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“The speed of communications is wondrous to behold. It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue.”

-- Edward R. Murrow

News and Opinion

Greenwald dissects the news. Worth a full read. Article goes on to discuss the current brewhaha about Trump and the troops as a repeat of previous propaganda catapultings.

Journalism’s New Propaganda Tool: Using “Confirmed” to Mean Its Opposite

One of the most humiliating journalism debacles of the Trump era played out on December 8, 2017, first on CNN and then on MSNBC. The spectacle kicked off on that Friday morning at 11 a.m. when CNN, deploying its most melodramatic music and graphics designed to convey that a real bombshell was about to be dropped, announced that anonymous sources had provided the network with a smoking gun proving the Trump/Russia conspiracy once and for all: During the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump Jr. had received a September 4 email with a secret encryption key that gave him advanced access to WikiLeaks’ servers containing the DNC emails which the group would subsequently release to the public 10 days later. Cable news and online media spontaneously combusted, as is their wont, in shock, hysteria and awe over this proof that WikiLeaks and Trump were in cahoots.

CNN has ensured that no videos of the festivities are available on YouTube for anyone to watch. That’s because the claim was completely false in its most crucial respect. CNN misreported the date of the smoking gun email Trump Jr. received: Rather than being sent to him on September 4 — 10 days prior to WikiLeaks’ public release, thus enabling secret access — the email was merely sent by a random member of the public after the public release by WikiLeaks (September 14), encouraging Trump Jr. to look at those now-public emails. ...

Very shortly after CNN unveiled its false story, MSNBC’s intelligence community spokesman Ken Dilanian went on air and breathlessly announced that he had obtained independent confirmation that the CNN story was true. ... How could that happen? How could MSNBC purport to confirm a false story from CNN? Shortly after, CBS News also purported to have “confirmed” the same false story: that Trump Jr. received advanced access to the WikiLeaks documents. It’s one thing for a news outlet to make a mistake in reporting by, for instance, misreporting the date of an email and thus getting the story completely wrong. But how is it possible that multiple other outlets could “confirm” the same false report?

It’s possible because news outlets have completely distorted the term “confirmation” beyond all recognition. Indeed, they now use it to mean the exact opposite of what it actually means, thereby draping themselves in journalistic glory they have not earned and, worse, deceiving the public into believing that an unproven assertion has, in fact, been proven. With this disinformation method, they are doing the exact opposite of what journalism, at its core, is supposed to do: separate fact from speculation. ... All that happened was that the same sources which anonymously whispered these unverified, false claims to CNN then went and repeated the same unverified, false claims to other outlets, which then claimed that they “independently confirmed” the story even though they had done nothing of the sort.

US veterans and soldiers divided over Trump calling war dead ‘suckers’

Donald Trump was struggling to retain support of active US service members, according to polls, even before last week’s bombshell report that the commander-in-chief referred to fallen and captured US service members as “losers” and “suckers”. But some veterans and military family members remain conflicted.

The Atlantic magazine’s story – in which four sources close to Trump said he cancelled a visit to pay respects at an American military cemetery outside Paris in 2018 because he thought the dead soldiers were “losers” and “suckers” and did not want the rain to mess up his hair – prompted an outpouring of condemnation, and comes less than two months before the 3 November election.

Several former Trump administration officials confirmed the report. Trump and the White House have denied it, with the president insisting: “There is nobody feels more strongly about our soldiers, our wounded warriors, our soldiers that died in war than I do.”

Polls in 2016 showed active service members preferred Trump to Hilary Clinton by a large margin, but polling from late July and early August conducted by the Military Times showed the continued steady drop in opinions of the commander-in-chief since he was elected, with almost 50% of respondents reporting an unfavorable view.

Assange extradition hearing: WikiLeaks founder's legal fight to avoid US trial resumes

The greatest threat to press freedom since 2016 -- the ongoing attempt by DOJ to extradite Assange in connection with publishing documents -- is underway in the UK, and US journalists who spent 4 years flamboyantly depicting themselves as free press warriors are largely silent: https://t.co/eDURF36DU3

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) September 7, 2020

More details at the link.

Julian Assange lawyers fail to adjourn extradition hearing

Lawyers for Julian Assange have failed to adjourn the extradition case against him after objecting to newly introduced US prosecution evidence accusing him of recruiting hackers to steal military secrets. On the opening day of a four-week hearing, the WikiLeaks founder appeared at the Old Bailey to resist an application to send him to the US to answer an 18-count American indictment. ...

Before coming to court, he had been formally rearrested on the new US indictment which updates and broadens previous charges. All but one are for violations of the country’s Espionage Act. Asked whether he was prepared to consent to be extradited to the US, Assange replied: “No.”

The district judge, Vanessa Baraitser, commented: “That was the response I was anticipating.”

Mark Summers QC, for Assange, said the late serving of the new US indictment was “abnormal, unfair and liable to create real injustice”. The additional material had appeared out of the blue, Summers said. It presented extra allegations of criminality which it claimed on their own might be separate grounds for extradition, such as stealing data from banks, obtaining information on tracking police vehicles, and supposedly “assisting a whistleblower [Edward Snowden] in Hong Kong”.

“This is essentially a fresh extradition request,” Summers added, presented at short notice at a time when Assange has been “inhibited” from speaking to his defence lawyers. Summers said: “We believe the US saw the strength of the defence case and thought they would lose [and so introduced the additional material].” He asked the judge to “excise” or dismiss the belated extra US indictments. ... But Baraitser refused the defence request. ...

The new material in the new US indictment covers allegations of Assange’s alleged cooperation with and encouragement of hackers from the group LulzSec.

They literally re-arrested him on the day of his trial. For those keeping note: yes, they re-arrested a man already in prison. This entire process is less trial than Soviet joke. https://t.co/xHli8Hgv1f

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) September 7, 2020

Julian Assange Extradition Hearing - September 7, 2020

At A Time Of Rapidly Creeping Authoritarianism, Assange’s Freedom Is More Crucial Than Ever

My home state of Victoria has become the center of attention in the anti-lockdown movement for its authoritarian crackdown against not just people who are in violation of lockdown protocol, but people who merely post about staging future anti-lockdown protests on social media.

Police have been breaking into people’s homes and arresting them in front of their children under charges of “incitement” for posting about anti-lockdown protests on Facebook, drawing international headlines. This is obviously a major threat to human rights that sets a dangerous precedent and will have many undesirable knock-on effects, and it should be condemned unequivocally.

“This is awful. ‘Incitement’ is going to be used to crack down on all sorts of protests – including on issues we agree with and think are worth protesting,” explained Australian author and analyst Ketan Joshi of one such arrest. “Every time I post about this, I am stunned by the number of people who seem furiously unwilling to draw any connection between what’s happening above and the history of climate and anti-racist protest in Australia.”

“Those who claim Covid-19 is being exploited by governments to dismantle our diminishing freedoms have just been handed a chilling new piece of evidence to support their case,” tweeted journalist Jonathan Cook.

Indeed this ham-fisted approach seems to be a lot more popular among residents of Melbourne and the state of Victoria who are subjected to it than to a large portion of the outside world. Part of this discrepancy is due to Australia having an entire culture built around the phrase “No worries, whatever you reckon’s a fair thing,” but another part is the fact that people in other self-proclaimed democracies are accustomed to having a bill of rights to protect them against such intrusive overreach.

Many Australians are unaware of this, but we are in fact the only developed democracy that does not have a bill of rights built into its legal infrastructure. An inordinate amount of trust is instead placed upon our legislature and judicial system to always do the right thing on a case-by-case basis, a premise that has been fully discredited by things like the Facebook post arrests, the silencing of sexual assault victims in Victoria, the police raids on two Australian journalists last year, the almost-instituted ban on reporting political corruption in Queensland, and the trial, conviction, sentencing and imprisonment of a man entirely in secret whose very identity itself is classified, just to pick from a few very recent examples.

As we’ve discussed previously, it’s a guarantee that there will be authoritarian agendas rolled out during the Covid-19 pandemic which our rulers have no intention of ever fully rolling back. We know this because that’s what always happens; the US Patriot Act was mostly already written prior to 9/11 and the pre-planned Orwellian measures were simply slid in at a time of chaos and confusion when people were less likely to push back on creeping authoritarianism.

The trouble is, we can’t see it.

For months I’ve been getting many people telling me every day that I need to be sounding the alarm about this virus giving cover for an authoritarian power grab that will thrust us into a dystopia from which we will never recover. Few of them can agree on exactly what form this power grab is taking, and none can lucidly explain in their own words exactly what they know and how they know it when I ask them to, but they want me to write essays defending their viewpoint.

It’s not that they’re wrong to be suspicious; again, it’s a guarantee that authoritarians and plutocrats are at the very least opportunistically shoring up power and wealth for themselves in a whole host of ways amid the confusing upheavals of 2020. It’s just that I can’t write essays which I can competently defend about things I cannot see. The level of evidence and argumentation that I apply to the rest of my work simply is not there at this time. I’ve been looking at this thing from every angle, and a powerful evidence-based argument for any kind of centralized monolithic global power grab in relation to this virus just isn’t forthcoming.

This doesn’t mean such a power grab doesn’t exist, it just means that if it does exist, the bulk of it is happening in secret. And it is a very safe bet that there are at the very least a lot of agendas being planned within establishment power structures around the world which we would object to if they weren’t hidden behind thick veils of corporate, financial, and government opacity.

Which brings us to Julian Assange, whose extradition trial of world-shaping importance is set to resume a few hours from this writing.

Assange started a leak publishing outlet on the premise that corrupt power can be fought with the light of truth. Corrupt power responded by smearing, torturing and imprisoning him, thereby proving his thesis unassailably correct. The depravity of the powerful can only operate behind veils of secrecy, because if it happened out in the open our greatly outnumbered rulers would risk finding themselves on the wrong end of a guillotine blade. Assange sought to hold power in check by reducing the amount of hiding space it has for its malfeasance, which is why he is currently behind bars.

If we had transparency for the powerful as we ought, there wouldn’t be any wild theorizing about what they’re up to behind the walls of secrecy. Indeed, the various agendas that are doubtless being schemed toward by oligarchs and unaccountable government agencies wouldn’t even exist, because people only plot such evils when they are out of the public eye. Whatever’s going on with this virus would be clear as day, and the fact that people are paranoid and distrustful of authority figures about the matter is solely the fault of those authority figures’ refusal to have transparency and accountability.

The more secrecy the powerful are able to obtain, the more wars they start, the more exploitation, oppression and thievery they can get away with, the more power they can steal from the people and shift to themselves. Which is precisely why they are going after a journalist who made it his vocation to deprive them of secrecy.

As Jonathan Cook recently put it, “Assange had to be made to suffer horribly and in public – to be made an example of – to deter other journalists from ever following in his footsteps. He is the modern equivalent of a severed head on a pike displayed at the city gates.”

We must not allow them to get away with this. Especially now, when transparency for the powerful is more important than ever.

Looking at you, Australia.

Censoring Dissent! NOAM CHOMSKY Talks To Jimmy About JULIAN ASSANGE!

DSA member in Spokane, Washington detained by unidentified officers before police violence protest

Last Sunday, August 30, the 40-year-old cochair of the Spokane, Washington chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Jeremy Logan, was arrested by unidentified local officers dressed in plainclothes at a protest against police brutality. He was detained in a local jail for over 24 hours as federal agents attempted to interrogate him. The incident is a chilling development in the antidemocratic crackdown on protests against police brutality across the United States in which local police carried out snatch-and-grab operations previously in New York City, Pittsburgh, and Portland. In the latter city, these kidnapping-style arrests were carried out directly by unmarked federal agents deployed by the Trump administration.

Logan described the events he endured through social media posts and interviews, which were verified by two witnesses who were present at the time. Around 2:00 p.m., he arrived at the site of a local rally. He noticed a man dressed all in black approaching him, then “looked across the street as two men, also in plainclothes, were running directly at me,” one of them with a green vest and a gun. One of the men told him he “was under arrest for a warrant in Okanogan [County].” Soon after being grabbed by these men, a “beatup, old minivan” arrived with up to five more officers in street clothes, who then placed handcuffs on Logan and put him in the back of the van, driving him a few blocks away so that a city cop car could pick him up to transport him to the downtown jail. None of the men had badges or identified themselves with a department. Logan reported that he “repeatedly asked them to identify themselves and was told not to worry about it.”

After Logan hounded the officers to state the cause for his arrest, the city police contradicted the snatch squad’s earlier statement and said they had a warrant from Chelan County. Based on Logan’s admittance that he does have a warrant for unpaid fines in Douglas County and has not even traveled to Chelan or Okanogan for years, there is no evidence of a valid cause for arrest. According to official communications received by HuffPost after Logan was released, the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office carried out the arrest, citing a “valid felony warrant” and alleging that Logan “has made threatening public statements toward law enforcement in the past.” The Spokane Police Department took responsibility for his transportation in the marked city police vehicle to the jail.

Logan pointed out that police could have arrested him at any point in the years in which his warrant had been active, but they chose to do so at the site of a protest. It is clear that the warrant was utilized as a pretext for his arrest on the basis of his political involvement with tenant organizing, the DSA, and antipolice violence protests since a close friend was murdered by police in 2017. The political motivations behind the unconstitutional proceedings were made clear by the fact that local police repeatedly tried to get Logan to speak to federal officers, presumably about his political activity, other protesters, and similar topics while he was detained. ...

The Spokane DSA issued a brief statement in response to the events, calling upon the Spokane city government to launch an investigation into the arrest and detainment.

Democracy Dies in Obfuscation

“US Political Divide Becomes Increasingly Violent, Rattling Activists and Police,” a Washington Post headline (8/27/20) declared last week. My high school English teacher would have taken a red pen to that title, pointing out that divides cannot be violent, only people can. People on both sides of a divide are becoming violent, is what the Post meant. And that is the real problem with this headline and the 2,800 words that follow.

False equivalences are among the biggest distortions that plague corporate journalism, as FAIR has documented over and over (e.g., Extra!, 11–12/04; FAIR.org, 9/30/04, 10/13/19, 11/22/19). Especially in an era when lying has been adopted as a key political strategy by the president and many others on the political right, coverage of “both sides” of an issue without plainly separating facts from fiction actively undermines democratic discourse, and the informed citizenry on which it depends.

People at the Washington Post are aware of the crucial role the media play in making democracy possible. So aware, in fact, that they introduced the paper’s first slogan in its history—“Democracy Dies in Darkness”—a month after President Donald Trump took office. It’s hard not to assume the timing was an indication of the Post’s expectation that a vigilant press would be especially necessary in a Trump presidency.

And yet.

In the extensive genre of corporate media obfuscation about right-wing paramilitary violence, this WaPo piece stands out even amidst some tough competition.

The first four paragraphs of the piece describe an armed right-wing attack on a voter registration rally sponsored by a Democratic congressional candidate in Tyler, Texas (an attack the Post and most other national outlets didn’t bother to cover when it happened several weeks earlier—FAIR.org, 8/11/20). Hundreds of armed people descended on the peaceful crowd, yelling obscenities and physically assaulting them. But this is where the accurate reporting ends.

The next sentence refers to this scene as “scuffling.” It’s not how I would choose to describe a violent attack by heavily armed people. The term both downplays the level of violence and intimidation involved in the attack and vaguely intimates that both sides contributed to it. This trend continues throughout the article, referring to “a spate of exchanges” and a “series of disturbances” to describe a pattern of right-wing political violence directed at protests against police brutality. Later in the article, the Tyler assault is summed up as an incident where “brawls erupted.”

The article claims, without citation or qualification, that “people on both sides…have been filmed exchanging punches, beating one another with sticks and flagpoles, or standing face-to-face with weapons.” Upon finishing the article, the reader finds there were two specific incidents of left-wing menace mentioned: one where a group of protesters harassed restaurant goers for not raising their fists in solidarity with Black Lives Matter (an incident the Post admits was nonviolent); and the case of a driver who was beaten by protesters after crashing his truck.

In contrast to this single assault, the article documents eight recent right-wing assaults on protestors, in addition to the one in Tyler—six of them involving gunshots aimed at protesters, resulting in multiple injuries and four fatalities.

In other words, the article’s factual content itself belies its framing.

The picture it paints is not one of escalating clashes between left-wing and right-wing protesters. Rather, it describes an alarming increase in armed right-wing attacks on peaceful left-wing protesters, usually racial justice protesters. It is a pattern of intimidation and violence, one that is instantly recognizable to any student of 20th century history. Across the globe, privatized violence aimed at popular democratic demands is a hallmark of right-wing authoritarianism. The failure to name—and, worse, to try to obscure through misleading comparisons—what is plainly a threat to US democracy is a dereliction of journalistic duty.

[More at the link. -js]

Much more detail at the link:

U.S. govt-linked PR firm ran fake news networks for right-wing Latin American regimes

A major US PR firm located just a few blocks from the White House has been caught running an industrial grade propaganda operation on social media. The information warfare blitzkrieg relied on fake accounts and pages to spread disinformation on behalf of right-wing, US-backed governments in Latin America, while deploying covert propaganda to destabilize the leftist governments in Venezuela and Mexico. The company behind the campaign, CLS Strategies, signed a contract to represent Bolivia’s far-right junta and provide “strategic communications counsel” in the lead-up to that country’s ostensible election. After coming to power through a US-backed military coup in November 2019, the Bolivian regime has delayed the election numerous times on specious grounds.

CLS Strategies also used its network of fake accounts and pages to push propaganda on behalf of Venezuela’s right-wing opposition and the US-backed parallel coup regime of Juan Guaidó. Some of the CLS-run Facebook and Instagram profiles even posed as disgruntled Venezuelan soldiers, and called on members of the armed forces to rebel against their socialist government. Other pages claimed to be run by disaffected former supporters of leftist leaders like Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Bolivia’s Evo Morales.

The DC-based company similarly filled social media with disinformation demonizing Mexico’s left-wing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) and his party Morena, who have been under increasing attack by right-wing oligarch forces. On Facebook, the PR firm spent a staggering $3.6 million on ads to promote this propaganda.

CLS Strategies has close links to the US government. The firm employs former government officials like Mark Feierstein, who oversaw Latin America policy for the Obama White House. Feierstein also served as coordinator of Latin America activities for the US Agency for International Development (USAID), a regime-change arm that has been used as a front for covert CIA operations and spearheaded the Trump administration’s coup attempts in Venezuela. Another CLS senior advisor, David Romley, worked as a Pentagon spokesman, press attaché to the secretary of defense, and public affairs officer for the US Marine Corps. Before moving to CLS, Romley also served as vice president for communications at the German Marshall Fund, a prominent Cold War-era think tank funded by the US government and NATO that has been integral in pushing the new cold war on Russia and China.

A co-founder of CLS, Peter Schechter, was also the founding director of the Latin America center at the major Washington think tank the Atlantic Council, which is funded by the US and UK governments and European Union and acts as a de facto organ of the NATO military alliance. ... This controversy underscores how US PR firms, elite Washington insiders, and foreign opposition groups work in tandem to promote right-wing regimes in Latin America while astroturfing opposition to democratically elected left-wing governments. Given the extensive links CLS has to the Democratic Party, this scheme also highlights the bipartisan consensus around regime change and support for corrupt neoliberal leaders linked to death squads and drug trafficking.

Krystal Ball: 65% of Americans Approve Of Labor Unions As Economy Implodes

In California’s Wine Country, Undocumented Grape Pickers Forced to Work in Fire Evacuation Zones

As wildfire smoke billowed into the wine-producing region of Sonoma County, California, workers continued harvesting grapes, day and night. Even in evacuation zones, where the safety threat from flames was severe enough for officials to ask residents to leave the area, the county agriculture commissioner invited workers to continue laboring in the fields, doling out evacuation-area access passes to dozens of agricultural producers. With undocumented immigrants — many of them workers from Latin American Indigenous communities — already economically drained after surviving months of the pandemic with virtually no government support, workers were in no position to decline an offer for work.

For the workers, their hands were forced by a combination of circumstances as toxic as the ash that falls over the region’s famous vineyards: the economic drive to keep the wine industry going; the lack of resources for non-Spanish-speaking workers; a near-total dearth of economic support; the economic stresses of the coronavirus pandemic; and a climate of fear around immigration enforcement that prevents the workers from asking for help.

What’s needed more than anything, advocates say, is an economic safety net in times of disaster so that people don’t have to accept perilous work and changes to immigration laws, so they don’t have to fear offers of help.

“We work when there are rains, we work when there is fire, we work in whatever conditions. It isn’t the most viable, but it is a necessity to provide for our families here or the parts of our families that stayed in our place of origin,” said Gervacio Peña Lopez, a board member of the local Indigenous workers’ group Movimiento Cultural de la Unión Indígena, who is Mixtec and worked in the fields for years. “There is no resource we can count on, so there’s nothing left but to work.”

Officials that regulate evacuation order exemptions have close relationships to agricultural associations that serve local business owners’ interests. Over four years of massive wildfires, the wine region’s agricultural commissioners worked closely with the Sonoma County Farm Bureau and Sonoma County Winegrowers to repeatedly grant permission to growers to harvest in wildfire-evacuation zones. Smoke from wildfires can damage the delicate flavor of the region’s world-famous wines. The threat of deep financial losses creates a pressing incentive to harvest as quickly as possible, even when fire and smoke risk damage to lungs — and especially during a year when yields are expected to be lower than usual and the pandemic cut down restaurant sales.

Moving to End Diversity Trainings, Trump WH Memo Says 'No Place' for 'Critical Race Theory' in US Government

An order from the Trump administration's Office of Management and Budget to identify and end funding for federal worker diversity trainings meant to combat bigotry and systemic bias with government institutions and agencies was met with condemnation Saturday after a memo declared that "critical race theory" and other anti-racism constructs "should have no place in the Federal government."

In the two-page memo, the Washington Post reports,

OMB Director Russell Vought says Trump has asked him to prevent federal agencies from spending millions in taxpayer dollars on these training sessions. Vought says OMB will instruct federal agencies to come up with a list of all contracts related to training sessions involving "white privilege" or "critical race theory," and do everything possible within the law to cancel those contracts, the memo states.

The memo, released on Friday, also tells all federal agencies to identify and if possible cancel contracts that involve teaching that America is an "inherently racist or evil country."

The memo (pdf) written by Vought specifically characterizes "critical race theory"—which by definition is simply a theoretical framework for social scientists who explore the ways in which racial identities and racism impact society and culture—as "divisive, false, and demeaning propaganda" that "should have no place in the Federal government."

The reaction of condemnation arrived swiftly.

Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, condemned the OMB memo's inherent message.

"Our nation stands at an inflection point as communities are grappling with the ongoing threat of racism, white supremacy and police violence," Clarke said in Saturday statement. "President Trump's latest federal directive is an attempt to discredit, condemn and silence important conversations happening in communities and workplaces about anti-racism and about our nation's history of white supremacy. By banning government support for these discussions, he sends a dangerous message to the country that racism is a fallacy."

The Police Can’t Be Judge, Jury & Executioner: Filmmaker Yoruba Richen on Killing of Breonna Taylor

'Nothing but pain': Jacob Blake speaks for first time since he was shot by police

Jacob Blake has spoken publicly for the first time since a police officer shot him seven times in the back. The 29-year-old says he is in constant pain from the shooting, which doctors fear will leave him paralyzed from the waist down.

In a video posted on Saturday evening on Twitter by his family’s lawyer, Ben Crump, Blake said from his hospital bed that “every 24 hours it’s pain, nothing but pain. It hurts to breathe, it hurts to sleep, it hurts to move from side-to-side, it hurts to eat.”

Blake, a father of six, said he has staples in his back and stomach. ...

#JacobBlake released this powerful video message from his hospital bed today, reminding everyone just how precious life is. #JusticeForJacobBlake pic.twitter.com/87CYlgPDBj

— Ben Crump (@AttorneyCrump) September 6, 2020

Blake, who had an outstanding arrest warrant when he was shot, pleaded not guilty Friday to charges accusing him of sexually assaulting a woman in May and waived his right to a preliminary hearing. Blake appeared remotely via video conference from his hospital bed, wearing a dress shirt and tie. He spoke only to respond to the judge’s questions.

The state justice department has said a knife was recovered from Blake’s vehicle, but it has not said whether he was holding it when officers tried to arrest him.

The man who made the widely seen cellphone video of the shooting, 22-year-old Raysean White, said he saw Blake scuffling with three officers and heard them yell, “Drop the knife”, before gunfire erupted. He said he didn’t see a knife in Blake’s hands.

RIP Popular Resistance's Kevin Zeese:

Hawkins Press Secretary and Activist, Kevin Zeese Has Passed Away

The Hawkins/Walker campaign is very sad to report that our Press Secretary, comrade-in-arms and brother, Kevin Zeese, passed away last night. He was 64 years old.

“I lost a friend. All of us lost a prolific, tireless, and principled advocate and activist for peace and justice. My condolences go out to his partner, Margaret Flowers, also a committed activist, his family, and the many people whose lives were enriched by Kevin and his work,” Howie Hawkins said.

Kevin was a giant in the world of activism, from peace and justice to cannabis legalization to healthcare to independent politics. He was a well-known scholar, attorney, and writer. He was co-editor of Popular Resistance, one of the left’s most popular sources for news and opinion from a left-radical perspective, which he led with his partner, Dr. Margaret Flowers. He served as Press Secretary for the Nader/Camejo campaign in 2004.

He was most recently in the news as one of the Embassy Protection Collective, one of the last four to protect the Venezuelan embassy in Washington, D.C. against the forces of the illegitimate presidency of Juan Guaidó and the passivity of the secret service and federal security forces of the Trump administration. Kevin, Margaret and others nonviolently resisted the embassy’s takeover by puppets of the United States and tenanted the diplomatic building with the permission of the Venezuelan government for more than a month. Ultimately, they were arrested and after a trial plagued with restrictions against the defense, all federal charges brought by the Trump administration were dropped.

Kevin was also an active force of solidarity with several Latin American movements, causes and peoples against US imperialism and illegal intervention. He worked tirelessly to denounce US illegal sanctions and covert operations that affect the progressive efforts of the peoples of Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Cuba, and beyond. His legal background only strengthened his conviction about the illegality of all these US unilateral sanctions that only increase the suffering of millions of Latin Americans.

Black Wall Street Dems Try Using Identity Politics To Protect Cabinet Positions

Democrats don't care for their own base, prefer the Republican base.

Democrats eye Arizona, Georgia and Texas as potentially winnable

Former vice-president Joe Biden’s presidential campaign sees Arizona, Texas and Georgia as possible pathways to victory and ousting Donald Trump from the White House.

During a press briefing with reporters top Biden campaign officials displayed a map of the states that they see as winnable. The map showed Arizona, Texas and Georgia in the light pink color marked as “expand” states.

“We really feel like all of these states are legitimately in play,” Biden’s campaign manager, Jen O’Malley Dillon, said.

Democrats have not won any of those three states in the past two election cycles. They all have Republican governors. Texas in particular is a state Democrats have long hoped to put in their column, but so far to no avail.

The map put Nevada, Minnesota, Virginia and New Hampshire, which the Democrats won in 2016, in its protect category and Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Florida in its win back category. Donald Trump won Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Florida in 2016.

Cornel West & Ben Jealous on Whether Progressives Can Push Joe Biden Leftward If He Defeats Trump

Nancy Pelosi Challenger Shahid Buttar Responds to Allegations | Useful Idiots

'This Is Against the Law and DeJoy Must Be Fired': Postmaster General Accused of Criminal Violation of Campaign Laws

New calls went up for Postmaster General Louis DeJoy to be fired from his job Sunday after it was reported that former employees of the GOP megadonor and logistics executive now running the U.S. Postal Service reimbursed workers at the company for donations they made to the Republican Party at his behest—an arrangement that would be illegal under both state and federal campaign finance laws.

The arrangement with former employees at his company, New Breed Logistics, was first reported by the Washington Post on Sunday.

Along with other employees who confirmed the story but requested anonymity for fear of reprisal from DeJoy, the Post spoke with David Young, longtime human resources director for DeJoy who is now retired but had access to payroll records from the 1990s up until 2013.

"Louis was a national fundraiser for the Republican Party. He asked employees for money. We gave him the money, and then he reciprocated by giving us big bonuses," Young explained to the newspaper. "When we got our bonuses, let's just say they were bigger, they exceeded expectations—and that covered the tax and everything else."

One of the unnamed employees said DeJoy "would ask employees to make contributions at the same time that he would say, 'I'll get it back to you down the road.'" That kind of arrangement, the Post explained "would be unlawful."

Breaking -- Postmaster General Louis DeJoy's rise as a GOP fundraising powerhouse was fueled by his urging his employees to donate to the GOP -- and then he illegally reimbursed them for those donations. https://t.co/XqU56Dc0sf

— Steven Greenhouse (@greenhousenyt) September 6, 2020

"What is alleged here—"straw" donations— is not a minor violation," said political columnist Karen Tumulty. "Many people have faced prison for this."

Ryan Grim: New Progressive Scheme To TAKE OVER State Of Rhode Island

This man is literally unable to say a non-platitude. https://t.co/ie9V3ouvct

— Gravel Institute (@GravelInstitute) September 6, 2020

'Disaster for Endangered Species and the Natural World': Advocates Decry Trump Move to Gut Habitat Protection Law

Environmental groups called a proposed rule change to the Endangered Species Act announced by the Trump administration Friday "a disaster for endangered species and the natural world."

The changes would also require USFS to "assign weight" to industry claims of economic impact of a given area and exclude federal lands essential to the recovery of species from critical habitat protection, based on the economic interests of pollution-causing industries.

"If this proposal and the others put forward by the Trump administration are allowed to stand, it will be death by a thousand cuts for endangered wildlife across the country," Bonnie Rice, a senior campaigner for Sierra Club, said in a statement Friday. "Critical habitat is just that—critical for species' survival and recovery. In the face of mass extinction, and climate and health crises worsened by habitat destruction and loss of nature, it's essential that we protect more habitat, not less."

Democrats on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee called the decision "misguided."

"Developers and polluters could basically veto any critical habitat protections for endangered species by claiming economic impacts, even without proof," said Noah Greenwald, endangered species program director at the Center for Biological Diversity. "Wildlife simply can't survive or recover if they have no place to live, but that's exactly what will happen if the Trump administration succeeds in turning over the critical habitat designation process to industry."

These warnings are the latest against continuing moves by the Trump administration to roll back environmental regulations. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler came under fire Thursday for a speech in which he outlined further plans to gut regulations of the fossil fuel industry should President Donald Trump win a second term.

"Added together, these rules are a disaster for endangered species and the natural world," said Greenwald. "This administration doesn't care about anything but money, and wildlife will suffer."

California wildfire: Blazes have consumed record 2 million acres this year

50,000-Foot Smoke Plumes and Record-Shattering Heatwave as Climate Emergency Grips California

Smoke plumes rising tens of thousands of feet into the air over California could be seen from outer-space overnight and into Sunday as massive wildfires that touched off this weekend amid a statewide heatwave triggered dramatic rescue efforts for hundreds of people trapped in a U.S. national forest and fresh warnings of a "climate emergency" unfolding in real time.

The fast-moving "Creek Fire" in the Sierra National Forest—which has burned at least 36,000 acres and was reported as 0% contained as of Sunday—triggered a military-assisted rescue effort of more than 200 people camped at a popular swimming reservoir in the park. The fire was so ferocious, according to the National Weather Service (NWS) Oakland Center Weather Service Unit on Saturday, that the tops of smoke plumes soared to 50,000 feet or more.

#CreekFire last 5 hours from 1pm - 7pm PT #timelapse
Multiple aircraft reporting tops above 50,000 feet!
Multiple lightning strikes detected #GOES17 #AxisMeadowLakes cam @nvfirecams @AlertWildfire via @NVSeismoLab #cawx #CAfire pic.twitter.com/9qpXp2iDX0

— NWS CWSU Oakland (@NWSCWSUZOA) September 6, 2020

Meanwhile, with temperature records "shattered" in areas across the state on Saturday, a number of other wildfires erupted elsewhere. After Tom Dang, a science and operations officer out of the NWS's Tuscon office, shared the following satellite imagery of the multiple fires, meteorologist and journalist Eric Holtaus said: "It cannot be overstated how terrifying this satellite image is." ...

"This is what climate change looks like," lamented Dana Brown, a research professor of history and professor emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz. in the Guardian on Thursday in a column documenting the recent and widespread destruction caused by this year's fire season in California.

Interviewed by CapRadio this week about the climate connection and what to do about the intensifying wildfire seasons in California and elsewhere, UC Berkeley forest ecologist and climate change scientist Patrick Gonzalez—who says that "outdated policies" combined with human-caused global heating accounts for a 900% increase in areas burned by wildfires since the mid-1980s—said ending the fossil fuel economy should be the chief priority for anyone wanting to address the root cause of the issue.

"Fundamentally, the main solution to a lot of the fire problems that we have [is] taking action on climate change," Gonzalez said of the fires. "To be carbon-free is the ultimate end goal, and the sooner we reach that, the better it will be for nature and for people."

Homeless Californians face new crisis: living outside in smoke-filled air

Susana de Sant’Anna hasn’t been able to take a full breath of air since about June 2015. That was when she was hospitalized in San Francisco with severe sepsis, complicated by Lemierre’s syndrome – a rare infectious disease - and an abscess of the left lung. She underwent two lung surgeries, and in the two years it took her to recover, she burned through all her savings and became homeless. Sant’Anna has spent the last five years bouncing between shelters, transitional housing and friends’ couches.

Now, with wildfire smoke choking the city, fog for weeks on end and the lingering threat of a virus that affects the lungs, she spends her days hiding in a hotel room paid for by donations that she stretches by cutting back on food, knowing that just one breath of the smoky air outside could set her recovery back. “They’re saying people like me with vulnerabilities need to be in a safe place, but I don’t have a home,” Sant’Anna said. “Now I have two hazards to face.”

Tens of thousands of Californians across the state have found themselves in circumstances similar to Sant’Anna: unhoused or housing-insecure amid a pandemic, struggling to breathe in a region cloaked in smoke. North of Los Angeles, the Lake fire has been burning in Angeles national forest since 12 August, tearing through 31,089 acres. Mid-August lightning storms ignited more than 900 wildfires in the north of the state that together have burnt through more than 1.5m acres (2,344 sq miles) and killed eight.

Also of Interest

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

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A Little Night Music

Robert Johnson - They're Red Hot

Robert Johnson - Preachin' Blues

Robert Johnson - Hellhound on my trail

Robert Johnson - Traveling Riverside Blues

Robert Johnson - Kind Hearted Woman Blues

Robert Johnson - Love In Vain

Robert Johnson - Rambling On My Mind

Robert Johnson - From Four Until Late

Robert Johnson - I Believe I'll Dust My Broom