IF INDIANA IS GERRYMANDERED THE PEOPLE WILL SPEAK AND BE HEARD

Harry Targ

 

Governor Braun and sectors of the Republican majorities in the Indiana legislature are advocating mid-decade gerrymandering. While we may correctly regard such advocacy as profoundly anti-democratic, that is to take away the Democratic seats in Congress, we might use such a gerrymandered strategy to our advantage.

How is that possible? First, a gerrymandered election, of course, would require that all of our Indiana Congress people face electoral challenges. Second,  incumbents in all nine districts would have to answer for Indiana's declining real wages, access to health care, and educational resources and the fact, as the United Way ALICE study has shown, that 38 percent of Hoosier households earn below a livable wage (see below). Third, contested elections in all nine districts would offer the opportunity for candidates, and their supporters, to show how most of the incumbents voted in ways to reinforce these deplorable conditions as a result of federal legislation.

And finally, candidates in all nine districts could articulate a vision of national policy, and state policies, that would help Hoosier citizens improve their lives. For example, proposals being introduced in the California legislature, which could also be introduced at the federal level, would require  that those who make the highest income and wealth in the country, particularly billionaires, pay a wealth tax to help support healthcare, education, housing for the masses of people in the United States (and states like Indiana) who are suffering. And one thing would be made crystal clear: the health and wellbeing of the American people is not a partisan issue. Voters of both parties can understand that.

The Indiana Economy Hurts Working People of Both Parties: A Little History

The material below indicates that under Republican rule in Indiana for over a decade the economic circumstances (and education, good paying jobs etc.) have worsened for Hoosier workers and their families. The Republican "business model" is a disaster for workers. From 2017 through 2022, the Indiana economy grew more slowly than the nation as a whole. In inflation-adjusted terms, the Hoosier economy expanded by 10.8%, while the nation economy as a whole grew by 11.3%.

“...the dismal growth of 2017 through 2020 accounts for all the lagging performance of the Hoosier economy. The expansion from 2009 to 2019 was the worst relative performance of our economy in state history. By 2019, the Indiana economy was slipping into recession due primarily to the tariffs put in place by the Trump administration. "What the new GDP data tells us about the Hoosier economy". Michael Hicks Muncie Star Press, reprinted in the Journal and Courier, January 8, 2024)

Tax abatements, huge job promising government funded projects, military contracts, the privatization of education from K through college, real estate speculation, and more are a substantial cause of the movement of wealth from the 99 percent to the top one percent. And we see in Indiana that 38 percent of households exist below a liveable wage, healthcare is scarcer and more expensive, there are pockets of food deserts, and across the state growing environmental degradation. It is time to say enough is enough.

However, Hoosier politicians and corporate/university elites suggest that the Indiana economy is booming and will only improve with lower taxes, more support for industrial projects like LEAP, and a general reliance on the "free market." The United Way ALICE reports suggest that economic circumstances of large percentages of Hoosiers have worsened over the last decade.  The number of households in Indiana living below a livable income have increased since the last decade.

https://iuw.org/alice-2025/

Let us be clear, the interference of President Trump and recent visits of Vice-President Vance to Indiana suggest that the new MAGA agenda is designed to radically transform both federal and state policies back to the era of the Gilded Age, when wealth was accumulated at the top and the vast majorities of the population, White and Black, men and women, most workers, Democrats and Republicans suffered enormously.

 

US IMPERIALISM IN LATIN AMERICA CONTINUES: IT IS TIME FOR THE PEACE MOVEMENT TO SAY “NO”

Harry Targ

(a repost)

“It’s past time for Maduro to go. Keep it up, President Trump,” said Senator Lindsay Graham in an X post on Friday, October 24.

Venezuela is “a candidate for decisive military action on land, sea, or air” because it has for years been “a safe haven for drug cartels poisoning America,” Graham added.

During a White House address on October 23, US President Donald Trump said, “Now they’re coming in by land … I told them the land is gonna be next.”

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/10/24/us-deploys-aircraft-carrier-and-threatens-invasion-of-venezuela-while-expanding-drug-war-to-colombia/

Progressives Need to Address US Imperialism Now!

The world again enters an economic, political, and military crisis in the Western Hemisphere. It remains important to historicize and contextualize current threats and murders in the Caribbean by the United States. The sub-text of statements from the Trump Administration “all options are on the table;” meaning that there might be a military intervention to overthrow the government of Venezuela. For many who are learning about US imperialism for the first time, it is important to revisit the history of the Western Hemisphere and to contextualize a regional crisis which is misrepresented throughout the mainstream media. And after revisiting this history it becomes clear that the Peace movement needs to take a clear anti-imperialist position.

As Greg Grandin argues in “Empire’s Workshop,” the rise of the United States as a global empire begins in the Western Hemisphere. For example, the Spanish/Cuban/American war provided the occasion for the United States to develop a two-ocean navy, fulfilling Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt’s dreams. After interfering in the Cuban Revolution in 1898 defeating Spain, the United States attacked the Spanish outpost in the Philippines, thus becoming a global power. Latin American interventionism throughout the Western Hemisphere, sending troops into Central American and Caribbean countries thirty times between the 1890s and 1933, (including a Marine occupation of Haiti from 1915 until 1934), “tested” what would become after World War II a pattern of covert interventions and wars in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

The Western Hemisphere was colonized by Spain, Portugal, Great Britain, and France from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries. The main source of accumulated wealth that funded the rise of capitalism as a world system came from raw material and slave labor in the Western Hemisphere: gold, silver, sugar, coffee, tea, cocoa, and later oil. What Marx called the stage of “primitive accumulation,” was a period in world history governed by land grabs, mass slaughter of indigenous peoples, expropriation of natural resources, and the capture, transport, and enslavement of millions of African people. Conquest, land occupation, and dispossession was coupled with the institutionalization of a Church that would convince the survivors of this stage of capitalism’s development that all was “God’s plan.”

Imperial expansion generated resistance throughout this history.  In the nineteenth century countries and peoples achieved their formal independence from colonial rule. Simon Bolivar, the nineteenth century leader of resistance, spoke for national sovereignty in Latin America.

But from 1898 until the present, the Western Hemisphere has been shaped by US efforts to replace the traditional colonial powers with neo-colonial regimes. Economic institutions, class systems, militaries, and religious institutions were influenced by United States domination of the region.

In the period of the Cold War, 1945-1991, the United States played the leading role in overthrowing the reformist government of Jacob Arbenz in Guatemala (1954), Salvador Allende in Chile (1973), and gave support to brutal military dictatorships in the 1970s in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. Also, the United States supported dictatorship in Haiti from 1957 until 1986. The Reagan administration engaged in a decade-long war on Central America in the 1980s.  In 1965 the United States sent thousands of marines to the Dominican Republic to forestall nationalist Juan Bosch from returning to power and in 1989 to overthrow the government of Manuel Noriega in Panama. (This was a prelude to Gulf War I against Iraq).

From 1959 until today the United States has sought through attempted military intervention, economic blockade, cultural intrusion, and international pressures to undermine, weaken, and destroy the Cuban Revolution.

Often during this dark history US policymakers have sought to mask interventionism in the warm glow of economic development. President Kennedy called for an economic development program in Latin America, called the Alliance for Progress and Operation Bootstrap for Puerto Rico. Even the harsh “shock therapy” of neoliberalism imposed on Bolivia in the 1980s was based upon the promise of rapid economic development in that country.

The Bolivarian Revolution

The 21st century has witnessed a variety of forms of resistance to the drive for global hegemony and the perpetuation of neoliberal globalization. First, the two largest economies in the world, China and India, have experienced economic growth rates well in excess of the industrial capitalist countries. China has developed a global export and investment program in Latin America and Africa that exceeds that of the United States and Europe.

On the Latin American continent, under the leadership and inspiration of former President Hugo Chavez, Venezuela launched the latest round of state resistance to the colossus of the north, with his Bolivarian Revolution. He planted the seeds of socialism at home and encouraged Latin Americans to participate in the construction of financial institutions and economic assistance programs to challenge the traditional hegemony of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization.

The Bolivarian Revolution stimulated political change based on varying degrees of grassroots democratization, the construction of workers’ cooperatives, and a shift from neoliberal economic policies to economic populism. A Bolivarian Revolution was being constructed with a growing web of participants: Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and, of course, Cuba.

It was hoped that after the premature death of Chavez in 2013, the Bolivarian Revolution would continue in Venezuela and throughout the region. But the economic ties and political solidarity of progressive regimes, hemisphere regional institutions, and grassroots movements have been challenged by declining oil prices and economic errors by Maduro; increasing covert intervention in Venezuelan affairs by the United States; a US-encouraged shift to the right by “soft coups” in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Ecuador; and a more aggressive United States foreign policy toward Latin America. Governments supportive of Latin American solidarity with Venezuela have been undermined and/or defeated in elections in Honduras, Paraguay, Brazil, Argentina, and now attacks have escalated against what National Security Advisor John Bolton calls “the troika of tyranny;” Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba.  As Vijay Prashad puts it: “Far right leaders in the hemisphere (Bolsonaro, Márquez, and Trump) salivate at the prospect of regime change in each of these countries. They want to eviscerate the “pink tide” from the region” (Vijay Prashad, thetricontinental.org, January 20, 2019).

Special Dilemmas Latin Americans Face

Historically all Western Hemisphere countries have been shaped and distorted in their economies, polities, and cultures by colonialism and neo-colonialism. They have also been shaped by their long histories of resistance to outside forces seeking to develop imperial hegemony. Latin American history is both a history of oppression, exploitation, and violence, and confrontation with mass movements of various kinds. The Bolivarian Revolution of the twenty-first century is the most recent exemplar of grassroots resistance against neo-colonial domination. Armed with this historical understanding several historical realities bear on the current threats to the Venezuelan government.

First, every country, with the exception of Cuba, experiences deep class divisions. Workers, peasants, the new precariat, people of color, youth, and women face off against very wealthy financiers, entrepreneurs, and industrialists, often with family ties, as well as corporate ties, with the United States. Whether one is trying to understand the soft coup in Brazil, the instability in Nicaragua, or the deep divisions in Venezuela, class struggle is a central feature of whatever conflicts are occurring.

Second, United States policy in the administrations of both political parties is fundamentally driven by opposition to the full independence of Latin America. US policy throughout the new century has been inalterably opposed to the Bolivarian Revolution. Consequently, a centerpiece of United States policy is to support by whatever means the wealthy classes in each country.

Third, as a byproduct of the colonial and neo-colonial stages in the region, local ruling classes and their North American allies have supported the creation of sizable militaries. Consequently, in political and economic life, the military remains a key actor in each country in the region. Most often, the military serves the interests of the wealthy class (or is part of it), and works overtly or covertly to resist democracy, majority rule, and the grassroots. Consequently, each progressive government in the region has had to figure out how to relate to the military. In the case of Chile, President Allende assumed the military would stay neutral in growing political disputes among competing class forces. But the Nixon Administration was able to identify and work with generals who ultimately carried out a military coup against the popular elected socialist government of Chile. So far in the Venezuelan case, the military seems to be siding with the government. Chavez himself was a military officer.

Fourth, given the rise of grassroots movements, the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela began to support “dual power,” particularly at the local level. Along with political institutions that traditionally were controlled by the rich and powerful, new local institutions of popular power were created. The establishment of popular power has been a key feature of many governments ever since the Cuban Revolution. Popular power, to varying degrees, is replicated in economic institutions, in culture, and in community life such that in Venezuela and elsewhere workers and peasants see their own empowerment as tied to the survival of revolutionary governments. In short, defense of the Maduro government, depends on the continuing support of the grassroots and the military.

Fifth, the governments of the Bolivarian Revolution face many obstacles. Small but powerful capitalist classes is one. Persistent United States covert operations and military bases throughout the region is another. And, perhaps most importantly, given the hundreds of years of colonial and neo-colonial rule, Latin American economies remain distorted by over-reliance on small numbers of raw materials and, as a result of pressure from international financial institutions, on export of selected products such as agricultural crops. In other words, historically Latin American economies have been distorted by the pressure on them to create one-crop economies to serve the interests of powerful capitalist countries, not diversified economies to serve the people.

Finally, and more speculatively, United States policy toward the region from time to time is affected by the exigencies of domestic politics. For example, the Trump Administration verbal threats against Venezuela are being articulated as the president’s domestic fortunes are being challenged by the threat of impeachment and confrontations with the new Congressional leadership. War often masks domestic troubles.

Where do Progressives Stand

First, and foremost, progressives should prioritize an understanding of imperialism, colonialism, neocolonialism, and the role of Latin American as the “laboratory” for testing United States interventionist foreign policies. This means that critics of US imperialism can be most effective by avoiding “purity tests” when contemplating political activism around US foreign policy. One cannot forget the connections between current patterns of policy toward Venezuela, with the rhetoric, the threats, the claims, and US policies toward Guatemala, Haiti, the Domincan Republic, Cuba, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Panama, and in the new century, Bolivia, Venezuela, Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina.

Second, progressives need to show solidarity with grassroots movements in the region, support human rights, oppose military interventions, and demand the closure of the myriad of United States military bases in the region and end training military personnel from the region. (When citizens raise concerns about other countries interfering in the US political system, it is hypocritical for the United States to interfere in the political and economic lives of other countries in Latin America.).

Finally, progressives must oppose all United States foreign policies that are designed to maintain twenty-first century forms of imperialism in the Western Hemisphere. Support for progressive candidates for public office should require that they oppose economic blockades, punishing austerity programs imposed by international financial institutions, the maintenance of US ties with ruling classes in the region; essentially all forms of interference in the economic and political life of the region. And, as progressives correctly proclaim about domestic life, their candidates should be in solidarity with the poor, oppressed, and marginalized people of the Western Hemisphere. Progressives cannot with integrity support the “99 percent” in the United States against the “1 percent” without giving similar support for the vast majority of workers, farmers, women, people of color, and indigenous people throughout the hemisphere.

And if it is true that US policy toward Latin America is a laboratory for its policy globally, the same standard should be applied to United States policy globally. 

The time has come for the articulation of a comprehensive stand against United States imperialism in the Western Hemisphere, and around the world.

(A useful history of United States interventionism can be found in Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq,

 

REMEMBERING CUBA: END THE BLOCKADE! REMOVE CUBA FROM THE LIST OF STATE SPONSORS OF TERRORISM

 Harry Targ

 

 

From Thursday, April 5, 2012

ECONOMICS, POLITICS, AND CULTURE:THE CUBAN EXPERIENCE

Harry Targ

(These remarks were prepared for a presentation before a musical performance at Purdue University by Sierra Maestra, the stirring band formed at the University of Havana in 1976. The band was named after the mountain range in Eastern Cuba that was the site of the formation of the Cuban revolutionary force that overthrew the U.S. supported dictator in the 1950s. The nine-person band promotes and celebrates the classic Cuba Son music that has its roots in the diversity of class, race, ethnicity, and gender in Cuban history).

People’s lives begin with the struggle for existence and are supplemented by the pursuit of joy and liberation. Culture, often reflecting the pain of daily existence and the vision of a better life, is intimately embedded in history, economics, and politics.

Cuba’s revolutionary poet Jose Marti describes his place in history, economics, and politics.

“I am a truthful man,
From the land of the palm,
Before dying, I want to
Share these poems of my soul.

My poems are light green,
But they are also flaming red
My verses are like a wounded fawn.
Seeking refuge in the mountain.

(Pete Seeger reports learning these two additional Marti verses from a Cuban of African descent in 1983.)

Red, as in the desert,
Rose the sun on the horizon.
It shone on a dead slave
Hanging from a tree of the mountain.

A child saw it, trembled,
With passion for those that wept,
And swore that with his blood
He would wash away that crime.”

Latin American social theorists and activists of the era of the Cuban revolutionary process (since the 1950s) defined the economic and political context of countries like Cuba, less passionately but rigorously, as a result of dependency. For example, Brazilian social scientist, Theotonio Dos Santos wrote about what he called “the structure of dependence.”

“Dependence is a situation in which a certain group of countries have their economy conditioned by the development and expansion of another economy, to which the former is subject.”

Andre Gunter Frank, looking at the broad sweep of history beginning with the rise of capitalism out of feudalism referred to “the development of underdevelopment.” During the fifteenth century the sectors of the globe now referred to as the “Global North” and “Global South” were roughly equal in economic and military power. But as a result of the globalization of capitalism and militarism, some countries, primarily in Europe and North America, developed at the expense of most of the other countries of the world.

Dependency theorists began to include domestic class structures in their analysis of relations between dominant and dependent nations. In addition to dominant and weak countries bound by exploitation and violence, within both powerful and weak countries class structures existed. In fact, rulers in poor countries usually were tied by interests and ideology to the interests and ideology of the ruling classes in powerful countries. And, most importantly, the poor, the exploited, the repressed in both rich and poor countries shared common experiences, often a common outlook, and potentially a common culture.

I have written a book chapter about “Themes in Cuban History” from the point of view of dominance and dependence (from Harry R. Targ, Cuba and the USA: A New World Order? International Publishers, 1992). The chapter addresses:

-Spanish conquest between 1511 and 1515

-Cuba as sugar producer

-Cuba as slave society. By 1827 over 50 percent of Cuban residents were of African descent.

-Britain’s economic and military penetration of the island beginning in the 18th century

-Revolutionary ferment, particularly slave revolts, permeating 19th century Cuban society

-The visions of U.S. leaders, including Thomas Jefferson, that some day Cuba would join the new nation to the North.

-U.S. investor penetration of the island, challenging the Spanish and British. By the 1880s over 80 percent of sugar exports went to the United States and large plantations on the island were owned by Americans.

-The Spanish/Cuban/American war of 1898 which lead to a full transfer of colonial and neo-colonial hegemony from the Spanish and British to the United States

-The United States establishment of economic, political, and cultural domination of the island from 1898 to 1959. Subordinate wealthy and powerful Cubans controlled the political system, benefitting from U.S. hegemony, while “the poor people of this earth” on the island made up the vast majority.

-1953 to 1959 armed struggle which overthrew the Batista dictatorship and the elimination of U.S. interests on the island.

-1959 to the present Cuba haltingly, with international and domestic opposition, pursuing a new society to “wash away that crime” of long years of empire and dependency.

How is this history relevant to indigenous Cuban music and its connections with U.S. culture?

Culture, it seems to me, grows out of the experience of peoples. That experience is shaped by history, economics, and politics. Music is a common way of communicating and sharing experience, particularly of pain and joy.

The seeds of a common Cuban culture were planted in various fields--Africa, the sugar plantations of the island, and growing relations between Cubans and people of African descent in the region, including the United States.

Finally, culture can be revolutionary when it expresses pain, implies a better life, and extends the experiences of some to others--of similar class, racial, ethnic, and gender histories.

So as we listen to Sierra Maestra and reflect on the roots of its music, its contribution to jazz in the U.S., and the commonalities of Cuban Son and U.S jazz and blues, we might remember Marti’s expression from the poet’s point of view:

“With the poor people of this earth,
I want to share my lot.
The little streams of the mountains
Please me more than the sea.”

(All verses quoted here are from Pete Seeger, Where Have all the Flowers Gone; A Singer’s Stories, Songs, Seeds, Robberies, A Sing Out Publication,1993).

LIES AND FOREIGN POLICY:Old and New Stories

 Saturday, March 5, 2022

LIES AND FOREIGN POLICY: AN OLD STORY

 Harry Targ

This is an old story. As Professor John Mearsheimer has pointed out, governments, often democracies, lie to convince their citizens that war is justified. As many have pointed out, lies have been perpetrated on all sides about the Ukraine war.

Part of the job of peace activists is to interrogate all the narratives, seek truth, and stand up for basic principles: no war, no interventions overt and covert, and justice for all people.

And it is a testament to the potential wisdom of people that governments feel they must lie to achieve their goals.

**********************************************

Foreign Policy Lies Lead to War

July 25, 2003

By Harry Targ

On August 2, 1964, North Vietnamese armed motor boats attacked two U.S. naval vessels off the coast of North Vietnam. The administration of Lyndon Johnson defined the attacks as an unprovoked act of North Vietnamese aggression.

Two days later it was announced that another attack on U.S. ships in international waters had occurred and the U.S. responded with air attacks on North Vietnamese targets. President Johnson then took a resolution he had already prepared to the Congress of the United States. The so-called Gulf of Tonkin resolution declared that the Congress authorizes the president to do what he deemed necessary to defend U.S. national security in Southeast Asia. Only two Senators voted "no." Over the next three years the U.S. sent 500,000 troops to Vietnam to carry out a massive air and ground war in both the South and North of the country.

Within a year of the so-called Gulf of Tonkin incidents, evidence began to appear indicating that the August 2 attack was provoked. The two U.S. naval vessels were in North Vietnamese coastal waters orchestrating acts of sabotage in the Northern part of Vietnam. More serious, evidence pointed to the inescapable conclusion that the second attack on August 4 never occurred.

President Johnson's lies to the American people about the Gulf of Tonkin contributed to the devastating decisions to escalate a U.S. war in Vietnam that cost 57,000 U.S. troop deaths and upwards of three million Vietnamese deaths.

Forty years later, George W. Bush and his key aides put together a package of lies about Iraq- imports of uranium from Niger, purchases of aluminum rods which supposedly could be used for constructing nuclear weapons, development of biological and chemical weapons, and connections between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden.

As the Vietnamese and Iraqi cases show, foreign policies built on lies can lead to imperial wars, huge expenditures on the military, economic crises at home, and military casualties abroad.

The American people must insist that their leaders tell the truth about the U.S. role in the world.

And from Peace Action October 23, 2025

Subject: BREAKING: 9 illicit military strikes, 37 dead, no legal authorization

n Venezuela - help stop Trump's march to endless war!

Harry - If the now NINE illicit military strikes from the Trump administration on small craft in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific ocean are beginning to look a lot like the “endless wars” we confronted over the last 25 years, you’re on to something. ✅ No Congressional authorization for military strikes ✅ Vague, unsubstantiated threats to our security ✅ Designation of actors as “enemy combatants” to have them summarily killed without any legal review ✅ Lies, lies, and more lies If it looks like endless war, talks like endless war, and walks like endless war, then it’s more than likely the beginning of yet another endless war. As of this week, the Trump administration has now bombed nine individual small boats, killing 37 people. The President has justified the strikes as a matter of national self-defense, claiming, without evidence, that drugs from the region are responsible for three hundred thousand deaths in the U.S. last year. “To every terrorist thug smuggling poisonous drugs into the United States of America, please be warned that we will blow you out of existence,” Trump said at the United Nations last month. “Each boat that we sink carries drugs that would kill more than twenty-five thousand Americans.” In reality, there were about eighty thousand drug-overdose deaths in the U.S. last year. Fentanyl, which was responsible for the overwhelming majority of them, doesn’t come from Venezuela, and the Coast Guard has NO record of ever seizing it in the Caribbean.[1]  Trump's strategy also now extends well beyond these small boat attacks. Media reports indicate his administration is preparing potential drone strikes within Venezuela itself, targeting what they claim are cartel leaders and drug labs.[2] Officials have suggested similar military actions could extend to Mexico, where Trump has repeatedly threatened intervention. This represents Trump's broader attempt to assert U.S. military dominance throughout the Western Hemisphere, treating our neighboring countries as targets for American force rather than partners for diplomatic solutions. Earlier this month, Senators Tim Kaine (D-VA) and Adam Schiff (D-CA) introduced a broad War Powers Resolution to block strikes in the Caribbean Sea. Their resolution lost on a largely partisan vote, and the strikes have predictably escalated. Now, they are back with a more specific War Powers Resolution aimed at stopping an unauthorized war with Venezuela, and the Senate needs to feel the heat from the majority of Americans who want an end to these unjustified, illegal, endless US wars.  Click here now to demand your senators support the Kaine/Schiff/Paul War Powers Resolution today! Harry, this is a critical moment in stopping this dangerous new war from escalating out of control. Trump has indicated that he plans to step up his dangerous warmongering. In addition to the drone strikes in the Caribbean, he’s already admitted to authorizing CIA operations within the borders of Venezuela. He’s ordered B-52 bombers to fly just off the Venezuela coast. Trump has foreshadowed a land war as well, threatening "so now we’ll have to start looking about the land because they’ll be forced to go by land.” With the initial War Powers Resolution earlier this month, forty-four Democrats, two Independents, and two Republicans showed they had the spine to stand up and block Trump’s unauthorized, unjustified military strikes against boats in the Caribbean. We now need to turn those 48 votes into the 51 we need to pass this War Powers Resolution. We must get louder and even more insistent in our calls for no more war –– and that’s what we need you to do today. Contact your senators today and demand that they reclaim their constitutional authority to debate and vote on war authorization, and support SJ Res 90 - the Kaine/Schiff/Paul War Powers Resolution to end U.S. armed hostilities with Venezuela. Behind this ramped-up militarization of U.S. relations in the Western Hemisphere is Stephen Miller, the President’s deputy chief of staff and the head of the White House Homeland Security Council. Miller is also a key figure behind the appalling increase in militarization against immigrants here at home. In Miller’s view, these military strikes help expand the President’s power, while also reinforcing the narrative of Venezuelan immigrants as “alien enemies.” As another former Trump Administration official put it, “this just feels like the militarization of domestic policy. How do you stay in power? You create an ‘other.’ You say that we’re under attack. You create a casus belli. You blame the other for everything. This is happening while you have the deployment of National Guardsmen to cities. You’re getting people used to these kinds of actions. This is expanding the definition of the use of force.”[1] Yet our constitution gives the power to authorize the use of military force to Congress, and it’s incumbent upon us to make sure they hear our insistent demand to take that authority back. Or, as Senator Tim Kaine more aptly put it, “Should this lawless Administration drag our servicemembers into an escalating conflict without a specific authorization by Congress, every American will be able to tell from today’s vote if their senators tried to stop it, or rolled over.” Please, write to your senators today and demand they go on the record for ending this potentially disastrous war.  In solidarity against this disastrous, illegal, and unnecessary war with Venezuela,  All of us at Peace Action Sources: [1] https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/the-real-target-of-trumps-war-on-drug-boats