This evening's music features Memphis bluesman Furry Lewis.

Here are some stories from tonight's posting:

Glenn Greenwald: As Bulk NSA Spying Expires, Scare Tactics Can’t Stop "Sea Change" on Surveillance

I don't know if I'd assume that simply because the Obama administration has no legitimate legal authority to "hoover up" your records that they would actually stop doing it. Hell, those fellas make war without legitimate legal authority, what's going to stop them from spying on your phone calls?

For the First Time Since 9/11, Congress Checks the Security State

Sunday night marked the first time that Congress has limited the executive branch’s surveillance authority since the terror attacks in 2001 set off a dystopian explosion in the government’s ability to spy on people inside and outside its borders.

But it was not so much a glorious moment of constitutional rebalancing for the legislative branch as it was parliamentary farce as usual. Faced with the long-planned expiration at midnight of three contentious provisions of the Patriot Act, the Republican-controlled Senate was simply unable to get it together and vote to renew the surveillance powers.

That failure to act was consequential. One of the three provisions had been used — improperly, it turns out — as legal justification for a National Security Agency program that collected phone records on millions of Americans without a warrant or any probable cause, along with other business records.

So as of today, for the first time in 14 years, you can make phone calls without the NSA hoovering up the records of who you called and for how long.

McConnell finally caved to reality with just hours to go, dropping his opposition to the USA Freedom Act, and allowing a vote on whether to proceed with it. That vote was 77-17.

By that point, however, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., was on a tear, his opposition to Fourth Amendment violations supercharged by a need to call attention to his flagging presidential campaign.

Paul prevented the Freedom Act from passing before the midnight deadline — but with the cloture vote a done deal, a final vote is expected mid-week.

Zombie Patriot Act Will Keep U.S. Spying—Even if the Original Dies

Not only does the U.S. government have all sorts of other ways to collect the same kind of intelligence outlined in the Patriot Act, but there’s also a little-noticed back door in the act that allows U.S. spy agencies to gather information in pretty much the same ways they did before.

In other words, there’s a zombie Patriot Act—one that lives on, though the existing version is dead. ...

For starters, there will be what’s left of the Patriot Act itself. One former U.S. intelligence official told The Daily Beast that Section 214 of the law, which allows “pen register/trap & trace,” could be used to collect phone and even email records. That would not only cover the gap from the expiring NSA program that collects the phone records of Americans’ landline calls, but potentially expand the government’s collection. (No wonder the NSA largely views the bill that would reform the Patriot Act as a major win.)

That former official and another both noted that there are other tools, including under different laws than the Patriot Act, for obtaining “roving wiretaps,” which allow the government to monitor one person’s multiple communications devices.

Following the Senate vote to proceed on to the Freedom Act, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) told The Daily Beast that the intelligence agencies did have a means to continue surveillance of terrorists and spies.

“I think there are other tools that can be used, but I’m not going to elaborate on them,” Inhofe said. ...

Then there’s another powerful tool that the FBI and intelligence agencies have long had in their arsenal and still will—national-security letters. They make it relatively easy for investigators to gather up all kinds of communications records. This authority can be used to collect phone, Internet, and financial records.

Appeals Court Refuses to Block Release of Guantánamo Force-Feeding Videos

Sixteen media organizations, including The Intercept’s publisher First Look Media, are seeking footage of Abu Wa’el Dhiab, who was repeatedly restrained and force fed while on hunger strike. ...

The government has argued that releasing the videos would harm national security by, among other things, inflaming “Muslim sensitivities overseas.” Last October, District Judge Gladys Kessler rejected their arguments and ordered the videos made public, with redactions to protect the identity of Guantánamo guards. The government then appealed.

Today, the U.S. Court of Appeals in the Washington, D.C., called the government’s appeal “premature,” and declined to weigh in on the merits of releasing the videos.

Kessler’s order required further negotiations over redactions, the appeals judges wrote in their opinion, and “it is possible that appropriate redactions will limit the scope of, or perhaps eliminate altogether, the government’s concerns over release of the videotapes.”

Court Allows Germany's Key Role in Deadly US Drone Program to Continue

German Court Turns Down Drone Lawsuit but Leaves Door Open to Others

Amid the grim accounts of civilian deaths from U.S. drone strikes, the attack that killed Faisal bin Ali Jaber’s relatives has stood out. ...

Earlier this week, the drone killings were the focal point of a historic lawsuit that was heard in a German courtroom. Though a panel of German judges dismissed the case on Wednesday, and the current security crisis in Yemen prevented Faisal from attending the proceedings, he and his attorneys consider their effort a victory, marking the first time Germany’s role in U.S. drone strikes has been acknowledged in court.

“One of the good things to come out of the decision that was taken by the judges is that an appeal is immediately available to us,” Faisal said in a phone interview. “So the path remains clear for us to continue challenging this case in the German courts.” ...

“Some people, perhaps some German people, may think that the story was really about who presses the button and perhaps Germany isn’t responsible for that,” Faisal said. “But actually, the infrastructure and what goes on behind the scenes to allow all of this to take place is crucial to the story. And the other side of the story is that innocent people are dying and suffering on a daily basis as a result of the drone program. And that’s what this case is aimed at — to help the German people understand that Ramstein plays a fundamental role in this process.” ...

The court also affirmed that the plaintiffs had standing to file their complaint even though they are not German citizens and live outside Germany — thus rejecting a key argument put forward by government attorneys. Potentially paving the way for future litigation, Craig called the court’s position a “huge step forward.”

Faisal and his fellow plaintiffs have a month to file an appeal, and according to Craig, “absolutely” intend to do so.

Black Americans killed by police twice as likely to be unarmed as white people

Guardian analysis finds 102 people killed by police so far this year were unarmed, and that agencies are killing people at twice the rate calculated by US government

An analysis of public records, local news reports and Guardian reporting found that 32% of black people killed by police in 2015 were unarmed, as were 25% of Hispanic and Latino people, compared with 15% of white people killed.

The findings emerged from a database filled by a five-month study of police fatalities in the US, which calculated that local and state police and federal law enforcement agencies are killing people at twice the rate calculated by the US government’s official public record of police homicides. The database names five people whose names have not been publicly released.

The Guardian’s statistics include deaths after the police use of a Taser, deaths caused by police vehicles and deaths following altercations in police custody, as well as those killed when officers open fire. They reveal that 29% of those killed by police, or 135 people, were black. Sixty-seven, or 14%, were Hispanic/Latino, and 234, or 50%, were white. In total, 102 people who died during encounters with law enforcement in 2015 have been unarmed.

The figures illustrate how disproportionately black Americans, who make up just 13% of the country’s total population according to census data, are killed by police. Of the 464 people counted by the Guardian, an overwhelming majority – 95% – were male, with just 5% female.

Steven Hawkins, the executive director Amnesty International USA, described the racial imbalance as “startling”. Hawkins said: “The disparity speaks to something that needs to be examined, to get to the bottom of why you’re twice as likely to be shot if you’re an unarmed black male.”

Keiser Report: We Are All Greeks Now

Chris Hedges: Karl Marx Was Right

The final stages of capitalism, Marx wrote, would be marked by developments that are intimately familiar to most of us. Unable to expand and generate profits at past levels, the capitalist system would begin to consume the structures that sustained it. It would prey upon, in the name of austerity, the working class and the poor, driving them ever deeper into debt and poverty and diminishing the capacity of the state to serve the needs of ordinary citizens. It would, as it has, increasingly relocate jobs, including both manufacturing and professional positions, to countries with cheap pools of laborers. Industries would mechanize their workplaces. This would trigger an economic assault on not only the working class but the middle class—the bulwark of a capitalist system—that would be disguised by the imposition of massive personal debt as incomes declined or remained stagnant. Politics would in the late stages of capitalism become subordinate to economics, leading to political parties hollowed out of any real political content and abjectly subservient to the dictates and money of global capitalism.

But as Marx warned, there is a limit to an economy built on scaffolding of debt expansion. There comes a moment, Marx knew, when there would be no new markets available and no new pools of people who could take on more debt. This is what happened with the subprime mortgage crisis. Once the banks cannot conjure up new subprime borrowers, the scheme falls apart and the system crashes.

Capitalist oligarchs, meanwhile, hoard huge sums of wealth—$18 trillion stashed in overseas tax havens—exacted as tribute from those they dominate, indebt and impoverish. Capitalism would, in the end, Marx said, turn on the so-called free market, along with the values and traditions it claims to defend. It would in its final stages pillage the systems and structures that made capitalism possible. It would resort, as it caused widespread suffering, to harsher forms of repression. It would attempt in a frantic last stand to maintain its profits by looting and pillaging state institutions, contradicting its stated nature.

Marx warned that in the later stages of capitalism huge corporations would exercise a monopoly on global markets. “The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe,” he wrote. “It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.” These corporations, whether in the banking sector, the agricultural and food industries, the arms industries or the communications industries, would use their power, usually by seizing the mechanisms of state, to prevent anyone from challenging their monopoly. They would fix prices to maximize profit. They would, as they [have been doing], push through trade deals such as the TPP and CAFTA to further weaken the nation-state’s ability to impede exploitation by imposing environmental regulations or monitoring working conditions. And in the end these corporate monopolies would obliterate free market competition.

A May 22 editorial in The New York Times gives us a window into what Marx said would characterize the late stages of capitalism:

As of this week, Citicorp, JPMorgan Chase, Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland are felons, having pleaded guilty on Wednesday to criminal charges of conspiring to rig the value of the world’s currencies. According to the Justice Department, the lengthy and lucrative conspiracy enabled the banks to pad their profits without regard to fairness, the law or the public good.

... “The old is dying, the new struggles to be born, and in the interregnum there are many morbid symptoms,” Antonio Gramsci wrote.

What comes next is up to us.