Political cartoonist Ted Rall and CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM EST.
Today we discuss:
• The “alternative homeland” – the notion that Jordan should become the Palestinian state – is rocking the Hashemite Kingdom, following Israeli measures to register swaths of the occupied West Bank as sovereign Israeli soil. Mamdouh al-Abbadi, Jordan’s former deputy prime minister, says: The fear in Amman is not just about military invasion, but about making life in the West Bank impossible to force ethnic cleansing into Jordan.
• Senate Republicans are under increasing pressure from the hard right to do whatever is necessary to break through a filibuster and ram through the Save America Act on a simple majority vote over Democratic opposition.
• Last year, between 200,000 and more than 1 million immigrants in the United States stopped working, according to analyses of Census Bureau data. But as immigrants left, unemployment for native-born Americans jumped to 4.7% in January from 4.1% a year before. That not only exceeds the overall unemployment rate of 4.3%, but also the 4.6% rate for foreign-born workers. Removing people from the country led to fewer workers and fewer people to buy the goods and services those workers produced, argues Stan Veuger, senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Plus: tariffs and AI are having a depressing effect, and low-wage employers are refusing to pay more.
