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

"I believe that, as long as there is plenty, poverty is evil. Government belongs wherever evil needs an adversary and there are people in distress."

-- Robert Kennedy

News and Opinion

US Congress closes in on $900bn Covid aid bill as Friday deadline looms

US congressional negotiators on Wednesday were “closing in on” a $900bn Covid-19 aid bill that will include $600 to $700 stimulus checks and extended unemployment benefits, as a Friday deadline loomed, lawmakers and aides said. Top members of the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives and Republican-controlled Senate sounded more positive than they have in months on a fresh response to a crisis that has killed more than 304,000 Americans and thrown millions out of work.

For months, Republicans have been gunning for a stimulus package with a much lower price tag than what Democrats want. The two sides seem to have found common ground on a $908bn relief package – over $1tn less than the first stimulus package.

Their aides were struggling on Wednesday to draft legislative language as rates of Covid-19 infections are soaring to new highs, even as the United States starts to vaccinate people. The American economy is showing signs of weakening.

Negotiators were looking for a way to shift the approach to aiding hard-hit state and local governments, which has been a key Democratic priority but opposed by Republicans, one source familiar with the talks said. The measure, to be attached to a spending bill that must pass by Friday to avert a government shutdown, is not expected to include new protections for companies from lawsuits related to the pandemic, something high on the Republican agenda.

Senator Dick Durbin, the chamber’s No 2 Democrat, said the goal was to reach an agreement on Wednesday and have it ready for voting beginning on Thursday.

The Republican Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, said he felt optimistic.

Congress’s COVID Relief Bill Includes Direct Checks. It’s Still Not Enough to Help Most Vulnerable

Jobless Claims SPIKE As Poverty Increased By Lack Of Federal Aid

When Austerity’s Chickens Came Home to Roost in the U.S., Bernie and “the Squad” were Unprepared

In March, Bernie Sanders and “the Squad” were calling for a $2000 monthly check to be included in the first governmental response to the pandemic. That didn’t happen. Instead, the Democratic Party majority in the House silently voted for the CARES Act. The CARES Act pumped more than four trillion dollars to the richest corporations while providing just a one-time $1200 payment to workers and the poor. So-called “progressive Democrats” such as Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez voiced opposition to the bill but did not organize against it. Ten months later, the chickens of austerity are roosting on a global pandemic that the U.S. ruling class has used to beef up its profits at the expense of the rest of us. ...

Majorities of people of all political persuasions are hungry for Medicare for All and any kind of relief from the precarity of neoliberal capitalism. Young Democrats displaced from the American Dream hoped that the rise of Bernie Sanders and “the Squad” represented the first signs of life for the resurgence of class struggle politics in the United States. A major problem with this formulation rested in the fact that Bernie Sanders, AOC, and the rest of the squad diverted their youthful and increasingly socialist base to the corporate jaws of the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party is where movements go to die and where austerity is given a friendly, more diverse face from which to shatter the dreams and lives of the working class.

COVID-19 has served as a litmus test for the socialist-ish elements of the Democratic Party. The theory of change that inserts the likes of Bernie Sanders and AOC as the leaders of the class struggle has failed to materialize in reality. In recent weeks, AOC and Sanders have blamed Republicans for the latest stimulus package which is half of what was formulated by Donald Trump before Biden became president-elect and excludes the singular $1200 payment to every American. They have been silent about the fact that House leader Nancy Pelosi signed off on the latest stimulus proposal coming out of Congress. When asked about the change of heart toward a bipartisan stimulus, Pelosi answered, “That's okay now because we have a new president. A president who recognizes that we need to depend on science.”
In other words, the masses will get science but no rental assistance, a vaccine but no universal healthcare, and a new president but not a new politics that will fulfill their basic needs. Sanders and his surrogates have opposed the latest Pelosi-backed bill but have only called for the inclusion of another one-time $1200 dollar payment. It is clear that the chickens of austerity are roosting on the Sanders-wing of the Democratic Party. Austerity is politically defined by the complete absence of any demands on power which disrupt the status quo and the endless downward pressure placed on the lives of the downtrodden. Sanders’ willingness to reduce his demand for a $2000 universal basic income to a $1200 one-time payment after nine months of economic crisis follows the logic of austerity to a T. ...

Bernie Sanders and “the Squad” have always been unprepared to challenge austerity because their struggle does not fundamentally confront the character of the U.S. state. The U.S. state is the enforcement mechanism of capitalism. ... Austerity’s chickens have come home to roost in the form of the most devastating economic crisis since the Great Depression and there is no end in sight. The lesson of this moment is that real demands must be placed on the ENTIRE state, even the most supposedly left elements nesting within it. Movements are defined by their demands. Without them, AOC and Sanders will continue to support bloated military budgets and capitulate to the class that actually wields power: the capitalist class. The so-called “left-wing” of the Democratic Party is accountable only to the political apparatus enforcing austerity on the masses of people. That AOC and Sanders won’t respond to the demands of the masses is a lesson that has yet to be learned by loyal Sandernistas. Because so-called progressives are unprepared for the moment, it is ultimately up to workers and oppressed people to make the United States ungovernable unless their demands for a better life, and a new world, are met.

Bernie CLASHES With Manchin Over Stimulus Checks For The People

Congress to Pass $17 Billion Bailout of Airlines, to Top Off Prior Bailout

Airlines in the US will get another $17 billion taxpayer-funded bailout if the $748 billion “bipartisan” stimulus proposal that the four most senior Congressional leaders are discussing this afternoon makes it into law.

There is a commitment now to pass something. Many items that either party wanted but that the other refused to yield on have been trimmed out of this proposal, including the $1,200 stimulus checks. But their airline bailout is in it.

Democrats and Republicans may not agree on much of anything these days, but they both love to bail out airline shareholders and bondholders. And that’s what this is – dressed up as payroll protection and airline support program.

The Democratic-backed $2.2 trillion stimulus package that the House passed at the end of September but that was not taken up by the Senate included $25 billion to bail out airline shareholders and bondholders. The airline industry has been lobbying with all its might to get this money. So now, it looks like they will have to make do with $17 billion.

This new bailout comes on top of the original stimulus bill, which was passed in March and which came with $25 billion in so-called payroll support for the airlines, an additional $25 billion in loans for passenger airlines, and over $10 billion in grants and loans for cargo airlines and aviation contractors. The payroll protection provisions expired on September 30, under the assumption that by then the airlines would be operating more or less back at normal.

Transit Workers Union: Worker REBELLION INEVITABLE If Federal Aid For Transit Left Out

A CIA Officer Has a Headache. Media Blame Russia.

A 9,000-word story for GQ (10/20/20) about the mystery ailment of a CIA officer in Moscow has become the unlikely subject of a weeks-long media storm.

Marc Polymeropoulos told the magazine’s correspondent Julia Ioffe that in December 2017, while staying at a Moscow hotel (or “enemy territory,” as she described it), he was suddenly struck with strong feelings of head pain, nausea and dizziness. All the symptoms Ioffe lists are common to many types of migraine, a condition an estimated 1 billion people have suffered from. Yet Polymeropoulos—and Russiagate proponent Ioffe—suspected something else: some sort of hitherto unheard-of Kremlin microwave gun.

Ioffe is completely credulous of her professional spy interviewee—presenting him as a heroic figure who “hunted terrorists” in Pakistan and Yemen for a living—despite the fact that his story is riddled with inconsistencies. Just hours after apparently being savagely attacked by Vladimir Putin’s thugs, Polymeropoulos felt well enough to not only travel to St. Petersburg (over 400 miles away), but also to walk for several miles through a Russian winter, go sightseeing and boozing in a number of “dive bars,” and do his Christmas shopping as well.

Once back in the US, he was diagnosed with occipital neuralgia, an inflaming of the nerves in the neck, a condition which leads to frequent migraines. As the website of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons notes, “Many cases can be attributed to chronic neck tension or unknown origins.”

The GQ article includes official denials of the existence of a mystery weapon from both Russia and the CIA, who made clear that many of Ioffe’s claims were “simply not true”; Polymeropoulos claims that the agency flatly told him he was “making it up.”

“If there was credible intelligence that showed an adversary purposefully harmed a CIA officer, you can bet Director [Gina] Haspel would act swiftly and decisively,” said an agency spokesperson. For Ioffe, this was not a reason to spike the story, but more evidence of the government’s “obstinate lack of willingness to condemn Vladimir Putin or Russian attacks in any way.”

Ioffe, who was fired from Politico in 2016 for a tweet suggesting an incestuous relationship between Trump and his daughter Ivanka, has been among the most strident proponents of the theory that Russia hacked the 2016 election and controls the Trump administration, going so far as to suggest that the official Twitter account of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (the oldest US newspaper west of the Appalachians) was a Russian bot, because of its use of “Russian quotation marks.” (The “»” sign she referenced is actually commonly used as an arrow on Twitter.)

When she is not agreeing to selfies with Neo-Nazi leader Richard Spencer, Ioffe writes some bizarrely Russophobic articles. Imagining exiled NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s life in Russia, she wrote (New Republic, 7/24/13):

Maybe he will marry a Russian woman, who will quickly shed her supple, feminine skin and become a tyrant, and every dark winter morning, Snowden will sit in his tiny Moscow kitchen, drinking Nescafe while Svetlana cooks something greasy and tasteless, and he will sit staring into his black instant coffee, hating her.

Despite all this, her story about the CIA agent’s headache was picked up and repeated across the US media (e.g., New York Post, 10/22/20; NPR, 10/27/20; Mother Jones, 10/20/20) and in the international press (e.g., London Independent, 10/21/20; Sydney Morning Herald, 10/22/20; New Zealand Herald, 10/22/20). The Washington Post (10/25/20) even felt it was an important enough story to merit an editorial.

The Moscow story is reminiscent of a similar recent occurrence in Cuba, where a number of US diplomats reported similar headaches and nausea after hearing a piercing sound. Corporate media immediately suggested that some sort of “sonic weapon” was likely to blame (e.g., Vox, 8/28/17; CBS News, 8/23/17; USA Today, 8/10/17). It was only when the Associated Press (10/17/17) published recordings that US officials in Havana had made of the noise that a more mundane culprit was identified: crickets. The dastardly sonic weapon was actually, unmistakably, the high-pitched mating call of the short-tailed cricket, as any Cuban would likely have known. Ioffe references the Cuban conundrum, plus a similar case of American diplomats in Guangzhou, China, hearing piercing noises, but does not mention the cricket explanation at all.

Incidents like these are surprisingly common in Cold War history. Going further back in time, during the 1980s, the US government formally accused the Soviet Union of supplying chemical weapons—so-called “Yellow Rain”—to Communist states in Southeast Asia to use on American troops fighting there. While media took it deadly seriously at the time, it is now commonly accepted that the “chemical weapon” was actually just honeybee feces (Scientific American, 9/85; New York Times, 9/3/87).

Completely disregarding the cricket explanation, a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine released earlier this month about the 2017 Havana incident suggested that the symptoms displayed by US government workers there were consistent with those of exposure to microwave energy, although it very prominently warned that “evidence has been lacking, no hypothesis has been proven and the circumstances remain unclear.” Russia is mentioned in only one paragraph of the 77-page document, which does not make any accusations against any country. Experts immediately challenged the report as completely incoherent “science fiction.”

Despite this, a host of big media outlets (e.g., Slate, 12/5/20; Mother Jones, 12/5/20; Reuters, 12/6/20; Vox, 12/6/20) immediately took the idea of a Russian attack on the embassy in Cuba as highly likely. There is “strong evidence that the incidents were the result of a malicious attack,” the New York Times (12/5/20) informed its readers. Other explanations, it said, were “unlikely.” “CIA analysts who are Russia experts, diplomats and scientists contend that evidence points to Moscow,” it added. NBC News (12/7/20), meanwhile, festooned its broadcast with pictures of the Kremlin (despite the event happening in Cuba), telling viewers that “Russia has a long history of working on these weapons.”

“Is Russia Microwaving American Spies?” read the headline of Ben MacIntyre’s London Times column (10/30/20). “Dozens of US officials have been hit by ‘Havana Syndrome’ but no one seems to want the truth to come out,” he added, also claimng that US officials in Guangzhou had suffered a similar fate to Polymeropoulos in Moscow.

The Washington Post editorial board (12/9/20) took the news to its logical endpoint, combining the Moscow, Havana and Guangzhou cases, together with other discredited Russiagate theories, to demand that President-elect Joe Biden must “call out” Russian President Vladimir Putin. Given that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved their famous doomsday clock—symbolizing the risk of the destruction of the planet through nuclear weapons—to the closest it has ever been to midnight, upping tensions with Russia would be reckless in the extreme. For the single-minded Post, however, Putin’s denials are actually further proof of devious, “asymmetric warfare” being waged against America.

The problem with this whole narrative, journalistically, is that with tremendously high stakes it relies largely on the testimonies of US officials, many of them anonymous, who have a clear incentive to lie and defame three countries with whom the United States is currently ramping up tensions. Overreliance on official sources has led to a number of terrible media blunders of late (FAIR.org, 12/3/18, 7/3/20). As we wrote (2/28/20):

It is the job of the covert security services to lie and manipulate. They are among the least trustworthy groups in the world, journalistically speaking, as part of their profession involves planting fake information. The only group less deserving of blind faith than spies would be anonymous spies.

Perhaps even more troubling is the close relationship many of the outlets promoting the story have with the intelligence services. One author of an NBC News article (12/5/20) on the subject, Ken Dilanian, is known to have had a long term “collaborative” partnership with the CIA, explicitly promising the agency positive news coverage, even sending them copies of his stories for them to edit and rewrite (Intercept, 9/4/14). Meanwhile, the London Times’ MacIntyre was named as part of a cluster of journalists who worked with a British government-funded disinformation think tank, the ironically named Integrity Initiative, whose sole purpose appears to be pushing out anti-Moscow propaganda into the media.

Why is there so little skepticism of fanciful official claims in corporate media? If the US truly believed that its agents and diplomats were being attacked, it would surely treat it as an act of war. The US bombed Nicaragua because it insulted an American business magnate. Thus, it is hardly likely to overlook a direct attack on its representatives. Surely more plausible explanations for these maladies include headaches, crickets, paranoia, mass hysteria or simply lying, rather than a vast global conspiracy using heretofore unknown science fiction weapons in order to mildly inconvenience a few American operatives.

The next time a CIA officer gets a headache, we should give him an aspirin, not risk starting World War III.

Infinite loop | US officials and journalists cite each as they blame Russia for Solar Winds hack

SolarWinds: company at the core of the Orion hack falls under scrutiny

The revelation that elite cyber spies in past months conducted the largest hack against US officials in years has put the spotlight on SolarWinds, the Texas-based company whose software was compromised while servicing some of the biggest agencies and companies in the United States. SolarWinds provides computer networking monitoring services to corporations and government agencies around the world, and has become a dominant player since it was founded in 1999. ...

On Sunday, SolarWinds alerted thousands of its customers that an “outside nation state” had found a back door into its most popular product, a tool called Orion that helps organizations monitor outages on their computer networks and servers. The company revealed that hackers snuck a malicious code that gave them remote access to customers’ networks into an update of Orion. The hack began as early as March, SolarWinds admitted, giving the hackers plenty of time to access the customers’ internal workings. ...

SolarWinds estimated in a financial filing that about 18,000 customers had installed the compromised software, meaning many of them were vulnerable to spy operations at some time this year. The company earlier this week took down a web page that boasted of dozens of its best-known customers, from the White House, Pentagon and the Secret Service to the McDonald’s restaurant chain and Smithsonian museums.

FireEye, without naming any specific targets, has said it has confirmed infections in North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East, including in the health care and oil and gas industry, and has been informing affected customers around the world.

Texas and other states sue Google for abusing 'monopolistic power'

Google is facing a new multi-state lawsuit, led by Texas, that accuses the company of abusing its “monopolistic power”, the latest in a slew of major legal efforts to rein in big tech.

In a video announcing the suit on Wednesday, the Texas attorney general charged Google with engaging in anticompetitive behavior, particularly in the online advertising market. Texas argues that the company dominates the pathways by which an advertisement gets from the agency that produces it on to a web page or mobile app.

“Google repeatedly used its monopolistic power to control pricing [and] engage in market collusions to rig auctions in a tremendous violation of justice,” Ken Paxton said. “It isn’t fair that Google effectively eliminated its competition and crowned itself the head of online advertising. Let me put it this way: if the free market was a baseball game, Google positioned itself as the pitcher, the batter and the umpire.” Paxton’s office released a redacted copy of a federal lawsuit, but it was not immediately clear if it had been filed in court.

The lawsuit seeks monetary damages from Google and asks the court to enact “structural relief to restore competitive conditions in the relevant markets”. ...

The nine states that joined Texas are Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Mississippi, South Dakota, North Dakota, Utah and Idaho. The Texas lawsuit will be the fourth in a series of federal and state lawsuits targeting alleged bad behavior by America’s major internet platforms, which have grown from startups to omnipresent titans in the past two decades.

Biden and Pence will soon receive Covid vaccine as storm threatens to delay deliveries

Joe Biden and Mike Pence are set to receive the Covid-19 vaccine soon as rollouts of the first doses continue nationwide, despite fears a monster snowstorm could hamper delivery efforts. ...

The US has also suffered its deadliest day of the pandemic so far. A total of 3,019 people died because of coronavirus in the last 24 hours, the third highest total since the first cases were recorded in the US as far back as January. ...

Meanwhile, shipments of the vital coronavirus vaccine around the US face delay as a monster winter storm pummels states from Virginia to Massachusetts. Now deliveries of more of the first vaccine approved for use in the US, via the Pfizer-BioNTech pharmaceutical partnership, could be held up. ...

Meanwhile the first Covid-19 vaccinations got under way at nursing homes, where the virus has killed more than 110,000 people in the US. Elderly and infirm people in long-term care have been among the most vulnerable and residents in nursing homes in Florida and Virginia have been among the first people being inoculated in the US this week.

Also on Wednesday, 66 sites are expecting a vaccine shipment as part of an effort to dole out nearly 3m doses in the first week of distribution.

DEBUNKED Distraction Tactics Against Forcing Medicare 4 All Vote!

AOC's Gas Lighting Gets Called Out On Twitter!

US shatters Covid records for new cases and deaths as vaccines are distributed

Nearly a quarter million new coronavirus infections and more than 3,600 deaths were reported in the United States on Wednesday, shattering previous records as the national vaccination campaign against Covid-19 began rolling out across the country this week.

According to Johns Hopkins University, the US confirmed 247,403 new cases of coronavirus on Wednesday, and another 3,656 Americans died of the virus in a single day. Thursday’s unemployment report also showed new jobless claims rose to 885,000 last week, representing the highest weekly number since September.

Study confirms the intuitively obvious:

Study of 50 Years of Tax Cuts For Rich Confirms 'Trickle Down' Theory Is an Absolute Sham

Neoliberal gospel says that cutting taxes on the wealthy will eventually benefit everyone by boosting economic growth and reducing unemployment, but a new analysis of fiscal policies in 18 countries over the last 50 years reveals that progressive critics of "trickle down" theory have been right all along: supply-side economics fuels inequality, and the real beneficiaries of the right-wing approach to taxation are the super-rich.

The Economic Consequences of Major Tax Cuts for the Rich (pdf), working paper published this month by the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics and written by LSE's David Hope and Julian Limberg of King's College London, examines data from nearly 20 OECD countries, including the U.K. and the U.S., and finds that the past five decades have been characterized by "falling taxes on the rich in the advanced economies," with "major tax cuts... particularly clustered in the late 1980s."

But, according to Hope and Limberg, the vast majority of the populations in those countries have little to show for it, as the benefits of slashing taxes on the wealthy are concentrated among a handful of super-rich individuals—not widely shared across society in the form of improved job creation or prosperity, as "trickle down" theorists alleged would happen.

"Our research shows that the economic case for keeping taxes on the rich low is weak," Hope said Wednesday. "Major tax cuts for the rich since the 1980s have increased income inequality, with all the problems that brings, without any offsetting gains in economic performance."

Krystal Ball: Cascading Elite Failures Are The Worst Part Of 2020

In response to our #FOIA lawsuit, USPS sent us Postmaster General Louis Dejoy’s calendar—but it’s almost entirely redacted. https://t.co/mqp2cg8bUL pic.twitter.com/qKEasg1ebu

— American Oversight (@weareoversight) December 16, 2020

The Sabotage of the U.S. Postal Service Is a National Security Matter

Among the growing list of priorities for the incoming Biden administration is a comprehensive investigation of the efforts to sabotage the U.S. Postal Service. In August, Aaron Gordon, reporting for Vice’s Motherboard, published a leaked internal document from the U.S. Postal Service showing that management was planning to eliminate hundreds of high-speed sorting machines in the midst of a pandemic. Sources inside the Postal Service that spoke with Gordon told him that they had “personally witnessed the machines, which cost millions of dollars, being destroyed or thrown in the dumpster.”

Documents reviewed by Gordon also “laid out detailed plans to reroute mail to sorting facilities further away in order to centralize mail processing even if it moves the mail across further distances.” Gordon reported that a union official wrote on the document: “This will slow mail processing.” When this news swept across mainstream media, it was characterized as an effort to interfere with mail-in ballots and boost the chances of a Trump election win. But the slowdown at the U.S. Postal Service continues, making it look more like an all-out effort to sabotage a government mail program in order to destroy its reputation for timely delivery and boost the fortunes of private mail shippers.

Any effort to sabotage a vital government function that impacts the efficiency with which U.S. businesses operate is a matter of national security. The GDP of the United States, already hit hard by the rolling pandemic shutdowns, depends on the timely delivery of mail. What is currently happening to the reputation of the U.S. Postal Service during this pivotal holiday shipping period could sabotage its reputation for years going forward.

School Privatization Zealot Betsy DeVos Reportedly Urging Career Education Staff to Obstruct Biden Agenda

After spending much of her nearly four-year tenure in government attacking public schools and pushing privatization schemes, outgoing Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is now reportedly encouraging career staffers at her department to obstruct President-elect Joe Biden's policy agenda.

During a department-wide virtual meeting Tuesday, according to Politico, DeVos pointed out that many Education Department employees "will be here through the coming transition and beyond."

"Let me leave you with this plea: Resist," DeVos said, co-opting language used in opposition to President Donald Trump. "Be the resistance against forces that will derail you from doing what's right for students. In everything you do, please put students first—always."

DeVos' remarks came just two weeks after the billionaire education secretary lashed out at proposals to forgive student loan debt and eliminate tuition for public colleges and universities, dismissing such popular ideas as "government gift-giving."

Last December, as Common Dreams reported, DeVos proposed putting the federal government's massive student loan portfolio under the control of a "stand-alone government corporation," a move critics denounced as an attempt to prevent future administrations from canceling student loan debt.

Biden, who has not yet announced his nominee to succeed DeVos, has vowed to forgive some of the student loan debt held by tens of millions of Americans and make public colleges and universities tuition-free for families with incomes below $125,000 a year.

In response to DeVos' comments Tuesday, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, tweeted that "because of DeVos' 'resistance,' thousands of public schools have no resources to reopen safely" amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

"Because of her 'resistance,'" Weingarten added, "thousands of student loan borrowers have fewer avenues for justice and repayment."

McConnell ADMITS GOP May Lose GA Without Stimulus

US hit by plastic debris lost from UK ship

Brightly coloured plastic debris from the UK has been washing up along the coast of Maine in the US after a shipment bound for incineration fell into the sea.

The plastic debris, part of a 10,000-tonne consignment from Re-Gen Waste, a company based in Newry, Northern Ireland, has infuriated environmentalists and locals surprised to learn that the north-eastern state of Maine is importing plastic from almost 3,000 miles away.

Volunteers struggling to clear the waste from the shoreline of Sears Island, alongside a company employed to tackle it, fear they are fighting a losing battle as more plastic washes up with every tide.

Politicians and environmentalists say the US, which is the world’s biggest producer of plastic waste, should not be importing more plastic. They are concerned about the potential effects on wildlife in Penobscot Bay, home to one of Maine’s first commercial lobster fisheries. ...

Ron Huber, a conservationist and executive director of Friends of Penobscot Bay, said he had already been concerned about waste from New York and other parts of New England coming to Maine. “Now we’re getting Europe’s waste as well? This is a real disincentive to reduce waste: ‘Oh we’ll just take your waste and burn it.’”

Global Forest Treaty Needed Now

Illegal deforestation has become a defining problem of our time, but its place in global governance remains piecemeal. Just a few months ago, the idea of an international agreement on forests would have been unthinkable because of the spread of climate denialism and nationalist populism. But the winds of geopolitical change have blown open a new opportunity. It is time to create a global treaty to protect forests — one with meaningful involvement from a wide range of parties. And with legal force.

While illegal deforestation is not new, there is no moment in history that has attracted as much attention to it as now — or generated so much alarm. From 2015 to 2020, the global rate of deforestation was estimated to be 10 million hectares, or about 25 million acres, a year. The area of primary forest worldwide has decreased by more than 80 million hectares, or 198 million acres, since 1990. Destruction of heavily forested spaces, which contain 80 percent of all biodiversity on the planet, accounts for 10 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions.

But these climate and environmental threats represent only part of the problem. The clearing of trees sustains organized environmental crime, including transnational networks that drive unlawful deforestation through illegal land invasions for agriculture and ranching, human-made forest fires, illegal wood extraction, illegal mining and wildlife trafficking, to name only some of the transgressions. Wherever these activities take place at a large scale, they are associated with illicit financial flows, tax evasion, corruption, arms smuggling, human trafficking, sexual exploitation and forced labor.

Deforestation tends to leave not only massive environmental destruction in its wake but also poverty, the end of traditional livelihoods and rampant violence. It is no coincidence that deforestation hot spots are home to some of the highest homicide rates on the planet. Deforestation brings about enormous human suffering, as well as enormous economic losses, to the tune of $5 trillion annually. Equally important, tree clearing and extinctions actually make pandemics more likely to occur. ...

The lack of a legally binding global instrument to protect forests has left some biomes highly vulnerable to land invasions, forest fires and predatory extractive processes, especially in countries where leaders deny climate change and view the forest as an obstacle to development. In those settings, excessively rigid discourses of national sovereignty, aimed at undermining international cooperation, can flourish. Forests also remain subject to predatory practices by multinational corporations that ignore environmental standards, even when the standards are high in their own home countries. ... The components for a forest treaty with broad, serious geopolitical engagement already exist. Now is the time to bring them all together.

UN Warns New Wave of Locust Swarms Threatens Food Security of Millions in East Africa

Despite an "intense" international effort to combat a major, climate crisis-fueled invasion of desert locusts in Eastern African communities since January, a new generation of locust swarms is threatening the food security of millions of people in the Horn of Africa and Yemen, a United Nations agency warned Wednesday.

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which has been coordinating the global response, said in a statement that pest control actions across 10 countries costing about $200 million have prevented the loss of an estimated 2.7 million tonnes of cereal, worth nearly $800 million—enough food to feed 18 million people for a year.

"However, favorable weather conditions and widespread seasonal rains have caused extensive breeding in eastern Ethiopia and Somalia," FAO explained. "This was worsened by Cyclone Gati which brought flooding to northern Somalia last month allowing locust infestations to increase further in the coming months. New locust swarms are already forming and threatening to re-invade northern Kenya and breeding is also underway on both sides of the Red Sea, posing a new threat to Eritrea, Saudi Arabia, [Sudan], and Yemen."

"For Kenya, the threat is imminent, it could happen any time now," Keith Cressman, the FAO's senior locust forecasting officer, told BBC News, which pointed out that this year had already featured the region's worst locust invasion in 70 years—and in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. "It could be as bad as what we've seen in the past year because the area of breeding ground in these countries is as big as 350,000 sq. km. (135,000 sq. miles)."

"We lost so much of our pastures and vegetation because of the locusts and as a result we are still losing a good number of our livestock," Gonjoba Guyo, a pastoralist in North Horr, Kenya, told the BBC. "I have lost 14 goats, four cows, and two camels because of the locust outbreak and now there is lots of fear that we may face similar or worse consequences."

Also of Interest

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

Senate Proposal Would Retroactively Shield Corporations From All COVID Lawsuits

Xavier Becerra: Biden makes phony “left” gesture with Health and Human Services cabinet pick

The Planet’s Problem from Hell: Samantha Power

Media Blame Russia For Cyber Intrusions Without Providing Evidence

Progressives Denounce Trump SEC's "Gift to the Oil Industry" as Anti-Corruption Rule Gets Neutered

Atlantic City to auction off chance to blow up Trump's former casino

European leaders rush into isolation after Macron tests positive for Covid-19

A Little Night Music

Buster Benton - Catch Up With The World

Buster Benton - Money is the Name of the Game

Buster Benton & Carey Bell - Born With the Blues

Buster Benton - Lonesome for a Dime

Buster Benton - Blues & Trouble

Buster Benton - Leave Me Alone

Buster Benton - Spider In My Stew

Buster Benton - Sweet 94

Buster Benton - That's Your Thing

Buster Benton - Dangerous Woman'

Buster Benton - Gone fishin'