On December 13, the House Financial Services Committee held a long-awaited hearing into the collapse of the FTX crypto empire. FTX’s disgraced former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried could not, as he had hoped to, testify there in person because he was sitting, as Inmate 14-372, in a jail in the Bahamas. Instead, the committee heard an … Continue reading The Egregious Arrogance of Sam Bankman-Fried (& his ilk)
What is it about those entitled White guys who defy the norms of decent grooming to present themselves as “lovable rogues” and thereby somehow also defy the norms of truth-telling and probity to achieve outstanding success in their careers… all of it based on industrial-scale fraud and lies. And by doing this, they bring whole … Continue reading Mop-haired fraudster lies way to success. Wide harm ensues.
I’ll briefly interrupt my ongoing romp through the 1520s here to give a brief report on what I did in the morning yesterday, just a couple hours before the MAGA mobs marched into the U.S. Capitol. Our Quaker meeting had been in touch in recent weeks with the pastors at the four churches that the … Continue reading A key development of 2021
Some quick takeaways from this past week’s election news here in the USA. 1. Though Biden won, it’s still true that more than 70 million Americans cast a vote for Donald Trump. That, after four years of seeing him in action: racism, misogyny, crass cutting of health care and other vital social programs; “White” entitled-ism, … Continue reading Takeaways from an election
Living in DC, one comes across opportunistic Astroturf organizations who come here to generate “images” of themselves as feisty, strongly supported “grassroots” orgs that presumably they then show to their financial backers to get more gobs of money. Often, they are laughably unsuccessful at presenting this picture. (The Saudi-supported, anti-Tehran MEK comes to mind…) Today, … Continue reading Opportunistic anti-Beijing Astroturfers perform near White House
There are, it seems to me, two distinct kinds of horizon that anyone considering the effects of Covid-19 on global politics and society needs to look at. One is the time horizon: Crucially, how soon until we can see the widespread (or universal?) delivery of a safe and functioning vaccine against this coronavirus. The other … Continue reading Horizons (temporal, geopolitical, & otherwise) on Covid-19
Yesterday, within hours of President Trump and PM Netanyahu announcing the details of their peace(-less) plan, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) took swift steps to draft and win support for a letter (PDF) that roundly criticized the contents of the plan. Even more significantly, among the first 12 signatories he gathered for the letter were … Continue reading U.S. Democratic senators swift to oppose Trump-Netanyahu plan
I was delighted when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi responded to the whistleblower’s report of Pres. Trump’s fateful July 25 phone call with Pres. Zelensky by swiftly moving toward impeachment. Yesterday, she and her advisers produced just two Articles of Impeachment: One on “Abuse of power”, the other, “Obstruction of Congress.” The first Article deals with … Continue reading Trump’s impeachment: Why include “national security”?
The smart, experienced Arab-American community leader and activist Abdeen Jabara and I are engaged in, I guess, a spirited discussion over at Mondoweiss of the value of Michael Fishbach’s latest book, The Movement and the Middle East: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Divided the American Left. I spent a long time working on the review of … Continue reading Discussing Palestine and the US radical movement of the 1960s & ’70s.
Amb. Robert E. Hunter had a compelling piece on the Lobelog site recently in which he warned that the House Democratic leaders’ choice of the Ukraine issue on which to hang their impeachment hearings for Pres. Trump means that the discussion of both Ukraine and Russia in the U.S. political system has now become seriously … Continue reading U.S. Dems’ dangerous demagoguing on Russia
