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“No word in the B vocabulary was ideologically neutral. A great many were euphemisms. Such words, for instance, as JOYCAMP (forced-labour camp) or MINIPAX Minis-
try of Peace, i.e. Ministry of War) meant almost the exact
opposite of what they appeared to mean. Some words, on
the other hand, displayed a frank and contemptuous un-
derstanding of the real nature of Oceanic society. An
example was PROLEFEED, meaning the rubbishy enter-
tainment and spurious news which the Party handed out
to the masses.”

-- George Orwell

News and Opinion

OMG, OMG! Putin is going to release a video! I guess we've given up on the imminent attack thing and now we're on to the "imminent video" thing.

Perhaps next our great intelligence network will discover that Putin is planning to kidnap Kim Kardashian and make a video with her to increase his popularity among young Americans.

What is it that our intelligence people are smoking?

Russia plans ‘very graphic’ fake video as pretext for Ukraine invasion, US claims

US officials claim they have evidence of a Russian plan to make a “very graphic” fake video of a Ukrainian attack as a pretext for an invasion. The alleged plot would involve using corpses, footage of blown-up buildings, fake Ukrainian military hardware, Turkish-made drones and actors playing the part of Russian-speaking mourners.

“We don’t know definitively that this is the route they are going to take, but we know that this is an option under consideration,” the deputy national security adviser, Jonathan Finer, told MSNBC, adding that the video “would involve actors playing mourners for people who are killed in an event that they would have created themselves”. Finer added: “That would involve the deployment of corpses to represent bodies purportedly killed, of people purportedly killed in an incident like this.” ...

US officials said the video would show Turkish-made Bayraktar drones taking part in the fabricated attack as a way of implicating Nato. ... Administration officials said the plan was to use the video as evidence of Ukrainian “genocide” against Russian speakers to justify Russian military intervention. By going public, the US hoped to stall or slow down Moscow’s plans. ...

The New York Times and Washington Post first published versions of the account given by administration officials, noting that the officials did not provide evidence for the US claims.

Britain said it agreed with the US assessment, having conducted its own analysis of the intelligence reports. ...

Last weekend, Reuters and CNN cited senior US officials claiming Russia had moved blood supplies close to the border, indicating a potential imminent military attack. Ukraine’s deputy defence minister, Hanna Maliar, denounced the blood supply claim, calling it a provocation designed “to spread panic and fear in our society”. On Thursday, Maliar told the Guardian she had checked that claim with Ukrainian intelligence agencies, which had their own sources. “It simply wasn’t true. We found no information to back this up, we did not see any blood supplies moved to the front or even in the civilian hospitals around the front,” she said, in an interview at a military airfield at Boryspil, outside Kyiv.

Psaki Asked If Reporters With Tough Questions About U.S. Intel Are Repeating Foreign Propaganda

US Again Tries To Pass Off Government Assertions As Evidence

The western media are blaring headlines today about a “revelation” by the US government which does not actually reveal anything because it contains nothing but empty narrative fluff.

“U.S. reveals Russian plot to use fake video as pretense for Ukraine invasion,” reads a headline from CBS News.

“US reveals Russia may plan to create fake pretext for Ukraine invasion,” claims another from The Hill.

The claim is that the Russian government is plotting to fabricate a false flag operation using a graphic video with crisis actors in order to manufacture a pretense for a full-scale military invasion. State Department Spokesman Ned Price and AP reporter Matt Lee had an exchange about this claim at a Thursday press conference that you simply must watch if you haven’t already.

Please watch this video in which journalist Matt Lee accuses State Dept. spokesman Ned Price of veering into "Alex Jones territory" by making the claim that Russia plans to stage a "false flag" attack with "crisis actors" -- Price then sneeringly calls Lee a Russian propagandist pic.twitter.com/5xMsbfWYgz

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) February 3, 2022

Lee pointed out that claims about false flags and crisis actors were “getting into Alex Jones territory” and asked for the evidence for these extraordinary claims, which one would think is reasonable since extraordinary claims are generally considered to require extraordinary evidence. Price said that the evidence is “intelligence information that we have declassified,” and when Lee asked where the declassified information was Price looked at him like he just asked the stupidest question in the world and said “I just delivered it.”

The exchange goes on to reveal that Price really did mean that the completely unverified government assertion he’d just regurgitated is the evidence for the claim being made, meaning the evidence of the government assertion is that assertion itself.

Refusing to relent, Lee kept hammering the point that a completely unsubstantiated assertion is not the same as evidence especially given all the government assertions that have proved not to be true over the years.

“Matt, you said yourself you’ve been in this business for quite a long time,” Price replied. “You know that when we make information, intelligence information public, we do so in a way that protects sensitive sources and methods.”

Ahh, so the evidence is secret. It’s top secret evidence, to protect “sensitive sources and methods”. It sure is convenient how all the evidence of immensely consequential claims made by a government with an extensive history of lying is always far too sensitive for the public to be permitted to scrutinize.

This is the kind of evidence you can’t see. The evidence is invisible.

“You also know that we do so, we declassify information only when we’re confident in that information,” Price continued. “If you doubt the credibility of the U.S. government, of the British government of other governments and wanna, you know, find solace in information that the Russians are putting out, that’s for you do to.”

So if you doubt the credibility of governments with a very well-documented history of lying about exactly this sort of thing, you’re at best a useful idiot of Vladimir Putin and at worst a Kremlin operative yourself.

Yep, sounds legit. That’s definitely the sort of thing government officials say when they feel like they’re being truthful.

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden tweeted about the exchange, “This is wild. The State Department’s spokesman can’t comprehend why the Associated Press feels the need to distinguish between a claim and a fact, and becomes visibly offended—and then angered—by the suggestion that his claims may require evidence to be accepted as credible.”

Wild indeed. Assertions are not evidence. A government declassifying itself making an unsubstantiated assertion is not “declassifying” anything. This is not the sort of behavior anyone would accept from anyone else, except perhaps a televangelist or a cult leader, but it’s already being treated as truth by US and British politicians.

If I got on here for example and began drumming up publicity with claims that I have evidence that extraterrestrials are visiting this planet, and then after racking up millions of views and lots of publicity my evidence turned out to be a video clip of me saying “Extraterrestrials have been visiting this planet,” I would be called a liar, a scammer, and a clickbait grifter, and rightly so. I could then claim that I can’t provide any further evidence beyond my own assertion without compromising my sensitive sources and methods, but I’d still quite rightly be called a liar, a scammer, and a clickbait grifter.

But if I’m the most powerful institution in the world and have an extensive history of lying about exactly the sort of claim I just made, that’s considered fine and normal within the mainstream western orthodoxy.

Wild. Just wild.

France, Germany and Turkey reach out to Putin as troops remain on Ukraine border

Competing mediation offers have showered down on Vladimir Putin, as his defence minister visits troops on the Ukraine border before unprecedented joint exercises with Belarus, due to start in a week’s time. The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, on a trip to Kyiv, offered to host talks between Ukraine and Russia. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, prepared a fourth phone call in a week with Putin, and the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, said he was planning a trip to Moscow.

Russia confirmed it was possible that Scholz and Macron would travel to Moscow together, as a symbol of European unity and as joint signatories to the Minsk agreements, the stalled 2015 deal designed to bring peace and autonomy to Russian-supporting eastern Ukraine. ...

The frenetic diplomatic activity on Thursday came as Russia accused the US of ratcheting up “tensions” by sending 1,000 soldiers to Romania and 2,000 to Poland to bolster Nato’s eastern flank. Moscow is refusing to pull back more than 100,000 troops from Ukraine’s borders, and said its security demands had not yet been addressed by Nato.

Erdogan’s efforts to become the lead mediator are likely to be rejected by Moscow. Putin has been angered by Ankara’s decision to sell drones to Kyiv for use in eastern Ukraine, as well by a new offer to build a Turkish drone manufacturing plant in the country.

Islamic State leader killed during raid by US special forces in Syria

Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, the leader of Islamic State and one of the world’s most wanted men, has been killed during an overnight raid by US special forces in north-west Syria. The pre-dawn attack on a house in the village of Atme, just south of the Turkish border, led to up to 13 casualties, among them women and children. It also resulted in the destruction of a US helicopter, which had been used to carry special forces troops from Erbil in Iraq. ...

Thursday’s raid was the most significant by the US since Qurayshi’s predecessor Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was killed in October 2019 in a village 9 miles (14.5km) south of Atme.

Biden said the civilian casualties were caused when Qurayshi detonated a suicide vest and other explosives on the third floor of the building where he had taken refuge. ... However, there was a significant discrepancy between the initial Pentagon report that eight children had been safely evacuated and two children were killed by the blast triggered by Qurayshi, and the accounts of first responders on the scene who say they found six children and four women dead.

“Some of the corpses in the area do not look like they died in an explosion. They look like they were hit by extremely heavy calibre gunfire,” Charles Lister, director of the Syria programme at the Middle East Institute in Washington, said. “And we do know, because I saw it in a video last night as it was happening, that at least one of the helicopters in the area fired its heavy machine guns at the building for over a minute straight."

Why Amnesty’s Israeli Apartheid Report Is So Damning?

‘Apartheid state’: Israel’s fears over image in US are coming to pass

At the beginning of the year, Israel’s foreign minister Yair Lapid reflected on the diplomatic challenges for 2022. “We think that in the coming year, there will be debate that is unprecedented in its venom and in its radioactivity around the words ‘Israel as an apartheid state’,” he told Israeli journalists. “In 2022, it will be a tangible threat.”

Lapid pointed to two United Nations investigations he said were likely to conclude that Israel’s governance of occupied Palestinian territory amounts to the crime of apartheid under international law. Several Israeli and international human rights organisations have reached exactly that view, including Amnesty International with the release of a report this week, Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians: a Cruel System of Domination and a Crime Against Humanity.

Israel is also facing an international criminal court investigation into actions in the occupied territories, such as the confiscation of Palestinian land to build Jewish settlements, that Amnesty International and others have said breach international laws against apartheid.

But Israel is also concerned that the breaking of the longstanding taboo in the US on comparing its rule over the Palestinians to white South Africa’s racist repression of its black population is evidence of a slower-moving – but potentially more dangerous –threat: the fracturing of once rock-solid backing for Israel within its most important ally.

The Israeli foreign ministry’s director general, Alon Ushpiz, placed protecting longstanding bipartisan support for the Jewish state in the US at the top of a list of Israel’s diplomatic priorities this year as opinion polls show eroding support among Democrats, in part driven by changing narratives about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Israeli police ‘may have hacked phone’ of key witness in Netanyahu trial

A key figure in the corruption trial of Israel’s former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu may have been illegally bugged by police, according to reports, amid global controversy about Israeli-made spyware and how it has been used.

In a recording broadcast by Channel 12 news, police are heard allegedly discussing tapping a phone belonging to Shlomo Filber, a former Netanyahu ally turned state witness. “It’s as if it’s illegal … to install the application,” a police officer says.

The claim emerged days after Israeli officials admitted that – contrary to earlier denials – they may have found evidence pointing to improper use of spyware by its own investigators. ...

A former head of the communications ministry, Filber is accused of mediating between Netanyahu and the controlling shareholder of Bezeq, a telecoms group, in an alleged plot to exchange regulatory favours for positive coverage of Netanyahu on a news site owned by the firm.

According to Channel 13, data was extracted from a phone without a court order and included photos, phone numbers, correspondence history and various applications.

Surprise! Brandon is helping the Wall Street crooks loot your 401k.

Biden Reversal Gives Wall Street A Big Win

When former President Donald Trump paved the way for his private equity donors to skim fees from Americans’ 401(k) retirement accounts, Joe Biden’s campaign denounced the stealth executive action and promised to oppose such changes if he won the presidency. But less than two years later, Biden’s administration just quietly cemented that same policy, delivering a gift to the Democrat’s own finance industry sponsors, even as federal law enforcement officials are warning of rampant malfeasance in the private equity industry. At issue is a Trump Labor Department ruling in 2020 that authorized retirement plan administrators to shift workers’ savings into high-risk, high-fee private equity investments, despite regulators’ long-standing interpretation that federal laws prohibited such moves.

Trump Labor Department officials touted the reinterpretation as a way to “help Americans saving for retirement gain access to alternative investments that often provide strong returns.” The letter followed Blackstone Group CEO Steve Schwarzman, a Trump adviser and major donor to his super PAC, saying that accessing the $7 trillion in Americans’ 401(k) was one of his company’s top goals. At the time, Biden’s campaign criticized the Trump move, telling the American Prospect that the Democratic nominee “staunchly opposes regulatory changes that will lead to skyrocketing fees and diminished retirement security for savers. This regulatory action is another example of President Trump putting the interests of Wall Street ahead of American workers and families.”

But rather than rescinding Trump’s ruling, Biden’s own Labor Department appears to have cemented the Trump directive in a new supplemental letter being hailed by finance industry lawyers. ...

Last week, the conservative-dominated U.S. Supreme Court handed down a ruling empowering 401(k) holders to sue finance executives that invest their savings in inappropriately risky or predatory private equity investments. However, Biden’s Labor Department has effectively blessed such investment strategies. Indeed, industry lawyers and investment executives are already celebrating the letter as a precedent setting ruling potentially opening trillions of dollars of Americans’ retirement savings up to higher-fee investments. “We believe this is a settled matter now,” said a finance executive at Partners Group, the Switzerland-based investment firm that spearheaded the lobbying push for the letter, according to Bloomberg Law.

CA Democrats Squash Medicare for All Bill

David Sirota: Gavin Newsom FAILS To Pass Single-Payer, Yet ANOTHER Failure Under His Leadership

Warren Warns 'Corporate Vultures' Are Circling Medicare on Biden's Watch

Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday joined physicians and dozens of her House Democratic colleagues in urging the Biden administration to immediately halt Medicare Direct Contracting, a Trump-era pilot that could result in complete privatization of the cherished public healthcare program by decade's end.

"It is completely baffling to me that the Biden administration wants to give the same bad actors in Medicare Advantage free rein in traditional Medicare," Warren (D-Mass.) said during a hearing held by the Senate Finance Subcommittee on Fiscal Responsibility and Economic Growth.

"My view is that President Biden should not permit Medicare to be handed over to corporate profiteers," Warren added. "Doing so is going to increase costs and put more strain on the Hospital Insurance Trust Fund. The Biden administration should shut down the Direct Contracting model."

The Direct Contracting (DC) pilot was first publicly announced by the Trump administration in 2019 and launched with little notice in the final months of the former president's tenure. The program is administered through the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Innovation Center, an agency that the Affordable Care Act empowered to experiment with alternatives to traditional Medicare's payment model, which directly reimburses healthcare providers.

The DC pilot, by contrast, inserts private middlemen called Direct Contracting Entities (DCEs) between patients and providers, allowing insurance giants and Wall Street-backed startups to keep as profit the public funding that they don't spend on care.

A majority of the 53 current DCEs—which are paid monthly by the federal government to cover a specified portion of a patient's medical care—are investor-owned. Unlike Medicare Advantage, which Medicare patients choose voluntarily, the DC pilot automatically assigns seniors to DCEs, often without their knowledge or consent.

"Wall Street is not racing to buy up clinics because they want to expand coordinated care models and limit profits," Warren argued Wednesday. "Private equity and insurance companies want the eye-popping profits that are possible when the federal government lets them pocket whatever it is they can avoid spending on seniors and people with disabilities who need healthcare."

"The number of corporate vultures hoping to feed on Medicare continues to grow," said Warren, the first Democratic senator to publicly criticize the Biden administration for letting the DC pilot proceed. "This invites fiscal disaster, and I hope this administration will reverse this decision."

White House PUSHES Spotify To Censor Rogan

Restaurant Owners Got 30 Times More Federal Covid Aid Than Workers: Report

Federal coronavirus relief programs gave U.S. restaurant owners 30 times more money, on average, than their poorly paid workers who have struggled to keep up with rent and grocery bills throughout the deadly pandemic, according to a new analysis released Thursday.

The report from advocacy group One Fair Wage and the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, urges congressional lawmakers who are "now considering allocating tens of billions more dollars in taxpayer funds to restaurant owners" to make further aid contingent on employers providing a livable wage.

Restaurant owners have collectively received more than $73.2 billion in federal relief since March 2020 thanks to grants, loan forgiveness, and tax credits authorized by Congress, notes the report. Meanwhile, subminimum wage workers—a majority of whom are women and disproportionately women of color—have struggled to obtain assistance.

Researchers contrast the experiences of restaurant owners and workers:

To help them face the challenge of keeping their businesses afloat during the pandemic, restaurant owners had access to three different federal relief programs: the Paycheck Protection Program, the Restaurant Revitalization Fund, and the Employee Retention Tax Credit. If they were able to access all three programs at their average amount awarded, an average restaurant owner with fewer than 500 employees could have obtained a total of up to $775,439 in grants, forgiven loans, and potential tax credits.

While they also faced tremendous challenges in paying their rent and feeding their families, restaurant workers throughout the pandemic had access to two much smaller and harder to access federal relief programs: federal unemployment insurance and a stimulus cash payment. In May 2021, One Fair Wage estimated that only 56% of initial unemployment claims reached workers several months after the onset of the pandemic. Nearly two-thirds of workers surveyed reported that they faced challenges obtaining benefits. If they were able to access the full amount of both programs, a restaurant worker could have obtained at most a total of $26,300 over 74 weeks (a year and a half) in additional assistance.

As the authors explain, the National Restaurant Association—led by major chain CEOs with multimillion-dollar salaries—successfully lobbied for billions of dollars in subsidies for restaurant owners while "simultaneously lobbying against any wage increases for their workers," allowing the industry to maintain the nation's lowest-paid workforce.

Congress—which has kept the federal subminimum wage for tipped workers at $2.13 an hour for more than 30 years—obliged, allowing businesses to access funds that came with few, and sometimes no, worker-friendly strings attached.

From the inadequate requirements governing employee retention, wages, and treatment in restaurant owner rescue programs to the structure of federal and state unemployment aid, restaurant workers have largely been left behind when it comes to Covid-19 relief, the report shows.

"In the first year of the pandemic," the authors write, "many restaurant workers found themselves locked out of the unemployment benefits offered in the $2 trillion federal stimulus relief package," with some receiving $3,200 in stimulus checks "at most."

The report continues:

The CARES Act and the American Rescue Plan gave workers a combined potential of 74 weeks of unemployment insurance, totaling at most up to $23,100 in extended benefits on top of the base unemployment insurance weekly benefit. However, to be eligible for state unemployment insurance, workers were required to submit a minimum [number] of hours worked or minimum amount of wages earned over a specific "base period"—usually a time frame equal to one year (though this varies state by state). In June 2020, two-thirds of service workers who applied to the One Fair Wage Service Workers' Relief Fund noted challenges in accessing unemployment insurance; many noted that they were deemed ineligible due to their subminimum wage.

Subminimum wage workers' dependence on tips left them vulnerable to incidence of wage theft and under-reported cash tips that led to workers receiving smaller weekly unemployment benefits or even being denied these benefits outright. In the case of employers under-reporting restaurant workers' tips, workers only qualified to receive part of their salary or appeared to earn "too little" and thus failed to qualify for unemployment insurance altogether.

Given widespread difficulties in securing unemployment benefits, the report notes that "millions of workers returned to working in restaurants in the summer of 2020."

By the fall of 2020, however, "tipped workers reported that their tips had declined, while health risks, customer hostility, and sexual harassment had increased," says the report. "When asked to enforce social distancing, mask rules, and Covid vaccination card rules on the same customers from whom they had to get tips to survive, workers reported that their tips decreased even further—a key breaking point for millions of workers."

There has been a "mass exodus" from the restaurant industry due to a "lack of relief and stagnant wages"—especially in the 42 states where tipped workers are still allowed to be paid a subminimum wage, the authors write. Compared with their counterparts in the eight states that guarantee a full minimum wage plus tips, restaurant workers making a subminimum wage are more likely to live in poverty and to be victims of sexual harassment.

Nearly one million workers have left the restaurant industry during the pandemic, "unwilling and unable to tolerate poverty wages any longer," the report states. "Of those who remain, 53% say they are leaving, and 76% say the only thing that will make them return to work in restaurants is a full, livable wage with tips on top."

Ex-Chicago Cop Jason Van Dyke Freed Early over Murdering Laquan McDonald; Activists Seek Fed Charges

California county on track to be run by militia-aligned group

A retired police chief and self-described Reagan Republican with decades of public service, Leonard Moty checked all the boxes to represent his community in one of California’s most conservative counties. But on Tuesday, voters ousted Moty, handing control of the Shasta county board of supervisors to a group aligned with local militia members. The election followed nearly two years of threats and increasing hostility toward the longtime supervisor and his moderate colleagues in response to pandemic health restrictions.

While it’s not yet clear who will replace Moty, the two candidates in the lead attended a celebration on Tuesday with members of an area militia group, the Sacramento Bee reported.

The recall is a win for the ultra-conservative movement in Shasta county, which has fought against moderate Republican officials and sought to gain a foothold in local government in this rural part of northern California. It also highlights a phenomenon that extends far beyond the region, as experts warn the pandemic and eroding trust in US institutions has fueled extremism in local politics and hostility against officials that could reshape governments from school boards to county supervisors to Congress. “I think it’s going to be a change in our politics. I think we’re going to shift more to the alt-right side of things,” Moty said on Wednesday. ...

Located more than two hours from California’s more densely populated state capital, Sacramento, Shasta county has long been a conservative bastion and home to a thriving State of Jefferson movement, which advocates for secession from California and the formation of a new state. But it was also the sort of place where people could work through their differences to achieve common goals, said Moty, who had served as a supervisor since 2009.

Texas leans on new voting law to reject thousands of primary ballots

Officials in Texas are rejecting thousands of mail-in ballots ahead of the first 2022 midterm primary votes next month, raising serious alarm that a new Republican law is going to disenfranchise droves of eligible voters. The state’s 1 March primary is being closely watched as the first important test of one of the dozens of voting restrictions GOP-controlled state legislatures enacted in 2021. ...

County election officials are already seeing significant consequences from the new rules around mail-in voting. So far, they have rejected 2,202 of the 32,817 applications for mail-in ballots submitted – a 6.7% rejection rate, according to the Texas secretary of state’s office. ...

Those who qualify can continue to request mail-in ballots until mid-February, and officials and voting advocates are worried that the number of rejections could rise as more people submit their applications. They also say it does not portend well for the general election in November, when turnout will be higher. “It’s already a clusterfuck,” said Charlie Bonner, a spokesperson for Move Texas, a group that works on voter mobilization in Texas.

The source of the vast majority of those rejections is a new provision in state law that requires voters to provide either their Texas driving license number or the last four digits of their social security number – or both – on their application for vote by mail. Some voters registered originally with only one of those numbers, and if they now put the other on their application, it gets rejected.

“We’re going to lose a lot of voters and I don’t think they’re going to be coming back. I think it was purposely done to try to cull out voters and make it harder for them to participate in our democracy,” said Grace Chimene, the president of the Texas chapter of the League of Women Voters, a non-partisan group that works on voting issues.

Biden's Own Base CAVES. Democrats, Dem Leaners Drop Support For Prez Amid Covid & Economic Woes

After decrying Republican election rigging, Democrats embrace it in New York

New York Democrats are plowing ahead with an aggressive effort to rig the state’s electoral maps to give the party as many as three additional seats in Congress, a move that comes as the party has denounced similar Republican-led efforts in other states as anti-democratic.

Democrats currently have a 19-8 advantage in New York’s delegation to the US House of Representatives. Their proposed districts, unveiled on Sunday, would give them up to three additional seats, increasing their advantage to 22-4. (There is one fewer seat overall in New York because of population shifts.) ...

Over the last few months, Democrats in Congress have led efforts calling for an end to excessive partisan gerrymandering – an effort that failed last month when Republicans filibustered a sweeping voting rights bill. They’ve watched as Republican legislatures across the US have carved up district lines to their advantage to help the GOP as they try to take control of the US House later this year.

But New York is one of the few places where Democrats have complete control of the process and a chance to gain Democratic seats. Nationally, Republicans have complete control over the drawing of 187 districts and Democrats have control over just 75. More than a third of the districts Democrats will draw are in New York. ...

Democrats, who hold a narrow super majority in the state legislature, approved the plan on Wednesday without holding a public hearing on the maps – a decision that has infuriated voting advocates. “They’re just muscling it through,” said Blair Horner, the executive director of the New York Public Interest Research Group.

Federal Court Deals Blow to 'Noxious Fracked Gas' Mountain Valley Pipeline

Climate campaigners celebrated Thursday after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit delivered yet another blow to a controversial gas project spanning over 300 miles in Virginia and West Virginia.

"At a time when we need to urgently move away from fracked-gas pipelines and all the harms they bring—from impacts to endangered species to damage to water quality to climate change—the law and science prevailed in this case," declared Anne Havemann, general counsel of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network.

A three-judge panel from the Richmond-based federal appeals court threw out the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services' assessment of how the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) would impact two endangered fish species: the Roanoke logperch and the candy darter.

"If a species is already speeding toward the extinction cliff, an agency may not press on the gas. We urge the Fish and Wildlife Service to consider this directive carefully while reassessing impacts to the two endangered fish at issue, especially the apparently not-long-for-this-world candy darter," Judge James Wynn wrote in the court's opinion.

"We recognize that this decision will further delay the completion of an already mostly finished pipeline," Wynn added, "but the Endangered Species Act's directive to federal agencies could not be clearer: 'halt and reverse the trend toward species extinction, whatever the cost.'"

While the five companies behind the pipeline said that "we remain committed to completing the MVP project and believe the concerns associated with MVP's biological opinion can be addressed by the agency," climate campaigners expressed hope this will help kill the project.

Big Oil Board Members Refuse to Testify on Climate Pledges

With board members from four Big Oil companies refusing to testify before Congress about their so-called net-zero plans, House Democrats will speak with climate experts next week about the failures of ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and BP to truly work toward reducing planet-heating emissions.

Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), chair of the House Oversight Committee, said Thursday that she was "disappointed" that board members from the four companies will not attend a hearing scheduled for February 8, where they were expected to answer questions about their net-zero fossil fuel emissions targets and other promises, but added that the panel will hear from "climate science experts who will tell us exactly what these companies need to do to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement."

"If these fossil fuel companies were really taking meaningful steps to curb dangerous emissions, their boards of directors would be eager to testify before the committee when requested, and speak to the American people," said Maloney, adding that another hearing being held on March 8 will be the board members' "last chance to cooperate" voluntarily.

"If their board members refuse to appear, they should expect further action from this committee," she said.

As Common Dreams reported last month, climate experts have denounced Exxon's plan to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050—a plan that leaves out the bulk of their products' emissions—as "greenwashing."

The Center for Climate Integrity (CCI) detailed the loopholes contained in the fossil fuel companies' climate pledges in a recent report showing that none will help the world limit global heating to 1.5° above pre-industrial levels in keeping with the Paris climate agreement.

The four companies' pledges have all been found to:

• Exclude "scope 3" emissions—those that result from result from the ultimate use of the company's product—and focus instead on emissions directly and indirectly released from their operations;
• Set targets that only cover a portion of their business, excluding portions like so-called "downstream operations" such as refining;
• Rely on post-emission compensation rather than actually reducing emissions, with promises to plant trees or introduce carbon capture and storage; and
• Rely on emission intensity metrics by producing oil more efficiently, resulting in an increase in absolute emissions.

The plans "ultimately serve little more than to greenwash the fossil fuel industry's image and deceive customers about the climate risks inherent in continued use of its products," said CCI.

"Given all the loopholes and disinformation in their companies' 'net-zero' pledges, it's no wonder these board members are dodging the committee's request to testify," said Richard Wiles, president of CCI, in a statement Thursday. "If they are paying attention, they know their companies' pledges are totally insufficient to avert climate catastrophe. No amount of spin can hide the reality that the fossil fuel industry is continuing to pollute and drive climate change."

The board members who have declined to testify are climate Dr. Susan Avery of Exxon, activist investor Alexander Karsner of Exxon, Enrique Hernandez of Chevron, Melody Meyer of BP, and Jane Holl Lute of Shell.

Their refusal comes four months after CEOs of the companies tesified before the same committee but refused to say, under oath, that they would stop spending money to oppose climate action.

US Pacific north-west weighs plans to cope with extreme weather

First came the heavy snow in late December that blanketed Seattle and the surrounding area. Then the torrential rain and flooding hit in early January. One by one, four of the region’s main mountain passes were deemed impassable, and a 20-mile stretch of Interstate 5 south of Seattle was closed. It was the first time all five had been closed in more than a decade, leaving the Seattle area virtually cut off from cross-state travel.

But it was simply the latest in a series of extreme weather events that have pummeled the Pacific north-west over the past year. In the typically mild-weathered state of Washington alone, it began with heavy snowfall last February, followed by dry, scorching temperatures over the summer that left more than 100 people dead, and then a record-breaking fall rain in the Seattle area.

Now, with more intense extreme weather expected in the years ahead, driven by the climate crisis, a bipartisan assortment of Washington state lawmakers has simultaneously introduced a handful of bills this legislative session that, rather than focusing on mitigation and emission reduction, focus on climate adaptation. From a proposal to establish a grant program for farmers and ranchers facing damage from flooding and other natural disasters, to adding climate resiliency planning to water system plans, these innovations are intended to prepare the state for the challenges ahead.

“I just think we’re definitely seeing much more extreme weather events and this is going to become the norm, not the one-off,” said Washington senator Mark Mullet, a Democrat, who introduced the proposal to add air conditioners. ... But these proposals also reflect a broader trend taking shape in the last five years, in which the climate movement has increasingly recognized the importance of adaptation, explained Aseem Prakash, professor of political science at the University of Washington and director of the Center for Environmental Politics. ...

Prakash explained that even if we immediately start drastically reducing emissions, the effects of the climate crisis are already being felt. “So we have to adapt. I think the climate movement realizes this political and moral necessity to adapt,” he said. “And also, whenever we have floods, extreme heat waves, who suffers? It’s really the poor people, the underprivileged. So there is also a very important climate justice component.”

Also of Interest

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

Xi-Putin summit: Russia inches closer to China as ‘new cold war’ looms

The Russians Are Coming! But Are They Bringing the Chinese?

Why does Russia focus on ‘indivisible security’ in Ukraine standoff?

War Mania Leads White House to Condemn US Senator as Russian Propagandist

Could the U.S. Defend Ukraine?

The U.S. Black Political Class and War

'The Mission Was Successful.'

The News Is Not That Israel Has Apartheid, but That Amnesty Dares Say So

Ottawa protests: tensions grow as truck blockade paralyzes Canada capital

Biden Education Dept. Reverses on Student Debt Case After Reporting Stirred Outrage

Deepening crisis of American capitalism as national debt hits $30 trillion

When Repos Blew Up in 2019, Hedge Funds Were $800 Billion Short U.S. Treasury Futures; Then Margins Blew Out

Critics Say GOP Bill in Alabama Would 'Decapitate Public Education'

What Does Climate Change Have to do with Snowstorms?

A Little Night Music

Hot Tuna - Keep On Truckin'

Hot Tuna - Hot Jelly Roll

Hot Tuna - 99 Year Blues

Hot Tuna - Uncle Sam Blues

Hot Tuna - Hesitation Blues

Hot Tuna - Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning

Jorma Kaukonen & Jack Casady (Hot Tuna) - Mann's Fate

Hot Tuna - Candyman

Hot Tuna - Funky #7

Hot Tuna (Acoustic) 10.02.1973 San Francisco, CA Complete SBD

Hot Tuna - Full Concert - 03/04/88 - Fillmore Auditorium