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**MARCH 27, 2024**
On the Prospect website
A Bump in the Road for Apple
The Department of Justice monopolization lawsuit against Apple
highlights Big Tech's efforts to dominate the automotive business.
BY LUKE GOLDSTEIN
One More Way the Supreme Court Has Legalized Corruption
Disgraced Sen. Bob Menendez is pretending to 'run' for
re-election because that allows him to tap his campaign account for
legal defense. BY RYAN COOPER
[link removed]
The Swamp; or, Inside the Mind of Donald Trump
His orations about migrants are a pastiche of others' golden
oldies. Exhibit A: the lie that migrants are sent from prisons and
mental institutions. BY RICK PERLSTEIN
Kuttner on TAP
****
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**** The Corrupt Trifecta of Yass, Trump, and
Netanyahu
Yass's payoffs to Trump are part of his efforts to destroy democracy
in the U.S. and Israel, while helping China.
In the past few days, we've learned that Donald Trump's reversal on
whether TikTok should be barred from the U.S. is mainly a payback to
Trump mega-donor Jeff Yass, who owns 15 percent of TikTok's Chinese
parent company, ByteDance. But it gets so much worse.
Now it turns out that Yass's money helped Trump reap a
multibillion-dollar windfall
when his social media company went public. Yass's company has been the
biggest institutional shareholder of the shell company that has merged
with Trump's Truth Social.
What else do we need in this corrupt dance? How about the destruction of
what's left of Israel's democracy.
Yass is also a major donor to an Israeli think tank and strategy group
, called
the Kohelet Forum
,
that has been a prime architect of Netanyahu's attempt at one-man
rule, the weakening of Israel's democracy, and the elimination of what
remains of the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel.
Kohelet's founder helped draft Israel's Basic Law on the
Nation-State, which took effect in 2018. This law established Jewish
people as having the sole right to self-determination, and downgraded
Arabic as one of Israel's official languages. Kohelet also drafted the
law that gives the Knesset, Israel's parliament, the power to override
Supreme Court decisions, and grants the government total control over
judicial appointments. This is a core part of Netanyahu's strategy for
clinging to power by evading prosecution.
[link removed]
One of Kohelet's close allies is the Shiloh Policy Forum
,
which promotes illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank and
far-right Israeli politicians who support that policy.
In the U.S., Eugene Kontorovich, head of Kohelet's international law
department and director of the Center for the Middle East and
International Law at George Mason University's Antonin Scalia Law
School, has been instrumental in the movement to brand all criticisms of
Israeli policy as antisemitic .
If we connect these dots, they display Trump's effort to cash in by
reversing his stance on China and U.S. national security, and the
blowback between billionaire efforts to destroy democracy in Israel and
similar moves to destroy it in the U.S. There is a dance between
would-be dictators of similar mind (Trump and Netanyahu) and the
oligarch who connects them.
You might think that someone who professes to care about antisemitism
would think twice about providing so much ammunition. But Yass's
cynicism knows no bounds, matched only by that of Trump and Netanyahu.
The fates of democracy in the U.S. and in Israel are indeed linked. But
not in the way the propagandists for AIPAC and Netanyahu would have us
believe.
~ ROBERT KUTTNER
Follow Robert Kuttner on Twitter
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