This evening's music features influential blues singer, songwriter and piano player Leroy Carr.

"A Europe of Equals": Report from Athens as Greek Voters Seek Alternatives to Austerity

Dominoes of Democracy? Europe's Left Finds Hope in Anti-Austerity Vote

While many in the mainstream media focus on the nitty-gritty economic implications of Sunday's landslide anti-austerity vote in Greece, leaders of Europe's left are hopeful that the outcome, a repudiation of harsh Troika-imposed policies, will start a long-awaited domino effect of democracy across the continent.

"Our deeply unequal global economy relies on ordinary people having no real voice over economic decisions, so this 'no' vote strengthens the battle for a fairer, more humane, people-centred Europe," Global Justice Now director Nick Dearden said on Sunday.

In a column for Ireland's Journal Media, anti-austerity activist Paul Murphy described Sunday's vote as "potentially the most important political event since the collapse of the Berlin Wall."

Noting that the win relied on an "overwhelming mobilization" of both the working class and young people, Murphy—who works with the Irish Anti-Austerity Alliance but was in Athens for the vote—said that "[d]epending on what happens next, it can represent a turning point towards a challenge to the rule of the 1% in Europe and the dominance of Thatcherite neo-liberalism."

Germany's democratic socialist Die Linke Party (Left Party) echoed that sentiment, with party chair Bernd Riexinger declaring: "Democracy achieved a victory in Europe today. The Greek people fought back for a second time against the catastrophic policies of social cutbacks and economic devastation. They said ‘No’ to further austerity, ‘No’ to a false medicine that always worsens the illness."

Economist Richard Wolff on Roots of Greek Crisis, Debt Relief & Rise of Anti-Capitalism in Europe

Eurozone tells Greece not to expect debt relief any time soon

Hopes fade for quick solution to thwart Grexit as Eurogroup finance chiefs stress they are waiting for Athens to accept further reforms

The Greek government has been told by its eurozone partners not to expect debt relief any time soon, amid fading hopes of decisive action to stop the country tumbling out of the currency union.

Eurozone finance ministers arriving for emergency talks in Brussels made it clear they were waiting on Athens to sign up to further reforms and were in no hurry to discuss debt relief.

Finance ministers are preparing the way for a summit of eurozone leaders that gets underway on Tuesday evening. The summit, called after Greeks rejected the eurozone-drafted bailout plan in a referemdum on Sunday, is seen as one of the last real chances to secure a deal to stop Greece crashing out of the euro.

Greek banks are on the brink of running out of cash, but senior European figures are already dampening hopes of any breakthrough. “What we are going to do today is to talk to each other and restore order,” said the president of the European commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, adding that there would be no overnight solution.

In a coordinated press statement, the leaders of France and Germany called on Greece to come up with “serious and credible proposals” at Tuesday’s summit which are consistent with its wish to stay in the eurozone.

Today’s Civilian Victims in Yemen Will be Ignored Because U.S. and its Allies Are Responsible

In Fayoush, Yemen this morning, just outside of Aden, “a massive airstrike” hit a marketplace and killed at least 45 civilians, wounding another 50. Officials told the AP that “bodies were strewn about following the strike.” The bombing was carried out by what is typically referred to as a “Saudi-led coalition”; it is rarely mentioned in Western media reports that the U.S. is providing very substantial support to this “Saudi-led” war in Yemen, now in its fifth month, which has repeatedly, recklessly killed Yemeni civilians.

Because these deaths of innocents are at the hands of the U.S. government and its despotic allies, it is very predictable how they will be covered in the U.S. None of the victims will be profiled in American media; it’ll be very surprising if any of their names are even mentioned. No major American television outlet will interview their grieving families. Americans will never learn about their extinguished life aspirations, or the children turned into orphans, or the parents who will now bury their infants. There will be no #FayoushStrong Twitter hashtags trending in the U.S. It’ll be like it never happened: blissful ignorance.

This is the pattern that repeats itself over and over. ...

All of that stands in the starkest contrast to the intense victim focus whenever an American or Westerner is killed by an individual Muslim. ...

This media imbalance is a vital propaganda tool. In U.S. media land, Americans are always the victims of violence and terrorism, always menaced and threatened by violent Muslim savages, always targeted for no reason whatsoever other than primitive Islamic barbarism. That mythology is sustained by literally disappearing America’s own victims, pretending they don’t exist, denying their importance through the casual invocation of clichés we’ve been trained to spout (collateral damage) and, most importantly of all, never humanizing them under any circumstances.

Our media's Isis threat hype machine: government stenography at its worst

If you turned on US cable news at any point last week, you might have thought this July 4 holiday would be our last weekend on earth – the supposed terrorist masterminds in Isis and their alleged vast sleeper cell army were going to descend upon America like the aliens in Independence Day and destroy us all.

CNN has led the pack in whipping Americans into a panic over the Isis threat, running story after story with government officials and terrorism industry money-makers hyping the threat, played against the backdrop of scary b-roll of terrorist training camps. Former CIA deputy director Mike Morell ominously told CBS last week that “I wouldn’t be surprised if we weren’t sitting here a week from today talking about an attack over the weekend in the United States.” MSNBC and Fox joined in too, using graphics and maps right out of Stephen Colbert’s satirical “Doom Bunker,” suggesting World War III was just on the verge of reaching America’s shores.

Nothing happened, of course. But it was an abject lesson in how irrational government fear-mongering still controls our public discourse, even when there wasn’t a shred of hard evidence for any sort of attack, only a feeling that one might happen.

The media totally bought into this frenzy, despite the fact that the FBI and other intelligence agencies openly admitted they did not have any “specific” or “credible” threat information to hinge the holiday-weekend warnings on. Naturally, we didn’t find this out until several paragraphs down in any of the articles about the subject, and on television it sometimes wasn’t mentioned at all. Even when it was, the lack of push-back or questioning was startling. For example, this report from NBC News:

Authorities told NBC News that they are unaware of any specific or credible threat inside the country. But the dangers are more complex and unpredictable than ever. ...

As for those vague terror warnings that didn’t materialize over the weekend? They’ve been extended.

Tony Blair and the Self-Exalting Mindset of the West: in Two Paragraphs

Tony Blair today took a little time off from serving the world’s despots in order to exploit the 10th anniversary of the July 7 London train bombing. He did so by casting blame on “radical Islam” for the world’s violence while exempting himself, pronouncing:

This is a global problem… we’re not going to allow anyone to excuse themselves by saying that the slaughter of totally innocent people is somehow a response to any decision by any government.

The proposition Blair just decreed invalid – “the slaughter of totally innocent people is somehow a response to any decision by any government” – is exactly the rationale which he himself repeatedly invoked, and to this day still invokes, to justify the invasion and destruction of Iraq, as in this example from December, 2009:

Tony Blair has said he would have invaded Iraq even without evidence of weapons of mass destruction and would have found a way to justify the war to parliament and the public. . . . “If you had known then that there were no WMDs, would you still have gone on?” Blair was asked. He replied: “I would still have thought it right to remove him [Saddam Hussein]”. . . . He explained it was “the notion of him as a threat to the region” because Saddam Hussein had used chemical weapons against his own people.

“Excusing the slaughter of totally innocent people” – whether in Fallujah or Gaza or Yemen – is a staple of western elite discourse to justify the militarism of the U.S., the UK, and their most special allies. It only suddenly becomes inexcusable when carried out by Muslims against the west.

Eric Holder Returns as Hero to Law Firm That Lobbies for Big Banks

After failing to criminally prosecute any of the financial firms responsible for the market collapse in 2008, former Attorney General Eric Holder is returning to Covington & Burling, a corporate law firm known for serving Wall Street clients.

The move completes one of the more troubling trips through the revolving door for a cabinet secretary. Holder worked at Covington from 2001 right up to being sworn in as attorney general in Feburary 2009. And Covington literally kept an office empty for him, awaiting his return.

The Covington & Burling client list has included four of the largest banks, including Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo. Lobbying records show that Wells Fargo is still a client of Covington. Covington recently represented Citigroup over a civil lawsuit relating to the bank’s role in Libor manipulation.

Covington was also deeply involved with a company known as MERS, which was later responsible for falsifying mortgage documents on an industrial scale. “Court records show that Covington, in the late 1990s, provided legal opinion letters needed to create MERS on behalf of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and several other large banks,” according to an investigation by Reuters.

The Department of Justice under Holder not only failed to pursue criminal prosecutions of the banks responsible for the mortage meltdown, but in fact de-prioritized investigations of mortgage fraud, making it the “lowest-ranked criminal threat,” according to an inspector general report.

Eric Holder: Return to Sender

Why Eric Holder’s new job is an insult to the American public

If we had a more aggressive media, this would be an enormous scandal, more than the decamping of former Obama Administration officials to places like Uber and Amazon. That’s because practically no law firm has done more to protect Wall Street executives from the consequences of their criminal activities than Covington & Burling. Their roster of clients includes every mega-bank in America: JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Bank of America. Yet Holder has joined several of his ex-employees there, creating a shadow Justice Department and an unquestionable conflict of interest. In fact, given the pathetic fashion in which DoJ limited punishment for those who caused the greatest economic meltdown in 80 years, Holder’s new job looks a lot like his old job.

You could actually make a plausible argument that Covington & Burling bears responsibility for the Great Recession: In the late 1990s, Covington lawyers drafted the legal justification for MERS, the private electronic database that facilitated mortgage-backed securities trading. MERS saved banks from having to submit documents and fees with county land recording offices each time they transferred mortgages. So it’s unlikely you would have seen mortgage securitization at such a high volume without MERS, and by proxy, without those legal opinions. Of course, securitization drove subprime lending, the housing bubble, its eventual crash and the financial meltdown that followed. Though evidence pointed to MERS’ implication in the mass document fraud scandal that infected the foreclosure process, former Covington lawyer Holder never prosecuted them, and now he’s back with the old team.

Covington’s real meal ticket is white-collar defense. They literally promote their aptitude in getting bank clients off the hook in marketing materials. I wrote in Salon last March about the firm’s boasting, in a cover story in the trade publication American Lawyer, about avoiding jail sentences and reducing cash penalties for executives at companies like IndyMac and Charles Schwab. Included in the praiseworthy article is Lanny Breuer, who ran the Justice Department’s criminal division under Holder. Breuer, a vice chairman at Covington, vowed not to represent companies under Justice Department investigation, but his presence in a marketing document specifically wooing bank clients is clear: Sign up with Covington, and you get access to insiders at the highest level.

That’s precisely Eric Holder’s value to the firm. He’ll never end up as lead litigation counsel for Citigroup, and he can’t be involved in any cases dating back to his Justice Department tenure for two years. But he’ll be able to advise behind the scenes, a compelling prospect for banks in trouble. As we have seen over the last decade, relationships and influence matter more than the letter of the law in determining whether white-collar criminals face justice.

Details of Hillary's dirty little south-of-the-border coup in behalf of corporate interests emerge from the muck of her private emails. That Hillary just loooves her some demockery!

During Honduras Crisis, Clinton Suggested Back Channel With Lobbyist Lanny Davis

The Hillary Clinton emails released last week include some telling exchanges about the June 2009 military coup that toppled democratically elected Honduran president Manuel Zelaya, a leftist who was seen as a threat by the Honduran establishment and U.S. business interests.

At a time when the State Department strategized over how best to keep Zelaya out of power while not explicitly endorsing the coup, Clinton suggested using longtime Clinton confidant Lanny Davis as a back-channel to Roberto Micheletti, the interim president installed after the coup. ...

The request to talk to Davis came on October 22, 2009, a crucial turning point for the “de facto” government that had ousted Zelaya.

A week later, Clinton and her top aides reportedly brokered a deal to bring Zelaya back to power through a national unity government. But the deal was no “breakthrough,” as some media outlets reported. Rather, there was a huge loophole, providing the pro-coup Honduran legislature with veto power over Zelaya’s return. The supposed plan fell apart, and the “de facto” government sponsored what many considered a fraudulent election while denying Zelaya’s return.

The election, on November 29, 2009, was beset by violence, with anti-coup organizers murdered before the election and the police violently suppressing an opposition rally in San Pedro Sula and shutting down left-leaning media outlets. Major international observers, including the United Nations and the Carter Center, as well as most major opposition candidates, boycotted the election. ... Rather than seeing this as a failure, the Clinton emails released last week further confirm that the State Department had sought the permanent ouster of Zelaya all along.

Also of interest:

Yanis Varoufakis: Angela Merkel has a red and a yellow button. One ends the crisis. Which does she push?

Can Greece and EU Make Amends?

Greek ‘No’ Vote Spurs Wider Resistance

Former International Court of Justice judge: Dick Cheney should face prosecution