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“If voting made any difference they wouldn't let us do it.”

-- Mark Twain

News and Opinion

Nothing says democracy like the heavily-armored thugs of the state beating the crap out of voters at the polls and attempting to steal the ballots.

We only want to vote #CatalanReferendum pic.twitter.com/9aJv4cgss4

— Gerard Albacete (@gerardalbacete7) October 1, 2017

Hundreds Injured as Spanish Police Beat Up Referendum Voters in Catalonia

Horrific scenes are playing out across the Catalonia region in northeastern spain on Sunday as Spanish police used violence to try to prevent voters from heading to polling stations in a disputed independence referendum. As of early afternoon, the Catalan health ministry said at least 465 people had been injured by police violence. (UPDATE at 5 p.m.: A total of 844 people required medical assistance "as a consequence of the actions of the Spanish police," according to the regional government). Police officers brought from outside the region were fulfilling orders from the Spanish government to stop the vote in Catalonia, which was declared illegal by the country’s top court. Almost half of all injuries took place in Barcelona, the regional capital.

At some schools that were being used as polling stations, police used axes to smash their way inside before charging into crowds and even in some cases firing rubber bullets. Catalans shouted “out with the occupying forces!” and sang the anthem of the region as a show of defiance.

Videos and photos making the rounds on social media show police officers violently beating and dragging peaceful protesters out of polling places, at one point even apparently hurling voters down a flight of stairs. Photos show elderly voters with blood pouring down their faces.

Catalonia referendum: 90% voted for independence

90% of the 2.26 million Catalans who voted on Sunday voted in favour of independence, according to preliminary results released by the region’s government. The region has 5.3 million voters. Officials said 770,000 votes were lost due to disruption which resulted in polling stations being raided by Spanish police.

Carles Puigdemont, Catalan’s leader, announced in a televised statement that the region had earned the right to become an independent state and that results would be passed the region’s parliament in the coming days.

In a press conference shortly before Puigdemont’s, a defiant Mariano Rajoy, the Spanish prime minister, said no referendum had been held today and blamed unrest on the Catalan government.

According to the Catalan department of health, 761 people were injured in the unrest. Two were seriously injured and remain in hospitals in Barcelona. At least 10 police officers are said to have been injured.

Videos from earlier in the day show police hitting people in the crowd with batons while voters hold up their hands, police dragging voters from polling stations by their hair and Spanish police attacking Catalan firefighters.

Rajoy praised the police and said they acted with “firmness and serenity”.

There have been several calls by Catalan politicians and opposition MPs for the Spanish prime minister to resign over the hardline police response.

More than 40 unions and associations in Catalonia have called a region-wide strike on Tuesday in protest against today’s “grave violation of rights”.

Escuela adultos Freire, en Barcelona, @policia ha requisado urnas y herido a esta mujer, cuentan quienes estaban https://t.co/TCgRopKo81 pic.twitter.com/KGwso66BwI

— Rebeca Carranco (@RebecaCarranco) October 1, 2017

Catalonia's leader calls for international mediation in bid for independence from Spain

Catalonia's leader on Monday called for international mediation in the region's bid to declare independence from Spain, a day after violence and chaos erupted over a disputed referendum that left nearly 900 people injured in clashes with riot police.

Carles Puigdemont said the European Union should consider the independence issue as a regional problem and urged Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s government to accept mediation.

The Catalan president said the regional parliament in the next few days will carry out the mandate to declare independence after the “yes” victory in the referendum. ...

Spain insists the referendum was illegal and invalid. ... Spanish Foreign Minister Alfonso Dastis said Monday he didn't consider the police response heavy-handed, saying it was "a matter of interpretation."

“I don’t think there was such a heavy hand, but in any case, they had to react,” Dastis said ahead of an Italian-Spanish forum in Rome. He said “some of the pictures are real, some of them are not real,” but police simply reacted when people were preventing them from doing what the courts had ordered.

Spanish Police Injure 800 in Crackdown on Catalonia Independence Referendum as Crisis Escalates

‘We are with you Catalunya’ – the revolt in Spain is bigger than flags and language

Though brutal, the Guardia Civil actions on Sunday were calculated: in the selection of riot squads from outside areas, where casual hatred of Catalans is rife; in the targeting of old people and women; and in the pinpoint nature of the interventions, which people on the barricades thought were concentrated on middle-class areas. There were thousands of riot cops on hand, on ships in the harbour. If Madrid had wanted to, it could have confiscated every ballot box within minutes and, for good measure, jammed the smartphone app the Catalan authorities were using to tally the results against the electoral roll. But prime minister Mariano Rajoy wanted to send a subtler message: let the most fervent separatists have their vote and get their heads broken, while scaring the rest of the population into non-participation, including any waverers. ...

For the whole day voting was slow, because the websites were being jammed, said election officials. But it still happened. That’s why, amid the baton slaps and rubber bullets, two million people managed to cast a countable vote, with 90% voting Yes to independence. And as they voted, it looked to me like a modern cosmopolitan nation was being born. That’s a rare event in the era of globalisation, but it might not be the last. ...

People stood in the rain and talked in small groups – without hand gestures or raised voices – about what to do. This street-space, with its tobacco and occasional marijuana fumes, populated by wet dogs, irate pensioners and council officials demanding everyone switch their phones to airplane mode to reduce traffic to allow the voting app to work, was alive with democratic argument. If there was a consensus, it was that Catalonia should declare independence by nightfall, and have done with Spain. If such a move seems illegitimate, backed by two million out of a potential 5.3 million votes, and in a technically disrupted poll, you have to weigh the quantity of democracy against its quality. ... In Catalonia on Sunday I saw something like a true democratic participation – and that should make the world, and the EU, think twice before dismissing the whole thing as a nationalist stunt.

Given the fascist-style response of the police, and the incendiary claim by Rajoy that police had acted “serenely”, you can see the Catalans’ point. By going peacefully on to the streets for hours, and creating in their own communities a real democracy of co-existence, tolerance and pacifism, they showed that the quality of their democratic culture was far greater than that of the closet Francoists and Opus Dei types who pull the strings in Madrid.

A Challenge to Saudi's War on Yemen?

Bipartisan Group To Force Vote on U.S. Involvement in Yemen War

For more than two years, the United States has been providing support for a Saudi-led military intervention in Yemen that has cost the lives of over 10,000 civilians and plunged much of the country into a humanitarian crisis. ...

Now, four members of the House from very different ideological poles are teaming up to force the body to vote for the very first time on whether the U.S. should continue to support the Saudi war in Yemen. Reps. Ro Khanna, D-Calif.; Mark Pocan, D-Wisc.; Thomas Massie, R-Ky.; and Walter Jones, R-N.C. have introduced what’s called a privileged resolution to force a vote on the war within 15 days.

H.Con.Res.81 would invoke the War Powers Act to terminate U.S. involvement in the war. ...

“H.Con.Res.81 is privileged under the War Powers Act of 1973, meaning it’s guaranteed a vote and doesn’t have to have the blessing of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Rules Committee, or leadership, who would normally block these things from getting to the floor because they don’t want to debate war,” Kate Khizer, director of policy and advocacy for the Yemen Peace Project, told The Intercept. ... That means sometime in the week of October 9, the House will vote on participation in the war for the first time.

Rex Tillerson in China over North Korea - "There is no official direct dialogue going on"

Egypt caught ordering huge cache of illegal North Korean weapons

Egypt was unmasked Sunday as the unexpected buyer of a cache of 30,000 North Korean rocket-propelled grenades, an illegal deal that resulted in the U.S. withholding almost $300 million worth of aid, the Washington Post first reported. 

Described as the “largest seizure of ammunition in the history of sanctions against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” the destination for the weapons was initially unclear. However, a U.N. investigation found a complex web of transactions that led back to the Egyptian military, U.S. officials privy to the report told the Post. According to the U.N., the deal was worth $23 million.

The U.N.’s findings influenced Washington’s recent decision to deny Egypt $95.7 million in aid, and to delay a further $195 million.

How Syria’s Victory Reshapes Mideast

Plainly, Syria’s success – notwithstanding the caution of President Bashar al-Assad in saying that signs of success are not success itself – in resisting, against the odds, all attempts to fell the state suggest that a tipping point in the geopolitics of the region has occurred. We have written before how the Syria outcome dwarfs that of Israel’s 2006 war against Hezbollah, significant though the result of that war was, too.

Both events taken together have brought America’s unipolar moment in the Middle East to an end (though not globally, since the U.S. still retains its necklace of military bases across the region). The successes have corroded badly the reputation of the Gulf States and have discredited fired-up Sunni jihadism as a “go-to” political tool for Saudi Arabia and its Western backers. But, aside from the geopolitics, the Syria outcome has created a physical connectivity and contiguity that has not existed for some years: the border between Iraq and Iran is open; the border between Syria and Iraq is opening; and the border between Lebanon and Syria, too, is open. This constitutes a critical mass both of land, resources and population of real weight.

The region will listen intently to what these victors will have to say about their future vision for the region – and for Islam. In particular, how Syria articulates the lessons for Middle Eastern societies in light of its war experience will have a profound import. We can say, firstly, Islamism generally is the major loser in the struggle for the Levant. Both in Syria and Iraq, ordinary Levantine Sunnis have been sickened by intolerant, puritan Islam. ...

America seems intent – with Israel pushing hard from behind – to leverage the Kurds against the Syrian State (in the interest of limiting the extent of Iranian presence within Syria, and even to try to break the contiguity between Iraq and Syria). That latter prospect seems unlikely. The U.S.-Israeli Kurdish “project” in Syria may fail, as Kurds (much less concentrated in northeastern Syria than they are in northern Iraq), conclude that it would be better and wiser to come to terms with Moscow (and therefore find some modus vivendi with Damascus), rather than trusting to the constancy of American promises of autonomy – amid the almost universal regional hostility to this high-risk independence project. Ultimately, it must be obvious to the Kurds that it is Russia (and Iran) that represent the incoming tide into the northern tier states. ...

And finally, the “fallout” from the Syria conflict has prompted the northern tier states to “Look East” – as President Assad recently instructed his diplomats so to do. For Iran it may be primarily to China (as well as to Russia), but for Syria, it is more likely to be Russia in a predominantly cultural way, with China seeing Syria as an “important node” in its Belt & Road Initiative. This represents a historic shift in the Middle East. Western officials may imagine that they have a hold over Syria by holding reconstruction funding hostage to having their way with Syria’s future: if this is so, they will as wrong about this as they have been on almost everything pertaining to Syria.

Upcoming AIPAC Visit Promises to Renew Focus On Israel Anti-Boycott Bill

AIPAC is paying a visit to Washington D.C. in mid-October, threatening to bring renewed focus on legislation a leading civil liberties group warns will criminalize support for the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights. AIPAC — or the American Israel Public Affairs Committee — lists support of the Israel Anti-Boycott Act as a key issue in its legislative agenda, asking people to urge their members of Congress to co-sponsor the bill. Several thousand leading AIPAC activists will be arriving in Washington beginning on October 17.

The American Civil Liberties Union, meanwhile, maintains that the Israel Anti-Boycott Act (S. 720) would have a chilling effect on free speech, as it threatens to penalize U.S. individuals and companies solely on expressed political beliefs. The ACLU opposition reversed the momentum of the legislation, as Democratic senators have been wary of winding up on the opposite side of a central player in the resistance to Trump.

Democratic Sen. Ben Cardin of Maryland, who introduced the Israel Anti-Boycott Act on March 23, is still working with members to review potential clarifications to the bill, according to his office. Cardin promised to amend the measure without changing its core function after the ACLU’s legal interpretation of the bill found that violations “would be subject to a minimum civil penalty of $250,000 and a maximum criminal penalty of $1 million and 20 years in prison.” The ACLU said they will “carefully evaluate” any amendments to the bill to see whether they address their concerns.

Trump Administration Lobbying Hard for Sweeping Surveillance Law

The Trump administration is pushing hard for the reauthorization of a key 2008 surveillance law — section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA — three months before it sunsets in December.

To persuade senators to reauthorize the law in full, the Trump administration is holding classified, members-only briefings for the entire House and Senate next Wednesday, with heavy hitters in attendance: Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, NSA Director Mike Rogers, and FBI Director Christopher Wray will give the briefings, according to an internal announcement of the meetings provided to The Intercept and confirmed by multiple sources on Capitol Hill.

Section 702 serves as the legal basis for two of the NSA’s largest mass surveillance programs, both revealed by Edward Snowden.

Trump administration asks Supreme Court to slash workers’ rights

It’s employees vs. employers in the first case of what legal experts are calling a “blockbuster” term for the U.S. Supreme Court.

The high court kicked off its 2017 term Monday with a case that’s actually three consolidated cases, in which several employees who signed arbitration agreements sued their employers alleging the companies haven’t paid them the overtime wages they were owed. The lower courts are split about whether to allow the cases to move forward, or dismiss them because of the arbitration agreements. The National Labor Relations Act guarantees an employee’s right to collective bargaining, and the plaintiffs argue that individual arbitration agreements violate that law. ...

The court’s liberal bloc, most vocally Justice Stephen Breyer, expressed serious concerns about what what a vote for the companies would mean for the future of labor rights. “I’m worried that what you’re saying is overturning labor law that goes back years, to FDR at least,” Justice Breyer said regarding comments by the company attorney, Paul Clement. “I don’t know how you win without undermining and changing what goes back to the New Deal.” “There is nothing sinister about arbitration,” Clement said.

For the first time in at least a quarter-century, this case pits one federal government agency, the National Labor Relations Board, siding with the employees, against another, the Department of Justice, siding with the employer. The Department of Justice filed an amicus brief in June supporting the companies, and sent the deputy Solicitor General, Jeffrey Wall, to argue the case Monday.

After Equifax Breach, GOP Senators Don’t Yet Have Votes to Overturn Critical Rule That Protects Consumers

Senate Republicans are currently short of the votes they need to overturn a critical consumer protection rule, Sen. John Thune, a member of Republican leadership from South Dakota, said on Tuesday.

With all eyes on health care, the urgency of Puerto Rico’s humanitarian crisis, and President Donald Trump’s ongoing NFL feud, Senate Republican leaders are scrambling to secure the votes to overturn a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau rule that bars companies from forcing consumers into arbitration in boilerplate contracts nobody reads. If they are successful, they will effectively be protecting financial companies from class-action lawsuits and forcing consumers to forfeit their right to a day in court.

When asked by The Intercept whether he expects a vote this week, Thune said he wasn’t sure. ... Asked if one problem was a lack of votes, Thune said yes. “There are some issues related to that, that I think are still being worked on, and I suspect that it probably won’t come up unless they think, unless [Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is] convinced we have the votes for it. They’ve been whipping it,” he said.

Meanwhile, the House has already passed a resolution overturning the rule.

Juan González: Puerto Rico's Financial Control Board Worsened Crisis After Hurricane Maria

Puerto Rico Rejects Loan Offers, Accusing Hedge Funds of Trying to Profit Off Hurricanes

Puerto Rico has rejected a bondholder group’s offer to issue the territory additional debt as a response to the devastation of Hurricane Maria. Officials with Puerto Rico’s Fiscal Agency and Financial Advisory Authority said the offer was “not viable” and would harm the island’s ability to recover from the storm.

The PREPA (Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority) Bondholder Group made the offer on Wednesday, which included $1 billion in new loans, and a swap of $1 billion in existing bonds for another $850 million bond. These new bonds would have jumped to the front of the line for repayment, and between that increased value and interest payments after the first two years, the bondholders would have likely come out ahead on the deal, despite a nominal $150 million in debt relief.

Indeed, the offer was worse in terms of debt relief than one the bondholder group made in April, well before hurricanes destroyed much of the island’s critical infrastructure.

Puerto Rico’s Fiscal Agency and Financial Advisory Authority suggested that profit motive rather than altruism was the bondholder group’s real goal. “Such offers only distract from the government’s stated focus and create the unfortunate appearance that such offers are being made for the purpose of favorably impacting the trading price of existing debt,” the agency said in a statement.

Costs and Climate Be Damned, Rick Perry Seeks to Prop Up Coal, Nuclear Plants

U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry's proposal to ensure "a reliable, resilient electric grid" by propping up nuclear and coal power plants is being met with condemnation by environmental advocacy groups who says it's based on an erroneous argument and spells bad news for customers and the climate alike.

Perry made the proposal Friday to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), stating: "A diverse mix of power generation resources, including those with on-site reserves, is essential to the reliable delivery of electricity—particularly in times of supply stress such as recent natural disasters. My proposal will strengthen American energy security by ensuring adequate reserve resource supply and I look forward to the commission acting swiftly on it."

The Hill describes it as the most definitive action "yet by the Trump administration to try to save coal and nuclear plants," as it asks the independent agency to make a rule that "independent system operators and regional transmission organizations—the entities that operate regional electric grids... be required when signing wholesale electricity contracts to allow certain 'resilient' power plants to get a 'fair rate of return,' even when prices would otherwise be lower."

"To make his case," explains ThinkProgress' Joe Romm, "Perry has fabricated an economic threat to U.S. grid reliability from cheap renewables and then proposed a rule to account for the imaginary reliability benefit of other electricity sources—all the while ignoring the actual health and environmental costs of carbon pollution from burning coal that aren't priced in to the market yet."

Alarm Sounded Over Trump's 'Little Noticed' Push to Undermine Food Safety

In what critics are describing as a move to prioritize exports over public health, the Trump administration is quietly planning to transfer work on international food safety standards from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) health arm to its brand new trade arm, which is supervised by former animal-drug industry executive Ted McKinney.

Politico's Helena Bottemiller Evich first reported the "little-noticed" plan on Monday. Much of the concern "involves the USDA's staff that manages the U.S.' participation in the Codex Alimentarius Commission, a little-known but powerful standards-setting panel that sits under the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Health Organization and is crucial for resolving trade disputes under the WTO," Bottemiller Evich notes.

The Codex Commission is currently debating whether to impose residue limits on the controversial drug zilpaterol, marketed as "beef-improvement technology" that is primarily used to promote growth in cattle.

Michael Hansen, a senior scientist at Consumers Union, told Politico that the Trump administration's decision to place McKinney—former global corporate affairs director of the animal pharmaceutical giant Elanco—in charge of what is often called "the food code" raises serious questions about "whether the U.S. will put even more pressure to make sure zilpaterol gets through."

The European Union, China, and other nations have insisted that zilpaterol—as well as ractopamine, a drug that promotes leanness and muscle growth in animals—is not safe for human or animal consumption and should not be used in food production. The U.S. approved the drug despite these concerns.

The Intercept continues its excellent series documenting the rise of state-corporation fusion in putting down resistance to environmental destruction. Reminder - this fascist exercise took place on the watch of the Obama administration.

Police Used Private Security Aircraft for Surveillance in Standing Rock No-Fly Zone

At the height of the movement to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline’s construction last fall, the Federal Aviation Administration imposed a rare “temporary flight restriction,” also known as a no-fly zone, covering nearly 154 square miles of airspace above the pipeline resistance. The no-fly zone — a response to the activities of indigenous drone pilots, whose aerial videos documenting the struggle at Standing Rock drew large social media followings — was approved from October 25 to November 4 in 2016 and renewed twice to cover a smaller area, remaining in effect until December 13.

Documents obtained via open records requests, as well as material from court cases, reveal new details about how the FAA and state agencies helped police and private security companies wrest control of the airspace above the NoDAPL resistance from indigenous water protectors.

Following the flight ban, the media was no longer permitted to use aircraft to cover the events without undergoing a review process. According to the FAA’s no-fly order, “Only relief aircraft ops under direction of North Dakota Tactical Operations Center [were] authorized in the airspace.” Meanwhile, aircraft operated by Dakota Access Pipeline security officials continued to fly over the area to conduct surveillance. The FAA confirmed to The Intercept that the flights would have been legal only if the private security aircraft were participating in a law enforcement action. Prosecutors have used footage from those flights as evidence in felony cases brought against pipeline opponents, displaying an unusual and troubling partnership between the private security operatives and law enforcement.

As The Intercept has previously reported, pipeline builder Energy Transfer Partners hired the shadowy mercenary firm TigerSwan in September 2016 to oversee its security operation. TigerSwan moved quickly to establish a collaborative relationship with law enforcement. The Intercept received more than 100 leaked documents from a TigerSwan contractor describing those efforts in detail, along with DAPL security’s broader strategy of using aerial surveillance, infiltration, and social media monitoring to counter the water protector movement. TigerSwan, which began as a military and State Department contractor, frequently used the language of counterterrorism to inflate threat assessments, at times comparing the water protectors to jihadi insurgents.

Court documents confirm that DAPL security personnel were coordinating their flights with state agencies. In a police report concerning a highly militarized October 27 police raid during the no-fly period, Lt. Cody Trom of the Bismarck Police Department wrote that a team of officers assigned to clear protesters from a bridge at County Road 134 included a “DAPL air asset.” A spokesperson for the Morton County Sheriff’s Department, one of the agencies leading the police response at Standing Rock, told The Intercept, “DAPL was not deputized.” The spokesperson did confirm, however, that law enforcement personnel were present on DAPL aircraft. “During no-fly zone periods, a law enforcement officer was always on board the helicopter. The helicopter was flown by a private contractor, and a law enforcement officer accompanied him to conduct aerial surveillance.”

Also of Interest

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

Spanish Police Beat Catalan Voters, Deepening the Divide That Threatens Spain

Iraqi Kurdistan Voted to Secede, Now What?

Latest Fake News Panic Appears to Be Fake News

Sen. Corker: US Will Likely Have Troops in Afghanistan for the Next Decade

Anti-Monopoly Candidates Are Testing a New Politics in the Midterms

Judge Delays Decision In Motion To Release Reality Winner On Bail

Conservative Provocateur James O’Keefe’s Group Hit With Restraining Order, Blocking Latest Sting

Rise of the yimbys: the angry millennials with a radical housing solution

A Little Night Music

The Tams - Unlove You

The Tams - It's All Right (You're Just in Love)

The Tams - What Kind Of Fool

The Tams - Sunshine, Rainbow, Blue Sky Brown Eyed Girl

The Tams - Got To Get Used To A Broken Heart

The Tams - Thank You For My Baby

The Tams - Untie Me

The Tams - If Love Were Like Rivers

The Tams - Shelter

The Tams - Trouble Maker

The Tams - There Ain't Nothing Like Shagging

The Tams - Find Another Love

The Tams - Be Young Be Foolish Be Happy