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This evening's music features blues singer, songwriter and harmonica player Big Mama Thornton. Enjoy!

"The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion […] but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do."

-- Samuel P. Huntington

News and Opinion

The Last Time A Foreign Military Threat Was Placed Near The US Border, The World Almost Ended

It’s ridiculously hypocritical for westerners to condemn Russia and China for responding aggressively to the US empire building up military threats on their borders, because the last time a credible military threat was placed near the border of the United States, the US responded so aggressively that it almost ended the world.

I point out this hypocrisy not because hypocrisy in and of itself is an especially terrible sin — there are much worse things you can be in life than a hypocrite — but to flag the fact that people who think Russia and China should tolerate US actions on their borders that the US would never tolerate on its own borders actually believe the United States should rule the world.

It’s worth spending some time learning about the Cuban Missile Crisis for a number of reasons in the 2020s. First, in a time of soaring hostilities between nuclear-armed governments it’s probably good to have a lucid understanding of how close humanity came to wiping itself out in 1962, and the fact that total nuclear war was averted by a single dissenting decision by a single Soviet officer on a nuclear-armed submarine that was being bombarded by the US navy. Second, in an environment where talk of peace negotiations and compromise are regarded as treasonous Kremlin loyalism it’s good to have an understanding of the fact that the only reason we survived that perilous standoff was because Washington made compromises and pulled its Jupiter missiles out of Turkey and Italy. Third, the Cuban Missile Crisis shows how aggressively the US will respond to a foreign rival placing a military threat near its border.

The Single Dumbest Thing The Empire Asks Us To Believe

The dumbest thing the US-centralized empire asks us to believe is that the military encirclement of its top two geopolitical rivals is a defensive action, rather than an act of extreme aggression.https://t.co/LhZW6sQv9I

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) May 1, 2023

As we’ve discussed previously, the single dumbest thing the US empire asks us to believe is that its amassing of war machinery near the borders of its top two geopolitical rivals should be seen as a defensive measure, rather than the act of extreme aggression that it obviously is. The US empire was the aggressor when it expanded NATO and began turning Ukraine into a de facto NATO member, and it is the aggressor as it accelerates its encirclement of China and opens the floodgates of US-financed weapons into Taiwan.

We know the US would never in a million years tolerate such things being done anywhere near its own borders. We know this from the Cuban Missile Crisis, and we know this from the way empire managers talk about potential threats near the US border. There are US presidential candidates openly talking about invading Mexico just to take out drug cartels. Last month John Bolton penned a furious screed demanding aggressive military force against Cuba in response to reports that Havana and Beijing could possibly be in talks for a joint military training facility on the island at some point in the future. Earlier this year Senator Josh Hawley gave a speech at the Heritage Foundation ominously asking his audience to imagine a dark, horrifying future in which the Chinese military surrounds the United States, and his description of this frightening imaginary scenario matched the way the US military has actually been surrounding China in real life.

“Imagine a world where Chinese warships patrol Hawaiian waters, and Chinese submarines stalk the California coastline,” Hawley said. “A world where the People’s Liberation Army has military bases in Central and South America. A world where Chinese forces operate freely in the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean.”

This kind of rhetoric illustrates quite clearly that the managers of the US empire would regard military buildups by Russia and China near their borders as an incendiary and entirely unacceptable provocation  —  an act of war in and of itself.

And apologists for the empire would have you believe that wild discrepancy is perfectly fine and normal.

To demand that Russia and China tolerate foreign activities on their borders that the US would never even think about tolerating on its own borders is just demanding that the entire world lie down and submit to being ruled by Washington. It’s American supremacism at its worst.

Saying the US empire gets to do extremely aggressive things to other nations but those other nations aren’t allowed to do those same things to them is just saying you think the US rules the world. You’re saying it plays by different rules, because it’s in charge of the planet. You’re saying the US empire has a monopoly on military aggression in the same way the police in your society have a monopoly on violence. They’re allowed to act with extreme aggression on the borders of Russia and China for the same reasons that a police officer can legally tase you, but you can’t legally tase a police officer.

If you say Russia and China should let the US do things on their borders that it would never permit them to do on its own borders, what you are really saying is that you think the US should be functioning as the police, judge, jury and executioner of the entire world.

That is in fact the mainstream consensus on these conflicts. It normally gets obfuscated and manipulated to keep people from looking at it too closely, but that is in fact the argument being presented here. The US empire believes it is the rightful ruler of this planet, and those who are currently shaking their fists at Russia and China for refusing to accept this are fully behind it in that perspective.

Excellent analysis:

Scott Ritter: Putin Didn't Kill Prigozhin, but Ukraine is FINISHED

Yevgeny Prigozhin confirmed dead after plane crash, Russian investigators say

Russia’s investigative committee, which investigates serious crimes in the country, has confirmed that the head of the Wagner mercenary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was among the people killed in a plane crash.

The committee said on Sunday that after forensic testing, all 10 bodies recovered at the site had been identified, and their identities “conform to the manifest”.

Russia’s civil aviation authority said previously that Prigozhin and some of his top lieutenants were on the list of those onboard the plane that crashed on Wednesday.

The announcement prompted days of speculation over the fate of Prigozhin. He was known to have body doubles and to use multiple passports and disguises while travelling. There had been false reports of his death twice before, including after a plane crash in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2019. ...

Russia’s statement on Sunday did not provide any details as to what may have caused the crash, which came two months after Prigozhin’s short-lived mutiny in which Wagner troops captured a defence headquarters in Rostov and marched on Moscow.

Zelensky interview. Preparing stab in the back narrative

Ukrainian pilot ‘Juice’ among three killed in jet collision, Zelenskiy says

Three Ukrainian military pilots, including one nicknamed “Juice” who campaigned in the US for the supply of F-16s, were killed on Friday when two combat training aircraft collided in an accident over a region west of Kyiv, Ukraine’s air force has said in an indication of the risks faced by its members.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said in his nightly video address that the three men included Andriy Pilshchykov, “a Ukrainian officer, one of those who greatly helped our state”.

Investigators have begun to look into the causes of the accident, as the air force said there was no suggestion of Russian involvement. However, the incident underlines the risks to Ukrainian pilots who are often having to rely on old Soviet airframes that would not be in use were it not for the war.

Ukraine’s Counteroffensive Has Failed—It’s Time to Reevaluate

There is no question that the war in Ukraine has radically changed. Even Western media outlets that have been steadfastly cheerleading for this war – and, indeed, even Ukrainians themselves – are now admitting what battlefield realities dispositively prove. The much-vaunted Ukrainian counter-offensive – the imminent dramatic event we were assured for months would be transformative in finally giving Ukraine the upper hand and dislodging entrenched Russian positions inside Ukraine: a claim that doubled as a propaganda tool to assuage a growingly restless Western population about their endless support for this war – is now, no matter how you slice it, a failure.

After months of multi-pronged attacks, Ukraine’s gains are so minimal and trivial as to be barely worth noting. Russia continues to occupy a very significant chunk of both Eastern and southern Ukraine, along with Crimea which they have held since 2014. Even Western intelligence reports acknowledge that the Russians’ defensive positions are more fortified and entrenched than any seen in decades. The U.S. has already depleted its own stockpiles of artillery and other vital weapons and simply does not have to give Ukraine what they need to have any hope of changing this situation in anything resembling the near- or the short-term future. ...

Joe Biden just asked for another $25 billion to keep this war going – as he offered $700 checks per household to the victims of the Maui fire and as profits for the European arms industry reach such record heights that they do not even bother to conceal their glee. Even if you were someone who supported the US role in Ukraine back in February of 2022 with the best of intentions – namely, you wanted to help a country seeing to avoid Russian domination – the failed nature of this mission has to compel a re-evaluation of perspective and policy. The last thing this war is doing is protecting Ukraine and Ukrainians. It is destroying both of those while imposing suffering among everyone in the U.S. and Western countries other than a tiny sliver of arms dealers and intelligence agencies. In other words, the war in Ukraine is following exactly the same pattern as every other U.S. war fought over the last 50 years.

Neocon adventure in Niger risks big conflict in West Africa

Bloomberg TV PANICS Over Well Paid UPS Drivers

Thanks to NLRB's Cemex Decision, 'Union-Busting Just Got a Lot Harder'

The National Labor Relations Board on Friday announced a new framework for determining when companies must bargain with unions without an election—a policy that supporters said will make union-busting much more difficult.

Following the NLRB's decision in Cemex Construction Materials Pacific, when workers ask an employer to voluntarily recognize a union as their bargaining representative, the company can voluntarily do so and begin good-faith negotiations.

Alternatively, the company may file a petition seeking an election, and as long as it does not commit unfair labor practices, one will be held. However, if a company does engage in such violations—or refuses to voluntarily recognize a union and fails to file a petition—the NLRB will now order the employer to recognize and bargain with the union without an election.

In other words, "union-busting just got a lot harder," More Perfect Union said on social media. "This brings the board's position closer to the old Joy Silk doctrine, which held that if a majority of workers signed union cards, there didn't need to be an election at all and bosses just had to recognize the union and bargain in good faith."

The Joy Silk doctrine came from a 1949 NLRB decision and was replaced by the Gissel doctrine in a 1969 U.S. Supreme Court case.

Ex-Alabama deputy sheriff sentenced to prison for sexual assault on woman in his custody

A former Alabama deputy sheriff has been sentenced to 12 and a half years in prison for sexually assaulting a woman in his custody. On 30 January 2020, while on duty as a Dallas county deputy sheriff, 33-year-old Joshua Davidson placed a woman in custody following a traffic stop. He drove her down a dark road to a desolate location where he forced her to perform oral sex on him against her will, the justice department said in a statement.

The victim, who reported the assault immediately, was afraid that Davidson would shoot her if she did not cooperate, the statement added.

In May, Davidson pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting the woman. WSFA reports that Davidson had only been employed by the sheriff’s office for three months before the assault and that the US Marshals Service arrested him in July 2020 in New Hampshire before extraditing him to Alabama.

Following the arrest, authorities said Davidson faced charges of kidnapping, human trafficking and sodomy, WSFA reports. Records reviewed by the news station showed that Davidson had also worked for the Greenville police department and the sheriff’s offices in Butler and Crenshaw counties.

Family of Kenneth Chamberlain, Black Man Killed in 2011 by Police, Settles with City of White Plains

Death of New York motorcyclist in ‘buy-and-bust’ police operation deemed homicide

The death of a new New York scooter rider who died during a “buy-and-bust” police operation in the Bronx has been upgraded to a homicide, the city medical examiner has said. The examiner ruled Eric Duprey’s death a homicide, caused by blunt force trauma to his head. Duprey, 30, died on Wednesday after a New York police department sergeant threw a picnic cooler at him as he was riding off, causing him to lose control of his scooter and smash into a tree and a parked car.

He was pronounced dead at the scene, according to a news release from the New York attorney general’s office. ...

In a statement, the NYPD said Duprey had been attempting to flee from police and committed to “a full, thorough, and transparent investigation of this incident to determine the facts”.

Trump Trial Date Set For MARCH 4, 2024 In 2020 Election Case, ONE DAY After Super Tuesday

Trump legal team claims trial dates ‘by design’ clash with election campaign

Donald Trump’s legal spokesperson has predicted that forthcoming early trial dates in the former president’s four criminal cases will not hold, and that his multiple cases could clash with the final stages of the 2024 presidential election campaign and voting.

Alina Habba told the Fox News Sunday show that prosecutors’ plans for fast turnarounds in Trump’s two federal criminal cases and the state indictments in New York and Georgia amounted to “unrealistic theatrics”. She said that each of the trials would last from four to six weeks, raising the threat of overlapping schedules.

“No judge is going to say you can be in two trials in two different states, because a lot of these overlap. They are going to have to go into October, November of next year,” she said.

Habba, who acts as general counsel for the Trump-supporting political fundraising group Save America PAC, claimed that the possibility of extending the trials right up to election day, 5 November, next year, was “by design”.

She claimed, without providing evidence, that Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton county in Georgia who is leading the prosecution of Trump over his attempts to overturn the 2020 election result in Georgia, and Jack Smith, the special counsel who has spearheaded the two federal indictments, were engaged in a “coordinated effort” with partisan motive. “We know this is intentional – it’s to tie [Trump] up, it’s definitely political,” Habba said.

Bernie Sanders BENDS THE KNEE To Biden, Says Cornel West Run A DISTRACTION From DEFEATING TRUMP

How 19th-century pineapple plantations turned Maui into a tinderbox

In the late 18th century, when the Hawaiian Kingdom became a sovereign state, Lahaina carried such an abundance of water that early explorers reportedly anointed it “Venice of the Pacific”. A glut of natural wetlands nourished breadfruit trees, extensive taro terraces and fishponds that sustained wildlife and generations of Native Hawaiian families. But more than a century and a half of plantation agriculture, driven by American and European colonists, have depleted Lahaina’s streams and turned biodiverse food forests into tinderboxes. Today, Hawaii spends $3bn a year importing up to 90% of its food. This altered ecology, experts say, gave rise to the 8 August blaze that decimated the historic west Maui town and killed more than 111 people.

“The rise of plantation capital spawned the drying of the west side of Maui,” said Kamana Beamer, a historian and a former member of the Hawaii commission on water resource management, which is charged with protecting and regulating water resources. “You can see the link between extractive, unfettered capitalism at the expense of our natural resources and the ecosystem.”

Drawn to Hawaii’s temperate climate and prodigious rainfall, sugar and pineapple white magnates began arriving on the islands in the early 1800s. For much of the next two centuries, Maui-based plantation owners like Alexander & Baldwin and Maui Land & Pineapple Company reaped enormous fortunes, uprooting native trees and extracting billions of gallons of water from streams to grow their thirsty crops. (Annual sugar cane production averaged 1m tons until the mid-1980s; a pound of sugar requires 2,000lb of freshwater to produce.) Invasive plants that were introduced as livestock forage, like guinea grass, now cover a quarter of Hawaii’s surface area. The extensive use of pesticides on Maui’s pineapple fields poisoned nearby water wells.

The dawn of large-scale agriculture dramatically changed land practices in Maui, where natural resources no longer served as a mode of food production or a habitat for birds but a means of generating fast cash, said Lucienne de Naie, an east Maui historian and chair of the Sierra Club Maui group. “The land was turned from this fertile plain – with these big healthy trees, wetland taros and dryland crops like banana and breadfruit – to a mass of monoculture: to rows and rows of sugar cane, and rows and rows of pineapple,” she said. ...

In Hawaii, water is held in a public trust controlled by the government for the people. But on Maui, 16 of the top 20 water users are resorts, time-shares and short-term condominium rentals equipped with emerald golf courses and glittering pools, according to a 2020 report from the county’s board of water supply. The 40-acre Grand Wailea resort, the island’s largest water consumer, devoured half a million gallons of water daily – the amount needed to supply more than 1,400 single-family homes. Over the past two decades, Native Hawaiians have fought lengthy legal battles to reclaim their water rights and restore depleted streams for domestic and traditional practices like sustainable fishing and taro farming.

Bare power lines and ‘obsolete’ poles were possible cause of Hawaii fires

In the first moments of the Maui fires, when high winds brought down power poles, slapping electrified wires to the dry grass below, there was a reason the flames erupted all at once in long, neat rows – those wires were bare, uninsulated metal that could spark on contact. Videos and images analyzed by the Associated Press confirmed those wires were among miles of line that Hawaiian Electric Co left naked to the weather and often-thick foliage, despite a recent push by utilities in other wildfire- and hurricane-prone areas to cover up their lines or bury them.

Compounding the problem is that many of the utility’s 60,000 mostly wooden power poles, which its own documents described as built to “an obsolete 1960s standard”, were leaning and near the end of their projected lifespan. They were nowhere close to meeting a 2002 national standard that key components of Hawaii’s electrical grid be able to withstand 105mph winds. A 2019 filing said it had fallen behind in replacing the old wooden poles because of other priorities and warned of a “serious public hazard” if they “failed”.

Google street view images of poles taken before the fire show the bare wire. It is “very unlikely” a fully-insulated cable would have sparked and caused a fire in dry vegetation, said Michael Ahern, who retired this month as director of power systems at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts. ...

Hawaiian Electric is facing a spate of new lawsuits that seek to hold it responsible for the deadliest US wildfire in more than a century. The number of confirmed dead stands at 115, and the county expects that to rise.

Growing number of countries consider making ecocide a crime

A growing number of countries are considering introducing laws to make ecocide a crime. Mexico is the latest country where politicians are seeking to deter environmental damage – and to get justice for its victims – by criminalising it. Karina Marlen Barrón Perales, congresswoman for Nuevo León, has submitted a bill to the Mexican congress introducing a new crime of “ecocide”.

While damaging the environment is already a civil offence in most countries, recognition of ecocide elevates the most egregious cases to a crime – with accompanying penalties.The new Mexican bill looks to criminalise “any unlawful or wanton act committed with the knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment”. If passed, anyone found guilty of ecocide could be jailed for up to 15 years and fined as much as 1,500 pesos (£70) a day.

The Mexican bill uses a definition of ecocide developed by an international panel of legal experts in 2021. The definition was mainly intended to be adopted by the international criminal court through an amendment to the Rome statute – the key goal of the Stop Ecocide Foundation – but is now also being used for national-level legislation.

Only a few states around the world have criminalised ecocide, including Vietnam, Ukraine and Russia. Ukraine’s public prosecutor is already investigating a possible case of ecocide against Russia for breaching the Nova Kakhovka dam. France became the first EU country to put ecocide into law in 2021, although the wording is not as strong as campaigners had hoped for. A test case involving carcinogenic chemicals is currently in the courts.

Similar draft laws have been submitted in other countries, including the Netherlands. Belgium is poised to finalise its own version of the law while the Catalan parliament is leading efforts to criminalise ecocide within the wider Spanish penal code. In Scotland, Labour MSP Monica Lennon is trying to introduce an ecocide bill and will launch a public consultation on the matter in the autumn. In Brazil, where deforestation of the Amazon rainforest has been repeatedly described as a crime, political party PSOL put forward an ecocide bill to congress in June.

Also of Interest

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

Diana Johnstone: A Voice Heard in the Land

Oliver Anthony CALLS OUT Republican Elites: 'Song Was About You'

WATCH: BRICS Summit Disappointments

Ukraine’s Vain Search for Wonder Weapons

The NYT & WSJ’s Critical Articles About Kiev’s Counteroffensive Explain Why It Failed

So Much Winning ... And More ...

He became the first Black mayor of a rural Alabama town. Then a white minority locked him out

Justice department fights asylum seeker’s lawsuit over separation from her son

The Campaign To Keep Electric Bills High

‘I’m not the guilty one’: the water protector facing jail time for trying to stop a pipeline

Thousands Evacuated After Chemical Leak and Massive Fire at 'Cancer Alley' Oil Refinery

New dawn for Arctic’s first people: the Inuit plan to reclaim their sea

THIS Is Why The Rest Of The World Hates Us!

A Little Night Music

Big Mama Thornton - Rollin' Stone

Big Mama Thornton - I Feel the Way I Feel

Big Mama Thornton - Ain't Nothin' You Can Do

Big Mama Thornton - Big Mama's Bumble Bee

Big Mama Thornton - Little Red Rooster

Willie Mae 'Big Mama' Thornton - Big Mama's Coming Home

Big Mama Thornton - Everything Gonna Be Alright

Big Mama Thornton - Let's Go Get Stoned

Big Mama Thornton - Hound Dog