New Internationalism

The bipartisan so-called "supercommittee" has failed to reach an agreement on reducing the federal deficit after three months of negotiations over taxes and spending. The full Congress will now have a little over a year to come up with an alternative. A trigger of $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts over 10 years to military and domestic programs takes effect in 2013. “What people need to remember is that we are a rich country and that this crisis is actually an opportunity to harness our abundant resources in ways that will position us better for the future,” says Sarah Anderson, co-author of a new report from the Institute for Policy Studies, “America Isn’t Broke: “How to Pay for the Crisis While Making the Country More Equitable, Green, and Secure.”

Anthony McCarthy, host of the Anthony McCarthy Show, joins Marc for a look at the failure of the debt supercommittee, with its members failing to to reach agreement on deficit savings.  We're also joined by Deneen Borelli, Project 21 Fellow, and Sarah Anderson, Director of the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, and co-author of the report America Is Not Broke.

Keynote speaker Phyllis Bennis, fellow at the Institute of Policy Studies, noted, however, that the discourse is changing. Previously there was an assumption that Israel was the region’s only democracy, and the U.S.’s only friend there. That’s changed with the coming of the Arab Spring. And Israel’s policies are causing them to lose allies. No country in Europe now buys Israeli agricultural products. A 2010 Zogby poll found that 63 percent of Democrats support tearing down the settlements. It’s no longer political suicide to criticize Israeli policies. The question is, how to turn a shift in discourse into a change in U. S. policy?

"'The real challenge,' said Phyllis Bennis, a fellow at the liberal Institute for Policy Studies who studies social movements, is making the revolt against the accumulation of wealth 'happen politically.' The 3-week-old Occupy movement must spotlight the outrage of folks such as Schwetz to build a movement big enough to succeed in making tax-the-rich proposals become law, analysts say...Critics of the fledgling movement dismiss it as the rambling of the usual protesters — a cacophony of liberal causes broadcasting a scattershot message. It's much of the same language that was used to dismiss the antiwar movement a decade ago when the United States invaded Afghanistan, Bennis said."