Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features blues and gospel singer Roebuck "Pops" Staples. Enjoy!

"One of the necessary accompaniments of capitalism in a democracy is political corruption."

-- Upton Sinclair

News and Opinion

An interesting read. Here's a bit to get you started:

Clinton Campaign Spread Alfa Bank Ruse Throughout Obama Admin to Press Trump-Russia Probe

A Hillary Clinton campaign operation to plant a false rumor about Donald Trump setting up a “secret hotline” to Moscow through a Russian bank was much broader than known and involved multiple U.S. agencies, according to declassified documents and sources briefed on an ongoing criminal investigation of the scheme. In addition to the FBI, the 2016 Clinton campaign tried to convince the Obama administration’s State Department, Justice Department and Central Intelligence Agency to look into the hoax, and continued pressing the issue even after Trump was inaugurated in January 2017.

The goal was to trigger federal investigative activity targeting her Republican rival and leak the damaging information to the media. “The Clinton machine flooded the FBI with pressure from a number of angles until investigations of Trump were opened and reopened,” said one of the briefed sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive law enforcement matter. "The deception was wide-ranging."

Special Counsel John Durham outlined the FBI part of the scheme in a felony indictment of Michael Sussmann. The former Clinton campaign lawyer was charged last month with making a false statement to the former general counsel of the FBI when he claimed he was not working “for any client” in bringing to the FBI’s attention allegations of a secret channel of communication between computer servers in Trump Tower and the Alfa Bank in Russia. According to the indictment, Sussmann was in fact acting on behalf of clients including the Clinton campaign, and an unnamed tech executive who RCI has previously reported is Rodney L. Joffe, a regular adviser to the Biden White House on cybersecurity and infrastructure policies.

Internal emails reveal the Clinton operatives knew the links they made between Trump and Russia were “weak,” even describing them as a “red herring,” but fed them to investigators anyway. After Sussmann’s meeting with the FBI in September 2016, the Clinton campaign approached the State Department the following month with the same lead, this time using paid Clinton campaign subcontractor Christopher Steele to feed the rumors. A former British intelligence officer, Steele was offered as a reliable source to help corroborate the rumors. On Oct. 11, 2016, Steele gave his contact at Foggy Bottom documents alleging that a supposed hidden server at Trump Tower was pinging Moscow.

Two days later, a State official who previously worked under former secretary Clinton funneled the information to the FBI’s then-top Eurasia/Russia counterintelligence official, Stephen Laycock, according to recently declassified notes and testimony. Laycock, in turn, forwarded the information to Peter Strzok, the FBI agent who led the investigation of Trump and his campaign and had just weeks earlier texted a bureau lawyer, “We’ll stop [Trump from being elected].”

Progressives Show They're A Total JOKE, Fold To Manchin

Manchin wavers on Biden’s plan, Democrats vow to push ahead

Pivotal Sen. Joe Manchin wavered Monday on his support for President Joe Biden’s sweeping $1.75 trillion domestic policy proposal, but Democratic leaders vowed to push ahead, with initial voting possible on the bill and a related $1 trillion infrastructure package in the House this week. ...

Democrats have been working frantically to finish up months of negotiations, and it’s unclear whether Manchin’s resistance will deliver a debilitating blow to those efforts or have the opposite effect of propelling Democrats to start taking votes on Biden’s signature domestic proposal. His comments infuriated some Democrats but energized others, particularly progressives eager to force his hand.

The White House swiftly responded that it remains confident Manchin will support Biden’s plan, and the congressional leaders said it all remained on track. ...

At a leadership meeting late Monday, Pelosi said the House Rules Committee could meet as soon as Tuesday evening or Wednesday, which would allow for votes midweek, according to a person who requested anonymity to discuss the private talks. The Senate would still have to vote, likely later in the month.

Bill McKibben: “Manchin’s Latest Hissy Fit” Threatens to Curb Biden Agenda at U.N. Climate Summit

The collapse of Biden’s social reform bill

The ignominious collapse of the Biden administration’s social reform pretenses has dealt a blow to the fiction that the Democratic Party can be a vehicle for progressive social change. The framework of Biden’s “Build Back Better” budget plan revealed last week bears little relation to the bill that “progressive” Democrats like Senator Bernie Sanders and his allies affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, claimed would represent meaningful improvements in workers’ lives.

In the course of “negotiations” with right-wing congressional Democrats, the bill was stripped of most provisions that would cost businesses money or improve the living conditions of the working class. Two years of free community college, paid family and medical leave, a permanent child tax credit, and significant expansions to Medicare have all been killed. Moreover, the supposedly progressive measures still left in the bill are actually oriented towards the interests of the ruling elite. Out of the $555 billion allocated for climate-related spending, $320 billion is in the form of tax credits to utilities, electric vehicle manufacturers, and companies that build battery-charging stations. Another $110 billion is for subsidies to producers of “solar, batteries and advanced materials.”

Proposals for universal pre-kindergarten programs and federally subsidized child care remain left on the table but only to free the mothers of small children to take low-wage jobs. Medicaid has only been expanded into states which refused federal subsidies for expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. This is also aimed at inducing workers to take low-wage jobs that do not offer health care coverage. The latest reform bill also excludes any significant tax rate increases for either corporations or the wealthy.

Senator Bernie Sanders, whom the Democratic leadership promoted to chair of the Senate Budget Committee to spearhead the legislation, has not declared any public opposition to the new bill, stripped of many of the reforms he and other “progressives” previously called for. In an interview with CNN, Sanders called the current bill “very, very strong” and evaded answering if he would vote for the legislation as is.

'We're Not Giving Up': Sanders, Other Progressives Fight to Rescue Drug Price Reforms

Sen. Bernie Sanders, lawmakers in vulnerable districts, and grassroots progressive groups are ramping up their last-ditch effort to rescue a plan to lower U.S. prescription drug prices as the longstanding—and widely popular—Democratic campaign promise is at risk of being excluded from President Joe Biden's signature domestic policy bill.

As top Democratic lawmakers continued discussing a possible compromise on medicine pricing over the weekend, Sanders (I-Vt.)—the chair of the Senate Budget Committee—made clear Sunday that he still sees prescription drug reforms as a crucial component of the Build Back Better Act, which has been sliced in half to appease corporate-backed Democrats in the Senate and House.

"It is outrageous that we continue to pay the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs and that one out of four Americans cannot afford the prescriptions that their doctors write," the Vermont senator said in an appearance on CNN. "That is not acceptable."

Sanders, who is closely involved in ongoing reconciliation talks, pointed to recent survey data showing that more than 80% of the U.S. public believes Medicare should have the power to directly negotiate drug prices with the pharmaceutical industry, something it is currently barred from doing under federal law.

"So the issue is, right now, the pharmaceutical industry is doing everything that it can to make sure that one out of four Americans is unable to afford the prescriptions that their doctors write. People are dying," said Sanders. "As soon as I leave the studio, I'm going to be going back home to get on the phone to make sure that we have [drug price reforms]."

Prescription drug price reforms—which Democratic lawmakers and candidates have been running on for years—were entirely absent from a $1.75 trillion reconciliation framework the Biden administration unveiled last week, an omission that prompted immediate outrage from progressive healthcare campaigners.

Predictably, the pharmaceutical industry has mobilized its vast resources and an army of around 1,500 registered lobbyists—nearly three for each member of Congress—in an effort to kill Democrats' proposed price reforms, the savings from which progressives hope to use to fund an expansion of Medicare benefits.

Analysts have estimated that allowing Medicare to directly negotiate drug prices would save the federal government hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade.

"Giving Medicare the power to negotiate drug prices will save the government billions," Social Security Works, a progressive advocacy group, said Monday. "But most importantly, it will save lives."

While there's still hope on Capitol Hill that lawmakers will ultimately include a version of the drug pricing plan in the final reconciliation package, it's unclear how ambitious the compromise proposal will be compared to the original, which was based on Democratic legislation known as H.R. 3. ...

Politico reported Sunday that "if Democrats are able to reinsert a drug plan, lawmakers and aides say it will hew closer to the far more narrow and industry-friendly version put forward by House and Senate centrists and endorsed by the White House than the aggressive plan that already passed the House twice." With a vote on the full Build Back Better Act expected as soon as Tuesday, a drug pricing deal could be announced in the coming hours.

"Though the drug industry's goal is preventing any government price negotiation whatsoever, limiting the bargaining to a narrow subset of drugs and leaning more heavily on measures like out-of-pocket caps that don't impact the companies' bottom line would be a victory in itself," Politico noted. "Several progressives and frontliners said they would rather leave drug pricing out of the package altogether than pass what they see as a weak version that will sap motivation for future action."

Fed to start reining in economic aid as inflation risk rises

With inflation at its highest point in three decades, the Federal Reserve is set this week to begin winding down the extraordinary stimulus it has given the economy since the pandemic recession struck early last year, a process that could prove to be a risky balancing act.

Chair Jerome Powell has signaled that the Fed will announce after its policy meeting Wednesday that it will start paring its $120 billion in monthly bond purchases as soon as this month. Those purchases are intended to keep long-term loan rates low to encourage borrowing and spending.

Once the Fed has ended its bond purchases by mid-2022, it will then turn to a more difficult decision: When to raise its benchmark short-term rate from zero, where it’s been since COVID-19 hammered the economy in March 2020. Raising that rate, which affects many consumer and business loans, would be intended to make sure inflation doesn’t get out of control. But it would carry the risk of discouraging spending and undercutting the job market and the economy before they’ve regained full health.

As SCOTUS Reviews Texas Abortion Ban, Activists Look to New Strategies to Save Reproductive Freedom

Supreme court appears open to allowing challenge to Texas abortion law

A majority of the US supreme court appeared skeptical of a controversial Texas law that gives private citizens the right to file civil lawsuits to enforce a six-week abortion ban. The threat of expensive litigation posed by the ban has had a chilling effect and halted the vast majority of abortions in America’s second-largest state, which is home to more than 6 million women of child-bearing age.

Over nearly three hours of arguments on Monday the nine-member bench heard from three parties: attorneys for Texas, the Biden administration and abortion providers. The focus of arguments was whether Texas can allow private citizens to enforce an abortion ban in direct contradiction of supreme court precedent in Roe v Wade, the 1973 ruling that provides a constitutional right to abortion up to roughly 24 weeks, and whether the federal government then has the standing to stop the law in court.

Although laws deemed unconstitutional are often described as “struck down” by courts, in fact courts block specific officials from enforcing laws. Texas made it difficult for courts to scrutinize the law by making it difficult to identify who they would block from enforcing it, having, in the words of chief justice John Roberts last month, “delegated enforcement … to the populace at large”.

This design by the Republican-led Texas legislature represented a purposeful effort to evade federal court scrutiny. While abortion was the constitutional right at issue, debate focused on the legality of the structure of Texas’s law, rather than the right to abortion. The court heard two separate challenges to the Texas law during oral arguments. Three liberal justices had already said they believed the law was unconstitutional. A fourth, the conservative Roberts, had said in the past he would have blocked the law while lower courts considered it. And two more justices, conservatives Amy Coney-Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh, who both joined the bench during the Trump administration, had critical questions for attorneys representing Texas’s case.

Kyle Rittenhouse trial begins as judge hopes to pick jury within a day

The trial of Kyle Rittenhouse began on Monday with the challenge of seating jurors who had not made up their minds about the young man who shot three people, killing two, during a violent night of protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin, last year.

Rittenhouse, now 18, faces life in prison if he is convicted of first-degree homicide. He faces two homicide counts, one of attempted homicide and two of recklessly endangering safety for firing his weapon near others. He is also charged with possession of a dangerous weapon by a person under 18. ...

Before jury selection began, Bruce Schroeder, Wisconsin’s longest-serving circuit court judge, told attorneys picking a 20-member jury pool from 150 prospective jurors could be accomplished in a day. The trial is expected to last two to three weeks.

Almost one in three of Republicans say violence may be necessary to ‘save’ US

Almost a third of Republicans believe violence may be necessary to “save” the US, according to a new poll. Researchers at the Public Religion Research Institute, a nonprofit, found that 30% of Republicans agreed with the statement “Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country”.

Among Americans who believe the 2020 election was “stolen” from Donald Trump, which it was not, 39% believe violence may be required.

The troubling statistics show the post-election rancour that led to the violent insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January is still very much in place. Republicans are most likely to believe “true American patriots may have to resort to violence”, PRRI found, with just 11% of Democrats and 17% of independents agreeing with the statement. Among all Americans, 18% agreed.

Do they have a First Amendment in Florida?

Police warn woman not to wear Halloween costume as protest

A South Florida woman says she was warned by a local police officer not to wear a Halloween costume that is designed like a condo building project that she and others oppose since it would be considered a protest for which she needs a permit.

Cat Uden told the South Florida Sun Sentinel that the officer told her that if she wore the costume to the city of Hollywood’s Hollyweird Halloween block party Saturday night it would be considered a planned protest march. ...

On Facebook, Uden urged other opponents of the development to wear a costume like hers, designed like a condo building, or to bring signs that said, “No Condo,” to the Halloween block party. A few days after she posted the message, Uden said she got the call from the local police lieutenant. ...

Police spokeswoman Deanna Bettineschi said that Uden needs a permit to hold a “planned protest march.” If she attends the event and leads an organized demonstration, Uden will be given a warning and asked to leave. After a warning, the penalty could include arrest with a fine up to $500 or 60 days in jail, Bettineschi said.

Dems Predict Biden Will LOSE In 2024

Steven Donziger's address (in case you want to send him some encouragement by mail)

Steven Donziger
87103-054
FCI Danbury
Route 37
Danbury, CT 06811

Biden, Bolsonaro and Xi among leaders agreeing deal to end deforestation

World leaders have agreed a deal that aims to halt and reverse global deforestation over the next decade as part of a multibillion-dollar package to tackle human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. Xi Jinping, Jair Bolsonaro and Joe Biden are among the leaders who will commit to the declaration at Cop26 in Glasgow on Tuesday to protect vast areas, ranging from the eastern Siberian taiga to the Congo basin, home to the world’s second largest rainforest.

Land-clearing by humans accounts for almost a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions, largely deriving from the destruction of the world’s forests for agricultural products such as palm oil, soy and beef. By signing the Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration on Forest and Land Use, presidents and prime ministers from major producers and consumers of deforestation-linked products will commit to protect forest ecosystems. ...

The commitments on deforestation are an early win for the UK, which as host nation bears responsibility for forging a consensus among the nearly 200 countries present, amid concerns that an overall commitment on cutting greenhouse gas emissions by the 45% scientists say is needed this decade will fall short.

A pledge from CEOs to eliminate activities linked to deforestation, and £1.5bn funding from the UK government for forests, are also part of the deal. £350m of that will go to Indonesia and £200m to the Congo basin, with a new £1.1bn fund for the west African rainforest.

While the forestry agreement has been cautiously welcomed by ecologists and forest governance experts, they point to previous deals to save forests that have so far failed to stop their destruction, including in 2014. But this time, the EU, China and the US alongside major forested countries like Brazil, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Papua New Guinea will all sign the commitment.

Do not trust Brazil’s ‘greenwashing’ promises, say Amazon activists

Amazon forest defenders are urging delegates at Cop26 not to trust the “greenwashing” promises of Jair Bolsonaro’s government, which has wreaked havoc on the environment over the past three years.

Brazil will field one of the biggest delegations at the UN climate talks in Glasgow and fund a lavish promotional pavilion inside the conference centre. According to the agriculture minister, Tereza Cristina Corrêa da Costa Dias, and the environment minister, Joaquim Alvaro Pereira Leite, the message is that Brazil is “a longtime champion of the environmental agenda and an agrifood powerhouse”.

But climate activists say the world should pay more attention to the destructive policies of the recent past than vague promises about the future, which they say are aimed at securing cash. Suely Vaz, a former head of the environment regulator Ibama who now works for the Climate Observatory, said the Brazilian government had gutted forest protection agencies and tried to change the law in favour of farmers and land grabbers.

“Nowadays Brazil has an anti-environmental policy. They are paralysing everything. Deforestation and forest fires are out of control. This must change to ensure that climate money – which is important for our country – can be used in very detailed, specified way,” she said.

Carlos Rittl, a senior policy adviser at the Rainforest Foundation Norway, said Brazil should not get away with a makeover that aimed to shake its pariah reputation under Bolsonaro. “It will be the biggest team ever. They are spending a lot on communications. Agriculture and industry will be there and a big comms team trying to sell the world a different image. But the world needs to hold Brazil accountable to the truth. The satellites don’t lie.” Satellite images show deforestation is at its highest level since 2012.

Tom Goldtooth at COP26: Absolute Carbon Reduction “Issue of Life and Death” for Indigenous Peoples

Space Colonization And The Myth Of Separateness: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

All of the problems that proponents of space colonization claim it will solve can be far more realistically addressed by sociopolitical changes and technological innovations geared toward protecting and preserving life here on Earth. The only reason anyone takes it as a given that humanity needs to become independent from Earth’s ecosystem to survive is because they assume the destructiveness inherent in capitalism are an inescapable constant. And there is literally zero reason to believe it’s even possible.

Also of Interest

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

JOHN PILGER: Justice for Assange Is Justice for All

Lebanon: “We’re all going to hell”

Bookshops thrive as France moves to protect sellers from Amazon

The U.S. Supply Chain Crisis Will Get Worse - As Will Inflation

Wall Street Banks Closed in the Red on Friday on Reports of Hedge Fund Losses

China’s Economic “Miracle” Was Normal

Indigenous peoples to get $1.7bn in recognition of role in protecting forests

‘So many have gone’: storms and drought drive Guatemalans to the US border

Jon Stewart EXPOSES Wall Street CEO's Lies To His Face

Top media company demands reporters write pro-US/EU/Israel propaganda

A Little Night Music

Pops Staples - Love Is A Precious Thing

Pops Staples - People Get Ready

Pop Staples - Nobody's Fault But Mine

The Staple Singers - This May be the Last Time

The Staple Singers - A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall

Pops Staples - No News Is Good News

The Staple Singers - It's Been A Change

Albert King, Steve Cropper, and Pop Staples - Tupelo

Pop Staples - World In Motion

The Band w/The Staples Singers - The Weight