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This evening's music features Louisiana blues musician Kenny Neal. Enjoy!

“Joseph McCarthy, the Junior Republican Senator from Wisconsin, ruled America like devil king for four years. His purges were an American mirror image of Stalin's purges, an unnoticed similarity.”

-- Martha Gellhorn

News and Opinion

Jill Stein: Newest Target Of McCarthyism

McCarthyite Witch Hunt Comes For Jill Stein

This is what Russiagate has come to. This psychotic conspiracy theory is now so desperate to turn this endless fountain of nothing into something that it is rifling through the documents of a campaign which received one percent of the popular vote because its candidate had dinner in Russia two years ago. ...

Jill Stein gave a perfectly reasonable explanation of the dinner she had in which she was photographed at a table with Michael Flynn and Vladimir Putin, and not one shred of evidence has ever been produced anywhere contradicting it. The Green Party necessarily has to run a presidential candidate every election in order to secure party viability; if they hadn’t run Stein they would necessarily have run someone else. The existence of third parties is a perfectly legitimate, legally sanctioned and desirable part of the American electoral process, and in the rest of the world they are considered normal. There is no legitimate reason whatsoever to suspect that Stein’s candidacy had anything to do with a Kremlin conspiracy. ...

Last year we learned that one of America’s two major political parties actively sabotages candidacies which don’t perfectly kowtow to establishment agendas, and this year we’ve seen this same establishment running relentless punitive character assassination campaigns against any leftist candidates who dare to run outside the rigged Democratic party system.

Which of course is why it’s so funny when people claim that Russia attacked American democracy. In order for anyone to attack American democracy, democracy would have to exist in America.

Jill Stein Says Senate Request for Docs on Russia Probe is “New McCarthyism”

NYT Prints Government-Funded Propaganda About Government-Funded Propaganda

An op-ed by the president of the right-wing human rights group Freedom House, published in the New York Times (12/11/17)—later boosted by New York Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker—warned of the menace of “commentators, trolls, bots, false news sites and propaganda,” and their negative effects on democracy. Missing from its analysis was any account of how the government that funds their organization—86 percent of Freedom House’s budget comes from the US government, primarily the State Department and USAID—uses social media to stir unrest and undermine governments worldwide.

What the reader was left with was a very selective, curated impression that online social media manipulation is something done exclusively by brown and black people and those dastardly Slavs. The column condemns “surreptitious techniques pioneered in Moscow and Beijing to use the internet to drown out dissent and undermine free elections,” going on to site online skullduggery in the Philippines, Kenya, Turkey, Mexico and Iran.

Missing from the piece by Freedom House’s Michael Abramowitz is any mention—much less discussion—of numerous reports detailing online manipulation by US and allied governments and Western PR firms.

No mention of the Defense Department’s $100 million program Operation Earnest Voice software that “creates fake online identities to spread pro-American propaganda.” No mention of the US Air Force’s 2010 solicitation of “persona management” software designed to create hundreds of sock puppets, “replete with background, history, supporting details and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographically consistent.” No mention of USAID (the same government agency, incidentally, that funds Freedom House) secretly creating an entire social media platform to “stir unrest” in Cuba. No mention of the US State Department’s newly-created $160 million Global Engagement Center, targeting English-language audiences with unattributed Facebookvideos combating, in part, “Russia propaganda.” ...

Social media manipulation is a major problem in urgent need of robust discussion. But outlets like the New York Times—and others, such as Buzzfeed—that focus only on attempts by Official US Enemies, and never direct any criticism inwards, aren’t concerned with having an earnest discussion of the problem. They are, instead, using the specter of online manipulation to smear those in bad standing with the US State Department while deflecting any conversation about what the most powerful country in the history of the world may be up to online.

UN: Coalition airstrikes kill 136 in Yemen in 11 days

The U.N. human rights office said Tuesday it has verified the killings of 136 Yemeni civilians and other non-combatants in airstrikes carried out over 11 days this month by a Saudi-led military coalition batting Yemen's Shiite rebels.

Spokesman Rupert Colville of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights said U.N. officials are "deeply concerned" about a surge in civilian casualties from airstrikes following the killing in early December of Yemen's former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh. ...

The airstrikes, which also injured 87 people, hit Yemen's rebel-run TV channel, a hospital in the Red Sea port city of Hodeida, and a wedding party — a strike that killed one woman and nine children, the rights office said. ...

Meanwhile, hundreds of world figures urged the leaders of the United States, France and Britain on Tuesday to stop "stoking the flames of war" in impoverished Yemen. The statement, signed by 355 high-profile figures, marked the 1,000th day of the war, which has turned the poorest Arab country into the world's largest humanitarian crisis.

US prepared to 'compel the denuclearisation' of North Korea, says Trump national security adviser HR McMaster

The US is willing to “compel” North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons programme, Donald Trump’s national security adviser has said.

H R McMaster reiterated the US President’s assertion that “all options” were open to Washington when it came to confronting the Kim regime’s rapidly advancing missile programme. ...

He told the BBC: “Of course that’s what we want, but we’re not committed to a peaceful [resolution] – we’re committed to a resolution.

“We want the resolution to be peaceful, but as the president has said, all options are on the table and we have to be prepared, if necessary, to compel the denuclearisation of North Korea without the cooperation of that regime.

“The chances of war, who knows what they are? They could go up or down, I think, based on what we all decide to do. North Korea is a grave threat to all civilised people across the globe.”

Donald Trump threatens to cut aid to countries over UN Jerusalem vote

Donald Trump has threatened to withhold “billions” of dollars of US aid from countries which vote in favour of a United Nations resolution rejecting the US president’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

His comments came after the US ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley warned member states that she will be “taking names” of countries that vote for a general assembly resolution on Thursday critical of the announcement which overturned decades of US foreign policy.

Speaking at a cabinet meeting on Wednesday, Trump said: “Let them vote against us. We’ll save a lot. We don’t care. But this isn’t like it used to be where they could vote against you and then you pay them hundreds of millions of dollars,” he said. “We’re not going to be taken advantage of any longer.”

The warning appeared aimed largely at UN members from poorer nations in Africa and Asia who are regarded as more vulnerable to US pressure. Egypt, which drafted Monday’s UN security council resolution which the US vetoed, is particularly vulnerable receiving $1.2bn in US aid last year. But Trump’s comments may also resonate elsewhere – including in the UK which is hoping to negotiate a quick post-Brexit trade deal with Washington.

EU moves to punish Poland over judiciary reforms

Poland is facing the EU’s “nuclear option”

The European Union has triggered an unprecedented disciplinary process against Poland in a bid to make the country’s right-wing leaders back down on judicial reforms that critics say threaten its democracy.

The European Commission decided on Wednesday to launch so-called “Article 7” proceedings against Poland, one of its largest member states. It’s a drastic measure that could ultimately lead to the “nuclear option” of suspending Warsaw’s E.U. voting rights, which has never happened to a member country before.

Over the last two years, Poland’s conservative Law and Justice government has adopted 13 laws which the EU’s ruling body fears will jeopardize fundamental democratic values by allowing for political interference in the courts. Passing legislation on Friday that gave the government effective control of judicial appointments and the supreme court finally brought the issue to a head. ...

Poland responded by calling the E.U.’s decision purely political. The ruling Law and Justice party believes the new laws are necessary to tackle corruption and update a system that was never sufficiently reformed following the collapse of Communism three decades ago.

Catalonia's regional election unlikely to heal bitter divisions

They are known as the silent majority, a multitude of depoliticised, working-class Catalans living in the industrial towns around Barcelona who, when asked, say they want nothing to do with independence. ... On Thursday night it will be established whether this social group, whose families mostly migrated to wealthy Catalonia from poorer parts of Spain, really exists – or at least whether its members have shaken off their apathy and voted, as the Spanish prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, will be praying.

Only if they turn out in force and help to overturn the parliamentary majority enjoyed by the separatists at elections in 2015 will the government in Madrid be able to breathe a sigh of relief. Even then, it will only be a relative letup in a bruising political conflict that is set to run for years, decades, or generations.

These are extraordinary circumstances, with Catalonia split into two increasingly angry halves and polls showing that those who preach moderation or compromise are the least likely to succeed. A bitter campaign in which the Catalan electorate is being told to punish one side or the other for their behaviour over the past months has done nothing to heal wounds. One side is outraged that police batons were used during the 1 October vote, that some of its leaders are now in jail and that Rajoy later imposed direct rule. This, it says, is the final proof of Madrid’s iniquity.

The other side is furious that the separatists used a slim parliamentary majority – backed by less than 50% of Catalan votes – to force a confrontation with Madrid before declaring a muddled form of independence that turned out to have no substance to it. That, they say, has sowed the seeds of division, fractured Catalan society and driven away both money and jobs. ...

The only certainty is that whoever wins on Thursday will face two daunting tasks: mend the divisions between Catalans and make peace with Madrid.

Think the neoliberal Democrats would go for this if they were in power? Pffffftttttt!!!

While US Attacks Net Neutrality, UK Makes High-Speed Internet 'Legal Right'

While last week the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rolled back net neutrality rules that allowed the internet to be regulated as a public utility, the United Kingdom announced Wednesday that by 2020, high-speed internet will be a legal right for all British households and businesses.

Rejecting an offer from the British communications company BT to voluntarily provide universal broadband access and improve speeds in rural regions on their own timeline, the U.K. Department of Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport has adopted a universal service obligation (USO) stipulating that by 2020, speeds of at least 10Mbps—or what's "needed to meet the requirements of an average family"—must be available nationwide.

The department told the Guardian that officials felt BT's proposal was not "strong enough for us to take the regulatory USO off the table, and have therefore decided not to pursue BT's proposal, in favor of providing a legal right to broadband."

"We are grateful to BT for their proposal but have decided that only a regulatory approach will make high speed broadband a reality for everyone in the U.K., regardless of where they live or work," said Culture Secretary Karen Bradley. "We know how important broadband is to homes and businesses and we want everyone to benefit from a fast and reliable connection."

Cliven Bundy has to stand trial again

Cliven Bundy, a Nevada rancher and long-time government critic accused of leading an armed standoff between a militia and federal authorities in 2014, will have to stand trial again.

Judge Gloria Navarro declared a mistrial on Wednesday for Bundy, his two sons, and another militia member because prosecutors withheld some evidence from the trial, including surveillance records, FBI logs, a threat assessment of the Bundys, and an internal affairs report from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the government agency involved in the land dispute.

GOP tax bill passed and now heads to Trump’s desk

The Republican tax bill has passed. This time, for real. After falling afoul of the Senate’s strict budget rules on Tuesday, the House of Representatives voted on and passed 224-201 their overhaul of the country’s tax code for the second time in 24 hours.

This it’s time going straight to President Donald Trump’s desk where he is expected to sign it and remake the American tax code for individuals and businesses. Some of the changes will be felt almost immediately in 2018 while some consequences will be gradually felt over years and decades.

The focus and centerpiece of the Republican plan is a permanent lowering of the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. That cut will significantly increase the national debt but Republicans believe it will make American businesses more competitive in an increasingly global economy and thereby spur the domestic economy.

Individuals taxpayers will see a much more complicated landscape. Every taxpayer will see the tax rate in their income brackets lowered but not every taxpayer will pay less money in taxes. While the rates have gone down, many deductions on state and local taxes and mortgages are now capped. Whether people pay more in the long run will depend in part on how their states and localities respond.

Corporations Say Publicly They’ll Pocket the Tax Cut, But Republicans Aren’t Listening

Weeks before the Republican-led Congress moved toward final passage of its corporate tax cut bill, major companies had already begun a surge of stock buybacks — confirming critics’ fears that the windfall of lower rates will be used for self-enrichment rather than job growth.

Home Depot led the buyback splurge, pocketing $15 billion. ... Other corporations are expected to use the windfall to increase mergers and acquisitions (M&A) or invest in automation. “Industry executives have been eagerly anticipating tax reform in earnings calls, interviews and casual conversation all year. Multiple CEOs have projected major M&A activity will follow if any kind of corporate rate reduction is finalized, further accelerating the rapid pace of consolidation in the industry,” wrote one industry publication about how waste companies are anticipating tax reform.

But the House Republicans who wrote and passed the tax bill on Tuesday have ignored these warnings. In interviews with The Intercept, members suggested that stock buybacks, as well as M&A, will either be rare or not that harmful to the economy.

McConnell Is Happy About Tax Cuts, But Even Happier About Stuffing Judiciary With Right-Wingers

Even while riding the high of his party's dead-of-night tax victory, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) still wouldn't call the GOP's $1.5 trillion "gift to the rich" the crowning achievement of his career. That honor, McConnell told Bloomberg in an interview, remains with "Neil Gorsuch and the changes we're making in the circuit courts."

"But this would be a really close second," McConnell said, referring to the tax legislation.

This "achievement" has its origins in 2016, when McConnell refused to even consider Merrick Garland, former President Barack Obama's selection to replace the deceased Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Having successfully deprived Obama of a Supreme Court pick—a move critics denounced as outright "theft"—earlier this year McConnell deployed the so-called "nuclear option" to ram President Donald Trump's nominee, Neil Gorsuch, through a Democratic filibuster and ensure that Democrats could not block future nominees.

Now that the Supreme Court seat he kept vacant is securely in Republican control, McConnell has turned his attention to confirming Trump's lower court nominees—and he's moving at a breakneck pace. Last week, Senate Republicans "confirmed President Donald Trump's twelfth federal appeals court nominee, setting a record for the most circuit court picks confirmed in a president's first year," reports Axios's Khorri Atkinson.

The 1% Will Earn the People's Hatred

Polls show the American people oppose both the oligarchic tax code and the apocalyptic war budget, but such facts are of no legislative consequence, because the U.S. political machinery hears only the voice of Capital, as expressed by both corporate parties. If Congress does not undo the war budget -- which means dismantling imperialism -- then the decimation of social spending will continue. But the Democrats, including Bernie Sanders, will not do that. The rich prevail in virtually every contest because their political monopoly matches their monopoly on economic power -- both of which are ultimately secured by force of arms, domestically and in international relations.

The rich rule, not because they are smart or even competent, but because there are no organized domestic forces strong enough to stop them -- not even a viable social democratic opposition to temper their obscene excesses with the discipline of common decency. ... With nobody to stop them, the 1% are free -- for the time being -- to multiply the contradictions of their existence. In the near term, until an effective, genuine “resistance” to the rule of the rich can be galvanized, the plutocrats and their minions will be their own worst enemies, accelerating the process of their own decline.

The orgy of class thievery just completed on Capitol Hill has alarmed and outraged three-quarters of the public, including much of Donald Trump’s racist electoral base -- and the full import of the crime has not yet set in. The oligarchs have no shame, and revel in the ease with which the system allows them to plunder. The ghouls of Wall Street believe they are basking in the glow of the ultimate “creative destruction” -- the elimination of all constraints on capital -- and that they are invincible. Donald Trump tweets that this is so from his hegemonic toilet seat. The rich cannot help but push the rest of our noses in the dirt, and that -- plus the inherent contradictions of capitalism in fatal decline -- will be their undoing.

Ta-Nehisi Coates quits Twitter after public row with Cornel West

Award-winning author Ta-Nehisi Coates has deleted his widely followed Twitter account after a public row with fellow intellectual Cornel West. ...

The Princeton scholar, author and activist West described Coates as “the neoliberal face of the black freedom struggle” in a Guardian column on Sunday, launching a furious debate about the two men in black, activist and liberal circles. West – a leading and outspoken American philosopher, activist and social critic – argued that Coates, who has arguably become the most popular and widely read black intellectual on race in a generation, writes from a worldview that “fetishizes” white supremacy. According to West, that preoccupation clouds Coates’ perception of other factors that shape modern society. ...

The specific trigger for West’s Guardian column was Coates’ newest book, We Were Eight Years in Power, a collection of essays from the Obama presidency, which takes a generally celebratory tone about the 44th president and his administration. “Coates praises Obama as a ‘deeply moral human being’ while remaining silent on the 563 drone strikes,” West wrote, spelling out his long list of grievances with Obama from the political left.

Alaska’s Arctic national wildlife refuge now has a $1bn price tag on it

Years ago, camping in Alaska’s Arctic national wildlife refuge, I watched a herd of caribou – 100,000 bulls, cows and their three-week-old calves – braid over the tundra, moving to a rhythm as old as the wind. “Not many places like this left today,” said my friend Jeff, sitting next to me above an ice-fringed river.

And so Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski believes this refuge – 80 miles east of Prudhoe Bay – could generate $1bn over 10 years once it’s opened to oil leasing. She and her Republican colleagues slipped this drilling provision into the Senate Republican tax bill. Murkowski repeatedly says this development would cover just 2,000 acres, “about one ten-thousandth of ANWR”. ... Alaska’s lieutenant governor, Byron Mallott, has said that drilling in ANWR is necessary to deal with climate change. His caddywhompus logic: we need to drill for more oil to raise money to address a problem that’s caused by humanity’s addiction to oil. Why not just say the truth? We want the money.

Murkowski adds: “We have waited nearly 40 years for the right technology to come along for a footprint small enough for the environment to be respected.” They have not. Alaskans have been trying to drill here for decades, using one crazy rationale after another. At one hearing the state’s lone congressman, Don Young, put a blue pen mark on his nose to show how small the industry footprint would be. Clever man. The development would in fact be a spider web of roads, pipelines, well pads and landing strips smack in the middle of the biological heart of the refuge. It would look less like a refuge and more like Prudhoe Bay, where thousands of spills have been reported. ...

Christopher Lewis, a retired BP manager of exploration, has said: “I do not believe that there are any adequate, commercially viable reservoirs in the Arctic refuge.” The reality is “there are other less sensitive and less costly places to explore”. ... Shell and BP expect global temperatures to rise as much as 5C by 2050. Senator Murkowski acknowledges this, but remains committed to drilling, as do others. She never asks Alaskans to sacrifice; never compels them to get innovative and be truly independent. Why not lead the world into the clean energy revolution? Go solar and tidal. Alaska has massive tides.

France bans fracking and oil extraction in all of its territories

France’s parliament has passed into law a ban on producing oil and gas by 2040, a largely symbolic gesture as the country is 99% dependent on hydrocarbon imports. ...

No new permits will be granted to extract fossil fuels and no existing licences will be renewed beyond 2040, when all production in mainland France and its overseas territories will stop.

Socialist lawmaker Delphine Batho said she hoped the ban would be “contagious”, inspiring bigger producers to follow suit.

France extracts the equivalent of about 815,000 tonnes of oil per year – an amount produced in a few hours by Saudi Arabia.

Loud orgies of Mexican fish could deafen dolphins, say scientists

A species of Mexican fish amasses in reproductive orgies so loud they can deafen other sea animals, awed scientists have said, calling for preservation of the “spectacle” threatened by overfishing. An individual spawning Gulf corvina, say the researchers, utters a mating call resembling “a really loud machine gun” with multiple rapid sound pulses. ...

Each spring all adults of the species migrate to a single site – the Colorado River Delta in the northernmost part of Mexico’s Gulf of California – for what scientists call a “spawning aggregation” that can number into the low millions. The frenzy sees all the world’s adult corvinas gathered in less than 1% of their usual home range for a few weeks. During this time male corvinas emit calls that reverberate through the hulls of fishing boats and can be heard even above water – drawing in the fishers. Within minutes, a single boat with one net can harvest two tonnes of corvina, which can grow to about a metre (3.3ft) in length and weigh as much as 12kg (26lb).

A fleet of 500 boats nets as many as two million fish each spawning season, placing the species in peril. According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which keeps a red list of endangered species, the Gulf corvina is “vulnerable” to extinction. ... But there is evidence that landed corvinas are getting smaller – a sign of overfishing, which happens when fish of a particular species are caught faster than they can reproduce.

Also of Interest

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

“Russsiagate” and the Collapse of Obama’s War Against Syria

Israeli Army arrests Palestinian teen for hurting soldiers' masculinity

It’s a Police State Mentality” — J20 and the Racist Origins of Criminalizing Protest

The Other Side of the Post’s Katharine Graham

Thomas Frank: The fury around Donna Brazile is symptomatic of our times

“Game On”: K Street Salivating Over Next Step in Tax Fight

Yes, America, There is a Class War, and You Just Lost It

Lee Camp: How To Create NPR’s Propaganda

A Little Night Music

Kenny Neal - Blues Leave Me Alone

Kenny Neal - I'm a Blues Man

Kenny Neal - I Smell Smoke

Larry Garner, Kenny Neal & Miguel Hernandez - Juke Joint Woman

That's Alright - Kenny Neal

That's Alright - Keep On Moving

Kenny Neal - Bring It On Home

Kenny Neal - Jimmy Reed Medley