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This week on CounterSpin: US elite media have heralded Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as a reformer—”young and brash,” as the New York Times editorial board had it—who is uplifting women, in particular, in the monarchy. It takes a lot to upset a narrative—particularly from a country that is mainly only reported in terms of its strategic partnership, i.e. usefulness to powerful US interests—but one would hope that reports that Saudi Arabia under MBS (as he’s called) is torturing women political prisoners would be sufficient. We’ll talk about story vs. reality with journalist Sarah Aziza.
Transcript: ‘MBS Has Ushered in an Era of Unprecedented Crackdowns and Repression of Political Speech’
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin Sarah Aziza Interview @http://www.fair.org/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin190208Aziza.mp3″]
Howard Schultz (photo: DoD/James K. McCann)
Also on the show: Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz doesn’t like the word “billionaire”; he’d prefer we speak of “people of means,” thank you. Schultz is responding—touchily—to the increased willingness to engage seriously proposals to reduce wealth and income inequality in the US. We’ll talk about some of those proposals—what they can and can’t do, and why we need them all—with economist Dean Baker, co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and author of the free book Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer.
Transcript: ‘The Distribution of Income Depends on How We Structure the Economy’
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin Dean Baker Interview @http://www.fair.org/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin190208Baker.mp3″]
As a Christian, I feel that it is our obligation to not only help the poor, but also to save those who have violated the first commandment, becoming an idolator to their wealth. Since the ultras, like the young ruler in the gospels, will never willingly relinquish their wealth, we need to confiscate the wealth of those whose net worth exceeds $50 million per capita. This will impact approximately 2/100ths of 1% of the population and the windfall can then be annualized with yearly payments to bolster Social Security and universal healthcare and nothing else! (We don’t need any more bridges to nowhere!)
That talk on taxes was years and years overdue