Another sign of the shifting political zeitgeist

Yesterday, the US senate passed its first bill S.1 of the new congress by a margin of 77-23. It was an impressive display of bipartisanship in a body that has been described as being in gridlock. So what was in this bill that it was elevated to symbolic importance by being the first to be considered and garnered such support? It should come as no surprise that it was a bill strongly promoted by the Israel lobby led by AIPAC that seeks encourage economic punishments on those who support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.
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Is ‘billionaire’ now seen as pejorative?

I of course think it is and so, I would guess, would many of this blog’s readers but it seems that Howard Schultz is sensitive to it too and prefers the term ‘people of means’ and ‘people of wealth’. Here he is responding to a question from Anand Giridharadas, author of the book Winners Take All about whether billionaires have too much power over the political process.

Well, too bad, Howard. ‘Billionaire’ is probably the least pejorative label that is going to be used on you. Trust me, there are a whole lot worse that can and will be used as you continue your vanity project.

He also says that what he is trying to do is “walk in the shoes of the American people”. Does everyone wear Gucci and Prada shoes now?

The Brexiteers must be really desperate …

… because some of them are asking that Donald Trump be brought in to salvage Theresa May’s floundering efforts and twist the arms of the Irish over the intractable border issue.

Conservative MPs, who oppose the prime minister’s European Union exit deal, want her to approach the US president and request that he lobby the Irish government to give ground in negotiations, Sky News reported on Tuesday.
…

But senior EU figures have resisted calls to reopen negotiations, in part because of opposition from the Irish government to altering the backstop.
…

The demand comes amid concerns that the new US Congress would side with Dublin against any changes that would put at risk the Good Friday Agreement, which was negotiated between the UK and Ireland with the help of the US.

That way lies madness. There is no situation so bad that Donald Trump’s intervention would not make worse.

Keeping the Democratic party honest on health care

The Democratic party establishment tries to walk a tightrope. Their party base favors a whole slew of progressive measures. But the party hierarchy consists of either members of the oligarchy or people who are beholden and enamored of it. So they end up saying one thing publicly and another privately to their wealthy donors. We are seeing this now with the idea of Medicare For All as a means of providing universal health coverage. What was portrayed as utterly radical when Bernie Sanders proposed it during the 2016 campaign has caught fire within the party within an incredibly short time, so much so that every single Democrat who has announced a run for the presidency this year has expressed support for it, a remarkable turnaround.
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Venezuela, Simon Bolivar, and US interference in South America

Venezuela is a good example of how the US political-media-business communities unite to overthrow governments that it dislikes, especially when it comes to South America. The Trump administration seems to be laying the groundwork for overt military intervention in Venezuela to complement the US’s long-standing covert efforts at destabilizing that country and supporting coups, actions that were also done by the Obama administration. Readers may recall the coup against Hugo Chavez in 2002 that the US government and the media (with the New York Times being among the worst culprits) and political establishments in the US quickly endorsed, only to find Chavez regaining power. The media quickly assigned that disgraceful episode to the memory hole and it is rarely brought up again, though recent events in that country would surely justify doing so.
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The uncertain future of particle physics

The field known as particle physics has as an important goal the search for the fundamental constituents of matter and it has proved very fruitful, leading us to our present understanding of matter being made up of quarks, gluons, and leptons. Pretty much everyone has heard of the Large Hadron Collider, the massive accelerator of radius 27 km near Geneva that was built mainly to search for the Higgs boson, and found it. But as is always the case with physics, immediately after any discovery comes the question: What next? And in this case, the answer is not clear. The Higgs was the last remaining particle in the Standard Model of particle physics so in one sense one can say that that chapter has come to end. But is the end merely that of the chapter or is it the end of that particular physics book, that we have reached the end of particle physics and all that remains are just mopping up operations?
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‘Tax the rich’ is going mainstream in the US

Anand Giridharadas is the author of the book Winners Take All. In an interview, he called out the global plutocrats at Davos about their so-called ‘philanthropy by rich people as a solution to the world’s problems’, angering many of them. The real solution is to tax the hell out of them.

I think Davos is a family reunion for the plutocrats that broke the modern West. I’ve never been to it, so I’m a cultural critic looking from a distance, but it seems to me to be a gathering of people who think that they are changing the world when they are exactly what needs changing. A gathering of people who use the idea of making a difference as a kind of lubricant in the engine of making a killing, of people who promote generosity as a cheap substitute for justice.
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