The New York Review of Books: America’s Indefensible Defense Budget

A parable, to begin: in 2016, the 136 military bands maintained by the Department of Defense, employing more than 6,500 full-time professional musicians at an annual cost of about $500 million, caught the attention of budget-cutters worried about surging federal deficits. Immediately memos flew and lobbyists descended. The Government Accountability Office, laying the groundwork for another study or three, opined, “The military services have not developed objectives and measures to assess how their bands are addressing the bands’ missions, such as inspiring patriotism.” Supporters of the 369th Infantry Regiment band noted that it had introduced jazz to Europe during World War I. How could such a history be left behind? A blues band connected effectively with Russian soldiers in Bosnia in 1996, another proponent argued, proving that bands are, “if anything, an incredibly cost-effective supplement” to the Pentagon’s then $4.5 billion public affairs budget. [...]

The sheer size of the military establishment and the habit of equating spending on it with patriotism make both sound management and serious oversight of defense expenditures rare. As a democracy, we are on an unusual and risky path. For several decades, we have maintained an extraordinarily high level of defense spending with the support of both political parties and virtually all of the public. The annual debate about the next year’s military spending, underway now on Capitol Hill, no longer probes where real cuts might be made (as opposed to cuts in previously planned growth) but only asks how big the increase should be. [...]

If the United States faced acute threats, allocating 60 percent of the government’s unrestricted funds to defense might be necessary. We do not, but we still spend more on defense than the next eight largest spenders combined—China, Saudi Arabia, India, France, Russia, Britain, Germany, and Japan—and four of those countries are treaty allies. The disproportion has held for decades. [...]

For many years, the United States has increasingly relied on military strength to achieve its foreign policy aims. In doing so, it has paid too little heed to the issues that military power cannot solve, to the need for diplomatic capabilities at least as strong as military ones and, in particular, to the necessity of multilateral problem-solving—as slow and frustrating as it often is—to address current threats. Sadly, it took a rash and unbelievably unwise decision by the president to throw away the Iran nuclear deal for members of Congress and the public to begin to appreciate what tough, patient diplomacy can achieve.

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Jacobin Magazine: The Two Faces of Kamala Harris

Over her time as DA and, later, as California attorney general, she took a number of progressive stances. She opposed the anti-gay Proposition 8, helped defend Obamacare in court, supported an undocumented immigrant’s bid for a law license, sponsored legislation that increased transparency around websites’ data collection, opposed California’s despicable “shoot the gays” ballot initiative, and filed a brief in the Supreme Court encouraging it to allow public universities to consider race in admissions. Under her direction, the state’s justice department adopted body cameras, California police were made to undergo implicit racial bias training, and her office received an award for accelerating the testing of rape kits.

Harris also had a respectable record of standing up to corporate malfeasance. She filed a friend-of-the-court brief signed by thirty-one other state attorneys general in 2011 in a Supreme Court case looking to end the practice of drug companies paying competitors to keep generic versions of their drugs off the market. In 2012, she set up a privacy enforcement protection unit in the attorney general’s office, which at one point fined a company for surreptitiously installing spyware on its customers’ computers. [...]

The limits of Harris’s approach are likewise evident in her actions on police shootings. She did back a bill that required reports on officer-involved shootings to be posted publicly online and mandated bias training and that justice department agents wear body cameras. But as district attorney, she refused to hand over the names of police officers whose testimonies had led to convictions despite the officers’ arrest records and histories of misconduct. As attorney general, she also opposed instituting police body cameras statewide and stood against a bill requiring her office to investigate fatal police shootings. [...]

Harris has shown the capacity to be moved leftwards when pressured by activism. This is no small thing. But you can’t pressure Harris — or any other politician, for that matter — without having an understanding of her record beyond the fuzzy PR that Democratic loyalists are currently trying to substitute for actual political discussion. Perhaps Harris will end up the 2020 nominee. Then it’s all the more important we understand her inadequacies.

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The Atlantic: The Architects Redefining Aesthetics

Many architects dismiss these additions, Downey said, because they don’t think they’re visually appealing, or because it doesn’t occur to them to take the extra steps for accessibility. Downey himself didn’t start pushing past the visual level of design until his sudden blindness introduced him to a broader range of sensory experiences. “With sight, I designed to sight and didn’t go beyond that,” he said. “I didn’t really think sufficiently beyond that to engage all the senses, which is really the relevancy of architecture: that whole human experience of the body in space.”

Now, Downey argues that the multisensory experience he discovered after losing his eyesight should become the new norm for design. “I want to propose to you today that the blind be taken as the prototypical city dwellers when imagining new and wonderful cities, and not the people who are thought about after the mold has already been cast,” Downey said in a 2013 TED talk. “It’s too late then.” Centering the blind, he said at the time, would lead to “predictable and generous” sidewalks, spaces that balance the needs of people and cars, and “robust, accessible, well-connected” mass-transit systems. “It would actually be a more inclusive, more equitable, and more just city for all,” he said. [...]

That idea of beginning with human experience rather than beauty, Bauman contended, has applications beyond the deaf and blind communities. It’s a design philosophy that can be applied to tackling problems of sustainability as climate change worsens, and of an aging population, and of increasing urbanization. And it can be used to improve spaces for able-bodied people, too, by newly emphasizing their comfort and the ways they want to make use of space. By focusing on real people, architects hope to create buildings that aren’t just accommodating to all on a basic level, but truly universal.

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openDemocracy: Is the UN taking a position in today’s ‘culture wars’?

Couples with children under 18 years old comprise only 33% of households worldwide. Almost as common, in developing countries, are extended families with multiple generations living together. There is also a growing number of what the report calls ‘emerging’ families, including same-sex partners, sibling-based households, and ‘blended families’ with married or cohabiting partners with children from previous unions. [...]

That event was notable not so much because ‘usual suspects’ (the Holy See, Egypt, Qatar, Belarus, Russia, Bangladesh) defended the patriarchal family, but because the US did. Even during the conservative Reagan and Bush administrations, US delegates avoided sharing a platform with states that have such overtly authoritarian and religious agendas. [...]

Speakers described this (and only this) kind of family unit as supportive of patriotism, teamwork, love, acceptance, social cohesion, and better economic outcomes – without noting that it requires women’s acquiescence to subordination and dependency to function. Any non-binary interpretation of gender, deviation from heterosexuality, or assertion of women’s autonomy, is profoundly disruptive to this project. [...]

Meanwhile, women tend to be left on their own without care as they age (twice as many women as men live alone after the age of 80, the report finds), and are more likely to lack adequate income support in old age thanks to maternity-related interruptions in capacities to earn and save.

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EURACTIV: The far-right’s influence in Europe is much greater than its new EU Parliamentary group suggests

The first was the major EU enlargement of 2004, when 10 countries joined, swiftly followed three years later by Romania and Bulgaria. The effect on the richer, western countries of the EU was enormous: within a few years, millions had moved westwards from the former eastern bloc.

Then came the financial crash of 2008, which stagnated wages and ushered in austerity measures, which hurt already disadvantaged communities. Within a few years, the migrant crisis had begun, culminating in the mass movement of hundreds of thousands of people to Europe, predominantly from African and Asian countries. [...]

Immigration poses a challenge for both center-left and center-right parties, but it is a particular challenge for liberals, for whom openness to migration is part of their political DNA. But given the real economic realities of many center-left voting areas, the political parties have adapted, seeking to adopt versions of far-right positions on immigration and so neutralize it as a topic. Rather than stealing the clothes of the far-right, they merely steal the colors. [...]

The rise of a new far-right grouping within the EU’s parliament only tells part of the story, because their influence doesn’t lie merely in the ballot box. Until centrist parties can find answers to the very real dislocations and dispossessions of millions of Europeans, far-right parties will keep making the political weather – and keep forcing parties across the political spectrum to adapt to save themselves from the storm.

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EURACTIV: Right- and left-wing violence cannot be equated, says expert

The Federal Office’s report shows that the community of Reich citizens and so-called ‘self-administrators’ is growing. How come, what kind of people are they?

This is by no means a new phenomenon, these people have long been known among researchers. Yet, the size of the group is growing and Reichsbürger is a collective term for everything. It is also easy to enter the right-wing extremist scene.[...]

Moreover, in recent years we have observed an increase in physical attacks on Jews where perpetrators are of Arab descent. The attacks are not, therefore, carried out with a classical right-wing extremist motivation, but because of hostility towards Israel.[...]

No. The extremist groups from the left are very divided in terms of ideologies and programmes. These are not rooted in tradition as is the case with right-wing extremism, which leans towards nationalist thinking. [...]

On the right, the vast majority of offences are racially motivated, often directed against migrants. On the left, we see mostly confrontational violence directed towards the right-wing scene and police officers. It is often about eliminating the basic democratic order of the state. For example, by attacking right-wing politicians or attacking the police at demonstrations.

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The Atlantic: Bernie Sanders’s Ideas Dominated the Second Debate

Several of the candidates seemed to define themselves against Sanders, reflexively comparing and contrasting their agenda with his. It was a reminder of just how popular the senator from Vermont’s ideas have become since his first campaign, in 2016: His policies have dominated discussion for much of the past three years, helping pry open the Democrats’ Overton window, inch by inch.

That’s especially true when it comes to health care. When asked about the pragmatism of progressives’ proposals, Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado said, “I agree with Bernie” on his goal of universal health care. But “where I disagree is on his solution of Medicare for All.” South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, for his part, criticized what he sees as an impractical shift to a Medicare for All system. “Every person in politics who allows that phrase to escape their lips has a responsibility to explain how you are supposed to get from here to there,” Buttigieg said. [...]

The candidates, again and again, were playing the game on Sanders’s turf. He didn’t receive the Democratic Party’s nomination in 2016, and he might not secure it in 2020. But when the issues he’s long championed are being debated before 15 million Americans, in some ways he’s already won.

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