UnHerd: It’s time to tax the super rich

When asked how she intended to fund her Green New Deal, she noted that tax wouldn’t be such a crazy idea; the top marginal tax rate for much of America’s history had been around the 60-70% mark and perhaps the “tippy-top” earners on “$10,000,000 or more” ought to pay that much again. Income inequality in the US now exceeds what it was in the 1920s; only the top 1% have seen any real wage growth in the last 30 years, and it’s among the 0.1% that the increase is most pronounced. If you are in that micro-percentile, you can expect to earn 198 times what someone in the bottom 10% earns.

Not to be outdone, Elizabeth Warren, the presidential candidate and Democratic senator from Massachusetts, proposed a wealth tax on “ultra-millionaires” – 2% on accumulated wealth greater than $50,000,000, and 3% on wealth greater than $1,000,000,000. (I find writing out the actual numbers much more expressive than the near-euphemistic “million” and “billion”; more comparable to what each of us see when we check our online bank accounts). [...]

Ever since, the trend has been for top rate of income tax to fall – and for inequality to widen. When Margaret Thatcher came to power, she dropped the top rate from 83% to 60%. It fell further to 40% under Labour, went back up to 50% after the crash, before George Osborne cut it back from 50% to 45% (with no concomitant easing of his austerity agenda). Osborne later boasted that the measure had recouped £8 billion – apparently because so many top-earners had decided to keep their money in the country. Closer analysis suggest this was more likely the result of clever accounting on the part of the rich (deferring payment from one year to the next) and the actual effect was minimal.[...]

But it’s also true that setting your tax rate low can be utterly disastrous. The infamous Kansas Experiment saw Republican governor Sam Brownback eliminate state income tax and slash taxes for the highest earners in an attempt to boost investment. It resulted in a complete collapse in state revenues, school closures, prison riots, and subsequent shamefaced capitulation. It turns out that sometimes, asking people for less money means that you receive less money.

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Bloomberg: Qatar May Be About to Annoy Saudi Arabia Even More

Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, Qatar’s former prime minister, has tweeted that OPEC “is only being used for purposes aimed at harming our national interest.” That goes double for the GCC, where two of its six members — Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — are prime movers in the economic blockade of Qatar. (The blockade has been going on for 18 months and counting, and it stems from Saudi accusations that Qatar is destabilizing the region by cozying up to Iran, charges Doha contests.) [...]

But here’s the twist: Exiting OPEC, a powerful cartel with a real impact on world affairs, will cost Qatar little, being a minor-league oil producer with little influence on the group's decisions; leaving the GCC, an ineffectual grouping that has little impact on regional affairs, could cost it a lot. If Qatar were to pull out, it would reinforce the Saudi-Emirati claim that the ruling family in Doha is undermining the Arab consensus. Staying in the alliance allows Qatar to signal that it is committed to regional cooperation, putting the onus for ending the blockade on the Saudis and Emiratis.

It is always possible that the Saudis and Emiratis will try to beat Qatar to the punch and kick it out of the GCC. But that would require them to convince Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain, the three other members, to go along. While Bahrain tends to follow Saudi Arabia in most matters, Kuwait and Oman have chafed at what they regard as Saudi bullying, and they have remained steadfastly neutral on the blockade. (The Kuwaitis have said they’d like to see efforts to resolve the “long-standing Gulf dispute” at the summit next week.)

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Foreign Policy: Mohammed bin Salman Is the Next Saddam Hussein

Saudi Arabia’s indignation at the United States would not be the first time an autocratic U.S. ally in the Middle East has assumed it could act with virtual impunity due to its alignment with Washington in countering Iran. Indeed, the Saudi prince’s meteoric rise to power bears striking similarities to that of a past U.S. ally-turned-nemesis whose brutality was initially overlooked by his Washington patrons: former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.[...]

Mohammed bin Salman’s gradual and brutal consolidation of power, marked by the detention and torture of his domestic rivals, evokes the “nation-changing assault on dissent within Iraq’s ruling party in 1979 by a young President Saddam Hussein,” Toby Dodge, a consulting senior fellow for the Middle East at London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies, told Bloomberg last year. “The concentration of power in one youthful, ambitious and unpredictable pair of hands is worrying now as it was then.” Washington’s steadfast support of Saddam during the 1980s not only enabled his rampage against his own people and neighboring countries, but also eventually threatened U.S. security interests.[...]

However, U.S. ties with Saddam truly began to solidify in February 1982, when the Reagan administration removed Iraq from the State Department’s terrorism list, paving the way for providing military assistance to Iraq. This occurred roughly 17 months after Saddam’s invasion of Iran, while Iraqi forces were occupying the oil-rich southwestern Iranian province of Khuzestan that Iraq sought to annex. In December 1983, President Ronald Reagan dispatched Donald Rumsfeld as a presidential envoy to meet Saddam and set the stage for normalizing U.S.-Iraqi relations. U.S. support for Saddam during the war would grow to include, according to the Washington Post, “large-scale intelligence sharing, supply of cluster bombs through a Chilean front company, and facilitating Iraq’s acquisition of chemical and biological precursors.” [...]

According to declassified CIA documents, two-thirds of all Iraqi chemical weapons deployed during the war were used in the last 18 months of the conflict, when U.S.-Iraqi cooperation peaked. This included the March 1988 genocidal chemical weapons attack on the Iraqi Kurdish town of Halabja, which led to the deaths of as many as 5,000 civilians. Ironically, this attack would later be used by the George W. Bush administration in 2003 as part of its pretext for invading Iraq to eliminate the country’s by then nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. 

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Deutsche Welle: Saudi Arabia exports extremism to many countries - including Germany, study says

Susanne Schröter: The findings do not surprise me at all. It has long been known that Saudi Arabia has been exporting Wahhabist ideology - largely similar to the ideology of the so-called "Islamic State" (IS). Propaganda material and organizational expertise are being sent along with money. People are being hired to build mosques, educational institutions, cultural centers and similar organizations, so that Wahhabist theology can reach the public – with great success. [...]

The export of Wahhabism got off the ground after the Islamic revolution in Iran. The revolution had dramatically shaken the Saudis. When Iran started exporting its Shiite ideology, the Saudis felt threatened by it. Around that time, in 1979, hardliners seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca. The Saudis launched an ideological offensive and said, "Now we are exporting our own ideology. We will show the hardliners in our own country what we are capable of achieving." Then, they started promoting Wahhabism through intermediaries and organizations like the World Muslim League in different countries throughout Asia, Africa and parts of Europe – for example, in former Yugoslavia where Muslims and Christians fought against each other in the civil war. Wahhabists saw it as gateway, where money was needed since the Muslim population was ready for a new and radical ideology.

The result is that, in many parts of the world, a radical form of Islam is gaining the upper hand. I have experienced this first hand in Southeast Asia. In southern Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, and sometimes Malaysia, it was always said that a special form of Islam was practiced, a much more open, much more tolerant version. There has been a dramatic development towards radicalism over the past three decades. It is perfectly clear that this development has been encouraged by Saudi money. Moreover, young intellectuals have been recruited with generous scholarships at Saudi universities. These people return to their homes after having studied at Saudi universities and suddenly carry out Wahhabi missionary work in all their home countries.

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Al Jazeera: Looking beyond the siege of Doha

The Saudi camp seems to be running out of patience for the same Doha policies that triggered the 2014 diplomatic crises. In my view, the Saudis have three main demands: Ejecting Muslim Brotherhood leadership as well as other prominent figures from Doha, neutralising the Qatari media, especially Al Jazeera, towards the Gulf states and Egypt and moulding Qatar's regional policies so they do not collide with Saudi/Emirati interests. While Qatar is expected to offer concessions, it will deem some of these demands as a violation of its sovereignty. [...]

But it is also necessary to evaluate the US' position in the region. Qatar, after all, is the home of the largest US military base in the region. I think the Trump administration is implicitly pleased to see the Qataris sweat this crisis out. From Washington's point of view, this crisis may help Doha to fully understand the importance of the American presence, and to modify some of its regional policies that are not aligned with US interests. [...]

When it comes to the GCC, it is clear that the current crisis a symptom of the long-term problems between Qatar, Saudi, UAE and Bahrain and does not effect the entirety of the cooperation. Kuwait and Oman did not - and are less likely to - cut relations with Doha. Both Kuwait and Oman are the only two members who never severed diplomatic ties with any other GCC states. In fact, the Kuwaiti leadership undertook shuttle diplomacy between Doha and Riyadh to end the 2014 diplomatic crisis. [...]

Doha faces tough choices. If it does not address the concerns of the Saudi camp, it will be geographically isolated. Saudi Arabia could also push to freeze Qatar's membership in the GCC. Over time, this will place an unprecedented geopolitical pressure on the Qatari policymakers. At worst, this could slide Qatar towards Iran. This would be an unintended consequence that neither Riyadh nor Doha aspire towards. If Doha gives in to all of the demands at once, the Qatari government might not be able to survive the humiliation at home. Giving in to all Saudi demands and handing sovereignty to Riyadh would be viewed as political suicide by many in Qatar.

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Al Jazeera: Analysts: Leaks could threaten Emirati diplomacy

The latest email leaks from the Hotmail account of the United Arab Emirates' ambassador to Washington, Yousef al-Otaiba, could threaten Emirati diplomacy and strain regional relations, analysts say. [...]

On Saturday, hackers released what they claimed was the first in a series of emails taken from the inbox of Otaiba. The leaks have revealed a strong relationship between the UAE and think-tanks closely allied to Israel, along with Emirati efforts to tarnish the images of Qatar and Kuwait; Emirati involvement in the failed coup attempt in Turkey; and the UAE's fight against Islamist movements, particularly Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. [...]

Some of the leaked emails include a detailed agenda for a meeting scheduled later this month between officials from the UAE government and representatives of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a pro-Israel think-tank. The agenda includes a joint assessment of the changes that have taken place in Saudi Arabia, which proposes a plan to support Saudi stability and its new policy directions.

The agenda also includes a review of internal Saudi policies, domestic challenges faced by the Saudi leadership, foreign policy and the kingdom's role in stripping legitimacy from worldwide "jihad".

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Independent: Robert Fisk: For the first time, Saudi Arabia is under attack by Sunni and Shia leaders

The Saudis step deeper into trouble almost by the week. Swamped in their ridiculous war in Yemen, they are now reeling from an extraordinary statement issued by around two hundred Sunni Muslim clerics who effectively referred to the Wahhabi belief – practiced in Saudi Arabia – as “a dangerous deformation” of Sunni Islam. The prelates included Egypt’s Grand Imam, Ahmed el-Tayeb of al-Azhar, the most important centre of theological study in the Islamic world, who only a year ago attacked “corrupt interpretations” of religious texts and who has now signed up to “a return to the schools of great knowledge” outside Saudi Arabia.

This remarkable meeting took place in Grozny and was unaccountably ignored by almost every media in the world – except for the former senior associate at St Antony’s College, Sharmine Narwani, and Le Monde’s Benjamin Barthe – but it may prove to be even more dramatic than the terror of Syria’s civil war. For the statement, obviously approved by Vladimir Putin, is as close as Sunni clerics have got to excommunicating the Saudis. [...]

As Narwani points out, the bad news kept on coming. At the start of the five-day Hajj pilgrimage, the Lebanese daily al-Akhbar published online a database which it said came from the Saudi ministry of health, claiming that up 90,000 pilgrims from around the world have died visiting the Hajj capital of Mecca over a 14-year period. Although this figure is officially denied, it is believed in Shia Muslim Iran, which has lost hundreds of its citizens on the Hajj. Among them was Ghazanfar Roknabadi, a former ambassador and intelligence officer in Lebanon. Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, has just launched an unprecedented attack on the Saudis, accusing them of murder. “The heartless and murderous Saudis locked up the injured with the dead in containers...” he said in his own Hajj message.

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Salon: Homosexuality, a Western vice: In much of the Middle East, it’s getting more dangerous to be gay

“Egypt stands next to the American people in these difficult times, offering sincere condolences to the families of the victims and wishing the injured a speedy recovery,”the ministry said.

Yet the statement didn’t acknowledge that Pulse was a gay club or that many of the victims were members of the LGBTQ community.

Three days later, a court in Cairo sentenced two 18-year-olds to three years in prison on charges of “debauchery”: The young men were apprehended through government surveillance of social media dating apps for gay men, according to court records. [...]

“Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Bahrain and Kuwait have all rushed to condemn the crime in Orlando labeling it terrorism while insisting Islam has nothing to do with it,” said a spokesman for Mesahat, an LGBT service organization operating in Egypt and Sudan.

“These same governments keep arresting and torturing gay people and are putting them in jail. Meanwhile they are sponsoring a religious discourse that feeds homophobia.” [...]

But gay people in the region say widespread condemnation of homosexuality came about only in the 1980s, when the rise of the global LGBT rights movement coincided with the expansion of ultraconservative Wahhabism sponsored by Saudi Arabia.

Activities and relationships that were considered normal 30 years ago are now described as haram, an Islamic term to describe religiously prohibited behavior like eating pork or consuming alcohol. Homosexuality is now frequently condemned as a “Western” vice and a threat to Arab and Islamic culture.

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