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The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: Byther Smith

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Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features Chicago blues guitarist Byther Smith. Enjoy!

^{Byther Smith - I Don't Know Where You Go}

"Democracy can hardly be expected to flourish in societies where political and economic power is being progressively concentrated and centralized. But the progress of technology has led and is still leading to just such a concentration and centralization of power."

-- Aldous Huxley

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News and Opinion

Dutch farmers fight back against huge cuts to livestock

Along roads and bridges in the Netherlands, people are hanging the Dutch flag upside down. It is a sign of solidarity with the Dutch farming sector, which will also be upturned by a radical 30% reduction in livestock numbers, a move being made to meet environmental targets.

In recent weeks, farmers have blocked off food distribution centres with hundreds of tractors, blockaded major roads and turned up outside regional assemblies and ministers’ homes to protest. One late-night protest ended with a police officer accused of firing a gun at a 16-year-old farmer’s son.

It comes as authorities in the Netherlands have released details of the cuts in ammonia, nitrogen oxides and nitrous oxide needed to protect more than 150 nature reserves in the country. And it is the farming sector that is going to bear the brunt of emissions cuts. “This is not a democracy any more: it’s a dictatorship,” says Jeroen van Maanen, a farmer with 130 cows in Zeewolde, central Netherlands, who has joined the protests.

Manure, when mixed with urine, releases ammonia, a nitrogen compound. If it enters lakes and streams via farm runoff, excessive nitrogen can damage sensitive natural habitats. The country has the seventh biggest livestock population in the EU but is comparatively small in size. This gives it Europe’s highest livestock density, with insufficient land to make good use of the waste from more than 100 million cattle, chickens and pigs.

Van Maanen says farmers are being unfairly targeted: “If you come for us and our families, you come at a farmer’s soul,” he says. “We’ve proposed all kinds of solutions but we are ignored. And finally, they come up with a plan for a reduction in livestock. No other sector has reduced nitrogen in the last 30 years [as much as] we have. This is why there’s a lot of emotion and pain.”

The latest government coalition has not, so far, been dissuaded by the protests from its drive to tackle the country’s environmental problems. After a landmark court ruling in 2019, it needs to reduce nitrogen emissions in order to allow building projects to go-ahead in the country.

Worth a read:

Will the Morning Come?

Formed in 1984 during the military dictatorship (1964–85), the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) grew out of agricultural workers’ and peasants’ occupations of latifúndios, gigantic estates held by wealthy individuals and corporations. Over the past four decades, these farmers have taken control of millions of hectares of land across Brazil, forming the largest social movement in Latin America. Approximately 500,000 households live in these MST-led occupations, meaning that the MST has organised about 2 million people into its ranks.

Around 100,000 families live on encampments (acampamentos), which are occupations of fallow land to which they have not been given formal access; 400,000 families live on settlements (assentamentos), whose land they now hold by right through liberal provisions in Chapter III of the country’s 1988 Constitution, Article 184, which states that the government can “expropriate, on account of social interest, for purposes of agrarian reform, rural property that does not perform a social function.” However, it is important to note that, on a punctual basis, the Brazilian state nonetheless attempts to evict families from these legal encampments.

The settlements’ residents organise themselves through various democratic structures, create schools for their children and community kitchens for the indigent and develop techniques for agroecological farming towards fulfilling their own needs and for sale in the marketplace. The MST is now rooted in the social landscape of Brazil; it is impossible to think of the country without the movement’s red flag fluttering across these encampments from the Amazon in the north to Arroio Chuí, Brazil’s southernmost point. ...

The MST organises peasants to improve not only their control over land, but also over agricultural production, including by avoiding toxic chemicals which destroy both the workers’ land and health. This project is now linked to an interest amongst consumers for food whose components do not harm them and whose production does not destroy the planet. The possibility of uniting the majority of the country’s 212 million people in pursuit of agrarian reform galvanises the MST.

Russia, Ukraine seal landmark grains-export deal in Istanbul

US to send more HIMARS precision rocket systems to Ukraine in latest package

The US will send four more high-mobility artillery rocket systems to Ukraine as part of the next military aid package to strengthen Kyiv in what’s become a grinding long-range fires duel, Pentagon officials said Wednesday.

The new M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, will bring the total number committed to Ukraine to 16. The light, wheeled multiple rocket launcher allows Ukraine to strike at ranges of 85 kilometers, or 53 miles, and with more precision than previously sent artillery.

The added HIMARS would be included in its upcoming 16th package of equipment from U.S. military stockpiles, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said as he hosted a virtual meeting of the Ukraine-focused contact group with allies. The package will also include rounds for guided multiple-launch rocket systems, or GMLRS, and artillery. ...

This week Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu ordered the military to prioritize the destruction of Ukraine’s long-range missiles and artillery, while Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Wednesday that Russia’s objectives now extend beyond the eastern Donbas region.

Russia Prepares Big Offensive, Putin Talks to MbS, Ridicules EU on Gas; EU Scraps Food Sanctions

Ukraine Seeks Debt Freeze as War Ravages Economy

Ukraine has asked its international creditors, including Western powers and the world's largest investment firms, to freeze its debt payments for two years so it can focus its dwindling financial resources on repelling Russia.

Facing an estimated 35% to 45% crash in GDP this year following Moscow's invasion in February, Ukraine's finance ministry said on Wednesday it was hoping to finalise the deferral on its roughly $20 billion of debt by Aug. 9.

The delay, which was quickly backed by both the major Western governments and heavyweight funds that have lent to Kyiv, would come just in time to put off around $1.2 billion of debt payments due at the start of September.

Far right in front for snap Italy election after Draghi goes

Italy will hold snap elections on 25 September that could see a coalition led by the far-right Brothers of Italy party win a majority, after Mario Draghi’s resignation as prime minister.

Announcing on Thursday that he had signed a decree to dissolve parliament, the Italian president, Sergio Mattarella, said: “The period we are going through does not allow for any pause in the [government] action which is needed to counter the economic and social crisis and rising inflation.”

Draghi confirmed his resignation early on Thursday after an attempt to salvage his broad coalition failed when three key parties snubbed a confidence vote. ...

Based on current polls, the obvious favourite in September’s election is a coalition led by the far-right Brothers of Italy and including the League and Forza Italia. The Brothers of Italy, led by Giorgia Meloni, is in first place on voter intentions with nearly 24%, ahead of the Democratic party (PD) on 22% and the League on 14%, according to a poll by the SWG institute carried out on Monday. Forza Italia is currently expected to reap about 7% of the vote and M5S 11%.

NEW Jobless Claims Reach Highest Level Since November

Natural gas prices rising in US, dampening hopes for lower inflation

The price of natural gas in the US has risen by nearly half in the past month, as drought and the war in Ukraine continue to bite and millions of Americans turn up their air conditioners in a heatwave.

Natural-gas futures jumped 48% this month, including 10% on Wednesday, to $8.007 per million British thermal units (btu). The rise has come as other energy costs, including oil, have begun to drop from their June peaks. A ferocious continental heatwave is projected to last into August. ...

The heat is also testing aging power grids, as consumers use high amounts of electricity. In Texas, a global hub for cryptocurrency mining, bitcoin miners shut off their machines amid warnings of rolling black-outs.

The rising price of gas, along with coal, could dash hopes for an end to inflation any time soon. Some saw recent falling commodity prices as a signal that inflation, now running at 40-year high of 9.1%, could be close to peaking.

But higher natural gas prices, the Wall Street Journal noted on Thursday, contribute to rising prices for the fertilizer, steel, cement, plastic and glass industries as well as the immediate costs in electricity production.

Amazon buys US medical provider as it cements move into healthcare

Amazon will acquire the primary care organization One Medical in a deal valued roughly at $3.9bn, marking another expansion for the retailer into healthcare services.

The Seattle-based e-commerce giant said in a statement Thursday it is buying One Medical for $18 a share in an all-cash transaction. It’s one of Amazon’s biggest acquisitions, following its $13.7bn deal to buy Whole Foods in 2017 and its $8.5bn purchase of Hollywood studio MGM, which closed earlier this year.

One Medical, whose parent company is the San Francisco based 1Life Healthcare, Inc, is a membership-based service that offers virtual care as well as in-person visits. It also works with more than 8,000 companies to provide its health benefits to employees.

As of March, One Medical had about 767,000 members and 188 medical offices in 25 markets, according to its first-quarter earnings report, which also showed the company had incurred a net loss of $90.9m after pulling in $254.1m in revenue. The total deal value announced Thursday includes One Medical’s debt.

Neil Lindsay, the senior vice president of Amazon Health Services, said in a statement the acquisition is geared toward reinventing the healthcare “experience“ for things like booking an appointment and taking trips to the pharmacy.

US Gov Is Collecting Your Cell Phone Data!

Ex-Minneapolis officer given two and a half years over George Floyd killing

A federal judge has sentenced former Minneapolis police officer Thomas Lane to two and a half years in prison for violating George Floyd’s civil rights, calling Lane’s role in the restraint that killed Floyd “a very serious offense in which a life was lost” but handing down a sentence well below what prosecutors and Floyd’s family sought.

Judge Paul Magnuson’s sentence was just slightly more than the 27 months that Lane’s attorney had requested, while prosecutors had asked for more than five years in prison – the low end of federal guidelines for the charge Lane was convicted on earlier this year. He said Lane, who faces sentencing in September on state charges in Floyd’s killing, will remain free on bond until he must turn himself in on October 4.

Lane, who is white, held Floyd’s legs as Officer Derek Chauvin pinned Floyd’s neck with his knee for nearly nine and a half minutes on 25 May 2020. Bystander video of Floyd, who was Black, pleading that he could not breathe sparked protests in Minneapolis and around the world in a reckoning over racial injustice in policing.

Two other officers, J Alexander Kueng and Tou Thao, were also convicted of violating Floyd’s civil rights and will be sentenced later.

Worth a full read:

The rightwing supreme court has another target: Native American rights

In 1886, the supreme court in United States v Kagama described states as the “deadliest enemies” of Native nations. The case concerned criminal jurisdiction on Indian reservations, but it also recognized the role states, and their citizens, played in fueling Native conflict and dispossession. It was a rare occasion in which the court acknowledged it was making Indian law in the context of great violence and suffering. Paradoxically, the court found that the very nation that waged wars of extermination and invasion against Native people also declared itself their sole guardian, protecting its “wards” from the “local ill feeling” of land-hungry whites flooding Native lands in the western states. And where the US constitution was lacking in language defining federal authority over Native nations, the court had invented it, for better or for worse.

That’s why the court affirmed in Kagama, like it has for nearly two centuries, that Indian country sat apart from states and was instead subject to congressional and federal authority. Put simply, states had no business in tribal affairs. That decision and others like it – however imperfect and drenched in conquest they were – supposedly shielded Native people and their reservations from the arbitrary authority of states and hostile white settlers.

Last month, the supreme court tore up that decision and centuries of legal precedent with it. The 5-4 decision in Oklahoma v Castro-Huerta found that state governments have the right to prosecute non-Natives for crimes committed against tribal members on reservation lands. The decision weakens the effects of McGirt v Oklahoma, which found that most of eastern Oklahoma was still legally Indian Country, where many crimes were beyond the grasp of state law. But the court applied Castro-Huerta far beyond Oklahoma.

“A state has jurisdiction over all of its territory, including Indian country,” Brett Kavanaugh wrote, resting his argument on a false 10th amendment claim, which doesn’t authorize states to intervene in tribal affairs. His words could have come from the most ardent anti-Indian racist of a bygone era. Asserting state criminal jurisdiction over Native lands has been a primary tactic of legally eliminating Native people. Chief Justice John Roberts’ court draws from a long tradition of violent conquest, going back to Cherokee removal in the 19th century and to the termination policies of the 20th.

The theory of state supremacy, supposedly enshrined in the final amendment of the Bill of Rights, has a sordid history of white supremacy and reactionary politics. The same reasoning found its way into the Dredd Scott decision in 1859 to keep Black people as white property in slave states. More recently, Kavanaugh cited the 10th amendment in his concurring opinion overturning Roe v Wade. States, according to this extremist – and now dominant – view in the court, possess the authority to abolish and criminalize abortions, potentially curb voting rights and now abrogate treaties and redefine federal relations with Native nations.

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Historian REVEALS How Biden is Jimmy Carter 2.0

Republicans keep gerrymandered maps – after they were struck down by court

When I called up Catherine Turcer on Tuesday, she mentioned that her daughter had just sent her a text message saying it must feel like she’s living the same day over and over again.

Turcer is the executive director of the Ohio chapter of Common Cause, a government watchdog group, and one of the most knowledgeable people about redistricting in her state. Earlier that morning, the Ohio supreme court struck down the map for the state’s 15 congressional districts, saying they were so distorted in favor of Republicans that they violated the state constitution. It was the seventh time this year the court has struck down either a congressional or state legislative map (it has struck down the congressional map twice and state legislative districts five times).

Despite those rulings, Republicans have maneuvered to keep both the congressional and state legislative maps in place for this fall’s election. It has set up an extraordinary circumstance in Ohio: voters will cast ballots for federal and state representation this fall in districts that are unconstitutional. ...

“It’s incredibly painful to participate in elections that you know are rigged,” she told me. “I’ve been encouraging folks to look at the upcoming elections as important to participate because if we do just opt out, we would have even worse representation.”

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Oil sector’s ‘staggering’ $3bn-a-day profits for last 50 years

The oil and gas industry has delivered $2.8bn (£2.3bn) a day in pure profit for the last 50 years, a new analysis has revealed.

The vast total captured by petrostates and fossil fuel companies since 1970 is $52tn, providing the power to “buy every politician, every system” and delay action on the climate crisis, says Prof Aviel Verbruggen, the author of the analysis. The huge profits were inflated by cartels of countries artificially restricting supply.

The analysis, based on World Bank data, assesses the “rent” secured by global oil and gas sales, which is the economic term for the unearned profit produced after the total cost of production has been deducted.

The study has yet to be published in an academic journal but three experts at University College London, the London School of Economics and the thinktank Carbon Tracker confirmed the analysis as accurate, with one calling the total a “staggering number”. It appears to be the first long-term assessment of the sector’s total profits, with oil rents providing 86% of the total.

The profit-grabbing is holding back the world’s action on the climate emergency, he said: “It’s really stripping money from the alternatives. In every country, people have so much difficulty just to pay the gas and electricity bills and oil [petrol] bill, that we don’t have money left over to invest in renewables.”

Some of the rents go to governments as royalties, says Prof Paul Ekins, at University College London: “But the fact remains that, over the last 50 years, companies have made a huge amount of money by producing fossil fuels, the burning of which is the major cause of climate change. This is already causing untold misery round the world and is a major threat to future human civilisation.

Climate Crisis Pushes Migratory Monarch Butterflies Onto Endangered List

The International Union for Conservation of Nature on Thursday formally listed the beloved migratory monarch butterfly as endangered, citing dire threats to the subspecies posed by the climate crisis, deforestation, pesticide use, and logging.

Dr. Bruno Oberle, the director-general of IUCN—the world's leading scientific authority on species conservation—said the new listing "highlights the fragility of nature's wonders, such as the unique spectacle of monarch butterflies migrating across thousands of kilometers," a reference to the insects' remarkable biannual journey across North America.

"To preserve the rich diversity of nature, we need effective, fairly governed protected and conserved areas, alongside decisive action to tackle climate change and restore ecosystems," Oberle added. "In turn, conserving biodiversity supports communities by providing essential services such as food, water, and sustainable jobs."

The population of monarch butterflies in North America has been falling rapidly in recent years, a decline largely unabated by government action to protect the imperiled insects or to fight the climate crisis that is pushing them to the brink of extinction.

Echoing recent research attributing the monarch butterfly's decline to the climate emergency, IUCN notes that "climate change has significantly impacted the migratory monarch butterfly and is a fast-growing threat; drought limits the growth of milkweed and increases the frequency of catastrophic wildfires, temperature extremes trigger earlier migrations before milkweed is available, while severe weather has killed millions of butterflies."

"The western population is at greatest risk of extinction, having declined by an estimated 99.9%, from as many as 10 million to 1,914 butterflies between the 1980s and 2021," the organization observed. "The larger eastern population also shrunk by 84% from 1996 to 2014. Concern remains as to whether enough butterflies survive to maintain the populations and prevent extinction."

Additionally, IUCN stressed that "legal and illegal logging and deforestation to make space for agriculture and urban development" have also "destroyed substantial areas of the butterflies' winter shelter in Mexico and California, while pesticides and herbicides used in intensive agriculture across the range kill butterflies and milkweed, the host plant that the larvae of the monarch butterfly feed on."

Anna Walker, a member of the IUCN SSC Butterfly and Moth Specialist Group, said Thursday that while "it is difficult to watch monarch butterflies and their extraordinary migration teeter on the edge of collapse... there are signs of hope."

"So many people and organizations have come together to try and protect this butterfly and its habitats," said Walker, who spearheaded the monarch butterfly assessment. "From planting native milkweed and reducing pesticide use to supporting the protection of overwintering sites and contributing to community science, we all have a role to play in making sure this iconic insect makes a full recovery."

Extreme heat warnings in effect in 28 states across US

The National Weather Service has warned that extreme heat will affect more than 100 million people in the US this week, with triple-digit temperatures in some states and broken temperature records in many areas across the country.

“Above-normal temperatures will continue to prevail across much of the US through the end of the week, with a significant portion of the population remaining under heat-related advisories and warnings,” the agency said.

Heat warnings and advisories have been put in place for 28 states, with central and southern states facing the brunt of the scorching heat. Some parts of Oklahoma reached 115F (46C) this week, while the Dallas area hit 109F (42C). ...

In the north-east, where temperatures are settling in at more than 90F (32C), city leaders have warned residents to limit outside activity during the hottest times of the day. ...

In Phoenix, America’s hottest city, an extreme heat warning was in place for Thursday and Friday. The temperature is forecast to hit 113F (45c) on Thursday afternoon and 115F (46C) on Friday afternoon. Heat advisories are only issued when temperatures are higher than average for the time of year, and in Phoenix in July that means temperatures over 112F. So far this year, the city has broken or equaled four daytime high records and nine nighttime lows.

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Also of Interest

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

Why Is Biden Dangerously Joining the Warpath Against Iran?

Britain Helped US Cover Up Downing of Iranian Airliner

10 Years of Rojava: A Visionary Social Experiment Under Threat

The European Position At The End Of The Unipolar World

Calling Putin ‘Hitler’ to Smear Diplomacy as ‘Appeasement’

Why Nord Stream II Must Be Opened Immediately

Australia Finally Recognizes That The AUKUS Deal Makes No Sense At All

Marijuana Justice Coalition Applauds 'Long Overdue' Senate Legalization Bill

Unsealed testimony confirms judicial misconduct in filmmaker Roman Polanski’s 1977 criminal case

FBI find nothing in New Jersey search for missing Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa

Nancy Pelosi SHAMELESSLY Denies Insider Trading But Track Record Reveals 'More'

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A Little Night Music

Byther Smith - Your Mama's Crazy

Byther Smith - 35 Long Years

Byther Smith - Tell Me How You Like It

Byther Smith - Walked All Night Long

Byther Smith - Money Tree

Byther Smith - Close To You Baby

Byther Smith - Knockdown

Byther Smith - Hold That Train

Byther Smith - All For Business

Byther Smith - Movin' On

Byther Smith - Addressing The Nation With Blues

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