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"The awful James Clapper, Obama’s director of National Intelligence, who famously gave perjurious testimony before congress on the extent of the administration’s domestic spying operations, has sent the president his letter of resignation, rushing, like a manic Black Friday shopper, to get near the front of the clemency line, right behind Hillary Clinton."

-- Jeffrey St. Clair

News and Opinion

While I shudder to think of whom he might be replaced by, it can't be bad news that this liar is leaving government service:

James Clapper resigns as US director of national intelligence

The United States’ intelligence chief has resigned ahead of Donald Trump’s inauguration.

James Clapper’s turbulent tenure as director of national intelligence was defined by combating whistleblower Edward Snowden’s National Security Agency revelations and defending his own integrity after those disclosures contradicted his statements to Congress.

Clapper, who had clashed with President-elect Donald Trump’s aide Michael Flynn, told a hearing of the House intelligence committee on Wednesday that he had submitted his resignation on Wednesday night and felt “pretty good” about it.

“I’ve got 64 days left and I think I’d have a hard time with my wife with anything past that,” Clapper, a career intelligence officer and air force general, told the committee. Clapper’s final day will be the day of the presidential inauguration, on 20 January.

Clapper is only the fourth director of national intelligence, a position nominally atop the 16 intelligence agencies but without significant budgetary or operational authority over them. The recently created position, established in a 2004 law, waxes and wanes in power with the personality of its occupant.

Death of the ‘Two-State Solution’

Donald Trump’s election victory raises many unanswered questions, but it also settles a few, starting with the fate of the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process.” In the words of Israeli Education Minister and Jewish Home Party leader Naftali Bennett, “The era of a Palestinian state is over.” ...

Last week, a co-chair of the Trump campaign’s Israel Advisory Committee reaffirmed that the President-elect rejects Washington’s traditional view that Israel’s settlements are obstacles to peace and illegal under international law.

The so-called “two-state solution” — creation of a Palestinian national homeland comprising the West Bank and Gaza, and coexisting with Israel — has been a longstanding axiom of official U.S. policy, accepted as well by Israel and its unofficial lobbying arm, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

Of late, however, the rise of extreme Jewish nationalists to power in Israel, the relentless expansion of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, and Israel’s evident disinterest in peace negotiations have all but killed hopes for such a solution. In 2015, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared, “There will be no withdrawals” from the occupied West Bank and “no concessions” to the Palestinians. ...

Roger Cohen, the New York Times columnist and an ardent liberal Zionist, reported last month following a trip to Israel that the two-state idea is all but “clinically dead.” He explained: “The incorporation of all the biblical Land of Israel has advanced too far, for too long, to be reversed now.”

Many Israeli supporters of a two-state solution now publicly admit that bitter truth. Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak accuses Netanyahu of engaging in a “messianic drive” toward “a single Jewish state, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.” For the current crop of right-wing leaders in Israel, the main question is whether to offer Palestinians citizenship within an expanded Israel or to remove them.

In recent years, polls of Israeli adults show that nearly half believe Arabs should be expelled from Israel. Nearly eight in 10 believe Jews should receive preferential treatment compared to non-Jews. The Netanyahu government and Knesset are filled with overt racists. Last year, Netanyahu appointed as deputy defense minister a rabbi who asserted, “[Palestinians] are like animals, they aren’t human.”

Jerusalemites recite call to prayer from their rooftops

Over the past two weeks, Israel has been working to ban the Muslim call to prayer, the athan. ...

In response to the Israeli government’s plan to prohibit the call to prayer in the city, Jerusalemites climbed onto the roofs of their houses and recited the call to prayer all together. ...

Churches in Nazareth showed solidarity by broadcasting the call to the night prayer in response to attempts to prohibit the call of prayer being broadcasted from Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Jerusalem Mayor Threatens to Destroy Palestinian Homes If Illegal Outpost Evacuated

Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat issued a threat today over the Israeli High Court’s order to evacuated the illegal settler outpost of Amona, saying any such evacuation would lead him to begin mass demolition of Palestinian homes in occupied East Jerusalem.

Barkat insisted Amona needs to be immediately legalized, and that if it wasn’t, the legal standard for evacuating an illegally built settlement after decades of court battles would leave him no legal alternative but to destroy “hundreds or thousands” of Palestinian homes. ...

Even further-right city council member Arye King mocked Barkat’s threat as a sign he’s a “radical leftist,” insisting that a real far-right wouldn’t make the threat but would have started destroying the Palestinian homes long ago.

Why Is the World Closing Borders on Us? A Plea From a 13-Year-Old Syrian Refugee Living in Morocco

Struggling With Visibility, Iraqi Troops Shoot Anything That Moves in Mosul

It’s a cloudy day over Mosul, and the poor visibility is further slowing the advance toward the city, with US warplanes largely unable to carry out airstrikes, and Iraqi troops on the ground also saying they’re having a hard time telling who is who inside Mosul.

Iraqi troops’ solution to that lack of clarity, such as it is, is to just shoot anything that moves, with troops confirming that they deliberately open fire on any cars they see moving “even if there is a family inside,” because for all they know the family has suicide vests on.

Only a small number of Iraqi special forces have actually gotten into Mosul, with ISIS seen trynng to spread the advancing forces thin by allowing advances in some areas and stalling them in others. What troops have gotten into Mosul have described struggling with “waves” of jihadist forces attacking them, and today’s report suggests they are still pinned down, and not really in a position to advance any further.

Isis in Afghanistan: 'Their peak is over, but they are not finished'

Islamic State fighters have been pummelled by US airstrikes and receive little local support, but they maintain a small – and seemingly resilient – stronghold in eastern Afghanistan.

The fighters are few but unusually brutal, in keeping with the group’s behaviour elsewhere. They may not be an existential threat to the Afghan state but they are to civilians.

Local authorities said using explosives was a common method of killing for Isis, who also impose strict rules at odds with local customs: forcing men to grow beards and women to wear burqas. They declare government-officiated weddings invalid, smash shrines and ban smoking, snuff and poppy cultivation. ...

This week, Isis attacked a unit of elite Afghan bodyguards in central Kabul, which killed at least six, including civilians. Although on the ropes in Afghanistan, the group can still strike in the heart of the capital. ...

Borhan Osman, a researcher with the Afghanistan Analysts Network, said that although Isis had lost half its initial territory in Nangarhar, it seemed to have dug in firmly in its four districts. “They have proved to be irremovable from these areas,” he said.

John Bolton Calls for US to Impose Regime Change on Iran

Still considered among the candidates for President-elect Donald Trump’s Secretary of State, John Bolton is continuing to underscore his longstanding aversion of trying to come up with diplomatic solutions by urging the US to impose a regime change on Iran.

Bolton has long called for bombing Iran, and long criticized the nuclear deal with Iran. Today he said he thinks Iranians would probably welcome a “new regime,” though he conceded that whoever the US ended up installing might not be particularly democratic. ...

Bolton provided no good reason for a regime change in Iran after the P5+1 nuclear deal, insisting simply that they are a “long-term problem” in his view. Bolton had similarly made Iraq a “long-term” subject of interest through the 1990s, and was seen as one of the architects of the 2003 US invasion and occupation. Despite how badly that went, he seems eager to give it another shot with the even larger nation of Iran.

Obama, sounding a bit like John Bolton, says, "No fair making peace with Russia!"

Obama urges Trump against realpolitik in relations with Russia

Barack Obama has warned the US president-elect, Donald Trump, against taking a purely “realpolitik approach” to relations with Russia and encouraged his successor to continue standing up for American values.

“I’ve sought a constructive relationship with Russia but what I have also been is realistic in recognising there are some significant differences in how Russia views the world and how we view the world,” Obama said at a press conference with the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, in Berlin.

While not expecting Trump to “follow exactly our blueprint or our approach”, Obama said he was hopeful that his successor would pursue constructive policies that defend democratic values and the rule of law.

Trump, he said, should not “simply take a realpolitik approach and suggest … we just cut some deals with Russia – even if it hurts people or violates international norms or leaves smaller countries vulnerable or creates long-term problems in regions like Syria”.

Dreaming Up a Reason for NATO’s Relevance

On Nov. 13, after Trump’s victory, NATO Secretary General and former Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg wrote a think piece in the U.K.’s Observer newspaper, and acknowledged the need for more widespread contributions while crying up the historic importance and future need for NATO by citing growing Russian “assertiveness” (diplo-speak for “aggression”) and the threat from international terrorism. ...

Stoltenberg was right to acknowledge Trump’s concerns about the contributions to NATO. But I think  he was also addressing another and already-serving president somewhat closer to home – head of the European Commission and totemic Eurocrat Jean-Claude Juncker – who for a while now has been plotting an integrated European Union army and who ramped up the rhetoric last week after Trump’s victory.  The head of NATO is naturally not going to be too happy that the E.U. is poaching on his territory as the supposed military defender of Europe.

It was also reported in The Observer that France and Germany are planning to announce the acceleration towards an E.U. army over the coming weeks. So much for European-wide consensus. It would appear that Juncker also sees this as a bargaining position in future Brexit negotiations, if Britain ever does get around to triggering Article 50 for withdrawing from the E.U. Any E.U. army would need the U.K.’s contribution – not just the armed forces, which are the second largest in the E.U., but also continued close cooperation with the intelligence agencies.

After all, if both the U.K. post-Brexit and the U.S. after the ascension of Trump become increasingly isolationist and isolated, it would be natural for the two countries to pivot towards each other to the increasing exclusion of Europe. The U.K./U.S. “special relationship” has always been heavily predicated on the uniquely close working relationship of their spies, and the E.U. will fear being left further out in the cold. ...

So, back to President-elect Donald Trump. What will he do, faced with this mess of competing Western military/security interests and Euro-bureaucrat careerists? Perhaps his U.S. isolationist position is not so mad, bad and dangerous as the wailings of the Western liberal press would have us believe?

American “exceptionalism” and NATO interventionism have not exactly benefited much of the world since the end of the Cold War. Perhaps the time has indeed come for an American Commander-in-Chief who can indeed cut deals to cut through the saber-rattling rhetoric and, even unintentionally, make a significant contribution to world peace.

A real world wide web

Elon Musk has asked the U.S. government for permission to more than double the number of satellites currently in orbit as part of SpaceX’s plans to create a global Wi-Fi network.

Announced last year, the project initially sounded a bit farfetched, but SpaceX is now looking to get things up and running. The company has filed detailed technical descriptions of how the project will work with the Federal Communications Commission, seeking permission to launch a hell of a lot of satellites into space.

Between active and inactive satellites floating around in space, there are just over 4,000 orbiting the earth. SpaceX wants to eventually launch 4,425 extra satellites to create a global communications array which could provide high-speed internet access to the entire world.

SpaceX claims that when the system is up-and-running it will provide a low-latency 1 gigabit per second connection for every user.

Senate Shakeup Could Bring Positive Change for Encryption Advocates

On Wednesday morning , the Democratic Senate leadership announced it would be playing a game of musical chairs: Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., will be the next ranking member of the Intelligence Committee while Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., will be exchanging her leading role on the intelligence oversight panel for one on the Judiciary Committee. ...

Warner is expected to challenge Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr, R-N.C., in ways Feinstein might not have — particularly on protecting encryption technology. ...

Sens. Burr and Feinstein worked together during the last Congress to put forward legislation on encryption that horrified technologists and privacy advocates alike — a bill that would force companies to decrypt user data when investigators came knocking. Meanwhile Warner championed a new commission, made up of industry, law enforcement, and advocates to study the issue. ...

During a time when the committee was grappling with its role in domestic surveillance, Warner also sponsored amendments in November 2013 to guarantee the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court would have access to outside experts. He hasn’t, however, been a serious critic of those programs the way Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and some other Democrats have been.

Sen. Leahy, protector of constitutional rights, out as ranking member of the Judiciary committee. Sen. Feinstein, destroyer of them, is in.

— Trevor Timm (@trevortimm) November 16, 2016

Why the World Needs WikiLeaks

My organization, WikiLeaks, took a lot of heat during the run-up to the recent presidential election. We have been accused of abetting the candidacy of Donald J. Trump by publishing cryptographically authenticated information about Hillary Clinton’s campaign and its influence over the Democratic National Committee, the implication being that a news organization should have withheld accurate, newsworthy information from the public.

The Obama Justice Department continues to pursue its six-year criminal investigation of WikiLeaks, the largest known of its kind, into the publishing of classified documents and articles about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay and Mrs. Clinton’s first year as secretary of state. According to the trial testimony of one F.B.I. agent, the investigation includes several of WikiLeaks founders, owners and managers. And last month our editor, Julian Assange, who has asylum at Ecuador’s London embassy, had his internet connection severed.

I can understand the frustration, however misplaced, from Clinton supporters. But the WikiLeaks staff is committed to the mandate set by Mr. Assange, and we are not going to go away, no matter how much he is abused. That’s something that Democrats, along with everyone who believes in the accountability of governments, should be happy about.

Despite the mounting legal and political pressure coming from Washington, we continue to publish valuable material, and submissions keep pouring in. There is a desperate need for our work: The world is connected by largely unaccountable networks of power that span industries and countries, political parties, corporations and institutions; WikiLeaks shines a light on these by revealing not just individual incidents, but information about entire structures of power.

While a single document might give a picture of a particular event, the best way to shed light on a whole system is to fully uncover the mechanisms around it — the hierarchy, ideology, habits and economic forces that sustain it. It is the trends and details visible in the large archives we are committed to publishing that reveal the details that tell us about the nature of these structures. It is the constellations, not stars alone, that allow us to read the night sky.

Snowden: Fear of terrorism used as ‘legislative magic wand’ for surveillance

The Democratic Party is ever more obviously dominated by a bunch of spoiled children, constitutionally incapable of sorting out their mistakes. They are making the Republicans look like the grownups in the room.

The Stark Contrast Between GOP’s Self-Criticism in 2012 and Democrats’ Blame-Everyone-Else Posture Now

Democrats have spent the last 10 days flailing around blaming everyone except for themselves, constructing a carousel of villains and scapegoats – from Julian Assange, Vladimir Putin, James Comey, the electoral collage, “fake news,” and Facebook, to Susan Sarandon, Jill Stein, millennials, Bernie Sanders, Clinton-critical journalists and, most of all, insubordinate voters themselves – to blame them for failing to fulfill the responsibility that the Democratic Party, and it alone, bears: to elect Democratic candidates.

This Accept-No-Responsibility, Blame-Everyone-Else posture stands in stark contrast to how the Republican National Committee reacted in 2012, after it lost the popular vote for the fifth time in six presidential elections. RNC Chairman Reince Priebus called Mitt Romney’s loss “a wake-up call,” and he was scathing about his party’s failures: “there’s no one reason we lost. Our message was weak; our ground game was insufficient; we weren’t inclusive; we were behind in both data and digital; our primary and debate process needed improvement . . . So, there’s no one solution: There’s a long list of them.”

The RNC’s willingness to admit its own failures led to a comprehensive 100-page report, issued only a few months after its 2012 defeat, that was unflinching in its self-critique. ... The report itself also took aim at the GOP’s chosen candidate, containing sections that were “pointed in its critique of Mitt Romney."

Rather than maligning the voters who rejected his party, Preibus accepted responsibility for losing them: “To those who have left the party, let me say this, we want to earn your trust again, to those who have yet to trust us, we welcome you with open arms.”

The self-exhonerating mentality of Democrats is particularly remarkable in light of how comprehensive their failures have been. After the 2012 election, the GOP immersed itself in unflinching self-critique even though it still held a majority in both houses of Congress and dominated governorships and state houses. By rather stark contrast, the Democrats have now been crushed at all levels of electoral politics, yet appear more self-righteously impressed with themselves, more vindicated in their messaging and strategic choices, than ever before.

Don’t blame minority turnout for Clinton’s loss. White Democrats in key states just didn’t vote.

Much of the post-election analysis, often based on limited exit poll data, indicated that Clinton lost the Electoral College because members of minority communities did not vote in high enough numbers. There is some truth to this explanation, especially in North Carolina, where the state closed polling places in African-American areas.

But a closer look at vote totals reveals another possible explanation for what happened — namely, that tens of thousands of white Democrats in key states just stayed home this year.

With the help of a USA Today map showing changes in turnout by county, we looked at the six states that flipped from blue in 2012 to red in 2016. Turnout was largely up across Michigan, Florida, and Pennsylvania. But in Ohio, Wisconsin, and Iowa, 11 counties saw voter turnout decline by at least 5 percent.

Nine of those counties had striking similarities: They were overwhelmingly white and saw a drop in votes for Democrats by the thousands even as Republican vote totals remained relatively unchanged. These missing white Democrats helped doom Clinton.

Bernie Sanders rallies supporters with call for new direction in Democratic party

On a gorgeous fall day, surrounded by changing trees, a group of Bernie Sanders’ most ardent supporters held a political bonfire for the doomed Trans-Pacific Partnership outside the US Capitol building.

“RIP TPP!” the group chanted at the rally, organized by National Nurses United. ...

Sanders swept to the stage to wild cheers. ...

“I’m not here to blame anybody, criticize anybody, but facts are facts,” Sanders said, his voice building as he spoke. “When you lose the White House to the least popular candidate in the history of America, when you lose the Senate, when you lose the House and when two-thirds of governors in this country are Republican, it is time for a new direction for the Democratic party!”

It’s been a whirlwind week for the self-styled “democratic socialist”.

Since the election, Sanders has been a frequent face on cable news. He swept through New York earlier this week to promote his new book, Our Revolution. In many ways, Sanders has emerged from the party’s devastating loss as the face of the party’s future.

On Wednesday, the Senate minority leader, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, rolled out the party’s new leadership team. In a testament to his growing influence within the party since challenging Clinton for the presidential nomination, Sanders joined the Democratic leadership team as chairman of outreach.

That a lifelong independent is playing a key role in rebuilding the Democratic party is a sign of just how strange Washington DC has been since the American people elected Donald Trump as president. ...

At the rally, Sanders sounded a note of unity, imploring union members, immigrants, climate activists, criminal reform advocates and more to join the fight for equality in the Trump era.

“When we stand together, Donald Trump, nobody – nobody – is going to stop us.” Sanders said. “Let us go forward together!”

Jeff Sessions is Trump's choice for attorney general, reports say

Donald Trump has offered Republican senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama for the job of US attorney general, according to multiple media reports.

The New York Times, CBS News and Bloomberg, among others, all reported on Friday that the rightwing, anti-immigration senator was the president-elect’s pick for the job.

Separately, the Washington Post and Reuters reported that Republican congressman Mike Pompeo had been offered the job of CIA chief. Pompeo is a vocal critic of the Iran nuclear deal, and a supporter of NSA bulk data collection.

On Thursday, Trump’s team announced that the president-elect met Sessions at Trump Tower in New York the day before. Sessions is a long-time, rightwing member of the Senate.

Bannon, Flynn, Sessions -- Great! Senate must demand that Sessions as AG stop the massive institutional race discrimination against whites!

— David Duke (@DrDavidDuke) November 18, 2016

No senator has fought harder against the hopes and aspirations of Latinos, immigrants, and people of color than Sen. Sessions

President-elect Donald Trump has reportedly chosen Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) to be attorney general of the United States, raising concern and ire among civil rights advocates who said the former federal prosecutor's record is marred by racism as well as anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric.

"If you have nostalgia for the days when blacks kept quiet, gays were in the closet, immigrants were invisible, and women stayed in the kitchen, Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions is your man," Rep. Luis V. Gutiérrez (D-Ill.) declared in a searing statement. "No senator has fought harder against the hopes and aspirations of Latinos, immigrants, and people of color than Sen. Sessions."

Trump's pick to head the U.S. Justice Department—who must be confirmed by the Senate—"has a long history of opposition to civil rights," The Nation's Ari Berman wrote on Friday.

"The Senate rejected Sessions for a federal judgeship during the Reagan administration because of racist statements he made and for falsely prosecuting black political activists in Alabama," Berman noted. "He opposed the Voting Rights Act, the country's most important civil rights law."

Donald Trump Transition Turmoil: A Closer Look

Trump takes out time from his busy schedule of assembling his kakistocracy to meet with a ghoulish, old war criminal:

Trump picks Kissinger’s brain as team takes shape

Trump, who has no foreign policy experience — or indeed time in political office — of his own, had already met with Kissinger during his campaign and was delighted to welcome him to Trump Tower.

There, the Republican’s close-knit team are debating who to invite to join his administration and observers and foreign capitals are watching closely to see if his staff and cabinet picks offer any clue as to the direction of his policy.

“I have tremendous respect for Dr. Kissinger and appreciate him sharing his thoughts with me,” Trump said after the pair met in his luxury New York skyscraper, adding that they had discussed China, Russian, Iran, Europe and broader world affairs.

Newt Gingrich says he will not be in Trump Cabinet

Newt Gingrich said Thursday he will not serve in the Donald Trump administration in any official role.

The former House Speaker and presidential candidate had been mentioned frequently as a potential top member of the new government, possibly as secretary of defense, state or health and human services.

But he ended that speculation in an interview with McClatchy. “I will not be in the Cabinet,” Gingrich, 73, said. “I intend to be focused on strategic planning.”

McClatchy had contacted him for comment on whether his long ties to the Washington establishment might pose a problem with a Trump team that boasts of its outsider status and its promise to “drain the swamp” of Washington.

He did not say whether the decision not to be in the new government was his or Trump’s. The Trump transition team did not respond to requests for comment.

Flynn is in

President-elect Donald Trump has offered retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn the position of White House national security adviser, according to a report by the Associated Press citing a senior official.

An executive at Flynn Intel Group, a private intelligence firm founded by Flynn, confirmed to VICE News that the position was offered to him, but it was not clear whether he will accept. ...

The national security adviser position is an executive branch job that does not require Senate confirmation. The adviser provides the president with a daily national security briefing, oversees the National Security Council staff, and will likely be hugely influential in shaping Trump’s foreign, military, and intelligence policies.

His selection does not come without controversy. Flynn was fired from the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2014 over what was called his “chaotic” management style. He has called Obama “weak” and “spineless” on national security, and has criticized the president’s military campaign against the Islamic State. He is also a proponent of coercive interrogation methods.

Colin Powell says Flynn is a "fucking lunatic," and having worked with Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Bolton, Colin Powell knows fucking lunatics.

— CJ Werleman (@cjwerleman) November 18, 2016

Turkish Client Paid Trump Adviser Michael Flynn’s Company “Tens of Thousands” of Dollars for Lobbying

Donald Trump has repeatedly promised to “drain the swamp” of Washington corruption. The new ethics pledge he announced Wednesday would prohibit registered lobbyists from working for his transition team or administration.

But Trump’s supposed aversion to lobbyists has not harmed the fortunes of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, one of Trump’s earliest and most visible supporters, now a vice-chair of the transition team and a rumored frontrunner for the influential post of national security advisor.

Though Flynn is not a lobbyist himself, his company, Flynn Intel Group, is registered with Congress as a lobbying organization, and has a registered lobbyist on its staff. A Flynn Intel Group client, Kamil Ekim Alptekin, a Turkish businessman with real estate, aerospace, and consulting interests, told The Intercept on Thursday that one of his companies, Inovo BV, paid Flynn’s company “tens of thousands of dollars” for analysis on world affairs. On election day, Flynn published an opinion piece for The Hill urging U.S. support for Turkey’s controversial strongman president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and pushing for the extradition of Erdogan’s political rival, Fethullah Gülen, who now resides in Pennsylvania. “From Turkey’s point of view, Washington is harboring Turkey’s Osama bin Laden,” Flynn wrote, on Nov. 8.

In a statement, Flynn said that he would sever ties with his own company if he entered Trump’s administration. He did not say whether he would close the business, where his son is listed as chief of staff, or disclose his other clients.

Michael Hudson: Donald Trump Wants to Make the 1% Even Richer

Trump Prepares to Takeover Fed

In Donald Trump’s first four years as president, he will not only choose three judges for the Supreme Court, he’ll also pick five of the seven members on the Fed Board of Governors. It would be impossible to overstate the effect this is going to have on the nation’s economic future. With both houses of Congress firmly in the GOP’s grip, we could see the most powerful central bank in the world transformed into a purely political institution that follows the diktats of one man.

Critics may think that is a vast improvement over the present situation in which the Fed conceals its allegiance to the giant Wall Street investment banks behind a public relations cloud of “independence”, but the idea of one man controlling the price of the world’s reserve currency and, thus, the price of financial assets and commodities across the globe, is equally disturbing. Already we have seen how the Fed’s determination to enrich its constituents has resulted in one titanic asset-price bubble after the other. Imagine if that power was entrusted to just one individual who could be tempted to use that authority to shape economic events in a way that enhanced and perpetuated his own political power. Even so, after seven years of a policy-induced Depression that has increased inequality to levels not seen since the Gilded Age, we think it is high-time that the president use his power to choose the members who will bring the bank back under government control. ...

Trump, who is no fan of the Fed’s bond buying program called QE, has admitted he thinks stocks are in a bubble suggesting that he will probably take a more conservative approach to monetary policy. Even so, that doesn’t change the fact he’s going to have to opportunity to personally select the FOMC’s ruling majority, which means that he’ll be in a position to demand their loyalty as a condition of their hiring. Does anyone seriously doubt that Trump would rather control the Fed himself than keep it in the clutches of the cutthroat Wall Street banks? ...

The Fed has had every opportunity to show where its loyalties lie and it has sided with Wall Street every single time. There’s a reason why 95 percent of all income gains in the last eight years have gone to the one percent, while working people have struggled just to put food on the table. Just like there’s a reason why stocks have tripled in value in the last eight years while wages and incomes have stagnated and the economy has slowed to a crawl. It’s the policy, stupid.

The Fed has created the conditions for a permanent Depression so it can provide infinite cheap money to its crooked reprobate friends on Wall Street. Now their little party is coming to an end.

Where do the fines collected from Wall Street by DOJ go?

Ever since Wall Street bankers cratered the global economy in 2009, federal prosecutors have barely been able to keep up with the unprecedented scale of corporate wrongdoing. Last year, in a series of high-profile settlements, Citicorp, JPMorgan Chase, Barclays, and the Royal Bank of Scotland agreed to pay more than $2.5 billion in criminal fines for manipulating the exchange rates on foreign currencies. Credit Suisse forked over $1.1 billion for helping its wealthy clients evade taxes. And the Justice Department ripped up an earlier settlement with UBS and fined the Swiss bank more than $200 million for rigging interest rates. ... The record-setting fines levied by the Justice Department are still flooding federal coffers with billions of new dollars. Which raises the question: Where is all the money going?

The answer, it turns out, is the Crime Victims Fund, a little-known pool of money created during the law-and-order push of the 1980s to assist victims of crime, much of it violent. All criminal fines paid by individuals or corporations are deposited directly into the fund, which in turn flows to states to support individual victims and the organizations that assist them: battered women’s shelters, counseling centers for abused children, families who lost their primary breadwinners to murder, victims left permanently disabled by violent assaults. America’s biggest corporate criminals, in short, are paying to help the victims of other criminals. Thanks to a wave of big-dollar settlements with banks and pharmaceutical companies, the Crime Victims Fund ballooned from approximately $3 billion at the end of 2009 to almost $12 billion by the end of 2014.

The problem is, the fund only receives money from criminal fines. And in most cases, the Justice Department has been letting big banks and other corporate criminals off the hook with civil settlements and deferred prosecution agreements. Those settlements, instead of going into the Crime Victims Fund, mostly get handed over to the Treasury to reduce the deficit. Of the $23 billion in fines the Justice Department collected last year, in fact, only $2.6 billion made its way into the Crime Victims Fund. That means the feds aren’t just letting banks and top executives off easy for defrauding customers—they’re shortchanging victims of murder, sexual assault, and child abuse.

Well now, this is disturbing.

'Illegal protests' criminalized under WA senator's proposed bill

Washington state Republican Senator Doug Ericksen, R-Ferndale, said he has prepared a bill for the next legislative session that would create a new crime of "economic terrorism." If approved, it would allow felony prosecution of those who intentionally break the law in an attempt to intimidate or coerce private citizens or the government by obstructing economic activity.

Ericksen’s measure would create a class C felony when protests aimed at causing economic disruption jeopardize human life and property. It would not apply in cases of lawful and protected activities, such as strikes and picketing, his office said.

In Ericksen's measure, the penalties apply not just to participants, but also those who either give money or help organize, or otherwise encourage others to commit “economic terrorism.”

Global green movement prepares to fight Trump on climate change

The global green movement is preparing for the fight of its life against efforts by Donald Trump to rollback action on climate change, with a surge in fundraising, planned court challenges and a succession of protests.

Environmental activists said the election of a climate change denier as US president, along with the prospect of former vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin and various oil billionaires holding senior posts, has prompted an “outpouring” of donations.

This week, comedian, John Oliver, used his show to urge viewers to give to the Natural Resources Defense Council, while EarthJustice, a specialist in environmental law, reported a “substantial increase” in donations to wage the expected legal battles ahead. The Sierra Club said it has had 9,000 new monthly donors since election day, more than they had in the year to date.

After spending eight years cheering and occasionally scolding Barack Obama, environmentalists are now moving on to a war footing. Campaigns will be pitched around climate action and protecting national parks, with green groups claiming that public support for these things means that Trump has no mandate to tear them apart.

With Congress and the White House in Republican hands, the message will have to resonate in conservative ears rather than just energise the base.

“We won’t be in a defensive crouch for the next four years, licking our wounds,” said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, America’s largest green group. “If Trump tries to go backwards on climate change he’ll run headlong into an organised mass of people who will fight him in the courts, in Congress and on the streets.”

After Trump Elected, Nearly 200 Nations Proclaim "Urgent Duty" to Implement Paris Climate Accord

Huge deposit of untapped oil could be largest ever discovered in US

A huge deposit of untapped oil, possibly the largest ever discovered in the US, has been identified by the US Geological Survey (USGS) in west Texas.

The USGS estimated that 20bn barrels of oil was contained within layers of shale in the Permian Basin, a vast geological formation that stretches across western Texas and an area of New Mexico. The discovery is three times larger than the Bakken oilfields of North Dakota and is worth around $900bn.

The enormous deposit, in the Midland Basin Wolfcamp shale area that includes the cities of Lubbock and Midland in Texas, is the largest continuous oilfield ever discovered by the USGS. The area also includes 16tn cubic feet of natural gas and 1.6bn barrel of natural gas liquids. ...

More than 3,000 horizontal oil wells have already been drilled in the Midland Basin Wolfcamp region. The geology of the area requires many firms to use hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to remove oil and gas from the shale formations, which can be as much as a mile thick in some places.

A recent rush to open up the Permian Basin has helped push oil prices down, with this and other woes causing the US oil industry to lose $67bn last year. President-elect Donald Trump has promised to open up new areas for oil, gas and coal as part of an “America first” energy policy that will involve the eradication of funding for clean energy.

Wildlife preservation turning into war in Africa

'Climate Emergency': North Pole Sees Record Temps, Melting Ice Despite Arctic Winter

As 2016 continues on its march toward becoming the hottest year on record, the Arctic is seeing extreme warmth beyond anything previously recorded at this time of year—prompting alarm from climate scientists around the world.

Yeah, this isn't normal.
Follow @ZLabe @Weather_West @Climatologist49 for more.
Folks, we're in a climate emergency. Tell everyone you know. pic.twitter.com/BKuD7H4qfD

— Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) November 17, 2016

The temperature at the North Pole as of Thursday was a stunning 36ºF (20°C) above normal.

The bizarre heat is fueling the rapid melt of the pole's ice caps, and it is particularly unusual because it's all happening during the polar night—the time of year when the North Pole never sees the sun, observed UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain. ...

The cause? According to the Washington Post, it's the result of an elongated jet stream propelling hot air farther north than normal—which is caused by climate change.

"The Arctic warmth is the result of a combination of record-low sea-ice extent for this time of year, probably very thin ice, and plenty of warm/moist air from lower latitudes being driven northward by a very wavy jet stream," Jennifer Francis, an Arctic specialist at Rutgers University, told thePost.

Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.

Top FBI Lawyer Argues Against Requiring Warrant for Data That Tracks People’s Location

Suits in the suites commit environmental crimes, workers pay the price, as usual:

Volkswagen to axe 30,000 jobs worldwide

Wall Street and Private Prisons 'Licking Their Lips' Over Trump Presidency

Obama’s Hollow Legacy

Trump’s Fascism Picks Up Where Obama’s Left Off

Jill Stein’s Failed Strategy of Pandering to Sandernistas

Death of the Liberal Class? Death to the Liberal Class!

If Donald Trump gets his way, his administration will be disastrous

Donald Trump’s Lobbying Ban Effectively Bans Very Little

A Little Night Music

Rockin' Dopsie & The Zydeco Twisters - I'm In The Mood

Rockin' Dopsie & The Zydeco Twisters - Keep A Knockin'

Rockin' Dopsie - I Can't Lose with the Stuff I Use

Rockin' Dopsie & The Twisters - Rock Me Baby

Rockin' Dopsie - Lucille

Rockin' Dopsie - Last Night

Rockin' Dopsie - Foot Stompin' Zydeco

Rockin' Dopsie - Allons A Lafayette

Rockin' Dopsie - Dopsie's Cajun Stomp

Rockin' Dopsie - Choo Choo Cha Boogie