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Trump Wants More War Money Than Last Year and Democrats Don't Seem to Mind |
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Thursday, 21 March 2019 08:32 |
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Taibbi writes: "The military is once again poised receive a huge budgetary bump from President Trump, and the Democrats don't seem interested in doing much about it."
The Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis travels the Straits of Hormuz. (photo: US Navy)
Trump Wants More War Money Than Last Year and Democrats Don't Seem to Mind
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
21 March 19
The Trump administration is asking for a $750 billion defense budget for next year. You might be shocked by the Democrats’ counter-offer
 he military is once again poised receive a huge budgetary bump from President Trump, and the Democrats don’t seem interested in doing much about it.
Last week, reports emerged that Trump, while touting overall spending cuts “higher than any administration in history,” was planning to ask for a $750 billion defense budget — a $34 billion increase over last year’s request. This will put an end to years of what’s known as budget “parity,” or the idea that defense and non-defense funding should rise and fall together.
Last year, the Department of Defense failed to pass its first-ever audit. For this and other reasons, one would think that this would be a good time for Democrats to band together and prevent a raise in military spending, or even fight for cuts until the Pentagon can get its books in order.
That doesn’t seem to be in the works.
According to a Hill source, the Democrats are targeting a counter-offer above the $716 billion budget Trump asked for in 2018. In other words, the Democrats want to lower Trump’s number, but still give the Pentagon a raise.
“Even the opening number is going to be really high,” says the source.
Trump’s budget request represents a 5-percent increase overall. Budget analysts have said they expect the final number to be between last year’s $716 billion figure and $733 billion, the likely final number also quoted to Rolling Stone. A $733 billion defense budget number would represent a 2.4-percent increase, or about half of what Trump wants.
Should the Democrats approve a $733 billion budget — remember, Trump’s $716 billion budget passed 85-10 in the Senate last year — it would break a record for the second consecutive year.
The irony of the hike in defense spending this year is that on paper, the so-called “base” defense-spending number is expected to drop significantly. The baseline defense number will go from $647 billion in fiscal year 2019 to $576 billion in 2020, a $71 billion decrease. These “cuts” will be offset by massive increases in what’s called Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) funding, sometimes called “war funding.” Technically these funds are only supposed to go to active combat operations.
In reality, however, OCO funding is mainly used as a means to increase military spending above caps designated by Congress. Thanks to the Budget Control Act of 2011, Congress can only spend a certain percentage of overall appropriations on defense versus non-defense programs. In 2018, the cap was roughly 54 percent.
This year, Trump is seeking to use far less on non-defense spending, just $543 billion, versus $597 billion last year, a 9-percent cut. To get in line with the Budget Control Act, the most Trump can ask for as “base” spending for defense would be that $576 billion number.
Therefore, in order to raise the defense budget while slashing funds for everything else, both sides will have to get creative.
Last year, Trump asked for $69 billion in OCO money. This year, he’ll request $165 billion in OCO funding, despite the fact that we haven’t started any major new wars lately.
This is strictly a trick allowing Trump, and likely Congress, to increase defense spending while cutting everything else, despite laws in place designed to prevent exactly this situation.
A $750-billion budget would roughly equal the total spent by the next 15 highest-spending countries, a list that includes England, France, Germany, Italy and Japan — none of which appear to pose much of a threat. Our military spending more than doubles that of our two most serious competitors, China ($224 billion) and Russia ($44 billion).
The Trump budget request includes $31 billion to “modernize” our nuclear triad, plus funding for an additional Virginia-class submarine and 78 F-35 jets from Lockheed-Martin at a cost of $11.2 billion. There is also a request for $7 billion in “emergency” funding for building whatever it is they’re calling Trump’s hare-brained wall plan these days.
The wall funding is likely to spur enough controversy that it will take a long time for the two sides to agree on a final numbers. But expect the Democrats to agree up-front to a large military increase, perhaps in conjunction with a deal for higher base non-defense spending levels in the name of “parity.”
Momentum toward endless raises for defense might be slowed if some of the more progressive new members of the House Democratic Caucus could get together and try to mount resistance in the lower chamber. So far, that effort hasn’t materialized.
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Unlike Some Democratic Candidates, Bernie Hasn't "Evolved" - and That's a Good Thing |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=46703"><span class="small">Meagan Day, Jacobin</span></a>
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Wednesday, 20 March 2019 12:59 |
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Day writes: "In the seventies, Bernie Sanders called for nationalizing major industries, a stance the media want to frame as a gaffe. But it only shows how consistent he's been in fighting predatory elites - in stark contrast to the other Democratic candidates."
Sen. Bernie Sanders waves to supporters while standing next to wife Jane O'Meara Sanders after speaking at his first event of the 2020 presidential campaign at Brooklyn College, NYC on March 2. (photo: John Angelillo/UPI)
Unlike Some Democratic Candidates, Bernie Hasn't "Evolved" - and That's a Good Thing
By Meagan Day, Jacobin
20 March 19
In the seventies, Bernie Sanders called for nationalizing major industries, a stance the media want to frame as a gaffe. But it only shows how consistent he’s been in fighting predatory elites — in stark contrast to the other Democratic candidates.
 ast week, CNN published a report about Bernie Sanders’s time as a member of an independent left-wing political party in Vermont called the Liberty Union Party. “Bernie Sanders in the 1970s urged nationalization of most major industries,” the headline read. Socialists were impressed, but not everyone shared our enthusiasm.
According to CNN, the Liberty Union Party called for “nationalization of the energy industry, public ownership of banks, telephone, electric, and drug companies and of the major means of production such as factories and capital, as well as other proposals such as a 100% income tax on the highest income earners in America.” Sanders ran for governor of Vermont and US Senate on the Liberty Union Party ticket four times between 1972 and 1976, and was briefly the party’s chairman. His dissatisfaction with its inactivity between elections led to his departure in 1977.
This history wasn’t exactly a secret. It made the rounds in 2016, with some using it to smear Bernie as an “out-and-out Stalinist.” The new report has solicited even more red-baiting attacks from the Right. “If there were any doubt that Democrats are the party of socialism,” said the spokesman for the Republican National Committee, “their highest-polling 2020 candidate has called for total government control of our country’s industries.”
But the GOP’s got it twisted. The CNN report doesn’t say anything about the Democratic Party — except by stark contrast. In fact, only a handful of top-ranking Democrats are even willing to come out for Medicare for All and tuition-free college, and the few that do support these enormously popular proposals today were mostly pulled left in Bernie’s wake.
On the contrary, the CNN report reveals Bernie to be a remarkable outlier in a political field crowded with corporate mercenaries. Bernie has been fighting against corporate domination and the exploitation of working people his entire life. We hardly needed more proof, but here it was anyway.
Bernie’s rationale for his suggestion in 1973 that we nationalize energy companies was that it’s “grossly unfair that low income and working people are being forced to contribute more and more profit to the already overflowing coffers of billionaire owners.” He added, “The oil industry, and the entire energy industry, should be owned by the public and used for the public good — not for additional profits for billionaires.”
Though this idea may strike some as radical compared to his current agenda, the politics animating it are unmistakably Bernie’s. And it must be said that Medicare for All, his signature policy proposal, was also considered unthinkable before he popularized it during his 2016 presidential campaign. Medicare for All would nationalize the health insurance industry, replacing private for-profit companies with a single public program — just like what Bernie proposed to do with the oil companies in the seventies.
In 1993, twenty years after his involvement with the Liberty Union Party, Bernie brought his first single-payer bill to Congress. “Our system is not in need of band-aids or patchwork or such concepts as managed competition. We are in need of a new system,” he said as he introduced it. Some called him crazy, but he was on a mission. “The American people believe that healthcare must be a right of all citizens and not just the privilege of the wealthy.”
His message stayed consistent for the next two decades. “Healthcare must be recognized as a right, not a privilege,” he wrote in 2013, in the twilight of his relative obscurity. “The American people understand that our current healthcare system is not working… The only long-term solution to America’s healthcare crisis is a single-payer national healthcare program.”
In just a few short years, after staying the course for half a century, he would break through with this message and become the most popular politician in the United States.
Bernie has long backed ambitious pro-working-class policies even when they were considered fringe, convinced that the public’s appetite for fairness would eventually override its pessimism about what’s politically possible.
In the Democratic Party presidential primary race, that history sets Bernie apart.
When Bernie was in his thirties, he was attempting to build an independent political party whose purpose, he said, was “to create a situation in which the ordinary working people take what rightfully belongs to them.”
When Kamala Harris was in her thirties, she was a prosecutor in the San Francisco District Attorney’s office, advancing a sterling political career by sending people to jail.
When Beto O’Rourke was in his thirties, he was positioning himself as a social liberal while gentrifying low-income Latino neighborhoods in El Paso, calling for “better checks on collective bargaining in the public sector,” and wooing wealthy Republican backers.
When Elizabeth Warren was in her thirties, she was a Republican. She only changed party affiliation when she became concerned that GOP’s inattention to the optimal conditions of market competition would imperil capitalism, an economic system she cherishes.
When Joe Biden was in his thirties, he was fighting against efforts to racially integrate public schools. Not yet a politician, Biden was a staunch opponent of busing, calling it “the single most devastating issue that could occur to Delaware.” On the subject of racism, Biden added, “I don’t feel responsible for my father’s sins — only for my sins.”
In contrast to young Biden, young Bernie was an activist fighting against racial discrimination in education.
Decades later, Biden and Bernie’s polar opposite reactions to such issues were again on display, this time as differing stances on crime policy. In a 1994 Congressional debate, Biden scaremongered about predatory criminals and said the nation needed to “take back our streets by more cops, more prisons.” In that same debate, Bernie spoke out against mass incarceration, called for a less punitive criminal justice system, and beseeched Congress to fight crime by ending mass poverty.
Just as Biden’s early stance on school integration was a reliable indicator of how he’d approach criminal justice issues, Bernie’s early calls to bring industries under public control are a reliable indicator of how he’d behave as president. They suggest he’s not afraid of offending the business community, and that his instinct will be to fight for the working class.
If we’re serious about taking on the formidable power of the ruling elite and building a society based on equality and democracy, we should look at the candidates’ lifelong records and ask, which of them truly shares those priorities.
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Is Felony Murder the Next Chapter in the Anti-Protest Movement? |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=50405"><span class="small">Darlene Harris, The Root</span></a>
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Wednesday, 20 March 2019 12:59 |
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Harris writes: "While protests are commonplace in a healthy democracy, the movement to silence dissent is picking up steam."
A demonstrator protesting the shooting death of Michael Brown is arrested by police officers in riot gear Nov. 30, 2014, in St. Louis, Mo. (photo: Joshua Lott/Getty)
Is Felony Murder the Next Chapter in the Anti-Protest Movement?
By Darlene Harris, The Root
20 March 19
he Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “riots are the language of the unheard,” but legislators across the country seem to be rushing to silence those cries.
While protests are commonplace in a healthy democracy, the movement to silence dissent is picking up steam.
Over the past several years, there has been a wave of legislation to criminalize protests in America and abroad. This past December, Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) attempted to sneak an anti-Israel Political Boycott measure into a spending bill. The measure proposed criminalizing Americans for participating in political protests targeting Israel.
In North Dakota, a bill was introduced in 2017 that permitted motorists to hit and kill protesters with no liability if the collision was “accidental.” In Washington state, legislation was introduced to charge demonstrators with economic terrorism if police deem the protester(s) to be disruptive.
My home state of North Carolina even passed an Extraordinary Event law that permits police to stop and search residents based on “extraordinary events,” an exceedingly vague phrase. For instance, in 2016, my client, Braxton Winston, who was attending demonstrations following the fatal police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott, was arrested for having a water bottle and mask—items apparently prohibited by law enforcement. Another client, Gloria Merriweather, who attended the same protest, was charged with inciting a riot for merely being in attendance. The charges against both Winston and Merriweather were eventually dropped.
While Keith Lamont Scott, who was African-American, was killed by an African-American police officer, many of the unarmed African-American police shooting victims are killed by white men and, in some cases, white women. This has led to intense pain, anger and frustration from those citizens who feel that justice has been denied. The response to that has been to silence questions and dissent, even for things as finite as death.
In addition to worrying about growing efforts to criminalize demonstrations, we must also worry about protesters being charged under a felony murder theory. During the recent murder trial for my former client Rayquan Borum, prosecutors charged him with first-degree murder and sought to use the theory of felony murder in convicting him.
Typically, we see the felony murder rule applied when someone is in the process of committing an inherently dangerous felony. For example, if someone breaks into a house and the owner falls down the stairs, breaks their neck and dies. The perpetrator would not only be charged with the breaking and entering, but also with first-degree murder for the death of the owner. Another example is where a person robs a store and someone in the store dies of a heart attack during the robbery. The robber would be charged with first-degree murder and armed robbery if they had a weapon.
In North Carolina, felony murder is punishable by life without parole. In the Borum instance, the underlying felony was rioting at the 2016 protests connected to Scott’s shooting.
One issue is the use of “rioting” as the underlying felony (like robbery or breaking and entering). Say, for instance, you’re at a protest and as you’re leaving, tensions rise and things are inflamed. This event could now be deemed a “riot.” Several legal questions arise: Are all attendees “engaged” in the riot through mere presence? If someone dies, by means other than intentional homicide, are all attendees responsible?
To understand how problematic this classification is, we must first examine the word “riot.” The term is heavily racialized, often used to describe black Americans and working-class Americans who, by their sheer presence or expression of pain, make others uncomfortable. The word “riot” conjures up images of people behaving violently. But anger is not always wrapped in a neat package.
Anyone who dares to express righteous indignation over police brutality, fatal police shootings of unarmed civilians, an inability to obtain health insurance or a political leader who is behaving poorly could be deemed a “rioter.”
It is important to note that societal upheaval is typically a last resort. When communities decide to stage a protest, they typically do so as a means of gaining awareness about a major issue and because other avenues have failed.
In the United States, we have seen protests occur following fatal police shootings of unarmed African Americans. We also saw protests erupt following the election of President Donald Trump when hundreds of thousands of women came together for the 2017 Women’s March, which included a mass action in Washington, D.C., and smaller events in communities across the United States and the world. From the scenarios above, it is typically African Americans who are deemed “rioters.”
Of course, North Carolina is no stranger to mass demonstrations. In April 2013, the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber and the North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP staged multi-week and multi-city Moral Monday protests to challenge what he and his coalition deemed immoral and unjust laws.
If legislators and police are permitted to reach for the rioter label, and then criminalize people accordingly, our democracy is in trouble. Had North Carolina been successful in convicting my client under the felony murder theory, it would have set a precedent that would have reverberated across the country. I fear the growing anti-protest sentiment coupled with deeply entrenched racism will not only invalidate citizens’ First Amendment rights but will also criminalize people who choose to take a stand against injustice. Remember, under the felony murder theory, persons “engaged” in a riot can be charged with felony murder, which carries a sentence of life in prison.
If riots really are the language of the unheard, shouldn’t we be ensuring that all people have an opportunity to be heard? If riots are the cry of those ignored, should the courts really be branding (and punishing) people with felonies for exercising their First Amendment freedom of speech rights?
It appears that the felony murder designation could be the next phase of the anti-protest movement, and advocates and activists would do well to stop, stall or slow this trend.
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FOCUS: The Supreme Court Is Doing What It Was Rigged to Do |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
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Wednesday, 20 March 2019 12:13 |
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Pierce writes: "The 5-4 majority ruled that the government can detain non-citizens indefinitely, even years after they went to jail."
Supreme Court justices. (photo: Alex Wong/Getty)
The Supreme Court Is Doing What It Was Rigged to Do
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
20 March 19
The 5-4 majority ruled that the government can detain non-citizens indefinitely, even years after they went to jail.
 t is profoundly wrong to believe that, just because the president* is a vulgar talking yam, his policies are not succeeding in several important places. (Most of these policies, it should be noted, differ only in how crude they are from policies that would have been pursued by most Republican presidential candidates.) For example, on Tuesday, by the now-customary 5-4 margin, the Supreme Court handed a big victory to the administration* not only in Nielsen v. Preap, the case under consideration, but also to the administration*'s excessive hostility toward immigrant populations. From the AP:
The issue in the case before the justices had to do with the detention of noncitizens who have committed a broad range of crimes that make them deportable. Immigration law tells the government it must arrest those people when they are released from custody and then hold them while an immigration court decides whether they should be deported.
But those affected by the law aren’t always picked up immediately and are sometimes not detained until years later. In the case before the Supreme Court, a group of mostly green card holders argued that unless they’re picked up essentially within a day of being released, they should be entitled to a hearing where they can argue that they aren’t a danger to the community and are not likely to flee. If a judge were to agree, they would not have to remain in custody while their deportation case goes forward. That’s the same hearing rule that applies to other noncitizens the government is trying to deport.
But the Supreme Court disagreed with the immigrants’ interpretation of federal law in a 5-4 ruling that divided the court along ideological lines. Looking at a statutory provision enacted by Congress in 1996, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that “neither the statute’s text nor its structure” supported the immigrants’ argument. The court’s conservative justices sided with the Trump administration.
In other words, if you did a two-year bid 30 years ago for whatever, and you've been the choir director in a Trappist monastery since you got out of stir, ICE can now grab you up and detain you, theoretically, for the rest of your life. The Supreme Court just dropped its imprimatur on indefinite detention.
(The plaintiff here was a guy who was busted twice for weed, did his time, and was released in 2006. Seven years later, ICE picked him up and locked him away. Since then, he won his deportation case and is still in this country.)
During the Court's last term, Justice Stephen Breyer, who took the unusual step of reading his dissent from the bench on Tuesday, warned us that the conservative majority was warming up to remove any semblance of constitutional protections from immigrants. Dissenting in a case called Jennings v. Rodriguez, Breyer wrote:
Whatever the fiction, would the Constitution leave the government free to starve, beat, or lash those held within our boundaries? If not, then, whatever the fiction, how can the Constitution authorize the government to imprison arbitrarily those who, whatever we might pretend, are in reality right here in the United States? The answer is that the Constitution does not authorize arbitrary detention. And the reason that is so is simple: Freedom from arbitrary detention is as ancient and important a right as any found within the Constitution’s boundaries.
In his dissent on Tuesday, Breyer somehow resisted the temptation to say he told us so but, he did tell us so.
That is because we cannot interpret the words of this specific statute without also considering basic promises that America’s legal system has long made to all persons. In deciphering the intent of the Congress that wrote this statute, we must decide—in the face of what is, at worst, linguistic ambiguity—whether Congress intended that persons who have long since paid their debt to society would be deprived of their liberty for months or years without the possibility of bail. We cannot decide that question without bearing in mind basic American legal values: the Government’s duty not to deprive any “person” of “liberty” without “due process of law,”; the Nation’s original commitment to protect the “unalienable” right to “Liberty”; and, less abstractly and more directly, the longstanding right of virtually all persons to receive a bail hearing. I would have thought that Congress meant to adhere to these values and did not intend to allow the Government to apprehend persons years after their release from prison and hold them indefinitely without a bail hearing.
We will have los desaparecidos in this country. We are on our way toward that. We probably have them now.
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