Blog Archives

Jared Kushner And Trump Family Have Given Hundreds Of Thousands Of Dollars To Democrats

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Kushner, who is under fire for meeting a Kremlin-linked Russian banker in December, has almost exclusively given his political donations to Democrats. Kushner has contributed $134,700 to federal candidates’ campaigns, and outside of $3,000 that an 18-year-old Kushner donated to Rudy Giuliani’s aborted 2000 Senate bid, none of that money went to Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. But $10,400 of it did go to Cory Booker’s 2014 Senate campaign. Kushner also gave to New York Sens. Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer, as well as New Jersey senator Robert Menendez before 2004.

Kushner also gave money at the state-level to candidates in his home state of New Jersey. According to New Jersey campaign finance filings, Kushner gave $44,400 to politicians and political committees in the state since 2002, all of it to Democrats. Booker’s campaign received the largest donation, a $20,000 campaign contribution to Booker and allied politicians when Booker was running for reelection as mayor of Newark in 2009. Kushner also donated $17,000 to the New Jersey Democratic Committee in 2001.

Jared Kushner And Trump Family Have Given Hundreds Of Thousands Of Dollars To Democrats

An Uber non-scandal

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Uber Starts Charging What It Thinks You’re Willing to Pay – Bloomberg

Charging what the market will bear isn’t controversial. What’s new here is the way what the market will bear is determined, and the granularity of the market which could get as fine as the individual consumer. Even though this is a a new and more accurate tool, I don’t see how its use is a radical departure from how goods and services are priced. 

Uber will most certainly “optimize” this methodology for pricing if it attributes a decline in revenue to the pricing. Uber’s objective is not accuracy or consistency or fairness for their own sake, which is also entirely consistent with its function in the market. 

If one is a proponent of, or sanguine about, Uber’s disruption, as it were, one cannot take issue with this newly revealed practice without contradicting oneself.

Not so incidentally, the drivers will now have another legitimate grievance which might have only a temporary and marginal adverse effect on the business. What it will do, however, is further stretch Uber’s interpretation of the “independent contractor” classification for its drivers. By the time this classification is successfully challenged, if that happens, the issue will be moot because Uber will have virtually no need for drivers. 

An Uber non-scandal

The Imperial Bureau

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In the 1950s, for example, the National Lawyers Guild, an association of progressive lawyers formed as an alternative to the segregated, anti–New Deal American Bar Association, was preparing a report detailing the FBI’s illegal wiretaps and dirty tricks. The FBI, after discovering the plan through its surveillance of the organization, drafted a report asserting that the National Lawyers Guild was an agent of Moscow. Only a tool of the Soviet Union, after all, would assert that the FBI engaged in illegal surveillance. The House Un-American Activities Committee published the report under its own name.

A couple decades later, the hubris of HUAC’s most famous alum — forever immortalized in his utterance “when the president does it that means it’s not illegal” — would send scholars scrambling for a new term to describe Nixon’s power grabs. Arthur Schlesinger Jr responded with the idea of the imperial presidency.

Two key components of Schlesinger’s concept were the president’s increasingly unilateral war-making — Nixon bombed Cambodia without congressional authorization — and the political uses of intelligence. The FBI is not merely a law enforcement agency; it is also an intelligence agency. Its domestic intelligence capabilities are the direct fruit of its role as a political police, and have been useful for thwarting domestic antiwar sentiment.

With his brazen actions, Nixon crossed an important threshold. He investigated his establishment opponents and illegally surveilled his counterparts in the Democratic Party. His crime was not subverting the democratic process — electoral subterfuge, suppression, and criminal prosecution of radical groups were and are a venerable American tradition — but instead harassing elected Democrats.

The Imperial Bureau

Mohammad Sabaaneh’s dangerous cartoons | The Electronic Intifada

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One cartoon, ironically subtitled “Scales of ‘Justice,’” portrays the traditional set of scales associated with the law. But here its column is sharply bent at an angle and the scales on either side of the beam are suspended in the air, implying a system in which justice is impossible.

Another depicts an Israeli judge – signified as such as he sits atop a lectern with the Scales of Justice adorned with a Star of David – saddled and ridden by an Israeli soldier, who chokes the judge with a set of reins. The soldier controls the gavel in the judge’s hand with a rope and waves it menacingly at a shackled prisoner below. Military rule supersedes fair trial.

Sabaaneh’s work also taps into Palestinian despair with the ongoing “peace process.”

An emotionally palpable drawing envisions Israel’s wall truly as an open-air prison that separates Palestinians into tiny, individual cells. People go about their lives as best they can in each cell – a little girl holds balloons, a man plays a violin, a woman breastfeeds her child – and some even manage to reach over the walls and hand a gift to their neighbors.

But these small acts of normalcy do not change their fundamental lack of freedom.

Mohammad Sabaaneh’s dangerous cartoons | The Electronic Intifada

The Ridenhour Prizes – Fostering the spirit of courage and truth

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National Bird follows the dramatic journey of three whistleblowers who are determined to break the silence around one of the most controversial current affairs issues of our time: the secret U.S. drone war. At the center of the film are three U.S. military veterans. Plagued by guilt over participating in the killing of faceless people in foreign countries, they decide to speak out publicly, despite the possible consequences. The filmgives rare insight into the U.S. drone program through the eyes of veterans and survivors, connecting their stories as never seen before in a documentary.

The Ridenhour Prizes – Fostering the spirit of courage and truth