Robustly post-modern, post-Brexit, post-BS, Trump-era, alt-left, anti-Imperialist, anti-Neoliberalist, anti-Zionist, pro-peeps worldwide. Fierce irreverance from an Old Leftist and all the Fake News that's not fit to print.
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[...] there were also other opinion polls of Jews that the Jewish Chronicle preferred to ignore. Last week the Haaretz-Dialog poll found that a majority of Israeli Jews, some 56%, also believed that they are the chosen people. It would seem to me that in a situation where the Palestinians live under occupation, the fact that over half Israeli Jews believe in Palestinian racial inferiority, should serve as a reminder as to who it is who is really oppressed and it’s not British Jews. ‘79 Percent of Right-wingers Believe Jews Are the Chosen People. Are You for Real?’
A Republican-led, Democrat-supported bill to safeguard US elections from foreign interference is stuck in the bowels of Congress. Here’s a possible explanation: The White House doesn’t want it to pass.
The Secure Elections Act, which Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) introduced, would have made significant changes to the way states protect their voting systems in three significant ways.
No doubt US lawmakers will also draw up a bill to stop the US from meddling in foreign countries' elections?*
“Throughout most of American history, commercial interests have played a central role in foreign policy, and vice versa. During the next few decades the interaction between them will become more intense, more important, more difficult to manage … The second Clinton administration should lay out a framework for this interaction to provide the necessary guide for setting priorities …”
— Jeffrey Garten, Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade 1993-95, ‘Business and Foreign Policy’, Foreign Affairs, May/June 1997
In late 2015, General Electric swallowed the energy division of the French multinational Alstom. The issue was highlighted mid-battle by Tom Gill on Counterpunch in May 2014.
Alstom had two prongs – energy (power and grid) and transport, with the former constituting over 70% of its business. The GE pr machine described it as ‘GE’s largest industrial deal ever’.
This is not your average takeover. Alstom’s trajectory incorporates larger dimensions.
It is a case study in the character of the peculiarities and vulnerability of the electric power and heavy engineering sectors – large-scale and extraordinarily complex output, irregular demand, and an inevitable close involvement with states as dominant purchasers.
It is a case study in the significant diminution of France’s industrial sector and of the deteriorating capacity of the French state.
It is a case study, by contrast, in the capacity of the US state and its strategic support of US corporate commercial interests.
It is a case study in the structural inhibition of the European Union’s institutions to ensuring European industrial vitality.
THE UNITED STATES has never been a friend of the International Criminal Court. While relations between the U.S. and the ICC have fluctuated over the course of different administrations, the American government has steadfastly refused to take the step that 124 other states have of ratifying the Rome Statute and thus becoming a member of the international legal body. The ICC’s mandate to investigate war crimes has thus been hampered by the unwillingness of the world’s sole superpower to commit to the organization.
Recent statements from the Trump administration suggest that the United States is now preparing to go to war against the ICC itself, motivated largely by an effort to silence investigations into alleged American war crimes committed in Afghanistan, as well as alleged crimes committed by Israel during the 2014 war in the Gaza Strip. In a speech at a D.C. event held by the Federalist Society on Monday, Donald Trump’s national security adviser John Bolton denounced the ICC as “illegitimate” and expressed his intentions toward the institution in no uncertain terms. “We will not cooperate with the ICC,” Bolton said. “We will provide no assistance to the ICC. We will not join the ICC. We will let the ICC die on its own. After all, for all intents and purposes, the ICC is already dead to us.”
In addition to this death wish against the court, Bolton said that the United States would retaliate against any ICC investigations into U.S. activities by sanctioning the travel and finances of ICC officials, even threatening to prosecute them in American courts.
DESPITE APPEALS FOR his release from the Trump administration, an Egyptian criminal court sentenced U.S. citizen Moustafa Kassem to 15 years in prison on September 8. The sentencing, which human rights advocates said is part of a crackdown on political dissent, crushed his family’s hopes to see their ailing relative freed, and disappointed advocates who hoped the White House could sway the government of Egyptian strongman Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
Kassem, who suffers from diabetes, has already served five years in pretrial detention and is now set to spend another 10 years in an Egyptian jail cell, barring a presidential pardon, early release, or deportation to the United States.
“We were so saddened to hear this news. We did not expect it,” Eman Kassem, Moustafa Kassem’s sister, told The Intercept. “He did nothing to deserve that verdict.”
Egyptian prosecutors alleged Moustafa Kassem, an Egyptian-American tried alongside over 700 people, joined the summer 2013 protests at Cairo’s Rabaa Square. The protests came shortly after a military coup that deposed Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi and installed el-Sisi in power.
Prosecutors presented no specific evidence that the 53-year-old Moustafa Kassem was at the square that day.
Today, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced it seized nine copycat websites set up to look like U.S. military recruitment pages. The websites, including Army.com and Air-Force.com, encouraged potential recruits to hand over their personal contact information. But that data was then sold to for-profit schools for their own recruitment.
The FTC filed a complaint in federal court today charging that two Alabama-based companies, Sun Key Publishing and Fanmail.com, made roughly $11 million selling data to private schools. The companies would contact the potential recruits and encourage them to enroll at specific for-profit schools under the false impression that the U.S. military endorsed the organizations. If the mark sounded interested, Sun Key would sell that recruit’s information for anywhere between $15 and $40. Tens of thousands of people visited the websites every month.
The defendants were charged with violating the FTC Act as well as the FTC’s Telemarketing Sales Rule and reached a settlement with the government. But they won’t have to give back that $11 million because of their “inability to pay.”
