The Evening Blues - 3-14-23



eb1pt12


The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: Gus Cannon

Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features jug-band banjo player Gus Cannon. Enjoy!

Gus Cannon - Walk Right In

“Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate."

-- Edward W. Said


News and Opinion

Aukus nuclear submarine deal loophole prompts proliferation fears

The Aukus scheme announced on Monday in San Diego represents the first time a loophole in the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) has been used to transfer fissile material and nuclear technology from a nuclear weapons state to a non-weapons state.

The loophole is paragraph 14, and it allows fissile material utilized for non-explosive military use, like naval propulsion, to be exempt from inspections and monitoring by the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). It makes arms controls experts nervous because it sets a precedent that could be used by others to hide highly enriched uranium, or plutonium, the core of a nuclear weapon, from international oversight.

The Aukus partners have held intensive discussions with the IAEA about the plans and have taken steps to limit the risk. Early on in the talks, the idea was floated that paragraph 14 might not be invoked at all, and the nuclear fuel would be kept under IAEA safeguards. However the IAEA was not prepared to have its inspection standards watered down to the extent that the agency would not be able to determine the timing of a visit, and the Aukus partners were squeamish about letting an international team of inspectors aboard their state-of-the-art submarines. ...

“The primary problem with Aukus was always the precedent set, that Australia would be the first country that would remove nuclear fuel from safeguards for use in naval reactors,” James Acton, co-director of the nuclear policy programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said. “My fear was never that Australia would misuse that fuel, but that other countries would invoke Aukus as a precedent for removing nuclear fuel from safeguards.”

China calls on AUKUS allies to 'abandon Cold War mentality'

Aukus: nuclear submarines deal will cost Australia up to $368bn

Australia is to embark on one of its most significant, expensive and geopolitically consequential military tasks in a century: the push to acquire, operate – and eventually build – nuclear-powered submarines. The program is forecast to cost $268bn to $368bn between now and the mid 2050s, most of it beyond the first four-year budget period, and will depend on help from the US and the UK.

As part of the multidecade nuclear-powered submarine plan unveiled on Tuesday, Australian taxpayers will pour “substantial” funds into expanding American shipbuilding capacity, understood to be about $3bn in the first four years.

Australia’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese, said Aukus plan marked “a new chapter” in the relationship between the three countries, as he joined the US president, Joe Biden, and the UK prime minister, Rishi Sunak, for the announcement in San Diego. “The Aukus agreement we confirm here in San Diego represents the biggest single investment in Australia’s defence capability in our history,” Albanese said.

Without directly naming China as a source of concern, Albanese said the plan reflected a shared determination to ensure all countries could “act in their sovereign interests free from coercion”.

China warns, guardrails are coming off

The Drums Of War With China Are Beating Much Louder Now

Comments from both Washington and Beijing have suddenly become much more pointed and aggressive in recent days, with talk about hot war now being discussed as not just a real possibility but in many cases as a probability. Let’s have a look at some of the most significant recent developments.

The Chinese government has finally broken from its usual restrained commentary on the way the empire has been aggressively encircling the PRC with war machinery in ways that Washington would never permit itself to be encircled and waging economic warfare that it itself would never tolerate.

“Western countries—led by the U.S.—have implemented all-round containment, encirclement and suppression against us, bringing unprecedentedly severe challenges to our country’s development,” President Xi Jinping said in a speech last week.

China’s new Foreign Minister Qin Gang followed up on Xi’s comments the next day with a warning of “conflict and confrontation” should US aggressions and encirclement continue.

“If the United States does not hit the brake, but continues to speed down the wrong path, no amount of guardrails can prevent derailing, and there surely will be conflict and confrontation,” he said, adding, “Who will bear the catastrophic consequences? Such competition is a reckless gamble with the stakes being the fundamental interests of the two peoples and even the future of humanity.”

One of the most hilarious empire narratives we’re being asked to believe today is that the US is militarily encircling its number one rival China, on the other side of the planet, defensively. The US is very plainly the aggressor in this standoff, and China is very clearly reacting defensively to those aggressions.

These comments come not long after PRC Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Mao Ning issued a stern warning to the US to “stop walking on the edge, stop using the salami tactics, stop pushing the envelope, and stop sowing confusion and trying to mislead the world on Taiwan,” calling the Taiwan issue “the first red line that must not be crossed” in US-China relations. As we’ve discussed previously, these increasingly frequent “red line” warnings are very similar to the ones that were being issued with greater and greater urgency by Moscow before US brinkmanship provoked the invasion of Ukraine.

The official head of the US intelligence cartel made some comments before the House Intelligence Committee on Thursday which appear to have put the final nail in the coffin of the question of Washington’s “strategic ambiguity” on whether the US would go to war with China in defense of Taiwan.

Asked by Congressman Chris Stewart about President Biden’s increasingly explicit assertions that the US would go to war with China over Taiwan, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines asserted that, despite the White House’s repeated walk-backs of those claims, it is clear to China that this is in fact Washington’s actual policy on the Taiwan question.

“In this particular case, I think it is clear to the Chinese what our position is based on the president’s comments,” Haines said.

There’s been a marked spike in rhetoric from US officials about war with China being something that’s inevitably going to happen, or even something that is already underway.

At a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Wednesday, Senator John Cornyn expressed concern that difficulties in replenishing weapons stocks from the proxy war in Ukraine indicate that the US may not yet be “ready” to fight a “shooting war in Asia.”

“I think the war in Ukraine has demonstrated the weakness of our industrial base when it comes to replenishing the weapons that we are supplying to the Ukrainians,” said Cornyn. “In World War Two we became the Arsenal of Democracy and saved Britain and Europe, but if we got involved in a shooting war in Asia, we would not be ready.”

“I know what war looks like — we’re at war,” Congressman Tony Gonzales said at a House Homeland Security hearing on Thursday.

“I mean, this is a war, maybe a Cold War. But this is a war with China,” Gonzales added, citing things like Chinese aircraft intercepting US aircraft on China’s border and China “invading Taiwan via their cyberspace” as evidence that the US is “at war” with the PRC.

The US war machine is making it more and more explicit that its position on Taiwan is very different from its position on Ukraine, in that it will directly commit American troops to fighting a hot war with China over Taiwan. This is especially concerning because US military encirclement and provocations with Taiwan are making that war more and more likely, in the same way western provocations made the war in Ukraine more likely.

“Sending more weapons to Taiwan isn’t ‘deterrence,’ it’s a provocation,” tweeted Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp, who’s been documenting US provocations in Taiwan more thoroughly than anyone else I know of. “It’s clear now that increasing US military support for Taiwan will make a Chinese attack more likely. Anyone who is telling you otherwise is wrong or is purposely deceiving you.”

Indeed, University College Cork professor Geoffrey Roberts has argued that Putin chose to wage a “preventative war” on Ukraine with the calculation that the way the west was turning it into a major military power meant it needed to be confronted early before it became a major threat. The exact same thing could easily be happening with Taiwan.

“China is the big one,” DeCamp also tweeted recently. “Both sides are talking as if war is inevitable. Not a proxy war, a direct war between two nuclear powers. It can’t happen. The US needs to change course and stop its military buildup in the Asia Pacific, or we’re doomed.”

Couldn’t have put it better myself. This must be opposed, and opposed forcefully. Now more than ever, humanity appears to be on track toward the unfolding of a chain of events that leads to the worst thing that could possibly happen.

To close with some good news, the imperial media are apparently not fully aligned with the war-with-China agenda (at least not yet). All the insane hawkishness mentioned above appears to have scared some sense into some influential voices in the mainstream media, with surprisingly anti-war arguments emerging in the last few days.

In an article titled “Who Benefits From Confrontation With China?“, none other than the New York Times editorial board taps the brakes with a wildly US-biased but still-welcome argument that “America’s increasingly confrontational posture toward China is a significant shift in U.S. foreign policy that warrants greater scrutiny and debate.”

“Americans’ interests are best served by emphasizing competition with China while minimizing confrontation. Glib invocations of the Cold War are misguided,” NYT argues.

In a Washington Post article titled “Democrats and Republicans agree on China. That’s a problem.“, Max Boot (yes, that Max Boot!) argues that the bipartisan foreign policy consensus on escalations against Beijing are a sign that something dangerously ill-advised is in the works.

“The problem today isn’t that Americans are insufficiently concerned about the rise of China. The problem is that they are prey to hysteria and alarmism that could lead the United States into a needless nuclear war,” Boot writes.

CNN’s Fareed Zakaria echoes Boot’s criticism of the Washington foreign policy orthodoxy, saying that “Washington has embraced a wide-ranging consensus on China that has turned into a classic example of groupthink.”

A new Financial Times piece titled “China is right about US containment” acknowledges that Xi Jinping’s aforementioned comments about encirclement and suppression are “not technically wrong,” and says that betting on China’s submission in the new cold war “is not a strategy."

In a Daily Beast article titled “What the U.S. National Security Community Is Getting Wrong About China,” David Rothkopf argues that “We have passed the crossroads and we are already, unfortunately, dangerously, well on our way down the wrong path” with US-China relations.

It remains to be seen if these sentiments will be sustained in the mainstream media. Even if they are, they may just be the liberal media counterpart to the way some right wingers in the mainstream media like Tucker Carlson are permitted to object to US foreign policy toward Russia as long as they continue to support brinkmanship with China (all the outlets I just mentioned have been enthusiastic supporters of US proxy warfare in Ukraine, after all). This may be yet another instance of the way the empire gets the mainstream herd arguing over how imperial agendas of global domination should be enacted, rather than if they should.

Time will tell whether any sanity erupts from the muck of the empire regarding the possibility of igniting the most horrific war imaginable. As always with such things, I remain cautiously pessimistic.

Former US natsec advisor: destroy Taiwan semiconductor factories if China invades

Former White House National Security Advisor Robert C. O’Brien has hinted at a sinister US contingency plan in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Rather than see Taiwan’s semiconductor factories fall into the hands of the Communist Party of China, the US and its allies would simply pull a Nordstream. “The United States and its allies are never going to let those factories fall into Chinese hands,” O’Brien told Semafor, a news outlet that has been funded by jailed Democratic financier Sam Bankman-Fried and his brother. O’Brien went on to compare the destruction of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s (TSMC) to Winston Churchill’s bombing of a French naval fleet after the country’s surrender to Nazi Germany.

Semiconductors made in Taiwan are necessary for the functioning of everything from smartphones to cars. Taiwan manufactures around 65 percent of the world’s semiconductors and close to 90 percent of advanced chips. Annually, a third of all new computing power generated globally is fabricated in Taiwan. The US National Security Council estimates that the loss of TSMC “could disrupt the world economy to the tune of more than $1 trillion.” As tensions rise over the Taiwan Strait, the US Treasury Department has published at least two studies on “the overall market impact of an invasion,” while the National Security Council is conducting a study on “semiconductors and US dependencies on TSMC.”

TSMC’s advanced chips are used in “all major US defense systems and platforms,” making them an essential building block of American empire. Given these facts, it is highly likely that the destruction of Taiwan’s chip manufacturing plants would be the most damaging act of economic sabotage in history.

Having served in senior positions in the three administrations that preceded Biden’s, few private American citizens are better positioned to receive and transmit the views of national security elites than O’Brien. As Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor, he traveled to Arizona in 2020 to congratulate the state’s governor on the opening of a $12 billion TSMC factory in the state, using the appearance as a platform to rail against Chinese communism. ...

As Bloomberg reported in October 2022, former officials with ties to the Pentagon have urged the Biden administration to destroy Taiwan’s semiconductor industry in the event of a Chinese military assault. The outlet cited Elbridge Colby, a rabidly anti-China former Pentagon official, proclaiming, “We can’t allow such a valuable equity to fall into Chinese hands, I think it would be nuts.”

US Increases Dominance as World's Top Arms Exporter

A Sweden-based research institute published a report Monday showing that the United States accounted for 40% of the world's weapons exports in the years 2018-22, selling armaments to more than 100 countries while increasing its dominance of the global arms trade.

The report—entitled Trends in International Arms Transfers, 2022—was published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) and listed the United States, Russia, France, China, and Germany as the world's top five arms exporters from 2018-22. The five nations accounted for 76% of worldwide weapons exports during that period.

The five biggest arms importers over those five years were India, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Australia, and China.

The United States saw a 14% increase in arms exports over the previous five-year period analyzed by SIPRI. U.S. arms were delivered to 103 nations from 2018-22, with 41% going to the Middle East.

"Even as arms transfers have declined globally, those to Europe have risen sharply due to the tensions between Russia and most other European states," Pieter Wezeman, senior researcher at the SIPRI Arms Transfers Program, said in a statement. "Following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, European states want to import more arms, faster. Strategic competition also continues elsewhere: Arms imports to East Asia have increased and those to the Middle East remain at a high level."

China HUMILIATES Biden With Potential Ukraine Peace Deal

China’s Xi to Speak With Zelensky, Meet With Putin

Chinese President Xi Jinping plans to speak with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for the first time since the Russian invasion of Ukraine was launched, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

The report, which cited people familiar with the matter, said Xi is also planning to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow next week and will likely hold his talk with Zelensky following his trip to Russia.

The report indicates Xi is looking to mediate between the two sides and comes after Beijing released a 12-point peace plan for the conflict in Ukraine that focuses on calling for a pause in fighting and a resumption of peace talks.

The U.S.-Ukraine war unity is slowly cracking apart

Publicly, there has been little separation between Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, an alliance on full display last month when the American president made his covert, dramatic visit to Kyiv. But based on conversations with 10 officials, lawmakers and experts, new points of tension are emerging: The sabotage of a natural gas pipeline on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean; the brutal, draining defense of a strategically unimportant Ukrainian city; and a plan to fight for a region where Russian forces have been entrenched for nearly a decade.

Senior administration officials maintain that unity between Washington and Kyiv is tight. But the fractures that have appeared are making it harder to credibly claim there’s little daylight between the U.S. and Ukraine as sunbeams streak through the cracks.

For nine months, Russia has laid siege to Bakhmut, though capturing the southeastern Ukrainian city would do little to alter the trajectory of the war. It has become the focal point of the fight in recent weeks, with troops and prisoners from the mercenary Wagner Group leading the combat against Ukrainian forces. Both sides have suffered heavy losses and reduced the city to smoldering ruins. ...

Multiple administration officials have begun worrying that Ukraine is expending so much manpower and ammunition in Bakhmut that it could sap their ability to mount a major counteroffensive in the spring. “I certainly don’t want to discount the tremendous work that the Ukrainians’ soldiers and leaders have put into defending Bakhmut — but I think it’s more of a symbolic value than it is a strategic and operational value,” said Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

Kyiv, for now, has ignored Washington’s input.

David Dayen On SVB Bailout

Silicon Valley Bank collapse ‘could force central banks to stop interest rate rises’

The world’s most powerful central banks may stop raising interest rates after the Silicon Valley Bank crisis, economists have said, amid growing signs of financial stress linked to rapid increases in borrowing costs over the past year. Analysts said the US Federal Reserve would probably leave interest rates on hold at its decision next week, as the meltdown at the California-based technology lender rippled through global financial markets.

Against a backdrop of concern over contagion spreading through the wider global banking industry, financial market expectations for significant further rate increases from the Bank of England and the European Central Bank also eased on Monday. ...

Economists said financial stability concerns after SVB’s collapse would probably force banks to act more cautiously when issuing loans – in effect doing some of the same job as higher borrowing costs. However, they also said SVB’s failure showed delayed impacts from the most aggressive rate-rising cycle in decades were feeding through.

“The Fed is starting to break things,” said John Briggs, the global head of economics and markets strategy at NatWest. He said he expected the Fed to lean towards a 25 basis point rise rather than 50 basis points that was previously expected. “If tightening to date is starting to break things, then the Fed may not want to pile on more,” Briggs said.

SVB’s collapse came after the bank invested heavily in US government bonds two years ago, at a time when it had healthy deposit levels concentrated in the tech sector and among venture capital investors. With a fall in US government bond prices as the Fed raised interest rates, the value of its investments dropped.

SECRET Fed BAILOUT Pumps BILLIONS Into Banks

Worth a click and a peek:

Stiglitz: Silicon Valley Bank’s failure is predictable – what can it teach us?

The run on Silicon Valley Bank – on which almost half of all venture-backed tech startups in the US depend – is in part a rerun of a familiar story, but it’s more than that. Once again, economic policy and financial regulation have proven inadequate.

The news about the second-biggest bank failure in US history came only days after the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, assured Congress that the financial condition of US banks was sound. But the timing should not be surprising. Given the large and rapid increases in interest rates Powell engineered – probably the most significant since the former Fed chair Paul Volcker’s interest-rate hikes of 40 years ago – it was predicted that dramatic movements in the prices of financial assets would cause trauma somewhere in the financial system.

But, again, Powell assured us not to worry – despite abundant historical experience indicating that we should be worried. Powell was part of Donald Trump’s regulatory team that worked to weaken the Dodd-Frank bank regulations enacted after the 2008 financial meltdown, in order to free “smaller” banks from the standards applied to the largest, systemically important, banks. By the standards of Citibank, SVB is small. But it’s not small in the lives of the millions who depend on it.

Powell said that there would be pain as the Fed relentlessly raised interest rates – not for him or many of his friends in private capital, who reportedly were planning to make a killing as they hoped to sweep in to buy uninsured deposits in SVB at 50-60 cents on the dollar, before the government made it clear that these depositors would be protected. The worst pain would be reserved for members of marginalised and vulnerable groups, such as young non-white males. Their unemployment rate is typically four times the national average, so an increase from 3.6% to 5% translates into an increase from something like 15% to 20% for them. He blithely calls for such unemployment increases (falsely claiming that they are necessary to bring down the inflation rate) with nary an appeal for assistance, or even a mention of the long-term costs.

Now, as a result of Powell’s callous – and totally unnecessary – advocacy of pain, we have a new set of victims, and America’s most dynamic sector and region will be put on hold. Silicon Valley’s startup entrepreneurs, often young, thought the government was doing its job, so they focused on innovation, not on checking their bank’s balance sheet daily – which in any case they couldn’t have done.

6% Inflation Sends Food Prices SKY HIGH, BAILOUT BIDEN Rescues VCs Instead

Barney Frank Under Fire for Downplaying Deregulation While Being Paid by Signature Bank

Barney Frank, a former House Democrat from Massachusetts, has been the subject of criticism since federal regulators took over Signature Bank on Sunday.

That's because Frank, architect of the Dodd-Frank banking regulations implemented in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, played a key role in whitewashing the bipartisan effort to weaken those rules in 2018—after he had received more than $1 million while serving on Signature's board following his departure from Congress.

Since federal regulators seized Signature's assets on Sunday—two days after they intervened to protect depositors amid the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB)—progressive critics have been quick to blame a deregulatory measure approved five years ago by the then-Republican-controlled Congress for engendering two of the three largest bank failures in U.S. history.

The GOP, however, wasn't alone in supporting Sen. Mike Crapo's (R-Idaho) Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act. As Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a trenchant critic of the legislation, observed when it was moving through Congress, several Democrats—including Sens. Mark Warner (Va.), Joe Manchin (W.Va.), and Jon Tester (Mont.)—were integral to its passage.

To justify their decision, many of them pointed to Frank. The originator of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act used his cachet as a presumed banking expert to legitimize a rollback of the very framework he helped enact in 2010 as chair of the House Financial Services Committee. But the ex-lawmaker wasn't merely an uninterested bystander. In 2015, he joined the board of directors at Signature, a crypto-friendly bank that was poised to benefit from less stringent oversight.

Frank said Crapo's Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act "would not help the biggest Wall Street banks and denied it would increase the risks of another financial crisis," The Washington Post reported when then-President Donald Trump signed the bill into law in May 2018. "Some Democrats leaned heavily on those words as they pushed back against the plan's liberal critics."

However, the newspaper noted, "proponents of the law rarely, if ever, mentioned that Frank is not just the author of the 2010 law, but also sits on the board of New York-based Signature Bank."

In the wake of Signature's collapse on Sunday night, Frank's role in downplaying the risks of deregulation—while being paid by a bank that stood to gain from it—has received fresh light.

Autopsy Suggests “Cop City” Protester Sitting Cross-Legged, Hands Up, When Shot 14 Times by Police



the horse race



RFK Jr. Says He Could Be The Donald Trump Of The Democratic Party



the evening greens


Biden approves controversial Willow oil drilling project in Alaska

The Biden administration has approved a controversial $8bn (£6bn) drilling project on Alaska’s North Slope, which has drawn fierce opposition from environmentalists and some Alaska Native communities, who say it will speed up the climate breakdown and undermine food security.

The ConocoPhillips Willow project will be one of the largest of its kind on US soil, involving drilling for oil and gas at three sites for multiple decades on the 23m-acre National Petroleum Reserve which is owned by the federal government and is the largest tract of undisturbed public land in the US.

It will produce an estimated 576m barrels of oil over 30 years, with a peak of 180,000 barrels of crude a day. This extraction, which ConocoPhillips has said may, ironically, involve refreezing the rapidly thawing Arctic permafrost to stabilize drilling equipment, would create one of the largest “carbon bombs” on US soil, potentially producing more than twice as many emissions than all renewable energy projects on public lands by 2030 would cut combined.

In its decision, the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management said that the approval “strikes a balance” by allowing ConocoPhillips to use its longstanding leases in the Arctic while also limiting drilling to three sites rather than five, which the company wanted.

But the approval has been met with outrage among environmental campaigners and Native representatives who say it fatally undermines Joe Biden’s climate agenda. In all, the project is expected to create about 260m tons of greenhouse gases over its lifespan, the equivalent of creating about 70 new coal-fired power plants.

Toxic ‘forever chemicals’ found in toilet paper around the world

All toilet paper from across the globe checked for toxic PFAS “forever chemicals” contained the compounds, and the waste flushed down toilets and sent to sewage treatment plants probably creates a significant source of water pollution, new research has found.

Once in the wastewater plant, the chemicals can be packed in sewage sludge that is eventually spread on cropland as fertilizer, or spilt into waterways. “Toilet paper should be considered as a potentially major source of PFAS entering wastewater treatment systems,” the study’s authors wrote.

PFAS are a class of about 14,000 chemicals typically used to make thousands of consumer products resist water, stains and heat. They are called “forever chemicals” because they do not naturally break down, and they are linked to cancer, fetal complications, liver disease, kidney disease, autoimmune disorders and other serious health issues.

The study checked 21 major toilet paper brands in North America, western Europe, Africa, Central America and South America, but it did not name the brands.

The peer-reviewed University of Florida report did not consider the health implications of people wiping with contaminated toilet paper. PFAS can be dermally absorbed, but no research on how it may enter the body during the wiping process exists. However, that exposure is “definitely worth investigating, said David Andrews, senior scientist with the Environmental Working group, a public health non-profit that tracks PFAS pollution.


Also of Interest

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

With the Twitter Files, Democrats Support Government Censorship of Lawful Speech

Americans need to wake up to the realities of a post-unipolar world before it’s too late

China's Prestigious Middle East Deal May Soon See Challenges

Bankruptcies Soar Across EU, As Companies Hit Wall At Fastest Rate Since Records Began in 2015

Israel’s Liberal Supporters Take Denial to New Level

Silicon Valley Bank Was a Wall Street IPO Pipeline in Drag as a Federally-Insured Bank; FHLB of San Francisco Was Quietly Bailing It Out

US Officials Make Non-Bailout Bailout of Silicon Valley and Signature Bank and Continue Class Warfare

Consequences Of Silicon Valley Bank’s Failure

The Chris Hedges Report: Kshama Sawant’s New ‘Workers Strike Back’ Coalition Will Fight for $25 Minimum Wage and More


A Little Night Music

Cannon's Jug Stompers - Minglewood Blues

Gus Cannon - Can You Blame The Colored Man

Gus Cannon - Going Around the Mountain

Cannons Jug Stompers - Big Railroad Blues

Cannon's Jug Stompers - Feather Bed

Cannon's Jug Stompers - Money Never Runs Out

Cannon's Jug Stompers - Going To Germany

Cannon's Jug Stompers - Viola Lee Blues

Gus Cannon and Blind Blake - Poor Boy Long Ways From Home


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14 users have voted.

Comments

Olaf will replace you!

up
9 users have voted.

@humphrey

More people of position are straying outside the lines these days.
Some people still have honesty in their guts.

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11 users have voted.
joe shikspack's picture

@humphrey

heh, fired for bringing out the spring line too soon.

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6 users have voted.

No interceptor touched the American spy UAV that was approaching Crimea, Moscow has said

“As a result of sharp maneuvers around 9:30am Moscow time, the MQ-9 unmanned aerial vehicle went into uncontrolled flight, lost altitude, and collided with the water surface. The Russian fighters did not use weapons, did not come into contact with the UAV, and returned safely to their home base,” the defense ministry said in a statement.

https://www.rt.com/russia/572980-russia-us-drone-down/

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7 users have voted.
joe shikspack's picture

@QMS

heh, boy the u.s. likes to push, push, push until it gets whacked, then it whines. what a bunch of maroons.

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4 users have voted.

while flying over the Black Sea.

@QMS

First a bit of a prelude.

https://www.ibtimes.com/ukrainian-woman-shoots-down-russian-drone-using-...

A Ukrainian woman who allegedly brought down what was initially believed to be a Russian military drone with a jar of pickles said she will stand and fight in the face of Russia's invasion of her country.

The woman, identified only as Elena, encountered the remote-controlled machine as she was smoking and sitting on the balcony of her home in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, Liga.life reported.

Elena, who has never seen a drone up close before until that moment, said she grabbed a jar of preserved plum tomatoes from under her chair and threw it at the machine "out of fear," according to the outlet.

What is certain is that the drone had a boo boo.

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4 users have voted.
usefewersyllables's picture

@humphrey

splashing our hardware (where we can see it). I'm sure that the oligarchy's response will be very Sean Connery/Jimmy Malone:

They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. THAT’S the Chicago way!

Think I'll make a Manhattan tonight, just in case.

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7 users have voted.

Twice bitten, permanently shy.

joe shikspack's picture

@humphrey

i guess kiev will have to start building up its strategic pickle reserves.

This incident demonstrates a lack of competence in addition to being unsafe and unprofessional

i would say that the incident shows great competence on the part of the russian pilots, destroying a pricey u.s. drone without firing a shot.

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6 users have voted.
soryang's picture

@humphrey The MQ9 probably stalled. These aircraft are sitting ducks. They are designed to operate in airspace that is basically uncontested. When I first heard there was a collision, I judged that to be very unlikely. Could be a compressor stall from ingested material, or maneuver stall from remote piloting. There are so many intercepts and so few result in collision, it is extremely unlikely. The Russian commentator suggests a maneuver stall.

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4 users have voted.

語必忠信 行必正直

ggersh's picture

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gu99k7f5y-g

We have more similarities then differences is the main theme
here.

Thanks for the EB's Joe!

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5 users have voted.

I never knew that the term "Never Again" only pertained to
those born Jewish

"Antisemite used to be someone who didn't like Jews
now it's someone who Jews don't like"

Heard from Margaret Kimberley

joe shikspack's picture

@ggersh

thanks! that was a good segment, i'll just put it here to make it easier for folks:

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6 users have voted.
snoopydawg's picture

.

Matt Taibbi Squares Off w/ House Dems Over TwitterFiles

That sets the perfect stage for today's hearing, in which, as I told you, they treated Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger basically like traitors. It's extraordinary. They treated them as criminals. And to Democratic members of Congress, they are criminals. And the reason they're criminals is that they exposed the crimes of the most important allies of the Democratic Party, the CIA, Homeland Security, the FBI, and Big Tech in the mission that the Democratic Party considers central to their future viability, namely the power to censor the Internet. And it is the U.S. government that is acting as the key agent in coercing this. And they know this is unconstitutional. They know that the U.S. government cannot indirectly, through pressure, censor in a way the constitution would forbid them from censoring directly under the First Amendment. They know that Americans would find all of this objectionable and dangerous, that the FBI and the CIA and Homeland Security, which were told are here to protect us from foreign threats, instead are directly involved in our politics by deciding for American citizens which viewpoints we can and can't hear or who will and will not be permitted to have a platform online. So, they wanted this all in secret. It's the same reason why Julian Assange is in a prison. Why Edward Snowden's in exile. Why Daniel Ellsberg almost spent his life in prison. Anyone who exposes the secret crimes of the U.S. Security State becomes the enemy of politicians because politicians support these agencies and want this hidden and not exposed. And what Taibbi did was expose it. And that's why this rage that we're about to show you that got directed at him, all day, only from Democrats - that’s where it comes from. That they want all of this hidden is what accounts for the behavior we saw today

We just saw the equivalent of church committee hearing and the anti McCarthyism hearings, but this time the shitlibs took the opposite side of what they took back then. It’s simply amazing to watch this great travesty happening in real time. But it’s also very horrifying watching it.

I posted an essay on the CIA democrats that were running in 2016 by the WSWS who were horrified by the democrats openly embracing the intelligence agencies and the military by supporting people running that had that type of background. No longer would they have to bribe or threaten democrats to push their agendas because now they could have their own people in congress that would get things done for them.

This is fascinating if true. Pelosi knew that a few republicans were going to vote against certifying the election results which is a legal procedure and 2 points that they were going to bring up was how 2 states had election laws against what happened during the mail in voting which would have made so it was investigated. But when Pelosi and Pence were cleared from the room that session ended. When congress reconvened she declared it an emergency session and the rules had changed and no one could protest it anymore.

Democrats have used that procedure many times since 2001 when they used it against the Bush results.

Within the questions: the FBI and government apparatus had advanced knowledge of the scale of the J6 mall assembly yet doing nothing? Why were the Capitol Hill police never informed of the FBI concerns? Why didn’t House Speaker Nancy Pelosi secure the Capitol Hill complex, and why did she deny the request by President Trump to call up the national guard for security support? Why did the FBI have agent provocateurs in the crowd, seemingly stimulating rage within a peaceful crowd to enter the Capitol building? There have always been these nagging questions around ‘why’?

What follows below is a brilliant analysis of the federal government motive to create a J6 crisis that permitted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to trigger an emergency session and avoid the 2020 election certification challenges.

Those congressional floor challenges, known and anticipated well in advance of the morning of January 6, 2021, would have formed a legal and constitutional basis for ‘standing’ in judicial challenges that would have eventually reached the Supreme Court. The certification during “emergency session” eliminated the problem for Washington DC.

Link

Democrats once again couldn’t face the possibility of losing another election to The Donald because they again ran one of the most despicable person like Biden who had a history of passing bills that hurt the working class and only benefited his donors. For me he was on par with HerHeinous the Hellabitch. For her they blamed everyone except herself and since Russia gate had been debunked how would they explain his loss to the base? Maybe China gate which seems to have finally gotten its legs?

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joe shikspack's picture

@snoopydawg

that greenwald piece is really good and worth a read, i just skimmed it and i'll come back to it later to read it more closely.

i strongly suspect that (at least until evidence to the contrary emerges) biden won the general election fair and square and that pelosi didn't have to have an emergency session to ensure the outcome. if it's true that the democrats deliberately provoked j6 in coordination with the fbi (leaving aside that the fbi and intel community might have its own agenda) there are plenty of motives available that include the political win of tarring your opponents as extremists.

the democrats real rigging actions appear in the dirty primary election system.

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snoopydawg's picture

@joe shikspack

Here’s one from Taibbi and he’s saying that democrats don’t support whistleblowers anymore either. It’s not surprising since they didn’t support them during Obama’s tenure and only supported the one that by definition and some dems actions wasn’t an actual whistleblower.

Gotta wonder how shitlibs would treat Ellsberg today if he spilled the beans on Ukraine. They respected Assange during Bush's Iraq war for showing war crimes, but y’all know how they thought of him when democrats lied about his working with Russia during Russia Russia….

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joe shikspack's picture

@snoopydawg

you have to hand it to taibbi, he's doing a masterful job of exposing the democrats for the monsters they are.

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Pluto's Republic's picture

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“What the U.S. National Security Community Is Getting Wrong About China...."

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Everything is wrong. All of it is a lie. Without exception.

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____________________

The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato
snoopydawg's picture

@Pluto's Republic

The same thing was supposed to happen to Russia after we put crushing sanctions on them and instead of the ruble and banks crashing its our dollar and banks that are crashing. If it wasn’t hurting so many of us I’d be Lmao. Instead I’m wondering how bad the collateral damage is going to be.

I just read an essay with a chart that shows that every time the fed raises interest rates the market reacts in a bad way. Of course Powell knew what he was doing just so that he could keep wages down and the working class in dire need. And of course everyone in government knew that if their donors got in trouble they would be there to make sure they were okay. I’d call that evidence of a premeditated crime, but what do I know?

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joe shikspack's picture

@Pluto's Republic

yep, if i had a nickel for everytime some algorithm has pushed a bunch of propaganda about one of the u.s.' adversaries at me, well, i could probably own the world.

have a great evening!

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Namely that he said that the investor in SVB, example ROKU, did some really stupid stuff that had the potential of losing all the assets of the company. That they were supposedly the "big brains" and it was the wrong thing to do.

That is only true if the primary goal of the people running the financials inside ROKU care about the health and longevity of the company. They don't care about that. They have NO loyalty to the company. I don't know what the background is but I'd bet the owners of ROKU aren't the ones who developed it.

Had they spread the money around and reduced the risk it would have been safer but it would have reduced the return percentage.

F'in crooks. Bain on steroids (as an example). Killers of Sears, Kodak, etc, etc, etc. And the industries that brought us to where we are. Stolen.

They're more than happy to watch our country die.

(Nother added) And our current "statepeople" shitting in the people's house are fully complicit in the theft.

/rant

Oh, I forgot to add a PI day cake... a picture I took from my deck a couple weeks ago.

230219_17s.jpg

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joe shikspack's picture

@exindy

yep, i agree with you, but would offer a friendly amendment which is that not only the people running roku don't care, neither do the people running the banks, nor do the venture capital middlemen. nobody in the whole chain really gives a damn. the whole thing is a giant smash and grab operation. they are all in it to grab whatever they can on the upside and jump overboard with their gains on the downside.

gorgeous photo! it kind of reminds me of the incredible sunset photos that knucklehead used to post if you've been around long enough to remember him and his amazing photography.

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Shahryar's picture

"In its decision, the Department of Justice said that the approval “strikes a balance” by allowing Jack the Ripper to kill while also limiting killing to three women rather than five, which the psychopath wanted"

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joe shikspack's picture

@Shahryar

an excellent analysis. i wonder if biden's decision means that we will all be exterminated by an increasingly uninhabitable climate at 3/5ths the speed. or perhaps biden just considers all of us 3/5ths of a person.

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enhydra lutris's picture

@joe shikspack You just had to go and play Viola Lee Blues, didn't you. So far I've listened 6 more versions including a 20 minute session from '68 and the one from Monterey pop. Heh, can't resist.

be well and have a good one

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

joe shikspack's picture

@enhydra lutris

heh, i doubt that biden would ever devalue a corporate person.

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enhydra lutris's picture

@joe shikspack @joe shikspack

have a great day

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

joe shikspack's picture

@enhydra lutris

i just pulled that album out of the basement and transferred it to digital a couple of weeks ago. Smile

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I represented a guy in a divorce. His wife didn't particularly contest it, and actually sent her son to me to represent him in his divorce years later. She resides in my very small community.
She is a good, reliable D voter.
Her other son, deceased, was also a good D, climate change protester.
He went to California to protest the cutting down of redwoods. He was in a tree. The authorities cut it down, and he died when the tree fell. Nobody was held accountable. Protester squatting, sitting, crossed legs, hands up, is nothing new to me, but maybe new to activists.
Maybe.
Thanks for the ebs, js
edit: my lap top save draft function was in overdrive tonight.

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"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981

joe shikspack's picture

@on the cusp

anybody who has been watching the u.s. police murder more than a thousand people a year with virtual impunity for years now can be shocked but not surprised by the revelation of yet another atrocity committed by the police.

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what my reaction or response would be if cops killed a family member. Or, a close friend.
Good ebs tonight.
Educate us my friend!
There is no solution to any problem if we do not understand it.
Clarity,more, sir! Bring it on!

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"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981

snoopydawg's picture

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From MoA tonight quoting the WP:

The quality of Ukraine’s military force, once considered a substantial advantage over Russia, has been degraded by a year of casualties that have taken many of the most experienced fighters off the battlefield, leading some Ukrainian officials to question Kyiv’s readiness to mount a much-anticipated spring offensive.

An influx of inexperienced draftees, brought in to plug the losses, has changed the profile of the Ukrainian force, which is also suffering from basic shortages of ammunition, including artillery shells and mortar bombs, according to military personnel in the field.

NATO had trained Ukraine’s military for 8 years and built up a lot of reinforced bunkers and they became the biggest military in Europe, but with less troops fighting against them they have wiped out its advantage. Not only that, but it has wiped out many European country’s weapons and now they are struggling to keep Ukraine armed. Plus many of the troops weren’t actually Russian soldiers, but people from the Donbas military.

Zelensky said that he will not withdraw from Bakmut, but will send even more soldiers into it. The city is basically lost and Russia will take it so I’m considering that Zelensky is committing a crime against humanity by just sending people to their deaths.

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joe shikspack's picture

@snoopydawg

you have to wonder how long elensky's 4 hour soldiers can continue to hold bakhmut.

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snoopydawg's picture

@humphrey

By his building military alliances in Asia he’s going to set the region on fire and blow it up. And for what? The writing is on the wall at this point that America is going to lose its hegemonic status and instead of going balls to the wall we should back off and start making truly peaceful alliances. History is full of what happens when a hegemon is going down and just once I’d like to see a country find its senses before it hits rock bottom. But I doubt that there is anyone in Biden’s administration that has the smarts to do that.

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soryang's picture

Russia, Ukraine, etc. This is two hours or so. I've watched most of it. Mirko, debates the other three. Very interesting. I'm going to keep watching.

Some of the comments during the live stream were also worth looking at. I like the way Alex/ Reporterfy doesn't let Mirko off the hook. Some sparks fly as Brian and Mirko disagree. I found the contrast among the perspectives revealing.

Thanks for the EBs Joe!

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語必忠信 行必正直