3 for Sunday: Gaza, Trump, Doug Murray

Caitlin Johnstone’s post today is penned with her customary directness under the header, It’s A Complete Lie To Say Gaza Can Have Peace If Hamas Surrenders. After backing this claim with statements from the Netanyahu and Trump administrations to show the truth, you’d think now undeniable, that the intent is the ethnic cleansing of Gaza as part of the project discussed in US Neocons & Israel’s far Right, she turns to double standards over Palestine:

Israel bombed the home of two married doctors in Gaza on Friday, killing nine of their children and critically injuring their sole surviving son. The father of the children was also severely injured in the attack, while their mother, while still working at the nearby hospital, received the charred bodies of her children. They were too badly burned to be recognized.

This one incident, just by itself, is vastly more newsworthy and deserving of attention than two Israeli embassy staff members being killed in Washington. But news coverage hasn’t reflected this, because Palestinians aren’t regarded as human beings in the mainstream western press.

Which leads me directly to a podcast two days ago by Lowkey, described in my last post but one – Lowkey on “corporate capture” at the BBC –  as “astonishingly well informed”. Where Caitlin’s piece skewers the hideous double standards by which one multiple infanticide among many is deemed less “newsworthy” than the same day killing of two Israeli embassy staffers in DC, the double standards in Lowkey’s sights contrast the charging of Kneecap’s Liam Hannah, for waving a Hezbollah flag at an O2 gig last November, with the impunity granted to Britons actively involved in what the highest court on the planet calls a genocide.

Just under thirteen minutes.

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Also catching my eye today is a two thousand worder by British Marxist economist, Michael Roberts. A Marxist economist is a political economist, since Marx insisted, as the classical economists Smith and Ricardo would have insisted – had it even occurred to them that later practitioners would assume otherwise – that economics cannot be separated out as a distinct discipline, outside the moral, political and social spheres; outside, we might say, the wealth of nations.

So here’s Michael Roberts on the subject of the tax bill Team Trump managed on Thursday to get through  the House of Representatives on Thursday. Those who like their spoonerisms on the dark side might say Trump just did a Hobin Rood.

Donald Trump’s ‘big, beautiful’ tax bill

The US House of Representatives, the lower house of Congress, in which the Republican party has a slender majority, has passed President Donald Trump’s government budget proposals.  Trump calls this “The Big, Beautiful Bill”.  It would extend sweeping tax cuts for the better-off and rich that were passed in 2017 during Trump’s first presidential term.  The beautiful bill would also make big reductions to the Medicaid insurance scheme for low-income individuals and to a food aid programme. And of course, there are cuts in tax subsidies for renewable energy (‘drill baby, drill’).

Trump had called for $163bn in cuts to federal spending. Non-defence spending is to be slashed by 22.6% to its lowest level since 2017, alongside a sharp increase in the defence budget. While non-defence government services are to be drastically cut, government outlays will rise 13% for ‘defence’ and 65% for ‘homeland security’, with the aim to clamp down on so-called ‘illegal immigration’.

The planned cuts in Medicaid are particularly brutal. America is the only advanced economy without a system of universal health coverage. The US spends more than $4.5tn annually on healthcare. Healthcare is the largest component of US consumer spending on services (well above expenditure on recreation, eating out and hotels).  Safety net programs like Medicaid lift 45% of Americans who would be below the poverty line out of poverty. Substantial cuts to Medicaid would result in millions without health insurance. And these programs don’t only serve those below the poverty line, but millions more paycheck-to-paycheck, near-poor families.

The tax cuts will primarily benefit high-income households and corporations, while the spending cuts will disproportionately affect low- and middle-income households. These include reductions to Medicaid, nutritional assistance programs, the layoff of hundreds of thousands of federal employees, and the dismantling of entire government agencies.

According to recent estimates by the Yale Budget Lab, the average after-tax-and-transfer income of households in the bottom quintile and second-to-bottom quintile is expected to decrease by 5% and 1.4%, respectively. On the other hand, households in the fourth and top quintile will see their incomes increase by 1.4% and 2.5% respectively. These losses are on top of the estimated reduction in median household income by 2.8% due to Trump’s tariffs. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reckons these estimated losses of the bottom quintiles are likely conservative, as they do not account for cuts overseen by the House Education and Workforce Committee, which are expected to affect student loan repayment conditions.

Read in full on Michael’s The Next Recession blogsite …

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I’m not exactly a fan of Mehdi Hassan and don’t always agree with him but his presence of mind in adversarial exchange, and depth of knowledge to support that quickness of wit, are outstanding. Here he takes on another clever man, but one who has long struck me as less scrupulous, less informed and frankly – since this is what Zionists including gentile atheists like Murray are – racist.

NB the introduction is heavy-handed. To skip, go straight to 2:08.

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