Author Archives: ModestoRoland

Al Franken Wants to Ban Bullying of LGBT Students. Will Republicans Let Him?

by ModestoRoland Posted on July 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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Every congressional session for the past five years, Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) has introduced legislation to protect LGBT students from harassment and bullying at public schools. Every time, it hasn’t so much as received a vote on the Senate floor. But on Tuesday, Franken thinks his long-suffering bill might finally win passage.

Since 2010, Franken has introduced the Student Non-Discrimination Act, a simple measure that would prohibit discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation—just as schools are already required to prevent discrimination due to sex, religion, or race. School administrators would be “expected to step in and set a policy that kids can’t do this,” Franken said in an interview with Mother Jones on Monday. “They can’t bully kids because they’re LGBT. If they do, they’ll be told not to and face disciplinary action just like a kid who bullies kids because they’re black, or because they’re Asian, or because they have a disability.”

It wouldn’t be just kid-on-kid harassment that Franken’s bill would ban; school officials themselves wouldn’t be able to treat LGBT students differently based on their identities. Public schools would no longer be able to bar students from attending prom with a same-sex date, for example.

According to his Franken’s office, the measure is schedule to be voted on Tuesday as an amendment to the Senate’s bill to amend No Child Left Behind. “In the last Congress we got 64 votes in the Senate for ENDA—that’s the Employment Non-Discrimination Act—and that is basically setting the same rights to adults that here we’re trying to extend to kids. This, to me, is a lower bar. I think that we can do this,” Franken says. “I think that it will be a close vote, the make-up of the Senate has changed since the last Senate, but I don’t quite understand why my colleagues would not extend these rights to children.”

Despite that optimism, it’s unclear whether enough Republicans will line up to support Franken’s measure on Tuesday. So far just one Republican, Sen. Mark Kirk of Illinois, has signed on as a co-sponsor. “I’m going to be certainly lobbying my colleagues and try to convince them that we’re senators, but we’re also grown-ups, and we should be there for these kids,” Franken says. “Think about your own kid, going to school with anticipation or going to school with fear.”

During a speech on the Senate floor Monday afternoon, Franken offered a litany of statistics showing why LGBT students need extra protection from harassment. About three out of four LGBT students reported verbal harassment in a 2013 National School Climate survey. From that same study, 35 percent said they suffered a physical assault at school, and almost a third missed at least a day of school within the month of the survey due to fear for their safety. “You can’t learn when you’re afraid, when you dread going to school,” Franken told Mother Jones. He says he became fully invested in solving the problem after a raft of suicides of LGBT student and other bullied teenagers hit the Anoka-Hennepin County school district in Minnesota from 2009 to 2011.

Even if Franken’s amendment passes the Senate, it’d still have to clear the House during reconciliation, when Congress will try to merge competing education reform bills. Colorado Democrat Jared Polis put forward the same measure when the House debated a reauthorization of the education bill last week, but Republican leaders in the chamber declined to put it up for a vote. But Franken is hopeful, he says, since the White House has been “very supportive” of the measure and would help push it during reconciliation.

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Al Franken Wants to Ban Bullying of LGBT Students. Will Republicans Let Him?

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America Still Has Hundreds of Military Bases Worldwide. Have They Made Us Any Safer?

by ModestoRoland Posted on November 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

With the launch of a new US-led war in Iraq and Syria against the Islamic State (IS), the United States has engaged in aggressive military action in at least 13 countries in the Greater Middle East since 1980. In that time, every American president has invaded, occupied, bombed, or gone to war in at least one country in the region. The total number of invasions, occupations, bombing operations, drone assassination campaigns, and cruise missile attacks easily runs into the dozens.

As in prior military operations in the Greater Middle East, US forces fighting IS have been aided by access to and the use of an unprecedented collection of military bases. They occupy a region sitting atop the world’s largest concentration of oil and natural gas reserves and has long been considered the most geopolitically important place on the planet. Indeed, since 1980, the US military has gradually garrisoned the Greater Middle East in a fashion only rivaled by the Cold War garrisoning of Western Europe or, in terms of concentration, by the bases built to wage past wars in Korea and Vietnam.

In the Persian Gulf alone, the US has major bases in every country save Iran. There is an increasingly important, increasingly large base in Djibouti, just miles across the Red Sea from the Arabian Peninsula. There are bases in Pakistan on one end of the region and in the Balkans on the other, as well as on the strategically located Indian Ocean islands of Diego Garcia and the Seychelles. In Afghanistan and Iraq, there were once as many as 800 and 505 bases, respectively. Recently, the Obama administration inked an agreement with new Afghan President Ashraf Ghani to maintain around 10,000 troops and at least nine major bases in his country beyond the official end of combat operations later this year. US forces, which never fully departed Iraq after 2011, are now returning to a growing number of bases there in ever larger numbers.

Map: The US Military Footprint, Worldwide

In short, there is almost no way to overemphasize how thoroughly the US military now covers the region with bases and troops. This infrastructure of war has been in place for so long and is so taken for granted that Americans rarely think about it and journalists almost never report on the subject. Members of Congress spend billions of dollars on base construction and maintenance every year in the region, but ask few questions about where the money is going, why there are so many bases, and what role they really serve. By one estimate, the United States has spent $10 trillion protecting Persian Gulf oil supplies over the past four decades.

Approaching its 35th anniversary, the strategy of maintaining such a structure of garrisons, troops, planes, and ships in the Middle East has been one of the great disasters in the history of American foreign policy. The rapid disappearance of debate about our newest, possibly illegal war should remind us of just how easy this huge infrastructure of bases has made it for anyone in the Oval Office to launch a war that seems guaranteed, like its predecessors, to set off new cycles of blowback and yet more war.

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America Still Has Hundreds of Military Bases Worldwide. Have They Made Us Any Safer?

Posted in alo, FF, GE, ONA, Safer, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on America Still Has Hundreds of Military Bases Worldwide. Have They Made Us Any Safer?