So, the other day I’m doomscrolling the news from Gaza, and I stumbled over this 8 year-old Truthout article that somebody dug up and tweeted. The callousness of Washington foreign-policy think tanks — and the Israeli general public — is perversely spectacular:
Israeli hardliners joke about the periodic need to decimate each new generation of Palestinian militants as “mowing the grass,” a process underway again in new bombardments of Gaza. This ugly metaphor has also penetrated the think-tank world of Official Washington, as ex-CIA analyst Elizabeth Murray learned.
In early 2010, one of Washington DC’s most prestigious think tanks was holding a seminar on the Middle East which included a discussion of Israel’s December 2008-January 2009 assault on Gaza which killed about 1,300 Palestinians. When the death toll was mentioned, one expert on the panel smiled enigmatically and intoned: “It’s unfortunate, but every once in a while you have to mow the lawn.”
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The Colonial Pipeline hack attack caused gas shortages all around the US, sparking massive amounts of mindless — and straight-up stupid — panic buying, and Israel was no exception — and the US, of course, was happy to sell them all the shit they could burn in Gaza this week.
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No doubt that day last week will go down as “Black Wednesday” for all the death’n’misery profiteers out there: the day the US Trade Representative’s office announced its support for a waiver of patent protection for COVID19 vaccines developed by Pfizer, Biontech, Novavax, and Moderna — and Wall Street crapped its pants.
After week after week after week of hell raised about places like India, where they’re dying like flies and can’t get enough vaccine because American corporations, true to form, are hoarding the supply and the IP protection — the US Trade Rep has decided that waiving patent protection on vaccines during a worldwide pandemic might be a pretty good idea after all… and this hasn’t stopped Wall Street from doing the voodoo that it do so well — setting shares of all four of those companies dropping like a rock on Jupiter.
Buddy, can you paradigm?
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