Millions of food stamp recipients in the United States will see their benefits cut from the beginning of next month as the program is fully paid through October.
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) will be cut because a temporary measure to increase food stamps expires Oct. 31.
The country’s weak economy and the high rate of unemployment have caused a growing number of people to rely on the SNAP program. Some 48 million Americans are using food stamps each month, half of them children and teenagers.
According to the US Department of Agriculture, the average benefit is currently about $275 per household per month and a family of four with no changes in circumstance will receive $36 less per month.
The change means that the average benefit will go from about $1.50 per person, per meal each month to about $1.40.
“For those of us who spend $1.70 a day on a latte this doesn’t seem like a big change, but it does kind of really highlight the millions of families living on an extremely modest food budget,” Stacy Dean, vice president for food assistance policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said.
“Every week is a struggle as it is,” said Heidi Leno, who lives in Concord with her husband, 9-year-old daughter and twin 5-year-olds. “We hate living paycheck to paycheck and you have to decide what gets paid.”
Jennifer Donald, a mother of three in Philadelphia, said she counts on the family’s $460 monthly benefit to put food on the table.
“I was mad and devastated and a little bit confused because we need our benefits,” Donald said. “This is the way we eat right now. Live a day in our life before you can cut our benefits.”
This is while lawmakers are considering slashing billions of dollars to the overall program.
Last month, the House of Representatives voted to cut food stamps funding by $39 billion over the next decade. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that such a level of cuts would cause up to 3.8 million people to lose food stamp benefits in 2014.
The US Senate had previously voted to cut $4 billion from the program.
Toiling in terrible conditions, no salaries for months, passports confiscated by employers – that’s the horrendous reality for migrant workers helping with preparations for the World Cup 2022 in Qatar, as revealed by German filmmaker, Peter Giesel.
He and his cameraman were detained and imprisoned after they tried to investigate the story. The two went to Qatar following the publication of a report in the Guardian, claiming that workers are enduring appalling labor abuses.
Giesel said that they were arrested in their hotel rooms on October 3 and taken to police headquarters. There, all their equipment was impounded, and police then took the filmmakers to the State Security prison in the suburbs of Doha.
RT exclusively interviewed filmmaker Peter Giesel to find out about their experiences, and what they witnessed while covering the issue in Doha.
“We were there, in those separate cells, in [sic] the total of 21 hours. We were treated quite well, we got good food, to be honest, but the bad thing about those 21 hours was that we weren’t allowed a single phone call: not to our embassy, not to our families, no one was there to tell us what the charge was really, so we were kind of desperate in there, not having any contact with the outside world,” Giesel stressed.
Prior to their confinement, he and his cameraman met with migrant workers who told them about their plight.
One of the men interviewed worked for 12 years as an air conditioning specialist, but, as Giesel indicated to RT, “ironically, his accommodation itself doesn’t even have a fan.”
The man hasn’t been getting his salary and bonuses for a number of years, and his main difficulty is to fight a case against his boss and his firm: the employer took his passport from him, and the 35-year-old worker hasn’t made the money necessary to return home, “the devilish circle”, as Peter Giesel put it to RT.
Another group of guys – there were four of them – weren’t paid for seven months in a row and were trying to file a case when Giesel met them.
As the filmmaker explained, one of the main issues surrounding migrant workers is that they are employed under the so-called kafala system, which is “a law basically stating that every migrant worker that comes into Qatar has to find his own personal sponsor meaning his boss, the firm or corporation he’s working for.”
“And that sponsor has to take care of him legally and medically, but obviously, most of the sponsors take their passports away from the migrant workers. That puts maybe tens of thousands of them in a miserable situation. They can’t make any money to go home, so they’re trapped down there.”
Moreover, migrant employees can’t rely on outside forces such as their countries’ embassies, according to Giesel.
“I had a chance to sneak into the Nepalese embassy and do my recordings down there. It seems to be some kind of chaos: the bureaucracy not only in the embassies, but also in the Qatari system might be too overwhelming for those 1.4 million migrant workers to be treated fairly,” he told RT.
Despite the disastrous situation, Giesel is certain that the World Cup in Doha won’t be canceled, as “there’s just too much money involved in it. There are sponsorships, contracts ready, most of them signed already, there’s big political money, there’s big infrastructural money. Right now, there are billions spent down there in Doha to put up the streets, to put up new shopping malls, to put up new stadiums indeed.”
The FIFA President, responding to the outrage, said that he would speak with the country’s emir about the situation, but “we can’t be the ones who change it.”
Giesel said that they were detained in their hotel rooms on October 3 and taken to police headquarters. There, all their equipment was taken from them, and police then took the filmmakers to the State Security prison in the suburbs of Doha.
Finally, when asked why migrants continue to come to Qatar despite the difficulties, Giesel simply said that they “make more money out there.”
“Although the salaries average an estimated $350 a month, even for specialist workers, it’s more than in their home countries: Nepal, Bangladesh…” Giesel told RT.
Most readers have probably heard of Marc Rich. He was the Jewish criminal who was pardoned by Bill Clinton just prior to the former president’s leaving office in 2001. Rich was the original founder of Glencore, the company whose exploitive activities in the African nation of Zambia are documented in the video above. Some years ago he was indicted for tax fraud, and the film goes into his criminal past in considerable detail. It will probably come as no great surprise that Rich’s pardon was sought by officials of the Israeli government.
Clinton also cited clemency pleas he had received from Israeli government officials, including then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Rich had made substantial donations to Israeli charitable foundations over the years, and many senior Israeli officials, such as Shimon Peres and Ehud Olmert, argued on his behalf behind the scenes.[27] (Speculation about another rationale for Rich’s pardon involved his alleged involvement with the Israeli intelligence community.[28][29] Rich reluctantly acknowledged in interviews with his biographer, Daniel Ammann, that he had assisted the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service,[15][6] a claim that Ammann said was confirmed by a former Israeli intelligence officer.[14] According to Ammann, Rich had helped finance the Mossad’s operations and had supplied Israel with strategic amounts of Iranian oil through a secret oil pipeline.[6] The aide to Rich who had persuaded Denise Rich to personally ask President Clinton to review Rich’s pardon request was a former chief of the Mossad, Avner Azulay.[23][30] Another former Mossad chief, Shabtai Shavit, had also urged Clinton to pardon Rich,[2] whom he said had routinely allowed intelligence agents to use his offices around the world.[3])
Also not surprisingly, the pardon was recommended by our current Attorney General, Eric Holder.
Somewhat less familiar, perhaps, is the name of Ivan Glasenberg. It is Glasenberg who heads Glencore today. Wikipedia lists Glasenberg as a “triple citizen,” that is to say, he reportedly holds citizenship in Israel, Australia, and South Africa. So far as I’m aware, the CEO hasn’t been indicted for anything, but as you’ll see from the video, Glencore has engaged in some highly questionable business practices in regards to its copper mining operations in Zambia. Here it has extracted enormous wealth from the ground—Zambia has been blessed with the third largest copper reserves in the world—yet the country ranks among the poorer nations on earth, with a majority of its citizens subsisting on two dollars a day.
Directed by Christoffer Guldbrandsen, the above documentary is entitled “Stealing Africa.” It was released in November of last year and originally aired on the BBC—which probably explains the omission of the Israeli connection or the absence of any mention of Glasenberg or Rich even being Jewish. Glencore today is called Glencore Xystrata as a result of a merger which took place in May of this year, just a few months after the documentary’s release. Also, just as a matter of interest, Marc Rich died in June of this year. Glasenberg, still among the living, is listed by Forbes as having a net worth of $6.7 billion.
A little bit more on the documentary is available from the website Why Poverty:
In Ruschlikon, a sleepy village in Switzerland, the wealthy residents are receiving more tax revenue than they can use since the arrival of Ivan Glasberg, CEO of commodity giant Glencore. Yet in Zambia, where Glencore owns a majority stake in the country’s biggest copper mining operations, tax is an issue that’s contributing to its poverty…
Glasberg netted $9.6 billion when Glencore went public in 2011. The receipt of of his taxes overwhelmed the public coffers of Ruschlikon so much that the mayor decided to lower the town’s tax rate by 7%.
Not so fortunate for the residents of copper-rich Zambia – where Glencore owns a 73% stake in the Mopani Copper Mines (one of the biggest mining operations in the country).
Unfortunately, Zambia’s copper resources have not made the country rich. Virtually all Zambia’s copper mines are owned by corporations. In the last ten years, they’ve extracted copper worth $29 billion but Zambia is still ranked one of the twenty poorest countries in the world.
So why hasn’t copper wealth reduced poverty in Zambia yet made the residents of Ruschlikon better off? Once again it comes down to the issue of tax, or in Zambia’s case, tax avoidance and the use of tax havens.
The film also gives us some insight into why so many governments, particularly in poorer parts of the world, seemingly do nothing to stop rampant corporate abuses. This is true even in Zambia, which ironically at present has what appears to be a fairly decent government—with some committed officials striving to act in the public interest. But the problem is, quite simply put, Glencore is more powerful.
Director Christoffer Guldbrandsen
Producer Henrik Veileborg
Produced by Guldbrandsen Film
It’s time to take some of the profit out of the for-profit healthcare system currently victimizing the people of the United States. This is a small step and one which can be implemented on levels which do not necessitate the consent of an entire nation.
If you’re not intelligent enough to already have realized that the present for-profit healthcare system in the United States constitutes a human rights violation, you might as well go back to watching black and white 1950s sitcoms on your smart phone, and stop reading altogether.
“I will prescribe regimens for the good of my patients according to my ability and my judgement and never do harm to anyone.”
That’s one translation of the Hippocratic Oath. “First do no harm” is one way of saying it.
Let’s face it, the for-profit healthcare extortion system in the United States is doing a lot of harm to a lot of people.
When a doctor asks a high price for their services, they are saying one thing. They are saying that if you don’t meet their price, they will withhold their services. That’s how a market is supposed to work. Unfortunately, when doctors withhold their services in order to get more money, people have been known to die. It’s pay or die when it comes to the present healthcare extortion system in the United States.
Individual states license doctors to practice their discipline within that state’s borders. States currently allow licensed medical professionals free reign to charge excessive amounts for their services. The argument that the medical profession exists within a free market and doctors are worth whatever they can get remains entirely bogus. In reality, the for-profit medical profession is an extortion racket where, unless a patient meets the system’s financial demands, something very bad might very well happen to them. Has anyone, anyone ever, compared prices when they needed brain surgery? The states through their licensing powers become willing partners in this extortion racket. Doctors in the present system are asking their patients that most delightful of questions, “Your money or your life?”
If a licensed hunter is limited in the number of deer he can bag in one season, certainly a state has the authority to limit the profit margin on licensed professionals within its jurisdiction. If states and local governments can regulate the prices charged by cab drivers, those same licensing authorities most certainly have the capability to cap the incomes of medical professionals whose entire careers depend upon the state issuing them a license to practice.
A modest proposal. Allow doctors to make as much as they want through earnings and investments within the current healthcare system. However, if their income is more in a year than the governor of the state which issues their license, they will be charged a fee of 75% of those overage monies, which will be paid to the licensing authority. On the plus side the licensing authority will take those monies and initiate a program which reimburses doctors 5% of their outstanding student loans if they perform two weeks of non-profit medical community service each year. Of course there will be other trivial details which can be worked out rather easily once this concept is accepted by those of good faith.
It’s time for individual states to stop participating in the healthcare extortion racket. If any doctor says they will leave the state if they can’t make as much money as they can extort from their captive audience, well, here’s your scrub hat, what’s your hurry?
Costa Rican police have arrested four alleged members of a gang that trafficked organs to foreigners, the country’s attorney general says.
Carlos Jimenez said those detained on Thursday include three doctors, who are employed at the public Calderon Guardia Hospital in the capital, San Jose, as well as one Greek citizen, suspected of recruiting donors to sell their kidneys.
The arrested doctors have conducted the transplant surgeries “with full knowledge that the donors were receiving money in exchange for their organs,” said Jimenez.
The patients received a payment between USD 80,000 to 100,000 a transplant, according to officials.
This is the second arrest in the case since June when the leader of the trafficking gang, Francisco Mora Palma was detained together with a government official.
According to officials, Palma, who was also the chief of nephrology at the Calderon Guardia Hospital, was the main contact for foreigners seeking to buy kidneys, while the government official recruited possible donors.
At the time of June arrest Attorney General Jorge Chavarria said, “The patients who required the transplants were in Israeli territory, and some of the (trafficking) victims [had their kidney removed] here and others were transported to Israel. We have information that at least one person died after being operated on in Israel.”
The deceased donor was a woman who passed away while returning home to Costa Rica from transplanting an illegal organ in Israel.
In addition, two Israeli citizens paid in 2012 a Costa Rican and Nicaraguan man USD 6,000 for two illegally obtained kidneys, according to the International Organization for Migration of Costa Rica.
Meanwhile, another illegal organ trafficking ring was uncovered last year in Israel after several countries contacted authorities and provided them with the names of the suspects.
Furthermore, the Israeli regime admitted in 2009 that it had harvested organs from dead Palestinians without permission from their next of kin in the 1990s.
The confession came after Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet revealed in a report that the Israeli authorities returned bodies of deceased Palestinians with organs missing.
Lesotho (pronounced “Leh – soo – too”), is a mountain fortress of a country, totally surrounded by South Africa. The people there, the Basotho (pronounced “Bah – soo – too), are tough as nails, and you’d have to be. It’s high desert country, cold in the winter, not much water. The Basotho are fiercely independent.
Back in the early days, they fought off the Germans who tried to take their land. The Germans then drove them off of the fertile lowlands and into the arid mountains. So their King cut a deal with the English King for the country to be a British Protectorate … very clever, one of the few parts of Africa that was never a colony of anybody. These days, curiously, most of the time the country is populated by old folks, and women and kids—the only real employment for hundreds of miles around are the mines of South Africa … including the coal mines. So the men are all at work in South Africa, and the country runs on the money that the miners send home.
Of a wintry morning in Maseru, the capital, there’s a haze across the city from the thousands and thousands of coal fires. By and large, these fires are warming poor women’s shacks and shanties, and cooking what passes for their kids’ breakfasts. They burn coal because it’s what they have. There are no forests, so they can’t burn wood. There are no great herds of cattle, so they can’t burn dung.
And as a result, Maseru mornings have that curious acrid smell that only comes from coal, and the haze that comes from coal burnt in leaky stoves and open three-stone fires.
I bring up this image of dirt-poor people in a dirt-poor country to provide a clear context for the New York Times report of the latest lethal IPCC recommendation, which they describe as follows:
To stand the best chance of keeping the planetary warming below an internationally agreed target of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) above the level of preindustrial times, the panel found, no more than one trillion metric tons of carbon can be burned and the resulting gas released into the atmosphere.
Just over half that amount has already been emitted since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and at the rate energy consumption is growing, the trillionth ton will be released somewhere around 2040, according to calculations by Myles R. Allen, a scientist at the University of Oxford and one of the authors of the new report. More than three trillion tons of carbon are still left in the ground as fossil fuels. SOURCE
First, the “internationally agreed target” of 2°C? I don’t recall any international agreement on that, except perhaps among attendees at one of the IPCC’s annual moribund quackathons held in Rio or somewhere.
But lets look instead at the important issue, the numbers that they give for carbon. They say we’ve burnt a half-trillion tonnes, and that we should stop when we’ve burned another half trillion tonnes, and leave the other two-and-a-half trillion tons of fossil fuels in the ground. Leave it in the ground … the mind boggles. Never happen.
So in a scant few decades, the women of Maseru are supposed to just stop burning coal? And do what? Burn their furniture? They could pull up the floorboards and burn them … if they had floors …
Dont’cha love these guys? Don’t they understand that their policies KILL PEOPLE! I apologize for shouting, but they seem to be congenitally blind to the results of their actions, so perhaps their ears still work. Do they have a plan in hand for fueling Maseru, and a thousand other Maseru’s around the world? Wind won’t do it. Sun won’t do it. So in a couple decades … what?
Here’s what they avert their eyes from.
Artificially increasing energy prices for any reason harms, impoverishes, and kills the poor.
Yes, kills. People die from the cold. If the women of Maseru have to pay more for coal, they have less money to pay for food. So they will buy a bit less coal and a bit less food, and somewhere in there, in the hidden part that far too many people don’t want to think about, kids are dying. It’s already happening. The World Bank and the US are currently refusing to fund coal-fired power plants around the world … rich people refusing cheap energy to poor people, on my planet that is disgusting and criminal behavior.
Can’t say much more than that without excessively angrifying my blood, thinking about rich 1%ers like the IPCC conclave and Myles R. Allen trying to make all fossil fuels more expensive, and blithely ignoring the lethal consequences of their actions. So I’ll leave it there, but spread the word.
Iran’s state-owned Fars News Agency (FNA) claims that CNN has ‘fabricated’ the remarks made by President Hassan Rouhani in response to the question about the Holocaust. The US news channel added to or changed parts of his remarks, the agency said.
On Tuesday, the newly elected Iranian president gave his first English-language TV message in an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. The interview made international headlines with hundreds of news agencies worldwide boasting titles like “Iran’s President Rouhani calls Holocaust ‘reprehensible’ crime against Jews” or “Rouhani recognizes the Holocaust as crime against Jews”.
Asking about Rouhani’s take on the Holocaust, Amanpour noted that his predecessor, President Ahmadinejad, infamously denied the Holocaust. “Do you accept what it was, and what was it?” the US journalist asked.
However, according to Iran’s FNA, the news channel made up parts of Rouhani’s answers, adding the word ‘Holocaust’ among other placatory remarks to its translation from the answers given in Farsi.
According to the exact English translation provided by FNA, the Iranian President said,
“I have said before that I am not a historian and historians should specify, state and explain the aspects of historical events, but generally we fully condemn any kind of crime committed against humanity throughout history, including the crime committed by the Nazis both against the Jews and non-Jews, the same way that if today any crime is committed against any nation or any religion or any people or any belief, we condemn that crime and genocide. Therefore, what the Nazis did is condemned, [but] the aspects that you talk about, clarification of these aspects is a duty of the historians and researchers, I am not a history scholar.”
Meanwhile, the CNN translation of Rouhani’s answer stated:
“I’ve said before that I am not a historian and then, when it comes to speaking of the dimensions of the Holocaust, it is the historians that should reflect on it. But in general I can tell you that any crime that happens in history against humanity, including the crime that Nazis committed towards the Jews as well as non-Jews is reprehensible and condemnable. Whatever criminality they committed against the Jews, we condemn, the taking of human life is contemptible, it makes no difference whether that life is Jewish life, Christian or Muslim, for us it is the same, but taking the human life is something our religion rejects but this doesn’t mean that on the other hand you can say Nazis committed crime against a group now therefore, they must usurp the land of another group and occupy it. This too is an act that should be condemned. There should be an even-handed discussion.”
According to FNA, the word ‘Holocaust’ as well as the statement “whatever criminality they committed against the Jews, we condemn” are “the worst parts of the fabrications which totally change what President Rouhani has said.”
European diplomats are holding Israel accountable over an incident where IDF servicemen attacked a EU humanitarian convoy in the West Bank on Friday. So far Tel Aviv has left the scandal in limbo, offering no official explanation for the incident.
Diplomats from several EU countries have spoken out against the shocking incident of harassing a person with diplomatic immunity, clearly awaiting some sort of official reaction from the state of Israel.
After disturbing photos of the French diplomat, Marion Fesneau-Castaing, spread on the ground with IDF soldiers standing around her hit international news, the scandal over hijacked EU aid to homeless Bedouins from demolished villages in the West Bank has gained momentum.
“EU representatives have already contacted the Israeli authorities to demand an explanation and expressed their concern at the incident,” says a statement issued by the spokesmen for EU foreign policy, Catherine Ashton and Humanitarian Aid Commissioner, Kristalina Georgieva.
An EU official described the Israeli actions as “shocking and outrageous”, the BBC reported.
The British Consulate General in Jerusalem is “concerned at reports that the Israeli military authorities have prevented the affected community from receiving humanitarian assistance,” the consulate’s spokesman said.
“We have repeatedly made clear to the Israeli authorities our concerns over such demolitions, which we view as causing unnecessary suffering to ordinary Palestinians, as harmful to the peace process and contrary to international humanitarian law,” the spokesman added.
The Israeli authorities should “live up to their obligations as occupying power to protect those communities under their responsibility,” the UN Humanitarian Coordinator James Rawley said.
‘Illegal diplomatic activity’
The Israeli Foreign Ministry’s spokesperson, Paul Hirschson, has threatened to lodge a complaint over Marion Fesneau-Castaing’s actions, Agence France-Presse reported.
“If she did participate then a formal complaint will be filed because that is not the way diplomats behave,” he said.
On Saturday the EU ambassador in Israel called the Foreign Ministry Deputy Director-General for Europe, Rafi Shutz, demanding explanations regarding the IDF in the West Bank on Friday.
“What was done there by the European diplomats was a provocation,” said Shutz as quoted by the Haaretz.
Mr Shutz claimed that force against the female French diplomat was used because she slapped one of the soldiers. He also announced that the state of Israel is looking into allegations that foreign diplomats “abused their diplomatic privileges”.
Because Palestinian construction at the site of former Khirbet Al-Makhul village was ruled illegal by an Israeli court, the European diplomats were engaging in illegal activity, Shutz stated. He also pointed out that humanitarian aid to Palestinians should be delivered through the proper channels, coordinated with Israel.
The IDF explained the use of stun grenades during the incident, claiming that stones were thrown at security forces. Stun grenades were thrown directly into a group of European diplomats, aid workers and locals who were trying to deliver emergency aid to the residents of a demolished Palestinian village, Reuters reported.
On Friday a truck with EU humanitarian aid for the villagers of the demolished Khirbet Al-Makhul settlement was attacked by IDF personnel, who confiscated the truck and the payload. French diplomat Marion Fesneau-Castaing, who attempted to prevent confiscation of the aid, was pulled out of the truck and forced to the ground. The incident received wide international coverage.
Houses, stables and a kindergarten at Khirbet Al-Makhul village were demolished on Monday after a decision by Israel’s High Court, which ruled that villagers had illegal building permits. The villagers refused to leave the ruins saying they have been living on that land for generations.
The seizure incident of a truck carrying humanitarian aid has become yet another page in the row between Brussels and Tel Aviv. In July the EU announced it is going to stop all financial assistance to Israeli organizations operating in the occupied territories, starting from 2014.
The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reacted angrily, denouncing the move as interference in Israel-Palestine relations and retaliated by blocking EU humanitarian aid to tens of thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank.
Israel and the Palestinian Autonomy remain in fruitless peace talks, with the major stumbling block being the ongoing construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, occupied since the 1967 Middle East war.
That’s because, quite ironically, he’s fallen into the War on Terror trap—the comfortable and comforting stereotype of angry Muslims as irrational ideologues armed with religious hair-triggers and little else.
Like so many of the so-called “Left” in America, Maher has basically accepted the key notion that a whole population of like-minded people have decided to kill Americans because of an irrational religious belief system.
Maher’s go-to example of the Muslim world’s “unique” religious insanity is the way Muslims seem to go ballistic whenever “The Prophet” is offended—in cartoons, bad movies or by American soldiers burning Korans.
It’s not that it hasn’t happened. It has. Muslim outrage over real or perceived sleights to The Prophet and Islam—which forbids graven imagery of God and, in some cases, Mohammed—is no laughing matter.
But isn’t it interesting that the supposedly “Liberal” Obama Administration is currently fending off scandal-hungry Republicans because they tried to pawn off a “terrorist” attack on a paramilitary target (the Benghazi “diplomatic facility” also housed a “CIA annex”) as little more than a predictably frenzied Muslim response to an offensive movie?
That’s where Maher picked it up on an episode of “Real Time” when the topic strayed from GOP efforts to hang Benghazi on the Democrats to Maher’s relentless drumbeat about the inherent nuttiness of Muslims. Bill even entertained the possibility that it is better to keep dictatorships in control of Muslims because, like the Arab Spring in Egypt, when you let them have some freedom, they naturally become a mob of theocratic loonies. In other words, their kooky religion means Muslim masses cannot be trusted to govern themselves.
Unfortunately for Maher, he had Glenn Greenwald—America’s leading voice of reason and roving moral conscience—sitting across the table from him. Not coincidentally, Greenwald lives in Brazil and writes for a British paper, but those aspects of his pseudo-exiled status haven’t stopped him from holding a sharply-focused mirror up to America’s darker side, or from reaching a growing audience of disillusioned Americans.
And when it came time to hold up a mirror to Maher’s jingoistic and oddly unreflective take on Egypt, Greenwald did not disappoint:
Maher’s dismissive take on the consequences of American imperialism is not only puzzling, but it is also a bit alarming. If this is the view of a high-profile “Liberal” regarding America’s ongoing assault on key Muslim countries and its proxy wars around the globe, the future of the “Left” looks pretty bleak.
Really, hasn’t that been the story of the Obama years thus far?
Like the Cold War before it, the Neo-Con’s War on Terror has been transformed by Obama into a normalized fact of American politics that both sides must heed, lest they forgo their status as “patriotic Americans.”
And Bill is nothing if not patriotic. The way we know he’s true-blue? He’s got the one thing necessary to be a real, post-9/11 “patriot” actor—a blind spot.
To accept the drone war and the black hole of Gitmo and a policy of extrajudicial assassinations and all those convenient tropes about Muslim “radicalization,” one must remain blind to the implicit and, more shockingly, to the explicit causes of Muslim furor against—and let’s be honest here—the highly militarized American empire dominating their lives.
That blind spot keeps the culpability out and the easy assumptions in. How else can one square their beloved American “values” with actual American actions that kill so many innocents—men, women and children—in far-off lands?
When Greenwald countered Maher’s arguments with obvious comparables of religious extremism—Lt. Gen. Boykin’s “Our god is bigger” rationale for destroying Iraq and radical Judaism’s role in extending a religiously-based homeland in the Occupied Territories—Bill’s bizarre response was to attack Greenwald’s “silly liberal view that all religions are alike because it makes you feel good.”
Really, Bill? Are you the same crusader for rationality who made “Religulous?”
Did you forget about George the Younger’s claim that his decisions, particularly about going to war, were answerable to a “higher father?”
In Maher’s case, the blind spot is almost comical. An avowed, proud and exceedingly loud atheist, it is amazing that he is unwilling or unable to see the role religion played and still does play in America’s imperial ideology. Like many of the right-wingers he likes to razz, he’s blotting out Christianity’s role in the genocide of the American Indians, the missionary impulse toward “Little Brown Brothers” in Asia or the way propaganda about “Godless Communism” was the centerpiece of Cold War jingoism for the better part of the “American Century.”
But the most glaring example of Bill’s blind spot was the segment that immediately followed his tense exchange with Greenwald. It was a recurring gag titled “The Search for America’s Craziest Congressman,” this time featuring Rep. Paul “Evolution is a lie from the pit of Hell” Broun (R-GA) and Rep. Michelle “The Muslim Brotherhood controls our foreign policy” Bachmann (R-MN). Two incredibly religiously fundamentalist Christians harboring an array of strange views, Maher even termed them as a “danger to democracy.”
Next he brought out Zachary Quinto, an openly gay actor currently making a name for himself as the rebooted Mr. Spock. Defying all logic, Maher started the discussion on newly-out-of-the-closet NBA center Jason Collins, referencing the critique of Collins’ gayness by ESPN commentator Chris Broussard. Maher lampooned Broussard for opening his commentary with “As a Christian,” which Bill pointed out means he’s a moron, and then he admonished those who “…use the Bible as a cudgel against the Gay.”
But the irony didn’t end there.
Maher moved the discussion to the NRA and gun rights, picking up his consistent theme about Americans loving guns and being violent. He predictably attacked the “fantasy” held by many “right-wing” gun owners that they may need them to rise up against tyranny here in America.
Huh. Crazy ideologues just looking for a reason to revolt. Go figure.
Then came the coup de grâce.
In his “New Rules” segment, Bill got some good laughs about the Christian heavy metal singer who tried to have his wife killed by a hired assassin. The joke turned on the fact that the Bible does, in fact, offer a variety of valid reasons to kill one’s wife and nearly two dozen verses that expressly support it.
Had Bill looked in the mirror after delivering that punchline, he’d have seen that the joke was suddenly and irreversibly on him.
Three days after a Denver woman was brutally murdered, the city’s housing authority evicted her family because the slain woman was the only one on the lease.
Just days after losing a loved one, the victim’s mother and autistic son are now homeless, sleeping wherever they can after they were booted from their own house.
The eviction occurred after 47-year-old Sandra Roskilly was murdered on the front porch of her home. Daniel Abeyta, the 31-year-old gunman who was armed with a rifle, shot the Denver woman to death on Friday. He also shot a second woman in the leg and tried to detonate a propane canister in the street. A police sniper shot and wounded the gunman, who now faces a first-degree murder charge, KUSA-TV reported.
Police believe Roskilly was an innocent bystander when Abyeta, who lived in a neighboring home, went on a shooting rampage. The murder has devastated the woman’s family.
“We haven’t processed that Sandy’s gone yet,” the victim’s sister-in-law, Letta Campbell, told KWGN. But the family wasn’t even allowed to mourn before receiving the eviction notice from the Denver Housing Authorityon Monday. Roskilly died without a will, which legally transfers all of her personal belongings to a public administrator.
Since the shooting victim was the only one on the lease, Roskilly’s family members were forced to vacate the house less than six hours after receiving the notice. Doris Kessler, the 70-year-old mother of the victim, as well as Roskilly’s 18-year-old autistic son, were forced to leave the house on Monday. After kicking them out, Housing Authority officials changed the locks.
Roskilly’s son, who relatives say suffers from a severe case of autism, is currently being housed in a facility in Pueblo, which is nearly two hours south of Denver. Kessler is now sleeping on a couch at the home of one of her other children.
“She’s been living here 10 years and now they’re telling her she’s just a visitor and she has no rights whatsoever,” Dennis Campbell, Roskilly’s brother, told CBS News.
The murdered woman’s family members were prohibited from taking any of the furniture or property in the house, and officials told CBS that a judge will decide what happens to the house.
“Everything [Kessler’s] going to have left of my sister are in that home,” Campbell told KSDK.
Federal housing officials on Tuesday condemned the Denver Housing Authority, arguing that there is room for compassion in the law. Jerry Brown, a spokesman at Housing and Urban Development, told the Associated Press that federal laws are not carved in stone.
“Our rules and guidelines are just that, and we would hope people would use compassion,” Brown said. “They have discretion, which is why the city has a board to administer it. There was no notification on our end of an eviction, and we didn’t have a say in it.”
Meanwhile, authorities are still investigating the murder, so the victim’s family is not yet allowed to bury Roskilly. Unable to hold a funeral pending the investigation and unable to return to her home, the mother of the victim is being denied the closure of a murder that quickly overturned her life.
A New York City developer has broken ground on a midtown luxury tower that reportedly plans to separate potential tenants based on their income, going so far as to segregate occupants via drastically different entrances and exits.
Extell, a Manhattan developer, has begun construction on the glitzy tower, where 55 low-income units will be available, yet distinctly separate from the 219 market-rate condominiums overlooking the city’s waterfront.
In exchange for building the low-income apartments, Extell is seeking millions of dollars in tax breaks from New York lawmakers, according to the New York Post.
However, unlike other developers seeking the tax exemption, 40 Riverside Boulevard will have five floors facing away from the Hudson River with a separate entrance, elevator and maintenance elevator. The 219 condos have a riverside view, a contradiction the West Side Rag blog compared to the wealth gap at turn-of-the-20th-century Britain.
“You know that show ‘Downton Abbey’? Where the servants have to come to and go through separate entrances and bow their heads when they see a noble?” the author wrote, as quoted by the Post. “Well, there could soon be a version right here on the Upper West Side!”
A spokeswoman for the Department of Housing Preservation and Development said Extell’s tax exemption application is under review, yet Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal said the plans “smack of classism.”
“My immediate reaction was, ‘This is reprehensible,’” she told MSNBC on Monday. “Why would they do this? What is the need to segregate low-income working-class people from the wealthy?”
Rosenthal said her Upper West Side constituents agreed with her and pressed the Extell to integrate the low-income and high-income apartments, saying the current place seems to be from the past.
“That has no place in the 21st century, especially on the Upper West Side, which is a bastion of progressivism and always has been…I think that because that has been a public outcry, the developer will probably come to the table.”
While separate doors may seem like a centuries-old idea, it is emblematic of the current wealth gap that has only expanded over recent years in New York City. A New York University study published earlier this year revealed that median incomes decreased (by 6.8 percent to $50,433 a year) in the years between 2007 and 2011, while rent prices rose (by a monthly gross of 8.6 percent).
Even more worrisome, one-third of New Yorkers spend at least half of their annual income on housing.
“Given that two-thirds of New Yorkers rent their homes, it’s concerning to see that rental housing has become increasingly expensive across the city and increasingly affordable to many tenants,” said Ingrid Gould Ellen, the co-director of the Furman Center, which was involved in the NYU study.
One percent of New Yorkers earned almost 45 percent of the city’s income in 2007, James Parrott, a Fiscal Policy Institute economist, told the Post. That one percent, which accounts for roughly 90,000 people, had an average income of $3.7 million, or approximately $10,000 a day.
The latter is equivalent to what the city’s poorest one million households take home in one year.
“New York City has always had extremes of rich and poor,” Parrott said. “But we haven’t had the extremes we have today. It’s been getting more extreme all the time. It’s more extreme now than what it was 10 years ago, or 15 years ago.”
President Fernández speaking before the UN Security Council
(photo:Presidencia/Télam/e)
While leading the session of the UN Security Council earlier today, President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner made a call to “revise the functions of UN organisms, in particular the Security Council.”
The president took a stance against the right to veto of the permanent member states, while reiterating the need to negotiate with the United Kingdom over the Malvinas.
President Fernández is currently head of the council for the month of August.
In her discussion about the UN itself, she emphasised that the organisation, which was created after the cold war, now needed to adapt to “a new world with a new reality.” Fernández argued that the United States, France, UK, Russia, and China should not necessarily continue to have the right to veto just because they have had it up until now. “The old methods are not going to give solutions [today],“ she said.
“Peace and security are not military concepts. Many believe that peace is only gained through weapons, but I believe that there are multiple examples that show that what really constructs societies are values and ideals.”
Fernández also claimed that, since the UN now reaches its decisions by consensus “there is no need to exercise a veto.” Her request was made in the context of a call to “strengthen” cooperation between regional organisations such as the CELAC, the African Union and the League of Arab States to the United Nations.
Regarding the Falklands/Malvinas the president said her government’s stance is not based on a whim. “We simply want the United Nations resolution to be enforced and for our two countries to sit down and discuss this.”
“One can have different opinions about something that has not been resolved by the UN, but a problem arises when the assembly is not looking at differing views,” she argued.
Fernández added that the Malvinas are “only an example”, and affirmed that she did not wish to introduce further controversy to this debate. “These are ideas, I’m not so arrogant as to say they are the absolute truth,” she said.
By Kurt Nimmo | Another Day in the Empire | April 20, 2026
In 2025, Alex Karp, the CEO of government and military tech contractor Palantir, published The New York Times best-seller, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West. The Wall Street Journalpraised the book as a cri de coeur, a passionate appeal “that takes aim at the tech industry for abandoning its history of helping America and its allies,” while Wired praised the book as a “readable polemic that skewers Silicon Valley for insufficient patriotism.”
On April 18, 2026, Palantir posted twenty-two points to social media summarizing the book. In addition to taking Silicon Valley to task for insufficient patriotism, advocating a role for AI in forever war, and denouncing the “psychologization of modern politics,” the Palantir post on X declares: “National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.”
National conscription, a form of involuntary servitude, and the wars it portends, is good for business, especially for corporations within the orbit of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the national security state. Palantir fits comfortably within this amalgamation. … continue
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