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As unjust as the war in Ukraine is of which we are reminded constantly by our corporate media . Not much is mentioned about the afghan people having to sell their kidneys and their children to keep from starving. Are we only interested in the plight of people who look like us?

Kent

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As I Iisten to Ralph and Medea spout excuses for russia's invasion and rape of Ukraine, I'm sickened to my stomach. I guess old leftists just can't let go of the dream of the soviet union/russia being a Valhalla. Like typical leftists, they blame it all on the US/cia/military industrial complex. The facts are, putin wants to reestablish the Soviet empire, which dissolution he called the greatest catastrophe, and Ukraine and Georgia are just the start. Hey Ralph and Medea, you like talking about the expansion of Nato as an excuse, what about the Budapest accord where the US, Great Britain and russia agreed to respect Ukraine's sovereignty in exchange for giving up 2,000 nuclear heads? (making Ukraine at the time the world's third largest nuclear power). Russia broke it's promise and now both the UK and the US have the moral if not the legal obligation to assist Ukraine.

Oh, and let's not forget Finland and Sweden. They have woken up to russia's fascism and can't wait to join Nato. Are those two countries American stooges, Ralph?

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If anyone had any doubts the U.S. is not a war driven economy, one need look no further than the timing of the ending of U.S. military forces in Afghanistan to the start of the first U.S. weapons shipments to the Ukrainian conflict. Not even six months peace between our involvement.

August 30, 2021, withdrawal of U.S. and Allied forces from Afghanistan - https://www.nytimes.com/article/afghanistan-war-us.html

January 22, 2022 - First Biden authorized shipments of weapons to the Ukraine -

https://www.euronews.com/2022/01/22/us-sends-first-shipment-of-military-aid-to-ukraine-amid-standoff-with-russia

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Thank you thank you thank you Ralph! Having Medea on the show is brave and so appreciated! As we join together for a world beyond war, rejecting the media complex blue and red that supported this insanity is brave work. Your values are core values, thanks for all you do!

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It is not enough to just go back to the 1990s. If we truly want to look at the source of the problem in Eastern Europe we should be looking in the late 1930s. It's the Soviet Union that established the groundwork for the Nazi occupation of Poland. They were allies at the beginning of the war. You cannot expect that history to be whitewashed because it was Joseph Stalin in collaboration with Adolf Hitler that permitted the occupations of the Baltics. You can't explain any other way why those peoples would want to have as much Western support as possible. While the Soviets and the Germans took Eastern Europe at the outset of the war the West sat on the Western front.

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If only there was some way that citizens could choose our representatives for a term of office. Then citizens could choose representatives that are not controlled by the Military Industrial Congressional Complex or other big money corporate interests.

If there was a way that citizens could choose our representatives for a term of office then people such as Ralph would be encouraging citizens to choose representatives that are not controlled by the MICC or other big money interests and instead choose representatives controlled by small donations from ordinary citizens as people such as Ralph keep pointing out the problems caused by representatives controlled by the MICC and other big money interests.

It is hard to imagine that if there were a way for citizens to choose our representatives that people such as Ralph would not be working to replace big money representatives with representatives controlled by small donations from ordinary citizens.

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Nov 27, 2022·edited Nov 27, 2022

...I would call the current war in Ukraine a "less than optimal but acceptable" event in the world view of the real power elements in the US and Western Europe: the policy blob and the military/industrial beast that exists to do nothing but expand. The US has had boots on the ground in Ukraine for at least eight---probably ten, or perhaps more--years. JSOC is NOT a sort of Armed Peace Corps. If there were Spetsnaz battallions within a hundred miles of the Mexican border, we'd start with B-52s and then go to nukes until it was flattened for a hundred miles. Putin is an autocrat and obviously he shouldn't have invaded, but these bloodthirsty Dems need to get some perspective, and maybe their souls back, sooner rather than later...

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We need to discuss the role of "MICIMATT" in regard to our country's present military and foreign policies.

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All the parties involved in this episode bring up some very good points. I enjoyed the discussion. Regarding Mr. Nader and Mr. Swanson’s discussion about the military budget and the national budget as a whole, as I’ve stated before, I believe the narrative needs to move away from the concept that spending in one area is some kind of natural limitation on spending in other areas when it comes to the federal budget in the US. If nothing else, for at least most of the time where that has been the narrative, there has not been a successful movement to limit the military budget and reallocate the money towards social spending. It is not a winning strategy for ending militarization or for expanding social spending.

Moreover, and more importantly, the notion of the constrained national budget is one tied to monetarism, Milton Friedman’s ideology, and is not consistent with empirical macroeconomic evidence. I know that I have pointed this out to Steve Skrovan before in the comments with evidence. The real issue with military spending is not a budgetary one, but rather that a focus on militarization and war is a tremendous waste of human capital. Many of our brightest minds are designing equipment of war and our valuable labor is going towards building these tools of militarization. Some of this equipment, if ever used, will be the destruction of humanity. Needless to say, this is perhaps not the best use of precious resources.

Furthermore, militarization has to be one of the most environmentally destructive activities. Even if we forget about the consequences of nuclear war, military objects such as tanks, jets, submarines, and so forth are incredibly environmentally destructive. It is not like we can rely on regulation to force tanks and fighter jets, for example, to be more fuel efficient. On top of all of that, militarization is taking diplomatic resources away from achieving international policy which might lead to substantive environmental reforms.

In the last RNRH episode with Jim Hightower, I mentioned in the comments how progressives need to find a way to connect with oil & gas industry employees to find ways to ensure their continued employment without the burdens of benefit loss, salary loss, and any burdensome unpaid retraining requirements. The exact same thing is true with those who work on defense projects. Even people who hate the idea of war might vote to support militarization if it means they get to keep/gain a stable, well-paying job in their community. Progressives need to find ways to keep these people employed in their communities without the militarization. This citizen-oriented perspective might be the way to get people to vote against fossil fuel and military interests. This might seem like a tall task, and it is, but the task is a manageable one if we understand what economic resources are available to us. This is related to my earlier critique of the monetarist narrative which is oddly and incorrectly used by many progressives.

Organizing is a central theme to the RNRH, and for good reason, but it seems to me that organizing a broad base is a lot easier when the organizing is centered around full employment rather than attempted organizing around narratives which might lead people to believe that stable, well-paying jobs in their communities might become lost. Thus, achieving full employment needs to be a policy goal for progressives because it’s a vital piece of the peace puzzle.

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