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“The United States is not only the strongest, but also the most terrified country.”

-- Leon Trotsky

News and Opinion

Giving Peace Very Little Chance

After nearly 15 years of Mideast war – with those conflicts growing ever grimmer – you might expect that peace would be a major topic of the 2016 presidential race. Instead, there has been a mix of warmongering bluster from most candidates and some confused mutterings against endless war from a few.

No one, it seems, wants to risk offending Official Washington’s neocon-dominated foreign policy establishment that is ready to castigate any candidate who suggests that there are other strategies – besides more and more “regime changes” – that might extricate the United States from the Middle East quicksand.

Late in Thursday’s Democratic debate – when the topic of war finally came up – former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton continued toeing the neocon line, calling Iran the chief sponsor of terrorism in the world, when that title might objectively go to U.S. “allies,” such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, all of whom have been aiding Sunni jihadists fighting to overthrow Syria’s secular regime. ...

Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who battled Clinton to a virtual tie in Iowa, took a somewhat less belligerent position at Thursday’s debate, repeating his rather naïve idea of having Sunni states lead the fight against Sunni jihadists. On the more reasonable side, he indicated a willingness to work with Russia and other world powers in support of an anti-jihadist coalition. ...

While Sanders clearly sought to sound less hawkish than Clinton – and did not repeat his earlier talking point about the Saudis and others “getting their hands dirty” – he did not address the reality that many of the Sunni countries that he hopes to enlist in the fight against the jihadists are already engaged – on the side of the jihadists. ...

Sanders, although he opposed the Iraq War, has hesitated to challenge Clinton too directly on foreign policy, apparently fearing to distract from his focus on income inequality and domestic concerns. He apparently has chosen fuzziness on foreign policy as the better part of political valor.

GOP Candidates Compete Over Who Will Commit Most War Crimes Once Elected

At a rally in New Hampshire on Monday night, Donald Trump was criticizing Ted Cruz for having insufficiently endorsed torture — Cruz had said two nights earlier that he would bring back waterboarding, but not “in any sort of widespread use” — when someone in the audience yelled out that Cruz was a “pussy.” Trump, in faux outrage, reprimanded the supporter, repeating the allegation for the assembled crowd: “She said he’s a pussy. That’s terrible. Terrible.”

The spectacle of one Republican presidential candidate being identified by another as a “pussy” for failing to sufficiently endorse an archetypal form of torture exemplifies the moral state of the current race for the GOP nomination.

The Republican candidates have seemingly been competing with one another over who would commit the gravest war crimes if elected. In recent months, one candidate or another has promised to waterboard, do a “helluva lot worse than waterboarding,” repopulate Guantánamo, engage in wars of aggression, kill families of suspected terrorists, and “carpet bomb” Middle Eastern countries until we find out if “sand can glow in the dark.”

The over-the-top bombast plays well in front of self-selected Republican audiences — the crowd responded to the description of Cruz Monday night with full-throated chants of “Trump! Trump! Trump!”

Syria: the battle for Aleppo

French foreign minister steps down with criticism of US resolve over Syria

The French foreign minister has questioned the US’s commitment to resolving the crisis in Syria, saying its “ambiguous” policy was contributing to the problem.

“There are the ambiguities including among the actors of the coalition … I’m not going to repeat what I’ve said before about the main pilot of the coalition,” Laurent Fabius told reporters. “But we don’t have the feeling that there is a very strong commitment that is there.”

Fabius separately announced on Wednesday that he was, as expected, leaving the French government, and said he did not expect US president Barack Obama to change his stance in the coming months.

“I don’t think that the end of Mr Obama’s mandate will push him to act as much as his minister declares [publicly],” he added, referring to the secretary of state, John Kerry.

“There are words, but actions are different and obviously the Iranians and Russians feel that.”

Iraq Claims Full Victory in Virtually-Destroyed Ramadi

Today, Iraqi officials say they have “full victory” in Ramadi, having moved into the last ISIS-held district and “liberated” it. ...

The biggest problem, though, is that even if ISIS is well and fully ousted from Ramadi, all Iraq really has control of is a bombed out husk of a city, with estimates suggesting that upwards of 80% of the city is badly damaged or destroyed, and clean-up likely to take years.

“Liberation” of the capital then doesn’t ultimately mean all that much, except that it pushed ISIS a bit further back from the vicinity of Baghdad, as the hundreds of thousands of former residents of Ramadi aren’t likely to be allowed to return for a very long time.

Cracks in coalition: Turkey summons US envoy over America’s refusal to call Kurds terrorists

US Intel Chief: ‘Paranoid’ Russia Pushing US Into Cold War Spiral

Even though Ukraine has been in a state of ceasefire for a solid year now, the annual assessment from the US Director of National Intelligence on Russia still centered heavily on putative “Russian aggression” in Eastern Ukraine, saying the Russians are forcing the US “into another Cold War-like spiral.” ...

Clapper conceded that the missile defense is a threat to Russia’s “great power status” because it would “neuter” their nuclear arsenal. Russia has previously responded to threats to deploy missile defense on the Russian frontier by threatening to deploy more missiles along that same frontier to counter the effort.

Historically, the US has insisted the missile defense in Europe was solely aimed at Iran, and the fact that it was all on the Russian border was coincidental. That Iran’s missiles don’t have the range to reach those parts of Europe never made this a very credible argument, but Clapper appeared to scrap it entirely, a tacit admission that they’re targeting Russia, while railing against Russia’s “paranoia” for noticing that they’re being targeted.

IMF warns Ukraine it will halt $40bn bailout unless corruption stops

The International Monetary Fund has warned it will halt its $40bn (£28bn) bailout programme to Ukraine unless the conflict-torn eastern European country takes immediate action to tackle corruption.

The IMF’s managing director, Christine Lagarde, said on Wednesday that “without a substantial new effort” to improve governance, it was hard to see how the Washington-based organisation could continue to provide financial help. ...

Lagarde’s comments follow the resignation last week of Ukraine’s economic minister, Aivaras Abromavičius, after he accused a senior aide to the country’s president, Petro Poroshenko, of blocking anti-corruption reforms.

The IMF’s programme involves disbursing money in stages and has always been contingent on economic and political reforms. A third tranche of assistance has been held up since October because IMF officials have grown increasingly concerned that the financial assistance would be squandered or stolen by corrupt officials.

Europe has decided to play "hot potato" with refugees:

Athens given deadline as EU looks to send more refugees back to Greece

European Union authorities have given Athens one month to improve conditions for asylum seekers in the hope of eventually sending more refugees back to Greece.

The plan to overhaul Greece’s migration and asylum system is part of the EU’s effort to get to grips with the biggest refugee crisis since the second world war, amid apocalyptic warnings that the union is falling apart.

The European commission issued Athens with a list of instructions on Wednesday to bring Greece into line with EU norms on refugee policy, including improving living conditions for asylum seekers and overhauling judicial procedures so people denied leave to remain have the right to appeal. Reception centres must ensure adequate staffing, so Greek authorities can deal with more asylum cases, the commission said. ...

Greece, still midway through a bruising austerity programme with unemployment rates touching 25%, has warned that it cannot cope with the influx of people. The prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, has warned against turning his country into a “black box” for refugees.

Nice dehumanizing language there, Bibi.

Netanyahu plans fence around Israel to protect it from 'wild beasts'

Binyamin Netanyahu has announced his intention to “surround all of Israel with a fence” to protect the country from infiltration by both Palestinians and the citizens of surrounding Arab states, whom he described as “wild beasts”.

The Israeli prime minister unveiled the proposal during a tour of the Jordan border area in Israel’s south, adding that the project – which would cost billions of shekels – would also be aimed at solving the problem of Hamas infiltration tunnels from Gaza, a recent source of renewed concern.

He called the border project a part of a “multi-year plan to surround Israel with security fences to protect ourselves in the current and projected Middle East”.

Describing the need for new walls and fences on Tuesday, Netanyahu said: “In our neighbourhood, we need to protect ourselves from wild beasts.

“At the end of the day as I see it, there will be a fence like this one surrounding Israel in its entirety. We will surround the entire state of Israel with a fence, a barrier.”

When the pope visits Mexico, he should ensure its rights violations see daylight

Pope Francis’s visit to Mexico – one of the most reverently Catholic countries in the world, with a shocking human rights record – is already the subject of some apparent consternation at the highest levels of government because it was reported that the disappearance of the Ayotzinapa students and the plight of thousands of Central American migrants were high on the pope’s agenda.

That probably doesn’t sit well with the administration of President Enrique Peña Nieto. The catalogue of horrors taking place under his watch in every corner of this colorful and vibrant land is so long and grim it amounts to a human rights crisis of epidemic proportions. ...

The figures speak for themselves: nearly half of the country’s population lives in poverty, with the numbers rising. The average monthly figures for murders in the context of Mexico’s brutal “war against organized crime” have also increased in recent years. More than 27,000 people have gone missing – almost half of them since Peña Nieto took office in 2012; many of them have been forcibly disappeared. The number of reported cases of torture and other ill-treatment has increased substantially; between 2013 and 2014, the number of complaints of torture filed at the federal level doubled.

But the Peña Nieto administration’s strategy to tackle these horrors seems to be to ignore and deny. ...

Whether Pope’s Francis potential advocacy on these issues will have any impact on a government that has so far chosen to systematically look away from the horrors increasingly unfolding before their eyes is impossible to predict.

But maybe, at the very least, the pope’s attention can help ensure that the government can no longer ignore or deny the realities of life in Mexico under their administration.

'Internet of Things' an Absolute Goldmine for Big Brother, Admits Top US Spy

Sworn testimony delivered to the U.S. Congress by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper raised eyebrows on Tuesday as he acknowledged publicly for the first time that surveillance agencies are almost certain to exploit (if they aren't already) the increasing number of web-connected devices—also known as the "Internet of Things"—as a way to keep tabs on the population in the coming years.

"In the future, intelligence services might use the [Internet of Things] for identification, surveillance, monitoring, location tracking, and targeting for recruitment, or to gain access to networks or user credentials," Clapper said in his submitted testimony (pdf).

In a piece at The Register—titled "We're going to use your toothbrush to snoop on you, says US spy boss"—tech-security journalist Kieran McCarthy reports Clapper's acknowledgement that the Internet of Things (IoT) is a "potential goldmine for surveillance" echoes "a similar conclusion reached by academics last week." The testimony on Tuesday, McCarthy adds,  follows "repeated warnings over the poor security standards included in smart-home products, even the most well-resourced and well-known. Recently, the Ring doorbell and the Nest thermostat were discovered to have security vulnerabilities that could provide an attacker with your Wi-Fi password – and so access to your home network.

Days of Revolt: Company Town

Iran wants to be paid in euros, not U.S. dollars

Iran is ready to sell its oil to the world again, but it wants to be paid in euros, not dollars.

Over the weekend, a top official at Iran's state-owned oil company said the country had a strong preference for euros.

"Our top priority is to receive cash and oil [payments] in euro," Safar-Ali Karamati, a deputy director at the National Iranian Oil Company, told an Iran news outlet on Saturday. ...

In Iran's eyes, "anything other than the dollar would be financially and politically better," says Majid Rafizadeh, a Middle East scholar at Harvard University.

Policymakers and markets at odds on interest rates as Yellen briefs Congress

While the Federal Reserve chair, Janet Yellen, is the one tasked with delivering a message over the next two days when she speaks to Congress, financial markets are keen to know if she has absorbed their message to her: stifle your rate hike plans.

In the 53 days since investors last heard from Yellen, when she held a press conference after overseeing the first US interest rate hike in nearly a decade, markets have been roiled with volatility and increasing doubt about the health of the US and global economies.

In that time, the S&P 500 has lost nearly 11% of its value and the 10-year note’s yield has declined by half a percentage point. ...

To be sure, Yellen and her colleagues already appear to be damping expectations for future rate increases.

In its late January policy statement, the Fed altered its language to acknowledge that global financial and economic developments had clouded the outlook. Top Fed officials, including vice-chairman Stanley Fischer and Federal Reserve Bank of New York president William Dudley have nodded to those concerns in recent speeches and interviews.

Still, markets are keen to see if Yellen follows their lead.

“The issue is whether Yellen indicates the FOMC is willing to change its stance and move closer to investors,” Albion’s Reynolds said.

Texas prosecutor officially disbarred for sending innocent man to death row

A Texas legal disciplinary board upheld a decision to disbar a prosecutor who oversaw a case that sent an innocent man to death row.

The board on Monday affirmed an earlier decision that found Charles Sebesta extracted false confessions and withheld testimony to convict Anthony Graves, who spent 18 years in prison before he was exonerated. ...

Graves was imprisoned from August 1992 until October 2010 for being an accomplice in starting a fire that killed a grandmother and five children outside of Houston in 1992. Graves spent 12 of those years on death row, nearing execution twice. ...

There was no physical evidence linking Graves to the murders. The prosecutor’s case instead relied on a string of prosecutorial misdeeds. Sebesta presented false testimony in the case and withheld information from the defense.

Sebesta had convicted another man, Robert Carter, for setting the fire. Sebesta pushed Carter to say Graves was an accomplice, though Carter told Sebesta he acted alone a day before he testified.

“Sebesta never disclosed this information to the defense,” the disciplinary board said.

Sebesta also lied about one of the defense attorney’s alibi witnesses. Sebesta said the witness was a murder suspect and could be indicted, which was not true, but the witness refused to testify.

New York Police Sergeant Finally Charged In Death of Eric Garner

A New York Police Department sergeant has just been charged in the death of Eric Garner, but when you hear the details, you might be shocked.

The sergeant has been stripped of her gun and badge. She now faces internal charges in the July 2014 death of Eric Garner, but still no criminal charges. ...

New York Police Department Sgt. Kizzy Adonis has been charged, and it is leaving the family, friends and supporters of Eric Garner with some hope that somehow justice might begin to enter the stage.

Adonis was one of the supervising officers who was at the scene of Garner’s death on Staten Island. ... But Adonis was not part of the team out harassing Garner that day. Nevertheless, when she heard the radio call and realized she was close, she rerouted and showed up.

Adonis was charged with failure to supervise, which is an internal disciplinary sanction. ...

Still today, no one has been charged criminally in the death of Garner.

The executing Officer Daniel Pantaleo, applied the hold and remains on desk duty.

Bernie Sanders on NH Victory: "Tonight We Served Notice to the Political and Economic Establishment"

Crashing the parties: Sanders and Trump victories vindicate the 'outsiders'

A record number of New Hampshire voters queued in freezing traffic jams until well after polls were due to close to pick a Democrat and Republican candidate to run for president who had, until recently, belonged to neither party.

The rebellion against the political establishment was so overwhelming that no one even waited for the last-minute voters to make it in the door before declaring results that would have been unthinkable a few months ago: Bernie Sanders, a self-declared democratic socialist and independent senator from Vermont, had trounced Hillary Clinton in the Democratic race by almost 22 points. A bombastic property tycoon called Donald Trump had flattened a crop of Republican veterans who were once seen as the strongest field of conservative candidates for a generation. ...

The scale of the defeat on Tuesday nevertheless points to strategic challenges for Clinton that could hurt her in other states – particularly the “Super Tuesday” states voting on 1 March that once looked much more hospitable territory.

According to exit polling in New Hampshire, the only demographics Clinton won here were those aged over 65 and those earning more than $200,000 a year – a reversal of her comeback against Obama in 2008 when she won the state with the help of blue-collar workers.

It is waning support from younger voters and women that may also prompt a rethink of Clinton’s strategy ahead of the key battle for the Nevada caucuses next week.

"An Earthshaking Moment": Sanders Win Reveals Deep Divide Between Voters & Democratic Party Leaders

What Clinton said in her paid speeches

When Hillary Clinton spoke to Goldman Sachs executives and technology titans at a summit in Arizona in October of 2013, she spoke glowingly of the work the bank was doing raising capital and helping create jobs, according to people who saw her remarks.

Clinton, who received $225,000 for her appearance, praised the diversity of Goldman’s workforce and the prominent roles played by women at the blue-chip investment bank and the tech firms present at the event. She spent no time criticizing Goldman or Wall Street more broadly for its role in the 2008 financial crisis.

“It was pretty glowing about us,” one person who watched the event said. “It’s so far from what she sounds like as a candidate now. It was like a rah-rah speech. She sounded more like a Goldman Sachs managing director.”

At another speech to Goldman and its big asset management clients in New York in 2013, Clinton spoke about how it wasn’t just the banks that caused the financial crisis and that it was worth looking at the landmark 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law to see what was working and what wasn’t.

Exit Polls: 40 Percent of NH Dems Want a President More Liberal Than Obama

The world woke up this morning to find that the populist stirrings that were fanned by the leaderless Occupy Wall Street movement, which first galvanized the debate on the wealth and income inequality of the 99 percent, have been simmering in the hearts and minds of voters ever since. Apparently, voters were simply waiting for an authentic presidential candidate to frame their demands into a cohesive message. Yesterday, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont crushed Hillary Clinton in the first presidential primary in New Hampshire, taking 60 percent of the Democratic vote to Hillary’s 38.4 percent with over 90 percent of the vote counted. ...

One key finding from the exit polls in New Hampshire is that despite billions of dollars spent by the Koch brothers and their ilk in attempts to make the word “liberal” a four letter word, voters are now prepared to stake their claim to the mantle. In the video clip below, a very animated David Chalian, CNN’s Political Director, explains that exit polls among Democrats in New Hampshire yesterday showed that a whopping 40 percent of Democrats want someone more liberal than Obama.

Equally fascinating, David R. Jones, writing for the New York Times, took the same exit polling facts and turned them into a headline that read: “Most Democrats Do Not Want More Liberal Policies.” Technically, that is true. According to CNN, 41 percent want to continue Obama’s policies; 40 percent want a president with more liberal policies; while only 14 percent want someone less liberal. But Obama is already supposed to be a liberal. If 40 percent of Democrats don’t think he’s walking the walk, then what does that say about Hillary’s chances to win this election when she’s on record telling a big crowd at a Women for Hillary event in Ohio last fall that she’s a moderate. Her exact words were: “You know, I get accused of being kind of moderate and center. I plead guilty.”

Other questions in the exit polling spelled more trouble for Hillary. According to CNN exit polls, three-quarters of Democratic voters said they are worried about the economy. Ninety percent said they felt the structure of the economy favored the wealthy. The legitimate fear is that if Hillary gains the White House, she will appoint guardians of the interests of the wealthy into key posts as Treasury Secretary, head of the Securities and Exchange Commission and U.S. Justice Department – effectively rubber-stamping the gold-plated revolving door between Wall Street and Washington — a replay of the Obama administration in other words.

Hillary Donors Helping Chris Matthews’ Wife Into Congress

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews has been accused by Bernie Sanders supporters of being blatantly one-sided in favor of Hillary and against Bernie Sanders, to the point that thousands of progressives have signed a petition calling for MSNBC to suspend the host of “Hardball” “because of his constant shilling for Hillary Clinton.” The magazine Esquire sharply criticized Matthews’ recent interview with Clinton as “ahistorical and out of bounds” for his attacks on Sanders. Now, research by The Daily Caller reveals that Hillary’s biggest donors are backing Matthews’ wife — Kathleen Matthews — in her congressional race in Maryland, even though many of them don’t even live in the same state, much less the same district, that Matthews is seeking to represent. ...

Many of Matthews’ biggest donors have close ties to either the Clinton foundation or the Clintons themselves. As noted by Bloomberg two years ago, 12 families have donated to every single Clinton campaign and charity. Of the 12 families, the two families that have donated the most to the Clintons are both funding Matthews’ campaign. Four families from Bloomberg’s list of biggest Clinton donors have given to the Matthews’ campaign. None of the four live in Maryland, where Matthews is actually running.

Is Clinton really a victim of most negative campaign in Democratic history

Hillary Clinton accuses Bernie Sanders of engaging in the most negative campaign in the history of Democratic presidential nomination contests, breaking his decades-long pledge to run only positive campaigns.

Clinton said Sanders ran a negative TV ad against her. But the 30-second spot never mentions her name.

She claims Sanders is attacking her when he brags that he doesn’t benefit from a super political action committee. He does point out that she gets money from PACs but is careful not to say the money influenced her.

She accused him of being sexist when a top aide said Sanders would consider her to be his vice president. But that’s a common comment about all candidates. Sanders said it was a joke and cited his strong pro-woman voting record.

Democratic voters in early nominating states, including those who support Clinton, say they don’t see Sanders’ campaigning as anywhere near how Clinton labels it. She and Sanders are campaigning in similar ways, they say, and both are far, far less critical than the Republican candidates for president. ...

Wayne Lesperance, director of the New England College Polling Institute, said the tactic had worked when Clinton fought back at an 11-hour grilling on Capitol Hill about the 2012 terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya, making Republicans look like “bullies.” But, he said, it doesn’t appear to be working now. “It’s a bad strategy,” he said. “It’s like she’s stomping her foot. It doesn’t play well.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates Is Voting for Bernie Sanders Despite the Senator's Opposition to Reparations

'Not Your Firewall': Minority Voters Refuse To Be Token in Clinton Strategy Map

Hillary Clinton's allegedly formidable advantage among minority voters in South Carolina, Nevada, and elsewhere is being questioned—and tested—as people of color are increasingly coming forth to reject being treated as a political "firewall" for her campaign.

Following Clinton's significant loss to rival Bernie Sanders in New Hampshire on Tuesday night, campaign manager Robby Mook sent a memo to supporters suggesting that Clinton's "high levels of support in the African American and Hispanic communities" should all but guarantee her the Democratic nomination.

"It will be very difficult, if not impossible, for a Democrat to win the nomination without strong levels of support among African American and Hispanic voters," Mook wrote. "Hillary's high levels of support in the African American and Hispanic communities are well known. She has maintained a wide double digit lead over Sen. Sanders among minority voters in national surveys and in states where African American and Hispanic voters make up a large share of the electorate. That type of support was not created overnight; it has been forged over more than 40 years of fighting for and alongside communities of color. They know her, trust her and are excited about her candidacy."

The release of the memo spurred wide rebuke from voters, including New York Daily News columnist and Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King, who wrote online: "Hey Black & Latino voters, Did YOU get the Hillary memo asking you to save her campaign?"

King, who openly supports Sanders, has previously said that he "fundamentally reject[s]" the notion of an African American firewall and finds it "insulting on its face."

These Quakers Are Asking Tougher Questions Than Many in the Press

Presidential candidates these days are accustomed to mainstream reporters quizzing them on process and politics, with a typical media scrum filled with questions about the latest polls, repeated demands for a response to the most recent attack from rival campaigns, and sometimes even vapid inquiries about workout routines or favorite foods.

So a group of Quakers has been trying to fill the substance vacuum — by training hundreds of activists to stalk the candidates in early primary states and ask them tough questions on issues ranging from immigrant detention to nuclear weapons to the role of money in politics.

The American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization that works to promote social justice, trained over 1,100 activists in Iowa and New Hampshire. Students, veterans, climate activists, and others learned how to formulate the right question, approach a candidate at an event, and record the interaction so it can be shared through social media.

They’ve asked over 250 questions so far, many of them available on their website as “Bird Dog Reports“.

Search for Justice Heats Up As Attorneys Weigh Criminal Charges in Flint Crisis

The search for justice for victims of the Flint water crisis is heating up this week after investigators announced that they are weighing criminal charges while a new lawsuit, filed on behalf of a poisoned child, implicates those officials at the very top.

During a press conference in Lansing on Tuesday, attorney Todd Flood, a former Wayne County assistant prosecutor who was tapped by the Michigan attorney general to lead the investigation, said they are considering charges including "gross negligence, involuntary manslaughter, and misconduct in office" against those responsible for the lead-tainted water.

Flood explained that even in the case where someone made an "honest mistake," that individual could still be charged with breaking civil or criminal laws if they turned a "blind eye" on the problem, rather than work to protect potential victims, the Detroit Free Press reports.

In fact, a lawsuit filed Monday in federal court accuses Michigan's top officials, including Governor Rick Snyder and former Flint emergency manager Darnell Earley, of "failing to act" despite knowledge of the dangerously high lead levels in the city's water supply.

Flint resident Luke Waid filed the suit after learning that his two-year-old daughter is one of the thousands of children now suffering from lead poisoning after the city, under the control of the state-appointed emergency manager, switched its water source to the Flint River as a temporary cost-cutting measure.

Waid told the Free Press that his children "don't have a voice of their own so I have to be their voice. I have to stand behind my children. If I didn't feel so betrayed, I wouldn't have brought it this far."

This is worth a full read:

What the media hides about China’s economic slowdown: Greed has corporate elites turning blind eye to nation’s environmental destruction

What’s missing from the way that our financial press reports about China’s economic slowdown is that it fails to take into account the role of the mainland’s people and the environment in how this crisis came to be. For too long this story has been told exclusively with quarter over quarter economic performance statistics by the myopic business press, which ignores entirely the deeper ecological crisis and intense social upheaval that has been underway in China  for years. ...

Polite society continues to let the ecological destruction wrought by unfettered capitalism be somebody else’s problem, or more precisely, on the second set of books to which we relegate such “externalities.”

After all, wasn’t that the whole rationalization for outsourcing to begin with? Leave it to the Chinese to sweat out the manufacturing details, and the global investor class from the golf course gets to figure out what to do with the profits they extract. But now, with so much of their water polluted and their air so contaminated China’s people and its ecology have been stressed to the breaking point. ...

China’s air pollution kills 4,000 people a day, close to 17 percent of the country’s annual mortality. Even though it is roughly a fifth of the world’s population, the Max Planck Institute reports China accounts for almost half of the 3.3 million deaths annually caused by air pollution. ... Contaminated air is only part of it. The United Nations World Water Report issued last year reported the Chinese Ministry of Water Resources had determined that in 118 of the country’s cities tested, 97 percent of the sub-surface groundwater was contaminated, and in 64 percent of the places surveyed the drinking water source was seriously contaminated. ...

Here in the West, we don’t get the magnitude of what’s going on because our corporate media doesn’t want us making the broader connections to just what a ruination the last few decades of global free trade has wrought on the planet.

“Imagine a thousand Flints in a country without a free press,” says Michael Santoro, a China expert and professor of management and global business at Rutgers Business School.

Obama's Climate Change Plan Frozen By Supreme Court

Supreme court to block Obama's sweeping climate change plan

The supreme court agreed to block Barack Obama’s clean power plan on Tuesday, raising fears that the centrepiece of his climate change plan could be overturned.

The unexpected decision creates instant uncertainty about the future of Obama’s climate plan and the historic global agreement to fight climate change reached in Paris last December. ...

The surprising vote by the justices put a temporary freeze on Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rules cutting carbon emissions from power plants until the Washington DC circuit court of appeals hears challenges from 29, mainly Republican-led states, and dozens of corporations and industry groups. Arguments are scheduled for 2 June.

The 5-4 decision for a stay came as a shock to the EPA and environmental campaign groups, and was widely seen as a sign that opponents of the power plant rules have made a strong argument against the plan. ...

Obama and US officials have been adamant in their discussions with world leaders that the power plant rules would withstand legal challenges, and would come into force even if a Republican wins the White House next November.

New Docs Link Polluted Drinking Water Supply to Massive US Military Base

Internal documents obtained by the Japan Times offer evidence that the contamination of local drinking water sources near a massive U.S. airbase in Japan is the result of years of repeated mishaps and "lax safety standards" by U.S. military forces.

The reports, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, "expose a spate of accidents at the [Kadena Air Base in Okinawa] during the past 15 years that have involved at least 21,000 liters of fire extinguishing agents—some of them toxic."

The reporting cites several such instances, including a three-day period in 2001 when 17,000 liters of fire extinguishing agents were released and "attributed by base officials to mechanical and electronic malfunctions."

It also cites an incident in 2015 when "a drunk U.S. Marine activated a firefighting system. It filled a hangar with more than 1,500 liters of JET-X 2.75 percent—a foam classified by the U.S. government as hazardous. It contains chemicals known to cause cancer, and neurological and reproductive disorders." That foam made its way to local waterways, but the base did not notify Japanese authorities.

The U.S. Pacific Air Forces issued a statement in January that—despite the detection of toxic substance in the drinking water sources— the water was safe because it is adequately treated before consumer use.

Also of Interest

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

This Is How Hillary Clinton Gets the Coverage She Wants

The Insider Game — Clinton Intervenes with IRS for Swiss Bank UBS. Bill Books Some Speeches.

Why Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote

Sanders defied the pragmatists. Don't count him out in the weeks ahead

Welcome to the United States of Flint

Budget Deficit Mania and the Congressional Budget Office

The internet of things: how your TV, car and toys could spy on you

Knesset panel summons foreign media over 'biased' coverage

A Little Night Music

Jimmy Rushing & Count Basie - Don't You Want A Man Like Me?

Count Basie - Tall Cotton

Lester Young/Count Basie - Lady Be Good

Count Basie Orchestra - Swingin' The Blues

Count Basie - Splanky

Count Basie - Jumping At The Woodside

Count Basie - Basie Boogie