The Evening Blues - 3-31-17



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The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: Hound Dog Taylor

Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features Chicago bluesman Hound Dog Taylor. Enjoy!

Hound Dog Taylor - Christine

"President Trump and his wealthy friends have just discovered how complicated healthcare is in this country — for the rest of us that is. They will soon find out that U.S. militarism is just as complicated, and for many of the same reasons. Healthcare is uniquely complicated in the United States because the U.S. is the only wealthy country in the world where for-profit corporate interests have carved out such a dominant role in the sickness and health of its people. ... Our dysfunctional medical industry and our murderous war machine are by far the most expensive “healthcare” and “defense” systems in the world. Both are hugely profitable, but neither provides value for money in the form of a healthier or a safer society, the stated missions that justify their existence and their endlessly-expanding demands on our resources.

These are also the two areas of public policy in which bad policy predictably and inevitably leads to massive losses of human life. In terms of keeping people safe from disease and war respectively, U.S. “healthcare” and U.S. “defense” both fail catastrophically despite their ever-growing price tags. In fact, the huge amounts of money involved contribute to their failures by corrupting and distorting the non-commercial purposes they are both supposed to serve."

-- Nicolas J S Davies


News and Opinion

Trump said he'd stop dragging us into war. That's yet another fat lie

Remember when presidential candidate Donald Trump blasted former president George Bush for dragging the United States into the Iraq war, calling the invasion a “big, fat mistake”? How, then, does that square with now President Donald Trump stepping up US military involvement in Iraq, as well as in Syria and Yemen, and quite literally blasting hundreds of innocent civilians in the process? ...

According to the UK-based organization Airwars, for the first time since Russia intervened in Syria’s civil war in 2015, US strikes in Syria are now responsible for more civilian casualties than Russian strikes. ... The devastating airstrikes in Iraq and Syria are sowing panic and distrust. Residents have reported that more civilian buildings such as hospitals and schools are being attacked. ... Trump’s deepening military involvement in the Middle East morass also extends to Yemen, with similar tragic consequences.

“The destructive cycle of intervention and chaos must finally come to an end,” roared Trump in one of his “thank you” speeches just after the election. To the cheers of the crowd, he promised that the United States would be pulling back from conflicts around the world that are not in America’s vital national interest.

It looks like that promise was one big, fat lie. Trump is dragging the United States even deeper into the Middle East quagmire, with more and more civilians paying the ultimate price.

Here is an excerpt from an excellent interview of journalist Gareth Porter:

Aiding Saudi Arabia’s Slaughter in Yemen

Dennis Bernstein: Is Saudi Arabia using starvation as a weapon of war against Yemen where there is mass hunger bordering on a famine? Gareth Porter has been writing extensively about this for Consortiumnews and other sources. I want to … begin with a bit of an overview because a lot of people don’t really understand the level of suffering, and the situation in Yemen. So, just give us a brief overview of what it’s like on the ground now. How bad is it? And then I want to talk to you about this new policy about starvation as a weapon.

Gareth Porter: Sure. Well, unfortunately the way this war in Yemen has been covered, thus far, with a few exceptions, of course, the public does have the impression that this is a war in which a few thousand Yemenis have been killed, and therefore, it’s kind of second to third tier, in terms of wars in the Middle East. Because people are aware that Syria is one in which hundreds of thousands of people have died. So, and I think that’s the frame that most people have on the conflict in Yemen.

And that’s very unfortunate, because maybe it’s true that it’s only been several thousands, or let’s say ten thousand plus people, who have been killed by the bombs, directly. But what’s really been happening for well over a year, I think it’s fair to say a year to a year and a half, is that more people are dying of starvation-related or malnutrition-related diseases and starvation, than from the bombs themselves. And this is a fact which I’m sorry to say simply has not gotten into the press coverage of the war, thus far.

And, of course, the Saudis launched the war in late March, 2015 with the full support of the Obama administration. They had that agreement ahead of time, before they started, that the United States would provide the logistical support, the bombs, help in targeting, not explicitly targeting but sort of technical assistance in making decisions about how to approach the war.

And, more important than any of those things, in some ways, was the assurance the United States government would provide the political/diplomatic cover, for this war. And I think that’s really the crucial problem here. That the Saudis have felt that they could get away with not just continuing to bomb civilian targets, and infrastructure targets, and, essentially establishing a thorough going blockade, economic blockade of the country, preventing the fuel, the food, and the medicine from coming into the country that this poor… really the poorest nation in the Middle East have to have in order to survive. But now, as you suggested in your intro, is actually trying to impose, to use starvation as a weapon.

So, the Pentagon knew that the building was crammed full of people - but decided to bomb them anyway:

Pentagon responds to criticism over civilian deaths in Mosul blast

The Pentagon on Thursday said it would soon release a video showing Islamic State militants herding civilians into a building in the Iraqi city of Mosul and then firing from it, the U.S. military's latest response to an outcry over a separate explosion thought to have killed scores of civilians. ...

Local officials and eyewitnesses have said as many as 240 people may have died in the Al-Jadida district when a blast made a building collapse, burying families inside. ...

A spokesman for the U.S-led coalition fighting Islamic State told reporters on Thursday he was working to declassify a video showing militants hiding civilians in a building in west Mosul to "bait the coalition to attack."

"What was see now is not the use of civilians as human shields ... For the first time we caught this on video yesterday as armed ISIS fighters forced civilians into a building, killing one who resisted and then used that building as a fighting position against the (Counter Terrorism Service)," Colonel Joseph Scrocca said.

Woohoo! US State Department grants Syria limited rights to self-determination! Sadly, that is a major capitulation.

In shift, Tillerson says Assad’s status up to Syrian people

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said on Thursday that the fate of Syrian President Bashar Assad was up to the war-ravaged country’s people.

Speaking after talks in Ankara, he added there was “no space” between Turkey and the US over fighting the so-called Islamic State group — even as his Turkish counterpart reiterated a key point of discord. ...

Under Barack Obama’s administration, the US made the departure of Assad a key policy aim, but new US President Donald Trump has put the accent firmly on defeating IS. ...

The trip comes after Turkey announced “Euphrates Shield,” its operation in northern Syria, had ended but did not say if troops had been withdrawn from the war-torn country.

Rex Tillerson Fails to Acknowledge Concerns over Turkey's Slide Toward Dictatorship in Ankara Visit

Journalists Sue Trump Over Inclusion on 'Kill List'

Two journalists have sued President Donald Trump saying they are on the "Kill List"—an "illegal death sentence" that violates their constitutional rights and impedes their professional work, the lawsuit charges.

The plaintiffs are 46-year-old Bilal Abdul Kareem, a U.S. citizen and freelance journalist who reports on the ongoing conflict in Syria. The other, 54-year-old Ahmed Zaidan, is a senior journalist with Al Jazeera and is a Syrian and Pakistani citizen. In 1998 Zaidan was the first journalist to interview Osama Bin Laden, and his work has been featured on CNN and PBS's "Frontline."

The lawsuit (pdf) filed Thursday by human rights organization Reprieve and the Washington, D.C. law firm Lewis Baach in the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. argues: "Plaintiffs' inclusion on the Kill List is the result of arbitrary and capricious agency action, accomplished without due process, and in violation of the United States Constitution and U.S. and international law."

Their designation on the list, the suit argues, was due to the fact that their "travel, communications, social media content and contacts, related data, and metadata have been input into 'algorithms' used by the United States to identify terrorists."

And though the two journalists were put on list by President Barack Obama, that list has been inherited by Trump, who "has continued to include them on the Kill List and has, in addition, removed certain restrictions and criteria previously employed in the designation of persons to be included on the Kill List."

Trump accepts Israeli settlement exception, US official says

The Trump administration accepts Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's rationale for approving one exceptional new settlement for evacuees of Amona, an Israeli outpost in the West Bank that was dismantled last month, one senior administration official told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday.

Earlier in the day, Israel's security cabinet approved a new settlement that was promised by Netanyahu to former residents of Amona. Their outpost was evacuated after Israel's High Court ruled it was an illegal construction.

Behind Michael Flynn's Turkish Lobbying Controversy, An Israeli Gas Pipeline

Russia is a ‘strategic competitor' to the west, says James Mattis

The US defence secretary, James Mattis, has described Russia as a “strategic competitor” after meeting his UK counterpart Sir Michael Fallon in London, despite Donald Trump’s White House seeking to work with Vladimir Putin. Mattis spoke about the extent of Russian interference globally, from other people’s elections to engagement with the Taliban in Afghanistan and its development of a new missile.

“Right now Russia is choosing to be a strategic competitor,” he said, accusing Moscow of interfering in other people’s elections, though he did not specifically mention the the 2016 US presidential race. Mattis said: “Russia’s violations of international law are now a matter of record, from what happened with Crimea to other aspects of their behaviour in mucking around inside other people’s elections, and that sort of thing.”

His approach contrasts with that of Trump, who has praised Putin and is embroiled in a row over the extent of alleged links between Russia and his campaign team in the run-up to November’s election. The US defence secretary’s description of Nato’s common defence policy as being the “bedrock” of west’s transatlantic alliance contrasted with Trump who last year cast doubt on American commitments. Mattis, on his first trip to the UK as defence secretary, told a press conference in London that Nato’s article 5, which commits the other 27 members of the organisation to come to the aid of a member state under attack, was an absolute given.

Trump sets himself on collision course with China ahead of Xi meeting

Donald Trump has set himself on a collision course with Chinese president Xi Jinping, saying the first meeting between the two leaders would be “very difficult”. Xi will travel to the US next week and will have his first face to face meeting with Trump at Mar-a-lago, the US president’s country club in Florida, from April 6 to 7.

But just hours after the trip was officially announced, Trump used Twitter to slam China for its trade balance with the US, setting an ominous tone for what many call “the most important bilateral relationship in the world”. “The meeting next week with China will be a very difficult one in that we can no longer have massive trade deficits and job losses. American companies must be prepared to look at other alternatives,” Trump wrote in a pair of tweets.

Trump’s erratic behaviour is likely to cast a shadow over Xi’s visit, with US officials also criticising China over North Korea. “This is a very dangerous way to start the meeting,” said Amy King, a senior lecturer at Australian National University and expert on Chinese foreign relations. “Trump needs to recognise there is very little he can do in terms of getting China to yield by threatening high tariffs, and they would simply have a backfire effect on the US economy.” China is already looking for ways to retaliate against the US, King added, with Trump rhetoric “making the Chinese government pretty nervous”.

Julian Assange waits for Ecuador's election to decide his future

For Ecuador’s 15 million inhabitants, Sunday’s presidential election runoff will pose a fundamental question: whether to continue with a leftwing government that has reduced poverty but also brought environmental destruction and authoritarian censorship, or to take a chance on a pro-business banker who promises economic growth but is accused of siphoning money to offshore accounts.

But they are not the only ones for whom the result will be critically important. Thousands of miles away, in the country’s tiny embassy in central London, Julian Assange will be watching closely to see if his four and a half years of cramped asylum could be coming to an abrupt, enforced end.

Guillermo Lasso, the businessman and leading opposition candidate, has vowed that if he wins, the WikiLeaks founder’s time in the embassy will be up. Lasso has said he would “cordially ask Señor Assange to leave within 30 days of assuming a mandate”, because his presence in the Knightsbridge embassy was a burden on Ecuadorian taxpayers.

His government opponent, Lenin Moreno, has said Assange would remain welcome, albeit with conditions. “We will always be alert and ask Mr Assange to show respect in his declarations regarding our brotherly and friendly countries,” Moreno said. The most recent polling showed Moreno at least four percentage points ahead of his rival, though earlier polls had Lasso in the lead, and many analysts caution that the results are within the margin of error.

Wikileaks Releases New Batch of CIA Documents

Today, March 31st 2017, WikiLeaks releases Vault 7 "Marble" -- 676 source code files for the CIA's secret anti-forensic Marble Framework. Marble is used to hamper forensic investigators and anti-virus companies from attributing viruses, trojans and hacking attacks to the CIA.

Marble does this by hiding ("obfuscating") text fragments used in CIA malware from visual inspection. This is the digital equivallent of a specalized CIA tool to place covers over the english language text on U.S. produced weapons systems before giving them to insurgents secretly backed by the CIA.

Marble forms part of the CIA's anti-forensics approach and the CIA's Core Library of malware code. It is "[D]esigned to allow for flexible and easy-to-use obfuscation" as "string obfuscation algorithms (especially those that are unique) are often used to link malware to a specific developer or development shop."

The Marble source code also includes a deobfuscator to reverse CIA text obfuscation. Combined with the revealed obfuscation techniques, a pattern or signature emerges which can assist forensic investigators attribute previous hacking attacks and viruses to the CIA. Marble was in use at the CIA during 2016. It reached 1.0 in 2015.

The source code shows that Marble has test examples not just in English but also in Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic and Farsi. This would permit a forensic attribution double game, for example by pretending that the spoken language of the malware creator was not American English, but Chinese, but then showing attempts to conceal the use of Chinese, drawing forensic investigators even more strongly to the wrong conclusion, --- but there are other possibilities, such as hiding fake error messages.

The Marble Framework is used for obfuscation only and does not contain any vulnerabilties or exploits by itself.

States Doubling Down on #BroadbandPrivacy After Congress Sells Out

The growing backlash to federal rollback of regulations continued this week, as Minnesota and Illinois both made moves to protect internet privacy after Congress voted to let broadband providers sell user data to third parties without permission. In what the Pioneer Press called a "surprise move" on Wednesday, the Minnesota Senate voted to bar internet service providers (ISPs) from selling customer data without their written consent. ...

Meanwhile, on Thursday, Democratic lawmakers in Illinois considered implementing their own internet privacy rules in response to the congressional vote. An Illinois House committee endorsed two online privacy measures, including one that would allow users to find out what data internet companies like Google and Facebook have on them and which third parties they've shared it with.

"People are looking to us now to provide protections for consumers," state Rep. Arthur Turner (D-Chicago), who proposed the right-to-know bill, said Thursday, the Associated Press reported.

Ed Yohnka, a spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Illinois, told the AP that legislation like this was necessary because of the now "razor-thin" line between government and private interests, who can sell data to federal agencies. "This is a new age and privacy really means a completely different thing," Yohnka said.

EU Commission President Juncker in jaw-dropping threat to Trump over support for Brexit

In an extraordinary speech the EU Commission president said he would push for Ohio and Texas to split from the rest of America if Trump does not change his tune and become more supportive of the EU.

Venezuela opposition allege coup as supreme court seizes power

Venezuela has lurched further away from democracy – and closer to confrontation with its regional neighbours – after the pro-government supreme court assumed the legislative powers of the opposition-controlled congress. Judges ruled that lawmakers were in contempt of court because they were holding up efforts to revive the crisis-stricken economy. Opposition congressmen decried the move by the justices as a step towards dictatorship. ...

President Nicolás Maduro lost control of congress in December 2015 when voters – angry about soaring inflation, rising poverty and shortages of medicines and basic commodities – inflicted a heavy legislative election defeat on the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela. Since then, relations between the administration and the legislature have been stuck between tension and conflict. Last year, the government quashed an attempt to force a recall referendum, prompting street protests.

Vatican-backed efforts to bring the two sides to the negotiating table broke down in November as the economy spiralled further out of control. Opposition leaders are now calling for a new wave of street demonstrations, prompting fears of a repeat of the deadly violence seen in recent protests.

[For a better, outside the mainstream media perspective on the recent events in Venezuela, there's this: Twilight of the Idols: Venezuela’s National Assembly Goes Belly Up - js]

Fake News: Venezuela Upholds Rule of Law, But Press Calls It Dictatorship

The powers that be and the mainstream media are now rushing to say that Venezuela is now “a one man rule”. However, in what modern democracy can a parliament accept as voting members people who have NOT been duly elected because the voting process in their district was proven to have been grossly irregular? How can decisions taken by that parliament in which these non-elected people are recognized and participate, be in any way legitimate parliamentary decisions? That is the situation in which the National Assembly of Venezuela, with an opposition majority, finds itself.

On July 28, 2016 the National Assembly swore in as assembly deputies three individuals who had been suspended by the Venezuelan Supreme Court (TSJ) because of an ongoing investigation on gross irregularities involving vote buying in their district, the Amazon state. There are telephone recordings of a high placed official of that state government offering a great deal of money to groups of people in exchange for their votes for opposition candidates.

The National Assembly, ignoring and violating the Supreme Court decision that suspended these people, proceeded as if it was business as usual in the legislature. Therefore, on 28 March 2017 the Supreme Court released a ruling that it will temporarily assume the functions of the National Assembly until that body ceases to be in contempt of court, that is, until the three offending deputies are removed. This is in accordance to Article 336.7 of the Venezuela Constitution that allows the Supreme Court to take corrective measures in the case of an unconstitutional parliamentary omission.

On 28 March 2017, Luis Almagro, the director of the Organization of American States (OAS) called for Venezuela to be suspended from the OAS opening the way for foreign intervention in Venezuela, alleging a violation of democratic principles. This is the same OAS that kept silent about the parliamentary coups d’etat in Brazil and Paraguay, the coup d’etat in Honduras,  that has kept silent on the hideous assassinations of students and journalists in Mexico, and the multitude of human rights violations of labour unionists in Colombia.

Federal judge ensures Trump's travel ban won't go into effect anytime soon

After keeping President Donald Trump’s travel ban from going into effect earlier this month over concerns that it would violate the First Amendment, U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson issued another ruling Wednesday extending his hold on the executive order. In a hearing in Honolulu, Watson heard arguments from Hawaii Attorney General Douglas Chin, asking to extend the block, and government attorneys, who wanted the judge to at least narrow its scope. ...

Department of Justice lawyers had hoped to convince Watson to only block the part of the executive order that applied to the six countries, but the judge declined.

Watson’s original order was a temporary restraining order — an emergency measure that ends after a certain time period. In his ruling Wednesday, Watson extended that order to a preliminary injunction, which can remain in effect throughout an entire court case. And the legal battle against Trump’s ban could go all the way to the Supreme Court.

Seattle is suing the Trump administration for threatening to defund sanctuary cities

Seattle officials announced Wednesday that the city is suing President Donald Trump’s administration over its threat to strip funding from sanctuary cities, an unofficial term for jurisdictions that don’t detain undocumented immigrants indefinitely just because the feds ask. Earlier this year, Trump signed an executive order to strip grants from these cities on the grounds that they’re breaking federal law.

Seattle’s lawsuit argues that Trump’s order is not only unconstitutional but also dangerous and unfair to the inhabitants of the more than 100 cities that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement recognize as having sanctuary status. The federal law Trump cited in his executive order prohibits state and local governments from blocking their employees’ from communicating with ICE — it doesn’t require them to detain undocumented immigrants accused of crimes until federal agents can start the deportation process. ...

The lawsuit also disputes the Trump administration’s repeated claims that undocumented immigrants lead to more crime, a correlation unsupported by research. Rather, Seattle fears that if the city were forced to give up its sanctuary status, undocumented immigrants would retreat into their homes and stop interacting with police due to fears of being deported — which could lead to more crime. In Los Angeles, for example, Latinos are reporting fewer sexual assault and domestic abuse for that exact reason, the Los Angeles Police Department chief recently announced.

The robot debate is over: the jobs are gone and they aren't coming back

In 2013, the Oxford Martin School released a report that looked at the automation of work, assessing the likelihood that robots and other technologies would replace humans. It concluded that of the 702 job categories examined, 47% were susceptible to automation within the next 20 years. ... Now, a new report by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in the United States is set to be an even bigger wake-up call. Written by economists Daron Acemoglu (MIT) and Pascual Restrepo (Boston University), it not only adds support to the Oxford Martin conclusions, it actually suggests the jobs are already lost and unlikely to come back.

It contends that in the US between 1990 and 2007, the addition of each robot into manufacturing industries resulted in the loss, on average, of 6.2 human jobs. It also suggests automation depressed wages by between a quarter and a half of one per cent. ... There is another important insight: these jobs losses and lower wages are likely to have a lasting and devastating effect. Author Daron Acemoglu told the New York Times that, “even if overall employment and wages recover, there will be losers in the process, and it’s going to take a very long time for these communities to recover. The market economy is not going to create the jobs by itself for these workers who are bearing the brunt of the change.”

What lends the NBER report added authority is it doesn’t rely on modelling to predict what robots are likely to do to jobs in the future, but on hard data to look at what robots are already doing to jobs in the present. The results are so startling that even the authors were surprised, having previously taken a much more sceptical line. The report also challenges the neoliberal tenet that unregulated markets are a surefire way to full employment, and it can reasonably be taken to imply a large role for governments in managing the change that is coming. Additionally, it undermines the persistent claim that technology will create enough jobs in the future because this is what happened in the past.

Well now, here's a surprise. (not)

To Those Who Trusted Him on Trade, Trump Prepares 'Punch in the Face'

In yet another broken promise, President Donald Trump appears to be walking back his campaign rhetoric on the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA—preparing to deliver what one critic described as "a punch in the face" to those who trusted Trump to make the trade deal better for working people.

According to the Wall Street Journal on Thursday, a draft proposal being circulated in Congress by the U.S. trade representative's office "would keep some of NAFTA's most controversial provisions, including an arbitration panel that lets investors in the three nations circumvent local courts to resolve civil claims."

Such panels are regarded with suspicion by environmental, labor, public health, and democracy advocates, who say they put corporate welfare above the public interest. As Friends of the Earth president Erich Pica said Thursday, "These tribunals allow corporations to punish governments wishing to enforce sensible environmental and public interest regulations by imposing massive monetary damages."

With the leaked proposal, Pica said, "Trump and members of his administration are proving that they will always prioritize CEOs over the working men and women who have suffered from NAFTA's punishing trade policy."

Citing trade scholar Jeffrey Schott, the Wall Street Journal further reported that "a number of the proposed negotiating objectives echo provisions in the Trans-Pacific Partnership [TPP], a 12-nation trade pact among Pacific Rim countries. Mr. Trump campaigned heavily against the TPP. The president pulled the U.S. from the deal on his first working day in office."

Dave Dayen watchdogs and fact-checks Obamacrat Larry Summers' incredible hypocrisy. An excellent take down:

Larry Summers Had the Power to Punish Wall Street. Now He’s Slamming Obama’s Gentle Treatment.

As head of Barack Obama's National Economic Council during 2009 and 2010 at the height of the foreclosure crisis, Larry Summers broke many promises to help homeowners while simultaneously dismissing Wall Street’s criminality. Now, after the Obama administration has left power and Summers has no ability to influence anything, he finds himself “disturbed” that settlements for mortgage misconduct are full of lies. Those of us who screamed exactly this for years, when Summers might have been able to do something about it, are less than amused. ...

Summers highlights an agreement last April, where Goldman Sachs needed to supply $1.8 billion in consumer relief to homeowners to settle claims that they swindled investors with mortgage-backed securities. But Goldman Sachs didn’t own any mortgages. So it bought distressed mortgages in bulk on the open market, for as low as 50 cents on the dollar. Then it modified the balance to, say, 60 cents on the dollar, satisfying the consumer relief while earning profit.

In other words, Obama’s Justice Department sentenced Goldman Sachs to make money. A more recent Deutsche Bank settlement allowed the bank to invest in hedge funds that do the same purchase-and-modify loan scheme, getting credit for $4.1 billion in consumer relief simply from the investment. Deutsche Bank is even looking to earn credit for consumer relief by indirectly funding new subprime loans, also a moneymaking activity. This is like sentencing a bank robber to open a lemonade stand.

“While there may have been some encouragement to principle (sic) reduction through these settlements,” Summers writes, “neither the cost to banks nor the incremental benefit to consumers is remotely comparable to the consumer relief figures advertised by both the DoJ and the banks.”

[Frankly, I think that Summers did not commit a spelling error at all. If anything, Summers typed and accidental truth. Summers and the whole Obama administration were all about "principle reduction." - js]

Larry Summers should be the last person expressing outrage about any of this. It was his indifference to the suffering of homeowners after the financial crash that led to this fake justice-by-settlement scheme.



the horse race



Bernie Sanders Talks 'Dark Money' with Journalist Jane Mayer

Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday sat down with investigative journalist Jane Mayer to discuss the threat that secretive and undisclosed campaign financing—exemplified by the outsized influence of powerful billionaires like Charles and David Koch—continues to have on U.S. democracy and what should be done to push back.

Mayer—author of the 2016 best-seller Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right—recently wrote a feature for The New Yorker in which she detailed the significant role the deep pockets, and bizarre far-right politics, of billionaire Robert Mercer played in President Donald Trump's campaign run.

2 White House Officials Helped Give Nunes Intelligence Reports

A pair of White House officials helped provide Representative Devin Nunes of California, a Republican and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, with the intelligence reports that showed that President Trump and his associates were incidentally swept up in foreign surveillance by American spy agencies. ...

Since disclosing the existence of the intelligence reports, Mr. Nunes has refused to identify his sources, saying he needed to protect them so others would feel safe going to the committee with sensitive information. In his public comments, he has described his sources as whistle-blowers trying to expose wrongdoing at great risk to themselves.

That does not appear to be the case. Several current American officials identified the White House officials as Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the senior director for intelligence at the National Security Council, and Michael Ellis, a lawyer who works on national security issues at the White House Counsel’s Office and was previously counsel to Mr. Nunes’s committee. Though neither has been accused of breaking any laws, they do appear to have sought to use intelligence to advance the political goals of the Trump administration.

Sean Spicer, the White House spokesman, refused to confirm or deny at his daily briefing that Mr. Ellis and Mr. Cohen-Watnick were Mr. Nunes’s sources. The administration’s concern was the substance of the intelligence reports, not how they ended up in Mr. Nunes’s hands, Mr. Spicer said. ...

Jack Langer, a spokesman for Mr. Nunes, said in a statement, “As he’s stated many times, Chairman Nunes will not confirm or deny speculation about his source’s identity, and he will not respond to speculation from anonymous sources.”

Moscow Sees Hypocrisy in Allegations After U.S. Interfered in Russian Elections in 1990s

Michael Flynn: new evidence spy chiefs had concerns about Russian ties

US intelligence officials had serious concerns about Michael Flynn’s appointment as the White House national security adviser because of his history of contacts with Moscow and his encounter with a woman who had trusted access to Russian spy agency records, the Guardian has learned.

US and British intelligence officers discussed Flynn’s “worrisome” behaviour well before his appointment last year by Donald Trump, multiple sources have said. They raised concerns about Flynn’s ties to Russia and his perceived obsession with Iran. They were also anxious about his capacity for “linear thought” and some actions that were regarded as highly unusual for a three-star general.

Flynn’s erratic conduct had troubled US intelligence officials for some time, multiple sources have told the Guardian. One concern involved an encounter with a Russian-British graduate student, Svetlana Lokhova, whom Flynn met on a trip to Cambridge in February 2014. At the time, Flynn was one of the top US spies and the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which provides information to the Pentagon about the military strengths and intentions of other states and terrorist groups.

A historian and a leading expert on Soviet espionage, Lokhova has claimed to have unique access to previously classified Soviet-era material in Moscow. She says her forthcoming book makes groundbreaking revelations about Soviet military intelligence operations run by the GRU – Russia’s military spy agency. ... Flynn and Lokhova were introduced to each other at the end of a dinner attended by 20 guests who included Sir Richard Dearlove – the former head of MI6 – and Prof Christopher Andrew, the official MI5 historian. ...

Though there is no suggestion of impropriety, Flynn would have been expected to “self report” any conversation with an unknown person, especially with links to an “adversary” country, such as Russia. Flynn did not disclose his conversation with Lokhova, the Wall Street Journal reported. Whatever concerns the US intelligence agencies had over Flynn, he retained his top-level security clearance.

Russian deception influenced election due to Trump's support, senators hear

Decades of Russian covert attempts to undermine confidence in western institutions, including planting or promoting false news stories or spreading doubt about the integrity of elections, will accelerate in the future unless the US confronts so-called “active measures”, several experts testified to the Senate intelligence committee.

“Part of the reason active measures have worked in this US election is because the commander-in-chief has used Russian active measures at time [sic] against his opponents,” said Clint Watts of George Washington University’s Center for Cyber and Homeland Security. ...

[According to Watts,] Wittingly or not, Trump and his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, embraced and promoted narratives, including false ones, convenient to Russian interests, including a fake story about a terrorist attack on the Turkish airbase at Incirlik used by US forces and baselessly doubting the US citizenships of Barack Obama and Ted Cruz.

“On 11 October, President Trump stood on stage and cited what appears to be a fake news story from [the Russian propaganda outlet] Sputnik News that disappeared from the internet. He denies the intel from the United States about Russia. He claimed that the election could be rigged – that was the number one theme pushed by RT, Sputnik News,” Watts testified.

Senate Intelligence Committee rejects Flynn's request for immunity

The Senate Intelligence Committee has rejected Michael Flynn's request for immunity from prosecution in exchange for his testimony into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election, congressional sources told NBC News.

President Donald Trump's former national security advisor's lawyer was told the move was "wildly preliminary" and "not on the table" at this point, a senior congressional official told NBC. It does not necessarily rule out immunity at a later date, since the Senate investigation is ongoing.

Flynn, who resigned after only weeks on the job, also offered to speak to the Justice Department in exchange for protection from prosecution, according to NBC. At this time, there is no indication that Flynn is admitting guilt to any crimes.

In a statement Thursday, his lawyer Robert Kelner said no "reasonable person" would get questioned in "such a highly politicized, witch hunt environment without assurance against unfair prosecution."



the evening greens


If you have the stomach to keep track of what the Trump-enabled Republicans are doing with regard to climate change, here's an interesting dispatch from the front lines. The article is worth reading in full, but here's a taste to get you started:

House Republicans Launch a New Assault on the EPA

A Russian loomed over the House of Representatives Wednesday. And it wasn’t Putin. Instead, the figure who came up in two different discussions among House members was Trofim Lysenko, a Soviet agronomist who manipulated data in ways that fit perfectly with the political agenda of Joseph Stalin. Lysenko’s theories, which rejected the now accepted ideas of genes and genetic inheritance, were so appealing to the Soviet dictator they became the only ones taught in the country in the 1940s as Soviet scientists were forbidden from contradicting his teachings. Yet the actual research behind Lysenko’s conclusions was so off base that the decision to exempt him from the standard scientific process ultimately helped lead to a famine.

The story of the man who imperiled his country with pseudoscience designed to please a politician seemed particularly relevant during a day filled with Republican efforts to provide scientific cover for a range of unscientific policies. The House Committee on Science, Space and Technology began the day with a hearing called Climate Science: Assumptions, Policy Implications, and the Scientific Method. Held just two days after a Trump executive order killed federal efforts to address climate change, the hearing included testimony from three experts far out of the scientific mainstream whose careers have been boosted by promoting theories that benefit Republicans and the fossil fuel industry.

Expert witnesses Judith Curry, John Christy, and Roger Pielke Jr., who are frequently called on to present the Republican case for inaction on climate in Congress, all underscored the point that whatever is happening with the climate has been exaggerated and doesn’t warrant serious action, a message that may be particularly welcome to administration officials who have already decided to take just that path. ...

Although 97 percent of actively publishing climate scientists agree that climate warming trends are “extremely likely due to human activity,” only one of four witnesses represented that point of view. Michael Mann, a professor at Pennsylvania State University, pointed to a study he published earlier this week linking climate change to droughts, heat waves, and floods, and noted that the fires that recently devastated the Midwest are evidence of the need to respond to the phenomenon. Mann has been widely attacked for such mainstream views before. His email has been hacked. He’s received hate mail, death threats, and has been the subject of hostile congressional hearings. At Wednesday’s hearing, he invoked Lysenko to explain the current enthusiasm for climate denial and then withstood condemnation from Republicans who chastised him for referring to the other panelists as deniers. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher told him he should be “ashamed.”

Lawsuits Pile Up, Resistance Revs Up Against Trump's KXL Order

Rising to the challenge set by the Trump administration's approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, environmental organizations and Indigenous groups are already firing back with a pair of lawsuits and an energized vow to resist the controversial, 1,700-mile conduit.

"This dirty pipeline is a loaded gun pointed at our climate and some of America's most vital water supplies, and we won't let [President Donald] Trump pull the trigger," said Kierán Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), which is part of a coalition of environmental groups that on Thursday filed suit against the Trump administration in the federal district court in Great Falls, Montana.

The suit accuses President Donald Trump's State Department of relying on an "outdated and incomplete environmental impact statement" in its decision making. Further, according to Reuters, the groups argue that "[b]y approving the pipeline without public input and an up-to-date environmental assessment, the administration violated the National Environmental Policy Act." Plaintiffs also include Northern Plains Resource Council, Bold Alliance, Friends of the Earth, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Sierra Club. ...

A separate suit (pdf) filed on Monday by the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) and North Coast Rivers Alliance (NCRA) further contends that Trump's permit violates the Endangered Species Act, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act. The groups are seeking injunctive relief, restraining pipeline company TransCanada from taking any action that would harm the "physical environment in connection with the project pending a full hearing on the merits." ...

The lawsuits are just part of a larger strategy to defeat the pipeline. "This project is going to be fought at every turn," 350.og co-founder Bill McKibben, who was one of the early organizers of anti-KXL protests, told the Atlantic this week.

In addition to the pending lawsuits, journalist Robinson Meyer reports on the mounting roadblocks for the pipeline's approval: 

The clearest hurdle is that the state of Nebraska has still not approved a path for Keystone XL. TransCanada, the corporation leading the project, has submitted three different possible routes for the pipeline, but the state's Public Service Commission has yet to approve any of them. According to activists, more than 100 people have filed to formally intervene against the pipeline's proposed routes.

Further, a divestment campaign and a series of resistance camps along the path of the pipeline, similar to those that sprang up in opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline, are being planned ahead of next month's massive climate mobilization, the People's Climate March in Washington, D.C. on April 29.

Using 100% renewable energies: A distant dream or the near future?

Peru's farmers are in crisis as thousands of international patents claim rights to native plants

A root called maca, said to boost sexual stamina, became a national craze in China in 2013. Farmers in Peru, where maca is grown, made huge sums of money for a few seasons, until one day the Chinese buyers disappeared. Instead of buying from Peru, they were growing the root at home. But now Peru’s government is trying to stop them, using an obscure new law to catch the companies it says are committing acts of “biopiracy.” ...

Peru’s government is betting on a 2014 international law called the Nagoya Protocol, designed to prevent biopiracy by making clear that species and traditional knowledge unique to a place are the intellectual property of that place and its people. And to enforce it, Peru has set up the world’s only biopiracy task force.

Andres Valladolid heads the task force, working with three intellectual property specialists. Together, they scan patent registries around the world to ensure Peru is compensated when its genetic resources are used. ... But intellectual property law is a slow game, especially when it’s breaking new legal ground. Valladolid’s team are still fighting the first maca case they took on in 2005 against the U.S. company Pure World Botanicals. “At this point, the patent still stands and we consider that the case is not closed,” Valladolid told VICE News. Meanwhile, work is piling up: “In China, practically every day there is a new patent on maca,” he said.


Also of Interest

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

Duping Americans on Healthcare and War

Crossing the U.S. Border with Electronic Devices

Roaming Charges: A Pruitt Runs Through It

Facebook Failed to Protect 30 Million Users From Having Their Data Harvested by Trump Campaign Affiliate

Big Stakes in the French Presidential Election: Governance Versus the People

Meet the Midwestern Contractor That Appears Hundreds of Times in the CIA WikiLeaks Dump

Say Hello To Medicare-For-All’s Latest Cosponsor

Bernie to Democrats: You’ll Never Win Without Independents


A Little Night Music

Hound Dog Taylor - Take Five

Hound Dog Taylor - Alley Music

Hound Dog Taylor - Down Home Special

Hound Dog Taylor - Sitting Here Alone

Hound Dog Taylor - Sadie, One More Time

Hound Dog Taylor - The Sun Is Shining

Hound Dog Taylor & the Houserockers - Kitchen Sink Boogie

Hound Dog Taylor - Give Me Back My Wig

Hound Dog Taylor - November 28, 1972 - set 1

Hound Dog Taylor - November 28, 1972 - set 2



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It's Friday squared! If it were December 31, it'd be a Friday trifecta, or Fri tri for short.

Taylor may be nothin' but a Hound Dog, but his music is really good.

As for Flynn, I am shocked, shocked to find that lobbying is going on here!

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjbPi00k_ME]

Speaking of lobbying, guess where the people in the US who make the most money live? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_income

Isn't that a one of the bedroom community states for people who work in and near Washington, D.C.? What a coincidence!

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkhX5W7JoWI&list=RDJkhX5W7JoWI]

Have a good one!

ETA:

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkhX5W7JoWI&list=RDJkhX5W7JoWI]

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joe shikspack's picture

@HenryAWallace

woohoo! friday at last.

hey, i live in maryland, how come i'm not rich? Smile

oh, that's why. all the lobbyist parasites live in the couple of counties around dc.

have a great weekend, hw!

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Azazello's picture

and Happy Cesar Chavez Day.
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5NQdd_rvnM width:500 height:300]

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We wanted decent healthcare, a living wage and free college.
The Democrats gave us Biden and war instead.

joe shikspack's picture

@Azazello

happy cesar chavez day!

when i was on my last vacation out west, we were tooling around california and i pulled off at an exit for keene california looking for a gas station and we stumbled onto the cesar chavez national monument. it's a really nice place with gorgeous rose gardens. sadly, it was late afternoon and it was closed, but next time i'm in california...

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Azazello's picture

@joe shikspack
Stuff like that is why I never miss the Evening Blues.

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We wanted decent healthcare, a living wage and free college.
The Democrats gave us Biden and war instead.

joe shikspack's picture

@Azazello

usually if i pull a quote out of an essay, i link it in the blog posts of interest section.

here it is again: Duping Americans on Healthcare and War

thanks for the kind words!

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Hi Joe - I don't think any country should honor patents on plants and animals especially those that have been tended by local people for centuries.

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"The justness of individual land right is not justifiable to those to whom the land by right of first claim collectively belonged"

joe shikspack's picture

@duckpin

i think my favorite hound dog album is "release the hound" which is mostly live material from several different concerts - all of it pretty amazing stuff.

i don't think that plants or any sort of living organism should be allowed to be patented, it seems sort of ridiculous to claim credit for what nature does.

have a great weekend!

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divineorder's picture

thought provoking excerpts. Thanks.

Heh. My peoples:

Free. We retirees LOVES us some free. Or cheep. Yeah, we loves cheap even more. But is free really, well, you know, free?

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A truth of the nuclear age/climate change: we can no longer have endless war and survive on this planet. Oh sh*t.

joe shikspack's picture

@divineorder

imagine that, the average american would rather not sacrifice humans and dump trillions of dollars into a bottomless pit! yet politicians don't think that there's a constituency for peace? pffffttt!!!!

of course it's not free. and nowadays, even if you pay good money, congress says that your isp can still sell your information to whomever they choose without so much as a by your leave. that really pisses me off.

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If the Republicans were smart (okay, I know this is rather absurd), they would realize that standing by the insurance companies is ultimately a losing proposition, and they could steal a march on the Democrats by pushing for Single-Payer Trump Care. The Dems might never recover.

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Mark F. McCarty

joe shikspack's picture

@veganmark

it would be a great strategy if all they wanted was to obtain votes and get elected. after all, a large part of trump's appeal was that he ran to the left of hillary on wars and regime change as well as trade.

sadly, the republicans are also a corporate party, so ultimately they need to please the dark corporate overlords by keeping the money flowing upwards.

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karl pearson's picture

Thought I would add this little article as an addendum:

Alabama Republican Rep. Mike Rogers introduced legislation that would make undocumented immigrants pay for a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico.
The bill introduced Tuesday would impose a 2 percent fee on all wire transfers to the home country of undocumented immigrants, AL.com reported.

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joe shikspack's picture

@karl pearson

that's pretty low. but, it is just about exactly the sort of thing that one has come to expect from the current crop of republicans.

so, i wonder how he will differentiate between "undocumented migrants" and documented us persons when imposing this 2% fee on remittances - or does he intend to also tax the remittances of all people who send money to people in mexico? one suspects the latter.

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Re:

Moscow Sees Hypocrisy in Allegations After U.S. Interfered in Russian Elections in 1990s

and some related stuff.

Just want to make the points (before I forget, lol) which no doubt multiple others will have made well before the bottom of the page where this lands, that while CIA and apparently 16 other spy agencies and hundreds or perhaps thousands of private companies hacking everyone's everything is OK, an insiders leak, (presented as a 'hack') of the emails of some private persons (presented as 'an act of war' deserving a long-planned nuking of multiple countries following the crippling of their defenses, so that it's like some engaging sport of shooting ducking pension-deprived grannies made homeless and trapped in a dead-end alley, only with global nuclear dimming and planetary death - bonus) and an idiot propagandist falling for a phishing scheme - apparently despite warnings - to give up his password, this exposing their wrongdoing in such instances as their injuring the American public and making mock of any claim to 'American democracy', such exposure of criminals running for public office before they're potentially elected by an unwitting public is not OK, while the actual wrong-doing and electoral interference and control is - being merely perfectly acceptable self-interest/corporate/billionaire interference with and control over elections and public policy, which has been pretty much normalized even there, on Democracy Now...

That's presented as being 'not out of the way' with regard to Trump's (ex)team members (as is unfortunately true generally) but another country's news services running legitimate and verified news stories which TPTB don't want even a small number of the US public hearing about in order to make informed voting choices is apparently something completely different, at least to TPTB and their lackeys. Although it appears to be the potential for Russian business interests/the Russian people to gain some benefit from trade using their own resources, rather than it all going to the all-important American business interests having no business military-forcing their way in there at all, which has corporate politicians and various PTB/other lackeys in a tizzy, weaving a tangled propaganda web that leaves them repeatedly tripping over manufactured contradictions, unsurprisingly landing with their mouths full of their own feet.

No wonder the CIA's vaults and evidence of their ability to fake the 'fingerprints' of other people's countries into internet addresses were leaked by some patriot... just in time, too.

And virtually everything else related to this nonsensical and pre-exploded claim makes it painfully clear that much of this is to cover over for what the Clinton campaign did, as well what the billionaire/wanna-be trillionaire corporate political big funders/PTB plan to do in their hostile global corporate/military take-over.

The potential seems high for another really nasty Black Flag coming right up, horrible enough to 'justify' using nukes on multiple other long-targeted countries and their citizens, I fear - time to break into the PRB's luxury bunkers ourselves? Lock the buggers out, if nothing else.

And it seems that the very idea of non-Russian-only voter fraud is definitely CT, now that Homeland Security has made all information/oversight regarding 'election infrastructure' Top Secret from the American public and everyone except themselves and interested private parties, these doubtless being Top Secret as well...

If the country does not very visibly unify in not voting for either wing of evil so that the landslide to an actual party of the people absolutely cannot be denied, there can be no hope ever again of any actual election in America.

Never vote for any evil again! That stuff will kill us all.

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Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.

A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.