This evening's music features New Orleans r&b singer and self-appointed "Emperor of the Universe," Ernie K-Doe.

Here are some stories from tonight's post:

What is Nakba Day?

Palestinians have been mourning the loss of their homeland since 1948, but Nakba Day, an annual day of commemoration inaugurated by the Palestinian Authority, is a relatively new addition to the calendar.

"Nakba" is just the Arabic word for disaster. After 1948, with the definite article “al” (i.e., al-Nakba), it became the proper name for the displacement of hundreds of thousands of persons and the establishment of a Jewish state following the Israeli War of Independence.

As Israelis were preparing an elaborate celebration for the nation's 50th anniversary, Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat decided that Palestinians should mark the 50th anniversary of the Nakba as well. He declared May 15, the day after Israeli independence in 1948, as Nakba Day.

In 2005, Nakba Day and Israel's Independence Day fell in the same week for the first time. This caused some conflation of the two events, with left-wing activists and Palestinian Israelis holding Nakba Day events, such as visiting deserted Palestinian villages on Independence Day, to the moral indignation of some other Israelis.

From that year, joint Nakba Day-Independence Day commemorations became an annual event. In 2011, however, the Knesset passed the so-called “Nakba Law” in 2011, which empowered the finance minister to defund NGOs marking Independence Day in a mournful manner.

The more Israel represses the Nakba, the stronger the memories

One can respect the other’s pain, about which there is no historical doubt, and, if we want to be honest and brave, one can also ask if the State of Israel has ever atoned for what it did, whether deliberately or accidentally, with forethought or lacking choice, in 1948. Has it ever abandoned the policy that caused the Nakba? Isn’t it the same policy of dispossession, occupation, oppression, destruction, and expulsion that continues to this day, 67 years after 1948, and 48 years after 1967? ...

But the truth is that there is no greater proof of Israel’s insecurity about the justness of its cause than the battle waged to forbid marking the Nakba. A people confident in its path would respect the feelings of the minority, and not try to trample on its heritage and memories. A people that knows something terrible is burning under its feet sees every reference to what happened as an existential threat.

Israel started to battle the Nakba immediately after it occurred; it did not allow the refugees to return to their homes and lands and confiscated their abandoned property. It destroyed nearly all of their 418 villages out of foresight, covered them with trees planted by the Jewish National Fund and prevented any mention of their existence.

The primitive concept was that one could erase the memory of a people with trees and suppress its pain and consciousness with laws and force. This country of monuments forbade any monument to their tragedy. This country of commemoration days and wallowing in grief forbade them to mourn. Every Arab carrying a rusty key is considered an enemy; any sign marking a destroyed village is an abomination.

Not only is there no justice in this, there’s no benefit in it, either. The more Israel tries to repress the memory, the stronger it gets.

FBI had internal concerns over licence plate readers, documents reveal

The FBI has deployed surveillance technology that can read car license plates around the country despite its own internal worries about the privacy implications of the mass tracking devices, newly released documents reveal.

An email exchange between FBI agents dated June 2012 records that the assistant director of the FBI postponed the purchase of a particular type of camera linked to LPRs after he was advised by his own legal department, the office of general counsel (OGC), of privacy concerns. The document is redacted, thus obscuring the precise nature of the camera, but it does note that the OGC is “still wrestling with LPR privacy issues”.

Another batch of documents obtained by the ACLU records the interest of the FBI’s Video Surveillance Unit (VSU) in LPRs stretching back some time. One document notes that the “VSU has spent years evaluating LPR products”.

Later in the same document it is revealed that LPRs were bought in “limited quantities and deployed to numerous field offices”. The equipment was purchased from a company called ELSAG North America headquartered in Brewster, New York, that claims to be able to record up to 1,800 license plates a minute with cameras mounted on police cars or on fixed points such as bridges or overpasses. ...

Jay Stanley, the ACLU’s expert on technology-related privacy issues, said that the heavily redacted documents released by the FBI left many questions still unanswered. “As is so often the case, we are left with the feeling that the public should know more about the policies that the FBI has developed – if the agency has guidance relating to privacy concerns over this very sensitive technology, then the public should be told about it.”

It’s Been 6 Months Since Tamir Rice Died, and the Cop Who Killed Him Still Hasn't Been Questioned

When the Cuyahoga County Sheriff's Department made its first public comments on Tuesday about its ongoing investigation into the death last November of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, it provided few details. Nearly six months since Cleveland police fatally shot Rice at a community center park where he had been waving around a toy gun, questions are mounting as to why the investigation has taken so long, especially given explicit surveillance footage of the shooting and the troubling police record of the officer who pulled the trigger.

Mother Jones has learned that the two officers involved in the shooting—Timothy Loehmann, who fired the shots, and Frank Garmback, who drove the police car—still have not been interviewed by investigators from the sheriff's department. According to an official familiar with the case, investigators have made more than one attempt to interview Loehmann and Garmback since the Cleveland Police Department handed over the case in January. ...

Michael P. Maloney and Henry Hilow, the two attorneys representing the officers, declined to comment to Mother Jones about the officers' participation in the investigation, saying it would be inappropriate to do so while the investigation was ongoing.

Coups, Massacres And Contras: The Legacy Of Washington’s New Point Man In Latin America

The Obama administration announced in December that it would immediately re-establish diplomatic relations with Cuba, a policy shift that ended 54 years of isolation. In another move that was diametrically opposed to this policy shift, it then imposed economic sanctions on Venezuela in March.

Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and president of Just Foreign Policy, argues that Obama realized his administration made a mistake implementing the sanctions, and so attempted to back-pedal by stating: “We do not believe that Venezuela poses a threat to the United States, nor does the United States threaten the Venezuelan government.”

Weisbrot added: “And then he did something that no U.S. president has done since 1999, when Hugo Chávez was president-elect of Venezuela: he met with Venezuela’s head of state. This was arguably as important for hemispheric relations as his meeting with Raúl Castro.”

But with the appointment of Feierstein, Weisbrot told MintPress News that he believes U.S. policy toward Latin America may not have changed at all.

“Feierstein’s been involved in campaigns against left governments since the U.S.-backed war against the Sandinistas in the 1980s,” Weisbrot told MintPress, adding that he can’t understand why nobody has reported on Feierstein’s appointment yet.

Indeed, a quick review of Feierstein’s track record in Latin America reveals that the new senior director for Western Hemisphere Affairs at the National Security Council has played an integral role in facilitating destabilization of South American countries since the 1980s.

Obama’s Ugly Reign - Fast Track

So this is how Barack Obama is moving into the final 20 months of his dismal neoliberal presidency, which he once (proudly) described as ideologically akin to the Eisenhower White House. He is nauseating much of his own Wall Street-captive party’s electoral base by trying to push through the absurdly regressive, secretive, eco-cidal, and global-corporatist Trans Pacific Partnership treaty – a massive investor rights measure that promises to reduce wages, deepen inequality, undermine popular sovereignty, and assault already endangered livable ecology in the name of (what else?) “free trade” and “growth.”

The treaty is so toxically capitalist and transparently authoritarian that even the leading right-wing corporate Democrats Bill and Hillary Clinton – champions of the arch-neoliberal North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) – have to keep their distance from it in accord with Mrs. Clinton’s presidential ambitions.

After going on television to childishly claim that U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren’s elementarily logical and evidence-based “arguments [against TPP] don’t stand the test of fact and scrutiny” (harsh if inept words for a top party colleague and ally), Obama was at first unable to persuade all but one U.S. Senate Democrat not to block his bid for “fast-track” legislation, which would grant the president to bring the TPP to an up-or-down floor vote with no amendments. A subsequent re-do secured enough sold-out Democratic votes to combine with unanimous Republican support to succeed in the upper Congressional body.

Hall of Shame

Joe Stiglitz: TTIP is for special interests

Trade Deals and the Logic of the Middle Finger

Optimism Finds a Cure

After news broke that Senate Democrats had voted against giving President Obama fast-track authority for his TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) ‘trade’ agreement there was a moment when true knowledge of the world was held ever-so-briefly in suspension. Eternal optimists of the liberal and progressive persuasions instantly declared that Democrats had acted on, if not quite their moral compasses, at least credible threats from the electorate that their futures as professional collectors of campaign contributions might be at risk. However, upon reading the ‘reasons’ for the vote it became clear that said Democrats were only moving slowly to assure they would be paid their proper tribute for endorsing the deal.

While optimism is certainly within the range of normal human emotions, those expressing it in socially beneficial forms can be found facing down militarized cops in Ferguson, Missouri, fighting mountaintop removal in West Virginia and occasionally burning cop cars in Baltimore. As Senate Democrats were quick to demonstrate, where optimism is never rewarded is in expectations that they will act in the public interest. It took only twenty-four short hours for the graftariat to ready itself to once again conduct the (rich) people’s business. If the fact of the reversal fails to impress, the speed with which it took place certainly should. With the capitalist coup (TPP, TTIP) now so near completion, the call of opposition has been rephrased as it always should have been, to ‘take the politics out of money.’ ...

Conspicuously missing from the current ‘moment’ is the soundtrack, the anti-commodity of social expression that makes official absurdity visible by offering contrast to it. The institutional panic that hit Senate Democrats when they realized they had momentarily slowed the trajectory of total capitulation to capitalist interests was met by equally panicked interpretation from the cooperative opposition that a crack had appeared that had not been made to appear. House Democrats may or may not pass ‘fast track’ and the TPP but jobs will nevertheless be outsourced, pensions looted, wedding parties in the Middle East bombed and Democrats (and Republicans) will remain craven and self-serving until a different order is established.