Salon: Congressman seeks to block arms sale to Saudi Arabia, citing U.S.-backed war crimes in Yemen

The bipartisan campaign to block U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia is growing, both within and outside the government.

Rep. Ted Lieu, D-California, introduced a new bill on Tuesday morning that would block a $1.15 billion U.S. weapons deal with Saudi Arabia.

“The reason we’re doing this is because there is now overwhelming evidence that war crimes are being committed in Yemen and that most of them appear to be done by Saudi Arabia-led air strikes,” Lieu told Salon in an interview on Monday.

He noted that U.S.-backed, Saudi-led coalition attacks on civilians have been thoroughly documented in an array of independent reports by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Oxfam, the United Nations and other organizations. [...]

Explaining the motivation behind their joint resolution, all four senators cited the atrocities committed by the U.S.-backed, Saudi-led coalition in Yemen and how the destructive campaign there has strengthened extremist groups like al-Qaida and ISIS. [...]

Despite the enormous civilian casualties and destruction, the U.S. has stood behind the war in Yemen. The Pentagon is still refueling coalition planes and providing intelligence to the Saudi-led coalition. The State Department has stressed that Saudi Arabia, a repressive theocratic monarchy that has exported radical Islamist ideology throughout the Arab and Muslim world, “remains a key ally and partner” and that the “United States continues to support a strong defense and security relationship with Saudi Arabia.”

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Salon: Hate crimes against Muslims have risen, even as hate crimes against everyone else have declined

While many well-meaning Americans would like to believe that Islamophobia is limited to certain less tolerant parts of the country or certain hateful presidential candidates, anti-Muslim hate crimes have not only increased all over the country, but are at their highest levels since the aftermath of 9/11, according to a new report. Analyzing crime data from researchers at the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernadino found that hate crimes against American Muslims were up 78 percent in 2015. Attacks against those perceived as Arab rose even more.

“The rise,” the report’s authors observe, “came even as hate crimes against almost all other groups — including blacks, Hispanics, Jews, gays and whites — either declined or increased only slightly.” Using police data from 20 states, researchers found 260 instances of reported hate crimes against Muslims, which is the most since 481 were reported in the months after 9/11. As a New York Times article on the report points out, “victims are often reluctant to report attacks for fear of inflaming community tensions, and because it is sometimes difficult for investigators to establish that religious, ethnic or racial hatred was a cause.” [...]

The report found that said rhetoric has a tangible impact on crime data: “Our analysis of daily data following terrorist attacks found a tolerant statement about Muslims by a political leader was accompanied by a sharp decline in hate crime, while a less tolerant announcement was followed by a precipitous increase in both the severity and number of anti-Muslim hate crimes.”

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The Guardian: Hillary Clinton 'dropped climate change from speeches after Bernie Sanders endorsement'

Hillary Clinton has dropped the words “climate change” from most of her public addresses since winning the endorsement of her party rival Bernie Sanders, according to Climate Home analysis.

While the presidential candidate talks regularly about her plan for the US to become a “clean energy superpower”, in recent months she has rarely made reference to the planetary crisis that necessitates it. [...]

Research from Yale released in July indicates that even during the hottest year ever recorded, only the 17% of voters who describe themselves as “alarmed” about climate change rank it as a top tier election issue. Meanwhile, Trump has framed Clinton’s climate change response as a “poverty-expansion agenda”. The economy ranks in the top two defining policy areas for all other voters.

The Democratic primary season was altogether different. Clinton, the overwhelming favourite for the nomination, was ambushed on the left by her socialist rival. To tackle climate change, Sanders had promised to declare legislative war on fossil fuel companies. For her part, Clinton announced a plan to increase US solar capacity seven-fold by 2020. In the spring, she rolled out a wider platform on environmental justice and protection. [...]

Obama has since emerged as something of a climate warrior, but even in the election campaign for his second term he barely spoke about climate change, said Roberts. “I think he’s careful to not whack the hornets nest of the ideological and fossil fuel interests on the right.”

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Vox: Why Putin might be trying to recreate the Soviet-era KGB — and why he might regret it

A well-connected Russian newspaper is reporting that Vladimir Putin plans to unite his domestic security, foreign espionage, and counterintelligence agencies into one superagency, in effect recreating the old Soviet KGB. If true, it suggests Putin is seriously worried about his future — and that he dramatically misunderstands the risks in this maneuver. [...]

It brings all the security agencies under one man. In the past, Putin governed through a kind of royal court, with multiple organizations with overlapping responsibilities constantly in competition. Increasingly, though, he is now relying on a handful of his closest allies instead.

This is because he simply doesn’t seem to trust the elite as a whole and instead is elevating a handful of people he does trust. The MGB would also be a powerful tool to control them and head off any political coups or conspiracies. In particular, it would gain lead responsibility for investigating allegations of corruption and economic crimes, and these have become to main weapon the Kremlin uses to intimidate and eliminate its enemies these days. [...]

Putin is clearly concerned about the possibility of a conspiracy within the elite to oust him: This is a perennial topic of discussion in Moscow. He appears to see agencies like the National Guard and MGB as the guarantors of his power. However, the old model did at least mean any coup would have to involve many different groups. Ironically, Putin might be creating for the first time a single agency with enough power to topple him.

While that is unlikely, there is another way this agency will limit Putin’s power. Already, the intelligence he receives is dangerously politicized, slanted in ways designed to please him. There is no Russian equivalent of congressional oversight, not even an independent national security adviser to warn him when he is being fed slanted and partial data.

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Deutsche Welle: Mainstream parties suffering losses - an international comparison

Professor Uwe Jun from the University of Trier says "that society has become much more strongly diversified." Other values, opinions, and lifestyles have emerged, "and they are not resonating with the big parties anymore, because the big parties are far too broad, and don't stand for specific interests." That is challenging the very existence of mainstream parties. Professor Oskar Niedermayer of the Free University in Berlin adds that the big parties have had to "bundle very different interests" in order to remain big. The refugee question has shown how divided society is, and how tough that's been for the mainstream parties to address. [...]

Up until the 1980s, Austria was also in this group, with the special case that the Social Democrats and the conservative Austrian People's Party formed grand coalitions for almost two-thirds of the period following World War II. It was precisely this "eternal grand coalition" aimed at consensus building that led to the rise of the Freedom Party, or FPÖ. [...]

Niedermayer also doesn't see any "danger that Germany will develop the kind of circumstances common in Italy." Should a complicated coalition building process fail, the "two mainstream parties could shoulder the impact." Niedermayer is critical of introducing a majority electoral system like in Britain. He says the primary goal of such a system is forming a government that's capable of acting. In the worst case, a defeated minority goes without representation, "because the majority is the majority." He says proportional representation is much better at reflecting various interests in parliament. "We should keep [the current German] system, even if government formation were to become more difficult as a result of stronger fragmentation of our party system," he said.

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