Well here’s a Bernie News Roundup of sorts, and more news will come in separate threads later.
Starting off with what most of you have already read, but.. worth reading again:
Bernie Sanders Just Gave One of the Finest Speeches of His Career
The most meaningful foreign-policy address delivered by a prominent American political figure in this moment of global turmoil and possibility was not, as should be quite clear by now, Donald Trump’s “Rocket Man” rant at the United Nations.
Rather, it was the speech that Senator Bernie Sanders gave Thursday at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. The long-planned address by the 2016 presidential contender was not presented as a formal response to Trump. And yet, as Sanders outlined a vision for foreign policy that was more nuanced, more complex, and more genuinely internationalist than that of the president, he provided the most necessary and valuable counter to Trump.
Sanders also countered the narrow framework of the contemporary debate about foreign policy that gave rise to the nationalist presidency of a billionaire populist who thinks there is a country in Africa called “Nambia.”
“When we talk about foreign policy it is clear that there are some who believe that the United States would be best served by withdrawing from the global community. I disagree. As the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth, we have got to help lead the struggle to defend and expand a rules-based international order in which law, not might, makes right,” Sanders declared in a critical section of his address.
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The speech that Sanders delivered at Westminster College touched on many issues of the moment—President Trump’s “incredibly foolish and short-sighted” abandonment of the Paris agreement and efforts to address climate change, the failure of “free trade” schemes such as NAFTA and the danger of flawed proposals such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership deal, and his fury over United States “support for Saudi Arabia’s destructive intervention in Yemen, which has killed many thousands of civilians and created a humanitarian crisis in one of the region’s poorest countries.” He decried “a rise in authoritarianism and right-wing extremism–both domestic and foreign—which further weakens this order by exploiting and amplifying resentments, stoking intolerance and fanning ethnic and racial hatreds among those in our societies who are struggling.”
But the speech that Sanders gave was much more than a response to the headlines and challenges of the moment. It was a deeply thoughtful and deeply historic address, which recognized the significance of the fact that he was appearing on the stage where in 1946 former British prime minister Winston Churchill outlined a post–World War II vision of how to shield future generations from “the two giant marauders, war and tyranny.”
Much more beyond the link.
