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This evening's music features Blues singer and guitarist Albert King. Enjoy!

"If the president does something dastardly, the impeachment process is available."

-- Brett Kavanaugh

News and Opinion

Worth a full read, there's a lot more important detail than can be fairly abstracted here. Of note, though, a key enabler of the corporate dictatorship, Nancy Pelosi is ready to keep impeachment off of the table again and now, again:

In Letter to Trump, House Democrats Promise to Investigate Brett Kavanaugh for Perjury If Confirmed

Even as Brett Kavanaugh inches closer toward his confirmation as a Supreme Court justice, congressional Democrats are making a last-ditch attempt to bring attention to the nominee’s potential perjury, including about his role in the warrantless surveillance programs of the post-9/11 Bush White House.

Dozens of members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus sent a letter Thursday to President Donald Trump committing to leverage subpoena power in an effort to investigate the full record of Kavanaugh’s time in the White House for evidence of perjury. House Democrats will have subpoena power if they retake the lower chamber in the midterm elections, and Rep. Jerrold Nadler, who will likely chair the House Judiciary Committee should that happen, has already promised to investigate any credible allegations of perjury if Kavanaugh is confirmed. Nadler did not sign the letter.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., raised questions about the nominee’s Bush-era record on the second day of Kavanaugh’s nomination hearings last month, but the issue has otherwise received little of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s attention. In the lower chamber, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has demurred when faced with questions of how Democrats would approach a Kavanaugh confirmation, post-midterm season. “We are not about impeachment,” she said Tuesday at the Atlantic Festival in Washington, D.C.

Sanders Calls for Kavanaugh Perjury Investigation – Where are the Democrats?

Hundreds arrested at anti-Kavanaugh protest: 'It's time for women to be heard'

More than 300 protesters, including the comedian Amy Schumer, were arrested at the US Capitol in Washington on Thursday as they made a final, desperate appeal to senators to reject the embattled supreme court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

Demonstrators chanted, unfurled banners and staged a sit-in at a Senate office building, one day before the body is poised to take its first vote on the judge’s nomination to America’s highest bench. The scenes were unprecedented for any supreme court nominee in recent history. Thousands of protesters, survivors of sexual assault among them, gathered outside the courthouse in Washington where Kavanaugh currently sits as a federal judge and walked in unison to the supreme court, where he hopes to secure a lifetime appointment. ...

“It’s time for women to be heard,” said Karen Bralove, an alumnus of Holton-Arms, the all-girls preparatory school Dr Christine Blasey Ford attended in the early 1980s when she alleges Kavanaugh attempted to rape her. “I don’t know whether Brett is going to be confirmed, but women and survivors are not going to be quiet any more.” ... Bralove added: “This is so triggering for so many people.” She added the fight would not end even if Kavanaugh is confirmed. “We do not do 10 days of marching and then go back to our lives, because nothing is the same any more. Nothing.” ...

From the exterior of the supreme court, by late afternoon demonstrators marched directly to the scene of the debate. Thousands packed the atrium of the Hart Senate office building, while streams of protesters flooded each floor with chants of “Our court” and “Justice now”. Many spread out banners and sat on the floor, then were put in plastic handcuffs by law enforcement and led away.

The very rude elevator screamers are paid professionals only looking to make Senators look bad. Don’t fall for it! Also, look at all of the professionally made identical signs. Paid for by Soros and others. These are not signs made in the basement from love! #Troublemakers

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 5, 2018

You mean like these non-professionally made, non-identical signs made in the basement with love? pic.twitter.com/uegQZrGyPU

— Mrs. Betty Bowers (@BettyBowers) October 5, 2018

For all the talk of anti-Kavanaugh protesters being paid, I just saw a group of Confirm Kavanaugh folks whip out a binder with a FreedomWorks logo on it and a printout of all the Senators (with their pictures next to them) who they should lobby

— Sam Stein (@samstein) October 5, 2018

Collins says she will vote to confirm Kavanaugh

After lengthy remarks in defense of his nomination, Collins confirms she’ll vote along party lines.

Very hard now to understand what it was Collins was undecided about all this time.
She has firmly rejected virtually every single potential reason or pretext for voting against Kavanaugh.

— Nick Confessore (@nickconfessore) October 5, 2018

“The allegations fail to meet the more-likely-than-not standard,” Collins says.

“I do not believe that these charges can fairly prevent judge Kavanaugh from serving on the supreme court.”

One Republican just flipped, but is it enough to stop Kavanaugh?

The razor-thin Republican Senate majority that could hand a contentious victory to Brett Kavanaugh rests, in part, with Sen. Lisa Murkowski — the moderate Republican from Alaska with a #MeToo story of her own.

The Senate narrowly voted — 51-49 — Friday morning to end debate on Kavanaugh’s ascent to the Supreme Court after days of debate surrounding accusations of sexual misconduct from three different women and a subsequent FBI probe. As the only Republican “no” vote, however, Murkowski could hold the key to Kavanaugh’s confirmation. If she votes nay again on his confirmation Saturday — and another Republican joins her — Kavanaugh might not take his seat on the high court as planned.

That means West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat, could also change Kavanaugh’s fate. Although his “yes” vote tipped the scales in favor of Kavanaugh Friday, he could change his vote by Saturday. ... The other moderate Republicans that often vote in tandem with Murkowski — Sen. Susan Collins of Maine and Sen. Jeff Flake or Arizona — voted to advance Kavanaugh’s confirmation Friday. But they still haven’t made how they’ll vote Saturday entirely clear. Flake said he thinks Kavanaugh will be confirmed on Saturday and indicated he’ll vote to confirm him. Collins will reportedly reveal her decision at 3 p.m. Friday, but has indicated that she’s satisfied with the FBI investigation into the allegations of sexual assault. ...

Now that Murkowski has voted against Kavanaugh, her moderate colleagues could choose to join her. If all three vote “no” together — even if Manchin keeps his “yes” vote — Kavanaugh loses the confirmation.

Eve Ensler to White Women Supporting Kavanaugh: Stand with Survivors & Fight This Nomination

Facebook has a big Kavanaugh problem — and it won’t go away

Amid Facebook’s mounting problems, CEO Mark Zuckerberg will confront hundreds of irate employees Friday to explain why a company executive lent his support to Brett Kavanaugh at the Senate Judiciary hearings last week. Joel Kaplan, vice president for global public policy, was seated alongside his wife and Kavanaugh’s own family at Thursday’s emotional hearing, attending to show support for his friend of more than two decades.

But for Facebook staff in Menlo Park, Kaplan’s presence was an outrage. According to reports by The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, the company’s internal message board lit up with missives from employees who took Kaplan’s appearance to be an endorsement for Kavanaugh from Facebook itself.

One employee wrote that it was “a slap in the face to his fellow employees.” ...

Kaplan apologized, but without backing down on his support of Kavanaugh. “I want to apologize,” the Facebook executive wrote last Friday in a note to staff. “I recognize this moment is a deeply painful one — internally and externally.” Zuckerberg addressed the controversy at a weekly Q-and-A session, saying Kaplan had not broken any company rules and he trusted his executive’s judgment — but added that he would not have made the same decision. That failed to quell the anger with many employees suggesting the CEO was trying to shrug off Kaplan’s support of a man accused of sexual misconduct while at school and in college.

David Sirota nails it - worth a click.

America's new aristocracy lives in an accountability-free zone

When the former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling was released from prison a few weeks ago, the news conjured memories of a corporate scandal that now seems almost quaint – and it was also a reminder that Enron executives were among the last politically connected criminals to face any serious consequences for institutionalized fraud. Since Skilling’s conviction 12 years ago, our society has been fundamentally altered by a powerful political movement whose goal is not merely another court seat, tax cut or election victory. This movement’s objective is far more revolutionary: the creation of an accountability-free zone for an ennobled aristocracy, even as the rest of the population is treated to law-and-order rhetoric and painfully punitive policy.

Let’s remember that in less than two decades, America has experienced the Iraq war, the financial crisis, intensifying economic stratification, an opioid plague, persistent gender and racial inequality and now seemingly unending climate change-intensified disasters. While the victims have been ravaged by these crime sprees, crises and calamities, the perpetrators have largely avoided arrest, inquisition, incarceration, resignation, public shaming and ruined careers. That is because the United States has been turned into a safe space for a permanent ruling class. Inside the rarefied refuge, the key players who created this era’s catastrophes and who embody the most pernicious pathologies have not just eschewed punishment – many of them have actually maintained or even increased their social, financial and political status. ...

Now comes the latest stage of the immunity project: the installation of Kavanaugh as the sentinel standing watch over this sprawling accountability-free zone from a lifetime perch on America’s very own star chamber. Kavanaugh is the nominee of Donald Trump, who as a businessman helped set the legal precedent protecting corporate titans from fraud charges, and who as president has appointed a cabinet of accountability evaders – from the treasury secretary, Steve Mnuchin, who escaped prosecution during the financial crisis, to the transportation secretary, Elaine Chao, who avoided consequences for her role at Wells Fargo during that company’s mass fraud. Kavanaugh is also the nominee of an accountability-free party whose last House speaker was deemed “a serial child molester” by a judge, whose potential next House speaker is named in a college sexual abuse scandal, and whose White House occupant was caught on camera bragging about sexually accosting women.

To the delight of the Republican party, Kavanaugh is not backing down in the face of multiple credible accusations of sexual misconduct. ... In the context of this political moment, Kavanaugh’s defiance is more than merely a plea of innocence. It is more than just an ideological warrior’s yearning to serve on a court that has been making it ever-harder for commoners to hold the aristocracy accountable.

An interesting article worth a click:

Is Saudi Arabia the Middle East’s Next Failed State?

Reports are growing that Muhammad bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s hyperactive crown prince, is losing his grip. His economic reform program has stalled since his father, King Salman, nixed plans to privatize 5 percent of Saudi Aramco. The Saudi war in Yemen, which the prince launched in March 2015, is more of a quagmire than ever while the kingdom’s sword rattling with Iran is making the region increasingly jumpy. Heavy gunfire in Riyadh last April sparked rumors that MBS, as he’s known, had been killed in a palace coup. In May, an exiled Saudi prince urged top members of the royal family to oust him and put an end to his “irrational, erratic, and stupid” rule. Recently, Bruce Riedel, an ex-CIA analyst who heads up the Brookings Institution’s Intelligence Project, reported that the prince is so afraid for his life that he’s taken to spending nights on his yacht in the Red Sea port of Jeddah.

What does it all mean? The person to ask is Ibn Khaldun, the famous Tunisian historian, geographer, and social theorist. You might have trouble getting him on the phone, though, since he died in 1406. ...

As Ibn Khaldun put it:

[T]he life of a dynasty does not as a rule extend beyond three generations. The first generation retains the desert qualities, desert toughness, and desert strategy. … They are sharp and greatly feared. People submit to them. … [T]he second generation changes from the desert attitude to sedentary culture, from privation to luxury and plenty, from a state in which everybody shared in the glory to one in which one man claims all the glory for himself while the others are too lazy to strive for glory. … The third generation … has completely forgotten the period of desert life and toughness, as if it never existed…. Luxury reaches its peak among them, because they are so much given to a life of prosperity and ease.

Ibn Saud, the founder of the modern Saudi state, by allying himself with Wahhabism, the local version of Islamic ultra-fundamentalism, embodied Ibn Khaldun’s concept of a ruthless desert warrior who uses religion to mobilize his fellow tribesman and battle his way to the throne in 1932. Once Saud took power, he proved to be a tough and cagey politician who put down rebellion and expertly played Britain and America off against one another to solidify his throne. But the half-dozen sons who followed were different. The first, Saud, was a heavy spender who brought the kingdom to the brink of bankruptcy. The second, Faisal was an autocrat who was so out of his depth that he believed Zionism somehow begat communism. Khalid, who took power in 1975, was an absentee monarch who was gripped by paralysis when hundreds of rebels took over Mecca’s Grand Mosque in November 1979 and had to be rescued by French commandos flown in specially for the occasion. Fahd, who succeeded to the throne in 1982, was obese, diabetic, and a heavy smoker who ultimately fell victim to a massive stroke. Abdullah, his successor, also was sickly and obese, while Salman, who assumed the throne in 2015 at age 79, has suffered at least one stroke and is said to exhibit “mild dementia.” A video of the king landing in Moscow in 2017 shows a doddering old man who can barely descend a staircase.

The upshot is a group study in decrepitude. MBS, who all but took over the throne in 2015, meanwhile personifies all the foolishness and decadence that Ibn Khaldun attributed to the third generation. ... As for the lean and hungry fundamentalists whom Ibn Khaldun said would administer the final blow, there’s no doubt who fits that bill: ISIS and al- Qaida. Both are fierce, warlike, and pious, both inveigh against a Saudi regime drowning in corruption, and both would like nothing more than to parade about with the crown prince’s head on a pike.

Hillary's handiwork continues to assist the spread of American values:

Libya is a war zone. Why is the EU still sending refugees back there?

“Some around the world are arguing that human rights are outdated, that national interest can justify the suppression of individual and collective rights,” declared Federica Mogherini, the EU’s foreign policy chief, last week at the UN general assembly. “We are here today to state the opposite … Human rights are real.” As she said this, I was getting desperate WhatsApp messages from some of the thousands of refugees locked up indefinitely in detention centres in Tripoli, after being forced back to Libya under EU policy.

The same day, hundreds in the Abu Salim detention centre had been threatened by unknown men with guns, while a pregnant woman collapsed from sickness amid heavy rain. Since 26 August, Tripoli has experienced the worst fighting in years, as rival militias fight to take control of the city. As the UN-backed government declared a state of emergency and shells began to fall indiscriminately, refugees and migrants were abandoned or released on to the dangerous streets. Some resorted to drinking toilet water to survive. Others were stuck on front lines, shot at or abducted by suspected traffickers, or cowered together as bombs went off beside them.

Europe’s “stop the boats” policy now resembles Australia’s, as African migrants and refugees are locked up indefinitely after being returned to Libya by the EU-backed Libyan coastguard. They have no recourse to judicial review, instead waiting for help from the UN, while praying not to be sold to traffickers by Libyan authorities who regularly threaten and insult them. There are roughly 7,000 people in “official” Tripoli detention centres, including 640 children, according to the UN. Many of those currently incarcerated described the moment they came closest to freedom: a point in the Mediterranean when they thought help had come, in the form of Italian boats, only for the boats to block their way until the Libyans arrived to pull them back. ...

While the EU has been effectively treating Libya as a safe country, despite consistent reports of rapes, torture, exploitation, forced labour and physical abuse of returnees, the fighting that broke out in August exposed how untrue this was. As refugees called me and begged for help, I contacted international organisations including the UN high commissioner for refugees (UNHCR) and the International Organization for Migration. Again and again, they said there was nothing they could do while the fighting continued. The refugees have been left on their own to fight for survival. Some have even been forced to become actors in the war, after militias pulled them out of detention centres and made them move heavy weapons or pack bullets, beating those who resisted. ...

For the thousands of detainees who have escaped dictatorships or war zones, only to survive torture and abuse by smugglers, the proclamations about human rights by European politicians are total hypocrisy.

Sweden's 'true queen', 8, pulls ancient sword from lake

An eight-year-old girl has pulled a 1,500-year-old sword from a lake in southern Sweden.

“I felt something with my hand and at first I thought it was a stick,” Saga Nevecek told the local Värnamo Nyheter newspaper. “Then it had a handle that looked like it was a sword, and then I lifted it up and shouted: ‘Daddy, I found a sword!’” The find, made in July but announced only this week for fear it would trigger a summer stampede to the site at Tånnö on the shore of Lake Vidöstern, felt “pretty cool and a bit exciting”, she told the Swedish public broadcaster Sveriges Radio.

Despite intense speculation on social media, there was no immediate confirmation that Saga would be crowned “Queen of Sweden”, in an echo of the Arthurian legends of the sword in the stone and the lady of the lake.

Her father, Andrew, said in a Facebook post that the sword, estimated by experts from the nearby Jönköping county museum to date to the 5th or 6th century AD, before the Viking era, was still in the remains of its wood and leather scabbard.

Brazil Faces a Momentous Choice

Brazil elections: prospect of Bolsonaro victory stokes fears of return to dictatorship

Latin America’s largest democracy will hold what some consider the most critical election in its history on Sunday, with a far-right populist notorious for his hostility to gays, refugees, ethnic minorities and the environment leading the race to become Brazil’s next president. Jair Bolsonaro, a self-styled political outsider who basks in comparisons with Donald Trump, topped polls with about 35% of intended votes on Friday as 147 million Brazilians prepared to elect their new leader, as well as 27 state governors, and nearly 1,600 lawmakers.

“This is the most important election in the history of Brazil,” said James N Green, the director of Brown University’s Brazil Initiative. “There is just no other time at which voters’ decisions will determine the fate of the country and its direction [to such an extent] … We are at a moment in which a conservative, rightwing pro-fascist-type person is possibly going to be the president,” added Green, the author of several books on Brazil’s 1964-85 dictatorship. “I don’t even want to imagine what that is going to be like [if he wins] … It would be the beginning of the end of democracy.”

Hoping to foil Bolsonaro, a 63-year-old ex-paratrooper, is the former São Paulo mayor Fernando Haddad, who is lying second in the polls. Haddad, 55, replaced jailed former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva as the Workers’ party (PT) candidate last month after Lula was forced to drop out of the race. With Brazil struggling to escape its worst ever recession with 13 million unemployed, Haddad has promised a return to the golden days of economic boom under Lula, who was president from 2003 to 2011. ... Haddad had seemed to be gaining ground on Bolsonaro but the latest polls give him about 22% of intended votes, suggesting his campaign may have stalled, while Bolsonaro has opened up a 13-point lead.

Boo! Scary potential wage growth!

World markets rattled by US inflation concerns

Mounting concern about the inflationary impact of falling US unemployment has sent tremors through global financial markets amid fears that the long post-financial crisis rally in asset prices is nearing its end. The effective interest rate on 10-year benchmark US bonds reached their highest level for seven years after the latest snapshot of the American labour market showed fewer workers claiming jobless benefits.

Shares on Wall Street fell sharply as investors predicted that the monthly official payroll report out on Friday would show that the drop in unemployment was leading to pressure for higher wages. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped for the first time in six days. The more broadly based S&P 500 also fell and the technology-heavy Nasdaq was down nearly 2%, its worst performance since June. They managed to rally slightly before the closing bell but all eyes will be on Friday’s job report. And good news for employees may be bad news for investors. ...

“Rapidly rising US treasury yields are rocking equity markets around the globe, with high price-to-earnings tech stocks leading the decline,” said Yasuo Sakuma, chief investment officer at Libra Investments in Tokyo on Friday. The Federal Reserve has already raised interest rates eight times in the past three years in order to head off the threat of higher inflation, but its chairman, Jerome Powell, said on Thursday the economy could expand for “quite some time”.

San Francisco police targeted only black residents in drug arrests, lawsuit claims

San Francisco police exclusively targeted black residents during undercover drug arrests as part of a pattern of racial profiling, according to a new lawsuit. Police in the California city, where only 6% of the population is black, worked with federal authorities to arrest 37 people, all of whom were black, for selling small amounts of drugs, the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California said in a complaint announced Thursday. During the operations, one undercover officer was caught on camera declining to buy drugs from an Asian woman and waiting to buy from a black woman, who was later prosecuted.

The suit focused on San Francisco police collaborations with the US Drug Enforcement Administration and federal prosecutors in 2013 and 2014, but the ACLU has alleged that the discriminatory policing and harassment of black people in the city has continued. “We’ve seen time and time again how racial bias has infected the San Francisco police department’s ability to administer equal enforcement of the law,” Novella Coleman, an ACLU staff attorney, said in an interview.

The allegations are striking given how rapidly the African American population has declined in San Francisco, a city that has a serious housing crisis amid a booming tech economy. The city and state also have also developed a huge marijuana industry while reports over the years have repeatedly shown that black residents in San Francisco are disproportionately targeted for marijuana and other drug arrests. ...

The ACLU suit was announced the same day a Los Angeles Times investigation revealed that officers involved in southern California drug enforcement efforts have stopped and searched thousands of Latino drivers without uncovering any drugs.

Activists Pledge $1.8 Million to Susan Collins’s Democratic Challenger If She Votes to Confirm Brett Kavanaugh

Activists, led by Ady Barkan, have now raised over $1.8 million in pledges for a future Democratic opponent of Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, promising to only make good on the pledges if the senator votes in favor of Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. Collins is expected to announce her decision on whether to back Kavanaugh’s confirmation at 3 p.m. EDT.

In stark contrast to the typical corporate campaign finance model, the activists’ innovative effort aims to send a message to the senator via a large number of small contributions. A source close to the campaign recently told The Intercept that the average donation is $28.40. Collins is not responding well to the campaign. She went to the conservative website Newsmax to call the effort a “bribe.”

“I consider this quid pro quo fundraising to be the equivalent of an attempt to bribe me to vote against Judge Kavanaugh,” she said. “I think it demonstrates the new lows to which the judge’s opponents have stooped.” ... The irony is that all of those who are now complaining about the small-donor organizing effort by Barkan have spent their careers defending the right of large-money donors to influence politics.

Collins, for instance, worked with her Senate Republican colleagues in 2014 to vote down a Democratic amendment to overturn the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which further opened the floodgates for corporations to spend money in politics. Two years earlier, she voted against the DISCLOSE Act, which would have required outside special interest groups to disclose their donors.

Court Rules Against W.Va. Pipeline, Then an Effort to Change Rules

Time and again, opponents have tried to delay a natural gas pipeline that would stretch from Northern West Virginia to Southern Virginia, using lawsuits to stall permit approvals or construction. And time and again, state and federal regulators have stepped in to remove such hurdles, even if it has meant rewriting their own rules. Now, the process looks to be repeating itself.

On Tuesday, a federal appeals court blocked a key permit for Mountain Valley Pipeline, a 300-mile natural gas project that’s known as MVP. The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers wrongly approved a permit that allowed MVP to temporarily dam four of West Virginia’s rivers so the pipeline can be buried beneath the streambeds. But rather than pausing or rethinking the project, the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection has already been rewriting the state construction standards for pipeline river crossings that prompted the appeals court to block the plan.

Florida red tide sweeps away Republican Rick Scott's Senate poll lead

Barely a month ago, Republican Rick Scott held a clear lead in the race to become Florida’s next US senator. Now a tidal wave of toxic algae threatens to engulf the campaign of the outgoing state governor, whom critics have dubbed ‘Red Tide Rick’.

Wildlife officials confirmed on Thursday that the same deadly algae bloom that overran Florida’s south-west coastline this summer, killing dolphins, fish, manatees and turtles and devastating the area’s tourism industry, had washed ashore on several Atlantic coast beaches. The arrival in the busy waters off Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties of the Karenia brevis organism that causes red tide marks a significant escalation of a naturally occurring phenomenon that many believe has been worsened by Scott’s environmental policies.

His detractors, including the incumbent Democratic senator Bill Nelson, have pounced on Scott for years of rolling back environmental protections and slashing funding for Florida’s water management agencies by $700m. They say the devastating scale and spread of this year’s disaster is a direct result of Scott’s lax attitude to polluters. Nor is red tide the only problem. Outbreaks of blue-green algae are still choking many of Florida’s inland waterways to the south and west of Lake Okeechobee, with abnormally high levels of the toxin microcystin recorded in several areas. Like red tide, the freshwater algae blooms occur naturally but are fuelled by fertilizers and other industrial pollution in water run-off from farming and sugar production activities in the Everglades.

Meanwhile Scott, who once reportedly banned state employees from using the terms ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’, has seen a two-point polling lead at the beginning of September dissolve into an advantage for Nelson of almost the same margin. Last month he was harangued during a campaign stop by a crowd blaming him for escalating the red tide crisis.

In Landmark 'Necessity Defense' Trial, Valve Turners Will Argue Saving the Planet Justified Tar Sand Pipeline Shutdown

Three activists whose landmark trial is set to begin in Minnesota state court on Monday for their 2016 multi-state #ShutItDown action—which temporarily disabled all tar sands pipelines crossing the U.S.-Canada border—will argue the action was necessary because of the threat that fossil fuels pose to the planet. Rejecting a challenge from state prosecutors in April, an appeals court ruled that the "valve turners" can present a "necessity defense"—and bring in top climate experts to testify. In June, the Minnesota Supreme Court denied prosecutors' petition to appeal that ruling.

The necessity defense "is a plea that, yes technically we committed a crime, but we did it to prevent a greater harm," explained Annette Klapstein, a retired attorney from the Seattle area and one of the valve turners on trial. "We cannot work through our political system, because its values are nothing but profit," she told The Nation. "We live in an oligarchy, not a democracy."

"It's very much in the interest of the capitalist political system to make us feel powerless, to make us feel that we can't do anything," she added, but "ultimately, they cannot win if we do not consent. If we really withdraw our consent, if we really go out there and sit down in front of the machine, eventually they can no longer operate it. And at this point, that is our only option." Klapstein and Emily Nesbitt Johnston are facing felony charges under Minnesota law for shutting down Enbridge Energy's Line 4 and Line 67. While Benjamin Joldersma, who assisted them, also faces charges in the case, the state has dropped trespassing charges against videographer Steve Liptay.

The Nation reports that Princeton political scientist Martin Gilens and Harvard Law School's Lawrence Lessig are among the expert witnesses slated to testify. Dr. James Hansen, a former NASA scientist who has been called "the father of modern climate change awareness," and 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben will also testify in case, according to the activist group Climate Direct Action.

This will be the first of the valve turner cases where those on trial can present a necessity defense, as judges in three states have barred fellow activists from doing so.

Urging Multi-Pronged Effort to Halt Climate Crisis, Scientists Say Protecting World's Forests as Vital as Cutting Emissions

With a new statement rejecting the notion that drastically curbing emissions alone is enough to curb the threat of human-caused global warming, a group of scientists are urging world leaders to take immediate action to stop deforestation—calling it a key solution to stem the planetary climate crisis. Forty scientists from five countries signed a statement days before the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is scheduled to meet in South Korea, warning that stopping deforestation is as urgent as ending the world's dependence on fossil fuels.

"We must protect and maintain healthy forests to avoid dangerous climate change and to ensure the world's forests continue to provide services critical for the well-being of the planet and ourselves," the statement read. "Our message as scientists is simple: Our planet's future climate is inextricably tied to the future of its forest." Because forests absorb about a quarter of the carbon released by human activity, the elimination of forests and jungles around the world would release more than three trillion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere—more than the amount that could be released from all of the world's oil, gas, and coal reserves.

"The forest piece of the conversation is often lost and I don't think the IPCC report will highlight it enough," Deborah Lawrence, a professor at the University of Virginia who signed the statement, told The Guardian. Deforestation represents a vicious cycle in the fight against the climate crisis. As the burning of fossil fuels leads to a warmer planet, changes in the climate have had multiple effects including wildfires like the ones that have swept through Europe and the U.S. in recent months, contributing to more deforestation which then releases more carbon.

Also of Interest

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

Intercepted Podcast: From Nation State to Empire State: A Radical History of How We Got to Trump

Trump Admin Follows Corporate Media Playbook for War With Iran

Brazil’s Far-Right Presidential Candidate Jair Bolsonaro Is Headed for Victory on Sunday — and He’s Bringing His Shock Troops With Him

'A prisoner of environment': is it time to leave the American west?

Why the next three months are crucial for the future of the planet

A Little Night Music

Albert King - Oh, Pretty Woman

Albert King - The Feeling

Albert King, Pops Staples & Steve Cropper - Tupelo Blues

Albert King - I'll Play The Blues For You

Albert King - Crosscut Saw

Albert King - Cadillac Assembly Line

Albert King - Everybody Wants to go to Heaven, But Nobody Wants to Die

Albert King - Angel Of Mercy

Albert King - Born Under a Bad Sign

Albert King - Live at Blues Alley (1981)