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“We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”

-- George Orwell

News and Opinion

America Revisits the Dark Side

Candidates Compete to Promise the Most Torture and Slaughter

From the look of the presidential campaign, war crimes are back on the American agenda. We really shouldn’t be surprised, because American officials got away with it last time – and in the case of the drone wars continue to get away with it today. Still, there’s nothing like the heady combination of a “populist” Republican race for the presidency and a national hysteria over terrorism to make Americans want to reach for those “enhanced interrogation techniques.” That, as critics have long argued, is what usually happens if war crimes aren’t prosecuted.

In August 2014, when President Obama finally admitted that “we tortured some folks,” he added a warning. The recent history of U.S. torture, he said, “needs to be understood and accepted. We have to as a country take responsibility for that so hopefully we don’t do it again in the future.” By pinning the responsibility for torture on all of us “as a country,” Obama avoided holding any of the actual perpetrators to account.

Unfortunately, “hope” alone will not stymie a serial war criminal – and the president did not even heed his own warning. For seven years his administration has done everything except help the country “take responsibility” for torture and other war crimes. It looked the other way when it comes to holding accountable those who set up and ran the CIA’s large-scale torture operations at its “black sites” around the world. It never brought charges against those who ordered torture at Guantánamo. It prosecuted no one, above all not the top officials of the Bush administration.

Now, in the endless run-up to the 2016 presidential elections, we’ve been treated to some pretty strange gladiatorial extravaganzas, with more to come in 2016. In these peculiarly American spectacles, Republican candidates hurl themselves at one another in a frenzied effort to be seen as the candidate most likely to ignore the president’s wan hope and instead “do it again in the future.” As a result, they are promising to commit a whole range of crimes, from torture to the slaughter of civilians, for which the leaders of some nations would find themselves hauled into international court as war criminals. But “war criminal” is a label reserved purely for people we loathe, not for us. To paraphrase former President Richard Nixon, if the United States does it, it’s not a crime.

[See article for examples of republican campaign promises to commit war crimes. - js]

What was our most popular book of 2015? Find it in our library catalogue! https://t.co/hmfeCmGKCj (UN only) pic.twitter.com/niGXUxHtGt

— UN Library (@UNLibrary) December 31, 2015

Obama’s Crocodile Tears

Had I seen the image of Obama, weeping over American gun deaths, seven years ago, I know I would have been deeply moved. ...

But the image comes seven years later, following a period of Obama’s proving himself an utterly cold and dry-eyed killer. Actually, apart from seven years packed with regular killing and support of others doing killing in at least half a dozen lands, he is reliably reported to have once said at a high-level meeting, without tears or the least change in demeanor, “I’m pretty good at killing.” ...

After seven years of mass murder, dirty tricks destroying countless lives and destabilizing many peaceful lands, thousands of extrajudicial killings conducted by young thugs from basement computer-games rooms at CIA, and unblinking acceptance of such brutal savageries as we’ve seen from Israel or Saudi Arabia or Turkey, his tears truly mean nothing, except perhaps somewhere in the back of his own dark and terrible mind. ...

I don’t know what caused him to cry in his little performance about guns in America, but if you tell me it was because a decent human was overwhelmed momentarily by America’s hideously murderous society, I will not even bother to answer.

Bombs Speak Louder Than Words: The Liberal Reinvention of George W. Bush

A chorus of liberal media personalities and politicians is calling for a new perspective on George W. Bush’s legacy in light of the virulent anti-Muslim rhetoric coming from members of the current Republican presidential field. Following Donald Trump’s proposal for a national registry of American Muslims, political rivals and commentators are redirecting our attention toward the former president’s effort to draw a distinction between the “War on Terror” and a war on Islam (NBC News, 11/20/15).

Even before  Trump’s latest demagoguery reignited latent anti-Muslim sentiment in America, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was using a refurbished image of Bush to illuminate her opponents’ xenophobic rhetoric. During CBS’s Democratic debate in November (11/14/15), Mrs. Clinton said that a legacy of friendly discourse “was one of the real contributions—despite all the other problems—that George W. Bush made after 9/11 when he basically said after going to a mosque in Washington, ‘We are not at war with Islam or Muslims.’”

As the demonization of Muslims once again gains currency in American electoral politics, liberal personalities are joining the call to return to the good old days when Republicans fielded candidates who talked sweetly to the community of over 1.5 billion Muslims around the world while at the same time ordering warplanes to bomb an ever-larger number of them. ...

Public dissatisfaction with the Bush administration reached a fever pitch in 2006–07, just as the process to decide his successor began, and few can forget then–candidate Obama’s centerpiece of “hope and change.” Yet no sooner had Obama taken office than he promised a supposedly forward-looking agenda that would preclude any substantive reflection on the legal, political and material fallout of the Bush presidency (New York Times, 1/11/09).

Aside from some notable exceptions—Obama’s prohibition on torture, for example—the new administration continued many core Bush-era policies, which has led to a series of bizarre scenarios culminating in the current latter-day praise by Democrats of their former nemesis. ...

Given the various ways in which Bush’s policies were folded into mainstream liberal thinking by the Obama administration, perhaps it is not surprising that Democrats campaigning for the 2016 nomination have taken on this attitude, with a corresponding falling into line among liberal media outlets. Yet for those voters who are not so eager to reform Bush’s legacy, such apologist recollections might lead one to second-guess the supposedly alternative direction into which Democratic candidates promise to take the country—or at least to yearn for a media that takes a more critical view.

'Greater share of oil production' Hillary Clinton emails reveal motives of Libya intervention

Gaddafi’s warnings to Blair have been proven by today's attack on Libyan police training centre

The Libyan uprising always contained more extreme Islamists than portrayed by its supporters inside and outside Libya. There is a measure of truth in Muammar Gaddafi's claim to Tony Blair that the jihadis had "managed to set up local stations and in Benghazi have spread the thoughts and ideas of al Qaeda."

His claims sound particularly prophetic since the transcript of the Blair-Gaddafi phone conversations are published on the same day that a suicide bomber driving a truck packed with explosives killed an estimated 65 people at a Libyan police academy. The attack is likely to be the work of the Libyan branch of Isis which today controls Sirte, Gaddafi's home region and last stronghold, and has been battling over the last week to take over Libya's main oil ports. ...

The Gadaffi-Blair conversations leave the impression that because it was so obviously in Gadaffi's interests to suggest that his opponents were led by Islamic extremists, that the West was too swift to dismiss the idea. It also looks as if outside powers were determined to get rid of the Libyan leader whatever happened. Since the rebels were not strong enough to do this by themselves, this meant he would be overthrown primarily by a NATO air campaign and the result would be a political vacuum and the disintegration of Libya. Gadaffi may have been wrong about the way things were happening, but he was right about the final calamitous outcome.

18 Ex-Military Guatemalan Leaders Arrested for Crimes against Humanity During U.S.-Backed Dirty War

Turkey warns US over ‘Kurdish corridor’ in Syria

The Turkish army has expressed concerns to the United States’ top military figure over Syrian Kurdish groups’ attempts to create a “Kurdish corridor” in northern Syria and change the demographic structure of the region to the advantage of Kurds.

The messages were delivered to Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who held talks with Turkish Chief of General Staff Gen. Hulusi Akar and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu on Jan 6. ...

One of the most important issues the Turkish army raised was the attempts of the Democratic Union Party (PYD) in crossing the Euphrates River and therefore entering the Azaz-Jarablus corridor.

Turkey claims the PYD is an offshoot of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and, ergo, “terrorists” even though the U.S. and other anti-ISIL coalition members see them as a legitimate political party.

“We are aware of their desires and attempts to establish a Kurdish corridor along the Turkish border by entering the Azaz-Jarablus line. We have declared so many times that Turkey will never accept this,” a security source said.

Turkey Raids Kurdish Party Offices — While Hoping It Will Contribute to a New Constitution

Turkish police detained senior local officials from the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) on Friday in a raid on one of its Istanbul offices, party officials said, days after President Tayyip Erdogan said he backed legal action against its members.

Meanwhile, also on Friday, Turkey's parliament speaker said he hoped all parties, including the HDP, would take part in a parliamentary commission charged with drafting a new Turkish constitution. ...

Erdogan and the government accuse the HDP, parliament's third-biggest party, of being an extension of the PKK, which has fought a three-decade insurgency for greater Kurdish autonomy in the southeast and which is considered a terrorist group by Turkey, the United States, and the European Union.

The HDP says it is opposed to violence and wants a peaceful solution for Turkey's Kurds.

The ruling AK Party (AKP) has put replacing the country's coup-era constitution at the heart of its agenda after winning back its parliamentary majority in a November election.

US Hellfire missile mistakenly shipped to Cuba

A dummy US Hellfire missile was mistakenly shipped from Europe to Cuba in 2014, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.

The inert missile did not contain any explosives, the Journal reported, but there are concerns that Cuba could share the technology with potential US adversaries such as North Korea or Russia. ...

The US official told the AP that Lockheed was authorised to export the dummy missile for a Nato training exercise. The official attributed the shipping error to Lockheed’s freight forwarders, and said the US was working with Lockheed to get the device back.

Hillary Clinton Suggests She May Oppose Obama’s $1 Trillion Nuclear Arms Upgrade

Hillary Clinton signaled the potential for a major national security policy reversal this week after she told an activist in Iowa that the planned $1 trillion nuclear weapons modernization program “doesn’t make sense.”

Despite a momentous speech embracing nuclear disarmament in Prague in April 2009, President Barack Obama has stunned critics by embarking on an aggressive effort to upgrade the military’s nuclear weapons program, including requests to buy 12 new missile submarines, up to 100 new bombers, and 400 land-based missiles, along with upgraded storage and development sites.

During the first Democratic presidential debate in October, Clinton called the “spread of nuclear weapons” the greatest threat to national security. Obama has similarly identified nuclear proliferation as a greater threat than an apocalyptic battle between superpowers — even while supporting the massive nuclear arms stockpile upgrade and refusing to change the hugely risky hair-trigger alert status of our nuclear arsenal.

Revealed: White House seeks to enlist Silicon Valley to 'disrupt radicalization'

The White House will attempt to enlist Silicon Valley’s major technology firms in its efforts to combat terrorism on Friday when a delegation of the most senior intelligence officials fly to California to meet with executives from companies including Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Microsoft, YouTube and others. ...

Barack Obama’s chief of staff, Denis McDonough, will lead a delegation that will include National Security Agency chair Admiral Mike Rogers and the director of national intelligence – America’s top spy James Clapper. FBI director James Comey also will attend. ...

Several people familiar with the meeting said White House officials told technology companies the focus would be on terrorism and extremism. But given that many of the participants – Apple, Microsoft and Dropbox – don’t have social networks, encryption is almost assured to come up, several people close to the talks said. At least one tech executive, who declined to speak on the record, said this felt like a “bait and switch” since McDonough first approached some tech companies last week.

But since Snowden leaked secrets on western government spy operations in 2013, Silicon Valley’s leaders have been cautious of seeming too cozy with Washington’s three-letter agencies, which also include the FBI and the CIA.

For instance, Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Alphabet, formerly known as Google, was once friendly with the Obama administration. But in a charged 2014 meeting he declined a personal invitation from Obama for more meetings on surveillance, people familiar with the matter told the Wall Street Journal at the time.

‘Insider Threat’ Program: Hundred Thousand Pentagon Personnel Under Total Surveillance

At least a hundred thousand military, civilian, and contractor personnel at the Defense Department have been subjected to a “continuous evaluation” or total surveillance of their electronic activities and communications. The surveillance is part of the department’s “Insider Threat” program and raises concerns about the extent to which whistleblower communications are being intercepted.

According to a 2015 report to Congress obtained by Steven Aftergood of Secrecy News, “Multiple pilots and concept demonstrations using ‘push’ and ‘pull’ capabilities to conduct continuous evaluation” have been used to monitor personnel with access to classified information.

“Pull” capabilities refers to an Automated Continuing System (ACES), which conducts “point-in-time records checks” and “pulls” data from “trusted data sources.” “Push” capabilities refers to an ACES Next Generation system, which automatically pushes relevant updated information to the system without additional requests for data.

The total surveillance of personnel with access to classified information makes it possible to conduct “insider threat analyses” of “law enforcement, personnel security, human resources, counterintelligence, physical security, network behavior monitoring, and cybersecurity activities,” according to the report to Congress.

New York to Appoint Civilian to Monitor Police’s Counterterrorism Activity

The mayor will appoint an independent civilian to monitor the New York Police Department’s counterterrorism activities, lawyers said in court documents on Thursday as they moved to settle a pair of lawsuits over surveillance targeting Muslims in the decade after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The agreement would restore some of the outside oversight that was eliminated after the attacks, when city leaders said they needed more flexibility in conducting investigations. In the years that followed, the Police Department secretly built files on Muslim neighborhoods, recorded sermons at mosques, collected license plates of worshipers and documented the views of everyday people on topics such as drone strikes, politics and foreign policy.

The settlement does not explicitly prohibit any methods that are currently allowed, and the city does not admit any wrongdoing. Police officials said many of the provisions of the agreement — such as barring investigations based solely on religion, race and ethnicity — simply codified changes already in place. But civil rights lawyers said some tactics that investigators used over the past decade violated the Constitution and would probably not have been allowed if anyone outside the Police Department had been reviewing the investigative files. ...

The city agreed to place a civilian lawyer, appointed by the mayor, inside the Police Department to review intelligence files and report potential wrongdoing to the police commissioner, the mayor or a federal judge.

The settlement, which must be approved by a federal judge, represents the most significant recalibration of the rules governing police intelligence-gathering in the city since Sept. 11, 2001.

Rahm Emanuel is a national disgrace: Why he represents every worst instinct of the Democratic Party

The scandal surrounding Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel’s grossly corrupt and negligent handling of police violence in his city keeps getting worse and worse.

Ever since Chicago was forced in November to release video showing the gruesome police killing of black teenager Laquan McDonald, Emanuel has been on a quest to save himself from being driven out of office. He has publicly shed tears over McDonald’s death and announced a raft of new measures intended to show that the Chicago Police Department is reforming itself. ...

We now know, thanks to emails obtained by The Daily Beast, that lawyers met with Emanuel just weeks before the election and discussed the video with him. ...

It beggars belief that Emanuel—a man whose hard-charging, domineering, micro-managing tendencies are the stuff of legend—would have merely left the details of such a potentially explosive issue to his staff without some personal directive. That would have required a personality transplant. Clearly, Emanuel was involved.

It’s equally clear that Emanuel does not deserve to run Chicago for even a second longer. He exemplifies a particularly loathsome breed of Democratic politician—the constantly triangulating, plutocrat-courting, privatizing so-called “centrist,” that so dominated the Bill Clinton years. Emanuel deserves to be buried—along with that tradition—so that someone with a modicum of integrity can take the reins.

Another Chicago Cover-up: Judge Orders New Trial For Police Who Killed Darius Pinex

A federal judge has ordered a new trial for Chicago police who killed Darius Pinex, a twenty-seven year-old black father of three, during a traffic stop on January 7, 2011. The officers were found not guilty by a jury in February 2015, however, a city lawyer “intentionally concealed” crucial evidence from lawyers for the Pinex family.

The details of misconduct and the order for a new trial are stunning developments in the city. As with the shooting of Laquan McDonald, the city is implicated in another clear cover-up to protect officers from being held responsible. In fact, following the judge’s order, the city lawyer, Jordan Marsh, resigned.

Prosecutor to seek murder indictment for officer who killed unarmed veteran

A prosecutor in Georgia is to seek two indictments for murder against a police officer who shot and killed Anthony Hill, an unarmed black man who was naked when he died.

DeKalb district attorney Robert James said he would ask a grand jury to indict Officer Robert Olsen of the DeKalb County police department, accused of shooting Hill on 9 March last year while responding to a call of a man behaving erratically outside a suburban Atlanta apartment complex. ...

The announcement means that James’s office will be recommending the charges against Olsen to a criminal grand jury to be convened later this month. In Georgia, a prosecutor cannot bring charges without a grand jury indictment.

In addition to the murder charges, James also recommended one count of aggravated assault, two counts of violation of oath of office by a public officer, and one count of making a false statement.

Report: Nebraska Lets Juveniles Be Locked in Solitary Confinement for 90 Days

Some Nebraska detention centers set a maximum of five days that a juvenile can spend in solitary. But others are far harsher. The Nebraska Correctional Youth Facility of Omaha allows a juvenile to be detained in solitary confinement for up to 90 days. As the ACLU notes, this is out of step with “most of Nebraska’s neighboring states,” which “restrict the use of solitary for youth along a range of 24 hours to five days.” ...

Some states have a uniform reporting requirement so officials can monitor the use of solitary confinement. Nebraska has no such requirement, which is why the ACLU pursued the information using numerous open records requests to individual detention facilities.

The ACLU also warns that the state has large racial disparities in the juvenile detention system as a whole; around one-fifth of Nebraska youth are racial minorities, but they make up 55 percent of the juvenile detention facilities’ population.

Militia Leader Ammon Bundy Met With a Local Sheriff to Discuss Ending the Oregon Standoff

The leader of the anti-government militia that has occupied a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon and the local sheriff met on Thursday in an effort to resolve the situation peacefully. ...

The two met by the side of the road for about five minutes, then shook hands, and agreed to talk again on Friday.

"At some point this all has to be resolved," said the sheriff. "Let's get the community back to normal before everything gets out of hand."

Bundy replied by asking the sheriff to address the land-use issue at the heart of the controversy with the federal government that led to the occupation — to which Ward replied that it was not his jurisdiction. Bundy said then that he would stand his ground, after which the men shook hands and parted ways, agreeing to speak again by telephone the next day. ...

Earlier in the day, before meeting the sheriff, the Bundys had made it known that they would present a set of demands on Friday.

Why the Feds Punk Out When Confronting White Rightwing Insurgents

When a criminal justice system born in Native American genocide and Black slave patrolling finds itself in conflict with conservative white Christian landowners, it short-circuits.

The white, rightwing land grabbers who are in armed occupation of federal property can’t seem to buy a confrontation with President Obama’s FBI or any other armed federal agency. How is it, the people of the world must be wondering, that a country that runs by far the world’s biggest prison system, with the most heavily armed cops on the planet, equipped with the most advanced evidence gathering devices known to man – how is it that the Superpower of Policing and Prosecution seems to fear a confrontation with groups with names like the Oregon Bearded Bastards?

The reason is really quite simple: the U.S. criminal justice system was not created to control white militias or greedy ranchers or gun-toting racists and Bible-thumpers. For most of U.S. history, these were prime stakeholders in the American project to build a White Man’s Nation. The gunmen in Oregon have plenty of historical reasons to believe that land-grabbing is their birthright – and that a significant segment of white America empathizes with them. The federal government treads lightly, because white Christian lives do matter.

For almost 50 years, the primary mission of the U.S. criminal justice system has been to control, contain and incarcerate Black Americans. It has spent half a century refining the tools to terrorize Black people on the streets, in their homes and in their schools. It is so efficient at what it does, that one out of every eight prison inmates on the planet is an African American. The Mass Black Incarceration State was designed to pre-empt any insurgency by Black people – not to deal with the Bundy family and the Bearded Bastards of Oregon.

Clinton adviser urged using hurricane to boost Obama's re-election bid

One of Hillary Clinton’s closest advisers told her that Barack Obama should use a deadly hurricane to boost his re-election campaign, a proposal that she agreed to pass on to the White House, a new tranche of emails reveals.

Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime friend of the Clintons, sent a memo in 2012 presenting a strategy for turning Hurricane Isaac to the Democrats’ political advantage by contrasting it with President George W Bush’s handling of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. ...

With Hurricane Isaac set to hit the Gulf coast and possibly veer towards New Orleans, Blumenthal urged the administration to set up a command post and send Vice-President Joe Biden and the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) to the scene.

“The theme of the Republican convention is the failure of President Obama, not only on the economy but also generally as an effective chief executive,” he continued. “The FEMA effort after Isaac will: a. Implicitly contrast with the Bush one after Katrina; b. Demonstrate that the Obama administration is effective and acts in the public interest by effectively managing government; c. Show the indispensability of the federal government without ever having to make an ideological case. And: Once the FEMA effort begins, while the Republican convention is meeting, Democrats across the board should point out that the Romney-Ryan budget plans would slash FEMA. Even if not specified, as little is specified in their plans, drastic FEMA cuts would be inevitable.”

Clinton replied: “I passed this on to the White House. We’ll see what happens.”

Wow, somebody at Bloomberg has wakened to the fact that governments have this thing called fiscal policy through which (if they weren't so busy cutting spending in order to transfer wealth to their rich corporate overlords) they should be using to stimulate economies.

The End of the Monetary Illusion Magnifies Shocks for Markets

Central bankers are no longer the circuit breakers for financial markets.

Monetary-policy makers, market saviors the past decade through the promise of interest-rate reductions or asset purchases, now lack the space to cut further -- if at all -- or buy more. Even those willing to intensify their efforts increasingly doubt the potency of such policies. ...

“The monetary illusion is drawing to a close,” said Didier Saint Georges, a member of the investment committee at Carmignac Gestion SA, an asset-management company. “With central banks becoming increasingly restricted in their stimulus policies, 2016 is likely to be the year when the markets awaken to economic reality.” ...

They have only themselves to blame for becoming agents of volatility, according to Christopher Walen, senior managing director at Kroll Bond Rating Agency Inc.

He told Bloomberg Television this week that officials’ willingness to keep interest rates near zero and repeatedly buy bonds and other assets meant they became “way too involved in the global economy” and should have left more of the lifting work to governments.

The handover to looser fiscal policy now needs to happen if economic growth and inflation are to get the spur they need, said Martin Malone, global macro policy strategist at London-based brokerage Mint Partners.

“Major economies have exhausted monetary and foreign-exchange policies,” he said. “Government action must take over from central-bank policies, triggering more confident private-sector investment and spending.”

This is an excellent article that lays out the issues clearly and in plain english unencumbered by financial jargon. Recommended:

Hillary Clinton Is Not Telling The Truth About Wall Street

Hillary Clinton's campaign spent much of this week waging a dishonest attack on Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and his campaign's Wall Street reform platform. ... Clinton's attack on Sanders is as simple as it is untrue: Unlike Sanders, Clinton has argued, she is willing to take on "shadow banking" -- a broad term for various financial activities that aren't regulated as strictly as conventional lending.

Sanders has in fact proposed attacking shadow banking in two principal ways: by breaking up big financial firms that engage in shadow banking, and by severing federal financial support for shadow banking activities by reinstating Glass-Steagall.

These would be substantive changes. A lot of shadow banking takes place at firms with traditional banking charters, like JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America. Some of it takes place at specialized hedge funds, or at major investment banks like Goldman Sachs. Breaking them up would not eliminate the risk shadow banking poses to the economy, but it would limit it. Risky shadow banking activities cannot bring down institutions that are too-big-to-fail if there are no too-big-to-fail institutions.

Yet the Clinton campaign has repeatedly said Sanders is wholly ignoring shadow banking, accusing Sanders of taking a "hands-off" approach to it that would not apply to firms like Lehman Brothers and AIG. This barrage has come from Clinton's press aides, campaign CFO Gary Gensler, and Clinton surrogate Barney Frank.

In a bizarre appearance on Chris Hayes' MSNBC show, Frank claimed that splitting up Morgan Stanley or Bank of America "is not going to do anything, literally not anything to restrain shadow banking." He even said that since Lehman Brothers was "very small" when it failed, Sanders' break-up-the-banks plan would be unworkably broad and apply to too many firms.

It's hard to see these comments as anything but dishonest. Lehman Brothers was not "very small" when it failed. At $639 billion in assets, it was the single-biggest bankruptcy filing in American history. Only six U.S. banks are now larger than Lehman was, and the next-largest institutions are almost half Lehman's size. AIG -- then the world's largest insurer -- was even bigger.

Bernie Sanders Decries Lack of Wall Street Prosecutions

"So Bernie Sanders is the only person in senior levels of government, period, of anybody. Actually, even Senator Warren hasn't made this point yet, that says, look. This crisis isn't just about greed. Yes, there's certainly greed. It's about fraud. To remedy it we have to deal with the fraud itself. "

This article has a lot of good detail that cannot be fairly abstracted. It's worth a peek:

The Problem With Hillary Clinton Using a Progressive Hero to Attack Bernie Sanders

Hillary Clinton is using a prominent surrogate to attack Bernie Sanders’ emphatic proposals for reforming Wall Street: Gary Gensler, former chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Gensler, who is the Clinton campaign’s chief financial officer, has enormous credibility among financial reformers after his aggressive (and lonely) efforts to rein in banks during the early years of the Obama administration. ...

But Gensler’s attacks on Sanders come across as hollow given that the Clinton campaign has been largely silent on the issue that defined Gensler’s legacy – the regulation of derivatives – and the undermining of that legacy by the man Obama chose to succeed him.

Much of what Gensler accomplished at CFTC has been washed away by his successor, Timothy Massad. But reversing Massad’s weakening of financial reform is barely a feature of Clinton’s platform. ...

Gensler’s comments about Sanders repeatedly attacked him for failing to consider the shadow banking system: the collection of financial institutions whose activities sit outside the regulatory perimeter. But after two years of CFTC give-backs, much of the derivatives market sits in the shadows as well. On this point Gensler and Clinton have said little, and the silence speaks volumes.

This Pesticide Might Be Killing off Bees

At least one pesticide from a controversial family of chemicals appears to be a threat to bees and other pollinating insects when applied to certain crops, US regulators announced this week.

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said residues of the pesticide imidacloprid, which is sold under a variety of brand names, "potentially poses risk to hives when the pesticide comes in contact with certain crops that attract pollinators." A preliminary assessment said residues in concentrations of 25 parts per billion or less on citrus or cotton plants can harm bees and affect their hives, the agency said.

But EPA is still studying what happens when imidacloprid is used on other plants, such as corn and leafy vegetables. Those plants "either do not produce nectar or have residues below the EPA identified level," an EPA statement said. ...

Environmental groups, meanwhile, criticized the EPA study as too limited. The Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) said the agency failed to study the risks imidacloprid poses to other pollinators like butterflies or birds, and relied too heavily on an industry-funded study.

"The EPA's decision to rely on industry-funded research is absolutely unacceptable, particularly when there has been so much research by independent researchers," Lori Ann Burd, environmental health director at CBD, said in a statement on the findings.

In Age of Extreme Weather, Industrial Farming Threatens Us All

Extreme weather is damaging to crop production and threatens food safety worldwide, according to a new study published in Nature on Wednesday.

And the most developed nations like the U.S., which rely heavily on industrial monocultures for food production, are particularly vulnerable.

The study, which evaluated cereal production losses due to extreme weather in 177 countries from 1964-2007, found that "droughts and extreme heat significantly reduced national cereal production by 9–10%....Furthermore, the results highlight ~7% greater production damage from more recent droughts and 8–11% more damage in developed countries than in developing ones." ...

Over the past 50 years, 75 percent of the world's biodiversity, soil, and water have been destroyed through the proliferation of mass food production and agrochemicals like pesticides and other synthetics, among other measures.

"Gov. Snyder Should Be Arrested": Flint Residents Demand Justice over Water Poisoning

Calls for Michigan Gov. Snyder's Arrest as Flint Poisoning Scandal Implicates Top Staffers

Calls for Michigan Governor Rick Snyder's ouster—and arrest—are growing after internal emails showed that his high-level staffers were aware of lead poisoning in Flint's public water supply six months before the administration declared a state of emergency.

According to the newly-released emails, which were obtained by NBC News, Snyder's chief of staff at the time, Dennis Muchmore, wrote to an unnamed high-level health department staffer: "I'm frustrated by the water issue in Flint."

"These folks are scared and worried about the health impacts and they are basically getting blown off by us (as a state we're just not sympathizing with their plight)," Muchmore wrote in the email, according to journalists Stephanie Gosk, Kevin Monahan, Tim Sandler and Hannah Rappleye.

"I really don't think people are getting the benefit of the doubt," wrote Muchmore. "Now they are concerned and rightfully so about the lead level studies they are receiving." ...

Many hold Snyder directly culpable for the emergency itself, and note his role in the Detroit water crisis.

"The source of the Flint Water Crisis leads directly to Gov. Rick Snyder and the fiscal austerity policies that he and his Republican colleagues have been pushing for years on Michigan residents," said Lonnie Scott, executive director of Progress Michigan," in a statement released Thursday. "Families in Flint were forced to drink lead-tainted water while the administration scoffed at their concerns and cries for help. An entire generation of Michiganders now face an uncertain future because of Republican cuts to essential and life-giving services."

Wrote a petition calling for the arrest of MI Gov. Rick Snyder. Sign & RT! https://t.co/thcWQWmJlw #ArrestGovSnyder pic.twitter.com/GfXIqe5M8c

— Michael Moore (@MMFlint) January 7, 2016

Also of Interest

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

Trump's angry white men – and why there are more of them than you think

Yes, the armed Oregon occupiers would be raided if they weren’t white — same goes if they were leftists

At This Point, Rahm Emanuel Is Basically a David Simon Character - And Rick Snyder, too.

This is the web browser you should be using if you care at all about security

The Anglo-Saxon Hide, Adam Smith, Karl Marx and the 35 Hour Work Week

Ötzi the Iceman's 5,000-year-old stomach bug sheds light on human migration

A Little Night Music

Tuba Skinny - Crow Jane

Tuba Skinny - Hey Hey Daddy

Tuba Skinny - My Baby Don't Want Nobody But Me

Tuba Skinny - C. C. Rider

Tuba Skinny - Make Me A Pallet On Your Floor

Tuba Skinny - Minor Drag

Tuba Skinny - Lovesick Blues

Tuba Skinny - Shine On Harvest Moon

Tuba Skinny - Jailhouse Blues

Tuba Skinny - Please, Please, Please

Tuba Skinny - Dusty Rag

Tuba Skinny - Milenberg Joys

Tuba Skinny - What's the Matter with the Mill

Tuba Skinny - Some of these Days

Tuba Skinny - 4/14/15