This afternoon saw two major developments in cases brought by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, though the two cases are separate. In the case in Alexandria, Virginia against Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s one-time campaign manager, the jury brought in guilty verdicts on eight counts but could not agree on the other ten. Manafort is due to face another trial in Washington DC next month.
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Take a look at this short video sent out by him on his Twitter account.
Austerity doesn’t work. pic.twitter.com/LvKSMvHetI
— Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) August 17, 2018
I don’t know if Corbyn was also behind the creation of the video or just tweeted it out.
The only quibble I have with it is that it seems to depict the austerity advocates as well-intentioned but misguided. In reality I think they know exactly what they are doing and that is to shift wealth away from the lower income groups to the rich. All the ‘concern’ about the deficit and growth is just window dressing.
The video, with a few tweaks, would apply well to the US too.
The senate in Argentina recently voted to not allow abortions in the first 14 weeks of pregnancy and the Catholic church was instrumental in achieving that outcome.
The Catholic Church lobbied aggressively against the legalized abortion bill. Every year, about 500,000 illegal and unsafe abortions take place in the country, and since the abortion rights vote, at least one woman has died from an attempt to perform an abortion on herself.
Conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh used to be constantly in the news because of the extreme views he expressed. His radio show is still on the air daily, as far as I know, but we rarely hear about him. The same goes for other conservatives like Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin who used their ability to take extreme stands and shock people to gain publicity for themselves.
I do not miss them at all but am curious as to why they have become largely marginal figures. It could be due to the operation of a media version of Gresham’s law that “bad money drives out good”. Alex Jones and Donald Trump have cranked up the outrageousness to 11 and thus hogged all the media attention and effectively muffled the voices of others in the marketplace of conservative extremism.
I am sure that there are still ‘dittoheads’ (what Limbaugh fans are called) out there who listen faithfully to his show. But he himself does not seem to be able to gain much attention from outside that world.
Most of us believe that money plays a huge negative role in American politics. Wealthy individuals, organizations, and lobbying groups give huge sums to politicians and those politicians then act in ways that benefit their donors either directly or indirectly. Of course, both parties vehemently deny that there is a quid pro quo, arguing that donors merely contribute to those elected officials and candidates who already agree with them. Some studies have seemed to provide support for this position.
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That the prison industry in the US is abusive towards its inmates is well known. What is perhaps not so well known is how it takes advantage of their captivity to squeeze even more money out of them and their families. As Victoria Law writes, one way they do that is by demanding that families can only communicate with inmates through private companies that have been granted monopoly rights to provide this service at exorbitant rates. Since both prisoners and their families are desperate to keep in touch with each other, they are ripe for exploitation. One of the worst companies is called JPay.
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No one could ever figure out what Omarosa Manigault Newman’s job was as an aide to Donald trump. The only thing we heard about was that she spent a lot of time planning an elaborate wedding for herself using the White House as a background. But now it is becoming clear that she spent a lot of time talking to people and, according to her, secretly recording the conversations.
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Lost in the primary news from last week was one item. You may recall me writing about Arthur Jones, described as “an outspoken Holocaust denier, activist anti-Semite and white supremacist”, who is now the Republican nominee for a US Congressional seat in Illinois. He ran unopposed in a district that is strongly Democratic and the Republican party did not think it worthwhile to run someone against him in the primary, since the winner was likely to lose in the general election anyway.
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You may recall the horrific killing by Israel in 2014 of four young children playing on a beach in Gaza. Robert Mackey writes that a confidential report reveals that these children were murdered using drones operated remotely.
Testimony from the officers involved in the attack, which has been concealed from the public until now, confirms for the first time that the children — four cousins ages 10 and 11 — were pursued and killed by drone operators who somehow mistook them, in broad daylight, for Hamas militants.
The testimony raises new questions about whether the attack, which unfolded in front of dozens of journalists and triggered global outrage, was carried out with reckless disregard for civilian life and without proper authorization. After killing the first boy, the drone operators told investigators, they had sought clarification from their superiors as to how far along the beach, used by civilians, they could pursue the fleeing survivors. Less than a minute later, as the boys ran for their lives, the drone operators decided to launch a second missile, killing three more children, despite never getting an answer to their question.
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I was traveling to attend a wedding over weekend and so did not get to follow the news but was gratified upon my return to read that the much-promoted Unite the Right 2 rally that was supposed to be a show of force of the white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and fascists in front of the White House where they now think they have a friend turned out to be a total bust, with the number of counter-protestors utterly dwarfing the few people who turned up for the rally under heavy police protection.
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