Source: Foreign Policy
by Olena Tregub & Marc R DeVore
“For almost as long as it has been fighting its war against Ukraine, Russia has received help from its friends. In September 2022, Russia began using Iranian one-way attack drones; last May, it began using North Korean missiles to strike Ukrainian power stations, apartments, and military targets. That an expansionist, revisionist Russia is violating international agreements — including United Nations sanctions — by importing weapons from two rogue states should give the world cause for alarm. Worse, however, is what the debris from North Korean, Iranian, and Russian missiles has revealed: They are filled with newly produced Western electronics. In other words, the world’s most dangerous regimes are building their most lethal weapons using electronics from advanced industrial democracies despite supposedly stringent sanctions.” (02/04/25)
“Nearly two months after their liberation from a half-century of dictatorship, Syrians appear to be shaping their future as much as the country’s new de facto ruler, former Islamist rebel leader Ahmed al-Sharaa. And many are doing it through laughter. Since the fall of the Assad regime Dec. 8, a collective of 20 comedians has toured the country entertaining thousands of people in various venues with uncensored humor. They are taking advantage of Syria’s newfound freedom of expression and equality. And their audiences are as diverse as the comedy collective itself, reflecting Syria’s ethnic and religious groups. ‘If we can laugh together, we can live together,’ Malke Mardinali, co-founder of the Styria Comedy Club, told New Lines Magazine. One audience member said about the show, ‘We feel at home here. We can laugh about anything and as much as we want – no one is watching us anymore.'” (02/03/25)
“It is common to think of politics in terms of a one-dimensional political spectrum. There are people on the left, people on the right, and people in the center, and we can sort people by where they fall on that spectrum. There is a grain of truth to this, of course, but it’s an overly simplistic way of thinking about politics, and taking it seriously is a recipe for distorted thinking in a number of ways. One such distortion is that it cedes too much ground to political extremists for setting the terms of political debate. The left is the left; the right is the right; the center is the midpoint between whatever the left is saying and whatever the right is saying; the center left and center right are whatever the left and right are saying, but less.” (02/04/25)
“Federal workers are on the front lines of the Trump-Musk regime’s illegal and destructive orders. The email sent to federal employees urging them to resign in exchange for uncertain benefits is clearly aimed at purging critical government employees and replacing them with loyalists and ideologues. The email promises workers up to eight months of pay if they resign by February 6. At first glance, this might sound like a generous offer. But neither Elon Musk nor U.S. President Donald Trump have the legal authority to make such a promise. Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), senior Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, in an email Sunday expressed deep skepticism about the promises. Just ask Elon Musk’s employees at Tesla, SpaceX, or Twitter/X, and you’ll find similar disregard for employees.” (02/04/25)
“How did countries manage to saddle themselves with enormous debt? More important, how can they get out? That’s the topic of The Age of Debt Bubbles (Springer, 2024), edited by Max Rangeley. Many books approach this topic from an academic viewpoint – but the topic is hardly academic at all. One country’s default would have worldwide consequences, affecting the poorest of the poor all the way to the top 1 percent, who could see their fortunes erased overnight. Mr. Rangeley’s book has two parts. First, he provides an academic analytical framework written by economists including Roger Koppl of Syracuse University and Harry Richer, a policy researcher and political adviser in the U.K. He then offers the practical experience of senior policymakers who provide their real-world experiences in tackling debt …” (02/04/25)
“It didn’t take long for the border and immigration enforcement industry to react to Donald Trump’s reelection. On November 6th, as Bloomberg News reported, stock prices shot up for two private prison companies, GEO Group and CoreCivic. ‘We expect the incoming Trump administration to take a much more aggressive approach regarding border security as well as interior enforcement,’ explained the GEO Group’s executive chair, George Zoley, ‘and to request additional funding from Congress to achieve these goals.’ In other words, the ‘largest mass deportation operation in U.S. history’ was going to be a moneymaker. As it happens, that Bloomberg piece was a rarity, offering a glimpse of immigration enforcement that doesn’t normally get the attention it deserves by focusing on the border-industrial complex. ” (02/04/25)
“President Donald Trump took office last month touting his commitment to ending wars. ‘My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker,’ he announced in his recent inaugural address. For years, in fact, Trump has touted his antiwar credentials and boasted about ending ‘endless wars.’ On Saturday, Trump ramped up America’s longest-running war, carrying out a strike in Somalia that killed an unspecified number of people.” (02/04/25)
“On September 11, 2001, the nominee for secretary of commerce, Howard Lutnick, took his son Kyle to his first day of kindergarten; which, he told the Senate, ‘is why I am with you today.’ The detour made him late for work at the company of which he is CEO, Cantor Fitzgerald, a leading financial service firm then located on top floors of the World Trade Center. His brother Gary ‘and 657 of my other friends and colleagues at Cantor Fitzgerald’ lost their lives that day. Lutnick asked the surviving employees, about a thousand people, to help him rebuild the company and help the 658 families who had lost a loved one. Over the next five years, they all donated 25 percent of their salaries to those families, about $180 million. … I don’t know whether he will do a good job as Secretary of Commerce. … I do suspect he’ll be a better head of that department than the last one.” (02/04/25)
“The ability to draw and send money, or the power of the purse, belongs to Congress. The Constitution states in Article I, Section 9, Clause 7 that ‘No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.’ While the President has the duty to enforce and carry out the laws, Congress writes and enacts them. The Supreme Court has consistently affirmed Congress’s authority over federal spending, reaffirming that no money can be spent without an appropriation from Congress (1850) and that executive actions cannot create financial obligations beyond what Congress has authorized (1990). … Nonetheless, there have been regular conflicts between legislative and executive branches over spending, or not spending.” (02/04/25)
“Even God took the seventh day off. Not Donald Trump. The blitz of new programs and initiatives emanating from the White House in just two weeks is unprecedented and encouraging. There are so many things that are broken in our country; President Trump seems determined to tackle them all. (It makes you wonder just what Joe Biden and his hapless crew were up to for the past four years.) As of today, President Trump has been in the Oval Office for just over two weeks; in that time he has pushed through much-needed reforms of the Washington bureaucracy, fired a slew of people responsible for weaponizing the Department of Justice, banned DEI programs and ‘gender-affirming care,’ tossed much of the Green New Deal out the window, persuaded Panama to drop their participation in China’s Belt & Road project, enabled the deportation of heinous criminals and brought home hostages from Venezuela.” (02/04/25)
