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This evening's music features soul blues singer and guitarist Little Milton Campbell. Enjoy!

"I remember talking to, 40 years ago, one of the leading people in the government who was involved in arms control, pressing for arms control measures, détente, and so on. He's very high up, and we were talking about whether arms control could succeed. And only partially as a joke he said, "Well it might succeed if the high tech industry makes more profit from arms control than it can make from weapons-related research and production. If we get to that tipping point maybe arms control will work." He was partially joking but there's a truth that lies behind it."

-- Noam Chomsky

News and Opinion

Chris Hedges: The Trump-Russia Saga and the Death Spiral of American Journalism

Reporters make mistakes. It is the nature of the trade. There are always a few stories we wish were reported more carefully. Writing on deadline with often only a few hours before publication is an imperfect art. But when mistakes occur, they must be acknowledged and publicized. To cover them up, to pretend they did not happen, destroys our credibility. Once this credibility is gone, the press becomes nothing more than an echo chamber for a selected demographic. This, unfortunately, is the model that now defines the commerical media.

The failure to report accurately on the Trump-Russia saga for the four years of the Trump presidency is bad enough. What is worse, major media organizations, which produced thousands of stories and reports that were false, refuse to engage in a serious postmortem. The systematic failure was so egregious and widespread that it casts a very troubling shadow over the press. How do CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, The Washington Post, The New York Times and Mother Jones admit that for four years they reported salacious, unverified gossip as fact? How do they level with viewers and readers that the most basic rules of journalism were ignored to participate in a witch hunt, a virulent New McCarthyism? How do they explain to the public that their hatred for Trump led them to accuse him, for years, of activities and crimes he did not commit? How do they justify their current lack of transparency and dishonesty? It is not a pretty confession, which is why it won’t happen. The U.S. media has the lowest credibility — 26 percent — among 46 nations, according to a 2022 report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. And with good reason.

The commercial model of journalism has changed from when I began working as a reporter, covering conflicts in Central America in the early 1980s. In those days, there were a few large media outlets that sought to reach a broad public. I do not want to romanticize the old press. Those who reported stories that challenged the dominant narrative were targets, not only of the U.S. government but also of the hierarchies within news organizations such as The New York Times. Ray Bonner, for example, was reprimanded by the editors at The New York Times when he exposed egregious human rights violations committed by the El Salvadoran government, which the Reagan administration funded and armed. He quit shortly after being transferred to a dead-end job at the financial desk. Sydney Schanberg won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting in Cambodia on the Khmer Rouge, which was the basis for the film “The Killing Fields.” He was subsequently appointed metropolitan editor at The New York Times where he assigned reporters to cover the homeless, the poor and those being driven from their homes and apartments by Manhattan real estate developers. The paper’s Executive Editor, Abe Rosenthal, Schanberg told me, derisively referred to him as his “resident commie.” He terminated Schanberg’s twice-weekly column and forced him out. I saw my career at the paper end when I publicly criticized the invasion of Iraq. The career-killing campaigns against those who reported controversial stories or expressed controversial opinions was not lost on other reporters and editors who, to protect themselves, practiced self-censorship.

But the old media, because it sought to reach a broad public, reported on events and issues that did not please all of its readers. It left a lot out, to be sure. It gave too much credibility to officialdom, but, as Schanberg told me, the old model of news arguably kept “the swamp from getting any deeper, from rising higher.” The advent of digital media and the compartmentalizing of the public into antagonistic demographics has destroyed the traditional model of commercial journalism. Devastated by a loss of advertising revenue and a steep decline in viewers and readers, the commercial media has a vested interest in catering to those who remain. The approximately three and a half million digital news subscribers The New York Times gained during the Trump presidency were, internal surveys found, overwhelmingly anti-Trump. A feedback loop began where the paper fed its digital subscribers what they wanted to hear. Digital subscribers, it turns out, are also very thin-skinned.

“If the paper reported something that could be interpreted as supportive of Trump or not sufficiently critical of Trump,” Jeff Gerth, an investigative journalist who spent many years at The New York Times recently told me, they would sometimes “drop their subscription or go on social media and complain about it.”

Giving subscribers what they want makes commercial sense. However, it is not journalism.

Losing Bakhmut, losing Donbass

Zelensky Says Ukraine Is Preparing to Attack Crimea

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Friday that Ukraine is preparing to launch attacks to recapture Crimea by forming new military units and sending troops to train in other countries. ...

Zelensky and other top Ukrainian officials have maintained that kicking Russia out of Crimea is one of their war goals, but Russia controls a good portion of territory to the north of Crimea in the Kherson Oblast. The Pentagon has also assessed it’s unlikely Ukraine can take the peninsula, which Russia has controlled since 2014.

Despite the Pentagon’s assessment, Biden administration officials still say they would support Ukrainian attacks on Crimea. “Russia has turned Crimea into a massive military installation … those are legitimate targets, Ukraine is hitting them, and we are supporting that,” Victoria Nuland, the US undersecretary of state for political affairs, recently said.

Biden Forgot About U.S. Invasion HE PUSHED FOR

Lots more info at the link:

European antiwar protests gain strength as NATO’s Ukraine proxy war escalates

This February 21, several thousand Greeks filled Athens’ streets to denounce NATO and the United States in the wake of Antony Blinken’s Greece visit, where the US Secretary of State applauded the Mediterranean country for being amongst the first European countries to support Ukraine, thus leading to way for “the support of democracy.”

It was just one action among many protest actions across the continent as the NATO proxy conflict in Ukraine approached its first anniversary. European citizens are growing agitated as their leaders appear set on extending the war at least another year: they’ve approved several rounds of sanctions on Russia, provided billions of euros in assistance to Ukraine, and have agreed to train thousands of Ukrainian soldiers. Such actions have blighted living standards for average Europeans. Although the continent has avoided a widely feared energy collapse thanks to successful efforts to secure energy alternatives and unseasonably warm weather, European governments had already prepared for possible power outages and mobile blackouts earlier this winter due to the severing of Russian energy.

As the war escalates, so too are protest actions in core NATO states, from Greece to Britain to the Czech Republic to France and Spain. The recent wave of demonstrations builds on sizable displays of opposition to the war throughout the winter in cities from Chisinau to Paris to Brussels to Tirana to Vienna.

In Germany, where Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock has declared that “we are at war with Russia” amid reports that the US military destroyed the country’s Nord Stream pipeline connecting it to Russia’s gas supply, demonstrations against the NATO proxy war are surging as well. The rising tide of protests across the continent appear to have have have rattled European leaders, triggering police repression, demagogic denunciations, and even prosecution of protest leaders for publicly criticizing their governments’ military support to Ukraine.

There Has Never In History Been A Greater Need For A Large Anti-War Movement

Things are escalating more and more rapidly between the US-centralized power structure and the few remaining nations with the will and the means to stand against its demands for total obedience, namely China, Russia, and Iran. The world is becoming increasingly split between two groups of governments who are becoming increasingly hostile toward each other, and you don’t have to be a historian to know it’s probably a bad sign when that happens. Especially in the age of nuclear weapons.

The US State Department’s Victoria Nuland is now saying that the US is supporting Ukrainian strikes on Crimea, drawing sharp rebukes from Moscow with a stern reminder that the peninsula is a “red line” for the Kremlin which will result in escalations in the conflict if crossed. On Friday, Ukraine’s President Zelensky told the press that Kyiv is preparing a large offensive for the “de-occupation” of Crimea, which Moscow has considered a part of the Russian Federation since its annexation in 2014.

As Anatol Lieven explained for Jacobin earlier this month, this exact scenario is currently the one most likely to lead to a sequence of escalations ending in nuclear war. In light of the aforementioned recent revelations, the opening paragraph of Lieven’s article is even more chilling to read now than it was when it came out a couple of weeks ago:

The greatest threat of nuclear catastrophe that humanity has ever faced is now centered on the Crimean peninsula. In recent months, the Ukrainian government and army have repeatedly vowed to reconquer this territory, which Russia seized and annexed in 2014. The Russian establishment, and most ordinary Russians, for their part believe that holding Crimea is vital to Russian identity and Russia’s position as a great power. As a Russian liberal acquaintance (and no admirer of Putin) told me, “In the last resort, America would use nuclear weapons to save Hawaii and Pearl Harbor, and if we have to, we should use them to save Crimea.”

And that’s just Russia. The war in Ukraine is being used to escalate against all powers not aligned with the US-centralized alliance, with recent developments including drone attacks on an Iranian weapons factory which reportedly arms Russian soldiers in Ukraine, and Chinese companies being sanctioned for “backfill activities in support of Russia’s defence sector” following US accusations that the Chinese government is preparing to arm Russia in the war.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has reportedly been holding multiple meetings with top military officials regarding potential future attacks on Iran to neutralize the alleged threat of Iran developing a nuclear arsenal, a “threat” that Netanyahu has personally been lying about for years.

If you’ve been reading Antiwar.com (and if you care about this stuff you probably should be), you’ve been seeing new articles about the latest imperial escalations against China on a near-daily basis now. Sometimes they come out multiple times per day; this past Thursday Dave DeCamp put out two completely separate news stories titled “US Plans to Expand Military Presence in Taiwan, a Move That Risks Provoking China” and “Philippines in Talks With US, Australia on Joint South China Sea Patrols“. Taiwan and the South China Sea are two powderkeg flashpoints where war could quickly erupt at any time in a number of different ways.

If you know where to look for good updates on the behavior of the US-centralized empire and you follow them from day to day, it’s clear that things are accelerating toward a global conflict of unimaginable horror. As bad as things look right now, the future our current trajectory has us pointed toward is much, much, much worse.

I know everyone's different and maybe I'm a bit myopic -- but especially with the claimed entrance of China into the war, it's hard to imagine focusing on anything else right now. The people in power are essentially signaling that World War III is imminent. It's sheer insanity

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) February 25, 2023

Empire apologists will frame this trajectory toward global disaster as an entirely one-sided affair, with bloody-fanged tyrants trying to take over the world because they are evil and hate freedom, and the US-centralized alliance either cast in the role of poor widdle victim or heroic defender of the weak and helpless depending on which generates more sympathy on that day.

These people are lying. Any intellectually honest research into the west’s aggressions and provocations against both Russia and China will show you that Russia and China are reacting defensively to the empire’s campaign to secure US unipolar planetary hegemony; you might not agree with those reactions, but you cannot deny that they are reactions to a clear and deliberate aggressor.

This is important to understand, because whenever you say that something must be done to try and avert an Atomic Age world war, you’ll get empire apologists saying “Well go protest in Moscow and Beijing then,” as though the US power alliance is some kind of passive witness to all this. Which is of course complete bullshit; if World War III does indeed befall us, it will be because of choices that were made by the drivers of the western empire while ignoring off-ramp after off-ramp.

This tendency to flip reality and frame the western imperial power structure as the reactive force for peace against malevolent warmongers serves to help quash the emergence of a robust anti-war movement in the west, because if your own government is virtuous and innocent in a conflict then there’s no good reason to go protesting it. But that’s exactly what urgently needs to happen, because these people are driving us to our doom.

In fact, it is fair to say that there has never in history been a time when the need to forcefully oppose the warmongering of our own western governments was more urgent. The attacks on Vietnam and Iraq were horrific atrocities which unleashed unfathomable suffering upon our world, but they did not pose any major existential threat to the world as a whole. The wars in Vietnam and Iraq killed millions; we’re talking about a conflict that can kill billions.

Each of the World Wars was in turn the worst single thing that happened to our species as a whole up until that point in history. World War I was the worst thing that ever happened until World War II happened, and if World War III happens it will almost certainly make World War II look like a schoolyard tussle. This is because all of the major players in that conflict would be armed with nuclear weapons, and at some point some of them are going to be faced with strong incentives to use them. Once that happens, Mutually Assured Destruction ceases to protect us from armageddon, and the “Mutual” and “Destruction” components come in to play. ...

But we’re not going to turn away from this trajectory unless the masses start using the power of our numbers to force a change from warmongering, militarism and continual escalation toward diplomacy, de-escalation and detente. We need to start organizing against those who would steer our species into extinction, and working to pry their hands away from the steering wheel if they refuse to turn away. We need to resist all efforts to cast inertia on this most sacred of all priorities, and we need to start moving now. We’re all on a southbound bus to oblivion, and it’s showing no signs of stopping.

Top General: Ukraine MUST Negotiate With Russia

Could Lula Help End the War in Ukraine? Brazil's President Vows to Pursue Diplomacy, Won't Arm Kyiv

‘Never like this before’: settler violence in West Bank escalates

There is a large rolling gate at the entrance to the small Palestinian village of Za’atara, in the north of the occupied West Bank, but it is rarely closed. On Sunday, however, wary that Israeli settlers living in the area were seeking revenge for the murder of two brothers shot dead by a Palestinian gunman in nearby Huwara, Za’atara’s residents were braced for retaliatory violence.

It didn’t take long for the settlers to arrive. Villagers said that by dusk, about 100 armed Israelis, accompanied by a dozen Israel Defence Forces (IDF) soldiers, had massed on the road outside the entrance, and after the troops tried to intervene several of the settlers began shooting. Sameh Aqtash, a 37-year-old blacksmith who had just returned from earthquake volunteering efforts in Turkey, was shot in the stomach. Because the army would not clear the road for an ambulance to reach him, he bled to death, Aqtash’s nephew Fadi said.

Aqtash was somehow the only fatality during an unprecedented hours-long settler rampage in the vicinity of Huwara overnight: more than 350 Palestinians were injured, while dozens of homes and businesses and hundreds of cars were set alight, according to rights groups and Palestinian officials. In an article published on Monday morning, a prominent rightwing Israeli commentator, appalled by the reported inaction of the IDF, dubbed the events “Kristallnacht in Huwara”...

Incidents of settler violence across the West Bank happen every day, and have steadily increased over the past few years: many of the 700,000 or so Israelis living in the territory and East Jerusalem are motivated by what they see as a religious mission to restore the historical land of Israel to the Jewish people.

Shootings, knife attacks, burning crops, vandalism and the theft of land and livestock are supposed to make life for Palestinians so unbearable they have no choice but to leave. On many occasions, the Israeli army has been documented failing to stem the violence, or even joining in.

Biden administration under pressure as Israel-Palestine violence escalates

The summit in the city of Aqaba on Sunday, the first of its kind in a decade, between military officials from Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Egypt, the US and the host Jordan, seemed a belated chance to limit the damage. For all the talk of it being a “security” as opposed to a “political” summit – a description designed to minimise resentment among domestic audiences unwilling to negotiate – the event was a chance to bring a modicum of political control to the streets. The Palestinian Authority, after all, has severed cooperation with Israel on security issues. With the violence worsening, the meeting seemed the least participants could do.

The joint communique issued by Jordan afterwards committed Israel to “stop discussion of any new settlement units for four months and to stop authorisation of any outposts for six months”. It promised a regional security commission and a further summit in a month. A US national security adviser welcomed the meeting as a starting point. But the breathing space that had apparently been created was suffocated within hours, the time it took for the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to issue a tweet contradicting the summit’s conclusions.

He tweeted that “the building and authorisation in Judea and Samaria will continue according to the original planning and building schedule, with no change”, using the biblical term for the West Bank. “There is not and will not be any freeze.” ...

Now the US has a decision to make. Having redipped its toe in the Palestinian question by orchestrating the Jordan summit, it will have to decide whether to do more than make a minimal ritualistic call for restraint on both sides.

The U.S. can't won't take care of our own, but Ukraine, why the U.S. government has endless money for them.

US Paying Ukraine Teachers, Pensions, Civil Service

Janet Yellen Makes TONE DEAF Visit To Ukraine As Americans Are BURIED In Inflation

Analysis Spotlights the Lasting Pain Inflicted by Reagan's Social Security Cuts

In 1983, just before signing legislation that cut Social Security benefits, then-President Ronald Reagan declared that "we're entering an age when average Americans will live longer and live more productive lives."

But Reagan's assumption of ever-rising life expectancy in the U.S. turned out to be false, according to a new analysis, a fact with painful consequences for those who saw their Social Security benefits pared back thanks to the 1983 law's gradual increase of the full retirement age—the age at which one is eligible for unreduced Social Security payments.

As Conor Smyth wrote Monday for the People's Policy Project, a left-wing think tank, the Social Security Amendments of 1983 hiked the full retirement age "from 65 in 2000 to 67 at the end of 2022."

"What this actually meant was not that the age at which people could retire and start drawing Social Security benefits changed—that remained at 62," Smyth explained. "Instead, by raising what's called the full retirement age (FRA) by two years, the law effectively cut benefit levels across the board, regardless of the age that any particular individual began claiming Social Security benefits. The result is that those retiring at 62 today face a 50% greater penalty for retiring before the change than they would have before 2000."

The 1983 law was an outgrowth of a special presidential commission headed by Alan Greenspan, a right-wing economist who would go on to serve as chair of the Federal Reserve for nearly two decades.

Smyth noted that before final passage of the measure—which cleared the House and Senate with bipartisan support, including from then-Sen. Joe Biden—"a popular argument for raising the retirement age was that life expectancy had increased, so people should work for longer."

"The presumption was that the increase in life expectancy since Social Security's implementation would continue as the retirement age rose. But, in reality, something peculiar happened," Smyth wrote. "Over the same period during which the 1983 law forced the retirement age up from 65 to 67, life expectancy in the U.S. actually declined. In 2000, U.S. life expectancy was 76.8 years. According to data released last December, life expectancy in 2021 was 76.4 years. This was the second consecutive year of significant life expectancy decline."

"That's a drop of 0.4 years over a time span when the FRA rose by nearly two years," Smyth observed. "So not only have Americans seen their benefits cut by an increase in the FRA, they now also face a particularly morbid version of a benefit cut in the form of shorter lives."

It Was OBAMA’s Deregulation That Caused East Palestine Disaster – Says Wash Post

50 Years On, Legacy of Wounded Knee Uprising Lives in Indigenous Resistance

As many Native Americans on Monday marked the 50th anniversary of the militant occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, participants in the 1973 uprising and other activists linked the deadly revolt to modern-day Indigenous resistance, from Standing Rock to the #LandBack movement.

On February 27, 1973 around 300 Oglala Lakota and members of the American Indian Movement (AIM), seething from centuries of injustices ranging from genocide to leniency for whites who committed crimes against Indians, occupied the hamlet of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation for more than two months. The uprising occurred during a period of increased Native American militancy and the rise of AIM, which first drew international attention in 1969 with the 19-month occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay.

"The Native people of this land after Wounded Knee, they had like a surge of new pride in being Native people," Dwain Camp, an 85-year-old Ponca elder who took part in the 1973 revolt, told The Associated Press.

Camp said the occupation drove previously "unimaginable" changes, including the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, the Indian Child Welfare Act, the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, and the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act.

"After we left Wounded Knee, it became paramount that protecting Mother Earth was our foremost issue," he explained. "Since that period of time, we've learned that we've got to teach our kids our true history."

Camp said the spirit of Wounded Knee lives on in Indigenous resistance today.

"We're not the subjugated and disenfranchised people that we were," he said. "Wounded Knee was an important beginning of that. And because we're a resilient people, it's something we take a lot of pride in."

Some of the participants in the 1973 uprising had been raised by grandparents who remembered or even survived the 1890 massacre of more than 200 Lakota Lakota men, women, and children by U.S. troops at Wounded Knee.

"That's how close we are to our history," Madonna Thunder Hawk, an 83-year-old elder in the Oohenumpa band of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe who was a frontline participant in the 1973 occupation, told Indian Country Today. "So anything that goes on, anything we do, even today with the #LandBack issue, all of that is just a continuation. It's nothing new."

Nick Tilsen, an Oglala Lakota who played a prominent role in the 2016-17 protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock, North Dakota and who founded the NDN Collective, told Indian Country Today that "for me, it's important to acknowledge the generation before us—to acknowledge their risk."

"It's important for us to honor them," said Tilsen, whose parents met at the Wounded Knee occupation. "It's important for us to thank them."

Vegetable shortages in UK could be ‘tip of iceberg’, says farming union

Shortages of some fresh fruit and vegetables such as tomatoes and cucumbers could be the “tip of the iceberg”, the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) has said. Certain products are hard to come by in UK supermarkets due to poor weather reducing the harvest in Europe and north Africa, Brexit rules and lower supplies from UK and Dutch producers hit by the jump in energy bills to heat glasshouses.

The NFU’s deputy president, Tom Bradshaw, said a reliance on imports had left the UK particularly exposed to “shock weather events”. He said the UK had now “hit a tipping point” and needed to “take command of the food we produce” amid “volatility around the world” caused by the war in Europe and the climate crisis. “We’ve been warning about this moment for the past year,” Bradshaw told Times Radio on Saturday. “The tragic events in Ukraine have driven inflation, particularly energy inflation, to levels that we haven’t seen before.

“There’s a lack of confidence from the growers that they’re going to get the returns that justify planting their glasshouses, and at the moment we’ve got a lot of glasshouses that would be growing the tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, aubergine that are sitting there empty because they simply couldn’t take the risk to plant them with the crops, not thinking they’d get the returns from the marketplace.

“And with them being completely reliant on imports – we’d always have some imports – but we’ve been completely reliant on imports [now]. And when there’s been some shock weather events in Morocco and Spain, it’s meant that we’ve had these shortages.”

Bradshaw also acknowledged that the current shortage was an indirect result of the UK’s decision to leave the EU. He added: “It’s really interesting that before Brexit we didn’t used to source anything, or very little, from Morocco but we’ve been forced to go further afield and now these climatic shocks becoming more prevalent have had a real impact on the food available on our shelves today.”

Soaring chemical fertiliser prices weigh heavily on French farmers

Research reveals climate crisis is driving a rise in human-wildlife conflicts

From blue whales colliding with ships to African elephants raiding crops in villages, the climate crisis is causing a rise in conflicts that lead to injury or death for humans and wildlife, new research shows.

The climate crisis is making food, water and healthy habitats harder to come by, forcing animals and human populations into new ranges or previously uninhabited places. It is also changing the way they behave. This means a rise in human-wildlife conflicts, as well as damage to personal property and loss of livelihoods for people, according to a review paper led by the University of Washington.

The team looked at 30 years of research and found that the number of studies linking climate breakdown to conflict had quadrupled in the past 10 years compared with the previous two decades. They warn of an “extraordinary breadth” of places already affected.

The paper, published in Nature Climate Change, looked at 49 cases of human-wildlife conflict on every continent except Antarctica, and in all five oceans. From 2.5mg mosquitoes to 6,000kg African elephants, conflicts involved all major wildlife groups – birds, fish, mammals, reptiles and invertebrates.

Changes in temperature and rainfall were the most common drivers of conflict, cited in more than 80% of case studies. The most common outcome was injury or mortality to people (43% of studies) and wildlife (45% of studies). Conflicts are defined as direct interactions between humans and wildlife that have a negative outcome for one or both.

Also of Interest

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

Putin Says Russia Cannot Ignore NATO’s Nuclear Capabilities

Biden Administration’s Capitulation to Israel

‘Crafting an illusion’: US rail firms’ multimillion-dollar PR push

US battered by tornadoes, wind and snow as more storms expected

Rediscovered Terry Pratchett stories to be published

HILLARY Calls For Putin REGIME CHANGE

Will SCOTUS NUKE Liz Warren Agency?

Tucker Carlson Features Jimmy Dore’s Anti-War Rant!

Mediaite SMEARS Jimmy Dore For Telling Truth About Ukraine N@zis

CNN FAILS To Disclose NORFOLK SOUTHERN LOBBYIST As Panelist On East Palestine

Lobbyist Claims He Gave DAMNING Hunter Biden-China Information To FBI

A Little Night Music

Little Milton - Feel So Bad

Little Milton - Driftin' Drifter

Little Milton - Walkin' The Back Streets And Crying

Little Milton - I can't quit you baby

Little Milton ~ Blind Man

Little Milton ~ That's What Love Will Make You Do

Little Milton - A Nickel And A Nail

Little Milton - If Walls Could Talk

Little Milton - We're Gonna Make It

Little Milton - Poke Salad Annie

Little Milton - I'm Trying