Education and wealth have a direct correlation. It’s not by coincidence that most rich people are well-educated or that most people living in poverty are deficient in formal education. According…
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Education and wealth have a direct correlation. It’s not by coincidence that most rich people are well-educated or that most people living in poverty are deficient in formal education. According to recent Bureau of Labor Statistics, a professional with a master’s degree, on average, earns double the income of a laborer with a high school diploma. The same professional is also unemployed at half the rate.
Due to this relationship, education is often referred to as “the great equalizer,” the proverbial key to unlocking the coveted American dream. It’s the impetus for the proliferation of mass student loan debt throughout the United States. Yet for Black Americans the return on investment is unpromising.
As Donald Trump increases the pressure on the throat of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear agreement with Iran, more than the nuclear agreement is at risk of being lost. Trita Parsi, an Iran expert who was consulted by the Obama administration during the negotiations, has identified two other potential offspring of the agreement: it could soften the enmity between America and Iran and open the possibility of important cooperation, and the successful diplomacy between the bitterest of enemies could serve as a blueprint for the U.S. in future conflicts with seemingly ossified enemies. Both of these opportunities are also in danger of being lost.
There is a jagged contradiction in Trump’s foreign policy with Israel and Iran. He has been quite clear that he regards Israel as an unconditional ally and Iran as an unredeemable enemy. And yet, his policy does not always reflect his promise.
When the white supremacists chanted “blood and soil” in honor of a Confederate general in Charlottesville this weekend, they were invoking me and people like me. On my father’s side, I’m descended from plantation families that enslaved Africans and African Americans in Mississippi and South Carolina. My second great-grandfather, Samuel Mitchell McAlister Jr., was a slaveholding Confederate private in the Mississippi State Cavalry.
White supremacists have called, so I must respond. As a descendant of slaveholders and Confederate soldiers, I want to tell the truth about the evil that my ancestors and the Confederacy perpetrated, the repercussions their crimes have today, and how I and other white people still benefit from discrimination against people of color.
Like clockwork, as his administration’s approval slipped to all-time lows, President Donald J. Trump managed to rattle his saber and utter bellicose nuclear threats toward the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), manufacturing a foreign crisis to attract political support and to draw attention away from his recent legislative failures.
“North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States,” Mr. Trump unloaded in a statement to reporters in the White House. “They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen. (North Korean President Kim Jong Un) has been very threatening, beyond a normal statement. And as I said, they will be met with fire, fury and, frankly, power, the likes of which this world has never seen before.”
North Korea responded hours later, threatening to strike the U.S. territory of Guam in the western Pacific. Guam is home to 163,000 U.S. citizens as well as several major U.S. military bases. A statement issued by the North Korea state media said of Mr. Trump: “Sound dialogue is not possible with such a guy bereft of reason and only absolute force can work [on] him.”
Tensions began to tighten when the U.N. Security Council imposed a new round of sanctions against North Korea over its test launches of two intercontinental ballistic missiles in July. The sanctions ban North Korean exports of coal, iron, lead and seafood, which would slash up to one-third of North Korea’s export revenue.
Finally, Mr. Trump tweeted that U.S. military was “locked and loaded.”\
The first round of discussions are underway for the renegotiation of the 23-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement NAFTA. Many are expecting thorny bargaining to take place between Canada, Mexico, and a newly “economic nationalist” United States imbued with President Trump’s “America First” outlook promising stringent protectionist measures.
Meant to do away with trade barriers and expedite the free circulation of goods and services between the countries, the 1994 pact reconfigured the countries’ economies toward regional integration – a task critics doubt the Trump administration is willing to advance.
In Mexico, agrarian organizations and popular movements have criticized NAFTA for devastating the country’s small producers and hurting Mexico’s overall food sovereignty, turning the country into an exporter of raw materials and an importer of processed products. Meanwhile, industrial jobs in the U.S. were offshored to Canada and low-cost manufacturing hubs in Mexico.
The negotiators – U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland and Mexican Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo – will each come to the table with different sets of proposals representing the interests of their own respective business sectors.
There are no signs that demands by labor are being heeded or taken into account, according to Manuel Perez-Rocha, an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.
“The few own the many because they possess the means of livelihood of all. … The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labor.” —Helen Keller
Most people shy away from the simple question; do those who are paid the most in our society deserve to be compensated like that? If a particular individual was the driving force behind a cure for all cancer, or instrumental in significantly increasing the human life span, I think most everyone would agree that their value to society would be such that they’d be entitled to millions, even billions of dollars. But the world’s wealthiest individuals do not, in fact, seem to have contributed in such a way that they have earned a distinction placing them above the masses, garnering more money in less than a year than what virtually everyone else earns in a lifetime. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which ranks the world’s richest three hundred people, these incredibly wealthy elite saw their net worth jump by $52.4 billion in 2013. On July 21, 2016, Bloomberg would recount how Amazon founder Jeff Bezos had surpassed Warren Buffet as the third richest person in the world, thanks to a tidy increase of $5.4 billion in his personal fortune in 2016. Meanwhile, the vast majority of workers, who desperately need a significant pay raise, are simply not getting one.
Corporate lobbying groups linked to Goldman Sachs have directly lobbied the White House’s National Economic Council headed by Goldman’s immediate past president Gary Cohn, according to federal records reviewed by International Business Times. Cohn previously pledged to recuse himself from any Goldman-related matter, but there is no indication he recused himself from the matters that the Goldman-linked groups were lobbying his council on.
Along with directly lobbying lawmakers, major corporations often lobby the government through industry trade associations. Those groups marshal the collective political power of whole industries — and can also allow individual companies to shroud their influence-peddling activities under the veneer of a larger organization. In the case of Goldman Sachs, the company itself has not directly lobbied the NEC this year. However, IBT identified at least three groups linked to the bank that lobbied the council in the first half of 2017. Those groups have spent more than $3.6 million on lobbying the government this year.
On the same day a bombing by U.S. military forces in Afghanistan reportedly killed 11 Afghan civilians, including women and children, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) offered up his proposal for “winning” the 16-year-long war in Afghanistan on Thursday by essentially calling for it to continue endlessly.
The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who denounced the Trump administration for offering “no strategy at all” for the war thus far, is putting forth his proposal as an amendment to 2018 National Defense Authorization Act. It includes increasing the number of combat troops, cementing “a long-term, open-ended” U.S. presence in the country, and affording the U.S. military broader authority to target extremist groups.
Among the details, as noted in McCain’s press statement:
North Korea says it’s preparing a plan to launch missiles toward the U.S. territory of Guam, if ordered to do so by leader Kim Jong Un. That announcement has drawn condemnation from Tokyo and South Korea, and comes amid rising tensions between North Korea and the United States.
Here & Now‘s Meghna Chakrabarti talks with John Feffer (@johnfeffer), co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies, about North Korea’s tumultuous history with the U.S. and the world.
The FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are investigating a bombing that took place on Saturday at the Dar Al-Farooq Islamic Center in suburban Minneapolis while worshipers were performing their morning prayers.
The FBI confirmed that the blast was caused by an improvised explosive device, or IED, that destroyed the imam’s office, shattered windows and smoked up the entire building. Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton called the bombing an “act of terrorism” when he met with local leaders at the mosque on Sunday. No one was injured in the blast and authorities are unsure of the motive or culprit behind it.
What is for certain is that this is not an isolated incident. The mosque was a frequent target for menacing voicemails, hateful emails and threatening anti-Muslim letters. On Aug. 1, vandals attacked the local Muslim Cemetery Al Magfirah in Castle Rock Township in Minnesota. The cemetery was riddled with spray-painted swastikas, cuss words and a message that said, “Leave, you r dead,” alongside damaged furniture and equipment.
