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"You cannot organize civilization around the core of militarism and at the same time expect reason to control human destinies."

-- Franklin D. Roosevelt

News and Opinion

Here's the start and finish of this article, it's a great article worth reading in full:

Chris Hedges: The Enemy From Within

America is a stratocracy, a form of government dominated by the military. It is axiomatic among the two ruling parties that there must be a constant preparation for war. The war machine’s massive budgets are sacrosanct. Its billions of dollars in waste and fraud are ignored. Its military fiascos in Southeast Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East have disappeared into the vast cavern of historical amnesia. This amnesia, which means there is never accountability, licenses the war machine to economically disembowel the country and drive the Empire into one self-defeating conflict after another. The militarists win every election. They cannot lose. It is impossible to vote against them. The war state is a Götterdämmerung, as Dwight Macdonald writes, “without the gods.”

Since the end of the Second World War, the federal government has spent more than half its tax dollars on past, current and future military operations. It is the largest single sustaining activity of the government. Military systems are sold before they are produced with guarantees that huge cost overruns will be covered. Foreign aid is contingent on buying U.S. weapons. Egypt, which receives some $1.3 billion in foreign military financing, is required to devote it to buying and maintaining U.S. weapons systems. Israel has received $158 billion in bilateral assistance from the U.S. since 1949, almost all of it since 1971 in the form of military aid, with most of it going towards arms purchases from U.S. weapons manufacturers. The American public funds the research, development and building of weapons systems and then buys these same weapons systems on behalf of foreign governments. It is a circular system of corporate welfare.

Between October 2021 and September 2022, the U.S. spent $877 billion on the military, that’s more than the next 10 countries, including China, Russia, Germany, France and the United Kingdom combined. These huge military expenditures, along with the rising costs of a for-profit healthcare system, have driven the U.S. national debt to over $31 trillion, nearly $5 trillion more than the U.S.’s entire Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This imbalance is not sustainable, especially once the dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency. As of January 2023, the U.S. spent a record $213 billion servicing the interest on its national debt. ...

Militarists drain funds from social and infrastructure programs. They pour money into research and development of weapons systems and neglect renewable energy technologies. Bridges, roads, electrical grids and levees collapse. Schools decay. Domestic manufacturing declines. The public is impoverished. The harsh forms of control the militarists test and perfect abroad migrate back to the homeland. Militarized Police. Militarized drones. Surveillance. Vast prison complexes. Suspension of basic civil liberties. Censorship.

Those such as Julian Assange, who challenge the stratocracy, who expose its crimes and suicidal folly, are ruthlessly persecuted. But the war state harbors within it the seeds of its own destruction. It will cannibalize the nation until it collapses. Before then, it will lash out, like a blinded cyclops, seeking to restore its diminishing power through indiscriminate violence. The tragedy is not that the U.S. war state will self-destruct. The tragedy is that we will take down so many innocents with us.

Today's fascists can turn on a dime!

he Media Once Bashed Trump For Transgressing The One-China Policy The US Now Spits On

The US has been increasingly treating Taiwan like a sovereign nation with whom diplomatic relationships and alliances can be formed, in violation of its longstanding One-China policy that has kept the peace for decades. And I just think it’s worth noting that the western media who’ve lately been condoning these moves became outraged at Donald Trump just a few years ago for doing the same thing to a far lesser degree.

After his victory in the 2016 presidential election but before taking office, Trump received a phone call from Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen, in transgression of Washington’s longstanding policy of declining to acknowledge the sovereignty of Taiwan’s government. This position was enshrined back in the seventies during Washington’s efforts to normalize relations with Beijing in order to pull it away from Moscow during the last cold war, reversing its previous Guaido coup-like policy of insisting that China’s true government was in Taiwan.

The reaction from the mass media was adversarial and immediate. “Donald Trump insults China with Taiwan phone call,” said a headline from CNBC. “Trump’s phone call with Taiwan president risks China’s wrath,” warned The Guardian. “This Is Why Trump’s Taiwan Call Was Truly Bizarre,” said Vanity Fair. “Trump may have just thrown decades of US-China relations into disarray,” exclaimed Vox. “Trump-Taiwan call breaks US policy stance,” said the BBC.

“We have what’s called a One-China policy, where we recognize there’s only one Chinese government,” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow told her audience after the news of Trump’s phone call broke. “And it took us a long time to get there. It sounds rational now, but it took us a long time — it took us decades to get there — and that’s where we are. And Donald Trump apparently took that silverware drawer out of the kitchen cabinet today and turned it upside down over his head and just started shaking the silverware to see what happens. It took decades to develop the ground on which we talk to China, and Donald Trump tore it up today.”

Trump's Taiwan call: "We don't know if he did it on purpose... this, conceivably, is the way wars start" @maddow pic.twitter.com/uWukClkhiy

— Subscribe to Unprecedented on Ghost - no paywall! (@TheDailyEdge) December 3, 2016

And yet now we’re seeing dramatically more aggressive erosion of Washington’s One-China policy than a president-elect answering a phone call, all without the mass media blinking an eye. Two successive House speakers have now had physical visits with Tsai Ing-wen, with Nancy Pelosi visiting Taiwan last August and Kevin McCarthy meeting with Tsai in Washington a few weeks ago. President Biden has unequivocally stated that the US would go to war against China to defend Taiwan from an attack by the PRC, and his Director of National Intelligence later confirmed that this is indeed the new position of the US government.

Escalations involving Taiwan are developing on a near-daily basis now. In a new article titled “Taiwan Now Has ‘Real Time’ Intelligence Sharing Link With Five Eyes,” Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp discusses the revelation that Taiwan is being integrated into the Five Eyes intelligence alliance of the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Taiwan becoming a de facto sixth eye in the alliance would surely be seen as a major provocation by the PRC, who sees Taiwan as a rebel province. And it should here be noted that Russia invaded Ukraine largely because it saw it as gradually being made into a de facto member of the NATO alliance.

In another recent article titled “House China Committee Prepares Proposals to Rapidly Arm Taiwan,” DeCamp reports on the latest efforts to ramp up the deluge of military weaponry being sent to the island, again a move which echoes the lead-up to the war in Ukraine. One of the silliest things the US empire asks us to believe is that the act of amassing large proxy arsenals on the borders of its enemies is something that should be regarded as a defensive action, rather than the incendiary provocation of extreme aggression that it self-evidently is.

In another recent article titled “China says Taiwan inviting ‘wolves’ with US defence industry forum,” Reuters reports that Beijing is “extremely concerned” about a US military-industrial complex forum that will be hosted in Taipei next week.

This is just in the last few days; reports about these escalations are coming out all the time. And yet the mass media have little or nothing critical to say about any of this.

So what changed since late 2016? Well for one thing Trump is no longer in office, and the imperial narrative managers who hated him because they saw him as an untrustworthy steward of the empire don’t have the same commitment to sowing distrust of the current US president.

More importantly, the agendas of the US empire changed. Ramping up aggressions against China were a back-burner issue back then, and the idea of a military confrontation between the world’s two most powerful countries seemed an unthinkable impossibility. Now the US is rapidly ramping up its military encirclement of China and pouring weapons into Taiwan at a time that just so happens to coincide with China beginning to become the exact sort of rival superpower that the US empire has long had a standing policy of preventing.

As the agendas of the empire have changed, so too have the positions of the imperial media. We’re now seeing more and more promotion of anti-China hysteria in the media, and the continuing erosion of the One-China policy is now being overlooked at best and overtly endorsed at worst. While China is being given more and more reasons to see US involvement in Taiwan as an unacceptable threat, the mainstream press are for the most part refusing to apply an appropriate level of scrutiny to the consequences which could begin erupting from this at any time.

Now we’re getting reports that President Xi Jinping directly threatened Biden about Washington’s meddling this past November, saying he will not be the Chinese leader who goes down in history as having lost Taiwan and that there will be war if his hand is forced.

So the worst thing that could happen if we keep going along this trajectory is pretty much as bad as anything you could possibly imagine. The mass media’s negligence on this front is horrifying.

Missiles Strike Pavlograd; US Military: Russia More Powerful Now, Biden Looks for Way Out

Exploiting Ukraine War for LNG Expansion

In what it calls “one of the most blatant examples of the ‘shock doctrine,'” a Greenpeace report released this week reveals how the gas industry took advantage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to lock Europe and the U.S. into building new liquefied natural gas (LNG) infrastructure that threatens the well-being of both frontline communities and the entire planet.

Projects approved in the U.S. alone could, by 2030, push its exports past what the International Energy Agency has budgeted for the entire global LNG trade if world leaders want to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and stop global warming at 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, the report said.

“Our investigation exposes the truth behind the corporate and political push for more fossil gas imports from the U.S. to European countries: The bottom line is that fossil gas only profits the industry, it is dirty, toxic, not needed, and not wanted,” said Anusha Narayanan, climate campaign director with Greenpeace USA.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022 sent the EU into an energy crisis as it scrambled to prepare for the following winter without relying on Russian gas — which supplied almost 40 percent of the bloc’s gas in 2021. The U.S. rushed to fill in the gap, with the EU’s imports skyrocketing by 140 percent in 2022, making the bloc the world’s top importer of U.S. gas.

However, the solution pushed by the gas industry in both countries was not a stop-gap measure to keep homes warm in the short-term while building up renewable energy capacity to insure against similar crises in the future, as Greenpeace details in the report titled Who Profits From War – How Gas Corporations Capitalise from War in Ukraine.

Instead, the EU’s REPowerEU plan invested $20.9 billion in gas infrastructure. The bloc has already started building eight liquefied gas terminals and has proposed 38 more. In the U.S., new gas infrastructure approved so far would double export capacity to 439 billion cubic meters per year.

Many of the gas contracts last 10 to 15 years, and most of the projects won’t even begin working until 2026, too late to satisfy the initial need but in plenty of time to spew greenhouse gasses into the air during a critical decade for climate action.

According to Greenpeace’s estimate, the new European infrastructure would emit 950 million tonnes of CO2-eq per year while U.S. export terminals — including those in operation, under construction, and approved for construction — would emit 1,824 million tonnes of CO2-eq per year. Taken together, that’s the yearly equivalent of adding 604 million new cars to the roads.

“The gas industry is using today’s news — the war and the energy crisis–to try to lock in more gas for decades, even though the industry knows it’ll be disastrous for the climate and international stability,” senior research fellow at the Oxford Sustainable Law Programme Ben Franta said in a DeSmog report cited by Greenpeace.

That report detailed how the gas industry changed its messaging following Russia’s invasion from emphasizing the “energy transition” to “energy security.”

In the 10 months before Feb. 24, 2022, four major industry groups only tweeted about energy security 3 percent of the time. Afterwards, the number of tweets on the theme skyrocketed by more than 10 times. In the lead up to RePowerEU, one of these groups — Gas Infrastructure Europe (GIE) — lobbied policy makers for more LNG projects and argued that their focus should be less on 2050 climate targets and more on the immediate crisis.

“The extreme energy prices of last year, and the current threats to security of supply require a focus on the shorter term,” the group said.

Yet critics warn such a shorter-term focus would have disastrous consequences for everyone except fossil fuel companies, who have already made record profits off the energy crisis.

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres has called on both the U.S. and the E.U. to bump up their carbon neutrality deadlines to 2040, and, to limit warming to 1.5°C, the E.U. needs to stop burning gas by 2035.

The new infrastructure is not required to meet current needs, Greenpeace said. The U.S. already has enough in place to increase short-term exports to Europe, and, despite last year’s crisis, according to the IEA, natural gas demand in the bloc actually fell its farthest ever in 2022 by 55 billion cubic meters.

Yet, beyond interfering with its decarbonization timeline, the E.U.’s pivot from Russian gas via pipeline to imported LNG also threatens its climate goals because LNG is more carbon intensive and often comes from fracked U.S. gas that Greenpeace calls one of “the most polluting and dirty forms of energy in the world.”

Russian Official: Ukrainian Drone Attack Sets Crimean Fuel Depot Ablaze

A Ukrainian drone strike on an oil storage facility in the Crimean port of Sevastopol caused a massive fire, according to a Russian official cited by the Associated Press on Saturday. This comes amid an escalation in attacks against Crimea, annexed by Russia in 2014, and as the ever-imminent Ukrainian counteroffensive in the south and east of the country is expected to fail.

Despite earlier reporting of as many as four drones being involved in the strike, Mikhail Razvozhaev, the Russian-appointed governor of Sevastopol, said experts have since examined the site and it is clear that "only one drone was able to reach the oil reservoir," though another UAV was downed.

US General Says Russian Ground Forces ‘Bigger Today’ Than Before Invasion

Gen. Christopher Cavoli, the commander of US European Command, told Congress on Wednesday that Russia’s ground forces are “bigger today” than they were before Moscow launched its invasion of Ukraine last year.

“[T]he Russian ground force has been degenerated somewhat by this conflict, although it is bigger today than it was at the beginning of the conflict,” Cavoli told the House Armed Services Committee. ...

Cavoli also said Russia’s air force and navy haven’t taken many losses. “The Air Force has lost very little, they’ve lost 80 planes. They have another 1,000 fighters and fighter bombers. The navy has lost one ship,” he said.

Hundreds of thousands rally in France amid pension reform anger

Uzbekistan votes on clause that could extend president’s rule to 2040

Polls have closed across Uzbekistan, ending a day of voting in the central Asian nation in a constitutional referendum that could allow President Shavkat Mirziyoyev to remain in power until 2040. Voting stations closed at 8pm (3pm GMT), after being open for 12 hours. The Election Commission has to announce the result within 10 days.

Mirziyoyev, 65, became president in 2016 after the death of the dictator Islam Karimov.

He insists the overhaul of the constitution will improve governance and quality of life in the landlocked country of 35 million people, whose rights have long been heavily restricted. But observers say Mirziyoyev is expected to benefit most in the majority-Muslim country.

The constitutional changes would extend presidential terms from five to seven years, allowing him to serve two more terms and extend his time in power until 2040.

Hillary Clinton’s Secret Recipe For Imperialism!

2nd Largest Bank Failure In HISTORY

Twitter to let publishers charge users per article read, says Elon Musk

Twitter CEO Elon Musk said on Saturday that the social media platform will allow media publishers to charge users on a per-article basis with one click, calling it a win for both the public and media organisations.

The feature, to be rolled out in May, will enable users who do not “sign up for a monthly subscription to pay a higher per article price for when they want to read an occasional article”, billionaire owner Musk tweeted.

On Friday, Musk had said that Twitter will take a 10% cut on content subscriptions after the first year, noting that the company will not take a cut for the first 12 months. These subscriptions include long-form text and hours-long video.

Chief Justice Roberts Wife CASHED In On Connections

John Roberts' Wife Made Millions From Elite Law Firms, Major Companies: Whistleblower Docs

A whistleblower from the legal recruiting firm Major, Lindsey & Africa says Jane Sullivan Roberts, the wife of U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, was paid $10.3 million in commissions over seven years from her job as a headhunter at the company, where she placed attorneys with law firms—including at least one that argued a case before the Supreme Court after the placement was made.

Sullivan Roberts was paid the money between 2007 and 2014, having taken a job with the company two years after her husband was confirmed to the Supreme Court, according to a report out Friday from Business Insider.

The whistleblower, Kendal Price, said in a sworn affidavit in December that he believed "at least some of [Roberts'] remarkable success as a recruiter has come because of her spouse's position."

Price's complaint was reported on earlier this year byPolitico and The New York Times, and Insider published new documents regarding the case.

"When I found out that the spouse of the chief justice was soliciting business from law firms, I knew immediately that it was wrong," Price, who worked alongside Sullivan Roberts from 2011-2013 at Major, Lindsey & Africa, told Business Insider. "During the time I was there, I was discouraged from ever raising the issue. And I realized that even the law firms who were Jane's clients had nowhere to go. They were being asked by the spouse of the chief justice for business worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and there was no one to complain to. Most of these firms were likely appearing or seeking to appear before the Supreme Court. It's natural that they'd do anything they felt was necessary to be competitive."

Insider noted that a spokesperson for the Supreme Court told The New York Times in a prior statement that all nine of the court justices are "attentive to ethical constraints" and obey federal financial disclosure laws.

However, Price's whistleblower complaint was released weeks after ProPublica reported that Justice Clarence Thomas financially benefited for years from gifts from Republican megadonor Harlan Crow, and sold property to him—none of which was previously disclosed to the government as is required by law.

Earlier this week, Politico revealed that days after his confirmation, Justice Neil Gorsuch sold his share of a property to the CEO of a major law firm—and disclosed the sale, but not the buyer.

Sullivan Roberts' $10.3 million commission at her legal recruiting firm was listed as "salary" on Roberts' financial disclosure forms.

"The balance of Roberts' income did not come at a steady rate from a single employer, as 'salary' suggests," reported Insider. "It was paid by the deal and based on a sizable cut of her clients' salaries—a compensation model which varies from year to year depending on her ability to capitalize on her network. The ultimate sources of her income were the firms hiring Major, Lindsey & Africa-backed candidates. Their identities and the specific amounts that they paid Roberts for her services remain unknown."

Price called the justice's characterization of his wife's commissions "misleading."

"Characterizing Mrs. Roberts' commissions as 'salary' is not merely factually incorrect; it is incorrect as a matter of law," Bennett Gershman, a law professor at Pace University, wrote in a memo supporting Price's claims. "The legal distinction between these terms is clear, undisputed, and legally material. If the chief justice's inaccurate financial disclosures were inadvertent, presumably he should file corrected and amended disclosures."

Considering the recent reports on Gorsuch and Thomas, court observers suggested the latest news is more evidence that the Supreme Court is "suffering a massive, systemic ethics crisis."

"What's the public confidence in a system," asked Joshua Dratel, an attorney for Price, "when the firms which are appearing before the court are making decisions that are to the financial benefit of the chief justice?"

‘We need to read the room’: GOP divided on abortion as Democrats unite for 2024

Hours after Joe Biden announced his re-election campaign on Tuesday, his vice-president and 2024 running mate, Kamala Harris, delivered a fiery call to action for voters alarmed by the loss of constitutional protections for abortion. “This is a moment for us to stand and fight,” she said to a packed auditorium at Howard University, a historically Black college in Washington and her alma mater. To the “extremist so-called leaders” rolling back access to reproductive rights, Harris warned: “Don’t get in our way because if you do, we’re going to stand up, we’re going to organize and we’re going to speak up.”

Across the Potomac, Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley appealed for a “national consensus” on abortion in a carefully worded speech delivered earlier that day from the Arlington headquarters of a leading anti-abortion group. Sidestepping the thorny policy debates already animating the Republican primary contest, she said her focus was on “humanizing, not demonizing” the conversation around abortion. “I believe in compassion, not anger,” she said. “I don’t judge someone who is pro-choice any more than I want them to judge me for being pro-life.”

Nearly a year after the supreme court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade, the battle over abortion rights is shaping the opening stages of the 2024 presidential contest. In dueling speeches this week, Harris and Haley previewed sharply contrasting approaches to an issue that is energizing Democrats and dividing Republicans. It’s a sign of just how dramatically abortion politics have shifted in the post-Roe era.

Republicans, who for decades championed the anti-abortion agenda of the religious right, are now wavering on their positions, no longer sure of how to navigate an abiding principle of American conservatism in their quest to win control of the White House and Congress.

Meanwhile, Democrats running for office at every level of government – from the presidential ticket on down – are placing abortion rights at the heart of their campaigns, presenting themselves as bulwarks against Republican extremism on the issue. It was a strategy the party used to surprising success in the 2022 midterm elections last year, when voters in red states, blue states and swing states resisted attempts to advance abortion restrictions.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ‘not planning’ to run for Senate seat in 2024

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will not run for a seat in the US Senate next year, according to her office, clearing the way for incumbent New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a Democrat, to run for re-election unopposed by the progressive congresswoman.

“She is not planning to run for Senate in 2024. She is not planning to primary Gillibrand,” Lauren Hitt, Ocasio-Cortez’s spokesperson, told Politico.

Gillibrand, who launched her re-election campaign in January for a third Senate term, was widely believed to be facing a number of potential challengers in the state primary, including Ocasio-Cortez.

The announcement follows indications from other New York progressives, including Mondaire Jones and representatives Jamaal Bowman and Ritchie Torres, that they are not considering a challenge.

New York Democrats were hit hard in the midterm elections last year and the loss of four seats to Republican candidates is widely blamed for the party losing control of Congress. Avoiding an acrimonious challenge from the progressive wing of the party, and concentrating on recovering the 2022 losses, is considered to be Democrats’ political priority.

Wow, looks like the establishment (represented by The Guardian) really doesn't like hand-counted votes. "costly and experimental?" - really? as if votes weren't hand-counted for most of the country's history?

Far-right California county’s bid to hand count votes will cost millions

In Shasta county, a deep red enclave in far northern California, officials are intensifying their push to replace voting machines with a costly and experimental hand-count system that could cost an additional $4m over two years.

The decision of the far-right majority on the region’s governing body, the Shasta county board of supervisors, to press ahead with the controversial plan comes as half the county’s workforce is preparing to strike over wages. Officials on the board recently said the county did not have enough money to pay requested wage increases for workers.

The move has deepened divisions in a small county where public spending budgets are tight, with critics denouncing the price tag of an overhaul based on lies about election fraud. In a tense meeting that saw one county supervisor served with recall paperwork, the board’s ultra conservative majority renewed their support for a system that will cost three times more than the voting machines the county previously used.

“We’re going to have free and fair elections in Shasta county,” said Patrick Jones, the chair of the board of supervisors, at a meeting on Tuesday. “Apparently money seems to be more important than making sure our elections are fair.”

The board of supervisors has pushed the rural county of 180,000 people into the national spotlight with its decision this year to upend the county’s voting system without a replacement, and attempt to create a new system from scratch.

Biden denies ‘bomb train’ permit to ship liquid gas through populated areas

The Biden administration’s transportation department has denied a special permit request from gas giant New Fortress Energy that was needed to run up to 200 liquified natural gas “bomb train” cars daily from north-east Pennsylvania to a New Jersey shipping terminal.

The proposal’s opponents warned before the recent East Palestine train wreck that a derailment would likely result in a catastrophe, and those fears were amplified in the Ohio train disaster’s wake.

The plan was significant because it asked for approval to move an “unprecedented” amount of liquified natural gas by rail, and seemed to be designed to circumvent more heavily regulated pipeline transportation, said Kim Ong, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, which worked to derail the plan.

The Department of Transportation did not give a reason for the denial in federal registry documents, and opponents to the proposal were “surprised” but pleased by the development, Ong added.

“It is hard to say why they decided to do what they did, but hopefully the East Palestine disaster would make them look more closely at the transport of all hazardous and explosive materials across the country,” Ong said.

North Carolina residents urge UN to investigate toxic PFAS pollution

A citizens group in North Carolina has formally requested the United Nations to investigate multiple alleged human rights violations stemming from chemical manufacturer Chemours’ toxic PFAS pollution in the region.

About a half million residents live in the Cape Fear River basin between Fayetteville and Wilmington, where Chemours has produced PFAS and polluted the region for over 40 years. The residents face “an environmental human rights crisis … involving pervasive human exposure to toxic chemicals”, according to a communication filed with the UN by Clean Cape Fear and the University of California at Berkeley Environmental Law Clinic. ...

A UN human rights commission investigation there would be the first to look into an environmental crisis in the US. Residents say they have been denied the right to clean water, bodily integrity, information, an effective remedy, and a clean, healthy and sustainable environment.

University researchers first discovered the pollution in 2017, and North Carolinians are “in disbelief that we are still living with this”, said Clean Cape Fear co-founder Emily Donovan, who resides near Wilmington. “We’re nearly six years into this and my kids still go to a school that has water with high levels of PFAS,” she added. “Everyone is aware of the problem … and is outraged, and we’re all asking, ‘Why is this still going on?’”

Chemours is among the world’s largest PFAS producers, and last year the Guardian detailed how pollution from its Fayetteville Works plant has contaminated the air, soil, and water throughout hundreds of square miles in the Cape Fear River basin. ... Residents suspect the pollution is behind anecdotally high levels of cancer and other diseases linked to exposure to the chemicals. Though a brief state health department analysis found elevated levels of one kind of cancer, it and the EPA have refused to carry out the kind of epidemiological studies needed to determine the pollution’s full health effects, and which are required to hold Chemours legally responsible for health problems.

Chilean President Plans to Nationalize Lithium Industry

Chile’s President Gabriel Boric, in a televised address to the nation last month, announced his plan to nationalize the country’s lithium industry to boost the economy and protect the environment:

“Chile has one of the largest lithium reserves in the world. It is a mineral that, being in electric bus and car batteries, is key in the fight against the climate crisis, against climate change. It is an opportunity for economic growth that will be difficult to beat in the short term. Together with the development of green hydrogen, it is the best chance we have at transitioning to a sustainable and developed economy. We can’t afford to waste it.”

Boric said that his national lithium policy includes the creation of a state-owned company, which would eventually take control of the country’s lithium mining sector from private industry giants.

In this regard, he added that future lithium contracts would only be issued as public-private partnerships, with full state control. The government would not terminate current contracts, he said, and expressed the hope that companies would be open to state participation before the contracts expire.

The head of state added that the plan includes encouraging the use of new technologies to minimize the impacts of mining on ecosystems and promote research through a salt-flat protection network. For this purpose, he announced that a National Institute of Lithium and Salt Lakes would be created.
Boric said that future lithium exploration would be undertaken with the participation of all Indigenous communities residing near the extraction zones and reliant on local water basins for their livelihoods.

He said his plan not only promotes extraction and conservation, but also encourages generation of lithium products in the country. The plan will be presented to the Congress in the second half of the year.

Also of Interest

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

You’re Not Deficient, You’re Just Ruled By Assholes

The Last Hurrah

The Most Powerful Demolition of Russiagate Yet

Workers Who Have Occupied an Italian Factory for Two Years Are Getting Close to Owning It Themselves

Michael Hudson: Debt and the Collapse of Antiquity – Part 2

Seymour Hersh: Confessions of a Political Flack

Who Gets to Talk About Police Reform?

Lithium in Bolivia — A Looming Clash of Views

Wildflowers, eagles and Native history: can this California ridge be protected?

After Terminal Cancer Diagnosis, Daniel Ellsberg Reflects on Leaking Pentagon Papers & His Legacy

FBI Suspects 9/11 Hijackers CIA Assets

Get U.S. Troops Out Of Africa! Say Right Wing Republicans

Democrats DESPERATELY Cling To Lies About Hunter Biden Laptop!

Tulsi Gabbard DECIMATES Biden Push To Allow CIA To READ AMERICANS' EMAILS W/ Foreigners

A Little Night Music

Nappy Brown With The Zippers Quartet – I'm Getting Lonesome

Nappy Brown – That Man

Nappy Brown - Open That Door

Nappy Brown – Skiddy Woe

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUmtL0fmudw

Nappy Brown – Don’t Be Angry

Nappy Brown - Coal Miner

Nappy Brown - The Hole I´m in

Nappy Brown With The Zippers Quartet – Little By Little

Nappy Brown – Piddily Patter Patter