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The recent leak of Ukraine war documents reveals much about how the US government has been misleading the public. But the corporate media is more concerned with catching and punishing the leaker, all in the name of defending democracy.

Ukrainian servicemen ride a tank on a road in eastern Ukraine on November 24, 2022. (Anatolii Stepanov / AFP via Getty Images)

The Ukraine war documents leak is a very big deal. Among other things, the documents reveal that the Biden administration has been misleading the public about its upbeat assessment of the Ukrainian war effort. The leak lays bare the extent of US spying on friends and enemies alike, including the United Nations secretary general. It shows that friendly nations dependent on US largesse have quietly been undermining Washington’s geopolitical interests. It makes clear that the world came far closer to unimaginable catastrophe during last year’s September run-in between British and Russian pilots than we were told at the time. And it confirms that the United States and NATO allies do have boots on the ground in the war-torn country in the form of ninety-seven special forces personnel.

But for some reason, that is not what anyone is talking about in response to these leaks.

Rather than the jaw-dropping disclosures, which this brief list only scratches the surface of and which have major implications for US security, the political establishment has instead fixated on the leaker, his motives, his personal faults, and what the government is doing to make sure this doesn’t happen again. Before we even knew the identity of the leaker, major press institutions like the Washington Post proclaimed the leak a grave violation and threat to national security, practically calling for the leaker’s head on a plate.

Before long, a host of journalists at outlets like NPR and Vice were volunteering their time to help the Department of Justice (DOJ) track down the person responsible, poring over photos for possible clues — acting as “heroes of the hunt,” as one commentator approvingly put it. The New York Times and Washington Post — two outlets, incidentally, that have reported extensively on the content of the leaks, and therefore spread them much further than they otherwise would have gone — finally exposed him to the world last week, revealing details about a twenty-one-year-old National Guard airman who had sent the photos to his gamer buddies on Discord, including a seeming penchant for offensive and racist rhetoric. In the process, as the Intercept’s Nikita Mazurov pointed out, reporters cavalierly made public potentially identifying details that could incriminate the leaker’s teenage associates.

Six years after much of the liberal and media establishment roundly condemned the Intercept for accidentally exposing a leaker and getting her railroaded by Donald Trump’s DOJ, these same voices are cheering on as a different president does the same — and have even been deliberately helping it to do so.

And because no issue can be discussed in today’s US political discourse without having the country’s partisan-coded culture war superimposed, much of the discussion has now devolved into a partisan food fight over whether or not the leaker is really a “whistleblower” or even a “hero.” This isn’t surprising: whenever there’s a major, politically sensitive leak, the political establishment does everything possible to turn the terms of debate to the supposed character deficiencies, both real and imagined, of the leaker. Just look back at the media coverage of Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, and Daniel Ellsberg to be reminded.

The more time you spend talking about whether the leaker is a good person, the less you’re devoting to the official deception and misbehavior the leaks have shed light on.

This is not an accident. The more time you spend thinking and talking about the leaker and whether or not he’s a good person, the less you’re devoting to the substance of the leaks and the official deception and misbehavior they have shed light on.

But ask yourself: What’s more corrosive to US democracy? That the president secretly put US boots on the ground in an incredibly dangerous, constantly escalating war zone, explicitly breaking a promise in the process and acting against the wishes of the majority of the voting public? Or that the public was finally told about it? If we truly believe that “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” then it makes little sense to vehemently oppose turning on a light. (US officials, for the record, say that the special forces are merely working in the US embassy, but then US officials also told us a week ago Russia was responsible for this leak.)

It also means less time and energy spent on thinking about the years-long, bipartisan war on leaks that this young airman is the latest to be ensnared in. It means no one discusses the government’s now-routine practice of ruining people’s lives over even admittedly inconsequential leaks, and how the point of it is to intimidate future leakers and ensure the political and economic elite can continue to operate in secrecy. The moves we’ve seen to track down and prosecute this leaker closely mirror the punitive response to the explosive 2021 IRS leak that revealed to the public just how little tax the US ultrarich were paying.

As Jacobin’s Ben Burgis recently wrote, “Citizens in a democracy should be able to make informed decisions about their country’s foreign policy.” The terror we’ve seen break out among the establishment over this prospect is a reminder that some of those who most eagerly invoke democracy don’t seem to really believe in it.

According to Russia’s parliamentary investigative committee, Washington would be working to create an “universal’ genetically engineered bioweapon”.

Joe Biden’s promise to wage a so-called second war on poverty met yet another setback last month when the federal government clawed back food stipends for low-income Americans. Expanded SNAP benefits, enacted as part of the first COVID relief bill in March 2020, had been widely popular. They were effective, too, keeping over four million […]

We share some of the most useful newsletters on how Russia’s war is changing the world

Austin’s Lady Bird Lake has recently gained public attention after the discovery of a fourth body there, raising fears of a possible serial killer.

The victim, John Christopher Hays-Clark, 30, was pronounced dead on-site after multiple 911 callers reported an unresponsive person in the water on Saturday at about 1:20 p.m.

Remarkably, the other three victims, a man whose identity remains unknown, and Jason John, 30, and Jonathan Honey, 33, had all been found in the same body of water this year. However, police have ruled out the possibility of foul play in any of the cases.

Police have declared no visible signs of trauma on any victims. In addition, they point to the fact that there are many access points to Lady Bird Lake, which close at 10 p.m., as a humble reminder to the public to avoid entering the area at night.

Even though the police have yet to find a link between the four deaths in Austin’s lake, suspicion still lingers. The members of the highly-active Facebook page, “Lady Bird Lake Serial Killer / Rainey St Killer,” express their doubts about the lack of similarities shared among the victims.

John Kelly, a renowned criminal profiler and psychotherapist who has interviewed multiple serial killers, suggests that it is worth looking into whether or not the Austin victims have anything in common. According to reports, the four deceased, aged between 30 and up, were witnessed around Rainey Street moments before their bodies were found in their final resting place, the lake.

The police have yet to find substantial proof that a serial killer is behind the events in Austin’s lake, but investigations are still ongoing. The Travis County Medical Examiner’s Office is working on determining the cause of death of Jonathan Honey.

13-year-old Jacob Stevens of Ohio tragically lost his life after engaging in the “Benadryl Challenge,” a dangerous TikTok stunt in which participants take a large dose of antihistamines to induce hallucinations.

According to his father, Justin, Jacob was home last weekend with friends when he overdosed on the pills, and his body could not handle it, leading to his passing six days after being put on a ventilator.

Justin Stevens, Jacob’s father, spoke to ABC 6, describing his son’s death as being the “worst day of his life,” and warned parents to take extra care in monitoring their children’s activity online, highlighting that other young people have lost their lives to the same challenge.

Johnson & Johnson, the Benadryl manufacturer, and the Food and Drug Administration both issued public service announcements in response to the tragedy, calling for greater awareness of the dangers of the challenge. Recognizing the potential dangers posed by social media,

Justin’s devastation is compounded by the fact that his son’s friends had filmed him taking the pills intended to give him social media clout. It is a grim reminder of the dangers of social media and the power it has to affect young people’s lives.

The death of Jacob Stevens serves as a somber reminder of the potential risks of using social media. It emphasizes the need for extra protections, including age restrictions on over-the-counter medications and tighter regulations on the use of social media by young people.

A terrorist shot and wounded two men who were driving by in the eastern Jerusalem neighborhood of Shimon HaTzakih, aka Sheikh Jarrah, on Tuesday morning.

(Video courtesy CCTV)

The post WATCH: Terrorist fires at Jews in Jerusalem from point blank range appeared first on World Israel News.

President Isaac Herzog conveyed an appropriate Yom Hashoah message with just the right tone, but the people who most needed to hear and heed it either weren’t listening or didn’t think it applied to them.

By Ruthie Blum, JNS

During his Holocaust Remembrance Day speech on Monday night at Yad Vashem, Israeli President Isaac Herzog admonished the public never to invoke the genocide of the Jews in any context other than the Shoah itself. This was a not-so-veiled reference to a practice that’s become frighteningly commonplace in the politically polarized country.

“The Nazi abomination is an unprecedented evil, unique by any measure,” he said. “We must remember, repeat and emphasize again and again: These, and only these, are Nazis. This, and only this, is the Holocaust. Even when we are in the midst of fierce disagreements on our destiny, calling, faith and values, we must be careful about and guard against making any comparison, any analogy, to the Holocaust and the Nazis.”

He went on to remind the citizens of Israel that the “Nazi monster” didn’t distinguish between one member of the tribe or another, regardless of their “views, beliefs or lifestyles.” Indeed, he stressed, such “nuances” were utterly meaningless to those who set out to annihilate every last Jew.

“For them,” he pointed out, “we were one people, scattered and separated among all the nations, with one sentence: death. And our victory over them, as well, which takes place every day, is a victory of one people.”

He concluded: “We are currently celebrating 75 years of Israeli independence—75 years of victory during which the Jewish and democratic State of Israel and its [proud] society are standing up and declaring to the Nazi monster and those who, even in this generation, are following in its path: ‘You cannot defeat us, because we are brothers and sisters; yes, siblings who know how to argue and dispute, but never hate one another, are never enemies.’

“We are one people and we will remain one people, united not only by a painful history, but also by a shared destiny and a hopeful future.”

It was an appropriate message with just the right tone. As is the case with all such pleas, however, the people who most needed to hear and heed it either weren’t listening or didn’t think it applied to them. Indeed, within minutes, Herzog’s social-media feed was filled with nasty remarks from both sides of the spectrum.

Supporters of the government accused him of abetting the opposition to thwart judicial reforms. Members of the protest movement were more vitriolic.

“I’m ashamed that you’re the president of my country,” tweeted one respondent. “You have nothing to say about the pure evil [Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] that’s trying to destroy the country just to get out of going to jail.”

Another, writing “Yair Golan was right,” posted an article from 2016 about the then-deputy chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, who took the opportunity of Holocaust Remembrance Day to caution against the country’s own “seeds of intolerance, violence, self-destruction and moral deterioration.”

Yet another argued, “Make no mistake; the comparison [of the current government] to the rise of the Third Reich is absolutely spot on!”

So much for Herzog’s words about Jewish unity, delivered at the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem. Simultaneously, at a Tel Aviv synagogue service marking the somber event, MK Boaz Bismuth from Netanyahu’s Likud Party was heckled loudly as he attempted to express a similar sentiment about brotherhood.

Shouting one of the key chants at anti-government rallies (“shame, shame, shame”) and ordering him to leave, many congregants wouldn’t let him speak. Some attendees yelled at them to stop harassing their guest. Faced with the altercation that was threatening to turn physically violent, Bismuth exited the premises.

“When your daily job is to corrode the remains of Israeli statehood, and then you appear at a Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony and pretend to represent something, don’t be surprised when you’re thrown out on your butt,” tweeted Raanan Shaked, an editor at the Hebrew daily Yedioth Ahronoth.

This type of hyperbole, along with the very comparisons and analogies that Herzog insisted rightly should be taboo, is not only now the norm; its spewers refuse to refrain from employing it even while the country mourns the six million who didn’t live to see the birth of the Jewish state and honors the survivors of the unfathomable atrocity.

It’s as inexcusable as any form of Holocaust denial. Shame on any Israeli who engages in it.

Ruthie Blum is a Tel Aviv-based columnist and commentator. She writes and lectures on Israeli politics and culture, as well as on U.S.-Israel relations. The winner of the Louis Rappaport award for excellence in commentary, she is the author of the book “To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter, Obama, and the ‘Arab Spring.’” 

The post Holocaust remembrance and inexcusable hyperbole – analysis appeared first on World Israel News.

Today is Tax Day, the deadline for Americans to pay their taxes. One group that won’t be paying much today: the rich, who have stashed $2 trillion in offshore tax havens.

A man walks into the IRS building in Washington, DC, on March 10, 2016. (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP via Getty Images)

Tax day is a costly annual annoyance for most, but for some of the wealthiest people in the United States, this year’s April 18 tax deadline might not mean much. That’s because according to a new report, the richest sliver of our population has managed to avoid billions in tax obligations by hiding their money offshore.

What’s more, it could get easier for the megarich to hide their taxable income, thanks to efforts by the Supreme Court and the Biden administration.

A recent study from academic and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) researchers found that wealthy Americans have stashed nearly $2 trillion in foreign tax havens, with much of that fortune linked to a handful of the country’s richest households.

That data arrived weeks after the US Supreme Court hobbled regulators’ efforts to combat international tax evasion schemes by limiting fines for people who fail to disclose foreign bank accounts. The study also follows a US Senate report warning of a glaring loophole in a law designed to combat the use of tax havens — a law that Republican legislators have long been trying to repeal outright. Compounding matters, earlier this year, the Biden administration gave foreign banks a reprieve on tax reporting.

Together, the moves paint a picture of a tax day and many more to come where ordinary Americans will pay what they owe, while the rich can get off scot-free.

“Strong Concentration”

The new study, published last month by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that US households held “just below $2 trillion” in 2018 in financial accounts in places like Switzerland, Luxembourg, and the Cayman Islands that are generally considered tax havens because they have low effective tax rates.

Not surprisingly, a disproportionately high percentage of assets held in offshore tax havens are owned by the top 0.01 percent of US earners.

“We find a strong concentration of offshore assets at the very top of the income distribution: Around 30 percent of all foreign assets belong to the top 0.01 percent, with a particularly high share for assets held through partnerships and assets held in tax havens,” the researchers write.

They additionally note that “more than 60 percent of the individuals in the top 0.01 percent of the income distribution own foreign accounts, the vast majority in tax havens.”

The study is based on account information reported to the IRS by foreign financial institutions under the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), a law passed in 2010 to help the government crack down on offshore tax evasion.

Republicans, led by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), have introduced several bills to repeal the law, which requires foreign banks and financial institutions to disclose accounts and assets held by US customers.

Major multinational banks have repeatedly enabled tax evasion schemes by the ultrawealthy. A two-year investigation into Credit Suisse by the Senate Finance Committee recently revealed that employees of the crime-ridden and collapsed Swiss bank knowingly helped a US businessman conceal $220 million from US authorities, even after the company pledged to comply with all requirements of FATCA as part of its 2014 plea agreement with the Justice Department.

Limiting Enforcement

Last fall, the Senate Finance Committee released a report noting that loopholes and limited enforcement resources “have significantly hindered” the effectiveness of FATCA. “As a result, wealthy taxpayers continue to use schemes involving offshore entities and secret bank accounts to successfully hide billions in income from the IRS,” lawmakers wrote.

For much of FATCA’s history, its enforcement mechanism has not been utilized. Banks that fail to comply with the law are supposed to be hit with a 30 percent withholding tax on their US investment income. For years, the IRS waived this requirement, before it finally went into effect in 2020.

The clampdown didn’t last long. Earlier this year, the Biden administration gave a new three-year grace period to some foreign banks that fail to disclose the tax identification numbers of existing US account holders.

Due to significant historical underfunding at the IRS, it is impossible to know whether or not the total amount of money collected thanks to FATCA has met the original $8.7 billion projection when the bill was passed, because measuring the amount raised by voluntary compliance is difficult.

Opponents of FATCA — like the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, a Koch-linked think tank — have used this lack of information to argue in favor of the law’s repeal, buttressing the Biden administration’s decisions to water down enforcement.

A potential lifeline for tax enforcement emerged last summer, when Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which granted a $80 billion budget increase to the IRS over ten years.

However, a recent Supreme Court ruling will likely further complicate efforts to reduce tax evasion by the ultrawealthy.

Last month, justices voted 5-4 to limit penalties the government can issue against US citizens for failing to file reports detailing their foreign bank accounts to the IRS.

In doing so, the justices sided with powerful corporate lobbying groups, including the US Chamber of Commerce, the National Federation of Independent Business, the American Farm Bureau Federation, and the Restaurant Law Center.

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