Thanks to leaks of US State Department cables given to The Intercept, we are now aware of a $10 million settlement agreed upon in 2013 paid to a US citizen Khaled Hassen by the UAE. The UAE had fought to keep secret the fact that people at the highest levels of that country, which is a loyal puppet of the US and Saudi Arabia, including members of their royal family had acknowledged being involved in torture.
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I have written before of my puzzlement at the huge advances paid by publishers for books by politicians and celebrities because I could not see how these books could possibly be interesting enough to recoup in sales what the publishers seemed to expect. At least when it comes to politicians, there is a ready-made market of their own political parties and partisan groups that may buy these books in bulk as gifts to be given out to loyalists. And when it comes to celebrities in the arts and sports worlds, there does seem to be a fascination with what they are ‘really’ like, an appeal that completely eludes me.
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In a recent column, David Brooks of the New York Times describes the structural barriers that have been created that separate the rich from the rest of us and prevent the poor from making progress. He starts out reasonably enough.
Upper-middle-class parents have the means to spend two to three times more time with their preschool children than less affluent parents. Since 1996, education expenditures among the affluent have increased by almost 300 percent, while education spending among every other group is basically flat.
…The most important is residential zoning restrictions. Well-educated people tend to live in places like Portland, New York and San Francisco that have housing and construction rules that keep the poor and less educated away from places with good schools and good job opportunities.
Stephen Colbert walks us through the main aspects of the latest Russia-Trump story, this time containing actual information involving Donald Trump Jr.’s efforts to get damaging information about Hillary Clinton from Russian sources, a story that includes a Russian pop star, his oligarch father, and a British promoter.
Ben Norton writes that Sam Harris, the self-styled ‘centrist liberal’, moves further and further into the warm embrace of the xenophobes.
In language eerily reminiscent of the rhetoric of the fascist far right, New Atheist pundit Sam Harris has called for reducing the number of Muslims in society, warning on the January episode of his popular podcast, “You can’t have too many Muslims in your culture if you want it to remain enlightened.”
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I have not been writing that much about the administration of Donald Trump with its daily diet of outrageous and contradictory things that he and members of his administration say on the record (usually via Twitter), and the news reports based on leaks from anonymous sources within the administration about all the dubious activities that he and his family members and others have been engaged in. It seems to be better to wait for actual facts to emerge rather than try to follow the twists and turns of rumors and speculations.
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Marcus Ranum looks at the chaos that the US has unleashed in Libya as a result of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s ‘liberal interventionist’ strategy. This is an old strategy that involves asserting US military power to overthrow leaders whom the US no longer finds useful for its purposes but dressed up in the guise of trying to save the people from a despot. But once the leader is overthrown, the US walks away and the media treats the resulting situation as if it were the working out of local factors and not as a consequence of US actions.
The net result is that people who at one point lived in a modern functioning society suddenly find themselves in utter misery and despair. We now see Libya as the source of many refuges fleeing the devastation with some of them seeking revenge through groups like ISIS at those who did this to them, and the country itself the source of weaponry throughout the region.
At one of the G20 meetings currently going on in Hamburg, Germany that dealt with the important question of how to improve the conditions in some African countries in order to stem the tide of refugees fleeing awful conditions, who do you think represented the US among the other 19 heads of state and sat between Germany’s president Angela Merkel and China’s president Xi Jinping? Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, or National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, all of whom are present as part of the US delegation?
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The crafts company Hobby Lobby has been fined $3 million and asked to return over 5,000 stolen artifacts to Iraq. The name of the company may be familiar to some because they were behind a victorious lawsuit that went all the way to the US Supreme Court because they argued that the religious beliefs of the owners of the company should allow them to not provide contraceptive coverage in the employees’ health insurance policies. Yes, the family that owns the company consists of religious zealots.
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Donald Trump seems intent on making childish belligerent noises over North Korea and this is concerning because bellicose rhetoric (such as considering doing some “very severe things”) has the effect of raising the stakes and expectations. This can create its own dynamic and lead to Trump doing something rash because to not take action after talking tough would make him (at least in his own eyes and those of his supporters) look weak, and for such weak-minded people that is something to be avoided at all costs.
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