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This evening's music features soul singer Joe Tex. Enjoy!

"The greater the importance to safeguarding the community from incitements to the overthrow of our institutions by force and violence, the more imperative is the need to preserve the constitutional rights of free speech, free press and free assembly in order to maintain the opportunity for free political discussion."

-- Charles Evans Hughes

News and Opinion

White Supremacy in Action: Police Stand Down as Trump Mob Storms Capitol to Disrupt Election Vote

Worth a full read, here are some excerpts:

The Insurrection Was Predictable

Two months ago, The Daily Poster published a series of reports on the growing threat of a coup attempt, wondering why it wasn’t being taken more seriously by Democrats and the media. We were scoffed at and eye-rolled, as if such things could never happen in America. Nobody is scoffing or eye-rolling anymore after today’s events at the U.S. Capitol. There, insurrectionists stormed the building and halted the certification of the national election, as security forces allowed them to breach the Senate chamber and shut down the proceedings. ...

About a decade ago, I wrote a book called “The Uprising,” which described how we were entering an era of chaos where right-wing groups would try to seize power under the guise of populism. Clearly, that has been happening — we saw it speed up during the Tea Party backlash and it was further accelerated by Donald Trump, who is a unique president in his willingness to use the White House megaphone to foment and destabilize. Today’s events were the result of all that incitement. ...

The Capitol Police have a $460 million budget and 2,300 personnel to guard the U.S. Capitol complex. For comparison, that is twice the size of the budget of my own city’s police department, which is used to secure an entire metropolis. Somehow, this army of Capitol security forces was unable — or unwilling — to stop insurrectionists from breaching the building and taking over the floor of the U.S. Senate. And it’s not like they were caught by surprise — they had advance warning of the potential for unrest. So it’s almost as if they weren’t trying to stop the mayhem. ...

As I wrote earlier this week, the Republican Party officials who fueled and abetted this insurrection did so because they assume they will feel no political, social or legal consequences for their behavior. On the contrary, they will likely be rewarded with higher approval ratings and support from many Republican voters. And if the Look Forward Not Backward™ crowd gets its way and makes sure there are no legal consequences for any of Trump’s many crimes, then these Republicans will know they have a lifetime get-out-of-jail-free card for their own extremist behavior.

i cant really wrap my head around the fact people who violently breached the building, and trashed it were allowed to just...leave the capitol.

— Kate Nocera (@KateNocera) January 6, 2021

Trump Has Proven The US Is Ripe For A Right Wing Coup

Trump has proven something important today. Capitol police, whose job is protect Congress, just let the protestors thru: they removed barriers and even took selfies with them.

If an Antifa group had tried this, swarming up, trying to climb thru windows, shoving aside barriers, lounging in the Speaker’s Office, they’d have been shot down like dogs. Instead I’m seeing arrest totals of around fifteen.

So what we now know is that when a serious right wing mob or militia, one that really does intend to overthrown American government (this group did not), shows up, the cops will not stop them: their opposition will be no more than token.

At that point it will come down to the military. In this case it’s clear the military would not acquiesce, but a President who gets the military enough onside to at least paralyze them or is smart enough to make sure that the colonels or generals in charge of capitol-adjacent troops are on his side or will not intervene, then the coup will succeed.

Anyway, America is now a pre-coup nation. the necessary conditions are in place: vast inequality, poverty, a stabbed-in-the-back narrative and a storyline that a right wing President was overthrown thru voter fraud. The police have indicated they will not stop a coup. All that is necessary is to paralyze the military, or make a deal with them, and a smart would-be dictator will be able to do the job.

Historian: White Terrorist Groups Attacked Democracy During Reconstruction, They Are Doing It Again

33 arrested, 1 dead, 13 hurt amid pro-Trump riots at the U.S. Capitol

One person is dead, 33 are arrested and 13 others were injured amid pro-Trump riots and demonstrations near and at the U.S. Capitol Wednesday, according to initial information released by MPD. Those numbers are expected to rise. ...

A woman was shot and killed as part of a mob that reached the inside of the Capitol.

Three of those arrested were charged with carrying a pistol without a license, possession of a large capacity ammunition feeding device, possession of unregistered ammunition, according to DC Police. The other 30 were arrested because of disobeying the curfew put in place by DC's Mayor Bowser from 6 p.m. on Wednesday until 6 a.m. on Thursday.

Of the 33 people arrested, multiple people were not from the DMV area, according to the information provided on those charged by DC Police.

For reference, there were 14,000+ arrests at the George Floyd protests.

— Public Citizen (@Public_Citizen) January 6, 2021

Trump Unleashes Mob to Storm Capitol and Disrupt Functioning of U.S. Government

As the Capitol police were overwhelmed, a source in the Defense Department gave conflicting accounts to reporters as to why a request from Washington’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, for the National Guard to be deployed was not immediately met. Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam announced that he was responding to a request from the mayor to send “members of the Virginia National Guard along with 200 Virginia State Troopers” to the Capitol.

“As we figured out during the BLM protests,” Charlie Savage of the New York Times observed on Twitter, “the thing about calling out the National Guard to quell this riot is that because D.C. is not a state, the commander of those troops would not be Muriel Bowser, D.C.’s elected leader. They would instead be controlled by… Donald Trump.”

Later in the afternoon, a defense official told Dan Lamothe of the Washington Post, “The entire D.C. National Guard will be activated today, putting about 1,100 guardsmen on duty tonight.” Defense officials told the New York Times that the belated order to deploy the National Guard had been approved by Pence, not Trump.

ABC News reported later that “President Trump rebuffed efforts for quite some time to call in the National Guard Wednesday afternoon as chaos escalated at the U.S. Capitol, and steps weren’t made until a few White House officials intervened for ‘the sake of the country.'”

Even when the Capitol police attempted to retake the building from the mob, the officers seemed generally reluctant to use force.

I believe the Republican members of Congress who have incited this domestic terror attack through their attempts to overturn the election must face consequences. They have broken their sacred Oath of Office.

I will be introducing a resolution calling for their expulsion. pic.twitter.com/JMTlQ4IfnR

— Congresswoman Cori Bush (@RepCori) January 6, 2021

'White privilege on display': police hypocrisy condemned after pro-Trump insurgence

Many Americans and people around the world watched in horror as a mob of Donald Trump supporters rushed the US Capitol in Washington DC on Wednesday afternoon, wreaking fear and chaos with seemingly little resistance from police on Capitol Hill. ... While images and videos of Capitol police pointing their guns and running around the building were shared, many more images of the Trump-supporting mob successfully overtaking the building, including sitting at the front of the Senate and walking away with a podium, spread on Twitter. ...

“Always interesting to see how white protestors can encounter so little resistance and breach the capitol with the vice-president there, while black protestors would be lying dead in front of the capitol building right now,” wrote the writer Roxane Gay. Others pointed to the stark contrast between law enforcement’s response to the mob at the Capitol versus their treatment of protesters against police brutality.

Capitol during Capitol
BLM protests today pic.twitter.com/5NAcaIUsCq

— Ricky Rocksteady (@RocksteadyRicky) January 6, 2021

“Thinking about all the protestors who got their eyes shot out by rubber bullets this summer for doing things like ‘walking’,” said the journalist Libby Watson. Dozens of people who were peacefully protesting for racial justice, along with some journalists who were covering the events, have sustained serious injuries from rubber bullets and teargas that were used by police to disperse crowds.

Appears the “looting/shooting” rule doesn’t apply to everyone https://t.co/gxp2NQjHM2

— Adam Serwer (@AdamSerwer) January 6, 2021

US Capitol stormed: Who are Trump supporters?

Vote to certify Biden victory resumed after pro-Trump mob storms Capitol

Congress has reconvened to certify Joe Biden as the next president of the United States late Wednesday, hours after a violent mob of supporters loyal to Donald Trump stormed the US Capitol in what lawmakers condemned as an attempted insurrection aimed at overturning the results of an American election. ... By nightfall, authorities said the Capitol had been secured. Escorted by armed officers, Vice-president Mike Pence, who is presiding over the joint session of Congress, senators and members of the House returned to their chambers to resume debate over an objection to the electoral college count.

But the mood had shifted remarkably from that afternoon, when a band of Republicans arrived on Capitol Hill prepared to lead a brazen, if futile, rebellion against certification. Several Republican senators, unsettled by the violence that sent them scrambling under tables for protection, dropped their objections. For those who planned to forge ahead with the plot, Republicans senator Mitt Romney warned in a floor speech that drew sustained applause that they would “forever be seen as being complicit in an unprecedented attack against our democracy”.

Republican Senator Josh Hawley, a ringleader of the challenge, was undeterred. The Missouri Republican said he would still object to the results in Pennsylvania, arguing that the earlier violence should not dismiss his concerns that fraud had occurred during the election.

The Senate overwhelmingly voted down a challenge to reject Biden’s victory in Arizona, the first state to sustain an objection based on spurious claims of widespread voter fraud. The House followed suit shortly thereafter, though 121 Republicans voted to toss out the state’s electors.

“Americans Are Now Getting a Mild Taste of Their Own Medicine” of Disrupting Democracy Elsewhere

ALLAN NAIRN: But at the same time, I think it would be a huge mistake for people who are anti-fascist to respond to that by embracing the establishment, embracing authoritarian measures. You know, imagine how the laws are going to be rewritten now. Imagine how security procedures are going to be rewritten now. It’s almost a guarantee that it’s going to be much harder now to hold demonstrations in Washington, D.C., and in the vicinity of the Capitol. It’s going to be harder for movements legally, for movements like the Black Lives movement, for example, to go out on the streets again. There are sure to be more restrictions. And there are sure to be more restrictions on speech, through the newly empowered corporate censors, like Facebook and Twitter and so on, and perhaps through the government itself.

I think we have to be clear-eyed, and don’t let this Trumpist movement coopt the idea of rebellion. Rebellion against injustice is a good thing. The problem is that they — and the U.S. system is indeed unjust and murderous. But they are rebelling against the aspects of the U.S. system that happen to be good: the democracy, the tolerance, the chance for a democratic space in organizing. That’s what they’re rebelling against, on behalf of evils, like racism, like madness, like blind obedience to the leader, Trump. But we have to be careful and stand against both that, but also the establishment, which is still the main power in the United States and that is now in the middle of gutting the American poor, the American working class. That has to be rebelled against, just as we resist these fascistic forces. And it’s not easy to do both at the same time, but it’s necessary.

Glenn Greenwald REACTS: Twitter, Facebook SUSPEND Trump Accounts

Caitlin Johnstone: MSM Already Using Capitol Hill Riot To Call For More Internet Censorship

The United States received a very small taste of its own medicine today as rioting Trump fanatics temporarily forced their way into the nation’s Capitol building, and now the whole nation is freaking out.

I am being generous when I say that America was given a very small taste of its own medicine; unlike the horrific coups and violent uprisings the US routinely orchestrates in noncompliant nations around the world, this one stood exactly zero chance of seizing control of the government, and only one person died.

I am also being generous when I say the rioters “forced their way” in; DC chose not to increase its police presence in preparation for the protests despite knowing that they were planned, and there’s footage of what appears to be cops actively letting them through a police barricade. There was some fighting between police and protesters, but contrasted with the unceasing barrage of police brutality footage which emerged from Black Lives Matter demonstrations a few months prior it’s fair to say the police response today was relatively gentle.

the police opened the fucking gates. pic.twitter.com/HyDURXfoaB

— katie (@cevansavenger) January 6, 2021

Predictably, this entirely American disruption has blue-checkmarked commentariat shrieking about Vladimir Putin on social media.

Future historian: "As right-wing mobs were terrorizing the Capitol, liberal truth-tellers kept their eyes on the real villain." #BlueAnon pic.twitter.com/VNpLASbD1L

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) January 6, 2021

Just as predictably, it’s also got them calling for the censorship of social media.

The New York Times has published two new articles titled “The storming of Capitol Hill was organized on social media” and “Violence on Capitol Hill Is a Day of Reckoning for Social Media“, both arguing for more heavy-handed restrictions on speech from Silicon Valley tech giants.

In the former, NYT’s Sheera Frenkel writes “the violence Wednesday was the result of online movements operating in closed social media networks where people believed the claims of voter fraud and of the election being stolen from Mr. Trump,” citing the expert analysis of think tank spinmeister Renee DiResta of “Tulsi Gabbard is a Russian asset” fame. As usual no mention is made of DiResta’s involvement in the New Knowledge scandal in which a Russian interference “false flag” was staged for an Alabama Senate race.

“These people are acting because they are convinced an election was stolen,” DiResta said. “This is a demonstration of the very real-world impact of echo chambers.”

“This has been a striking repudiation of the idea that there is an online and an offline world and that what is said online is in some way kept online,” DiResta adds.

This narrative which seeds the idea that unregulated communication on the internet will lead to violent uprisings is funny coming from Frankel, who, as a Twitter follower recently observed, wrote a piece in 2018 condemning the Iranian government for restricting protesters’ social media access during the demonstrations at that time.

“Social media and messaging apps have become crucial to antigovernment demonstrators around the world, as a means of both organizing and delivering messages to other citizens,” Frankel wrote. “Not surprisingly, restricting access to such technology has become as important to government crackdowns as the physical presence of the police.”

In the other article, co-authored by Frankel, Mike Isaac and Kate Conger, the message is driven home even less subtly.

“As pro-Trump protesters stormed the Capitol building on Wednesday and halted the certification of Electoral College votes, the role of social media companies such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube in spreading misinformation and being a megaphone for Mr. Trump came under renewed criticism,” reads the article, adding, “So when violence broke out in Washington on Wednesday, it was, in the minds of longtime critics, the day the chickens came home to roost for the social media companies.”

The article reports on the US president’s temporary suspension of social media privileges for allegedly inciting violence with his posts, then discusses the various kinds of disinformation and violent ideation being circulated in Trump discussion forums.

“Those alternative social media sites were rife with Trump supporters organizing and communicating on Wednesday,” NYT tells us. “On Parler, one trending hashtag was #stormthecapitol. Many Trump supporters on the sites also appeared to believe a false rumor that Antifa, a left-wing movement, was responsible for committing violence at the protests.”

“We know the social media companies have been lackadaisical at best” at stopping extremism from growing on their platforms, Jonathan Greenblatt, director of the Anti-Defamation League, told NYT. “Freedom of expression is not the freedom to incite violence. That is not protected speech.”

We will likely see many more such articles in the coming days, arguing for increased regulation of internet communication to prevent future incidents like today.

In and of itself this won’t sound terribly concerning to the average citizen. Nothing wrong with taking steps to prevent people from plotting violence and terrorism on social media, right?

But how do you predict what protests are going to be “violent”? How do you decide which protests and what political dissent need to be censored and which ones should be permitted to communicate freely? Do you just leave it up to Silicon Valley oligarchs to make the call? Or do you have them consult with the government like they’ve been doing? Are either of these institutions you’d trust to regulate what protests are worthy of being permitted to organize online?

Because the actual power structures in the United States seem to be interested in simply censoring the internet to eliminate political dissent altogether.

In 2017 top officials from Facebook, Twitter and Google were brought before the Senate Judiciary Committee and admonished to come up with policies that will “prevent the fomenting of discord” in the United States. ...

Do you trust these monopolistic megacorporations to decide whether or not people’s dissident speech is acceptable? I don’t.

As Julian Assange is condemned to remain falsely imprisoned and the mass media ramp up their case for more imperial narrative control, we are now in a battle for the sovereignty of our very minds.

Matt Taibbi: The Media’s Role In Dividing Us In Light Of Capitol Chaos

US reports record one-day death toll

The US recorded 3,775 deaths in one day, according to Johns Hopkins University, the fourth time the toll in the world’s worst-affected country has exceeded 3,500. Each of the four days has occurred in the last three weeks.

The total US death toll is 361,063. The number of cases is stands at 21,294,092.

California orders hospitals to take transfer patients amid devastating Covid surge

Hospitals in California are so swamped by the coronavirus pandemic that the state has ordered those with room to accept patients from others that are out of intensive care beds.

The public health order issued on Tuesday night could result in patients being shipped to northern California from southern California and the agricultural San Joaquin Valley, where 14 counties were immediately ordered to delay non-essential “and non-life threatening” surgeries in order to provide beds. The order, which will last at least three weeks, also applies to any county where ICU capacity to treat Covid-19 patients is bottoming out.

“If we continue to see an alarming increase of Covid-19 patient admissions at hospitals statewide, some facilities may not be able to provide the critical and necessary care Californians need, whether those patients have Covid-19 or another medical condition,” said Dr Tomas J Aragon, the state’s public health officer.

The order could be a bellwether for California, where officials have warned that some hospitals may have to start rationing care if an expected post-holiday surge in Covid-19 cases overwhelms the healthcare system.

California on Wednesday reported its second-highest number of daily coronavirus deaths, with 459 lives lost. The total death toll in the state in the past week stands at 2,504, with more than a quarter-million new weekly cases portending a continued overwhelming crush on hospitals.

As Virus Surges, New Studies Suggest Warning for School Reopening

Since the beginning of the pandemic, one of the most contentious questions has been under what conditions it might be safe to reopen schools. Families are distressed about children suffering academically and emotionally at home, and leaders are anxious to get parents back to work, partly to aid economic recovery. The absence of good information about how the coronavirus spreads, along with a lack of federally led testing and contact tracing, has fueled massive amounts of distrust, with some suspicious that reopened schools are less safe than leadership purports and others convinced closed schools are safer than leaders claim. Teachers and communities have organized protests, both to close schools and to open them.

Now, higher-quality research is beginning to emerge, shedding light on the relationship between reopened schools and the spread of the virus earlier this fall. Two new studies in the U.S. that were published in the last two weeks suggest that when community transmission is low, reopening school buildings, at least when schools are not operating at full capacity, does not contribute much to the virus’s spread. But the risks change, the researchers found, when community transmission is higher. A third study, published in early December, found that reopening Florida schools led to increased infections among school-age children, particularly among high schoolers. Florida is one of the only states to provide incidence rates by age and county.

One of the studies, published Monday by two economists and one epidemiologist at Tulane University, looked at the effects of school reopening on Covid-19 hospitalization rates. The authors believe it’s the first study worldwide to explore this relationship, as nearly all prior research has compared school reopenings to case positivity rates — a less reliable but more accessible measure. While hospitalization rates don’t capture those who may still be suffering from long-term symptoms of Covid-19 or who got very ill but never sought hospital treatment (perhaps due to lack of health insurance), the researchers say it’s still a more robust way of measuring real sickness in a community than case rates, which include those who are asymptomatic or have very mild illnesses.

The study found that in counties where new Covid-19 hospitalization rates were below 36-44 per 100,000 per week — which was roughly 75 percent of U.S. counties this past summer — in-person school reopening did not lead to an increase in hospitalizations. Researchers found, however, that in places where new hospitalizations exceeded that threshold, the school reopening picture was far less clear. And because even slight increases in transmission can have significant effects, more caution, they said, is warranted. ...

A second study, published in late December, looked at the impacts of Washington state and Michigan school reopenings on Covid-19 transmission through November. The researchers focused on positivity rates, and like the Tulane study, they found that in areas where transmission rates were low, in-person schooling didn’t appear to contribute to the virus’s spread. But when community rates were higher, reopening schools was linked to increased spread. Michigan and Washington have been collecting data on each school district and making it publicly available, something many states have not done.

Renegade Inc | Looking Forward

'Wake up, Kenosha': protesters rally after officer in Jacob Blake shooting avoids charges

Protesters marched in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Tuesday night to express outrage over the decision not to charge a white police officer for shooting a Black man, Jacob Blake, in the back from close range last summer, in an incident that sparked a fierce uprising. ...

The decision not to bring charges sparked anger and frustration among protesters although the march was peaceful, with a group of about 50 people shouting “wake up, Kenosha” and “Seven shots in the back. No, that ain’t right” before assembling outside the Kenosha county administration building. ...

Tony Evers, Wisconsin’s Democratic governor, had called out the national guard in anticipation of the protests but said the lack of prosecution of any of the police officers involved in the attempted arrest and shooting of Blake was “further evidence that our work is not done”.

Blake’s family expressed dismay over the decision by prosecutors and vowed to take the protests to Washington DC.

“Now our battle must go in front of the Congress, it must go in front of the Senate,” said the shot man’s father Jacob Blake Sr. “We’re gonna protest right into the offices. We’re gonna go see Nancy [Pelosi] first ... then we’ll go see the Senate until we’re seen, until we’re heard.”

Jon Ossoff wins Georgia runoff election, giving Democrats control of Senate

The Georgia Democrat Jon Ossoff has won his Senate runoff election, giving Democrats control of the Senate for the opening of Joe Biden’s presidency.

Ossoff’s victory against David Perdue, was called by the Associated Press late on Wednesday, and follows fellow Democrat Raphael Warnock’s victory against incumbent Kelly Loeffler.

With the victories of Ossoff and Warnock, the US Senate is now 50-50. Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris will serve as the tie-breaking 51st vote, giving Democrats control of the chamber for the first time since 2015.

No More Excuses For Democrats -- AOC Pivots Messaging

I wonder how long it will take the Dem party to squelch this optimism:

With Democrats Poised to Seize Senate, Progressives Say Party Has Mandate to Go Big

With the Democratic Party poised to take control of the U.S. Senate on the back of projected victories by Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff—achievements made possible by tireless grassroots organizing—progressives on Wednesday wasted no time making clear that Democrats will soon have a mandate to urgently pursue a transformative policy agenda aimed at tackling the immediate crises facing the nation and securing a just, livable future.

Major networks declared Warnock the winner over Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.) early Wednesday, and Decision Desk HQ projected that Ossoff will emerge victorious in his race against Republican David Perdue. If Warnock and Ossoff's leads hold, as they're expected to, Democrats and Republicans will each hold 50 seats in the Senate, putting Vice President-elect Kamala Harris in the role of tie-breaker. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is set to become Senate minority leader.

After applauding the historic nature of the likely runoff victories—Warnock is on track to become the first Black senator from Georgia, and Ossoff the state's first Jewish senator—progressive activists and lawmakers swiftly pivoted to detailing what Democrats must do to ensure that the wins bring about desperately needed change.

"Victory in Georgia must lead to transformative change across America," said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC). "Recurring survival checks, union jobs that pay a living wage, guaranteed healthcare, racial justice, voting rights, immigration reform, climate action, reproductive justice, education, and much more. It can't wait!"

Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-N.Y.) added simply, "The era of small ideas is over."

In the late stages of their pivotal campaigns, Warnock and Ossoff both threw their support behind the effort to deliver $2,000 direct payments to most Americans, a popular push—led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in the Senate and CPC members in the House—that may have given the Georgia Democrats a last-minute boost.

With President-elect Joe Biden also behind the demand, the checks were viewed as a no-brainer relief measure that Democrats could pursue immediately upon taking power to provide rapid financial assistance to millions of Americans struggling to afford food, rent, and healthcare amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. ...

The direct payments, as well as other significant Democratic legislative priorities, could be passed through budget reconciliation, a process that requires only a simple majority vote—something that could still prove hard to achieve, given the willingness of right-wing Democrats such as Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) to buck the party.

"If Democrats win both Senate seats in GA, it's going to be hard to explain why they should promptly re-empower McConnell by seeking small-ball deals with him instead of getting rid of the filibuster and passing Biden's big, bold agenda," Adam Jentleson, public affairs director at Democracy Forward, said late Tuesday. "Biden has a mandate. Time to use it."

"Many senators who once opposed going nuclear later supported it," Jentleson added. "For Biden it's a question of whether he'd rather spend his energy courting folks like Manchin to pass big stuff, or chasing McConnell (plus 10 Republicans) for small deals that probably won't materialize anyway."

Trump auction of oil leases in Arctic refuge attracts barely any bidders

The Trump administration’s last-minute attempt on Wednesday to auction off part of a long-protected Arctic refuge to oil drillers brought almost zero interest from oil companies, forcing the state of Alaska into the awkward position of leasing the lands itself.

The coastal plain of the Arctic national wildlife refuge was up for sale to drillers as part of the Trump administration’s plan to pay for Republicans’ tax cuts with oil revenue. Conservatives argued the leases could bring in $900m, half for the federal government and half for the state.

But the lease sales fell dramatically short of that amount – with the high bids totaling about $14m on 11 tracts of land that cover about 600,000 acres of the 1.6m-acre coastal plain. ...

Alaska’s state-owned economic development corporation made almost all of the bids for the leases, in the hopes that oil companies will eventually be interested in the area. They spent $12m. Major oil companies steered clear of the auction. Only two lesser-known companies placed bids: Knik Arm Services, which is listed as a real estate firm, and Regenerate Alaska Inc., a subsidiary of 88 Energy.

Brazilian beef farms ‘used workers kept in conditions similar to slavery’

Brazilian companies and slaughterhouses including the world’s largest meat producer, JBS, sourced cattle from supplier farms that made use of workers kept in slavery-like conditions, according to a new report.

Workers on cattle farms supplying slaughterhouses earned as little as £8 a day and lived in improvised shacks with no bathrooms, toilets, running water or kitchens, according to a report from Brazilian investigative agency Repórter Brasil.

Since 1995, the report said, 55,000 Brazilian workers have been rescued by government inspectors from “situations similar to slavery”. While the number of investigations has fallen in recent years – 118 workers were freed in 2018, compared with 1,045 a decade earlier – that does not mean the situation has improved, just that inspections have been reduced, it noted. ...

The report challenges meat companies such as JBS, which has faced criticism over its inability to control its supply chains of cattle farms in the Amazon. ... In September, JBS promised to control its entire supply chain by 2025 – 14 years after it and other Brazilian companies Minerva and Marfrig originally promised to do so. The three companies signed a deal in 2009 with Greenpeace in which they agreed not to buy cattle from farms “engaged in slavery”. Similar deals signed with federal prosecutors stopped them buying from farms included on a rolling government “dirty list” for keeping workers in slavery-like conditions.

In August 2019, government inspectors found nine unregistered workers clearing pasture on the Copacabana farm in Mato Grosso do Sul state were being paid £8 a day, the report said. They lived in improvised shacks made of logs, plastic, palm fronds and corrugated iron without toilets, kitchens or running water. The farm and its controller, Fernanda Thomazelli, were later included on the 2020 “dirty list”. The farm had sold cattle directly to two JBS slaughterhouses in 2019 and 2020.

Also of Interest

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

After Right-Wing Coup Effort in DC, Venezuela Offers Sympathy for US Suffering What 'It Has Generated' Elsewhere

Progressives Back Rep. Cori Bush's Resolution to Expel Lawmakers Who Incited Violent Siege of Capitol

While Republicans Fractured, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff Teamed Up — And It Seems to Have Worked

Janet Yellen’s Cash Haul of $7 Million Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg; She Failed to Report Her Wall Street Speaking Fees from JPMorgan and Others in 2018

Denmark launches children's TV show about man with giant penis

Jimmy Dore: Capitol Stormed by Protestors! Trump's Twitter Suspended!

Rising: Inside The War Between Trump And Pence

Rising: Will Hawley, Cruz PAY For Their Election Certification Gambit?

Pelosi says Trump must be REMOVED IMMEDIATELY

A Little Night Music

Joe Tex - You Little Baby Face Thing

Joe Tex - Show Me

Joe Tex - One Monkey Don't Stop No Show

Joe Tex - Baby You're Right

Joe Tex - You Better Believe It Baby

Joe Tex - You're Right , Ray Charles

Joe Tex - If Sugar Was As Sweet As You

Joe Tex - Come In My House

Joe Tex - Yum Yum Yum

Joe Tex - Chicken Crazy

Joe Tex - C. C. Rider