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laura flanders
Win the War, Invest in Peace: That's the Conversation We Need to Be Having
Practice in holding two things together at the same time: the need to stop this war and to work across national boundaries to prevent the next one.
Apr 06, 2022
In the middle of a brutal assault, it's difficult to talk about demilitarization. And so, it was with trepidation that I recently convened a conversation about exactly that.
One of my guests, Anastasiya Leukhina, a war refugee from Ukraine, has a degree in peacebuilding from Notre Dame. In regular times, she said, she'd describe herself as a sort of peacenik, but now, "considering the situation and the losses that we have on the ground, we really need military assistance and we really need modern warfare and we need as much of it as we can get, as soon as possible."
The payment of billions of dollars on new weapons systems failed to prevent Russia's invasion. Indeed, Vladimir Putin used NATO's build up as an excuse for it.
More warfare is certainly coming. Even if Russian forces draw back from Kyiv and negotiations reach a deal, the conflict has already seen massive growth in weapons spending by the EU and NATO, even by countries like Germany and Denmark who've been spending down for years. Russian spending is up, and the US leads the pack. The Biden administration's proposed Pentagon budget for 2023 stands at $813 billion. It's bigger in real terms than ever before, as bloated as ever and spending on Ukraine is only a tiny fraction of it.
As Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies pointed out in our conversation, the payment of billions of dollars on new weapons systems failed to prevent Russia's invasion. Indeed, Vladimir Putin used NATO's build up as an excuse for it.
As Phyllis put it, "while there's an inevitable urgency for all things military right now, we know that greater militarization creates more problems after."
The idea of a neutral Ukrainian state gets fainter with every war crime, but if the US and NATO resume their military exercises in Ukraine, the risk of war with Russia will always be with us. In the end, my guests agreed that what's needed for sustainable peace will be an equal investment in the architecture of peace, and not just the president-to-president kind, but the people-to-people sort.
Gesturing to a book on his shelf, published by anti-war activists in 1913, Dmitri Makarov, zooming in from Russia, suggested that in today's interconnected world, we're much better equipped to communicate globally now than we ever were, and every local crisis has global implications.
Could the OSCE, the UN, or the Council of Europe be empowered to monitor and constrain not just Russia's arms deals, but everyone's? Could today's sanctions regime provide a model?
Conversations like this aren't easy but we're going to need more of them. And they won't come on media networks underwritten by arms-makers. That's why I'm happy to be launching season three of the Laura Flanders Show on public television this week.
Scholars of authoritarianism say that mind control begins with the limiting of options, a lopping off of a whole set of realities and choices. Dissenters say that what makes a difference is practice, and this conversation felt to me like practice; practice in holding two things together at the same time: the need to stop this war, and to work across national boundaries to prevent the next one.
You can find my conversation with Ukrainian professor Anastasiya Leukhina, Russian human rights defender, Dmitri Makarov, and Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, on PBS stations all across the country this week. Or find it on YouTube.
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GOP United in Action To Keep Workers Down
Republican governors in state after state are cutting off the federal aid. They'd rather turn away free money than relieve pressure on the poor.
May 19, 2021
Just six percent of private sector workers belong to a union in the U.S., but that doesn't mean we're short of united action on our economy.
For weeks now, employers and their lobbies have been unified in their lament that a scarcity of workers is the result of overly generous federal unemployment benefits. People would rather stay home and get rich off the public purse, they say, and the stories run everywhere with the help of the Chamber of Commerce.
There may be bosses who back better bridges and airports for their products, but they're not about to invest billions in childcare or elder support for their workers.
As a result, Republican governors in state after state are cutting off the federal aid. They'd rather turn away free money than relieve pressure on the poor.
Employers and their lobbies act as one all the time to keep workers desperate. Take the last few months--after a millions-strong majority voted a new administration into office in part on a pledge to raise wages, the opposition was so strong that a hike wasn't even tried. United opposition has kept the federal minimum wage stuck at $7.25 since 2009, and wages for tipped, teenage, and disabled workers are even lower.
Now the Biden administration's facing united resistance in Congress to passage of the American Jobs Plan. There may be bosses who back better bridges and airports for their products, but they're not about to invest billions in childcare or elder support for their workers. And if you think the anti-affordable child care lobby's strong, you haven't met the mob opposing universal health care, even after a deadly pandemic.
Are workers staying home because they can? It's possible. But three separate studies of the CARES Act (which was twice as generous) say the impact on employment was negligible.
Far more likely, it's lack of child care and public transport and affordable healthcare and continuing fear of Covid that is keeping people home when humanly possible. That, more than laziness, certainly seems to explain why tens of thousands of women have exited the workforce.
Besides, if an extra $300 a week enables some to make ends meet without that stinking $7/hr job at the Dollar Store. Is that so bad?
Even with the bonus, which is due to end in a few more months, workers aren't getting rich. But their employers are, as long as they keep wages down, benefits skimpy, and workers desperate. One for all and all for one--for them, it works. Just don't let anyone pass that pro-union PRO Act.
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Time to Take the Mittens Off!
"If you like the Bernie meme, you’re going to love Healthcare For All."
Jan 27, 2021
I like as good meme as much as the next person who likes memes, but I have my qualms about the Bernie mitten moment.
For those who have been paying attention to something else, in the days after the Biden/Harris inauguration, a picture of Vermont's Senator Sanders siting masked and in mittens went viral.
Speedily engineered apps enabled anyone to sit Sanders at their protest, on their trampoline or in their favorite painting. Former labor secretary Robert Reich tweeted Sanders Photoshopped into Edward Hopper's gloomy nighttime diner. I'm not sure why.
With over two million people dead from Covid around the world, and hundreds of millions forced into poverty while the richest thrive, we need radical systems change more than ever.In the Intercept, Naomi Klein mused about the meaning of the meme: was it lefty longing for the presidency that might have been--superficial street cred for unity-seeking centrists--or a defiant display of we-the-people power at a moment of he-the-President consolidation?
I kept remembering what Tony Benn once told me. A long time Labour Party member in the UK, Benn never gave up on the socialist principles of his party's founders. He fought his entire life against the rightward drift into neoliberalism and famously tried, and failed, to become the party leader. On a different ideological landscape, Benn in the UK played a comparable role to the one Bernie plays in the US.
After decades in Parliament, Benn retired in 2001. Opposing wars, standing up for unions, he kept up the protest, but the further he got from power, the more fondly even his enemies began to regard him. Months before his death, I remember him saying, "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they demonize you, and then there's a pause and then you become a national treasure." He meant it as a warning.
It is not time yet for Bernie Sanders to become a treasure. With over two million people dead from Covid around the world, and hundreds of millions forced into poverty while the richest thrive, we need radical systems change more than ever. It's not just Trump, but also the macho, racist greed and anti-governmentism that he rode in on that needs impeaching.
"If you like the Bernie meme, you're going to love Healthcare For All," tweeted Reich, when he came to his senses.
That's more like it. Like or loathe memes, it's time for Sanders, and more to the point, Sanders-ism, to take its mittens off.
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