Tag Archives: foreign policy

Political Rants

Take over the Democratic Party right effing Now

I’ve probably told this story before, but let me repeat it for some of the young people out there. I have never been a sustained political activist, but I’ve been activist-adjacent all of my adult life. During that time, I have attended political meetings (mostly around foreign policy issues), participated in protests, and interacted with more committed activists at various levels. I bloviate – that’s most of what I’ve done. I’ve also worked phone banks for specific candidates a handful of times from 2006 on.

Since the mid to late 1990s, I have also taken part in online organizing at a very low level. At the beginning, this involved subscribing to listservs, message boards, that sort of thing. As I mentioned above, I started working on Democratic party campaigns about sixteen years ago, but I never contributed money to a campaign until relatively recently. Nevertheless, around the time of the 2004 election, I started getting fundraising emails from the Democratic party. One of my colleagues on one of the listservs probably shared list data with the party at some point. (I suspect I know who this might have been, but it hardly matters.)

The money machine

I’m providing this background to illustrate one of the central problems with the Democratic party today. In this instance, they treated a group of activists, some very committed to social change, as a market for fundraising. The groups I was involved in fell away after that period, partly as a function of the rise of social media. So now, instead of receiving messages from activists and participating in conversations, I get an inbox full of fundraising messages every day, and I’m bombarded by similar pleas every time I go on FB or Instagram.

There are complex reasons for this, and I won’t delve into all that right now, but suffice to say that this isn’t how change happens. Yes, Democratic party candidates need money to compete. But a party cannot just be about extracting money from its base in $5 or $10 increments. ($22 seems to be the favorite this season.) A party needs to be connected to political and social movements. It needs to be present in people’s lives and making a tangible difference in their communities. Right now, the only time people hear from the Democratic party is when they need money or votes. That’s why we need to take its sorry ass over.

Where it’s working

There are some good efforts underway to accomplish this. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are a good example. Yes, they endorse candidates and support fundraising efforts, but principally they work within local communities to build change from the ground up. The New York City chapter is doing some great work, combining actual organizing and activism with an electoral strategy. It’s encouraging that they recognize the centrality of community-based efforts while putting some energy into electoral politics.

Let’s face it – you can do great things in your community, build strong, radical institutions, foster positive change from the ground up …. only to have it all taken apart by some right wing legislature, governor, Congress, president, or supreme court. The recent supreme court decisions illustrate how important it is for the left to keep its hand in elections. And since we are now working against time with respect to the climate crisis, the only way to facilitate radical change is by commandeering the ossified Democratic party, filling its ranks with activists, and replacing its leadership with people willing to do what needs doing.

No time to lose

There’s a lot going on in this country at the community level, particularly on the labor front. Policies largely associated with the left are popular, but the leadership of the Democratic party has had its head up its ass since the 1990s. The only way we can move crucial issues forward is by combining committed activism with a national electoral strategy, built on the bones of the Democratic party.

Not easy, but it’s easier than starting from scratch. And we just wasted a day.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

About casting lead upon the waters

You have heard this from me before, but I’ll say it again – in broad strokes, Biden’s foreign policy is kind of awful. We knew this was coming back during the 2020 presidential campaign, when Biden’s web site had near-zero entries for foreign affairs. What I should have included in my ad-hoc assessment is his tendency to create policy off-the-cuff. This may be the only trait he shares with Trump – leading with his mouth.

Sure, I’m deeply concerned about Biden’s foot-dragging on reestablishing the Iran nuclear deal, his disinclination to revisit Obama’s Cuba policy, and his refusal to bury the hatchet with Afghanistan in some respect. But Biden’s tendency to speak personally about public policy is bringing us close to the brink of global war, and that’s not a good place to be. No, he’s not as nuts as Trump was. I think, though, that the world takes what Biden says a bit more seriously.

Pivot to aggression

You probably heard about Biden’s comments regarding Taiwan. I have to think that he raised this issue intentionally, as many both inside and outside the administration have elevated the China/Taiwan issue since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Roughly speaking, the feeling early on was that Russian success might encourage Beijing to move against the island. Most of what I heard on this score was a lot of hand waving, but the fact that that story has been out there says something about our Asia policy.

The Democratic party foreign policy establishment has been anxious to make their “pivot to Asia” since the mid Obama years. That characterization always struck me as odd and belligerent, summoning the image of a corpsman turning on his heel to point his weapon eastward (once again). I have to think that Asians were about as excited over this as Africans were over Bush’s announcement of the “Africa Command” back in the 2000s (or as Martians were over Trump’s announcement of the “Space Force”). But the focus, as always, is ascending China, and not so much the self-determination of Taiwan.

Countering what, exactly?

There’s plenty that China does that should be criticized, but is it a budding military hegemon? Not likely. The press’s hair was on fire over the story that China has more military vessels than we do. Numerically true, but (a) they are predominately smaller ships than the U.S. has, and (b) the calculation doesn’t take into account forces allied to the U.S. military. (See this article in The Diplomat.) The United States has an enormous presence in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, maintaining hundreds of bases and fleets of vessels many thousands of miles from its national territory. Can China make that claim?

Last year Biden announced a joint plan with the British to sell nuclear submarines to Australia. Again, this is more about China than Australia. The United States is trying to head off regional consolidation in the Asia Pacific region under the leadership of China. Obama tried to pull China’s neighbors into the Trans Pacific Partnership, another neoliberal multilateral investment agreement along the lines of NAFTA, the MAI, and others. Now Biden is trying an opt-in, a la carte type of pact that is explicitly not neoliberal (this is what his administration claims). Their hope is to get more people behind the pact, of course. (TPP went down in flames.)

Block v. block

The core of this dispute is not democracy; it’s economics. Washington’s nightmare scenario has long been the rise of China as an economic power to the point of displacing us as the center of the global economy. That they are willing to flirt with military conflict is obvious, and it speaks volumes about our leaders’ priorities.

World War II rose from a world divided into competing trading blocks – the dollar block, the sterling block, etc. We should learn from that bitter experience.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Fallout from the “Strategic Partnership”

Back in September, months before this Ukraine catastrophe got underway, the White House released a Joint Statement on the US-Ukraine Strategic Partnership. I don’t recall hearing about this in the news media at the time. This past week, Noam Chomsky raised it in an interview with Jeremy Scahill for the Intercept – that’s why I know about it. The administration wasn’t trying to hide the ball on this. That we’re committing ourselves to an alliance with Ukraine is such a mundane fact at this point, it basically just fades into the background.

As we wade deeper into this Russia/Ukraine morass, we need to better understand the implications of this policy. There is no question but that Russia is responsible for the current conflict – their decision to invade is dead wrong and a serious crime against peace in general and Ukraine in particular. Nevertheless, the current discourse on American corporate media portrays Russia as a nation uniquely bent on fulfilling imperial ambitions. But Russia is not alone in this regard.

Reviving the New American Century

The American-led military alliance in Europe already includes a brace of former Soviet republics and vassal states. Now, partly in response to Russia’s invasion, more nominally neutral states are lining up to join NATO. With regard to Ukraine, here’s some relevant language from that September joint statement:

The United States supports Ukraine’s right to decide its own future foreign policy course free from outside interference, including with respect to Ukraine’s aspirations to join NATO.

Chomsky likens this to Mexico joining a military alliance with China. His point is that, while Mexico and Ukraine are sovereign nations with the right to determine their future, they are, in fact, not free to pursue this kind of relationship. That is the cost of being the neighbor of a major power. If we were truly concerned with the well-being of the Ukrainian people, we would have helped them work out a modus vivendi with Russia, since that is the geographic – geopolitical reality they live with.

Instead, we focus on our own priorities with respect to Ukraine. We want our new American Century back. And we are willing to fight the Russians to the last Ukrainian in order to achieve that goal.

Good news for some

As the old saying goes, it’s an ill wind indeed that doesn’t blow someone some good. For the weapons manufacturers, military contractors, and fossil fuel companies, the wind is just right. The war in Ukraine may be the best thing that’s happened to them in decades. It has short-circuited any impulse to put some government muscle behind transitioning out of oil and gas. The Biden administration was reluctant to do so in the first place, and now they have the political imperative not to.

Arguably, this is a large part of what the conflict is all about. Best of the Left has had a couple of shows about the origins of the conflict and the interests of fossil fuel multinationals. Ukraine has significant reserves of natural gas. The prospect of western countries developing these reserves and selling them to Russia’s current customers in Europe is likely one of the Putin government’s obsessions, whatever they may say in public. Money to be made, as always.

Then there’s the push to build the infrastructure for liquified natural gas (LNG) in the United States. This means storage facilities, port facilities – a massive construction enterprise that will represent billions in investment in a system that contributes mightily to climate change. The Ukraine war is fueling that effort, as well.

Time is short

I know I’ve written about this conflict a lot recently. And I know there’s a lot else going on in the world. But Ukraine is setting in motion a very destructive cycle in the global economy, and we need to encourage our government to push for a settlement before it’s too late.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.