Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features Chicago blues guitarist Buster Benton. Enjoy!

"Aggression is simply another name for government."

-- Benjamin Tucker

News and Opinion

Serbia to Ask NATO to Deploy Serb Military, Police in Kosovo - Vucic

Serbia will ask NATO peacekeepers to let it deploy Serbian military and police in Kosovo, although it believes there is no chance of the request being approved, President Aleksandar Vucic said on Saturday. ...

It would be the first time Belgrade requested to deploy troops in Kosovo, under provisions of a U.N. Security Council resolution which ended a 1998-1999 war, in which NATO interceded against Serbia to protect Albanian-majority Kosovo.

The resolution says Serbia can deploy up to 1,000 military, police and customs officials to Orthodox Christian religious sites, areas with Serb majorities and border crossings, if such a deployment is approved by KFOR's commander.

At the time it was agreed, Kosovo was internationally recognised as part of Serbia. With the West's backing, Kosovo declared independence in 2008, a declaration not recognised by Serbia.

NATO Pressed for Action as Tensions Rise in North Kosovo

A weekend dispute in northern Kosovo has fueled a new round of controversy, and tensions, as the Kosovar military threatened to move against ethnic Serbs who were blocking the road, leading to a standoff.

This happens from time to time, mostly starting with the Kosovo government preventing the northern Serbs from trading across the border with neighboring Serbia. This leads to a lot of threats back and forth, and unresolved standoffs.

With its endless military operation in Kosovo, NATO finds itself threatening to be sucked into the situation. Kosovo wants NATO to intervene on their side against the Serbs, while Serbia contacted NATO and asked permission to deploy peacekeepers into Kosovo to prevent the crackdown.

NATO’s original war in Kosovo, in 1998, gave the region de facto independence from Serbia, though the Serbians have never recognized that as legal. This has led NATO to a more or less forever deployment in the center of an ever-sparking powder-keg, assured to be impacted alliance-wide if and when it all falls apart.

NATO Never Wanted Peace In Ukraine Says Fmr. German PM Angela Merkel

What a gibbering fool.

Trust between the West and Russia has been destroyed, NATO chief says

The West has tried to build bridges with Russia since the end of the Cold War but any trust that was established in recent years has been destroyed with Russia's invasion of Ukraine, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Monday.

"NATO strived for decades to develop a better, more constructive relationship with Russia," he told CNBC's Hadley Gamble in Brussels.

"After the end of the Cold War we established institutions [like the] NATO-Russia Council, when I was prime minister of Norway I remember that President Putin attended NATO summits ... so this was a different time when we worked for a better relationship. Russia has walked away from all of this," he said.

Stoltenberg said a level of trust that had been established during a rapprochement between Western nations and Russia in recent decades had been destroyed by Moscow's decision to invade Ukraine.

"Even if the fighting ends, we will not return to some kind of normal, friendly, relationship with Russia. Trust has been destroyed," he said. "I think the war has had long-lasting consequences for the relationship with Russia."

Military Groomers Are Increasingly Infiltrating US High Schools

Protect your kids.

A New York Times report has found that enrollment in the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC), a Pentagon-funded program designed to groom children for military service, is increasingly becoming mandatory in US high schools.

“J.R.O.T.C. programs, taught by military veterans at some 3,500 high schools across the country, are supposed to be elective, and the Pentagon has said that requiring students to take them goes against its guidelines,” the report says. “But The New York Times found that thousands of public school students were being funneled into the classes without ever having chosen them, either as an explicit requirement or by being automatically enrolled.”

“While Pentagon officials have long insisted that J.R.O.T.C. is not a recruiting tool, they have openly discussed expanding the $400 million-a-year program, whose size has already tripled since the 1970s, as a way of drawing more young people into military service. The Army says 44 percent of all soldiers who entered its ranks in recent years came from a school that offered J.R.O.T.C.,” the Times reports.

In high schools across the U.S., thousands of students are being placed in the military's JROTC classes without choosing them on their own.

"The only word I can think of is 'indoctrination,'" one parent said. https://t.co/Jopf3EYAne

— The New York Times (@nytimes) December 11, 2022

And before you ask, no, the Pentagon’s grooming program is not being forced on kids in Malibu and the Hamptons.

“A vast majority of the schools with those high enrollment numbers were attended by a large proportion of nonwhite students and those from low-income households,” the Times reports, naming Detroit, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Oklahoma City, and Mobile, Alabama as cities where high schools are funneling kids into the program en masse.

Defenders of mandatory JROTC enrollment reportedly cite the need to “divert students away from drugs or violence” and “the allure of drugs and gangs” in urban areas, as though corralling them into the single most violent gang on Earth is a deterrence from violence and gangs. Grooming students to go kill foreigners for crude oil is not my idea of a healthy diversion from youthful error, but maybe that’s just me.

This would probably be a good time to remind readers that poverty in the United States is one of the Pentagon’s most effective recruiting tools, with Army officials explicitly acknowledging that young people’s inability to afford a college education on their own is responsible for their success in meeting recruitment goals, and US lawmakers warning that helping people pay off crushing student debt will hurt recruitment. US military recruiters have an established record of targeting poorer schools, because impoverished communities often see military service as their only chance at upward mobility.

The New York Times describes a cult-like environment in these JROTC programs where “parents in some cities say their children are being forced to put on military uniforms, obey a chain of command and recite patriotic declarations in classes they never wanted to take,” with special textbooks which “at times falsify or downplay the failings of the U.S. government.” And if even The New York Times believes you’re falsifying and downplaying the failings of the US government, it’s got to be pretty bad.

Victims of the military grooming program told the Times that they were put in frequent contact with military recruiters who pushed the idea of enlisting to pay for college, with one student saying a male recruiter “still texts me to this day” even well after graduation.

I’m not sure how American parents could possibly read of such things without being intensely creeped out.

Every day I see US conservatives mindlessly bleating about “groomers” in the LGBT community trying to turn children into sexual deviants, claiming kids are being “indoctrinated” in school by learning about gay marriage and respect for trans people, but none of them seem to have any problem with the real-life indoctrination and grooming kids are subjected to by the most murderous and depraved institution in the world.

One of the dumbest things happening in mainstream western political discourse right now is the way conservatives are increasingly framing themselves as society’s last bulwark against the normalization of child molestation, something which has been growing reliably less normalized and more aggressively rejected across the entire political spectrum for generations. But sure, pretend the ideology which wants to drag civilization back to the days of the Boy Scouts, the Catholic Church, and fathers reigning supreme over their household (and everyone in it) are the ones protecting us from the rape of children.

The most consequential groomers of our day are not LGBT people and their allies, but the adults who are grooming children to violently enact the will of the most tyrannical regime on earth with the full support of their government. And yet so far it’s been mostly conservatives who I’ve seen defending the news of mandatory JROTC enrollment in impoverished neighborhoods. They’re not just fine with this kind of indoctrination, they actively support it.

And to them I can only say, okay groomer.

Slash the Pentagon Budget in Half & Abolish ICBMs: Dan Ellsberg on How to Avoid Nuclear Armageddon

Bernie WITHDRAWS Yemen Resolution After Biden Challenge, Is Anti-War Left DEAD?

Citing Agreement With Biden, Sanders Withdraws Yemen War Powers Resolution

Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday night withdrew a Senate resolution to end U.S. involvement in the Saudi-led war on Yemen, but vowed to work with the Biden administration and congressional colleagues to keep trying.

"Today, I withdrew from consideration by the U.S. Senate my War Powers Resolution after the Biden administration agreed to continue working with my office on ending the war in Yemen," Sanders said in a statement.

"Let me be clear," Sanders continued: "If we do not reach agreement, I will, along with my colleagues, bring this resolution back for a vote in the near future and do everything possible to end this horrific conflict."

Bolsonaro supporters try to storm police HQ in ‘January 6-style’ rampage

Fanatical supporters of Brazil’s outgoing president, Jair Bolsonaro, have torched cars and buses and tried to storm the federal police headquarters in the country’s capital in what one commentator called a botched attempt to spark a January 6-style turmoil.

The violence erupted on Monday evening after the leftwing politician who defeated Bolsonaro in October’s historic election – former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – had his victory officially ratified by Brazil’s electoral court.

Several hours later, hardcore Bolsonaristas who want the result overturned rampaged through the heart of Brasília, after a member of their radical group was arrested for allegedly trying to incite violence that would prevent Lula from being sworn in on 1 January.

Reuters said witnesses saw extremists, many wearing the yellow Brazil shirts that symbolise the president’s far-right movement, confronting security forces outside a federal police headquarters. Police used stun grenades and teargas to disperse the crowd.

Footage posted on social media by bystanders and local journalists showed militant Bolsonaro supporters setting fire to a bus.

Peru protests: Appeal to release ex-president Pedro Castillo rejected

Natural Gas Prices Surge 10% On Cold Temperatures

U.S. natural gas futures have extended their rally, jumping nearly 10% on Monday’s session following forecasts for much colder weather as well as higher heating demand through late December than previously expected.

Colder weather is likely to force utilities to pull more gas from storage, with storage levels already ~1.5% below the five-year average for this time of year.

The cold snap is expected to start next weekend and peak right on Christmas in the bulk of the country.

As Scandals Mount, So Do Calls to Abolish Private Medicare Advantage Plans

As yet another scandal involving Medicare Advantage made headlines this week, progressive U.S. lawmakers and advocates renewed calls to abolish the private health insurance program that a recent Senate report said is "running amok" with "fraudsters and scam artists."

In a new Nation article written with health insurance reform advocate Wendell Potter, Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) contend that one of the most confusing things facing elders while choosing their Medicare plans "is a scheme by private insurance companies to prey on seniors and profit off of the Medicare brand, all in the name of padding their corporate profits and shareholder returns."

"The scheme is called Medicare Advantage. But in reality, so-called 'Medicare Advantage' is neither Medicare nor an advantage," wrote the lawmakers, who earlier this year introduced legislation that, if passed, would ban private insurance plans from using the Medicare name.

"It's actually just private insurance that uses the trusted Medicare name to trick seniors and people with disabilities into enrolling, then profits by denying coverage for necessary medical care," Khanna and Pocan added. "It is long past time for Congress to end this scam and ensure that consumers get accurate information about their healthcare options."

On Monday, Kaiser Health News detailed how insurance companies selling Medicare Advantage plans "have repeatedly tried to sidestep regulations requiring them to document medical conditions the government paid them to treat."

The KHN report said that government auditors "uncovered millions of dollars in improper payments—citing overcharges of more than $1,000 per patient a year on average—by nearly two dozen health plans."

This follows a Senate Finance Committee report published last month that found insurance companies and other brokers are making false or misleading claims to dupe senior citizens into purchasing Medicare Advantage plans.

An investigation published in October by The New York Times found that insurance companies are exploiting Medicare Advantage plans to rake in billions of dollars in excess profits.

In April, the inspector-general's office at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services published a report revealing that Medicare Advantage plans deny medically necessary care to tens of thousands of enrollees each year.

Nearly half of Medicare's 60 million beneficiaries are currently enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans, and the majority of U.S. seniors are expected to be signed up by next year.

The ACO-REACH program, a Trump-era scheme set to take effect on January 1st that would shift some Medicare recipients to private insurance plans without their knowledge or consent, is also raising eyebrows and ire.

Canada court rejects mother’s lawsuit to ban Indigenous ceremony at children’s school

A Canadian court has again rejected claims from a mother that Indigenous cultural events at her children’s school infringed on their religious freedoms, ordering her to pay costs after revelations her lawsuit was secretly funded by a Christian activist organization.

Candice Servatius, an evangelical Protestant, complained in 2016 after an Elder performed a smudging demonstration at her children’s school in the western British Columbia town of Port Alberni. A hoop dancer also said a prayer while performing at a school assembly.

Ahead of the event, parents received a letter advising them that students would participate by holding a cedar branch to “feel the bristles..to remind them that they are alive and well” and that smoke from sage would be fanned to “cleanse” the students and classroom. When Servatius went to the school, she found out that the ceremony had already taken place.

Despite Servatius’s claim that “her children were forced to participate in a religious ceremony”, the British Columbia supreme court ruled against her in 2020. Justice Douglas Thompson concluded the events were meant to teach students about Indigenous culture and attendance wasn’t mandatory. In his ruling, Thompson also found that while the students observed a smudging ceremony and hoop dance, “they did not hold cedar branches and were not smudged or otherwise cleansed”.

This week, an appeals court agreed with the lower court, calling it “uncontroversial” that public educational institutions like schools would be involved in reconciliation efforts with Indigenous communities. The school is located within the traditional Nuu-chah-nulth territory and nearly one-third of the students in the school district are Indigenous, according to the British Columbia court of appeal.

Heh, progressive dems ring alarm bells that corpadems won't respond to.

Fake Populists See A Real Opportunity

“The rail workers had good reason to threaten a strike,” a U.S. senator wrote last week. “Railway workers wanted sufficient paid leave to cover illnesses, and the big companies didn’t want to provide them, despite the fact the rail companies are more profitable than ever. How have they gotten so profitable in just the last few years? By cutting the number of rail jobs and working laborers harder. The record profits of the rail industry have been a tremendous victory for Wall Street. Not so much for workers.”

If you think the senator who wrote that was Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren or some other Democrat, think again. It was January 6 fist-pumper Josh Hawley, the Republican from Missouri.

That’s right, while President Biden was behaving like a villain from Les Misérables — busting workers’ strike and then eating caviar and lobster at a black-tie dinner with the French president — Hawley was penning that essay, which culminated in him declaring: “Wall Street and Washington say this anti-worker agenda is the natural order of things. They’re wrong, as usual. We don’t have to follow this path — and we shouldn’t a moment longer.”

Many liberals will stop reading right here, insisting that Hawley is an insincere insurrectionist — which happens to be true. Indeed, Hawley, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), and other fake populists are often LARPing a good game about paid sick days, the $15 minimum wage, and COVID-19 relief checks, but they’ve avoided backing legislation to strengthen union rights and routinely cast votes with the GOP’s big donors. It was the same with Donald Trump: For every decent health care initiative and direct aid program the former Republican president stumbled into supporting, he was spending far more time as a standard-issue shill for capital against labor.

And yet, laughing at the GOP’s fake populists as if they are politically irrelevant ignores a significant and dangerous trend: Democrats’ genuflections to their corporate donors — whether breaking a strike, authorizing corporate giveaways, or stalling a $15 minimum wage — have been handing conservatives myriad opportunities to court working-class voters.

And lately, polling data show those voters have been responding.

Since the 2018 midterm elections, Republicans have gained seven points among voters whose annual income is below $50,000, according to exit polls. In this year’s midterm elections, those surveys show the GOP won a plurality of all voters whose income is below $100,000 — also a seven-point gain since the last midterm. Republicans also won 42 percent of union households.

SBF DENIED Bail As MASSIVE Campaign Finance Fraud Revealed

EU becomes first leading economy to legislate for ‘green tariff’ on imports

In the early hours of Tuesday morning the EU became the first big economy to legislate for a “green tariff” on imports, to be levied on goods that are produced with high carbon dioxide emissions.

The carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) means that countries which fail to green their industries will soon face a new threat: an effective carbon tax that will penalise those hoping to profit from high-carbon activities, and force them to clean up.

The system will be applied at first to iron and steel, cement, fertilisers, aluminium, electricity, hydrogen and some chemicals.

Jozef Síkela, minister of industry and trade of the Czech Republic, who led the negotiations in the EU parliament, said: “The carbon border adjustment mechanism is a key part of our climate action. This mechanism promotes the import of goods by non-EU businesses into the EU which fulfil the high climate standards applicable in the 27 EU member states. This will ensure a balanced treatment of such imports and is designed to encourage our partners in the world to join the EU’s climate efforts.”

The agreement is still provisional, and details remain to be ironed out by member states and other institutions. But if all goes according to plan, CBAMs will come into force on a trial basis from next October. However, at first, there will be no financial or other penalties attached to the EU’s CBAM – companies will only be required to report on the emissions associated with the production of the goods they wish to sell.

Pennsylvania Lifts Fracking Ban in Polluted Town of Dimock

Environmental justice advocates cried foul Tuesday after it was reported that the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection is allowing a fracking giant to resume drilling operations in Dimock just two weeks after it accepted responsibility for poisoning the small rural town's drinking water.

Roughly 14 years after a well explosion on New Year's Day 2009 revealed to Dimock residents that methane had seeped into their groundwater, Cabot Oil & Gas pleaded no contest to 15 criminal charges, including nine felonies, on November 29. The notorious driller, now owned by Coterra Energy, was featured in the 2010 HBO documentary Gasland.

On the same day the Houston-based company took responsibility for destroying the town's drinking water and agreed to pay $16.3 million to build new public water infrastructure and to cover the costs of delivering clean water to those who have been harmed for the next 75 years, it received a green light to extract more of the same polluting fossil fuels when state regulators quietly lifted a moratorium on gas production in Dimock that had been in place since 2010.

As The Associated Press reported Monday, "State officials denied that Coterra was allowed to plead to a misdemeanor charge in exchange for being allowed to drill for potentially hundreds of millions of dollars worth of gas."

"Some of the residents, who have long accused the Department of Environmental Protection of negligence in its handling of the water pollution in Dimock, said they felt betrayed," the news outlet noted.

"We got played," said Ray Kemble, a Dimock resident who has led a yearslong fight against the fracking company and state regulators alike.

Food & Water Watch Pennsylvania state director Megan McDonough said Tuesday in a statement that "this outrageous action by Gov. [Tom] Wolf is just one more gift his administration is delivering to the dirty fracking industry."

"The people of Dimock suffered at the hands of careless corporate polluters, as have other communities across Pennsylvania," said McDonough. "Reaching this deal on the very same day that Coterra was in court for contaminating Dimock's water raises serious questions about what was going on behind the scenes in the Wolf administration."

Eels facing population collapse, conservation groups warn

Eels are facing population collapse, conservation groups have warned, after annual fishing negotiations for key EU waters ended in the setting of quotas above those scientists have recommended.

Eels are critically endangered, and conservation groups and scientists have argued that all EU eel fisheries should be closed, to allow populations space to recover.

However, in the annual negotiations over EU waters including the north-east Atlantic, which ended in the early hours of Tuesday morning, the European Commission agreed only to extend the closure of eel fisheries at sea from the current three-month closure to six months, to cover juvenile eel migration and mature eels swimming between the sea and rivers.

Also of Interest

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

Indict Us Too: Daniel Ellsberg & Cryptome's John Young Demand US Drop Charges Against Julian Assange

Patrick Lawrence: Germany & the Lies of Empire

When False Claims Are News - Russia, India, Nukes

As inflation eases slightly, Biden and the Fed say recessionary interest rises will continue

On Bicentennial of US-Mexico Diplomatic Relations, Former US Ambassador to Mexico Accuses AMLO of “Goading” Washington

Nasa mission will give unprecedented view of Earth’s surface water

Briahna Joy Gray: Twitter Files Journalists SMEARED; Matt Taibbi Called Racist, Sexist, Conservative

Odessa blackouts. Ukraine situation crashing as Russian missile strikes continue

A Little Night Music

Buster Benton - Money Is The Name of The Game

Buster Benton - Lonesome for a Dime

Buster Benton - Blues & Trouble

Buster Benton - Spider In My Stew

Buster Benton - Dangerous Woman

Buster Benton - Sweet 94

Buster Benton - Cold Man Ain't No Good

Buster Benton - Leave Me Alone

Buster Benton - That's Your Thing

Buster Benton - Love Like I Wanna