Saudi arrests drive home message: Change comes from the top
an analysis of Seattle-area homelessness and concluded the city needed to spend $400 million a year to solve the homelessness problem.
I’m sure Seattle, and many other governments, will manage to spend $400 million without solving the problem.
It’s good that Amazon pushed back against the tax. Their reminder that they could reduce or close up business if Seattle’s government got too greedy helped cut the tax roughly in half.
You can’t just keep squeezing businesses or other taxpayers forever and not expect them to try to escape. At some point, businesses will pack up and leave. Then there will be fewer paying jobs that make a city’s population less likely to be homeless in the first place.
Sawant and the other big-taxers try to make productive companies, which employ people so they can afford things like rent, sound like villains. She called Amazon’s threat to leave “extortion.” The activist group Working Washington asked Seattle’s attorney general to charge Amazon with the crime of “issuing mob-like threats.”
Mob- like threats? Amazon just wants to be left alone so it can build complexes, hire people and sell stuff.
As usual, government is the organization that sounds mob- like.
Saudi Arabia this week branded its most iconic women’s rights advocates as “traitors,” sending what analysts and activists say is an unmistakable message: future change comes only from the throne.
The arrest of at least 10 activists, the majority women, comes one month before the kingdom is slated to lift its driving ban on women.
It was a goal the detainees fought for over generations, but which has been aggressively branded as the fresh approach of the young heir to the throne— Mohammed bin Salman.
The crackdown on Saudi Arabia’s women activists may appear contradictory to the crown prince’s sweeping reforms, but analysts say it fits in line with the enduring top- down vision.
Gerald Feierstein, a former US ambassador to Yemen who also served in Saudi Arabia, says the arrests are “unsurprising.”
“While Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has embarked on a broader program of economic modernization and social reform, dubbed Vision 2030, he has said explicitly that his program does not include broadening the political space,” Feierstein said in a Middle East Institute brief.
“In fact, arrests of activists have continued without interruption despite the reform project,” he said, pointing to the continued imprisonment of blogger Raif Badawi.
For Kristian Ulrichsen, a fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute in the US, the move is meant as a clear reminder of who is in charge.
“At a time when the lifting of the driving ban on Saudi women is fast approaching, the image of prominent women’s rights activists being branded as traitors on the front pages of Saudi newspapers sends a powerful message.”
In the kingdom, the warning “will be very clear to anyone who might be tempted to criticize the government,” Ulrichsen said.