It is impossible to know now whether Trump’s campaign promise to renegotiate NAFTA will result in any substantial improvements. But there is also no reason for the civil society movements that defeated the TPP to allow other interests to set the agenda on NAFTA.
Source: Alternet
With less than a month to go until Donald Trump and his bevy of far-right appointees take the White House, communities across the United States are preparing for a potential escalation in immigration raids, police repression, Islamophobic targeting, corporate exploitation and climate chaos. Many of those taking to the streets to protest fascism and preparing mutual defense plans in their neighborhoods were also actively organizing throughout the Obama years, which saw a record number of deportations, open-ended wars and the highest levels of imprisonment in the world.
Source: The Guardian Unlimited
According to new figures, the US dropped nearly three bombs every hour, 24 hours a day. Dare we think how Donald Trump will continue this legacy?
Most Americans would probably be astounded to realize that the president who has been painted by Washington pundits as a reluctant warrior has actually been a hawk. The Iran nuclear deal, a herculean achievement, and the opening of diplomatic relations with Cuba unfortunately stand alone as President Obama’s successful uses of diplomacy over hostility.
Source: The Nation
About 54 cents of every discretionary dollar in the federal budget goes to the military. And that’s been true for a very long time. Despite his claimed opposition to current wars, President-elect Donald Trump has promised to end limits on Pentagon spending, increase the size of the US military, and even to expand the US nuclear arsenal. Military budgets will likely go up over the next four years, not down.
Now more than ever it is important for us to remember what past wars have cost—all the costs. George W. Bush’s Iraq War continues today, though US military involvement is different and it’s morphed into the “global war on terror.” And the costs continue to rise.
Rather than create opportunities for marginalized people, the 1996 Guatemalan Peace Accords favored a neoliberal philosophy that embraces foreign corporate investment and drives the dispossession of indigenous lands.
Trump seems to think that there are only two countries other than the United States that matter in the world today – Russia and China. As both Robert Gates and Henry Kissinger have pointed out, he is using the Nixon technique in reverse.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019