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“At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.”

-- Salvador Dali

News and Opinion

One of the U.S.' pre-eminent planners of global domination is worried that his criminal government is out over its skis:

Henry Kissinger Calls for Negotiated Peace in Ukraine to Avoid World War

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has again come out in favor of negotiations to end the war in Ukraine in an article for The Spectator titled “How to Avoid Another World War.”

Kissinger said that he “repeatedly expressed my support for the allied military effort to thwart Russia’s aggression in Ukraine” but that he thought there was room for negotiations. “The time is approaching to build on the strategic changes which have already been accomplished and to integrate them into a new structure towards achieving peace through negotiation,” he wrote.

The former secretary of state suggested referendums could be held to settle disputes over some of the territory Russia has captured from Ukraine. “If the pre-war dividing line between Ukraine and Russia cannot be achieved by combat or by negotiation, recourse to the principle of self-determination could be explored. Internationally supervised referendums concerning self-determination could be applied to particularly divisive territories which have changed hands repeatedly over the centuries,” he wrote.

Kissinger said the goal of peace in Ukraine should be to secure Kyiv’s “freedom” and to “define a new international structure” that Russia could eventually join. He said he disagrees with the idea that Russia should be “rendered impotent by the war,” a common view among hawks in Washington.

How Ukraine's far-right, with NATO backing, block peace

CIA Chief Says Russia-Iran Building ‘Full-Fledged Defense Partnership’

CIA Director William Burns said in an interview that aired on PBS that Russia and Iran are working toward a “full-fledged defense partnership” and that such an arrangement threatens the US and its allies in the Middle East.

As an example of Russian and Iranian military cooperation, Burns cited Iran supplying Russia with drones, although Tehran insists that only happened before Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine. ...

Iran on Sunday dismissed Burns’ concerns and said that it wouldn’t “seek permission from anyone” before it expands ties with Russia. “Cooperation between Iran and Russia in various fields including defense is expanding within the framework of common interests… and is not against any third country,” Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanani said.

Russia Belarus Cooperation, Zelensky Determined to Hold Bakhmut, Turkish Media Savages Zelensky

Russia Installs Shield Over Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Storage Site

A shield is being set up over a storage site for spent nuclear waste at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine to protect it from shelling and drones, a Russian-installed official said on Saturday.

Video footage published by Vladimir Rogov, a Russian-appointed official in Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia province, showed workers mounting a screen of what appeared to be some kind of transparent sheeting on wires above dozens of concrete cylinders about 5 metres (16 feet) high.

"For now, it will protect from shrapnel and IEDs (improvised explosive devices) thrown from drones. But later on it will be substantial," he said.

Israel sinks to new low by smearing slain children as “terrorists”

It isn’t anything new for the state to smear Palestinians killed by its police and military as terrorists. But it seems to be a fresh twist for Israel to try to convince the UN that most of the Palestinian children slain by its forces had “terror” ties.

According to media reports, Israeli officials planned to tell Virginia Gamba, the UN special reporter on children and armed conflict, that Palestinians are exploiting children who are then killed by its forces. Gamba was visiting Israel, the West Bank and Gaza ahead of her annual report on the conflict’s impact on children.

“Regarding the Palestinian casualties, Israel will present data indicating that most teenagers were operatives of the Hamas and Islamic Jihad terror groups, or engaged in military activity or military-linked activity,” an unnamed diplomatic source told Israel’s Channel 13.

The gambit is part of Israel’s overall strategy of deflecting its responsibility for Palestinians slain by its forces.

More than 50 Palestinian children have been killed in 2022, according for Defense for Children International-Palestine.

Swedish court blocks extradition of journalist sought by Turkey in Nato deal

Sweden’s supreme court has blocked the extradition of an exiled Turkish journalist, which was a key demand by Ankara to ratify Stockholm’s Nato membership.

The court said on Monday there were “several hindrances” to sending back Bulent Kenes, a former editor-in-chief of the Zaman daily, who Turkey accuses of being involved in a 2016 attempt to topple President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Some of the accusations against Kenes are not crimes in Sweden, which along with the political nature of the case and his refugee status made extradition impossible, the court added.

“There is also a risk of persecution based on this person’s political beliefs. An extradition can thusly not take place,” the judge Petter Asp said in a statement. As a result, “the government … is not able to grant the extradition request.”

Media Prescribe More ‘Pain’ for Workers as Inflation’s Only Cure

Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell is profit’s prophet and the corporate media are his cultish devotees, joining hands to sacrifice working people. In this cult, profit is sacrosanct.

When inflation hits, this is because of the conditions upon which profits are made. It’s not the fault of profit-making itself. The problem is a “labor shortage,” or “too much demand,” which forces the invisible hand to raise prices—and not a shortage of dignified work, or a surplus of people living paycheck to paycheck. Maximal profits are a given, and scarcity for ordinary people is a requirement.

This catechism means that, even if reporters in corporate media are sympathetic to working people’s struggle with the increasing costs of living, the group that inevitably needs to take a hit to curb inflation is, you guessed it, still working people.

This dynamic plays out in the media like a bait and switch, in which reporters acknowledge and sympathize with the pain of ordinary people, but prescribe them more pain as the only way out.

Such was the case when USA Today (11/2/22) ran its front-page headline, “Latest Fed Rate Hike: More Pain Coming.” The article starts by saying that inflation is at its “highest in a generation”; the online version links to another story (10/13/22) with working people rightly bemoaning the increases in their cost of living:

Michael Rossini, 57, of Randolph, Massachusetts, is shelling out an additional $55 or so a week on groceries. And filling up his pickup truck now costs $170, up from $100 before the inflation spike, even after the summer drop-off in pump prices….

“I’ve got to provide for my family,” he said. But, he said, “my quality of life has gone down…. I can’t get this time back.”

But as “More Pain Coming” makes clear, USA Today provides no option for people like Michael but the Rube Goldberg–esque conveyor belt Powell and the Federal Reserve have constructed to cull the bloated American economy.

According to the article, “consumers should expect their costs to head even higher and job losses to mount as economic growth slows” as the Fed continues to raise interest rates. The Fed’s moves will “ripple through the economy and ultimately, hit businesses and consumers and slow demand and inflation.”

That the Fed decided to use its incredible influence over the US and global economy is of course deserving of coverage. But to pay lip service to the needs of ordinary Americans, as if that’s what’s driving the Fed’s decision to burden them further, obscures the class war being waged. It’s a bait and switch that works to convince people that the scarcity they feel is an inevitable consequence of natural forces, not a political decision that need not be.

Despite corporate media’s best attempts, polls show the vast majority of Americans lay blame on corporations for needlessly driving inflation (Navigator, 7/26/22). This didn’t stop NPR (11/29/22) from characterizing this view as one of “economists and politicians on the left.” NPR‘s “The Mystery of Rising Prices. Are Greedy Corporations to Blame for Inflation?” was written like a “whodunnit,” but if the protagonist detective was too inept to discover that their anonymous employer was in fact the murderer staging a cover-up.

NPR business correspondent Stacey Vanek Smith somehow came within point blank range of the “smoking price gun” of corporate price-setting, only to acquit these corporations and blame regular people in a verdict that takes the bait and switch to another level.

From pointing out that corporate profits “reached an all-time high this year” to detailing the “confessions” of corporate executives at companies like Kroger, AutoZone and Hostess, who “bragged about how much they were able to raise prices,” the author/detective seemed hot on the trail of how corporate profiteering has produced a cost of living crisis. They even acknowledge that corporations have “murdered the competition,” with the four companies that “control about 80% of the beef and poultry market” having “settled lawsuits over price-fixing just this year.”

But after laying all this out, our detective consulted an expert witness whose view is that blaming corporate greed is a “red herring.”

“Blaming inflation on greed is like blaming a plane crash on gravity,” the economist Justin Wolfers said. Once again, greed and the resulting pain and scarcity working people feel is natural. There’s nothing you or anyone else can do about it. Profits are a given.

Further, greed is good:

“The only reason we’re not all paying $800 for a pair of socks or a cheeseburger is simply due to greed in another form: competition. ‘That greed forces them to offer low prices because they’re trying to muscle out their competitor,’ says Wolfers.”

Despite having just detailed the corporate tendency to reduce such competition, as with the case of the meat industry, this is enough to lead her to her verdict.

The killer, our detective determined, is consumers:

As it turns out, consumers might be the guilty party in the inflation mystery…. “Inflation is coming from demand,” says Wolfers.

It’s your own damn fault, people! But the good news? “Prices will fall and inflation will ease.” Why? In order to make ends meet,

our collective savings has been shrinking and household debt has been on the rise…. But, until demand drops, companies will push prices up as much as they can. It’s elementary.

The only way out is through.

The New York Times (11/1/22) also ran a story examining evidence that corporations are using inflation as an excuse to raise prices on consumers, but unlike our “whodunnit,” shied away from deciding on a guilty party for inflation writ large. The subhead was forthright enough:

Some companies and restaurants have continued to raise prices on consumers even after their own inflation-related costs have been covered.

The Times’ acknowledgement of corporate greed, though, didn’t affect its conviction that consumer demand must take a hit to bring prices down. In a piece assessing the Fed’s interest rate hikes, the Times (11/18/22) reported on the difficulty the continued resilience of both the labor market and consumer demand poses for the Fed, without so much as a word considering an outcome that doesn’t require kicking people out of their jobs:

Rate increases have yet to seriously dent the overall job market…. “The shocking part is, for as much as we’ve raised rates in six months, we’re really just still not seeing much in the labor market,” Christopher Waller, a Fed governor, said at a recent event….

In theory, shoppers should be pulling back as money becomes more expensive to borrow and uncertainty about the future mounts. But so far, businesses continue to invest, and consumers are hardy.

With these inflation indicators “lagging,” the Times says the Fed is trying to “thread the needle” so as to not impose supposed unneeded costs on the economy:

So far, “it appears tighter money has not yet constrained business activity enough to seriously dent inflation,” Raphael Bostic, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, wrote in an essay on Tuesday. “While there are risks that our policy actions to tame inflation could induce a recession, that would be preferred to the alternative.”

How being so determined to bring inflation down that you are willing to cause a recession, a far worse outcome that would throw millions out of work, just to bring inflation down is “threading the needle” remains a mystery. That that outcome “would be preferred to the alternative” just goes to show at whose behest the Fed is operating. Rich people, of course, are never unemployed. However, their giant piles of money do lose value as inflation persists. So a recession would be preferable to them—and only them.

So even though working people are already shouldering the heaviest burden of inflation, and even though the Times (11/1/22) previously reported on how many companies are taking advantage of the situation, it doesn’t propose that those corporations should be made to shoulder more of the burden of deflationary efforts.

[More at the link. -js]

Just in Time for Holidays, Dems May Embrace GOP Plan to Boot Millions Off Medicaid

With congressional leadership expected to imminently release the text of omnibus government funding legislation, Politico revealed Monday that Democrats are preparing to join with Republicans who have demanded an end to Medicaid policies enacted because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

As part of pandemic relief legislation passed in 2020, Congress boosted Medicaid funding to states but imposed a "continuous coverage" requirement, barring them from cutting off most enrollees from the government healthcare program until after the public health emergency (PHE) officially ends.

Citing four unnamed sources familiar with talks, Politico reported that while the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office expects the PHE to expire next July, "lawmakers have struck an agreement to move the end of its Medicaid rules up to April 1, which would allow states to begin removing people from the rolls who no longer qualify, usually because their income has increased."

Supreme court blocks Biden from lifting Covid-era border restrictions

The US supreme court on Monday said Covid-era restrictions at the US-Mexico border that were set to end on Wednesday should stay in place, at least temporarily, as a Republican legal challenge moves forward.

The development came just as the White House had been attempting to prepare for an increase in the number of migrant crossings, even as some border cities were struggling to cope with undocumented people arriving and being obliged to sleep on the streets in freezing weather, especially El Paso in west Texas in recent months.

John Roberts, the chief justice of the court, on Monday, at the request of Republican officials in 19 states, blocked the Biden administration from ending a pandemic-era policy of rapidly expelling most migrants apprehended or turning themselves in at the US-Mexico border .

The Republican officials led by the attorneys general in Arizona and Louisiana asked the supreme court to act after a federal appeals court on Friday declined to put on hold a judge’s ruling last month that invalidated an emergency order known as Title 42. The policy was set to expire Wednesday.

A group of Republican-led states sought to overturn last month’s ruling by intervening in a case originally brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on behalf of migrants denied entry under the Title 42 public health rule. The supreme court gave the parties in the legal dispute until Tuesday at 5pm ET to respond.

In Historic First, House Committee Urges DOJ to Criminally Charge Trump for Jan. 6 Insurrection

House January 6 panel recommends criminal charges against Donald Trump

The January 6 committee has referred Donald Trump to the justice department to face criminal charges, accusing the former president of fomenting an insurrection and conspiring against the government over his attempt to subvert the outcome of the 2020 election, and the bloody attack on the US Capitol.

The committee’s referrals approved by its members on Monday are the first time in American history that Congress has recommended charges against a former president. They come after 18 months of investigation by the bipartisan House of Representatives panel tasked with understanding Trump’s plot to stop Joe Biden from taking office.

“The committee believes that more than sufficient evidence exists for a criminal referral of former President Trump for assisting or aiding and comforting those at the Capitol who engaged in a violent attack on the United States,” Congressman Jamie Raskin said as the lawmakers held their final public meeting.

“The committee has developed significant evidence that President Trump intended to disrupt the peaceful transition of power under our Constitution. The president has an affirmative and primary constitutional duty to act to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. Nothing could be a greater betrayal of this duty than to assist in insurrection against the constitutional order.”

The committee accused Trump of breaching four federal criminal statutes, including those relating to obstruction of an official proceeding of Congress, assisting an insurrection and conspiring to defraud the United States. It also said Trump may have committed seditious conspiracy – the same charge which a jury found two members of the rightwing Oath Keepers militia group guilty of last month.

Climate goal of 1.5C is ‘gasping for breath’, says UN head

The goal of limiting global heating to 1.5C is “gasping for breath”, the UN secretary general has said as he announced a “climate ambition summit” for September.

António Guterres said the summit would challenge leaders of governments and businesses to come up with “new, tangible and credible climate action to accelerate the pace of change” and confront the “existential threat” of the climate crisis.

“We are still moving in the wrong direction,” he said on Monday. “The 1.5C goal is gasping for breath. National climate plans are falling woefully short. And yet we are not retreating, we are fighting back.”

He added: “The invitation [to the summit] is open. But the price of entry is non-negotiable – serious new climate action that will move the needle forward. It will be a no-nonsense summit. No exceptions. There will be no room for backsliders, greenwashers, blame-shifters or repackaging of announcements of previous years.”

Guterres has become increasingly outspoken about the climate emergency, and the summit will put further pressure on countries to act.

News Sites Took Nearly $1 Million From Consultant Pushing Power Companies' Agenda: Report

Alabama Power and Florida Power & Light hired a political consulting firm that paid six news websites in the two states nearly a million dollars as they attacked officials seeking to hold the polluting utilities accountable, an investigation revealed Monday.

NPR's David Folkenflik, along with Mario Ariza and Miranda Green of Floodlight, found that the power companies hired consulting company Matrix LLC, which, along with clients and associated entities, paid six sites—Yellowhammer News, Alabama Political Reporter, Alabama Today, The Capitolist, Florida Politics, and Sunshine State News—at least $900,000 collectively between 2013 and 2020.

According to the report, "Matrix sought to ensure much coverage was secretly driven by the priorities of its clients. Payments flowed as the utilities in Florida and Alabama fought efforts to incorporate more clean energy in electric grids—a fight they are still waging."

Alabama Power—which operates a coal-fired plant holding the dubious distinction of being the nation's largest single source of CO2 emissions—received "overwhelmingly positive coverage" in the three Alabama sites linked to Matrix during the seven-year period.

Meanwhile, Terry Dunn, a Republican elected in 2010 to the Alabama Public Service Commission said that, after winning his race, he was approached by a fossil fuel industry lobbyist who made him a promise. He could keep his roughly $100,000 per year job on the body that controls energy prices for years to come if he "remained a team player."

Dunn—who ran on a pledge to compel Alabama Power executives to open their financial books and publicly answer questions—demurred, and soon found himself the target of what appeared to be a concerted smear campaign.

One 2013 headline in the right-wing Yellowhammer News claimed that "Democrats embrace" him, while a 2014 column by Alabama Political Reporter editor-in-chief Bill Britt accused Dunn of "using the state's utility rates for political gain."

In 2014, Dunn lost his race for reelection by 19 percentage points. To this day, Alabama has not had a rate hearing on power prices, and Alabama Power remains one of the nation's most profitable utilities, according to NPR.

This is but a sampling of the alarming corruption detailed in the lengthy exposé. Reacting to the report, HEATED publisher Emily Atkin said that it "pulls back the curtain on yet another insidious corporate strategy to erode the core tenets of democracy for profit."

"The most evil thing about this tactic is that it is designed to further erode public trust in the press," Atkin tweeted. "These people constantly deride real journalism as fake news while simultaneously funding the creation of actual fake news. They're confusing people into complacency."

"These power companies and their political allies want you to believe all journalism is pay-for-play," she continued. "Don't fall into their trap."

"Oh, and one more thing—If you're a professional journalist, I am BEGGING you to speak out against people and practices described in this story," Atkin added. "A free press relies on self-regulation. Defend our fucking profession."

Global Biodiversity Pact Deemed ‘Weak’

Over the objections of the Democratic Republic of Congo and frustrations of other African nations, a final draft of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework was adopted in the early hours of Monday that conservationists say is not strong enough to prevent industries and corporate behemoths from continuing their destructive, profit-driven attacks on the natural world and vulnerable species.

“The draft agreement is weak,” said An Lambrechts, leader of Greenpeace International’s delegation at the summit, following the release of the final draft text on Sunday. “This is an open invitation to greenwash. In its present shape, it won’t halt biodiversity loss, much less reverse it.”

Some NGOs praised the deal as a historic achievement that followed years of negotiations at the international level under the Convention of the Parties process.

Inger Anderson, under-secretary-general of the United Nations and executive director of the U.N. Environment Programme, said the “adoption of this Framework and the associated package of ambitious targets, goals and financing represents but a first step in resetting our relationship with the natural world.”

The key agreement under the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) is the goal of protecting 30 percent of all land and water vital to species and ecosystems by the year 2030. This compares to the current situation in which less than 17 percent of land and just 10 percent of marine environments are under formal protections.

“Make no mistake: this is an historic result for nature,” said Andrew Deutz, director of global policy for The Nature Conservancy, in a statement. “The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework provides a long-needed international blueprint to guide our collective turnaround of nature’s fortunes within this crucial decade.”

But the approval of the deal was not without controversy.

A row ensued during final deliberations when the Democratic Republic of Congo delegation raised concerns that the agreement did not ask enough of wealthier, more developed nations to fund the conservation goals set out in the framework.

“The parties which are developed nations should provide resources to parties which are developing,” a Congolese representative said through an interpreter.

Climate Change News reports that both the Ugandan and Cameroon delegations were displeased with how Chinese Minister of Ecology and Environment Huang Runqiu, who chaired the conference, brought down the gavel and declared the agreement approved despite a clear objection from the D.R.C.

“What we saw was a force of hand,” said one delegate from Cameroon via a translator while Uganda asked to have its displeasure over the process put on the official record.

Anderson said that the success of the pact “will be measured by our rapid and consistent progress in implementing, what we have agreed to,” adding that the “entire United Nations System is geared to support its implementation so that we can truly make peace with nature.”

But while many expressed optimism that the Kunming-Montreal framework represents the beginning of a new era to protect the world’s biodiversity, more critical conservationists like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth International (FOEI) said people should not be fooled about what the deal contains and what it lacks.

FOEI said it was “deeply concerned” about the way in which the framework was adopted and warned that “the corporate capture of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) made reaching the kind of deal the crisis demands impossible.

“The text does not stipulate any regulation on corporations and instead promotes greenwashing measures such as ‘Nature-Based Solutions,’ which allow for offsetting for environmental destruction,” said Nele Marien, FOEI’s forests and biodiversity coordinator, in a statement on Monday.

The approved draft, said the group, “does not stop the destructive advance of agribusiness, the main driver of biodiversity loss. Rather, it promotes agribusiness through concepts such as ‘sustainable intensification’ and ‘innovation.'”

And while Greenpeace applauded the “explicit recognition” in the agreement that the rights, roles, territories, and knowledge of Indigenous Peoples are key to protecting biodiversity worldwide, the group said the pact still fell short on this front.

“Indigenous Peoples are the most capable and knowledgeable guardians of nature,” Lambrechts said. “There is so much potential for biodiversity protection if Indigenous Peoples are in leadership roles. Rights-based protections are the future of conservation. Direct finance for Indigenous Peoples is a critical next step.”

“Taken altogether, however, COP15 failed to deliver the ambition, tools, or finance necessary to stop mass extinction,” she added. “The 30×30 target, to protect at least 30 percent of land and of sea by 2030, has successfully made it in. But it is stripped-down, without essential qualifiers that exclude damaging activities from protected areas. As is, it is just an empty number, with protections on paper but nowhere else.”

Also of Interest

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

Scott Ritter: A Lexicon for Disaster

Ukraine - Is There Really A Change Of The Narrative?

Why Congress Can’t Stop the CIA From Working With Forces That Commit Abuses

Thomas Friedman & The Myth of Liberal Israel

Peru's 'forgotten people' rage against political elite after Castillo arrest

Chris Hedges: Teaching Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago in Prison

Life In The Absence of Coercion

More than 100 new designs discovered in Peru’s ancient Nazca plain

Terry Hall: lead singer of the Specials dies aged 63

FBI Pressure CENSORED Hunter Biden Story At Twitter

South African President Ramaphosa survives 'farmgate' scandal

Karine Jean-Pierre DISMISSES Question About Hunter Biden Suppression, 'Talk To The FBI'

A Little Night Music

Charlie Christian - Stompin' At The Savoy

Charlie Christian - Seven Come Eleven

Charlie Christian - Ad Lib Blues

Benny Goodman, Charlie Christian - Flying Home

Charlie Christian - Blues In B

Charlie Christian - Profoundly Blue

Charlie Christian - I Found a New Baby

Benny Goodman Sextet featuring Charlie Christian - Rose Room

Charlie Christian - Grand Slam