Tariq Ali, Author of many books, including Street-Fighting Years, Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity and The Dilemmas of Lenin. - London Review of Books
Stephan: Tariq Ali has written a very interesting geopolitical assessment of what is happening. I don't fully agree with Ali's assessment of NATO, but his analysis incorporates accurately nuances that are usually not even considered.
British Writer Tariq Ali Credit: Wikimedia
No one knows how this will end. Putin’s reckless adventurism has backfired: an attempt to mimic the US on a GDP of $1.5 trillion, smaller even than Italy and minuscule compared to China ($14.7 trillion), was always going to be foolhardy. If he imagined a quick sortie, akin to a colonial-style ‘police operation’, he must now realise that installing Yanukovych or another puppet president in Kyiv will commit Russia to maintaining a massive military presence in Ukraine. A country that twelve years ago had a polity roughly divided between pro-Russian and pro-Western factions has swung decisively in the West’s favour.
Biden, too, threw caution to the wind. His decision last November to proceed with Nato enlargement – starting the process of incorporating Ukraine – in the half-hope, half-belief that this would check Russia’s encroachment at the borders of Donbass and Crimea proved disastrously wrong. This can’t be admitted in public, but Nato leaders know it and so do the leaders of China, India, Vietnam, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Cuba and the other countries that abstained from […]
Zolan Kanno-Youngs, White House Correspondent - The New York Times
Stephan: Finally someone, a Democrat, of course, is proposing to do something about the wealth inequality that so distorts American society. This is a very big deal and will generate billions of dollars of tax revenue. I predict the Republicans, and a couple of Democrats, Manchin and Sinema, who have been rented by the oligarchs and the corporations they control will oppose this Biden measure.
The White House proposal to impose a tax on billionaires is the first time President Biden has explicitly called for a wealth tax. Credit: Stefani Reynolds/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — The White House will ask Congress on Monday to pass a new minimum tax on billionaires as part of a budget proposal intended to revitalize President Biden’s domestic agenda and reduce the national deficit.
The tax would require that American households worth more than $100 million pay a tax rate of at least 20 percent on their full income, as well as unrealized gains in the value of their liquid assets, such as stocks, bonds and cash, which can accumulate value for years but are taxed only when they are sold.
Mr. Biden’s proposal to impose a tax on billionaires is the first time he has explicitly called for a wealth tax. While many in his party have advocated taxes that target an individual’s wealth — not just income — Mr. Biden has largely steered clear of such proposals in favor of increasing the top marginal […]
Stephan: You would think any human capable of rational thought would recognize that supporting the young of a country would result in many benefits, benefits far exceeding the costs of such support. Now we have factual evidence that this is true. But compared with the rest of the developed world the United States does not see this nor like children very much. It is very sad. (see SR archives).
Citation for the research study upon which this report is based: https://www.nber.org/papers/w29854
Families in the audience listen to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris deliver remarks on the day tens of millions of parents get their first monthly payments from the Child Tax Credit in the South Court Auditorium in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on July 15, 2021, in Washington, D.C. Credit: Chip Somodevilla / Getty
New research finds that if the expanded child tax credit were made permanent, the social and economic benefits from the investment would far outweigh the costs of the program.
A working paper from Columbia University, Barnard College and Open Sky Policy Institute researchers finds that if low-income families with one child saw their income increase by $1,000 a year, the benefits would outweigh the cost of the program 10-fold.
While making the program permanent would cost the government $97 billion, it would create social benefits worth $982 billion. These benefits include direct impacts, like improved health and longevity for both children and parents and increased future earnings for the children, and indirect benefits, like lower crime rates. Taxpayers would also benefit, saving […]
Stephan: This is a really alarming although little-covered story. What it is telling us is that so great is the corruption of the U.S. Congress, and the laws they have passed about legalized bribery that in the midst of the Russian war on Ukraine it is still possible for Russian oligarchs and their corporations to hire lobbyists to rent American congress members.
People stand in line to enter Sberbank in Moscow on March 12, 2022. Credit: AP
A number of Russian entities sanctioned by the Biden administration after the invasion of Ukraine have been able to keep the full extent of their lobbying footprint in Washington, D.C., hidden due to a wrinkle in disclosure laws.
For years, Russian entities registered to lobby under the Lobbying Disclosure Act, rather than registering under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, according to public filings. They were able to do so so long as a foreign government or political party was not the “principal beneficiary” of the lobbying effort. As a result, those Russian entities were able to influence U.S. policy without disclosing details with the Department of Justice about the scope of their outreach.
Top lobbying shops like Squire Patton Boggs registered under the LDA to represent Gazprombank, which the Treasury Department called Russia’s third-largest financial institution. BGR Group and Roberti Global registered under the LDA to represent Nord Stream 2 AG, the company behind the now-defunct energy pipeline […]
Stephan: Amory Lovins, in my opinion, is one of the most interesting people in American public life. All the things he has proposed over the years have been in service to fostering wellbeing, and they have all turned out to be correct. One does not hear much about him anymore, and I thought my readers would find this interview of interest.
Lovins’ house in Snowmass, Colorado. Credit: Judy Lovins
Temperatures dropped far below freezing this week in Snowmass, Colorado. But Amory Lovins, who lives high up in the mountains at 7,200ft above sea level, did not even turn on the heating.
That’s because he has no heating to turn on. His home, a great adobe and glass mountainside eyrie that he designed in the 1980s, collects solar energy and is so well insulated that he grows and harvests bananas and many other tropical fruits there without burning gas, oil or wood.Advertisement
Nicknamed the “Einstein of energy efficiency”, Lovins, an adjunct professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, has been one of the world’s leading advocates and innovators of energy conservation for 50 years. He wrote his first paper on climate change while at Oxford in 1968, and in 1976 he offered Jimmy Carter’s government a blueprint for how to triple energy efficiency and get off oil and coal within 40 years. In the years since there is barely a major industry or government that he and his […]
