore, be it resolved…”

None of this is surprising coming from the Republican Party, which has clearly lost its collective mind and is in fact, and in Florida most acutely pursuing, the systematic dismantling of the Bill of Rights.

But most Americans make a distinction between European democratic socialism and the distorted dictatorships found in North Korea, Russia, and China. No sane individual believes for a second that “National Socialism” (aka Nazism) had anything to do with socialism. A 2021 Gallup Poll found that 52% of Democrats and 72% of Republicans view American Capitalism positively and, rather counter-intuitively, that 65% of Democrats and 14% of Republicans think of socialism in a positive light.

For Republicans, who are now the “either-or” heirs of the John Birch Society, it is either Capitalism or socialism. Democrats, on the other hand, understand “socialist” in the context of European social-democratic governments whose support for national healthcare, heavily subsidized education, housing, and parental leave contribute to a social safety net Republicans dismiss as “Communism.” For most Democrats “socialism” means features of social governance that can conceivably exist alongside a less predatory version of Capitalism. For Republicans, only the most predatory form of Capitalism is worth saving.

So it was disappointing to find that 109 Democrats — including a majority of the Massachusetts House delegation — signed on to Salazar’s resolution. Only Jim McGovern, Richard Neal, and Ayanna Pressley refused to make a show of red-blooded patriotic anti-Communism. At the very least they made a distinction that 65% of registered Democrats share regarding the nature of “socialism.” I was not surprised by Bill Keating, Stephen Lynch, Seth Moulton, or Jake Auchincloss. I had expected more of Lori Trahan and Katherine Clark, previously (and significantly) the Assistant House Democratic Leader.

“Disappointing” doesn’t even begin to describe Massachusetts House Democrats. Their disgraceful vote was another sign that the Democratic Party is as ambivalent about the social safety net as it is about every other liberal issue or democratic right it has already conceded to Republicans through collusion or neglect. From police reform to the defense of abortion and voting rights, Democrats allow Republicans to set the agenda on every issue, and they seem only too happy to join their Republican colleagues in betraying working people and minorities as they undermine true liberals within their own party.

With the ascendancy of the Tea Party, Trump, De Santis, and others in the GOP’s far-right starlight — and with a slim Republicans majority in the House — it appears we have entered a new McCarthy era. In the Fifties, the first targets of Joe McCarthy were liberal Democrats he claimed were “communistically inclined”, along with Jews, gays, and “Hollywood elites.” McCarthy succeeded in having libraries throughout the US purged of books, including Philip Foner’s The Selected Works of Thomas Jefferson and The Children’s Hour by Lillian Hellman, a play about false accusations in a girl’s school that had obvious parallels with what McCarthy himself was doing. If you live in Florida today, no doubt you are experiencing either deja vu or PTSD.

I have long believed that the Democratic Party, sadly, is the only thing standing between Republicans and the final nail in the coffin of American democracy. But if Democrats are not up to the task, it may be time for a new party to take on that responsibility. The formation of a new party — a regular occurrence in any other democracy — is hampered only by our lack of imagination.

Stuck in a mouse trap

Posted by David Ehrens on 2022-07-28 No comments

Republicans, Republicans, and more Republicans have joined forces to create a new political party — for Democrats.

This new party, calling itself Forward, will initially be chaired by Andrew Yang, who in 2020 posed as a Democrat for the sake of the primary, and Christine Todd Whitman, a former Republican governor of New Jersey and EPA Secretary under George W. Bush.

Forward joins forces with two previous GOP attempts to splinter the centrist wing of the Democratic Party: Renew America, launched in 2021 by a group of Reagan/Bush Republicans; and Serve America, another Republican group founded by Morgan Stanley lawyer Eric Grossman with [George W.] Bush administration figures.

Forward is an idea Christine Todd Whitman has been pushing for at least a year, usually by painting Trump’s destruction of the Republican Party like Jim Jones’ destruction of his own cult.

But rather than simply throwing “rational Republicans” a lifeline, Whitman’s other goal is to hollow out the Democratic Party by peeling away as many centrists as possible from the Democratic Party’s supposed “radical left.” When NPR host Steve Inskeep asked Whitman what she wanted from Democrats, she answered: “We want Democrats, when faced with a radical left candidate from the Democrat Party, to vote for a centrist Republican.”

Andrew Yang might have run as a Democrat in 2020 but earlier this month he showed up at a far-right event called Freedom Fest 2022 to rub elbows with both American and European fascists and to introduce them to his new project with a talk, “Forward — Notes on the Future of our Democracy.”

If you were paying any attention to the Republicans’ CPAC (Conservative Political Action) Conference in Budapest last May, many of the same elements attended Freedom Fest 2022. But instead of painting themselves as “rational Republicans” as they’re now doing with Forward, at CPAC they were fawning all over Viktor Orban and his Fidesz party — precisely because of its illiberal policies.

Fidesz, which is now a hard right Christian nationalist party, originally started out as a center-right coalition offering a “big tent” for both right-leaning liberals and far right nationalists. Over time, Fidesz has become increasingly repressive, antisemitic, and fascistic — so much so that last week, after Viktor Orban delivered a speech warning of the dangers of “race mixing,” one of his long-time advisors resigned from Fidesz, slamming Orban’s remarks as “pure Nazi text worthy of (Nazi propagandist) Goebbels.”

Whether the Republican Party’s new Forward movement will be an oasis of sanity for “rational Republicans” or a tasty cheese trap for Democrats who have to compete in Red districts, Forward is likely to suffer the same fate as Fidesz because the people and organizations who created Forward are just as unscrupulous and authoritarian as the orange meanie they created but can’t control.

If Yang and Whitman’s project goes anywhere — and that’s a big if — no doubt a number of fickle Democrats would be tempted to jump ship and join Forward. And good riddance. But if history offers any sort of guide, the Democratic Party would then try to staunch the hemorrhaging by moving even further to the right itself, creating an even more unfriendly climate for progressives.

This is why progressives — presently stuck in the Democratic Party’s mouse trap — will be forced to leave the Democratic Party sooner or later. Because America doesn’t need a second centrist party half as much as it needs one that represents working class people, the poor, and the marginalized.

Tomorrow, don’t forget to set your clock back to 2008

Posted by David Ehrens on 2021-01-19 No comments

Tomorrow Joe Biden will be inaugurated as the 46th U.S. president at a Capitol which now resembles Iraq’s Green Zone. The FBI is vetting all 25,000 National Guard troops who are bivouacking there for the first time in centuries — just in case some of them want to turn American weaponry against the new president. In addition to the National Guard there will be almost 1,000 active-duty military providing medical and bomb disposal support services.

For the 74 million Americans who voted for the outgoing president it doesn’t look much like a democracy. For most, only continued white supremacy makes America a democracy. And for many of the 81 million Americans who voted for Biden, myself included, it won’t feel lik much of a democracy either. For all our wishful thinking, there’s no rolling back the clock on who we are and what we’ve become. Very few of the 155 million people who voted for either candidate in the last election truly believe in full democracy, that is, both at home and abroad.

For years Americans have recognized that democracy and white supremacy are incompatible. Current events now force us to recognize that white supremacy leads only to authoritarianism and mob rule. And if we have the courage to look back with clear eyes on our history, we see it has always been this way.

The Patriot Act, FISA courts, the surveillance state, and the demonization and criminilzation of refugees, have become permanent fixtures under both Republican and Democratic administrations. Conservatives defend fascists while Liberals have now thrown both fascists and intemperate people off social media, proposed extensions of the No Fly List, drafted new anti-terrorism laws, and are now considering relaxing limits to all sorts of surveillance. After 9/11 we have not heard a peep from Democrats about retiring any of the anti-democratic laws and security measures that followed, as they continue to abrogate foreign policy decisions to an increasingly imperial presidency.

For many of us on the Left, Democrats cannot be relied upon to be any better stewards of democracy than Republicans. They will continue to be unreliable allies in police and criminal justice reform, housing, and universal healthcare. Judging by Biden appointments to-date, the Democratic Party’s true constituency continues to be corporate America. It remains to be seen if Democrats will actually help students drowning in debt, families losing their homes, people crushed by medical costs, or if they are willing to give up our long addiction to American Exceptionalism. There is ample reason to doubt this last one.

It’s fair to say that tomorrow, as Joe Biden takes office at noon, progressives will have a new political opponent who, for the most part, does not share anywhere near the same vision of what this country could be. Progressives and Centrists may have both worked to rid the country of Donald J. Trump. But the enemy of my enemy is not always my friend. And, so that this is clearer, our remaining enemy is neoliberalism not my well-meaning Democratic friends who haven’t really examined it very closely.

One unquestioned aspect of neoliberalism is maintaining a monstrous military to intervene at a moment’s notice to protect American interests, and to force neoliberalism (usually mis-labeled as “democracy”) down the throats of even nations who don’t want it — all in the name of nation-building. Over decades this has led to U.S.-supported coups all over the world, insurrections, assassinations, and regime change — in other countries, of course, never ours until now. But now the chickens have come home to roost.

Bipartisan war-mongering and constant regime change efforts revealthat America has no real commitment to democracy as a principle. Neoliberalism’s bipartisan sidekick is neoconservativism, another ideology based on American supremacy and the notion that we are obligated to project our “supremacy” or “exceptional” virtue using the biggest, most lethal arsenal in the world. If it sounds evil expressed this way, it’s because it is evil.

As we move from a Republican administration, which literally tried to build a wall around America to shut the world out, to a Democratic adminstration built from spare parts of the 2008 Obama presidency, we move from isolation to international engagement. Some of that engagement, such as restoring the Paris Climate Accords, is very welcome. Unfortunately much of the international engagement we can expect in the next four years will not be so good. We are about to witness the trimphant return of both neoliberalism and neoconservatism. And what good is the biggest, baddest military in the world if you don’t use it liberally and keep it in practice?

Yesterday Joe Biden announced that Victoria Nuland will be his Under Secretary for Political Affairs. Nuland, who camped out at various think tanks after leaving her role as Dick Cheney’s Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs and then Hillary Clinton’s spokesperson, is married to Robert Kagan. Kagan was co-founder of the Project for a New American Century, an organization that relentlessly cheer-led the invasion of Iraq. People forget that when America’s president changed from Bush to Obama, American foreign policy didn’t change along with presidents.

Nuland’s disgraceful involvement in regime change efforts (and the wars they require) should have immediately disqualified her as Biden’s pick. In 2014 Nuland and U.S. Ambassador to the Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt discussed the U.S. removing Ukraine’s elected president Victor Yanukovych. The Ukraine had backed away from a U.S. trade deal in favor of a $15 billion bailout from Russia. At the same time, a EU trade agreement was about to create new EU customers in the Ukraine. When a phone call of Nuland and Pyatt’s support for a coup to get rid of Yanukovych was leaked, Europeans were incensed and German Chancellor Angela Merkel was livid. It hadn’t helped that Nuland expressed utter contempt for the European Union. “Fuck the EU!” Nuland was heard saying on the same leaked call. The rest of the sordid coup story involves Nuland’s backchannel talks with Oleh Tyahnybok, a Ukrainian fascist.

Besides her regime change efforts in Syria and Libya, this was nothing new for Obama’s Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. Clinton was involved in another coup in Honduras — in which the Honduran military supported by the U.S. goverment impounded ballot boxes and forced the likely winner into exile. Clinton regarded the exiled candidate, Manuel Zelaya, as another “troublemaker” like Hugo Chavez, and she quickly organized new elections with pro-American OAS “partners” once it was clear that Zelaya could not re-enter the country. No need to point out that this is precisely the same strategy for overturning the 2020 presidential election recommended by Michael Flynn and attempted by Ted Cruz and a host of other Republican plotters. But Clinton got a free pass from Democrats because her crimes were not directed against Americans, just brown people somewhere else.

Nuland’s choice signals that the Biden adminstration will renew American provocations of Russia — in addition to all the other nations we currently sanction and meddle with. Last year Nuland wrote in Foreign Affairs that “The coming U.S. presidential election offers the United States a chance to get off defense, restore the strength and confidence of the democratic world, and close the holes in its security after years of drift and division. Once that resolve is firmly on display, the United States can seize the moment of renewal at home and stagnation in Russia to stretch out a hand again.” But Victoria (“Fuck the EU”) Nuland is precisely the wrong person to stretch out her claws to Europeans who have a talent for remembering history.

With U.S. military installations in Eastern Europe already literally ringing Russia, it’s not clear what sort of “holes” Nuland really thinks need plugging. Nuland has proposed even greater militarization of Russia’s borders, stepped-up VOA and other propaganda efforts, and a return to the halcyon days of the Cold War. “Washington and its allies have forgotten the statecraft that won the Cold War and continued to yield results for many years after. That strategy required consistent U.S. leadership at the presidential level, unity with democratic allies and partners, and a shared resolve to deter and roll back dangerous behavior by the Kremlin.” Joe Biden has apparently swallowed this Kool-Aid.

Many Liberals recognize (even embrace) Biden’s explicit reset of the clock from Trumpworld of 2020 to Obamaworld of 2008. But if Biden succeeds in replacing Trump’s isolationism with the muscular American Exceptionalism that preceded it — as Nuland’s appointment clearly signals — expect more global war and no relief from our trillion dollar “defense” and spy agency budgets. And don’t expect Biden to stop provoking China either or repair lapsed or broken friendships with traditional allies. These relationships have been destroyed by Democrats and Republicans alike.

Forbes reports that Europe may have finally given up on a pro-Brexit America which continually insulted the EU project and thumbed its nose at former allies. Biden had asked the EU to delay a new trade deal with China, to not permit member nations to integrate with Chinese digital technology, and to not tax or regulate American Big Tech. An impatient, if not fed-up, Europe showed it wasn’t going to play along with a new U.S. reassertion of power, even if Biden was a familiar face.

The days of Americans barking orders and allies snapping to attention seem to be a thing of the past. Like their Republican cousins, Democrats just don’t realize it yet.

The battle for the Senate is just getting started

Posted by David Ehrens on 2020-11-09 No comments

As the remaining votes in the 2020 presidential election continue to be counted, the math is showing that more than 75 million Americans have had enough of Donald Trump, while 70 million still think he walks with Jesus. Biden’s win over a white supremacist does not necessary add up to a mandate, but the almost 5 million difference in votes was a clear victory for Americans who felt they had been brought to the edge of a cliff.

Regardless of Biden’s win, he will be severely hobbled if Republicans maintain control of the Senate. The election decided 96 Senate seats — 48 for Republicans, 48 for Democrats — but two Senate seats from Georgia remain to be filled by recount and special election.

The battle for the United States Senate is just getting started.

Two Senate seats remain undecided in the exceptionally close races in Georgia. Besides a presidential vote that is almost certainly headed for recount, in January Raphael Warnock will face Republican Kelly Loeffler in a special election after a four-way race, and Jon Ossoff will face Republican David Perdue in a Senate runoff election.

If both Warnock and Ossoff win their elections, Democrats would have a majority in the Senate.

After Trump’s stinging repudiation, and because the Senate hangs in the balance, Republicans are not going to go down in Georgia without a fight. These two Senate races will almost certainly be the most expensive in history. Republicans will pull out all the stops to raise large sums to defeat Warnock and Ossoff. And then they will try to suppress the vote and challenge ballots.

Funding for both candidates, and for voting integrity, will be necessary to win this fight.

You can donate to either candidate via their links above — or navigate to gasenate.com.

gasenate.com

Here you can choose to donate to one, or both, or to both and to FairFight.com, Stacey Abrams’ voting integrity project, which will work to make sure that Georgia voters will have their votes counted.

The battle for the United States Senate is just getting started.

Goodbye, Gus

Posted by David Ehrens on 2020-11-09 No comments

On November 12th, state committee members of the Massachusetts Democratic Party will vote for a new Chairman. At present the party is led by Gus Bickford, who for years has held the post in conflict of interest with his day job as a political consultant. Bickford recently took his ethics challenges to a whole new level by poking his nose into the Morse-Neal race for the 1st Congressional District and launching a homophobic attack on Morse. This misstep, not so distant from Thursday’s vote, will probably end his tenure. Thankfully.

Under Bickford’s tenure the MassDems have fallen into greater and greater disrepair. Membership is down, town committees aren’t operating, and democracy has been a casualty. The party hasn’t been able to successfully challenge Republican governors and Bickford has failed to provide help in critical county and legislative races. Voters who have left the MassDems to become unenrolled say the party’s platform, revised every other year, doesn’t bear any similarity to to how Democratic lawmakers actually vote.

Bickford is being challenged by Mike Lake and Bob Massie.

Lake is deputy treasurer of the MassDems and CEO of Leading Cities, which promotes “business development and government cooperation opportunities and implementing public policy that effectively addresses the shared challenges facing 21st century cities.” Massie is known for his advocacy of environmental, climate, human rights, economic issues, and corporate responsibility. Both are affluent white guys who established nonprofits and helped themselves in the process.

Massie authored a roadmap called “BUILDING OUR FUTURE TOGETHER: A 10-Point Plan to Strengthen the Massachusetts Democratic Party and Win the Governorship in 2022.” And at least according to Lake, he and Massie are on the same page about many of the changes necessary to fix the party: “I think Bob Massie and I frankly have a much more aligned vision of what the party can be. […] We have already pledged to support each other.”

So, Massie or Lake — either would be a vast improvement over the ethically-challenged do-nothing currently presiding over the demise of the Massachusetts Democratic Party.

Scapegoats

Posted by David Ehrens on 2020-11-07 No comments

Razor-thin margins of the 2020 presidential election left many Democrats scratching their heads in dismay at the almost 49% of the population supported Trump, and wondering what had gone wrong. In a three hour long conference call, Democratic Party leaders identified their scapegoat — it was progressives who had tanked the 2020 elections for them.

Democrats are quick to dismiss their own failures. In 2016 the same accusing fingers pointed at so-called identity politics as the reason for Hillary Clinton’s defeat. Centrists linked arms with the American Right in denigrating the unique challenges of marginalized people and the idea of inviting them into the Democratic Big Tent.

2020 was no different. Democrats wasted no time channeling their inner Joe McCarthy, admonishing that “socialism” was responsible for soft Democratic performance and that support for abortion, LBTQ, trans rights, and gun control was too “divisive.”

Repeated attacks like these demonstrate that progressives will never find a permanent home in the Democratic Party. As Joe Biden begins assembling his cabinet and planning his first 100 days, we will see exactly how party centrists intend to reward progressive contributions to his win.

For almost four years I was a Democrat. But from almost the moment I joined the party I discovered — at least at the state level — an inert, ineffective and undemocratic organization, entirely focused on fundraising for political machines and lazy incumbents, whose business is conducted mainly in the dark.

Nick Martin, writing in the New Republic, describes his unhappy relationship with his home state, North Carolina, but also his disappointment in the half-hearted efforts of the NC Dems. Martin also describes his grudging admiration for the clear, persistent, and ruthlessly effective messaging of Republicans:

“You don’t have to understand much about electoral politics to grasp that the Republican Party’s ground game in rural North Carolina was leagues beyond whatever slapdash operation the Democratic Party rolled out of the back of the shed. The GOP understood that it wasn’t going to pick up enough votes in the state’s bluer hubs to beat Biden in the state, so they organized the hell out of their base…”

Democrats scratch their heads in wonder at evil geniuses like Mitch McConnell and Karl Rove, and marvel at the Republican long game. But what Martin describes in his article is no magic formula but instead simple common sense — organize the hell out of your base, appeal to their values, make them excited to vote, and use the base to magnify and echo the message. Repeat, repeat, repeat. And Republican values don’t change, no matter how unpopular they are. And Republicans don’t apologize for them.

In her response to the Democratic Party’s most recent Joe McCarthy moment, progressive Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez offered a few observations of her own. Reviewing the unsuccessful ground games of several Democrats who laid blame for their losses at the feet of a party supposedly too “socialist,” Ocasio-Cortez noted that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee failed in its digital messaging — right in the middle of a pandemic — by blacklisting political consultants who work with progressive primary challengers and who actually know how to deploy social media effectively. In Ocasio-Cortez’s view, some of these Democratic losses were self-inflicted.

Readers may recall the “Better Deal” that Democrats rolled out in 2017 following Hillary Clinton’s defeat — but most likely not. The intended reboot of the Democratic Party was dead the moment Schumer and Pelosi’s press conference ended. Democratic messaging then — as it still is now — was timid and vague and nobody, much less Democrats themselves, believed a word of it.

On the left side of the party, progressives proposed concrete programs — Medicare for All, rescuing students from lifelong debt, and a Green New Deal. And they made efforts to explain their policies, not just the social but the economic benefits. Elizabeth Warren famously had a plan for everything but faced an uphill battle in the primaries because many in the Democratic Party, including almost everyone on the primary debate stage with her, thought she was too “socialist.”

Love ’em or hate ’em, we know exactly what progressive Democrats stand for. This cannot be said of centrists, whose campaign promises are rarely convincing. If this sounds harsh, just look at the Massachusetts Democratic Party platform. It sounds fairly progressive but when you see how Massachusetts Democrats actually vote you realize the platform is nothing but a cynical heap of verbiage, revealing only that its professed values ultimately mean nothing.

And voters have taken note, especially in the three counties that comprise the 9th U.S. Congressional District. Bristol, Plymouth, and Barnstable counties are slowly moving from purple to red, and the party’s answer to this rightward drift is to accelerate it.

But Democratic failures are also structural, particularly at the state level. If you voted in the September Democratic primaries you may have noticed that there were almost no challengers to incumbents who, for the most part, vote pretty much like Republicans. Town Democratic committees in Massachusetts have long since given up holding weekly or monthly meetings and only emerge from hibernation during presidential elections. Bob DeLeo runs the Massachusetts House exactly like Mitch McConnell does the U.S. Senate. Neither is a force for good.

And when the stakes are high for marginalized people, most Massachusetts Democrats are nowhere to be found. In 2016 the Massachusetts Democratic Party couldn’t be bothered to challenge Bristol County’s white supremacist sheriff. And Massachusetts Democrats still haven’t passed comprehensive police accountability legislation or the Safe Communities Act. Or thrown enough support behind efforts to get rid of a racist flag and racist school mascots. And Democrats wonder why groups they take for granted, including Black voters, were induced to vote for Trump in small but surprising numbers.

All over America Republicans are taking control of state houses. State Democratic parties are lying half-dead on gurneys and have to be shocked back to life. The party needs to become a bottom-up organization again. But throughout the Democratic Party it is political machines, consultants and donors who wield the power, fighting challenges to incumbents, failing to revive state and local committees and resisting party reform. And all power flows from the top. Again, the party’s wounds are self-inflicted.

There are obvious and commonsense ways of addressing the state party’s structural problems. Bob Massie, who is gunning for MassDems president Gus Bickford’s job, just released a plan to reform and revive the party. It’s worth a read.

But my guess is that Massie won’t have any more luck fighting headwinds in his own party than Keith Ellison did when he made a bid as Chair of the national DNC. It seems that Democrats hate change as much as Republicans. And they hate progressive change even more.

It seems inevitable that the Democratic Left will eventually be forced to build itself a new political home. But for the moment we can all breathe a sigh of relief that within a few months the country will no longer be run by a mentally ill fascist whose midnight Tweets re-traumatize us daily.

Vote Yes on Question 2 – Ranked Choice Voting

Posted by David Ehrens on 2020-10-28 No comments

Elections and widespread voter suppression disenfranchise voters throughout the United States. In this most recent presidential election we have seen almost every trick used to make voting difficult or impossible. But there are many paths to disenfranchisement. Who we see on the ballot, who we see on the debate stage, and how we select the winners all determine whether we get the politicians we need.

The hegemony of the so-called Two Party System isn’t doing democracy any favors. Like the convention of having 9 Supreme Court justices, there is nothing in the U.S. Constitution that requires a two-party system. The reality is that we have dozens of political parties. Yet this magic number is taken by many as an article of political faith.

This year more than a dozen presidential candidates qualified to appear on state ballots, but you wouldn’t know it since only two parties were invited to appear at debates hosted by the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD). Despite its government-y name, the CPD is a 501(c)(3) non-profit whose board members are a Who’s Who of establishment politics. It was founded by the then-chair of the Democratic Party, Paul Kirk, Jr., and by his Republican equivalent, Frank Fahrenkopf, Jr. Since 1996 CPD’s sponsors have included Anheuser-Busch, Dun & Bradstreet, Philip Morris, Sara Lee, Sprint, AT&T, Ford Motor Company, Hallmark, IBM, J.P. Morgan, U.S. Airways, the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, and — well, you get the idea.

The entire election process — including the voting procedure itself — is designed to disadvantage third parties. The American preoccupation with “viability” always trumps presenting new ideas to voters. When, as Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein did in 2016, a third party candidate does overcome all odds and manages to get on the ballot, s/he is usually vilified, as Stein was, for stealing votes from “viable” candidates who are only viable thanks to free coverage from media giants and non-profits like CPD. Stein was arrested when she tried to “crash” CPB’s 2016 debates.

I recently viewed a 2016 video of Stein being interviewed by “Headliner” anchor Mehdi Hasan. When asked what she could uniquely offer voters, she pointed to: student debt relief; an emergency jobs program based on a green energy economy; and and end to police violence. While today’s Democrats are still struggling to address police violence, income inequality, and climate change, Stein nailed it four years ago.

Fast forward to 2020. It wasn’t just Bernie Sanders and the Squad who brought progressive platform planks to voters. Planks from Stein’s platform were eventually embraced by at least several Democrats in the 2020 election cycle.

I was one of those who voted “Green” in 2016. Admittedly, my vote was lost in a sea of Massachusetts votes for Hillary Clinton. But I felt it was important to support a fundamentally decent candidate with a more humane and rational platform than Democrats were offering. And — no — my vote didn’t bring Donald Trump to power any more than Russian troll farms or Jim Comey did. Democrats anointed the wrong candidate, and she lost because not enough people wanted her.

Which brings me to Ranked Choice Voting (RCV). RCV is used in a number of American cities, Maine, Australia, New Zealand, Malta, Ireland, and elsewhere. It gives voters more than one choice on a ballot, so that if their first candidate is not viable — in the real sense of the word — then their 2nd, 3rd, or 10th choice will at least influence the final vote. Ranked Choice Voting also avoids costly runoff elections by calculating instant runoffs.

On November 3rd Massachusetts voters will have a chance to choose Ranked Choice Voting by checking “Yes” on Question #2. The 10-way Democratic primary in the 4th Congressional District offered a perfect example of why RCV is needed. As a Boston.com article pointed out, “winning without the support of the vast majority of voters has become a feature of most recent open House primaries. In 2018, Rep. Lori Trahan won her 3rd District primary with less than 22 percent of the vote. In 2013, Rep. Katherine Clark won with less than 32 percent. In 1998, former Rep. Mike Capuano clinched the nomination with 23 percent.”

And we call this democracy?

Had Ranked Choice voting been available in 2016, I imagine that Green voters like myself would have held our noses and chosen Hillary Clinton as our second pick. But that wasn’t even an option.

So if Massachusetts voters, who are overwhelmingly Democratic, still end up rejecting Ranked Choice Voting in the face of increasing problems with conventional voting, then I will be quick to offer this piece of advice: Shut up about third parties spoiling “your” wins. You had your chance and you blew it.

Vote Yes on Question #2.

Expand the Court

Posted by David Ehrens on 2020-10-22 No comments

If he manages to be elected, Joe Biden must add at least two Supreme Court justices. I would welcome his choice of Barack Obama for one new seat and Merritt Garland for the other.

Adding justices is what should happen if Republicans jam through the appointment of an “originalist” judge who is also a member of a cult featuring handmaids.

Of course, not everybody thinks expanding the Supreme Courts is a great idea. Some Democrats — including Biden himself — fear the sky would fall if such an audacious thing were done.

But given that the Republicans have been packing lower courts for years, maybe we need to trade in “Hope and Change” for some “Audacity and Change.” The threat of so-called “court packing” would send a chilling message to Republicans pondering Trump’s eclipse — do it and see what happens.

But forget about Barrett’s cult for a moment. Shouldn’t we restore some religious balance to the highest court in the land? 63% of Supreme Court Justices are already Catholic in a country where only 23% identify as such. If Barrett is confirmed that number would hit 75%. Many American Catholics don’t even share the views of their more conservative co-religionists on the Court. And more Americans than ever check off “none” in the religious box.

Expanding the Court is hardly a new idea. Donald Trump’s next favorite president (after himself, of course) is Andrew Jackson, who added two justices to the Court in 1836.

There is also nothing sacred about nine justices or lifetime presidential appointments. The way justices are appointed in other Western nations puts our process to shame.

The Supreme Court of Canada is appointed by the Governor in Council and consists of nine justices. The number started out as six, was bumped up to seven, and ultimately nine. On the surface theirs looks like ours, but Canada’s Supreme Court Act requires that three judges come from Ontario, three from Quebec, two from the Western provinces or Northern Canada and one from the Atlantic provinces. And Judges must also retire before their 75th birthdays.

The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom has twelve justices and they must have already served on the bench for 15 years, or 2 on a “federal” bench. The UK convenes a selection commission chosen from judiciaries in Britain, Scotland, Northern Island and Wales, and it strives for balance. After selection, a justice is formally appointed by the Queen. Even with 12 justices that number can still be increased. Justices must retire at 70 or 75, depending on when they joined the bench.

The German Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht, or BVerfG), has sixteen justices divided a couple of ways into two senates and three chambers. Judges are elected by both the Bundestag and the Bundesrat, each of which selects eight justices. A Justice must have previously held a position on the bench and be at least 40 years of age. Justices serve for 12 years or until the age of 68, whichever comes first.

The French Court of Cassation is the highest appeal court in France and has an elaborate system of chambers and sitting and administrative judges, but 15 justices head up the court. These 15 judges serve a 9 year term and 3 each are appointed by the President of the Republic, the Senate and the National Assembly presidents. To become a judge, a lawyer must be admitted to the Supreme Court Bar after passing an exam from the National School of the Magistracy. Typically, candidates are already judges in lower courts.

Our Supreme Court selection process is a mess. Not only is it highly politicized, but it lacks regional and demographic representation, professionalism, and justices typically serve well past normal professional expiration dates. More importantly, our selection process is simply undemocratic.

We need a serious re-think of the selection process, as well as term limits for the Supreme Court. And there are plenty of places to look for better ideas, starting with some of our closer allies.

But in the interim, let’s expand the Supreme Court.

Bristol County’s Hall of Fame and Wall of Shame

Posted by David Ehrens on 2020-10-09 No comments

Legislators are elected to help people. Some think their responsibility stops with constituents; others have a broader sense of responsibility to the earth, humanity, and global concerns. This is who I want representing me.

When it comes to immigration in this state, I want legislators to take action against the Trump administration’s enlistment of local police in increasingly brazen and cruel roundups of desperate and paperless refugees. But the majority of Bristol County legislators are profound disappointments. Most coast to re-election without challengers. Instead of democracy we have political machinery and patronage in Bristol County. And with a few exceptions, we get hacks instead of leaders as a result.

Hall of Fame

I am grateful to the following state representatives and senators for stepping up to support the Safe Communities Act. It takes guts and principle and that broader sense of responsiibility to help suffering human beings, whether they can vote for you or not.

Rep. Antonio F. D. Cabral, 13th Bristol (H.3573)
Rep. James K. Hawkins, 2nd Bristol (H.3573)
Sen. Paul R. Feeney, Bristol and Norfolk (S.1401 is the Senate version)
Sen. Rebecca L. Rausch, Norfolk, Bristol and Middlesex (S.1401)

Wall of Shame

The Republicans on the list below all belong on the Wall of Shame. Their party has become a rotting husk and a personality cult whose immigration policy is literally written by white supremacists. No surprise that Massachusetts Republicans march in lockstep with White House immigration advisor Stephen Miller, who proposed deporting Central American DACA recipients in railroad boxcars.

But the Democrats on this list? To be charitable, if they don’t share the xenophobia of their Republican friends, then their only excuse is that they are cowardly machine politicians afraid of angering rightwing police unions and some of their more racist constituents. Everyone on the list below will protest that they’re not racists or xenophobes — and a few can even point to programs they’ve funded which help disadvantaged communities.

But when it’s time to show their mettle, they are invariably too timid to help refugees whose lives have been upended by war, climate change, political instability, or hunger. Their love of humanity is conditional and narrow, reserved only for campaign contributors and potential voters. For refugees they look away, and for that — Democrat or Republican — they ought to be deeply ashamed.

Rep. Jay Barrows
Rep. Carole Fiola
Rep. Patricia Haddad
Rep. Christopher Hendricks
Rep. Steven Howitt
Rep. Christopher Markey
Rep. Shaunna O’Connell
Rep. Norman Orrall
Rep. Elizabeth Poirier
Rep. Paul Schmid
Rep. Alan Silvia
Rep. William Straus
Senator Michael Brady
Senator Mark Montigny
Senator Marc Pacheco
Senator Michael Rodrigues
Senator Walter Timilty

a brave new fascist America

Category Archives: Liberalism

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Mixed signals on Abortion

Defending Private Prisons

Supporting the Surveillance State

A long history of racism

Sticking with Trump’s Immigration policies

Botching Student debt relief

Support for criminalizing marijuana

No support for enlarging the Supreme Court

Sacrificing the Social Safety Net

Foreign policy a complete disaster

Environmental policy in the dumpster

Biden or not?

Hall of Fame

Wall of Shame