RUTHFULLY YOURS

This week the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law published my new research paper, “Economic Dealings With Occupied Territories.”

The gist (from the abstract):

This Article conducts a comprehensive survey of the relevant current state practice and judicial precedent regarding occupied territories, aside from the well-examined case of Israel. Much of this practice has never been considered by scholars, let alone examined holistically. Clear patterns emerge when state practice is examined globally, and the principles they suggest are in turn reaffirmed by recent path-breaking decisions of European national courts.

State practice and decisions of important national courts support a fully permissive approach to economic dealings by third-party states or nationals in territories under prolonged occupation or illegal annexation. There is no obligation on third-party states to block such activity, or to insist on particular language on product labels, or to ensure that their foreign aid funds do not cross into occupied territory.

Can Israel Unite?

Here in Jerusalem there are pensioners old enough to remember how, almost a half-century ago, Israel’s first national-unity government was born. You might say its father was Gamal Abdel Nasser, president of Egypt. He’d blockaded the Straits of Tiran via which Israel got oil from Iran, booted the UN peacekeepers from Sinai, massed his army there, and declared that his objective in any resulting war would be the end of the Zionist entity. “Death to Israel!” chanted the multitudes in Tahrir Square. Meanwhile the U.S., which ten years before had promised to keep the straits open, was too busy in Vietnam to keep its word.

Things in 1967 were clear. We faced an emergency, faced it by ourselves, and faced it with a government most of us didn’t trust anymore. “The government in its present composition,” said the editors of Haaretz, referring to the coalition headed by the Mapai party (the precursor of today’s Labor) under Levi Eshkol, “cannot lead the nation in its time of danger.” A few days after this call for a change, Eshkol and the Mapai barons who’d founded, built, defended, and run the country practically by themselves for its first nineteen years did what had to be done. They brought into the cabinet not just the one-eyed Moshe Dayan of the breakaway Rafi party but the radioactive Menachem Begin, founder and chief of Herut, the successor of the pre-state Irgun and precursor of Likud.

This week health insurers announced they will hike premiums on ObamaCare plans by double digits in 2016. Yet it’s not ObamaCare buyers who are getting gouged.
For the most part, what consumers have to pay is calculated based on their income.
They don’t pay the sticker price. It’s you – the taxpayers – who get taken to the cleaners, because you foot the bill for the subsidies paid directly to the insurers.
That makes the Supreme Court ruling in King v. Burwell, expected this month, even more consequential. It will determine the fate of these subsidies in 37 states.
Without subsidies, ObamaCare buyers in those states will have to pay the actual – and unaffordable – sticker price of ObamaCare. And you – taxpayers – will not have to fork over hundreds of billions of dollars to subsidize insurers over the next decade.

Friday evening I spoke in Daphne Alabama to the Baldwin County GOP on the subject of the individual responsibility to preserve liberty. It was their “Celebration of Patriotism” event but one thing we must re-learn in America is the call of patriots. An integral part of being a true patriot is the moral courage to make a stand against the tentacles of tyranny – after all that is how our nation began. But what perplexes me is how our culture has become so confused on what courage really is.

This past week there were so many – including our own president – who took to the airwaves to profess the courageous actions of one person who decided to transform from being a man into a woman. I found that response to be rather, well, shall we say, quite over the top. Then again, somewhere in hidden rooms people are deciding the new standards of courage, coolness, and acceptance. So I think that at this late hour, 11:24pm Central Time. I will offer a reminder to America of what courage was and still is.

The great attraction of Siberia for three centuries of settlers, free and otherwise, had been the chance to start afresh in a land where no one would ask too many questions about a person’s past. Shaking off history remains the oldest tradition of them all
It was at one of the smaller towns along the Trans-Siberian Railway, one of the two-minute stops that are so easy to miss altogether between Novosibirsk and Krasnoyarsk, that the government inspectors boarded our train. My husband Timothy and I were alerted to their presence when the stewardess who had taken our tickets came to our cabin shortly after 9 p.m. and told us that “inspectors of the regime” were aboard, and could we please lock our door and not open it for any reason until she came to fetch us. We did as she said, and also closed the window curtains. It was not necessary to turn out the lights, for we had not figured out how to turn them on or indeed whether they were working or broken. The last thing Timothy said before we lapsed into silence was, “This supports my bribe theory.”

Former Green Party and independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader labeled 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton a “deep corporatist and a deep militarist” who has made peace with the nation’s power structure.

“I think Hillary is not the Hillary of when she was 30 years old. She made peace with the power structure and she is a deep corporatist and a deep militarist. One can almost forgive the corporatism. She moved to New York with Bill because that’s where the power is and Wall Street but her militarism is absolutely shocking,” he said during a discussion about his new book, Return to Sender, which focuses on unanswered letters Nader wrote to U.S. presidents about an array of issues.

Nader cited the war in Libya during President Obama’s first term to support his position on Clinton.

“Barack Obama’s schizophrenic — and at times, contradictory — policy towards Syria has led us to this point where U.S. forces are serving in support of anti-ISIS elements, including Al-Qaeda. Not fourteen years after 9/11, is this what America signed up for?”

U.S. coalition aircraft struck ISIS positions in support of Syrian rebels, including Jabhat al-Nusra, Al-Qaeda’s official Syria affiliate, along with another prominent jihadist group, Ahrar al-Sham. This is a dramatic shift from just a year and a half ago, when Obama administration officials said they would support Islamist groups as long as they weren’t allied with Al-Qaeda.

Agence France Presse reports:

US-led aircraft bombed Islamic State group fighters as they battled rival Syrian rebels, including Al-Qaeda loyalists, for the first time, a monitoring group said on Sunday.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights described the overnight raids in northern Aleppo as an intervention on the side of the rival rebels, which include forces who have been targeted previously by US-led strikes.

“We, through democratic means, have brought an end to an era of oppression.” — Kemal Kilicdaroglu, leader of the main opposition, Republican People’s Party (CHP).

Erdogan is now the lonely sultan in his $615 million, 1150-room presidential palace. For the first time since 2002, the opposition has more seats in the parliament than the AKP.

For the first time since his Islamist party won its first election victory in 2002, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was nowhere to be seen on the night of June 7. He did not make a victory speech. He did not, in fact, make any speech.

Not only failing to win the two-thirds majority they desired to change the constitution, the AKP lost its parliamentary majority and the ability to form a single-party government. It won 40.8% of the national vote and 258 seats, 19 short of the simple majority requirement of 276. Erdogan is now the lonely sultan at his $615 million, 1150-room presidential palace. For the first time since 2002, the opposition has more seats in parliament than the AKP: 292 seats to 258.

“My commitment is… to reject any oppression in the name of religion… a goal that we will reach in a peaceful and law-abiding way.” — Raif Badawi.

In another example of Saudi “justice,” Badawi’s lawyer, Walid Abu’l-Khayr, was jailed. He was sentenced to 15 years in jail, to be followed by a 15-year travel ban.

What is happening to Badawi is a perfect reminder to anyone who claims to be “offended” by “Islamophobia” why it might exist, who is to blame for it, and that it is precisely behavior such as this that justifies it.

You may have seen the face of Raif Badawi, a young Saudi man, or a short article about him, or impressive efforts by The Independent, to bring attention to the cruel punishments inflicted on him by a series of deeply illiberal Saudi courts: 1000 lashes — “very harshly,” the flogging order read — to be administered 50 at time for 20 weeks, or five months.

Raif Badawi is a 31-year old author, blogger and social activist, who gently tried to introduce just the smallest traces of enlightened thinking to the government and the religious elite of Saudi Arabia from his home in Jeddah.

The U.S. government gives up personal data secrets with barely a fight.

U.S. government incompetence seems to grow by the month, and now we know it’s becoming a threat to national, and even individual American, security. The Obama Administration announced last week that Chinese hackers made off this year with personnel files that may have included those of all 2.1 million federal employees, plus former employees going back to the 1980s.

This is no routine hack. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) lost background-check data to the Chinese nine months before this breach and still hadn’t locked the cyber front door. OPM’s inspector general issued a damning report last November that parts of its network should be shut down because they were riddled with weaknesses that “could potentially have national security implications.” You can’t ring the alarm much louder than that, but the failure to take basic precautions continued.

In other words this isn’t a James Bond movie. It’s a Dilbert cartoon. Despite years of warnings, and after the Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden debacles, the federal bureaucracy can’t protect its most basic data from hackers. Private companies like Target are pilloried, not least by politicians, for their data leaks. But the feds have $4 trillion to spend each year plus access to the most advanced encryption systems. Will anyone in government take responsibility for this fiasco?