Let's Try Democracy

1. Reports on the climate collapse have stopped in some cases the nonsense talk about needing the United States to “lead,” and even gone beyond urging it to get out of last place, and begun demanding that it do its fair share to undo its share of the damage. That’s the same thing we need on militarism, when U.S. weapons are on both sides of most wars, almost all foreign bases are U.S. bases, and most people in the U.S. can’t begin to name its current wars, drone murders, read more

Listen here.

When Neera Tanden emailed her colleagues in support of forcing Libya to pay for the privilege of having been bombed, many misunderstood, including one of her colleagues who emailed back objecting to creating what he supposed was an obvious financial incentive for bombing more countries.

Now that Tanden has been nominated for high office and will face confirmation hearings in the U.S. Senate, we have an obligation to get this right. The top ways in which Tanden has been misunderstood are:

1. Tanden

You may have heard that the U.S. House of Representatives just passed a bill to spend $741 billion renaming military bases that have been heretofore named for Confederates. You may think that’s a grand idea but still wonder at the price tag.

Of course, the secret is that — even though most of the media coverage is about the renaming of bases — the bill itself is almost entirely about funding (part of) the world’s most expensive military machine: more nukes, more “conventional” read more

Take a gander, if you can stomach it, at buildbackbetter.gov.

Now, be honest, if this were the work of a Republican would you be ready to protest?

Not only did you not vote for anything new, as the vast majority of the nominees and the policy proposals are long-established moss-gathering Washingtonians, but the new additions here and there are the worst of the bunch.

Biden, who had no foreign policy platform on his campaign website, and no foreign policy task force, has suddenly, post-election, prioritized read more

The November 28 Daily Progress report on the Charlottesville Retirement Commission finally taking baby steps toward divestment from fossil fuels begins by quoting a resolution passed at my urging a year-and-a-half ago by the Charlottesville City Council on divestment from fossil fuels and weapons. It then reports that the City divested its operating budget from fossil fuels, but simply omits that it did the same with weapons.

In fact, the whole article makes no mention of weapons beyond the resolution read more