[Peace-discuss] Fwd: [PeaceTalk-UFPJ] The Democrats must become a real anti-war party | Hamilton Nolan | Opinion | The Guardian

Mon Jan 13 05:11:12 UTC 2020

Keveen Zeese puts forth what must, or ought to, be done to change th U.S. political system. I wonder what support that could muster.

—mkb

Begin forwarded message:

From: Kevin Zeese <kbzeese at gmail.com<mailto:kbzeese at gmail.com>>
Subject: Re: [PeaceTalk-UFPJ] The Democrats must become a real anti-war party | Hamilton Nolan | Opinion | The Guardian
Date: January 10, 2020 at 10:56:18 AM CST
To: Alice Slater <alicejslater at gmail.com<mailto:alicejslater at gmail.com>>
Cc: "wbw-discussion at googlegroups.com<mailto:wbw-discussion at googlegroups.com>" <wbw-discussion at googlegroups.com<mailto:wbw-discussion at googlegroups.com>>

If the Democrats steal this nomination from Bernie again, my hope is that elected officials begin to abandon the Democratic Party. It is critical for this party to be broken up. In the Counterpunch article<https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/01/10/bernie-and-iran/> I linked to earlier, it makes these points in its conclusion:

"Alexandria Acasio-Cortez recently said, correctly, that in most countries she and Joe Biden would be in a different political party. The Democrats are proving, yet again, that she and Bernie are the ones that don’t belong in the establishment party — outsiders who are trying to reform an unreformable party of big business and imperialism. ...

"If Bernie and the Squad are serious about stopping war they should throw a serious gauntlet down: threatening to form a new party if Democrats don’t actively agitate, organize, and legislate for peace talks to be immediately held, with the goal of removing the U.S. military from the Middle East. This or a similarly-meaningful demand is what’s required to actually mobilize the energy of working people to break the bi-partisan unity for war.

"One cannot stay in a party with so much blood on its hands that passively allows another catastrophic war, the repercussions of which may lead to not only bloodshed, but the final nail in the coffin of U.S. democracy."

I was pleased to see AOC is withholding her dues from the DCCC.  She knows that the Democratic Party will try and destroy her. New York is losing a congressional seat and it is very likely redistricting will focus on her district, making it more difficult for her to win re-election. This should be a signal to all members of the Squad and Sanders, that it is time to form a new party that challenges the corporatism of the Democrats. A nomination stolen from Sanders could instigate such action.

We need a viable party that stands for economic, racial and environmental justice as well as peace and anti-imperialism. There are independents and third party activists, as well as Democrats, and probably some Republicans, who would rapidly join such a party.

KZ
@KBZeese
Build power and resistance
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On Fri, Jan 10, 2020 at 11:20 AM Alice Slater <alicejslater at gmail.com<mailto:alicejslater at gmail.com>> wrote:
Thanks for your great thoughts Kevin!   And for your words of encouragement in the face of awful odds!   Just to add to what did the peace movement in, for those of us in the Democratic party that worked for five years to take it over and nominate an anti-war candidate, George McGovern, don't underestrmate the power of the military-industrial controlled media who never said a good word about McGovern after he was nominated, never talked about the war, poverty, civil rights women's rights and all the great movements of the 60s that manifested politically and captured the Democratic nomination for McGovern, without an internet, going door to door and talking to registered democrats all over the country and getting out delegates elected to the Convention in 1972 in Miami.  They hounded him merciless about his VP choice, Senator Eagleton from Missouri who had been hospitalized many years earlier for manic-depression and he had to actually get him off the ticket to shut them up, and put Sargent Shriver on instead but he never recovered or got any decent press coverage.   Indeed the super-delegates that stopped Bernie from getting the nomination in 2016 were put in because of the McGovern stealth capture of the party against the wishes of the party bosses.   At this 2020 convention where the party rejected Eliason as the party chair and gave us another triangulating neo-liberal, Perez, he has agreed to have a straight delegate vote on the first ballot only, after which the superdelegates, representig the party regulars get to vote for their neoliberal choice.

Wish us all luck!   Faiilng to take over the party for Bernie doesn't preclude us from supporting a third party in the aftermath.   Maybe he would run on a third party this time if he cant get the nomination.  It's still all an open question, unless we win the nomination for Bernie on the first ballot.   It's worth a try as we will still have a President then committed to movement building which is absolutely essential to change course.     Alice

Alice Slater
446 E 86 St
New York NY 10028
212-744-2005
646-238-9000(mobile)
www.wagingpeace.org<http://www.wagingpeace.org/>
www.worldbeyondwar.org<http://www.worldbeyondwar.org/>

We may now care for each Earthian individual at a sustainable billionaire's level of affluence while living exclusively on less than 1 percent of our planet's daily energy income from our cosmically designed nuclear reactor, the Sun, optimally located 92 million safe miles away from us.   Buckminster Fuller

On Fri, Jan 10, 2020 at 10:33 AM Kevin Zeese <kbzeese at gmail.com<mailto:kbzeese at gmail.com>> wrote:
Well said, but the Democratic Party is going in the opposite direction. In the mid-term elections, more veterans and former intelligence officers were elected to the Congress for the Democratic Party. AOC was the exception, replacing a corporate Democrat, the other members of the Squad replaced other progressive Democrats. When Trump sought to get out of Syria, he was attacked by neocon Republicans and corporate/military Democrats. The Democratic Party's invention of Russiagate prevented diplomacy between Trump and Putin. And, the impeachment is about Trump slowing shipments of weapons to Ukraine for a proxy war with Russia. It is fanciful thinking to expect the Democrats to become a real anti-war opposition party.

I hope Sanders can win the nomination against the tremendous efforts of the Democratic Party to stop him at all costs. And, I hope that if he does he will be able to overcome Dems abandoning him in the General Election as they did to George McGovern. And, if he survives all of that, I hope that the Democratic Party will be transformed to a Sanders party just as the Republicans became a Trump party. Those are a lot of hurdles to overcome. I gave up on the Democratic Party during the Clinton era and have never returned. My view is we need to build outside of the corrupt Democratic Party, build both a mass movement and an alternative political party that represents the movement. I realize many are working for Sanders and trying to change the party from the inside. I wish them good luck but am not convinced that reforming a party of millionaires and billionaires is the best use of my time.

KZ

@KBZeese
Build power and resistance
Popular Resistance
www.PopularResistance.org<http://www.popularresistance.org/>
Shift Wealth: Economic Democracy
Its Our Economy
www.ItsOurEconomy.US<http://www.itsoureconomy.us/>
Democratize the Media
Clearing the FOG (Forces of Greed)
Radio http://www.ClearingTheFOGRadio.org<http://www.clearingthefogradio.org/>

On Fri, Jan 10, 2020 at 9:15 AM Alice Slater <alicejslater at gmail.com<mailto:alicejslater at gmail.com>> wrote:
This is so well-said!   Alice
Alice Slater
446 E 86 St
New York NY 10028
212-744-2005
646-238-9000(mobile)
www.wagingpeace.org<http://www.wagingpeace.org/>
www.worldbeyondwar.org<http://www.worldbeyondwar.org/>

We may now care for each Earthian individual at a sustainable billionaire's level of affluence while living exclusively on less than 1 percent of our planet's daily energy income from our cosmically designed nuclear reactor, the Sun, optimally located 92 million safe miles away from us.   Buckminster Fuller

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Kevin Lindemann and Cathy Campo kklcac at earthlink.net<mailto:kklcac at earthlink.net> [PeaceTalk-UFPJ] <PeaceTalk-UFPJ at yahoogroups.com<mailto:PeaceTalk-UFPJ at yahoogroups.com>>
Date: Fri, Jan 10, 2020 at 8:37 AM
Subject: [PeaceTalk-UFPJ] The Democrats must become a real anti-war party | Hamilton Nolan | Opinion | The Guardian
To: <PeaceTalk-UFPJ at yahoogroups.com<mailto:PeaceTalk-UFPJ at yahoogroups.com>>

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/10/democrats-anti-war-trump-iran-hamilton-nolan<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/10/democrats-anti-war-trump-iran-hamilton-nolan?utm_term=RWRpdG9yaWFsX0d1YXJkaWFuVG9kYXlVUy0yMDAxMTA%3D&utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=GuardianTodayUS&CMP=GTUS_email>

The Democrats must become a real anti-war party
Hamilton Nolan<https://www.theguardian.com/profile/hamilton-nolan>Fri 10 Jan 2020 05.30 EST

Geopolitically speaking, we are the bad guys. The United States government, that is. The extent to which this is true fluctuates somewhat from administration to administration, but in the postwar decades it has been a fairly reliable judgment. We sponsor coups, fund death squads, stage unjustified invasions and enable all manner of human rights violations in exchange for economic and political gain. This is a fact that our political class has long deemed too unpleasant for the populace to swallow. What should be an uncontroversial observation of reality is therefore considered a taboo in mainstream political discourse. The Democratic party has long participated in this jingoistic hologram-weaving almost as enthusiastically as Republicans have. What we need are unapologetic soldiers for peace. What we usually get instead is … Pete Buttigieg.

Donald Trump got mad watching cable news, impulsively assassinated a top Iranian military figure, and has brought us to the brink of an entirely needless war. Unsurprising. We knew he was a tantrum-prone child when we elected him. We chose this incredibly stupid path. Guns and the flag are the bread and butter of the Republican party, and they will continue to feed these things to Americans as long as they continue to be an effective way to distract everyone from the fact that they are funneling all of your money to the rich. The only hope of salvation from our B-movie nightmare lies in having an opposition party that actually opposes this stuff. As long as the Democrats<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/democrats>themselves remain dazzled by militarism like a bunch of eight-year-olds gaping at a cool fighter jet, we are doomed to debate only how fast our world-annihilating stockpile of weapons should expand.

The gravitational pull of the US military and its more than $700bn budget<https://www.forbes.com/sites/sebastienroblin/2019/12/11/house-dems-pass-defense-budget-on-republican-terms-7-takeaways-from-the-2020-national-defense-authorization-act/#1eb297fb1800> warps our national politics like a black hole. It is plainly insane. It sucks up money that could be spent improving lives rather than planning to destroy them; it sucks up human talent that could be put to more beneficial use than blowing things up; and, like all bureaucracies, the military tends to create the conditions to sustain itself – in this case, a profusion of congressmen with military bases and defense contractors in their districts, who see forever wars as useful employment boosters.

This structural danger has been apparent since the Eisenhower years, but our situation today – the most powerful army in history under the total control of the biggest idiot in history – is another fun legacy of the Clinton-era Democratic triangulation strategy, which holds that the path to Democratic power is to act more like Republicans.

It is this approach to politics that earned us enthusiastic bipartisan backing for the Iraq war, and it remains the guiding philosophy of politicians like Joe Biden and his younger avatar Buttigieg. (The idea of joining the military reserve as a résumé line item right after joining McKinsey has a very strong Clinton-era vibe.) These types of Democrats seek out veterans for the same reason that Republicans try to recruit black candidates: they see politics purely as an optics game, and they have an extremely low opinion of the voting public.. A Democrat with an M-16 or a black Republican are an idiot’s idea of a foolproof “checkmate!” moment in political debate.

Consequently, a substantive movement for peace has long been dismissed as foolish by the same political geniuses who transformed John Kerry, a veteran best known for being a peace activist, into a flag-saluting “Reporting for duty!” soldier man on stage at the Democratic convention. Kerry lost to a Republican draft dodger. Now we are ruled by another Republican draft-dodger. Our military budget is still larger<https://www.pgpf.org/chart-archive/0053_defense-comparison> than those of the next seven countries combined. We’re still starting new wars in the Middle East. And other than Bernie Sanders, all of the Democratic candidates seem incapable of saying clearly and without qualification that this is insane.

The vast military buildup that followed 9/11 did nothing to prevent the biggest economic collapse since the Great Depression. The “recovery” decade after that has been accompanied by inequality that continues to rise to ludicrous levels. From the perspective of a normal person, this has all been one long con. This is how societies break down. Trump’s election was a blind grasp for the most different thing. Imagine if people were given the chance to vote for something even more different: peace. Not the political talking point of “peace through strength”, but peace through justice, a genuine acknowledgment that our empire-building days need to end, because all they do is get poor people killed in exchange for making rich people richer.

Most Americans can’t name<https://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2015/03/28/how-many-people-know-their-senators/yfgXyHR96X7YGhesaNQbnM/story.html> their own senator. I’m quite sure they don’t know that the US sponsored a coup<https://www.npr.org/2019/01/31/690363402/how-the-cia-overthrew-irans-democracy-in-four-days> to overthrow the democratically elected leader of Iran in 1953 and strengthen an autocratic shah whose secret police oppressed and tortured citizens for decades. It is little wonder Iranians whose parents and grandparents had their fingernails extracted by force thanks to America’s desire for “stability in the region” might feel less than gracious towards America. This is the sort of conversation we should be having in our country right now; instead, we are treated to elected leaders competing to see who can best explain away our recent assassination of a Very, Very Bad Man.

For decades, voters have not had a real alternative to militarism. The Republicans were all about it, and the Democrats were determined to show that they were too, like an undersized kid starting fights in a schoolyard. Those few Democrats brave enough to call for peace as a real policy goal have long been marginalized and mocked.

But we live in a different time now. In the same way that socialism has gone from a punchline to a platform, peace is ready for its turn in power. And just like the old-school Democrats who hew to the failed centrist gospel of triangulation are being replaced with a new generation, so too must those who think that they need to strike muscular war poses for political reasons be pushed out of the party. The Iraq war is their legacy, and they don’t deserve a chance to make the same mistake again.

Nothing requires less courage than letting yourself go along with a march towards war when you have the biggest military in the world. Show me a candidate willing to fight for peace, and I’ll show you the future.

Sent from my iPhone

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