Nadia Hijab is a leading voice on Middle East issues. The author lately published (along with Ingrid Jaradat Gassner) an important piece on how to think about Palestinian conditions at…
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Nadia Hijab is a leading voice on Middle East issues. The author lately published (along with Ingrid Jaradat Gassner) an important piece on how to think about Palestinian conditions at al-Shabaka, the think tank Hijab directs. I sat down with her last month to ask her about her ideas.
Q. I think of you as an optimistic person, yet you’ve spent years on this issue, much longer than I have. How have you done that?
Nadia Hijab: I’m pretty glass half full. I think you have to be a person of an optimistic nature to do this work. I always think it’s such an insane piece of work to do. And that’s the Middle East Eye piece I wrote [“Things will get worse for the Palestinians. Why I still have faith”]. Really you see the world ranged against you– and you’re right. All the superpowers and the big regional power that is now Israel– and you have to have faith and you have to believe, you have to have the optimism to think you can change things otherwise you wouldn’t carry on.
Every once in a while you can get despondent or feel hopeless but what keeps you going is that there are so many others going with you, so I think we reinforce each other and we reinforce our ability to move forward.
Q. You told me that the presence of Jews in the struggle has been an important sign to you. Since when and why?
(CN) – The Trump administration’s decision to end a covert CIA program to arm and train moderate Syrian rebels is garnering support from unusual quarters.
Among those celebrating the decision is Phyllis Bennis, Middle East expert at the Institute for Policy Studies, a think tank with roots that go back to the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s.
Bennis says the CIA program exacerbated the Syrian conflict, which she believes has gotten worse since President Trump took office.
The Iraqi government recently declared victory in Mosul, the stronghold of the Islamic State. Many months of fighting, bombing, and shelling has reduced the once grand and historic city to rubble while tens of thousands of its residents have fled.
Despite Iraq’s triumphant declarations of having defeated ISIS, pockets of fighting remain active and there are reports of a hundred or more residents being trapped in the city.
The fight against ISIS in Iraq has been used to justify on-going American involvement in the war-torn nation. Under the Trump administration that situation is likely to escalate given the President’s bombastic campaign rhetoric.
If you’re looking for fairy tales that are on the grim (not Grimm) side, things that once might only have been in dystopian fiction, look no further than our present planet at our present moment. What about, for instance, that trillion-metric-ton iceberg ― yes, “trillion” is not a misprint ― that broke loose last week from the Antarctic Peninsula and just floated away. It was larger than the state of Delaware, capable of filling an estimated 462 million Olympic-sized swimming pools, its volume twice that of Lake Erie. If you want to think in movie terms, then consider this eerie event a trailer for the main feature on its way to screens globally. If significant parts of Antarctica destabilize in the future, you can expect movie titles (given rising sea levels) like So Long, Miami; Zai Jian Shanghai;Ta-ta London; Dag Amsterdam.
Honestly, we’re now in a fairy tale world, if by modern fairy tale you happen to mean Game of Thrones after not “winter” but “summer” comes to Westeros. So in the week after Antarctica changed its shape perceptibly, it seems appropriate to turn to TomDispatch regular John Feffer, our expert in global dystopian futures and author of the novel Splinterlands, which we recently published in our new book line.
President Trump told reporters on Air Force One on Wednesday that his proposed border wall would have to be “transparent” to prevent Americans from being struck and killed by 60-pound sacks of drugs tossed over from the Mexican side.
“One of the things with the wall is you need transparency. You have to be able to see through it,” Trump said. He continued:
In other words, if you can’t see through that wall — so it could be a steel wall with openings, but you have to have openings because you have to see what’s on the other side of the wall.
And I’ll give you an example. As horrible as it sounds, when they throw the large sacks of drugs over, and if you have people on the other side of the wall, you don’t see them — they hit you on the head with 60 pounds of stuff? It’s over. As crazy as that sounds, you need transparency through that wall.
Trump acknowledges that the scenario he paints is somewhat “crazy,” but there is a kernel of truth to it. For decades, drug smugglers have employed an arsenal of sometimes cartoonish tactics — from tricycles to narco-subs to drone delivery — to ferry their wares north of the border.
The president of the United States wants a see-through wall at the U.S.-Mexico border, in part because he’s worried about people getting hit in the head by any bags of drugs that might be hurled over the divide.
“As horrible as it sounds, when they throw the large sacks of drugs over, and if you have people on the other side of the wall, you don’t see them—they hit you on the head with 60 pounds of stuff? It’s over,” Trump told reporters on Thursday. “As crazy as that sounds, you need transparency through that wall.”
To which at least one border security expert responds: “Over a 2,000 mile border, I think you’d have a higher chance of getting hit by a meteorite than a bag of drugs.” That’s Sanho Tree, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies who focuses on drug policies and the border. When I talked to Tree this morning, he was amused and astonished by the president’s remarks.
“The most important thing is, Donald Trump just admitted that he’s worried about people throwing drugs over a wall that’s designed to stop drugs!” Tree said. “Wile E. Coyote needs to take this wall back to Acme, because the road runner just owned him.”
Data consistently demonstrates that blacks are the most loyal Democratic voting bloc. Surveys conducted in 2016 indicate that 87% of blacks identify with the Democratic Party, which constitutes roughly 21% of all Democrats. Comparatively, 63% of Hispanics and 39% of whites lean left.
And yet, despite loyalty to the Party and contrary to the 2016 Democratic Party platform, which emphasizes the Party’s commitment to eliminating systemic barriers to wealth accumulation, the DNC has consistently failed to implement a successful strategy to equalize access to big dollar contracts.
In fact, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) spent $759 million on contracts during the 2010 midterm election cycle. A mere 1.5% of contracts were allocated to African American contractors. Members of the DNC’s Black Caucus responded to contracting disparities with a forceful message; don’t bite the hand that feeds you.
The recent health insurance bills in the U.S. House and Senate are in a race to the bottom for heartlessness, deception and awful public policy. The bills share well-known faults: less coverage, higher premiums and co-pays, and big tax cuts for the wealthy made possible by Medicaid allocations that fail to meet costs.
The Congressional Budget Office predicts 634,500 Tennesseans will lose coverage under the Senate plan — 395,000 from Medicaid; 239,500 in the individual markets. Nationally, it’s 22 million people losing coverage.
One additional repugnant feature, however, has not gotten much attention, perhaps because the legislative jargon is buried on page 67 of the House bill, page 30 of the Senate version. Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times tracked the obscure references and discovered it is a tax break for our large health insurance companies “well in excess of $70 million a year.”
The Affordable Care Actrepeal bill unveiled Thursday by SenateRepublicans has aptly drawn universal scorn from healthcare experts, hospital and physician groups and advocates for patients and the needy. That’s because the bill is a poorly-disguised massive tax cut for the wealthy, paid for by cutting Medicaid — which serves the middle class and the poor — to the bone.
Yet some of the measure’s most egregious, harshest provisions are well-disguised. They’re hidden deep in its underbrush or in the maze of legislative verbiage. We’ve ferreted out some of them and present them here in all their malevolent glory. In this effort we’ve built on ace detective work by Adrianna McIntyre, Nicholas Bagley of the University of Michigan, David Anderson of Duke University and balloon-juice.com, Andy Slavitt, the former head of Medicare and Medicaid in the Obama administration, and others.
Some of these provisions match those in the House Republicans’ repeal bill passed May 4, and some are even harsher — more “mean,” to use a term President Trump himself applied to the House bill. That bill, according to the Congressional Budget Office, would cost some 23 million Americans their health coverage by 2026. The Senate bill wouldn’t do much better, and might do worse.
And within the next five years, 17% of Americans will live in a state or metro area with a $15 minimum wage. For a visual timeline showing the pace at which cities and states plan to gradually increase the hourly minimum to $15, check out this Fortune graphic.
The increases on July 1 follow previously set guidelines approved by voters. New York City, Seattle, Mountain View, Los Angeles and the state California are all scheduled to incrementally reach a $15 minimum wage by 2022.
