VIDEO OF THE DAY: Mike Johnson sparks war in his own party with stunning move
The abrupt decision to kick Rep. Mike Turner off of the House Intel Committee over his support for Ukraine is sparking outrage in the GOP ranks, putting Johnson's already slim majority in serious danger. Nice going, bozo!
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A year of empty threats and a “smokescreen” policy: how the State Department let Israel get away with horrors in Gaza
Brett Murphy, ProPublica: Time and again, Israel crossed the Biden administration’s red lines without changing course in a meaningful way, according to interviews with government officials and outside experts. Each time, the U.S. yielded and continued to send Israel’s military deadly weapons of war, approving more than $17.9 billion in military assistance since late 2023, by some estimates. The State Department recently told Congress about another $8 billion proposed deal to sell Israel munitions and artillery shells. 'It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the red lines have all just been a smokescreen,' said Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard Kennedy School and a preeminent authority on U.S. policy in the region. 'The Biden administration decided to be all in and merely pretended that it was trying to do something about it.' Throughout the contentious year inside the State Department, senior leaders repeatedly disregarded their own experts. They cracked down on leaks by threatening criminal investigations and classifying material that was critical of Israel. Some of the agency’s top Middle East diplomats complained in private that they were sidelined by Biden’s National Security Council. The council also distributed a list of banned phrases, including any version of “State of Palestine” that didn’t have the word “future” first. Two human rights officials said they were prevented from pursuing evidence of abuses in Gaza and the West Bank. Over the past year, reports have documented physical and sexual abuse in Israeli prisons, using Palestinians as human shields and razing residential buildings and hospitals. At one point early in the conflict, UNICEF said more than 10 children required amputations every day on average. Israeli soldiers have videotaped themselves burning food supplies and ransacking homes. One IDF group reportedly said, 'Our job is to flatten Gaza.' 'This is the human rights atrocity of our time,'one senior diplomat told me. 'I work for the department that’s responsible for this policy. I signed up for this. … I don’t deserve sympathy for it.'"
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Trump poses undeniable threat to Black lives and democracy
Black Lives Matter: Black people, Indigenous people, immigrants, and poor and lower-class people—all of our most vulnerable communities—will be impacted hardest by Trump’s initiatives. While this feels like a major defeat and a setback with no sign of recovery, we must not give it that much power. Will you donate to Black Lives Matter and support their efforts to protect our communities from Trump and his white supremacist cronies?
Gaza ceasefire takes hold after another delay, raising hopes of ending the war and freeing hostages
A ceasefire between Israel and Hamas took hold in the Gaza Strip on Sunday, ushering in an initial six-week period of calm and raising hopes for the release of dozens of militant-held hostages and an end to the devastating 15-month war. A last-minute delay by Hamas put off the truce’s start by nearly three hours and highlighted its fragility. Even before the ceasefire took effect, celebrations erupted across the territory and some Palestinians began returning to their homes. Israel, meanwhile, announced the names of the first three hostages expected to return home later Sunday, in exchange for the planned release of 90 Palestinian prisoners. Israeli bombing has killed at least 115 people since the ceasefire was announced.
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Capitalist housing markets make natural disasters worse
Ben Burgis, Jacobin: "How much does it cost to rent a furnished home in Bel Air? It depends when you’re asking. One such home was listed in the fall for $15,900 a month. That’s already a brain-melting amount of money to spend on rent. It works out to nearly $200,000 a year. If you want to rent it now, though, it’s $29,500 — an 86 percent increase. Trey White is a real estate agent from Pacific Palisades. He told the New York Times he’s seen an “unfathomable amount of illegal price gouging” since the Los Angeles fires started. Disaster price gouging is just one of the ways that the basic dynamics of capitalist housing markets are making a bad situation worse in Los Angeles. As Katya Schwenk wrote, one of the reasons the disaster was so severe in the first place is that real estate developers have “pushed to build ever more homes in zones designated as ‘very high risk’ for wildfires.” As with rent-gouging landlords, the basic market incentives of these developers have overwhelmed every other consideration. The result has been urban sprawl 'encroaching further and further into fire-prone wildlands.' Meanwhile, as wildfire risk increases, for-profit fire insurers are increasingly cutting their losses. In the now largely destroyed neighborhood of the Pacific Palisades, for example, State Farm canceled 1,600 policies last July. It dropped a couple thousand more elsewhere in Los Angeles. Some homeowners and renters have opted to pay as much as four times more for less coverage from California’s fire insurer of last resort, the California Fair Access to Insurance Requirements (FAIR) Plan, but many homes that have burned down since January 7 were probably uninsured. Any society needs to find ways to provide housing — but there’s no law of nature dictating that this function has to be assigned to profit-seeking market actors. The socially necessary function of minimizing the risk that people whose homes are vulnerable to being wiped out in natural disasters has to be carried out. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be carried out by the likes of State Farm...In the United States, we’re used to thinking of public housing as economically segregated housing for the very poor (and thus as centers for the social ills that accompany extreme poverty), but examples like Sweden and Vienna usefully show that it doesn’t have to be that way. We can and should build public housing open to everyone. Nor should such social democratic models be seen as the outermost limit of what’s possible. Surely it is not beyond the capacity of the human race to figure out how to do without landlords."
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The TikTok ban won’t help
Siddharth Suhas Shanbhag, Jacobin: "In a digital landscape dominated by social media apps owned and curated by US companies, TikTok is the most successful app to have come out of China. It has over 170 million American users — most of the US population — largely young people, and also a significant number of businesses that use the app to advertise their wares. Whether the ban will actually occur remains anyone’s guess. Joe Biden has said that his administration doesn’t plan to implement it during its last days in the White House, and Donald Trump, who had originally tried to ban the app during his first term, later vowed to save it (after accumulating some fourteen million followers on the platform). The court, in its decision to uphold the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, signed by President Joe Biden last spring, stated that national security concerns outweigh the potentially harmful consequences to freedom of speech. The justices were sympathetic to the US government’s argument that, since ByteDance is a Chinese company, there are potentially serious risks that arise from the possibility that it will be required to share data about its American users with the Chinese government. There were also risks, the justices affirmed, that the Chinese government could influence the quality of the content circulating on the app, to the detriment of the interests of American citizens. But the fact that the government has refused to act in a similarly protective manner in relation to US-owned social media apps is telling. Regulation is desperately needed to protect Americans’ data and protect free speech on social media. If the law was really about data protection or national security, it would set industry-wide standards, but the real motive behind it is to preserve US tech dominance. This is substantiated by the astonishing lack of government oversight of homegrown apps and tech companies. The Supreme Court obviously has few qualms about the undue power to manipulate the behavior of citizens that US policy has granted to corporations, private players who have no concern for the greater interests of their users beyond their ability to target them with ads and political messaging. Regulation could compel social media companies to protect our data and our right to privacy, but platforms designed to favor profit maximization over human well-being will always run counter to these goals, whether operated by companies in the United States, China, or elsewhere. The TikTok ban, if it actually happens, shows that government is at least capable of intervening forcefully. But that it is motivated by US economic hegemony, and during a time when tech capitalists and government in the United States have never been more imbricated, indicates that we can’t expect meaningful industry-wide intervention for the many anytime soon."
It’s time for Democrats to go low
Peter Rothpletz, the Guardian: "Democrats should make the next four years of Republican governance as grueling and painful as possible. What the 2024 election results made clear is that the Obama coalition is dead. If Democrats are to have any shot at reclaiming power, so too must be the niceties and mores of the Obama era. Yes, Democrats must get mean – ruthlessly, bitterly mean. This is not to say, however, that they need merely to cast aside the former first lady’s once-famous, now-infamous messaging mantra. No, what I prescribe is not just a new approach to political discourse but a new theory of opposition party politics. Trumpism has corrupted America in many ways, but one of the most obvious is how voters now expect lawmakers and surrogates to be truly vicious cultural warriors for them. Democrats can either bemoan the fact the fundamental rules of politics and discourse have changed or they can adapt to it. In the four years to come, emboldened voices on the right will work to expand the Overton window. Democrats’ reaction to this effort must not materialize as feigned – or earnest – injury and horror. Take the punch and return the favor. This new, more muscular messaging strategy must be combined with a far more aggressive war footing in the halls of Congress. Time and again congressional Democrats have swept in to save Republican leaders – and Republican voters – from their own lawmakers. This generosity must end. The Dems must bleed the Republican party of its political capital at every opportunity, even if it means the American people experience some pain. Yes, Democrats should make the next four years of Republican governance as grueling and painful as possible. Do not help them pass a budget (if Johnson, as Last playfully notes, offers up DC statehood as an incentive for cooperation, we can have another conversation). Do not vote for a single cabinet nominee – even those who qualify as 'adults in the room' (sorry, Marco Rubio). Relatedly, do not hold back from highlighting all the darkest aspects of said nominees’ backgrounds – from former Fox host Pete Hegseth’s alleged sexual assault to Robert F Kennedy’s purported role in the deaths of dozens during a 2019 measles outbreak in American Samoa. Liberals made the decision to compare the former and future commander-in-chief to Hitler. Rhetoric like that can’t be memory-holed. Thus, symbolically lauding the man’s re-ascension to power will not preserve the Democrats’ reputation as the 'party of norms.' On the contrary, it will cement the growing sense – particularly after the pardon of Hunter Biden – that Dems traffic in lies and deceit with the same shamelessness as Republicans. After all, as Robert Frost often liked to observe, “a liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel”. Democrats must get over themselves; far too much is at stake."
Food for thought
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