MoA—Attempts by Netanyahoo to goad the U.S. into attacking Iran have been manifold. But Trump’s legacy is on the line. I doubt very much that he will risk it for an attack that would have wide ranging and unpredictable consequences. How would it benefit him?
THE ISTER—In 2003, Khodorkovsky was criminally prosecuted by Putin for tax evasion and fraud for which he ended up serving 10 years in prison. His protege Leonid Nevzlin was convicted of ordering multiple contract murders on Khodorkovsky’s behalf, and sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia. Associate Platon Lebedev was also convicted and imprisoned. This wave of prosecution sent a message and gave Putin a strong position, which was used to negotiate a “grand bargain” with the remaining oligarchs: they retained most of their existing assets in return for alignment with Putin’s vertical rule of Russia. The era of financial gangsterism from the 1990s was over.
JEFF J. BROWN—For most of us, likely including Meng, there is a huge difference in perception between dealing with immigration (CBSA) and police (RCMP) officers. Immigration greets us at the airport and stamps our passports, asking mostly innocuous questions about our visits.
Yet, not realized by most of us, immigration can serve court ordered arrests. Thus, why did the RCMP officers, who were standing right there, not arrest Meng directly? I’ll give you three guesses and the first two don’t count. It was likely to give Meng the impression that she only had a problem with her Canadian paperwork, since she had been a legal resident of Vancouver since 2001, not that she was being set up for extradition to the USA on criminal charges.
Notice in the above timeline, CBSA held and questioned Meng for 2.5 hours (11:45 a.m. – 2:15 p.m.), where,
Meng is (again interviewed by an agent for 14 minutes and is) questioned about her role with Huawei. During this time Meng is compelled to hand over the passcodes to her electronic devices.
This timeline strongly suggests an illegal sting operation to get Meng to innocently spill the beans to immigration about her case and Huawei, give up all her passwords to the electronic devices that CBSA took and later turned over to RCMP, not to mention the devices of Meng’s still anonymous travel companion from Hong Kong.
CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—Let’s clear this up before the girl power parade starts: the first woman to head the US war machine will not be a groundbreaking pioneer of feminist achievement. She will be a mass murderer who wears Spanx. Her appointment will not be an advancement for women, it will be imperialism in pumps. Modern mainstream feminism has abandoned women’s interests so thoroughly and completely in almost all spheres of importance that it has largely become only superficially distinct from the patriarchy it purports to oppose. The plight of mothers, elderly women, young girls, caregivers and wives have been almost entirely shuffled out of popular discourse, with focus instead shifted onto discussions about whether women are being adequately rewarded for their service to the God of Capitalism, or how they’re just as qualified as men to murder thousands of people at a time.
GARY OLSON—Although his capitulation ultimately tore out their hearts, roughly 10 million beleaguered and bitter Millennials embraced Bernie Sanders because they realized they were being shafted by the Lords of Capital. Today, they could declare, “It’s not the pandemic, stupid! It’s the pandemic under economic inequality.” In sum, what is so exciting about this research is that an “intersectional perspective that promotes solidarity across struggles needs to be advocated” and the groundwork now exists.