The most important answer is no. The U.S. government spends its money overwhelmingly on the wrong things. Far more than it needs a different quantity of spending, it needs a different type of spending. In the United States, 60% or so of the money that Congress decides on each year (because Social Security and healthcare are treated separately) goes to militarism. That's according to the National Priorities Project, which also says that, considering the whole budget, and not counting debt for past militarism, and not counting care for veterans, militarism is still 16%. Meanwhile, the War Resisters League says that 47% of U.S. income taxes goes to militarism, including debt for past militarism, veterans' care, etc. I read books all the time about the U.S. public budget and the U.S. economy that never mention the existence of the military at all. The most recent example is the new book by British columnist George Monbiot. I had him on my radio show and asked him about this, and he said he had no idea how high military spending was. Shocked he was. We should set our own agenda even when it's based on information generally avoided, as has in fact been done through city resolutions here in Berkeley.
Is Donald Trump good or bad, worthy of praise or condemnation?
The correct answer is yes. When regimes, as one is supposed to call non-U.S. governments, do good, one should praise them, and when they do bad one should condemn them. And when it's 99 percent one of those two, the remaining 1 percent that's the other should still be acknowledged. I want Trump impeached and removed and in some cases prosecuted for a long list of abuses. See the articles of impeachment ready to go at RootsAction.org. I want Nancy Pelosi, who has adamantly opposed impeachment for Bush, Cheney, Trump, Pence, and Kavanaugh, asked what if anything she would ever deem impeachable. But I also want Democrats who have been demanding that Trump become more hostile toward Russia and North Korea to have a seat and quietly consider whether there are any principles they could ever imagine placing above partisanship. We need to work on policies, not personalities. Let's leave the focus on personalities to fascists.
Should Syria be bombed for using chemical weapons or spared because it didn't really do so?
The proper response is no, nobody gets to bomb anybody, not legally, not practically, not morally. No crime of weapons use or weapons possession justifies any other crime, and certainly not the greatest crime there is. Spending months debating whether Iraq has weapons is not relevant to the question of whether to destroy Iraq. The answer to that question is an obvious and legal and moral one that should not await any illumination of irrelevant facts.
Are you beginning to see the pattern? We are generally asked to spend our time on the wrong questions, with heads-they-win and tails-we-lose answers available. Would you vote for cancer or heart disease? Take your pick. I won't argue with lesser evil voting or with radical voting. Why would I? It's 20 minutes out of your life. It's lesser evil thinking year-in and year-out that I have a major complaint with. When people join a team led by half the elected officials in the government, self-censor, and claim to want what that half of a broken government wants, knowing it will be compromised down from there, representative government is inverted and perverted. Labor unions came to my town and told people they were forbidden to say "single-payer" and had to make posters about something called "the public option" because that was what Democrats in Washington wanted. That's making of yourself a prop, a tool. What you say need not be, and must not be, limited in the way that who you vote for is.
This asking of the wrong questions is how we're taught history, as well as current civic participation, and therefore how we're led to understand the world.
Are you in support of the U.S. Civil War or in favor of slavery?
The answer should be no. The dramatic reduction in slavery and serfdom was a global movement, which succeeded in most places without a horrific civil war. If we were to decide to end mass-incarceration or meat consumption or fossil fuel use or reality tv shows, we wouldn't benefit from the model that says to first find some fields and kill each other in huge numbers and then end incarceration. The proper model would be to simply proceed with ending incarceration, gradually or rapidly, but without the mass murder, the side-effects of which in the case of the U.S. Civil War, as in most cases, are still tragically with us.
Should a corrupt plutocratic racist sexist imperialist perjurer be kept off the U.S. Supreme Court because he likely committed sexual assault? Should we insist on a corrupt plutocratic racist sexist imperialist perjurer clearly innocent of any sexual assault? This was not anyone's position, but this was the debate presented by the media and the Congress. So, this was largely the debate entered into by the petitions, the emails, the phone calls, the hearing disruptors, the protesters sitting in the Senate offices, and the media guests and callers and letters-to-the-editor writers. Had Kavanaugh been blocked and the woman behind him in line been nominated, it's hard to see how stopping her would have been possible. Our opposition to him ought to have been based in all of the many reasons available that we found compelling.
Now of course he can be impeached and removed from office. In fact that is the only way, other than disastrously counterproductive violence, to remove him, short of revising the ancient U.S. Constitution. But Nancy Pelosi is against impeachment, and many Democratic loyalists believe that obedience and discipline are the highest virtues. Here's what I think. Representatives are supposed to represent, not obey party orders. Representatives who do not commit to impeachment before an election are extremely unlikely to back it after one. And the theory that talking about impeachment will turn out voters for Republicans but not Democrats is based on nothing but speculation and ingrained habits of timidity. In 2006 the false belief that Democrats would impeach President Bush turned out Democratic voters, not Republicans. Every popular impeachment in history has boosted its advocates, while one unpopular impeachment -- that of Bill Clinton -- hurt its advocates very slightly. The conclusion one can draw from that is not that impeachment is always unpopular, but that cowards believe it more important to be wrong than to be victorious.
The same applies to the widespread malady of Pencedread, a fairly new and unstudied disease that consists of believing that a nation that could hold elected officials accountable and in fact toss them out on their ears but which had Mike Pence in the White House would be worse than a nation in which presidents can do virtually anything they like, and in which Congressional committees hold public hearings at which their members unanimously agree that they are simply powerless to prevent a president from launching a nuclear war but which has that model of wise statesmanship Donald Trump on the throne. I don't buy it. I think it's way too clever for its own good. And yet it's hardly clever at all. If there's one thing that almost everyone knows about U.S. politics, it's that the vice president is next in line for the crown. Who does not know that? I think the more important question is not who wears the crown but whether we allow it to be a crown.
I don't think recognizing that the whole system is deeply corrupted adds to or takes away from the cleverness of opposing holding those in it accountable. It just adds to the work that's needed in terms of public education and structural reform. When the Democrats took the majority in 2006, Nancy Pelosi said she would not allow any impeachments, exactly as she had said before the election -- though we'd wanted to imagine that either she was lying or that we would change her mind. And Rahm Emanuel said that the Democrats would keep the war on Iraq going -- in fact escalate it -- in order to run against it (whatever that means) again in 2008. As long as the Democrats are not credibly campaigning on anything more significant than not being Trump or Pence or Kavanaugh, they will want those people around to "run against." Loyal Democrats will agree, and radical independents will declare impeachment to amount to naive counter-revolutionary surrender to the Democrats, even though the Democrats oppose it. And there we will be: royal powers without limit, temporary despots alternating between the party of the right and the party of the far right, until that last minute clicks off on the Doomsday Clock.
Activism in a corrupt world is an unfair uphill struggle, but we see bursts of possibility nonetheless. We saw popular resistance play the major role in stopping the massive bombing of Syria in 2013, for example. We have seen a certain segment of the U.S. population grow wise about war and militarism during the past 17 years. This year we've seen four candidates for Congress, all women and all Democrats, win primaries in districts gerrymandered to their party, none of whom emphasizes opposition to war, none of whom wants to abolish all war, but all of whom, when pressed, talk about war in a way that almost no current or recent Congress member has -- including the four these women are replacing, and including Barbara Lee.
Ayanna Pressley wants to slash the military by 25%. Rashida Tlaib calls the military "a cesspool for corporations to make money" and she proposes moving the money to human and environmental needs. Ilhan Omar denounces U.S. wars as counterproductive for endangering the United States, wants to close foreign bases, and names six current U.S. wars she would end. And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, when asked where she would find the money to pay for things, does not follow Bernie Sanders down the dead-end path of raising taxes, but rather declares that she would cut a bit of the gargantuan military budget -- which stops those "where would you get the money" questions cold.
Now, none of these four may actually act on their statements, and some silent surprise like Congressman Ro Khanna may become an advocate for peace without ever having promised to be, but statistically that's unlikely. The most likely people to be willing to act for peace in public office are the ones who are publicly talking as though they do not want any weapons profits in their campaign bribes, er excuse me campaign contributions.
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