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-- Napoleon

News and Opinion

Blue wave! The Corporate Demorat party is a resilient beast, resistant to takeover attacks.

Billionaire Republican Donors Helped Elect Rising Centrist Democrats

Just three years ago, hedge fund manager Louis Bacon was writing a $19,600 check to a committee called “Boehner for Speaker.” Now, the billionaire GOP donor has pivoted to influence the future of the Democratic Party. Records show Bacon is one of several deep-pocketed donors that have shifted to financing recent Democratic campaigns. Though national media attention has focused largely on newly elected democratic socialists and progressive members, the House Democratic caucus has also swelled with pro-business moderates, such as the Blue Dogs, the Problem Solvers Caucus, and the New Democrats.

The newly ascendent centrists flexed their muscle this week when a bloc of moderate lawmakers imposed a set of rules on Rep. Nancy Pelosi in her bid for speaker of the House, forcing the California Democrat to accept parliamentary changes that are designed to give the GOP greater access to floor votes and amending legislation. The rule changes were proposed by the Problem Solvers Caucus — a nearly 2-year-old group affiliated with the organization No Labels that consists of 24 House Democrats and 24 House Republicans. Many of the members of the caucus were elected with financial support from Bacon, the billionaire hedge fund manager, along other wealthy donors with a long history of giving to Republicans.

When the House was previously under Democratic control, the Blue Dogs and New Democrats helped industry lobbyists kill health care reforms designed to lower costs and expand public insurance options. Earlier this year, the same bloc sided with House Republicans to repeal financial reforms on medium and large-sized banks. ... Federal Election Commission records show that much of the centrist bloc has been financed by eight Super PACs associated with group No Labels, a centrist group that created the Problem Solvers Caucus. Despite the litany of PACs, the donors remain largely the same group of about 13 wealthy businessmen, most of whom have a history of financing Republican campaigns. ...

Earlier this week, The Intercept reported that former Clinton adviser Mark Penn, who owns an investment company that owns a stake in a number of political consulting firms, has quietly shaped the anti-Pelosi strategy. Penn’s spouse Nancy Jacobson is the founder of No Labels. The No Labels project touts itself as an effort to build commonsense solutions to vexing political issues. Yet the group did not demand that Republicans John Boehner or Paul Ryan seek Democratic votes or open legislation to Democratic amendments in order to serve as House speaker, a new bipartisan criteria the group succeeded in imposingin part on Pelosi.

Corrupt Democrat Beats Progressive For Caucus Chair

Joe Crowley’s Parting Shot: Ousted by Ocasio-Cortez, He Undermined Barbara Lee in House Leadership Race

The election of Rep. Hakeem Jeffries as House Democratic Caucus chair on Wednesday represented a symbolic and substantive comeback for the wing of the party that had suffered a stunning defeat last June, when Rep. Joe Crowley was beaten by primary challenger Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Jeffries, who represents a Brooklyn district next door to Crowley’s, bested Rep. Barbara Lee of California, who had the support of the insurgent movement that had ousted Crowley. A protege of Crowley’s, Jeffries is heavily backed by big money and corporate PACs. Less than 2 percent of his fundraising comes from small donors, who contribute less than $200, according to Federal Election Commission records.

The outgoing caucus chair, Crowley played an integral role in Jeffries’s election. ... In the run-up to the vote, he told a number of House Democrats that Lee had cut a check to Ocasio-Cortez, painting her as part of the insurgency that incumbents in Congress feel threatened by, according to Democrats who learned of the message Crowley was sharing.

There was a kernel of truth in the charge. Lee’s campaign did indeed cut a $1,000 check to the campaign of Ocasio-Cortez, but did so on July 10, two weeks after she beat Crowley. Since then, Reps. Steny Hoyer, Raúl Grijalva, and Maxine Waters, as well as the PAC for the Congressional Progressive Caucus, have all given money to Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign committee. It’s not an unusual phenomenon — a way to welcome an incoming colleague — but Crowley’s framing of it linked Lee to the growing insurgent movement, despite her decades of experience in Congress. Reached for comment, a spokesperson for Crowley did not respond to The Intercept’s questions about his involvement in the leadership race. After Wednesday’s election, in which Jeffries prevailed 123-113, The Intercept asked Lee if she had heard what Crowley had told other Democrats. “Those rumors took place and that was very unfair,” Lee said. “We’re moving forward now.” ...

While Lee has not encouraged primaries against her colleagues and has worked closely with party leadership in her time in the House, her iconoclastic image, rooted in her lone vote against authorizing the use of military force in the days after 9/11, meant that the caricature resonated, as Crowley no doubt knew it would. Indeed, it’s a charge some Democrats in Congress are ready to believe — and some outside supporters of Lee were hoping was true — as Lee is something of a hero among the incoming class of insurgents, and Ocasio-Cortez floated Lee’s name for speaker in June and later endorsed her bid for caucus chair. Rep. Ro Khanna of California, who is also closely associated with the insurgent wing of the party, was an early and vocal supporter of Lee. ...

Rep. Jackie Speier of California told reporters that some members were telling both Lee and Jeffries that they had their support. Lee confirmed Speier’s claim, telling me that before the election, in which the ballots were cast in secret, a majority of the caucus had committed to supporting her, but she couldn’t be sure why they flipped. If six Democrats had voted differently, Lee would have prevailed.

Pro-Charter School Democrats, Embattled in the Trump Era, Score a Win With Hakeem Jeffries

Hakeem Jeffries victory in the race for Democratic House caucus chair on Wednesday was a loss for progressive groups that rallied against him, but it was a victory for one national group in particular: Democrats for Education Reform, or DFER — a political action committee that funds candidates supportive of charter schools and is critical of teachers unions. DFER was founded in 2005 by a number of Wall Street leaders, with the mission, as co-founder Whitney Tilson explained it, “to break the teacher unions’ stranglehold over the Democratic Party.”

While DFER really began to flex its financial muscles in 2008 — when it raised about $2 million to help elect pro-charter candidates — its earlier work focused primarily on New York. There, the group helped elect Hakeem Jeffries to the New York State Assembly in 2006. (He served in the state Legislature from 2007 to 2012.) In 2007, DFER also helped lobby New York legislators to lift the state’s charter school cap, increasing it from 150 schools to 250. In 2010, Jeffries co-sponsored legislation to raise the state’s charter cap even further, to 460 — where it stands today. Over the years, Jeffries has become one of DFER’s top candidates. In 2012, when Jeffries announced that he would run for Congress, the group rallied behind him, elevating him to its so-called DFER Hot List. No other Democrat received more in direct DFER contributions that cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. ...

Jeffries “embodies the Obama education agenda we support: greater investments in public education; strong standards to ensure our children are ready for the global economy; and diverse, high quality public school options for our parents to choose from,” DFER president Shavar Jeffries told The Intercept. (The two Jeffries are not confirmed blood relatives, but identify as cousins.) “Alongside the election of reform-supporting governors and state and local officials around the county,” Shavar Jeffries continued, “his ascendancy into greater leadership in the House signals that the Obama reform agenda remains strong.” ...

Jeffries has been called the “Barack Obama of Brooklyn,” in part for his education policy stances, as Obama was also an early DFER-backed candidate. DFER is credited with derailing Linda Darling-Hammond’s bid for education secretary in the Obama administration. Darling-Hammond is a progressive education policy expert who has positive relationships with teachers unions. ... DFER, and education reform generally, has traditionally been linked to affluent white collar industries like tech and — especially in New York — finance. ... The financial sector has contributed substantially to Jeffries’s political campaigns.

Full Bernie Sanders Speech on Economic Justice, Healthcare, Opposing Trump & Ending the War in Yemen

Greenwald - worth a full read:

CNN Submits to Right-Wing Outrage Mob, Fires Marc Lamont Hill Due to his “Offensive” Defense of Palestinians at the UN

CNN on Thursday afternoon fired its commentator, Temple University Professor Marc Lamont Hill, after right-wing defenders of Israel objected to a speech Professor Hill gave at the U.N. on Wednesday in defense of Palestinian rights. CNN announced the firing just twenty-four hours after Hill delivered his speech. Hill’s firing from CNN is a major victory for the growing so-called “online call-out culture” in which people who express controversial political views are not merely critiqued but demonized online and then formally and institutionally punished after a mob consolidates in outrage, often targeting their employers with demands that they be terminated. Hill’s firing, conversely, is a major defeat for the right to advocate for Palestinian rights, to freely critique the Israeli government, and for the ability of journalism and public discourse in the U.S. generally to accommodate dissent.

Conservatives claimed to be offended, traumatized and hurt by Hill’s political views on Israel and Palestine, which they somehow construed as being anti-semitic, and demanded that CNN fire him as punishment for the expression of those opinions. CNN honored the demands of those claiming to be victimized by exposure to Hill’s viewpoints by firing him as a political analyst. On Wednesday, Hill appeared at an event of the U.N. Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, commemorating the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. During his speech, he accused the Israeli Government of practicing “settler colonialism” and apartheid, supported the international boycott movement against Israel (modeled on the one that ended South African apartheid in the 1980s), and called for a “free Palestine from the river to the sea.”

The right-wing outrage machine sprung into immediate action. The Washington Examiner’s Philip Klein accused Hill of a “long history of anti-Semitism,” adding: “The phrase ‘from the river to the sea’ has been a rallying cry for Hamas and other terrorist groups seeking the elimination of Israel, as a Palestinian state stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea would mean that Israel would be wiped off the map.” ...

Hill defended himself quite adeptly in a series of tweets explaining his speech. ... It is a requirement in U.S. discourse about Israel and Palestine that an absolute lie be affirmed: namely, that it’s still possible for a viable “two-state solution” to be created, where Palestine and Israel live side-by-side as sovereign states. The undeniable reality – that is now widely recognized in both Israel and Palestine, even as it’s forbidden to be acknowledge in mainstream U.S. precincts (CNN) – is that illegal Israeli settlements have grown so rapidly and have eaten up so much Palestinian land in the West Bank that such a solution is now essentially impossible, a fact even the U.N. acknowledges. That leaves only two realistic choices: either (a) a single state “from the river to the sea” in which Israelis as a minority have full political rights while Palestinians are segregated and treated and repressed as second-class citizens, the very definition of “apartheid,” or (b) a single state “from the river to the sea” in which both Israelis and Palestinians share full and equal political rights.

Professor Hill, like all morally decent people, opposes apartheid. Therefore, he advocates a single state in which both Palestinians and Israelis have equal political rights. What is actually offensive is not Professor Hill’s comments but rather the suggestion that it is “anti-semitic” or constitutes advocacy of “genocide” to support equal political rights for all human beings, including Palestinians.

Moscow isn’t buying Trump’s sudden concern for Ukraine

A Kremlin spokesperson dismissed Donald Trump’s claim he cancelled a G20 meeting with Vladimir Putin over the situation in Ukraine, saying the real reason was the Mueller probe, Reuters reported Friday. The president announced via his Twitter Thursday that he was pulling out of a planned face-to-face with Putin on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Argentina, because Russia had not returned sailors and ships seized in a maritime confrontation off the coast of Crimea on Sunday. ...

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Friday that she didn’t buy Trump’s excuse — and that the president’s “domestic political situation” was to blame. “Was Ukraine’s provocation in the Kerch Strait the true reason for the cancellation? We have heard the official explanation and taken note of it,” she said, sticking to the Kremlin line that Ukraine was the aggressor in Sunday’s clash. “But is it true? I think the true reason is rooted in the domestic political situation in the United States, which is crucial for decision-making.”

Mueller just drew a direct line between Trump’s business and the Kremlin

In January 2016, then-candidate Donald Trump rose to the defense of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who’d just been accused of likely ordering the assassination of a dissident former Russian spy in the UK. “Many people say it wasn't him,” Trump said. “So who knows who did it?"

Days earlier, Michael Cohen, then an executive in Trump’s company, had personally called a Kremlin staffer to ask for help arranging financing for a Trump Tower in Moscow, according to a court filing released Thursday. In a surprise courtroom appearance Thursday, Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to Congressional investigators about his communication with the Kremlin in the run-up to the 2016 election.

Cohen’s admission reveals that both Trump and the Kremlin downplayed the extent of their relationship at the time the campaign was already well underway — and kept up that charade long after Trump became president. Cohen's testimony also suggests Trump had a powerful financial incentive to win's Putin's approval, former prosecutors say. “The significance of Cohen’s plea is motive — not Cohen’s motive, but Trump’s motive for deferring to Russia over and over again,” said Jens David Ohlin, Vice Dean at Cornell Law School. “The motive is money and business deals. This gives Mueller the last piece of the puzzle.”

On Thursday, Trump blasted Cohen in an impromptu press appearance, accusing him of lying to save himself from a lengthy prison sentence, and saying there was “nothing wrong” with pursuing a business opportunity in Russia, anyway.

CrossTalk: Julian Assange’s trials

Second top Republican says he will vote against Trump judge pick

A second Republican senator, Tim Scott of South Carolina, has said he will vote against Donald Trump’s nominee to serve as a district judge in North Carolina, likely dooming the prospects of Thomas Farr filling the country’s longest court vacancy. Civil rights groups such as the NAACP have heavily criticized Farr for his work defending state laws found to have discriminated against African Americans. Farr is nominated to serve as a district court judge in North Carolina.

Scott announced Thursday that he would not vote for Farr, joining Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona and 49 Democratic lawmakers in opposing the nominee.

Farr once served as a lawyer for the re-election campaign of the Republican senator Jesse Helms in 1990.

NAFTA 2.0 Signed: A Deal for 'The Corporate One Percent'

U.S. President Donald Trump, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto signed a trade agreement to replace NAFTA on Friday—a deal some lawmakers and advocacy groups say is still fundamentally flawed as it stomps on the rights of workers and the environment and empowers "the corporate one percent at the expense of the rest of us."

Simply put, "The NAFTA 2.0 text is not the transformational replacement of the corporate-rigged trade-pact model that progressive activists, unions, and congressional Democrats have long demanded," wrote Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch. ...

Already, some U.S. lawmakers have announced their opposition to NAFTA 2.0. Democratic Rep. Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, for one, said ahead of the signing that it does "not do nearly enough to raise wages for workers, lower costs for healthcare consumers, or protect the environment," and that barring major changes, the deal "will result in more broken promises by Donald Trump to American workers." In addition, she said, the deal as is "would not only raise drug prices in Canada and Mexico, but would tie Congress' hands, preventing us from enacting essential reforms needed to lower prescription drug prices."

Denouncing the deal's "outrageous giveaways to the fossil fuel industry and big pharmaceutical companies," Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) conveyed his opposition as well. "Unless strong enforcement mechanisms are written into the text of this agreement, corporations will continue to ship U.S. jobs to Mexico where workers are paid as little as $2 an hour."

GM Closing 5 Plants - Trump Has No Answers

The US mortality crisis: CDC reports extraordinary drop in life expectancy

Life expectancy in the United States continued its extraordinary decline in 2017 after stagnating in 2016 and falling in 2015. Not since the combined impact of World War I and the Spanish Flu in 1918 has the country experienced such a prolonged period of decline in life expectancy.

The annual mortality report from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) highlights the disastrous impact of the social crisis on the American working class. Suicides and drug overdoses, what have been termed deaths of despair, have been identified as the driving forces behind the continuing decline in how long Americans are expected to live. ...

Age-specific death rates between 2016 and 2017 increased for age groups 25–34, 35–44, and 85 and over. These statistics indicate a healthcare system failing the elderly and a societal crisis ravaging younger workers. Deaths of despair, including alcoholism, are a leading cause of deaths in younger ages groups.

The US suicide death rate rose to the highest in 50 years last year. Since 2008, it has ranked as the 10th leading cause of death for all ages in the US. In 2016, suicide became the second leading cause of death for ages 10–34 and the fourth leading cause for ages 35–54. From 1999 to 2017, suicide rates have increased for both males and females, with the greatest yearly increases occurring since 2006. ...

The rate in drug overdoses has skyrocketed. From 1999 to 2017, the overdose rate soared from 6.1 per 100,000 to 21.7 per 100,000. The rate increased by an average of 10 percent per year from 1999 to 2006, by 3 percent per year from 2006 to 2014, and a staggering 16 percent per year from 2014 to 2017. The rise coincides with the opioid crisis ravaging through parts of the US, concentrated in West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Charlottesville neo-Nazi who ran Heather Heyer over with a car is claiming self-defense

James Fields Jr. was acting in self-defense when he drove into the crowd of counterprotesters in Charlottesville last August, his lawyers said in the trial’s opening statements Thursday, following what the judge called the “most complicated jury selection” process he’d ever participated in.

Lawyers representing 21-year-old James Alex Fields Jr., an Ohio resident, said that in the coming weeks, they would argue that their client acted in self-defense on that fateful day in August 2017 because he felt threatened by the protesters at the Unite the Right rally and was in fear of serious bodily injury or death. ...

Prosecutors will have to prove that Fields acted intentionally and with premeditation when he rammed his vehicle into about two dozen counterprotesters standing at an intersection in downtown Charlottesville on Aug. 12, 2017. In gruesome video footage, which prosecutors plan to rely on heavily, you hear people screaming and see bodies flying. Fields then rapidly reversed, hitting people on the way, and sped off. He was apprehended by a deputy about a mile away and arrested. Earlier in the day, Fields was photographed marching alongside white supremacists, and holding a shield emblazoned with a neo-Nazi group’s logo.

Reporters inside the courtroom say that lawyers offered a preview to the testimony and evidence they plan to present during the trial, including that Fields allegedly idled in his car before he accelerated into the crowd. To prove that the act was premeditated, they also plan to show an post from Fields’ Instagram account shared months earlier, showing a car driving into protesters.

Cops seize pipe bombs, rocket launcher, and lots of drugs from white supremacist gangs in Florida

Dozens of white supremacists are facing anywhere between two years to life in prison after authorities in Florida concluded a three-year investigation into a white supremacist firearm and drug trafficking ring earlier this month. Authorities seized dozens of illegal firearms as part of the operation. A local news station reported that police also confiscated a a rocket launcher. Numerous gang members have been charged with illegally possessing firearms and distributing heroin, methamphetamine, crack cocaine, and other drugs.

And at least one alleged member, Richard Morman, of New Port Richey, has been charged with possession of pipe bombs, authorities say. The investigation, dubbed “Operation Blackjack” by authorities, was primarily centered in Pasco County, Florida, which is just outside Tampa.

Government shutdown looms as Trump demands $5bn for border wall

Donald Trump has insisted that any government funding deal must include at least $5bn for a wall along the US border with Mexico. It is not the first time the president has threatened to shut down the government.

Democrats are hoping to use the showdown over government funding to force through legislation protecting Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 US election and possible links to the Trump campaign. The party is also hoping to use it as leverage to keep the commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, from adding a question about citizenship status to the census, which they fear will keep undocumented immigrants from being counted and lead to an inaccurate process.

Any government funding deal requires bipartisan support, with a 60-vote threshold needed in the Senate, where there are currently only 51 Republicans.

Go figure.

Cliven Bundy rebukes Trump over attack on migrants: 'We should have a heart'

Cliven Bundy is not a fan of walls. A hero to some in the far right due to his family’s armed standoffs with the US government, the Nevada rancher is an avid supporter of Donald Trump. But there’s one major issue where they diverge. “I really question his doctrine ever since he started it about building a wall,” Bundy, 72, told the Guardian on Wednesday. “I don’t like walls. I think we oughta be able to get along with neighbors … Trump’s wall never did sit very good with me.” ...

Despite links between the White House and the Bundys’ rightwing causes, Ammon surprised some of his followers on Tuesday with a lengthy Facebook video challenging some of the president’s positions and expressing sympathy for migrants seeking to enter the US. Ammon criticized conspiracy theories about the migrants and claims that “they’re all a bunch of terrorists”, saying: “That’s a bunch of garbage.” He also acknowledged the violence migrants are fleeing: “The conditions in Honduras factually are terrible … Many of the refugees have testified that they had lost a husband or a mother or a brother or a sister or children and that they’ve been threatened.” He said some anti-immigrant arguments are “fear-based” and “based upon selfishness”.

Reached by phone, Cliven said he agreed with some of his son’s arguments. “Are they good people or bad people? If they’re good people looking for refuge, we’re Americans and we should have a heart and we should try to help them,” he said, noting the harrowing journeys some have probably taken. “How much suffering and effort are they putting forth to get to our border? They are after some freedom and liberty and a better life.” ... Cliven said he believed migrants should have an opportunity to apply for asylum. “Are they really refugees or are they really criminals? … We need to settle down and sort them out,” he said. “We can take care of a few thousand people for a few days.” ...

The Bundys’ lengthy stints in jail may have also influenced their somewhat unique politics. Cliven, who was infamously caught on camera in 2014 referring to black Americans as “the negro”, and questioning whether they were “better off as slaves”, said he had learned a lot about the unfairness of the US prison system. “There’s a pretty good percentage of people that shouldn’t be in jail,” he said. “They are making money off of prisoners … It’s a bureaucracy instead of the justice system.” He said he was perplexed by America’s high rates of incarceration: “We are supposed to be the freeest nation in the world … I was in jail with several thousand people. I’ve seen a lot of good people in there. The smartest people in this nation might be incarcerated in their jails.”

Calling this exodus a 'migrant caravan' obscures the heart of the matter

The term “migrant” is a misnomer. It gives the impression that these people have similar situations to us. It implies they can apply for a visa, get a job and relocate their families the legal way just like an Australian might migrate to the United Kingdom for work. It is misleading to use the term migrants for a group of people who are fleeing criminal violence, authoritarian governments, corrupt security forces, economic failure and extreme poverty. It is misleading to imply that these people have the same opportunities to migrate as people from Australia, the US or other wealthy nations.

While there are legal visas from Central American people to travel, live and work in the US, the likelihood of these “caravan” people – who are for the most part members of the impoverished working class – being allowed legal entry to the US is low. Their “flight risk” would be considered high and as a result they would most likely not be awarded visas or be allowed into the country. There is also the challenge of their own capability to navigate the immigration system, obtain passports, visas and flights. That’s why for many the decision to join the caravan was impulsive. They took what they saw as an opportunity when it arose, not really understanding the immigration process. Many have been learning about migration law, the asylum-seeking and refugee process, and repatriation rights on the road to the US thanks to the work of UNHCR and other such organisations. ...

European countries used the same language when describing the influx of refugees fleeing Syria and Afghanistan as a “migrant crisis”. Such language masked the fact that these people were running away from war zones and violence and justified European countries’ desire to refuse assistance. Many of those European countries were directly responsible for the conditions that precipitated the mass movement of people throughout the region. If US and Nato had properly stabilised and rebuilt Afghanistan in the aftermath of the US and Nato invasion, then the next decade and more of conflict in Afghanistan wouldn’t have forced so many “migrants” to the European continent.

Similar geopolitical dynamics are being played out in the US currently. This is a mass exodus of people from Central American states that have been the victims of US political interventions for decades. Ongoing US intervention in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala has destabilised and militarised the region, leading to an increase in people migrating to the US. Blaming immigrants for fleeing poverty and violence is a simple response to a complex problem. A better way to stem the future flow of migrants might be to re-examine US foreign policy in Central America.

In Foreign Policy Speech, Elizabeth Warren Takes Aim at Global Corruption

In a 35-minute speech on Thursday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., laid out a foreign policy vision, linking corruption to the global rise in authoritarianism and calling for U.S. engagement that aggressively fights climate change and corporate power. Warren, a leading expert on bankruptcy law whose work led to the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau before being elected senator in 2012, is a favorite of many progressives. In 2016, she joined the Senate Armed Services Committee and last year traveled to Afghanistan — signs to many that she was burnishing her foreign policy credentials in preparation for a presidential run.

Speaking at American University in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, Warren called for the U.S. to take a “sharp knife” to defense spending, invest in diplomacy, and aggressively fight climate change. Pointing out the connections between wealth and political power in authoritarian states like Russia and China, Warren argued that the U.S. should take aim at corruption, internationally and at home. “From Hungary to Turkey, from the Philippines to Brazil, wealthy elites work together to grow the state’s power while the state works to grow the wealth of those who remain loyal to the leader,” said Warren. “That’s corruption, pure and simple.”

Left-wing politicians have traditionally been criticized for lacking a foreign policy vision or only articulating what they’re against — like costly wars and regime change — rather than what they’re for. Warren’s speech is the latest sign that the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is asserting itself in foreign policy ahead of the 2020 presidential race. ...

On Thursday, Warren was less willing to criticize the post-World War II international order, claiming that the U.S.-led order was “based on democracy, human rights, and improving economic standards of living for everyone.” ... In Warren’s telling, that golden age ended in the 1980s with the Reagan revolution. She glossed over key events of the pre-Reagan era: the entire Vietnam war, and CIA-backed regime change in Iran, Guatemala, Brazil, and Chile, to name a few. “Beginning in the 1980s, Washington’s focus shifted from policies that benefit everyone to policies that benefit a handful of elites, both here at home and around the world,” Warren told the audience.

But Warren also took aim at decades of austerity and free trade policies, arguing that the long history of trade deals like NAFTA have increased the power and wealth of multinational corporations, while inflicting decades of harm to working-class people. “For decades, the leaders of both parties preached the gospel that free trade was a rising tide that would lift all boats,” Warren said. “Great rhetoric except that the trade deals they negotiated mainly lifted the yachts and threw millions of working Americans overboard to drown.”

Bernie and Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal faces a wall of Republican climate change deniers

Environmental groups dropped a record-breaking $80 million-plus in the midterms earlier this month, and that has produced a new breed of progressive Democrats itching to pass a Green New Deal, a bold, even radical, plan to get the nation completely off fossil fuels within a decade. But the Democrats' huge gains in the House have knocked off many of the Republicans who were moderates on the issue, leaving Congress even more divided on climate than before.

The informal Climate Solutions Caucus was comprised of an even mix of 90 members of both parties this year, but close to half of its GOP members were just ousted, including its co-founder, Rep. Carlos Curbelo, a Florida Republican.

So while Democratic Congresswoman-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of New York, and Bernie Sanders will be hosting a town hall on climate change on Monday, most Republicans at the Capitol are digging in for a fight. That’s in spite of the Trump administration’s own grim climate assessment released last week, which predicts dire consequences and a $500 billion-a-year tax on the economy by the end of the century if emissions are left unchecked.

“If you read it closely, what it says is that by the end of the century, the economic impact is tiny,” Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) told VICE News as he hopped on a tram that runs under the Capitol. “We’ve got to weigh the cost of mitigation against the lost economic output there may be, and the people who are very worried about this don’t think it’s very much.”

"World leaders talk a lot about the environment, but do nothing"

Trump Greenlights Another 'Violent, Destructive' Assault on Marine Life With Seismic Testing Approval

Defenders of ocean habitats and marine life are up in arms on Friday as the Trump administration is set to approve new abilities for the fossil fuel industry to conduct widescale and "deafening" underwater seismic in federal waters off the U.S. Atlantic coast. The decision is expected to come from the National Marine Fisheries Service, a division of the Commerce Department, but conservation groups say it is a smack in the face to ocean ecosystems and a political nonstarter they vow to fight tooth and nail.

"This action flies in the face of massive opposition to offshore drilling and exploration from over 90 percent of coastal municipalities in the proposed blast zone," said Diane Hoskins, campaign director at Oceana. "These permits were already denied because of the known harm that seismic airgun blasting causes. President Trump is essentially giving these companies permission to harass, harm and possibly even kill marine life, including the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale – all in the pursuit of dirty and dangerous offshore oil. This is the first step toward offshore drilling in the Atlantic and we're going to make sure coastal communities know what's happening and fight this."

Michael Jasny, director of the Marine Mammal Protection Project at NRDC, said the president's action is totally detached from the reality of the threats the world's ecosytems now face. "Just one week after issuing dire warnings on the catastrophic fallout of climate change to come, the Trump Administration is opening our coastlines to for-profit companies to prospect for oil and gas—and is willing to sacrifice marine life, our coastal communities and fisheries in the process," fumed Jasny. "This is the first step towards drilling and scientists warn that seismic activity alone could drive the endangered North American right whale to extinction.

According to the Washington Post:

In addition to harming sea life, acoustic tests — in which boats tugging rods pressurized for sound emit jet engine-like booms 10 to 12 seconds apart for days and sometimes months — can disrupt thriving commercial fisheries. Governors, state lawmakers and attorneys general along the Atlantic coast say drilling threatens beach tourism that has flourished on the coast in the absence of oil production.

Seismic testing maps the ocean floor and estimates the whereabouts of oil and gas, but only exploratory drilling can confirm their presence. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill that soiled the Gulf of Mexico resulted from an exploratory drill. Another gulf disaster that looms almost as large has spewed oil for more than 14 years. The Taylor Energy Co. spill of up to an estimated 700 barrels a day started when a hurricane ripped up production wells, and could continue for the rest of the century, according to the Interior Department.

"Seismic blasting is a violent, destructive precursor to unnecessary offshore oil drilling," said Angela Howe, Surfrider Foundation Legal Director, in a statement. "According to estimates from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), the seismic exploration projects could directly harm tens of thousands of whales and dolphins, in addition to thousands of manatees, seals, and sea turtles. This type of damage to our coastal resources is unacceptable."

Hackers Stole Nearly Quarter Million Dollars Our Revolution Raised for Standing Rock Protests

Our Revolution, the progressive advocacy organization the grew out of Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign, has publicly acknowledged that a sophisticated hacking and theft operation last year stole nearly a quarter of million dollars from the group—funds it has been unable to recover.

According to Politico, which obtained tax filings that revealed the incident:

Our Revolution "was the victim of a Business E-Mail Compromise scam that took place in December 2016 but was not discovered until January 2017, resulting in the loss of approximately $242,000 via an electronic transfer of funds to an overseas account," the group disclosed in its tax forms covering the year 2017, which were filed earlier this month. 

"Our Revolution worked with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Our Revolution's counsel and an independent cyber-security consultant in an effort to identify the thieves and to recover the funds but, unfortunately, these efforts were unsuccessful."

The money stolen from the compromised account had been raised for the Standing Rock Sioux Native American tribe, which was at the time fighting vigorously to stop the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Lucy Flores, a former Our Revolution board member, told Politico that the organization still gave the tribe the $242,924 it had raised on its behalf, though it was forced to dip into other funds to do so. "We'd done fundraising specifically on behalf of the tribe, and to have that money just be gone and never reach its intended purpose was unacceptable," Flores said. "So we decided to give them the money that was raised and take the loss as an organization."

Citing the FBI, Politico reports the type of hack used against the group is known as a "CEO impersonation," one in which the attackers get inside a computer network and then create fake requests for wire transfers that look legitimate, usually by impersonating a known vendor. This kind of tactic—used against individiduals, organizations, and businesses—results in billions of dollars in losses each year.

Funny how certain associations always pop up in these sorts of situations:

Berta Cáceres: seven men convicted of murdering Honduran environmentalist

Seven men have been found guilty of the murder of the Honduran indigenous environmentalist Berta Isabel Cáceres. An eighth defendant, Emerson Duarte Meza, was cleared and freed on Thursday. ... The court ruled the murder was ordered by executives of the Agua Zarca dam company Desa because of delays and financial losses linked to protests led by Cáceres. The murder was contracted to a group of hitmen who were paid to kill Cáceres.

The seven men convicted of orchestrating her murder by a court in Tegucigalpa: Sergio Ramón Rodríguez, communities and environment manager for Desa; Douglas Geovanny Bustillo, former Desa security chief and ex-US trained army lieutenant; Mariano Díaz Chávez, US-trained special forces major who served with Bustillo; Henry Javier Hernández, former special forces sergeant who served with Díaz; Edwin Rapalo; Edilson Duarte Meza; and Oscar Torres. ...

Thursday’s verdict was welcomed by Cáceres’ family and colleagues, but they reiterated demands that justice be delivered against the masterminds and financiers of the plot. “Today there’s no satisfaction, or happiness, but we are glad to see jailed the killers who murdered my mother simply for defending natural resources at a moment when she was defenceless. We don’t want revenge because we are not killers like them, but we demand that the masterminds behind the murder be brought to justice,” said Olivia Zuniga, Cáceres’ eldest daughter. ...

The verdict confirmed a Desa executive coordinated with Bustillo before and after the murder. During the trial the executive was identified as company president David Castillo, a US-trained former military intelligence officer. Castillo faces trial separately, accused of masterminding the murder.

Also of Interest

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

Democrats re-elect a right-wing leadership

Why we stopped trusting elites

Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski Wins 2018 Sam Adams Award

Guardian Escalates Its Vilification of Julian Assange

Israel’s Overlooked Strategic Losses in Wars Against Arabs

El Chapo’s trial is revealing the futility of the war on drugs

A Little Night Music

Taj Mahal - She Caught The Katy

Taj Mahal - Lovin' In My Baby's Eyes

Taj Mahal - Blues Aint Nothin'

Taj Mahal - Love Her With A Feeling

Taj Mahal - Fishin' Blues

Taj Mahal - Going To The River

Taj Mahal - Oh Lord, Things Are Getting Crazy Up In Here

Taj Mahal - Senor Blues

The Allman Brothers with Taj Mahal - Statesboro Blues

The Taj Mahal Trio - Festival de Jazz de Vitoria-Gasteiz 2016