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Tuesday, August 18, 2026
Monday, August 17, 2026
[Salon] $1.1 MILLION AN HOUR!!—Trump’s Personal Profit in 2025 - Guest Post
https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/08/17/1-1-million-an-hour-trumps-personal-profit-in-2025/
$1.1 MILLION AN HOUR!!—Trump’s Personal Profit in 2025
Ralph Nader 8/17/26
To House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer—Your responses on July 1, 2026 on the reporting of the $2.2 billion profit personally reaped by President Donald Trump, while allegedly a public servant in 2025, was not specific enough.
Jeffries wrote on his social media account: “Donald Trump made more than $2 billion during his first year as President. Republicans are enriching themselves while making your life more expensive. We must crush the culture of corruption.”
Schumer wrote on his: “$2.2 BILLION for the Trump family. Higher costs for the American people.”
You should have described his huge loot as $1.1 million an hour. That’s right, $1.1 million an hour based on a 40-hour work week over one year. (And remember, Trump spends a lot of his time on his vengeance missions, his golf game, and napping—so a 40-hour work week is a generous estimate.)
You should have then compared that enormous sum per hour with the Trump/GOP supported federal minimum wage, frozen at $7.25 per hour. This would have given you the perfect occasion to highlight the case for a much higher federal minimum wage, helping tens of millions of American workers.
You also omitted his unlawful agreement with the IRS to give him a free ride on tax abuses.
Such profiteering from his public office at $1.1 million an hour is staggering, especially when you detail where it came from. This would have resonated with a huge portion of the voting public, including Republicans. Instead, Democrats lost the opportunity to make that stunningly understandable communication. But it is not too late to revive and make more concrete his boastful misuse of the office of the presidency. You can compare it with past presidents’ sense of self restraint. You can ask for widespread feedback from the American people and make it part of his widely discernible profiteering persona of greed and lawless power.
One further response to this mountain of greed by Donald Trump should be joint shadow hearings between the House and Senate Democrats during this August recess. This would bring this appalling engagement by Trump in his various investment arrangements to a wider audience and highlight recommendations of reforms to prevent such massive and dubious self-enrichment by a President of the United States. There will be many competent legal and other experts to testify at your hearings, which no doubt will reveal more information and reach a large audience during the August recess.
These hearings would provide the Capitol press corps with much needed information to fulfill their professional responsibility to provide the people with their right to know the fuller details of what has yet not been reported.
Another way to put it is, you don’t make $1.1 million an hour by pushing a button. There is a lot of personal hidden back-and-forths by many people and many conflicts of interest to make that rich haul a reality.
Contact your Democratic members of Congress and demand shadow hearings. Ask for their written response. Do your part to help make it happen. The Congressional Switchboard number is 202-224-3121.
[Salon] Israel beyond its borders: the Cyprus Question - ArabDigest.org Guest Post
Israel beyond its borders: the Cyprus Question
Summary: Israel is heading to the polls on October 27 and as the campaign heats up a powerful Israeli politician is chasing votes in Cyprus.
We thank Nour Halabi for today’s newsletter. Nour is a Lebanese political scientist and journalist whose work focuses on Middle East politics with a particular interest in identity politics and sectarianism.
In early August in Rome, Israeli and Lebanese officials sat down for a seventh round of US-mediated talks, with Israel refusing to withdraw from South Lebanon. Its forces continued striking villages in the south mid-negotiation and continued striking Gaza in parallel.
None of this is surprising. However, what is quite curious is a battle being fought several hundred kilometres from either front: a billboard campaign near Larnaca airport in Cyprus. The Yashar party led by Gadi Eisenkot a former IDF chief of staff and author of the Dahiya Doctrine (which calls for massive and disproportionate use of force and the deliberate targeting of civilians) launched the campaign in July. Eisenkot has emerged in recent polls as the strongest challenger to Netanyahu. His billboards have become the island’s most unlikely political flashpoint with opposition politicians demanding to know why they were allowed.
A promotional billboard campaign for Israeli politician Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar! party was launched in Cyprus to target Israeli citizens on the island ahead of the 27 October legislative elections.
But the billboards are just the tip of the iceberg. The country has spent years gradually absorbing a wave of Israeli capital, real estate and diaspora presence that has reshaped its coastal cities.
Behind the billboards there lies a story: decades of Israeli capital, real estate and strategic ties outstripping Cyprus’s ability to effectively regulate their impact.
Israeli presence in Cyprus well precedes the current election cycle. The exact resident population is difficult to establish, but estimates in recent years have put the Israeli community at around 15,000 people.
It is important to note that this should not be reduced to the idea of an Israeli “takeover.” Cyprus has spent years constructing an economic model intended to attract foreign money. Tourism, real estate, favourable tax structures, business relocation and investment-based residency have all formed part of that model. With Tel Aviv just an hour away by plane it is unsurprising that Israeli investment in Cyprus has shown significant growth as has the population of the expat community.
The Eisenkot billboards have become a lightning rod for Cypriot fears over Israel’s intentions. The anxiety is exacerbated by two different regulatory problems in attempting to manage the issue.
Independent Cypriot MEP Fidias Panayiotou demanded legislation prohibiting third-country election campaigns, while Cyprus’s Interior Ministry said it had no legal framework under its jurisdiction with which to regulate the political content of billboards. The island’s advertising self-regulatory body also reiterated there was no specific framework governing what could appear on commercial billboards. No previous case of a foreign party openly campaigning in Cyprus has been publicly identified.
So, regarding foreign political advertising, the gap exposed by the campaign is unusually striking. Cyprus regulates elections conducted in Cyprus. Cyprus never legislated against billboarding on behalf of a foreign politician because it never occurred to anyone that it would need to. And this is less an oversight than a description of how this kind of influence tends to work: it arrives ahead of the law.
Second, when it comes to property, the law is more explicit. Non-EU nationals face restrictions regarding acquiring Cypriot real estate. For example, current rules permit a plot of up to 4,000 square metres for an owner-occupied dwelling or up to two specified property units. Cyprus also offers permanent residency to qualifying non-EU investors, including through property investment of at least €300,000.
Nonetheless, in February, Cypriot MPs and government officials themselves acknowledged that the legislation governing foreign acquisitions is outdated and riddled with loopholes. A report cited in parliament found that non-EU nationals accounted for more than a quarter of recorded property sales in 2024. Much of the real estate is being purchased by Israelis.
Thus, on the one hand, there is a lack of rules, and on the other, there are existing rules that policymakers admit are flawed. Both raise the same broader question: how capable is Cyprus of regulating an external presence once that presence has become economically embedded and valuable?
There is also another layer to this relationship that makes the billboards impossible to treat as an isolated event.
Cyprus and Israel have spent the past decade deepening their security relationship. Cyprus has acquired Israel’s Barak MX air-defence system as part of a wider effort to replace ageing Russian equipment. Greece, Cyprus and Israel signed a trilateral work plan at the end of 2025 to deepen military cooperation during 2026, building on years of expanding defence ties. Additionally, plans announced in 2025 envisioned an approximately 200-kilometre pipeline carrying Israeli gas from the Karish field directly to Cyprus.
In sum, this bilateral relationship has become economically and strategically valuable to Cyprus and to Israel. Thus the billboards have appeared inside a political environment that is already transformed by years of accumulating ties.
Months prior to the appearance of the Eisenkot billboards, Oren Anolik, Israel’s ambassador to Cyprus, warned against rhetoric presenting Israeli residents and investment as threatening. He argued that portraying Israeli economic activity as a “takeover” or unchecked influence risks reinforcing historical stereotypes about Jewish economic power. Israeli families and professionals in Cyprus, he argued, can be understood as part of a broader process of economic and social integration.
Indeed, it is worth being precise about what is actually being examined here. Criticising a state’s behaviour is not the same as casting suspicion on a nationality. Pointing to concentrations of foreign capital does not imply that every foreign homeowner is a political actor. And analysing defence agreements is not the same as treating Jewish communal life as an arm of the Israeli state.
Clearly, an Israeli family moving to Cyprus is not the Israeli state. But recognising this distinction does not mean that the broader political and economic implications of Israeli migration and investment in Cyprus cease to be relevant.
For the island, the billboards expose a difficult question: can it regulate Israeli political activity on its soil when its economy has spent years being built around Israeli tourism, capital and residency?
Israeli power is generally discussed in the Arab world through its most violent manifestations and those realities remain fundamental. Nothing happening in Cyprus is remotely equivalent to the genocide and occupation in Palestine, the scorched earth war in Lebanon and the IDF occupation of a swathe of land in the south of Syria. However, for the wider region, Cyprus showcases a different and quietly dangerous form of regional reach. Power is still geopolitical even when it doesn’t arrive through arms and military occupation.
Consequently, if a politician trying to govern one country can look at the road outside another country’s airport and see that as part of his natural electoral terrain, it is clear that something has already changed in the relationship between capital, mobility, and most importantly, sovereignty.
Archaeo - Histories on X: "A colorized photograph (restored) showing a banquet scene in Shenyang (Manchuria), China, in March 1946, featuring Soviet Red Army officers alongside local residents and women. The Soviet occupation of Manchuria began in August 1945, when the Soviet Union launched a massive" / X
Sunday, August 16, 2026
Spain’s defiance challenges the western consensus — Strategic Culture
Spain’s defiance challenges the western consensus — Strategic Culture
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2026/08/16/spain-defiance-challenges-western-consensus/
8/16/26
"Whether one agrees with Sánchez’s policies or not, his government has shown that political independence has not yet disappeared from Europe.
Spain’s defiance challenges the western consensus."
The latest assault on Spain – using impoverished human beings condemned to unimaginable suffering as political cannon fodder – is yet another illustration of the ignoble arsenal employed by imperial power, and by the West more broadly, to impose its geopolitical interests.
Is anyone seriously expected to believe that, at the flick of an invisible switch somewhere in Morocco – or perhaps in Tel Aviv or Washington – tens of thousands of Moroccans and other African migrants simultaneously decided to storm the Spanish enclave of Ceuta before dispersing across Spain?
Who organised such an operation? Who coordinated it? Who stood behind it?
The Canaanite woman and welcoming foreigners - OSV News
The Canaanite woman and
welcoming foreigners - OSV News
Comment from OSV News:
This Sunday, one thing becomes clear: God really doesn't check passports or papers.
That is one of the messages of this Sunday's scripture, and it couldn't be more timely or provocative. In our polarized world -- a world divided by nationalities and religions, raging at each other with drones and missile strikes, seeking to expel foreigners and build walls -- these readings offer another way. Here is a way of mercy and acceptance and a love that knows no borders.
An eye-opening lesson comes in Matthew's Gospel, which recounts how Jesus meets a Canaanite woman who pleads for pity because her daughter is being tormented by a demon. Pay close attention to the first reaction to this woman. It doesn't come from Jesus. The blowback comes from the disciples.
Saturday, August 15, 2026
Friday, August 14, 2026
Thursday, August 13, 2026
Wednesday, August 12, 2026
Fr. Bob's Reflection for the Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
In the early days of sailing, a young boy went to sea hoping to become a sailor. One stormy day, he was told to climb to the top of the mast. The first half of the climb was easy because he kept his eyes fixed on the sky above him.
But halfway up, he made a mistake. He looked down.
Seeing the rough sea far below, he became dizzy. Fear gripped him, and he froze, afraid that he would fall.
An experienced sailor called up to him, "Look back to the sky, young man! Look back to the sky!"
The boy followed the advice, lifted his eyes once again, regained his confidence and safely finished the climb.
The young sailor made the same mistake Peter makes in today's Gospel. As long as Peter kept his eyes on Jesus, he was able to walk on water. But the moment he focused on the wind and the waves, fear replaced faith. He took his eyes off Christ and began to sink.
The same thing happens to us.
We begin our lives wanting to follow Jesus, but life's storms distract us. Worries, disappointments, work, family responsibilities, illness, or financial struggles can draw our attention away from Him. When we focus more on the storm than on the Savior, we begin to lose our balance.
Many years ago, I met a man at St. Christopher's Inn, our drug and alcohol rehabilitation center here at Graymoor. His parents had never been a real part of his life, and the lack of guidance left deep wounds that eventually led him into addiction.
A few weeks after arriving at the Inn, he began attending weekday Mass. After hearing this Gospel story, he said to me, "Father, it's amazing that Peter wanted so badly to get to Jesus that he was willing to walk on water."
Then he quietly added, "I think I have my own boat to get out of."
For him, that boat was drugs and alcohol. He realized he had to leave behind what was keeping him from Christ.
Most of us may not struggle with addiction, but we all have our own boats. It may be work, success, comfort, pride, fear, or anything else that keeps us from placing Christ first. Sometimes we are simply afraid to step out in faith because what is familiar to us feels safer than trusting Jesus.
The beautiful message of today's Gospel is that when Peter began to sink, Jesus immediately reached out His hand.
My friends, there will always be storms in life. But if we keep our eyes on Christ, we will never face them alone. Even when our faith falters, His hand is always there to lift us up.
If we keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, we too will discover what Peter did – that Christ is stronger than every storm. And with renewed faith, we will be able to say with Peter, "Lord, truly you are the Son of God."
Yours in Christ,
Fr. Robert Warren, S.A.
Spiritual Director
Tuesday, August 11, 2026
Monday, August 10, 2026
Sunday, August 9, 2026
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