Yes, America, there is a Class War, and you Just Lost It

By | Dec. 20, 2017 |
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By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –

The Republican Party did not just overhaul the tax code and they did not cut “your” taxes. They engineered a coup against the middle and working classes and they threw enormous amounts of public money to private billionaires and multi-millionaires.

Americans do not understand this sort of con game because mostly they don’t understand social class. They often don’t even believe in the latter. But really, not all households in the US are equal. Some have more income than others. Some have more power than others. And as with the Trumps, that wealth and power can be passed on to the next generation.

We’re not all middle class. That would make a mockery of the word “middle,” which implies that there are lower and upper classes. Some of us are working class, some are middle class, some are upper middle class, and some are rich. Policies that help the rich by cutting their taxes do not help the working and middle classes. They actively harm the latter by making less money available for government services and by devaluing the dollar.

The Republican Party mainly represents the rich. It also reaches out to rural people and claims to help them, but it is all lies. It mainly represents the rich.

h/t Pew .

Alabama routinely votes Republican. Alabama is one of the poorest states in the country. The Republicans aren’t actually doing anything for Alabama, except maybe making them feel good about themselves by buttering them up, or indulging them in their weird idea that fundamentalist Christianity should dictate social policy to 320 million Americans, who do not share those values.

The rich in the United States use American highways, and American wifi, and depend on the FBI to keep them from getting kidnapped. But they don’t want to pay for those things. They want you to pay for them even though they use them much more. I get angry when I see those trucks on the highway with the sign that they payed $9277 in tolls and fees last year to be on the highway. Trucks are the ones that tear up the highways and force us to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to rebuild. Their fees and tolls don’t come close to paying for the damage they do. So the costs are offloaded.

Onto us?

Onto us.

There are about 126 million households in the United States. One percent of them would be 1.26 million households. That is about the size of the city of Los Angeles. There are one hundred groups of 1.26 million households in the US, i.e. 100 Los Angeleses worth of households. Those one hundred groups are not equal in wealth. The bottom 100th of American households doesn’t have a pot to pee in.

The Republican Party slavishly serves the top 1.26 million households. That’s who they report to. That’s who sent them to Congress, through their campaign donations. They don’t care about you and they did not just now do you any favors.

The wealthiest one percent owns about 38 percent of the privately held wealth in the United States. In the 1950s, the top 1% only owned about 25 percent of the privately held wealth. A Republican was in the White House, Dwight Eisenhower. He was not a left wing guy. But he worried about corporations combining with government officials to become way more powerful. The last time wealth inequality was this high was just before the Great Depression. Think about that.


h/t Center for Budget & Policy Priorities

Americans’ wealth amounts to about $88 trillion. If you divided up all the privately held wealth equally, every household in the US would be worth $698,000. That is, they’d all have their own home plus substantial investments.

But needless to say, the wealth isn’t divided up equally. The top ten percent of households, 12.6 million households own 76% of the privately held wealth. That is, 10 of our notional 100 Los Angeleses own three-fourths of the wealth.

So just to be clear, of our 100 Los Angeleses worth of households, 90 of them own only 24 percent of the wealth.

So how did the top one percent go from having 25% of the privately held wealth to having 38%?

In some large part, it was tax policy. In the Eisenhower administration the top marginal tax rate was 91%, and the highest bracket of earners paid 90% in income tax. Progressive income tax was intended to keep the society from getting too out of kilter and to prevent wealth from becoming concentrated in a few hands.

h/t Fact and Myth.

There is no evidence, zero, that these tax policies hurt economic growth or hampered job creation.

Eisenhower’s tax policy was repealed over time, especially by Ronald Reagan. Reagan pulled the familiar scam of promising that tax cuts would pay for themselves by encouraging entrepreneurs to invest and to hire.

Instead, the government deficit ballooned (that’s what happens if you cut taxes but leave spending programs in place) .

And not only were all boats not lifted by Reagan’s rising tide, most of them were sunk. The average wage of an average worker is not higher now than it was in 1970.

h/t Bloomberg.com

The economy has grown enormously since 1970. So if workers did not get a share in the newly created wealth, who has it?

The 1%?

The 1%.

Think about tax policy as a snowblower aimed a a single point. Snow builds up at the point where the snowblower is facing. If you keep aiming at that point as you clean the snow, you’ll get an enormous hill of snow. There will be no snow to speak of on the driveway. There will just be an artificial mountain.

————————————————————————————
Boston Snow Removal Snow Plowing Contractor Builds Giant Snow Mountain

——————————————————————————————

So that is what the Republican Congress just did. They revved up the snowblower and they pointed it at a small mountain of already-accumulated snow, so that they will make the mountain larger.

This tax bill won’t create jobs, won’t spur investment, and won’t bring companies back home. It will make the 1.26 million households even more fabulously wealthy than they already are, and ensure that the rest of us get poorer.

When you cut taxes, you are cutting government services. There will be less money for the things the government does– education, funding science, dealing with national health crises, road building, dealing with interstate crime, etc.

And the super-wealthy who bought the politicians and made them pass this law? They just got ‘way richer and have every reason to be jubilant.

Posted in Featured,Inequality,Middle Class,Plutocracy,Poverty,Trade | No Responses | Print |

Trump Nat’l Security Speech: Is he the real threat to National Security?

By | Dec. 19, 2017 |
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Trump’s National Security Strategy document is about as confused and wrongheaded piece of writing you’d ever want to see.

It says,

“Jihadist terrorist organizations present the most dangerous terrorist threat to the Nation.”

This assertion is not true. The most dangerous threats to the United States are other states, especially the well armed ones. A few ragtag terrorists are dangerous, but they can’t do the damage a state can.

After other states, the next biggest danger comes from white supremacists and Neo-Nazis.

H/t Vox

Now, the white supremacists and Neo-Nazis are the groups Trump has been promoting, whom he considers ‘very fine people,’ and whose media he watches and cites. So in effect we have a terrorist president.

The document has a whole section called “Defeat Jihadist Terrorists.”

There’s a mistake right there. Muslims feel as though they are commanded to struggle for the faith, which is what jihad means. It is sort of like Timothy 6:12 in the New Testament: “Fight the good fight (agōnizou ton kalon agōna) of the faith; take hold of the eternal life, to which you were called . . .”

Jihad and the Greek agon are very similar. So that kind of “good fight” or struggle, jihad, is considered a virtue by Muslims. In the Qur’an, the word “jihad” does not carry a connotation of violence. You struggle by giving donations, e.g., or volunteering. It is a virtuous struggle and a struggle for virtue.

So you probably don’t want to give 1.6 billion Muslims the notion that this “good fight” is anything to do with terrorism.

And what do you call the terrorism of Myanmar Buddhists against innocent Rohingya Muslims. Is that jihad too? Don’t you need a universal word for terrorist activity?

Or what about the percentage of white nationalist terrorism that is religiously driven by Christianity? Is that jihadi also?

You call unprovoked violence on behalf of a religion “Vigilantism.” That’s what it is.

The document links what it calls jihadi terrorism to the desire for a caliphate or Muslim religious empire. But it goes on to complain about the Lebanese Hizbullah, a Shiite group that rejects a caliphate, since that is a Sunni notion. (Vanishingly few Sunnis nowadays want a caliph.)

The document calls for cooperation with allies. But Trump has assiduously insulted and alienated most of our allies in the world. He also has blabbed his mouth about operations in which Israel e.g. had a mole inside ISIL, revealing sources and methods. I don’t think most countries are eager to cooperate under these circumstances.

The document makes no mention of the US-enabled Saudi bombing of Yemen. Washington is driving Yemenis into the arms of terrorists by participating in this sick and creepy campaign, with civilian targets accounting for as many as a third of air strikes. This is like Nazis buzz-bombing civilian London in WW II! Only this is our coalition doing it.

This document is just bluster and hot air, showing no sign of actually understanding the occasional terrorism that surfaces in the Muslim world or giving the slightest idea of knowing how to combat terrorists.

Not understanding that the main terrorist threat is from white Americans is the big error, which colors everything else in the report.

Trump is so incompetent and just plain wrong that his daily barrage of insults that pass for foreign policy are undoing all the valuable work done by American counter-terrorism officials.

——-

Related video:

BBC: Is Donald Trump a danger to national security? BBC News

Posted in Donald Trump,Featured | 7 Responses | Print |

Fascism’s return and Trump’s war on youth

By | Dec. 19, 2017 |
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By Henry Giroux | (The Conversation) | – –

Fascism is all too often relegated to the history books.

The word conjures up a period in which civilized societies treated democracy with contempt, engaged in acts of systemic violence, practised extermination and elimination, supported an “apocalyptic populism,” suppressed dissent, promoted a hyper-nationalism, displayed contempt for women, embraced militarism as an absolute ideal and insisted on obedience to a self-proclaimed prophet.

But the seeds that produced such fascist horrors have once again sprung to life, returning in new social and political forms.

Today, a culture of fear dominates American society, one marked by massive inequities in wealth and power that not only uphold structures of domination, but also view differences as threats, compassion as weakness and shared responsibilities —if not the common good itself — as pathology.

Fascist thought is on the rise all over the world, but its most blatant and dangerous manifestation has emerged in the Trump administration.

Fear and the ethos of mass consumerism —coupled with widespread insecurity and ignorance —now drive people into a malignant notion of security, self-inflicted cynicism and into the arms of demagogues like Trump. For too many Americans, critical thinking and hope have given way to emotional bonding and the revival of the discourse of ultra-nationalism and bigotry.

Trump: Not Hitler, but dangerous nonetheless

Trump is not Hitler in that he has not created concentration camps, shut down the critical media or rounded up dissidents; moreover, the United States at the current historical moment is not the Weimar Republic.

But in the Trump era, remnants of fascism exist in different shapes and forms and include a celebration of the cult of the leader, systemic racism, the embrace of a toxic macho-populism and state support for ultra-nationalism, racism and the threat of violence against critics.

All of these elements are evident in Trump’s rhetoric and policy initiatives.

Trump’s corporate brand of neoliberal fascism is highly visible in right-wing policies that favour deregulation, corporate power and the interests of the ultra-rich.

Instead of draining the corporate swamp, Trump has embraced the merging of corporate and political power, and in doing so has turned the state into a battering ram designed to serve the most powerful and wealthiest members of society.

Trump’s mode of fascism is a unique product of our times, our commercial culture, and a corporate controlled media, all of which saps the foundations of a viable democracy.

American culture is advertising-saturated and celebrity-based, and has permitted a rich self-promoter to abandon any pretense of civility, accountability or integrity in order to hype, scam and market his way to power.

Call it Fascism, American-Style. It’s returned in the shadow of neoliberalism, with its celebration of the market as the template for governing all of society and its concentration of economic and political power in relatively few hands.

Friendly with dictators

How else to explain Trump’s unapologetic support and friendly attitude toward right-wing dictators such as the self-confessed killer, Rodrigo Duterte, president of the Philippines, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, all of whom have a fawning attraction to Trump given he exhibits little interest in their massive human rights violations.

Trump’s fascism is also on full display in his ramping up of the police state, his relentless racist rhetoric, taunts and policies that cast Blacks, immigrants and Muslims as people unworthy of respect, compassion and dignity, and in his support for a war culture.

The latter is marked by his expansion of the U.S. military budget, his provocations aimed at North Korea and reckless policies such as recognizing Jerusalem the capital of Israel —widely condemned by almost all world leaders — that destabilize the Middle East, Asia and other parts of the world.

But there are more subtle, if not under-examined, indicators that point to resurgence of fascist principles in the United States.

One of the most powerful is Trump’s war on youth.

Finance capitalism now drives politics, governance and policy in unprecedented ways. And it’s more than willing to sacrifice the future of young people for short-term political and economic gains, if not democracy itself.

In an apparent war on children, the Trump administration provides a disturbing index of a society in the midst of a deep moral and political crisis — not the least of which was the president’s support and defence of an accused serial pedophile, Roy Moore, in his unsuccessful attempt to win an Alabama Senate seat.

‘Foreclosed hope’

Too many young people today live in an era of foreclosed hope, an era in which it is difficult either to imagine a life beyond the tenets of a savage form of casino capitalism or to transcend the fear that any attempt to do so can only result in a more dreadful nightmare.

Youth today are not only plagued by the fragility and uncertainty of the present, they are, as the late Polish philosopher Zygmunt Bauman has argued, “the first post-war generation facing the prospect of downward mobility [in which the] plight of the outcast stretches to embrace a generation as a whole.”

American youth, especially those marginalized by race and class, are subject to the dictates of the punishing state. Not only is their behaviour being criminalized in schools and on the streets, they are also subject to repressive forms of legislation.

Several states are sponsoring legislation that would make perfectly legal forms of protest a crime that carries a huge fine, or subjects young people to possible felony charges? Increasingly, young people are viewed as a public disorder, a dream now turned into a nightmare.

The most recent example is evident in budget and tax reform bills that shift millions of dollars away from social programs vital to the health of poor youth to the pockets of the ultra-rich, who hardly need tax deductions.

As U.S. children’s rights activist Marian Wright Edelman points out, such actions are particularly alarming and cruel at a time when “millions of America’s children today are suffering from hunger, homelessness and hopelessness.”

She adds: “Nearly 13.2 million children are poor – almost one in five. About 70 per cent of them are children of colour, who will be a majority of our children by 2020. More than 1.2 million are homeless. About 14.8 million children struggle against hunger in food insecure households.”

Cruel mindset

The Trump administration is more than willing to pass massive tax cuts for the rich while at the same time refusing to fund the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which supports over nine million children.

Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, meantime, has argued that tax cuts shouldn’t benefit the poor because they will just waste the money on booze and women.

So if you’re not rich, it’s because you’re lazy. Really? Tell that to the 10,000 people, some of them children, who may die each year as a result of losing their health insurance due to the proposed Senate tax bill.

Such a mindset, and statements like Grassley’s, are more than cruel, they represent a political and economic system that has abandoned any sense of moral and social responsibility.

In this view, children are undeserving of aid because offering such government support flies in the face of a ruthless neoliberal ideology that insists that the only responsibility of government is to aid the rich and powerful corporations.

If the poor are suffering and subject to harsh conditions, according to Grassley’s logic, it is because of a lack of character.

Another under-analyzed example of Trump’s war on youth can be seen his cancellation of the DACA program (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), instituted in 2012 by former president Barack Obama.

Under the program, over 800,000 undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children or teens before 2007 were allowed to live, study and work in the United States without fear of deportation.

In revoking the program, Trump enacted a policy that is both cruel and racist, given that 78 per cent of DACA residents are from Mexico. These are the same immigrants Trump once labelled rapists, drug addicts and criminals.

Trump’s contempt for the lives of young people, his support for a culture of cruelty and his appetite for destruction and civic catastrophe are more than a symptom of a society ruled almost exclusively by a market-driven survival of the fittest ethos.

‘Systemic derangement’

It is about the systemic derangement of democracy and emergence of fascist politics that celebrates the toxic pleasures of the authoritarian state with no regard for its children.

Trump is the apostle of moral blindness and unchecked corruption, and he revels in a mode of governance that merges his never-ending theatrics of self-promotion with deeply authoritarian politics.

One of the most disturbing features of Trump’s fascism is his disregard for the truth and his embrace of an infantilism that demonstrates, for young people, a lack of any viable sense of critical thought, agency and commitment to social and economic justice.

What’s more, Trump has unleashed a rancid populism and racist-fuelled ultra-nationalism that mimics older forms of fascism and creates a culture of cruelty that both disparages its children and cancels out a future that makes democracy possible for them — and therefore all of us.

At the same time, Trump has embraced a merging of corporate power and politics that is characteristic of all fascist regimes, and in doing so, he has shifted wealth and resources away from vital social programs for young people into the hands of the financial elite.

There is more at work here than regressive tax policies, there is also an attempt to disable the welfare state by eliminating its funding.

Domestic terrorism

One result is what might be called the unleashing of a form of domestic terrorism — terrorism practised in one’s own country against one’s own people —in which young people are subject to state violence and relegated to forms of terminal exclusion, spheres of social abandonment and set adrift in a state of disorientation and despair.

Under this new resurgence of fascism, thinking is dangerous, public spheres that promote critical thought are considered pathological and youth are viewed as a threatening disoriented class, especially those marginalized by race, sexual orientation and class.

And so under Trump, the winds of fascism have accelerated into a hurricane and pose a haunting crisis for youth, the future and democracy itself.

That crisis of youth under the Trump regime is a political disaster of the first order and threatens every vital cultural and political ideal, principle, social formation and public sphere that makes a democracy possible. It’s best illustrated by Trump’s support for Moore, a homophobe, unabashed racist and an accused child predator, sexual harasser and sexual abuser.

Yes, fascism us making a comeback and is with us once again — yet Moore’s defeat in the deep-red state of Alabama to his Democratic challenger gives us reason to hope. Black voters, particularly black women, and young voters stood up to say “no more.”

The ConversationFascism requires those among us who value equity, fairness, justice and morality to defeat it. To stop fascism, it is crucial that we show that democracy is the only alternative, and that the grotesque elements of fascism will be challenged. Here’s hoping Alabama is just the beginning of such a struggle.

Henry Giroux, Chaired professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the Department of English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

——

Related video added by Juan Cole:

The Young Turks: “THIS Is How Fascism Begins”

Posted in Donald Trump,Far Right | 1 Response | Print |

The Mideast has a Militia Problem: Does Iraq’s Ayatollah Sistani Have the Answer?

By | Dec. 18, 2017 |
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By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has called for Iraq’s Shiite militias to come under control of the central government.

One of the problems facing the Middle East has been the rise of autonomous militias, who are often more powerful than the state and its army. You have Hizbullah in Lebanon, you have the militias in Libya that declined to stand down after the 2011 revolution, and you have the Shiite militias in Iraq. You even had the “Awakening Councils” of Iraqi Sunnis under US occupation, most of whom were not absorbed by the Iraqi army once the US left.

The Iraqi Shiite militias have played a valuable role in defeating ISIL in that country. But if they remain a set of separate military forces now that its defeat has been formally announced by Prime Minister Haydar al-Abadi, they threaten to throw the country into further turmoil.

I don’t think the militias were created by the 2014 ruling of Sistani calling for young Iraqis to serve their country by taking on ISIL. The militias often existed before that ruling, and the ruling itself seems to me to insist that the volunteers remain under the authority of the Iraqi government.

But the ruling does seem to have reinvigorated some militias and led others to be founded. Now what?

Sistani insists that all military arms in Iraq must remain under the ultimate control of the Iraqi army. He urged all militia members to be integrated into the national armed forces.

This step was, by the way, urged on the government of then prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, with regard to the Sunni Awakening Councils. But of 100,000 men, only about 13,000 were hired by the government in 2009 and after. You could argue that the US should not have helped create those Sunni militias to fight al-Qaeda, or you could argue that al-Maliki should have given them government jobs. But it seems clear that they became an element of disorder.

Sistani wants the al-Abadi government to avoid this mistake, by incorporating the militiamen into the regular armed forces and police.

But Iraq should be careful to bring some Sunnis into the army alongside these militiamen, or you’d just turn the army into a Shiite militia.

This Iranian take on the decision below, from Press TV, seems to me to misrepresent what is reported of Sistani’s appeal. Press TV says that Sistani wants the militias to retain their own corporate identity but to report to the Iraqi military. The Arabic press quotes him as using the word indimaj, which would be a melding into the armed forces:

Press TV: “Ayat. Sistani: PMU must be incorporated in state security institutions”

Posted in Featured,Iraq | 7 Responses | Print |

Turkey to defy Trump, open Embassy to Palestine in E. Jerusalem

By | Dec. 18, 2017 |
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Middle East Monitor | – –

Turkey will open an embassy in East Jerusalem, President Tayyip Erdogan said on Sunday, days after leading calls at a summit of Muslim leaders for the world to recognise it as the capital of Palestine.

“God willing, the day is close when officially, with God’s permission, we will open our embassy there,” Erdogan said in a speech, maintaining his fierce criticism of the United States’ decision to recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

Last week, speaking at an opening ceremony of developmental projects that was held in Turkey’s central city of Sivas, Erdogan said: “Palestine has been under occupation since 1947,” stressing, “Israel is an occupying state, a terrorist state.”

“Trump’s declaration of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel is null and void for us in any case,” he added, noting that the US declaration was an attempt to “damage peace and security in the region”, adding:

Declaring it as a capital and relocating the embassy has no validity for us [Turkey].

The Turkish leader pointed out that the US decision has ignored a 1980 United Nation (UN)’s Security Council resolution, which was signed by the US and condemned the Israeli annexation of Jerusalem. Resolution 478 called on the council member states to withdraw their diplomatic missions from Jerusalem and described the east of the city as “under occupation”.

Tension has risen across the Palestinian territories since US President Donald Trump’s decision to officially recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

Most countries consider East Jerusalem, which Israel annexed after capturing it in a 1967 war, to be occupied territory, and say the status of the city should be left to be decided at future Israeli-Palestinian talks.

While the international community has almost unanimously disagreed with Donald Trump’s announcement, reports suggest that the announcement was done with the pre-agreement of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, with the Saudi Arabia going as far as, allegedly, stating to the Palestinian President to accept a village on the outskirts of Jerusalem as the alternative Palestinian capital.

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Via Middle East Monitor

Posted in Israel/ Palestine | 2 Responses | Print |

Puerto Rico: On top of Everything Else, GOP Tax Bill is Racist

By | Dec. 17, 2017 |
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By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –

Puerto Rico’s governor, Ricardo Rosselló Nevares, sent a letter to all the members of Congress yesterday, begging on bended knee for a supplemental disaster aid appropriation.

That he had to write this letter is a profound embarrassment to the United States, since he had to remind the federal legislators that the 3.4 million residents of Puerto Rico are US *citizens*.

“No governor,” he said, “should be in the position of having to negate hope after a catastrophic disaster, owing to the inaction of Congress.”

He pointed out that “American citizens living in Puerto Rico …have been struck this year by two of the most catastrophic hurricanes in the modern history of the Island.”

Some 150,000 Puerto Ricans have been forced to leave the islands for the mainland because of lack of basic services like electricity and potable water, or 4.4% of the population!

Only 64% of the electricity has been restored, and clean water is also still not available to everyone.

But here is the kicker. Not only is it doubtful that Puerto Ricans will get the aid they deserve as Americans, but the tax bill the Republican Plutocrats are in the process of passing screws them over big time.

The bill treats American firms investing in and operating in Puerto Rico as though they are in a foreign country.

Euronews reports,

“Rosselló said the compromise bill includes a 12.5 percent tax on “intangible assets” of U.S. companies, such as a pharmaceutical patent produced in Puerto Rico, and a minimum of a 10 percent tax on companies’ profits abroad. “They are treating Puerto Rico as a foreign jurisdiction so they are levying a full tax,” he said.

Puerto Rico’s problems come in some part from congressional tax policy. The islands lost their favorable tax status in the 1990s with the “contract on America” GOP congress, and also suffer from lack of favorable treatment in shipping tariffs.

I fear there is only one explanation for why Puerto Ricans, who are US citizens, are being treated this way by the Republican Party. It is that the GOP is latently white supremacist and that colors how they see such matters.

—–

Related video added by Juan Cole:

Al Jazeera English: “Puerto Ricans frustrated over lack of aid”

Posted in Extreme Weather,Featured,Puerto Rico,Super Storms | 14 Responses | Print |

Having had Green Electricity for 300 days, Costa Rica Moves to EVs

By | Dec. 16, 2017 |
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By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –

Costa Rica, which has among the cleanest electrical grids in the world, has just passed a law promoting electric vehicles. The transportation sector in this Central American country of 5 million is heavily dependent on dirty petroleum and accounts for about half of its emissions of the heat-trapping poisonous gas, carbon dioxide.

The country’s congress overwhelmingly passed the law on its second reading, which aims at a goal of 37,000 EVs within 5 years. It has 1.4 million automobiles, So that would be about 2.6% of its fleet. Since its electricity is so clean, and is expected to be 100% renewables by 2021, Costa Rica’s electric cars will produce virtually no CO2.

Costa Rica’s electricity ran 100% on renewables for 300 days straight in 2017.

Wind and geothermal energy each provide 10% of the country’s electricity, with a whopping 78% coming from hydro. So far solar represents less than 1% of the mix, which is a missed opportunity. But it isn’t just that they are blessed with wind and lava. The country has invested in its electricity grid so as to be able to handle and transport this electricity.

In fact, Central America in general is establishing a green energy corridor. Alexander Richter notes that Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama are setting in motion plans to share around their surplus electricity production. That means if Costa Rica’s wind turbines produce more than it needs, the excess can go by wire to a neighbor, reducing emissions.

h/t ThinkGeoEnergy

Only one Costa Rican congressional representative voted against government incentives for electric cars.

Compare to the radically pro-carbon, pro-global heating provisions in the US GOP tax bill. It confirms my conviction that the US is the most corrupt country on earth. The US observers who maligned the Central American governments as “banana republics” might want to shift their gaze to North America.

As for bananas, they will soon be delivered in electric vehicles.

—–

Related video:

EuroNews: “Costa Rica trials hydrogen bus”

Posted in Climate Change,Featured,Geothermal,Green Energy,Latin America,wind energy | 2 Responses | Print |

FCC begins restoring Corporate Privilege to the Internet

By | Dec. 15, 2017 |
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By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –

This web site amounted to anything because of net neutrality, which I prefer to call internet liberty. That liberty is now going or gone.

The internet was originally based on the principle that everyone’s web site is as easily reached by users as everyone else’s. All nodes are equidistant from all other nodes.

So when George W. Bush and his cronies invaded and occupied Iraq, whispering a lot of sweet nothings in the ears of the US public, my daily reports of events in Iraq as conveyed in Arabic news sites were immediately accessible to anyone who cared to read me.

Public spirited people could reach my site as easily as they could reach corporate sites like that of MSNBC, then a collaboration of NBC Universal and the Microsoft corporation. MSNBC prepared for the coming Iraq war by firing liberal anchor Phil Donohue, because they knew he would be critical of the war, and the big corporations either wanted the war or were afraid of crossing Bush and his vindictive gang.

In April of 2004, when the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr staged an uprising against the US military, took over all the police stations in Baghdad and the Shiite south, and kicked the Ukrainian military off their base, I could report on all this from Iraqi (and Iranian) news sources and the speeches of their leaders and politicians, translating the Arabic and Persian into English.

I got a million page views that month, and even some pundits who did not like my views very much said things like that my coverage was better than that of the New York Times. (I don’t say that myself, but others did.)

My web site at that time was being run on blogger.com, which cost nothing. I had to pay for my internet address registration. But I really had almost no costs. I did not at that time take or want advertising. I considered the blog an extension of my teaching at a public institution, the University of Michigan, which had hired me to tell people about the Middle East. (I now do have costs, and am turning this site into a magazine, but that was a different time. If you like this site, please consider donating to it. Also given the way things are going, you probably should subscribe by email if you like getting the articles).

So in 2004 you could not get more grass roots or humble than this operation. And people could read my site as easily as they could read the news at the site of the pro-war Fox Cable News (the owner of which, Rupert Murdoch, promised everyone $14 a barrel petroleum if the US took over Iraq. The price went on up to $110 a barrel before falling to $40-50 a barrel more recently.)

But the internet service providers– corporations such as Verizon and Comcast, were deeply unhappy about the neutrality, the liberty of the internet. They would like to charge MSNBC millions of dollars a year to deliver their news site to the public. What they have in mind is to create lanes on the internet– fast lanes and slow lanes.

It has been demonstrated that if a web site takes a little longer than usual to download, readers simply close the page and go on to another site. So the sites slotted into the slow lane over time will lose all their readers.

And you get slotted in the slow lane because you cannot pay the millions for delivery of your site that MSNBC or Fox can.

In other words, fast lanes and slow lanes wipe out the diversity of the internet and deliver it into the hands of a few billionaires and of governments such as the Russian Federation, who can pay for a fast lane.

It would be as though all highways in the US cost $1,000 to get on each day, and if you couldn’t pay that, you’d have to use surface roads, service roads and dirt roads to get where you are going. Billionaires could get on the highway because for a billionaire $1000 is chump change.

So this sort of system, toward which the Federal Communications Commission under former Verizon employee Ajit Pai has just taken a big step, turns the internet into old style antenna television where you just had three or four networks and they broadcast popular shows to 60 mn people at a shot. Those networks back in the 1960s gave their writers strict instructions never to mention labor unions and in general began the process of turning the United States into a fascist plutocracy, a reality on the brink of which we are now teetering.

Back in Iraq War days, people would write me from small towns to thank me for my reporting on Iraq. Without it, they said, they would have no idea what was going on. They said that they had no NPR radio station because local officials had connived to prevent one operating in their area. Network news had only 22 minutes a day of national and international news and at least initially it was enthusiastically pro-war. Their local newspaper (that was when there were newspapers) was owned by a Republican and carried no independent news about Iraq, just whatever the White House or Pentagon briefing said that day. (They typically said that they were making enormous progress. On those days when 500 people were killed by a bomb, they scaled it back to “slow progress.” But it was always progress, in Panglossian Bushworld.)

What the big corporations who have Ajit Pai and the FCC in their back pockets want to do is close off those dissident voices and just have a handful of voices, the ones they can make money from and who say the sorts of things that millionaire CEOs and billionaire media moguls like Rupert Murdoch want to hear.

That way we can have more Iraq Wars, and this time they will be huge successes just because the 2 or 3 media outlets will report them as huge successes.

The tragedy is that the internet was working just fine before Ajit Pai got his corrupt mits on it. It didn’t have to be corporatized. Last I knew, Verizon is making a shitload of money. They don’t need more. The providers are already giving slower service and charging higher prices than in less feudal countries than the US.

Pai thinks we are so dumb that he made a propaganda video denying all these points and featuring a Pizzagate conspiracy nut who thought Hillary Clinton ran a pedophilia ring out of a Washington DC pizzeria. In the world Pai is making, we may not even have the means to challenge the Pizzagate narrative.

The first thing the providers will do is play favorite. AT&T already has a sweetheart deal with DirectTV. If you are with AT&T and don’t want DirectTV, you might face data caps.

Klint Finley at Wired writes:

“AT&T, for example, already allows its DirecTV Now video-streaming service to bypass mobile subscribers’ data limits. Verizon does much the same with its Go90 video service. Sling TV and Netflix, on the other hand, still count towards customers’ data caps. The end of the FCC’s current rules will allow companies to expand the ways they prioritize certain services over others.”

The FCC decision can be fought. Some 17 states are filing lawsuits against it.

Your congressional representative and your senators can craft legislation restoring internet liberty. They won’t bother unless they think you are so upset about this issue that you might not vote for them or give money to their campaign, though.

Some states, such as Washington, are announcing that they will penalize corporations who try to interfere with net neutrality.

My guess is that the European Union will also have things to say about all this. The internet is global and it would be easy for AT&T to run afoul of European Union antitrust laws.

But, the corporations destroyed radio as a democratic medium and made it a part of monopoly capital (and even now restrictions are being lifted that will aid further monopolization, by rightwing corporations such as Sinclair). They can do the same thing to the internet if people don’t stop them.

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Related video:

The Majority Report with Sam Seder: “FCC Chairman Stars In DISGUSTING Anti-Net Neutrality Propaganda Video”

Posted in Corruption,Featured,Internet,journalism,media,Plutocracy,social media | 12 Responses | Print |

Palestinians outraged but unsurprised by Trump on Jerusalem: ‘World already ignores our existence’

By | Dec. 15, 2017 |
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By Joey Ayoub | ( GlobalVoices.org) | – –

US President Donald Trump's declaration that the country would move its embassy in Israel to the city of Jerusalem was met with shock throughout the world. Among Palestinians, however, it was outrage mixed with a distinctive lack of surprise.

Jerusalem is a controversial site of contention in the so-called Israeli-Palestinian peace process for the simple reason that both the State of Israel and the State of Palestine claim it as their capital. Under international law, East Jerusalem is considered to be occupied Palestinian territory — Israel captured the city, previously under Jordanian rule, during the 1967 Six-Day War — and all embassies to Israel, up until this recent development, were located in Tel Aviv.

Palestinians watch Trump's speech on the news on December 6, 2017. Photo taken by Mariam Barghouti on Instagram and re-used with permission. Original caption reads: Watching Trumps speech. Face explains it: a little bit of mental cursing and a little bit of this is nothing new mixed with lament and meh.

Palestinians living in the city have long experienced discrimination under Israeli control. According to the series entitled “A City for All?” produced by the collective Visualizing Palestine, as of October 2017, 10,000 Palestinians born in Jerusalem “have no legal status because their parents hold different ID cards“. Despite being 37% of the current population of Jerusalem, Palestinians have received only 10% of the city's budget for their neighborhoods.

And between 2004 and 2016, “685 Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem were demolished…leaving 2,513 people homeless. Home demolitions are part of a broader Israeli policy to alter the demographic and geospatial makeup of Jerusalem, privileging Jewish settlers over the indigenous Palestinian population”:

“685 Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem were demolished between 2004 and 2016, leaving 2,513 people homeless. Home demolitions are part of a broader Israeli policy to alter the demographic and geospatial makeup of Jerusalem, privileging Jewish settlers over the indigenous Palestinian population.” Caption from Visualizing Palestine. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Jerusalem is a microcosm of the treatment that Palestinians face across the territories. Throughout Israel's 50-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, human rights groups, international organizations and governments have blasted Israel for human rights abuses, ranging from unlawful killings and forced displacement to discriminatory policies toward Palestinians.

With the US embassy decision, politicians across the world offered their rebukes. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, for example, declared that “Jerusalem is a red line for Muslims“. But over the years, condemnations haven't translated into any concrete change, especially when large sums of trade money with Israel have been on the line.

As for the US, Palestinians have long argued that the country's policies reflect an unmistakable pro-Israel bias. Despite the US claiming to be a neutral actor, its record at the United Nations, where it has used the veto in support of Israel several times (full list by the Jewish Virtual Library here), as well as the large amount in aid and weapons it sends to Israel every year (the most recent package in 2016 worth $38 billion over the course of a decade), speak for themselves.

In fact, so common was it to expect the US to use its veto in support of Israel that the Obama administration's 2016 decision to abstain from using it in a resolution condemning Israel's construction of settlements on Palestinian territory — declared illegal under international law — made headlines.

‘Who is America to declare the capital of Israel when it's Palestinian land?’

This perhaps explains why, while definitely outraged, Palestinians reacting on social media were not necessarily surprised by the US move.

At the time of writing, at least two Palestinians were killed and over 200 were injured during protests opposing the Jerusalem decision across East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza. Israel launched at least one airstrike on Gaza, injuring at least 25 civilians.

Linah Al Saafin, a Palestinian producer at Al Jazeera, shared this image of a 14-year-old Palestinian boy being arrested by Israeli soldiers in Hebron, West Bank:

Mariam Barghouti, a Palestinian activist and commentator who was herself arrested at the age of 20 by Israeli forces, wrote in an Al Jazeera op-ed that the US administration's announcement did not happen in a vacuum:

It's a culmination of international failure to address Israeli human rights violations, perpetual US support to Israel, the incompetency of Palestinian leadership to achieve any solutions through diplomatic efforts, and more recently the new friendship the US administration is building with some Arab states.

She also denounced the focus of much of the mainstream media on “reaction from Palestinian and Arab states” rather than the very rights of Palestinians continuously violated:

Barghouti finally pointed out that 2017 is the centenary of the Balfour Declaration, referring to a 1917 public statement issued by the British government during World War I announcing support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine:

Photo taken by Mariam Barghouti on December 8, 2017. “Protest silhouettes. Youth confronting Israeli forces near Beit El settlement in Ramallah against Trump’s declaration of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.” Used with permission. Source: Instagram

. . .

In a long status, Palestinian-Syrian journalist Eyad Hamid said that moving the embassy does not make much of a difference as it'd be akin to moving it from one occupied city, Jaffa, now part of Tel Aviv-Yafo where the current embassy is, to another, Jerusalem. . . .

Jerusalem-born and raised Leen Barghouti, who is currently a consultant to the Palestinian mission in Berlin, and previously a researcher at Georgetown University, viewed this as yet more proof of the Israeli government under President Benjamin Netanyahu isn't interested in peace:

There are not enough words to describe what on earth happened yesterday to my hometown Jerusalem, however it is clear the Israeli government is not interested in letting go of its domination, suppression and superiority. It is not interested in peace. Netanyahu's idea of peace is Palestinian servitude and submission. The US administration is basically rewarding theft, oppression, repression, violence and humiliation.

She then called on Palestinians to unite:

It's time now to unite and fight for our equal civil, cultural, religious and political rights. It's time to break our chains and retake our heritage that was stolen from us, it's time to fight for what is right rather than what is comfortable.

…

All ‘anger’ that isn't accompanied by the dissolution to the Oslo regime [a reference to the Palestinian Authority established by the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation] and withdrawal from recognition of the occupation and the complete divestment from negotiations is just [an] empty act with no meaning, and the Palestinian Authority won't do any of this because its priority is to preserve its privileges

The Israeli government hasn't wasted much time since the announcement, with 14,000 new housing units planned for Jerusalem, including 4,000 across the “Green Line”, i.e. in the legal territory of the State of Palestine. . .

Joey Ayoub is the MENA Editor at Global Voices as well as a Lebanese researcher currently living in Edinburgh. He is the founder of Hummus For Thought and mostly writes on Syria, Israel-Palestine, and Lebanon. He has a BS in Environmental Health from the American University of Beirut, an MA in Cultural Studies from SOAS, University of London and is currently doing a PhD at the University of Edinburgh. His MA thesis was on the politics of Hebrew and Yiddish in Zionist thinking and his PhD research is on the politics of cinema in postwar Lebanon.

For full reprinting of cited tweets, see the original article at GlobalVoices.org

Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution 3.0.

Posted in Israel/ Palestine | 1 Response | Print |