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Category: Politics

Elon Musk is a problem masquerading as a solution

Elon Musk is a problem masquerading as a solution

Anand Giridharadas writes: It is a perfect marriage for an age of plutocracy: Twitter with its serious problems and Elon Musk, the embodiment of those problems. What happens when the incarnation of a problem buys the right to decide what the problem is and how to fix it? Twitter has a disinformation problem — fake news about Covid vaccines, climate and more running buck wild across the platform. Mr. Musk has shown himself to be a highly capable peddler of…

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The Republican blueprint to steal the 2024 election

The Republican blueprint to steal the 2024 election

J. Michael Luttig writes: Nearly a year and a half later, surprisingly few understand what January 6 was all about. Fewer still understand why former President Donald Trump and Republicans persist in their long-disproven claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Much less why they are obsessed about making the 2024 race a referendum on the “stolen” election of 2020, which even they know was not stolen. January 6 was never about a stolen election or even about actual…

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China’s Covid lockdown outrage tests limits of triumphant propaganda

China’s Covid lockdown outrage tests limits of triumphant propaganda

The New York Times reports: Immediately after Beijing said it had detected a new coronavirus outbreak, officials hurried to assure residents there was no reason to panic. Food was plentiful, they said, and any lockdown measures would be smooth. But Evelyn Zheng, a freelance writer in the city, was not taking any chances. Her relatives, who lived in Shanghai, were urging her to leave or stock up on food. She had spent weeks poring over social media posts from that…

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The Putinomics playbook won’t work forever

The Putinomics playbook won’t work forever

Chris Miller writes: On March 27, President Joe Biden claimed that U.S. sanctions had reduced Russia’s currency to “rubble.” Yet in the past few weeks, the currency has rebounded, while the country shows no outward signs of crisis. So what impact are sanctions having? Plenty of questions remain in the short term. But the long-term consequences of the sanctions are clear and severe. Russian industry now faces difficulties in acquiring crucial tools and components. The future of entire sectors of…

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Building the “Big Lie”: Inside the creation of Trump’s stolen election myth

Building the “Big Lie”: Inside the creation of Trump’s stolen election myth

By Doug Bock Clark, Alexandra Berzon and Kirsten Berg, ProPublica This story was originally published by ProPublica By the time Leamsy Salazar sat down in front of a video recorder in a lawyer’s office in Dallas, he had grown accustomed to divulging state secrets. After swearing to tell nothing but the truth so help him God, he recounted that he was born in Venezuela in 1974, enlisted in the army and rose through its special operations ranks. He described how…

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In Afghanistan, vice and virtue are front and center

In Afghanistan, vice and virtue are front and center

Ahmed-Waleed Kakar reports: Muhammad Sadiq Akif was not in Kabul as the city fell to the Taliban last August. An insurgent propagandist who had been chronicling the frantic last days of the war on Twitter, he was over 60 miles to the southeast, in Loya Paktia. Taliban control there was tenuous and the surrender of a regional CIA-created militia, the notorious Khost Protection Force, was still being negotiated. Akif arrived in Kabul days later. Across the city, fluttering in the…

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The world’s richest person didn’t like Twitter. So he’s buying it

The world’s richest person didn’t like Twitter. So he’s buying it

David Leonhardt writes: Two years ago, the economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman published a statistic that you don’t normally see. It was the share of wealth owned by the richest 0.00001 percent of Americans. That tiny slice represented only 18 households, Saez and Zucman estimated. Each one had an average net worth of about $66 billion in 2020. Together, the share of national wealth owned by the group had risen by a factor of nearly 10 since 1982. This…

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Ukraine: First comes the dehumanization. Then comes the killing

Ukraine: First comes the dehumanization. Then comes the killing

Anne Applebaum writes: In the terrible winter of 1932–33, brigades of Communist Party activists went house to house in the Ukrainian countryside, looking for food. The brigades were from Moscow, Kyiv, and Kharkiv, as well as villages down the road. They dug up gardens, broke open walls, and used long rods to poke up chimneys, searching for hidden grain. They watched for smoke coming from chimneys, because that might mean a family had hidden flour and was baking bread. They…

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Video: A conspiracy against public interest operating inside the City of London

Video: A conspiracy against public interest operating inside the City of London

  Michael Oswald’s film The Spider’s Web reveals how at the demise of empire, City of London financial interests created a web of secrecy jurisdictions that captured wealth from across the globe and hid it in a web of offshore islands. Today, up to half of global offshore wealth is hidden in British jurisdictions and Britain and its dependencies are the largest global players in the world of international finance.

Heavy weaponry pours into Ukraine as commanders become more desperate

Heavy weaponry pours into Ukraine as commanders become more desperate

Politico reports: Western countries are rushing heavy weaponry to Ukraine as the war enters what promises to be a deadly, and potentially protracted, new phase. Those deliveries are coming amid increasingly desperate pleas from Ukrainian battlefield commanders as they endure withering Russian artillery and rocket fire that could last weeks or months. Over the past two weeks, the Biden administration began shipping out $1.2 billion worth of howitzers, around 200,000 artillery rounds, armored vehicles, counter-battery radars and experimental new armed…

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Judge holds Trump in contempt over documents in New York attorney general’s inquiry

Judge holds Trump in contempt over documents in New York attorney general’s inquiry

The New York Times reports: A New York judge on Monday held Donald J. Trump in contempt of court for failing to turn over documents to the state’s attorney general, an extraordinary rebuke of the former president. The judge, Arthur F. Engoron, ordered Mr. Trump to comply with a subpoena seeking records and assessed a fine of $10,000 per day until he satisfied the court’s requirements. In essence, the judge concluded that Mr. Trump had failed to cooperate with the…

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Loss is victory for far-right in French presidential election

Loss is victory for far-right in French presidential election

The Associated Press reports: The far-right has gone mainstream in France. That’s the headline from the landmark showing by Marine Le Pen in the French presidential election. The fierce nationalist didn’t win Sunday. But she edged another step closer — snatching a victory of sorts from her defeat to reelected President Emmanuel Macron. With 41.5% of the vote, unprecedented for her, Le Pen’s anti-foreigner, anti-system politics of disgruntlement are now more entrenched than ever in the psyche, thinking and political…

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How London became the world’s laundromat for dirty money

How London became the world’s laundromat for dirty money

  Russian oligarchs and companies have been investing in London for two decades, encouraged by British politicians of all stripes, but critics say the ‘London laundromat’ cleans dirty money from Russia and across the globe. The FT examines why it took Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to put the issue in the spotlight and whether new sanctions and measures to tackle the problem go far enough. Read more at Financial Times

Arming Ukraine is the path to peace

Arming Ukraine is the path to peace

Nicholas Grossman writes: As the United States and other NATO countries send Ukraine weapons to fight Russian invaders, some left-wing critics have denounced the effort as warmongering escalation. For example, linguist professor and activist Noam Chomsky described American policy as “praising ourselves for heroism” while “fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian.” I fault no one for lamenting the destruction and hoping for peace, but that assessment misunderstands this war and America’s role in it. The decision of when to stop…

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I’ve dealt with Putin before: I know what it will take to defeat this brutal despot

I’ve dealt with Putin before: I know what it will take to defeat this brutal despot

Viktor Yushchenko writes: Maksym Kurochkin is a playwright. For almost three years, he and 20 other Ukrainian playwrights had been planning to build a new theatre in the heart of Old Kyiv. The group found a magnificent old structure that they were busy renovating in order to open the Playwrights’ theatre on 12 March. On 24 February, Maksym and his colleagues awoke to the horrific sound of bombs. 12 March came and went. Instead of planning a grand opening for…

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How former chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, earned millions as Putin’s man in Germany

How former chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, earned millions as Putin’s man in Germany

The New York Times reports: On the evening of Dec. 9, 2005, 17 days after Gerhard Schröder left office as chancellor of Germany, he got a call on his cellphone. It was his friend President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Mr. Putin was pressing Mr. Schröder to accept an offer to lead the shareholder committee of Nord Stream, the Russian-controlled company in charge of building the first undersea gas pipeline directly connecting Russia and Germany. “Are you afraid to work…

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