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“We cannot expect people to have respect for law and order until we teach respect to those we have entrusted to enforce those laws.”

-- Hunter S. Thompson

News and Opinion

"I Know What North Korea Wants" - President Carter Warns "US Oligarchy Refuses To Do It"

The former president was speaking at a ‘Conversation with the Carters’ event at his Carter Center in Atlanta on Tuesday. ...

Carter said,

“The first thing I would do is treat the North Koreans with respect.”

“I know what the North Koreans want,” he said.

“What they want is a firm treaty guaranteeing North Korea that the US will not attack them or hurt them in any way, unless they attack one of their neighbors.” Carter said,

“But the United States has refused to do that.”

Trump on Kim Jong-un: "Rocket man is on a suicide mission"

Trump says U.S. may have to “totally destroy” North Korea

President Donald Trump threatened the destruction of North Korea in a speech to the United Nations Tuesday, leaving the audience of delegates whispering in shock.

“The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea,” Trump said, adding that a nuclear North Korea threatened the entire world.

“No nation on Earth has an interest in seeing this band of criminals arm itself with nuclear weapons and missiles,” Trump said, referring to Pyongyang’s regime. “Rocket man is on a suicide mission for himself,” he said, referring to North Korea’s 32-year-old leader Kim Jong-Un.

Reminder: threatening to kill 25 million North Koreans because you don't like their leader is threatening to commit genocide.

— Carlos Maza (@gaywonk) September 19, 2017

The Donald punctuates his UN speechifying with live weapons.

U.S. jets drop live bombs in a new, massive show of force aimed at North Korea

The Pentagon deployed a formation of 14 bombers and fighters over the Korean Peninsula on Sunday that also included South Korean and Japanese aircraft, the latest show of force in response to North Korea’s missile launches and nuclear tests.

The warplanes were dispatched after North Korea launched a ballistic missile over northern Japan on Thursday, triggering a widespread emergency alert for those who call the region home. Two Air Force B-1B bombers from Andersen Air Force Base in Guam and four Marine Corps F-35B fighters from Iwakuni, Japan, combined with four South Korean F-15K fighters and four F-2 Japanese fighters, U.S. defense officials said.

The aircraft carried out a simulated attack on the Pilsung training range in South Korea, a few dozen miles from the demilitarized zone separating the North and South, while using live bombs. The U.S. and Japanese jets also flew in formation over waters near Kyushu, Japan, a southern portion of the country that is the closest major island to the Korean Peninsula.

Oh my, such insolence! Why is Kim Jong Un not shaking in his boots and capitulating after The Donald's big show?

North Korea says more sanctions will spur it to hasten nuclear plans

The more sanctions the United States and its allies impose on North Korea, the faster it will move to complete its nuclear plans, the reclusive nation’s official KCNA news agency said on Monday, citing a foreign ministry spokesman.

How Trump’s advisers schooled him on globalism

On a sweltering Washington summer day, President Donald Trump's motorcade pulled up to the Pentagon for a meeting largely billed as a briefing on the Afghanistan conflict and the fight against the Islamic State group. There, in the windowless meeting room known as "The Tank", Trump was to be briefed on the state of America's longest-running war as he and his top aides plotted ways ahead. But, according to current and former U.S. officials familiar with the meeting, it was, in reality, about much more.

Trump's national security team had become alarmed by the president's frequent questioning about the value of a robust American presence around the world. When briefed on the diplomatic, military and intelligence posts, the new president would often cast doubt on the need for all the resources. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson organized the July 20 session to lay out the case for maintaining far-flung outposts — and to present it, using charts and maps, in a way the businessman-turned-politician would appreciate. ...

In the weeks since the briefing in the Tank, Trump has split with top adviser Steve Bannon, the engine of many of his nationalist, isolationist policies. He threatened war with North Korea and agreed to send more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, abandoning his promise to withdraw quickly. Announcing the plan, Trump acknowledged the influence of his advisers. "My original instinct was to pull out — and, historically, I like following my instincts," he said. "But all my life I've heard that decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk in the Oval Office; in other words, when you're President of the United States. So I studied Afghanistan in great detail and from every conceivable angle." ...

To be successful, Mattis and Tillerson decided they should use talking points and commentary with which they believed Trump would be most familiar: the role that the military, intelligence officers and diplomats play in making the world safe for American businesses, like The Trump Organization, to operate and expand abroad. American troops provide stability, diplomats push rule of law and anti-corruption measures and the intelligence community provides context and analysis that drive the first two, the briefers explained, according to the officials. The implications of American retrenchment in an age of increasing international competition were also discussed, the officials said. One chart presented included two maps depicting the exponential growth of China's presence in Africa over the past two decades and its impact on U.S. national security and private foreign investment, according to the officials.

Aides to Trump: America Needs to Police the World to Protect Corporate Interests

In most respects, it is unfortunate that the American president’s understanding of geopolitics is barely more sophisticated than that of the average Fox News viewer. The fact that White House advisers must expend time and energy policing the commander-in-chief’s media diet — to prevent a single cable news segment from reshaping his understanding of Middle East policy — is less than ideal; as is the fact that decisions of global import often seem to hinge on how the president responds to this or that visual aid. ...

Donald Trump’s ignorance of the realities of geopolitics — as defined by America’s foreign-policy Establishment — allowed him to ask some “stupid” questions, during the debate over America’s Afghanistan policy back in July. The “pros” in the Trump administration all knew that America must commit more troops to the project of winning a 16-year war (that most analysts consider unwinnable) in a country that is of little strategic value to the United States. The layman asked “why?”

Apparently, the ensuing discussion led the president to pose even broader, more profound versions of this same question. Eventually, Trump’s advisers were forced to justify the very existence of a globe-spanning, American military (a.k.a. American imperialism). This led our secretaries of Defense and State to explain that America must maintain worldwide military dominance — even at a prodigious cost in blood and treasure — so as to protect the interests of multinational corporations with ties to the U.S. state. ...

So: American taxpayers must fund a global, quasi-empire to advance the financial interests of U.S. corporations — which, by the way, deserve a massive tax break on the trillions in earnings that they’ve been hoarding overseas.

The U.S. Military Can’t Keep Track of Which Missions It’s Fueling in Yemen War

The United States has come under increasing scrutiny for what seems like unconditional support for the Saudi Arabia-led coalition waging a brutal air war in Yemen. One of the key measures of that support has been refueling operations: U.S. tankers fill up planes from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and other coalition members, which go on to drop bombs in Yemen. Those bombs have killed at least 3,200 civilians and leveled hospitals and markets, leading to accusations that the U.S. is facilitating war crimes.

But U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM, now admits that it doesn’t even know how much fuel it offloads for Saudi Arabia and its partners — directly contradicting information about refueling operations that it previously released. Responding to questions from The Intercept, CENTCOM now says that it lumps together refueling data for the coalition with data for U.S. planes in the area, joint U.S.-Emirati missions, and possibly other operations. Even this pooled data has unexplained discrepancies.

In other words: The U.S. military says it doesn’t know how much of its own fuel goes to an indefinite number of operations.

While refueling is just one way to track U.S. operations in Yemen, the muddling of missions for the fuel data reflects how haphazard and neglected U.S. policy in Yemen has become. Human rights groups and congressional staffers say that clear answers about what the U.S. is doing in Yemen are increasingly few and far between.

“Hill staff are asking basic questions about U.S. refueling support for the Saudi coalition in Yemen, and they haven’t gotten a straight answer from the administration,” said Kate Kizer, director of policy and advocacy at the Yemen Peace Project. “One agency says refueling is continuing, another says it stopped. Apparently this administration can’t get its story straight. There’s either blatant obfuscation, gross incompetence, or both going on.”

Bibi says that The Donald has agreed to wear the puppet strings.

Netanyahu says Trump willing to ‘fix’ Iran nuclear deal

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented US President Donald Trump with a detailed plan on how to “fix” the nuclear agreement with Iran during a meeting Monday, he said.

“There is an American willingness to fix the deal, and I presented possible ways to do it,” he told reporters after his hour-long meeting with the president. “I presented a certain course of action how to do it,” he added, declining to provide more details. ...

Israel has no preference for whether the deal is fixed or nixed, as long as its problematic aspects are removed, Netanyahu said, and the way to achieve that is to heap sanctions on Iran.

The very fact that the US administration is talking about changing or tearing up the deal when it comes up for review again in October is a welcome development, Netanyahu added. If Washington were to seek to renegotiate the terms, other world powers would surely follow suit, he posited.

Three held after Georgia Tech protest over police shooting of student

Three people were arrested during a protest that followed a vigil for a Georgia Tech student who was shot dead by campus police, a university spokesman said.

Police shot and killed Scout Schultz late on Saturday night after the 21-year-old student called 911 to report an armed and possibly intoxicated suspicious person, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) has said. Georgia Tech issued alerts urging students to shelter indoors on Monday night because of violent protests after the campus vigil. Video posted on social media showed a police vehicle burning in the street and officers pinning people to the ground as onlookers shouted.

After the peaceful vigil, about 50 protesters marched to the campus police department, a university spokesman, Lance Wallace, said. A police vehicle was damaged and two officers suffered minor injuries, with one taken to a hospital for treatment. Police restored order relatively quickly, Wallace said.

White Police, Black Unarmed Suspects

'Militaristic and intimidating': St Louis police criticized as protests stretch on

As protests over the acquittal of the former St Louis police officer Jason Stockley moved into their fourth night, some observers said the response from law enforcement had grown heavy-handed, and that local and state authorities had learned little from their actions during the Ferguson protests. ...

During intense demonstrations on Sunday night in downtown St Louis, police were accused of co-opting and chanting the popular protest slogan “whose streets? Our streets”. The interim police chief, Lawrence O’Toole, whose department made more than 120 arrests, said at a press conference that St Louis police “owned the night”.

Downtown resident Christian Misner, who watched some of the street scenes unfold in front of his home, said he was taken aback by the tone of the police response. “It was militaristic, coordinated, antagonistic and intimidating,” he said. “They were chanting and hitting the ground and their shin guards in unison with sticks.” Misner said there was a disconnect between the behavior of the crowd and the response of the police officers. “I saw no bottle-throwing, spitting or anything else,” he said. “Everyone was hanging out, talking, taking photos and video. Only two people were loudly vocalizing their frustration.”

Protest leaders, encouraging use of the chant “you kill our kids, we kill your economy”, have vowed to sustain large public demonstrations in an effort to disrupt the city’s economy. While protests after the teenager Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson were largely confined to a few blocks within that small St Louis suburb, these demonstrations have targeted areas of the city with concentrated wealth and business activity.

These tactics have already borne fruit: the rock band U2 and singer Ed Sheeran both canceled scheduled concerts in St Louis as a result of the protests. Protests have also resulted in shortened business hours, canceled hotel bookings and depressed retail and restaurant activity. Many protesters believe economic disruption is the best option for effecting change.

St Louis police condemned for 'alarming' attitude towards protesters

Members of law enforcement and civil libertarians were strongly critical of the tactics and behavior of the St Louis police department amid protests over the acquittal of a white officer in the 2011 shooting death of a black man.

Some officers’ behavior was called unethical, alarming and even unconstitutional.

One of the primary catalysts for concern was a video that emerged on Monday of a group of officers loudly mocking the popular protest chant “Whose streets? Our streets” after making a series of arrests. “That chant goes against the very code of ethics we swore to abide by,” said Heather King, president of the Ethical Order of Police, a local organization founded by African American officers. “Whether we agree with demonstrations, protests or acts of violence, it is our job to do our job free of personal bias.” ...

Jeffrey Mittman, the executive director of the ACLU of Missouri, said that by arresting 123 people on Sunday, police “unlawfully detained and arrested people, used excessive force and unconstitutionally broke up a peaceful assembly of people”. Police told a large group of people gathered in downtown that because windows had been broken and large flower pots pushed over, the assembly was being declared illegal.

Bystander video showed police using irritant chemical sprays on protesters who were seated and compliant, many with their hands in the air, or even those running away. Protesters accused the police of “kettling” them, surrounding them and making arrests once they fail to disburse. Mike Faulk, a reporter for the St Louis Post-Dispatch, told colleagues he was “pepper-sprayed in face while an officer’s foot held my head to ground”.

Naomi Klein on Bernie's Medicare-for-All Bill & Future of Democratic Party

Last-gasp Republican effort to repeal Obamacare gains momentum

A handful of Republican senators are attempting to revive the healthcare repeal effort that appeared all but dead and buried when Congress left Washington for the summer.

The last-gasp effort is gaining momentum on Capitol Hill as Republicans confront a narrowing window in which to dismantle Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA) on a party-line vote.

The legislation, authored by senators Lindsey Graham, Bill Cassidy, Ron Johnson and Dean Heller, would transfer billions of dollars currently spent on Medicaid expansion and tax credits under the ACA to states in the form of block grants. Such lump sums would be calculated with a complex formula that includes factors such as cost of living and population density.

Under the bill, millions of Americans could lose insurance coverage as spending discretion is handed to the states. The proposal also includes severe cuts to Medicaid, the national insurance program for low-income families, and would allow states to waive ACA protections that prohibit insurers from charging higher premiums of people with pre-existing conditions.

Refusing to Be Bargaining Chips, Dreamers Shut Down Pelosi's Pro-Dreamer Event

Along with undocumented Dreamers and other lawmakers, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was shouted down during a press event in San Francisco on Monday when a group of immigration rights advocates took over the room in protest of what they perceive as a show of political weakness by Democrats in Congress.

The group of protesters, as local Fox affiliate KTVU reports, shouted: "You're a liar!" and "You met with Trump and you call that resistance?"

As others have also stated, the group of protesters rejected the idea that Pelosi, along with Senate Minority Chuck Schumer (D-NY), should capitulate or make a deal with President Donald Trump over the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

"We are not your bargaining chip!" the group shouted while many held signs that read "Democrats Are Deporters" and "Fight 4 All 11 Million" — a reference to the full number of undocumented people estimated to live in the United States, as opposed to the approximately 800,000 who DACA is designed to protect.

Trump's Childhood Home is Now an Airbnb Where Refugees Slept Over to Protest Immigration Crackdown

The Senate’s Military Spending Increase Alone Is Enough to Make Public College Free

One of the most controversial proposals put forward by Sen. Bernie Sanders during the 2016 presidential campaign was a pledge to make tuition free at public colleges and universities. Critics from both parties howled that the pie-in-the-sky idea would bankrupt the country. Where, after all, would the money come from?

Those concerns were brushed aside Monday night, as the Senate overwhelmingly approved an $80 billion annual increase in military spending, enough to have fully satisfied Sanders’s campaign promise. Instead, the Senate handed President Donald Trump far more than the $54 billion he asked for. The lavish spending package gives Trump a major legislative victory, allowing him to boast about fulfilling his promise of a “great rebuilding of the armed services.” ...

Or with $80 billion a year you could make public colleges and universities in America tuition-free. In fact, Sanders’s proposal was only estimated to cost the federal government $47 billion per year. If the additional military spending over the next 10 years instead went to pay off student debt, it could come close to wiping it out entirely.

But proposals like that are written off as non-starters, even by Democrats. In her new book, Hillary Clinton compares Sanders’s idea to him nonsensically saying “America should get a pony.” And while concerns about the cost of ponies abound, few Democrats are raising similar concerns about military spending, even when it is meant for a commander-in-chief they consider reckless and unstable.

All the reasons you should be absolutely furious at Equifax—and the entire credit bureau industry

During the 17th and 18th centuries, pirates dominated the high seas—raiding ships and seizing whatever they chose. They menaced the waterways, then sold their protection services, cleaning up on both sides. Pirates were the ultimate crony capitalists, taking advantage of favorable political and economic winds to chase spectacular profits and cultivating relationships with high-status officials. Blackbeard, one of the boldest buccaneers, cultivated a notoriously cozy relationship with the governor of North Carolina, who is thought to have shared the booty and kept the law at bay.

The days of buccaneers and cutlasses may be behind us, but the legacy lives on in other forms—as the Equifax data breach scandal vividly illustrates.

Old Blackbeard himself would have admired the ingenuity of a business set up to grab sensitive information about citizens without their consent, conjure property rights over that data by concocting proprietary formulas, and sell it to the highest bidder. So much the better if private information falls into the hands of criminals—companies can sell protection services to the same hapless citizens. ...

The oligopolistic “Big Three” credit bureaus—TransUnion, Experian, and Equifax—exist to reap billions in profit from your personal information and make it easy for lenders to charge you the highest possible interest rates. Their use of your data could result in the loss of a potential home or a job. Yet when they screw up, they have little more to fear than a negligible fine.

WH officials fear colleagues wearing wires for Mueller: report

Officials working in the White House are reportedly worried that colleagues may be wearing wires for special counsel Robert Mueller.

Mueller's probe into possible connections between President Trump's campaign and Russian election meddling has caused rising tensions between White House Counsel Don McGahn and Ty Cobb, a lawyer who joined the administration to handle the Mueller probe, The New York Times reported Sunday.

Cobb has urged the administration to hand over as many documents as it can for the special counsel’s probe, while McGahn is worried about precedents that could weaken the White House for future administrations, the report said.

This tension has reportedly led to officials privately saying they thought colleagues could be wearing wires to record conversations for Mueller, according to the Times.

The Democrats who can’t quit Hillary Clinton

At this point, Hillary Clinton is less a political figure than the subject of a Lost Cause myth. She turns 70 next month, has no plans to run again, and her influence within the party seems to be waning. The triangulated platform she pitched just last year already feels like a relic now that dozens of mainstream Democrats have embraced the goal of single-payer health care. Given her limited relevance, forward-looking elements of the Democratic Party are annoyed with Clinton’s continued presence in the headlines. ...

Modern-day Clinton zealots are a strange breed. There aren’t any unique policies that unite them, nor are there any future campaigns on the horizon. What ties them together is a general feeling that the events of November 8, 2016 were cosmically, historically unjust, and that the world can never be forgiven for allowing them to happen. Moving on is unthinkable. The experience of seeing Donald J. Trump elected president over “the most qualified candidate in history” was so monumental, so traumatic, so important, that it deserves no less than a lifetime of monkish contemplation. This is how religions start; the death of Christ was deemed so important that, after 4,000 years of biblical history, it simply couldn’t be topped. The narrative had to end. So traumatized the apostles were by the Crucifixion that the only future they could imagine was Revelation — the seas would turn to blood, the rivers to poison, and the deserving few would be eternally rewarded for their loyalty.

Utah quietly tells feds: Trim Bears Ears monument by 90 percent

If maps Utah has submitted to the Interior Department are a guide, Bears Ears National Monument will be drastically cut in size.

The state’s vision, shared with Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, is to shrink Bears Ears to one-tenth its current 1.35 million acres, scaling the southeastern Utah monument down to about 120,000 acres surrounding Mule and Arch canyons west of Blanding, according to maps and other documents prepared by Gov. Gary Herbert’s office and obtained by The Salt Lake Tribune through records requests. ...

But Utah’s plan was immediately panned by Native American leaders, who say it disregards the wishes of the tribes that sought the monument in the first place. The state’s proposal “demonstrates their failure to listen to the concerns of our people who have lobbied and fought for over 80 years for this designation,” Navajo Nation President Russell Begaye said Friday.

“Now that we finally have achieved that, we want to keep the designation as it is,” Begaye said. “We are asking President Trump and his administration to support our position. It is unfortunate the state and [San Juan] County do not respect the views of their citizens and neighbors.” Added Willie Grayeyes, a Utah Navajo who chairs Utah Diné Bikéyah, created to protect Bears Ears: “We are Utah citizens and Americans too, yet our traditional wisdom and our ancestral ties seem not to matter.”

Bears Ears is sacred to Native Americans. But heritage isn't all equal for Trump

History and heritage are powerful words in American politics. In the United States, the Founding Fathers are second only to the apostles; the Constitution comes just after the Bible on the bookshelf and the Declaration of Independence is nearly as important an origin story as Genesis. Just days after bloody white supremacist rallies in Charlottesville last month, Donald Trump argued that a growing chorus of voices calling for the removal of Confederate statues would inevitably lead to the removal of monuments honoring the Founding Fathers – tantamount to heresy.

But not all heritage and history is holy in these United States. While Trump is quick to defend his Confederate forefathers, he has been equally swift to desecrate places held sacred by Native Americans.

Just weeks into his presidency, Trump hamfisted the Dakota Access Pipeline through the graves and homelands of the Standing Rock Sioux in North Dakota. Now, thanks to a leaked memo from interior secretary Ryan Zinke, we know the president plans to shrink protected areas and lift restrictions on extractive developments at 10 national monuments across the country – including the sacred Bears Ears national monument in southern Utah.

Bears Ears is one of the most powerful and historic cultural and spiritual centers of the first peoples of the south-west. The monument, established in the twilight of the Obama administration, stands just next door to Canyonlands national park, north of the San Juan river and east of the Colorado. The rock formation after which the monument is named comprises twin buttes standing high above the piñon-juniper treetops, carved canyons, and majestic mesas – like the head of a bear emerging from the south-west landscape. The area is revered by a full five Native nations in the south-west: the Navajo, Hopi, Uintah & Ouray Ute, Ute Mountain Ute and Zuni. ...

Evidently, history and heritage are only important when invoked to defend alabaster monuments to slaveholders.

Naomi Klein: We Are Seeing the Shock Doctrine in Effect After Hurricanes Harvey & Irma

Caribbean faces fresh devastation as Hurricane Maria hits islands

The Caribbean island of Dominica has been “brutalised and devastated” by category 5 Hurricane Maria, the prime minister of the country has said. The eyewall of the hurricane barrelled into Dominica’s eastern coast on Monday evening, crossing towards the former British colony’s capital, Roseau, on the south-west side.

Hurricane Maria had intensified into a category 5 storm as it moved towards Dominica. It was reclassified as a category 4 as it moved away from the island. It is expected to hit the eastern Caribbean islands still working to provide basic food, water and health services to the regions hard hit by Hurricane Irma.

The US National Hurricane Center (NHC) said the “major hurricane” was producing maximum sustained winds of 155 miles per hour and would strengthen further over the next two days, remaining “extremely dangerous” as it approaches the British Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico.

Also of Interest

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

How Swedes and Norwegians Broke the Power of the ‘1 Percent’

The Medicare for All Act of 2017: The Policies

Vincent Fort Angered Democratic Elites When He Endorsed Bernie Sanders. Can He Be Atlanta’s Next Mayor?

How the UN Covers for US Aggression

America’s Slow-Motion Military Coup

Vietnam War: New Ken Burns Documentary Dismisses the Colonial Origins of the Futile, Disastrous Conflict

Stanislav Petrov, 'The Man Who Saved The World,' Dies At 77

'They've called me a traitor': Catalans divided as independence vote nears

Catalonia’s Defiance of Spanish Authority Turns into Rebellion

BILL ANALYSIS: Columbia Gorge Clearcut Act

Hat tip mimi:

Chris Hedges: The Silencing of Dissent

A Little Night Music

Earl Gaines w/Freddy Robinson Orchestra - White Rose

Earl Gaines - Now Do You Hear

Earl Gaines - Tell Me Tonight

Earl Gaines - The Best Of Luck To You

Earl Gaines - It's Worth Anything

Earl Gaines - 24 Hours a Day

Earl Gaines - Nine Pound Steel

Earl Gaines - Hymn Number 5

Earl Gaines - You Belong To Me