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This evening's music features Detroit blues singer and guitarist Bo Collins. Enjoy!

“The essence of Christianity is told us in the Garden of Eden history. The fruit that was forbidden was on the tree of knowledge. The subtext is, 'All the suffering you have is because you wanted to find out what was going on. You could be in the Garden of Eden if you had just kept your fucking mouth shut and hadn't asked any questions.”

-- Frank Zappa

News and Opinion

Democrat leadership promises to stop progressive agenda in its tracks.

Nancy Pelosi Promises That Democrats Will Handcuff the Democratic Agenda If They Retake the House

In the first outline of the legislative agenda House Democrats would pursue if they take the majority in November, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has made the public a big promise, vowing to handcuff her party’s progressive ambitions, including in the event that a Democratic president succeeds Donald Trump, by resurrecting the “pay-go” rule that mandates all new spending is offset with budget cuts or tax increases. Along the way, she is playing into the hands of Republican strategists eager to warn voters that Democrats’ top priority is raising taxes.

Forcing budget offsets for every piece of legislation would make it more difficult for Democrats to pass a host of liberal agenda items, from “Medicare for All” to tuition-free public college. It continues a trend of Democrats caring far more about deficits than Republicans, constraining the activist impulses of liberal policymakers while giving conservatives free rein to blow giant holes in the tax code.

According to Axios, Pelosi “is committed to reviving” pay-go, which she instituted as a standing rule upon taking over the House in 2007. Though she waived the rule to pass the economic stimulus bill responding to the Great Recession, most of the other major legislative initiatives of the early Obama era — including the Affordable Care Act — were paid for. In 2010, Obama took this even further by signing the Statutory Pay As You Go Act. It enables presidents to enforce across-the-board cuts if Congress violates the rule.

When Republicans took over the House, they changed pay-go to “cut-go,” applying offsets only to spending instead of tax cuts, mandating that spending must be offset with budget cuts instead of tax increases. That still left the statutory law, which retained those aspects, but Republicans waived it for the Trump tax cuts. The move was a formalization of the trend: Deficit fears stop Democrats from moving forward on social programs, while Republicans plow ahead with tax cuts when they get to power.

Chris Hedges, "America: The Farewell Tour"

Here's an excerpt from an interview with Karl Grossman about the new "Space Force" and The Empire's plans to rain down death from above, i.e., "Full Spectrum Dominance". Worth a full read:

Karl Grossman on the weaponization of space

Janine Jackson: While the internet treated it largely as a kind of painful joke, corporate news media reported the Trump White House’s plans to establish a “Space Force” as the sixth branch of the US military as almost an inevitability: A Los Angeles Times story slips from saying the force “would be” responsible for training military personnel to saying the space command “will centralize planning for space war-fighting.” The pushback reported is from those concerned about “bureaucracy,” or changes in the “roles and budgets” of existing military branches. ... USA Today says it “would develop forces to defend satellites from attack and perform other space-related tasks.” It says the Pentagon’s plan “identifies”—doesn’t allege, but identifies—Russia and China as “explicitly pursuing space war-fighting capabilities to neutralize US space capabilities in a time of conflict.” What are we to make, Karl Grossman, of the idea that creating a space force is a defensive measure?

Karl Grossman: What we would be doing is opening the heavens to war, making space a war zone, and that flies in the face of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which sets space aside for peaceful purposes, and precludes the deployment in space, by any nation, of weapons of mass destruction. And there’s been efforts—I’ve covered them for years now; mainstream media has not covered these efforts—to broaden the Outer Space Treaty to preclude not just weapons of mass destruction, but any weaponry in space, and in that way ensure that it would be space for peace.

And the two countries that have been leaders in this effort have been Russia and China. In fact, I have here a piece from Chinese media, this was just a couple of weeks ago, “China Envoy Calls for Strengthening Outer Space Covenants and Cooperation.” What Russia and China—and let me mention, too, our neighbor Canada—have been promoting, pushing, has been a treaty titled Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space, the PAROS treaty.

And I’ve been actually to the United Nations for votes on the PAROS treaty. And one country after another country votes for it—again, with Russia, China and our neighbor Canada in the lead. And the one nation, in all the countries of the world, voting against the PAROS treaty? The United States. And because there’s a consensus process for a disarmament treaty, the PAROS treaty has gotten nowhere. So what we’d be doing by creating this Space Force, and seeking, as Trump put it, “American dominance” in space, is just really asking for Russia and China and other countries—there will be India and Pakistan, the list will go on—to go up into space and weaponize space.

Trump to chair UN security council meeting on Iran

Donald Trump will chair a UN security council meeting on Iran this month to spotlight its “violations of international law” during the annual gathering of world leaders in New York, according to the US ambassador, Nikki Haley. The United States, which holds the council presidency for September, has unsuccessfully pushed the security council to call out Iran. Haley has regularly attacked Iran, accusing it of meddling in the wars in Syria and Yemen.

Haley told reporters the president was chairing the meeting “to address Iran’s violations of international law and the general instability Iran sows throughout the entire Middle East region”.

Iran accuses Trump of 'bullying' other countries into anti-Tehran stance

Iran’s foreign minister has accused Donald Trump of trying to hijack the United Nations security council for the purposes of “bullying others” to turn against Tehran. ...

“There’s only one UNSC resolution on Iran … @realDonaldTrump is violating it & bullying others to do same,” Zarif wrote on Twitter. “Now he plans to abuse presidency of SC [security council] to divert a session – item devoted to Palestine for 70 yrs – to blame Iran for horrors US & clients have unleashed across (Middle East) chutzpah.”

John McCain: The View from the Middle East

It is not unusual that Arabs and Americans look at the same event from divergent lenses. Take, for instance, a scene from John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign when he told a woman in the audience who had called Obama an Arab: “No, Ma`am. He is not an Arab. He’s a decent family man.” That brief exchange has been tweeted and retweeted thousands of time in the last few days following McCain’s death. It has been promoted by people in mainstream media (and think tanks and academia) as evidence of the civility, “classiness”, and lack of prejudice of McCain. Yet, Arabs saw something entirely different in that exchange. They saw bigotry from McCain, who was denying that Obama was Arab in the same way one denies that someone is a Nazi. He clearly implied that an Arab can’t be a decent family man. In fact, Gen. Colin Powell was the only U.S. politician who pointed this out at the time. But a new image of McCain is being formulated before our eyes.

For Arabs in the Middle East and in the U.S., the view of McCain does not conform to the hagiography of U.S. media. People in the region remember well that McCain supported every U.S. and Israeli war, invasion, or attack against any Arab target. They remember that he was a major proponent of invading Iraq and argued for the expansion of U.S. wars into Iran, Libya and Syria in the wake of Sep. 11.

While the Washington director of Human Rights Watch was writing tributes to McCain, Arabs were remembering him as a champion of Middle East dictators (except those on bad terms with the U.S. and Israel.) It was not a coincidence that both the official Saudi regime lobby in DC and AIPAC promptly released emotional eulogies for McCain. The English-language, Arab Times (a mouthpiece of Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman) dedicated a special issue to him. McCain never wavered in his conformity with AIPAC’s agenda. He never had disagreements with the Israeli government except in outbidding them in his hostility to Palestinian rights and the usefulness of negotiations with Arabs.

Yet in the context of Washington politics, McCain was not regarded as the anti-Arab/anti-Muslim that he was, perhaps because there were Arabs and Muslims that he approved of. He championed, for instance, Iraqi opposition figure, Ahmad Chalabi (a key fabricator in the buildup to the U.S. invasion of Iraq) and the Afghan Muhajedeen. He was very close to Arab despots and approved arms sales to their repressive armies and intelligence apparatuses. He spoke of democracy but in the way that invading and colonizing states glorify “freedom” to justify conquest. McCain was a champion of Syrian rebels and pictures of him with Jihadi extremists (in Libya and in Syria) were circulated by Arabs on social media in the last week while the Washington press corps and Human Rights Watch were paying tribute him as “a defender of democracy.”

U.K. Charges Two Suspected Russian Intelligence Agents in Nerve Agent Attack

Two russian men charged by British prosecutors with using a Novichok nerve agent to poison a former spy are members of Russia’s military intelligence service, known as the GRU, Prime Minister Theresa May told the House of Commons on Wednesday. ...

May’s statement came just over an hour after Scotland Yard’s chief of counterterrorism policing, Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu, announced the charges and revealed that the movements of the two men before and after the attack were captured on six different surveillance cameras in the English city of Salisbury, where the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal was poisoned, along with his daughter Yulia, with a type of military-grade nerve agent developed by the Soviet Union.

Basu released the surveillance images, along with a detailed timeline and photographs of the two men and of a counterfeit perfume bottle used to smuggle the nerve agent into the country on an Aeroflot flight from Moscow to London.

The police also revealed that traces of the nerve agent were discovered in an East London hotel room where the two men, who used the names Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, stayed during their two day trip from Moscow.

Alarm as Guatemala bans head of UN anti-corruption body from country

Human rights officials and activists have warned that the rule of law in Guatemala is under threat after a UN-backed special prosecutor was banned from re-entering the country – the latest in a series of clashes between the government and an international anti-corruption commission. ...

Anti-corruption activists fear that the pioneering anti-corruption work of the UN-backed International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, Cicig, is now at risk. Cicig has launched a string of prosecutions against high-level officials, including the former president Otto Pérez Molina.

Guatemala's current president, Jimmy Morales, and his family are also the subject of multiple corruption investigations. On Friday, Morales announced he would not renew Cicig’s mandate, which ends in September 2019. ... In the past, the US has been among Cicig’s strongest supporters, but it has not clearly condemned Morales’s recent attempts to derail the commission’s work. In May, Senator Marco Rubio placed a hold on $6m of US funding to Cicig, claiming the panel was being manipulated by radical elements.

Cicig’s success in bringing down corrupt officials, judges and lawyers has soared during the five-year tenure of the head commissioner, Iván Velásquez. But on Tuesday, the government announced that Velásquez, currently in the US, would not be allowed back into the country, alleging that he was a threat to order and public security.

Confirming Dangers of FCC's Net Neutrality Repeal, New Study Shows Telecoms Throttling YouTube, Netflix, and Other Apps

An ongoing study first reported by Bloomberg reveals the extent to which major American telecom companies are throttling video content on apps such as YouTube and Netflix on mobile phones in the wake of the Republican-controlled Federal Communications Commission (FCC) repealing national net neutrality protections last December. Researchers from Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst used a smartphone app called Wehe, which has been downloaded by about 100,000 users, to track when wireless carriers engage in data "differentiation," or when companies alter download speeds depending on the type of content, which violates a key tenet of the repealed rules.

Between January and May of this year, Wehe detected differentiation by Verizon 11,100 times; AT&T 8,398 times; T-Mobile 3,900 times; and Sprint 339 times. David Choffnes, one of the study's authors and the app's developer, told Bloomberg that YouTube was the top target, but carriers also slowed down speeds for Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and the NBC Sports app.

As Amazon Hits $1T in Value, Its Warehouse Workers Denounce “Slavery” Conditions

To End Starvation Wages and Kick Billionaires Off Welfare, Sanders Introduces 'Stop BEZOS Act'

Taking aim at Walmart, McDonald's, Amazon, and other ultra-profitable corporations that pay workers so little that they're forced to rely on food stamps and other federal programs to survive, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) introduced legislation on Wednesday that would impose a 100 percent "corporate welfare tax" on large companies equal to the amount of public assistance their employees receive.

"Let us be very clear: We believe that the government has a moral responsibility to provide for the vulnerable—the children, the elderly, the sick, and the disabled," Sanders said in a statement. "But we do not believe that taxpayers should have to expend huge sums of money subsidizing profitable corporations owned by some of the wealthiest people in this country. That's what a rigged economy is about."

Officially titled The Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies (BEZOS) Act—an explicit dig at Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world—the goal of Sanders and Khanna's bill is to draw attention to the fact that taxpayers are effectively subsidizing corporations' starvation wages and pressure these companies to pay a living wage.

"If employers in this country simply paid workers a living wage, taxpayers would save about $150 billion a year on federal assistance programs, and millions of workers would live in dignity and security," Sanders explained at a press conference unveiling the Stop Bezos Act on Wednesday.

Under the Stop Bezos Act, all companies with over 500 employees—including part-time workers and so-called independent contractors—would be hit with a tax if they don't pay their workers enough to get by without federal assistance.

Report Finds Judge Kavanaugh Ruled Against Public Interest in Almost All of His District Court Cases

More Than $300,000 Has Been Pledged Against Susan Collins If She Votes for Brett Kavanaugh

As hearings on Supreme Court justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh are underway, activists have raised $330,000 and counting of pledged money for a future challenger to Republican Sen. Susan Collins, a critical swing vote.

Progressive activist Ady Barkan, who has the impairing condition of Lou Gehrig’s disease, spent the last five months crisscrossing the United States to campaign against Republicans who supported Donald Trump’s tax law. In mid-August, he announced an innovative tactic for pressuring Maine’s Collins to vote “no” on Kavanaugh’s confirmation. Using the website CrowdPac — which allows users to pledge a certain amount of campaign funding should certain conditions be met — the campaign announced that it would be collecting pledges for a future Democratic challenger to Collins.

Ayanna Pressley ousts 10-term Massachusetts Democrat in latest primary upset

In the latest upset during the 2018 Democratic primaries, Ayanna Pressley beat a veteran 10-term Democrat in Massachusetts in a House race being watched nationally as an indicator of the future of the Democratic Party. With Michael Capuano conceding and no Republican opponent on the ballot in November, Pressley will be become the first African American woman to represent Massachusetts on Capitol Hill. ...

Although Pressley gained renewed national attention in the wake of Ocasio-Cortez’s shock win against longtime incumbent Joe Crowley in New York City in June, she is a far more orthodox figure. Long heralded as a rising star in the Democratic Party, Pressley was first elected to the Boston City Council in 2009. The former staffer for Senator John Kerry and Congressman Joe Kennedy has been touted by national progressive groups for years. A former Clinton surrogate, Pressley was awarded a rising star award by the Democratic activist group Emily’s List in 2015.

Pressley, a Boston city councilor, and Capuano were both ardent progressives with a few differences. Pressley supported the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice); Capuano did not. Capuano favored a federal jobs guarantee; Pressley did not. Instead, the race focused on style.

Glenn Greenwald Interviews Kerri Harris: Can the Insurgency Now Defeat a Centrist U.S. Senator?

Delaware Democrats go to the polls Thursday in what has suddenly become a much-anticipated primary matchup between Sen. Tom Carper, who has been serving in public office since 1976, and Kerri Evelyn Harris, a black, LGBT Air Force veteran and community organizer who wasn’t born by that time.

While several insurgent candidates have unexpectedly defeated House incumbents in 2018 primaries – including Ayanna Pressley’s win Tuesday night in Boston against 10-term House incumbent Mike Capuano – unseating an entrenched, establishment-backed, three-term U.S. Senator like Carper is a much tougher challenge. From the start, Harris has been, and still, regarded as a clear underdog. But this race has become increasingly compelling.

You’ve Heard of Outsourced Jobs, but Outsourced Pollution? It’s Real, and Tough to Tally Up

Over the past decade, both the United States and Europe have made major strides in reducing their greenhouse gas emissions at home. That trend is often held up as a sign of progress in the fight against climate change. But those efforts look a lot less impressive once you take trade into account. Many wealthy countries have effectively “outsourced” a big chunk of their carbon pollution overseas, by importing more steel, cement and other goods from factories in China and other places, rather than producing it domestically.

Britain, for instance, slashed domestic emissions within its own borders by one-third between 1990 and 2015. But it has done so as energy-intensive industries have migrated abroad. If you included all the global emissions produced in the course of making things like the imported steel used in London’s skyscrapers and cars, then Britain’s total carbon footprint has actually increased slightly over that time.

“It’s a huge problem,” said Ali Hasanbeigi, a research scientist and chief executive of Global Efficiency Intelligence, an energy and environmental consulting firm. “If a country is meeting its climate goals by outsourcing emissions elsewhere, then we’re not making as much progress as we thought.” Dr. Hasanbeigi is an author of a new report on the global carbon trade, which estimates that 25 percent of the world’s total emissions are now being outsourced in this manner. ...

Not surprisingly, China, which has become the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide, remains the world’s factory. About 13 percent of China’s emissions in 2015 came from making stuff for other countries. In India, another fast-growing emitter, the figure is 20 percent. The United States, for its part, remains the world’s leading importer of what the researchers call “embodied carbon.” If the United States were held responsible for all the pollution worldwide that resulted from manufacturing the cars, clothing and other goods that Americans use, the nation’s carbon dioxide emissions would be 14 percent bigger than its domestic-only numbers suggest.

Dire Climate Change Warnings Cut From Trump Power-Plant Proposal

Warnings about potentially severe consequences of climate change were deleted from a Trump administration plan to weaken curbs on power plant emissions during a White House review. Drafts had devoted more than 500 words to highlighting the impacts -- more heat waves, intense hurricanes, heavy rainfalls, floods and water pollution -- as part of the proposal to replace Obama-era restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions. That language was left out of the Trump administration’s final analysis of the Environmental Protection Agency proposal, when it was unveiled Aug. 21.

Among the abandoned assertions: an acknowledgment that “the climate has continued to change, with new records being set” for global average surface temperatures, Arctic sea ice retreat, carbon dioxide concentrations and sea level rise, all markers of the phenomenon. The administration also scrapped a reference to numerous “major scientific assessments” that “strengthen the case that GHGs endanger public health and welfare both for current and future generations.”

Internal documents from a White House-led interagency review of the proposal reveal the decision to spike the language but not the rationale for doing so nor who ordered it omitted. The documents, recently released online, show the deletions came during last-minute August edits to the plan’s regulatory impact analysis. The abandoned assertions would have represented surprisingly candid admissions for an administration stacked with officials who have questioned how much human activity drives climate change and led by a president who once suggested global warming was a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese.

Republican Candidates are Paying a Fossil Fuels Conglomerate for Voter Data Mining

Koch Industries is a fossil fuels conglomerate with estimated revenues of more than $100 billion annually and 130,000 employees spread around the globe. It’s one of the largest, private corporations in the world with a history of funding nonprofit front groups and political candidates who are climate change skeptics. Typically, political payments go in one direction from this behemoth: from the Koch Industries Super Pac (KochPac) to Republican political candidates or political committees. Now, quietly, political payments are going in both directions, effectively creating an Orwellian campaign finance model.

Quietly, and without any corporate press release on such an unusual acquisition, Koch Industries has purchased i360, a vast voter database and data harvesting operation. According to i360’s website, it has “1800 unique data points” on 290 million American consumers as well as detailed information on 199 million voters from all 50 states. It brags that its data “shows you everything you need to know including the demographic and psychographic breakdown of your target market.”

The propriety of a multinational industrial conglomerate with an anti-regulatory agenda having a stranglehold on a highly sophisticated voter dating mining platform with unlimited funds to hire Ph.Ds., statisticians and computer scientists trained in artificial intelligence and machine learning, has yet to enter the national discourse.

Also of Interest

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

When Will The US Lose Control Of the World Payments System?

From Venezuela to McCain, Media and Human Rights Industry on Same Page

How Israel spies on US citizens

JP Morgan's top quant warns next crisis to have flash crashes and social unrest not seen in 50 years

Trans Mountain Pipeline a Serious Misstep for Trudeau

A Little Night Music

Mr Bo & His Blues Boys - I Ain't Gonna Suffer

Mr Bo and his Blue Boys - Baby Your Hair Looks Bad

Mr. Bo - I'm Leaving This Town

Mr. Bo & His Blues Boys - Lost Love Affair

Mr Bo - Heartache & Troubles

Mr Bo - Buzz Me

Louis "Mr. Bo" Collins - Born In The Country

Mr. Bo & His Blues Boys - If Trouble Was Money

Mr Bo - Fire Down Below