Thursday, December 29, 2022

Statue Of Meat-Packing Magnate Beheaded In Sacramento

Investigators found the severed head of the Charles Swanston statue a few feet away, but have no motive.

The historic statue of Charles Swanston, its head recently decapitated, stands in William Land Park on Tuesday, Dec. 27, 2022, in Sacramento, Calif. The statute of a 19th-century Northern California meat-packing magnate was beheaded earlier this week.
 (Photo: Hector Amezcua/The Sacramento Bee via AP)

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS |
PUBLISHED: December 29, 2022

SACRAMENTO — The statue of a 19th-century Northern California rancher and meat-packing magnate was decapitated earlier this week, leaving investigators in the state’s capital city scratching their heads to find a motive behind the vandalism.
Tipsters could receive a $1,000 reward for information about what befell the nearly century-old granite statue of Charles Swanston in Sacramento’s William Land Park on Monday. The severed head was found on the ground nearby.

Swanston traveled west from Ohio as part of the California Gold Rush and quickly realized he’d make more money as a butcher, according to Sacramento City Historian Marcia Eymann.

Police are investigating whether the vandal — or vandals — had a beef with the Swanstons or if it was a random act
.
The head of the Charles Swanston statue rests on the ground near a bush in William Land Park on Tuesday, Dec. 27, 2022, in Sacramento, Calif., the day after it was believed to have been vandalized. The statute of a 19th-century Northern California meat-packing magnate was beheaded earlier this week. (Photo: Hector Amezcua/The Sacramento Bee via AP)

“I have no idea why anyone, unless they’re vegetarians and didn’t like meat-packers” would do this to the statue, Eymann said Wednesday. “I find this very bizarre.”

The statue is the work of the late sculptor Ralph Stackpole, a famous San Francisco artist during the Great Depression era.

An early Sacramento pioneer and settler, Swanston then became a rancher and started a meat-packing business that made him rich. His son in the 1920s commissioned the statue, which is part of a fountain, and donated it to the city after Swanston’s death in 1911 at 101 years old, The Sacramento Bee reported.

The family’s ranch was located on what’s now William Land Park. Eymann said if not for his son’s donation, the city would likely have never put up a piece for Swanston.

“Not that anybody knows who he is, but that’s something very special that Sacramento had and now it’s destroyed,” she said.


https://www.valcomnews.com/charles-swanston-memorial-fountain-pays-tribute-to-early-area-resident

Charles Swanston Memorial Fountain pays tribute to early area ... 

Sep 10, 2014 ... The Charles Swanston statue is among the various memorials at William Land Park. At the west end of William Land Park and bordering the ...


http://freepages.rootsweb.com/~npmelton/genealogy/sacswans.htm

CHARLES SWANSTON - Rootsweb 

Charles Swanston, who closed his eyes to earthly scenes many years ago, ... founder of the well known meat packing firm of Swanston & Son, of Sacramento.


I DUNNO WHO WOULD WANT TO DECAPITATE IT



THE JUNGLE - cloudfront.net

https://d1lexza0zk46za.cloudfront.net › documents

THE JUNGLE. By Upton Sinclair. (1906). Chapter 1. It was four o'clock when the ceremony was over and the carriages began to arrive. There.
207 pages


Beasts of burden - Antagonism and Practical History | libcom.org

https://libcom.org › article › beasts-burden-antagonism-...

Mar 26, 2017 — An attempt to rethink the separation between animal liberationist and communist politics. This is a text which, we hope, faces in two ...


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West’s Double Standards: Pursuit For Human Rights Or A Tool For Dominance – OpEd

December 29, 2022 
By Eurasia Review

With the withdrawal of foreign forces from Afghanistan, it was hoped that the world especially the eastern part of the globe would have at least peace at borders and within. The regional power competitors were looking for regional prosperity through development and multilateralism.

However, the emerging situation in Ukraine since 2014 was a preparation for another regional chaos, which exacerbated as the Ukraine – Russia war. The US planned and secretly pushed the war to Russian borders. US since 2014, has provided around $22.1 billion to Ukraine in security assistance for training and equipment, and to help maintain its territorial integrity, secure its borders, and improve interoperability with NATO. In response to Russia’s unjustified war against Ukraine, US and its allies sided with Ukraine and supported it to safeguard it sovereignty and territorial integrity. Furthermore, other than military assistance, disinformation is also employed as one of the chief weapons to manipulate the international arena with fabrication.

Moreover, in controlling states’ behaviour, weapon modernization – a tactic to engage the world into arm race to ensure negative peace and stability through deterrence is massively employed. On one hand, through weapon modernization, countries come under heavy debt, the donors’ economy flourish and these recipient states suffer at home due to multiple encumbrances. Security assistance in that regard is a trap by U.S.

Secondly, under the banner of peace, U.S. itself is playing a role of war promoter by supplying all sorts of weapons and equipment to other states. It is arming the states with an aim to destabilize the globe at large. Despite Joe Biden’s election pledge to not “check [America’s] values at the door” when it comes to arms sales, the US has increased, not decreased, its weapons sales around the world, according to a new report of Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a Washington-based thinktank.

Furthermore, as Pera Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) study, the United States accounted for 39 percent of major weapons deliveries for the five-year period from 2017–21, this is twice as large as Russia’s share, and over eight times China’s share to the world market. Defense Security Cooperation Agency director James Hursch said “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the ongoing conflict has helped spur a greater demand for U.S. weapons, particularly from European nations who find themselves needing to replenish their own munitions stockpiles or have begun rethinking their own defense needs.”

“In this time of uncertainty, we have a clear way forward: Help Ukraine defend itself. Support the Ukrainian people. Hold Russia accountable,” Antony J. Blinken, Secretary of State said in a statement in February this year when Russia launched an offensive against Ukraine. However, US arms sales would also pose challenges to its own security by promoting conflicts, provoking other regional powers, encouraging arms races, and drawing the US itself into excessive or counterproductive wars. US arms sales is also facilitating human rights abuses by associate states like India in Occupied territory i.e. Kashmir.

The definition of ‘Human’ and ‘Human Rights’ is different under western countries lens. From, last seven and half decades, the Muslims of Palestine and Kashmir are under occupation by Israel and India, but not a single western country came forward with military or security assistance. A question for Western Powers, ‘Who will hold India and Israel accountable?’. The hypocrite nature and double standards of major international players are making this world – a war zone. The issue of Palestine and Kashmir, and aggression done by Israel and India is far graver. However, no Human Rights advocate (Western States) pushed to at least take some proactive measures to end these two prolonged occupations.

The international arena is clouded with ‘Double Standards and Hypocrisy’. The US always wanted to be in East because of many reasons for instance natural resources, threat to its hegemony, emergence of a powerful eastern bloc, and to counter China and Russia’s rise as global powers. Furthermore, in this reference, one of the key measures taken were also to weaken the Muslim bloc by preoccupying Muslim countries with terrorism and counter-terrorism. Pakistan — the only nuclear Muslim state — is going through challenging time due to political instability and terrorism. Pakistan is suffering for being frontline non-NATO Ally in US war against terrorism. Additionally, in last few decades, we have witnessed a strong effort by some states to push propaganda against Islam and Muslims using overt and covert means including media outlets, academia, civil societies, and contaminating media (social, electronic, and print) with disinformation.
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Whose rule of law is it anyway? 
What’s universal isn’t settled yet
29 Dec 2022, 

In the early 2000s, there was a near consensus among academic lawyers that the absence of the rule of law was strictly a “third world problem", meaning one that the advanced economies of the Global North had solved. Yet, just over a decade later, the United States elected as president a man who would go on to incite an insurrection at the US Capitol, conspire to overturn an election that he lost, abscond with classified documents when he finally left the White House, and then call for “termination" of the US Constitution.

How did a quintessentially ‘third world problem’ become a ‘first world problem’ as well? In fact, it was always thus. The purported differences in kind between the Global North and the Global South have always been a product of colonial triumphalism, rather than reflecting an accurate scientific taxonomy.

This was the core insight of ‘law and development’, a beleaguered area of study that came into (modest) prominence in the 1970s. At the height of the Cold War, organizations like USAID and Ford Foundation pushed law professors and legal scholars to take more of an active interest in evangelizing Western-style law (which is a bit like a pharmaceutical company paying a laboratory to ‘find’ that one of its proprietary drugs is indeed effective). But, as a few of that academic field’s scholars pointed out, law is not always ‘potent’ or ‘good’, even at ‘home’ in the West.

Ignoring this inconvenient truth, Western organizations proceeded to foist their vision of the rule of law on the rest of the world anyway. While law and development professors were unwilling to play ball, economists steeped in the Washington Consensus agenda (fiscal discipline, deregulation, trade and capital-market liberalization, privatization and so forth) were all too happy to fill the void.

In the years since, waves of economistic engagement—from ‘law and economics’ and new institutional economics to legal origin theory—have crashed onto the shores of the Global South. The consistent message has been that low-income countries must modernize their legal systems, replacing all traditions and social conventions rooted in ‘magical’ and ‘mystical’ thinking (as Max Weber once put it) with cold, calculable legal ‘rationality’.

The West, under the auspices of programmes such as the United Nations Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor and the World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators, has launched multiple initiatives not only to ‘export’ a valuable commodity—a Western-style legal system, i.e.—but also to quantify and measure its uptake. One influential effort, which I was involved with at its inception, is the American Bar Association-backed World Justice Project. Among other things, the WJP assesses the health of the rule of law in ailing developing countries (usually designated ‘corrupt’) and then prescribes treatments—typically shock therapy-style elixirs—to bolster property and contracts regimes.

The good works of Western law have continued apace in locations ranging from Vietnam and Iraq to Afghanistan. Yet, none of these initiatives was ever supported by any evidence that simply ‘transplanting’ legal regimes would succeed. On the contrary, many millions of dollars were spent on a two-decade-long reform effort in Afghanistan, and still, before the Taliban’s reconquest, the country ranked 134th of 139 in the WJP’s 2021 Rule of Law Index

There are undoubtedly problems with this kind of empirical approach, as the controversy surrounding the World Bank’s Doing Business report shows. But even more problematic is the underlying theory. As the 2008 global financial crisis did with orthodox economics, the Trump presidency exposed core flaws in rule-of-law scholarship that had long been buried or obscured. Chief among these is the assumption that law will play a decisive part in eliciting good behaviour, or that it will exert what legal scholars call “general normative force" on the society in question.

But now, no one can deny that the prevailing epistemic apartheid—the marginalization of those studying the ‘problems’ of establishing and maintaining the rule of law—within law schools has damaged Western countries as much as the rest of the world. This is evident even in the WJP’s own reports, which showed a marked decline in the US’s rule-of-law ranking for five consecutive years from 2017 to 2021.

Although the US recovered somewhat from Trump’s contempt for the rule of law in 2022, it might not be so lucky next time around. Trump has already announced his campaign for the 2024 presidential election, and dismissed the House’s 6 January Committee as a “kangaroo court".

Moreover, a fully Trumpified Republican Party seems committed to eroding the values that underpin the rule of law.

The emergence of social order via the establishment of law-like systems is a universal phenomenon. It happens when individuals join an emerging social consensus in support of such a system, and this process tends to follow the same pattern no matter the country. But understanding the rule of law’s basic structure and normative merits doesn’t really help us understand its underlying mechanics

Fortunately, now that we are seeing the global nature of the challenges associated with maintaining the rule of law, important but long-neglected areas of legal scholarship (including empirical legal studies, law and psychology, law and economics, and law and emotions) are getting the attention they deserve.

The more emphatically we can bring rigorous scientific analysis to the study of the rule of law, the better we can understand and protect it, both in the ‘third world’ and in the ‘first’. ©2022/Project Syndicate

Antara Haldar is associate professor of empirical legal studies at the University of Cambridge.

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Chomsky: Wars could break out all over the map

December 29, 2022
Z Article
Source: Dhaka Tribune



Possibilities of a settlement of the Russia-Ukraine conflict are diminishing, the MIT professor says in an exclusive interview with Dhaka Tribune

American linguist and philosopher Prof Noam Chomsky predicts a grim future for the world as the superpowers are at loggerheads over establishing supremacy centering on the Russia-Ukraine war.

In April, soon after the outbreak of the Ukraine crisis, he had suggested that Kyiv should settle its disputes with Russia by making some concessions.

“There have been possibilities for a settlement all the way along. They are diminishing. The prospects are grim…blame is widely shared,” Prof Chomsky, who teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US, said in an interview with Dhaka Tribune on Wednesday.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said in an interview aired on Sunday that he was ready to negotiate with all parties involved in the war in Ukraine but Kyiv’s Western backers, who have been providing military and diplomatic support, have refused to engage in talks.

Russia’s February 24 invasion of Ukraine has triggered the most deadly European conflict since World War Two, leading to a worsening of economic and geopolitical crises in most countries around the globe.

“The longer the conflict continues, the more harsh the conditions that each side imposes and the harder it is to find a diplomatic solution to bring the horrors to an end,” Chomsky said.

Asked if this war could have been headed off at the first place, the MIT emeritus professor said: “The war could have been averted long ago, and is continuing up to the last minute.”

With the conflict starting to wane and Russia talking about negotiations and Ukraine’s aides remaining nonchalant about striking a peace deal, there arises a concern that the war may shift to somewhere else.

Chomsky said: “Wars could break out all over the map. Language [of heads of states] is a minor factor.”

Asked for a solution to the economic recession and skyrocketing inflation in many low- and middle-income countries as a result of the Ukraine crisis just after the serious blow of the Covid-19 pandemic, Chomsky said: “There’s no simple answer. Each problem has to be dealt with in its own complex terms.

“No one knows… They have opportunities to follow different paths, but it’s not easy.”

He is, however, hopeful of a peaceful world despite the fact that the world’s superpowers remain envious of and aggressive towards each other, create divisions, and promote war or their form of democracy in a third country.

“History is full of such horrible cases. In 1945, it was almost impossible to imagine that Germany and France could become allies with friendly relations. It happened. We can only try our best,” he told Dhaka Tribune.

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Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky (born on December 7, 1928, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historical essayist, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He is a Laureate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona and an Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and is the author of more than 150 books. He has written and lectured widely on linguistics, philosophy, intellectual history, contemporary issues, and particularly international affairs and U.S. foreign policy. Chomsky has been a writer for Z projects since their earliest inception, and is a tireless supporter of our operations.
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Sudden Russian Death Syndrome

It’s not a great time to be an oligarch who’s unenthusiastic about Putin’s war in Ukraine.

The Atlantic
DECEMBER 29, 2022

Here is a list of people you should not currently want to be: a Russian sausage tycoon, a Russian gas-industry executive, the editor in chief of a Russian tabloid, a Russian shipyard director, the head of a Russian ski resort, a Russian aviation official, or a Russian rail magnate. Anyone answering to such a description probably ought not stand near open windows, in almost any country, on almost every continent.

Over the weekend, Pavel Antov, the aforementioned sausage executive, a man who had reportedly expressed a dangerous lack of enthusiasm for Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine, was found dead at a hotel in India, just two days after one of his Russian travel companions died at the same hotel. Antov was reported to have fallen to his death from a hotel window. The meat millionaire and his also-deceased friend are the most recent additions to a macabre list of people who have succumbed to Sudden Russian Death Syndrome, a phenomenon that has claimed the lives of a flabbergastingly large number of businessmen, bureaucrats, oligarchs, and journalists. The catalog of these deaths—which includes alleged defenestrations, suspected poisonings, suspicious heart attacks, and supposed suicides—is remarkable for the variety of unnatural deaths contained within as well as its Russian-novel length.

Some two dozen notable Russians have died in 2022 in mysterious ways, some gruesomely. The bodies of the gas-industry leaders Leonid Shulman and Alexander Tyulakov were found with suicide notes at the beginning of the year. Then, in the span of one month, three more Russian executives—Vasily Melnikov, Vladislav Avayev, and Sergey Protosenya—were found dead, in apparent murder-suicides, with their wives and children. In May, Russian authorities found the body of the Sochi resort owner Andrei Krukovsky at the bottom of a cliff; a week later, Aleksandr Subbotin, a manager of a Russian gas company, died in a home belonging to a Moscow shaman, after he was allegedly poisoned with toad venom.

Anne Applebaum: The Kremlin must be in crisis

The list goes on. In July, the energy executive Yuri Voronov was found floating in his suburban St. Petersburg swimming pool with a bullet wound in his head. Think Gatsby by the Neva. In August, the Latvia-born Putin critic Dan Rapoport apparently fell from the window of his Washington, D.C., apartment, a mile from the White House—right before Ravil Maganov, the chairman of a Russian oil company, fell six stories from a window in Moscow. Earlier this month, the IT-company director Grigory Kochenov toppled off a balcony. Ten days ago, in the French Riviera, a Russian real-estate tycoon took a fatal tumble down a flight of stairs.

To reiterate: All of these deaths occurred this year.

One could argue that, given Russia’s exceptionally low life expectancy and unchecked rate of alcoholism, at least some of these fatalities were natural or accidental. Just because you’re Russian doesn’t mean you can’t accidentally fall out of an upper-story window. Sometimes, people kill themselves—and the suicide rate among Russian men is one of the highest recorded in the world. For Edward Luttwak, a historian and military-strategy expert, that’s at least part of what’s happening: an outbreak of mass despair among Russia’s connected and privileged elite. “Imagine what happens to a globalized country when sanctions kick in,” he told me. “Some of them will commit suicide.” But the sheer proliferation of these untimely deaths warrants a closer look.


After all, this is what the Kremlin does. There is precedent for this phenomenon. In 2020, Russian agents poisoned—but failed to kill—the Putin critic Alexei Navalny with a nerve agent; a decade earlier, they succeeded in a similar attempt on the Russian-security-services defector Alexander Litvinenko. In 2004, when Viktor Yushchenko ran against a Kremlin-backed opponent for Ukraine’s presidency, he was poisoned with dioxin and left disfigured. Thirty years earlier, the Bulgarian secret service, reportedly with the help of the Soviet KGB, killed the dissident Georgi Markov by stabbing him on the Waterloo Bridge in London with a ricin-laced umbrella tip. Russian agents often “turn to the most exotic,” Luttwak told me. “People who do assassinations for commercial purposes look at [their methods] and laugh.”

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Suicides are more difficult to decipher. For oligarchs who have failed to show sufficient loyalty to Putin, coaxed suicide is not an implausible scenario. “It is not uncommon to be told, ‘We can come to you or you can do the manly thing and commit suicide, take yourself off the chess board. At least you’ll have the agency of your own undoing,’” Michael Weiss, a journalist and the author of a forthcoming book on the GRU, the Russian military-intelligence agency, told me. Did Antov really fall out his window in India? Was he pushed by a Kremlin agent? Or did he get a call that threatened his family and made him feel he had no option but to leap? “All of these things are possible,” Weiss told me.

In the Kremlin’s Gothic murderverse, imagination is key.

Defenestration has been a favorite method of removing political opponents since the early days of multistory buildings, but in the modern era, Russia has monopolized the practice. Like Tosca’s climactic exit from the battlements of Castel Sant’Angelo, death by falling from a great height has a performative, even moral aspect.

In Russian, this business of assassination is known as mokroye delo, or “wet work.” Sometimes, the main purpose is to send a message to others: We’ll kill you and your family if you’re disloyal. Sometimes, the goal is to simply remove a troublesome individual.

A few years after the Russian whistleblower Alexander Perepilichny died while jogging outside London in 2012, at least one autopsy detected chemical residue in his stomach linked to the rare—and highly toxic—flowering plant gelsemium. “These are the clues of evidence that the Russians are fond of using,” Weiss told me. A calling card, if you will. “They want us to know that it was murder, but they don’t want us to be able to definitely conclude it was murder.”

Robert Service: Back in the U.S.S.R.

Poisoning has that ambiguity. It is literally covert, concealed, sometimes hard to detect. Defenestration is a bit less ambiguous. Yes, it could be an accident. But it’s a lot easier to conclude it was murder—an overt assassination.

“Things that mimic natural causes of death like a heart attack or a stroke, the Russians can be quite good at doing that,” Weiss said. The deaths range in their showiness, but they’re all part of the same overarching scheme: to perpetuate the idea that the Russian state is a deadly, all-powerful octopus, whose slimy tentacles can search out and seize any dissident, anywhere. As the Bond franchise had it, the world is not enough.

The war in Ukraine is not universally popular among Russia’s ruling elite. Since the conflict began, sanctions on oligarchs and businessmen have constrained their profligate and peripatetic lifestyles. Some are, understandably, said to be unhappy about this. High-level Russian elites feel as if Putin “has essentially wound the clock backwards,” Weiss said, to the bad old days of Cold War isolation.

This year’s spate of deaths—so brazen in their number and method as to suggest a lack of concern about plausible, or even implausible, deniability—is quite possibly Putin’s way of warning Russia’s elites that he is that deadly octopus. The point of eliminating critics, after all, isn’t necessarily to eliminate criticism. It is to remind the critics—with as much flair as possible—what the price of voicing that criticism can be.


Elaine Godfrey is a staff writer at The Atlantic.
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Fox News co-host blames capitalism for Southwest Airlines meltdown: 'This is not even about Pete Buttigieg'

NEWS
CHRIS ENLOE
December 29, 2022


Fox News contributor Richard Fowler, guest co-host on "The Five," blamed capitalism on Wednesday for the Southwest Airlines meltdown.

Southwest Airlines, previously thought to be one of the better airlines to fly on, has left tens of thousands of travelers stranded over the holiday season after the company canceled thousands of flights. Indeed, the vast majority of canceled flights over the holiday season have been Southwest flights.

Outdated systems and brutally cold winter weather are being blamed for the problems, but that is no consolation to stranded travelers.
What did Fowler say?

Republicans, and even some Democrats, are partially blaming Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg for the meltdown. They argue he has abdicated his vocational responsibilities, which include responding to transportation crises.

Fowler, however, completely rejected the argument.

"Democrats had a lot of hope in Pete Buttigieg. Are they embarrassed of just how he's performed over the last couple of years?" co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy asked Fowler.

"This is not even about Pete Buttigieg, though," he responded, amused by the suggestion.

"Ninety percent of the flights canceled in the United States today are from Southwest Airlines because you have a bad management, they have bad software," he went on to say. "You can't blame the flight attendants, you can't blame the pilots, you can't blame the ramp agents.

"You have to blame the people who sit in the corporate suites of Southwest Airlines for canceling flights. Period. The end of story," Fowler declared. "To blame Pete Buttigieg for the fact that Southwest can't manage their planes is ridiculous."

Instead, Fowler blamed capitalism for the meltdown.

"Once again, this is about capitalism and an airline that cannot manage it," he claimed. "Don't fly Southwest Airlines."



Anything else?

Southwest chief commercial officer Ryan Green issued a new apology on behalf of the airline Wednesday.

"My personal apology on behalf of myself and everyone at Southwest Airlines for all of this," Green said in a video message.

The airline executive said Southwest Airlines is committed to re-earning customers' trust and will start doing so by giving travelers increased "flexibility" for travel arrangements impacted by the meltdown and reimbursing them for expenses directly related to Southwest's problems.


"$7 billion taxpayer bailout": Sanders tells Buttigieg to hold Southwest's CEO accountable for greed

The Vermont senator blasted Southwest's "unacceptable" meltdown and demanded the Transportation Department step in

By JAKE JOHNSON
PUBLISHED DECEMBER 29, 2022
Bernie Sanders | Southwest Airlines (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images)

This article originally appeared at Common Dreams. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.

Sen. Bernie Sanders on Wednesday urged the Transportation Department to ensure Southwest's chief executive pays a price for mass U.S. flight cancellations that have left passengers and employees stranded around the country, throwing lives into chaos and drawing further attention to the company's business practices.

"Southwest's flight delays and cancellations are beyond unacceptable," Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote on Twitter. "This is a company that got a $7 billion taxpayer bailout and will be handing out $428 million in dividends to their wealthy shareholders. The U.S. Department of Transportation must hold Southwest's CEO accountable for his greed and incompetence."

Bob Jordan, who has worked for Southwest for decades and became the company's CEO earlier this year, acknowledged on Tuesday that the airline needs to "upgrade" its outdated scheduling system and other technology that flight attendants and pilots have been warning about for years.

"For more than a decade, leadership shortcomings in adapting, innovating, and safeguarding our operations have led to repeated system disruptions, countless disappointed passengers, and millions in lost profits," the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association (SWAPA) said in a statement Wednesday. "The holiday meltdown has been blamed on weather that had been forecast five days prior, but this problem began many years ago when the complexity of our network outgrew its ability to withstand meteorological and technological disruptions. SWAPA subject matter experts have repeatedly presented years of data, countless proposals that make Southwest pilots more efficient and resilient."

Instead of investing more heavily in such critical upgrades, Southwest pumped billions of dollars into stock buybacks in the years leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Jordan took over as chief executive in February, receiving a generous compensation package that could amount to $9 million for the year. Earlier this month, just weeks before the airline began canceling thousands of flights per day, Jordan announced that the company would reinstate its quarterly dividend, which was suspended at the beginning of the pandemic.

The current payout of 18 cents per share, set to reach shareholders next month, will cost the company $428 million a year.

In an internal message to employees on Tuesday, Jordan said of the ongoing meltdown, "This stops with me."

"I'm accountable for this and I own our issues and I own our recovery," Jordan added.

Like Southwest's management, the Transportation Department—headed by Pete Buttigieg—knew there was potential for a holiday travel crisis. The department is currently investigating the ongoing flight cancellations.

"Before the debacle, attorneys general from both parties were sounding alarms about regulators' lax oversight of the airline industry, imploring them and congressional lawmakers to crack down," The Lever reported Wednesday. "Four months before Southwest's mass cancellation of flights, 38 state attorneys general wrote to congressional leaders declaring that Buttigieg's agency 'failed to respond and to provide appropriate recourse' to thousands of consumer complaints about airlines' customer service."

"Weeks before that, New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) sent Buttigieg a letter warning of 'the deeply troubling and escalating pattern of airlines delaying and canceling flights' particularly during holidays," the outlet added.

In November, Buttigieg leveled fines totaling $7.25 million against six airlines for "extreme delays in providing refunds" to customers whose flights had been canceled or significantly altered.

But critics said the punishment was far from adequate, and neither Southwest nor its main competitors were among the companies ordered to pay penalties. The Lever noted Wednesday that Southwest "has spent more than $2 million on lobbying since Biden took office and Buttigieg became secretary of Transportation," and he has faced withering criticism for refusing to take on the increasingly consolidated airline industry.

According to Bloomberg, Buttigieg told Jordan on Tuesday that the Transportation Department "expects that Southwest will meet its obligations to passengers and workers and take steps to prevent a situation like this from happening again."

The Christmas travel crisis isn't the first time this year that U.S. airlines have faced backlash over mass cancellations. Around the July 4 holiday, major airlines including Southwest canceled or delayed thousands of flights amid a travel surge.

At the time, Sanders wrote a letter calling on Buttigieg to strengthen federal regulations to impose a fine of "$27,500 per passenger for all domestic flights that are delayed more than two hours and all international flights that are delayed more than three hours when passengers are forced to wait on the tarmac."

The senator also urged the Transportation Department to fine airlines "$55,000 per passenger if they cancel flights that they know cannot be fully staffed."

Buttigieg has yet to do either.

Sen.-elect John Fetterman (D-Pa.), who joined Sanders in calling for a crackdown on the airline industry earlier this year, wrote on Twitter Wednesday that "airlines have a responsibility to their customers."

"When they fail," he added, "we must hold them accountable."
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Netanyahu’s new government could lose a critical constituency: American conservatives

BY RON KAMPEAS DECEMBER 29, 2022 

Likud leader MK Benjamin Netanyahu speaks with Religious Zionist party head MK Bezalel Smotrich during a vote in the plenum session at the assembly hall of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament in Jerusalem, Dec. 20, 2022. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)


WASHINGTON (JTA) — The op-ed was typical of the Wall Street Journal’s conservative editorial page, extolling the virtues of moderation in all things.

The difference was that the author of the piece published Wednesday, Bezalel Smotrich, has a reputation for extremism, and the political landscape he was imagining is in Israel, not America.

Experts who track the U.S.-Israel relationship say the op-ed had a clear purpose: to quell the fears of American conservatives whom Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long cultivated as allies and who may be rattled by his new extremist partners in governing Israel.

Those partners include Smotrich, the Religious Zionist bloc leader and self-described “proud homophobe” whom Israeli intelligence officials have accused of planning terrorist attacks — and who was sworn in as finance minister in Netanyahu’s new government Thursday. They also include Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has been convicted of incitement for his past support of Jewish terrorists, who will oversee Israel’s police.

The presence of Smotrich, Ben-Gvir and their parties in Netanyahu’s governing coalition has alarmed American liberals, including some in the Biden administration. But insiders say conservatives are feeling spooked, too.

“The conservative right was with [Netanyahu] and now he seems to be riding the tiger of the radical right,” said David Makovsky, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who just returned from a tour of Israel where he met with senior officials of both the outgoing and incoming governments. “And I think that is bound to alienate the very people who counted on him being risk-averse and to focus on the economy.”

In his op-ed published on Tuesday, two days before the new Israeli government was sworn inLINK TK, Smotrich sought to persuade Americans that the new government is not the hotbed of ultranationalist and religious extremism it has been made out to be in the American press.

“The U.S. media has vilified me and the traditionalist bloc to which I belong since our success in Israel’s November elections,” he wrote. “They say I am a right-wing extremist and that our bloc will usher in a ‘halachic state’ in which Jewish law governs. In reality, we seek to strengthen every citizen’s freedoms and the country’s democratic institutions, bringing Israel more closely in line with the liberal American model.”

The op-ed is at odds with the stated aims of the coalition agreements; whereas Smotrich says there will be no legal changes to disputed areas in the West Bank, the agreements include a pledge to annex areas at an unspecified time, and to legalize outposts deemed illegal even under Israeli law. He says changes to religious practice will not involve coercion, but the agreement allows businesses to decline service “because of a religious belief,” which a member of his party has anticipated could extend to declining service to LGBTQ people.

Netanyahu has alienated the American left with his relentless attacks on its preference for a two-state outcome to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which he perceives as dangerous and naive. (He also differs from them on how to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.) He has instead cultivated a base on the right through close ties with the Republican Party and among evangelicals, made possible in part because he has long espoused the values traditional conservatives hold dear, including free markets and a united robust Western stance against extremism and terrorism.

But his alliance with Smotrich and others perceived as theocratic extremists may be a bridge too far even for Netanyahu’s conservative friends, who champion democratic values overseas, said Dov Zakheim, a veteran defense official in multiple Republican administrations.

“Traditional conservatives are much closer to the Bushes, and Jim Baker and those sorts of folks,” he said, referring to the two former presidents and the secretary of state under the late George H. W. Bush.

Jonathan Schanzer, a vice president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said the op-ed was likely written at Netanyahu’s behest with those conservatives in mind.

“The Wall Street Journal piece was designed to appeal to traditional conservatives,” he said. “It was designed to send a message to the American public writ large that the way in which Smotrich and perhaps [Itamar] Ben Gvir have been described is based on past utterances and not necessarily their forward-looking policies.”

The immediate predicate for the op-ed, insiders say, was likely a New York Times editorial on Dec. 17 that called the incoming government “a significant threat to the future of Israel” because of the extremist positions Smotrich and other partners have embraced, including the annexation of the West Bank, restrictions on non-Orthodox and non-Jewish citizens, diminishing the independence of the courts, reforming the Law of Return that would render ineligible huge chunks of Diaspora Jewry, and anti-LGBTQ measures.

Smotrich in his op-ed casts the changes not as radical departures from democratic norms but as tweaks that would align Israel more with U.S. values. He said he would pursue a “broad free-market policy” as finance minister. He likened religious reforms to the Supreme Court decision that allowed Christian service providers to decline work from LGBTQ couples.

“For example, arranging for a minuscule number of sex-separated beaches, as we propose, scarcely limits the choices of the majority of Israelis who prefer mixed beaches,” Smotrich wrote. “It simply offers an option to others.”

In the West Bank, Smotrich said, his finance ministry would promote the building of infrastructure and employment which would benefit Israeli Jewish settlers and Palestinians alike. “This doesn’t entail changing the political or legal status of the area.”

Such salves contradict the stated aims of the new government’s coalition agreement, Anshel Pfeffer, a Netanyahu biographer and analyst for Haaretz said in a Twitter thread picking apart Smotrich’s op-ed.

“Smotrich says his policy doesn’t mean changing the political or legal status of the occupied territories while annexation actually appears in the coalition agreement and his plans certainly change the legal status of the settlements,” Pfeffer said.

Danielle Pletka, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said foreign media alarm at the composition of the incoming government was premature.

“I suspect that the vast mass of people will maintain the support that they have for Israel because it hasn’t got anything to do with the passing of one government to another and has everything to do with the principle that Israel is a pro-American democracy in a region that’s pretty important,” she said.

That said, Pletka said, the changes in policy embraced by Smotrich and his cohort could alienate Americans should they become policy.

“I think a lot of things can change if the rhetoric from Netanyahu’s government becomes policy, but right now, it’s rhetoric,” she said. “What you tend to see in normal governments is that they need to make a series of compromises between rhetoric that plays to their base and governance.”

Pletka said Netanyahuu’s stated ambition to expand the 2020 Abraham Accords to peace with Saudi Arabia would likely inhibit plans by Smotrich to annex the West Bank. In the summer of 2020, the last time Netanyahu planned annexation, the United Arab Emirates, one of the four Arab Parties to the Abraham Accords, threatened to pull out unless Netanyahu pulled back — which he did.

“It’s not just the relationship with the United States,” she said. “This might alienate their new friends in the Gulf, which, at the end of the day, may actually have more serious consequences.”

Netanyahu has repeatedly sought to relay the impression that he will keep his coalition partners on a short leash.

“They’re joining me, I’m not joining them,” he said earlier this month. “I’ll have two hands firmly on the steering wheel. I won’t let anybody do anything to LGBT [people] or to deny our Arab citizens their rights or anything like that.”

Zakheim said that Netanyahu, who is Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, from 1996 to 1999 and then from 2009 to 2021, has proven chops at steering rangy coalitions — but there are two key differences now.

Netanyahu wants his coalition partners to pass a law that would effectively end his trial for criminal fraud, and so they exercise unprecedented leverage over him. Additionally, Netanyahu in the past has faced the greatest pressure from haredi Orthodox parties, who are susceptible to suasion by funding their impoverished sector. That’s not true of his new ideologically driven partners.

“If you look at his past governments, he has really never been forced into real policy decisions by those to the right of him,” Zekheim said. “Now he’s got a problem because these 15 or so seats of those to his right are interested in policy, not just in money.”

Makovsky said Netanyahu appears to be leaving behind a conservatism that was sympathetic to the outlook of its American counterpart.

“His success has been that he’s a stabilizer. He’s risk-averse. He’s focused on the prosperity of the country, with high-tech success. He’s the one to be seen as the tenacious guardian against Iranian nuclear influence,” he said. “And those are things people could relate to. Now, it just seems like he’s just throwing the playbook out the window.”

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