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This evening's music features New Orleans r&b singer Tommy Ridgely. Enjoy!

“If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it. Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change.”

-- Ray Bradbury

News and Opinion

Top Republican Warns That Under New Spending Bill “the Intelligence Community Could Expend Funds as It Sees Fit”

In a dramatic moment on the Senate floor Monday afternoon, as the upper chamber rushed a spending bill through to end the government shutdown, the top Republican and Democrat on the Intelligence Committee warned that the bill contains language that would kneecap Congress’s ability to oversee secret covert actions and surveillance programs. Their effort to amend the language was rebuffed.

The intelligence community, in its latest grasp, has gone too far even for Richard Burr. The Republican chair of the Senate Intelligence committee has long been one of the Senate’s staunchest advocates for the intelligence agencies, leading the fight to reauthorize surveillance programs and fighting to bury the results of the Senate’s five-year investigation into CIA torture. But he took to the Senate floor Monday to warn that it would compromise Congress’s ability to oversee secret intelligence programs.

“This language could erode the powers of the authorizing committee,” Burr said. “Effectively, the intelligence community could expend funds as it sees fit without an authorization bill in place and with no statutory direction indicating that an authorization bill for 2018 is forthcoming.”

The provision, first reported by The Intercept, appeared in the House version of the spending bill last week and modified the 70–year-old-law that first chartered the CIA. It removed language that requiring intelligence agencies to spend money according to Congress’s instructions, and replaced it with a provision that allows the agencies to move money around freely and without Congress’s knowledge. Blackwater founder Erik Prince has recently pitched the administration on a private intelligence force that would report directly to President Donald Trump and CIA Director Mike Pompeo.

An excellent article worth a full read:

A National Defense Strategy of Sowing Global Chaos

Presenting the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United States on Friday at the Johns Hopkins University, Secretary of Defense James Mattis painted a picture of a dangerous world in which U.S. power – and all of the supposed “good” that it does around the world – is on the decline. “Our competitive edge has eroded in every domain of warfare – air, land, sea, space, and cyberspace,” he said. “And it is continually eroding.” What he could have said instead is that the United States military is overextended in every domain, and that much of the chaos seen around the world is the direct result of past and current military adventurism. Further, he could have acknowledged, perhaps, that the erosion of U.S. influence has been the result of a series of self-inflicted blows to American credibility through foreign policy disasters such as 2003 invasion of Iraq. ...

As topics like empire, imperialism, and even war and peace, are censored and excised from political debate, U.S. officials, subservient media and the rest of the U.S. political class conjure up an illusion of peace for domestic consumption by simply not mentioning our country’s 291,000 occupation troops in 183 other countries or the 39,000 bombs and missiles dropped on our neighbors in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan since Trump took office. The 100,000 bombs and missiles dropped on these and other countries by Obama and the 70,000 dropped on them by Bush II have likewise been swept down a kind of real time “memory hole,” leaving America’s collective conscience untroubled by what the public was never told in the first place.

But in reality, it’s been a long time since U.S. leaders of either party resisted the temptation to threaten anyone anywhere, or to follow through on their threats with “fire and fury” bombing campaigns, coups and invasions. This is how empires maintain a “credible threat” to undergird their power and discourage other countries from challenging them. But far from establishing the “Pax Americana” promised by policymakers and military strategists in the 1990s, from Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney to Madeleine Albright and Hillary Clinton, the results have been consistently catastrophic, producing what the new National Defense Strategy calls, “increased global disorder, characterized by decline in the long-standing, rules-based international order.”

Of course the drafters of this U.S. strategy document dare not admit that U.S. policy is almost single-handedly responsible for this global chaos, after successive U.S. administrations have worked to marginalize the institutions and rules of international law and to establish illegal U.S. threats and uses of force that international law defines as crimes of aggression as the ultimate arbiter of international affairs. Nor do they dare acknowledge that the CIA’s politicized intelligence and covert operations, which generate a steady stream of political pretexts for U.S. military intervention, are designed to create and exacerbate international crises, not to solve them.  For U.S. officials to admit such hard truths would shake the very foundations of U.S. imperialism.

Daily Beast Makes Strong Push For WWIII

CIA chief says North Korea is 'a handful of months' from endangering US

The CIA director, Mike Pompeo, has said that the Trump administration is intent on preventing North Korea from being able to fire multiple nuclear missiles at the United States, apparently sketching out a new red line for the regime in Pyongyang. Speaking in Washington, Pompeo explained for the first time what the administration meant when it warns that it would not allow the regime of Kim Jong-un to threaten the US with a nuclear weapon.

Despite personal warnings from Donald Trump on Twitter and in speeches, the US has not been able so far to prevent North Korea from testing a hydrogen bomb and conducting three test launches of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) – including one that appeared capable of reaching New York or Washington.

Pompeo suggested the threshold for US military action was set higher. “Kim Jong-un will not rest with a single successful test,” the former Republican congressman told an audience at the American Enterprise Institute. “The logical next step would be to develop an arsenal of weapons. That is not one, not a showpiece, not something to drive on a parade ground on 8 February [army day] but rather the capacity to deliver from multiple firings of these missiles simultaneously.”

“That increases the risk to America and that is the very mission set that President Trump has directed the government to figure out a way to make sure never occurs,” he added.

Erdogan's new front: Turkey takes on Syria's kurds

Kurdish forces in Syria launch powerful counterattack to set up extended battle against Turkey

Turkey is hoping for a quick victory in Afrin, but its soldiers and allied Syrian militiamen are facing counter-attacks by Kurdish forces on villages close to the border. The Kurds are reported to be readying reinforcements to join the battle from their bases in north east Syria where they have thousands of troops who until recently were fighting Isis.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan says there would be “no stepping back from Afrin” which means that the campaign, bizarrely named ‘Operation Olive Branch’, will continue. But it will take time to drive the Kurdish YPG paramilitary forces out the Afrin enclave north of Aleppo. So far the Turkish offensive has captured only a few villages close to the border in three days of fighting and there are a total of 350 villages in Afrin.

The population of the enclave is estimated to be 200,000, many of whom will be come refugees if Turkey and Arab militiamen take control.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that there had been a strong Kurdish counter-attack overnight that had recaptured two villages called Shenkal and Adamaly.

Turkey needs a swift success in Afrin because it is diplomatically isolated and there is growing international pressure to end the fighting. France has called for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council to discuss the fighting in Afrin and other parts of Syria. Britain said it would look for ways to prevent escalation. But Mr Erdogan said said in a speech in Ankara that Turkey had discussed the Afrin offensive “with our Russian friends, we have an agreement with them.” This probably refers to Russia agreeing to limited Turkish action as warning to the Kurds not to become the permanent proxies of the US in Syria.

Erdogan taunts U.S. over calls to leave Syria: “when will you leave Iraq?”

Turkey demanded the U.S. drop its support for Kurdish militia in Syria Monday and brushed off calls to rein in its campaign in Afrin as tensions surged between the NATO allies. Ankara launched Operation Olive Branch Saturday, a cross-border offensive targeting U.S.-backed Kurdish fighters in the enclave of Afrin in northern Syria. ...

The U.S. has acknowledged Turkey holds legitimate security concerns about the Kurdish presence across the border, but has called on Ankara to demonstrate operational restraint in Syria. However, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan dismissed Washington’s suggestion Monday, reminding an audience in Ankara of the lengthy U.S. presence in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“Then I ask the U.S.: Did you have any specific time duration in Afghanistan? When will it end? You entered Iraq before we came to power – has the time duration ended in Iraq, you are still there?” ... The verbal stoush comes amid a mounting death toll in Afrin, where the violence has forced thousands to flee the enclave.

US air wars under Trump: increasingly indiscriminate, increasingly opaque

In the first year of his presidency, Trump has gone out of his way to claim credit for the defeats inflicted on Islamic State, attributing it to his loosening of constraints on his generals. “I totally changed rules of engagement. I totally changed our military,” the president said in October.

It is difficult to separate fact from exaggeration and hubris in Trump’s claim. The preference for air power and drones against enemies far beyond the battlefields of Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq is not new. The Obama administration did seek to mitigate the cost in civilian lives from such stand-off and remote-control weapons, by maintaining political control over operations from the White House. But in the last weeks of the outgoing administration, some of those curbs were lifted. ...

Trump inherited those looser rules and claimed to relax them further, urging his generals to intensify the onslaught on Isis and al-Qaida. According to statistics compiled by the Airwars watchdog group, there were nearly 50% more coalition air strikes in Iraq and Syria in 2017 compared with the previous year. Civilian deaths rose by 215%. The coalition, almost all US planes, dropped 20,000 bombs on Raqqa. By the end of the five-month campaign, 80% of the city was declared uninhabitable by the UN, and 1,800 civilians are thought to have been killed. Airwars estimates 1,400 of those deaths were caused by coalition air and artillery bombardment.

“We had always expected the highest proportion of civilian casualties to occur in that stage in the war and that’s exactly what happened,” said Chris Woods, the head of Airwars. “Even if we had had a Clinton presidency we would doubtless have had higher civilian casualties in that last stage of the war simply because Raqqa and Mosul were under assault. What we still don’t fully understand is how many more civilians were harmed as a result of fairly significant changes that the Trump administration says it put in place.”

Woods said the US military had not fully explained how it altered the rules of engagement. But what certainly changed was the command tone. The defence secretary, James Mattis, and other officials started calling the campaign against Isis a “war of annihilation” and that is how it was conducted, even in densely packed cities, where the average munition used was a huge 500lb bomb.

Egypt’s race for president kicks off with arrest of top challenger

Egypt’s presidential campaign has kicked into full gear, and naturally the top opposition candidate was just arrested.

A retired top general named Sami Anan, seen as the last remaining real threat to Egyptian President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi, was dragged out of his car in the street by armed men at about 11:00 a.m. Tuesday morning, Mahmoud Refaat, a spokesman for Anan’s campaign, told VICE News. Anan’s arrest comes just days after he announced plans to challenge el-Sisi for the presidency in a vote scheduled for March. ... The cops didn’t just throw Anan in jail. They went after for dozens of his campaign staff, too, and even members of their families, Refaat said. ...

Throwing people in jail is a big part of what el-Sisi, himself an army general, has been up to ever since he seized power in a military coup in 2013. Immediately after taking charge, el-Sisi suspended the constitution and tossed the country’s first-ever democratically-elected president, Mohammed Morsi, into jail.

Since then, Egyptian authorities have arrested or charged probably at least 60,000 people, according to Human Rights Watch, and “forcibly disappeared hundreds for months at a time, handed down preliminary death sentences to hundreds more, tried thousands of civilians in military courts, and created at least 19 new prisons or jails to hold this influx.”

Spain warns fugitive Catalan leader not to try to sneak back into the country

Spain is ramping up its surveillance of Carles Puigdemont to ensure the fugitive former Catalan leader can’t sneak back into the country to take up his old job. “We are going to make sure that he can’t even enter in the trunk of a car,” Interior Minister Juan Ignacio Zoid told Spanish broadcaster Antena 3 on Tuesday.

He said the government’s security specialists were working to counter any methods that Puigdemont, who’s been living in exile since October and faces an arrest warrant if he returns, might use to attempt to re-enter the country – including traveling by boat or helicopter. “We are very worried, because we don’t know what a person with this behavior might do,” Zoido said.

Disaster Capitalism in Action as Puerto Rico Governor Announces Plan to Privatize Power Utility

Critics on Monday called Puerto Rican Governor Ricardo Rossello's plan to privatize the island's electricity authority a development that exemplifies the prevalence of "disaster capitalism"—the liberalization and corporatization of economies following destructive events like last September's Hurricane Maria, which devastated the island.

Wenonah Hauter of Food & Water Watch called the decision "catastrophic" and indicative of the same pattern of the Trump administration prioritizing wealthy companies that aim to take over public services.

"The decision to privatize Puerto Rico's state-owned power company follows the same dangerous path mapped out in the Trump administration's draft infrastructure plan," said Hauter. "Whether it's water or energy, privatization helps Wall Street at the expense of the wellbeing and health of communities, particularly low-income families and people of color."

Naomi Klein, who has written extensively about the phenomenon of disaster capitalism, said on Twitter that the decision is troubling but unsurprising. ...

Four months after the hurricane, about 30 percent of the island is still without power. In addition to gross mismanagement by the Trump administration, PREPA has also been blamed for the slow recovery. In November, the agency's director was forced to resign due to failures that included a short-lived rebuilding contract that was given to a tiny Montana-based energy company with connections to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke.

Utility workers also accused the government of hoarding supplies needed for the recovery, and union officials have argued that PREPA has intentionally sabotaged efforts to repair the electric grid in order to pave the way to privatization.

Month After Getting $3.5 Billion Tax Break From Trump, Bank of America Hikes Fees on Poorest Customers

Consumer advocates and banking customers are expressing outrage after an announcement by the Bank of America that it would begin charging fees to account-holders who maintain low balances.

The decision, announced Monday, comes a month after the Republican tax law gave the bank an expected $3.5 million tax break, and less than a week after it posted $2.4 billion profits in the last quarter of 2017.

Critics argued that such news should garner at least as much attention as the bank's announcement last month that it would use some of the financial windfall to give its 145,000 employees a one-time bonus of $1,000 each—a relatively small portion of its tax savings.

RIP Hugh Masekela

South Africans have paid tribute to Hugh Masekela, the legendary jazz musician and activist, who died on Tuesday aged 78.

The South African president, Jacob Zuma, said the nation would mourn a man who “kept the torch of freedom alive”. The arts and culture minister, Nathi Mthethwa, described Masekela as “one of the great architects of Afro-Jazz”. “A baobab tree has fallen,” Mthethwa wrote on Twitter.

A statement from the trumpeter’s family said Masekela “passed peacefully” in Johannesburg, where he lived and worked for much of his life, on Tuesday morning. ... Masekela had been suffering from prostate cancer for almost a decade.

Sessions Is Interviewed in Mueller’s Russia Investigation

Attorney General Jeff Sessions was questioned for several hours last week as part of the special counsel investigation, a Justice Department spokeswoman said on Tuesday, and the former F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, was interviewed by the office last year, according to two people briefed on the matter.

The meeting with Mr. Sessions marked the first time that investigators for the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, are known to have interviewed a member of President Trump’s cabinet. ...

Mr. Sessions, an early supporter of Mr. Trump’s presidential run, had been among a small group of senior campaign and administration officials whom Mr. Mueller had been expected to interview.

Mr. Mueller’s interest in Mr. Sessions shows how the president’s own actions helped prompt a broader inquiry. What began as a Justice Department counterintelligence investigation into Russia’s election interference is now also an examination of whether Mr. Trump tried to obstruct the inquiry, and the nation’s top law enforcement officer is a witness in the case.

For Mr. Mueller, Mr. Sessions is a key witness to two of the major issues he is investigating: the campaign’s possible ties to the Russians and whether the president tried to obstruct the Russia investigation.

House Science Committee Wants to Investigate a Government Scientist for Doing Science

Republicans on the House Science Committee are accusing Linda Birnbaum, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, of lobbying. In letters sent to the Inspector General and acting secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Reps. Lamar Smith and Andy Biggs wrote that they were “conducting oversight” of Birnbaum’s activity in response to a editorial she wrote in a scientific journal.

Birnbaum’s editorial, which the journal PLOS Biology published in December, addressed the gaps in the regulation of toxic chemicals. Though there are more than 85,000 chemicals approved for use in commerce, she noted in the piece, “U.S. policy has not accounted for evidence that chemicals in widespread use can cause cancer and other chronic diseases, damage reproductive systems, and harm developing brains at low levels of exposure once believed to be harmless.”

Birnbaum called for more research on the risks posed by chemicals and, in the sentence that the representatives appear to consider lobbying, noted that “closing the gap between evidence and policy will require that engaged citizens — both scientists and non-scientists — work to ensure that our government officials pass health-protective policies based on the best available scientific evidence.”

A toxicologist who has headed NIEHS and the National Toxicology Program since 2009, Birnbaum received no funding for writing the editorial, as she notes in the piece, nor does she recommend any specific policy, piece of legislation, or action in it beyond being engaged citizens. Nevertheless, Biggs and Smith, who have both received money from Koch Industries, Exxon Mobil, and other companies that have a financial interest in limiting research on the environmental effects of chemicals, noted that their “committee suspects this activity may be a violation of the anti-lobbying act.” The two Republican members of Congress also called on the DHHS Inspector General to analyze their concerns so that he might “launch a full-scale review of the situation.”

The Union of Concerned Scientists’s Andrew Rosenberg dismissed the representatives’ letters as “codswallop.”

DuPont vs. the World: Chemical Giant Covered Up Health Risks of Teflon Contamination Across Globe

Trump just screwed renewables. He may have also started a trade war.

Donald Trump announced import tariffs on solar panels Monday, part of his nationalist "America First" agenda and another blow to environmentalism from an administration bent on resuscitating fossil fuel production. The president said all solar panels made outside the U.S. will have a 30 percent duty, which decreases by 5 percent every year for four years.

The move will likely hinder a thriving renewable energy sector that heavily relies on parts manufactured abroad. Although some U.S. manufacturers will directly benefit from Trump handicapping international competition, the Solar Energy Industries Association said the tariffs would raise prices and result in 23,000 job losses this year across the industry. ...

The tax on solar panels were smaller than many in the the U.S. solar industry expected, a sentiment echoed in the boardroom of China’s biggest panel maker, JinkoSolar. ...

U.S. officials said Monday more taxes were likely, with imports of steel and aluminum possibly subject to similar duties in the coming months. The White House could also impose more stringent tariffs on Chinese goods pending the results of a probe into Chinese theft of U.S. intellectual property.

A Warning from the Center of the World: Pacific Nation Kiribati Is Disappearing as Sea Level Rises

Also of Interest

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

Leading Marxist Scholar David Harvey on Trump, Wall Street, and Debt Peonage

Candidates Who Signed Up to Battle Donald Trump Must Get Past the Democratic Party First

The last slave ship to America may have been found in an Alabama swamp

A Little Night Music

Tommy Ridgley - Ding Dong School

Tommy Ridgley - Wish I Had Never

Tommy Ridgley - Lavinia

Tommy Ridgley - Just A Memory

Tommy Ridgley - Ooh Lawdy My Baby

Tommy Ridgley - Jam up twist

Tommy Ridgley - In the Same Old Way

Tommy Ridgley - Did You Tell Him

Tommy Ridgley - Looped

Tommy Ridgley - The Girl From Kooka Monga

Tommy Ridgley - I Want Some Money Baby

Tommy Ridgley - Monkey Man