Rachel Maddow is my favorite journalist, because she weaves many distinct parts of a news story together in a way that they all make sense. Fortunately we also have a politician who does the same thing with a policy plan that Rachel does with news. Elizabeth Warren addressed students at American University on Thursday for 35 minutes.
Americans who seek an enlightened alternative to the crudely nationalist and frequently antidemocratic ideology of Trumpism, and to a broader misdirection of US foreign policy that began long before the current president took office, got it this week from Elizabeth Warren.
She delivered a striking rebuke to the president and his policies in a speech that many saw as framing the outlines of a 2020 Democratic challenge to Trump. But the speech was about more than political positioning. What Warren said challenged not just the awful turn that Republicans have taken under Trump but the failures of her own Democratic Party.
“Our country is in a moment of crisis decades in the making, a moment in which America’s middle class has been hollowed out, working people have been betrayed, and democracy itself is under threat,” Warren told an audience at American University on Thursday. “While it is easy to blame President Trump for our problems, the truth is that our challenges began long before him. And without serious reforms, they are just as likely to outlast him.”
To counter the drift of the United States and its best ideals, Warren is proposing to break the grip of billionaire campaign donors and corporate interests on American policy-making. “We need to refocus our international economic policies so that they benefit all Americans, not just wealthy elites,” the senator argued. “At the same time, we must refocus our security policies by reining in unsustainable and ill-advised military commitments and adapt our strategies overseas for the new challenges we’ll face in this coming century. And we need to end the fiction that our domestic and foreign policies are somehow separate, and recognize that policies that undermine working families in this country, also erode America’s strength in the world.”
“In other words,” she concluded, “it’s time to create a foreign policy that works for all Americans, not just the rich and powerful. Authoritarianism is on the move around the world, there is no time to waste.”… [emphasis added]
Inserted from <The Nation>
Here is the speech in its entirety.
I still think we need this woman in the White House!
RESIST!!
