Tag: in-the-news

The Department of Justice announced Thursday that it will begin investigating companies for earning what it believes to be excessive profits amid surging inflation and ongoing supply chain issues.

In a press release, the department said its antitrust division would begin to “deter, detect and prosecute those who would exploit supply chain disruptions” to earn what the department calls “illicit profit.” The goal of the initiative, according to the department, is to prevent companies from “overcharging customers under the guise of supply chain disruptions.”

The problem, of course, is that the supply chain disruptions are quite real—and inflation across the economy is the result of both those large-scale issues and government actions, including last year’s $1.9 trillion stimulus bill and protectionist policies. To the extent that private companies are raising prices, those things are the likely culprits—and higher prices are the market’s way of allocating scarce goods most efficiently, not evidence of price gouging.

“The DOJ and FBI would rather launch a global investigation of ‘illicit’ supply chain profiteering than acknowledge the obvious and inevitable result when unprecedented fiscal and monetary stimulus combines with decades of protectionism and regulatory sclerosis,” says Scott Lincicome, director of general economics and trade policy for the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

But this announcement from the DOJ is more than just a fishing expedition. It suggests that the mighty law enforcement apparatuses of the federal government are following Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) into the fantasy world where the profit motive is responsible for inflation. That cockamamie conspiracy theory becomes less funny when the FBI is empowered to charge companies for “illicit profits” as they try to keep shelves stocked in an environment of scarcity.

Warren has been trying to blame corporations for inflation since last year. She’s lobbed attacks at big oil companies and small grocery stores—a famously low-margin business—for trying to take advantage of supply chain issues to screw customers. As if businesses suddenly became more greedy within the past year after previously not caring about profits, I guess?

This week, Sanders climbed into the clown car too, tweeting that “Gas prices are at the highest level in 7 years” due to “corporate greed, collusion & profiteering.”

These are economically illiterate takes, though hardly unexpected ones. Warren is a broken record when it comes to blaming billionaires and corporations for everything from high college costs to the lack of affordable housing to the current supply chain problems. Just as reliably, she ignores the role that government has played in creating or worsening those problems—by subsidizing student loans, imposing restrictive zoning laws, and implementing trade-limiting rules like tariffs and the Jones Act, for example.

It’s one thing for a few senators to rile up their populist bases with nonsensical tweets. It’s another thing to see that same nonsensical argument backed by the FBI and Department of Justice—and into the White House’s economic policies, as they already have.

Indeed, the alternative to rising prices in the current economic environment probably isn’t a better consumer experience. It would be more empty shelves and longer delays. Companies that are finding ways to navigate the current weirdness and keep supplies flowing deserve praise, not the threat of an FBI investigation.

The post DOJ, FBI Will Investigate Companies for 'Illicit Profits' appeared first on Reason.com.

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The three men who chased Ahmaud Arbery through a Brunswick, Georgia, suburb in 2020, resulting in a deadly confrontation, were convicted of murder by a state jury in November. All three were sentenced to life in prison. Now the same three white men are on trial in federal court for the same conduct, facing the possibility of additional life sentences if prosecutors can persuade the jury that they targeted Arbery, who was black, “because of his race.”

According to the Supreme Court, this second prosecution does not amount to double jeopardy, because the state and federal crimes, defined by two different “sovereigns,” are not “the same offense.” But since Travis McMichael, Gregory McMichael, and William Bryan are already serving life sentences, you might wonder why the federal government is bothering to prosecute them again.

The answer seems to be that the Justice Department wants to condemn them as racists as well as murderers. “This is the kind of case you really need to do to send the message that the Justice Department won’t tolerate this type of racist hatred that results in violence,” former federal prosecutor Shan Wu told The Washington Post. Federal prosecutors are using the trial to make a moral statement about the defendants’ beliefs, which is not ordinarily seen as a legitimate function of criminal courts.

Yesterday, The New York Times reports, the jury was presented with “voluminous digital evidence of racism” aimed at establishing the defendants’ guilt. That evidence included a meme that Gregory McMichael—who first deemed Arbery suspicious and accompanied his son, Travis McMichael, in the pickup truck they used to chase him—shared on social media in 2016. “White Irish slaves were treated worse than any other race in the U.S.,” the post said, followed by “vulgar language that contrasted the Irish with other racial or ethnic groups who demanded ‘free’ things.”

The prosecution also noted Travis McMichael’s reaction to “a video of a Black person playing a practical joke.” The younger McMichael, who fired the shotgun that killed Arbery, “responded by using a racist epithet and saying he would kill the person who made the joke.”

The Post reports that the evidence also included “a litany of conversations” in which Travis McMichael “denigrated Black people, often while calling them the n-word.” The messages showed that McMichael “associated Black people with criminality” and “blamed them when he struggled to get a commercial driver’s license, accusing them of ‘running the show.'” In one message, McMichael said “he loved his job because ‘zero n—-rs work with me.'”

What about Bryan, who drove his own pickup truck during the chase and used his phone to record the final minutes of the encounter? In her opening statement on Monday, NPR reports, federal prosecutor Bobbi Bernstein said the government would show that Bryan “used the N-word and other slurs, in one instance, after learning that his daughter was dating a Black man. She said Bryan commented that his daughter ‘has her n—–r now.'”

It is not a crime to be a bigot, of course. The point of all this is to establish the defendants’ motive for chasing and assaulting Arbery, which is crucial to convict them of violating 18 USC 245 (b)(2)(B). That statute applies to offenders who use force to prevent someone, “because of his race, color, religion or national origin,” from “participating in or enjoying any benefit, service, privilege, program, facility or activity provided or administered by any State or subdivision thereof”—in this case, the street on which Arbery was jogging.

We may reasonably surmise, especially in light of the views that the defendants had expressed, that they would not have been so quick to suspect Arbery of burglary if his skin had been a different color. But that is not the same as proving beyond a reasonable doubt that they chased, detained, and assaulted him “because of” his race.

“The most compelling pieces of evidence will always be those that are most directly tied to the incident at hand,” Florida State University law professor Avlana Eisenberg told the Post. Eisenberg “noted that proving motive can be challenging, but also warned that acquittals in the hate-crimes case would deepen a disconnect between official findings and the ‘court of public opinion.'”

That concern is rather puzzling. There is a big difference between what counts as proof in the “court of public opinion” and what counts as proof in an actual court. If the jurors, after hearing all the relevant evidence, conclude that the prosecution has not met its burden of proving a racist motive for chasing and killing Arbery, they certainly should not convict the defendants anyway because that is what public opinion demands.

Convicting Travis and Gregory McMichael would have no impact on their punishment, since their sentences do not allow parole. A federal conviction theoretically could make a difference for Bryan, whose state sentence allows him to seek parole after 30 years. But he will be in his early 80s at that point, assuming he is still alive.

In other cases where people have been charged with federal “hate crimes,” by contrast, that decision had a big impact on the penalties they faced. In 2020, for instance, the Justice Department charged Tiffany Harris, a black woman who had already been charged with several state crimes in New York after allegedly slapping three Orthodox Jews on the street, with violating 18 USC 249.

That law applies to an offender who “willfully causes bodily injury” to someone “because of” that person’s “actual or perceived race, color, religion, or national origin.” The crime is a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison—more than twice the maximum penalty for the most serious state charge that Harris faced, which was itself four times the maximum penalty that would have been authorized without a state “hate crime” enhancement.

The evidence of motive in Harris’ case was pretty straightforward. She slapped three identifiably Jewish women—two across the face and one on the back of the head—as they were walking in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. “Fuck you, Jews,” she reportedly said during the second incident.

In the case against Travis McMichael et al., the prosecution says, the crucial evidence can be found in the ugly attitudes they expressed months or years before their crimes. Other seemingly redundant federal “hate crime” cases were based on evidence such as a racist manifesto and anti-Semitic social media posts. When such prosecutions threaten enhanced penalties, such as longer prison terms or execution rather than a life sentence, the government is effectively trying to punish people for their opinions. In a country where that sort of thing is not supposed to happen, punishing people for their criminal behavior—preferably just once!—should be enough.

The post The Men Who Killed Ahmaud Arbery Were Convicted of Murder. Now They Are on Trial for Racism. appeared first on Reason.com.

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David Cole, longtime Georgetown law professor who’s now the National Legal Director of the UCLA, writes in the New York Review:

Shapiro’s message was offensive, but if academic freedom is to mean anything, [Shapiro’s] two tweets can’t be a firing offense. And without academic freedom, the voices suppressed are as likely to be those of critical race theorists as opponents of affirmative action.

The concept of academic freedom was initially advanced in the United States by universities and professors as a defense against political intrusions aimed at perceived anarchists, Communists, and other critics of the status quo. Universities argued that because a robust exchange of ideas and free inquiry are essential to the academic enterprise, state officials must respect the independent judgments of universities and the free speech rights of their employees. The Supreme Court’s academic freedom cases have all involved government efforts to banish Communists from campus….

If universities do not respect this principle [of academic freedom] within their own institutions, how will they resist the political encroachments of outsiders? …

Doing what the vocal majority demands in this instance [i.e., firing Shapiro] would be a huge mistake. I unequivocally reject Shapiro’s contention that it is improper to seek to rectify the shameful fact that no Black woman has ever served on the Court—just as there was nothing wrong in Ronald Reagan’s commitment to appoint the first woman, or President Trump’s statement that he would pick a woman to fill Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat. And Shapiro’s tweet was, in my view, offensive.

But that doesn’t mean he should lose his job—or that the Georgetown community will be better-off if it banishes him. Expressing one’s position on affirmative action, or any other matter of public debate, even in an offensive manner, cannot be the basis for termination if academic freedom is to be respected.

The principle of academic freedom, like the freedom of speech generally, is not absolute. It does not protect those who engage in targeted racial harassment or threats, or speech that creates a pervasively hostile environment. But Shapiro’s tweets do not come close to crossing those lines. And in an instance such as this, in which he immediately responded by deleting the tweets and apologizing, the commitment to academic freedom demands tolerance for those with whom we disagree. Some have raised concerns about whether students of color will feel comfortable taking Shapiro’s classes. But his primary role will be running a conservative institute on campus, and as a lecturer he would not teach any compulsory courses.

Georgetown has also said it is investigating whether Shapiro’s tweets violated its rules of “professional conduct,” but if that open-ended term can be invoked to terminate a teacher for expressing a controversial view in a provocative manner, off-campus and outside of his employment, no professor’s free speech rights will be safe.

Most importantly, if universities start policing controversial speech within their own intellectual community, they will undercut their standing to object to others’ efforts to police them….

Academic freedom is especially important in today’s toxic political environment. The survival of our vast, multicultural democracy demands a commitment to pluralism. Our society is afflicted by deep polarization, in which both left and right have grown more strident and increasingly intolerant, opinions have ossified into identities, and many of us rarely talk to, or hear from, those with whom we disagree. The university has the potential to be a critical antidote. At its best, it provides a place in which people with widely divergent opinions live and learn together. But it can do so only by practicing the tolerance for disagreement that is too often missing elsewhere.

As a private university, Georgetown is not bound by the First Amendment. But like virtually all institutions of higher learning, it has committed itself to respecting the free exchange of ideas. Its policy protects even speech that “most members of the University community [consider] offensive, unwise, immoral, or ill conceived.” That so many faculty, students, and student organizations have demanded Shapiro’s ouster will make Georgetown’s adherence to its own standards extraordinarily difficult. Nothing is more challenging for leaders than to stand up to the will of the vocal majority. But it is moments like these that test our commitment to the values of tolerance and diversity. Condemning the message is the right response; firing the speaker is not.

(For my own view on the matter, see this post; see also this faculty letter.)

The post David Cole (of the ACLU and Georgetown Law) on the Ilya Shapiro Matter appeared first on Reason.com.

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From today’s decision in State ex rel. Kristof v. Fagan:

Relator [Kristof] is a prospective candidate for governor. After he filed his declaration of candidacy with the Secretary of State, the secretary asked relator for additional information to substantiate that he will “have been three years next preceding his election, a resident within this State,” as required to serve as governor by Article V, section 2, of the Oregon Constitution.

Relator submitted additional materials in support of his claim that he meets the constitutional eligibility requirement. Upon reviewing those materials, the secretary determined that, although relator had previously been a resident of Oregon, he had been a resident of New York since at least 2000 and he had not reestablished Oregon residency by November 2019. The secretary therefore concluded that relator did not meet the constitutional requirement….

In communicating its decision to relator, the Elections Division correctly emphasized that “it is not the Elections Division’s role to determine whether any candidate is sufficiently ‘Oregonian'” or “to examine the depth or sincerity of a candidate’s emotional connection to Oregon.” That is not this court’s role either. It is undisputed that relator has deep roots in Oregon and has consistently spent time here over many years.

This case, however, requires us to decide two legal questions: (1) the meaning of “resident within this State,” as those words are used in Article V, section 2, of the Oregon Constitution; and (2) whether the secretary was required to conclude that relator met that legal standard.

As we explain below, we conclude that “resident within,” when viewed against the legal context that surrounded the Oregon Constitution’s 1857 ratification, is best understood to refer to the legal concept of “domicile,” which requires “the fact of a fixed habitation or abode in a particular place, and an intention to remain there permanently or indefinitely[.]” Reed’s Will (Or. 1906). Under that legal concept, a person can have only a single residence at a time.

For the reasons that follow, we further hold that, on the record before the secretary, she was not required to conclude that relator was domiciled in Oregon between November 2019 and December 2020. Finally, although relator challenges the constitutionality of the durational residency requirement in Article V, section 2, we conclude that that question is not properly considered through this mandamus proceeding. We therefore … deny relator’s petition….

We recognize that relator has longstanding ties to Oregon, that he owns substantial property and operates a farm here, and that the secretary did not question his current  Oregon residency. Moreover, he has thought deeply and written extensively about the challenges faced by those living in rural areas of Oregon—and the rest of the country.
But that is not the issue here. The issue, instead, is whether relator has been, during the three years preceding the November 2022 election, “a resident within this State.” For the reasons set out above, we conclude that the secretary was not compelled to conclude, on the record before her, that relator satisfied that requirement.

The post N.Y. Times' Nick Kristof Can't Run for Oregon Governor appeared first on Reason.com.

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As Canada tries its best to keep donations of cryptocurrency from helping protesters against the country’s vaccine mandates on truckers, as detailed by Reason‘s Liz Wolfe, the Canadian Bankers Association has announced its intention to make sure that those associated with the protests are thoroughly locked out of all traditional financial services as well.

As Global News in Canada reports:

The Canadian Bankers Association said in a statement Wednesday that, as with other financial service providers, banks will “need to diligently implement the required measures.”

“Banks in Canada follow all applicable laws and regulations in carrying out their operations, in keeping with their commitment to protect the integrity of Canada’s financial system,” the association said.

The details of those “required measures” Canada wants to enforce on dissenters not convicted of any crime are totalitarian grimness of a sort many naively thought could not happen in the allegedly democratic, free West. These moves embody the Chinese “social credit” mentality: combining ancient authoritarian ideology and modern technological power to control how anyone, free citizen or convicted criminal, can actually survive in the world. (Ottawa has even announced its intention to steal protesters’ dogs, a truly cartoonish level of villainy.)

As the CBC reports:

The government’s new directive, called the “emergency economic measures order,” goes beyond asking banks to simply stop transferring funds to protest organizers. The government wants banks to stop doing business with some people altogether.

The order says that banks and other financial entities (like credit unions, co-ops, loan companies, trusts and cryptocurrency platforms) must stop “providing any financial or related services” to people associated with the protests — a move that will result in frozen accounts, stranded money and cancelled credit cards…

These financial institutions can’t handle cash, issue a loan, extend a mortgage or more generally facilitate “any transaction” of a “designated person” while the Emergencies Act is in place.

Even more sinister, one need not be someone actually committing any act of civic disorder to be thusly punished: “The regulations define a ‘designated person’ who can be cut off from financial services as someone who is ‘directly or indirectly’ participating in a ‘public assembly that may reasonably be expected to lead to a breach of the peace,’ or a person engaging in ‘serious interference with trade’ or ‘critical infrastructure.”

What “indirect” support might mean will play out in the courts, one hopes, unless Canada just decides to really live up to its current flexing as a totalitarian hellhole by tossing people in jail without charge or adjudication. But given targeting of donations both traditional and crypto lately, it will not be surprising if the government considers an “indirect” participant in the protests anyone who donates to the protesters’ cause.

The purpose of this sort of financial exile is to break dissidents’ will without having to take the perhaps reputation-damaging act of publicly and physically tossing thousands in prison for expressing their anger at government vaccine mandates on truckers. The equally, if metaphorically, bone-crushing act of locking people out of the financial system mark-of-beast style is less easily filmed or tweeted.

It is not yet clear, despite the Canadian Bankers Association’s statement, that the protesters the government thinks it has identified are all indeed financially un-personed already. While anons on 4chan are openly trying to meme a Canadian bank run into existence—once the government has announced and banks have agreed that they will block your access to your money or services on executive order, why should people trust banks?—there are scattered reports that Canadians are having more problems with accessing banking services electronically than normal this week.

What Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government is trying to do here, with the obedient collusion of the banking sector, is far beyond acceptable business as usual for a Western government; it is vile authoritarianism, in service of a policy goal of little objective importance given the existing Canadian rate of vaccination, and it ought to destroy both the moral and actual authority of his regime.

The post Canadian Banks Prepared To Make Un-Persons of Protesters, at Government Demand appeared first on Reason.com.

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On February 4, the U.S. State Department approved new proposed weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates. If the deals aren’t blocked by Congress, the three nations will receive fighter jets, guided missile tail kits, and reinforcements for missile defense systems, among other spare parts and munitions. The UAE transfer, the Pentagon said, “will support the foreign policy and national security of the United States.”

While officials in Washington were approving those deals, bombs were falling half a world away on Sana’a, Yemen. Jets constantly buzz over the city, with airstrikes hitting rebel areas and civilian neighborhoods alike.

Sukaina Sharafuddin is a mother and humanitarian aid worker who lives in Sana’a with her 6-year-old son, Elias. For Elias’ whole life, Sharafuddin has been trying to keep him safe from the chaos outside. “I feel that I’m protecting him somehow, although that’s not true,” she explains. “But at least if I hear warplanes hovering still close by, or louder than usual, I would move him to our other location, which is the kitchen floor…inside and as far away from windows as possible.”

Since the city’s airport closed in 2016, only warplanes fly the sky over Sana’a. Sharafuddin’s son used to jump up and down excitedly whenever he heard them. “But now that he is six,” says Sharafuddin, “he hears the explosions and asks a lot of questions that I don’t know how to answer.”

Sharafuddin found out she was pregnant with Elias just one week before a conflict embroiled her country. She had to go to three different hospitals before finding one with electricity. As doctors were about to perform a cesarean section, she explains, “I asked to have a general anesthetic because I didn’t want to hear the sound of bombs when my son was born. So war has been part of his life, right from the start.”

The strikes Sharafuddin and so many of her countrymen dread are part of Saudi Arabia’s campaign in the Yemeni Civil War, which has raged for over seven years. But they are also a product of American involvement, through weapons transfers, logistical support, and financial assistance.

On the campaign trail, then-candidate Joe Biden promised to “end our support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen.” A year into his presidency, however, little has changed. The U.S. continues to arm the Saudi-led coalition, and Yemen is teetering on the brink of collapse. Under Presidents Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and now Biden, American military support has enabled the destruction of an entire country.

“Things are just escalating very quickly day by day,” says Sharafuddin, “and [Biden] doesn’t seem to be doing anything.”

 

“Hell on Earth”

The Yemeni Civil War began in 2014 and has since evolved from a domestic struggle for the country’s presidency into a complex, multipronged conflict that has drawn in some of the world’s major military powers—including the U.S.

In the wake of a struggle for the presidency of Yemen, the Houthi rebels, an Iran-backed armed Islamist militant movement known formally as Ansarallah, began to fight against a Saudi Arabia–led coalition that had Western backing. The Saudi-led coalition included 10 countries upon its formation and hoped to return its preferred man to Yemen’s presidency. Former President Obama offered American military support. U.S. forces were present on the Saudi Arabia–Yemen border for a time, but America’s role has for the most part been limited to logistics and intelligence support rather than boots-on-the-ground involvement.

At first, Obama justified U.S. support as a necessary move “to defend Saudi Arabia’s border”—coming to the aid of a historical, albeit questionable, ally—and “to protect Yemen’s legitimate government,” a less straightforward U.S. security interest. Washington’s support for the coalition soon came to involve significant arms assistance, a hallmark of U.S. involvement in the Yemeni Civil War that continues through the current administration.

Over seven years ago, Saudi officials guessed that it would take only a few weeks to quash tensions in Yemen. Not so.

Freelance journalist Naseh Shaker, who is based in Sana’a, points to some issues behind ongoing tensions. The former Yemeni president’s regime “used to set up camps and rocket storerooms on the outskirts of the capital,” in areas like “Noqm Mountain and inside neighborhoods like Al-Hafa camp. Launching airstrikes targeting these camps is to intimidate and terrorize civilians.” But the Houthi movement “no longer uses these camps,” he says, even though they have “been targeted monthly since March 2015.”

“Neighboring countries are fighting us and cannot accept us as refugees or do as Turkey did with Syrians,” he continues. “Saudis and [the] UAE want to fight in Yemen using Yemenis and are not ready even to welcome civilians as refugees nor ready to open Sana’a airport for sick people.”

“East or West, home is best,” he says. “Not because living conditions are better, rather I think because no country can welcome us in a hospitable way as we generously welcome others.” Yemenis must make do where they are because “there’s no other option.”

The past seven years, Shaker explains, have turned his country into “hell on earth.”

“There’s no escape,” says Sharafuddin. “People like me—civilians who just want to live a peaceful life with their family—they cannot escape it, because Yemenis are not wanted around the world. We cannot go anywhere without a visa, even Arab countries. Even if you get out, no country will let you seek asylum.”

American politicians have pointed to many reasons as to why the U.S. should remain involved in the Yemeni Civil War. Some have argued that it is an opportunity to “prevent Yemen from turning into a puppet state of the corrupt, brutish Islamic Republic of Iran.” Others stress that the Houthis have endangered American soldiers in the region, while some have emphasized the importance of maintaining the alliance with Saudi Arabia.

No matter the explanation, Yemeni civilians are hopelessly caught in the middle of warring forces that have a great appetite for conflict.

And American weapons have, in large part, enabled the destruction of Yemen.

 

“We were so hopeful, and we were praying so hard.”

Throughout Obama’s presidency, the U.S. approved more than $100 billion in arms sales to Saudi Arabia. His administration oversaw the transfer of “everything from small arms and ammunition to tanks, attack helicopters, air-to-ground missiles, missile defense ships, and warships” to the kingdom. “But as the death toll and reports of human rights violations in the Saudi-led war on Yemen began to rise dramatically,” reported Vox, “the Obama administration nixed the sale of the precision-guided munitions it had originally agreed to put in the deal to try to coerce the Saudis into curbing those atrocities.”

Former President Trump had no such reservations. His administration approved a litany of massive weapons sales. On his first presidential trip abroad in 2017, Trump announced a deal with Saudi Arabia worth $110 billion immediately and $350 billion over the following decade. The administration notified Congress of its intent to send almost $500 million of precision bombs to Saudi Arabia in December 2020, despite strong resistance among lawmakers to similar deals.

Obama and Trump’s support for the Saudis wasn’t exactly unprecedented. The U.S.-Saudi relationship has official roots in 1945, making it the longest American relationship with an Arab nation. During a high-level meeting that year, America committed to providing security, while the kingdom promised access to its oil resources. U.S. presidents have been reluctant to challenge the relationship, seeing Saudi Arabia as a key ally in a neighborhood where America isn’t always welcome. This has also made them reluctant to challenge the kingdom’s nasty conduct—its involvement in the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, its oppressive blockade of Qatar, and its chaotic military engagement in the Middle East.

From 2016 to 2020, Saudi Arabia accounted for 24 percent of all U.S. arms sales, while the U.S. supplied 79 percent of the kingdom’s major conventional weapons. Saudi Arabia is America’s top weapons buyer, and America is Saudi Arabia’s top weapons supplier. Saudi Arabia and its coalition partners have used American arms to strike Houthi targets, killing thousands of rebel fighters. But civilians have disproportionately borne the costs of these campaigns. In 2017, the U.N. Human Rights Council reported that the Saudi-led coalition had caused more than 60 percent of civilian deaths in the conflict.

In her capacity as a humanitarian aid worker for Save the Children, Sharafuddin witnessed the aftermath of one of the most infamous coalition strikes on civilians: a 2018 attack on a school bus that left at least 26 kids dead. Her team visited the survivors and tried to help however it could, but she notes that “the help is always limited due to the shortage of funding and because the needs are always high.” When they met the surviving kids again a year later, “some of them still had shrapnel in their head.”

In October 2016, the Saudi-led coalition carried out an airstrike on a funeral ceremony in Sana’a, killing at least 100 people and wounding over 500. Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported that U.S.-produced weapons were used in this attack and in an April 2016 strike on a market that killed at least 97 civilians, including 25 kids. HRW wrote two years later that American arms were found at the sites of dozens of “other unlawful coalition attacks in Yemen.” All the while, arms deals funneled money into the pockets of American defense firms like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin.

Every Yemeni profiled in this piece says these weapons are major fuel in the fire destroying their nation. “The US can’t be a peace advocate while selling weapons to UAE and Saudi Arabia,” says Shaker. The “administration—not the people—needs to change its words into actions because the world is watching.”

“The American audience should hear that they have to…ask their government to stop this war, to stop selling arms to Saudi [Arabia]…and the UAE,” says Ahmad Algohbary, a freelance journalist and founder of the grassroots humanitarian aid organization Yemen Hope and Relief. “They have to stop this. I know that people will lose their jobs when this war ends,” due to scrapped arms contracts. “We know that will not build their economy, but what about us?”

American weapons have been dangerous enough in the hands of allies—but our enemies have acquired them, too. A 2019 CNN investigation found that “Saudi Arabia and its coalition partners have transferred American-made weapons to al Qaeda-linked fighters, hardline Salafi militias, and other factions waging war in Yemen, in violation of their agreements with the United States.” Iran-backed rebels also acquired American arms, putting U.S. military technology at risk. Saudi Arabia and the UAE used U.S.-made arms “as a form of currency to buy the loyalties of militias or tribes, bolster chosen armed actors, and influence the complex political landscape,” according to CNN’s sources.

It looked as though things might change under the Biden administration. In a November 2019 presidential debate, then-candidate Biden cast Saudi Arabia as a “pariah,” criticizing Trump’s coziness with the kingdom. “I would make it very clear we were not going to in fact sell more weapons to them,” he explained. He said he would end “the sale of material to the Saudis where they’re going in and murdering children.” Upon taking office, he announced the end of U.S. support for the Saudi-led military campaign in Yemen.

Sharafuddin says that just about everyone she knew followed the election as carefully as if they were in the U.S., watching it unfold over television, radio, and social media. “We were so excited when Biden said that if he was elected as the president of the United States, he would stop the war in Yemen and he would stop selling arms to Saudi Arabia,” Sharafuddin recalls. “We were so hopeful, and we were praying so hard, everyone was praying that Biden would be selected, thinking that he would come to the rescue.”

But in December 2021, “the Biden administration pushed an additional sale of missiles to Saudi Arabia through Congress, arguing that the weapons would be used for ‘defensive’ purposes,” the Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi and Annelle Sheline wrote in The New Republic. That supposedly comported with Biden withdrawing U.S. support for Saudi “offensive operations” in Yemen. His administration, seemingly committed to holding Saudi Arabia accountable and helping ease tensions in Yemen, condemned a December Houthi attack—but has not commented on the Saudi-led coalition’s bombings of Sana’a. As recently as last month, the coalition has killed civilians in internationally condemned strikes. A controversial January attack on a prison involved a bomb manufactured by Raytheon. Despite Biden’s campaign trail promises, America is still enabling the murder of civilians in Yemen.

“Honestly, I don’t know what to say. Now what?” asks Sharafuddin. “We thought that he would be better than the former presidents. But it is just disappointing, and it’s such a big lie.”

A September 2021 United Nations report “said the continued sale of weapons to both sides of the war has exacerbated the fighting.” Nations “that have continued arms transfers to Yemen are Canada, France, Iran, the United Kingdom and the United States.”

 

“I have seen death. I have seen hunger. I have seen everything.”

According to a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) estimate, the conflict led to 377,000 deaths by the end of 2021. Nearly 60 percent of those stemmed from unreliable access to food, water, and health care. Airstrikes only added to the death toll—in September 2021, a U.N. panel estimated that at least 18,000 Yemeni civilians had been killed or wounded by airstrikes since 2015. U.N. experts informed the Human Rights Council that Yemenis had endured roughly 10 airstrikes per day since March 2015, amounting to over 23,000 total attacks.

A devastating cholera outbreak infected over 1 million Yemenis and killed 3,000 between 2016 and 2021, and COVID-19 has ripped through the largely unvaccinated population, killing thousands. Due to the ravaged medical system, it is extremely difficult to ascertain infection rates and death tolls with any precision.

The worst of the war has disproportionately landed on Yemen’s most vulnerable. Early last year, the U.N. projected that “half of children under five in Yemen” could suffer from acute malnutrition in 2021, with 400,000 expected to endure severe acute malnutrition. Minimal access to routine immunization and health services, malnourished breastfeeding mothers, and unstable sanitation systems all put Yemeni kids in danger. In 2021, a child under the age of five died every nine minutes in Yemen due to the ongoing war. These factors combined have made Yemen “one of the most dangerous places in the world for children to grow up,” per the U.N.

Algohbary has a deep understanding of his country’s suffering. “I have seen death. I have seen hunger. I have seen everything,” he says. When visiting attack scenes of airstrikes to offer assistance, he says, “I saw blood. I saw body parts. I saw very horrible things.”

His organization has provided food baskets, blankets, and school supplies to thousands of suffering families—but it all started with just one.

A famine ripped through Yemen after the war began. “Once, I decided to stay with a family, to know what they are suffering from,” he says. “I stayed from the morning until the night with them, and I slept there. Imagine, they had only flour and they mixed this flour with water, and after they mixed it, they ate it.” Algohbary says he saw the family “eating tree leaves to survive.” He returned home crying.

“Every day since that day, I swear that I’m always thinking about them when I eat anything,” says Algohbary.

He began to tweet the stories of his suffering countrymen, and his devastating photos and documentation garnered international attention. “I didn’t think that people would help me,” he recalls—but he started receiving donations from far and wide. With those funds, he and his team at Yemen Hope and Relief have distributed food and conducted “more than 20 water well projects.”

Even as Algohbary recovers from a surgical procedure outside Yemen, his team is carrying on humanitarian work. Especially critical these days are the organization’s efforts to bring malnourished children back to health. “For a kid, it’s really hard,” he explains. A baby born in Yemen “is born to a hunger ward…in a warzone, in the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, in the worst place to live as a child.”

Algohbary has helped heal 360 malnourished Yemeni children and brought critical supplies to many communities. He says he has been happy to provide so much help. More importantly, though, he hopes for remedies to the war’s deep, complicated roots.

“As Yemenis, we want this war to be over,” he says. “We want these countries—the U.S. and other Western countries—to stop…refueling this war.”

“I really believe that the Yemeni war will be over when the U.S. decides to stop it,” says Algohbary. “They have to stop this.”

Until then, his work continues.

 

“If the U.S. wants to stop this war, they can do it in just one call.”

Last year, the U.S. sold more than $1 billion in weapons to Saudi Arabia. The Biden administration continues to offer the kingdom logistical support in the form of maintaining and servicing Saudi fighter jets. The line between “defensive” and “offensive” support, it turns out, is easy to manipulate.

In the last month alone, Yemen has faced reduced food assistance, airstrikes on hospitals and critical infrastructure, and a nationwide four-day internet outage. A yearslong land, sea, and air blockade imposed by the Saudi-led coalition has kept critical goods from reaching the Yemenis who need them. Peace advocates have called on the U.S. to pressure Saudi Arabia into relaxing these measures—but Biden officials aren’t pushing the matter. “It is not a blockade,” a State Department spokesperson argued last April. January was the deadliest month in Yemen since 2018, with nearly one civilian injured or killed every hour.

“What has been happening during the last few days [in Sana’a] is similar to what has been happening since 2015. Hearing warplanes hovering overhead has become part of our daily routine,” says Shaker. “I don’t know if a military camp, a civilian object, or myself may be targeted.”

Some American lawmakers realize that little has changed on the ground in Yemen, even as three different presidential administrations have overseen U.S. involvement in the conflict. In September, a bipartisan majority in the House voted to end U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s campaign through the National Defense Authorization Act—the third year running. However, the provision did not end up in the final bill.

Last week, Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D–Wash.) and Peter DeFazio (D–Ore.) wrote in The Nation that they intended “to pass a new Yemen War Powers Resolution” in order “to reassert Congress’s constitutional war powers authority, terminate unauthorized US involvement in this endless war, reinvigorate diplomatic efforts, and ease this devastating humanitarian disaster.”

Seven years’ worth of damage has left Yemenis weary. “I think if the U.S. wants to stop this war, they can do it in just one call—to call Saudi Arabia and the UAE to end it,” Algohbary emphasizes. Gather all the warring factions in Yemen and begin the peace process, he implores the Biden administration. “I lost friends, I saw famine, I saw blood. I have lived through every bad thing happening in Yemen.”

“Our message to the Americans themselves, to the international community, is that enough is enough with Yemen,” says Sharafuddin. “It is already bad enough as it is. It will take us years and years ahead to overcome the things we’ve been through.”

“We need peace,” says Algohbary. “We need peace.”

The post Biden's Hidden War Is Destroying Yemen appeared first on Reason.com.

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Here’s California’s broken grasp of economics in a nutshell for you: Top lawmakers and government-subsidized and unionized child care workers are arguing that marijuana taxes have to stay extremely high. Lowering them will harm “thousands of children living in poverty and children of color across our state,” state Senate President Pro Tempore Toni Atkins (D–San Diego) and Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon (D–Los Angeles) wrote in a letter to Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom.

California’s marijuana taxes are so high (and actual availability so limited) that the rollout of legal recreational sales has been a disaster. From January 2018 to November 2021 the state has collected $3.12 billion in marijuana tax revenue. While this sounds like a lot, market experts note that at least two-thirds of all marijuana sales are happening through unlicensed dealers to a tune of an estimated $8 billion a year. Even after legalizing marijuana, the black market still dominates California.

The marijuana industry is begging for tax relief from the state in order to encourage more legal retail. Growers in particular have their eye on the state’s excise tax, which is by law attached to the inflation rate. And that means taxes for marijuana automatically went up in January thanks to the massive inflation growth we’ve been seeing nationally.

But California’s government has been counting on the tax revenue from sales to bankroll any number of programs, including state-subsidized child care. Now the state is in a bizarre position where government leaders are insisting taxes that drive up retail prices and fuel criminal activity must remain there for the sake of poor minorities, even as the government launches a new war on weed.

This is all bizarre and backward. Sales taxes are regressive and the impacts of them trickle down to the very poor families that Atkins and Rendon claim to represent. It is not California’s wealthiest white folks buying and selling weed on the black market.

Honestly, these people are not actually representing the kids and families at all. This entire push is being fueled not by the families themselves but by the beneficiaries of the state’s spending: child care service organizations. On Wednesday, children’s youth program advocates held a press conference to discourage lawmakers in Sacramento from considering tax reductions in an attempt to encourage retail prices to drop and, thus, legal purchases to rise.

NBC reported this doozy of a quote:

Marianna Hernandez, a prevention manager at Community Coalition, an advocacy and social justice group based in South Los Angeles, said cutting services would be “an insult” to those disproportionately affected by the “war on drugs.”

“South L.A. was once overcriminalized for cannabis use, sale and possession,” she said. “To now strip the community of the resources coming from the tax revenues is, quite frankly, an insult to South L.A. Black and brown residents, many of which still have family members incarcerated to this day due to marijuana-related charges.”

If Hernandez is upset about the incarceration of poor minorities, why on Earth is she encouraging a tax system that continues to foster illegal sales and even more police crackdowns on illegal operations? Los Angeles Police in November raided a warehouse in the heavily Latino community of Sylmar and arrested eight for illegally growing marijuana. Note the Latino and Asian names of those arrested in this bust in San Bernardino County, also last November.

The reality is that this money the state is spending isn’t going to the poor kids but to the institutions set up to serve the poor kids and the people who work in them, who, coincidentally, are the people protesting. Last summer, Newsom signed a collective bargaining agreement to subsidize 40,000 child care workers. The state’s budget for fiscal year 2021-22 set aside $400 million of cannabis tax revenue for child care purposes. So these people have a stake in keeping taxes high, even if it means other black and brown people still end up getting arrested.

It’s a grossly cynical tactic for people who are financially dependent on these state subsidies to come out and argue that these very high, very regressive cannabis taxes are a boon to poor minorities. It is abundantly clear that these communities are still caught up in the marijuana black market because of this very system.

The post No, California Shouldn't Keep Crazy High Marijuana Taxes 'For the Children' appeared first on Reason.com.

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As the greatest inflation spike of the last 50 years occurs, the utter failure of economists, their models, and many pundits to foresee what was coming is worth highlighting. Of course, the biggest malfunction in the story was that of the Federal Reserve itself, which had a clear mandate to keep prices stable and seems surprised by their lack of stability.

It’s no understatement to say that the Fed failed to properly anticipate the inflation surge. On Feb. 8, 2021, Raphael Bostic, the president of the Atlanta branch of the Fed, said, “I’m really not expecting us to see a spike in inflation that is very robust in the next 12 months or so.” A few days later, Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren echoed this sentiment, noting that he would be “surprised” to see broad-based inflation sustained at a level of two percent before the end of 2022.

As the saying goes, problems often start at the top. When testifying before the House Financial Services Committee in February 2021, Fed Chair Jerome Powell predicted that it might take more than three years to hit the two percent inflation goal.

Around the summer of 2021, inflation became hard to ignore. Yet Fed officials insisted that it wasn’t yet time to roll back their temporary policies because they weren’t responsible for the rise in prices. The main villain was identified as supply-chain restraints. Once resolved, we were told, inflation would prove to be transitory. Testifying in June of last year before a House subcommittee, Powell said:

“If you look…at the categories where these prices are really going up, you’ll see that it tends to be areas that are directly affected by the reopening. That’s something that we’ll go through over a period…then be over. And it should not leave much of a mark on the ongoing inflation process.”

During a speech in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, last August, Powell again echoed this sentiment. He also noted that “longer-term inflation expectations have moved much less than actual inflation or near-term expectations, suggesting that households, businesses, and market participants also believe that current high inflation readings are likely to prove transitory.”

But as Hoover Institution economist John Cochrane has been reminding us all along, long-term inflation expectations are notoriously poor predictors of inflation. Sadly, few listened, and team “transitory” was born.

I thought this was a useless label since inflation was always going to be transitory. Even the inflation of the 1970s ended in the ’80s. What mattered is whether transitory inflation meant a few weeks, months, or years. Inflation continued to rise, and the meaning of transitory continued to shift so much so that Powell officially retired the word on November 30. By then, inflation had reached a staggering 6.8 percent.

Many non-Fed officials made their own bad predictions based on sophisticated forecasting models and/or expectations—the same expectations Cochrane urged us not to be too complacent about. Theories for why we shouldn’t worry abounded. It was caused by a base-effect price increase, supply-chain restraints, a drought in Taiwan—everything but the Fed’s expansionary policies and Congress’ overspending, in part because some of these experts had cheered for these actions all along.

Undeterred, some of the same people continue to make predictions that inflation will decline during the second half of 2022. Perhaps. I don’t make predictions. However, I know that the amount of money printed, borrowed, and spent during the last few years led to a one-time price level rise, and we may have a way to go until we are done. Yes, inflationary pressures like government cash and supply constraints will ease, but that may not be enough without vigorous monetary and fiscal restraints. And until now, the Fed has been dragging its feet to act.

A few economists did get it right. One is former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who warned a year ago that President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan could “set off inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation.” A day later, former International Monetary Fund Chief Economist Olivier Blanchard tweeted: “I agree with Summers. The 1.9 trillion program could overheat the economy so badly as to be counterproductive.”

There were others, too. They were mocked and the legislation passed.

Everyone makes mistakes. The important lesson here is that we should all be humbler. Maybe it’s time to think more and model less.

COPYRIGHT 2022 CREATORS.COM.

The post How Did the Fed Not Anticipate the Inflation Surge? appeared first on Reason.com.

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It’s no secret that public trust in institutions is in free fall. In 1958, when Americans were first asked by the National Election Study about their trust in the government, 73 percent of respondents said they could trust the government to do the right thing always or most of the time. In 2021, that number dwindled to 24 percent. The military, meanwhile, historically went unscathed—until now.

According to the Pew Research Center’s latest poll, only a quarter of Americans have a great deal of confidence that the military actually acts in the public’s best interest, a drop of 14 points since November 2020.

Andrew Bacevich, president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, cites a few explanations for this loss of confidence. “Rather than ‘above’ politics, the military is becoming subsumed into politics,” says Bacevich. He believes that there are three main reasons for this: the military’s mixed performance, its increased entanglement in partisan issues, and the politicization of everything, which means that “nothing is off limits” (not even the military).

“Trust in everything is down, and the obvious answer is that post-9/11 wars have not gone well,” the Atlantic Council’s Christopher Preble tells Reason. Preble also feels that the question’s oversimplification doesn’t fully capture the issue. He wonders whether the recent decline is in response to dishonest senior military officials or the armed forces as a whole, preferring to “drill down” into Pew’s specific meaning of the military. To Preble, there is a very obvious difference between “the boots on the ground and the brass.”

The Ronald Reagan Institute found, for the very first time since it began its national defense survey in 2018, that “a minority of Americans—only 45%—report having a great deal of trust and confidence in the military.” Probing further, it discovered that the most common reason behind why people had low trust in the military was due to political leadership, followed by service members and scandals within the military.

Americans haven’t lost all confidence in the military, but they are starting to realize that it’s no longer insulated from a broader loss of trust in institutions. A majority of Americans—74 percent—still express “at least a fair amount of confidence in the military to act in the public’s best interests.” However, having a “fair amount” of trust in the institution that is ensuring your safety and security isn’t exactly brag-worthy.

The hard truth is that not many Americans pay attention to the military until it affects them personally. But in August 2021, as the U.S. left Afghanistan in the middle of the night, Americans watched as two decades’ worth of progress in the country was wiped away almost instantly.

As soon as U.S. troops entered Afghanistan in 2001, the American public was repeatedly fed lies about how the mission was going smoothly. In 2013, during a press briefing, then–Army Lt. Gen. Mark Milley praised the Afghan forces: “This army and this police force have been very, very effective in combat against the insurgents every single day. And I think that’s an important story to be told across the board.” No wonder the public was stunned when, eight years after Milley’s comments, Afghan forces only lasted a matter of weeks when the U.S. left them to defend their country against the Taliban.

There is an inherent irony here that Preble has pointed out. “​​The most charitable thing that can be said is that individuals were shading the truth for a higher purpose,” he wrote. “They downplayed unpleasant facts to maintain a modicum of public support.” As it turns out, downplaying the truth doesn’t help you gain support.

Kelley Vlahos, editorial director of Responsible Statecraft and senior adviser at the Quincy Institute, wrote of a “silver lining” in this declining trust—”Americans won’t put the military on a pedestal again until it deserves it.” The erosion of public confidence in the military to do what’s best isn’t all that shocking. Now is the time for “critical thinking, moral courage, and a merit-based system in the military,” Vlahos argued.

When a group repeatedly hides the truth, glosses over issues, and misuses funds, it should be cause for concern. Other than scientists, the military remains more trusted than any other group included in Pew’s survey, but it’s finally facing the skepticism that it deserves.

The post Public Confidence in the Military Is Slipping appeared first on Reason.com.

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Yesterday, two reporters of the Washington Post actually wrote that Justice Thomas is a “Black justice whose rulings often resemble the thinking of White conservatives.” No this barb did not appear in the opinion section. It appeared in the news section.

Today, the Post noted a retraction. Or is it a “clarification”? After #MaskGate I have no idea how journalism works anymore.

CLARIFICATION
A previous version of this story imprecisely referred to Justice Clarence Thomas’s opinions as often reflecting the thinking of White conservatives, rather than conservatives broadly. That reference has been removed.

Now, the passage reads:

Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), a friend and ally of Clyburn’s for over 30 years, said even Clyburn’s critics respect his political instincts and his connection with a valuable but often disappointed subset of Democratic voters.

“Nobody that I’m aware of feels that opposing Clyburn’s nomination would be the wise thing to do,” he said. “If you know that a person has been vetted by Jim Clyburn, you know that person won’t go to the court and end up being a Clarence Thomas,” referring to the Black conservative justice.

I appreciate the “clarification,” but this story is still problematic. Why is it relevant to this story that Thomas is Black? The reason why is that Thompson called Thomas an Oreo. The initial version of the story dutifully reported that statement as fact. Now, the Post merely alludes to the implication. This sort of casual racism against conservatives is embedded so deeply in progressive culture. WaPo reporters and editors simply treat these barbs as fact.

For posterity, the original is preserved here:

"referring to the Black justice whose rulings often resemble the political thinking of White conservatives"https://t.co/i2IodOwtFV pic.twitter.com/Wl7Q4JAFMx

— John Doe (@fedjudges) February 17, 2022

The post WaPo Removes Claim That Justice Thomas's "Rulings Often Resemble the Thinking of White Conservatives." appeared first on Reason.com.

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