Newsletter 3.27.18

Hi all! Thanks again for all your support. Here's this week's newsletter.

Nima, Florence, and Adam

*****

Welcome to the Dick Cheney Administration - Stephen M. Walt, Foreign Policy (3/23/18)

Professor Stephen Walt disproves the notion that recent shifts in Trump administration personnel represent the ascendance of the 'burn-it-all-down' extremism of Trump's 2016 campaign. Rather, Walt points out, "putting Bolton, Pompeo, and Haspel in key positions looks more like a return to 'Cheneyism,' by which I mean a foreign policy that inflates threats, dismisses serious diplomacy, thinks allies are mostly a burden, is contemptuous of institutions, believes that the United States is so powerful that it can just issue ultimatums and expect others to cave, and believes that a lot of thorny foreign-policy problems can be solved by just blowing something up."

Terrible Mistreatment of Haitians Is a Shared Pastime of Donald Trump and the “Deep State” - Miriam Pensack, The Intercept (3/25/18)

In this look at the confluence of American racism, nativism and obsession with brutal incarceration, Pensack resurfaces the "period when the dark histories behind Trump’s Guantánamo and Haiti refugee decisions intertwined, a particularly painful episode that played out between 1991 and 1993, when thousands of Haitians fleeing a military coup found themselves behind barbed wire at Guantánamo."

Exonerating the Empire in Venezuela - Greg Shupak, FAIR (3/22/18)

The United States has for years undermined the Venezuelan economy with sanctions, but US media coverage of Venezuela’s financial crisis has gone out of its way to obscure this.

Israel’s War on Culture - Marisa Mazria-Katz and Mairav Zonszein, New York Review of Books (3/22/18)

An excellent long read on the ever-evolving connections and conflicts of making art in an apartheid state.

From Belfast to Guantánamo: the Alleged Torture of Northern Ireland’s “Hooded Men” - Summer Eldemire, The Intercept (3/22/18)

During Northern Ireland's "Troubles," British forces routinely abused detainees using brutal interrogation methods known as the "Five Techniques." These acts have been deemed "inhumane and degrading" by the European Court of Human Rights. Here is one survivor's story.

Why Are Progressives Cheering Cable News’ Parade of Hawks and Liars? - Jeff Cohen, FAIR (3/26/18)

Just as they did in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion, MSNBC and CNN now serve up a steady parade of war-hawks, spies and liars, presenting them as credible and almost heroic as long as they criticize the despicable man in the White House.

Farmworkers Fight Back Against Sexual Violence Only to be Accused by Wendy’s of “Exploiting” #MeToo - Sarah Lazare, In These Times (3/23/18)

The Fair Food Program, created by farmworkers in 2011, is a worker-led model for enforcing protections for some of the most exploited laborers in the United States. The program plays a vital role in protecting farmworkers from a host of abuses, including rampant sexual assault. 14 major buyers, including McDonald's, Subway and Burger King, have signed onto the agreement - Wendy’s remains the only outlier among major fast food chains.

Trump's Comments About His "Good Genes" Make His Death Penalty for Drug Dealers Proposal Even More Horrifying John Knefel, Truthout (3/27/18)

Trump's drug dealer execution rhetoric is a "predictable outgrowth of two positions he holds close: anti-Black racism, and the belief in his own genetic superiority."

End of the independent Palestinian state project - Hossam Shaker, Middle East Monitor (3/22/18)

It's long past time to accept reality: there will never be an independent Palestinian state as fantasized about in the press and the Western halls of power. Serving merely as a defenseless arm of Israel's security establishment, writes Shaker, any currently imagined "state" would exist only "to protect the Israeli occupation from the anger of the Palestinian generations who aspire to claim their freedom, independence and their right to return to their land and houses from which they were forcibly displaced."