5: Is It Possible to Cure Prejudice and Racism?
For obvious reasons, last year saw a surge of discussion around how to engage with people who hold prejudiced or racist views—and if those people should even be engaged with at all.
This debate tends to fall into two broad themes. The first is to say, essentially, fuck you: your prejudice is your problem—why should people of colour or anyone from the LGBTQ community have to go out of their way to fix what is largely a straight, white problem?
The second approach emphasises the need for empathy—for talking people around, no matter how repugnant their views. At the end of 2016 Barack Obama made it clear that this is the strategy he prefers. “There have been very few instances where I’ve said, ‘Well, that was racist, you are racist […] I don’t think that trying to appeal to the better angels of our nature, as Lincoln put it, is somehow compromise.”
While this discussion might have generated plenty of pinned tweets and rage posts, there appeared to be very little data on what actually works. However, in April of last year, a study was published that seemed to offer an answer. “Durably Reducing Transphobia: A Field Experiment on Door-to-Door Canvassing” by David Broockman and Joshua Kalla was hailed as the first large-scale experiment to achieve significant results in creating long-term change in prejudice.
Vice News
4: Corporations Prepare to Gorge on Tax Cuts Trump Claims Will Create Jobs
THE OFFICIAL LINE from U.S.-based multinational corporations is that if they get a huge tax break, they’ll bring home the trillions of dollars in profits they’ve stashed overseas and use it to hire tons of Americans. (Nearly 3 million, says the U.S. Chamber of Commerce!)
But now that Donald Trump’s election means it might really happen, corporate executives are telling Wall Street analysts what they’ll actually use that money for: enriching their shareholders and buying other companies.
The Intercept’s examination of dozens of earnings calls and investor conference talks since Trump won the presidential election finds that many executives are telling analysts at large banks that they are eager to take the money to increase dividends and stock buybacks as well as snap up competitors. They demonstrate considerably less if any enthusiasm for going on a domestic hiring spree.
Many U.S. multinationals, especially in the technology and pharmaceutical industries, have long resisted bringing their overseas profits back to America — because if they did they’d have to pay taxes on them at the current corporate rate of 35 percent. Their accumulated untaxed foreign profits have now grown to a spectacular $2.5 trillion, an amount equal to about 70 percent of the federal government’s annual budget and 14 percent of the entire U.S. economy.
The Intercept
3: Russia hacking: US intelligence chief hits back at Trump’s ‘disparagement’
The departing head of US intelligence has publicly defended his analysts against attacks by Donald Trump following their conclusion that Russia interfered in the November election, as the unprecedented dispute between the president-elect and the intelligence services he will soon control broke into the open.
“There’s a difference between skepticism and disparagement,” James Clapper told a hearing into foreign cyber-threats to the US held by the Senate armed services committee, adding that US intelligence analysts “stand more resolutely” than ever behind their conclusion of “Russian interference in our electoral process”.
The testimony comes amid an extraordinary escalation of animosity between Trump and the US intelligence agencies. Trump has publicly derided the agencies for concluding Russia interfered in the election, and this week cited a denial by Julian Assange of WikiLeaks that his source was the Russian government or “a state party”. US intelligence agencies have suggested that Russia passed the hacked material to WikiLeaks through intermediaries.
The Guardian
Resistance to many of President-elect Trump’s Cabinet picks who face Senate confirmation hearings in the coming weeks entered a new phase Tuesday when NAACP President Cornell William Brooks and five other civil rights leaders were arrested during a sit-in at the office of Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, demanding he withdraw his name from consideration for attorney general. Trump’s pick has drawn widespread outrage because of Sessions’s opposition to the Voting Rights Act, support for anti-immigration legislation and history of making racist comments. Fresh from his arrest, we are joined by Cornell William Brooks, president and CEO of the NAACP, who is also a longtime human rights advocate, civil rights lawyer and minister.
Democracy Now
1: US adds Bin Laden’s son to terror blacklist
The United States has added the son of the late al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden to the US counter-terrorism blacklist, in a move that would keep him from accessing the US financial system.
The State and Treasury departments said on Thursday they had designated Hamza bin Laden a “global terrorist” who they said had “called for acts of terrorism in western capitals”.
Hamza, who is in his mid-twenties, has become active as a member of al-Qaeda since his father’s death at the hands of US special forces on May 2, 2011.
Egyptian deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri has since taken up the reins of the organisation, but Hamza has also issued audio messages to supporters and was officially named an al-Qaeda member in 2014.
In August 2015, al-Qaeda released an audio message that it claimed had come from Hamza, in which he urged attacks on the US and its allies.
Aljazeera
