[Peace-discuss] Populist Except For Pentagon

[David Johnson]

Populist Except For Pentagon

Description: Pentagon

 <https://www.popularresistance.org/category/educate/> Educate!
<https://www.popularresistance.org/tag/ngos/> NGOs,
<https://www.popularresistance.org/tag/pentagon/> Pentagon,
<https://www.popularresistance.org/tag/populism/> Populism,
<https://www.popularresistance.org/tag/wars-and-militarism/> Wars and
Militarism 
By David Swanson,  <http://davidswanson.org/node/4752> www.davidswanson.org
May 13th, 2015

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Katrina vanden Heuvel
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-emerging-populist-agenda/2015/05
/12/525ad83e-f7f9-11e4-a13c-193b1241d51a_story.html?postshare=90214314434969
24> says there's an emerging populist agenda. Of course populist agendas
tend to emerge in times of demobilization for election distraction - that is
to say, in moments when huge political party and NGO resources are being
dumped into focusing attention on a distant election instead of on the
crises and work at hand. Witness all the efforts to get Hillary Clinton, and
not Barack Obama, to oppose the TPP.

And of course the agendas don't actually emerge. There's nothing new about
them. Millions of us have favored a living wage and free education and
breaking up the banking monopolies for years. The point of having such ideas
"emerge" is to create reservoirs of patience for not getting them and not
even demanding them, but rather diverting one's interest into cheerleading
for future saviors who will later treat campaign promises like, well,
campaign promises.

But what interests me about what's "emerging" is what's missing from it,
even in the rhetoric. Vanden Heuvel links to six reports or platform
statements. Each deals with economics, the public budget, spending and
investment priorities. Virtually absent from them all, by some coincidence,
is any mention of military spending, despite its taking up a majority of the
discretionary spending budget every year, and despite its swallowing far
more wealth than goes to the billionaires who are so rightly upbraided for
hoarding it so immorally.

Five of the six populist agendas propose nothing related to military
spending. It might as well not exist.
<https://populism2015.org/the-new-populist-agenda/> One of them includes as
number 11 of its 12 points: "We should reduce military budgets and properly
support humanitarian programs."

Was that so hard? It used to be the norm in Democratic Party platform
promises. Where has it gone too to? The other five organizations will not
attack the sixth with sharp critiques for including this, of course. Their
preferred tactic is silence.

The new normal seems to be PEP. Usually PEP means Progressive Except for
Palestine (we all know people who are generally against murdering babies but
not when Israel does it). But I'm using PEP to mean Populist Except for the
Pentagon.

If you don't want to take the time to watch the
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ffgQhX0kSA#t=1112> video of Bernie
Sanders' 12 proposals, here's his list:

1. major investment in infrastructure
2. reverse climate change
3. new economic models, no more huge tax breaks to corporations, but support
for worker-owned coops
4. Employee Free Choice Act (remember that?)
5. make minimum wage a living wage
6. pay equity for women
7. end NAFTA and CAFTA and permanent normal trade relations with China
8. affordable college
9. break up the Wall Street banks
10. Medicare for all - single payer healthcare
11. expand Social Security
12. progressive taxation

All wonderful stuff. Some of it quite courageous outside-the-acceptable
stuff. But what do you spend on reversing climate change? And do you also
keep spending on the single biggest contributor to climate change, namely
the military? What do you invest in infrastructure? It's not as though
Sanders doesn't know about the trade-offs. In between listing items 1 and 2,
he blames "the Bush-Cheney war in Iraq" for costing $3 trillion. He says he
wants infrastructure instead of wars. But routine "base" military spending
is $1.3 trillion or so each and every year. It's been far more in recent
years than all the recent wars, and it generates the wars as Eisenhower
warned it would. It also erodes the economy, as the
<http://www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/published_study/PERI_military_spend
ing_2011.pdf> studies of U-Mass Amherst document. The same dollars moved to
infrastructure would produce many more jobs and better paying ones. Why not
propose moving some money? Why not include it in the list of proposals?

In Sanders' case, I think he's partly a true believer in militarism. He
wants good wars instead of bad wars (whatever that means) despite the belief
in "good wars" requiring ongoing military spending. And partly, I think, he
comes at it from a deep habit of "supporting" the troops and veterans for
both sincere and calculating reasons. He's also a PEP in the Palestine
sense.

But people will be thrilled just to hear Sanders mention "the bad
Bush-Cheney war," when their standard is set by such war hawks as Hillary
Clinton, whose love for war, rather than some collective fit of amnesia,
explains the absence of the military from most of the emerging populist
agendas.

We should be clear that this degeneration of the Democratic Party platform
does not represent a shift in public attitudes, but rather an increase in
the corruption of the political system. No polls support this. Many campaign
funders do.

 

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