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The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: Ishmon Bracey

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Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features Mississippi bluesman Ishmon Bracey. Enjoy!

^{Ishman Bracey-Trouble Hearted Blues}

"Governments are not running the show anymore. Scumbag Entrepreneurs are, and they have a harsh and ruthless agenda."

-- Ralph Steadman

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News and Opinion

They Said The Massacres Would Stop When The Hostages Were Released. They Haven’t Stopped.

Last year I banged out an angry rant about the way Israel supporters would yell “release the hostages!” at anyone who talked about the latest massacre of Palestinian civilians, saying Hamas was to blame for the killing because of their refusal to release the Israeli captives, and that it would all stop once the hostages are free. I’m remembering that essay today because the hostages are free, but the massacres are continuing.

On Friday Israel reportedly blew up a vehicle carrying a Palestinian family of eleven people, including seven children. The IDF gave its usual excuse for the massacre: the civilians were deemed to have crossed an invisible line into a forbidden zone which made the Israeli soldiers feel unsafe. They did this exact same thing constantly during the last “ceasefire” as well.

In my polemic last year I argued that the slaughter we were seeing in Gaza plainly had nothing to do with pushing for the release of Israeli hostages, and that even if it did it would still be barbaric to massacre children until your enemies caved in to your demands.

What Israel Supporters Really Mean When They Say "Release The Hostages"

What they are saying is that they believe Israel should murder children, decapitate them, rip their guts out, dismember them, mutilate them, burn them alive, every single day, until its military demands are… pic.twitter.com/3VnffoYStb

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) August 26, 2024

But two years of genocide have made it clear that the Israeli military was never killing Palestinian civilians in order to push for the release of hostages or force Hamas to cave in to their demands. The Israeli military kills Palestinian civilians in order to kill Palestinian civilians. The killing is the goal, and it always has been.

We see this illustrated over and over again, in all sorts of ways. Israel apologists always argued that the only reason the IDF had destroyed Gaza’s healthcare system with nonstop hospital attacks was because Hamas was using those hospitals as secret military bases. But then multiple independent reports from western doctors in Gaza confirmed that Israeli forces had been entering the hospitals after attacking them and systematically destroying individual pieces of medical equipment one by one in order to make them unusable. Hamas wasn’t the target in those hospital attacks, the hospitals themselves were the target.

And now we are seeing the “Israel is killing people because Hamas has Israeli hostages” narrative debunked in exactly the same way the “Israel keeps bombing hospitals because there are Hamas bases in all of them” narrative was. The hostages are free, but the massacres continue.

None of which will surprise anyone who was paying attention these last two years. Israel’s genocidal intent has been on full display every minute of every day, and it continues to be even during this joke of a “ceasefire” where the genocide was theoretically supposed to be on pause for a little while.

Israeli Nat’l Security Minister DEMANDS Return To Genocide!

Several days after the story has been debunked, The Guardian continues to print lies...

JD Vance expresses ‘great optimism’ over Gaza ceasefire deal during Israel visit

The US vice-president, JD Vance, expressed “great optimism” over the Gaza truce plan which he described as “durable” and “going better than expected”, during a visit to Israel on Tuesday, two days after Israeli airstrikes killed 26 Palestinians. Vance’s trip, as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to strengthen the ceasefire agreement, comes as Hamas officials joined talks in Cairo meant to bridge outstanding differences with Israel.

“We are doing very well. Better than I expected. We are in a very good place. We’re going to have to keep working on it,” Vance said during a press conference in Kiryat Gat, southern Israel. When asked how likely it was that the ceasefire will hold, he replied that the past week has given him “great optimism”. His visit follows that of the US Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law. Vance met the two men on his arrival and is scheduled to see the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, on Tuesday night.

The ceasefire has been shaken by repeated violations since it was put in place on 10 October, with Palestinian militants killing two Israeli soldiers and Israel bombing Gaza on Sunday. ...

The Palestinian news agency said Israel had violated the ceasefire 80 times and killed at least 80 Palestinians in the past 11 days. Israel, in turn, has accused Hamas of delaying the return of hostages’ bodies, which it says is a violation of the ceasefire deal.

How genocide in Gaza fuelled a wave of Israeli settler violence in the West Bank

Israel Has Allowed Only a Fraction of the Agreed Upon Aid To Enter Gaza

Israel has allowed just a fraction of the agreed-upon number of aid trucks to enter Gaza under the ceasefire deal, according to officials in the Strip. Under the ceasefire agreement, Israel pledged to immediately allow the “commencement of full entry of humanitarian aid and relief” at a minimum consistent with the January 2025 ceasefire deal, under which Israel agreed to allow 600 aid trucks to enter Gaza per day.

According to Gaza’s Government Media Office, Israel has allowed just 15% of the trucks to enter Gaza. “We confirm that the total number of humanitarian aid trucks that have entered the Gaza Strip since the ceasefire began has reached 986 trucks out of 6,600 trucks that were supposed to enter until Monday evening, October 20, 2025, according to what was agreed upon in the text of the resolution,” the Media Office said in a post on Telegram.

Data from the UN2720 Monitoring and Tracking Dashboard, a mechanism created in 2024 to monitor aid shipments into Gaza, shows that from October 10 to October 21, only 853 aid trucks have reached their intended destination in Gaza. The Media Office added that, on average, 89 trucks were entering Gaza per day, saying it reflected “the continued policy of strangulation, starvation and humanitarian blackmail practiced by the occupation.”

'BABYSITTERS': Kushner, JD DESPERATE To TAME NETANYAHU

In Israel, Vance Says It Will Take Time for Hamas To Recover All Israeli Hostage Bodies

Vice President JD Vance visited Israel on Tuesday and said it would take time to recover all of the bodies of deceased Israeli hostages under the rubble in Gaza, contradicting previous Israeli claims that Hamas was violating the ceasefire deal by not handing over all of the remains.

“A lot of these hostages are buried under thousands of pounds of rubble. Some of the hostages, nobody even knows where they are,” Vance told reporters at the new US-led Civilian Military Cooperation Center (CMCC) in southern Israel, from where the US military will oversee the Gaza ceasefire.

Israel initially accused Hamas of violating the ceasefire agreement by not immediately handing over all 28 of the bodies, but Israeli officials were aware that not all of the remains would be released right away, and the deal created a mechanism for sharing information on recovering the bodies. Israel received two more bodies on Tuesday, and if they are confirmed to be Israelis, that means 13 bodies remain in Gaza.

When asked to set a deadline for Hamas to find all the bodies, Vance declined. “I’m not going to do what the President of the United States has thus far refused to do, which is put an explicit deadline on it. Because a lot of this stuff is difficult,” he said.

Aaron Matê : Bill Clinton and Palestine

Ukraine Says It Struck a Chemical Plant Inside Russia With British-Provided Storm Shadow Missiles

Ukraine’s military said on Tuesday that it used British-provided Storm Shadow missiles to strike a chemical plant inside Russia’s Bryansk Oblast, signaling the US is again supporting Ukrainian missile strikes on Russian territory.

“A massive combined missile-and-air strike was carried out, including with air-launched Storm Shadow missiles that penetrated Russia’s air defence system,” the General Staff of Ukraine’s Armed Forces said in a statement, according to Reuters. So far, the attack hasn’t been confirmed by Russia. ...

In August, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump administration was not allowing Ukraine to fire ATACMS into Russia, a policy that also applied to Storm Shadows, since the Ukrainian military requires US targeting data to fire the British missiles. But another report from the outlet this month said that President Trump reversed the policy and signed off on providing Ukraine with intelligence for long-range missile strikes on Russian territory.

Putin's SHOCKING Missile Reveal | Scott Ritter & Larry Johnson

Moscow Furious Demands Answers As US Delays Summit; Pokrovsk Disaster Worsens UK Kiev Briansk Strike

Plans for Trump-Putin talks in Budapest shelved

Plans to hold a summit between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in Budapest have been put on hold as Ukraine and its European allies rallied in pushing for a ceasefire without territorial concessions from Kyiv. The White House said there were now “no plans” for the US president to meet his Russian counterpart “in the immediate future” as a round of diplomacy at the end of last week failed to yield any significant progress towards ending the war.

The comment followed a Monday phone call between Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, and Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, at which Lavrov said his country’s negotiating position remained unchanged. Lavrov said: “I want to officially confirm: Russia has not changed its position compared to the understandings that were reached during the Alaska summit.” He had told Rubio this the day before, he added.

Last night Trump told reporters that he did not want a “wasted meeting” with Putin, adding: “I don’t want to have a waste of time, so I’ll see what happens.” Putting the Budapest summit on hold represents the end of a short diplomatic cycle that began with a call last Thursday between Trump and Putin. During that call, Putin reportedly proposed giving up parts of Kherson and Zaporizhzha provinces occupied by Russian forces, in return for all of Donetsk, a heavily fortified area long sought by Moscow but considered by Kyiv to be the gateway to central Ukraine.

After briefly appearing to flirt with Putin’s proposal, Trump rejected the plan on Sunday, saying Donetsk should be “cut the way it is”. Speaking to reporters on Air Force One, the US leader said: “They can negotiate something later on down the line. But I said cut and stop at the battle line. Go home. Stop fighting, stop killing people.”

Window of Opportunity for Peace is Closing - John Mearsheimer, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen

Ecuador releases survivor of US strike on alleged drug-trafficking submarine

Ecuador has released a man who survived a US strike on a suspected drug-trafficking submarine, after finding no evidence that he had committed a crime, the attorney general’s office has said. The United States has deployed warships to the Caribbean off the coast of Venezuela since August, attacking mostly boats that US authorities said were running drugs. These raids have killed at least 32 people and drawn angry reactions from some South American leaders.

US authorities repatriated the Ecuadorian man, who survived an attack last week on what Donald Trump said was a “very large drug-carrying submarine” headed for the United States. The Ecuadorian attorney general’s office said in a statement there was “no report of a crime that has been brought to the attention of this institution” against the man, and therefore “he could not be detained”.

The man, who has not been identified, had “no pending cases against him”, it added.

Another survivor of the same strike was sent to his native Colombia, where Armando Benedetti, the interior minister, said he had “arrived with brain trauma, sedated, drugged, breathing with a ventilator”. Authorities there said he would face prosecution.

Colombia's U.S. Ambassador Denounces Trump's Deadly Strikes on Boats in the Caribbean

CIA playing ‘most important part’ in US strikes in the Caribbean, sources say

The Central Intelligence Agency is providing the bulk of the intelligence used to carry out the controversial lethal airstrikes by the Trump administration against small, fast-going boats in the Caribbean Sea suspected of carrying drugs from Venezuela, according to three sources familiar with the operations. Experts say the agency’s central role means much of the evidence used to select which alleged smugglers to kill on the open sea will almost certainly remain secret.

The agency’s central role in the boat strikes has not previously been disclosed. Donald Trump confirmed last Wednesday that he had authorized covert CIA action in Venezuela, but not what the agency would be doing.

The sources say the CIA is providing real-time intelligence collected by satellites and signal intercepts to detect which boats it believes are loaded with drugs, tracking their routes and making the recommendations about which vessels should be hit by missiles. “They are the most important part of it,” said one of the sources. Two sources said that the drones or other aircraft actually launching the missiles used to sink the boats belonged to the US military, not the CIA.

Information the agency gathers against any of the alleged smugglers – dead or alive – is likely to remain classified and out of public view. That is in spite of the worldwide public interest and debate over the killing of civilians. The agency’s intelligence, unlike information gathered by the DEA or the US Coast Guard, which used to handle maritime interdiction operations against smugglers, is not designed as legal evidence.

“We do not produce evidence,” Mark Lowenthal, a former assistant director for analysis for the CIA, said. “We have intelligence. It is not the same thing as evidence. It’s a different milieu. Sometimes it’s cold hard fact and sometimes lots less.” He emphasized he is speaking generally based on his past experience and has no independent information about the current boat strikes or intelligence.

Welfare cuts have fuelled rise of far right and populism, top UN expert says

Decades of efforts by mainstream politicians to roll back welfare programmes have given rise to an “extremely dangerous” discourse that has helped fuel the rise of the far right and rightwing populists in countries around the world, a top UN expert has told the Guardian.

From London to Lisbon, politicians from centre-right and centre-left parties alike had steadily eroded social programmes, fostering a sense of scarcity and creating fertile ground for the stirring up of anti-migrant sentiment, said Olivier De Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights.

“If we were doing more, people would not feel threatened, they would not fear falling behind,” he said. “They would be reassured that the digital and ecological transitions and globalisation will be painless because they are protected by a state that cares for them.”

He pointed to the UK, where Nigel Farage’s Reform party is outflanking the Conservatives from the right on migration, as an example. “It’s completely terrifying,” he said. “Reform UK is higher in the polls than ever and you have these anti-migrant demonstrations in various parts of the UK … And the reason is that we’ve not been investing enough in the welfare state.”

De Schutter will present a report to the UN general assembly on Wednesday that lays out his belief in the value of investing in universal, rights-based social protection. At the heart of his argument is the need for governments to rethink the welfare state – from food assistance to healthcare and unemployment benefits – as an essential tool to maintain the social fabric of society, rather than a cost to be reduced.

Deputy US marshal and man shot during Ice operation in Los Angeles

An investigation is ongoing after federal agents shot a man in the elbow and a deputy US marshal was hit in the hand by a ricochet bullet during an immigration enforcement operation in south Los Angeles, police said. The Los Angeles police department said the incident was reported shortly before 9am and involved a federal agent being shot.

A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) statement given to Fox News said the deputy marshal and a man suspected of illegal entry into the US were shot and injured during what the DHS called a “targeted traffic stop”. During the operation, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents surrounded and boxed in a man in his vehicle. Tricia McLaughlin, a DHS assistant secretary, said the man used his vehicle to ram the federal agents’ vehicles in an attempt to flee. Officers then fired “defensive shots”.

The man was shot in the elbow. The deputy marshal was struck in the hand by a ricochet bullet, the DHS said. Both were taken to the hospital. McLaughlin said the injuries were “the consequences of conduct and rhetoric by sanctuary politicians and activists who urge illegal aliens to resist arrest”.

The homeland security department has said that violence against officers is on the rise, and has blamed activists for the increase. Donald Trump said in an executive memo last month that there has been “a more than 1,000% increase in attacks on US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers since January 21 2025, compared to the same period last year”. But the agency has not released data to verify those claims, or explained how it catalogues incidents.

Immigration activists say federal immigration enforcement agents are deploying increasingly violent tactics.

Speaker Mike Johnson says he won’t block House vote to release Epstein files

The Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, on Tuesday said he would not prevent a vote on legislation to make the Jeffrey Epstein files public, even as the chamber remained out of session for a fourth straight week. Johnson has kept the House of Representatives in recess ever since the shutdown began at the start of the month, after Democrats and Republicans failed to reach an agreement on extending government funding beyond the end of September.

That has had the knock-on effect of delaying the success of a legislative maneuver known as a discharge petition to force a vote on a bill that would make public documents from the federal investigation into Epstein, who was charged with sex trafficking and died while awaiting trial in 2019. The justice department this year said he died by suicide, but Donald Trump and his officials have previously restated conspiracy theories that Epstein was at the center of a larger plot.

The president opposes the release of the documents and called the controversy over them a “Democrat hoax”, but all House Democrats along with three Republicans have signed the petition, bringing it one signature away from reaching the 218-member threshold to trigger a vote. “If it hits 218, it comes to the floor,” Johnson told Politico in an interview. “That’s how it works: If you get the signatures, it goes to a vote.”

The final signature on the petition is expected to be Adelita Grijalva, an Arizona Democrat elected last month to fill her late father’s seat representing a district along the state’s border with Mexico. However, Johnson has refused to swear her in until the House reconvenes, which he says he will not allow until the government reopens.

Arizona sues Mike Johnson to force swearing-in of Democrat who could sway Epstein vote

Arizona’s attorney general is suing to force the Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, to swear in Adelita Grijalva, a Democrat who won a congressional special election in September. Grijalva was elected on 23 September in the southern Arizona district that her father, Raúl Grijalva, held until his death earlier this year.

Kris Mayes, the Democratic attorney general in Arizona, had promised to sue if Johnson would not let Grijalva get started on her work. She sent a letter to Johnson on 14 October demanding he schedule a swearing-in within two days, which did not happen.

“By blocking Adelita Grijalva from taking her rightful oath of office, [Johnson] is subjecting Arizona’s seventh congressional district to taxation without representation. I will not allow Arizonans to be silenced or treated as second-class citizens in their own democracy,” Mayes said in a press release announcing the lawsuit.

Johnson has said he would seat Grijalva once the government reopens, but with Democrats and Republicans deadlocked, there is no sign that the shutdown – now the second-longest in US history – will end any time soon.

Grijalva, who has held local offices in Arizona for decades, went to Washington in early October, expecting to be sworn in and start her new job. Johnson has so far refused to schedule a swearing-in for her, depriving her of the ability to use her office or access parts of the Capitol designated for members of Congress without an escort. “I want to get to work and I can’t,” Grijalva said in early October.

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Just in case you need a refresher in how Bill Clinton f@cked America and made the ascension of Donald Trump inevitable ...

The Corporate Democrats Delivered Donald Trump

This year, while Donald Trump and Republican legislators have been boosting oligarchy and slashing enormous holes in the social safety net, Democratic leaders have seemed remarkably uninterested in breaking away from the policy approaches that ended up losing their party the allegiance of so many working-class voters. Those corporate-friendly approaches set the stage for Trump’s faux “populism” as an imagined solution to the discontent that the corporatism of the Democrats had helped usher in.

While offering a rollback to pre-Trump-2.0 policies, the current Democratic leadership hardly conveys any orientation that could credibly relieve the economic distress of so many Americans. The party remains in a debilitating rut, refusing to truly challenge the runaway power of corporate capitalism that has caused ever-widening income inequality.

The Democratic Party establishment now denounces President Trump’s vicious assaults on vital departments and social programs. Unfortunately, three decades ago it cleared a path that led toward the likes of the DOGE wrecking crew. A clarion call in that direction came from President Bill Clinton when, in his 1996 State of the Union address, he exulted that “the era of big government is over.”

Clinton followed those instantly iconic words by adding, “We cannot go back to the time when our citizens were left to fend for themselves.” Like the horse he rode into Washington — the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which he cofounded — Clinton advocated a “third way,” distinct from both liberal Democrats and Republican conservatives. But when his speech called for “self-reliance and teamwork” — and when, on countless occasions throughout the 1990s he invoked the buzzwords “opportunity” and “responsibility” — he was firing from a New Democrat arsenal that all too sadly targeted “handouts” and “special interests” as obsolete relics of the 1930s New Deal and the 1960s Great Society.

The seminal Clintonian theme of “opportunity” — with little regard for outcome — aimed at a wide political audience. In the actual United States, however, touting opportunity as central to solving the problems of inequity obscured the huge disparities in real-life options. In theory, everyone was to have a reasonable chance; in practice, opportunity was then (and remains) badly skewed by economic status and race, beginning as early as the womb. In a society so stratified by class, “opportunity” as the holy grail of social policy ultimately leaves outcomes to the untender mercies of the market.

Two weeks before Clinton won the presidency, the newsweekly Time reported that his “economic vision” was “perhaps best described as a call for a We decade; not the old I-am-my-brother’s-keeper brand of traditional Democratic liberalism.” Four weeks later, the magazine showered the president-elect with praise: “Clinton’s willingness to move beyond some of the old-time Democratic religion is auspicious. He has spoken eloquently of the need to redefine liberalism: the language of entitlements and rights and special-interest demands, he says, must give way to talk of responsibilities and duties.”

Clinton and the DLC insisted that government should smooth the way for maximum participation in the business of business. While venerating the market, the New Democrats were openly antagonistic toward labor unions and those they dubbed “special interests,” such as feminists, civil-rights activists, environmentalists, and others who needed to be shunted aside to fulfill the New Democrat agenda, which included innovations like “public-private partnerships,” “empowerment zones,” and charter schools.

While disparaging advocates for the marginalized as impediments to winning the votes of white “moderates,” the New Democrats tightly embraced corporate America. I still have a page I tore out of Time magazine in December 1996, weeks after Clinton won reelection. The headline said: “Ex-Investment Bankers and Lawyers Form Clinton’s Economic Team. Surprise! It’s Pro-Wall Street.”

That was the year when Clinton and his allies achieved a longtime goal — strict time limits for poor women to receive government assistance. “From welfare to work” became a mantra. Aid to Families with Dependent Children was out and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families was in. As occurred three years earlier when he was able to push NAFTA through Congress only because of overwhelming Republican support, Democratic lawmakers were divided and Clinton came to rely on overwhelming GOP support to make “welfare reform” possible.

The welfare bill that he gleefully signed in August 1996 was the flip side of his elite economic team’s priorities. The victims of “welfare reform” would soon become all too obvious, while their victimizers would remain obscured in the smoke blown by cheerleading government officials, corporate-backed think tanks, and mainstream journalists. When Clinton proclaimed that such landmark legislation marked the end of “welfare as we know it,” he was hailing the triumph of a messaging siege that had raged for decades.

Across much of the country’s media spectrum, prominent pundits had long been hammering away at “entitlements,” indignantly claiming that welfare recipients, disproportionately people of color, were sponging off government largesse. The theme was a specialty of conservative columnists like Charles Krauthammer, John Leo, and George Will (who warned in November 1993 that the nation’s “rising illegitimacy rate… may make America unrecognizable”). But some commentators who weren’t right-wing made similar arguments, while ardently defaming the poor.

Newsweek star writer Joe Klein often accused inner-city Black people of such defects as “dependency” and “pathology.” Three months after Clinton became president, Klein wrote that “out-of-wedlock births to teenagers are at the heart of the nexus of pathologies that define the underclass.” The next year, he intensified his barrage. In August 1994, under the headline “The Problem Isn’t the Absence of Jobs, But the Culture of Poverty,” he peppered his piece with phrases like “welfare dependency,” while condemning “irresponsible, antisocial behavior that has its roots in the perverse incentives of the welfare system.”

Such punditry was unconcerned with the reality that, even if they could find and retain employment while struggling to raise families, what awaited the large majority of the women being kicked off welfare were dead-end jobs at very low wages.

During the 1990s, Bill and Hillary Clinton fervently mapped out paths for poor women that would ostensibly make private enterprise the central solution to poverty. A favorite theme was the enticing (and facile) notion that people could rise above poverty by becoming entrepreneurs.

Along with many speeches by the Clintons, some federal funds were devoted to programs to help lenders offer microcredit so that low-income people could start small enterprises. Theoretically, the result would be both well-earning livelihoods and self-respect for people who had pulled themselves out of poverty. Of course, some individual success stories became grist for upbeat media features. But as the years went by, the overall picture would distinctly be one of failure.

In 2025, politicians continue to laud small business ventures as if they could somehow remedy economic ills. But such endeavors aren’t likely to bring long-term financial stability, especially for people with little start-up money to begin with. Current figures indicate that one-fifth of all new small businesses fail within the first year and the closure rate only continues to climb after that. Fifty percent of small businesses fail within five years and 65 percent within 10 years.

Promoting the private sector as the solution to social inequities inevitably depletes the public sector and its capacity to effectively serve the public good. Three decades after the Clinton presidency succeeded in blinkering the Democratic vision of what economic justice might look like, the party’s leaders are still restrained by assumptions that guarantee vast economic injustice — to the benefit of those with vast wealth.

“Structural problems require structural solutions,” Bernie Sanders wrote in a 2019 op-ed piece, “and promises of mere ‘access’ have never guaranteed black Americans equality in this country… ‘Access’ to health care is an empty promise when you can’t afford high premiums, co-pays or deductibles. And an ‘opportunity’ for an equal education is an opportunity in name only when you can’t afford to live in a good school district or to pay college tuition. Jobs, health care, criminal justice and education are linked, and progress will not be made unless we address the economic systems that oppress Americans at their root.”

But addressing the root of economic systems that oppress Americans is exactly what the Democratic Party leadership, dependent on big corporate donors, has rigorously refused to do. Looking ahead, unless Democrats can really put up a fight against the pseudo-populism of the rapacious and fascistic Trump regime, they are unlikely to regain the support of the working-class voters who deserted them in last year’s election.

During this month’s federal government shutdown, Republicans were ruthlessly insistent on worsening inequalities in the name of breaking or shaking up the system. Democrats fought tenaciously to defend Obamacare and a health-care status quo that still leaves tens of millions uninsured or underinsured, while medical bills remain a common worry and many people go without the care they need.

“We must start by challenging the faith that public policy, private philanthropy, and the culture at large has placed in the market to accomplish humanitarian goals,” historian Lily Geismer has written in her insightful and deeply researched book Left Behind. “We cannot begin to seek suitable and sustainable alternatives until we understand how deep that belief runs and how detrimental its consequences are.”

The admonitions in Geismer’s book, published three years ago, cogently apply to the present and future. “The best way to solve the vexing problems of poverty, racism, and disinvestment is not by providing market-based microsolutions,” she pointed out. “Macroproblems need macrosolutions. It is time to stop trying to make the market do good. It is time to stop trying to fuse the functions of the federal government with the private sector… It is the government that should be providing well-paying jobs, quality schools, universal childcare and health care, affordable housing, and protections against surveillance and brutality from law enforcement.”

Although such policies now seem a long way off, clearly articulating the goals is a crucial part of the struggle to achieve them. Those who suffer from the economic power structure are victims of a massively cruel system, being made steadily crueler by the presidency of Donald Trump. But progress is possible with clarity about how the system truly works and the victimizers who benefit from it.

Curtis Sliwa TRASHES Bill Ackman For Telling Him To DROP OUT of Mayor's Race

Trump LASHES OUT At 'Ugandan Communist' Zohran

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No major banks have yet committed to stop funding new oil, gas and coal, research finds

No major bank has yet committed to stop funding new oil and gas fields or coal capacity, research has found. Most banks that have recently updated their climate policies have weakened them, according to the research by the TPI Global Climate Transition Centre (TPI) at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

The centre analysed 36 of the largest banks by market capitalisation and total assets, and found “banks are still at an early stage of their transition with decarbonisation targets that cover a limited set of sectors and business activities.”

The researchers evaluated banks’ climate policies using 77 sub-indicators grouped into 10 areas, called the net zero banking assessment framework (NZBAF).

They found 95% of the scores remained unchanged year on year, and those banks that had shifted had weakened their policies. On average, banks score on only 18% of the 77 sub-indicators and the best-performing bank scores on about one-third of the sub-indicators.

The report said banks have “weakened their disclosures in areas such as net zero commitments, financing conditions for high-emission sectors and fossil fuel policies”. Some banks either fully withdrew or weakened their net zero commitments, substituting firm language such as “commitment” or “target” with less precise wording such as “ambition” or “aspiration”.

Energy Prices To SPIKE Amid HUGE GOP Cuts

Trump EPA seeks to weaken scrutiny for some of US’s most toxic chemicals

A new rule proposed by the Trump administration would dramatically weaken safety reviews for some of the nation’s most toxic chemicals that are already on the market, public health advocates and an EPA employee warn.

Many of the chemicals that would receive less scrutiny are among the nation’s most dangerous substances, including PFAS, formaldehyde, asbestos and dioxins. Each poses serious health risks in consumer goods, or for workers handling the substances, advocates say.

If implemented, the new rule would shorten the time it takes to review chemicals, and alter the methodology used to assess their dangers. It would also prohibit states from banning or restricting dangerous chemicals, and could invalidate hundreds of state-level protections.

“This is a gift to industry wrapped on golden wrapping paper with a big bow on it,” said Kyla Bennett, a former EPA scientist now with the Public Employees For Environmental Responsibility non-profit.

Federal law requires the Environmental Protection Agency to continuously review the safety of toxic chemicals on the market, and that requirement has been an industry target in recent years.

Scientists say North Atlantic right whale population slowly increasing

One of the rarest whales on the planet has continued an encouraging trend of population growth in the wake of new efforts to protect the giant animals, according to scientists who study them.

The North Atlantic right whale now numbers an estimated 384 animals, up eight whales from the previous year, according to a report by the North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium released on Tuesday. The whales have shown a trend of slow population growth over the past four years and have gained more than 7% of their 2020 population, the consortium said.

It’s a welcome development in the wake of a troubling decline in the previous decade. The population of the whales, which are vulnerable to collisions with ships and entanglement in fishing gear, fell about 25% from 2010 to 2020.

The whale’s trend toward recovery is a testament to the importance of conservation measures, said Philip Hamilton, a senior scientist with the New England Aquarium’s Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life. The center and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) collaborate to calculate the population estimate.

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Also of Interest

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

Did the US Participate in a Gaza Massacre?

Dozens of Israeli soldiers identified in ICC complaint on killing of Hind Rajab

Hamas says dealt ‘severe blow’ to group it says collaborated with Israel

Craig Murray: 36-Minute Trials & No Jury

Media & MPs Condemn Westminster Attack on Press Freedom

EU-NATO Retreats From ‘Ukraine Is Winning’ To Begging For A Ceasefire

The Louvre raid was audacious - but nothing compared to the heist France’s political leadership just pulled off

Who’s Delusional, Who’s Drugged, Who’s Disinformed? It’s Hard to Tell

The Personal Politics of Hopelessness

No Kings and the Lure of Spectacle

Cuomo BEGS Sliwa To Drop Out- ‘Give Me Your Voters!’

Virginia Giuffre's Posthumous Memoir Details Sex Abuse by Epstein & Associates

Dem Operative ADMITS On CNN They Falsely Prosecuted Trump!

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A Little Night Music

Ishmon Bracey - Pay Me No Mind Blues

Ishmon Bracey - Saturday Blues

Ishmon Bracey - Woman Woman Blues

Ishmon Bracey - The Four Day Blues

Ishmon Bracey - Left Alone Blues

Ishman Bracey - Leavin' Town Blues

Ishman Bracey- Mobile Stomp

Ishman Bracey- Farish Street Rag

Ishman Bracey- My Brown Mama Blues

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