Global News and Analysis

Source: Frontline

What began as a joke is now no laughing matter. Donald Trump will most likely be the Republican nominee for the President of the United States. Given the deep uncertainty of this presidential campaign, there is a sense that he could even win the presidency. The headquarters of the Republican National Committee in Washington, D.C., teeters in fearful anticipation. No one would like to speak openly about the presumptive nominee, but most of the party faithful fear his ascendency.

Trump, the real estate baron, is truly an outside candidate. He says anything he wants, including dismissing the formidable pieties of the Republican Party on trade and foreign policy, and is therefore out of the party establishment’s control. Each of the mainstream candidates (Jeb Bush and Chris Christie) fell before Trump’s withering attacks and the massive support these attacks generated. Christie fell and then joined Trump’s juggernaut. Along New York City’s western highway are a series of buildings that bear—in large letters—Trump’s name. He was the real estate developer of these Trump Place Apartments. The Republican Party fears that it has been transformed into the Trump Party. He has done a hostile buyout under their noses. read more

Source: Foreign Policy in Focus

The Obama administration’s budget proposal for 2017 would jack up military spending higher than it’s been since World War II. The Republican leadership in Congress wants to jack it up higher than that.

Fortunately, these aren’t our only choices.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus has mapped out a saner alternative in what it’s calling the People’s Budget. The CPC’s budget proposal would, for one thing, end the Pentagon tactic of having a war budget — separate and on top of “regular” Pentagon spending — that’s become an all-purpose slush fund for the military’s wish list projects, many of which have nothing to do with the wars we are fighting. read more

Source: Alternet

Unexpectedly, Russia’s Vladimir Putin announced early this week that the bulk of his armed forces would withdraw from Syria. Putin says Russia attained its objective in this intervention. What were its aims? They were three, and each has been substantially met.

To bolster the government of Bashar al-Assad.

Last summer, the Assad government had been deeply weakened. The morale of its forces was low, evidence of which was the grave difficulty in attracting new recruits. In desperation, Assad turned to Iran and Russia, both of which cooked up the intervention in secret. Russian aircraft came and began to pummel the proxy armies of the Gulf Arab states, including Saudi Arabia and Turkey. These had begun to make serious gains, particularly in the northwest of the country. Russia broke the back of this advance, providing confidence to the Syrian army and its allied militias. read more

Source: Yes! Magazine

Excerpted from Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement

In the late 1990s, household workers around the country began to organize to address the exploitation and abuse in their occupation. These domestic workers, immigrant nannies, housecleaners, and elder-care workers from all over the world—the Philippines, Barbados, Brazil, Mexico, El Salvador, Indonesia, and Nepal—used public shaming strategies to draw attention to particularly egregious employers, sued for back pay, developed support groups, organized training and certificate programs, and lobbied for statewide domestic workers’ bills of rights. In building a movement, domestic workers used storytelling to connect workers with one another. Barbara Young, for example, a former nanny and an organizer with the National Domestic Workers Alliance, joined Domestic Workers United in New York City in the early 2000s. Young was in a park one day with the child she cared for when another household worker, Erline Brown, invited her to a DWU meeting in Brooklyn. “People were telling the stories about the work that they were doing, not getting vacation, not getting paid for holidays.,” she explained. “It was the first time I was hearing stories from workers coming together.” DWU mobilized women of different racial, ethnic, linguistic, and national backgrounds. Despite the diverse origins, all the stories seemed to resonate with one another. As Young put it: “Some people had different stories but similar stories.” read more

Source: The Guardian Unlimited

The National Insider Threat Task Force subjects officials to surveillance and fear, and uses me as an example. Those with legitimate concerns should be empowered to speak out

The US government is heavily invested in an internal surveillance program that is unsustainable, ineffective, morally reprehensible, inherently dangerous and ultimately counterproductive.

In the months following the US government’s initial charges against me over the release of government records in 2010, the current administration formed the National Insider Threat Task Force under the authority of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and several other US government agencies. read more

Source: The Guardian Unlimited

When he isn’t spewing insults, the Republican frontrunner is hammering home a powerful message about free trade and its victims

Let us now address the greatest American mystery at the moment: what motivates the supporters of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump?

I call it a “mystery” because the working-class white people who make up the bulk of Trump’s fan base show up in amazing numbers for the candidate, filling stadiums and airport hangars, but their views, by and large, do not appear in our prestige newspapers. On their opinion pages, these publications take care to represent demographic categories of nearly every kind, but “blue-collar” is one they persistently overlook. The views of working-class people are so foreign to that universe that when New York Times columnist Nick Kristof wanted to “engage” a Trump supporter last week, he made one up, along with this imaginary person’s responses to his questions. read more