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The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: The Electric Flag

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Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features blues-rock band The Electric Flag. Enjoy!

^{The Electric Flag - Killing Floor}

"Come aboard if your destination is oblivion- it should be our next stop. We can sit together. You can have the window seat if you want. But it's a sad view."

-- Yann Martel

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News and Opinion

Our Ongoing March Into Dystopia And Oblivion

Lots of fun stuff in the news today.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), which oversees the spy agencies of the United States, has admitted in a report requested by Senator Ron Wyden that the US intelligence cartel has been circumventing constitutional regulations designed to protect US citizens from government surveillance by simply purchasing information collected by commercial data brokers.

In an escalation in surveillance capitalism that should surprise no one but alarm everyone, US intelligence agencies have found that while the Fourth Amendment prohibits their directly wiretapping, hacking or bugging whomever they please without a warrant, there’s nothing stopping them from simply purchasing massive amounts of data harvested by Silicon Valley tech companies which can provide them with similar kinds of information. So that’s what they’ve been doing, because of course it is.

But remember kids, it’s important for you to be very afraid of TikTok because TikTok might harvest your information and give it to an authoritarian surveillance state.

A disturbing new Responsible Statecraft piece by Branko Marcetic notes that the civilian leadership roles in the US government which have historically been responsible for reining in the more dangerous impulses of the US war machine have actually been far more hawkish and aggressive on Ukraine than the Pentagon’s professional warmakers. According to a recent Washington Post report, inside the Biden administration “the Pentagon is considered more cautious than the White House or State Department about sending more sophisticated weaponry to Ukraine.”

If only the war machine is responsible for placing checks on the nuclear brinkmanship of the war machine, that means there are no real checks on the nuclear brinkmanship of the war machine. If JFK had been more hawkish and aggressive than his own generals at the most perilous moments of the last cold war, it’s entirely likely that the world as we know it would not exist today. It is bone-chilling that we are relying on the better angels of the most murderous military on earth to see us through these increasingly close games of nuclear chicken.

As Marcetic discussed in another article last year, the insanely hawkish rhetoric we are seeing from the western political/media class around the subject of nuclear brinkmanship is demonstrably far more oriented toward reckless confrontation than it was during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The people whose job it is to encourage restraint in these situations — the press, the diplomats, and the elected officials — are instead doing the exact opposite.

And the discourse is only getting crazier. The neoconservative think tank American Enterprise Institute is now floating the idea of giving nukes to Ukraine, which is about as evil and demented a foreign policy position as anyone could possibly come up with.

This as influential Russian foreign policy strategist Sergey Karaganov argues that Moscow has “set too high a threshold for the use of nuclear weapons” and that “it is necessary to arouse the instinct of self-preservation that the West has lost” by “lowering the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons” and “moving up the deterrence-escalation ladder.” Karaganov cites the fact that Belarus has begun receiving tactical nukes from Russia to show that Moscow is already moving in this direction.

This looks all the more disquieting in light of Michael Tracey’s observations in a recent Newsweek article titled “The Government Keeps Lying to Us About Ukraine. Where Is the Outrage?” Tracey discusses the way fighters from Ukraine and from NATO member Poland have been ramping up attacks on Russian territory, while the US government and news media deceive the American public about the fact that this is happening and how dangerous it is.

On top of all this you’ve got the empire’s increasingly ridiculous spin about the Nord Stream pipeline bombings. The mass media are now saying that Ukrainian special operations forces perpetrated the attack, and that the CIA had advanced knowledge of their plans, but tried unsuccessfully to tell them not to go through with it.

Which is a narrative that just so happens to fit perfectly into alignment with the information interests of the US empire. It contradicts reporting by Seymour Hersh that the US was directly involved in the attack, it pins culpability on a nation with whom the west highly sympathizes who can be framed as acting in their own defense against Russian invaders, and the US intelligence cartel gets to wash its hands of the whole ordeal by claiming it told the Ukrainians not to attack pipelines used by US ally Germany.

It’s also a narrative that is completely nonsensical. Saying “America didn’t attack Nord Stream, Ukraine did!” is like saying “Will Smith didn’t slap Chris Rock, his hand did!” Ukraine is completely dependent on the will of the US government to continue this war; if the US government draws a hard line and tells them not to do something or risk losing support, it will necessarily have to obey. It’s been public knowledge for a year now that the CIA is intimately involved in activities on the ground in Ukraine, and the CIA has been actively training Ukrainian special operations forces since before this war even began.

It’s amazing how many revisions this “actually Ukraine did it” narrative has undergone ever since Hersh’s bombshell in February forced NATO spy agencies to plant a counter-narrative. It’s like watching a slow wiki page edit, revised & drip-dripped across major NATOland media. https://t.co/4lygcedysJ

— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) June 14, 2023

So it’s a distinction without a difference to claim that Ukraine and not the US bombed Nord Stream — and that’s pretending for the sake of argument that we know the US wasn’t much more directly involved in the attack than it is admitting. There is currently no logical reason to assume that’s even the case, and there is never any valid reason to take the US intelligence cartel at its word about anything.

We are marching toward dystopia and oblivion, and we are doing it in ways that have no historical precedent. We’re in completely uncharted waters, and things are only getting crazier and crazier.

What a wild world. What a time to be alive.

Ukr Offensive Stuck, Rus DefMin Claims 7.5k Ukr Casualties in 10 days, Rus Economy to Grow 2% 2023

“Spring offensive” produces bloodbath for Ukraine

When the Ukrainian “counteroffensive” began last week, it was hailed in the American media as a decisive turning point in the US-NATO war against Russia. “An Endgame for Ukraine,” proclaimed Bret Stephens in the New York Times, which would produce a “crushing and unmistakable defeat” for Russia. Washington Post columnist Max Boot quoted General David Petraeus as stating that he expects “the Ukrainians to achieve significant breakthroughs and accomplish much more than most analysts are predicting.”

All of these statements have proven both delusional and self-deluded. Ten days in, the offensive has turned into a bloodbath for Ukrainian soldiers, many of them new recruits with little or no training. The Ukrainian government claims to have captured a mere 40 square miles of territory over the past week, at the cost of thousands of lives. It has gotten to the point where the US media describes as a massive triumph the ability of Ukrainian forces to capture, and hold for a few hours, a tiny nondescript village. ...

In figures that have not been contradicted by Ukraine, Russian officials state that over 1,000 Ukrainians are dying per day during the offensive, which would put the total Ukrainian death toll at a minimum of 10,000 so far. ...

An article in the New York Times, written by Helene Cooper, asks coldly, “Will Ukraine suffer a lot of casualties in the counteroffensive?” The answer: “That is already happening. US officials have confirmed that Ukrainian troops have suffered casualties and equipment losses in the early fighting. Little information is available on Russian losses, but the officials pointed out that attackers typically suffer heavier initial casualties than dug-in defenders, for the reasons outlined earlier.” The Times then asks, “Does that mean the counteroffensive is failing?” The answer: “No. Two U.S. officials said on Monday that the main thrust of the counteroffensive had probably not begun.” In other words, the death toll is only a down payment. ...

On Thursday, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley will host a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group at Ramstein Air Base. This will be followed by a summit of NATO defense ministers on June 16. These meetings will set the stage for the July 11-12 NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, in which the NATO powers are expected to announce some form of formal military alliance with Ukraine, which would set the stage for the direct involvement of NATO troops in the conflict.

The Vilnius meeting was conceived as a victors’ summit, against the backdrop of a victorious offensive intended to issue ultimatums to a Russia on its back foot. But an altogether different scenario is emerging: Faced with a military debacle, the United States is escalating its involvement in the war.

Milley Predicts Long, ‘Very Violent’ Ukrainian Counteroffensive

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley predicted Thursday that Ukraine’s counteroffensive will be long and “very violent” following a meeting of military officials in Brussels.

Milley made the comments when asked how long he expects the counteroffensive to last, saying it was “premature” to put a timeline on the battle. “This is a very difficult fight. It’s a very violent fight, and it will likely take a considerable amount of time and at high cost,” Milley said.

The Biden administration has been pushing for the violent counteroffensive as it’s explicitly opposed to a ceasefire and peace talks, a position Secretary of State Antony Blinken outlined earlier this month.

Milley claimed Ukraine has been making “steady progress,” but the battle lines have not changed much since Ukraine launched the assault early last week. According to The New York Times, it’s been three days since Ukraine claimed any gains, and Ukraine’s deputy defense acknowledged it was “very difficult to advance” in the southeast.

Russia Now Has Free Hand to Destroy Undersea Communications Cables - Putin Ally

A close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday there was no reason for Moscow not to destroy its enemies' undersea communication cables given what he said was Western complicity in the Nord Stream pipeline blasts. ...

"If we proceed from the proven complicity of Western countries in blowing up the Nord Streams, then we have no constraints - even moral - left to prevent us from destroying the ocean floor cable communications of our enemies," Medvedev, a former Russian president who is now deputy chairman of Russia's Security Council, said on Telegram.

Sub-sea cables which criss-cross the world's oceans have become the arteries of global communications. Their importance has made them the focus of growing geopolitical competition between China and Russia on the one side and the United States and its Western allies on the other.

The intelligence chief of the NATO military alliance cautioned in May that Russia may sabotage undersea cables to punish the West for supporting Ukraine.

UN nuclear chief says situation at Zaporizhzhia plant is ‘serious’ but it can operate safely for ‘some time’

The head of the UN atomic energy agency has said the situation at the Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in Ukraine is “serious” and that ensuring water for cooling was a priority of his visit, adding that the station could operate safely for “some time”.

Rafael Grossi, of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), was inspecting the state of Europe’s largest nuclear plant following last week’s breach in the Kakhovka dam downstream on the Dnipro River. He said IAEA inspectors would remain at the site. “What is essential for the safety of this plant is that the water that you see behind me stays at that level,” Grossi said in two tweets issued from near the station, including next to a pond that supplies water for cooling.

“With the water that is here the plant can be kept safe for some time. The plant is going to be working to replenish the water so that safety functions can continue normally.”

Grossi said the visit, his third to the plant in southern Ukraine since Russian forces occupied it in the first days of their February 2022 invasion, had gathered “a good amount of information for an assessment”.

Russia and Ukraine have repeatedly accused each other of shelling near the plant, endangering its safe operation. The station’s six reactors are now in shutdown.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen: State Dept Must Release Report on Shireen Abu Akleh, Hold Killers Accountable

Assange, one step closer to US extradition

Jack Teixeira, Pentagon leaks suspect, indicted by federal grand jury

Jack Teixeira, the 21-year-old US airman accused of leaking confidential intelligence and defense documents online has been indicted by a federal grand jury, the Department of Justice said on Thursday.

Teixeira, of North Dighton, Massachusetts, has been charged with six counts of willful retention and transmission of classified information relating to national defense, the justice department said.

US district court magistrate judge David Hennessy granted the government’s motion for detention on 19 May, the justice department added in the press statement.

Attorney general Merrick Garland said: “As laid out in the indictment, Jack Teixeira was entrusted by the United States government with access to classified national defense information – including information that reasonably could be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to national security if shared.”

He added: “Teixeira is charged with sharing information with users on a social media platform he knew were not entitled to receive it. In doing so, he is alleged to have violated US law and endangered our national security.”

CIA, NSA BUYING UP Americans' Personal Data With LITTLE OVERSIGHT: Dir National Intelligence Report

Looks like the banksters have competition ...

‘I have not seen one cent’: billions stolen in wage theft from US workers

Workers in the US have an estimated $50bn-plus stolen from them every year, according to the Economic Policy Institute, surpassing all robberies, burglaries and motor vehicle thefts combined. The majority of these stolen wages are never recovered by workers. Between 2017 to 2020, $3.24bn in stolen wages were recovered by the US Department of Labor, state labor departments and attorney generals, and through class- and collective-action litigation.

Wage theft disproportionately affects lower-wage workers, women, people of color and immigrant workers, and negatively affects local economies and tax revenues. There are numerous forms of wage theft, from employers not compensating workers for time worked, violating minimum wage and overtime laws, misclassifying employees as independent contractors, not providing legally required meal breaks, confiscating worker tips, or illegally taking deductions from worker wages.

Wage-theft violators include some of the largest employers in the US; Amazon paid $18m in November 2022 to settle a wage-theft class-action lawsuit in Oregon, the largest in the state’s history, and paid a $61.7m fine in 2021 over allegations of stealing tips from Amazon Flex drivers.

According to a 2018 report by Good Jobs, between January 2000 to 2018, Walmart paid over $1.4bn in fines and settlements over wage theft violations, FedEx paid over $500m during the same period, and Bank of America paid over $380m.

Construction contractors have a notorious reputation for wage-theft violations, often affecting immigrant workers, and exploiting loopholes to avoid paying wage-theft claims, such as shutting down businesses and reopening under a different business filing.

Google earned $10m from ads misdirecting abortion seekers to ‘pregnancy crisis centers’

Google has made millions of dollars in the last two years from advertisements misdirecting users who were seeking abortion services to “pregnancy crisis centers” that do not actually provide care, according to a new study.

The tech giant has taken in an estimated $10m in two years from anti-choice organizations that pay to advertise such centers alongside legitimate results on the Google search page, according to a new report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a non-profit group that conducts misinformation research. Its study, published on Thursday, estimates that the search results have reached and potentially misled hundreds of thousands of users.

Using the analytics tool Semrush, the CCDH estimated how much revenue Google has brought in from such advertisers between 1 March 2021 and 28 February 2023. It said Google’s lack of enforcement against these groups has enabled a multimillion-dollar “cottage industry” of anti-abortion marketing firms, which provide prepackaged promotional materials and websites to crisis pregnancy centers.

Greg Abbott decision to bus migrants to LA condemned as ‘despicable stunt’

Governor Greg Abbott of Texas’s decision to bus migrants to Los Angeles this week has been decried as a “despicable stunt”, as advocates in California reported that the group was not offered food during the 23-hour trip.

On Wednesday, 42 migrants, including 15 youth and three babies, arrived at Union Station in downtown LA, said Jorge-Mario Cabrera, the communications director for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights-Los Angeles (Chirla), who met the group when they arrived. The travelers he spoke to came from Venezuela, Honduras, Guatemala and Haiti, and one came from China, he said, adding some told him they had been on the bus for nearly a day without any food or drink.

Abbott tweeted that it was the “1st bus of migrants” arriving in LA, claiming Texas border towns “remain overrun & overwhelmed because Biden refuses to secure the border”. Recent reports, however, have found that the number of migrants crossing the US-Mexico border is at its lowest levels since the start of Joe Biden’s presidency. Abbott has faced increasing scrutiny for his bussing program over the last year, which has reportedly sent tens of thousands of migrants to Democratic-run cities, including New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington.

Immigrants’ rights groups have said the practice can be exploitative and cruel, noting last year that one bus Abbott sent to Philadelphia had a 10-year-old girl on it who had to be hospitalized from dehydration and a high fever. Last month, the governor sent buses to vice-president Kamala Harris’s residence in Washington.

LA councilmember Eunisses Hernandez said on Thursday several city agencies and nonprofits triaged the situation, offering health screenings, mental health care, connections to legal aid, assistance with family reunification and homeless services if needed. “Our community organizations do this every single day, the only difference here is these migrants were used as a political stunt, transported to our city for political means,” she said. “This action by the governor of Texas is a reflection of how incapable he is of running a state, of meeting a crisis head-on. It’s just really pathetic. But Los Angeles is a place where we value and welcome everyone.”

Native American tribes hail ‘major victory’ after supreme court ruling

Native Americans, tribal leaders and top Democrats hailed the US supreme court’s decision on Thursday to uphold federal protections for Native American children against removal from their tribal communities for fostering or adoption.

Following the announcement of the court’s 7-2 decision, several tribal leaders commended the supreme court’s ruling, calling it a “major victory for Native tribes, children, and the future of our culture and heritage”.

In a joint statement, the Cherokee Nation principal chief, Chuck Hoskin Jr, Morongo Band of Mission Indians chairman, Charles Martin, Oneida Nation chairman, Tehassi Hill, and Quinault Indian Nation president, Guy Capoeman, said: “It is also a broad affirmation of the rule of law, and of the basic constitutional principles surrounding relationships between Congress and tribal nations.

“We hope this decision will lay to rest the political attacks aimed at diminishing tribal sovereignty and creating instability throughout Indian law that have persisted for too long.”

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Here’s Why Cornel West Switched To Green Party In Presidential Campaign

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Fears of hottest year on record as global temperatures spike

Global temperatures have accelerated to record-setting levels this month, an ominous sign in the climate crisis ahead of a gathering El Niño that could potentially propel 2023 to become the hottest year ever recorded.

Preliminary global average temperatures taken so far in June are nearly 1C (1.8F) above levels previously recorded for the same month, going back to 1979. While the month is not yet complete and may not set a new June record, climate scientists say it follows a pattern of strengthening global heating that could see this year named the hottest ever recorded, topping 2016.

There has been “remarkable global warmth” so far in June, confirmed Copernicus, the European Union’s Earth observation arm, which said that the first few days of the month even breached a 1.5C increase compared with pre-industrial times. This is probably the first time this has happened since industrialization, the agency said.

The long-term warming conditions caused by the burning of fossil fuels will probably receive a further pulse of heat via El Niño, a naturally recurring phenomenon where sections of the Pacific Ocean heat up, typically causing temperatures to spike across the world.

Last week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) said El Niño conditions are now present and will “gradually strengthen” into early next year. Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, said human-caused warming will be exacerbated by an event that typically adds between 0.1C to 0.2C (0.18F to 0.36F) to the overall global temperature.

US midwest braces for smoky skies as Canadian wildfires rage on

The smoke-filled skies seen across US cities last week are set to make another appearance, as Canadian wildfires rage on and winds are bringing the airborne pollution south and again triggered fears over risks to health.

Air quality alerts were issued on Wednesday for the entire state of Minnesota and large parts of Wisconsin. This time, the culprit is a series of wildfires from the Canadian province of Ontario. ...

The National Weather Service forecasts the new wave of smoke will soon make a comeback in New York on Thursday and into Friday, but not nearly at the levels seen last week.

“Smoke from Canadian wildfires will be making a return to the forecast area late today into Friday. The good news is that per the latest High-Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR) Smoke model forecasts, the vast majority of the smoke should remain aloft,” the service tweeted.

US east coast cities warned to draft air quality plans similar to those in the west

US cities like New York may need the sort of wildfire smoke hazard plans that cities in California and elsewhere have adopted, experts have warned, in an era of boundless pollution driven by the climate crisis that is impervious to decades-old clean air laws. A week after a pall of wildfire smoke turned New York City’s skies into a shade of apocalyptic orange, leaders in the US government and east coast states are wrestling with how to keep residents safe from the significant health risks.

In California and elsewhere, there are plans offering advisories to wear masks above certain levels of pollution, trigger interventions to help vulnerable people such as the elderly, and issue warnings to the public to stay indoors on smoky days. The incomprehension over the worst ever day for toxic wildfire smoke in recent US history, which obliterated safe clean air thresholds and forced people to don masks outdoors, was summed up by Eric Adams, New York’s mayor, who admitted that the city was not primed for the sort of event more usually seen in California. ...

Some have called for more fundamental reforms of bedrock clean air laws that were designed years before it was apparent that global heating is causing more frequent and larger wildfires, sending plumes of smoke dangerous to cardiovascular and respiratory health thousands of miles away. The smoke from wildfires in Canada that shrouded New York, Washington DC and other US cities eventually unfurled as far as Norway.

Under standards first set in the 1970 Clean Air Act, wildfire smoke is considered an “exceptional event” that doesn’t count towards a state’s attainment of national benchmarks for pollution set by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The oil industry, as well as states, argued that wildfires were essentially random natural events outside the purview of clean air regulators. But with wildfires now threatening to erase much of the progress in cleaning up the US’s air from toxins expelled by cars and heavy industry – a study released this week found that the amount of land burned in California wildfires has increased fivefold since the 1970s, and it’s predicted to jump by as much as 50% by 2050 – that approach is being called into question.

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Also of Interest

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

Assange: An Unholy Masquerade of Tyranny Disguised as Justice

Quick Takes 3: Foreign Interference, Pandemic Deaths As New Normal, China-Brazil Trade and More

Nicaragua rebuilds – five years after US-funded terror was defeated

WaPo Mad That Debt Ceiling Deal Didn’t Cut Social Security

‘Lunch of suffering’: plain ‘white people food’ goes viral in China

Big Win for Tribal Sovereignty: Indian Child Welfare Act Upheld by Supreme Court in Surprise Ruling

Ecuador: ruled by decree

Tucker Carlson Compares Biden-MSM CULT To NORTH KOREAN State Propaganda

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A Little Night Music

The Electric Flag ( Live at Monterey) - Over Lovin' You

The Electric Flag - Fine Jung Thing

The Electric Flag ~ 'Another Country

The Electric Flag - Groovin' Is Easy

The Electric Flag - The Band Kept Playing

The Electric Flag - You Don't Realize

The Electric Flag - Texas

The Electric Flag - Senior Citizen

The Electric Flag - Sweet Soul Music

The Electric Flag - Soul Searchin'

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