Speaker(s): Professor Mike Savage, Dr Abigail McKnight, Dr Sam Friedman | We hope you’ve enjoyed listening to the autumn 2017 programme of LSE public events and that you’ll stay tuned for the exciting programme of events we have lined up for the new year. In the meantime we have a new podcast series that we think you might enjoy. LSE IQ is a monthly, thirty minute podcast, where we ask some of the smartest social scientists - and other experts - to answer intelligent questions about economics, politics or society. Recent episodes have tackled questions such as 'What's the secret to happiness?', 'Could social entrepreneurship be the answer to world poverty?' and, 'Is our prison system broken?'. To give you a taste of LSEIQ the latest episode, which asks 'Why is social mobility declining?', is available for you here in our public events podcast feed. To listen to other episodes and to subscribe, search for 'LSE IQ' in your favourite podcast app or visit http://lse.ac.uk/iq . We’d like to hear your opinion too so why not join the discussion on social media using the hashtag #LSEIQ and please also consider leaving a review on iTunes or the Apple podcast app.

Speaker(s): Dr Cristobal Young, Ed Miliband MP, Dr Andrew Summers | If taxes rise, will they leave? In his new book, Cristobal Young publishes the findings from the first-ever large-scale study of migration of the world’s richest individuals, drawing on special access to over 45mil US tax returns, together with Forbes rich lists. He shows that contrary to popular opinion, although the rich have the resources and capacity to flee high-tax places, their actual migration is surprisingly limited. Place still matters, even in today’s globalised world.

In the dying days of the battle of Mosul, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad followed Iraqi soldiers during the last push against Isis. But following their victory, a new wave of savagery was unleashed • Read the text version here

Lee's 1986 debut feature film, 'She's Gotta Have It,' centered on a young black artist who loves sex, but isn't interested in a committed relationship. Now he returns to the character in an expanded, 10-part Netflix series.

In 1912, white mobs set fire to black churches and black-owned businesses. Eventually the entire black population of Forsyth County was driven out. Patrick Phillips, author of 'Blood at the Root,' tells the story. Film critic David Edelstein reviews 'I, Tonya.'

12-13-2017 (Photo: The Ritz-Carlton, Hotel, Riad, Saud Arabia, Luxury) http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/contact http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/schedules Twitter: @BatchelorShow

The Kingdom falls down. Gregory Copley, Defense & Foreign Affairs.

The Government of Saudi Arabia on November 4, 2017, announced the formation of the Supreme Anti-Corruption Committee, headed by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and ostensibly at the behest of King Salman. Within hours, the committee had instituted the coordinated arrest of as many as 17 princes and dozens of former ministers. Attor-ney General Saud al-Moaajeb — a member of the Supreme Anti-Corruption Committee — had said on November 9, 2017, that at least $100-billion had been misused through “systematic corruption and embezzlement over several decades”. Of the 208 originally arrested, seven were almost immediately released without charge. Among the list of those arrested were: – Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, chairman and 95 percent owner of Kingdom Holding. – Prince Mutaib bin ‘Abdallah bin ‘Abd al-’Aziz al Sa’ud, Minister of the National Guard. – Prince Turki bin Abdullah, former Governor of Riyadh province. – Khalid al-Tuwaijri, former chief of the Royal Court. – Adel Fakeih, Minister of Economy and Planning. – Ibrahim al-Assaf, former Minister of Finance. – Admiral Abdullah bin Sultan bin Mohammed al-Sultan, Commander of the Royal Sau-di Navy. – Bakr bin Laden, chairman of Saudi Binladin Group. – Mohammed al-Tobaishi, former head of protocol at the Royal Court. – Amr al-Dabbagh, former Governor of Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority. – Alwaleed al-Ibrahim, owner of television network MBC. – Khalid al-Mulheim, former director-general at Saudi Arabian Airlines. – Saoud al-Daweesh , former chief executive of Saudi Telecom. – Prince Turki bin Nasser, former head of the Presidency of Meteorology and Environ-ment. – Prince Fahad bin Abdullah bin Mohammad al-Saud, former Deputy Defence Minister. – Saleh Kamel, businessman. – Sheikh Mohammed al-Amoudi, the Ethiopian-Saudi businessman. The three ministers removed from office by Royal decree, including the Minister of Economy and Planning, Adel bin Mohammed Faqih; Minister of the National Guard, Prince Mutaib bin ‘Abdallah bin ‘Abd al-’Aziz al Sa’ud; and the Commander of the Royal Saudi Navy, Adm. Abdullah bin Sultan bin Mohammed al-Sultan, were replaced by, re-spectively, Mohammed bin Mazyad al-Tuwaijri; Prince Khalid bin Abdulaziz bin Mo-hammed bin Ayyaf al-Muqren; and Vice-Adm. Fahd bin Abdullah al-Ghifaili. The de-tained officials were kept in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Riyadh, after a ban had been placed on all flights by private aircraft, to ensure that senior officials did not attempt to flee the country. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was reported to have personally interrogated many of those arrested, but left serious interrogation to a team of foreign mercenaries. It was known to Defense & Foreign Affairs that Crown Prince Mohammed had sought the surrender by many of the wealthy Saudis arrested of at least three-quarters of their assets to the State. It was estimated that as much as $180-billion had been committed in funds by those arrested as the price for their release, and that these funds were sought by the Crown Prince to help alleviate the rapidly depleting economic reserves of the Government. Saudi authorities indicated that some 208 people had been questioned or detained in connection with the “anti-corruption” drive. Former National Guard Minister Prince Mutaib, 65, the son of the late King ‘Abdallah bin ‘Abd al-’Aziz al Sa’ud, was released after more than three weeks in detention on No-vember 29, 2017, after a reported payment of more than $1-billion to the Supreme Anti-Corruption Committee. One source claimed that he had paid more than $10-billion, in-cluding surrendering control of key business assets under a deal which was managed — while the Prince was under detention — by his relatives. Former chief of protocol Mohammed al-Tobaishi was also released after allegedly settling more than six-billion riyals ($1.75-billion) to the State. By November 29, 2017, it was reported that al-most all those detained had agreed to some form of settlement, and would be released. The Ethiopian Government had been lobbying for the release of dual-national Sheikh Mohammed al-Amoudi, who was reported on November 12, 2017, to be ready for release. The series of arrests, while primarily to help rebuild the Saudi coffers, also served to help Crown Prince Mohammed eliminate political rivals, the most significant of which was seen as the Minister of State for the National Guard, Prince Mutaib bin ‘Abdallah bin ‘Abd al-’Aziz al Sa’ud, who had refused to allow the Guard to be used in the war against Yemen on the grounds that the Guard’s mission was internal security and not the conduct of inter-state wars. With the removal of Prince Mutaib, the Guard itself was effectively removed from the wing of the family which answered to the late King ‘Abdallah bin ‘Abd al-’Aziz al Sa’ud, and brought under the control of the Sudeiri side of the family, represented by King Salman and his son, Crown Prince Mohammed. The new Minister of State for the National Guard was named as Prince Khalid bin Ab-dulaziz bin Mohammed bin Ayyaf al-Muqren.

Journalist Ryan Cooper talks about the new paper he wrote with Matt Bruenig, founder of the People's Policy Project, a new left-wing think tank. "Foreclosed: Destruction of Black Wealth During the Obama Presidency" details how the Wall Street-induced foreclosure epidemic wiped out huge swaths of black wealth — and how Obama could have taken multiple actions to save most homes but did not. Check out the report and this article about it. Thanks to our supporters at Verso Books. Check out Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy by Lynne Segal. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig.

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Just in time for you Thanksgiving dinner table debate – it’s the new episode of Have You Heard! When a brawl breaks out over the bird this year, don’t just blame politics—blame the schools. You see, coping with contention is a learned skill—a skill that our schools have been actively avoiding for over a century. In this episode, we talk with historian Jon Zimmerman about the teaching of controversial issues: past, present, and future. It’s Have You Heard, episode #30! Note: full transcript coming soon.

Got an idea for an episode of Have You Heard? Tweet it at us or email your idea to Jennifer.

Speaker(s): Professor Tim Roughgarden | The fields of computer science and game theory both trace their roots to the first half of the 20th century, with the work of Turing, von Neumann, Nash, and others. Fast forwarding to the present, there are now many fruitful points of contact between these two fields. Game theory plays an important role in 21st-century computer science applications, ranging from social networks to routing in the Internet. The flow of ideas also travels in the other direction, with computer science offering a number of tools to reason about economic problems in novel ways. For example, computational complexity theory sheds new light on the “bounded rationality” of decision-makers. Approximation guarantees, originally developed to analyse fast heuristic algorithms, can be usefully applied to Nash equilibria. Computationally efficient algorithms are an essential ingredient to modern, large-scale auction designs. In this lecture, Tim Roughgarden will survey the key ideas behind these connections and their implications. Tim Roughgarden is a Professor in the Computer Science and (by courtesy) Management Science and Engineering Departments, Stanford University, as well as a Visiting Professor in the Department of Mathematics at LSE. Martin Anthony (@MartinHGAnthony) is Professor of Mathematics and Head of Department of Mathematics at LSE. The Department of Mathematics (@LSEMaths) is internationally recognised for its teaching and research in the fields of discrete mathematics, game theory, financial mathematics and operations research.

Tensions are rising in Honduras as the country’s electoral court has yet to release results from Sunday’s election that showed opposition candidate may defeat the conservative president. The U.S.-backed president Juan Orlando Hernandez was widely expected to win, despite growing concerns about his consolidation of power and his militarization of the country. But in an apparent upset, partial election results show his main challenger, Salvador Nasralla, leading Hernandez. We are joined by Suyapa Portillo, Assistant Professor of Chicano & Latino Studies at Pitzer College. She just returned from Honduras where she was an election observer.

Philosophy and modern physics: a case of the irrelevant versus the impractical?

Twenty-first century slave markets. Human beings sold for a few hundred dollars. Massive protests throughout the world.

The American and British media have awakened to the grim reality in Libya, where African refugees are for sale in open-air slave markets. Yet a crucial detail in this scandal has been downplayed or even ignored in many corporate media reports: the role of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in bringing slavery to the North African nation.

In March 2011, NATO launched a war in Libya expressly aimed at toppling the government of longtime leader Muammar Qadhafi. The US and its allies flew some 26,000 sorties over Libya and launched hundreds of cruise missiles, destroying the government’s ability to resist rebel forces.

US President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, along with their European counterparts, insisted the military intervention was being carried out for humanitarian reasons. But political scientist Micah Zenko (Foreign Policy, 3/22/16) used NATO’s own materials to show how “the Libyan intervention was about regime change from the very start.”

NATO supported an array of rebel groups fighting on the ground in Libya, many of which were dominated by Islamist extremists and harbored violently racist views. Militants in the NATO-backed rebel stronghold of Misrata even referred to themselves in 2011 as “the brigade for purging slaves, black skin”—an eerie foreshadowing of the horrors that were to come.

The war ended in October 2011. US and European aircraft attacked Qadhafi’s convoy, and he was brutally murdered by extremist rebels—sodomized with a bayonet. Secretary Clinton, who played a decisive role in the war, declared live on CBS News (10/20/11), “We came, we saw, he died!” The Libyan government dissolved soon after.

In the six years since, Libya has been roiled by chaos and bloodshed. Multiple would-be governments are competing for control of the oil-rich country, and in some areas there is still no functioning central authority. Many thousands of people have died, although the true numbers are impossible to verify. Millions of Libyans have been displaced—a staggering number, nearly one-third of the population, had fled to neighboring Tunisia by 2014.

Corporate media, however, have largely forgotten about the key role NATO played in destroying Libya’s government, destabilizing the country and empowering human traffickers.

Moreover, even the few news reports that do acknowledge NATO’s complicity in the chaos in Libya do not go a step further and detail the well-documented, violent racism of the NATO-backed Libyan rebels who ushered in slavery after ethnically cleansing and committing brutal crimes against black Libyans.

O NATO, Where Art Thou?

CNN (11/14/17) published an explosive story in mid-November that offered a firsthand look at the slave trade in Libya. The media network obtained terrifying video that shows young African refugees being auctioned, “big strong boys for farm work,” sold for as little as $400.

The flashy CNN multimedia report included bonuses galore: two videos, two animated gifs, two photos and a chart. But something was missing: The 1,000-word story made no mention of NATO, or the 2011 war that destroyed Libya’s government, or Muammar Qadhafi, or any kind of historical and political context whatsoever.

Despite these huge flaws, the CNN report was widely celebrated, and made an impact in a corporate media apparatus that otherwise cares little about North Africa. A flurry of media reports followed. These stories overwhelmingly spoke of slavery in Libya as an apolitical and timeless human rights issue, not as a political problem rooted in very recent history.

In subsequent stories, when Libyan and United Nations officials announced they would launch an investigation into the slave auctions, CNN (11/17/17, 11/20/17) again failed to mention the 2011 war, let alone NATO’s role in it.

One CNN report (11/21/17) on a UN Security Council meeting noted, “Ambassadors from Senegal to Sweden also blamed trafficking’s root causes: unstable countries, poverty, profits from slave trading and lack of legal enforcement.” But it failed to explain why Libya is unstable.

Another 1,200-word CNN follow-up article (11/23/17) was just as obfuscatory. It was only in the 35th paragraph of this 36-graf story that a Human Rights Watch researcher noted, “Libyan interim authorities have been dragging their feet on virtually all investigations they supposedly started, yet never concluded, since the 2011 uprising.” NATO’s leadership in this 2011 uprising was, however, ignored.

An Agence France-Presse news wire that was published by Voice of America (11/17/17) and other websites similarly failed to provide any historical context for the political situation in Libya. “Testimony collected by AFP in recent years has revealed a litany of rights abuses at the hands of gang leaders, human traffickers and the Libyan security forces,” the article said, but it did not recount anything that happened before 2017.

Reports by the BBC (11/18/17), the New York Times (11/20/17), Deutsche Welle (reprinted by USA Today, 11/23/17) and the Associated Press (reprinted by the Washington Post, 11/23/17) also failed to mention the 2011 war, let alone NATO’s role in it.

Another New York Times story (11/19/17) did provide a bit of context:

Since the Arab Spring uprising of 2011 ended the brutal rule of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, Libya’s coast has became a hub for human trafficking and smuggling. That has fueled the illegal migration crisis that Europe has been scrambling to contain since 2014. Libya, which slid into chaos and civil war after the revolt, is now divided among three main factions.

Yet the Times still erased NATO’s key place in this uprising of 2011.

In an account of the large protests that erupted outside Libyan embassies in Europe and Africa in response to reports of slave auctions, Reuters (11/20/17) indicated, “Six years after the fall of Muammar Gaddafi, Libya is still a lawless state where armed groups compete for land and resources and people-smuggling networks operate with impunity.” But it did not provide any more information about how Qadhafi was toppled.

A report in the Huffington Post (11/22/17), later republished by AOL (11/27/17), did concede that Libya is “one of the world’s most unstable [sic], mired in conflict since dictator Muammar Gaddafi was ousted and killed in 2011.” It made no mention of NATO’s leadership in that ousting and killing.

Part of the problem has been the unwillingness of international organizations to point out the responsibility of powerful Western governments. In his statement on the reports of slavery in Libya, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres (11/20/17) did not mention anything about what has happened politically inside the North African nation in the past six years. The UN News Centre report (11/20/17) on Guterres’ comments was just as contextless and uninformative, as was the press release (11/21/17) on the issue from the International Organization for Migration.

Al Jazeera (11/26/17) did cite an IOM official who suggested, in Al Jazeera‘s words, that “the international community should pay more attention to post-Gaddafi Libya.” But the media outlet provided no context as to how Libya became post-Qadhafi in the first place. In fact, Al Jazeera‘s source went out of his way to make the issue apolitical: “Modern-day slavery is widespread around the world and Libya is by no means unique.”

While it is true that slavery and human trafficking happen in other countries, this widespread media narrative depoliticizes the problem in Libya, which has its roots in explicit political decisions made by governments and their leaders: namely, the choice to overthrow Libya’s stable government, turning the oil-rich North African nation into a failed state ruled by competing warlords and militias, some of which are involved in and profit from slavery and trafficking.

Selective Attention to NATO’s Aftermath in Libya

Corporate media reporting on Libya largely mirrors reporting on Yemen (FAIR.org, 11/20/17, 8/31/17, 2/27/17), Syria (FAIR.org, 4/7/17, 9/5/15) and beyond: The role of the US government and its allies in creating chaos abroad is minimized, if not outright ignored.

Strikingly, one of the only exceptions to this overwhelming media trend came back in April from, of all places, the New York Times editorial board. The Times editorial (4/14/17) did not mince words, directly linking the US-backed military operation to the ongoing catastrophe:

None of this would be possible if not for the political chaos in Libya since the civil war in 2011, when — with the involvement of a NATO coalition that included the United States — Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi was toppled. Migrants have become the gold that finances Libya’s warring factions.

This is a significant reversal. Immediately after NATO launched its war in Libya in March 2011, the Times editorial board (3/21/11) cheered on the bombing, effusing, “Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi has long been a thug and a murderer who has never paid for his many crimes.” It waxed poetic on the “extraordinary,” “astonishing” military intervention, and hoped for Qadhafi’s imminent downfall.

The April 2017 Times editorial stopped far short of a being a mea culpa, yet it was still a rare admission of truth.

At the time this surprisingly honest editorial was written, there had briefly been a bit of media attention to Libya. The International Organization for Migration had just conducted an investigation into slavery in post–regime change Libya, leading to a string of news reports in the Guardian (4/10/17) and elsewhere. Practically as soon as this appalling story got the interest of corporate media, however, it quickly died out. Attention shifted back to Russia, North Korea and the bogeymen of the day.

When Western governments were hoping to militarily intervene in the country in the lead-up to March 19, 2011, there was a constant torrent of media reports on the evils of Qadhafi and his government—including a healthy dose of fake news (Salon, 9/16/16). Major newspapers staunchly supported the NATO intervention, and made no secret of their pro-war editorial lines.

When the US government and its allies were preparing for war, the corporate media apparatus did what it does best, and helped sell yet another military intervention to the public.

In the years since, on the other hand, there has been exponentially less interest in the disastrous aftermath of that NATO war. There will be short spikes of interest, as there was in early 2017. The most recent spurt of press coverage was inspired by the publication of CNN‘s shocking video footage. But the coverage invariably rapidly peaks and goes away.

The Extreme Racism of Libyan Rebels

The catastrophe Libya might endure after the collapse of its state had been predictable at the time. Qadhafi himself had warned NATO member states, while they were waging war against him, that they were going to unleash chaos throughout the region. Yet Western leaders—Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the US, David Cameron in the UK, Nicolas Sarkozy in France, Stephen Harper in Canada—ignored Qadhafi’s admonition and violently toppled his government.

Even from the small number of media reports on slavery in Libya that do manage to acknowledge NATO’s responsibility for destabilizing the country, nevertheless, something is still missing.

Looking back at Libya’s anti-Qadhafi rebels, both during and after the 2011 war, it is very clear that hardline anti-black racism was widespread in the NATO-backed opposition. A 2016 investigation by the British House of Common’s Foreign Affairs Committee (Salon, 9/16/16) acknowledged that “militant Islamist militias played a critical role in the rebellion from February 2011 onwards.” But many rebels were not just fundamentalist; they were also violently racist.

It is unfortunately no surprise that these extremist Libyan militants later enslaved African refugees and migrants: They were hinting at it from the very beginning.

Most American and European media coverage at the time of NATO’s military intervention was decidedly pro-rebel. When reporters got on the ground, however, they began publishing a few more nuanced pieces that hinted at the reality of the opposition. These were insignificant in number, but they are enlightening and worth revisiting.

Three months into the NATO war, in June 2011, the Wall Street Journal‘s Sam Dagher (6/21/11) reported from Misrata, Libya’s third-largest city and a major hub for the opposition, where he noted he saw rebel slogans like “the brigade for purging slaves, black skin.”

Dahger indicated that the rebel stronghold of Misrata was dominated by “tightly knit white merchant families,” whereas “the south of the country, which is predominantly black, mainly backs Col. Gadhafi.”

Other graffiti in Misrata read “Traitors keep out.” By “traitors,” rebels were referring to Libyans from the town of Tawergha, which the Journal explained is “inhabited mostly by black Libyans, a legacy of its 19th-century origins as a transit town in the slave trade.”

Dagher reported that some Libyan rebel leaders were “calling for the expulsion of Tawerghans from the area” and “banning Tawergha natives from ever working, living or sending their children to schools in Misrata.” He added that predominately Tawergha neighborhoods in Misrata had already been emptied. Black Libyans were “gone or in hiding, fearing revenge attacks by Misratans, amid reports of bounties for their capture.”

The rebel commander Ibrahim al-Halbous told the Journal, “Tawergha no longer exists, only Misrata.”

Al-Halbous would later reappear in a report by the Sunday Telegraph (9/11/11), reiterating to the British newspaper, “Tawarga no longer exists.” (When Halbous was injured in September, the New York Times—9/20/11—portrayed him sympathetically as a martyr in the heroic fight against Qadhafi. The Halbous brigade has in the years since become an influential militia in Libya.)

Like Dagher, the Telegraph‘s Andrew Gilligan drew attention to the slogan painted on the road between Misrata and Tawergha: “the brigade for purging slaves [and] black skin.”

Gilligan reported from Tawergha, or rather from the remnants of the majority-black town, which he noted had “been emptied of its people, vandalized and partly burned by rebel forces.” A rebel leader said of the dark-skinned residents, “We said if they didn’t go, they would be conquered and imprisoned. Every single one of them has left, and we will never allow them to come back.”

Gilligan noted “a racist undercurrent. Many Tawargas, though neither immigrants nor Gaddafi’s much-ballyhooed African mercenaries, are descended from slaves, and are darker than most Libyans.”

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization assisted these virulently racist rebels in Misrata. NATO forces frequently launched air attacks on the city. French fighter jets shot down Libyan planes over Misrata. The US and UK fired cruise missiles at Libyan government targets, and the US launched Predator drone strikes. The Canadian air force also attacked Libyan forces, pushing them out of Misrata.

In a public relations video NATO published in May 2011, early in the Libya war, the Western military alliance openly admitted that it intentionally allowed “Libyan rebels to transport arms from Benghazi to Misrata.” Political scientist Micah Zenko (Foreign Policy, 3/22/16) pointed out the implications of this video: “A NATO surface vessel stationed in the Mediterranean to enforce an arms embargo did exactly the opposite, and NATO was comfortable posting a video demonstrating its hypocrisy.”

Throughout the war and after, Libyan rebels continued carrying out racist sectarian attacks against their black compatriots. These attacks have been well documented by mainstream human rights organizations.

Human Rights Watch’s longtime executive director Kenneth Roth cheered on NATO intervention in Libya in 2011, calling the UN Security Council’s unanimous endorsement of a no-fly zone a “remarkable” confirmation of the so-called “responsibility to protect” doctrine.

Roth’s organization, however, could not ignore the crimes anti-Qadhafi militants committed against dark-skinned Libyans and migrants.

In September 2011, when the war was still ongoing, Human Rights Watch reported on Libyan rebels’ “arbitrary arrests and abuse of African migrant workers and black Libyans assumed to be [pro-Qadhafi] mercenaries.”

Then in October, the top US human rights organization noted that Libyan militias were “terrorizing the displaced residents of the nearby town of Tawergha,” the majority-black community that had been a stronghold of support for Qadhafi. “The entire town of 30,000 people is abandoned—some of it ransacked and burned—and Misrata brigade commanders say the residents of Tawergha should never return,” HRW added. Witnesses “gave credible accounts of some Misrata militias shooting unarmed Tawerghans, and of arbitrary arrests and beatings of Tawerghan detainees, in a few cases leading to death.”

In 2013, HRW reported further on the ethnic cleansing of the black community of Tawergha. The human rights organization, whose chief had so effusively supported the military intervention, wrote: “The forced displacement of roughly 40,000 people, arbitrary detentions, torture and killings are widespread, systematic and sufficiently organized to be crimes against humanity.”

These atrocities are undeniable, and they lead a path straight to the enslavement of African refugees and migrants. But to acknowledge NATO’s complicity in empowering these racist extremist militants, corporate media would have to acknowledge NATO’s role in the 2011 regime change war in Libya in the first place.

We’ve got a bonus episode for you today, which is audio from a debate between Alex Vitale — a recent guest on this show, sociologist and author of The End of Policing — and Heather Mac Donald, one of the leading intellectual champions of urban neoconservativism, over-policing, and mass incarceration at the Manhattan Institute. In a short intro, Dan explains why he’s rooting for one of these two individuals and why that person decisively wins. Thanks to our sponsors at Verso Books. We work really hard and don’t paywall a thing: support this podcast with $ at Patreon.com/TheDig

That is the question millions are asking after she made this assertion in a segment on Morning Edition today. Economists would usually look to evidence that budget deficits are creating too much demand in the economy, such as a rising inflation rate and/or high interest rates. Both interest rates and inflation are at historically low levels, with inflation consistently running below the Federal Reserve Board's 2.0 percent target. Based on these facts, it is not clear what could be the basis of Liasson's assertion.

In some cases, people point to the interest on the debt as a burden placed on our children. This is misleading since some of our children (or at least Bill Gates' children) will be receiving this interest. However, even this measure does not suggest a major problem. Currently, interest payments on the debt, after netting out money refunded by the Federal Reserve Board (the government pays interest on the bonds held by the Fed, which is then refunded to the Treasury) are less than 0.8 percent of GDP. They were more than 3.0 percent of GDP in the early 1990s.

Also, if anyone is concerned about the burden imposed by these future payments, they should also be concerned about the much larger commitments the government makes when issuing patent and copyright monopolies in order to finance innovation and creative work. In the case of prescription drugs alone, the added expense of patents and related protections comes to close to $370 billion a year, or almost 2.0 percent of GDP.

Adding in the costs from these monopolies in medical equipment, software, and other sectors would almost certainly double this amount. Anyone seriously concerned about burdens on future generations would have to be noting the burdens created by patent and copyright monopolies, which swamp any plausible interest burden of the debt. The fact this is never mentioned suggests that burdens on our kids are not a major concern for people complaining about budget deficits.

I am a big fan of Dani Rodrik's writings on trade, and I agree with most of what he says in his NYT column today, but I do have one major disagreement. However, before going there let me emphasize some of the key points he makes in the piece.

First, Rodrik is very much on the mark in arguing that recent trade deals, like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, have very little to do with free trade. As he says, these deals are about imposing a corporate-friendly structure of regulations on both our trading partners and the U.S. (The deals have the effect of locking in laws that could otherwise be more easily altered.)

He also is right in singling out the pharmaceutical industry as the biggest villain in this story. We have been using these trade deals to ensure ever longer and stronger patents and related protections. The result is to make drugs, which would otherwise be cheap, extremely expensive. The price of drugs can be a serious burden even in rich countries, but patent protection can make life-saving drugs altogether unaffordable in developing countries. We should be looking to foster alternative, more efficient, mechanisms for financing research, not using trade deals to impose patent monopolies everywhere.

It's worth mentioning in this context the effort to impose rules on digital commerce in these trade deals. Folks following the scandals related to Facebook and Twitter's involvement in the presidential election know that we don't really have the rules down ourselves. In other words, we do not have a system in place that prevents both foreign and domestic actors from using dishonest means to influence public opinion and interfere with the democratic process. We also don't have effective systems in place to ensure the privacy of our personal data. These are really big issues that are probably worth getting sorted out before we try to shove a one-size-fits-all model on the rest of the world. 

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These days, every place in the world wants to market its unique identity – and an industry has sprung up to help put them on the map • Read the text version here

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First farmers. Michael Balter

“…When hunter-gatherers in the Middle East began to settle down and cultivate crops about 10,500 years ago, they became the world’s first farmers. But two new papers suggest that they were at home on both the land and the sea: Studies of ancient and modern human DNA, including the first reported ancient DNA from early Middle Eastern farmers, indicate that agriculture spread to Europe via a coastal route, probably by farmers using boats to island hop across the Aegean and Mediterranean seas.

“Archaeologists have long known that farming arose in the Middle East and then spread to Europe, because radiocarbon dating of hundreds of early sites shows a clear time gradient from east to west. But that is only a rough guide, and in recent years geneticists have been filling in the details of that picture by sequencing the DNA of both modern and ancient populations. While the relatively cool conditions at many European sites have helped preserve the DNA of ancient skeletons, researchers had not succeeded in sequencing DNA from the many skeletons found at very early Middle Eastern sites, due to their very hot and dry environments. That has left a big gap in their understanding of the very earliest steps in the spread of farming from the Middle East to Europe, which began at least 8000 years ago.

“Since the early 1990s, a Spanish team has been excavating at three ancient farming sites in Syria, whose earliest dates range from 10,500 to 10,000 years ago—the very beginning of the agricultural revolution. Last week, in PLOS Genetics, the team reported having partially sequenced DNA from the mitochondria (the energy units of the living cell) of 15 skeletons from two of the sites, Tell Ramad and Tell Halula. This is the first report of ancient DNA from early Middle Eastern farmers.….”

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/06/first-farmers-were-also-sailors

Starving children with haunting eyes and emaciated bodies. Bombed-out hospitals and homes. A cholera epidemic that is the largest and fastest-spreading in modern history. These scenes have sparked outrage and a flurry of denunciations of the U.S.-backed war in Yemen, which is led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

But that’s not to say the war has no defenders in the United States. In fact, a public relations consultant and former U.S. diplomat enlisted by the UAE has worked to discredit U.S.-based groups raising awareness of atrocities in Yemen.

Hagar Chemali previously served as a top spokesperson for Samantha Power, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Now, she is paid six figures to shape the debate about the war at the U.N., including by discrediting NGOs that advance evidence of human rights violations in Yemen, according to public disclosures and emails obtained by The Intercept.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE launched a military intervention in March 2015 against the Houthi rebels, who are allied with former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh and backed by Iran. The Saudi-led coalition, which aims to reinstate ousted president Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, blockaded the country and has indiscriminately bombed civilian centers such as markets, hospitals, and children’s schools.

Last week, Power weighed in on the conflict, condemning American support for the coalition. But during her time at the U.N., Power maintained a code of silence on what U.S. allies were doing in Yemen. She is now criticizing a Trump administration policy that is largely a continuation of her former boss’s approach.

The United States should have long ago ended support for a Saudi-led coalition that, in addition to killing thousands of civilians thru air strikes, is now starving people. Enough is enough. https://t.co/NvOq2paOO6

— Samantha Power (@SamanthaJPower) November 14, 2017

Now, Chemali, who was Power’s spokesperson at the time the Saudi-led war on Yemen began, is working to undermine criticisms of the war.

At the U.N., Chemali played an influential role, coordinating all communications and overseeing public diplomacy for the U.S. Mission – the U.N.’s largest financial contributor. She had previously worked as the director for Syria and Lebanon on Obama’s National Security Council and as a spokesperson on terrorist financing at the Treasury Department.

Shortly after leaving the U.N. in early 2016, Chemali set up a one-person consulting firm called Greenwich Media Strategies. In September of that year, she registered to work for the UAE Embassy as a “foreign agent” – a legal designation under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA. That means she is paid to represent a foreign government.

In her current role, Chemali has reached out to journalists who cover the U.N. to undermine messaging from human rights groups critical of the war in Yemen. In one email from November 2016 obtained by The Intercept, Chemali laid out a strategy to discredit the work of a newly formed group called the Arabian Rights Watch Association, which had begun testifying before the U.N. Human Rights Council earlier that year.

The Intercept obtained emails between Chemali and Yousef al-Otaiba, the UAE’s influential ambassador to the United States, from a group that refers to itself as GlobalLeaks, which earlier this year began distributing emails from Otaiba’s Hotmail inbox — which he used for professional correspondence — to media outlets, including the The Intercept, the Daily Beast, Al Jazeera, and the Huffington Post.

ARWA is a small group of Yemeni lawyers and activists based in the United States. The organization began filing complaints with the U.N. Human Rights Council in early 2016, calling for an end to the blockade and for a U.N. investigation into all the parties in the war for violations.

The organization’s work began to gain traction that summer, when a group of U.N. experts started to investigate the blockade as a mass human rights violation. In April 2017, a U.N. human rights expert identified the blockade as a primary cause of the humanitarian crisis and called on the coalition to lift the siege.

When the UAE government noticed the efforts of NGOs like ARWA, it quickly tried delegitimize them. In August 2016, Anwar Gargash, UAE minister for foreign affairs, accused human rights groups of being front groups for the Houthis. “The [Houthi] rebel staff has turned into human rights activists and advocates of democracy, through a network of fake human rights organizations,” Gargash said on Twitter, according to the Emirati newspaper Al-Ittihad.

It didn’t take long for think tanks in Washington to adopt the same narrative. In October 2016, Michael Rubin, a scholar at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, wrote that ARWA was a Houthi front and “part of a campaign to whitewash the Iranian and Hezbollah co-option of the Houthis.” (Rubin has also frequently attacked the credibility of more prominent human rights organizations, such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.)

Mohammad Alwazir, the legal affairs director at ARWA, strongly disputed Rubin’s accusation, noting that ARWA has been critical of both the coalition and the Houthis.

“ARWA has consistently called for a credible independent investigation into all alleged violations, abuses and crimes committed in Yemen by all parties to the conflict,” Alwazir told The Intercept in an email. “That includes both the de facto authorities and the members of the Coalition.”

Alwazir also said that ARWA has taken more direct efforts to criticize the Houthis, including by sending letters to Houthi authorities demanding due process for their political prisoners.

Regardless, Rubin’s proclamation was a godsend for the UAE public relations machine, which moved quickly to circulate what he had written. In early November, Chemali wrote an email titled “Re: Houthi infiltration of the UN – Media reporting” and sent it to Otaiba and Lana Nusseibeh, the UAE’s ambassador to the U.N. “I’ve attached proposed next steps to follow-up on the AEI pieces to help bring attention to them and help land a larger piece in mainstream press,” wrote Chemali.

The Intercept also obtained a copy of the email attachment, a document titled “Follow-up on AEI pieces” that contains metadata identifying Chemali as its author. In it, Chemali laid out her plan to quietly circulate Rubin’s accusation throughout the U.N. She suggested that Nusseibeh reach out to ambassadors from other coalition countries and said that she would flag the piece for “UN correspondents and other relevant national security reporters and think tankers.”

“These steps take into consideration the need to proceed carefully and build attention to these pieces through ways that don’t appear too aggressive or loud and without UAE fingerprints,” Chemali wrote.

Chemali’s firm subsequently reached out to U.N. reporters at the Associated Press, New York Times, Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, CBS, and Reuters, according to Justice Department disclosures filed in 2017.

During the one-year period after Chemali registered as a foreign agent, the UAE paid her company more than $103,000 for the work on behalf of the Gulf monarchy. Her firm was not paid by the UAE directly. Instead, the money came from Harbour Group, a D.C.-based communications firm Otaiba has on permanent retainer, according to Justice Department disclosures. According to the Harbour Group’s filings with the Justice Department, the UAE pays the firm, which has seven registered “foreign agents” on staff, $80,000 a month for its work.

Chemali did not respond to repeated requests for comment from The Intercept. Her firm’s most recent FARA disclosure shows that it was on the UAE’s payroll through the end of September. Otaiba and the Harbour Group also did not respond to requests for comment.

In recent years, the Gulf monarchies have recruited a small army of lobbyists and communications consultants in Washington, in part to defend the Yemen War. In May, The Intercept reported that Saudi Arabia had spent more than twice as much on lobbying as Google and had 145 individuals registered as “foreign agents” on retainer. The UAE has a much smaller footprint but is equally effective – giving massive donations to both liberal and conservative think tanks, and even footing the lobbying bills for other dictatorships like Egypt.

Top photo: Samantha Power and Hagar Chemali brief journalists at U.N. headquarters in 2015.

The post Top Samantha Power Aide is Now Lobbying to Undermine Opponents of Yemen War appeared first on The Intercept.

In 1898, a new metropolis emerged from the consolidation of New York City with East Bronx, Brooklyn, Staten Island and the western part of Queens County. In Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919 (…

Originally published on The Nib. Artwork by Joyce Rice, script by Micah Lee.

 

 

The post How to Protect Yourself Against Spearphishing: A Comic Explanation appeared first on The Intercept.

Andrew Ross Sorkin had a good piece mocking the Peter Peterson funded Fix the Debt campaign since many of its CEO leaders are now gladly on the tax cut bandwagon. Unfortunately, the piece ends with sermonizing on the need to reduce deficits and debt.

"In the end, Mr. Peterson is right. The country — and businesses — will ultimately do better if the nation’s balance sheet is not bloated with debt. Part of the issue is generating enough revenue from taxes, and part is dealing with costs like health care and entitlements, which the tax overhaul plan does not even begin to tackle."

There are two ways in which deficits and debt can do actual damage to the economy. The first is the classic crowding out story. This is one in which government spending is pulling away resources from the rest of the economy. It has a lasting impact insofar as this leads to higher interest rates, which in turn reduce investment. The reduction in investment means the capital stock is smaller than it would otherwise be, which means that workers will be less productive. That means less future output and lower take-home pay.

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The Great War is often depicted as an unexpected catastrophe. But for millions who had been living under imperialist rule, terror and degradation were nothing new • Read the text version here

Corbyn, Abbott and McDonnell were long dismissed as irrelevant radicals. But their formative years on the margins were more important than anyone realised. By Andy Beckett • Read the text version here

Broadcasting from the United Nations climate summit in Bonn, Germany, we continue our conversation with Kevin Anderson, one of the world’s leading climate scientists. Anderson is deputy director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and professor of energy and climate change at the University of Manchester in Britain. The report is entitled “Can the Climate Afford Europe’s Gas Addiction?”

The Washington Post Fact Check says no. The issue is that the tax bill being considered by Republicans in the Senate would eliminate the mandate requiring people to buy insurance. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that this will lead 13 million fewer people to have insurance at the end of the decade. The short Fact Check piece says that these people actually are not being kicked off insurance, they are choosing not to buy it.

This is a very incomplete picture. On the one hand, some of these people would be looking at the current options and the decide that they would rather not buy insurance, if they didn't have to pay a penalty for not getting insurance. But this is only the first round.

Because the people who opt to buy insurance are more healthy than average, their absence from the pool causes the price of insurance. CBO projects the increase will be 10 percent a year. This means in year 2 of the Republican tax plan people will be looking at plans that cost 10 percent more, because Republicans have gotten rid of the mandate. In year 5 they will cost 60 percent more, and in year 10 they will cost 160 percent more than if the mandates were still in place.

Did the Republicans kick people off insurance in year 10 who decide not to buy insurance because it cost 160 percent more as a result of their tax plan? It might be reasonable to say they have.

To flip this over, suppose the Republicans got rid of the other major reform of the Affordable Care Act, the ban on discriminating based on pre-existing conditions. This would mean cancer survivors and people with heart disease would see the price of their policies become unaffordable. If they opted to not buy insurance that costs $50,000 or $60,000 a year would it be fair to say the Republicans kicked them off insurance?

According to the logic in this Fact Check piece the answer would be "no." Others may differ with this assessment.

Robert Samuelson comes in behind Donald Trump when it comes to mastering the logic of international trade. In his column telling readers that "Trump gets the trade problem all wrong," Samuelson gets three really big things about trade wrong:

1) The dollar's status as the major global currency is not a major factor in the trade deficit;

2) In contrast to Samuelson's trade agenda, most workers have no reason to want the U.S. government to devote greater efforts to enforcing patent and copyright protection elsewhere; and

3) The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was not about free trade; in fact, it can with more legitimacy be called a protectionist pact.

On the first point, the dollar has long been the major global currency. That did not lead the United States to run trade deficits in the 1950s and 1960s. In fact, through most of the next three decades, it ran considerably smaller deficits than it is running now.

The reason the U.S. is running such large trade deficits was the decision by many developing countries to accumulate huge amounts of reserves following the botched bailout from the East Asian financial crisis in 1997. This was a serious failure of the international financial system, managed by the United States. (That would be Clinton, Rubin, and Summers if we want to name names.)

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Behind the News, 11/16/17 - guests: Brooke Harrington on offshore wealth, Kali Akuno on building socialism in Jackson, Miss. - Doug Henwood

Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis re-cap the week via topical stand-up and sketches with guests Darren Harriott, Sophie Willan, Jake Yapp, Gemma Arrowsmith and food critic William Sitwell. Produced by Victoria Lloyd A BBC Studios Production

Democracy Now! 2017-11-15 Wednesday

• Headlines for November 15, 2017
• Pacific Climate Warriors Roll Out Anti-Coal "Red Carpet" for Angela Merkel at U.N. Climate Talks
• Special Report from the Occupied Forest: Meet Activists Fighting Europe's Largest Open-Pit Coal Mine
• Trump Climate Adviser Tells Democracy Now! Coal Needs a "Level Playing Field" at U.N. Climate Talks
• Scientists Issue Dire Warning on Climate Change & Key Researcher Urges "Changes in How We Live"

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