Reading list: December 5, 2016

The workweek begins.

DAPL has been stopped, at least for now. From NPR:

The Army Corps of Engineers has denied a permit for the construction of a key section of the Dakota Access Pipeline, granting a major victory to protesters who have been demonstrating for months.

The decision essentially halts the construction on the 1,172-mile oil pipeline about half a mile south of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. Thousands of demonstrators from across the country had flocked to North Dakota in protest.

Salon let writer Ben Norton go last week. Norton’s work is consistently good, but apparently the online magazine wants to focus on publishing fawning pieces on how actually-not-racist Jeff Sessions is. Norton’s last piece was on Fidel Castro and the double standards applied to him in the US discourse.

U.S. politicians’ talk of human rights in Cuba is ludicrous considering our government’s history of supporting far-right death squads throughout Latin America, extremist paramilitaries that have waged horrific campaigns of terror against civilians in countries like Nicaragua, murdering, torturing and raping men, women and children.

Even more outrageous is the utter silence on the exponentially worse crimes of numerous American allies. Cuba certainly does not have a perfect human rights record. But what country does? Where are the U.S. politicians condemning the much more egregious crimes of our allies?

In other Castro related news, the country has, in a move designed to irritate US commentators and the US government’s narrative, banned naming sites in the nation after Castro. The Cuban government cited a desire to avoid a cult of personality as the reason.

Raul Castro, Cuba’s president, promised there would be a new law preventing permanent tributes.

“There will be no monuments, statues or busts of Fidel, no streets or parks named after him — because that is what he wanted: no personality cult,” said the 85-year-old.

At Left Business Observer, Doug Henwood rejects “normalizing Trump.” In particular, Trump’s oligarchical tendencies spell disaster for the country.

Trump is forming a government that looks a lot like the one that Ted Cruz or a half-dozen other GOP candidates would have. It also looks to be the most plutocratic ever. As a Washington Post analysis pointed out, Commerce appointee Wilbur Ross’s net worth of $2.5 billion is ten times the combined value of George W. Bush’s first cabinet, deemed the cabinet of millionaires at the time. During what was probably an interview for the job of Agriculture Secretary, former Georgia Governor Sonny Purdue mentioned that he traded commodities. According to Purdue, Trump “lit up” at the news. He’s named the top lobbyist for Quicken Loans the head of his HUD transition team. It’s the direct injection of the business consciousness into governance without the slightest pretense of civilized mediation.

And Jonny Coleman at LA Weekly annihilates liberal pop culture and the cloying pretentiousness in its support for Hillary Clinton. It was nice to go over the greatest hits of garbage, like John Oliver’s “Make Donald Drumpf Again,” which is probably the epitome of the uselessness of Oliver and his ilk. And Coleman knows who’s ultimately to blame, too.

I can’t in good conscience sit back and pin it all on Hillary and her basket of incompetent strategists and celebrifriends. There is a very tacky precedent upheld by our lame-duck president, the one who branded himself as some sort of populist but who ultimately turned out to be an ineffectual puppet of corporate America. The president who gives daps to Ellen and Kendrick and uses the White House’s resources to release Spotify playlists, go on alt-comedy podcasts or compile listicles of “mind-expanding films and TV shows” so his legacy of cool will outshine Bill Clinton’s.

Finally, Chapo features guest Ezekiel Kweku of MTV and then roundtables a reading of Megan McArdle’s The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success.