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"Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy."

-- George F. Kennan

News and Opinion

It’s Not The Responsibility Of The Global South To Bring Down The Empire. It’s Ours.

The past year has shown that a lot of anti-imperialists tend to exaggerate the strength of the US empire’s enemies.

After October 7 many said the attack would unify the Axis of Resistance against Israel and the Zionist entity would fall in short order, but that unified confrontation never materialized because Iran wasn’t willing to take on an entire global empire backed only by a few small militant factions scattered around west Asia.

Now Syria has been captured, Hezbollah is greatly weakened, Gaza is rubble, and the West Bank is primed for annexation.

The fact of the matter is that the empire has been able to rule the world in the way that it has for a reason. It’s extremely powerful, and its ruthless methods of coercion, control and manipulation are very effective.

I point this out not to demean the efforts of those who try to resist it, but to tell westerners that we can’t expect the resistance fighters of the global south to fight all our battles for us. There can be a temptation to sit back and cheerlead for this or that state or militant group and say they’re going to bring the empire to its knees, but really it isn’t their responsibility to end the western empire. It’s ours.

Hamas, Hezbollah, Ansar Allah, and the various militias in the region are relatively small groups with relatively limited resources and capabilities. Iran, Russia and China have their own concerns and are primarily focused on surviving the empire’s aggressions with their own national sovereignty intact. It is very possible that the rise of China will end up dissolving the US empire’s stranglehold on our planet, but this could take a long time.

Empires always fall, but there is no law inscribed upon the fabric of the universe which says the end of this particular empire must necessarily come soon. It could easily take a century or more if we don’t nuke ourselves in the meantime, and if the looming environmental disasters on the horizon don’t destroy human civilization first.

This is not an expression of pessimism but a call to focus. It’s not fair for us to shirk off the responsibility of ending the western empire onto foreigners in struggling nations who all have a lot more problems than we do. It is fully within our capability to awaken a revolutionary zeitgeist within our society so that we can use the power of our vast numbers to take down this machine and create a better world.

We can begin working toward this awakening today. Doing everything we can to help people see the unacceptable nature of the empire and its abuses, not just with their minds but with their hearts as well. We have a historically unprecedented ability to circulate ideas, information and footage. Media has never in history been this democratized. We are living in unprecedented times, which means unprecedented developments are possible.

We vastly outnumber our rulers. They rule solely by our consent. The empire requires not only our docility and obedience but our labor and our continued purchasing behavior as well. If enough of us refuse to consent to giving them any of these things, we can force the end of our corrupt, murderous governments and systems, and replace them with something far healthier.

Everything in our civilization is geared toward making us forget that we can do this at any time. Everything about our civilization is designed to eclipse the possibility of real revolution from our consciousness. Our politics. Our schooling. Our news media. Our entertainment. Our mainstream culture. It’s all designed to trick us into ignoring the colossal elephant in the room that we don’t actually need to put up with the way things are if we don’t want to.

It is our responsibility to help our fellow westerners notice the elephant, using every means at our disposal. Help everyone around us see how fucked things are, how fucked over we’re all being by allowing things to continue in this way, and how we don’t need to allow it to.

The empire of lies is built upon a closed set of eyelids. Once those eyes snap open, the whole thing comes tumbling down.

Trump’s Middle East envoy visits Netanyahu in push for Gaza ceasefire

The US Middle East envoy chosen by the president-elect, Donald Trump, met the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, on Saturday amid efforts to secure a hostage deal and ceasefire in Gaza, an Israeli official said.

On Friday, Steve Witkoff met the Qatari prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, to discuss “the latest developments in the region, especially the efforts aimed at reaching a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip”, the Qatari foreign ministry said.

After Witkoff’s visit to the mediator in Qatar, the envoy, who has reportedly assured that the US would continue to work towards a deal to end the war soon, flew to Israel where he met Netanyahu.

After their talk, Netanyahu’s office said the prime minister would send the director of the Mossad foreign intelligence agency, David Barnea, to Qatar’s capital, “in order to continue advancing a deal to release our hostages”.

It was not immediately clear when Barnea would travel to Doha, but the US is pressing for a deal before Trump takes office on 20 January. Barnea’s presence means high-level Israeli officials who would need to sign off on any agreement are now involved.

Alastair Crooke : Should Trump Trust Netanyahu?

Israel Refusing To Commit to a Permanent Gaza Ceasefire as Part of Hostage Deal

One of the main disputes in the ongoing Gaza hostage and ceasefire negotiations in Qatar is Israel’s refusal to commit to ending the war after a potential deal’s second phase, Haaretz reported on Sunday.

A permanent ceasefire has been one of Hamas’s main demands, and the report said the Palestinian group wants the genocidal war to end after the second phase of the deal.

Instead of committing to a permanent ceasefire, the report said there will be an attempt to present a US commitment to “work with Israel towards ending the war.” That would mean the deal would hinge on a US promise to pressure Israel to end military operations in Gaza, and there would be no actual commitment from Israel.

The Haaretz report comes as US officials are insisting that a deal is “very close.” Hamas officials have also told the media that negotiations have been moving in a positive direction and that they were waiting for the Israeli officials Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sent to Qatar to approve their latest draft proposal.

Larry Johnson : Will the Palestinians Surrender?

MLA Members for Palestine Protest Denial of BDS Vote at National Assembly

"The more they try to silence us, the louder we will be!"

That was the message that protesters at the Modern Language Association Delegate Assembly in New Orleans wanted to send Saturday after the executive council of the MLA—the preeminent U.S. professional group for scholars of language and literature—blocked them from holding a member vote on a resolution endorsing the international Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights.

Like the resolution recently passed by the American Historical Association, the declaration issued by MLA Members for Justice in Palestine accuses Israel of committing scholasticide in Gaza, where—in addition to killing over 46,000 Palestinians, wounding nearly 110,000 others, and displacing around 2 million more—15 months of relentless Israeli onslaught has obliterated the embattled enclave's education infrastructure.

The MLA resolution—which supports the initial 2005 BDS call issued by Palestinian civil society groups—also acknowledges that international law experts accuse Israel of genocide and that the International Court of Justice, which is weighing a genocide case against Israel, has "determined that Israel is maintaining a system of apartheid."

"The MLA's commitment to 'justice throughout the humanities ecosystem' requires ending institutional complicity with genocide and supporting Palestinian colleagues," the statement asserts. "Therefore, be it resolved that we, the members of the MLA, endorse the 2005 BDS call."

Karim Mattar, an associate professor of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder, took part in Saturday's demonstration, during which supporters of the resolution staged a die-in and walkout, chanted slogans, and held a banner that read, "MLA Is Complicit in Genocide."

"I consider the executive council's decision to be a cowardly one," Mattar told Common Dreams. "The MLA is a humanities advocacy organization, and by repressing a membership vote, a democratic process to deliberate on the necessity of institutional divestment with companies that profit from genocide, it's actively contributing to the problem."

Matt Hoh : Trump and the Neocons Around Him

CIA Director Reiterates There’s No Evidence Iran Has Decided To Build a Nuclear Bomb

Outgoing CIA Director William Burns reiterated in an interview with NPR published on Friday that the US has not seen any sign that Iran has decided to build a nuclear weapon.

Burns was asked if the losses Iran and its allies have faced in recent months would make it more likely that Tehran would make a nuclear bomb. He said there was no indication that Tehran would reverse a public fatwa made by Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in 2003 that prohibited the development of weapons of mass destruction.

“We do not see any sign today that any such decision has been made, but we obviously watch it intently. You know that that sense of weakness could also theoretically create a possibility for serious negotiations, too,” Burns said.

Dialogue with Russia, walking away from Ukraine

Yoon Suk Yeol to miss start of South Korea impeachment trial on safety grounds

South Korea’s suspended president, Yoon Suk Yeol, will not attend the first hearing of his impeachment trial next week because of safety concerns, his lawyer has said. Yoon has been holed up in the presidential residence and protected by an elite guard force since being suspended and impeached last month following a short-lived declaration of martial law that plunged the country into political chaos.

He has refused to meet prosecutors and investigators, and earlier this month his presidential guard unit thwarted an attempt to arrest him after a tense hours-long standoff.

The constitutional court has scheduled five trial dates between 14 January and 4 February, which will proceed in his absence if he does not attend.

“Concerns about safety and potential incidents have arisen. Therefore, the president will not be able to attend the trial on 14 January,” lawyer Yoon Kab-keun said in a statement on Sunday. “The president is willing to appear at any time once safety issues are resolved.”

The court will decide whether to uphold his impeachment or restore him to office. Separately, investigators seeking to question Yoon on insurrection charges linked to his ill-fated martial law declaration are preparing another arrest attempt. Yoon would become the first sitting South Korean president to be arrested if investigators are able to detain him. If convicted of insurrenction he faces prison or even the death penalty. Yoon’s legal team said his guards remained on “high alert”.

Sweden neither at war nor at peace, says PM, as warships sent to Baltic Sea

The Swedish prime minister has said that his country is neither at war nor at peace as he announced that Sweden would be sending armed forces into the Baltic Sea for the first time as part of increased surveillance efforts amid a spate of suspected sabotage of undersea cables.

The country announced it will contribute up to three warships and a surveillance aircraft to a Nato effort to monitor critical infrastructure and Russia’s “shadow fleet” as the alliance tries to guard against sabotage of underwater infrastructure.

Speaking on the opening day of Sweden’s three-day annual Folk och Försvars (people and defence) conference in Sälen, northern Sweden, Ulf Kristersson also commented on the recent Baltic undersea cable breaks, saying “hostile intent cannot be ruled out”.

Amid hybrid attacks and “proxy wars” – citing Iran’s alleged use of members of Swedish gangs to commit crime – Kristersson said: “Sweden is not at war. But there is no peace either.”

He added: “True peace requires freedom and the absence of serious conflicts between countries. But we and our neighbours are exposed to hybrid attacks, carried out not with robots and soldiers, but with computers, money, disinformation and the risk of sabotage.” Those who want peace, he said, must “be prepared for war”. In a later press conference he said Sweden would be sending an ASC 890 reconnaissance aircraft and up to three warships. “This is the first time that Sweden has contributed armed forces in our own immediate area,” he said.

Italy releases Iranian man wanted by US over drone attack in Jordan

Italy has released an Iranian citizen wanted by the US over a drone attack in Jordan that killed three Americans a year ago, after the Italian justice minister asked a court to revoke his arrest. Mohammad Abedini has already returned to Iran, Iranian state TV said on Sunday afternoon.

He was scheduled to appear at a Milan court on Wednesday in connection with his bid for house arrest pending extradition to the US. Abedini was arrested on a US warrant on 16 December, three days before Italian journalist Cecilia Sala was detained while on a reporting trip to Iran. Sala, who was believed to be held as a bargaining chip for Abedini’s release, returned home last week.

The US Department of Justice has accused Abedini of supplying the drone technology to Iran that was used in a January 2024 attack on a US outpost in Jordan that killed three American troops. An official note on the case released by the Italian justice ministry on Sunday said that under Italy-US extradition treaties, “only crimes that are punishable according to the laws of both sides can lead to extradition, a condition which, based on the state of documents, can’t be considered as existing”.

The ministry said that the potential charge against Abedini – criminal association for violating the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, a US federal law – “did not correspond to any conduct recognised by Italian law as a crime”.

Canada’s election is about to have an Elon Musk problem with Trudeau’s exit

The decision by the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, this week to resign as head of the Liberal party has set in motion a leadership race against the backdrop of a looming general election, which will be held amid political turmoil triggered by Donald Trump’s “America first” economic nationalism. It has also given Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, an opportunity to inject himself into yet another country’s political turmoil.

Since Trudeau’s resignation on Monday, Musk has posted repeatedly about Canadian politics on X – the platform formerly known as Twitter he bought in 2022 for $44bn. He has praised clips of Pierre Poilievre, the leader of Canada’s Conservative party, while relishing in Trudeau’s downfall and engaging with rightwing Canadian influencers.

Trump and Musk have been promoting the idea of Canada becoming part of the United States, something that every major Canadian party leader, including Poilievre, has rejected. Trudeau posted on Tuesday that there “isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell” of Trump’s proposal becoming reality.

“Girl, you’re not the governor of Canada anymore, so doesn’t matter what you say,” Musk tweeted in response in the middle of the night on Tuesday.

Musk’s posts are emblematic of his expanding attempts to influence global politics over the last year, during which he has formed alliances with a number of rightwing populist leaders, amplified far-right influencers and obsessively voiced conservative grievances. After spending more than $200m to back Trump’s re-election campaign, he has also positioned himself as a key figure in shaping US policy decisions and forced foreign leaders to take his provocations seriously. ... Musk’s intrusion into European politics has prompted leaders in the UK, France and Germany to speak out against his election interference and misinformation. Now it appears it is Canada’s turn to deal with the richest man in the world.

Exposing the Duchess of Disinformation, w/ Lee Fang

US supreme court curbed public scrutiny as it boosted security before Roe ruling

A newly uncovered document reveals that the US supreme court sought to beef up judicial protection, while also reducing public scrutiny of the court’s doings, before the court’s controversial decision to overturn Roe v Wade. The heavily redacted memorandum of agreement (MOA) on security is dated March 2022, and was obtained by the Guardian after being recently surfaced by governmentattic.com.

The document shows that the US marshals service and the supreme court of the United States police department (SCUSPD) agreed to enhance cooperation and intelligence sharing and provide protection for retired judges on request. It also mandated that the cost of USMS’s enhanced cooperation would be paid for by them and the department of justice, rather than being added to the judiciary’s budget.

Crucially, the MOA mandates that the court would maintain “exclusive legal custody and control” of all security-related records, even those in USMS possession. That means those records would be explicitly excluded from Freedom of Information Act (Foia) requirements, and hidden from public view. Even temporary USMS possession of a document, the MOA underlines, “does not operate in any way to divest the Supreme Court of complete and exclusive legal control of such records”.

Gabe Roth, executive director of Fix the Court, a non-profit that campaigns for greater transparency and accountability of the supreme court, said that the record-keeping arrangements made it “sound like Scotus is upset that you and I and others keep requesting travel records of the justices via Foia, and they’re trying to get around sharing them under the law”.

He added: “But since Foias are by nature backwards-looking in time, often by several years, I can’t imagine what the security implications of knowing that, say, ‘Justice X had a deputy marshal accompany her to a Harvard speech in 2023’ would be.”

DoJ releases its Tulsa race massacre report over 100 years after initial review

On Friday, the Department of Justice (DoJ) released its report on the Tulsa race massacre after announcing the review last September. The report came more than 100 years after a June 1921 report by the justice department’s Bureau of Investigation, a precursor to the FBI, blamed the massacre on Black men and alleged that perpetrators did not violate any federal laws.

The Friday DoJ report, however, acknowledged that the attack by white citizens on Black residents “was so systematic and coordinated that it transcended mere mob violence”.

“The Tulsa race massacre stands out as a civil rights crime unique in its magnitude, barbarity, racist hostility and its utter annihilation of a thriving Black community,” Kristen Clarke, the assistant attorney general of the DoJ’s civil rights division, said in a statement. “In 1921, white Tulsans murdered hundreds of residents of Greenwood, burned their homes and churches, looted their belongings, and locked the survivors in internment camps.”

“Until this day, the justice department has not spoken publicly about this race massacre or officially accounted for the horrific events that transpired in Tulsa. This report breaks that silence by rigorous examination and a full accounting of one of the darkest episodes of our nation’s past. This report lays bare new information and shows that the massacre was the result not of uncontrolled mob violence, but of a coordinated, military-style attack on Greenwood.”

The 126-page report was conducted by a team of lawyers and investigators from the Emmett Till Cold Case Unit of the Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division who “spoke with survivors and with descendants of survivors, examined firsthand accounts of the massacre given by individuals who are now deceased, studied primary source materials, spoke to scholars of the massacre and reviewed legal pleadings, books, and scholarly articles relating to the massacre”, according to the department.

Despite the report’s findings, Clarke noted that “there is no living perpetrator for the justice department to prosecute”. Last June, the Oklahoma supreme court threw out a lawsuit brought by Lessie Benningfield Randle and Viola Fletcher, two Tulsa race massacre survivors, that sought to make the city of Tulsa pay restitution to survivors and their descendants. Randle and Fletcher, who are both 110, were children at the time of the massacre.

It's getting a little hot down there in Magaville!

Steve Bannon condemns Elon Musk as ‘racist’ and ‘truly evil’

In an escalation of discontent among the highest-profile far-right followers of Donald Trump, his former adviser Steve Bannon has called Trump’s newest favorite, Elon Musk, “racist” and a “truly evil guy”, pledging to “take this guy down” and kick him out of the Maga movement.

In an interview with the Corriere della Sera newspaper in Italy, excerpts of which were published this weekend by Breitbart, Bannon criticised Musk’s embrace of some forms of immigration and vowed to ensure that Musk does not have top-level access to the White House.

“He is a truly evil guy, a very bad guy. I made it my personal thing to take this guy down,” Bannon said. “Before, because he put money in, I was prepared to tolerate it – I’m not prepared to tolerate it any more.” He added: “I will have Elon Musk run out of here by inauguration day”, which falls on 20 January. “He will not have full access to the White House. He will be like any other person.”

“This thing of the H-1B visas, it’s about the entire immigration system is gamed by the tech overlords. They use it to their advantage. The people are furious,” said Bannon, whom Trump fired from his White House position during his first administration but who later reinvented himself through his War Room podcast as one of the chief evangelists of the Maga movement.

Bannon further widened his aim to attack Musk’s fellow tech giants Peter Thiel and David Sacks for having South African heritage. “He [Musk] should go back to South Africa,” Bannon said. “Why do we have South Africans, the most racist people on earth, white South Africans, we have them making any comments at all on what goes on in the United States?” Arguing that Musk’s “sole objective is to become a trillionaire” and calling him a proponent of “techno-feudalism on a global scale”, Bannon said, “I don’t support that and we’ll fight it,” adding: “He won’t fight. He’s got the maturity of a little boy.

LA wildfires: stronger winds threaten further destruction, officials warn

With the two biggest wildfires in Los Angeles still less than 30% contained, officials in California warned on Sunday that strengthening winds in the coming days threatened to expand the swath of destruction through the city that has already seen at least 16 people killed and many neighborhoods erased.

Three wildfires were still burning Sunday in Los Angeles county, where more than 150,000 people remained under an evacuation warning. Firefighters said shifting Santa Ana winds could blow the Palisades fire, which has razed almost 24,000 acres, back on itself towards the coast.

At a news conference on Sunday afternoon, officials said more than 4,700 personnel were assigned to stopping the blazes from spreading as winds are forecast to pick up again from tonight through Wednesday.

Christian Litz, a battalion chief with the LA county fire department, said the Palisades fire was “looking really good as far as flame activity but there’s still heat all along the edges” and crew were still working to ensure there was “no fire progression or to limit it as much as possible.”

Litz said that in addition to fire crews clearing a fire perimeter, or contingency line, the department had deployed “an abundance” of airborne fire-fighting resources. “We have airplanes, we have helicopters, even drones. We’re dropping retardant, we’re dropping water everywhere we can to secure that edge,” he added.

CA Landlords SPIKE RENTS For Fire Survivors

2024 was hottest year on record for world’s land and oceans, US scientists confirm

It was the hottest year ever recorded for the world’s lands and oceans in 2024, US government scientists have confirmed, providing yet another measure of how the climate crisis is pushing humanity into temperatures we have previously never experienced.

Last year was the hottest in global temperature records stretching back to 1850, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa announced, with the worldwide average 1.46C (2.6F) warmer than the era prior to humans burning huge volumes of planet-heating fossil fuels.

This new record, 0.1C (0.18F) hotter than the previous high mark set in 2023, means that all of the 10 hottest years since 1850 have occurred in the past decade. The data supports separate figures released by European Union scientists this week that also show a record 2024, albeit those figures showed 2024 was 1.6C (2.8F) hotter than pre-industrial times, the first measure beyond the internationally-agreed threshold of keeping long-term temperatures below a 1.5C (2.7F) rise.

Nasa, which also released its temperature data on Friday, concurs that 2024 was a record year, being 1.47C (2.6F) hotter than the pre-industrial era. “All the groups agree, regardless of how they put the data together, there’s no question,” said Gavin Schmidt, a senior climate scientist at Nasa. “The long-term trends are very clear.”

Schmidt said the levels of global heating are pushing humanity beyond its historical experience of the Earth’s climate. “To put that in perspective, temperatures during the warm periods on Earth three million years ago – when sea levels were dozens of feet higher than today – were only around 3C warmer than pre-industrial levels,” he said. “We are halfway to Pliocene-level warmth in just 150 years.”

‘The worst way of dying’: scientists urge coordinated effort to stop whales getting tangled

At least 45 whales were entangled by fishing ropes and line on the east coast in 2024, and experts are calling for better management of fishing gear in Australia to prevent marine suffering. Dr Olaf Meynecke, a marine scientist at Griffith University, said the issue of preventing whale entanglements was “largely ignored in Australia”.

Meynecke and his team recorded 45 confirmed entanglements on the country’s east coast last year, but he believes the true figure is about 100. “They’re really just the tip of the iceberg,” he said. ...

While the number of confirmed yearly entanglements is small compared to the now healthy population of humpbacks – some 40,000 whales are estimated to migrate annually along Australia’s east coast – Meynecke said preventing such incidents was an ethical issue.

The constant drag of rope and floats over time slowly causes a whale to succumb to exhaustion. “It’s probably the worst way of dying for any marine … animal,” Meynecke said.

“It takes weeks to several months until they actually die,” he said. “When they are on their migration … they would have to travel thousands of kilometres. Even the smallest float around the tail would mean, over several weeks, a loss of all energy reserves.”

Also of Interest

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

Killing the Constitution at Gitmo

Judge Orders CPS to Come Clean on Deleted Assange Docs

Medea Benjamin: Pro-Palestine Activism & Trump’s Return

Israel Plans Long-Term Occupation of New Zone Inside Syria

Sense of impunity ‘absolute’: The NGO holding Israeli soldiers to account

Looting The 'Allies'

Wall Street Watchdog Warns “Clock Is Ticking on a Coming Catastrophic Financial Crash”

The Pacific Pallisades Fire

A Little Night Music

Howard Tate – Night Owl

Howard Tate – How Come My Bull Dog Don't Bark

Howard Tate – Louisiana 1927

Howard Tate – Everyday I Have The Blues

Howard Tate – Get It While You Can

Howard Tate – Ain’t Nobody Home

Howard Tate – Look At Granny Run Run

Howard Tate - I Learned It All The Hard Way

Howard Tate- Shoot 'Em All Down

Howard Tate - Have You Ever Had The Blues