June, 07 2010, 01:26pm EDT
The War in Afghanistan Reaches New Milestone: Longest War in US History, Surpasses the Vietnam War
Brave New Foundation Teams Up With TrueMajority To Demand A Withdrawal Date For Afghanistan
LOS ANGELES
As the
Afghanistan War replaces the Vietnam War as the longest war in U.S.
history, Brave New Foundation and
TrueMajority today called on President Obama and Congress to ensure a
responsible troop withdrawal from Afghanistan complete no later than
December 2011. Brave New Foundation and TrueMajority released a new
video
marking the milestone featuring leading experts, including: former
military
analyst Daniel Ellsberg, Malou Innocent of the CATO Institute, author
Tom
Hayden and historian Christian Appy speaking to the Vietnamization of
Afghanistan and to the staggering cost to Americans totaling almost $300
billion and over 1,000 American lives.
As of Monday, June 7, 2010, the U.S.
will have been in Afghanistan
for 104 months, more than eight-and-a half years, surpassing the war in
Vietnam. In
his December 2009 West Point speech, President Obama announced a U.S.
military withdrawal from Afghanistan
would begin in July 2011. However, he set no end date, leaving open the
possibility that U.S.
combat troops could remain there indefinitely.
The call for a firm withdrawal end-date comes as Congress
debates spending another $33 billion on troop escalation in Afghanistan.
The
video is available at:
"It
is a real tragedy that Afghanistan
has now become the longest war in American history. This war has gone
on
long enough, and it's time to end it. We have already spent almost $300
billion dollars on Afghanistan
and have lost over 1,000 American lives, all for a war that is not
making us
safer." Director, Robert Greenwald, Brave New Foundation
"I
think of this war as Vietnamistan. It's essentially the same form of
war:
fighting people who are mainly motivated by the determination to expel
foreign
invaders from their country."Daniel Ellsberg, Former US
Military
Analyst, RAND Corp
"[President
Obama] has not promised or pledged how many troops he promises to take
out or
leave behind, so it's very ambiguous. I wouldn't be surprised if we are
in this
region for the foreseeable future."Malou Innocent, Foreign
Policy
Analyst, Cato Institute
"Afghanistan becoming the longest
war in our history forces us to ask: Just how long is long enough? How
much
money is too much? How many more lives is this worth? The answer is that
the
war in Afghanistan
has already cost us too much - and it's up to Congress to bring home the
troops
and refocus our priorities." Matt Holland, Online Director
TrueMajority/USAction
LATEST NEWS
Watchdogs' Database Details Right-Wing Efforts to Sway US Supreme Court
"Supreme corruption demands supreme transparency," said one campaigner behind the new effort.
Apr 18, 2024
A trio of progressive watchdog groups on Thursday unveiled a new database detailing the "troubling connections" between the U.S. Supreme Court's right-wing justices, the conservative organizations that have intervened in cases before the court, and the wealthy donors funding them.
Take Back the Court, Revolving Door Project, and True North Research published the database at SupremeTransparency.org, which "shines a spotlight on the complex web connecting justices to powerbrokers and the organizations that those powerbrokers fund, lead, and are otherwise linked to."
The watchdogs found that nearly 1 in 7 amicus briefs filed during the 2023-24 Supreme Court term were lodged by at least one powerbroker-affiliated organization. This affects 32 different cases before the court.
"The current U.S. Supreme Court has gone rogue."
For example, in Moore v. United States—in which the Supreme Court could preemptively ban or limit wealth taxes—half of all amicus briefs were filed by groups affiliated with right-wing powerbrokers.
In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, groups funded by billionaire industrialist Charles Koch want to scupper the Chevron deference, a 40-year precedent under which judges defer to the legal interpretations of federal agencies if Congress has not passed any laws on an issue. Powerbroker-affiliated organizations have filed more than one-third of the amicus briefs seeking to overturn the Chevron doctrine.
"Far too often people with insidiously close ties to justices like Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, such as Harlan Crow and Paul Singer, signal their interest in the outcome of cases by funding, leading, or influencing organizations that file amicus briefs," Revolving Door Project executive director Jeff Hauser said in a statement.
"There is just as much of a conflict of interest when a justice hears a case involving a benefactor as a named party and one in which the person who illicitly enabled their luxurious lifestyle is 'merely' similarly situated to one of the parties," Hauser added.
According to SupremeTransparency.org:
The current U.S. Supreme Court has gone rogue. The right-wing justices that make up the court's supermajority frequently toy with precedent and the rule of law to issue opinions that not only defy the will of a majority of Americans, but also rewrite constitutional principles, overturn widely respected legal precedents, and gut longstanding rules that protect the public interest.
In just the 2021 and 2022 Supreme Court terms alone, the court overturned Roe v. Wadeafter 49 years; gutted both the decades-old Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act; overturned a 100+ year old gun safety law; eroded the National Labor Relations Act (adopted as part of New Deal reforms to protect workers); broke with their own procedures regarding standing to sue in order to block student debt relief; and reversed decades of precedent to end the decadeslong practice of race-conscious college admissions policies that promoted diversity and redressed discrimination. But this radically reactionary court and its radically reactionary justices aren't acting alone.
"Supreme corruption demands supreme transparency," said Take Back the Court president Sarah Lipton-Lubet. "It's no secret that the many of the rich benefactors cozying up to the conservative justices are the same people who fund right-wing organizations with business before the court."
"But too often, stories about the Supreme Court don't connect these dots—and as a result, they leave us with an incomplete picture," she continued. "The truth is right-wing powerbrokers are seemingly paying to play; they're funding groups that are weighing in on court cases even as they buy access to the justices who will rule on those cases."
"It's just one of the ways our Supreme Court is deeply, fundamentally broken," Lipton-Lubet added. "And it's a reminder of how urgent and necessary it is that we reform this corrupt court."
Last year, the Supreme Court adopted a Code of Conduct that contained few new rules, no enforcement mechanism, and was widely panned as a toothless public relations stunt. Bolder proposals for reforming the high court include term limits and increasing the number of justices.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Climate Crisis to Cost Global Economy $38 Trillion a Year by 2050
"This clearly shows that protecting our climate is much cheaper than not doing so, and that is without even considering noneconomic impacts such as loss of life or biodiversity," a new study's lead author said.
Apr 18, 2024
The climate crisis will shrink the average global income 19% in the next 26 years compared to what it would have been without global heating caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels, a study published in Nature Wednesday has found.
The researchers, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), said that economic shrinkage was largely locked in by mid-century by existing climate change, but that actions taken to reduce emissions now could determine whether income losses hold steady at around 20% or triple through the second half of the century.
"These near-term damages are a result of our past emissions," study lead author and PIK scientist Leonie Wenz said in a statement. "We will need more adaptation efforts if we want to avoid at least some of them. And we have to cut down our emissions drastically and immediately—if not, economic losses will become even bigger in the second half of the century, amounting to up to 60% on global average by 2100."
"I am used to my work not having a nice societal outcome, but I was surprised by how big the damages were."
Put in dollar terms, the climate crisis will take a yearly $38 trillion chunk out of the global economy in damages by 2050, the study authors found.
"That seems like… a lot," writer and climate advocate Bill McKibben wrote in response to the findings. "The entire world economy at the moment is about $100 trillion a year; the federal budget is about $6 trillion a year."
This means that the costs of inaction have already exceeded the costs of limiting global heating to 2°C by six times, the study authors said. However, limiting warming to 2°C can still significantly reduce economic losses through 2100.
"This clearly shows that protecting our climate is much cheaper than not doing so, and that is without even considering noneconomic impacts such as loss of life or biodiversity," Wenz said.
The damages predicted by the study were more than twice those of similar analyses because the researchers looked beyond national temperature data to also incorporate the impacts of extreme weather and rainfall on more than 1,600 subnational regions over a 40-year period, The Guardian explained.
"Strong income reductions are projected for the majority of regions, including North America and Europe, with South Asia and Africa being most strongly affected," PIK scientist and first author Maximilian Kotz said in a statement. "These are caused by the impact of climate change on various aspects that are relevant for economic growth such as agricultural yields, labor productivity, or infrastructure."
However, Wenz told the paper that the paper's projected reduction was likely a "lower bound" because the study still doesn't include climate impacts such as heatwaves, tropical storms, sea-level rise, and harms to human health.
Unlike previous studies, the research predicted economic losses for most wealthier countries in the Global North, with the U.S. and German economies shrinking by 11% by mid-century, France's by 13%, and the U.K.'s by 7%. However, the countries set to suffer the most are countries closer to the equator that have lower incomes already and have historically done much less to contribute to the climate crisis. Iraq, for example, could see incomes drop by 30%, Botswana 25%, and Brazil 21%.
"Our study highlights the considerable inequity of climate impacts: We find damages almost everywhere, but countries in the tropics will suffer the most because they are already warmer," study co-author Anders Levermann, who leads Research Department Complexity Science at PIK, said in a statement. "Further temperature increases will therefore be most harmful there. The countries least responsible for climate change, are predicted to suffer income loss that is 60% greater than the higher-income countries and 40% greater than higher-emission countries. They are also the ones with the least resources to adapt to its impacts."
Wenz told The Guardian that the results were "devastating."
"I am used to my work not having a nice societal outcome, but I was surprised by how big the damages were. The inequality dimension was really shocking," Wenz said.
Levermann said the paper presented society with a clear choice:
It is on us to decide: Structural change towards a renewable energy system is needed for our security and will save us money. Staying on the path we are currently on, will lead to catastrophic consequences. The temperature of the planet can only be stabilized if we stop burning oil, gas, and coal.
McKibben, meanwhile, argued that the findings should persuade major companies to embrace climate action for self-interested reasons. He noted that most corporate emissions come from how company money is invested by banks, particularly in the continued exploitation of fossil fuel resources.
"If Amazon and Apple and Microsoft wanted to avoid a world where, by century's end, people had 60% less money to spend on buying whatever phones and software and weird junk (doubtless weirder by then) they plan on selling, then they should be putting pressure on their banks to stop making the problem worse. They should also be unleashing their lobbying teams to demand climate action from Congress," McKibben wrote.
"These people are supposed to care about money, and for once it would help us if they actually did," he continued. "Stop putting out ads about how green your products are—start making this system you dominate actually work."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Congressional Progressives Unveil 'Bold' Agenda for Second Biden Term
The Congressional Progressive Caucus says its legislative blueprint for 2025 and beyond aims to "deliver equality, justice, and economic security for working people."
Apr 18, 2024
The Congressional Progressive Caucus on Thursday published a "comprehensive domestic policy legislative agenda" for U.S. President Joe Biden's possible second White House term that seeks to "deliver equality, justice, and economic security for working people."
The CPC's Progressive Proposition Agenda is a seven-point plan aimed at lowering the cost of living, boosting wages and worker power, advancing justice, combating climate change and protecting the environment, strengthening democracy, breaking the corporate stranglehold on the economy, and bolstering public education.
"Progressives are proud to have been part of the most significant Democratic legislative accomplishments of this century. We have made real progress for everyday Americans—but there's much more work to be done," Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) said in a statement.
"That's why the Progressive Caucus has identified these popular, populist, and possible solutions," she added. "Democrats in Congress can meet the urgent needs people are facing; rewrite the rules to ensure majorities of this country are no longer barred from the American promise of equality, justice, and economic opportunity; and motivate people with a vision of progressive governance under Democratic majorities in the House and Senate and a Democratic White House."
Progressive lawmakers have already introduced bills for many items on the agenda, including a Green New Deal for Public Schools, expanding the Supreme Court, comprehensive voting rights protection, and legalizing marijuana.
Critics noted the conspicuous absence of Medicare for All—once a top progressive agenda item—and foreign policy issues including ending Israel's genocide, apartheid, occupation, settler colonization, and ethnic cleansing in Palestine.
Jayapal toldNBC News that the CPC is focusing its blueprint exclusively on domestic goals—especially ones it feels can be achieved.
"The way we came to this agenda is to say that we were going to put into this agenda things that were populist and possible... and affected a huge number of people," she said. "We haven't taken a position on particularly Israel and Gaza in the progressive caucus, and so that's not on here."
The CPC agenda is backed by a wide range of labor, climate, environmental, civil rights, consumer, faith-based, and other organizations.
"The Congressional Progressive Caucus is leading the way for Congress to address the major issues affecting working families, from reducing healthcare and housing costs to strengthening workers' rights to join unions, earn living wages and benefits, and have safe workplaces," Service Employees International Union president Mary Kay Henry said in a statement.
"SEIU is proud to partner with the CPC to move these priorities forward and build a more equitable economy in which corporations are held accountable for their actions," she added.
Mary Small, chief strategy officer at Indivisible, said: "House progressives were the engine at the heart of our legislative accomplishments in 2021 and 2022. They've continued that momentum to be true governing partners to the Biden administration as those laws and programs are implemented."
"That's why Indivisible is so supportive of the CPC's Proposition Agenda, a bold vision for progressive governance in 2025 and beyond. From reproductive rights to saving our democracy to economic security for all, the CPC is driving forward exactly the sort of legislative goals we want to see in our next governing moment."
That moment is far from guaranteed, with not only the White House hanging in the balance as Biden will all but certainly face former Republican President Donald Trump in November's election but also the Senate Democratic Caucus clinging to a single-seat advantage over the GOP. Republicans currently hold the House of Representatives by a five-seat margin.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular