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This evening's music features delta blues singer and guitarist Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup. Enjoy!

"Gotta admire the pure predator instinct in our rulers. They’re the wolves, we’re the sheep and God, do they love mutton."

-- Ian Welsh

News and Opinion

Yanis Varoufakis: Trumpism after Trump – NEWSWEEK Magazine, Interviewed by Basit Mahmood

“The wave of enthusiasm regarding the Biden administration has not washed over me,” he says. “I’m glad Trump is out, but at the very same time I’m very worried that Trumpism is going to get stronger. I’m very worried that the Democratic Party is in the process of turning in on itself, of divisions between the establishment figures, those who were effectively supported by Wall Street to become senators or congressmen or presidents for that matter and the socialists. ..."

Varoufakis doesn’t believe that the Biden-Harris ticket will improve outcomes for the poor or radically redistribute wealth. Nearly eight million Americans, many of them children and minorities, have fallen into poverty since May last year as the pandemic took its toll, according to Columbia University research. While Biden is intent on passing a $1.9 trillion economic rescue package that aims to provide more aid for the unemployed and those facing eviction, Varoufakis doesn’t think it will go far enough. He says: “Bernie Sanders has effectively bent over backwards in order to lead in the Senate with the Biden agenda on his shoulders. I can see why he’s doing it because he’s trying to use the moment, this moment in history in order to extract as many benefits as possible, Medicare, on the stimulus program, but I feel this will fail because in the end the stimulus program will be tepid. It’s going to benefit the large corporations it is not going to come with anything near the green new deal aspects of the policy that was agreed between Bernie’s team and Biden’s team.

“All those plans for a massive green works program are going to fade away, what is going to be left of them is not going to make any substantial dent on climate change, the Medicare for All program is not even on the table. There will be, due to Bernie’s intervention, substantial medical benefits for the many but only during the pandemic and then they will be withdrawn. By that time, it will be very very difficult for leftists who knocked on doors during the election campaign saying to people ‘come on come out vote for Biden’, bringing the vote out of people that were not going to otherwise vote for Biden, it will be very difficult to explain to them in two years’ time, why they did it. When there will be very little left. The whole Democratic party is going to coalesce around Clinton/Obama, Larry Summers kind of narrative austerity will be back on the table because of public debt and the natural tendency of Biden people to balance the books, which we saw under Clinton in the 90s and that’s when the left is going to have an existentialist crisis.”

Danny Sjursen: Counterinsurgency Comes Home

Caitlin Johnstone: Conspiracy Theories Are Caused By Government Secrecy

The DC Circuit has ruled that the CIA is under no obligation to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests pertaining to its involvement with insurgent militias in Syria, overturning a lower court’s previous ruling in favor of a Buzzfeed News reporter seeking such documents.

As Sputnik‘s Morgan Artyukhina clearly outlines, this ruling comes despite the fact that mainstream news outlets have been reporting on the Central Intelligence Agency’s activities in Syria for years, and despite a US president having openly tweeted about those activities.

“In other words, the CIA will not be required to admit to actions it is widely reported as having done, much less divulge documents about them to the press for even greater scrutiny,” Artyukhina writes, calling to mind the Julian Assange quote “The overwhelming majority of information is classified to protect political security, not national security.”

The CIA’s brazen collaboration with dangerous extremist factions seeking to topple Damascus, and its equally brazen refusal to provide the public with any information about the extent of its involvement in Syria from the earliest stages of the violence in that nation onwards, will necessarily provide fodder for conspiracy theories.

It is public knowledge that the CIA was involved in the Syrian war to some extent, it is public knowledge that the CIA has a well-documented history of doing extremely evil things, and it is public knowledge that the US government has long sought control over Syria. Due to the agency’s refusal to be transparent about the exact nature of its involvement in that nation, people are left to fill in the knowledge gaps with their own speculation.

Of course they will do this. Why wouldn’t they? Why would anyone give the lying, torturing, propagandizing, drug trafficking, coup-staging, warmongering, psychopathic Central Intelligence Agency the benefit of the doubt and assume their actions in Syria have been benevolent just because the hard facts have been hidden behind a wall of government secrecy?

Yet they will be expected to. Anyone with a sufficient degree of influence who comes right out and says the CIA knowingly armed violent jihadists with the goal of orchestrating regime change in Syria will be attacked as a crazy conspiracy theorist by the narrative managers of the establishment media. If their words are really disruptive to establishment narratives, there will be calls to deplatform, unemploy, and ban them from social media.

And really such is the case with all the melodramatic garment rending about the dangers of conspiracy theories today. All the fixation on the way unregulated speech on the internet has contributed to the circulation of conspiracy theories conveniently ignores the real cause of those theories: government secrecy.

If the most powerful government in the world were not hiding a massive amount of its behavior behind increasingly opaque walls of secrecy, people would not need to fill in the gaps with theories about what’s happening, because there would be no gaps; they would simply see what’s happening.

“But Caitlin!” one might object. “How could America engage in all its military operations around the world if it didn’t keep information about its behaviors a secret?”

Exactly, my smooth-brained friend. Exactly.

Government secrecy is indeed necessary for winning wars. Government secrecy is also necessary for starting those wars in the first place. US government agencies have an extensive history of using false pretenses to initiate military conflicts; if they could not hide the facts behind a veil of government opacity, the public would never engage in them. The American people would never have allowed their sons to go to Vietnam if they’d known the Gulf of Tonkin incident was a lie. They’d never have sent their sons and daughters to invade Iraq if they’d known weapons of mass destruction were a lie. They would lose the support of the public, and the international community would refuse to back them.

Protecting the lives of foreign military and intelligence personnel is the primary argument against government transparency in the United States, a premise which takes it for granted that there need to be foreign military and intelligence personnel at all. The only reason the lives of troops and intelligence officers would be endangered without massive walls of government secrecy is because those personnel are out there facilitating imperialist acts of mass murder and tyranny. The argument is essentially “Well we can’t tell you the truth about what’s happening in our government, because it would mean we’d have to stop doing extremely evil things.”

The argument that the internet needs strict censorship to eliminate dangerous conspiracy theories takes it as a given that simply eliminating government secrecy is impossible, which in turn takes it as a given that the US government cannot simply stop inflicting grave evils around the world. Our ability to share information with each other online is therefore ultimately being increasingly choked off by monopolistic Silicon Valley megacorporations because no one in charge can fathom the idea of the United States government ceasing to butcher human beings around the world.

That is the real underlying argument over internet censorship today. Should people have free access to information about what their own government is doing, or should their government be permitted to do evil things in secret while people who form theories about what they’re doing are shoved further and further away from audibility? That’s the real debate here.

The powerful should not be permitted to keep secrets from the public. They should not be permitted to jail journalists who try to reveal those secrets to the public, and they should not be permitted to collaborate with monopolistic corporations to censor people who form theories about those secrets. The amount of secrecy you are entitled to should be directly inverse to the amount of power that you have.

The US government has powerful agencies whose literal job is to conspire. The fact that people are punished and condemned for forming theories about how that conspiring might take place, even while those agencies are completely lacking in transparency, is abusive.

If the government was not doing evil things in secret, then it wouldn’t need secrecy. If the government didn’t have secrecy, there would be no conspiracy theories. Stop pointing your attacks at powerless people who are just trying to figure out what’s going on in the world amidst a sea of government secrecy and propaganda, and point your attacks instead at the power structures that are actually responsible for the existence of conspiracy theories in the first place.

Gosh, wasn't the U.S. government dead-set against election interference? Pfffffttttt!!!

US, OAS, Colombia try to steal Ecuador’s election from popular socialist candidate, while spreading fake news

A popular socialist candidate, Andrés Arauz, has won the first round of Ecuador’s presidential election by a landslide on February 7. The triumph by Arauz prompted the US State Department, the right-wing government of neighboring Colombia, and the  Organization of American States (OAS) are now working to prevent him from entering office.

Arauz won the election with 33 percent of the vote, a full 13 percent greater than the second-place candidate, banker Guillermo Lasso. His opponents are note seeking to force a vote recount under the supervision of the OAS, while simultaneously launching a smear campaign relying on blatant disinformation to link Arauz to a Colombian guerrilla group in hopes of disqualifying him.

Arauz has accused Ecuador’s US-backed government, led by right-wing leader Lenín Moreno, of “pushing to persecute me with crude lies… blackmailing and cheating justice.” The former president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, who was targeted in an OAS-sponsored coup in 2019, has also warned that a new plot is afoot.

The Moreno administration has broken records of unpopularity, garnering just an 8 percent approval rating. Against popular discontent, his government is desperately working to disqualify a leftist Correista challenger. Just two weeks before the election, Moreno traveled to Washington, DC to meet with top officials from the US government, as well as the coup-sponsoring general secretary of the OAS, Luis Almagro.

Now, the Moreno administration’s top electoral body is openly conspiring with the second- and third-place candidates, meeting privately with them, giving them a massive public platform to call to “defeat Correismo,” and even agreeing to conduct a recount of the vote in the specific precincts where they lost. This highly politicized recount, which has no legal basis, is estimated to take two weeks – an extraordinary length of time. The unusual process has the full backing of the US State Department, and will be overseen by the OAS, which previously inspired a military coup targeting Bolivia’s democratically elected socialist government in November 2019.

Catalonia election: pro-independence parties increase majority

Catalan pro-independence parties have increased their parliamentary majority following a regional election in which the unionist Socialists took the largest share of the vote and the far-right Vox party outperformed its conservative rivals to win its first seats in the northeastern Spanish region. Sunday’s election was overshadowed by the Covid pandemic and dominated by the continuing debate over independence that has shaped and divided Catalan politics for the past decade.

For the first time, pro-independence parties took more than half the votes, winning 51% – up from 47.5% in the last regional election in December 2017. Between them, they now hold 74 of the 135 seats in the Catalan parliament, an increase of four seats.

The Catalan Socialist party (PSC) finished first, winning 33 seats – up from 17 last time – and 23% of the vote. ... But Salvador Illa, the former Spanish health minister who ran as the PSC candidate, said he would seek to be invested as regional president, adding: “The meaning of my victory is very clear – it’s time to turn the page.” ...

Illa has vowed to heal divisions and “stitch Catalonia back together” if elected, but pro-independence parties responded to the PSC’s strong showing in pre-election polls by agreeing not to make any deals that would help it into government. Aragonès, who serves as Catalonia’s acting president, has dismissed Illa’s approach as “amnesia” and argued that his party will not “turn the page” while independence leaders remain in prison over their role in the doomed attempt at secession.

Myanmar security forces open fire to disperse protesters

Myanmar: tanks roll into cities as internet shut down

Myanmar’s internet has been cut overnight on Sunday, hours after armoured vehicles rolled into several cities, prompting fears for the fate of protesters and warnings by diplomats that “the world is watching”. Armoured cars appeared on the streets of Yangon, Myitkyina and Sittwe on Sunday, live footage broadcast online by local media showed, in the heaviest show of force so far by the military since it staged a coup on 1 February.

The US embassy in Myanmar warned on Sunday evening of reported “military movements” in the country’s main city, Yangon, and said it expected interruptions to internet access.

Around 1.30am, the internet-monitoring service Netblocks reported that national internet connectivity had fallen to 14% of ordinary levels. Contacts in Myanmar could not be reached by email or messaging apps. ...

Unverified video footage and photographs posted on social media also appeared to show military trucks carrying troops on the streets of Yangon.

A group of ambassadors in Myanmar, including the envoys from the EU, US, UK and Canada, put out a statement on Sunday night voicing their concerns about the shutdown and a spate of arrests of activists, civil servants and political leaders over the past week. “We call on security forces to refrain from violence against demonstrators and civilians, who are protesting the overthrow of their legitimate government,” the statement said.

Lancet Report: 40% of U.S. COVID Deaths Were Preventable. The Country Needs Universal Healthcare Now

Daily new Covid cases in US dip below 100,000 for first time in months

Average daily new coronavirus cases in the US have dipped below 100,000 for the first time in months, but experts cautioned on Sunday that infections remain high and precautions to slow the pandemic must remain in place.

The seven-day rolling average of new infections was well above 200,000 for much of December and went to roughly 250,000 in January, according to Johns Hopkins University. That average dropped below 100,000 on Friday for the first time since 4 November. It stayed below 100,000 on Saturday.

“We are still at about 100,000 cases a day,” Dr Rochelle Walensky, director of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), told NBC’s Meet the Press. “We are still at around 1,500 to 3,500 deaths per day. The cases are more than two-and-a-half-fold times what we saw over the summer.

“It’s encouraging to see these trends coming down, but they’re coming down from an extraordinarily high place.”
She added that new variants, including one first detected in the UK that appears to be more transmissible and has already been recorded in more than 30 states, will probably lead to more cases and more deaths. ...

The US has recorded more than 27.5m virus cases and more than 484,000 deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins data.

David Dayen: Katie Porter REMOVED From Financial Services Committee In Shady Dealings

Fed policies spark more concerns over market collapse

As money continues to pour into Wall Street, sending the three major markets indexes—the Nasdaq, the Dow and the S&P 500—to new record highs at the end of last week, there are mounting warnings that the lights are flashing red, signalling that the speculative bubble may soon burst, with major consequences. ... A Bloomberg article published over the weekend pointed to the rise of the so—called “Buffett indicator”—the ratio between the total market capitalization of US stock to the dollar value of the US gross domestic product (GDP). In 2019, it first crossed its previous peak, reached during the dot.com bubble at the turn of this century, and has now reached more than double the estimated GDP for the current quarter.

According to one market analyst cited in the article, the rise in the ratio “highlights the remarkable mania” in US markets, fuelled by the provision of virtually free money by the Fed. “Even if one expected those (Fed) policies to be permanent, which they should not be, it still would not justify paying two times the 25-year average for stocks,” he said.

In a Bloomberg comment posted last week, financial analyst Mohamed El-Arian pointed to the disconnect between the economy and financial markets, which in the short term opened “a bigger window for significant additional fiscal stimulus to supplement ultra-loose monetary policy and financial conditions,” but did so “at the risk of amplifying the policy, financial stability and political risks that await us down the road.” He warned that what might be favourable for fiscal policy and markets in the short term increased future risks, starting with financial stability. “The more Wall Street surges ahead in the short term, the harder it is for eventually improving economic conditions to validate the ever more elevated assets prices in an orderly manner.”

Wall Street Journal editorial board member and columnist Joseph Sternberg took an historical approach in a comment published last week, recalling the hyper-inflation of Weimar Germany in the 1920s. He noted that hyper-inflation was only part of the way monetary excesses destroyed German society at that time. “A consequence of chaotic financial markets [in Germany] was a new boom in speculation,” he wrote. “The economic miseries of the era were not uniformly distributed, and the divergences between new classes of haves and have-nots stoked political and personal resentments alongside rampant corruption. Does any of this sound familiar?”

'Fire DeJoy Before He Burns Down USPS': Postmaster General Pushes Plan for Slower Mail, Higher Prices

Undeterred by the backlash and widespread delays that followed his disruptive operational changes at the U.S. Postal Service last year, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy is reportedly planning to roll out another slate of policies that would significantly hike postage rates and further slow the delivery of certain kinds of mail.

While the plan has yet to be finalized, new details of the proposal—first reported by the Washington Post—intensified pressure on President Joe Biden to take decisive action before DeJoy inflicts any more damage on the most popular government institution in the country.

"Fire DeJoy before he burns down the USPS," Zephyr Teachout, associate professor of law at Fordham University, tweeted Saturday. "Biden has the power to fill the board that decides his fate. That board should be full of people who believe in public postal services. And that board must be ready to fire him quickly."

According to the Post, DeJoy—with the support of the USPS Board of Governors, which is composed entirely of Trump appointees—is "preparing to put all first-class mail onto a single delivery track... a move that would mean slower and more costly delivery for both consumers and commercial mailers."

The postmaster general has also "discussed plans to eliminate a tier of first-class mail—letters, bills, and other envelope-sized correspondence sent to a local address—designated for delivery in two days," the Post reported. "Instead, all first-class mail would be lumped into the same three- to five-day window, the current benchmark for nonlocal mail."

"The plan also prevents first-class mail from being shipped by airplane," the Post noted, "forcing all of it into trucks and a relay of distribution depots."

In addition to the new operational changes—which would be piled on top of the DeJoy policies that dramatically hampered USPS performance last year amid the coronavirus pandemic and national elections—the postmaster general intends to "push for significantly higher postage rates" in the name of raising revenue, according to the Post.

The new details of DeJoy's plan came as a growing number of Democratic lawmakers and outside progressives are urging Biden—who by law cannot fire the postmaster general himself—to take the forceful step of terminating every sitting member of the postal board and filling it with officials committed to preserving and strengthening the USPS as a public service. Postal governors, who can remove the postmaster general with a majority vote, must be confirmed by the U.S. Senate, which Democrats narrowly control.

Corporate Governments Created by Nevada & Big Tech. WTF!

'We Won't Be Intimidated,' Says NY AG After Amazon Files Preemptive Suit Over Covid-19 Worker Safety

New York Attorney General Letitia James responded forcefully on Friday to Amazon's preemptive lawsuit intended to block her from taking legal action against the behemoth corporation over workplace safety during the coronavirus pandemic and the firing of warehouse workers involved in a walkout last spring.

"Throughout this pandemic, Amazon employees have been forced to work in unsafe conditions, all while the company and its CEO made billions off of their backs," James said in a statement about the suit. "This action by Amazon is nothing more than a sad attempt to distract from the facts and shirk accountability for its failures to protect hardworking employees from a deadly virus."

"Let me be clear: We will not be intimidated by anyone, especially corporate bullies that put profits over the health and safety of working people," the state attorney general added. "We remain undeterred in our efforts to protect workers from exploitation and will continue to review all of our legal options."

Amazon on Friday filed a federal suit in the Eastern District Court of New York. The complaint, according to Bloomberg, says James' office "has threatened to sue if the retail giant doesn't comply with a list of demands, which include subsidizing public bus service and reducing production targets required of workers in its warehouses."

As Bloomberg reports:

The company's complaint also amounts to a lengthy and detailed defense of its actions to protect employees, including a day-by-day chronicle of safety measures it rolled out as the respiratory virus spread around the U.S. in March and April.

"Amazon has been intensely focused on Covid-19 safety and has taken extraordinary, industry-leading measures grounded in science, above and beyond government guidance and requirements, to protect its associates from Covid-19," the company said in its complaint.

James launched an investigation into Amazon after workers—including organizer Chris Smalls, who was later fired—protested conditions at a Staten Island warehouse. The state AG said at the time that "it is disgraceful that Amazon would terminate an employee who bravely stood up to protect himself and his colleagues."

Reporting on the company's move Friday, the New York Daily News noted that "Smalls says that he and another employee, Derrick Palmer, were terminated in retaliation for starting the protests. Amazon has argued that the two employees were terminated for their own failure to comply with health regulations."

'Beyond Outrageous': Big Pharma Using Loophole to Get Taxpayers to Fund Billions in Fines for Fueling Opioid Crisis

Four pharmaceutical corporations that agreed to pay a combined $26 billion to settle lawsuits resulting from a deadly opioid crisis they helped create reportedly plan to recoup a portion of those costs by deducting roughly $4.6 billion of the payouts from their taxes—sparking intense condemnation.

Big Pharma is attempting to make the public cover some of the fines related to lawsuits filed by dozens of state and local governments highlighting the culpability of opioid manufacturers and distributors in the deaths of an estimated 70,000 people per year.

As Public Citizen president Robert Weissman put it in a statement released Friday, "The drug companies are settling with taxpayers (local government entities) and then demanding that taxpayers pay part of the cost (via a federal tax subsidy)."

The Washington Post, which analyzed regulatory filings, reported Friday that "as details of the blockbuster settlement were still being worked out, pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson and the 'big three' drug distributors—McKesson, AmerisourceBergen, and Cardinal Health—all updated their financial projections to include large tax benefits stemming from the expected deal." ...

According to the Post, "U.S. tax laws generally restrict companies from deducting the cost of legal settlements from their taxes, with one major exception: Damages paid to victims as restitution for the misdeeds can usually be deducted."

The newspaper noted that "Congress has placed stricter limits on such deductions in recent years, and some tax experts say the Internal Revenue Service could challenge the companies' attempts to deduct opioid settlement costs."

But the ploy might work, as The Week noted, thanks to the CARES Act, which "opened up billions of dollars in tax breaks to companies regardless of pandemic suffering."

The Post provided an example of how one of the companies may exploit the loophole: "Dublin, Ohio-based drug distributor Cardinal Health said earlier this month it planned to collect a $974 million cash refund because it claimed its opioid-related legal costs as a 'net operating loss carryback'—a tax provision Congress included in last year's coronavirus bailout package as a way of helping companies struggling during the pandemic."

Four drug companies that fueled the opioid epidemic paid $26 billion in legal settlements.

Yet they are getting $4.6 billion of it back through tax write-offs.

The tax code is so rigged for the rich that even when they kill people they get a tax break.https://t.co/KwMQdubrxF

— Dan Price (@DanPriceSeattle) February 12, 2021

"Whether the payments will be deductible may hinge on specific word choices in the final terms of the settlement," the newspaper reported. "Though recent changes to the tax code have attempted to close loopholes that permit companies to deduct taxes when they have committed wrongdoing, many companies now push to make sure their settlements include a 'restitution' payment for victims—the 'magic word' that often qualifies them for deductions."

Reversing Xenophobic Trump Policy, Biden to Allow 25,000 Asylum-Seekers Stuck in Mexico to Enter US

The Biden administration on Friday announced plans to allow tens of thousands of asylum-seekers living in encampments near the border into the United States while they await their next immigration court hearings, fulfilling a campaign promise to end a Trump administration policy that forced asylum-seekers to endure dangerous conditions in Mexico pending legal review of their cases.

The first of approximately 25,000 asylum-seekers with active cases who are waiting in Mexico will be permitted to enter the U.S. on February 19. Authorities "plan to start slowly with two border crossings each processing up to 300 people a day and a third crossing taking fewer," the Associated Press reported Friday. "Administration officials declined to name them out of fear they may encourage a rush of people to those locations."

AP described the move as "a major step toward dismantling one of former President Donald Trump's most consequential policies to deter asylum-seekers from coming to the U.S."

Since the Trump administration's "Remain in Mexico" policy, officially called Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), was introduced in 2019, the xenophobic program "exposed people to violence in Mexican border cities," AP noted, "and made it extremely difficult for them to find lawyers and communicate with courts about their cases."

Glenn Greenwald On Censorship + Neera Tanden’s Greatest Hits | Useful Idiots

The “For the People Act” Would Make the U.S. a Democracy

Since the 117th Congress was convened on January 3, over 2,000 bills have been introduced in the House and Senate. But the very first legislation proposed by the Democratic Party majorities in both chambers — making it both H.R.1 and S.1 — is the “For the People Act” of 2021. This is appropriate, because the For the People Act is plausibly the most important legislation considered by Congress in decades. It would change the basic structure of U.S. politics, making it far more small-d democratic. The bill makes illegal essentially all of the anti-enfranchisement tactics perfected by the right over the past decades. It then creates a new infrastructure to permanently bolster the influence of regular people.

The bill’s provisions largely fall into three categories: First, it makes it far easier to vote, both by eliminating barriers and enhancing basic outreach to citizens. Second, it makes everyone’s vote count more equally, especially by reducing gerrymandering. Third, it hugely amplifies the power of small political donors, allowing them to match and possibly swamp the power of big money. ...

The For the People Act also includes a huge number of other positive measures. It would reform the Federal Election Commission, which is now all but toothless, letting campaigns commit obvious violations of the law. It would lessen the power of super PACs. It would create a code of ethics for the nine Supreme Court justices, something which, incredibly enough, has never existed in U.S. history. ...

It’s difficult to believe, based on its lamentable history of squabbling and in-fighting, that the Democratic Party will manage to hang together and pass a significant bill that’s both in their own obvious self-interest and in that of the country. But stranger things have happened, such as the fact that the For the People Act has gotten this far in the first place.

The best way to stop Trump from coming back would be actually governing and making ordinary people's lives materially better.

— Gravel Institute (@GravelInstitute) February 13, 2021

Democrats defend decision not to call witnesses as tactic under scrutiny

Democrats defended their prosecution of Donald Trump’s impeachment trial on Sunday and hinted at the possibility of criminal charges, after failing to convince enough senators the former president was guilty of inciting the deadly Capitol attack. The 57-43 vote for a conviction, which fell short of the two-thirds majority required, was still the biggest bipartisan impeachment vote in US history and amounted to “a complete repudiation” of Trump’s conduct, lead House manager Jamie Raskin insisted. Seven Republicans crossed party lines to vote with every Democratic and independent senator after the five-day trial.

But the tactics of Raskin and his team have come under scrutiny, with some Democrats asking if the decision not to seek witness testimony, after senators voted early on the trial’s final day to allow it, was a mistake. Specifically, evidence was not heard from the Washington congresswoman Jaime Herrera Beutler about a call between Trump and Republican House leader Kevin McCarthy during the 6 January riot showing that the president would not call off his supporters.

“Well Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election theft than you are,” Beutler said Trump replied when the House minority leader pleaded for him to recall the mob who overran the Capitol in support of the president’s false claims of a stolen election.

On Sunday, the Washington Post reported that the question of whether to call witnesses sparked lengthy debate among the House managers, who ultimately agreed to a deal to accept Beutler’s statement as a written record. The decision diverted the likelihood of the trial extending days, if not weeks as both sides deposed witnesses. ...

“These Republicans voted to acquit in the face of this mountain of unrefuted evidence,” Raskin told NBC’s Meet the Press. “There’s no reasoning with people who basically are acting like members of a religious cult.”

Conservative Lawyer Bruce Fein: Trump’s Acquittal Gives Future Presidents License to Break the Law

GOP Refusal to Convict Trump Is 'A Clarion Call for Eliminating the Filibuster,' Says Ro Khanna

Democrats' failure to convince even just 10 of their Senate Republican counterparts to vote to convict Donald Trump for inciting a deadly insurrection was viewed by progressive lawmakers and activists as a case in point for why the majority party must eliminate the legislative filibuster if it hopes to implement its agenda on climate, immigration, voting rights, and other key issues.

Just seven Republicans on Saturday joined every member of the Democratic caucus in casting "guilty" votes against the former president, leaving the Senate well short of the two-thirds majority—67 votes—required for conviction.

If Democrats could not persuade 10 of their GOP colleagues to vote to hold the former president accountable for provoking a coup attempt that left five people dead, progressives asked, why would they expect to convince 10 Republicans to join them in breaking the archaic 60-vote Senate filibuster that is standing in the way of crucial legislative priorities?

Dear Centrist Democrats, you couldn’t even get 10 GOP votes to convict the guy who sent a mob to kill you all. You think you can get them to vote on issues like immigration/climate? Come on.

You have to end the Filibuster & use every tool at your disposal to get things done.

— Erika Andiola (@ErikaAndiola) February 13, 2021

"The fact that we could not get even 60 senators to vote for the most obvious proposition of convicting Trump is a clarion call for eliminating the filibuster!" Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) tweeted, a sentiment that others echoed in the hours following the Senate's second acquittal of the twice-impeached former president.

500+ Scientists Demand Stop to Tree Burning as Climate Solution

A group of over 500 international scientists on Thursday urged world leaders to end policies that prop up the burning of trees for energy because it poses "a double climate problem" that threatens forests' biodiversity and efforts to stem the planet's ecological emergency.

The demand came in a letter addressed to European Commission President Urusla Von der Leyen, European Council President Charles Michel, U.S. President Joe Biden, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, and South Korean President Moon Jae-in. The signatories—including renowned botanist Dr. Peter Raven, president emeritus of the Missouri Botanical Garden—reject the assertion that burning biomass is carbon neutral.

Referring to forest "preservation and restoration" as key in meeting the nations' declared goals of carbon neutrality by 2050, the letter frames the slashing of trees for bioenergy as "misguided."

"We urge you not to undermine both climate goals and the world's biodiversity by shifting from burning fossil fuels to burning trees to generate energy," the group wrote.

The destruction of forests, which are a carbon sink, creates a "carbon debt." And though regrowing "trees and displacement of fossil fuels may eventually pay off this carbon debt," the signatories say that "regrowth takes time the world does not have to solve climate change."

What's more, burning trees is "carbon-inefficient," they say. "Overall, for each kilowatt hour of heat or electricity produced, using wood initially is likely to add two to three times as much carbon to the air as using fossil fuels."

Another issue is that efforts using taxpayer money to sustain biomass burning stymies what are truly renewable energy policies.

"Government subsidies for burning wood create a double climate problem because this false solution is replacing real carbon reductions," the letter states. "Companies are shifting fossil energy use to wood, which increases warming, as a substitute for shifting to solar and wind, which would truly decrease warming."

The letter denounces as further troubling proposals to burn palm oil and soybean, which would entail further deforestation to make way for palm and soy crops.

'Closing a portal to the Creator': fresh setback for attempt to prevent destruction of US holy land by miner

Efforts to prevent a sacred Native American site from being destroyed by a copper mine received a setback yesterday, when a federal judge rejected Apache tribal members’ request to halt the site’s transfer to a a multi-national mining company.

While US district judge Steven Logan acknowledged that the mine would “close off a portal to the Creator forever and will completely devastate the Western Apaches’ lifeblood”, he said the activist group Apache Stronghold lacked legal standing in the case since it represented tribal individuals rather than a tribal government.

Logan also said Apache Stronghold’s case did not prove an “immediate burden” or meet the narrow definition of violations under a federal law protecting religious freedoms. Although the preliminary injunction failed, the larger case is still moving forward and may go to trial, but the ruling removes any legal barrier for the 2,422-acre Arizona parcel called Oak Flat to become the property of Resolution Copper by 11 March.

Called Chi’chil Bildagoteel in Apache, Oak Flat is listed on the National Register of Historic Places for its spiritual and cultural significance to at least a dozen south-west Native American tribes. It contains hundreds of Indigenous archaeological sites dating back 1,500 years. Oak Flat also sits atop one of the largest untapped copper deposits in the world, estimated to be worth more than $1bn. The mining operation will consume 11 sq miles (17 sq km), including Apache burial grounds, sacred sites, petroglyphs and medicinal plants. ...

Some legal scholars disagreed with the ruling as well. “Our religious freedom laws wouldn’t allow the government to demolish churches with impunity, and the same should be true of a site that has been sacred to the Apache people for generations,” said Stephanie Barclay, Notre Dame law professor and director of Notre Dame Law School’s Religious Liberty Initiative. The group filed a brief in US district court this week in support of the Apache Stronghold case.

Texas sees one of its coldest winters in decades as temperatures drop

Texas is experiencing one of its coldest winter in decades , with temperatures expected to drop to as low as 11F (-12C) in Houston and 9F (-13C) San Antonio under a winter storm warning. The governor, Greg Abbott, issued a disaster declaration for every county in the state on Friday, as conditions continued to get colder over the weekend.

Warnings were issued by other government officials across the state, including Houston’s mayor, Sylvester Turner, who cited concerns about icy road conditions and urge people to not drive and stay home. Last Thursday, the city of Fort Worth saw a pileup of up to 100 cars, where five people died and several others were injured.

Unlike north-east states, Texas roads are not typically laid with salt, which helps melt ice. So roads in the state are not equipped to handle ice or sleet and most cars in the state don’t have snow tires. The average temperature for February is about 48F in Houston and 43F in San Antonio, making this winter exceptionally cold.

Also of Interest

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

We’re Living In A Movie About Fascism

Impeachment Trial Is Not About Convincing GOP Senators—Many of Whom Were Trump’s Co-Conspirators

Seven Republican rebels who voted to convict feel Trumpists' fury

Biden Admin Signals Goal to Close Gitmo

States Have No Inherent ‘Right to Exist’—but It’s a Media Fixation on Israel/Palestine

Reps Would Have to Resign From Corporate Boards Under Democrats’ Ethics Bill

Glenn Greenwald: The Lincoln Project, Facing Multiple Scandals, is Accused by its Own Co-Founder of Likely Criminality

Subpoenas Start to Fly in the GameStop Saga as a Dude Sitting in Federal Prison Offers Guidance

The Simplest Explanation For Not Breaking Covid Vaccine Patents

The Chicago plant that sparked a hunger strike amid environmental racism claims

World's oldest known beer factory may have been unearthed in Egypt

Jimmy Dore: WashPo Blames Capitol Protest On Economic Despair.

A Little Night Music

Arthur 'Big Boy' Crudup - Rock Me Mama

Arthur Crudup - My Baby Left Me

Arthur 'Big Boy' Crudup (Elmer James) - Make A Little Love With Me

Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup - So Glad You 're Mine

Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup - Death Valley Blues

Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup - I'm Gonna Dig Myself A Hole

Arthur Crudup - Who's Been Foolin' You

Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup - Shout Sister Shout

Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup - Chicago Blues

Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup - Mean Ol' Frisco Blues