The radio program On The Media this week had an absolutely gripping interview with Daniel Immerwahr, author of How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States. It begins at the 3:30 mark and lasts for about 50 minutes, laying out in great detail the hypocrisy of claiming to be a republic while actually being an empire that denied rights to the large populations under its control.
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It appears that I am not the only one taken by John Bercow, the speaker of the British House of Commons. As a result of the intense attention paid to the parliamentary maneuverings over Brexit, he has apparently become a cult figure in Europe and Der Spiegel interviewed him, where I was relieved to hear him saying that the rumor of him stepping down this summer was unfounded.
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I recently watched two television series produced and set in Australia. One was Secret City and the other was Rake. The former is a political espionage drama while the latter is a comedy-farce. How they both portray the Australian political-legal-police-internal security systems in less than flattering, to put it mildly, showing them as utterly corrupt and venal. Both shows portray the Australia-China relationship as a highly fraught one, and in Secret City, the US is shown manipulating Australia to serve its own foreign policy ends.
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Via a commenter, I received this news item of how the US has denied the entry visa of the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court because she had the quaint notion that Americans were subject to the same international laws as people of other countries, especially pertaining to war crimes. She vows to carry on regardless.
US authorities revoked International Criminal Court chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda’s entry visa to the United States, her office and the US State Department confirmed Friday.
“It is our understanding that should not have an impact on the Prosecutor’s travel to the US to meet her obligations to the UN, including regular briefings before the UN Security Council,” her office said in a statement.
“The Office of the Prosecutor has an independent and impartial mandate under the Rome Statute of the ICC. The Prosecutor and her Office will continue to undertake that statutory duty with utmost commitment and professionalism, without fear or favor,” it said.
A State Department spokesperson reiterated that the US would “take the necessary steps to protect its sovereignty and to protect our people from unjust investigation and prosecution by the International Criminal Court (ICC).”
UN Spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric said Friday that they “expect the United States to live up to the agreement to allow for the travel of ICC staff members to do their work at the United Nations.”
If you want to see the sense of entitlement that rich people have, you could do no better than the affidavit submitted by an FBI agent in support of the indictment. The affidavit contains verbatim transcripts of wiretapped conversations that the parents had with those scheming to falsely create credentials for their children. The transcripts include conversations involving Gordon Caplan, who before the scandal broke, was co-chairman of a major international law firm, and who yesterday issued a statement saying he would plead guilty to fraud for faking his daughter’s disability in order to enable her to get special testing conditions under which she not only got extra time but also enabled the proctor to change her answers to give her a higher score.
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It is interesting how ideas that less than four years ago were portrayed as controversial have now become mainstream. Republicans used to demand the repeal of Obamacare but now they claim that they oppose any lifting of the ban on denying people insurance because of pre-existing conditions. The idea of people being able to keep their children on their plans until they reach the age of 26 is also very popular. Bernie Sanders’ proposal of Medicare for All has been adopted by pretty much all the Democrats running for president.
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In a welcome move, both houses of Congress have passed a joint resolution to withdraw support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen. The House of Representatives voted 247-175 in favor of the resolution yesterday and the US Senate voted 54-46 in favor in March. The resolution “directs the president to remove U.S. armed forces from hostilities in or affecting Yemen within 30 days unless further engagement is authorized by Congress.” In the House, 16 Republicans voted in favor and no Democrats voted against while in the Senate seven Republicans voted in favor and no Democrats voted against.
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Remember Paul Ryan? The former house speaker and Ayn Rand devotee who grovels before the rich and said that even when he was still in college he fantasized about cutting benefits to the poor? That he is a truly awful person goes without saying. It turns out that he is also utterly self-unaware, as can be seen from the advice he offered Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez when he met her after her victory in November.
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Yesterday, the British parliament passed by the narrowest of margins 313 to 312 a motion proposed by backbenchers and supported largely by the opposition and opposed by the government that if there was no Brexit deal by the April 12 deadline, the UK would ask the EU for an extension of Article 50 rather than leave with no deal. The bill does not say how long the extension should be nor is there any guarantee that the EU would agree to it. This bill was vehemently opposed by hardline Leavers who seem to be hoping that the current deadlock will lead to a default no-deal outcome.
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