Global
And the word of the moment is . . . opportunity:
“What unites our party is a belief in opportunity, the idea that however you started out, whatever you look like, whoever you love, America is the place you can make it if you try.”
Could you be any more tepid? The words were those of the former president the other day, giving his blessing to the naming of Tom Perez as the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Perez is the safe, establishment choice to lead the party forward into the maelstrom of Trump, under a banner that seems garishly inoffensive: Tolerate our differences, give everyone a chance.
A rational and moral person might think of the recent U.S. raid in Yemen this way.
Sometimes the real world needs heroes. And sometimes those heroes need inspiration.
To anyone only passingly familiar with Captain America, it's easy to assume he's nothing more than the embodiment of blind patriotism. A muscled-up blond white man in stars and stripes, he looks like an American fascist's dream.
But Captain America was created to fight fascism in America’s name, and for that, he’s a perfect icon for the modern-day resistance.
The early days of the comic book industry were deeply rooted in New York City, so it's no surprise that most superheroes with a pedigree that old were created by the children of Jewish immigrants. Plenty of scholarly examinations of Superman have made a big deal of that aspect of that superhero’s creation. Though Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster started in Cleveland rather than New York, their experiences growing up in immigrant Jewish families influenced the creation of the ultimate immigrant character.
Sam Husseini just asked Nancy Pelosi why she won't support an impeachment investigation for Trump.
rump proposes to increase U.S. military spending by $54 billion, and to take that $54 billion out of the other portions of the above budget, including in particular, he says, foreign aid. If you can’t find foreign aid on the chart above, that’s because it is a portion of that little dark green slice called International Affairs. To take $54 billion out of foreign aid, you would have to cut foreign aid by approximately 200 percent.
Alternative math!
But let’s not focus on the $54 billion. The blue section above (in the 2015 budget) is already 54% of discretionary spending (that is, 54% of all the money that the U.S. government chooses what to do with every year). It’s already 60% if you add in Veterans’ Benefits. (We should take care of everyone, of course, but we wouldn’t have to take care of amputations and brain injuries from wars if we stopped having the wars.) Trump wants to shift another 5% to the military, boosting that total to 65%.
Now I’d like to show you a ski slope that Denmark is opening on the roof of a clean power plant — a clean power plant that cost 0.06% of Trump’s military budget.
Comrades and friends, I am not writing to advise you how to resist the Trump regime. There are as many action proposals in circulation as there are anti-Trump groups, with “resistance” the buzzword of the moment. But resistance against what, exactly, and for what purposes? Most of the tactical proposals I have seen are strangely devoid of political content. It seems that anti-Trump is more a mood than a movement with shared aims. It is a negative sentiment shared by most of the identity and interest groups that formed part of the Democratic Party coalition (or, as the President himself would put it, by the losers) during the 2016 election.
It is already clearly apparent, as many predicted, that Donald Trump's election as president of the United States would signal the start of what might be the final monumental assault on much of what is good in our world. Whatever our collective gains to date to create a world in which peace, social justice and environmental sustainability ultimately prevail for all of Earth's inhabitants, we stand to lose it all in the catastrophic sequence of events that Trump is now initiating with those who share his delusional worldview.