Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features blues, doo-wop and rock singer, violinist and guitarist Don "Sugarcane" Harris and Harmonica George Robinson, a Chicago blues harp player too obscure for a biography to exist on the internet, apparently. Enjoy!

"In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies. … They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory from a longer continuance of the war."

-- Adam Smith

News and Opinion

Leaked Emails From Pro-Clinton Group Reveal Censorship of Staff on Israel, AIPAC Pandering, Warped Militarism

Leaked internal emails from the powerful Democratic think tank Center for American Progress (CAP) [and publisher of CAP’s blog, ThinkProgress - js] shed light on several public controversies involving the organization, particularly in regard to its positioning on Israel. They reveal the lengths to which the group has gone in order to placate AIPAC and long-time Clinton operative and Israel activist Ann Lewis — including censoring its own writers on the topic of Israel.

The emails also provide crucial context for understanding CAP’s controversial decision to host an event next week for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. That event, billed by CAP as “A Conversation with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,” will feature CAP President Neera Tanden and Netanyahu together in a Q&A session as they explore “ways to strengthen the partnership between Israel and the United States.” That a group whose core mission is loyalty to the White House and the Democratic Party would roll out the red carpet for a hostile Obama nemesis is bizarre, for reasons the Huffington Post laid out when it reported on the controversy provoked by CAP’s invitation.

The emails, provided to The Intercept by a source authorized to receive them, are particularly illuminating about the actions of Tanden (right), a stalwart Clinton loyalist as well as a former Obama White House official. They show Tanden and key aides engaging in extensive efforts of accommodation in response to AIPAC’s and Lewis’ vehement complaints that CAP is allowing its writers to be “anti-Israel.” Other emails show Tanden arguing that Libyans should be forced to turn over large portions of their oil revenues to repay the U.S. for the costs incurred in bombing Libya, on the grounds that Americans will support future wars only if they see that the countries attacked by the U.S. pay for the invasions.

[Well, I guess we can just laugh anytime CAP/ThinkProgress issues of any sort of anti-war advocacy. There's yet another well-funded Democrat organization that's full-on warmonger. - js]

For years, CAP has exerted massive influence in Washington through its ties to the Democratic Party and its founder, John Podesta, one of Washington’s most powerful political operatives. The group is likely to become even more influential due to its deep and countless ties to the Clintons. As the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent put it earlier this year: CAP “is poised to exert outsized influence over the 2016 president race and — should Hillary Clinton win it — the policies and agenda of the 45th President of the United States. CAP founder John Podesta is set to run Clinton’s presidential campaign, and current CAP president Neera Tanden is a longtime Clinton confidante and adviser.” ...

In 2012, a former AIPAC spokesman, Josh Block, launched a campaign to brand several young, liberal writers at CAP’s blog, ThinkProgress, as anti-Semites due to their writings on Israel, Palestine and Iran. CAP and its writers were widely vilified for what Ben Smith, then of Politico, called deviations from “the bipartisan consensus on Israel,” and for voicing “a heretical and often critical stance on Israel heretofore confined to the political margins.” Among other crimes, these CAP writers stood accused of failing to sufficiently praise the Netanyahu government: “Warm words for Israel can be hard to find on [CAP’s] blogs,” Smith noted.

Rather than stand behind its writers, top CAP officials, led by Tanden, applied constant coercion to stifle content upsetting to AIPAC. As Gharib, one of the vilified CAP writers, recounted last week, “CAP’s positions moving forward from the attacks — including but not limited to virtually banishing criticisms of Israel and Netanyahu from our writings and, in at least one case, needlessly censoring a piece after publication — were guided by how to return to AIPAC’s good graces, often in coordination with AIPAC itself.” Most of the CAP writers accused of Israel heresy were gone from the organization within a short time thereafter, and several have publicly revealed that they had been censored on matters pertaining to Israel.

US officials rule out Israel peace deal before Obama leaves office

Barack Obama has made a “realistic assessment” that a peace deal between Israelis and Palestinians is not possible during his final months in office, US officials have said.

The officials spoke to reporters before the visit of the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, to the White House on Monday. It will be the first time the American president and Netanyahu have met since the US and its international partners reached a nuclear accord with Iran.

Netanyahu was a chief critic of the deal and lobbied Republicans in Congress to oppose its implementation.

While the nuclear accord is expected to be a major focus of the leaders’ talks, they will also discuss the fresh wave of Israeli-Palestinian violence that began two months ago at a Jerusalem holy site and spread across Israel and into the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Officials said Obama and Netanyahu would discuss steps to prevent further confrontation between the parties in the absence of a peace agreement. They said that while Obama remains committed to a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians, he does not believe it is possible before he leaves office in January 2017, barring a major shift.

George H.W. Bush Was So Bored by Peace He Wanted to Quit

A new biography of George H.W. Bush is getting a lot of attention, mostly because of Bush’s criticism of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. But there’s another revelation from Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush that is considerably more important and far-reaching.

Bush, according to the account in the New York Times, “suffered from a post-victory despondency after the Persian Gulf war of 1991 — a ‘letdown’ over no longer being involved in such a huge endeavor.”

“On March 13, 1991, just two weeks after Iraq capitulated in the gulf war, Mr. Bush fantasized in his diary about calling it quits after a single term,” the Times reported.

Quoting from Bush’s diary: “Maybe it’s the letdown after the day-to-day” 5 a.m. calls “to the Situation Room; conferences every single day with Defense and State; moving things, nudging things, worrying about things, phone calls to foreign leaders, trying to keep things moving forward, managing a massive project. Now it’s different, sniping, carping, bitching, predictable editorial complaints.”

That’s right: Bush was so bored without a war to fight that he considered retiring rather than slog through another dreary day of being President of the United States.

US military's explanation for the October attack that took 30 lives remains woefully inadequate

Day Before Deadly Bombing, U.S. Official Asked if Any Taliban Were “Holed Up” At MSF Hospital

A report released today by the medical aid group Doctors Without Borders (Médicins Sans Frontieres, or MSF) alleges that a U.S. gunship killed doctors and medical staff as they fled from a burning hospital targeted in a deadly October 3 aerial bombardment in Kunduz, Afghanistan. In addition to documenting the havoc wreaked by the attack, the report also claims that just a day before the bombing, an unnamed U.S. government official in Washington, D.C. had contacted the organization asking whether any Taliban fighters were “holed up” at the Kunduz hospital facility.

In a speech given in Kabul announcing the release of the report, Christopher Stokes, general director of MSF, said that the organization has yet to receive any explanation for the attack from the U.S. military. In light of the evidence that has now been compiled by the organization, “a mistake is quite hard to understand and believe at this stage,” Stokes added.

In its 13-page report on the initial results of its investigation into the incident, MSF says that it found no evidence to support the allegation that armed combatants had been present at the hospital, or that there had been any fighting occurring in the vicinity of the site. In the days leading up to the attack, an average of 117 patients had been receiving treatment in the hospital at any given time. Among these patients were wounded local civilians, government soldiers and Taliban forces, in keeping with both international law and MSF’s own policy of neutrality and treating injured patients without discrimination.

Mustard Gas Was Definitely Used in Islamic State Clashes

Chemical weapons experts have determined that mustard gas was used in a Syrian town where Islamic State (IS) insurgents were battling another group, according to a report by an international watchdog seen by Reuters.

A confidential October 29 report by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), a summary of which was shown to Reuters, concluded "with the utmost confidence that at least two people were exposed to sulfur mustard" in the town of Marea, north of Aleppo, on August 21.

"It is very likely that the effects of sulfur mustard resulted in the death of a baby," it said.

The findings provide the first official confirmation of use of sulfur mustard, commonly known as mustard gas, in Syria since it agreed to destroy its chemical weapons stockpile, which included sulfur mustard. ...

"It raises the major question of where the sulfur mustard came from," one source said. "Either they (IS) gained the ability to make it themselves, or it may have come from an undeclared stockpile overtaken by IS. Both are worrying options."

Syria is supposed to have completely surrendered the toxic chemicals 18 months ago. Their use violates UN Security Council resolutions and the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention.

The report, which will be formally presented to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon later this month, adds to a growing body of evidence that the IS group has obtained, and is using, chemical weapons in both Iraq and Syria.

Syria will be the next Vietnam-style war if Obama doesn't learn from history

Syria has the potential to become America’s new Vietnam – so, as Barack Obama sends the first 50 special operations troops to Syria to engage the Islamic State, we must be wary of history repeating itself.

The original mistake with Syria, as with Vietnam, was for leaders in Washington to believe that civil wars and insurgencies taking place halfway around the world represent a critical national security interest. Back then, the illusory “domino theory” – the idea that if one nation went communist it would start a chain reaction leading all the other nations in the region to do the same – justified the decision to engage in a tiny nation that itself represented zero threat to the United States. A version of that logic is at work again.

We’ve been told that it matters a great deal to US security interests whether Assad rules in Syria – but it does not. At last check an Assad has run Syria since 1970 without requiring US intervention. And any successor regime inheriting a destroyed Syria could hardly be a threat. Nonetheless, this assumption creates a powerful bias toward intervention that is difficult to check regardless of the strategic reality.

Before that original “forever war”, President John F Kennedy also told Americans that the United States was only training the South Vietnamese army. But US engagement eventually metastasized into a full-blown military intervention.

Today, after unnecessarily intervening in Syria, the US made things worse by embracing ineffectual and costly relationships with local partners on the ground. After years of arguing that there were no Syrian rebels worth supporting, the Obama administration then decided to try anyway and proceeded to waste hundreds of millions of dollars on perhaps the least successful training effort in US history. As the Centcom commander testified, only “four or five” trained rebels are in the fight.

It’s mystifying why Obama would commit such a colossal mistake when Vietnam provided so many painful lessons in avoiding precisely this kind of situation.

Pentagon’s Syria Rebel Training Cost $2 Million Per Rebel

The program was abandoned outright last month, with only 190 rebels ever trained, and only about half of them ever getting as far as Syria. Despite this, the Pentagon still managed to blow through most of the budget, capping out at $384 million, over $2 million per trainee.

The Pentagon insists that the training itself actually only cost $30,000 per trainee, but they blew through the rest of the money on weapons, vehicles, and ammunition. Of course, much of this wound up being immediately surrendered to al-Qaeda when the second class of trainees arrived in the country.

European Commission: Millions of Refugees Will Boost EU Economies

While the influx of asylum seekers from the Middle East into the European Union has been hugely controversial in some nations, and is fueling a lot of tensions, the European Commission’s reports suggest that they could be an economic boon for the continent if properly integrated into the workforce of those nations.

The Commission’s simulations are based on the assumption of 3 million refugees arriving between 2015 and 2017, a million this year, 1.5 million next, and 0.5 the following year. If half of the population are granted asylum, the EU’s labor force would increase 0.3 percent in each of the next two years.

There are several different estimates of the full scope of growth based different ranges of skills from the refugees, as at present it is hard to tell how many of them have advanced degrees or other valuable work experience. Germany, one of the nations absorbing the most, is expected to see 0.43 percent GDP growth next year from them, with that number growing annually all the way to 0.72 percent by 2020.

US Program To Save Child Refugees Has Welcomed This Many: Zero

A year after President Barack Obama launched a program to grant asylum to Central American children fleeing violence or seeking to reunite with family members, the statistics are in: not one child has made it to the U.S. through that initiative.

New analysis by the New York Times published Thursday reveals that the Central American Minors Program, established last December, received asylum applications from more than 5,400 children in countries like El Salvador and Honduras, most of whom are seeking to escape street gangs or sexual assault—but none of them have been accepted.

In fact, only 90 children total were even interviewed by the Department of Homeland Security, and only 85 qualified for any sort of refugee status and even they remain languishing because their paperwork has not been filed.

Putin grounds Russia-Egypt flights for crash probe duration

Putin suspends Russian flights to Egypt after Sinai plane crash

The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has suspended flights to Egypt, a Kremlin spokesman has said.

The move came after the head of the Russian federal security service suggested it would be “expedient” to suspend flights until the conclusion of the investigation into what brought down a Russian-operated airliner over the Sinai peninsula on Saturday, killing all 224 people on board.

Russia had previously suggested the UK was pre-judging the outcome of the investigation when it and Ireland suspended flights on Wednesday to and from the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh. The UK prime minister, David Cameron, has said it was “more likely than not” a bomb brought down the Metrojet Airbus A321-200. ...

Putin had ordered the Russian government to establish mechanisms to bring its citizens home, the spokesman said. Around 45,000 Russians are currently on holiday in Egypt, Oleg Safonov, the head of Russia’s state tourism agency, Rostourism, told the Tass news agency.

The Russian suspension, covering all of Egypt, is even more sweeping than that imposed by Britain, which had halted flights to Sharm el-Sheikh only.

Russia complains about lack of Egypt crash information from Britain

The Russian foreign ministry complained about Britain's failure to hand over information about Saturday's deadly plane crash in Egypt, after London said there was a significant possibility that Islamists had planted a bomb onboard.

"The British government has not given us any information about the plane crash," Maria Zakharova, a foreign ministry spokeswoman, told reporters, according to the TASS news agency.

"If they have information and they are not presenting it that is shocking," she added, saying it was surprising that the representative of a foreign government rather than experts were putting forward theories about the plane's fate.

Who Downed Metrojet Flight 9268?

According to numerous news reports, intercepts of “internal communications” of the Islamic State/ISIS group provided evidence that it wasn’t an accident but a terrorist act. Those intercepts must have been available to US and UK government sources early on, yet these same officials said they had no “direct evidence,” as Clapper put it, of terrorist involvement. Why is that? And furthermore: why the general unwillingness of Western governments and media to jump to their usual conclusion when any air disaster occurs, and attribute it to terrorism?

The answer is simple: they didn’t want to arouse any sympathy for the Russians. Russia, as we all know, is The Enemy – considered even worse, in some circles, than the jihadists. Indeed, there’s a whole section of opinion-makers
devoted to the idea that  we must help Islamist crazies in Syria, including al-Qaeda’s affiliate, known as al-Nusra, precisely in order to stop the Evil Putin from extending Russian influence into the region.

In a broader sense, the reluctance to acknowledge that this was indeed a terrorist act is rooted in a refusal to acknowledge the commonality of interests that exists between Putin’s Russia and the West. The downing of the Metrojet is just the latest atrocity carried out by the head-choppers against the Russian people: this includes not only the Beslan school massacre, in which over 700 children were taken hostage by Chechen Islamists, but also the five apartment bombings that took place in 1999. The real extent of Western hostility to Russia, and the unwillingness to realize that Russia has been a major terrorist target, is underscored by the shameful propaganda pushed by the late Alexander Litvinenko, and endorsed by Sen. John McCain, which claims that the bombings were an “inside job.” ...

This downright creepy unwillingness to express any sympathy or sense of solidarity with the Russian people ought to clue us in to something we knew all along: that the whole “war on terrorism” gambit is as phony as a three-dollar bill. If US government officials were actually concerned about the threat of terrorist violence directed at innocent civilians, they would partner up with Russia in a joint effort to eradicate the threat: that this isn’t happening in Syria, or anywhere else, is all too evident. Not to mention our canoodling with “moderate” Chechen terrorists, openly encouraging them to carry on their war with Putin’s Russia. Our “war on terrorism” is simply a pretext for spying on the American people, and most of the rest of the world, and cementing the power of the State on the home front, not to mention fattening up an already grotesquely obese “defense” budget.

With the belated admission that the downing of the Russian passenger jet was an act of terrorism, we are beginning to hear that this a tremendous blow to Putin’s prestige at home – something no one would dare utter about Obama’s or Cameron’s “prestige” if the Metrojet had been an American or British passenger plane. They say it’s “blowback” due to Russia’s actions in Syria, with the clear implication that it’s deserved. And yet, according to US officials and the usual suspects, the Russians aren’t hitting ISIS so much as they’re smiting the “moderate” Islamist head-choppers – the “Syrian rebels,” as they’re known — who are being funded, armed, and encouraged by the West.

If that’s true, then what kind of blowback are we talking about – and from which direction is it coming? Given this, isn’t it entirely possible that Metrojet Flight 9268 was downed by US-aided –and-supported “moderates,” who moderately decided to get back at Putin?

Naked Cameron with pig effigy paraded & burnt down in UK fest

House bill would require warrants for aerial surveillance

A House bill introduced on Thursday would require federal law enforcement officials to get a warrant if they want to conduct aerial surveillance inside the country.

It would also forbid them from identifying people who are inadvertently captured by aerial surveillance.

The measure, dubbed the Protecting Individuals From Mass Aerial Surveillance Act, is sponsored by Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.).

“Just because technological advances have made it easier for the federal government to collect information doesn’t mean that our privacy rights can or should be violated on the ground or in the air,” DelBene said in a statement. “Congress has an obligation to clear the legal fog by passing my bill to require the federal government to obtain a warrant if it wants to conduct aerial surveillance.”

The bill is co-sponsored by Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), Ted Poe (R-Texas), Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) and Don Beyer (D-Va.). A related bill was introduced in the Senate earlier this year.

New Zealand Spy Watchdog Investigating Country’s Ties to CIA Torture

Cheryl Gwyn, New Zealand’s inspector general for intelligence and security, said the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee report released in December 2014 named a number of countries that were involved in the torture and inhumane treatment of detainees — “but the names of those countries have been redacted.”

That wasn’t OK with her.

“I identified a public interest in inquiring into whether New Zealand’s intelligence agencies and personnel knew or were otherwise connected with or risked connection to the activities discussed in the U.S. Senate Report,” she wrote in her annual report released Wednesday.

Gwyn wrote that her inquiry “does not suggest or presuppose that New Zealand agencies or personnel were in any way connected with those activities.” But she said she does intend to find out whether there was such a connection — and “whether there were and/or now are any safeguards in place or other steps taken to address any connection or risk of connection to such activities.”

Chile admits poet Pablo Neruda might have been murdered by Pinochet regime

Chile’s government has acknowledged that Nobel-prize winning poet Pablo Neruda might have been killed after the 1973 coup that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power.

The interior ministry released a statement on Thursday amid press reports that Neruda might not have died of cancer as previously believed.

Neruda was best known for his love poems. But he was also a leftist politician and diplomat and close friend of Marxist president Salvador Allende, who committed suicide rather than surrender to troops during the September 1973 coup led by Pinochet.

Neruda, who was 69 and had prostate cancer, was traumatised by the coup and the persecution and killing of his friends. He planned to go into exile, where he would have been an influential voice against the dictatorship.

Supreme court may decide to hear most consequential abortion cases in decades

The US supreme court will decide as early as Friday whether to hear a case that could tee up the most consequential ruling on abortion rights in 23 years: a challenge to a Texas law that threatens to shut down half of the state’s clinics, or an appeal from the state of Mississippi defending a law that would close the only remaining abortion clinic in the state.

The stakes in both cases are towering. A decisive ruling in either one would determine the fate of nearly 30 abortion clinics across the rural south that are threatened with closure by similar laws. If the justices issue a ruling that strikes down one of the laws, it could halt the record pace of new abortion restrictions flowing out of conservative state legislatures. A ruling the other way would invite even more restrictions and leave little room for abortion providers to challenge those new regulations in court.

“I don’t think it’s overstating the case to say if the court upholds the restrictions in either the Texas or Mississippi case based on the justifications each state is offering – that these are health protective – that it would result in the most drastic reduction of the availability of abortion at any point since Roe v Wade,” said Priscilla Smith, director of Yale Law School’s reproductive justice program.

The court has issued only three decisions on abortion since 1992, all of which pared back existing rights. As a result, advocates have been reluctant to take any abortion case to the supreme court, for fear that it would result in a more expansive and permanent rollback of reproductive rights.

But Amy Hagstrom Miller, the founder of Whole Woman’s Health, the network of abortion clinics that is leading the lawsuit against the state of Texas, said the anti-abortion law that gutted the state’s abortion offerings had forced advocates’ hand.

Apparently it is nearly impossible for a cop to commit murder.

Pennsylvania officer who fatally shot unarmed man in back cleared of murder

A small-town police officer who fatally shot an unarmed motorist in the back as he lay face down on the ground was acquitted on Thursday at her murder trial.

A Dauphin County jury acquitted Hummelstown officer Lisa Mearkle of third-degree murder and voluntary and involuntary manslaughter charges in a shooting captured by a camera attached to her stun gun.

The video, which was played to jurors, showed Mearkle shocking 59-year-old David Kassick after he fled from a traffic stop before shooting him twice in the back as he lay face down in the snow in February.

After the verdict, Mearkle tearfully said she was sorry the shooting had happened.

“I feel relief right now, but it’s going to take a little bit for me to get back to my normal self,” she told reporters. “This has taken a toll on me that nobody understands.”

Mearkle said she wanted Kassick’s family to know that: “I truly wish it didn’t happen. I want them to know that. I didn’t want to shoot anybody.”

Mearkle, 37, testified on Wednesday that she believed Kassick was still a threat even after she shocked him repeatedly with a stun gun.

Pope Francis warns of church hypocrisy over poverty

Pontiff says it is impossible to speak about the poor while leading ‘life of a pharoah’

Pope Francis has warned the Roman Catholic church against hypocrisy on the issue of poverty, saying it was impossible to speak about the poor and the homeless and yet lead the “life of a pharaoh”.

The comments were made in an interview with Straatnieuws, a Dutch newspaper published by homeless people. The Vatican has been forced on the defensive after the publication of two books exposing greed and financial mismanagement at the heart of the church. The remarks appear to be a not-so-subtle jibe by Francis directed at his cardinals.

“The church must speak with the truth and also with testimony, the testimony of the poor. If a believer speaks about poverty or about the homeless, and leads the life of a pharaoh, this can’t be done,” he told the newspaper.

A separate report by Andrea Tornielli, a veteran Vatican reporter at the Italian newspaper La Stampa, who is working on a book with the pope to be released next year, said Francis was ready to take on the management of Vatican real estate, including apartments that have allegedly been undervalued by the agency that manages the properties.

“It will change,” an unnamed source told Tornielli, signalling what could prove to be a messy new fight within the Vatican.

In his interview with the Dutch newspaper, Francis said in response to a question about the church’s approach to poverty that Jesus had come into the world “homeless and poor”, and that the church believed every person had the right to three things: work, a home and land.

But just how much land, and what kind of house, seems to be up for interpretation within the church.

Release of TPP Full Text Shows Victory for Corporate Rights

'Worse Than We Thought': TPP A Total Corporate Power Grab Nightmare

'President Obama has sold the American people a false bill of goods,' says Friends of the Earth

"From leaks, we knew quite a bit about the agreement, but in chapter after chapter the final text is worse than we expected with the demands of the 500 official U.S. trade advisers representing corporate interests satisfied to the detriment of the public interest," said Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch.

In fact, Public Citizen charged, the TPP rolls back past public interest reforms to the U.S. trade model while expanding problematic provisions demanded by the hundreds of official U.S. corporate trade advisers who had a hand in the negotiations while citizens were left in the dark.

On issues ranging from climate change to food safety, from open Internet to access to medicines, the TPP "is a disaster," declared Nick Dearden of Global Justice Now.

"Now that we’ve seen the full text, it turns out the job-killing TPP is worse than anything we could’ve imagined," added Charles Chamberlain, executive director of Democracy for America. "This agreement would push down wages, flood our nation with unsafe imported food, raise the price of life-saving medicine, all the while trading with countries where gays and single mothers can be stoned to death."

Major climate action groups, including 350.org and the Sierra Club, were quick to point out that the text was notable as much for what it didn't say as what for what it did. "The TPP is an act of climate denial," said 350 policy director Jason Kowalski on Thursday. "While the text is full of handouts to the fossil fuel industry, it doesn’t mention the words climate change once."

What it does do, however, is give "fossil fuel companies the extraordinary ability to sue local governments that try and keep fossil fuels in the ground," Kowalski continued. "If a province puts a moratorium on fracking, corporations can sue; if a community tries to stop a coal mine, corporations can overrule them. In short, these rules undermine countries’ ability to do what scientists say is the single most important thing we can do to combat the climate crisis: keep fossil fuels in the ground."

#TPP's #ISDS grants Banksters new rights to attack financial stability laws. #TPPWorseThanWeThought #StopTPP pic.twitter.com/PYlO4Qxfc3

— Global Trade Watch (@PCGTW) November 5, 2015

US economy smashes expectations to add 271,000 jobs in October

The US economy added 271,000 jobs in October, about 90,000 more than expected. The unemployment rate dropped to 5%.

[Of course this is all about cooked numbers, real unemployment has barely changed a bit for years. - js]

The Federal Reserve is scheduled to meet in December to discuss raising interest rates for the first time since the 2008 recession. According to analysts, job gains of more than 150,000 on Friday would have been enough to keep a December rate hike on the table. ...

“At this point, I see the US economy as performing well,” Janet Yellen, the Fed chair, told Congress on Wednesday. Yellen did note that while there has been a slowdown in job gains, the economy would “continue to grow at a pace that’s sufficient to generate further improvements in the labor market”.

She stressed that no decision had been made and that a December rate hike would still be on the table as the Federal open market committee continued to monitor data.

Chaffetz Uses House Chairmanship to Shield His Big Pharma Backers

House Democrats seeking answers from pharmaceutical companies accused of jacking up prices on vital medications have run into a stone wall in the form of Republican Oversight Committee chair Jason Chaffetz, who counts the drug industry as one of his biggest backers.

Valeant and Turing Pharmaceuticals have both faced mounting criticism in recent weeks. Turing’s CEO, the “Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli, abruptly increased the price of a critical toxoplasmosis drug from $13.50 per tablet to $750 overnight. Valeant has also been accused of price-gouging, as well as controlling a secret specialty pharmacy that altered prescriptions so its higher-cost medications would go to patients.

Democrats, led by Elijah Cummings in the House and Bernie Sanders in the Senate, have taken aim at both companies, using them to symbolize rising anxiety over the cost of health treatments. For nearly a year, Cummings has sought internal documents and called for hearings through the Oversight Committee, where he’s the ranking member. Valeant and Turing have thus far resisted the document requests.

The Senate launched a bipartisan investigation of Valeant, Turing and other drugmakers this week. But although the House Oversight Committee agreed unanimously to investigate prescription drug prices at the beginning of the year, Chaffetz has refused every request to compel documents, issue subpoenas or schedule hearings.

Democrats' divide on death penalty emerges as major point of difference

A generation ago, opposition to the death penalty ended political careers.

Now, the three candidates sparring for the Democratic nomination are questioning the effectiveness and application of the death penalty.

Among them, only former secretary of state Hillary Clinton opposes abolishing the practice, and only in certain cases. Former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley signed into law a repeal of the death penalty in his state in 2013 and commuted sentences of the state’s remaining death row inmates in 2014. And Vermont senator Bernie Sanders has been a vocal opponent of the practice as matter or principle and policy.

As the candidates prepare to square off at a Democratic forum in South Carolina on Friday evening, the issue of the death penalty has emerged on the campaign trail as a point of contention in a race that has swerved to the left.

Socialist politician credits Bernie Sanders after re-election in Seattle

Kshama Sawant may be the only elected politician in the US who thinks Bernie Sanders has compromised his socialist principles a little too much to win the White House.

Sawant, a Socialist Alternative party member of the Seattle city council who drew national attention last year by driving resistant fellow councillors to pass a $15-an-hour minimum wage law, was re-elected this week after an unusually nasty campaign which saw corporate money swing behind her Democratic opponent.

Sawant credited her victory in part to Sanders, for creating “enormous momentum” for change that has helped engage young people and alienated workers in politics.

“When was the last time you heard a presidential candidate say we need a political revolution against the billionaire class?” said Sawant. “That is not Hillary Clinton. That is not Barack Obama. That is clearly somebody who is fundamentally different. ...

“There were so many people who said: ‘I wasn’t paying that much attention to Seattle politics but I’ve been listening to Bernie Sanders’ politics. I’ve been so excited by his call for a political revolution against the millionaire class and I’m looking around me and thinking I need to get involved at a local level.’”

That led Sawant to the question of whether it is enough to propel Sanders into the White House – a prospect few political pundits would put money on. Sawant agrees that it is unlikely but said the problem is not the Vermont senator’s policies or even the once toxic label of “socialist”. She said Sanders’ mistake was to run for the nomination of a capitalist party whose leadership will do all it can to stop him becoming its candidate.

“The question is not so much whether he’s electable but is he electable as a Democratic party candidate?” she asked. “That brings up the question of which candidate it is the Democratic party establishment going to back. An establishment that is completely bathed in Wall Street cash is not about to turn its back on that.”

Socialist Alternative has called on Sanders to run as an independent.

Introducing 'Keep It in the Ground' Bill, Sanders Goes Big on Climate

Proposed legislation by presidential candidate and Senate colleagues—which would keep majority of fossil fuels on public lands and offshore areas from being exploited—described as 'historic'

A handful of Democratic Senators, along with 2016 presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders, on Wednesday unrolled a bill that would go far beyond anything the administration of President Barack Obama has proposed by prohibiting all new coal, oil, and gas drilling on federally-owned lands and waters—from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic circle.

The Keep It in the Ground Act was introduced by Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.). The bill was cosponsored by Sens. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

Specifically, the proposed legislation would block corporations from pursuing new and non-producing leases for coal, oil, gas, shale, and tar sands extraction on federal land. In addition, it would ban offshore drilling in the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans and halt new and non-producing leases in the Pacific and Gulf of Mexico.

"We are taking on the Koch brothers and some of the most powerful political forces in the world who are more concerned with short-term profits than the future of the planet," said Sanders in a statement accompanying the bill. "I’ve got four kids, and I’ve got seven beautiful grandchildren. We have a moral responsibility to leave our kids a planet that is healthy and inhabitable."

The introduction of the bill follows an appeal issued in September by over 400 climate organizations and environmental leaders—including Asian Pacific Environmental Network and Indigenous People's Power Project—calling on Obama to halt new leasing on public lands and oceans, and insisting this is the single greatest thing he could do as president to curb the climate crisis. 

To Help Hard-Hit Seniors, Warren/Sanders Bill Would Boost Social Security

Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) introduced legislation on Thursday that would provide tens of millions of Americans with an emergency payment while tackling a corporate loophole that boosts CEO pay.

The legislation, the SAVE Benefits Act (pdf), is in response to the blow dealt roughly 65 million Americans last month when the Social Security Administration announced that there would be no annual cost-of-living increase for 2016.

It would provide an emergency payment of about $580—that's equal to 3.9 percent of the average annual Social Security benefit—which could help some 70 million seniors, veterans, people with disabilities, and others meet critical needs, a statement from the senators explains.

The 3.9 percent isn't a random figure—that's the increase in CEO compensation for the top 350 U.S. firms last year. The average salary of those CEOs was $16.3 million.

"This discrepancy [between increased CEO compensation and lack of raise for Social Security beneficiaries] isn’t an accident. It’s the result of choices made by Congress," a fact sheet (pdf) for the Act states.

The legislation would fund the emergency payments by closing a tax loophole that allows publicly traded companies to deduct so-called performance-based executive pay. Extra funds would be used to strengthen the Social Security and Disability trust funds.  A 2013 report from advocacy group Public Citizen found that the loophole for just the 20 highest paid CEOs had cost taxpayers as much as $235 million in lost tax revenue. 

President Obama rejects TransCanada Corp’s Keystone XL pipeline

ExxonMobil under investigation over claims it lied about climate change risks

New York attorney general subpoenas Exxon and Peabody Energy, two giants of the fossil fuel industry, over claims it misled the public and investors

The New York attorney general is investigating whether ExxonMobil misled the public and investors about the dangers and potential business risks of climate change, sources familiar with the investigation said on Thursday.

The company confirmed that it had received a subpoena from Eric Schneidermann, the New York attorney general, for financial records, email and other documents related to climate change.

Peabody Energy, the world’s biggest private coal company, is also under investigation, the legal sources confirmed.

The two giants of the fossil fuel industry – Exxon and Peabody – have long come under criticism from environmental and science groups for funding climate denial front groups, and spreading disinformation about climate science.

Democratic presidential contenders Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have both called for investigations into Exxon, following revelations that the company knew for decades about the dangers of climate change, but continued to cast doubt about the science.

The oil company denied the allegations, and said it had been forthcoming about the business risks of climate change in its shareholder and other reports.

Greenpeace says India has cancelled its legal registration

Greenpeace says its registration to operate in India has been cancelled under orders from the country’s home ministry.

The environmental group said in a statement that it would challenge Friday’s decision in court.

India began cracking down on foreign-funded charities last year after a government intelligence bureau report said economic growth was hurt when the groups rallied communities against polluting industries.

Not So Fast: ETA for California's $68 Billion Bullet Train Project Uncertain as Costs Rise

California's much-touted high-speed rail project, which will purportedly whisk passengers from Los Angeles to San Francisco in just under three hours, is currently projected to cost nearly $68 billion — more than twice the estimated cost of $33 billion in 2008 — and could go even higher.

Members of Congress and the California State Assembly sent a letter demanding the release of an internal report from the California High-Speed Rail Authority that was originally disclosed by the Los Angeles Times late last month. Released on Tuesday, it shows a projected 31 percent increase in estimated costs for the first phase of the train's construction. ...

Voters approved a bond measure in 2008 to partially fund the California High-Speed Rail Authority in order to construct the rail line. The line is designed to have 24 stations on more than 800 miles of track between San Diego and San Jose and allow trains to go up to 200 miles per hour, making it one of the largest public infrastructure projects in the country. The rail authority has said that the state would like to see a private company operate the trains.

But critics say the project is too costly and insist that the rail authority doesn't have enough money to see the high-speed line come to fruition. No private funders have stepped forward to fill the gap in state and federal funds, though Lisa Marie Alley, a spokesperson for the rail authority, said they have had interest from more than 60 potential partners.

Also of Interest

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

Hillary Swears Unswerving Fealty to Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu

Judy Miller’s ghost lingers: Putin, Syria and how the New York Times cheers on a new Cold War

Obama's catastrophic Syria folly

‘Drone Papers’ Revelations Are a Cry for Ending the Slaughter

Silicon Valley feigns benevolence with self-serving benefits packages

A Little Night Music

Don Sugarcane Harris - Out of the pocket

Don & Dewey - Blues in an Icebox

Don ''Sugarcane'' Harris - So alone

Don Sugarcane Harris - You Could've Had Me Baby

Don Sugarcane Harris - The Buzzard's Cousin

Don Sugarcane Harris - Generation Of Vipers

Pure Food And Drug Act - My Soul's On Fire

Sugarcane Harris - Elim Stole My Baby

Don and Dewey - Justine!

Don and Dewey - Kill Me

Don and Dewey - Farmer John

Don & Dewey - Mammer Jammer

Don & Dewey - Big Boy Pete

Don & Dewey - Miss Sue

Don & Dewey - Leavin' It All Up to You

Don & Dewey Pink Champagne

It's a Beautiful Day - Don & Dewey

Harmonica George - Get in the kitchen and burn

Harmonica George - Sad and Blue

Harmonica George - Sputnik Music