I went to see Mac D’Alessandro at a house party in Boston this summer, where he answered questions from the people gathered in a living room, after giving his stump speech.
Unfortunately I hadn’t brought a large enough memory card for my camera, and it ran out partway through (he answered a lot of questions!), but I got some good bits, including this clip where he talks about Barney Frank’s suggestion that we reduce military spending:
At the end, he moves up to a larger philosophical point about how military spending fits in to everything else we care about:
One thing I think we’ve got to do a much better job of as progressives and as Democrats is, stop putting issues into silos. Don’t put education over here, and the war over here, and health care over here… these things are all related, at the end of the day. Because, the money we’re spending on the wars, and on tax cuts to the wealthiest 2%, could easily be funding health care and education.
P.S. Mac could use your help! Volunteer, especially on election day this Tuesday to get out the vote! Call the campaign at 617-273-1443 if you can help. And now that I’ve posted this, I’m heading down there myself to spend the afternoon in the district, delivering Mac’s flyer to people’s doors.
…we have to start asking questions that change the debate…
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p>Questions like, why are we paying for the defense of Europe, Japan or South Korea, all who are wealthy enough to defend themselves.
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p>If we need to spend as estimated $40 billion a year in Naval costs to keep the Mid East shipping lanes safe for oil transport (much of which does NOT go to the US) why should those costs be reflected at the gas pumps, instead of going on the national credit card?
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p>Or, why do we need to blow up the world 100 times…why don’t we save some money and have the capability of blowing up the world 50 times? And related to that, why are we spending on Cold War weapon systems and deployments when we have completely new enemies?
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p>The Dems nationally have to start talking about “deficit reduction” this election and asking these questions maybe a way to shift the spending debate away from cuts in the safety net and at where the real money is being spent.
and not come off as weak on defense?
Sure the defense lobbyist will spin the “weak on defense” stuff…but frankly, asking “foreigners” to pay for their defense should appeal to even the T-Party mentality. Also, I think Barney’s point is about US bases in foreign countries and lobbyist and Congressional pork barrels will have less to object to because none of this money goes into new weapon systems (that lobbyist care about) or comes out of local CD earmarks.
Without a base in South Korea, how do we keep Kim Jong-il in check?
Without bases in Germany, how do we easily maintain a supply chain to the Middle East wars?
Without bases in foo, how do we do bar?
…than a deterrence…they would be overrun by the 1 million N Koreans with pitch forks…so in order to protect these troops, we’ll need to use “limited” nuclear weapons…as for keeping Kim Jong ill in check…Japan, China and S. Korea need to worry about him.. except for preventing him from selling a nuke to Bin Laden (which is a separate issue).
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p>Fine, keep one big ass base in Germany…right now we’ve got about 4 bases in german, Italy and other European countries…
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p>And we certainly do have lots of bases in foo, supporting bar.
…and working for Mac all day on Tue.!!
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p>Please, BMG, help me get a new Congressman!
Busy on another critical campaign. However, DID send a small check (wish it could’ve been larger) to Mac last week. Good luck!
I think it’s fair to say at this point that we have in fact won in Iraq. We did what we went in there to do and have concluded combat operations on our terms.
We have not achieved any of the things Bush initially made the case for war on. We didn’t eliminate the threat of nuclear weapons or collaboration with al-Qaeda because neither threat existed in the first place. We didn’t replace a tyrannical regime with democracy and freedom and economic growth; we replaced a tyrannical but stable regime with years of war and hell.
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p>Yes, we’ve achieved our much more limited objectives that were articulated well after we’d gotten bogged down in a low grade civil war and lost all the initial illusions. You could make the case that from the point of view of the Obama administration, we “won” – we are well on our way to achieving what Obama said we ought to do when he ran for president. But that’s far short of winning on any terms even vaguely reminiscent of what the war was supposed to be for.
…but our goal was the ouster of Saddam Hussein, which we accomplished. While things are far from perfect they have had a couple of rounds of elections in recent years.
I think that they achieved one of their original goals– the removal of Saddam, quickly. Hence, Mission Accomplished. The problem was that this created a new set of problems, and thus a new set of goals– stability, which has also been achieved, albeit precariously.
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p>President Bush made a singularly awful decision to invade in 2003, which decision has weakened us and strengthened our enemies, most particularly Iran. Thereafter, Bush made a good (but unpopular, esp on the left) decision on the “surge” which, along with other factors, and not a little bit of luck, set the stage for the the present stability and helped make the best of a terrible situation.
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p>What was not achieved was the goal of remaking the entire middle east through the projection of US power. Instead, the US ability to project power has been diminished, and the crazies in Tehran are more entrenched, and now close to having nukes.
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p>On the whole, I do think it fair to say that the successes are overshadowed by that last-noted failure. But, at the same time, it isn’t fair to call the successes that were achieved failures, for political reasons.
I think that our ill-considered, illegal, and immoral invasion of Iraq was precisely what OBL wanted us to do. Arguing about whether we “won” or “lost” misses the point in a colossal way. We “concluded combat operations on our terms” in Iraq in pretty much the same way that we claimed to have done the same in Vietnam in 1974. Iraq, even under Saddam Hussein, was our most important asset in asserting political and social influence in the ME, especially against Iran, and we utterly and totally destroyed it.
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p>I think the attack on 9/11 has cost the US economy trillions of dollars, significantly harmed the freedom and liberty of most Americans, and initiated the collapse of our economy.
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p>Our extreme right wing threatens to make us into precisely the oppressive, racist, xenophobic, and essentially corrupt culture that OBL, AQ, and the Muslim extremists have painted.
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p>I think we are in an internal essentially religious holy war between our fundamentalists and everyone else. OBL has essentially jujitsued our fears and insecurities so that we are destroying our own freedoms and liberties from within.
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p>Generations of young people, around the world, know America as the nation that pursued formal officially-sanctioned policies of kidnapping, rape, torture, and murder and did nothing when those moral crimes were documented.
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p>The United States of America of 2010 is a far far weaker force for good in the world than we were prior to September 11, 2001.