{"id":170347,"date":"2015-08-03T19:00:19","date_gmt":"2015-08-03T19:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=170347"},"modified":"2015-08-03T19:00:19","modified_gmt":"2015-08-03T19:00:19","slug":"urging-bernie-sanders-speak-foreign-policy-petition-gathers-8000-signers-first-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/politics\/urging-bernie-sanders-speak-foreign-policy-petition-gathers-8000-signers-first-day\/","title":{"rendered":"Urging Bernie Sanders to \u201cSpeak Out\u201d on Foreign Policy, Petition Gathers More Than 8,000 Signers in First Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON – A petition to Sen. Bernie Sanders \u2013 urging him to tackle foreign policy issues in his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination \u2013 gained 8,000 signers\u00a0on Sunday<\/span><\/span>\u00a0(Aug. 2).<\/p>\n

\n

While praising the Sanders campaign\u2019s \u201cstrong challenge to corporate power and oligarchy,\u201d the petition urges him \u201cto speak out about how they are intertwined with militarism and ongoing war.\u201d<\/p>\n

The nationwide petition adds: \u201cMartin Luther King Jr. denounced what he called \u2018the madness of militarism,\u2019 and you should do the same. As you said in your speech to the SCLC, \u2018Now is not the time for thinking small.\u2019 Unwillingness to challenge the madness of militarism is thinking small.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a lengthy speech to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference on July 25, Sanders lauded King as a visionary leader \u2013 but made no mention of\u00a0King\u2019s antiwar leadership<\/a>. From the speech, \u201cyou wouldn\u2019t have a clue that King explicitly and\u00a0emphatically linked the issues of economic injustice at home with war abroad<\/a>,\u201d says RootsAction.org, the group that launched the petition.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo far,\u201d RootsAction says, \u201cBernie\u2019s stump speech hardly mentions the huge military budget \u2013 and does not talk about how it is a massive roadblock for the scale of public investment in education, infrastructure and jobs that he is advocating.\u201d<\/p>\n

The petition is headlined, \u201cBernie Sanders, Speak Up: Militarism and Corporate Power Are Fueling Each Other<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

When it launched the petition yesterday, RootsAction pointed out that \u201con his campaign\u2019s official website, the page headlined \u2018Bernie Sanders: On the Issues\u2019 says nothing at all about foreign policy, war or any other such topics.\u201d<\/p>\n

Available for interviews:<\/p>\n

NORMAN SOLOMON,\u00a0solomonprogressive at gmail.com,\u00a0@roots_action<\/a>
\nSolomon is executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and co-founder of\u00a0RootsAction.org<\/a>. He is the author of\u00a0War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death<\/em>.<\/p>\n

RootsAction said in a statement when launching the petition yesterday: \u201cWith a strong grassroots campaign, Bernie is eloquent as he denounces corporate power, economic inequality and \u2018oligarchy.\u2019 But he\u2019s saying very little about crucial issues of war, militarism and foreign policy\u2026.<\/p>\n

\u201cOngoing war and huge military spending continue to be deeply enmeshed with basic economic ills from upside-down priorities. As the National Priorities Project has documented, 54 percent of the U.S. government\u2019s discretionary spending now goes to military purposes.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON – A petition to Sen. Bernie Sanders \u2013 urging him to tackle foreign policy issues in his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination \u2013 gained 8,000 signers\u00a0on Sunday\u00a0(Aug. 2). While praising the Sanders campaign\u2019s \u201cstrong challenge to corporate power and oligarchy,\u201d the petition urges him \u201cto speak out about how they are intertwined with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":153183,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,17,18],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-170347","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"category-politics","9":"category-latest-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=170347"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170347\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/153183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=170347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=170347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=170347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}