Category: June 2019

Listening for Immigration at the Democratic Presidential Debates

ANDREW MOSS – If you’ve been repelled by the family separations and other immigration-related cruelties perpetrated by the Trump administration, and if you plan to watch either or both of the upcoming Democratic presidential debates, please listen carefully – not just to what the candidates are saying, but how they’re saying it: how they frame the issues. Will they present immigration as a discrete set of concerns (“fixing our broken immigration system”), or will they describe it in relation to broader historical struggles, distinctly American struggles, for human rights?

Snub of Russia on D-Day a Worrisome Omission

DOUG MALLOUK – Has the current tide of hysteria against all things Russian risen to the point that European and American policymakers are now attempting an Orwellian rewrite of the history of World War II? This is no mere academic matter of misrepresenting the past but has life-and-death importance for the here and now.

When Countries Increase Their Military Budgets, They Decrease Public Health Spending

PEACE SCIENCE DIGEST – One key argument against military spending is that it “crowds out” government spending in public health. The evidence is mixed. Some argue that increased military spending has indirect but positive effects on public health — whether through the diversity of military expenditures or other “growth-stimulating” effects. Others suggest that there is a trade-off between military and public health priorities because government spending is constrained by limited resources. Using sophisticated statistical techniques, this article examines whether a causal relationship exists between military spending and public health spending.

Why the Trade War with China is So Dangerous

MEL GURTOV – The trade war with China that Trump so confidently predicted would result in a great new deal now threatens to become a permanent feature of US-China relations. Why that is likely may have less to do with the specific trade issues in dispute than with the vastly different negotiating styles and operating principles of the two countries’ leaderships.

Seeking True Diversity; Leaving Shame Behind

JOHN HEID – “Don’t Label Me, An Incredible Conversation for Divided Times” (by Irshad Manji, St. Martin’s Press, 2019), opens with an invitation to expand our moral imagination and concludes with an 11-step “moral courage regimen.” The pages in-between read like a manifesto as radical, i.e. deeply rooted, as any I have come across in years. This is a book acutely for our times. Irshad Manji offers critical analysis, alongside a crash course in nonviolent engagement techniques. Theory and practice all in one. The content is as at once a life-size mirror and flashing red lights for the progressive left.

Let’s Not Spend $1.7 Trillion on Our Nukes, a Group of N.J. Professors Says. Let’s Get Rid of Them, and the Threat of a Catastrophic War.

ZIA MIAN, ALAN ROBOCK and SHARON WEINER – On May 23rd, the New Jersey General Assembly approved Resolution 230, urging the federal government to pursue a broad range of measures to reduce the danger of nuclear war and to join the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. California and some American cities have already adopted similar resolutions to call for action in Washington on nuclear weapons. Here’s why.