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“There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.”

-- Adam Smith

News and Opinion

Hedges: Democrats, the More Effective Evil

When all else fails, when you are clueless about how to halt a 7.5% inflation rate, when your Build Back Better bill is gutted, when you renege on your promise to raise the minimum wage or forgive student debt, when you can’t halt the Republican suppression of voting rights, when you have no idea how to handle the pandemic which has claimed 900,000 lives – 16% of the world’s total deaths although we are less than 5% of the world’s population – when the stock market fluctuates on wild rollercoaster rides of highs and lows, when what little help the government offered to the labor force — half of whom, 80 million, experienced a period of unemployment last year — sees the termination of the extended unemployment benefits, rental assistance, forbearance for student loans, emergency checks, the moratorium on evictions and expansion of the child tax credits, when you watch passively as the ecocide gathers momentum, then you must make the public afraid of enemies, foreign and domestic. You must manufacture an existential threat. Terrorists at home. Russians and Chinese abroad. Expand state power in the name of national security. Beat the drums of war. War is the antidote to divert public attention from government corruption and incompetence. No one plays the game better than the Democratic Party. The Democrats, as journalist and co-founder of Black Agenda Report Glen Ford said, are not the lesser evil, they are the more effective evil. ...

An economic crisis means a political crisis. And a political crisis is traditionally solved by war against enemies inside and outside the nation. The Democrats are as guilty of this as the Republicans. Wars can get started by Democrats, such as Harry S. Truman in Korea or John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam, and perpetuated by Republicans. Or they can get started by Republicans, such as George W. Bush, and perpetuated by Democrats such as Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Bill Clinton, without declaring war, imposed punishing sanctions on Iraq and authorized the Navy and the Air Force to carry out tens of thousands of sorties against the country, dropping thousands of bombs and launching hundreds of missiles. The war industry, with its $768 billion military budget, along with the expansion of Homeland Security, the FBI, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the National Security Agency, is a bipartisan project. The handful of national political leaders, such as Henry Wallace in 1948 and George McGovern in 1972, who dared to challenge the war machine were ruthlessly hounded into political oblivion by the leaders of both parties. ...

The US domination of the world economy, after 75 years, is over. It is not coming back. We manufacture little, short of weapons. Our economy is a mirage build on unsustainable levels of debt. The pillage orchestrated by the capitalist elites and corporations has hollowed the country out from the inside, leaving the infrastructure decayed, democratic institutions moribund and at least half the population struggling at subsistence level. The two ruling parties, puppets for the ruling oligarchs, refuse to curb the rapacious appetites of the war industry and the rich, accelerating the crisis. That the rage of the dispossessed is legitimate, even if it is expressed in inappropriate ways, is never acknowledged by the Democrats, who were instrumental in pushing through the trade deals, deindustrialization, tax loopholes for the rich, deficit spending, endless wars and austerity programs that have created crisis. Instead, shooting the messenger, the Biden administration is targeting Trump supporters and winning draconian sentences for those who stormed the capital on January 6. Biden’s Justice Department has formed a domestic terrorism unit to focus on extremists and Democrats have been behind a series of moves to de-platform and censor their right-wing critics.

The belief that the Democratic Party offers an alternative to militarism is, as Samuel Johnson said, the triumph of hope over experience. The disputes with Republicans are largely political theater, often centered around the absurd or the trivial. On the substantive issues there is no difference within the ruling class. The Democrats, like the Republicans, embrace the fantasy that, even as the country stands on the brink of insolvency, a war industry that has orchestrated debacle after debacle, from Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq, is going to restore lost American global hegemony. Empires, as Reinhold Niebuhr observed, eventually “destroy themselves in the effort to prove that they are indestructible.” The self-delusion of military invincibility is the scourge that brought down the American empire, as it brought down past empires.

Russia WITHDRAWS Troops As Ukraine Trolls Markets

Vladimir Putin suggests dialogue is still possible on Ukraine crisis

Vladimir Putin has suggested it is still not too late for dialogue over Ukraine, as the world continues to be left guessing whether the Russian president is on the brink of invading his neighbour, or whether his military buildup is a negotiating ploy.

In a meeting in the Kremlin, the foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, told Putin he believed there was still room for dialogue on Russian requests for a new security deal with the west, which have been made as Russia amassed 140,000 troops around Ukraine’s borders in recent weeks.

“It seems to me that our possibilities are far from being exhausted. They certainly should not continue indefinitely. But at this stage I would suggest that they continue and be intensified,” Lavrov told Putin. ...

The footage released from the meeting appeared carefully choreographed to send a message about Kremlin thinking.

“We warn against endless conversations on issues that need to be resolved today. Still, as the foreign minister, I should say that there is always a chance,” said Lavrov.

An Off-Ramp from War? Russia Says It Pulled Back Some Troops from Ukraine Border as Talks Continue

Russian envoy warns of right to counterattack in eastern Ukraine

Russia’s ambassador to the EU has said Moscow would be within its rights to launch a “counterattack” if it felt it needed to protect Russian citizens living in eastern Ukraine. The comments in an interview with the Guardian will do little to calm fears of a major Russian assault on Ukraine, given one of the key scenarios suggested by western intelligence was Russia launching a “false-flag” operation to provide a pretext for invasion.

“We will not invade Ukraine unless we are provoked to do that,” said Vladimir Chizhov, who has represented Russia in Brussels since 2005. “If the Ukrainians launch an attack against Russia, you shouldn’t be surprised if we counterattack. Or, if they start blatantly killing Russian citizens anywhere – Donbas or wherever.”

Donbas is the region of eastern Ukraine where the Kremlin has armed and funded an insurgency since 2014. It has also, in recent years, handed out hundreds of thousands of Russian passports to residents of two so-called “people’s republics”, which are no longer controlled by Kyiv.

Russian UN Ambassador on NATO-Ukraine escalation

The US Government Truly Believes The Entire Planet Is Its Property

The Wall Street Journal has an article out titled “U.S. Aims to Thwart China’s Plan for Atlantic Base in Africa“, subtitled “An American delegation wants to convince Equatorial Guinea against giving Beijing a launchpad in waters the U.S. considers its backyard.”

The article quotes the former US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Tibor Nagy saying “We’d really, really not like to see a Chinese facility” on the Atlantic, and discusses “American concern about China’s global expansionism and its pursuit of a permanent military presence on waters the U.S. considers home turf.”

The Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi has discussed the irony of WSJ yelling about China’s “global expansionism” over a potential military base in Equatorial Guinea without applying that label to the US, when the US has hundreds of times the number of foreign military bases as China. Antiwar’s Daniel Larison wrote an article back in December eviscerating the ridiculous claim that a military base some six thousand nautical miles from the US coastline could be reasonably framed as any kind of threat to the American people.

But what really jumps out is the insane way the US political/media class routinely talks about virtually every location on this planet as though it is a territory of the United States.

The Wall Street Journal referring to the entire Atlantic Ocean as “America’s backyard” and “waters the U.S. considers home turf” follows a recent controversy over the US president proclaiming that “Everything south of the Mexican border is America’s front yard.” This provoked many references to the so-called “Monroe Doctrine”, a nineteenth-century imperialist assertion that Latin America is off limits to any power apart from the United States, effectively declaring the entire Western Hemisphere the property of Washington, DC.

It also follows another incident in which Press Secretary Jen Psaki remarked on the ongoing tensions around Ukraine that it is in America’s interest to support “our eastern flank countries”, which might come as a surprise to those who were taught in school that America’s eastern flank was not Eastern Europe but the eastern coastline of the United States.

The casual way these people say such things reflects a collectively held worldview that you won’t find on any official document or in any schoolchild’s textbook, but which is nonetheless a firmly held perspective among all the drivers of the modern empire: that the entire world is the property of the US government. That the US is not just the most powerful government in the world but also its rightful ruler, in the same way Rome ruled the Christian world.

It’s not something they can come out and directly say, because admitting they see themselves as the rulers of the world would make them look tyrannical and megalomaniacal. But it’s certainly something they believe.

They’re about as obvious about it as could be. They make almost no effort to conceal it. And yet you’ll still get empire apologists like Michael McFaul saying nonsense like this:

There was a time, not long ago, when imperial powers like UK, France, Portugal etc claimed their colonies as their "sphere of influence." Thank God we didn't listen o them back then. So why now is it ok to let Russia exercise a sphere of influence over its former colony, Ukraine?

— Michael McFaul (@McFaul) February 7, 2022

McFaul knows very well that the US is an imperial power and that it demands a very large “sphere of influence”.

To be a westerner is to be constantly inundated with made-up stories about tyrants who want to terrorize the world while living under a globe-spanning power structure that is actually terrorizing the world. It’s just so bizarre watching these imperial spinmeisters try to frame nations like China and Russia as freakish and backwards while working to literally rule the world like a comic book supervillain.

The US-centralized empire is quantifiably the single most destructive and evil power structure in today’s world. We shouldn’t want anyone to rule over the entire planet with an iron fist, but these monsters are the very least qualified among us to do so.

Iran nuclear deal talks stall as Tehran urges US to accept terms

Marathon talks to revive the Iran nuclear deal have hit a new roadblock, with Iran accusing the US of refusing to make the necessary political decisions to entrench the agreement in international law or to broaden the scope of economic sanctions that would be lifted. The issue has dogged the talks in Vienna between the west, Russia, Iran and China – which have been under way since February – from the outset. There is no sign that the eighth round of negotiations, once intended to be the final round, has reached the breakthrough some had been expecting.

Ali Shamkhani, the hardline secretary of Iran’s national security council, in a tweet issued in multiple languages, declared after speaking to his government’s negotiators that progress was becoming “more and more difficult”. ...

The US, he said, kept proposing new initiatives essentially designed to evade their commitments. ...

Asked what guarantees Iran was seeking, Khatibzadeh said: “The United States is not trustworthy and therefore objective guarantees must be obtained so that international law and relations are not again mocked by the US government.” He added that all sanctions should be lifted at the UN security council. “It does not matter what the title of the sanctions is since they were applied with a false label,” Khatibzadeh said.

We Need Answers About the CIA’s Mass Surveillance

The Central Intelligence Agency has been collecting American’s private data without any oversight or even the minimal legal safeguards that apply to the NSA and FBI, an unconstitutional affront to our civil liberties.

According to a declassified report released yesterday by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), the CIA’s surveillance program is reminiscent of the mass surveillance programs conducted by the NSA, though the details released thus far paint a disturbing picture of potential wide-scale violations of people’s privacy. To start, the CIA program has apparently been conducted outside the statutory reforms and oversight of the intelligence community instituted after revelations by Edward Snowden in 2013. The newly declassified CIA data collection program is carried out in conjunction with Executive Order 12333 and is therefore subject to even less oversight than the woefully under-supervised NSA surveillance programs subject to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. ...

From that letter and a PCLOB “” document, we know that the CIA collects a vast amount of data, often on U.S. persons, without any clear guidelines about data retention and without substantial oversight of analysts querying information about U.S. citizens. The program seems to exist outside the jurisdiction of either courts or Congress–given that even the Senate Intelligence Committee was left in the dark about this program.

Trudeau DECLARES Emergency: THREATENS Bank Accounts

Trudeau invokes rare emergency powers in attempt to quell protests

The Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, has invoked legislation that gives his government sweeping powers to fight a growing number of “illegal and dangerous” blockades across the country.

The first prime minister to invoke the Emergencies Act, Trudeau said the measures would be time-limited and only apply to specific geographic regions. “We are not preventing the right of people to protest legally,” he said, adding that the military would not be deployed. “The act is to be used sparingly and as a last resort.”

Hours before Trudeau’s announcement, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Alberta announced that they had seized a truck full of firearms at blockade near the US border.

The Emergencies Act, which goes into effect for a month, allows the federal government to bar people from gathering in certain locations. It could also allow officials to conscript the use of private tow trucks. The deputy prime minister, Chrystia Freeland, said the Act would bar the use of crowdfunding websites for illegal activities and punish companies whose trucks were being used in the protests.

The recent hack of the crowdfunding site GiveSendGo revealed substantial financial support from outside Canada, which Freeland called an attack on democracy. “This is about following the money. This is about putting an end to these illegal blockades. Consider yourself warned,” she said.

Belgian police prevent French ‘freedom convoy’ from entering Brussels

Belgian police have stopped drivers taking part in France’s so-called freedom convoy from entering Brussels, where they planned to hold a demonstration on Monday. Hundreds of protesters had headed north from Paris region on Sunday but Brussels authorities said the convoy would not be allowed to enter the city.

Police set up barriers and enforced checks around the European quarter, home to the EU headquarters and other buildings including the European parliament.

The protest against Covid restrictions and high energy prices shifted its focus to the symbolic heart of the EU after police prevented most of the estimated 3,000 vehicles from entering Paris at the weekend. About 100 managed to get past the police and converged on the Champs Élysées, where they were eventually dispersed with teargas on Saturday evening. ...

The mayor of Brussels, Philippe Close, said police were directing vehicles to a parking and rest area just outside the city, capable of accepting up to 10,000 vehicles, and warned demonstrators this was the only place they would be allowed to converge. He said protesters could be allowed to enter Brussels on foot, but they would not be allowed to “take the capital hostage”. Officials banned any demonstrations in the city on Monday.

Foreign money funding ‘extremism’ in Canada, says hacker

A hacker who leaked the names and locations of more than 90,000 people who donated money to the Canadian trucker convoy protest has said it exposed how money from abroad had funded “extremism” in the country. ...

The leaked data showed that more than 90,000 donations were made via GiveSendGo, with most funds appearing to come from Canada and the US. According to the data, individuals in countries including the UK, the Netherlands, Ireland and Denmark also donated.

Amarnath Amarasingam, a professor at Canada’s Queens University and an expert in extremism and social movements, tweeted that of the 92,844 donations, “51,666 (56%) came from the US, 36,202 (29%) came from Canada, and 1,831 (2%) came from the UK.” US-based donations totalled US$3.62m, while Canadians donated US$4.31m, he added.

The hacker said the sizeable number of donations coming from Canada showed that some people in the country had fallen into step with what they saw as American-style extremism.

Media DISMISSES Durham Report Claims Hillary Clinton Campaign SPIED On Trump, Planted Russiagate

‘Excited delirium’ emerges as key issue in trial of officers accused over George Floyd death

Use of the controversial label “excited delirium” by first responders when subduing people exhibiting signs of severe agitation has emerged as a key issue in the federal trial of three former Minneapolis police officers involved in the death of George Floyd.

Tou Thao, J Alexander Kueng and Thomas Lane are accused of depriving Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, of his civil rights by failing to give him medical aid while he was handcuffed and lying facedown as their senior colleague Derek Chauvin proceeded to murder him on 25 May 2020.

Jurors in the civil rights trial of the three more junior ex-officers have heard that Kueng knelt on Floyd’s back and Lane held down his legs, while Thao kept bystanders back. Kueng and Thao are additionally accused of failing to intervene to stop Chauvin, who was last year found guilty of Floyd’s murder and sentenced to 22 and a half years in prison. ...

But defense arguments have repeatedly focused on the condition termed excited delirium, and the training of police to respond to it, suggesting the officers were following procedure about restraining someone they thought was experiencing such a health syndrome.

The Minneapolis police department and the office of the city mayor, Jacob Frey, have said the city halted such training last year, after the American Medical Association (AMA) rejected the diagnosis of excited delirium. The AMA, called it a “manifestation of systemic racism” that had been misapplied to justify excessive police force or pharmacological interventions such as ketamine and “disproportionately cited in cases where Black men die in law enforcement custody”.

As Early Voting Begins, Texas Sees Spike in Rejected Ballots Due to Sweeping New Voter Restrictions

Groups Warn Texas Voting Rights 'In Jeopardy' as GOP Law Wreaks Havoc

With early voting underway in the 2022 Texas primaries, civil rights advocates warned Monday that ballot access in the state is under grave threat thanks in large part to the GOP's draconian voter suppression law, which is already throwing the election process into chaos.

Known as Senate Bill 1, the Republican-authored law implemented a slew of changes to Texas' already restrictive voting rules, including new voter ID requirements for mail-in ballots, a ban on drive-thru voting, and limits on counties' ability to expand voting options.

Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed Senate Bill 1 into law in September, prompting swift legal action from civil rights organizations and the Biden Justice Department. Critics argue the measure will disproportionately impact the poor, the elderly, people with disabilities, and people of color.

While parts of Senate Bill 1 have been temporarily blocked in the courts, much of the law is now in effect—and the results have been nightmarish, according to news reports, advocates on the ground, and Texas election administrators.

"Officials across the state are reporting higher-than-usual defect rates for mail-ballot applications," The Daily Beast reported Monday. "Last month, officials in Travis County said they were rejecting about half of the mail-in ballot applications they received... while 325 applications were rejected in Bexar County for failing to provide an ID number or providing one that was not on file."

"Texas voters are entitled to correct their mail-in voting applications or ballots if there's an error," the outlet noted. "But elections administrators say the process for alerting voters to errors lacks uniformity from county to county, largely depending on a county's budget and resources."

James Slattery, senior staff attorney for the Voting Rights Program at the Texas Civil Rights Project, said in a statement Monday that "the difficulties voters in Texas are experiencing right now were predictable when state leaders voted on Senate Bill 1—and we said as much to the Legislature last summer."

"Voters are confused, and we are concerned about the impact that this will have over the next two weeks and into the midterms in November," said Slattery.

The Texas Civil Rights Project was among the 30 organizations that sent a letter Monday demanding that Texas' Republican Secretary of State John Scott take steps to better educate voters about the rule changes under the new GOP law so as to minimize its disruptive impact, which could be huge given Texas' size.

The coalition warned in a press release that Scott's "poor handling of the state's new anti-voter laws" thus far "leaves Texans' freedom to vote in jeopardy during the 2022 primary election."

POLLS: Dems REJECT Biden For 2024 Reelection

'Net-Zero'? Europe's Top Banks Have Pumped $400 Billion Into Oil and Gas Since 2016

Scientists have warned repeatedly that avoiding the most catastrophic consequences of the climate crisis requires a rapid and just transition away from fossil fuels, and yet the largest 25 European banks—all purportedly committed to "net-zero" goals—have provided more than $400 billion in financing to 50 corporations expanding oil and gas production since 2016, with no signs of slowing down.

That's according to a new analysis out Monday from the responsible investment organization ShareAction, which said that this "continued love affair with oil and gas... is not only bad news for the climate, but also presents a huge risk for banks and their investors."

Last year, the International Energy Agency (IEA)—a powerful and relatively conservative institution—stated that there is "no need for investment in new fossil fuel supply" in its Net-Zero Emissions by 2050 pathway, and reiterated in its most recent World Energy Outlook that coal, oil, and gas must stay in the ground to have a fighting chance of limiting global warming to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels by the end of the century.

Despite this unambiguous message from the world's leading energy authority, ShareAction's research shows that Europe's biggest banks are still pumping billions of dollars into more than four dozen oil and gas companies expanding production, including ExxonMobil, Saudi Aramco, Shell, and BP.

Led by top offenders HSBC ($59 billion), Barclays ($48 billion), and BNP Paribas ($46 billion), 25 European banks have financed "upstream oil and gas expanders" to the tune of more than $400 billion since 2016.

Flourishing plants show warming Antarctica undergoing ‘major change’

Antarctica’s two native flowering plants are spreading rapidly as temperatures warm, according to the first study to show changes in fragile polar ecosystems have accelerated in the past decade.

The increase in plants since 2009 has been greater than the previous 50 years combined, coinciding with rapidly rising air temperatures and a reduction in the number of fur seals, according to researchers working on Signy Island in the South Orkney Islands.

Populations of Antarctic hairgrass (Deschampsia antarctica) and Antarctic pearlwort (Colobanthus quitensis) have been studied by scientists on the island since 1960. Research found hairgrass spread five times faster between 2009 and 2018 than between 1960 and 2009. For pearlwort, the increase was almost ten times more, according to the paper.

In the past decade, summer warming has increased from +0.02C to +0.27C each year, despite strong cooling recorded in 2012. “Antarctic terrestrial ecosystems respond quickly to these climatic inputs,” said lead researcher Prof Nicoletta Cannone, from the University of Insubria in Como, Italy. “I was expecting an increase of these plants but not of this magnitude, we are receiving multiple evidences that a major change is occurring in Antarctica.”

The primary driver of change is warming summer air, according to the study, which provides one of the longest records of changes in vegetation in Antarctica. A secondary reason is there are fewer fur seals on the island, which trample on the plants. It is not known why the number of seals has declined but it is likely to be related to changes in food availability and sea conditions.

Also of Interest

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

Cry ‘Havoc!’ — Let Slip the Dogs of War

The 'Frozen Ground Theory' And Other Ukraine War Nonsense

Karzai: Giving Afghan Funds to 9/11 Families an ‘Atrocity’

"Adding Insult to Injury": Afghan Activist & 9/11 Mother Condemn Biden's Seizure of Afghan Funds

Saudis Attack Yemen Capital, Target Telecom Ministry Area

The US government is deploying robot dogs to the Mexico border. Seriously?

Let Them Eat Punditry

On-Time Rent Payments Sag Amid Massive Spike in Rents

US ‘freedom convoy’ inspired by Canada bids to organize for Washington trip

Climate Crisis Has Made Western US Megadrought Worst in 1,200 Years

AOC SILENT On Pelosi Leadership, Warns Of 'Jim Crow' Return

The ONE Metric To See If Dems Are Truly Screwed In Midterms

Krystal Ball: Why the Trucker Convoy WON And What it Means

CNN Hires Investigator To Find Out Why Rogan Is Popular

A Little Night Music

Little Johnny Taylor - Since I Found A New Love

Little Johnny Taylor - Sweet Soul Woman

Little Johnny Taylor - Part Time Love

Little Johnny Taylor - Somewhere Down the Line

Little Johnny Taylor - I'll Make It Worth Your While

Little Johnny Taylor - There Is Something On Your Mind

Little Johnny Taylor - If You Love Me Like You Say

Little Johnny Taylor - How Can A Broke Man Survive

Little Johnny Taylor - Driving Wheel

Little Johnny Taylor - Big Blue Diamonds