As a teacher I get to read grad students papers and I found a recent one interesting about the term American Exceptionalism…..
The romantic notion of American exceptionalism undermines the effectiveness of US foreign policy, and clinging to this outdated notion harms specific areas of international cooperation. It should by now be clear that we aren’t special, and if we run foreign policy on deluded notions and poorly-earned arrogance it will only cause harm to those forming useful coalitions and partnerships. For example, on climate change, hubris will make a new administration focus on shaming other countries, when a show of some level of stability and making real changes domestically would go a long way towards real leadership.
Alexis de Tocqueville coined the term for the U.S. over 150 years ago (“The position of the Americans is…quite exceptional”). In a much less oft quoted sentence in that same paragraph, de Tocqueville goes on to say, “Their strictly Puritanical origin, their exclusively commercial habits, even the country they inhabit…seems to divert their minds from the pursuit of science, literature, and the arts…” And yet this notion lingers, not only in political language and symbols, but at the core of foreign policy formulation
This pandemic has done major damage to the working class…..they have seen the wages disappear and their livelihood shrink to nothing. In other words it has been devastating to the economy….well not so devastating for some…..some have made out like bandits without guns…..
During the coronavirus crisis so far, which the think tank classifies as starting on March 18, billionaires’ fortunes grew by more than $700 billion.
Despite the pandemic’s widespread financial fallout, the fortunes of many ultrawealthy people have continued to grow even as an unprecedented number of Americans filed for unemployment.
How wonderful! I am so glad that billionaires keep making lots of cash while the rest of society suffers.
Time for society to fight back.
Time for these slackers to do their part for this society.
The time has come……period!
Have you been impressed with the Dems handling of the economic pandemic?
Re-think your “atta boys”…..
Some 25 million US workers are facing a reduction or outright elimination of a $600 weekly federal addition to state unemployment benefits when the supplemental payment authorized by Congress under the CARES Act expires on July 25.
In the midst of a raging pandemic and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, with at least 30 million out of work and new jobless claims surpassing one million a week, the supplement is all that has been keeping many families above water. Coinciding with the impending end of a federal moratorium on evictions and the expiration of state moratoriums, the cut in jobless pay will propel millions into destitution and homelessness.
One survey found that 37 percent of renters and 26 percent of homeowners feared they could be homeless by the end of the year. Researchers at Columbia University say they expect US homelessness to increase by 45 percent compared to 2019.
STOP! believing the hype that Dems are the friends of the working class….it is a CON!
A closing thought…..we know how much Trump hates China and has gone out of his way to sanction them, right?
If that is true why has he ordered about 8 tons of stuff?
President Donald Trump’s US properties imported more than eight tons of Chinese goods since September, according to a CNN analysis.
More than six tons of tables were shipped to Trump International Hotel in New York last fall and two tons of cabinets were delivered to Trump National Golf Club Los Angeles in May, CNN reported.
On the 2016 campaign trail and throughout his presidency, Trump has accused China of unfair trade practices and pledged to address the trade deficit between the two countries.
As part of his “America First” policy, Trump entered a months-long tariff war with Beijing and has pressured American companies to redirect their business within the U.S.
No Irene this is not some silly post about some half Greek god hero and his story…..
There has been a wealth of interests about the musical “Hamilton”…..I am not a fan of musicals but I will give the play credit for introducing the American people to an unsung hero of the Revolution……Hercules Mulligan.
Born in Ireland’s County Londonderry on September 25, 1740, Hercules Mulligan immigrated to the American colonies when he was just six years old. His parents, Hugh and Sarah, left their homeland in hopes of improving life for their family in the colonies; they settled in New York City and Hugh became the eventual owner of a successful accounting firm.
Hamilton lived with Mulligan for a period during his tenure as a student, and the two of them had many late-night political discussions. One of the earliest members of the Sons of Liberty, Mulligan is credited from swaying Hamilton away from his stance as a Tory and into a role as a patriot and one of America’s founding fathers. Hamilton, originally a supporter of British dominion over the thirteen colonies, soon came to the conclusion that the colonists should be able to rule themselves. Together, Hamilton and Mulligan joined the Sons of Liberty, a secret society of patriots that was formed to protect colonists’ rights.
As a spy during the War…his information twice saved Washington from the Red Coats…..
Twice, the spy’s information prevented General Washington from ruin. On one occasion, a rushed officer came to Mulligan late at night in dire need of a coat. Upon further questioning, the officer carelessly disclosed his mission to capture George Washington later that day. Mulligan sent for Cato immediately and upon receiving the news, Washington relocated to safety. In another instance, the British had caught wind of Washington’s plan to travel to Rhode Island via the Connecticut shoreline. By a stroke of luck, Hercules’s brother, Hugh, was charged with loading the British boats with supplies. Hugh informed Hercules of the enemy’s stratagem and Cato carried the message to Washington who quickly rerouted.
That would be the National Defense Authorization Act……for FY2021
Every year, members of the congressional armed services committees go through the long and sometimes torturous journey of assembling the National Defense Authorization Act, the annual bill that sets policy for the Defense Department. The entire process, however, is also a critical exercise in the formation of U.S. national security policy.
The defense policy bill is so valuable to Pentagon operations that lawmakers frequently refer to it as a must-pass piece of legislation. Ideally, the NDAA debate forces lawmakers to explain why certain military investments are necessary or why a particular overseas military engagement has outlived its usefulness.
The M-IC has won the battle to keep troops fighting and dying in Afghanistan……
By a vote of 284-129, the House of Representatives soundly defeated an amendment to establish a plan to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan. A slight plurality of Democrats supported the measure, with most of the leadership opposing. All Republicans except two voted in to oppose. Libertarian Justin Amash supported the measure. The amendment to the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) was offered by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN).
President Trump declared in late May that he wanted to withdraw all US troops from Afghanistan before the November election. Since that time, Democratic leaders have shifted to an even more hawkish position, pulling out all the stops to prevent such a move. Much of the foreign policy of the Democratic leadership has been driven by opposition to Trump’s positions, rather than by what is best for the country or what the American people desire.
American troops have been fighting in Afghanistan for 19 years, with no progress in reducing violence.
(antiwar.com)
Seems that the Dems are joining the Repubs as the warmongers…..so it really is truly a one party government……two sides same coin.
The Act is one of pure Neocon-isms…..
A $740 billion defense policy bill that President Trump threatened to veto has passed the House with a veto-proof 295-125 majority, with 108 Republicans voting in favor of the 2021 Defense Authorization Act and 43 Democrats voting against. The bill calls for military bases and other properties named after Confederate military officers to be renamed within a year, a move Trump firmly opposes, the Hill reports. It also includes a 3% pay rise for troops and allocates $1 billion to a pandemic preparedness fund.
The House bill passed with bipartisan support, although Republican lawmakers strongly objected to an amendment placing limits on the president’s ability to use the Insurrection Act to deploy troops within the US, CNN reports. The amendment passed 215 to 190, with only one Republican voting in favor. The Senate is expected to pass its version of the bill this week, which calls for the renaming of bases named after Confederate officers within three years. Trump said weeks ago that he would veto any bill that included the renaming of bases, but since the measure appears in both the House and Senate version of the defense policy bill, it is likely to remain in the final version that makes it to his desk.
Trump has said he will veto this bill…..we will see if he means what he says or was it all just theatrics?
It is time for the Congress to get real about this country and the money we throw at war…….time to defund the Pentagon…..yep…I said DEFUND the Pentagon.
Congress has appropriated nearly $3 trillion dollars to fight the economic and public health impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic. This is on top of a terrible budget deal last year that blew through spending caps imposed by the 2011 Budget Control Act. With little end in sight to the pandemic and its associated recession, Congress is likely to spend even more in the months to come.
With resources more limited than ever, areas of the budget that were off-limits for years should now be more closely scrutinized. At the top of that list should be the single largest part of the federal discretionary budget, an entire category of spending that has long been off the table: the Pentagon.
I know hard to believe that I am agreeing with a conserv on the Pentagon……it worries me as well…..but matters not…..I will support a good idea no matter where it originates.
Pompeo’s State Department has decided that they would cherry pick rights….proving that this admin does not believe in equality or in human rights for all…..
Human rights advocates denounced as “dangerous” a draft report released Thursday by the U.S. State Department’s controversial Commission on Unalienable Rights that paints property rights and religious liberty as “foremost among the unalienable rights that government is established to secure” while casting doubt on other liberties, including reproductive freedom.
“Make no mistake: this report was not designed with principles of equality, justice, and rights in mind. Instead, it serves as another stepping stone in the White House’s radical, isolationist, anti-rights, anti-scientific, religious agenda,” Serra Sippel, president of the Center for Health and Gender Equity (CHANGE), said in a statement.
“The Commission on Unalienable Rights is a thinly veiled religious fundamentalist panel, and the people on it should have absolutely no say about the human rights of people all over the world,” Sippel declared, calling the panel “a dangerous distraction from the fact that this administration does not believe that all people are equal and entitled to human rights.”
No should be surprised…..Pompeo is just echoing the crap he spread when he was in Congress….the only difference now is that he has a power to make some of these outdated manure into law of the land.
Even people that worked for him tried to change things……
A State Department whistleblower attempted to warn the agency’s Office of Legal Affairs about “questionable” activities involving Secretary Mike Pompeo but was “blocked” from doing so, according to the complaint.
McClatchy reported Sunday that the complaint, made public through a lawsuit filed by the watchdog group American Oversight, alleged the unnamed employee and other “eyewitnesses” were prevented from sharing concerns about Pompeo’s activities in the U.S. and abroad with superiors and legal authorities at the agency despite repeated attempts.
The State Department declined McClatchy’s request for comment on the whistleblower complaint. However, in explaining redactions made to the whistleblower complaint, the agency’s lawyers revealed that Pompeo still remains the target of at least one active investigation despite arranging the firing of the agency’s inspector general in May.
Pompeo has given all pretense of being the chief diplomat of the US and is acting as an agent for Trump’s agenda….not the country’s agenda.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s Commission on Unalienable Rights unveiled its long-anticipated report in Philadelphia, ahead of which Pompeo delivered a speech more fitting for a Trumpian candidate for president in 2024 than a person serving in the apolitical position of secretary of state. Pompeo also published an op-ed in the Washington Post in which he devoted far more space to slamming his fellow Americans for “outrageous efforts to erase American history by tearing down statues of our nation’s founders” than he did to the worst human rights abusers around the world.
In calling for a return to our founding principles, Pompeo’s Philadelphia speech acknowledged almost in passing that “at our nation’s founding our country fell far short of securing the rights of all. The evil institution of slavery was our nation’s gravest departure from these founding principles. We expelled Native Americans from their ancestral lands.” This was one step in the right direction. The United States is a stronger advocate for human rights around the world when we acknowledge our own shortcomings and invite other nations and peoples to join us striving to improve. To that end, Pompeo should also have mentioned that women were denied the right to vote until the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920, or that two-tiered citizenship in the Jim Crow South ended only a full century after emancipation.
You know how much the conservatives hate socialism…..but only when it is applied to the downtrodden of this society…..it is acceptable as long as it will benefit the wealthy and preserve profits….
What?
I read a piece the other day about the idea of nationalization of one of America’s industries…..
With the US the world’s largest military, by far, it makes sense that their own armsmakers often have a level of capacity far beyond overseas competitors. The Air Force is finding this is limiting to the competition for US business.
And yet they’d survive only nominally. The nationalization would give the government an effective monopoly on those parts of the industry, but the US might spare the expense to prop up multiple design and construct facilities just for the sake of “competition.”
The nature of these many billion dollar plane projects means only a few could ever compete to begin with. Many have responded to the mounting cost by merging to share expenses. The Pentagon wants more than one contractor to choose from, even if they have to own them all.
Yet doing this necessarily will lead to consequences for state-run monopolies, replacing the profit motive at the company level with a new layer of bureaucracy. The companies traditionally seek Pentagon deals with lobbyists, and by hiring former Pentagon figures to gaudy contracts. It isn’t clear how well the military will be able to sustain this if they nationalize the companies.
The legality of nationalizing US industries remains shaky, with President Truman’s failed bid to nationalize the steel industry in the 1950s. The Obama Administration, however, did successfully nationalize General Motors, temporarily, under the guise of saving jobs.
Nationalizing to ensure competition is a very unusual notion, and that’s going to make advancing the case all the more difficult. Expect the big armsmakers to resist, as these huge plane deals tend to be wildly profitable.
The protests hitting our streets has called for a lot of things and even different things within the same protest.
Do they want police reform…..or is it the defunding of the police…..or in extreme cases….the abolition of the police…..but these things and ideas do overlap in spots……
Which one of these things is what we all want?
The conservs are even attacking the possibility of reform/defund/abolition with TV ads to scare the Be-Jesus out of the people.
A recent political ad, sponsored by the conservative State Government Leadership Foundation, imagines the hellscape of a post-police Minneapolis. A terrified white woman jolts awake at 2 am during a home invasion. She alerts her husband. She grabs her phone. She calls the police. But it’s too late. They have all been defunded. A dispatcher informs her that a “human resources” specialist can’t help her right now as the camera pans over her sleeping child, the burglar advancing ominously. “Radical liberals are fighting for a police-free future,” the narrator intones. “Don’t let them put your family in danger.”
There is one thing — and only one thing — the ad gets right: On all sides, in all directions, the debate over the future of policing remains a debate over safety, driven by communities who desperately, deeply want to feel safe.
In the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing at the hands of police, virtually every faction in American politics — from Trump Republicans to Biden Democrats, from Cato libertarians to intersectional Marxists — says they want to change policing.
On one end of the spectrum stand abolitionists, who want to “delegitimize the police.” These activists demand an entirely new public safety system based on social and economic equity, bolstered by a network of nonviolent emergency responders. They are offering more than a different vision for public safety — they are offering a different vision for the composition, and fundamental assumptions, of society. They have a different view of what causes crime. In the world they imagine, America would spend much more on education, health care, and infrastructure, and nothing on police departments as we currently know them.
Since the Trump lackeys think they have the right to police cities then why not abolish the police departments?
Acting Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Chad Wolf argued Monday that he does not need authorization or an “invitation” from local officials before deploying federal law enforcement assets to detain suspects.
In an interview with Fox News, Wolf defended his authority to conduct law enforcement operations on the streets of Portland, Ore., where local officials have requested that DHS withdraw after videos of protesters being snatched off the street by officers in unmarked cars sparked outrage.
“I don’t need invitations by the state, state mayors or state governors to do our job. We’re going to do that, whether they like us there or not,” Wolf said.
I have recently read a paper written by a service person about the way to confront tribalism in the near future……a “what if” if you will……
The article is written from the point of view of the United States in 2035 towards New Tribalism adherent groups imposing dangerous cultures on others.
Culture overrides ideological, political, or economic distinctions among peoples, driving global conflict in 2035[1]. While tremors of conventional conflict occur along fault lines between civilizations, localized conflicts erupt within civilizations as ethnicities and tribes seek to impose their ways of life upon others[2]. Governments struggle to meet societies’ demands for political and economic stability, leading them to turn inward and adopt protectionist policies, which erodes international coalitions that historically managed localized conflicts through small wars[3]. Cultural conflicts and weak multilateral cooperation accelerate the transition of predominant terrorism ideologies from a religious wave (1979 – late 2020s) to a wave known as New Tribalism, characterized by terrorist groups promulgating violent cultures based on ethnic, racial, or tribal mysticism[4]. Children are the vanguard of New Tribalism; child soldiers and child brides are cultural norms[5]. Rape and ethnic cleansing are integral in establishing a new human race[6]. New Tribalism thus “disrupts traditional cultures [by violating] even the most traditional elements of a society” by imposing its apocalyptic vision of how society should function[7]. In 2035, the U.S. faces the wicked problem of combating dangerous cultures of New Tribalism adherents before they topple governments, beget genocide, prompt mass migrations, and trigger regional instability.
Tribalism is a voting option in the US……as long as we have the mentality of “us against them”….we will never find the unity that we as a nation desperately needs.
I know a ‘what if’ is just conjecture……but this problem is already making problems for the nation and left unchecked it will eventually destroy this experiment began by the Founders.
What point do we as Americans allow this destruction to go on?
It is little secret that I am a foreign policy voter…..I spent many years working in government then teaching and later writing and being an activist.
I have looked at Trump’s foreign policy…..some of it I could support but not when it changes by the day……here is what I wrote at Donald the Orange foreign policy……
Now I need to look at what Biden’s approach would be if elected…..
This look is through the eyes of RealClearPolitics……
The 2020 presidential election is less than five months away. While the news cycle is still dominated by the pandemic and the economic consequences of the lockdown, the public needs to learn more about what is at stake for U.S. foreign policy in the upcoming contest. The Trump administration has taken some high-profile and controversial positions in world affairs. Now the electorate deserves to know where the presumptive Democratic candidate, Joe Biden, stands on these matters. To date, no clear Democratic foreign policy platform has emerged. To make an informed choice in November, it is important for the public to gain insight into Biden’s estimation of world affairs and his plans for the future of American foreign policy.
A list of questions may help the candidate decide whether and how he intends to differentiate himself from President Trump. It is insufficient for candidate Biden simply to repeat that he used to be vice president and therefore has experience. He should instead tell us what he will do with that experience if he wins in November. Will he change our foreign policy? How?
First and most importantly, we need to know how candidate Biden views China. Even before the pandemic, critical views on China were spreading — a reaction against China’s mistreatment of American firms, its military ambitions in the Pacific, and its human rights abuses domestically. Will Biden take steps to defend the autonomy of Hong Kong? What is his red line there? Would a Biden administration continue or reverse the Trump efforts to block the expansion of Chinese technology firm Huawei into sensitive security networks?
I have always been amazed on how so many usually rational Americans can blindly follow a toad like Trump.
Since most of them a staunch viewers of FOX News and thinks anything else is just “fake news”(their words….as well as the idiot in the Rose Garden)…but it seems that a spotlight news to be placed on FOX News….surely there is something that the FCC can do to force accuracy in reporting (but not until the toad in the Rose Garden goes away)…..
253 lies in just five days!
Fox News hit viewers with an “avalanche of misinformation” in its weekday coverage of the coronavirus crisis from July 6 through 10, according to a national media watchdog group that documented at least 253 instances of the network’s coverage undermining science, politicizing the pandemic, emphasizing economic issues, and promoting other lies or problematic positions in those five days alone.
Media Matters for America (MMFA) noted in a statement that its new analysis released Thursday follows Yahoo News reporting from earlier this month which claims that Fox News‘ messaging on Covid-19 was undergoing a “remarkable turn” from its earlier coverage to “acknowledge … that the coronavirus is a far graver threat.”
In contrast with the kind of shift reported by Yahoo, MMFA revealed that:
Nearly half of Fox‘s coronavirus misinformation was about the science of coronavirus and health recommendations from experts (115 instances).
Fox politicized recommended public health measures, such as face masks usage and business closures, 63 times.
Fox emphasized the economy and reopening schools 46 times despite public health concerns.
Fox’s “The Ingraham Angle” was responsible for a quarter of all coronavirus misinformation on the network.
Fox‘s “straight news” shows accounted for more than one-third of all coronavirus misinformation.
“Fox host Laura Ingraham and her prime-time show ‘The Ingraham Angle’ traded in coronavirus misinformation far more often than other Fox personalities and shows during the week of July 6,” MMFA research analyst Rob Savillo explains in the report.
