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

"Either war is obsolete or men are."

-- R. Buckminster Fuller

News and Opinion

Some good news to start off with. See the roll call here.

House of Representatives Orders Donald Trump to Stop Backing Saudi-led War in Yemen, Paving the Way for Decisive Senate Vote

In a stinging rebuke to the Trump administration’s cozy relationship with Saudi Arabia, the House of Representatives passed a resolution directing the administration to remove U.S. forces from supporting the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen. The measure, which passed by a vote of 248-177, is one of the first major pieces of legislation approved by the Democratic House. It is a significant achievement for the progressive wing of the party, whose members have long argued in favor of cutting off military support for Saudi Arabia.

The resolution, which invokes the 1973 War Powers Act, directs President Donald Trump to remove U.S. forces from “hostilities” in the Saudi-led intervention against an Iranian-backed rebel group in Yemen. In both the Trump and Obama administrations, the U.S. has provided weapons, targeting intelligence, and mid-air refueling support for the Saudi-led coalition.

A Republican-sponsored amendment, passed Wednesday, weakened the resolution slightly by allowing continued intelligence sharing with the coalition. The amendment, which passed by a vote of 252-177, allows the U.S. to continue sharing intelligence with foreign powers “if the President determines such sharing is appropriate.”

Under House and Senate rules, the resolution enjoys “privileged” status, meaning that it can bypass a committee vote. The Republican-held Senate passed a similar resolution in December by a vote of 56-41, but with a new Congress, the Senate will have to pass it again to send it to Trump’s desk. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has promised to bring it up for another vote.

Warsaw Summit: Pompeo says 'confronting Iran' key to peace

Uh oh, somebody let the crazy bastards out of their cages again.

As Rudy Giuliani Calls for Regime Change in Iran, Benjamin Netanyahu Raises the Specter of “War”

Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City who now serves as President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, called for the overthrow of Iran’s government on Wednesday during a rally in Poland staged by a cult-like group of Iranian exiles who pay him to represent them. Speaking outside the Warsaw venue for an international conference on the Middle East attended by U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Giuliani said that his message for the 65 governments discussing ways to confront Iran was simple. “The theocratic dictatorship in Tehran,” Giuliani said, “must end and end quickly.”

Giuliani went on to suggest that peace in the region would only come when Iran was ruled instead by his clients, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, an exile group of former terrorists also known as the Mojahedin-e Khalq, or People’s Mujahedin. The group’s leader, Maryam Rajavi, already refers to herself as “President-elect.” ...

Even before the conference began, the Israeli prime minister appeared to shrug off efforts by the State Department and the Polish government to portray the gathering as broadly focused on Middle East peace, describing it as primarily a meeting of Iran’s enemies. ... According to the English translation of Netanyahu’s remarks in Hebrew prepared by his office, the prime minister then added: “What is important about this meeting — and it is not in secret because there are many of those — is that this is an open meeting with representatives of leading Arab countries that are sitting down together with Israel in order to advance the common interest of war with Iran.”

Roberto Lovato: Elliott Abrams Is Bringing Violence of 1980s U.S. Latin America Policy to Venezuela

An excellent article full of details worth reviewing about Elliot Abrams' mendacity and modus operandi. Here's a taste to get you started:

Rep. Ilhan Omar Went After Elliott Abrams for Lying to Congress. Then He Did It Again.

Elliot Abrams, President Donald Trump’s special envoy for Venezuela, appeared before the House Committee on Foreign Relations on Wednesday. ... Abrams’s most notable lies occurred during this exchange about his actions as assistant secretary of state in the 1980s during the Reagan administration:

OMAR: On February 8, 1982, you testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about U.S. policy in El Salvador. In that hearing, you dismissed as communist propaganda reports about the massacre at El Mozote in which more than 800 civilians, including children as young as 2 years old, were brutally murdered by U.S.-trained troops. During that massacre, some of those troops bragged about raping a 12-year-old girl, girls, before they killed them. You later said that the U.S. policy in El Salvador was a “fabulous achievement.” Yes or no, do you still think so?

ABRAMS: From the day that President Duarte was elected in a free election, to this day, El Salvador has been a democracy. That’s a fabulous achievement.

Abrams’s words were “not only factually, demonstrably untrue, but grossly so,” according to Alejandro Velasco, a professor of modern Latin American history at New York University. His testimony, said Velasco, “continues a pattern he has shown since the 1980s of hubristically rejecting out of hand any suggestion that defeating social justice struggles in the 1980s, through the most brutal means, should in any way be seen as anything other than a resounding victory for the U.S.”

To start: When José Napoleón Duarte was elected president of El Salvador in 1984, it was not “a free election.”

Duarte was one of many Salvadoran politicians who spent time on the CIA’s payroll. ... Pratap Chitnis, a member of the U.K. House of Lords, traveled to El Salvador to witness the 1984 election on behalf of the British Parliamentary Human Rights Group. “Crucial to the whole standing of the exercise,” he reported, “was the fact that no politicians to the left of [Duarte’s] Christian Democrats” could participate. Why? Because, said official British observers, “had these representatives campaigned openly, they would have run a very high risk of being assassinated” by right-wing death squads. This was something like a U.S. presidential election in which the furthest-left candidate was Ted Cruz. ...

Thomas Carothers, a colleague of Abrams at the State Department, later wrote a book titled “In the Name of Democracy: U.S. Policy Toward Latin America in the Reagan Years.” Carothers was sympathetic to Abrams’s perspective and in fact, interviewed him for the book. Carothers states that “the administration approached the elections with two goals: ensuring that technically credible elections were held and that the Christian Democratic candidate, José Napoleón Duarte, won.” ... Abrams obviously knows that this was no “free election.” As in the past, he was consciously attempting to deceive Congress.

Needless to say, it also is not the case that “El Salvador has been a democracy” since 1984.

It should be emphasized that the atrocities in Guatemala have been legally recognized as a genocide. This is tantamount to Holocaust denial. https://t.co/Mq2xo3GqK1

— The Discourse Lover (@Trillburne) February 13, 2019

Nicolás Maduro claims foes 'totally failed' to topple him as efforts falter

Venezuela’s embattled leader, Nicolás Maduro, has claimed he has seen off a dramatic opposition challenge to his rule, as those efforts appeared to falter and the United States conceded it was “impossible to predict” how long he might remain in power. In an interview with Euronews, Maduro boasted that his political foes had “failed totally” in their quest to topple him. Opponents “could march every single day of their lives” and achieve nothing, Maduro said.

Venezuela’s newly emboldened opposition continues to insist Maduro’s days are numbered, with about 50 governments now recognizing its leader, Juan Guaidó, as the country’s legitimate president. ...

Addressing a congressional hearing, the US special envoy on Venezuela, Elliott Abrams, claimed “Maduro and his band of thieves” were finished. He claimed international pressure meant “there is a storm brewing inside the Maduro regime that will eventually bring it to an end”.

But while Abrams said Washington was “hopeful and confident” of Maduro’s demise he admitted it was “impossible to predict” when it might come. The US would maintain pressure “over the next weeks and months”, he added, suggesting a quick resolution is no longer expected.

Opposition leaders have spent recent days trying to dampen expectations that Maduro’s exit is imminent.

U.S. Congress won't support military intervention in Venezuela

Congress will not support U.S. military intervention in Venezuela despite comments hinting at such involvement by President Donald Trump, the Democratic chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee said on Wednesday.

U.S. Warns The World Against Buying Venezuelan Oil

U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton has warned countries and companies against buying crude oil from Venezuela, after the Latin American country’s Oil Minister Manuel Quevedo said during a surprise visit to India that Venezuela wants to sell more oil to the fast-growing Indian market.

In a tweet with a Bloomberg article on Venezuelan-Indian oil relations attached, Bolton wrote: “Nations and firms that support Maduro’s theft of Venezuelan resources will not be forgotten. The United States will continue to use all of its powers to preserve the Venezuelan people’s azsets and we encourage all nations to work together to do the same.”

“We have a good relationship with India and we want to continue this relationship. The relationships with India will continue, the trade will continue and we will simply expand all the trade and relationship,” Indian outlet Business Today quoted the Venezuelan minister as saying on the sidelines of the Petrotech conference in India this week.

At the start of the Venezuelan political crisis last month, Indian media reported that the Asian country continues to be one of the main buyers of Venezuelan crude oil. Indian refiners keep buying more than 400,000 bpd of oil from the troubled Latin American country, which is sitting on the world’s largest crude oil resources.

Hardline Brexiters threaten to vote down Theresa May's motion

Hardline Brexit supporters are threatening to inflict yet another Commons defeat on Theresa May because they fear the government is effectively ruling out leaving the EU with no deal. Members of the Tory European Research Group are unhappy with the wording of a No 10 motion because it endorses parliament’s vote against any Brexit without a withdrawal agreement.

The motion for debate on Thursday simply affirms “the approach to leaving the EU” backed by the Commons on 29 January, when an amendment was passed in favour of an attempt to replace the Northern Ireland backstop with “alternative arrangements”.

The motion was thought to be fairly uncontroversial until pro-Brexit supporters realised it also encompassed a second amendment passed on that day, which ruled out a no-deal Brexit. The amendment, tabled by Dame Caroline Spelman, “rejects the United Kingdom leaving the European Union without a withdrawal agreement and a framework for the future relationship”.

he ERG group, led by arch-Brexiter Jacob Rees-Mogg, is planning either to vote against or abstain on Thursday’s government motion, potentially causing another embarrassing parliamentary loss for the prime minister. However, talks with government whips will continue on Thursday in an attempt to find a compromise.

Dark money is pushing for a no-deal Brexit. Who is behind it?

Modern governments respond to only two varieties of emergency: those whose solution is bombs and bullets, and those whose solution is bailouts for the banks. But what if they decided to take other threats as seriously? This week’s revelations of a catastrophic collapse in insect populations, jeopardising all terrestrial life, would prompt the equivalent of an emergency meeting of the UN security council. The escalating disasters of climate breakdown and soil loss would trigger spending at least as great as the quantitative easing after the financial crisis. Instead, politicians carry on as if nothing is amiss.

The same goes for the democratic emergency. Almost everywhere trust in governments, parliaments and elections is collapsing. Shared civic life is replaced by closed social circles that receive entirely different, often false, information. The widespread sense that politics has become so corrupted that it can no longer respond to ordinary people’s needs has provoked a demagogic backlash that in some countries begins to slide into fascism. But despite years of revelations about hidden spending, fake news, front groups and micro-targeted ads on social media, almost nothing has changed.

In Britain, for example, we now know that the EU referendum was won with the help of widespread cheating. We still don’t know the origins of much of the money spent by the leave campaigns. For example, we have no idea who provided the £435,000 channelled through Scotland, into Northern Ireland, through the coffers of the Democratic Unionist party and back into Scotland and England, to pay for pro-Brexit ads. Nor do we know the original source of the £8m that Arron Banks delivered to the Leave.EU campaign. We do know that both of the main leave campaigns have been fined for illegal activities, and that the conduct of the referendum has damaged many people’s faith in the political system. But, astonishingly, the government has so far failed to introduce a single new law in response to these events. And now it’s happening again. Since mid-January an organisation called Britain’s Future has spent £125,000 on Facebook ads demanding a hard or no-deal Brexit. ...

So why won’t the government act? Partly because, regardless of the corrosive impacts on public life, it wants to keep the system as it is. The current rules favour the parties with the most money to spend, which tends to mean the parties that appeal to the rich. But mostly, I think, it’s because, like other governments, it has become institutionally incapable of responding to our emergencies. It won’t rescue democracy because it can’t. The system in which it is embedded seems destined to escalate rather than dampen disasters. Ecologically, economically and politically, capitalism is failing as catastrophically as communism failed. Like state communism, it is beset by unacknowledged but fatal contradictions. It is inherently corrupt and corrupting. But its mesmerising power, and the vast infrastructure of thought that seeks to justify it, makes any challenge to the model almost impossible to contemplate. Even to acknowledge the emergencies it causes, let alone to act on them, feels like electoral suicide. As the famous saying goes: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.”

Pelosi Sabotages Medicare for All, But Corporate Media Pretend Not to Notice

Thanks to Bernie Sanders’ presidential bid in 2016, his signature Medicare for All proposal is the litmus issue for Democrats in the unfolding 2020 campaign. With supermajority support among Democratic and independent voters and backed by more than half of Republicans, the single payer scheme was endorsed by a majority of Democratic candidates in November’s House races. Most of the declared Democratic presidential candidates claim to back Medicare for All, including even New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, who has accepted more money from Big Pharma than any other member of his party. So compelling is the issue, a Politico-Harvard poll shows that fully 84 percent of Democrats want the party to make Medicare for All “an extremely important priority.”

It should be huge news, then, that the top Democrat in Congress, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, is actively working to discredit and sideline the most popular domestic political proposal of the century. But, apparently not. The Intercept’s February 5 blockbuster, “Top Nancy Pelosi Aide Privately Tells Insurance Executives Not to Worry About Democrats Pushing ‘Medicare for All,’” was picked up by only one “mainstream” corporate media outlet: Newsweek. In burying this bombshell, the plutocrat-owned press is protecting Pelosi from the extreme embarrassment of being caught conspiring with insurance companies to subvert Democratic voters’ highest priority issue, with the obvious aim of derailing Bernie Sanders’ anticipated second run for the presidency. ...

The corporate media is part of the conspiracy of silence on Pelosi’s undercover Medicare for All machinations, just as they collude in ignoring Bernie Sanders’ steady stream of speeches on this issue and a slew of wildly popular proposals that would end private exploitation of a whole range of services to the people. Although single payer healthcare would directly benefit most businesses that employ workers, by eliminating profit-driven insurance payments and driving down drug and hospital costs, passage of Medicare for All would open Pandora’s box, shattering the corporate consensus on endless austerity and the sanctity of the “market.” Nobody but the Lords of Capital believes in the “market,” which is nothing but the state-protected right to profiteer from essential human needs. To preserve the fiction that “there is no alternative” to capitalist markets (Margaret Thatcher), the corporate media erases the people’s public options through its control of the political narrative.

That’s what Russiagate is really about – not fantasy plotters in Moscow, but silencing actual dissent to the corporate narrative at home. Unfortunately, Bernie Sanders and his brand of Democrat “socialists” can’t grasp the connection. They embrace the half of the corporate narrative that justifies endless war with Russia, China, Syria, and now Venezuela – while rejecting its twin: endless austerity. And then they wonder why the corporate narrative is just as hostile to single payer, free college tuition and a Green New Deal as it is to Putin, Assad and Maduro. Which leaves them at the mercy of their conniving corporate overseer, Nancy Pelosi.

Bernie Sanders Introduces Bold New Bill to Expand Social Security

In an effort to strengthen one of the nation’s most popular programs as the GOP pushes for cuts, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and several congressional Democrats on Wednesday introduced the Social Security Expansion Act to ensure that seniors can retire in dignity and “everyone with a disability can live with the security they need.”

Confronting an economic landscape in which half of older Americans have no retirement savings and 20 percent of seniors are forced to live on income that barely exceeds the federal poverty line, Sanders’ legislation would significantly expand Social Security benefits and ensure the program remains solvent for at least the next five decades by subjecting all income over $250,000 to the Social Security payroll tax.

Sanders officially introduced his legislation at a press conference alongside Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) and Democratic Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.), Jeff Merkley (Ore.), and Cory Booker (N.J.). ...

Arguing that Republican leaders who want to slash Social Security after giving tax breaks to the rich have “their priorities backwards,” Sanders declared, “We’re gonna tax the billionaires and expand Social Security.” ...

“Expanding Social Security as this legislation does is a solution to our looming retirement income crisis and to growing inequality between the wealthy and everyone else, as well as to the financial squeeze confronting working families,” Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works, said in a statement. “Not only is expanding Social Security, financed by requiring the wealthy to pay their fair share, extremely wise policy, it is overwhelmingly supported by voters across the political spectrum. That makes it powerfully winning politics, as well.”

Shutdown deal: Republicans urge Trump to accept as House heads to vote

Donald Trump has suggested he is open to a compromise border security measure that would avert another US government shutdown as negotiators in Congress appeared to reach an agreement before the funding deadline expires on Friday. Republicans and Democrats have broadly embraced the proposed legislation, but have cautioned that they will wait to see the final text of the bill, which includes far less funding than Trump initially sought for his wall along the border with Mexico.

“I don’t want to see a shutdown,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Wednesday. “A shutdown would be a terrible thing.” Trump said he would take a “serious” look at the legislation when it is released later on Wednesday and search for “landmines” that might imperil the measure.

Following weeks of fraught negotiations, a bipartisan group of lawmakers reached a compromise late Wednesday that would be voted on in the US Senate the following day, a senior Democratic aide said. ...

There is little appetite on Capitol Hill for another government shutdown, just weeks after a standoff over border security shuttered several federal agencies for 35 days and deprived 800,000 government employees of their paychecks. The government runs out of funding at midnight on Friday.

Amazon cancels plans for New York headquarters after fierce opposition

Amazon has cancelled its plans for a new headquarters in New York City following a torrent of local political opposition. “After much thought and deliberation, we’ve decided not to move forward with our plans to build a headquarters for Amazon in Long Island City, Queens,” the company said in a statement.

“For Amazon, the commitment to build a new headquarters requires positive, collaborative relationships with state and local elected officials who will be supportive over the long-term.” ["And shower us with money and accommodations at the taxpayers expense, because we're oh so needy." - js] ...

The tech giant was planning a waterfront campus in Queens where it would employ 25,000 people, and get $3bn in subsidies and tax breaks from the state and city. It was supported by New York City mayor Bill de Blasio and the governor, Andrew Cuomo. ...

“Defeating an anti-union corporation that mistreats workers and assists Ice [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] in terrorizing immigrant communities is a victory. Defeating an unprecedented act of corporate welfare is a triumph that should change the way we do economic development deals in our city and state forever,” said city councilman Jimmy Van Bramer, a Democrat who represents Long Island City.

All-time high for Americans late on car payments is a warning sign for the economy

At the end of 2018, an all-time high of 7 million people were 90 days or more behind on their car payments — 1 million more than had fallen that far behind in 2010, when the country was recovering from the Great Recession — researchers with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York said Tuesday. That’s particularly concerning because the U.S. unemployment rate is around 4 percent, the job market is generally quite strong, people are taking out auto loans at record levels, and the “overall auto loan stock is the highest quality” since the Fed started keeping the data in 2000.

“The substantial and growing number of distressed borrowers suggests that not all Americans have benefited from the strong labor market and warrants continued monitoring and analysis of this sector,” researchers with the Fed wrote in a blog post Tuesday.

The data may also indicate that predatory lenders are pushing loans on vulnerable people with more debt than they can afford.

Black Critics of Kamala Harris and Cory Booker Push Back Against Claims That They’re Russian “Bots”

American descendents of slaves identifying themselves with the hashtag #ADOS have been openly critical of 2020 presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Cory Booker over the past weeks. Some prominent black political commentators are now speculating that these critics are Russian bots.

Angela Rye, a CNN political commentator and board member of the Congressional Black Caucus PAC, has said she believes that some ADOS arguments are not organic, but were “paid for by Russia.” She added that she’s “not saying everyone who uses the hashtag is a Russian bot,” but she does believe “it originated from Russian bots.” Rye went on to argue that the same is true of critiques relating to “some of the stuff around the crime bill” circa 2016 — presumably referring to critics of Hillary Clinton who questioned her support of the bill now widely understood to have caused overwhelming harm to black Americans.

On a segment of Joy Reid’s MSNBC show titled “how to spot a bot,” Shireen Mitchell, founder of Stop Online Violence Against Women, argued that the ADOS hashtag is a way to identify foreign influence. “A lot of the ones that are pretending to be black people, black women in particular, who are focusing on black identity, have these sort of aspects in the ways that they’re talking about language,” she said. She went on to say that bots are posing as black Americans using “the vernacular or the language of someone that believes they are a part of our community” to claim authority to represent black Americans. “This has become a challenge particularly for the Democratic candidates because obviously, in 2016, all this activity was directed to help Donald Trump, or to hurt Hillary Clinton, to do both,” Reid said. ...

The creators of the hashtag - Antonio Moore, an attorney in California, and Yvette Carnell, a political commentator — are neither Russian nor bots and are demanding an apology. Carnell told The Intercept that she thinks calling out ADOS is an effort to delegitimize the grassroots movement they’ve worked to cultivate and to “undermine a real debate that we have about Kamala Harris within the black community.” ... Moore said that accusations like Reid’s are a McCarthyite tactic in the same vein as the attempts to publicly discredit Martin Luther King Jr. “It’s troubling, the lengths that these people will go to undermine authentic Black advocacy in order to prop up the Democratic establishment,” he said in an email. An MSNBC spokesperson declined to comment.

Indeed, people of color who challenge the Democratic Party from the left are often erased or dismissed as somehow not being real. During the 2016 Democratic primary, the hashtag #BernieMadeMeWhite spread as a response to the “Bernie Bro” stereotype, which wrongly claimed that nearly all Bernie Sanders supporters were young white men.

Proof Ilhan Omar Controversy Is Phony Outrage

Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz criticized for saying 'I don't see color’

Howard Schultz, the former Starbucks CEO and potential 2020 independent presidential candidate, is facing criticism for responding to a question on racial bias by saying that he does not “see colour”.

“As somebody who grew up in a very diverse background as a young boy in the projects I didn’t see colour as a young boy and I honestly don’t see colour now,” Schultz, who is from Brooklyn, said during a CNN town hall event in Houston on Tuesday evening. He was speaking about the arrest of two black men at a Starbucks in Philadelphia last year which ignited a racial profiling storm and prompted Schultz to close stores nationwide for four hours of staff anti-racial bias training. ...

Schultz’s claim to be colour-blind drew immediate criticism on social media as a cliched and implausible sentiment that undercuts the reality of racism by implying a post-racial society and erasing the identity of non-white people.

Andrew McCabe says officials discussed removing Trump after Comey firing

Former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe has said top Trump administration officials talked seriously about removing Donald Trump from office just months after he become president. McCabe, who briefly ran the FBI after Trump fired James Comey as the bureau’s director, told 60 Minutes that there were meetings at the justice department in the days following the firing to discuss whether Trump could be removed under the 25th amendment. The 25th amendment allows the vice-president and the majority of the cabinet to strip the president’s powers if they determine he is unable to discharge the duties of his office.

McCabe is the first official to publicly confirm that the move was discussed. The New York Times previously reported that the talks took place, citing anonymous sources. McCabe is currently promoting his new book The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump.

According to 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley, who appeared on CBS This Morning on Thursday to discuss his interview with McCabe, the talks happened in the eight days between Comey’s firing in 2017 and the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller to investigate Russian election interference and links between the Trump campaign and Moscow.

The deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, offered to wear a wire to record incriminating conversations with Trump, McCabe said, according to Pelley. A justice department official had claimed to the Times that the comment about wearing a wire was made sarcastically, but McCabe told 60 Minutes it was serious. “It came up more than once, and it was so serious that he took it to the lawyers at the FBI to discuss it,” Pelley said.

Naomi Klein's latest:

The Battle Lines Have Been Drawn on the Green New Deal

"I really don't like their policies of taking away your car, taking away your airplane flights, of ‘let’s hop a train to California,’ or ‘you’re not allowed to own cows anymore!'”

So bellowed President Donald Trump in El Paso, Texas, his first campaign-style salvo against Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey’s Green New Deal resolution. There will surely be many more. It’s worth marking the moment. Because those could be the famous last words of a one-term president, having wildly underestimated the public appetite for transformative action on the triple crises of our time: imminent ecological unraveling, gaping economic inequality (including the racial and gender wealth divide), and surging white supremacy.

Or they could be the epitaph for a habitable climate, with Trump’s lies and scare tactics succeeding in trampling this desperately needed framework. That could either help win him re-election, or land us with a timid Democrat in the White House with neither the courage nor the democratic mandate for this kind of deep change. Either scenario means blowing the handful of years left to roll out the transformations required to keep temperatures below catastrophic levels.

Back in October, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a landmark report informing us that global emissions need to be slashed in half in less than 12 years, a target that simply cannot be met without the world’s largest economy playing a game-changing leadership role. If there is a new administration ready to leap into that role in January 2021, meeting those targets would still be extraordinarily difficult, but it would be technically possible — especially if large cities and states like California and New York escalate their ambitions right now. Losing another four years to a Republican or a corporate Democrat, and starting in 2026 is, quite simply, a joke.

So either Trump is right and the Green New Deal is a losing political issue, one he can smear out of existence. Or he is wrong and a candidate who makes the Green New Deal the centerpiece of their platform will take the Democratic primary and then kick Trump’s ass in the general, with a clear democratic mandate to introduce wartime-levels of investment to battle our triple crises from day one. That would very likely inspire the rest of the world to finally follow suit on bold climate policy, giving us all a fighting chance. Those are the stark options before us.

'Uniquely American': Senate passes landmark bill to enlarge national parks

Joshua Tree and Death Valley national parks are to be enlarged, and stunning river landscapes in California and Utah will be protected, under new legislation that passed the US Senate on Tuesday. In all the public lands package sets aside more than a million acres of new wilderness and conservation areas in western states.

The Natural Resources Management Act passed 92-8 in the Republican-controlled Senate, a notable bipartisan effort in an administration marked by conservation rollbacks. Since Donald Trump took office, his administration has shrunk national monuments and put large swaths of land up for oil, gas and mining leases, including on the doorsteps of national monuments, parks and wilderness areas. The bill will go to the Democrat-controlled House next, where it’s likely to pass, and then to the president’s desk.

The landmark bill protects nearly 500,000 acres in California alone, including adding 43,000 acres to Death Valley national park and Joshua Tree national park, which was damaged by unsupervised crowds during the recent government shutdown. The bill also designates 375,500 acres of new wilderness in the southern California desert, which is a critical ecosystem for bighorn sheep and desert tortoise and the setting for thousands of years of cultural history, including the Old Spanish Trail, a historic trade route that linked northern New Mexico to Los Angeles. ...

As for watersheds, some 30,000 acres adjacent to the Yellowstone River in Montana will be protected from mining, and 100,000 acres of the Umpqua watershed in Oregon, one of the most important areas in the Pacific north-west for salmon and steelhead trout, will be conserved. The bill classifies nearly 620 miles of river as “wild and scenic” – prohibiting, for instance, federal support for dam construction – including the Amargosa River in California, the Green River in Utah and tributaries of the Rogue River in Oregon.

Buy organic food to help curb global insect collapse, say scientists

Buying organic food is among the actions people can take to curb the global decline in insects, according to leading scientists. Urging political action to slash pesticide use on conventional farms is another, say environmentalists.

Intensive agriculture and heavy pesticide use are a major cause of plummeting insect populations, according to the first global review, revealed by the Guardian on Monday. The vanishing of insects threatens a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems”, the review concluded, because of their fundamental importance in the food chain, pollination and soil health.
“It is definitely an emergency,” said Prof Axel Hochkirch, who leads on insects for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature,the global authority on the status of the natural world. “This is a real, global, dramatic problem.”

“If you buy organic food, you make sure the land is used less intensively,” he said. “There are a lot of studies that show organic farming is better for insects than intensive farming. It is quite logical.” Prof Dave Goulson at the University of Sussex, UK, also backed buying organic food. ...

Hochkirch said the most critical large-scale action to help insects was reform of the enormous public subsidies given to intensive farming. “This is the strongest threat to most species. It can only be dealt with on the political level. You need to change the system of how farmers are paid. It is not the farmer who is to blame, it is the system. He has to adapt to the payment regimes of the EU, or US, or wherever.”

Also of Interest

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

MSNBC’s ‘Resistance’ to Trump’s Venezuela Coup Ranges from Silence to Support

Netanyahoo Asks Arabs to "Advance The Common Interest Of War With Iran"

The Real Motive Behind the FBI Plan to Investigate Trump as a Russian Agent

The observer mission in Hebron acted as a restraint on the settlers’ worst excesses. Now that has come to an end

López Obrador Vows ‘Poverty’ for Mexican Government

Nick Brana: The Left Must Finally Break With the Democrats

Goldman Lobbyist Turned Schumer General Counsel Is Hiding Most Former Clients’ Names

Does Kamala Harris Deserve to Call Herself a Progressive?

Ralph Northam Still Doesn’t Understand What It Takes to be Forgiven

'Atmospheric river': storms pummel California with snow, rain and mud

New AI fake text generator may be too dangerous to release, say creators

Rare African black leopard captured by camera trap's extraordinary photos

A Little Night Music

Buster Benton - Lonely For A Dime

Buster Benton - Money Is The Name of The Game

Buster Benton - My Lady

Buster Benton - Judge Give Me Time

Buster Benton - Catch Up With The World

Buster Benton - That's Your Thing

Buster Benton - Dangerous Woman

Buster Benton - Do As You Please

Buster Benton & Carey Bell - Born With The Blues

Buster Benton - Spider In My Stew

Buster Benton - Good to the last drop