Aside from GOP criticism of President Obama’s strategy to defeat the Islamic State, Capitol Hill has been otherwise quiet on the use of force to defeat the group. Some lawmakers have…
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Aside from GOP criticism of President Obama’s strategy to defeat the Islamic State, Capitol Hill has been otherwise quiet on the use of force to defeat the group. Some lawmakers have called for increased military engagement, but with little public debate about its efficacy or its long-term consequences.
To learn more about the group, and why U.S. military strategy has failed to quash it,Courthouse News reporterBritain Eakin sat down with Phyllis Bennis, a Middle East analyst with the progressive Washington-based think tank Institute for Policy Studies. [The interview has been condensed.]
Utilities and the tax man: The liberal Institute for Policy Studies is out with a new report accusing utility companies of shirking the government on the taxes at the same time they rip President Barack Obama’s efforts to regulate power plant emissions. The group — citing data from another liberal organization, Citizens for Tax Justice — said that utilities pay the lowest effective tax rate of any American industry, which it says costs the government money it could use to invest in energy efficiency.
JUST OUT: The liberal Institute for Policy Studies is out with a new report accusing utility companies of shirking the government on the taxes, at the same time they rip President Barack Obama’s efforts to regulate power plant emissions. The group — citing data from another liberal organization, Citizens for Tax Justice — said that utilities pay the lowest effective tax rate of any American industry, which it says costs the government money it could use to invest in energy efficiency.
While our public agencies do not tell us how much we’re all spending for the land and nature we use in total, let’s not feel singled out. They slight other curious groups, too, who’d like to know statistics like a qualitative GDP, the true inflation rate, real unemployment rate, total assets of governments, actual debts of governments, etc. To meet the need for accuracy in the state’s stats, various groups have arisen to correct official figures and make the data available to inquiring minds. Do such organizations post the total for the worth of Earth? Here are the Top Twelve Potential Alternative Sources for the Figure on the Size of All Rents.
Renu Khator, president of the University of Houston and chancellor of the University of Houston system, is the first woman and Indian immigrant to lead a public university system in Texas. She also happens to be the top-earning public college executive in the country, having taken in a stunning $1.3 million in total compensation this past fiscal year.
Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, announced in a New York Times op-ed column on July 12 that the bank would soon raise wages for its lowest-paid employees. JPMorgan Chase — America’s largest bank, with $2.4 trillion in assets — has over 235,000 employees in over 100 countries, but the pay boost will cover only 18,000 employees in the United States.
The two-day meeting at the Democratic National Platform Committee in Orlando ended this weekend. In article for the Nation titled What the Democratic Party Platform Tells Us About Where We Are on War, Phyllis Bennis writes, the 35-page draft reminds us of two crucial realities, the limits of party politics while corporate and military interests dominate both parties and crucially the necessity of social movements to challenge those limits and sometimes to win.
Now joining us to talk about the Platform Committee and whether progressive forces led mostly by Sanders nominated representatives at the committee hearings is Phyllis Bennis.
U.S. foreign policy has a lot of roots in working with militant Wahhabism, terrorism, including in Afghanistan and other places. And then these forces get out of control, and then you bomb them, and then you fight them, and then they split, and then you work with one section of that split and you bomb another section. That seems to be what U.S. foreign policy considers a plan in the Middle East.
Now joining us to talk about this is Phyllis Bennis. Phyllis joins us from D.C., where she’s a fellow and a director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. She’s the author of many books, including her most recent, Understanding ISIS and the New Global War on Terror: A Primer.
Early in the morning of Sunday, July 3, a truck bomb exploded in a shopping district in Baghdad. Many of the more than 200 people killed were children shopping for new clothes for Eid Al-Fitr. The group ISIS claimed responsibility.
The Atlantic magazine published an article on July 5, 2016 highlighting the growing problems in Louisiana with legal financial obligations (LFOs) and their effect on poor defendants and the recently incarcerated. Former prisoners usually have a hard time finding a stable income post incarceration and LFOs often require former prisoners to pay thousands of dollars upon release.
