What The Hell Is Nancy Pelosi Doing?
House Democrats have lost their moral compass.
By Zach Carter
06/30/2019

Huffpost: https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5d155cece4b07f6ca57ac4cb

To sum up the week for House Democrats: no oversight of the rape allegation against the president, no protections for abused immigrant children, a hearing on tax cuts for millionaires and a request that Trump officials deregulate big banks.

Democrats did pass a bill trying to guard voting systems from foreign intrusion. But at the moment, it appears the most serious threat to the party’s electoral future is coming from inside the House.

Huffington Post:
https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5d02d4e4e4b0dc17ef06d77a

Joe Biden Says He’s Ready To Handle The World. He Got Iraq Wrong Three Times.

After voting for the Iraq War, Biden tried to drastically reorganize the country along ethnic and sectarian lines and helped lay the groundwork for ISIS to thrive.

By Akbar Shahid Ahmed
06/17/2019

The war in Iraq has roiled presidential politics in each election since President George W. Bush launched the invasion of the country in 2003. It was central to the 2004 election, arguably the reason that Barack Obama defeated Hillary Clinton for the 2008 Democratic nomination, and no small factor in Donald Trump’s victory in 2016, when he pitched himself as an alternative to elites in both parties ― particularly his rivals in the GOP ― who had backed the invasion.

As Joe Biden leads the Democratic field for 2020, the U.S.’s bloody history with Iraq is set to again become a defining issue in the race, and not simply because Trump has talked about an indefinite U.S. military presence there. Biden wants to convince voters his resume on foreign policy is an asset. But they’ve got ground to think otherwise. “He’s been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades,” former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who served with Biden in the Obama administration, wrote in his 2014 book.

Just this month, Biden’s primary opponents have zeroed in on his support for Bush’s invasion. “You’ve got to ask yourself where Joe Biden is on the issues that are most important to you. Did he support the war in Iraq that forever destabilized the Middle East?” former Rep. Beto O’Rourke asked on MSNBC this week. Days earlier, Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) had called for Biden to apologize. Almost 30 percent of Democrats are unhappy about Biden’s vote and more than 40 percent of party supporters younger than 30 say it makes them less likely to back him, a Politico/Morning Consult poll recently found.

And Biden’s campaign isn’t offering a counternarrative — either about what he has learned from the past or what wisdom he will bring to bear on the current challenge. With more than 5,000 U.S. troops now in Iraq and analysts warning that reconciliation and stability after the defeat of the Islamic State will require painstaking work, what does he want to do next?

Elizabeth Warren’s Big Break From 30 Years Of Pro-Corporate Trade Policy:
It’s time to get over the 1990s.

by Zach Carter

Huffpost: https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5cf5fc3fe4b0e346ce83b31a

“America chose to pursue a trade policy that prioritized the interests of capital over the interests of American workers,” Warren told a crowd in Detroit Tuesday. “We have encouraged companies to invest abroad, ship jobs overseas, and keep wages low. All in the interest of serving multinational companies and international capital with no particular loyalty to the United States.”

What matters in Warren’s vision is not the specifics of any particular trade tool or enforcement tactic. Warren isn’t pro-tariff or anti-tariff, for instance. It depends on the tariff. She’s in favor of international rules that are designed to achieve actual policy goals other than corporate profit. What we call “free trade,” she emphasizes, isn’t really a system where governments get out of the way. The rules of international commerce determine its outcomes ― and there is no such thing as a trade regime without rules. When governments agreed to grant 20-year monopolies on life-saving medicines under WTO treaties, for instance, they were not simply allowing nature to take its course — they were setting up a system.

In Warren’s telling, this was not an accident or a tactical failure. It was a deliberate ideological agenda. By the 1990s, a bipartisan consensus had emerged in Washington which maintained that global peace and prosperity were best supported by an international trade regime in which governments got out of the way and let markets work their magic. Trade would expand, wealth would accumulate, and international comity would ensue. Trade did expand and wealth did in fact accumulate ― increasingly, in the hands of a narrow community of corporate shareholders, at the expense of public health, environmental conservation and worker wages. This was an act of geopolitics, not the verdict of natural science or the intractable demand of human progress.

“Globalization isn’t some mysterious force whose effects are inevitable and beyond our control,” Warren said. “The truth is that Washington policies ― not unstoppable market forces ― are a key driver of the problems American workers face.”