Trump Budget, Kansas Boycott Law, New Poor People’s Campaign

In GOP-Trump Budget, More for the Military Means Less for Other Vital Programs
Interview with Lindsay Koshgarian, program director of the National Priorities Project, conducted by Scott Harris

Despite Republican party control of the U.S. Senate, the House of Representatives and the White House, a divided GOP needed the votes of minority Democrats to pass a two-year budget agreement. Although many Democrats had wanted to use their leverage to pass legislation to prevent the deportation of more than 700,000 DACA recipients – undocumented children brought to the U.S. by their parents – after a 5½ hour government shutdown, enough Democrats voted for the bill and President Trump signed the budget into law on Feb. 9.

The approved budget spends $500 billion more than current law allows by suspending a 2011 law pushed by “Freedom Caucus” conservatives that set hard caps on discretionary spending and included an automatic trigger known as “sequester” cuts if Congress attempted to bypass those spending caps. The budget deal for 2018 spends $700 billion for the military, and $591 billion for nonmilitary programs. Overall, 54 percent of the federal discretionary budget is now spent on the military and nuclear weapons.

President Trump’s recently announced 2019 budget, which is not likely to be passed by Congress, calls for a 14.1 percent increase in military spending – while making deep cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, education, food stamps, transportation and other essential government services. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Lindsay Koshgarian, program director of the National Priorities Project, who assesses the two-year federal budget deal passed by Congress and how the allocation of these federal funds impacts vital, non-military programs. [Rush transcript.]
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LINDSAY KOSHGARIAN: The budget that Congress passed last week was the budget for fiscal year 2018, which actually started on Oct. 1, of last year, so it took them several months to get the job done. And a lot of the national attention about why the budget was so difficult to pass in Congress and what the disagreements were focused on the need for humanitarian solutions for the Dreamers – people who were brought to the United States as young children of immigrants and have since made their lives here. But what didn’t get quite as much attention was the differences between spending in the budget for the Pentagon, military and nuclear weapons v. spending for everything else that’s funded by the discretionary budget.

And that’s the part of the budget that’s over $1 trillion and that’s what Congress decides each year when they go through this budget process. And essentially, the question was, how much they would fund the Pentagon and military v. how much fund everything else? Now Democrats generally were trying to negotiate for more spending for things like education and health and the state department while they were also willing to accept higher spending on the Pentagon. Many Republicans wanted higher spending on the Pentagon without raising spending on those domestic things – although some of them wanted to cut both.

And the deal they came to was to raise spending a little bit for each. So they gave $80 billion above what were the previous spending limits to the Pentagon, and they gave $60 billion above the previous limits to everything else. And in Washington, D.C. politics this is what people refer to parity of spending between the Pentagon and between everything else.

But of course, $80 billion doesn’t equal $60 billion, so they’re not equal in that sense. And it’s also as if you took half of your inheritance and gave it to one child, and then took the other half and gave it to your four other children and called it equal. So there’s a couple of reasons of why parity is really a bad name for this.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Now Lindsay, in terms of the distribution of tax dollars toward military and non-military spending. What does it say about the nation’s priorities at the moment, in terms of the dollars going to fund new weapons systems, other projects the Pentagon has in mind, new fighter jets and all the rest, vs. what really needs to be addressed in terms of social programs, especially considering the growing gap between the rich and poor in this country?

LINDSAY KOSHGARIAN: Well, in almost any given year, more than half of our discretionary budget – that part that Congress decided last week –goes to the Pentagon and military. And, they maintained that ratio in this budget deal. Fifty-four percent of the funds they allocated will go the Pentagon and nuclear weapons, while the remaining 46 percent will go to everything else. So, clearly the priority that Congress places is that a military solution trumps – pardon the expression – everything else.

The budget the president released, which was his budget request for 2019, and does come into direct conflict with the budget limits that Congress set for 2019. So, it’s unlikely that this budget proposal will become a reality. But that’s always the case with presidential budget request.

But the budget request we saw chose clearly what the president’s priorities are and where he wants to see our government headed. And what we saw there was that he maintained Pentagon spending of over $700 billion a year, which is about a 10 percent increase over recent spending levels that we’ve had for the Pentagon. And it’s also a spending level that keeps us in the range of spending more than the next eight to 10 countries in the world combined. We spend more than three times as much as China. We spend nine times as much as Russia on our military, so our military spending is already sky high and now it’s growing.

BETWEEN THE LINES: What kind of policies do the minority Democrats, who certainly don’t have much control in the House or the Senate right now – what do they bring to the table in terms of their views on the levels of military spending that should be approved?

LINDSAY KOSHGARIAN: It’s a wild mix. Last week, when the budget deal was passing in Congress, you had Sen. Chuck Schumer, who is the Senate leader of the Democrats saying that he supported both more military spending and spending for the middle class. So you had everything from that, to Democrats like Pramila Jayapal or Adam Smith in the House of Representatives, who question our military spending and really recognize there is such a thing as too much. And one of the things that I think that people who, across the political spectrum, again this is not limited to Democrats – there are definitely fiscal hawk Republicans who are very interested in seeing us call back some of the wasteful Pentagon spending that’s out there. We need to make it more understood that more Pentagon spending does not equal more safety.

For more information, visit the National Priorities Project at nationalpriorities.org.

Federal Judge Blocks Kansas Law Penalizing Supporters of Israel Boycott
Interview with Dima Khalidi, founder and director of Palestine Legal, conducted by Melinda Tuhus
A federal judge in Kansas recently ruled that a state law making it illegal to support the Palestinian civil society call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions – or BDS – against Israel for its illegal occupation of the West Bank, was unconstitutional. Kansas is one of 24 states with anti-BDS laws on the books. The state laws take various forms, including prohibiting individuals who support BDS from being awarded state contracts and/or prohibiting states from investing in companies that boycott Israel. The BDS movement calls for dismantling the wall that cuts through Palestinian land, guaranteeing the right of Palestinians to return to their homes inside Israel and assuring that equal rights are accorded to all Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Federal legislation – known as the “Israel Anti-Boycott Act,” has been introduced in Congress with bi-partisan support and is a top legislative priority this year of AIPAC, the most powerful and most well-funded pro-Israel lobbying group in the U.S. The proposed bill includes harsh criminal sanctions for U.S. persons who comply with or support boycotts of Israel in response to calls by the U.N., the E.U. or other international governmental organizations.

Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with Dima Khalidi, founder and director of Palestine Legal. The group based in Chicago and founded in 2012 works to protect the constitutional rights of those advocating for Palestinian freedom. Here, Khalidi explains the federal judge’s ruling upholding U.S. citizens’ right to engage in protest and boycotts targeting Israel’s illegal occupation and its significance.
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DIMA KHALIDI: The first challenge of one of these anti-boycott laws was brought in federal court against a Kansas law, so it was a federal district court in Kansas. The ACLU brought the lawsuit on behalf of a Mennonite schoolteacher who was involved in a teacher training program and had to contract with the state to be paid by the state to train other teachers, basically.

And because of Kansas’s new – as of 2017 – anti-boycott law, which prohibits contractors with the state from boycotting Israel, she was required to sign a certification that she didn’t boycott Israel in order to be involved with this teacher training program. And because her church, and she herself, decided to boycott certain Israeli companies and other companies that are complicit in Israel’s occupation, she refused to sign the certification and she is not able to be involved in this teacher training program as a result.

So it’s clear in this case that there is a political litmus test being applied for those who want to contract with the state, to be paid by the state, for whatever services they might be providing, and that is completely constitutionally unacceptable. The math teacher tried to get a preliminary injunction to stop the state from enforcing this law while this litigation proceeds, and the judge granted that preliminary injunction, so the state is now blocked from enforcing this law as long as this lawsuit is ongoing.

So, the decision was really important in making very clear that this law appears unconstitutional as a violation of First Amendment rights. The judge confirmed what we have been saying since we saw the first anti-boycott law introduced in 2014 that boycotts for Palestinian rights are the same as the boycotts that precipitated the Supreme Court case, NAACP v Claybourn, in 1982, and those were boycotts against white businesses in the South protesting segregation and racism in the South during the Civil Rights era.

So this decision is a really important precedent for other challenges that will surely come up against other anti-boycott laws and to prevent other anti-boycott laws from being enacted, hopefully, when legislators see the judge has ruled this way. The ACLU also brought a lawsuit against a very similar law in Arizona and that ruling is pending as well.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Dima Khalidi, Israel itself has just created a blacklist of 20 international organizations, including Code Pink and Jewish Voice for Peace, that can no longer enter Israel and therefore can’t get into the West Bank, due to their support for BDS. What impact do you think this will have on efforts to squelch support for BDS?

DIMA KHALIDI: Yes, this is clearly one of the many strategies that Israel is using to intimidate, to bully people who are speaking out for Palestinian rights. They are trying to send a message that if you take this kind of position, not only will you not be allowed into this country whatever your background is, but you will also be pursued in other ways.

As I said, Palestine Legal, my organization, has been documenting for five years the array of ways that Israel and Israel advocacy groups in the U.S. are targeting activists and regular people who are speaking out publicly for Palestinian rights. The ways range from lawsuits, to this legislative strategy, to defamation campaigns against individuals. They are very targeted against individual students, professors, other activists. Profiles of people on the Internet, on anonymous websites, claiming they are terrorists or anti-Semitic for their views.

We’re seeing universities being pressured very hard by Israel advocacy groups to punish student activists who are protesting, delivering divestment resolutions, etc. The list goes on and on. And all of these methods of suppression are aimed at silencing people who believe in Palestinian human rights, who want to see accountability for Israel’s decades of subjugation of Palestinians and dispossession of Palestinians.

For more information visit Palestine Legal at palestinelegal.org, BDS Movement at bdsmovement.net, US Campaign for Palestinian Rights at uscpr.org and Jewish Voice For Peace at jvp.org.

New Poor Peoples’ Campaign Challenges Nation’s ‘Distorted Morality’
Interview with Dr. Liz Theoharis, co-director of the Kairos Center and co-chair, along with Rev. William Barber, of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, conducted by Scott Harris

Religious leaders, joined by members of civil rights groups, labor unions and fast food workers gathered in Washington, D.C. and more than two dozen states across the U.S. on Feb. 5th to launch the “Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival.” The campaign, co-chaired by Moral Mondays founder The Rev. William Barber and the Rev. Liz Theoharis say their mission is to continue the work of the original Poor People’s Campaign organized by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in the late 1960s.

The coalition of groups engaged in the campaign kicked off 40 days of what they described as “moral action” to highlight “the human impact of policies which promote systemic racism, poverty, the war economy and environmental devastation. On Feb. 12 the Poor People’s Campaign joined fast food and other low-paid workers in Los Angeles, Detroit, Memphis and other cities across the U.S. to rally support for a $15 per hour minimum wage and the right to unionize.

In Memphis, hundreds of Fight for 15 activists commemorated the 50th anniversary of the city’s 1968 sanitation workers strike supported by Rev. King and the civil rights movement at the time. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Rev. Liz Theoharis, co-director of the Kairos Center, who, as Poor People’s campaign co-chairwoman was in Memphis to lead the protests. Here, Rev. Theoharis talks about the campaign’s goals and planned actions to challenge the evils of racism, poverty, and the nation’s distorted morality.
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THE REV. LIZ THEOHARIS: So, for many years, grassroots organizations across the United States have been saying that we need to come together and build a poor people’s campaign for today. We do draw lesson on theory of theology from Dr. King and from the Poor People’s Campaign of 1967 and ’68. You know, in that campaign, the last campaign of Dr. King’s life, he was connecting the tri-apartheid evils of systemic racism, of militarism and of economic exploitation, and said that the poor and dispossessed people of all races and all geographies needed to be brought together into a united and organized force in order to kind of wake up the nation and unsettle a bunch of what was going on at the time.

And you know, we see today, 50 years later, there’s a 60 percent increase in poverty since there was in 1968. The military budget is even more of a huge section of our budget than it was 50 years ago. And systemic racism is still alive and well. So we’re building a new Poor People’s Campaign – reigniting the campaign Dr. King and others were leading 50 years and saying that it’s kind of a time for deep moral revival in our nation. We need to shake things up and we need a breakthrough to be able to prioritize what’s really needed on the key issues of our day. And see that the real moral issues of our time are things like healthcare and living wages and education for our kids and votings rights and an end to the kind of pollution and ecological devastation that are taking place.

So poor people and clergy and grassroots activists and others are coming together and calling for this campaign. And pledging to be a part of 40 days of moral direct action and nonviolent civil disobedience in this coming spring.

BETWEEN THE LINES: And Rev. Theoharis, could you lay out some of the goals that you are working on within the Poor People’s Campaign? What are some of the policy demands that you’d like to communicate to Congress and the White House?

THE REV. LIZ THEOHARIS: Yeah, so we are calling for 40 days of moral direct action focused on a moral agenda that is still in the works. Right now, the goals of the campaign are really two-fold. One is to shift the moral narrative that is happening out there in our nation right now. When we looked at looked at the 2016 presidential election, there were 26 presidential debates in the primary and in the general election. And in those 26 debates, not one of them focused on problems of living wages or universal health care, of poverty and voting, of ecological devastation and the problems of the war economy. And so, to be able to have gotten through such an expensive and such a interesting 2016 presidential debates and not have the issues that are affecting the majority of people in this country the majority of the time, means that we need to do something to shift the narrative and make it impossible that our elected officials and candidates can talk about what they’re going to do and not actually speak to poverty and racism and the issues that are plaguing our nation today.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Rev. Theoharis, can tell us a bit about some of the dates coming up for actions that the Poor People’s Campaign has planned around the country?

THE REV. LIZ THEOHARIS: From March 1-5, many folks with the Poor People’s Campaign and National Call for Moral Revival will be in Selma, Alabama. It’s the 53rd anniversary of Bloody Sunday and we’ll be there making the connection between poverty and economic injustice and voting rights. Around April 4, which is the 50th anniversary of Dr. King’s assassination, the Poor People’s Campaign and the National Call for Moral Revival will be in Memphis again with the National Civil Rights Museum and with others that are looking to the legacy of Dr. King 50 years after his assassination.

Then on June 23, we’ll be doing a mass mobilization in Washington, D.C. where we’re talking about the next steps in the campaign and what people are called to do to continue to build power and organization amongst those that are impacted by the injustices that are in our world today. And so this spring, we’re hoping that folks all across the country and state Houses will take place in these 40 days, this six weeks of organizing and education and moral direct action.

For more information visit Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival at poorpeoplescampaign.org, Principles at poorpeoplescampaign.org/index.php/fundamental-principle/ and history at poorpeoplescampaign.org/index.php/poor-peoples-campaign-1968.

This week’s summary of under-reported news
Compiled by Bob Nixon
The Associated Press reports five mass graves in Myanmar have been identified by Rohingya Muslim refugees who fled to Bangladesh. The mass graves are located in the village of Gu Dar Pyin, where army solders last summer shot and killed Rohingya teenagers. The Myanmar government has denied any knowledge of the mass graves, but did report that a grave existed in another town where terrorists had been killed. The AP reports that Myanmar’s Army has engaged in the systematic slaughter of Muslim minority Rohingya civilians with support from Buddhist villagers. Relatives say nearly 400 people were killed during the attack in late August. (“AP Finds Evidence for Graves, Rohingya Massacre in Myanmar,” Star Tribune, Feb. 1, 2018)
The US Dept. of Homeland Security in a new draft report called on law enforcement agencies to continuously vet Sunni Muslim immigrants entering the U.S. who are deemed to have “at-risk” demographic profiles. The draft report, obtained by Foreign Policy magazine looked at 25 US based terrorist incidents from 2001 to 2017, concluding there would be “great value for the United States Government in dedicating resources to continuously evaluate persons of interest” and suggesting that immigrants to the U.S. be tracked on a “long-term basis.” (“Draft DHS Report Called for Long-Term Surveillance of Sunni Muslim Immigrants,” Foreign Policy, Feb. 15, 2018)
Schoolchildren in urban communities are at risk from exposure to air toxins causing illnesses linked to multiple brain-related disorders. The study which found that black, Latino and low-income students were the most likely to be exposed to harmful toxins, was based on research examining environmental conditions at 90,000 public schools across America. (“Air Pollution: Black, Hispanic and Poor Students Most at Risk From Toxins – Study,” The Guardian, Feb. 1, 2018)

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