Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features jazz and blues pianist and bandleader Buddy Johnson. Enjoy!

"The major western democracies are moving towards corporatism. Democracy has become a business plan, with a bottom line for every human activity, every dream, every decency, every hope. The main parliamentary parties are now devoted to the same economic policies - socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor - and the same foreign policy of servility to endless war. This is not democracy. It is to politics what McDonalds is to food."

-- John Pilger

News and Opinion

Worth a read. Biden is running to help the U.S. get over "Viet Nam syndrome," and throw its military weight around more. Woohoo!

How Biden Kept Screwing Up Iraq—Over and Over and Over Again

In September, former Vice President Joe Biden attempted to portray himself as an opponent of the Iraq war he voted for 17 years ago. Sure, as a U.S. senator, he voted to authorize the war, Biden told an NPR interviewer who asked about his foreign policy judgment. But that was only after Biden got a “commitment” from George W. Bush, the war’s architect, that the former president “needed the vote to be able to get inspectors into Iraq to determine whether or not Saddam Hussein was engaged in dealing with a nuclear program.” Alas, he continued, “before we know it, we had a shock and awe”—the opening aerial bombardment of the March 2003 invasion—and then “immediately, the moment it started,” Biden opposed the war. His mistake, he said, was trusting Bush. Much like Donald Trump’s own flexible history on Iraq, it was bald revisionism that a wag might call malarkey. ...

Reviewing Biden’s record on Iraq is like rewinding footage of a car crash to identify the fateful decisions that arrayed people at the bloody intersection. He was not just another Democratic hawk navigating the trauma of 9/11 in a misguided way. He didn’t merely call his vote for a disastrous war part of “a march to peace and security.” Biden got the Iraq war wrong before and throughout invasion, occupation, and withdrawal. Convenient as it is to blame Bush—who, to be clear, bears primary and eternal responsibility for the disaster—Biden embraced the Iraq war for what he portrayed as the result of his foreign policy principles and persisted, most often in error, for the same reasons.

Biden contextualized the war within an assertion that America has the right to enforce its standards of behavior in the name of the international community, even when the international community rejects American intervention. While Biden, as the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for most of the war, had unique prominence for his views, they didn’t come out of nowhere. For while Biden bullshitted through his September NPR interview, he also said something true: “I think the vast majority of the foreign policy community thinks [my record has] been very good.” That will be important context should Biden become president. He’s the favorite of many in Democratic foreign policy circles who believe in resetting the American geopolitical position to what it was the day before Trump was elected, rather than considering it critical context for why Trump was elected. ...

Biden is the last of the pre-Obama generation of Democratic foreign policy grandees who enabled the Iraq war. John Kerry and Hillary Clinton both lost their presidential bids, saddled in both cases with the legacy of the war they supported. Now Biden confronts rivals like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who are both sketching out foreign policies that begin with ending a generation of war. Sanders in particular is offering a geopolitical worldview that stands as a polar opposite to Biden’s, one of international bottom-up resistance to worldwide oligarchy. Should Biden get past Sanders, Warren, and Pete Buttigieg, Trump lies in wait—another GOP president whom Biden has misdiagnosed, to the point of expressing shock that Trump would seek to weaponize U.S. influence over Ukraine to harm his family.

A President Biden is likely to find himself a man out of time. Writing in The Guardian, David Adler and Ben Judah recently described Biden as a “restorationist” in foreign policy, aiming at setting the American geopolitical clock back to what it was before Trump took office. Yet now an emergent China, a resurgent Russia, and the ascent of nationalism and oligarchy across Europe, India, and South America have fragmented the America-centric internationalist order that Biden represents. While Trump has accelerated these dynamics, he is far less responsible for them than is the martial post-9/11 course of U.S. foreign policy that wrecked itself, most prominently in Iraq.

It remains to be seen if the U.S. foreign policy community can reckon with its new geopolitical reality. As Biden noted to NPR, he has a deep well of support within foreign policy circles, where supporting the Iraq war is treated as an unfortunate, understandable detail and a smaller problem than Iraq-inspired domestic skepticism of American power—an update of what Biden and others used to call the “Vietnam Syndrome.” Recently, The Washington Post’s Josh Rogin reported that 133 diplomatic, military, and development heavyweights backed Biden. They consider him an “antidote” to Trump, not an example of the political failures that seeded the bed for Trump.

pic.twitter.com/hegi7qnWzi

— Mrs Clinton Kildepstein (@BandaidC) December 17, 2019

The News Churn Memory Hole: How The MSM Lies Even When Telling The Truth

“This goofy ass Trump letter is gonna get more outraged coverage than the bombshell report on the entire Afghanistan war being a lie and frankly I don’t know if I can handle that right now,” popular Youtube commentator Kyle Kulinski tweeted today. The post was just one of the many observations that Kulinski tosses into the Twitterverse every day, presented in his typical casual, offhand way without any self-significance. But if you actually pause and think about what he’s saying here, how true it is and what it says about the mass media institutions which people rely upon to form their worldviews, it’s actually a damning indictment of our entire society.

It is a fact that far more news media energy is going into one trivial aspect of an impeachment agenda that will with absolute certainty fail to remove Trump from office than there is for the known fact that the US government fought to suppress indisputable proof that American officials have been consistently lying about an 18-year military occupation which continues to this day. This fact should, by itself, be sufficient to completely discredit the mainstream press. This one tiny piece of information, that there’s vastly more buzz about an irrelevant impeachment sideshow than there is over the Afghanistan Papers, should in and of itself cause everyone to regard the entire establishment media complex with the same amount of respect as it gives the Flat Earth Society.

This last week teaches us that temporarily freezing and then unfreezing future military aid to one of our many far-flung client states is huge national emergency but the government systematically lying about every aspect of the longest war in US history is a forgettable non-issue

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) December 15, 2019

But it doesn’t. People are so hypnotized by the endless drama of the mass media news churn that all context and sense of proportionality is lost to them. They stand transfixed by the latest kayfabe combat between the two puppets in America’s two-headed one-party system like an infant distracted from the cause of its outrage by a set of shiny, dangling keys. The public’s total immersion in whatever sparkly clickbait drama gets served before them by the waiters and waitresses of corporate news media enables the narrative managers responsible for manipulating public thought to simply pace mainstream attention away from inconvenient news stories, even after reporting on those very news stories themselves the day before. ...

A lot of dissident-minded optimists got hopeful that maybe once the lies of the Iraq war were exposed, people would lose trust in the political/media class which deceived them about such a massively significant atrocity. These hopes were of course dashed as public attention was simply paced on to the next new, shiny thing, and then on to another and then on to another, and on now to the point where everyone’s babbling about impeachment over some political shenanigans with Ukraine and Joe Biden without hardly anybody bellowing in unmitigated rage that this same party refused to impeach Bush over mountains of literal war crimes. There is no actual correlation between a story’s newsworthiness and the amount of news coverage it ends up getting, so the still earth-shakingly consequential repercussions of Bush administration’s malfeasance have been eclipsed by today’s set of sparkly keys.

Lawrence O'Donnell Defends FBI Lying & Gaslights Own Audience

FISA court judge rebukes FBI over handling of wiretap applications

A Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) judge published an unusual and harsh rebuke of the FBI over its handling of wiretap applications and demanded that the bureau respond to the court by next month with a plan to ensure that the information in its surveillance applications is true and reliable.

"The frequency with which representations made by FBI personnel turned out to be unsupported or contradicted by information in their possession, and with which they withheld information detrimental to their case, calls into question whether information contained in other FBI applications is reliable," Judge Rosemary Collyer wrote in an order published Tuesday.

Collyer's order came about a week after the Justice Department inspector general's report on the FBI Russia investigation was released. Though the IG found no political bias in the FBI's decision to open an investigation into associates of Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, Michael Horowitz concluded that the FBI had mishandled the surveillance applications for Trump campaign aide Carter Page.

The report identified a total of 17 "significant inaccuracies and omissions" in the applications and said that the probe found that "the surveillance of Carter Page continued even as the FBI gathered information that weakened the assessment of probable cause."

Reuters Shields OAS Over False Claims That Sparked Bolivia Coup

Organization of American States (OAS) election monitors  published a “final report” on December 4—22 days later than promised—on Bolivia’s October 20 presidential election, won by President Evo Morales. The tardy release of the final report contrasted sharply with the way the OAS rushed to impugn the election the day after it took place. Only three days after the election, the OAS published a preliminary report that reiterated its negative assessment. On November 10, it then issued a press release saying the election should be annulled. In these statements, the OAS claimed that the change in Morales’ lead in the last 16% of the vote count was “drastic,” “inexplicable” and “hard to explain.” ...

When the final OAS report on the election was belatedly released on December 4, a Reuters article (12/4/19) about it ran with the headline “Bolivia Election Rigging in Favor of Morales Was ‘Overwhelming’: OAS Final Report.” The only critic of the OAS report mentioned in the article was Morales himself.

But the OAS had come under heavy fire from US-based economists and statisticians ever since it began impugning the election on October 21. It’s impossible to learn that fact in 114 Reuters articles about Bolivia since the October 20 election. None even mentions the extensive technical criticism the OAS has received. The criticism should have received much more than a discrete mention in an article or two, but in over 100 articles, the London-based wire service didn’t even provide that. On December 12, I sent an email to several Reuters journalists and editors who have produced articles on Bolivia since October 20. I asked why that criticism has been completely ignored. None have replied.

On October 23, the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) issued a press release asking that the OAS retract its comments about the election. On November 8, the think tank published a paper rebutting the OAS. Mark Weisbrot, co-founder of CEPR, followed up with an op-ed in MarketWatch (11/19/19) that said the OAS “lied at least three times: in the first press release, the preliminary report and the preliminary audit.” On November 25, four members of the US Congress asked the OAS to respond to very specific questions raised by CEPR. On December 2, the Guardian published a letter signed by 98 economists and statisticians asking the OAS to “to retract its misleading statements about the election, which have contributed to the political conflict and served as one of the most-used ‘justifications’ for the military coup.” Did Reuters really miss all of this? ...

The Mexican government had agreed to let Jake Johnston of CEPR respond to the OAS final report at the permanent council meeting on December 12. The OAS refused to allow it. Johnston would have presented CEPR’s preliminary response to the 100-page final report. Reuters has thus far said nothing about the OAS ducking its main critics. Of course, to do that, Reuters would have to break its silence on the entire debate.

Fascist Bolivian coup leader fails in DC charm offensive

'Mentally, we're in crisis mode': protests leave Chileans living on their nerves

Two months after Chile lurched from an illusory calm to a fiery outburst of rage, there is still no sign that life is about to return to normal. After an agreement last month between political parties, the country will next year hold a referendum on drafting a new constitution – one of the protesters’ main demands.

But widespread anger still simmers over inequality, social exclusion and the high cost of education and healthcare. Demonstrators continue to gather across the country every day, and violence often erupts at nightfall.

Chileans have found themselves in a state of uncertainty – suspended between hopes of progress, and frustration over a political solution which seems beyond reach. ...

In some parts of the country life has regained a degree of normality, but daily routines are still disrupted by transport stoppages, the near-paralysis of the university system, and pockets of vandalism and violence in parts of cities. For many, the stress of each day is compounded by the financial impact of the protests: according to the government, nearly 15,000 businesses have been affected by the movement, more than half of which have suffered damage to their property. ...

Vast marches have become less frequent, but the undercurrent of rage that drove them has not yet dissipated. ... Chileans have not been appeased by solutions offered by mainstream politicians; the government’s approval rating has slumped to around 10%.

France names new pensions chief as strikes set to continue over Christmas

Violence in Paris amid nationwide pension reform protests

Police fired teargas and charged at demonstrators in central Paris as hundreds of thousands of protesters across the country staged a show of force against the government’s controversial pension reform plans. The violence erupted at Place de la Nation, one of Paris’s biggest squares, as riot police attempted to disperse protesters. Police said they had charged after coming under a hail of paving stones and missiles. There were 27 arrests by late afternoon.

French authorities said there were 615,000 protesters on the streets across France on Tuesday, compared with 806,000 on 5 December, the first major day of action against the controversial reforms. The unions suggested the final figure was likely to be nearer to 1 million people.

As a prelude to the day of action, employees at France’s electricity grid operator, RTE, deliberately cut supplies to tens of thousands of homes in the south-west of the country on Monday evening. As many as 50,000 homes in the Gironde area were reportedly briefly left in the dark. Afterwards, staff reportedly cut off about 37,000 properties in Lyon. ...

Philippe Martinez, the general secretary of the powerful and hardline CGT union, told journalists. “We’re hearing so much bullshit … ever since Emmanuel Macron arrived he’s done nothing except to divide our citizens. It’s scandalous.”

Macron pledged to shake up the country’s complex pension system in his 2017 election campaign and has spent almost two years consulting union and business leaders in an unsuccessful attempt to reach a compromise. In 1995 an attempt by the ex-president Jacques Chirac and his prime minister, Alain Juppé, to reform pensions led to three weeks of crippling strikes and the government ended up backing down.

An interesting analysis.

Labour’s Defeat Is Being Overstated

The Conservative Party’s election victory is a personal tragedy for Jeremy Corbyn, whose quest to lead a transformative Labour government has ended in failure. It is also a tragedy for Britain, which has lost the opportunity offered by a transformative Corbyn-led Labour government. It may also become a tragedy for the Labour Party, but only if it takes away the wrong lessons from its defeat. ...

Most of the commentary speaks of Labour achieving “its worst result since 1935.” This is a serious misrepresentation of the facts. Labour’s vote share in the election was 32.2 percent. That compares with the 30.4 percent it achieved in the general election of 2015, just before Corbyn became leader, when the Labour Party was led by Ed Miliband. It is also higher than the 29 percent vote share the Labour Party achieved in the general election of 2010, when it was led by the then incumbent Labour prime minister, Gordon Brown. Going back further, Labour’s vote share in earlier general elections was 27.6 percent in 1983; and 30.8 percent in 1987. In terms of absolute numbers of votes, Labour in 2019 gained more votes than it did in the general election of 2005 (10,269,076 versus 9,552,436), which Labour won under the leadership of the then incumbent Labour prime minister, Tony Blair.

The claim that Labour achieved “its worst result since 1935” is based solely on the number of members of parliament (MPs) it returned to the House of Commons following the election that stands at 202. This is indeed a historically low figure. However, saying that ignores the fact that Labour had already lost — in the general election of 2015 — 40 of its seats in Scotland, which it could formerly rely upon to reliably return a Labour MP. These 40 seats were lost to the left wing pro-independence Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP), not to the Conservatives. The SNP has held on to them ever since. Labour has never been able to regain these lost 40 seats, and given the rise of pro-independence sentiment in Scotland it seems increasingly unlikely that it will ever do so. ...

All this can be compared with the apocalyptic predictions which were made about his leadership before the election of 2017. Corbyn’s leadership was then said to be so incompetent and so disastrous that it would destroy the Labour Party as an electoral force. Obviously and in reality, Corbyn has done much better than that. In fact, in terms of Labour’s recent electoral history, the vote share he won for Labour was creditable, and he has left the Labour Party with a bigger share of the vote and a much larger and more active membership than when he found it.

All this should make one skeptical about claims that Labour lost the election because of Corbyn’s “excessive radicalism” or because Labour under his leadership became “too left wing.” Labour Party canvassers in fact found that the pledges in the manifesto were popular overall. The problem was not hostility to the manifesto as such, or concern about that it was “excessively radical” or “too left wing.” It was skepticism that a Labour government led by Jeremy Corbyn could make such a program work. There is a further reason to doubt that Labour’s failure in the election was due to its being perceived as “too left wing.” This is the utter failure of the supposedly more “moderate” left-centrist alternative to the right of it. None of the “moderate” Labour MPs who defected from the Labour Party in 2019 complaining about Labour’s “excessive radicalism” and anti-Semitism has won re-election to the House of Commons. Change UK, the party some of them set up, has failed to win a single seat, and looks certain to be wound up. As for those “moderate” Labour MPs who chose to join the Liberal Democrats, they too have failed to win any seats.

Why Then Did Labour Lose? The short and unavoidable answer — and one which is gradually gaining acceptance, despite continued denials from some quarters — is because of Labour’s stance on Brexit. A survey of Labour losses makes this fact overwhelmingly clear. Though there was a swing from Labour to Conservative across the whole of England and Wales (Scotland, as discussed above, now has a wholly different politics) the swing was not uniform, and was biggest, and Labour’s losses were far and away greatest, in northern England and in the English Midlands. It is not a coincidence that these regions voted heavily for Brexit in the 2016 referendum. By contrast in those areas which voted against Brexit in the 2016 referendum the Labour vote held up better, and Labour losses were relatively few. ... Overall, as surveys of the voting across England and Wales make clear, Labour held on to the great majority of its voters who voted against Brexit in the 2016 referendum, but lost roughly half of its voters who in the 2016 referendum voted for Brexit. It was this which caused Labour’s defeat and the Conservatives’ victory.

Lots more at the link.

Keir Starmer lays out case for 'radical Labour government'

Keir Starmer has set out his pitch for the Labour leadership with a call for his party not to lurch to the right as a result of last week’s devastating election result. While the leadership race has not yet formally been launched, the shadow Brexit secretary confirmed to the Guardian that, as widely expected in Westminster, he was “seriously considering” running to succeed Jeremy Corbyn.

In a wide-ranging interview, Starmer said Labour did not do enough to tackle the Conservatives’ central election pledge to “get Brexit done” nor sufficiently deal with antisemitism, and urged his party to return to being a “broad church”.

He insisted Labour could win the next general election; but only if it sticks to its values. “There’s no hiding from it. It is a devastating result, but it’s important not to oversteer. The case for a bold and radical Labour government is as strong now as it was last Thursday. We need to anchor ourselves in that,” he said.

“I want trust to be restored in the Labour party as a progressive force for good: and that means we have to win. But there’s no victory without values.” He said these include opposing “the moral injustice of poverty, inequality, homelessness” while advocating for internationalism and human rights.

Cybercriminals Found a Scary New Way of Making Hacked Companies Pay Ransom

As ransomware continues to spread like wildfire through the U.S., one cybercrime gang has found a new way to convince their victims to cough up the ransom. This week, the gang behind the Maze ransomware strain launched a public website listing victims who have yet to pay up, threatening that if no payment is received they will publish the data stolen from those companies for all to see.

Criminals have long advertised stolen data on underground criminal forums on the dark web, but this latest development, first reported by independent security researcher Brian Krebs, adds an insidious twist to the criminal’s arsenal. ... To back up their claims, the hackers have published the date of the attack and a number of files stolen in the hack, including Microsoft Office, text and PDF files. They also list the total volume of files allegedly exfiltrated from victims (measured in Gigabytes), and the IP addresses and machine names of the servers infected by the Maze ransomware. ...

The threat of ransomware has exploded in the last year, with a recent report from cybersecurity firm Emsisoft claiming that in the U.S. alone, 948 government agencies, educational establishments, and healthcare providers were infected, at a potential cost in excess of $7.5 billion.

Fifth Google worker-activist fired in a month says company is targeting the vulnerable

Google fired another employee activist on Friday, the fifth termination of an employee engaged in workplace organizing in less than a month. Kathryn Spiers, a 21-year-old security engineer who had worked for Google since February 2018, was suspended from work on 25 November – the same day that four other worker activists were fired for what the company described as “intentional and often repeated violations of our longstanding data security policies”.

Her suspension began just three hours after she published a piece of code that created a pop-up notification when Google employees visited the website of IRI Consultants, an anti-union firm that it was revealed Google had hired just a few days earlier. “Googlers have the right to participate in protected concerted activities,” read the browser notification, which appeared on the bottom right-hand corner of the site and was visible only to Google’s own workforce.

“I had been involved in other workplace organizing in the past, but the reason I wanted to push this change was a combination of Google hiring IRI and four of my co-workers being fired the same day,” Spiers said in an interview on Monday. “I thought a lot of my co-workers could use a reminder of their rights.” Spiers remained on suspension until 13 December, when she was informed of her termination by phone call, she said. A Google spokeswoman said the company had dismissed an employee who had “abused privileged access to modify an internal security tool”, which was “a serious violation”.

On Monday, Spiers filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) alleging that her firing was an unlawful response to workplace organizing activity, which is protected by federal labor law. The other four fired workers also filed similar charges, known as an unfair labor practice, with the labor board. At the time, Google said, “No one has been dismissed for raising concerns or debating the company’s activities.”

Impeachment Day? House Votes on Charging Trump with Abuse of Power & Obstruction of Justice

Report: Tulsi Gabbard expected to introduce bill to censure Trump rather than impeach

Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard is calling for President Donald Trump's censure on the eve a full House vote Wednesday on the articles of impeachment.

The resolution, slated to be introduced Tuesday afternoon, suggests that the president put personal political gain over national interest.

Jimmy Dore: Dems pursuing impeachment because they stand for nothing

Krystal Ball: Why Democrats should follow Tulsi's lead on impeachment

Top Dem Accused of Putting Private Equity Before Sick and Poor by Killing Effort to End 'Devastating' Surprise Medical Bills

Rep. Richard Neal, Democratic chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, teamed up with a Republican ally last week to effectively torpedo bipartisan legislation that aimed to curb surprise medical bills—a major source of financial pain for people who experience medical emergencies and other serious ailments.

Last Sunday, the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the Senate Health Committee announced a bipartisan agreement on legislation to shield the U.S. public from the "devastating financial toll of surprise medical bills." The chairmen of the two committees, Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) and Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), expressed hope that the legislation would be included in the must-pass spending legislation Congress is expected to approve by Friday.

But Neal, who has received tens of thousands of dollars in campaign donations from a private equity group opposed to the Pallone-Alexander measure, had other plans. Three days after Pallone and Alexander announced their agreement, Neal and Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Tex.), the top Republican on Ways and Means, countered with a more industry-friendly plan that would place billing decisions in the hands of a third-party arbiter, an idea favored by powerful hospital and doctor groups.

The Hill reported last Friday that surprise billing legislation will not be in the year-end spending measure, which does include big tax breaks for the healthcare industry. "With the key committees in the House pushing competing ideas, leadership is waiting until next year" to act on surprise medical billing, The Hill noted.

Neal and Brady's announcement of competing legislation sparked outrage among members of Congress and outside progressives who said delaying action on surprise billing until 2020 could kill any hopes of a solution. ... Freelance journalist Jon Walker said that by thwarting the effort to curb surprise medical billing before the end of the year, Neal is "actively helping private equity-owned doctor groups rip off and destroy the lives of people at their most vulnerable."

Nancy Pelosi allowing Rep Neal to kill suprise billing protection to pay back his big PE donors is the most disgusting story in DC right now.

— Jon Walker (@JonWalkerDC) December 16, 2019

"Let's be clear about what is happening," Walker tweeted. "Democrats pretend they want to improve healthcare and when they have a chance they take the side of wealthy for-profit companies with the most ghoulish business practices imaginable."

Lori Wallach on NAFTA 2.0: Better, or worse than the original?

Worth a full read:

The Ongoing Effort to Write Wall Street Out of the 2008 Financial Crisis

Since the 2008 meltdown, there’s been an ongoing effort to revise history and write Wall Street out of the financial crisis. The latest in this narrative is a new working paper, published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, which argues that the real criminals were, after all, those house-flipping exotic dancers made famous by Michael Lewis’s book and subsequent movie “The Big Short.” The new study zeroes in on what its authors call “fraudulent investors”: people who got mortgages for investment homes in which they never intended to live, despite claiming that they would. Pinning the blame for the mortgage crisis on the dancers who agreed to take the money being given to them by the banks would be similar to faulting hoodwinked students for taking out massive loans from fraudulent for-profit colleges.

During the recession, conservatives latched onto the narrative that the crisis was caused by prospective homeowners’ greed, implying — and often outright stating — that the crisis resulted from the bad decisions of lower-income, largely minority families. In a 2009 congressional oversight report, then-Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, blamed, among other reasons for the crisis, people who “simply made bad choices … and overestimated their readiness for homeownership.” He added these borrowers to his list of others, including those who commit mortgage fraud. While in Congress, Hensarling collected thousands of dollars from the payday lending industry around the time he was expected to act on policies affecting the industry, vocally criticized the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, and crusaded for years to deregulate Wall Street after the crash. He is now an executive at banking giant UBS, while many of his former staff have moved to the CFPB, where they have set about dismantling it.

The working paper, which comes with a disclosure saying it doesn’t represent the opinion of the Philadelphia Fed, complements other research indicating that the “subprime mortgage crisis” is a myth.

Saagar Enjeti: New 'Hillary 2.0' Biden ad shows why he will lose

Barack Obama is going after old men. His real target is Bernie Sanders

While you won’t see former president Barack Obama appearing at any town halls or any public events as the Democrats seek to oust Donald Trump from the White House, you can, if you can afford it, see him in a series of rooms – ballrooms, conference rooms, small theaters – talking to donors about what he thinks everyone else is doing wrong. His exasperation has found several targets at these private events, from the young activists he accused of just being mad online to the old white men running for office he accused of “not getting out of the way”. At this latest event in Singapore, Obama announced that women were “indisputably” better leaders than men. If the whole world was run by women, Obama speculated, “you would see a significant improvement across the board on … living standards and outcomes”.

While potentially opening himself up to a million hate tweets by Hillary Clinton supporters still upset about 2008 and 2016, the comments seem pointed at one old white man in particular: Bernie Sanders. There are two old white men in running for the nomination: Sanders and his good ole pal best bud forever, Joe Biden. The billionaires Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer don’t count here because I’m not convinced they’re not both Spider-Man villains. And while Obama’s withholding of an official endorsement for his former vice-president does seem pointed, the more likely target of his continued frustration is Sanders. Just last month, it was reported by Politico that Obama had privately spoken about the Vermont senator seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, saying that while he is mostly taking a hands off approach to the primary, if Sanders started to win he would “speak up to stop him”. ...

It’s not clear what Obama’s interference could do that the media’s strange silence about Sanders’s campaign hasn’t already done. The mass media has been avoiding using Sanders’s name like they’re trying to avoid summoning Beetlejuice. But Obama’s hostility is understandable, given that Sanders is the candidate most outspoken about putting a stop to the great neoliberal experiment that privatized all services, hollowed out the middle class and removed most social welfare safety nets, an experiment Obama was an enthusiastic facilitator of.

Maybe it was just vague virtue signalling and scoring easy points with centrist feminists? Just another bland platitude they can slap on a T-shirt and sell on Etsy? It would be boring to list all of the women leaders who would immediately disprove Obama’s claims about women leaders. Margaret Thatcher! Imelda Marcos! We gave Aung San Suu Kyi both a Nobel peace prize and a whole U2 song about her and even that couldn’t keep her from committing crimes against humanity. It’s almost – almost – like the real problem here is power and its morally corrupting qualities and not who is doing the wielding of it.

The United States Congress just passed a $738 billion giveaway for arms manufacturers, Pentagon lobbyists, and unconstitutional wars. @RepRoKhanna is right—this is not what resistance to Donald Trump looks like. pic.twitter.com/10f5uhVYhQ

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) December 17, 2019

Sanders Calls Out 'Deficit Hawks' in Both Parties Who Support $738 Billion Pentagon Budget But Claim US Can't Afford Medicare for All

In a scathing op-ed for the Washington Post Tuesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders took aim at Republican and Democratic "deficit hawks" who claim the U.S. cannot afford to guarantee healthcare to all, make higher education tuition-free, or fund other crucial domestic priorities but have no issue with voting to hand the Pentagon $738 billion.

"I find it ironic that when I and other progressive members of Congress propose legislation to address the many unmet needs of workers, the elderly, the children, the sick and the poor, we are invariably asked, 'How will we pay for it?'" wrote Sanders, a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate. "Yet we rarely hear that question with regard to huge increases in military spending, tax breaks for billionaires, or massive subsidies for the fossil fuel industry."

As Common Dreams reported last week, Sanders—in a joint statement with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.)—announced his opposition to the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act, sweeping legislation that increases the Pentagon budget by $22 billion and sets aside money for the creation of President Donald Trump's long-sought "Space Force."

The House, with the support of 188 Democrats, passed the NDAA last week. The Senate is expected to vote on the measure as early as Tuesday, and Trump has indicated he will sign the measure.

Sanders wrote Tuesday that "at a time when we have massive levels of income and wealth inequality; when half of our people are living paycheck to paycheck; when more than 500,000 Americans are homeless; and when public schools throughout the country are struggling to pay their teachers a livable salary, it is time to change our national priorities."

When it comes to giving the Pentagon $738 billion—even more money than it requested—there is a deafening silence within Congress and the ruling elites about what our nation can and cannot afford. Congress will just authorize and appropriate all of this money without one penny in offsets, no questions asked.

I find it curious that few of the "deficit hawks" are asking if it is fiscally prudent to be spending more on defense than the next 10 countries combined—more than half of our nation's discretionary budget.

And there is little discussion taking place as to why the Pentagon—riddled with fraud, cost overruns and corporate price fixing—is the only major agency of government that has not successfully undergone an independent audit.

Sanders said he is running for president in 2020 "because it's time for a new vision for America and a new set of priorities."

Is Mayor Pete over?

Pete Buttigieg Pledged to Make Diversity a Priority, but His Mayoral Leadership Is Mostly White

Despite a pledge to make diversity among his senior staff a central component of his South Bend, Indiana, mayoralty, Pete Buttigieg has instead surrounded himself with white senior officials in a city that is roughly half nonwhite.

After winning reelection to a second term in 2015, Buttigieg told a local news station his office would continue to prioritize diversity in its hiring and decision-making processes. “Research shows that any organization — government, business, you name it — performs better when it’s got diverse makeup and diverse leadership. This is a community that one of our strengths is the diversity of the residents who make this community up. The same needs to be true of our city administration.”

Buttigieg touted diversity in his city administration in response to a question from a reporter at an NAACP forum in July about how he planned to construct his presidential cabinet given that his top campaign staff didn’t “reflect the diversity of America.” Buttigieg said his mayoral office had appointed “people who reflect our community,” and that doing so led to “better representation” and “better decisions.” But of nine South Bend city departments heads, including city controller, public works director, and police and fire chiefs, seven are white, while one is black. And only two of Buttigieg’s six executive staff members in South Bend are nonwhite, an executive assistant and administrative assistant.

South Bend’s city departments include the legal department, the police and fire departments, the city finance office, and the offices of community investment, code enforcement, innovation, public works, and venues parks and arts. Of those department leaders, all but the city’s corporation counsel and the interim director of community investment are white. Until earlier this year, a black woman directed the mayor’s community outreach efforts. ...

A July 2017 column in the South Bend Tribune by local resident and former city council candidate Ricky Klee called the mayor’s administration “a force for inequality,” saying that the mayor’s hires “greatly decreased the presence of African-American and Hispanic leaders in city government” from 18 to 12 percent among the city’s highest-paid officials.

M4A Advocate Wendell Potter and Krystal Ball break down Yang's healthcare plan

This So-Called Bridge Fuel 'Leads to Hell': Blowout at ExxonMobil Fracking Site Among Nation's Worst-Ever Methane Leaks

The revelation Monday that a blowout last year at an Ohio natural gas well owned by an ExxonMobil subsidiary was one of the country's largest-ever leaks of the potent greenhouse gas methane provoked impassioned calls for a rapid, just transition to 100% renewable energy nationwide.

"The next time some paid liar in the fossil fuel industry insists fracked gas is helping solve the climate crisis, remind them that a single Exxon fracking site 'leaked more methane in 20 days than all but three European nations emit over an entire year,'" tweeted David Sirota, a speechwriter and adviser for Bernie Sanders' 2020 presidential campaign.

Sirota quoted The Washington Post's report on the findings of a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A team of American and Dutch scientists studied satellite data and found that the Feb. 15, 2018 blowout at a Belmont County well—which was hydraulically fractured or fracked before the incident—resulted in an "extreme" leakage of methane.

The team of 15 scientists explained that "from these data, we derive a methane emission rate of 120 ± 32 metric tons per hour. This hourly emission rate is twice that of the widely reported Aliso Canyon event in California in 2015." The incident in California, which lasted four months, is the largest known accidental methane leak in the United States. Methane is 84–87 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period.

"The Ohio episode triggered about 100 residents within a one-mile radius to evacuate their homes while workers scrambled to plug the well," The New York Times reported Monday. "At the time, the Exxon subsidiary, XTO Energy, said it could not immediately determine how much gas had leaked." Critics of continuing fossil fuel production pointed to new findings about the blowout and its consequences as evidence of the dangers of using natural gas as a "bridge" in a national—and global—transition to 100% clean energy.

Trump’s North America Trade Deal Is Poised to Worsen Climate Change—But Dems Don’t Seem To Mind

While Congressional Democrats made clear that they would not bring the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) to a vote until it had the backing of the AFL-CIO, support they finally secured last week, Democrats appear comfortable voting on the replacement trade deal that has virtually no support from leading environmental groups.

A House vote could come in the next few days and on Friday December 13, ten environmental organizations, representing 12 million members, sent a letter urging Congressional representatives to vote against the proposed deal, which will replace the 25-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

“This final deal poses very real threats to our climate and communities and ignores nearly all of the fundamental environmental fixes consistently outlined by the environmental community,” the letter stated. The groups—which include the Sierra Club, Greenpeace and 350.org—noted that “the deal does not even mention climate change, fails to adequately address toxic pollution, includes weak environmental standards and an even weaker enforcement mechanism, supports fossil fuels, and allows oil and gas corporations to challenge climate and environmental protections.” The groups link to a two-page analysis produced by the Sierra Club that goes into greater detail about what the group sees as the deal’s environmental shortcomings.

House Democrats, meanwhile, have been touting the environmental provisions negotiated in USMCA, insisting they’re both strong and the best they could have feasibly achieved.

Rainwater in parts of US contain high levels of PFAS chemical, says study

New data shows that rainwater in some parts of the US contains high enough levels of potentially toxic per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) to possibly affect human health and may, if found in drinking water, in some cases be high enough to trigger regulatory action.

PFAS chemicals appear in an array of everyday items, such as food packaging, clothing and carpeting. Chemicals in this family are the subject of the film Dark Water, which chronicles the real-life efforts of a lawyer seeking to hold a polluting factory to account in West Virginia.

Estimates pin the number of different PFAS variants at more than 4,700 but federal regulations so far target only two of them: PFOS and PFOA. Some of these chemicals have been known to cause serious health issues such as cancer, and immune system and thyroid problems.

Previously it was known that there is widespread PFAS contamination of the nation’s lakes, rivers and groundwater reserves but until recently, researchers were largely in the dark as to whether this family of chemicals could also be ubiquitous in rain.

Also of Interest

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

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A Little Night Music

Buddy Johnson - Any Day Now

Buddy Johnson & His Orchestra - A Woman, A Lover, A Friend

Buddy Johnson - Boogie Woogie's Mother in Law

Buddy Johnson - Doot Doot Dow

Buddy Johnson - Oh Baby Don't You Know

Buddy Johnson - I'm Just Your Fool

Buddy Johnson - Shufflin` And Rollin`

Buddy Johnson - Go Ahead And Rock

Buddy Johnson & His Orchestra - Walk 'Em