[Peace-discuss] People's State of the Union

[David Johnson]

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People's State of the Union

The Precarious State of Our Union - A Bipartisan Disaster We Can Fix

>From the viewpoint of everyday Americans, the State of our Union, in point
of fact, is not strong. In reality, we are in a state of historic crisis -
for our economy, ecology, democracy and security.

Thankfully, these crises are still eminently solvable. With a majority of
Americans disapproving of both establishment parties, there is unprecedented
momentum for a new way forward, based on principles of democracy, justice
and peace, towards an America and a world that works for all of us.

Republicans have long been recognized as unabashed servants of the economic
elite, leading the charge against the public interest. But they have not
been alone.

Democratic priorities were clear when President Obama had two Democratic
Houses of Congress to support him, as the party went to bat for trillions in
Wall Street bailouts, tax cuts for the rich, job-killing corporate trade
agreements, austerity budgets, health care reform that locked single payer
out and private profits in, mass deportations of hardworking immigrants,
privatization of schools, expanding wars for oil and regime change,
climate-killing "all of the above" energy policies, and unprecedented
assaults on privacy and press freedoms.

As a result of this bipartisan assault, we have not had a recovery by any
measure. One in two Americans remain in or near poverty including half of
children in public schools. One in three seniors relies on Social Security
to stay afloat. Wages are stagnant or declining, and real unemployment is
nearly 10%, twice as high as the official rate. Forty-three million current
and former students are locked in debt. Thirty-three million Americans are
still uninsured, and up to a million more Americans will be thrown off food
stamps (SNAP) this year, unbelievably, because they can't find work.

Undocumented immigrants live in fear of deportation. And African Americans
are threatened by racism and violence that permeates police departments,
courts, prisons, schools and the economy.

And while working people struggle, over 90% of income gains have gone to the
top 1%, corporate profits have tripled, and the richest 0.1% now owns more
than the lower 90% of us combined. A mere 20 billionaires now own as much as
the entire lower half of the US population. Globally, only 80 billionaires
own as much as the entire lower half of the world's population, 3.5 billion
people.

This unconscionable state of affairs cannot simply be blamed on greedy
Republicans. The President himself has been leading the charge, with
bipartisan Congressional help, to slash food and medicine for the
vulnerable, cut critical social programs by nearly a trillion dollars in
2011 alone, and repeatedly threaten Medicare and Social Security. Meanwhile,
Democrats oversaw a $16 trillion bailout for big banks and $5 trillion in
tax favors for the wealthy. They made the Bush tax cuts for the rich
permanent just as they were about to expire, and locked in low capital gains
and inheritance taxes. And Obama has long called for lower taxes on
corporations, though many of the most profitable multinationals commonly pay
little to no taxes or even get rebates - including GE, Duke Energy, PG&E,
Verizon, and Apple.

The President is also leading the bipartisan effort to pass the Trans
Pacific Partnership (TPP), a devastating secretive trade deal known as
"NAFTA on steroids" because it will send jobs overseas, undermine wages at
home, and roll back protections for workers, public health and the
environment. It fundamentally attacks American democracy and sovereignty by
allowing corporations to overturn and pre-empt our laws and regulations
through a separate, non-US "investor-state" court system. Using highly paid
corporate lawyers appointed by the World Bank to serve as judges, these
courts can make us pay for a rich corporation's lost future profits when we
exercise our democratic rights to protect ourselves from predatory banks,
pharmaceutical profiteering, the poisoning of our food and water supply, the
destruction of our climate and more.

In a case filed last week in the same "investor-state" court system under
NAFTA, the Canadian corporation Transcanada is suing US taxpayers for $15
billion dollars to cover lost future profits on their recently nixed $3
billion dollar Keystone pipeline project.

A similar travesty occurred last month, when an "investor-state" court
threatened to charge US taxpayers billions for lost profits due to
country-of-origin food labeling - providing critical food safety information
about where our meat comes from. This threat forced Congress to repeal the
law.  

In addition, the TPP is a staggering, full-on assault against climate
action. It prohibits policies that reduce fossil fuel exports, or give
domestic preference to renewable energy.

The President has already won from Congress "fast track authority", with
which he will try to ram the TPP through Congress with little debate and no
amendments allowed.  

But word has gotten out about this massive betrayal of democracy and passage
of the TPP has been repeatedly delayed for the past year. We must continue
to mobilize to defeat the TPP.

Meanwhile, climate change is accelerating off the charts with record storms,
heat, fires and floods across the country while California's drought
threatens the fruit and vegetable supply for the nation. Lethal impacts have
already been set in motion that require emergency action - the breakup of
the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, permafrost melt, mass extinctions,
and marine food chain disruption.   

Despite much hot air about climate change, Democrats' "all of the above"
energy policy has actually put fossil fuels above all. While Obama's
policies increased renewables to a scant 5% of the US energy supply, this
small portion has been overwhelmed by Obama's massive expansion of fracking
and oil and gas extraction, both offshore and on public lands. Even as Obama
boasted about the toothless Paris agreement that would allow a catastrophic
3 degrees Celsius temperature rise, Democrats - as well as Republicans -
were trashing the climate by lifting the ban on oil exports (equivalent to
building 135 new coal power plants), and expediting permits for fracking.
Without any help from the Republicans, Obama alone gave a secret executive
thumbs up to the major new fracked gas Gulf Trace Pipeline.

Fortunately, the economic and climate crises can be solved together, with a
Green New Deal - an emergency WWII-style mobilization to revive the economy,
turn the tide on climate change, and make wars for oil obsolete. It creates
20 million jobs to achieve 100% renewable energy by 2030. It creates
efficient public transportation and local sustainable food systems, repairs
critical infrastructure, and restores ecosystems. It immediately ends all
new fossil fuel infrastructure, exploration and extraction - including
fracking, offshore drilling, extraction on public lands and in the Arctic.
And it creates a planned, orderly transition to a decentralized,
democratically controlled energy system, including public ownership of
energy resources and infrastructure. And it ensures protection of workers in
fossil fuels and nuclear energy, providing them with employment in renewable
energy industries that are far healthier for workers as well as the
environment.

The Green New Deal will fund itself through massive health savings by ending
pollution and improving food quality, with military savings from making wars
for oil obsolete, and with savings from reductions in the cost of energy.
Additional funding could also come from a carbon tax.

Another travesty we can fix with the stroke of a pen is the crisis of
student debt. Currently 43 million current and former students are locked in
debt that they can't repay in the low wage economy - which is here for the
foreseeable future. It's unconscionable to allow our younger generation to
be the victims of this predatory debt. Average debt for the class of 2015 is
over $35,000 per student, and 70% of students are affected.

It's no surprise 80% of young people stayed home in the 2014 mid-term
elections, given that they have been locked out of our economy and thrown
under the bus. It's time to bring them back from debt servitude so they can
be full participants in our society and lead the way forward, as the younger
generation always has.

It's time to simply cancel this debt, as was done for the Wall Street
criminals whose waste, fraud and abuse crashed the economy. We owe our
students - the victims of that crash - at least as much. 

The bailout for students can be accomplished through quantitative easing,
the finance tool used to bail out the banks. This would be a huge stimulus
for the economy, as young people are enabled to follow their dreams and
re-imagine our future - as every new generation must.

And we must make public higher education free. It pays for itself by a seven
fold margin, as we saw with the GI bill following World War II. And it's the
right thing to do. Just as a high school education was essential for a young
person's economic security in the 20th century, higher education is
essential now in the 21st century - and should be provided for free as well.


The immigration crisis also needs an immediate remedy. In addition to
deporting a record 2.5 million immigrants, more than any past president,
Obama's recent night raids and deportations of Central American families and
children are inhumane and morally reprehensible. These families came here as
refugees from violence, poverty and chaos created by US policies like NAFTA,
the war on drugs, and political and military interventions. It's no
coincidence that the three most violent countries in central America - El
Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala - are failed states resulting from US
interventions that overthrew democratically elected progressive governments.

Deportation of these vulnerable, abused refugees is morally abhorrent. We
are all immigrants in this country - with the exception of native Americans.
The diversity of multicultural immigrant America has always been the core
strength of our nation. Our 12 million undocumented immigrants are
hardworking, tax-paying community residents who take the hardest and worst
paid jobs. They should be celebrated, not intimidated with the threat of
deportation. It's time to create a welcoming path to citizenship and put an
immediate end to the shameful era of deportations and detentions.
Fundamentally, the immigration crisis must be resolved by ending the harmful
US policies (including drug wars, predatory trade agreements, and political
and military interventions) that are turning whole populations into refugees
to start with.

The assault on public education has also been led by Obama and the Democrats
- including the targeted closures of schools in communities of color, high
stakes testing abuse, and the demonization of teachers and their unions.
Incentives for privatization/charters built into No Child Left Behind and
the Every Child Achieves Act should be repealed. High stakes testing should
be ended in favor of limited testing for diagnostic purposes only. It's time
to fully fund public education, respect and support our teachers, and teach
to the whole student for lifetime learning.

The stories of racist killings have become tragically commonplace - from
Trayvon Martin to Eric Garner, Freddy Gray, the Emmanuel nine, Quintonio
LeGrier and so many more. While the publicity may be unprecedented, racial
violence in America is neither new, nor confined to police. It is the latest
phase in a living legacy that runs from the criminal institution of slavery
through the era of lynchings and Jim Crow, into the age of drug wars, the
prison state, judicial racism, housing and school resegregation, the denial
of voting rights, the school to prison pipeline, targeted school closures
under the guise of "education reform", and police violence and
militarization.

Racial violence is not only physical. It permeates most social institutions,
where it has real effects with life-and-death consequences. Racism in the
prison system is reflected in the one out of three young African American
men in prison, on parole or on probation; and a rate of incarceration that's
six times as high as whites, having increased 4-fold since 1980.

Economic racism is seen in the staggering wealth disparity that doubled on
Obama's watch.

Racial violence is seen in health statistics, wherein people of color have
much greater risk of asthma, child mortality and other diseases, and years
of shortened lifespan.

These broad societal issues must be addressed comprehensively in a National
Plan of Action for Racial Justice Now. This begins immediately with citizen
police review boards and standing investigators to review all deaths at the
hands of police and hold perpetrators accountable. We must demilitarize
police, end the disastrous war on drugs and treat non-violent drug use as a
public health issue, not a criminal issue. That includes releasing
nonviolent drug offenders with pre and post-release support.  We must also
end the routine use of solitary confinement, remove children from adult
prisons, and close juvenile prisons in favor of residential education and
rehabilitation.

It's time for a foreign policy based on international law, human rights and
diplomacy. Currently US foreign policy is an exercise in economic and
military domination. Wars for oil and regime change over the past 14 years
have been a colossal failure, costing $6 trillion dollars, $75,000 per US
household, with over 1 million people killed in Iraq alone, and tens of
thousands of US soldiers killed or maimed. And what has resulted? Failed
states, mass refugee migrations, and growing terrorist threats. In fact, the
war on terror has globalized Al Qaeda, expanded the Taliban, created ISIS
and spawned innumerable, rapidly shifting hybrids of local resistance
fighters, brutal warlords and violent religious extremists.

Since collaborating with Saudi Arabia to support the Mujahadeen in
Afghanistan in the 1980's, the US has been funding and arming extremist
opposition groups - whether brutal war lords or violent religious zealots -
to sabotage governments resistant to US interests. This pattern, repeated
throughout the Middle East and around the world, is a colossal failure on
both moral and strategic grounds. It's time to stop the US wars for oil.
It's time to end the collaboration with the Saudis and other extremists.
Fortunately, a rapid transition to 100% renewable energy makes this
possible, just as the climate crisis makes getting off fossil fuels
essential for our survival in the first place.  

Global peace and stability, and the solution to ISIS, will not come from
more US violence, occupation and militarism that created ISIS in the first
place.

It's time to lead the way on an international Peace Offensive that can
prevent these catastrophic wars and stop ISIS in its tracks. This includes:

.  A weapons embargo to the Middle East, where we have been supplying arms -
whether purposefully or inadvertently - to all sides. We should work to
engage the Russians on this, as well as our allies and theirs.

.  Canceling the pending arms sale and all future arms sales to Saudi
Arabia.

.  Imposing sanctions against countries that continue to fund terrorism,
including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey. This should include freezing or
seizing their bank accounts.

. Ending the purchase of ISIS' oil by Turkey.

. Closing Turkey's border to crossings by jihadi militias into Syria.

. Pushing for a ceasefire in Syria and inclusive peace talks.

. Requiring the NSA, FBI and CIA to disclose what is known about who is
funding international terrorism, including releasing the 28 redacted pages
of the 9/11 report.

More broadly, the US must bring its foreign policy into compliance with
international law and human rights. The US must stop violating international
law by invading countries whose regimes our leadership doesn't like. We must
also stop providing weapons and/or financing to countries who are committing
war crimes or in flagrant violation of international law and human rights.
This includes Saudi Arabia, to whom the US has sold over $50 billion in
weapons over the past decade, and Israel, to whom the US provides $8 million
dollars a day in military assistance for war crimes and illegal occupation.

In summary, the stakes couldn't be higher. We face converging crises that
call for transformational solutions. These solutions won't come from
political parties funded by predatory banks, fossil fuel giants and war
profiteers. It will come from we the people, breaking away from the failed
corporate political parties.

Contrary to the President's message, the Democrats have utterly failed to
move us in the right direction.

This is a time for the politics of courage, to assert the power of our
vision, our values, and our numbers. It's time to vote for our deeply held
beliefs, not against what we fear. That politics of fear has delivered
everything we were afraid of. All the reasons we were told to vote for the
lesser evil - to avert the offshoring of our jobs, the meltdown of the
climate, the expanding wars, the attack on immigrants, the assault on our
civil liberties - we've gotten them all by the droves.

It's time to forget the lesser evil and fight for the greater good.  Because
our democracy, our lives, and the future of our planet depend on it.

Together we can build a world that puts people, planet and peace over
profit. The power to create this world is not in our hopes. It's not in our
dreams. It's in our hands!

-Dr. Jill Stein, January 12, 2016

 

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