Ten years ago, a hawker in Tunisia set himself on fire, which spurred on people along the entire Mediterranean Sea—from Morocco to Spain—to rise up in revolt. They took to their squares indignant at the terrible conditions in which they had to make their lives.
Little of their agenda has been advanced in the past decade. Governments of the southern European states have one by one betrayed the aspirations of the people; the most dramatic such failure was of the Syriza government in Greece, which won a mandate against austerity and then surrendered before the troika (the European Central Bank, the European Commission, and the International Monetary Fund) in 2015.
Uprisings in northern Africa ended with the return of the generals (as in Egypt), the destruction of states (as in Libya), and the assertion of the Arab monarchies (from Morocco to Saudi Arabia).
A decade later, U.S. President Donald Trump carved the obituary on the tombstone of that “Arab Spring” rebellion when he used the immensity of U.S. power to strengthen U.S. allies—such as the Arab monarchies and Israel—to the detriment of the people of the region.
What remains of the Arab Spring is a distant memory of the crowds in Cairo’s Tahrir Square; a better image of the present is that of the monarchs of Morocco and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) kissing up to Israel to please the United States.
Read more at:
Donald Trump’s Final Act: Snuffing Out the Promise of Democracy in the Middle East - CounterPunch.org
Showing posts with label Despots. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Despots. Show all posts
12/19/20
1/19/18
USA: Trump's 'Fake News Awards' Have a Sinister Subtext - by Albert R. Hunt
It's a cheap ploy, but it comes with a serious, sinister subtext. Trump has been making a case for changing U.S. libel laws to make it easier to punish publishers of news he considers "fake."
What he doesn't seem to realize is that actual fake news is already outside the protection of current laws.
That's the opinion of one of the foremost experts on U.S. libel law, Robert D. Sack, a senior judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit. Sack has focused on these issues for decades; before becoming a federal judge in 1998 he was a libel lawyer representing notable media clients like the Wall Street Journal.
Fake news, "invented and disseminated with the intention of fooling the recipient into believing it is genuine," is actionable under present law, he writes in the latest edition of his definitive two-volume treatise on defamation, "Sack on Defamation: Libel, Slander and Related Problems."
What he means is that if Trump were correct that mainstream news outlets deliberately published false information with the intent of making him look bad, he could successfully sue them without any changes to existing law.
Contemporary libel law grows out of a 1964 landmark Supreme Court case, New York Times v. Sullivan, in which the justices ruled that a public figure can win a defamation case only by showing that false and harmful charges against him were made with "actual malice."
That's a legal term-of-art that means publishing something knowing it was false or with "reckless disregard" for whether it was true or not.
This daunting standard applies only to public figures; ordinary citizens can win libel judgments if they are defamed negligently. It's designed to protect a free, aggressive press against intimidation or even bankruptcy.
In anticipation of Wednesday's "Fake News Awards" charade, Senator Jeff Flake, one of the few implacable Trump critics remaining among conservative Republican politicians, has prepared blistering remarks about the president's contempt for a free press.
Recalling Trump's charge that the press is "the enemy of the American people," the Arizona lawmaker noted that the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin used similar language to justify purges against real and imagined opponents. (Not that Stalin had a free press to worry about.)
"The president has it precisely backwards — despotism is the enemy of the people," Flake said in remarks prepared for delivery in the Senate. "The free press is the despot's enemy, which makes the free press the guardian of democracy. When a figure in power reflexively calls any press that doesn't suit him, 'fake news,' it is the person who should be the figure of suspicion, not the press."
Read more: Trump's 'Fake News Awards' Have a Sinister Subtext - Bloomberg
What he doesn't seem to realize is that actual fake news is already outside the protection of current laws.
That's the opinion of one of the foremost experts on U.S. libel law, Robert D. Sack, a senior judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit. Sack has focused on these issues for decades; before becoming a federal judge in 1998 he was a libel lawyer representing notable media clients like the Wall Street Journal.
Fake news, "invented and disseminated with the intention of fooling the recipient into believing it is genuine," is actionable under present law, he writes in the latest edition of his definitive two-volume treatise on defamation, "Sack on Defamation: Libel, Slander and Related Problems."
What he means is that if Trump were correct that mainstream news outlets deliberately published false information with the intent of making him look bad, he could successfully sue them without any changes to existing law.
Contemporary libel law grows out of a 1964 landmark Supreme Court case, New York Times v. Sullivan, in which the justices ruled that a public figure can win a defamation case only by showing that false and harmful charges against him were made with "actual malice."
That's a legal term-of-art that means publishing something knowing it was false or with "reckless disregard" for whether it was true or not.
This daunting standard applies only to public figures; ordinary citizens can win libel judgments if they are defamed negligently. It's designed to protect a free, aggressive press against intimidation or even bankruptcy.
In anticipation of Wednesday's "Fake News Awards" charade, Senator Jeff Flake, one of the few implacable Trump critics remaining among conservative Republican politicians, has prepared blistering remarks about the president's contempt for a free press.
Recalling Trump's charge that the press is "the enemy of the American people," the Arizona lawmaker noted that the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin used similar language to justify purges against real and imagined opponents. (Not that Stalin had a free press to worry about.)
"The president has it precisely backwards — despotism is the enemy of the people," Flake said in remarks prepared for delivery in the Senate. "The free press is the despot's enemy, which makes the free press the guardian of democracy. When a figure in power reflexively calls any press that doesn't suit him, 'fake news,' it is the person who should be the figure of suspicion, not the press."
Read more: Trump's 'Fake News Awards' Have a Sinister Subtext - Bloomberg
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