Exclusive poll: Americans want economic reform in 2020

Most Americans think the economic system is skewed toward the wealthy and the government should do more to fix it — and they're ready to vote for a candidate who agrees, according to a new Axios/SurveyMonkey survey.

Why it matters: The economy is usually the top priority for voters heading into a presidential election, and Democrats in particular — but also a strong majority of independents — are looking for big changes. By wide margins, they think unfairness in the economic system is a bigger problem than overregulation of the free market.

The big picture: Democrats and young adults are increasingly favorable to socialism.

As Axios' Felix Salmon noted, 18–24-year-olds in the survey view socialism (61% positive) more favorably than capitalism (58%), the only age group to do so. Older respondents tend to be far more wary of socialism.

Democrats are far more favorable toward socialism than independents and Republicans, as other surveys have found. 64% of Democrats in this survey say they have positive views of socialism, while 83% of Republicans and 61% of independents have negative views.

Men are much more bullish about capitalism (71% positive) than women (51%). Women, meanwhile, are slightly more favorable toward socialism (41% positive, vs. 36% for men).

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Top 10 Reasons Not to Love NATO

2. NATO is not a defensive institution. According to the New York Times, NATO has “deterred Soviet and Russian aggression for 70 years.” This is an article of faith, based on the unsubstantiated belief that Soviet and Russian aggression toward NATO members has existed for 70 years and that NATO has deterred it rather than provoked it. In violation of a promise made, NATO has expanded eastward, right up to the border of Russia, and installed missiles there. Russia has not done the reverse. The Soviet Union has, of course, ended. NATO has waged aggressive wars far from the North Atlantic, bombing Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Serbia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Libya. NATO has added a partnership with Colombia, abandoning all pretense of its purpose being in the North Atlantic. No NATO member has been attacked or credibly threatened with attack, apart from small-scale non-state blowback from NATO’s wars of aggression.



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Map shows how much Trump's approval ratings have changed in each state since he took office

Fool me once . . .

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"My goodbye letter to NBC," by Bill Arkin

From 1/2/19 . . .

Somewhere in all of that, and particularly as the social media wave began, it was clear that NBC (like the rest of the news media) could no longer keep up with the world. Added to that was the intellectual challenge of how to report our new kind of wars when there were no real fronts and no actual measures of success. To me there is also a larger problem: though they produce nothing that resembles actual safety and security, the national security leaders and generals we have are allowed to do their thing unmolested. Despite being at “war,” no great wartime leaders or visionaries are emerging. There is not a soul in Washington who can say that they have won or stopped any conflict. And though there might be the beloved perfumed princes in the form of the Petraeus’ and Wes Clarks’, or the so-called warrior monks like Mattis and McMaster, we’ve had more than a generation of national security leaders who sadly and fraudulently have done little of consequence. And yet we (and others) embrace them, even the highly partisan formers who masquerade as “analysts”. We do so ignoring the empirical truth of what they have wrought: There is not one country in the Middle East that is safer today than it was 18 years ago. Indeed the world becomes ever more polarized and dangerous.

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US: Anti-IS Coalition Airstrikes Killed Over 1,000 Civilians

U.S.-led coalition airstrikes against Islamic State have killed over 1,000 civilians in Iraq and Syria since 2014.

In a monthly civilian casualty report, the Coalition detailed confirmed deaths of 1,139 civilians in airstrikes conducted since the beginning of Operation Inherent Resolve between August 2014 and November 2018.

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The Establishment Will Never Say No to a War

Neoconservatism, it seems, never dies. It just mutates constantly to find new ways to intervene, to perpetuate forever wars, to send more young Americans to die in countries that don’t want them amid populations that try to kill them. If you want the most recent proof of that, look at Yemen, where the Saudi policy of mass civilian deaths in a Sunni war on Shiites is backed by American arms and U.S. It’s also backed by American troops on the ground — in a secret war conducted by Green Berets that was concealed from Congress. There is no conceivable threat to the U.S. from the Houthi rebels in Yemen; and there was no prior congressional approval. Did you even know we had ground troops deployed there?

The same for liberal internationalism, which also never seems to die, however many catastrophes it spawns. There’s always an impending “massacre” somewhere to justify intervention, which is why we have been dutifully told that withdrawing from Syria would lead to a “slaughter” of the Kurds. Remember the massacre that gave Hillary Clinton a chance to launch another Middle Eastern war in Libya? How many more innocents were slaughtered after we toppled Qaddafi than those in danger before? And all because Clinton refused to learn a single thing from Iraq. (If Clinton had actually won in 2016, we would probably have far more troops occupying Syria today, and be digging in for the long haul, and we’d probably have even more troops in yet another doomed surge in Afghanistan. That goes some way to explaining why Clinton has a massive 31/62 negative approval rating in the latest, Democrat-friendly Quinnipiac poll, much worse than even Trump.)

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NATO Partisans Started a New Cold War With Russia

U.S. leaders managed to get relations with Russia wrong just a few years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991. One of the few officials to capture the nature of the West’s bungling and how it fomented tensions was Robert Gates, who served as secretary of defense during the final years of George W. Bush’s administration and the first years of Barack Obama’s. In his surprisingly candid memoirs, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War, Gates recalls his report to Bush following the 2007 Munich Security Council, at which Russian President Vladimir Putin vented about Western security transgressions, including the planned deployment of a missile defense system in Central Europe.

“When I reported to the president my take on the Munich conference, I shared my belief that from 1993 onward, the West, and particularly the United States, had badly underestimated the magnitude of the Russian humiliation in losing the Cold War . . . .” Yet even that blunt assessment given to Bush did not fully capture Gates’s views on the issue. “What I didn’t tell the president was that I believed the relationship with Russia had been badly mismanaged after [George H. W.] Bush left office in 1993. Getting Gorbachev to acquiesce to a unified Germany as a member of NATO had been a huge accomplishment. But moving so quickly after the collapse of the Soviet Union to incorporate so many of its formerly subjugated states into NATO was a mistake.”

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Hallucinogenic drug found in 'magic mushrooms' eases depression, anxiety in people with life-threatening cancer

The Johns Hopkins group reported that psilocybin decreased clinician- and patient-rated depressed mood, anxiety, and death anxiety. The compound increased quality of life, life meaning, and optimism. Six months after the final session of treatment:

• About 80% of participants continued to show clinically significant decreases in depressed mood and anxiety, with about 60% showing symptom remission into the normal range
• 83% reported increases in well-being or life satisfaction
• 67% of participants reported the experience as one of the top five meaningful experiences in their lives
• About 70% reported the experience as one of their top five spiritually significant lifetime events

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