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Republican's Plan to Destroy Unions Failed Without Scalia on the Court |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=36361"><span class="small">Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Facebook Page</span></a>
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Wednesday, 30 March 2016 14:49 |
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Reich writes: "A tie vote in the Supreme Court gave public-employee labor unions a huge victory - allowing the lower court ruling in 'Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association' to stand, and thereby enabling public-employee unions to continue to collect 'fair share' fees covering collective bargaining costs from workers who aren't union members."
Robert Reich. (photo: Getty)
Republican's Plan to Destroy Unions Failed Without Scalia on the Court
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Facebook Page
30 March 16
 oday’s tie vote in the Supreme Court gave public-employee labor unions a huge victory – allowing the lower court ruling in “Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association” to stand, and thereby enabling public-employee unions to continue to collect “fair share” fees covering collective bargaining costs from workers who aren’t union members.
The irony is that before Justice Antonin Scalia’s death, Republicans had counted on winning the case by a 5-4 vote, and then using it to kill off public sector labor unions. Then they planned to use the “Friedrichs” case to judicially attack private-sector unions that collect such fees. It was a carefully-crafted strategy to get rid of labor unions altogether.
But Mitch McConnell’s refusal to allow a vote on Merrick Garland has meant a deadlocked Supreme Court. And a deadlocked Court can’t overrule lower courts. McConnell has been hoisted on his own petard.
What do you think?
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As Flint Residents Drank Poisoned Water, 20,000+ Detroit Households Lost Water Service Last Year |
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Wednesday, 30 March 2016 14:38 |
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Fried writes: "For two years, thousands of households in Detroit have gone without reliable access to water and sanitation. That needs to end now."
Protest over Flint's water quality. (photo: People's Water Board Coalition)
As Flint Residents Drank Poisoned Water, 20,000+ Detroit Households Lost Water Service Last Year
By Kate Fried, Food & Water Watch
30 March 16
For two years, thousands of households in Detroit have gone without reliable access to water and sanitation.
That needs to end—now.
 ith the Flint water crisis drawing headlines and igniting an international dialogue on inadequate access to safe, clean, affordable water in Michigan and beyond, it’s easy to forget that another water crisis has been raging in the state—the Detroit water shutoffs. The results of a new Freedom of Information Act request filed by Food & Water Watch find that 23,883 households — an estimated 64,000 people — in Detroit lost water service in 2015.
That’s 64,000 too many. Meanwhile, the Detroit City Council voted last summer to raise water rates by 7.5 percent, with another 3.25 percent increase expected this July.
Speaking to this issue, Congressman John Conyers, a Democrat who represents Detroit said, “I remain appalled by the unrelenting and widely-condemned continuation of water shutoffs in Detroit. It is unacceptable, arbitrary and inhumane to have shut off water to nearly 25,000 residential households in 2015—a number made public thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by Food & Water Watch. I renew my call for the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) to cease using water shutoffs as a means of collection enforcement, and I ask them to instead work with their counterparts in state and federal government to pursue a course that does not violate international norms of human rights.”
Soaring Rates, Little Relief
Over the last decade, Detroit residents have seen their water rates rise by 119 percent. But about 40 percent of the city lives in poverty, with an unemployment rate over 10 percent. Many in Detroit simply could not afford to pay their water bills. Community activists had attempted to address this problem as far back as 2006 with a Water Affordability Plan that was approved by the Detroit City Council. But the DWSD chose not to implement this plan, and instead created its own program—it did not work.
In March 2014, the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department announced it would begin shutting off water service for 1,500 to 3,000 customers every week if their water bills were not paid. Many of those affected by the shut-offs were given no warning. The infirm were left without water and functioning toilets, children could not bathe and parents could not adequately prepare food for their families.
Subsequent plans by the city to address the crisis also failed, mainly because they only applied to households behind on water bills and did nothing to address the overall problems with high water rates. According to an April 2015 Michigan ACLU investigation, of the 24,743 residential customers enrolled in the city’s 10-point plan, only about 300 were able to keep up with their payments, leaving 24,450 households to default.
More False Solutions
Last October the City of Detroit convened the Blue Ribbon Panel on Affordability to finally address the problem with water affordability in Detroit. The results, which were recently released, and propose to charge higher rates the more water customers use, once again miss the mark. Speaking before the Detroit City Council, Food & Water Watch Senior Organizer Lynna Kaucheck noted that “an inclining block rate design for water and sewer service [the technical term for the type of plan the panel released] does not amount to an affordability plan.”
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, combined water and sewer rates should not exceed 4.5 percent of a household’s income. But the Blue Ribbon Panel’s plan’s water prices for “minimal levels of service” are expected to range from 4-8 percent of a household’s income. Roughly 40 percent of the city’s households are at or below the federal poverty level—$24,000 a year for a family of four. Under the panel’s plan, their water bill would run $80-160 a month. When added to the cost of housing, food, heat, electricity and transportation—other basic human needs—that water is unaffordable.
Moreover, the plan would take two years to fully implement. But Detroit residents need affordable access to water, and they need it now (actually, they needed it several years ago). The Blue Ribbon Panel’s plan is not only overdue—it’s completely inadequate. Instead, Detroit residents need a plan based on income.
But unreasonably high water prices are not just a problem in Detroit. The Maryland House of Delegates recently introduced a plan to protect vulnerable populations from water shutoffs after many households in Baltimore struggled to pay their water bills too.
It’s time for the federal government to step up and intervene by establishing a sustainable source of funding for community water systems so this essential resource can be democratically controlled and affordable for all. Since today is World Water Day it seems fitting to announce that in the coming weeks we will unveil our new vision to ensure that the human right to water is fulfilled in every community in the United States. Stay tuned for more.
In the meantime, you can observe World Water Day by urging your elected officials to support access to safe and locally managed drinking water for all.
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FOCUS: The Blue State Model: How the Democrats Created a "Liberalism of the Rich" |
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Wednesday, 30 March 2016 12:33 |
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Frank writes: "Innovation liberalism is 'a liberalism of the rich.' This doctrine has no patience with the idea that everyone should share in society's wealth. What Massachusetts liberals pine for, by and large, is a more perfect meritocracy - a system where the truly talented get into the right schools and then get to rise through the ranks of society. Unfortunately, however, as the blue-state model makes painfully clear, there is no solidarity in a meritocracy."
Democrat and Republican fists. (photo: Getty)
The Blue State Model: How the Democrats Created a "Liberalism of the Rich"
By Thomas Frank, TomDispatch
30 March 16
Reading Thomas Frank's new book, Listen, Liberal, or What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?, I was reminded of the snapshot that Oxfam offered us early this year: 62 billionaires now have more wealth than the bottom 50% of the global population, while the richest 1% own more than the other 99% combined. And in case you’re wondering in which direction inequality is trending on Planet Earth, note that in 2010, it took 388 of the super-rich to equal the holdings of that bottom 50%. At this rate in the inequality sweepstakes, by 2030, just the top 10 billionaires might do the trick. Let me just add that, as Frank makes clear in his brilliant new work, Donald Trump doesn’t have to win the presidency for billionaires to stand triumphant on the American part of our planet. Hillary Clinton will do just fine, thank you.
Listen, Liberal is, in a sense, a history of how, from the Clintonesque 1990s on, the Democratic Party managed to ditch the working class (hello, Donald Trump!) and its New Deal tradition, throw its support behind a rising “professional” and technocratic class, and go gaga over Wall Street and those billionaires to come. In the process, its leaders fell in love with Goldman Sachs and every miserable trade pact that hit town, led the way in deregulating the financial system, and helped launch what Frank terms “the greatest wave of insider looting ever seen”; the party, that is, went Silicon Valley and left Flint, Michigan, to the Republicans. Only a few years after Bill Clinton vacated the Oval Office the financial system he and his team had played such a role in deregulating had to be rescued, lock, stock, and barrel from ultimate collapse. Quite a record all in all. Put another way, as Frank makes clear, in these years the Democrats (with obvious exceptions) became a more or less traditional Republican party. And if the Democrats are now the party of inequality, then what in the world are the Republicans? Don’t even get me started on the cliff that crew walked off of.
In the following post, adapted from his new book, Frank does a typically brainy thing. Since we’ve all heard for years about how the Democrats have been stopped from truly pursuing their political program by Republican experts in political paralysis, he turns to a rare set of places where, in fact, the Republicans were incapable of getting in the way and... well, let him tell the story.
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
The Blue State Model
How the Democrats Created a "Liberalism of the Rich"
hen you press Democrats on their uninspiring deeds -- their lousy free trade deals, for example, or their flaccid response to Wall Street misbehavior -- when you press them on any of these things, they automatically reply that this is the best anyone could have done. After all, they had to deal with those awful Republicans, and those awful Republicans wouldn’t let the really good stuff get through. They filibustered in the Senate. They gerrymandered the congressional districts. And besides, change takes a long time. Surely you don’t think the tepid-to-lukewarm things Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have done in Washington really represent the fiery Democratic soul.
So let’s go to a place that does. Let’s choose a locale where Democratic rule is virtually unopposed, a place where Republican obstruction and sabotage can’t taint the experiment.
Let’s go to Boston, Massachusetts, the spiritual homeland of the professional class and a place where the ideology of modern liberalism has been permitted to grow and flourish without challenge or restraint. As the seat of American higher learning, it seems unsurprising that Boston should anchor one of the most Democratic of states, a place where elected Republicans (like the new governor) are highly unusual. This is the city that virtually invented the blue-state economic model, in which prosperity arises from higher education and the knowledge-based industries that surround it.
The coming of post-industrial society has treated this most ancient of American cities extremely well. Massachusetts routinely occupies the number one spot on the State New Economy Index, a measure of how “knowledge-based, globalized, entrepreneurial, IT-driven, and innovation-based” a place happens to be. Boston ranks high on many of Richard Florida’s statistical indices of approbation -- in 2003, it was number one on the “creative class index,” number three in innovation and in high tech -- and his many books marvel at the city’s concentration of venture capital, its allure to young people, or the time it enticed some firm away from some unenlightened locale in the hinterlands.
Boston’s knowledge economy is the best, and it is the oldest. Boston’s metro area encompasses some 85 private colleges and universities, the greatest concentration of higher-ed institutions in the country -- probably in the world. The region has all the ancillary advantages to show for this: a highly educated population, an unusually large number of patents, and more Nobel laureates than any other city in the country.
The city’s Route 128 corridor was the original model for a suburban tech district, lined ever since it was built with defense contractors and computer manufacturers. The suburbs situated along this golden thoroughfare are among the wealthiest municipalities in the nation, populated by engineers, lawyers, and aerospace workers. Their public schools are excellent, their downtowns are cute, and back in the seventies their socially enlightened residents were the prototype for the figure of the “suburban liberal.”
Another prototype: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, situated in Cambridge, is where our modern conception of the university as an incubator for business enterprises began. According to a report on MIT’s achievements in this category, the school’s alumni have started nearly 26,000 companies over the years, including Intel, Hewlett Packard, and Qualcomm. If you were to take those 26,000 companies as a separate nation, the report tells us, its economy would be one of the most productive in the world.
Then there are Boston’s many biotech and pharmaceutical concerns, grouped together in what is known as the “life sciences super cluster,” which, properly understood, is part of an “ecosystem” in which PhDs can “partner” with venture capitalists and in which big pharmaceutical firms can acquire small ones. While other industries shrivel, the Boston super cluster grows, with the life-sciences professionals of the world lighting out for the Athens of America and the massive new “innovation centers” shoehorning themselves one after the other into the crowded academic suburb of Cambridge.
To think about it slightly more critically, Boston is the headquarters for two industries that are steadily bankrupting middle America: big learning and big medicine, both of them imposing costs that everyone else is basically required to pay and which increase at a far more rapid pace than wages or inflation. A thousand dollars a pill, 30 grand a semester: the debts that are gradually choking the life out of people where you live are what has made this city so very rich.
Perhaps it makes sense, then, that another category in which Massachusetts ranks highly is inequality. Once the visitor leaves the brainy bustle of Boston, he discovers that this state is filled with wreckage -- with former manufacturing towns in which workers watch their way of life draining away, and with cities that are little more than warehouses for people on Medicare. According to one survey, Massachusetts has the eighth-worst rate of income inequality among the states; by another metric it ranks fourth. However you choose to measure the diverging fortunes of the country’s top 10% and the rest, Massachusetts always seems to finish among the nation’s most unequal places.
Seething City on a Cliff
You can see what I mean when you visit Fall River, an old mill town 50 miles south of Boston. Median household income in that city is $33,000, among the lowest in the state; unemployment is among the highest, 15% in March 2014, nearly five years after the recession ended. Twenty-three percent of Fall River’s inhabitants live in poverty. The city lost its many fabric-making concerns decades ago and with them it lost its reason for being. People have been deserting the place for decades.
Many of the empty factories in which their ancestors worked are still standing, however. Solid nineteenth-century structures of granite or brick, these huge boxes dominate the city visually -- there always seems to be one or two of them in the vista, contrasting painfully with whatever colorful plastic fast-food joint has been slapped up next door.
Most of the old factories are boarded up, unmistakable emblems of hopelessness right up to the roof. But the ones that have been successfully repurposed are in some ways even worse, filled as they often are with enterprises offering cheap suits or help with drug addiction. A clinic in the hulk of one abandoned mill has a sign on the window reading simply “Cancer & Blood.”
The effect of all this is to remind you with every prospect that this is a place and a way of life from which the politicians have withdrawn their blessing. Like so many other American scenes, this one is the product of decades of deindustrialization, engineered by Republicans and rationalized by Democrats. This is a place where affluence never returns -- not because affluence for Fall River is impossible or unimaginable, but because our country’s leaders have blandly accepted a social order that constantly bids down the wages of people like these while bidding up the rewards for innovators, creatives, and professionals.
Even the city’s one real hope for new employment opportunities --- an Amazon warehouse that is now in the planning stages -- will serve to lock in this relationship. If all goes according to plan, and if Amazon sticks to the practices it has pioneered elsewhere, people from Fall River will one day get to do exhausting work with few benefits while being electronically monitored for efficiency, in order to save the affluent customers of nearby Boston a few pennies when they buy books or electronics.
But that is all in the future. These days, the local newspaper publishes an endless stream of stories about drug arrests, shootings, drunk-driving crashes, the stupidity of local politicians, and the lamentable surplus of “affordable housing.” The town is up to its eyeballs in wrathful bitterness against public workers. As in: Why do they deserve a decent life when the rest of us have no chance at all? It’s every man for himself here in a “competition for crumbs,” as a Fall River friend puts it.
The Great Entrepreneurial Awakening
If Fall River is pocked with empty mills, the streets of Boston are dotted with facilities intended to make innovation and entrepreneurship easy and convenient. I was surprised to discover, during the time I spent exploring the city’s political landscape, that Boston boasts a full-blown Innovation District, a disused industrial neighborhood that has actually been zoned creative -- a projection of the post-industrial blue-state ideal onto the urban grid itself. The heart of the neighborhood is a building called “District Hall” -- “Boston’s New Home for Innovation” -- which appeared to me to be a glorified multipurpose room, enclosed in a sharply angular façade, and sharing a roof with a restaurant that offers “inventive cuisine for innovative people.” The Wi-Fi was free, the screens on the walls displayed famous quotations about creativity, and the walls themselves were covered with a high-gloss finish meant to be written on with dry-erase markers; but otherwise it was not much different from an ordinary public library. Aside from not having anything to read, that is.
This was my introduction to the innovation infrastructure of the city, much of it built up by entrepreneurs shrewdly angling to grab a piece of the entrepreneur craze. There are “co-working” spaces, shared offices for startups that can’t afford the real thing. There are startup “incubators” and startup “accelerators,” which aim to ease the innovator’s eternal struggle with an uncaring public: the Startup Institute, for example, and the famous MassChallenge, the “World’s Largest Startup Accelerator,” which runs an annual competition for new companies and hands out prizes at the end.
And then there are the innovation Democrats, led by former Governor Deval Patrick, who presided over the Massachusetts government from 2007 to 2015. He is typical of liberal-class leaders; you might even say he is their most successful exemplar. Everyone seems to like him, even his opponents. He is a witty and affable public speaker as well as a man of competence, a highly educated technocrat who is comfortable in corporate surroundings. Thanks to his upbringing in a Chicago housing project, he also understands the plight of the poor, and (perhaps best of all) he is an honest politician in a state accustomed to wide-open corruption. Patrick was also the first black governor of Massachusetts and, in some ways, an ideal Democrat for the era of Barack Obama -- who, as it happens, is one of his closest political allies.
As governor, Patrick became a kind of missionary for the innovation cult. “The Massachusetts economy is an innovation economy,” he liked to declare, and he made similar comments countless times, slightly varying the order of the optimistic keywords: “Innovation is a centerpiece of the Massachusetts economy,” et cetera. The governor opened “innovation schools,” a species of ramped-up charter school. He signed the “Social Innovation Compact,” which had something to do with meeting “the private sector’s need for skilled entry-level professional talent.” In a 2009 speech called “The Innovation Economy,” Patrick elaborated the political theory of innovation in greater detail, telling an audience of corporate types in Silicon Valley about Massachusetts’s “high concentration of brainpower” and “world-class” universities, and how “we in government are actively partnering with the private sector and the universities, to strengthen our innovation industries.”
What did all of this inno-talk mean? Much of the time, it was pure applesauce -- standard-issue platitudes to be rolled out every time some pharmaceutical company opened an office building somewhere in the state.
On some occasions, Patrick’s favorite buzzword came with a gigantic price tag, like the billion dollars in subsidies and tax breaks that the governor authorized in 2008 to encourage pharmaceutical and biotech companies to do business in Massachusetts. On still other occasions, favoring inno has meant bulldozing the people in its path -- for instance, the taxi drivers whose livelihoods are being usurped by ridesharing apps like Uber. When these workers staged a variety of protests in the Boston area, Patrick intervened decisively on the side of the distant software company. Apparently convenience for the people who ride in taxis was more important than good pay for people who drive those taxis. It probably didn’t hurt that Uber had hired a former Patrick aide as a lobbyist, but the real point was, of course, innovation: Uber was the future, the taxi drivers were the past, and the path for Massachusetts was obvious.
A short while later, Patrick became something of an innovator himself. After his time as governor came to an end last year, he won a job as a managing director of Bain Capital, the private equity firm that was founded by his predecessor Mitt Romney -- and that had been so powerfully denounced by Democrats during the 2012 election. Patrick spoke about the job like it was just another startup: “It was a happy and timely coincidence I was interested in building a business that Bain was also interested in building,” he told the Wall Street Journal. Romney reportedly phoned him with congratulations.
Entrepreneurs First
At a 2014 celebration of Governor Patrick’s innovation leadership, Google’s Eric Schmidt announced that “if you want to solve the economic problems of the U.S., create more entrepreneurs.” That sort of sums up the ideology in this corporate commonwealth: Entrepreneurs first. But how has such a doctrine become holy writ in a party dedicated to the welfare of the common man? And how has all this come to pass in the liberal state of Massachusetts?
The answer is that I’ve got the wrong liberalism. The kind of liberalism that has dominated Massachusetts for the last few decades isn’t the stuff of Franklin Roosevelt or the United Auto Workers; it’s the Route 128/suburban-professionals variety. (Senator Elizabeth Warren is the great exception to this rule.) Professional-class liberals aren’t really alarmed by oversized rewards for society’s winners. On the contrary, this seems natural to them -- because they are society’s winners. The liberalism of professionals just does not extend to matters of inequality; this is the area where soft hearts abruptly turn hard.
Innovation liberalism is “a liberalism of the rich,” to use the straightforward phrase of local labor leader Harris Gruman. This doctrine has no patience with the idea that everyone should share in society’s wealth. What Massachusetts liberals pine for, by and large, is a more perfect meritocracy -- a system where the essential thing is to ensure that the truly talented get into the right schools and then get to rise through the ranks of society. Unfortunately, however, as the blue-state model makes painfully clear, there is no solidarity in a meritocracy. The ideology of educational achievement conveniently negates any esteem we might feel for the poorly graduated.
This is a curious phenomenon, is it not? A blue state where the Democrats maintain transparent connections to high finance and big pharma; where they have deliberately chosen distant software barons over working-class members of their own society; and where their chief economic proposals have to do with promoting “innovation,” a grand and promising idea that remains suspiciously vague. Nor can these innovation Democrats claim that their hands were forced by Republicans. They came up with this program all on their own.
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Bernie Sanders as Commander-in-Chief |
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Wednesday, 30 March 2016 08:24 |
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Parry writes: "Sen. Bernie Sanders's landslide victories in Washington State, Alaska and Hawaii on Saturday coincided with a long-awaited signal that he may finally be ready to challenge former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the 'Commander-in-Chief' question."
Bernie Sanders. (photo: Karen Bleier/Getty Images)
Bernie Sanders as Commander-in-Chief
By Robert Parry, Consortium News
30 March 16
Tulsi Gabbard, a Hawaii congresswoman and Iraq War veteran, stars in a stunning ad endorsing Bernie Sanders as “Commander-in-Chief,” a potential turning point in the Democratic race, writes Robert Parry.
 en. Bernie Sanders’s landslide victories in Washington State, Alaska and Hawaii on Saturday coincided with a long-awaited signal that he may finally be ready to challenge former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the “Commander-in-Chief” question, which has been regarded as one of her key strengths.
In what may be the most striking campaign commercial of the presidential race, the Sanders campaign released an ad, entitled “The Cost of War” and featuring Hawaii’s Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, an Iraq War veteran who endorsed Sanders not just as her preference for President but as Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. military.
“Bernie Sanders voted against the Iraq War,” Gabbard says. “He understands the cost of war, that that cost is continued when our veterans come home. Bernie Sanders will defend our country and take the trillions of dollars that are spent on these interventionist, regime change, unnecessary wars and invest it here at home.”
Gabbard also counters another strong point of the Clinton campaign, its contention that Clinton’s plans for incremental change are more realistic than Sanders’s calls for sweeping reforms – or a “political revolution” – to reverse the nation’s steady drift toward a country of lavishly rewarded haves and increasingly desperate have-nots.
“The American people are not looking to settle for inches; they are looking for real change,” Gabbard says. But perhaps her most important statement comes at the end of the 90-second commercial when she says: “My name is Tulsi Gabbard and I support Bernie Sanders to be our next President and Commander-in-Chief.”
The phrase “Commander-in-Chief” is one that Sanders has largely sidestepped in the early phases of the Democratic presidential race, conceding Clinton’s superior qualifications on foreign policy though questioning her judgment when she voted for the Iraq War in 2002. Yet, what the Gabbard ad seems to recognize is that Sanders’s campaign could rally a substantial part of the Democratic “base” and win over many “regular” Democrats by challenging Clinton on her hawkish proclivity for “regime change” wars.
Though many political analysts argue that it is too late for Sanders to overcome Clinton’s substantial delegate lead – bolstered by the unelected “super-delegates” drawn from party politicians – Sanders’s recent string of landslide victories suggest that many Democrats are uncomfortable with or opposed to Clinton, whose “negatives” are among the highest of national political leaders (in a race to the bottom with Donald Trump).
Many Democrats have a deep distrust of Clinton who – though now highlighting her more “progressive” positions – seems eager to “pivot to the center” once she nails down the nomination, a hunger that was reflected in her pandering speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee convention last week.
A Neocon Favorite
Many neoconservatives and “liberal interventionists” now see Clinton as the vessel carrying their hopes for more “regime change” wars.
From 2002-2006, Clinton famously supported President George W. Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq, which – beyond costing more than $1 trillion and killing hundreds of thousands of people (including nearly 4,500 U.S. soldiers) – destabilized the Middle East and gave rise to “Al Qaeda in Iraq,” which has since morphed into the Islamic State.
Apparently having learned no lessons from the Iraq War, Clinton consistently took hawkish and interventionist positions as President Barack Obama’s first Secretary of State.
In 2009, Clinton backed a coup in Honduras that removed democratically elected (and progressive) President Manuel Zelaya and reaffirmed control by the Central American country’s oligarchy. Since then, Honduras’s human rights situation has worsened, driving thousands of children to flee northward seeking safety and leaving environmental and political activists at the mercy of death squads.
Also, in 2009, Clinton joined with Bush-holdover Defense Secretary Robert Gates and neocon-favorite Gen. David Petraeus in pushing Obama into a major escalation of the Afghan War, a counter-insurgency “surge” that sent another 1,000 American troops to their deaths – and many more Afghans – but has since been abandoned as a failure.
In 2011, Clinton joined with “liberal interventionists” in again pushing Obama into a “regime change” war in Libya that led to the overthrow and torture-murder of Muammar Gaddafi – which she gleefully welcomed with the quip, “We came, we saw, he died” – but has since turned the once relatively prosperous North African country into a failed state with the Islamic State gaining another foothold.
Both as Secretary of State and since her departure in 2013, Clinton has pressed to escalate the “regime change” war in Syria, seeking a “no-fly zone” that would require the U.S. military to destroy the Syrian government’s air force and air defenses, apparently without regard to the risk that the U.S. intervention could pave the way for Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front and/or the Islamic State to march into Damascus.
Though the Syrian “regime change” strategy that Clinton has advocated has failed to oust President Bashar al-Assad, it has transformed another reasonably functional Mideast state into a bloody killing field and driven millions of refugees into what is now a destabilized Europe.
In 2014, Clinton also embraced the neocon-backed coup in Ukraine that has touched off a new and costly Cold War with Russia. Again showing her “tough-gal” side, Clinton likened Russia’s President Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler. Two years later, the Ukraine “regime change” has not only given the Ukrainians a corrupt and dysfunctional government – kept afloat with billions of dollars from the U.S. and Europe – but the heightened U.S. hostility toward Russia has impaired chances for big-power cooperation on a number of these other conflicts.
All of this may fit the neocon agenda of removing or punishing governments that are viewed as unfriendly to Israel, but these Clinton-embraced strategies have been highly destructive to a peaceful and prosperous world. There is also the increased danger that Clinton might represent as Commander-in-Chief when her most hawkish inclinations are not tempered or restrained by President Obama’s general resistance to interventionist wars.
For months, Clinton has been identified by top neocons as their best hope to maintain influence at the highest levels of Washington, especially if “America First” Republican Donald Trump secures the GOP nomination.
Robert Kagan, a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century, which drew up the Iraq War and other “regime change” plans in the 1990s, was among the influential neocons to abandon the Trump-dominated Republican Party and announce support for Hillary Clinton.
A month ago in a Washington Post op-ed, Kagan excoriated the Republican Party for creating the conditions for Trump’s rise and then asked, “So what to do now? The Republicans’ creation will soon be let loose on the land, leaving to others the job the party failed to carry out.” Then referring to himself, he added, “For this former Republican, and perhaps for others, the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Neocon Kagan Endorses Hillary Clinton.”]
Kagan, whom Clinton appointed to a State Department advisory panel, is married to Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, a former senior aide to Vice President Dick Cheney who rose under Clinton and helped orchestrate the Ukraine coup which sabotaged Obama’s behind-the-scenes cooperation with Putin on touchy issues such as Iran and Syria.
The Ukraine coup also opened the U.S. military-spending spigot even wider to pay for a new Cold War. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “A Family Business of Perpetual War.”]
Unpopular Warmongering
Though much of Clinton’s neocon-style warmongering is unpopular with the Democratic “base,” Sanders has treaded lightly in these areas during his primary challenge to her long-anticipated coronation as the Democratic presidential nominee.
When foreign policy comes up, Sanders contrasts his opposition to the Iraq War to Clinton’s support but returns as quickly as possible to his overriding theme of income inequality and his opposition to a political-economic system rigged for the One Percent.
Sanders’s hesitation to challenge Clinton on her perceived foreign-policy “strength” ignores a key football lesson often attributed to New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick, who reversed a longstanding belief that teams should look for their opponents’ weaknesses. Belichick instead focused on taking away his opponents’ strengths and making them play to their weaknesses.
With the help of Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, Sanders appears to have finally grasped that lesson. With Gabbard praising Sanders as her choice for “Commander-in-Chief,” she implicitly seeks to neutralize Clinton’s supposed strong suit – her foreign-policy experience – and transform it into a weakness.
The question now is whether Gabbard’s assistance to Sanders has come too late.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com.
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ne week before the Brussels terrorist attacks, a Saudi-led coalition 
