The US is seen around the world as the greatest threat to world peace

On Monday morning, I was listening to the public radio program 1A and they had on Michael Mandelbaum, an emeritus professor of American foreign policy, about his new book.

Author and professor Michael Mandelbaum argues that the world saw true peace beginning in 1989, with the end of the Cold War.

This peace, he says, ended in 2014. In The Rise and Fall of Peace on Earth, Mandelbaum writes that Russia, China and Iran ended it through aggressive military behavior and policies that pushed nationalism.

Mandelbaum’s thesis is a familiar one that is espoused by American chauvinists, that the US is the great spreader of democracy in the world but that its efforts are constantly being thwarted by the warlike behavior of other countries. If only those countries would stop meddling in the affairs of other nations, we would be enjoying world peace. To his credit, the host Todd Zwillich seemed to find this a bit much, as did many of the listeners who wrote in or called or tweeted to the show, pointing out how the US has been invading countries, supporting autocrats, subverting democracies all over the world, and is constantly involved in many simultaneous wars both overt and covert, hardly signs of a peace-seeking nation. The US currently has nearly 800 military bases in over 70 countries and I suspect that most Americans are unaware that this is the case or have even heard of many of those countries. They probably think that Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria are the only involvement.
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Hasan Minhaj on the attacks on civil rights

In the latest episode of his show Patriot Act, he takes on the topic of civil rights. In particular, he points out that while much attention is focused on the circus atmosphere that surrounds Donald Trump, this has resulted in little attention being paid to the deliberate dismantling of civil rights protections for minorities and LGBT communities by the departments of housing and urban development, education, justice, health and human services, and commerce.

You can see the full episode.

Bernie Sanders’ popularity with black voters

Despite the attempts of the media and the Democratic party establishment to paint a portrait that Bernie Sanders lacks support among black voters, the reality is quite different, as Ryan Grim reports.

Despite a persistent notion that his supporters are disproportionately white male “bros,” the new survey suggests that Sanders is actually slightly more popular among black Democratic voters than white ones, indicating that the narrative that developed during the 2016 campaign may no longer hold, if it ever did.

Sanders’s support among black voters, at 28 percent, puts him in second place among that demographic, behind Biden, at 32 percent. He trailed Biden 31-25 among whites.

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Good choice to head Planned Parenthood

Leana Wen, a 36-year old physician who used to be commissioner of health for Baltimore, has been selected as the new head of the organization. I have followed her career for some time and was pleased to hear that someone so concerned about social justice and a fearless advocate for it had taken on this job. As a child of immigrants who were poor, she knows how tough life is in the US if you lack money.

Now, it’s hard for Wen to pinpoint the pivotal moment when she realized that medicine was not just a matter of science but of social justice. Of course, there was her journey from China, but there was also the time in elementary school when she watched a neighborhood boy die of an asthma attack because his undocumented family was too scared to call 911. There was the woman she saw die in the ER after a botched abortion, the young mother without insurance who waited more than a year to have a breast lump examined and died of metastatic cancer, the middle-aged woman who couldn’t afford her blood-pressure medication and was paralyzed by a stroke. “I mean, there are dozens, hundreds, countless examples like that,” says Wen. “My patients are sick not just because of their illness, but because of so many other factors in our system that are making them ill. And I would not be the best doctor I can be if I did not also fight against these systemic injustices.”
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Further evidence of the Sackler family’s utter rapaciousness

The Sackler family are the owners of Purdue Pharma, maker of the powerful opioid OxyContin, the drug that has been a major contributor to the drug crisis that has killed so many people and ruined the lives of so many others. I have written before about how they relentless marketed the drug in their effort to get more money. The people in the pharmaceutical industry that pushed these drugs have been described as “drug dealers in lab coats”. Now ProPublica, that excellent investigative news organization that I financially support, has another report obtained from sealed testimony about their sleazy tactics to get doctors to prescribe more of the drug by giving them a false impression of its potency.
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Why did no bankers go to jail?

This was the big question after the financial crash of 2008 that ruined the lives of so many people. The public radio program Marketplace had a detailed examination of this question. While banks were named in indictments and plea deals reached with them for fines, no top bankers were named or prosecuted. Indeed the government bailouts enabled them to reward themselves with big bonuses. The analysis lasted about 45 minutes but was spread over three days as follows: Part 1 lasts from 0-19 minutes, Part 2 was from 4:50 to 15:30, and Part 3 lasted from 0 to 15:30 minutes.
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The neoliberal attacks on Bernie Sanders begin

Bernie Sanders made his formal announcement for the Democratic nomination on Sunday at a speech in his hometown of Brooklyn, New York, although his political career has been largely in Vermont. In it he spoke of his vision for the country and also his own story, something he rarely does because he clearly prefers talking about issues and disdains personality-driven politics, even though his personal story reveals a lifelong commitment to the causes that he is currently fighting for. He is no Johnny-come-lately, seizing the popular positions of the moment but has been instrumental in pushing the discourse in that direction. This is of course why he is so hated by both conservatives and Republicans but also by neoliberals and the Democratic party establishment and their supporters in the media. They see in him a genuine threat to the status quo and someone who cannot be bought off.
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s effective use of Twitter

She has a knack for how to use this medium, as can be seen by these responses to her critics.


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The alliance between anti-vaxxers and white nationalists

The anti-vaccination groups in the US seem to be not fazed at all by the outbreaks of measles in parts of the US and elsewhere in the world. They seem to have developed a deep-rooted belief in the rightness of their cause and no amount of scientific evidence to the contrary is going to change their minds, unless perhaps their own children fall sick. They think that those who believe in the safety of vaccines are part of a deep conspiracy to harm them and their children. In this, they are not unlike the right wing climate change deniers and Trump cultists who refuse to hear anything bad about their hero and so it should not be a surprise that there seems to be a burgeoning alliance between the two groups, as Kelly Weill reports.
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