Ingredients
1 pound green beans, stems trimmed
2 teaspoons olive oil
1 red bell pepper, seeded and cut into thin slices
1/2 teaspoon chili paste or red pepper flakes
1 clove garlic, finely chopped
1 teaspoon sesame oil
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
Directions
Cut the beans into 2-inch pieces. Bring a large saucepan 3/4 full of water to a boil. Add the beans and cook until they turn bright green and are tender-crisp, 1 to 3 minutes. Drain the beans, then plunge them into a bowl of ice water to stop the cooking. Drain again and set aside.
In a large frying pan, heat the olive oil over medium heat. Add the bell pepper and toss and stir for about 1 minute. Add the beans and saute for 1 minute longer. Add the chili paste and garlic and stir for 1 minute. The beans will be tender and bright green. Drizzle with the sesame oil and season with the salt and pepper. Serve immediately.
I like green beans so I probably note recipes for green beans constantly. But if you ever bother to search it (who has the time) and you end up with 20 or even 40 at this website, you'll know why.
I do not love using prisoners as slave labor. I do not love the privatized system that ships them all over, often too far away for their families and loved ones to visit them. There's also the use of private prisons to 'address' immigration. Joshua Leach and Hannah Hafter (In These Times) report:
Last year, a former federal prison near Folkston, Georgia was emptied after President Biden signed an executive order phasing out the use of private prisons. So why is business now booming at the same facility for GEO Group, one of the nation’s largest private prison firms? Because the administration has pulled a sneaky sleight-of-hand: Rather than fully halting the incarceration of people in such facilities, it has allowed them to simply be converted into immigration detention spaces.
This is an appalling reversal from the administration’s earlier promises. After all, Biden came into office with bold pledges to scale back the use of for-profit incarceration of all kinds. Within days of the president’s inauguration, he appeared to follow through on this promise by issuing an executive order purporting to end the use of private prisons to hold people in federal criminal custody.
However, Biden’s order left at least one major loophole: It was silent on the use of private contractors to detain immigrants in civil custody. There was reason to hope a similar order barring privatized immigration detention might follow, as Biden pledged on the campaign trail to “end for-profit detention centers,” as part of his immigration platform. And last April, he claimed that he would make good on this commitment within five days.
In the roughly 300 days that have passed since then, however, private detention has not ended — it has metastasized. In many ways, immigration detention is filling the gap in the federal incarcerated population left by Biden’s order. The expansion of the Folkston facility, for instance, would make it one of the largest such immigration detention facilities in the country.
The Biden administration has taken a few positive steps to address the particularly harmful forms of immigration detention, such as the confinement of asylum-seeking families. But for each step forward, there have been several steps back. In the case of family detention, for example, the sites where family units were confined haven’t closed down, but merely been repurposed. One of them — a facility in Berks County Pennsylvania, which for years held asylum-seeking mothers and children — has now reopened as a facility for detaining single adult women.
This is part of a pattern. If a facility is emptied for a time, but never shuttered, it is almost certain to eventually be refilled by another detained population. After Louisiana took positive steps to reduce the number of incarcerated people in its parish jails, for instance, many of these facilities simply switched over to detaining immigrants. The availability of such detention sites creates a powerful incentive to find ways to fill them, regardless of the stated rationale.
Far from reducing the use of immigration detention, Biden’s order on private prisons left an opening to expand it — and the statistics bear this out. The number of people in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody has climbed since Biden took office. This is especially concerning in the midst of a public health crisis known to spread in detention settings. During the most recent wave of Covid-19 infections, diagnoses surged in ICE custody, causing at least 11 deaths.
This is C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot" for Wednesday:
For two years the left has championed policies of surveillance and exclusion in the form of: punitive vaccine mandates, invasive vaccine passports, socially destructive lockdowns, and radically unaccountable censorship by large media and technology corporations. For the entire pandemic, leftists and liberals – call them the Lockdown Left – cheered on unprecedented levels of repression aimed primarily at the working class – those who could not afford private schools and could not comfortably telecommute from second homes.
Almost the entire left intelligentsia has remained psychically stuck in March 2020. Its members have applauded the new biosecurity repression and calumniated as liars, grifters, and fascists any and all who dissented. Typically, they did so without even engaging evidence and while shirking public debate. Among the most visible in this has been Noam Chomsky, the self-described anarcho-syndicalist who called for the unvaccinated to “remove themselves from society,” and suggested that they should be allowed to go hungry if they refuse to submit. [1]
In Jacobin, a magazine claiming to support the working class in all its struggles, Branko Marcetic demanded the unvaccinated be barred from public transportation: “one obvious course of action is for Biden to make vaccines a requirement for mass transport.” [2] Journalist Doug Henwood has scolded the unvaccinated with: “Get over your own bloated sense of self-importance.” [3] But Henwood has championed shutting down all of society in the name of safety, while refusing to engage counter-arguments – a combination that suggests a bloated sense of self-importance of his own.
Other left intellectuals, like Benjamin Bratton, author of a Verso book on the pandemic called Return of the Real, are notable for hiding amidst academic blather: “the book’s argument is on behalf [of] a ‘positive biopolitics’ that may form the basis of viable social self-organization, but this is less a statement on behalf of ‘the political’ in some metaphysical sense than on behalf of a governmentality through which an inevitably planetary society can deliberately compose itself.” [4] This is, as the late Alex Cockburn once said, “what dumb people think smart people sound like.”
Even the American Civil Liberties Union – long a bastion of objective thinking and civil liberties absolutism – has supported the mandates, lockdowns, and censorship. David Cole, the group’s legal director, debased himself in the New York Times with a tortured op-ed explaining how everything the ACLU stood for over the last 100 years suddenly did not apply during the season of freakout and overreach. [5]
In the second year of the pandemic, the chief executives of the top US corporations are on track to set new compensation records while the wages of their workers were reduced. This is the conclusion drawn by several analyses of pay data submitted by a group of S&P 500 corporations to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as part of their annual filing requirements.
On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal reported that median pay for CEOs rose to $14.2 million last year, up from a record $13.4 million in 2020. The report said that half of the companies reported median wages for their workers increased in 2021 by 3.1 percent. However, this is less than half of last year’s inflation rate of 6.7 percent, and it means that these workers took an effective paycut.
The Journal report noted, “Most CEOs received a pay increase of 11 percent or more, and pay rose by at least 25 percent for nearly one-third of them.” It also reported that for one-third of the companies, median employee pay declined last year.
These figures are based on a review by the Journal of “pay data for more than half the index from MyLogIQ LLC.” MyLogIQ is a provider of SEC compliance services and has access to the government agency public filings database.
In recent days, a longstanding investigation by the Department of Justice (DoJ) into the taxes and financial affairs of Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden, has become the subject of prominent news reports in the mainstream press. The reports, nearly all citing anonymous sources within the DoJ, confirm that the investigation, which began during the Trump administration but was not disclosed by Hunter Biden until December 2020, has broadened in scope.
As of this writing, no official charges have been made against Hunter Biden or any other member of the Biden family.
Prominent articles on the federal investigation into the younger Biden’s international business dealings began to appear in mid-March. On March 16, the New York Times reported that the president’s son recently paid off an outstanding tax liability of over $1 million. Nevertheless, “a grand jury continued to gather evidence in a wide-ranging examination of his international business dealings, according to people familiar with the case,” the newspaper wrote.
Subsequent reports, citing sources within the DoJ, confirmed that witnesses with close ties to Hunter Biden, including former business and romantic partners, are being interviewed by a federal grand jury located in Wilmington, Delaware. Among them is former business associate and fellow Yale University alumnus Devon Archer.
Archer was sentenced to 13 months imprisonment in February for his participation in a fraud scheme, following his conviction in 2018. The operation involved defrauding the Oglala Sioux tribe of roughly $60 million in bonds.
While Hunter Biden was not involved in Archer’s fraud case, the former friends and business partners both sat on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings, which, the DoJ has confirmed, is under investigation.
Hunter Biden was appointed to the Burisma board, despite having no experience in the field, during the period when his father, then vice president, served as the point-man for the Obama administration’s imperialist operations in Ukraine following the US-backed Maidan coup of February 2014.
Burisma paid Hunter Biden roughly $50,000 a month between 2014 and 2019. The money was wired to a Delaware-based corporation called Rosemont Seneca Bohai LLC, which was owned by Archer and registered by him on February 13, 2014. The company, according to a September 2020 report by Senate Republicans, acted as “a shell entity” to receive an estimated $3.5 million in payments from Burisma to Archer and Hunter Biden. In the same report, the Republicans detailed Hunter Biden’s business dealings in China.
In yet another major effort to escalate NATO’s proxy war against Russia, the Biden administration is seizing upon claims by Ukrainian officials of a massacre by Russian forces in the Kiev suburb of Bucha to implement a new round of sanctions and undermine any effort at a peaceful settlement of the war.
“I got criticized for calling Putin a war criminal,” US President Joe Biden said Monday. “Well, the truth of the matter, you saw what happened in Bucha. He is a war criminal.” Biden added, “We have to continue to provide Ukraine with the weapons they need in order to fight.”
The American government, along with the media, proceeds according to the principle: first the conclusion, then the investigation. Biden, who more than one year after the January 6 coup attempt cannot make up his mind whether Trump is guilty of a crime, has already decided that Russian President Vladimir Putin is guilty of “war crimes” in Bucha.
The actual facts, however, do not prove the conclusion. Russian troops withdrew from Bucha right after the Kremlin promised to dramatically reduce its forces in the direction of Kiev in peace negotiations last Tuesday. For days, no significant civilian casualties were reported. On Saturday, Ukrainian forces—including members of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion—entered the town, and a torrent of reports were unleashed in the Western press about alleged atrocities.
The images shown widely only indicate that bodies were found, but not who killed whom, when and under what circumstances. While video evidence has emerged of Ukrainian forces executing and torturing unarmed people, no similar evidence has emerged for Russian troops.
Given the systematic use by the United States of false allegations of atrocities to justify wars all over the world, and absent clear and convincing evidence, there is no reason to view the claims of a massacre in Bucha as anything other than war propaganda, aimed at enraging the population to justify military escalation.
Even if it were established that Russian troops fired on civilians—and that has not been established—that would not mean that they were acting under the instruction of the Russian government.
A number of Democratic Party strategists spoke to The Hill seven months ahead of the November midterms. One of them concluded the party is doomed.
With record gas prices and four-decade high inflation pricing some Americans out of basic commodities, party insiders weighed in. The consensus was President Joe Biden and Democrats are in serious trouble.
Worried about not only losing a majority in the House, but also in the Senate, top strategists spoke of the issues Democrats face in convincing Americans to turn out and vote for them in the fall.
Bill Galston, who advised former President Bill Clinton, said Biden’s approval numbers can only go so high right now.
“My hypothesis is that, unless and until inflation comes down appreciably, that there’s going to be a ceiling on his job approval that’s a lot lower than the White House wants it to be,” Galston said.
Gallup senior editor Jeff Jones concurred. “High gas prices are one of the biggest anchors on presidential approval,” Jones said.
Biden’s approval rating is hovering at a round 40 percent. The RealClearPolitics average shows 41.0% approve of Biden’s job performance, while 53.8% disapprove.
The Biden administration has repeatedly attempted to attribute pain at the pump to Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine. There was a consensus among experts that the message is not helping the president with voters.
