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Why Are 'Hands Off' Rallies Defending War-Hungry NATO?
Many people believe that NATO is a peace-loving, defensive alliance, but the opposite is true.
Apr 05, 2025
We are passionate supporters of all but one of the items on the Hands Off agenda for the April 5 rallies. We couldn’t agree more that the corrupt U.S. government should stop destroying, privatizing, firing, and giving away the post office, schools, land, Social Security, healthcare, environmental protections, and all sorts of essential public services. But we are deeply disturbed to see NATO (The North Atlantic Treaty Organization) on the list of items that we are rallying to protect.
Many people believe that NATO is a peace-loving, defensive alliance, but the opposite is true. During the past 30 years, NATO has fomented a vast arc of violence stretching from Libya to Afghanistan, leaving villages bombed, infrastructure destroyed, and countless dead.
Originally formed in opposition to the Soviet Union, NATO not only failed to disband with the fall of the Soviet Union, but it increased from 16 members in 1991 to 32 members today. Despite promises not to expand eastward, it ploughed ahead against the advice of senior, experienced U.S. diplomats who warned that this would inflame tensions with Russia. While Russia bears full responsibility for invading Ukraine, in violation of the UN Charter, we cannot deny the disastrous role played by NATO in provoking and then prolonging the war in Ukraine. Two years ago, then NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg admitted that insisting on NATO membership for Ukraine had brought on the Ukraine war. “[Putin] went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders,” he said.
NATO has taught people to measure military spending as a percentage of a nation's economy, as if war were a public service to be maximized.
The inclusion of NATO in the Hands Off list contradicts the basic Hands Off agenda. Right now, at the bidding of President Trump, NATO is openly and aggressively pressuring its member nations to move money from healthcare, retirement funds, and clean energy to weapons and militarism. Watch a video of the Secretary General of NATO publicly telling the European Union to move money from healthcare and retirement to war. It should be clear which side of the Hands Off agenda NATO is on.
NATO is a destabilizing, law-breaking force for militarization and war provocation. Its existence makes wars, including nuclear wars, more likely. Its hostility toward the few significant militaries in the world that are not among its members fuels arms races and conflicts. The commitment of NATO members to join each others’ wars and NATO’s pursuit of enemies far from the North Atlantic risk global destruction.
We would be happy to expand the Hands Off demands to international issues, such as Hands Off Palestine or Yemen or Greenland or Panama or Canada. But we do object to including a destructive institution like NATO, an institution that systematically and grossly violates the commitment to settle disputes peacefully contained in the UN Charter. If we are truly committed to human needs and the environment, as well as peace, diplomacy, and the UN Charter, then we should eliminate NATO from the Hands Off agenda.
We should go beyond that. We should recognize that while many government agencies are being unfairly cut and need to be defended, one enormous agency that makes up over half of federal discretionary spending is being drastically increased and needs to be cut. That is the Pentagon. The U.S. government spends more on war and war preparation than on all other discretionary items combined. Of 230 other countries, the U.S. spends more on militarism than 227 of them combined. Russia and China spend a combined 21% of what the U.S. and its allies spend on war. Of 230 other countries, the U.S. exports more weaponry than 228 of them combined. The U.S. spends more on war per capita than any other nation, except Israel.
This is not normal or acceptable, or compatible with funding human and environmental needs. NATO has taught people to measure military spending as a percentage of a nation's economy, as if war were a public service to be maximized. Trump has recently switched from demanding 2% of economies for war to 3%, and then almost immediately to 5%. There's no logical limit.
Companies that profit from war, like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, will always push for more military spending. So will NATO. While NATO allies consider Russia their most immediate and direct threat, their long-term adversary is China. The constant search for enemies leads to a vicious cycle of arms races. But there is a different path: the pursuit of disarmament negotiations, the rule of law and global cooperation. If we pursued that path, we could move massive amounts of money away from weapons to invest in addressing the non-optional dangers of climate, disease, and poverty.
The rational and moral international piece of the Hands Off agenda should be to eliminate both NATO and the voracious militarism that threaten the future of life on this planet.
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The Idiotic Tariff Policy of Dim-Witted Trump
The U.S. president, sadly, is not that smart or well-informed about history or the global economy—and apparently neither are his advisors. Ideally, Democrats would start proving they understand how to talk intelligently about trade.
Apr 04, 2025
Feeling liberated yet?
People of a certain age will remember Yosemite Sam chasing Bugs Bunny around with a shotgun, blasting holes in walls, ceilings, and windows while completely missing his target. It’s the perfect metaphor for Trump’s tariff policy announced this week.
Trump is acting as if tariffs were a form of warfare, and he’s “fighting back” against the countries that have “taken advantage of us.” This is how he’s behaving like Yosemite Sam with his blunderbuss, shooting everywhere and just making a mess while missing the target altogether.
He’s not only throwing wild tariffs on every country that trades with America (except Russia), but he also put a flat 10% tariff on every product imported into the United States (except from Russia).
Additionally, this sort of rhetoric — and making tariffs country-specific instead of product-specific — is what drives trade wars that also run the risk of increasing the danger of actual wars.
If Trump had any understanding of tariffs outside of his simplistic “you hurt us, we hurt you” worldview, he’d realize the best way to accomplish his stated goal of bringing manufacturing back to this country can be tariffs, but only when they are done carefully and selectively.
“Shooting” at countries instead of at products is not only hostile; it’s also generally counterproductive except, literally, during time of war.
Further demonstrating Trump‘s ignorance about the difference between business-based tariffs on products and war-based tariffs on countries, his commerce secretary, billionaire Howard Lutnick, is warning countries not to engage in reciprocal tariffs or trade restrictions.
The second solid criticism of Trump’s tariff plan is that only Congress has the legal power to impose them, and that’s a good thing.
No manufacturer is going to invest billions of dollars and years of construction to build a factory here in response to a tariff thrown up on the whim of a mercurial president; they want to know that that tariff will be there for decades so they can earn back their investment.
Which is why, outside of wartime, tariffs should be specific to products, not countries.
Our Department of Commerce specifies over 17,000 separate categories of products that tariffs can be attached to, and they’re often startlingly specific. Steel, for example, has 740 sub-categories ranging from rolled steel to ingots to hundreds of items as specific as “Semi-finished iron/nonalloy steel, ≥ 0.25% carbon, rectangular/square cross-section, width ≥ 4x thickness.”
Products that we make in America, or want to make here again, should be the targets of tariffs, not the countries that make them. And while there are thousands of product categories that are amenable to tariffs, there are also things it would be stupid to put tariffs on because we don’t make them here — and don’t plan to.
For example, we don’t grow coffee in the US, but they do in Mexico; that’s why we imported 65.5 million kilograms of unroasted beans from that country in 2022. Slapping a tariff on all Mexican goods will sweep up coffee, which will only succeed in driving up inflation here, as the cost of the tariff is added to every cup in every kitchen and restaurant across America.
Bringing back manufacturing also a really good thing to do, because it’s historically been one of the most important ways that workers can find entrée into the middle class without a college education.
Sadly, though, Trump may be doing more damage than good to the cause of the middle class with his bizarre country-based tariff policy.
Trump is able to do his uninformed tariff song-and-dance because there’s a loophole in our tariff laws that allows the president — during a time of national emergency — to impose emergency tariffs. It makes sense that the president should have that flexibility in the event of another Republican Great Depression or World War III, but that isn’t what’s happening today.
Trump declared a state of emergency at the beginning of his administration specifically so he could put his tariffs into place — which means the next president can simply reverse them. Again, no CEO in her right mind is going to invest billions based on that level of uncertainty.
At least four Republican senators get this; Tuesday night, Trump did one of his signature weird 1 am screeds on his Nazi-infested social media platform, calling out Mitch McConnell, Rand Paul, Susan Collins, and Lisa Murkowski by name because they’re supporting a Democratic effort to end the state of emergency so Congress can reclaim its trade authority. They voted with Democrats last night and the resolution passed; it goes to the House now, where Mike Johnson will probably kill it.
If Trump had any understanding of tariffs outside of his simplistic “you hurt us, we hurt you” worldview, he’d realize the best way to accomplish his stated goal of bringing manufacturing back to this country can be tariffs, but only when they are done carefully and selectively.
But, no; understanding anything other than how to cheat on golf and your taxes, screw vendors, stiff workers, and sexually assault women is beyond his limited abilities. And, of course, running companies into bankruptcy and being bailed out by Russians. Repeatedly.
When Congress imposes tariffs there’s a far better chance they’ll stay in place long enough to assure American companies it’s worth building new factories. Instead of imposing his tariffs by fiat, Trump should have put them into the form of a proposed bill that he’d then submit to Congress.
Sadly, he’s not that smart or well-informed about history, and apparently neither are his advisors.
So, here we are with actions taken that may throw the entire world into recession, or possibly even a second Republican Great Depression.
That said, there’s also a huge risk to any Democrats who might want to play Yosemite Sam themselves, blasting away at Trump’s tariffs and missing the nuance — and the multiple truths — that make up today’s trade situation.
The simple reality is that tariffs do work to protect domestic manufacturing; they have since the founding of our republic, and are used today by every country in the world (including the US) for that purpose. (There’s a great explainer of all this, including the American history with tariffs going back to George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, here.)
And, when Reagan embraced neoliberal cuts in tariffs, negotiating the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1986 — which led to the WTO and NAFTA (also negotiated by Reagan and Bush respectively) — those two Republican presidents began the long slide of American manufacturing.
As the union guy who spoke at Trump’s event yesterday noted, anybody over 50 can remember when everything in Walmart — and pretty much everywhere else, including the cars on the dealership lots — was made in America.
Hell, Sam Walton started Walmart with the slogan “100% Made in the USA” which is also the title of his autobiography; it was only when those tariffs collapsed as a result of Clinton signing off on Reagan’s/Bush’s NAFTA and the WTO that Walton’s stores began to import from cheap-labor countries and stopped stocking American-made products.
Because of this simple reality, Democrats who simply fall back on the old neoliberal talking points that tariffs are sales taxes and that countries that trade with each other are less likely to go to war with each other (the original explicit neoliberal rationale for tariff-free trade) are risking political suicide.
It’s hard to make political arguments that use nuance, but in this case, Democrats really don’t have a choice. Having grown up in the Midwest (Michigan) I can tell you that most anybody who hails from a former manufacturing region is cheering Trump on right now.
Regardless of party.
And today’s Democrats haven’t been all that hostile to tariffs: Not only did President Biden keep Trump’s tariffs from his first term in place, he added additional tariffs of his own (although almost nobody knows it).
Biden increased tariffs on steel and aluminum products from 7.5% to 25% in 2024; his tariffs on semiconductors will rise to 50% by the end of this year; Democratic tariffs on some electric vehicles (EVs) hit 100% last year; Biden’s tariffs on lithium-ion EV batteries and magnets for EV motors will go up by 25% by 2026. After the Covid crisis, the Biden administration even put a 50% tariff on syringes and needles to jump-start domestic production, and personal protective equipment (PPE) tariffs went up 25%.
(Notice that none of those are tariffs on countries, just on products. The only country-specific tariffs Biden approved were against Russia, in response to their invading Ukraine, as a form of economic warfare.)
Opposing tariffs just because Trump loves them, in other words, isn’t just ineffective politics; it doesn’t even conform to Biden’s new Democratic trade policy.
So, here’s how modern Democrats need to talk about this situation. It’s not only good political messaging; it’s also good trade policy, as I lay out in my book The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America.
First, Democrats need to answer the question, “Why tariffs, particularly if they act as taxes on imported goods?”
That answer is easy; it’s an accurate explanation of what Trump is totally garbling: Tariffs encourage manufacturers to produce their products here in the USA instead of in cheap labor or high pollution countries.
But the “how to do it” is the critical part.
Democrats, in other words, need to differentiate between “smart tariffs” and “stupid” or “wartime tariffs,” advocating the former while ridiculing the latter.
“Put tariffs on products, not on countries” would be a great start, for example.
Our dim-witted president is being called out on his shoot-from-the-hip tariff policy from both left and right. The country is confused, and needs to understand what is going on and how it will impact their future.
Democrats must therefore take a clear position in favor of smart, targeted tariffs — on individual products rather than countries — like Biden did.
And then they must point out that Trump’s obsession with slapping punitive tariffs on countries (except on Russian products) stupidly risks utterly crashing our economy — and possibly even the world’s economy — while starting a trade war that nobody will win.
And, tragically, it’s all being done not for any good reason, but just because Trump is not that bright.
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Trump DOJ to Seek Death Penalty for Luigi Mangione
Calling the death penalty "an intolerably cruel and unusual punishment," one socialist writer said that the European Union should offer the alleged assassin asylum.
Apr 01, 2025
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Tuesday that she is directing federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty in the case of Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old man accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December.
Federal prosecutors in New York City filed murder charges against Mangione in mid-December after Mangione was arrested in a McDonald's in Altoona, Pennsylvania, five days after Thompson was gunned down in front of a hotel in midtown Manhattan on December 4.
UnitedHealthcare is the largest health insurer in the country, though the company has said Mangione was never insured by them.
A grand jury in New York state indicted Mangione with first-degree murder "in furtherance of an act of terrorism" and second-degree murder, in addition to other, lesser charges also in mid-December. Mangione pleaded not guilty to those state charges, but has not entered a plea for his federal charges, according to PBS News.
"Luigi Mangione's murder of Brian Thompson—an innocent man and father of two young children—was a premeditated, cold-blooded assassination that shocked America," Bondi said in a statement. "After careful consideration, I have directed federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty in this case as we carry out President [Donald] Trump's agenda to stop violent crime and Make America Safe Again."
U.S. President Donald Trump, who oversaw a spate of executions carried out at an unprecedented rate during the final months of his initial administration, signed an executive order on his first day back in the White House that directs the Justice Department to seek out the death penalty in federal cases when possible.
Mangione, whose case triggered a wave of dark humor and vitriol directed at the for-profit healthcare industry, was compared to "Robin Hood" in a December intelligence report compiled by a regional intelligence center, according to The American Prospect.
In a Substack post published Tuesday, the socialist writer Carl Beijer wrote that the European Union (E.U.) must offer asylum to Mangione.
"Regardless of the merits of the case for or against Mangione, the death penalty remains an intolerably cruel and unusual punishment," wrote Beijer. "Given its commitment to using 'all available instruments' towards the abolition of capital punishment, the E.U. should publicly condemn the prosecution of Luigi Mangioni; should immediately offer him political asylum in defense of his basic right to life; and should negotiate with the U.S. Department of Justice to secure his release."
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