Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features Chicago blues harmonica player Snooky Pryor. Enjoy!

"A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction."

-- Graham Greene

News and Opinion

Google escalates blacklisting of left-wing web sites and journalists - Blacklists Chris Hedges

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Chris Hedges informed the WSWS Wednesday that his articles had ceased appearing on Google News. Hedges said the change occurred after the publication of his interview with the World Socialist Web Site in which he spoke out against Google’s censorship of left-wing sites.

“Sometime after I gave that interview, they blacklisted me,” said Hedges. “If you go into Google News and type my name, there are six stories, none of which have anything to do with me.”

“I write constantly. Previously, Google News listed my columns for Truthdig and my contributions to Common Dreams and Alternet, as well as references to my books,” Hedges said. “But now it’s all gone. And I’m certain it’s because I spoke out against the Google censorship.”

Google appears to have kept an older version of its news aggregator available online, accessible by visiting google.com and clicking the “news” link below the search bar. That version of the news aggregator, which appears to be in the process of being phased out, lists 254,000 results for the search “World Socialist Web Site.”

A similar search returns 89,600 entries for “Chris Hedges.”

The changes to Google News mark a new stage in a systematic campaign of censorship and blacklisting that has been underway at least since April, when Ben Gomes, the company’s VP of engineering, said Google was seeking to promote “authoritative” news outlets over “alternative” news sources.

It's Time To Boycott Google Search

Worth a full read:

Twitter Rescues American Democracy By Banning Ads From RT And Sputnik

Twitter has announced today that it will no longer be accepting advertisements from Russian outlets RT and Sputnik, thereby protecting Americans from consuming advertisements by propaganda outlets other than CNN, Fox, MSNBC, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, ABC, NBC, CBS, the Daily Beast, The Hill, NPR, the LA Times, USA Today, Newsweek, AP, Reuters, the Guardian, and any corporate media outlet used to manufacture public support for a corporatist system of government. ...

“Early this year,” Twitter’s explanation reads, “the U.S. intelligence community named RT and Sputnik as implementing state-sponsored Russian efforts to interfere with and disrupt the 2016 Presidential election, which is not something we want on Twitter. This decision is restricted to these two entities based our internal investigation of their behavior as well as their inclusion in the January 2017 DNI report.” ...

Not coincidentally this story is running concurrent to a revelation that Twitter’s marketing team unsuccessfully tried to sell RT a deal on advertisements for its coverage of the 2016 election, which Twitter failed to report to the Senate Intelligence Committee. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is catching flack for this from all across the political spectrum today, but in my opinion the public interest in this story misses the point entirely. It shouldn’t matter if Twitter tried to sell an advertisement package to RT any more than it should matter if RT and Sputnik promote leftist ideas in America. Ideas which conflict with the establishment narrative are not the problem. Americans do not need to be protected from unauthorized ideas.

In a corporatist system of government, which America most certainly has, corporate media is state media, and corporate censorship is state censorship. Powerful corporations like Time Warner and Twitter, Inc. are not separate from government in any meaningful way in America, since corporate power and elected power are not separated in any meaningful way. ... Which of course makes the current crusade against Russian state media ridiculous. Your true rulers do not oppose RT and Sputnik because they want to protect you from propaganda and psy-ops, they oppose RT and Sputnik because they gum up the gears of the propaganda and psy-ops you’re meant to be consuming. January’s DNI report essentially admits this.

Twitter Bans RT and Sputnik Ads, Who's Next?

20,000 Nazis March in Kiev. The Western Media Somehow Fails to Notice

Last weekend saw Ukraine’s biggest Nazi march of modern times. Yet, the Western media and its numerous correspondents in Kiev completely ignored the story, even on social networks. This is as clear an example of press bias as you will ever encounter.

On Saturday night, up to 20,000 far-right radicals honored the 75th anniversary of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) – a paramilitary group led by Stepan Bandera, which actively collaborated with Hitler’s Germany. They brandished lit torches, smoke pellets, and flares as they chanted fascist slogans. And some participants openly gave Nazi salutes during the rally.

The leaders of the procession included Oleg Tyahnybok, an associate of US Senators John McCain and Chris Murphy, who has called for Ukraine to do more to halt the "criminal activities" of "organized Jewry.” He’s also demanded Ukrainian citizens should have their ethnic origins stamped in their passports.

Earlier in the day, Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko said the actions of the UPA fighters would always remain an “inspiration” and an example for future generations. This conduct included the slaughter of tens of thousands of Jews and Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia from 1943 to 1944.

So, we had a major Nazi gathering in a European capital and the only English language sources that show up in a Google News search are from RT, Sputnik, The Nation and a half-hearted seven-sentence ‘report’ by US state broadcaster RFE/RL, which meekly describes them as mere “nationalists.” That means there is nothing from CNN, the Guardian, the New York Times, Washington Post or the BBC, among the usual suspects who make every little protest in Russia headline news.

Phoenix 2.0 - CIA To Unleash Vietnam Era Terror Campaign On Afghanistan

Last week the new head of the CIA Mike Pompeo publicly threatened to make the CIA a "much more vicious agency". His first step towards that is to unleash CIA sponsored killer gangs onto the people of Afghanistan:

The C.I.A. is expanding its covert operations in Afghanistan, sending small teams of highly experienced officers and contractors alongside Afghan forces to hunt and kill Taliban militants across the country ...

The C.I.A.’s expanded role will augment missions carried out by military units, meaning more of the United States’ combat role in Afghanistan will be hidden from public view.

This will be mass murder campaign. People will be pulled from their houses at night and vanish - 'eliminated'. That has been happening in Afghanistan for years, but on a relatively small scale. So far the targets were 'al-Qaeda', a small terrorist group, not the local insurgency. The new campaign will target the Taliban, a mass insurgency against the U.S. occupation. Thus is will be a mass campaign and cause mass casualties.

It is not going to be a counter-insurgency campaign, even though some will assert it is. A counter-insurgency campaign combines political, security, economic, and informational components. It can only be successful in support of a legitimate authority. The current Afghan government has little legitimacy. It was cobbled and bribed together by the U.S. embassy after wide and open election fraud threatened to devolve into total chaos. In August CIA director Pompeo met the Afghan president Ashraf Ghani and likely discussed the new plan. But the now announced campaign has neither a political nor an economic component. Solely centered on "security" it will end up as a random torture and killing expedition without the necessary context and with no positive results for the occupation.

Niger is the perfect example of the US state of perma-war

The vast majority of Americans probably had no idea that the US even had military troops participating in combat missions in Africa before the incident in Niger in the beginning of October that >left four American soldiers dead. But now the Trump administration is already planning to escalate lethal military operations in the country where the attack occurred – all with little debate.

Donald Trump has been involved in >a bizarre public feud with the families of the fallen soldiers, which has dominated headlines and cable television for weeks. But there has been far less pointed questions about why the US military is fighting in Niger at all, and yet it seems likely that there’s about to be more US military presence in the country that will >only make matters worse.

As NBC News >reported on Wednesday night: “The Trump administration is paving the way for lethal strikes against terrorists in Niger as the US military pushes forward with a plan to arm the Reaper drones that fly over that country.” Meanwhile, Republicans are also hinting that more military personnel >may be on the way as well. ...

Niger is the perfect illustration of the US’s permanent war posture around the world, where special forces fight various militants with little or no public scrutiny and no congressional authorization. The Obama administration announced in 2013 that they >were sending 100 troops to Niger as “support for intelligence collection” with French troops in the region. By this year, that number had ballooned to 800, with almost no media attention before the deaths of the soldiers.

The White House routinely gets away with this by claiming that US troops are on “advise and assist” missions – one of the >many military euphemisms that has morphed into the absurd over the last few years. Claiming troops are only “assisting” or “training” local forces is the way that the US military establishes a foothold in a country while telling everyone they don’t engage in “combat”. Then, when they inevitably do get in a firefight and a soldier gets killed – as happens time and time again – it provides an excuse to expand the mission even more. ... Rinse. Repeat.

Catalan independence declaration: "There is no going back"

Spanish PM dissolves Catalan parliament and calls fresh elections

The Spanish government has taken control of Catalonia, dissolved its parliament and announced new elections after secessionist Catalan MPs voted to establish an independent republic, pushing the country’s worst political crisis in 40 years to new and dangerous heights. Speaking on Friday evening, the Spanish prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, said his cabinet had fired the regional president, Carles Puigdemont, and ordered regional elections to be held on 21 December.

Flags of Spain and EU taken down as Catalonia declares independence pic.twitter.com/1JEZgFx7VF

— Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec) October 27, 2017

Rajoy said the Catalan government had been removed along with the head of the regional police force, the Mossos d’Esquadra. The Catalan government’s international “embassies” are also to be shut down. “I have decided to call free, clean and legal elections as soon as possible to restore democracy,” he told a press conference, adding that the aim of the measures was to “restore the self-government that has been eliminated by the decisions of the Catalan government”.

The actions came hours after Spain’s national unity suffered a decisive blow when Catalan MPs in the 135-seat regional parliament voted for independence by a margin of 70 votes to 10. Dozens of opposition MPs boycotted the secret ballot, marching out of the chamber in Barcelona before it took place and leaving Spanish and Catalan flags on their empty seats in protest.

Rajoy had earlier appealed for calm following the vote and promised that Catalonia would be returned to legal and constitutional order. “What has happened today in the Catalan parliament is unequivocal proof of how necessary it was for the senate to approve the government’s proposals,” he said on Friday afternoon. “Today the Catalan parliament has approved something that, in the opinion of the great majority of people, is not just against the law, but is also a criminal act because it is intended to declare something that isn’t possible – Catalan independence.”

Rajoy’s cabinet held an emergency meeting to enact the measures and is expected to appeal against the independence declaration in the Spanish constitutional court. Prosecutors will also file charges of “rebellion” against Puigdemont, a crime punishable with up to 30 years in jail, a spokesman said. Much will now depend on exactly how the Spanish government goes about removing Catalan officials from office and how pro-independence activists and the Mossos d’Esquadra react to the intervention. Addressing the crowds, Puigdemont called for a peaceful response to the coming crackdown. “In the days ahead, we must keep to our values of pacificism and dignity,” he said. “It’s in our – in your – hands to build the republic.”

Catalan crisis escalates

World's witnessing a new Gilded Age as billionaires’ wealth swells to $6tn

The world’s super-rich hold the greatest concentration of wealth since the US Gilded Age at the turn of the 20th century, when families like the Carnegies, Rockefellers and Vanderbilts controlled vast fortunes.

Billionaires increased their combined global wealth by almost a fifth last year to a record $6tn (£4.5tn) – more than twice the GDP of the UK. There are now 1,542 dollar billionaires across the world, after 145 multi-millionaires saw their wealth tick over into nine-zero fortunes last year, according to the >UBS / PwC Billionaires report.

Josef Stadler, the lead author of the report and UBS’s head of global ultra high net worth, said his billionaire clients were concerned that growing inequality between rich and poor could lead to a “strike back”. “We’re at an inflection point,” Stadler said. “Wealth concentration is as high as in 1905, this is something billionaires are concerned about. The problem is the power of interest on interest – that makes big money bigger and, the question is to what extent is that sustainable and at what point will society intervene and strike back?”

Stadler added: “We are now two years into the peak of the second Gilded Age.” He said the “$1bn question” was how society would react to the concentration of so much money in the hands of so few. Anger at >so-called robber barron families who built up vast fortunes from monopolies in US rail, oil, steel and banking in the late 19th century, an era of rapid industrialisation and growing inequality in America that became known as the Gilded Age, led to President Roosevelt breaking up companies and trusts and increasing taxes on the wealthy in the early 1900s.

“Will there be similarities in the way society reacts to this gilded age?,” Stadler asked. “Will the second age end or will it proceed?”

New Zealand’s new prime minister calls capitalism a ‘blatant failure’

New Zealand's new prime minister called capitalism a "blatant failure", before citing levels of homelessness and low wages as evidence that "the market has failed" her country's poor. Jacinda Ardern, who is to become the nation's youngest leader since 1856, said measures used to gauge economic success "have to change" to take into account "people's ability to actually have a meaningful life".

In her first full interview since becoming prime minister-elect, she told current affairs programme The Nation that capitalism had "failed our people". "If you have hundreds of thousands of children living in homes without enough to survive, that's a blatant failure," she said. "What else could you describe it as?"

Incumbent prime minister Bill English, whose National Party has held power for nine years, has said his party grew the economy and produced increasing budget surpluses which benefited the nation.

But Ms Ardern said: "When you have a market economy, it all comes down to whether or not you acknowledge where the market has failed and where intervention is required. Has it failed our people in recent times? Yes. "How can you claim you've been successful when you have growth roughly three per cent, but you've got the worst homelessness in the developed world?"

'No longer for sale': Foreigners banned from buying houses in New Zealand

Overseas buyers will no longer be allowed to purchase existing homes in New Zealand, Prime Minister-elect Jacinda Ardern declared as she unveiled a raft of policy deals made with her coalition partners.

The move to tackle soaring property prices was agreed during lengthy negotiations between the Labour Party leader and populist powerbroker Winston Peters to form a new government that also includes the Green Party.

Ardern announced plans to slash immigration on Tuesday and focus on regional development and job creation. ...

Foreign ownership and a housing shortage in New Zealand's larger cities were prominent issues in the lead-up to the September 23 election, which brought an end to nine years of rule by the conservative National Party.

14 Democrats join Republicans in repealing ranked-choice voting referendum

In a special session of the Maine Legislature on Monday, lawmakers passed a bill to delay and eventually repeal the ranked-choice voting reform legislation passed with a majority of a statewide vote less than a year ago.

“It is truly a sad day in the Maine Legislature,” said Democratic Senator Mike Carpenter of Aroostook County. “I cannot understand why so many lawmakers saw fit to abandon any chance of finding a bipartisan solution that addressed those concerns while still respecting the will of the voters by implementing as much of the ranked-choice voting law as we could.”

Two Democrats, Senators Dawn Hill of York County and Bill Diamond of Cumberland County, cast the deciding votes in favor of the delay-and-repeal bill in the Senate, with Republican Tom Saviello of Franklin County voting against undoing the referendum.

In the House, a bill to bring the law into compliance with an opinion by the state Supreme Court by limiting it to primary and federal contests initially passed, but after the Senate backed repeal fourteen Democrats joined every Republican in voting to undo the law.

The repeal comes after three other referendums passed last November, to raise the minimum wage, legalize marijuana and tax high income earners to fund education, were all modified or undone by the legislature earlier this year.

Idiots:

Poll: Majority of Dems has favorable view of George W. Bush

A slim majority of Democrats in the United States holds a favorable view of former President George W. Bush, according to a new poll.

Fifty-one percent of Democrats in the Economist-YouGov survey say they have a somewhat or very favorable view of the 43rd president, while 42 percent hold a somewhat or very unfavorable view of Bush. 

The results come just under one week after Bush delivered a blistering rebuke of President Trump’s policies. While Bush did not mention Trump by name during the speech, he criticized foreign polices that do not combat security threats head-on and domestic policies that rebuff immigrants.

Video captures Hurricane Maria’s terrible impact on Puerto Rico.

On Tuesday afternoon, 34 days after the hurricane made landfall in Puerto Rico, the National Weather Service in San Juan posted an unassuming YouTube link to their Twitter account. I’ve never seen anything like it posted by the National Weather Service before:

The video is an 11 minute tour of the island, complete with drone flyovers and somber piano music. It shows the enormous scale of one of the worst humanitarian disasters in U.S. history, as thousands of people continue to struggle for survival.

Subsidy plan for coal and nuclear plants 'will cost US taxpayers $10.6bn a year'

A Trump administration plan to subsidize coal and nuclear energy would cost US taxpayers about $10.6bn a year and prop up some of the oldest and dirtiest power plants in the country, a new analysis has found.

The Department of Energy >has proposed that coal and nuclear plants be compensated not only for the electricity they produce but also for the reliability they provide to the grid. The new rule would provide payments to facilities that store fuel on-site for 90 days or more because they are “indispensable for our economic and national security”.

Rick Perry, the energy secretary, said the subsidies were needed to avoid power outages “in times of supply stress such as recent natural disasters”.

The plan would provide a lifeline to many ageing coal and nuclear plants that would otherwise go out of business, primarily due to the abundance of cheap natural gas and the plummeting cost of renewables. ...

Perry’s pro-coal market intervention would cost taxpayers as much as $10.6bn a year over the next decade, >according to a joint analysis by the non-partisan groups Climate Policy Initiative and Energy Innovation. Just a handful of companies, operating about 90 plants on the eastern seaboard and the midwest, would benefit from the subsidies, the report found.

Record-Melting Fall Heat Wave Bakes Southern California

It's not every Oct. 23 or 24 that millions of Americans are swathed in temperatures above 100°F. This week has done just that, bringing some of the toastiest weather ever observed in the U.S. during late October, and more pre-Halloween heat is on the way.

By far the most scorching weather has been in Southern California, although it's also been exceptionally mild this month in settings as far-flung as Michigan, Florida and New England.

A multi-day summer-like heat wave kicked into high gear on Monday and continued Tuesday along and well inland from the California coast, from Santa Barbara through Los Angeles to San Diego. Dozens of locations recorded highs for the date and all-time highs for this late in the year, and Santa Ana winds kept the temperatures amazingly warm throughout Monday night. In Orange County, the city of Fullerton soared to 107°F on Monday. According to WU weather historian Christopher Burt, this is likely the hottest single temperature recorded anywhere in the U.S. so late in the year. Even Death Valley has never recorded a temperature this high after Oct. 16 in any year! For comparison, the national U.S. record high for November is 105°F, most recently at Tustin Irvine Ranch, California, in 1997.

The heat and wind will continue through Wednesday across the coastal ranges of Southern California, keeping fire danger at critical levels on both Tuesday and Wednesday as designated by the NOAA/NWS Storm Prediction Center. ... Hot temperatures pushed further up the California coast on Tuesday. Big Sur topped 100°F before noon, as did several other coastal locations. In San Diego, public schools closed early on both Monday and Tuesday because of the heat; by 2019, all of the district's school buildings are slated to have air conditioning.

Mysterious object seen speeding past sun could be 'visitor from another star system'

A mysterious object detected hurtling past our sun could be the first space rock traced back to a different solar system, according to astronomers tracking the body. While other objects have previously been mooted as having interstellar origins, experts say the latest find, an object estimated to be less than 400m in diameter, is the best contender yet.

“The exciting thing about this is that this may be essentially a visitor from another star system,” said Dr Edward Bloomer, astronomer at the Royal Observatory Greenwich. If its origins are confirmed as lying beyond our solar system, it will be the first space rock known to come from elsewhere in the galaxy.

Published in the minor planet electronic circulars by the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the observations reveal that the object is in a strong hyperbolic orbit – in other words, it is going fast enough to escape the gravitational pull of the sun. ...

“If further observations confirm the unusual nature of this orbit, this object may be the first clear case of an interstellar comet,” the report notes. A second report, published later the same day, redesignated the object as an asteroid on account of new analysis of its appearance, giving it the handle A/2017 U1.

Also of Interest

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

Twitter Versus RT: Which One is State Media Again?

Why “Centrists” Will Sink the Democrats, If They Haven’t Already

Levitating the Pentagon

Lawyer Behind Russian Dossier Tried to Undermine Bernie Sanders as well as Trump

Ryan Zinke: cowboy in Trump's cabinet taking aim at America's public lands

Bernie Sanders Is Working on a “Comprehensive Plan” for Puerto Rico

Canada indigenous women were coerced into sterilisations, lawsuit says

APNewsBreak: Georgia election server wiped after suit filed

Russia Wants Bulgarians to Stop Painting Soviet Monuments To Look Like American Superheroes

A Little Night Music

Snooky Pryor - How'd You Learn To Shake It Like That

Snooky Pryor - Crazy 'Bout My Baby

Snooky Pryor - In This Mess

Snooky Pryor - Fire, Fire

Snooky Pryor - Boogie Twist

Snooky Pryor - I'm Getting Tired

Snooky Pryor - Come On Down To My House

Snooky Pryor - Slow Down

Snooky Pryor - Do It If You Want To

Snooky Pryor - Mind Your Own Business