She brought up the military budget increase when she first started talking about the childcare policy. Additionally, her website mentions to cutting military spending. That’s what I’m talking about when I said signaling, cutting military spending. She doesn’t have to use the surplus from cutting military spending on childcare, but that’s one of the few times I recall her bringing military spending up on the trail.
I don't remember her ever connecting any of her proposal funding to the military budget.
That’s reductive. Sanders’ vote for the Crime Bill seems irregular within the context of his overall record which lends credence to his explanation for why he voted for it. Warren doesn’t have anything like that on foreign policy or military spending. That’s why I don’t view them as comparable, they don’t have equal credibility. The Crime Bill was substantively worse vote though.
Yeah, that's a good point w/r/t Bernie's overall history, which is why I don't hold that vote against him like anti-Sanders people do, ridiculously trying to paint him as some sort of crypto-racist.
Where I disagree is the claim that Warren's record should rob her claim of credence and she doesn't have credibility here. That vote is very much so irregular in the context of her overall record. She has 21 defense votes on her record. She was out of lockstep with Bernie, often considered the voice of the progressive left FP, in only 2 out of those 21 votes: the 2017 military funding vote we're talking about and Obama's nomination of John Brennan. 90% of her record has been in line with the progressive option. That gives her credibility when she explains why she took that aberrant 2017 vote.
Candidate Obama also claimed similar things, but that didn’t seem to inform his decisions when it came selecting advisors and staff. Warren doesn’t have more credibility than he did regarding foreign policy. I could see her being mindful of his growing pains and pick up where he left off, but anything beyond that seems like projection at this point.
Warren comes from a distinctly different political philosophy and background than Barack Obama. The main flaw of the latter was that he believed in the conciliatory, both-sides-working-together fraudulent myth of American politics due to his neoliberal philosophy. He was habitually incapable of naming enemies of progress. Warren is the complete inverse. Not only does she go after them by name, effectively channeling the righteous resentment and anger amongst the various underclasses to the true enemies of progress, but she has penned herself into following through on rhetoric by laying out actual plans, the degree to which is unprecedented in modern political campaigning. Of course it's possible she could turn around and name a bunch of Wall Street execs and Neocons to her cabinet. Anyone could. But unlike Obama, it would just be an utterly bizarre rebuke of the philosophy she spent her entire political and academic life championing. Of course this is a projection, same as you saying you could see her picking up where he left off. No one knows what she'll do, we just have to make informed decisions based on her history, none of which indicates she'll fall into the same traps that led the Obama administration to be such a disappointing failure to progressives.
That’s a mischaracterization of what I wrote. I never claimed to be looking for a plan that “completely upends” the current paradigm. Mike Gravel is relevant to me because...? Nevermind this entire paragraph is just some weird projection that isn't worth my time.
You literally equated "buying into the current paradigm of how the US operates abroad" with "being weak on foreign policy" and "untrustworthy", so I'm not sure how saying you're looking for a plan/candidate to upend that paradigm is a mischaracterization of what you wrote. Mike Gravel is the only candidate offering such upending, so I figured that would be relevant to what you were saying. My apologies.
You said this was progressive, I said buying into the current paradigm is hardly progressive. As it presently stands, her plan is equivalent to making sure 50 percent of the staff is composed of women whenever a prison is built. Hiring more women is great; however, placing that in a vacuum and ignoring the rest of the context misses the point and is problematic.
Her website doesn’t state anything specific about what international relations looks like in the Warren administration. Without articulating her own foreign policy, this proposal can only be interpreted as the status quo except green… well, unless it affects national security interests or “market conditions” make it difficult. When the best outcome of an initiative is eco-friendly imperialism, then said initiative needs to be reassessed.
This proposal isn’t for environmental activists, the first thing many in that group will point out are the waivers because they are used to politicians adding crippling caveats. This proposal is for the those who read headlines about female drone operators or gay CEO’s of military contractors and think it’s woke and progressive. It’s for those who equivocate restraint with abolishing the military. Like I said before, it’s to get good headlines since most people don’t read anything beyond them.
I don't believe I ever said this plan is "progressive", I said it's the "most progressive plan out there" which, in the FP realm, is like saying "least racist".
I'm familiar with your critique of Warren's plan as it was mostly promulgated by a certain very active section of twitter minutes after she released it, which really indicates to me that the genesis of this critique was born of superficial analysis of the headline without digesting the actual proposal and its implications. In a more decontextualized sense, it's a very valid critique of neoliberal ideology as a whole, but in this context, it really only works best on people who are already primed and conditioned to view Warren as a crypto-neoliberal in the mold of Hillary Clinton. Anyone who claims this plan is a panacea for the American Military Industrial Complex is either an idiot or morally bankrupt. On the other hand, waving away the goal of net-zero carbon emissions for the largest polluter in America and funneling billions into green tech R&D as eco-friendly imperialism (a nonsensical term that ignores the unbreakably causal link between America's imperialist foreign policy and America's catastrophic environmental policies) is obviously a fool's luxury.
You call this proposal "status quo except green" which is a strange turn of phrase, because a crucial element of the status quo is being environmentally disastrous. Enacting policies such as this would necessarily, meaningfully refashion the status quo. The same odd critique could be levied against the Green New Deal for not wanting to overturn more aspects of American society, as right-wingers claim is the ultimate aims of the environmental activists fighting for these policies (kill all farting cows, abolish air travel, etc). Decarbonization and large scale investments in green technology are two of the main pillars of the GND, so when a plan is released supporting those ends and one's first response is to say it's a ploy to get headlines - the ultimate aim of which is to allow the American war machine to continue unabated - I'm not seeing how that person isn't either a conservative or unnecessarily conspiratorial. This plan does not solve all of America's foreign policy evils, and it doesn't even offer a deeply moralistic rebuke of them. It should not be confused with a novel, broader philosophy of what America's role should be in the global community of the 21st century (one could glean more of this in her Green Marshall Plan). What it is is a plan to address the largest polluter in American society by mandating drastic reductions in its carbon footprint (which has the second-order effect of reducing its reach) and redirecting its budget to developing green technologies. That's it. It's one component of her foreign policy platform, not the whole thing.
Your definition of nefarious seems to be uselessly broad. It wouldn’t take Tom Cotton to utilize these waivers often with something as ambiguous as national security interests and a timetable of 2030. Thinking something like that shows ignorance about how political actors operate, but I know you to be a well thought person. You keep talking about the carbon footprint, I’ll questioning why killing innocent brown people from a solar powered military base, if market conditions allow for it, is worthwhile policy. I’m not giving her a pass on having an incomplete analysis just because she’s my preferred candidate. She needs to do better and I expect her to.
Understanding and valuing the importance of the goals laid out in these proposals is the line in the sand for whether I consider a SecDef nefarious or not. If they seek to abuse these waivers, they're nefarious. I don't think that's a uselessly broad litmus test, I think it the basic minimum needed to ensure continued survival on this planet. In our current techno-ecological environment, the US Military's ability to murder innocent brown people across the globe is inextricably linked to their energy consumption habits. Forcing a net-zero carbon footprint will severely curtail the broad reach of the US military. Again, it's not a panacea, but it's a good and drastic step that's worthy of being followed through on.
best candidate looking better
