The clock ran out on me — exacerbated by a computer problem at my end — as I went back to edit my comment above about the value of Saudi assets in the US.
I wanted to add that despite threats, Saudi Arabia isn't going to move assets wholesale out of the US. Those assets did not come here out of Saudis' tender feelings for us. No, they are here because this is the safest harbor for them, and that isn't going to change anytime in the foreseeable future.
Moreover, the Saudi economy is tanking with falling oil prices, so Saudis will be even more protective than before of their precious financial assets.
It's just empty posturing: Saudi Arabian threats to remove Saudi assets from the US are hollow.
The clock ran out on me — exacerbated by a computer problem at my end — as I went back to edit my comment above about the value of Saudi assets in the US.
I wanted to add that despite threats, Saudi Arabia isn't going to move assets wholesale out of the US. Those assets did not come here in the first place out of Saudis' tender feelings for us. No, they are here because this is the safest harbor for them, and that isn't going to change anytime in the foreseeable future.
Moreover, with falling oil prices, the Saudi economy is is suffering badly, giving Saudi Arabia even less latitude for economic posturing.
As Paul Krugman has been pointing out, having the world's reserve currency is a sword which cuts both ways and is nowhere near as essential to America's economic well being as is commonly believed.
And believe it or not, as big a number as a trillion dollars sounds, in the sheme of the American economy, it is not a huge amount of assets.
And I, for one, would be happy to see the US government subject to lawsuits for its misbehavior around the world.
If anybody wants to take a look, Google Maps has a clear satellite image of Masdar City. It looks like mostly sand, but what an array of photovoltaic cells:
Seth Meyers incisively and humorously called out Hillary Clinton for her handling of the Debbie Wasserman Schultz debacle. The bit starts at the 3:30 mark.
I too have personal connections to Paris. Lived my teenage years in Geneva, my brother studied at what we called the Sorbonne (though I must confess that I don't know what the Sorbonne is exactly) and my in-laws live in the Ninth Arrondissement. It's hackneyed, but heartfelt: We're all Parisians now.
And here's another new supporter of the deal: Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, and Representative from a very Jewish district in Florida, who previously opposed the Iran deal, has now come around and is supporting it.
I am not so sure John McCain really does qualify as heroic. The son and grandson of admirals, he was assured both a place at Annapolis and advancement through the ranks. Yet at Annapolis he finished at the bottom of his class and he was such a terrible pilot that he crashed three planes which were not under fire (including the crash that resulted in his capture), and yet the Navy kept putting him back in the cockpit. I'm the son of a Navy fighter pilot and cannot help but be struck by the unearned privilege that John McCain enjoyed in the military, and for that matter, all of his life.
Yes, McCain did once turn his back on that privilege when his Vietnamese captors offered to release him early in deference to his father's position, and he refused to go. That one act might fairly be described as heroic, but it was singular and the rest of his military career was more privileged than heroic.
Please do not construe this as an endorsement of Trump's Swiftboating. It isn't. I just don't believe that John McCain was a true war hero in the manner that, say, John Kerry was.
Obama did indeed, as you note, make back room deals with big Pharma. He made back room deals too with health-insurance companies. And on top of that, though he was publicly proclaiming the opposite, he also put the squelch on single-payer. None of this, of course, was properly reported in the corporate press.
At the time it was going down, this infuriated me. But Paul Krugman takes the view that in the current American political context these were unavoidable compromises to get health-care reform enacted. A case of not letting the perfect be enemy of the good. And in view of how well the ACA is performing, my view has mellowed about the White Houses's secret back room deals with these corporate interests.
Israel's blockade of Gaza is one thing. The opprobrium of the entire planet is quite another. South Africa is the better comparison, not the blockade of Gaza.
Although it being sold (and reported) as a trade deal, as Paul Krugman points out, the TPP is really an intellectual-property deal. The tariffs that it would reduce are economically insignificant, swamped as they are by shifts in currency values.
I visited East Jerusalem on a school trip in 1967 before the '67 War. It was then part of Jordan and because of the enmity between Israel and Jordan we were not allowed to enter Israeli West Jerusalem. This was not much of a hardship though, as East Jerusalem is where most of the interesting historical sites are. So we remained there and what are now the surrounding Occupied Territories.
It was beautiful. It was Arab. It was peaceful. Sadly, a few short months after our visit, Israel invaded and occupied East Jerusalem, and nothing has been the same since.
President Obama doesn't have much of a climate legacy to imperil. Remember, for instance, that shortly after the Gulf oil spill he opened-up the Atlantic seaboard to oil drilling.
Emergency room visits are indeed very expensive with costs passed on to the taxpayers. But they are also billed at extremely high rates to the uninsured patients who visit them, patients who by definition have little money to pay.
One must always pay more attention to what President Obama does than what he says. Yes, it is good that he has made a statement supporting net neutrality. But what he has done is appoint an industry lobbyist to head the FCC.
At the Guardian, George Monbiot has this to say about governments confronting corporations on climate change:
"Governments gather to discuss an urgent problem and propose everything except the obvious solution – legislation. The last thing our self-hating states will contemplate is what they are empowered to do: govern. They will launch endless talks and commissions, devise elaborate market mechanisms, even offer massive subsidies to encourage better behaviour, rather than simply say 'we’re stopping this'.
This is what’s happening with manmade climate change."
Perhaps not completely unfair. You probably saw the study reported last month which correlates high pay of public university presidents, which can reach into the millions (and I gather that football coaches are often paid even more), with high student debt and a high use of part-time faculty at those universities.
At Salon.com Thomas Frank has a related piece excoriating American universities, public and private, for relentlessly and unconscionably jacking up prices every year since 1981, the press for failing to report on this and the government for failing to do anything about it.
Here's a link to the Djebbar interview for any interested. The As It Happens website does not enable listening to free-standing segments. So if you want to hear the interview, click on the "Listen" link near the top of the page and then fast forward to the 9:50 mark.
Al-Jazeera's report about the polonium poisoning isn't really an exclusive. It only seems that way to Americans because the US media is so assiduously ignoring the story. But it is being covered in the rest of the world.
Last night (Nov. 6) on the CBC's "As It Happens", Canadian journalist Carol Off conducted a seven-minute interview with Saad Djebbar, the lead lawyer for Suha Arafat, Yasser Arafat's widow which laid it all out.
The rest of the world is coming to know about the Swiss scientists findings about Arafat's murder. It is only Americans who are being kept in the dark.
Europa Report was indeed a fine summer film. And with astronaut Col. Chris Hadfield on a book tour, I've listened to several radio interviews in which the procedures learned watching Europa Report were helpful in understanding his descriptions of actual events which occurred during his space missions.
Europa Report falls into that SciFi subcategory which tries to avoid excessive speculation and to adhere as closely as possible to currently understood science. Made in technical consultation with NASA the events in the movie are not just plausible, but some seem to have been plucked out of actual space missions.
In a posting this morning (Oct. 18) at his blog, Paul Krugman writes that he believes outcome number five would at worst be neutral and could indeed be positive for the U.S. economy if it were to push down the value of the dollar.
At his blog this morning, Paul Krugman makes the same analysis, that this government shutdown is the result of the strategy of our super rich and their political henchman to torpedo Obamacare. But he thinks that their Tea Party beast has escaped from its cage (I think that's his metaphor) and that Kochs et al. have lost control of it. Killing Obamacare serves their interest. Closing down the government or (especially) defaulting on the national debt does not.
Nobody put it better than Matt Taibbi when he wrote that Congress isn't there to protect the people from special interests. Congress is there to protect special interest from the people.
Paul Krugman and others think that the principal driver behind the ferocious Republican opposition to the ACA (Obamacare) is not that big business doesn't want it, but that it will work very well, and that it's success will be politically extremely costly to the political party so identified with opposition to it.
I heard the theory proposed (and I wish I could remember by whom) that the nihilistic strategy behind the poison gas attack was its very brazenness. The thinking is that the government expects no meaningful response from the international community. And so the failure of the outside world to respond to an act as provocative as launching such an attack while UN inspectors are actually in the country would badly demoralize the opposition. After all, if the international community fails to respond to an act so outrageous, when would it respond? According to this theory, the attack was a way of saying, "Abandon hope. You're alone. The outside world will not come to your aid under any circumstance."
Larry Summers is not merely being considered as Fed Chair by the White House, he is Obama's first choice. It is Summers who Obama wants, for reasons Ezra Klein outlines:
Paul Krugman commented on the Klein piece (I can't find the link) and noted that these are all the worst possible things to look for in a candidate for the Fed Chair's office.
Wouldn't it be nice if we had an inquiring press to delve into these questions?
Credit where credit is due, so thank you to John Shiffman, Kristina Cooke and Reuters for reporting on the NSA/DEA shenanigans. But this should be the ordinary duty of journalism not the rare, rule-breaking exception.
Matt Taibbi once wrote (paraphrasing here), "Congress isn't there to protect the people from the special interests. Congress is there to protect the special interests from the people."
And now Obama may skip the upcoming Moscow summit over the Snowden affair. Well, "thank you, frenemy," say I. The Obama Administration, which has amply demonstrated its vindictiveness toward whistleblowers, now shows the world its petulance when that vindictiveness is thwarted.
Let's note that the Congressional bill that would have restricted NSA wholesale spying on Americans was beaten back by a coalition formed by Barack Obama with John Boehner and Michele Bachmann.
As a kid many decades ago, I read a science fiction story in which the surprise ending was that robots were turned into consumers so as to keep people employed. The robots started wearing clothes, were programed to use furniture and so forth.
On a more serious note, I can only imagine what it is like living in the heart of Detroit, based on the descriptions of inner Camden in Days Of Destruction Days Of Revolt by Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco.
Please pardon the cavil, but this headline conflates two different animated lagomorphs (rabbits and hares), the Trix rabbit, the silly one, and Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd's wabbit nemesis.
Meanwhile, Barack Obama is so hellbent on persecuting (and I think that's the right word) Edward Snowden that he's now threatening to cancel a planned September Moscow visit.
This kind of reporting certainly does put into perspective the blather heard from American broadcast news outfits. Maybe it's because it's British, but this brings to mind the shock and hang-wringing by the servile American press a few years ago when a British television reporter had the temerity to ask George Bush tough questions in an interview. Is it any wonder that Reporters Without Borders ranks the United States 47th in its world Press Freedom Index? 47th.
There's an interesting piece in The New York Times today by spy novelist Alex Berenson to the effect that if the Obama administration had not immediately criminalized Snowden so seriously for his revelations that he faces life in prison and had instead indicated willingness to discuss its surveillance programs, and invited Snowden back to the U.S. to face a reasonable penalty (a year or two in jail according to the author) it would not have put him and whatever information is on those hard drives into the tender mercies of questionable players such as China and Russia.
Not only is the government spying on us, but in its zeal to suppress any knowledge of its surveillance and keep it from the American people, it has once again hoist itself on its own petard.
I wouldn't say that I was "enamored" of candidate Obama. In fact, he wasn't my first choice among the Democratic field. But I do confess that when he was elected, I suspended political disbelief and bought into the hope that the Obama campaign's mantra of "change" actually meant something. And God knows how much change truly was greatly needed.
But as I noted above, it was not very long before I was disabused.
Sad to say, it was not long into his first term that I began to believe that Obama was looking me in the eyes and lying to me. Though the Bush and Obama styles are distinctly and deliberately different, there has been so much policy continuity between them that I have begun to think of the last 12 years as the Bush-Obama era.
And also fun. Here, in no particular order, is who I was able to recognize: Christopher Hitchens, Oliver Stone, Wallace Shawn, Matt Taibbi, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Phil Donahue and I think Daniel Ellsberg.
The Verizon and Prism government spying have been widely reported over the last couple of days. But I've hardly seen anything on a report of even more government intrusion which appeared in the Wall Street Journal this morning (June 7) that the federal government also has access to all Americans' credit card information, every purchase every one of us makes.
It's also worth noting how entwined broadcast "journalism" and flat-out advocacy have become. Exhibit A, of course, is Fox News. Exhibit B: Before CNN hired him, wasn't Wolf Blitzer a propagandist (to use the indelicate term) for AIPAC?
Geoff Thale of the Washington Office on Latin America described Chavez's support of Libya et al. as "rhetorical". This was on WAMU's Diane Rehm Show this morning and was meant to parry Tom Gjelten's citation of Chavez's support as evidence that Chavez had no real interest in human rights.
One thing that surprised me which came up in that conversation and again later in the day during a radio interview with The New Yorker's Jon Lee Anderson is that Chavez very much considered himself a Christian. No value judgment on that. I just didn't expect it.
I am no fan of Michael Bloomberg, but must give him credit on this one. According to The New York Times today (Feb. 7), the Mayor, who's a vocal supporter of Israel, has forcefully defended Brooklyn College's rights in this matter and condemned those attempting to silence the school.
Paul Krugman has been writing a lot lately expressing his doubt that the Republican Party will be able anytime soon to cease being the party mainly of angry white men because it is so encased in its own bubble of received beliefs that it is impervious to real-world, objective feedback.
It's actually has also been illegal for many years in the United States to force employees to join a union. Though you would not know from the shoddy reporting in the press, "right to work" is about prohibiting unions from charging non-union members fees for their negotiation and representation services.
Gov. Granholm is exactly right, of course, but she misses a point which is that unions not only benefit workers, but they also benefit the companies which employ them, industrial ones anyway.
Take the case of Germany. Very much unlike here at home, in Germany unions have a place at the table and representation on the corporate board. As a consequence, because employees have a real stake in long and profitable operations, companies in Germany are very careful to keep their manufacturing technology up-to-date and their factories running well. They are disincentivized from closing factories or moving to other countries.
Compare this to the United States where factories are so often allowed to rust into obsolescence and then are closed and their jobs shipped overseas. Unlike Detroit, Germany automobile companies — VW, Porsche, BMW, Mercedes Benz, etc. — have a history of long, strong profitable operations. This is true not only of the automotive sector, but of German industrial operations in general. Moreover, German industrial workers are better paid, are more healthy and enjoy a better lifestyle than their American counterparts.
Andrew Bacevich has a piece reprinted in the November issue of Harper's Magazine (orgiinally published, interestingly, in the September issue of The American Conservative) entitled, "How We Became Israel". The title is sufficiently descriptive of the content that I need add no additional comment here explaining the article's cogency to this post.
Joe Walsh (the other Joe Walsh, the musician of James Gang fame) must be pulling his hair out hearing his own good name attached to the antics of the jerk from Illinois.
Well, it's going to happen in LOTS of places which are police states. But not in civil democracies. And this is said with a lifetime of experience crossing borders, including a period when I crossed the U.S./Canada border six times every week.
Yes, so true. So what's Netanyahu's game? What does he and/or Israel (their interests not being unitary) stand to gain from the incessant saber rattling and spurious claims of imminent Iranian nuclear Armageddon, which, as noted in a prior Informed Comment post, have now been going on for 20 years?
At the same time that the party heavyweights noisily try to force Akin out of the race, the Republican Party platform, to much less fanfare, is being drafted to call for a Constitutional Amendment to completely ban abortion in the United States.
What a great piece! Glenn Greenwald has written extensively about the utter meaninglessness of the word "terrorist" as used by government and the media. It is entirely vague and devoid of objective definition but is used promiscuously to vilify those the government wants vilified.
Yeah, Yves Smith's great, one of the four horsemen of finance-and-economics bloggers, the others being Paul Krugman, Matt Taibbi and Simon Johnson. (And yes, I know Yves Smith is a woman.)
Mr. Emmerich, I could not agree more with your observation about the blogs of Messrs. Cole and Greenwald. So let me add a third for your delectation: Paul Krugman's. Mr. Krugman's on vacation for a couple of weeks, but he'll be back, and "Informed Comment", Glenn Greenwald and Paul Krugman are the three tent poles of essential daily reading.
What a great piece! Not only for shining a light on the mendacity and puncturing the pompous and casual racism of the Romney campaign but also for a whirlwind tour of the distribution of culture and genetics on the British Islands. I've been dabbling lately learning something about Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Age (Goldsworthy, Daileader), the High Medieval period (Armstrong) and the history of the English language (McCrum et al., Lerer) and this synthesizes all of it in about 800 words.
Wolf Blitzer and Joe Johns basically are on the take. They and all the other journalistic nonentities who populate the broadcast and cable newsrooms are very handsomely paid to inanely shill for the corporate and the government narratives.
Indeed, if Congress cared that we are healthy. I think it was Matt Taibbi who observed that Congress isn't there to protect the people from the special interests, Congress is there to protect the special interests from the people.
There are only a few blogs I read daily, Juan Cole's and Paul Krugman's chief among them. Messrs Krugman and Cole are both about my age, both eminent thinkers of our day, and now are both offering music clips by artists of my childrens' generation.
As a Mad Man might put it, "I came for the insight and analysis but stayed for the music."
My understanding is that the latest Iran sanctions bill — which passed the House by a hugely lopsided majority (I don't know about the Senate) — also prohibits the United States from negotiating with Iran. Sounds too absurd to be true, right? No negotiating. Except that in Washington the too absurd is true all the time.
All the bases will be turned over to Iraq, all 505 of them? A very impressive number indeed — if it actually happens.
A less impressive number is the 18,000 American troops still in Iraq as there will be a like number of Americans permanently assigned to the gargantuan American embassy (formerly known as the Green one) in Baghdad plus approximately 60,000 private contractors whom could fairly be described as mercenaries.
Since the failure to prevent 9/11 ten years ago, the FBI's principal antiterrorism strategy seems to be to entrap deluded young halfwits into grandiose aspirational schemes, arrest them, and then trumpet the arrest to a credulous American press as a great antiterrorism coup.
Just to clarify my "Change without a difference" comment, I did not mean to suggest (nor do I think I said) that September 2010 is just like April 2004. What I meant is that the U.S. claims that "combat forces" are out of Iraq, thus we have "changed" to a force of noncombatant status. I don't believe the forces left behind are noncombatant and thus the claimed change has made no difference.
The "withdrawal of all combat troops" appears little more than p.r. optics to me.
What kind of "withdrawal" leaves behind 50,000 heavily armed American soldiers encamped in massive fortified bases and supplemented by 85,000 private support personnel/mercenaries? That's an Iraq occupation force of 135,000 by my count.
It so happens that I had recently purchased “Inside Out”, but had put it on the bookshelf for reading mañana. But with this recommendation, I’ve taken it off the shelf and will start reading this afternoon. And yes, I’m a fan, so will be looking for the cameo appearance of one Juan Cole.
Does it seems likely that the CIA public statements that Amiri was paid $5 million and that he was a CIA spy before he "defected" to the U.S. are designed to induce Iran to imprison or execute him?
Just leave two million Gazans festering in the "largest open-air prison in the world"?
If that's the plan — and in this interview, Emanuel Shahaf says it is — then this is no solution at all.
By happenstance, the New York Times today (October 7) has a short article about the myriad dialects still spoken in Italy:
"You Say ‘Anguria,’ I Say ‘Cocomero’: Italy’s Many Dialects"
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/world/what-in-the-world/italy-dialects.html
The clock ran out on me — exacerbated by a computer problem at my end — as I went back to edit my comment above about the value of Saudi assets in the US.
I wanted to add that despite threats, Saudi Arabia isn't going to move assets wholesale out of the US. Those assets did not come here out of Saudis' tender feelings for us. No, they are here because this is the safest harbor for them, and that isn't going to change anytime in the foreseeable future.
Moreover, the Saudi economy is tanking with falling oil prices, so Saudis will be even more protective than before of their precious financial assets.
It's just empty posturing: Saudi Arabian threats to remove Saudi assets from the US are hollow.
The clock ran out on me — exacerbated by a computer problem at my end — as I went back to edit my comment above about the value of Saudi assets in the US.
I wanted to add that despite threats, Saudi Arabia isn't going to move assets wholesale out of the US. Those assets did not come here in the first place out of Saudis' tender feelings for us. No, they are here because this is the safest harbor for them, and that isn't going to change anytime in the foreseeable future.
Moreover, with falling oil prices, the Saudi economy is is suffering badly, giving Saudi Arabia even less latitude for economic posturing.
Saudi Arabia's economic threats are hollow.
As Paul Krugman has been pointing out, having the world's reserve currency is a sword which cuts both ways and is nowhere near as essential to America's economic well being as is commonly believed.
And believe it or not, as big a number as a trillion dollars sounds, in the sheme of the American economy, it is not a huge amount of assets.
And I, for one, would be happy to see the US government subject to lawsuits for its misbehavior around the world.
If anybody wants to take a look, Google Maps has a clear satellite image of Masdar City. It looks like mostly sand, but what an array of photovoltaic cells:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Masdar+City+-+Abu+Dhabi+-+United+Arab+Emirates/@24.4264004,54.610505,4293m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x3e5e48a369f3f1f1:0x2c78fcb77107ce5b!8m2!3d24.4266734!4d54.614979
Who can spend an hour listening to a radio program about the AUMF? But this Radio Lab swim in the AUMF pool is rewarding.
http://www.radiolab.org/story/60-words/
Seth Meyers incisively and humorously called out Hillary Clinton for her handling of the Debbie Wasserman Schultz debacle. The bit starts at the 3:30 mark.
http://www.salon.com/2016/07/26/seth_meyers_the_only_one_whos_got_his_eye_on_the_ball_right_now_is_bernie_sanders/
Here's a link to the coverage in Haaretz:
http://www.haaretz.com/settlementdollars/1.689683
Good point!
Sad that it has to be made.
I too have personal connections to Paris. Lived my teenage years in Geneva, my brother studied at what we called the Sorbonne (though I must confess that I don't know what the Sorbonne is exactly) and my in-laws live in the Ninth Arrondissement. It's hackneyed, but heartfelt: We're all Parisians now.
And here's another new supporter of the deal: Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, and Representative from a very Jewish district in Florida, who previously opposed the Iran deal, has now come around and is supporting it.
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/07/us/politics/iran-nuclear-deal-debbie-wasserman-schultz.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0
At least there was a modicum of good news on this front, yesterday. New York Times headline: "Oil Companies Sit on Hands at Auction for Leases"
http://www.nytimes.com—oil-drillers-sit-on-hands-at-auction-for-leases.html
And now Jeb Bush has gone a step further, saying the Iraq War "turned out to be a pretty good deal."
http://www.salon.com/2015/08/13/jebs_iraq_mess_just_got_worse_now_he_says_war_turned_out_to_be_a_pretty_good_deal/
Peter Beinart at The Atlantic has also been thinking about this today:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-surge-fallacy/399344/
I am not so sure John McCain really does qualify as heroic. The son and grandson of admirals, he was assured both a place at Annapolis and advancement through the ranks. Yet at Annapolis he finished at the bottom of his class and he was such a terrible pilot that he crashed three planes which were not under fire (including the crash that resulted in his capture), and yet the Navy kept putting him back in the cockpit. I'm the son of a Navy fighter pilot and cannot help but be struck by the unearned privilege that John McCain enjoyed in the military, and for that matter, all of his life.
Yes, McCain did once turn his back on that privilege when his Vietnamese captors offered to release him early in deference to his father's position, and he refused to go. That one act might fairly be described as heroic, but it was singular and the rest of his military career was more privileged than heroic.
Please do not construe this as an endorsement of Trump's Swiftboating. It isn't. I just don't believe that John McCain was a true war hero in the manner that, say, John Kerry was.
ArminG,
Obama did indeed, as you note, make back room deals with big Pharma. He made back room deals too with health-insurance companies. And on top of that, though he was publicly proclaiming the opposite, he also put the squelch on single-payer. None of this, of course, was properly reported in the corporate press.
At the time it was going down, this infuriated me. But Paul Krugman takes the view that in the current American political context these were unavoidable compromises to get health-care reform enacted. A case of not letting the perfect be enemy of the good. And in view of how well the ACA is performing, my view has mellowed about the White Houses's secret back room deals with these corporate interests.
7. Obamacare has brought down medical-care costs and put an end to the inexorable rise year after year of both costs and health-insurance premiums.
Link: http://www.vox.com/2015/3/23/8277197/obamacare-price-myth
Israel's blockade of Gaza is one thing. The opprobrium of the entire planet is quite another. South Africa is the better comparison, not the blockade of Gaza.
Although it being sold (and reported) as a trade deal, as Paul Krugman points out, the TPP is really an intellectual-property deal. The tariffs that it would reduce are economically insignificant, swamped as they are by shifts in currency values.
I visited East Jerusalem on a school trip in 1967 before the '67 War. It was then part of Jordan and because of the enmity between Israel and Jordan we were not allowed to enter Israeli West Jerusalem. This was not much of a hardship though, as East Jerusalem is where most of the interesting historical sites are. So we remained there and what are now the surrounding Occupied Territories.
It was beautiful. It was Arab. It was peaceful. Sadly, a few short months after our visit, Israel invaded and occupied East Jerusalem, and nothing has been the same since.
President Obama doesn't have much of a climate legacy to imperil. Remember, for instance, that shortly after the Gulf oil spill he opened-up the Atlantic seaboard to oil drilling.
Emergency room visits are indeed very expensive with costs passed on to the taxpayers. But they are also billed at extremely high rates to the uninsured patients who visit them, patients who by definition have little money to pay.
I'm in. Just sent 23andMe my C-note. Can't wait to see my "racial" history.
One must always pay more attention to what President Obama does than what he says. Yes, it is good that he has made a statement supporting net neutrality. But what he has done is appoint an industry lobbyist to head the FCC.
At the Guardian, George Monbiot has this to say about governments confronting corporations on climate change:
"Governments gather to discuss an urgent problem and propose everything except the obvious solution – legislation. The last thing our self-hating states will contemplate is what they are empowered to do: govern. They will launch endless talks and commissions, devise elaborate market mechanisms, even offer massive subsidies to encourage better behaviour, rather than simply say 'we’re stopping this'.
This is what’s happening with manmade climate change."
http://www.monbiot.com/2014/09/11/political-straightjacket/
Perhaps not completely unfair. You probably saw the study reported last month which correlates high pay of public university presidents, which can reach into the millions (and I gather that football coaches are often paid even more), with high student debt and a high use of part-time faculty at those universities.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/19/education/study-links-growth-in-student-debt-to-pay-for-university-presidents.html
At Salon.com Thomas Frank has a related piece excoriating American universities, public and private, for relentlessly and unconscionably jacking up prices every year since 1981, the press for failing to report on this and the government for failing to do anything about it.
Link: http://www.salon.com/2014/06/08/colleges_are_full_of_it_behind_the_three_decade_scheme_to_raise_tuition_bankrupt_generations_and_hypnotize_the_media/
This is a link to the "Fresh Air" interview with Vincent Harding:
http://www.npr.org/2014/05/22/314915387/fresh-air-remembers-civil-rights-activist-vincent-harding
WHYY's "Fresh Air" program aired today (May 22) an excerpt from an interview Terry Gross did in 1988 with Vincent Harding. It is powerful and moving.
The audio clip is seven-and-a-half minutes long, and if you have the time, I recommend listening to it rather than reading the transcript.
This is much more encouraging than reports from NPR and the BBC yesterday (Nov. 18) that General al-Sisi is becoming a national hero.
Here is that link again. Seemed not to go through above.
http://www.cbc.ca/asithappens/episode/2013/11/06/wednesday-arafat-poisoned-toronto-deputy-mayor-dude-etymology-leona-aglukkaq-and-more/
Here's a link to the Djebbar interview for any interested. The As It Happens website does not enable listening to free-standing segments. So if you want to hear the interview, click on the "Listen" link near the top of the page and then fast forward to the 9:50 mark.
Al-Jazeera's report about the polonium poisoning isn't really an exclusive. It only seems that way to Americans because the US media is so assiduously ignoring the story. But it is being covered in the rest of the world.
Last night (Nov. 6) on the CBC's "As It Happens", Canadian journalist Carol Off conducted a seven-minute interview with Saad Djebbar, the lead lawyer for Suha Arafat, Yasser Arafat's widow which laid it all out.
The rest of the world is coming to know about the Swiss scientists findings about Arafat's murder. It is only Americans who are being kept in the dark.
Europa Report was indeed a fine summer film. And with astronaut Col. Chris Hadfield on a book tour, I've listened to several radio interviews in which the procedures learned watching Europa Report were helpful in understanding his descriptions of actual events which occurred during his space missions.
Europa Report falls into that SciFi subcategory which tries to avoid excessive speculation and to adhere as closely as possible to currently understood science. Made in technical consultation with NASA the events in the movie are not just plausible, but some seem to have been plucked out of actual space missions.
In a posting this morning (Oct. 18) at his blog, Paul Krugman writes that he believes outcome number five would at worst be neutral and could indeed be positive for the U.S. economy if it were to push down the value of the dollar.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/18/the-china-debt-syndrome/
At his blog this morning, Paul Krugman makes the same analysis, that this government shutdown is the result of the strategy of our super rich and their political henchman to torpedo Obamacare. But he thinks that their Tea Party beast has escaped from its cage (I think that's his metaphor) and that Kochs et al. have lost control of it. Killing Obamacare serves their interest. Closing down the government or (especially) defaulting on the national debt does not.
Nobody put it better than Matt Taibbi when he wrote that Congress isn't there to protect the people from special interests. Congress is there to protect special interest from the people.
Paul Krugman and others think that the principal driver behind the ferocious Republican opposition to the ACA (Obamacare) is not that big business doesn't want it, but that it will work very well, and that it's success will be politically extremely costly to the political party so identified with opposition to it.
I heard the theory proposed (and I wish I could remember by whom) that the nihilistic strategy behind the poison gas attack was its very brazenness. The thinking is that the government expects no meaningful response from the international community. And so the failure of the outside world to respond to an act as provocative as launching such an attack while UN inspectors are actually in the country would badly demoralize the opposition. After all, if the international community fails to respond to an act so outrageous, when would it respond? According to this theory, the attack was a way of saying, "Abandon hope. You're alone. The outside world will not come to your aid under any circumstance."
Larry Summers is not merely being considered as Fed Chair by the White House, he is Obama's first choice. It is Summers who Obama wants, for reasons Ezra Klein outlines:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/07/23/right-now-larry-summers-is-the-front-runner-for-fed-chair/
Paul Krugman commented on the Klein piece (I can't find the link) and noted that these are all the worst possible things to look for in a candidate for the Fed Chair's office.
Do something. Yes.
Stop talking. No.
Wouldn't it be nice if we had an inquiring press to delve into these questions?
Credit where credit is due, so thank you to John Shiffman, Kristina Cooke and Reuters for reporting on the NSA/DEA shenanigans. But this should be the ordinary duty of journalism not the rare, rule-breaking exception.
Matt Taibbi once wrote (paraphrasing here), "Congress isn't there to protect the people from the special interests. Congress is there to protect the special interests from the people."
And now Obama may skip the upcoming Moscow summit over the Snowden affair. Well, "thank you, frenemy," say I. The Obama Administration, which has amply demonstrated its vindictiveness toward whistleblowers, now shows the world its petulance when that vindictiveness is thwarted.
Let's note that the Congressional bill that would have restricted NSA wholesale spying on Americans was beaten back by a coalition formed by Barack Obama with John Boehner and Michele Bachmann.
As a kid many decades ago, I read a science fiction story in which the surprise ending was that robots were turned into consumers so as to keep people employed. The robots started wearing clothes, were programed to use furniture and so forth.
On a more serious note, I can only imagine what it is like living in the heart of Detroit, based on the descriptions of inner Camden in Days Of Destruction Days Of Revolt by Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco.
Please pardon the cavil, but this headline conflates two different animated lagomorphs (rabbits and hares), the Trix rabbit, the silly one, and Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd's wabbit nemesis.
Meanwhile, Barack Obama is so hellbent on persecuting (and I think that's the right word) Edward Snowden that he's now threatening to cancel a planned September Moscow visit.
This kind of reporting certainly does put into perspective the blather heard from American broadcast news outfits. Maybe it's because it's British, but this brings to mind the shock and hang-wringing by the servile American press a few years ago when a British television reporter had the temerity to ask George Bush tough questions in an interview. Is it any wonder that Reporters Without Borders ranks the United States 47th in its world Press Freedom Index? 47th.
http://en.rsf.org/spip.php?page=classement&id_rubrique=1043
Wow!
There's an interesting piece in The New York Times today by spy novelist Alex Berenson to the effect that if the Obama administration had not immediately criminalized Snowden so seriously for his revelations that he faces life in prison and had instead indicated willingness to discuss its surveillance programs, and invited Snowden back to the U.S. to face a reasonable penalty (a year or two in jail according to the author) it would not have put him and whatever information is on those hard drives into the tender mercies of questionable players such as China and Russia.
Not only is the government spying on us, but in its zeal to suppress any knowledge of its surveillance and keep it from the American people, it has once again hoist itself on its own petard.
The South China Morning Post is having similar thoughts about Cheney and Snowden:
http://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1263089/cheney-true-threat-freedom
Wild! And how about that head gear?
I wouldn't say that I was "enamored" of candidate Obama. In fact, he wasn't my first choice among the Democratic field. But I do confess that when he was elected, I suspended political disbelief and bought into the hope that the Obama campaign's mantra of "change" actually meant something. And God knows how much change truly was greatly needed.
But as I noted above, it was not very long before I was disabused.
Sad to say, it was not long into his first term that I began to believe that Obama was looking me in the eyes and lying to me. Though the Bush and Obama styles are distinctly and deliberately different, there has been so much policy continuity between them that I have begun to think of the last 12 years as the Bush-Obama era.
Great La Prensa illustration!
I meant Chris Hedges, not Hitchens.
Very, very different.
Great!
And also fun. Here, in no particular order, is who I was able to recognize: Christopher Hitchens, Oliver Stone, Wallace Shawn, Matt Taibbi, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Phil Donahue and I think Daniel Ellsberg.
Who else?
The Verizon and Prism government spying have been widely reported over the last couple of days. But I've hardly seen anything on a report of even more government intrusion which appeared in the Wall Street Journal this morning (June 7) that the federal government also has access to all Americans' credit card information, every purchase every one of us makes.
Joe Nocera also has an insightful take on this issue in the New York Times today (May 25).
It's also worth noting how entwined broadcast "journalism" and flat-out advocacy have become. Exhibit A, of course, is Fox News. Exhibit B: Before CNN hired him, wasn't Wolf Blitzer a propagandist (to use the indelicate term) for AIPAC?
We've seen part of this movie before. Didn't CNN erroneously broadcast that the Supreme Court shot down Obamacare?
Geoff Thale of the Washington Office on Latin America described Chavez's support of Libya et al. as "rhetorical". This was on WAMU's Diane Rehm Show this morning and was meant to parry Tom Gjelten's citation of Chavez's support as evidence that Chavez had no real interest in human rights.
One thing that surprised me which came up in that conversation and again later in the day during a radio interview with The New Yorker's Jon Lee Anderson is that Chavez very much considered himself a Christian. No value judgment on that. I just didn't expect it.
Also, China says it is reversing its longstanding policy and is preparing to impose a carbon emissions tax.
As Kathleen points out, this mordant skit was not broadcast on the show. Naturally.
I am no fan of Michael Bloomberg, but must give him credit on this one. According to The New York Times today (Feb. 7), the Mayor, who's a vocal supporter of Israel, has forcefully defended Brooklyn College's rights in this matter and condemned those attempting to silence the school.
Paul Krugman has been writing a lot lately expressing his doubt that the Republican Party will be able anytime soon to cease being the party mainly of angry white men because it is so encased in its own bubble of received beliefs that it is impervious to real-world, objective feedback.
It's actually has also been illegal for many years in the United States to force employees to join a union. Though you would not know from the shoddy reporting in the press, "right to work" is about prohibiting unions from charging non-union members fees for their negotiation and representation services.
Gov. Granholm is exactly right, of course, but she misses a point which is that unions not only benefit workers, but they also benefit the companies which employ them, industrial ones anyway.
Take the case of Germany. Very much unlike here at home, in Germany unions have a place at the table and representation on the corporate board. As a consequence, because employees have a real stake in long and profitable operations, companies in Germany are very careful to keep their manufacturing technology up-to-date and their factories running well. They are disincentivized from closing factories or moving to other countries.
Compare this to the United States where factories are so often allowed to rust into obsolescence and then are closed and their jobs shipped overseas. Unlike Detroit, Germany automobile companies — VW, Porsche, BMW, Mercedes Benz, etc. — have a history of long, strong profitable operations. This is true not only of the automotive sector, but of German industrial operations in general. Moreover, German industrial workers are better paid, are more healthy and enjoy a better lifestyle than their American counterparts.
Juan Cole puts it all together: Disengagement from the Middle East plus a top speed of 160 MPH and zero-to-60 of 4.4 seconds!
Andrew Bacevich has a piece reprinted in the November issue of Harper's Magazine (orgiinally published, interestingly, in the September issue of The American Conservative) entitled, "How We Became Israel". The title is sufficiently descriptive of the content that I need add no additional comment here explaining the article's cogency to this post.
Joe Walsh (the other Joe Walsh, the musician of James Gang fame) must be pulling his hair out hearing his own good name attached to the antics of the jerk from Illinois.
Well, it's going to happen in LOTS of places which are police states. But not in civil democracies. And this is said with a lifetime of experience crossing borders, including a period when I crossed the U.S./Canada border six times every week.
Deplorable! Is there any additional information publicly known about this? Who, where, what happened next?
A good place to keep abreast of these issues is Mark Bittman's blog at the New York Times.
Yes, so true. So what's Netanyahu's game? What does he and/or Israel (their interests not being unitary) stand to gain from the incessant saber rattling and spurious claims of imminent Iranian nuclear Armageddon, which, as noted in a prior Informed Comment post, have now been going on for 20 years?
At the same time that the party heavyweights noisily try to force Akin out of the race, the Republican Party platform, to much less fanfare, is being drafted to call for a Constitutional Amendment to completely ban abortion in the United States.
Pretty good! Just forwarded it to a friend at NASA. He may well already have seen it but if not, he's sure to be entertained.
What a great piece! Glenn Greenwald has written extensively about the utter meaninglessness of the word "terrorist" as used by government and the media. It is entirely vague and devoid of objective definition but is used promiscuously to vilify those the government wants vilified.
Yeah, Yves Smith's great, one of the four horsemen of finance-and-economics bloggers, the others being Paul Krugman, Matt Taibbi and Simon Johnson. (And yes, I know Yves Smith is a woman.)
Mr. Emmerich, I could not agree more with your observation about the blogs of Messrs. Cole and Greenwald. So let me add a third for your delectation: Paul Krugman's. Mr. Krugman's on vacation for a couple of weeks, but he'll be back, and "Informed Comment", Glenn Greenwald and Paul Krugman are the three tent poles of essential daily reading.
Link: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com
This morning (Monday) a mosque in Joplin, Missouri was incinerated, the second act of arson perpetrated against it within five weeks.
Link: http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/08/second_fire_in_five_weeks_burns_missouri_mosque.php?ref=fpblg
What a great piece! Not only for shining a light on the mendacity and puncturing the pompous and casual racism of the Romney campaign but also for a whirlwind tour of the distribution of culture and genetics on the British Islands. I've been dabbling lately learning something about Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Age (Goldsworthy, Daileader), the High Medieval period (Armstrong) and the history of the English language (McCrum et al., Lerer) and this synthesizes all of it in about 800 words.
And yes quite right. Some things do need to be said. I hope Juan's friend's warning proves to have been unnecessary.
(And 60 is not so old.)
Wolf Blitzer and Joe Johns basically are on the take. They and all the other journalistic nonentities who populate the broadcast and cable newsrooms are very handsomely paid to inanely shill for the corporate and the government narratives.
Explanation link much appreciated.
Indeed, if Congress cared that we are healthy. I think it was Matt Taibbi who observed that Congress isn't there to protect the people from the special interests, Congress is there to protect the special interests from the people.
"When the government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny!"
—— Thomas Jefferson
There are only a few blogs I read daily, Juan Cole's and Paul Krugman's chief among them. Messrs Krugman and Cole are both about my age, both eminent thinkers of our day, and now are both offering music clips by artists of my childrens' generation.
As a Mad Man might put it, "I came for the insight and analysis but stayed for the music."
Were that one could walk such sweet balance on that tightrope.
My understanding is that the latest Iran sanctions bill — which passed the House by a hugely lopsided majority (I don't know about the Senate) — also prohibits the United States from negotiating with Iran. Sounds too absurd to be true, right? No negotiating. Except that in Washington the too absurd is true all the time.
All the bases will be turned over to Iraq, all 505 of them? A very impressive number indeed — if it actually happens.
A less impressive number is the 18,000 American troops still in Iraq as there will be a like number of Americans permanently assigned to the gargantuan American embassy (formerly known as the Green one) in Baghdad plus approximately 60,000 private contractors whom could fairly be described as mercenaries.
Didn't mean to write "nothing", though in a way that works. Intended "noting".
It's worth nothing that the protestors look like people, ordinary human beings while the police look like Star Wars Storm Troopers.
This is true in city after city.
Since the failure to prevent 9/11 ten years ago, the FBI's principal antiterrorism strategy seems to be to entrap deluded young halfwits into grandiose aspirational schemes, arrest them, and then trumpet the arrest to a credulous American press as a great antiterrorism coup.
Just to clarify my "Change without a difference" comment, I did not mean to suggest (nor do I think I said) that September 2010 is just like April 2004. What I meant is that the U.S. claims that "combat forces" are out of Iraq, thus we have "changed" to a force of noncombatant status. I don't believe the forces left behind are noncombatant and thus the claimed change has made no difference.
The "withdrawal of all combat troops" appears little more than p.r. optics to me.
What kind of "withdrawal" leaves behind 50,000 heavily armed American soldiers encamped in massive fortified bases and supplemented by 85,000 private support personnel/mercenaries? That's an Iraq occupation force of 135,000 by my count.
Change without a difference.
It so happens that I had recently purchased “Inside Out”, but had put it on the bookshelf for reading mañana. But with this recommendation, I’ve taken it off the shelf and will start reading this afternoon. And yes, I’m a fan, so will be looking for the cameo appearance of one Juan Cole.
Does it seems likely that the CIA public statements that Amiri was paid $5 million and that he was a CIA spy before he "defected" to the U.S. are designed to induce Iran to imprison or execute him?