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Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features blues rock guitarist Guitar Shorty. Enjoy!

^{Guitar Shorty - You Don't Treat Me Right}

"Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage."

-- H.L. Mencken

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News and Opinion

Just when you thought that the clown show couldn't get any more, um, clownish... CNN headlines scream about the Great Candidate Dick Size Debate; too bad they don't have scream headlines when candidates roar that they will commit war crimes, or more importantly, when the current president commits them. Check this CNN crap out:

Donald Trump defends size of his penis

(CNN) - Donald Trump assured American voters Thursday night that despite what Marco Rubio had suggested, there was "no problem" with the size of his hands -- or anything else.

"Look at those hands, are they small hands?" the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination said, raising them for viewers to see. "And, he referred to my hands -- 'if they're small, something else must be small.' I guarantee you there's no problem. I guarantee."

Rubio in recent days revived a decades-old old insult, mocking Trump for having relatively slight hands.

"He's always calling me Little Marco. And I'll admit he's taller than me. He's like 6'2, which is why I don't understand why his hands are the size of someone who is 5'2," Rubio said in Virginia on Sunday. "And you know what they say about men with small hands? You can't trust them."

The Grief of Others and the Boasts of Candidates

The crowd that gathered in an airplane hangar in the desert roared with excitement when the man on stage vowed to murder women and children.

It was just another Donald Trump campaign event, and the candidate had affirmed his previously made pledge not only to kill terrorists but to “take out” their family members, too. Outrageous as that might sound, it hardly distinguished Trump from most of his Republican rivals, fiercely competing over who will commit the worst war crimes if elected. All the chilling claims about who will preside over more killings of innocents in distant lands -- and the thunderous applause that meets such boasts -- could easily be taken as evidence that the megalomaniacal billionaire Republican front-runner, his various opponents, and their legions of supporters, are all crazytown.

Yet Trump’s pledge to murder the civilian relatives of terrorists could be considered quite modest -- and, in its bluntness, refreshingly candid -- when compared to President Obama’s ongoing policy of loosing drones and U.S. Special Operations forces in the Greater Middle East.  Those policies, the assassinations that go with them, and the “collateral damage” they regularly cause are based on one premise when it comes to the American public: that we will permanently suspend our capacity for grief and empathy when it comes to the dead (and the living) in distant countries.

Classified documents recently leaked to the Intercept by a whistleblower describe the “killing campaign” carried out by the CIA and the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command in Yemen and Somalia. (The U.S. also conducts drone strikes in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Libya; the leaked documents explain how President Obama has institutionalized the practice of striking outside regions of “active hostilities.”) Intelligence personnel build a case against a terror suspect and then develop what’s termed a “baseball card” -- a condensed dossier with a portrait of the individual targeted and the nature of the alleged threat he poses to U.S. interests -- that gets sent up the chain of command, eventually landing in the Oval Office.  The president then meets with more than 100 representatives of his national security team, generally on a weekly basis, to determine just which of those cards will be selected picked for death.  (The New York Times has vividly described this intimate process of choosing assassination targets.) ...

In 2014 [...] the human-rights group Reprieve, analyzing what limited data on U.S. drone strikes was available, discovered that in attempts to kill 41 terror figures (not all of whom died), 1,147 people were killed.  The study found that the vast majority of strikes failed to take down the intended victim, and thus numerous strikes were often attempted on a single target. The Guardian reported that in attempts to take down 24 men in Pakistan -- only six of whom were eventually eliminated in successful drone strikes -- the U.S. killed an estimated 142 children.

Trump’s plan merely to murder the relatives of terrorists seems practically tame, by comparison. ...

Every single major candidate from both parties has plans to maintain some version of Washington's increasingly far-flung drone campaigns. ... Election 2016 isn’t so much a vote to select the leader of the planet’s last superpower as it is a tournament to decide who will next step into the Oval Office and have the chance to play god.

Husband of San Bernardino Survivor Calls for Stronger Gun Laws, Not Weaker Privacy

As Apple fights a judge’s order to help the government hack an iPhone used by San Bernardino killer Syed Rizwan Farook, interested parties are weighing in with legal briefs and letters.

Perhaps the most  powerful submission so far is a letter sent by Salihin Kondoker, whose wife is a survivor of the holiday party rampage that left 14 dead. She was shot three times.

But Kondoker isn’t mad at Apple for refusing to comply with the order.

“In the wake of this terrible attack, I believe strongly we need stronger gun laws. It was guns that killed innocent people, not technology,” he wrote.

He continued:

I believe privacy is important and Apple should stay firm in their decision. Neither I, nor my wife, want to raise our children in a world where privacy is the tradeoff for security. I believe this case will have a huge impact all over the world. You will have agencies coming from all over the world to get access to the software the FBI is asking Apple for. It will be abused all over to spy on innocent people. America should be proud of Apple. Proud that it is an American company and we should protect them not try to tear them down.

Silicon Valley giants side with Apple in FBI dispute

Silicon Valley firms rally behind Apple in FBI encryption battle

The US technology industry formally lined up beside Apple on Thursday in the company’s legal fight with the FBI over encryption.

The phalanx of Silicon Valley colleagues and rivals, including Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Cisco and others filed a joint brief in California’s central district court.

A second group of tech firms such as Airbnb, eBay, GitHub, Kickstarter, LinkedIn, Medium, Reddit and Twitter, filed another.

The companies said that if the FBI wins the case, “the assistance it can request is limited only by its imagination” and the variable opinions of judges. Further, they said, the disputed order to write a new software tool so that the FBI can open San Bernardino killer Syed Farook’s iPhone constitutes “classic compelled speech”. ...

The companies joined leading technologists, digital rights campaigners and civil libertarians, and the husband of one of the San Bernardino terror attack victims, to warn of the far-reaching effect of making mobile communications and potentially the entire internet less secure.

The tech firms, echoing two weeks’ worth of Apple statements, warned that the FBI was executing a judicial strategy “unbound by any legal limits” that would hand the government an end-run around “established legal procedures authorized by thorough, nuanced statutes to obtain users’ data in ways not contemplated by lawmakers”. ...

David Kaye, the UN special rapporteur on free expression, argued in another legal filing backing Apple that the FBI risks violating the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Congress Looks to Rebrand Proposed Pentagon Base Closures

Every year, Congress shoots the [Pentagon] plan down, because no one wants base closures to happen in their state. This year though, there seems to be less resistance, though Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R – NE) made it clear that they’re not comfortable with the term “base closures.”

Rep. Fortenberry urged the Pentagon to rebrand the effort as being run by a “military infrastructure savings commission” instead of a “round of base closures.” ...

Officials estimated [they have] around 20% more bases than they need, with the Air Force estimating their own capacity was above 30% more than needed.

Syrian Rebels Furious as Ceasefire Continues to Hold

After five years of civil war, Syria is experiencing a temporary return to normalcy, with a ceasefire now in its fifth day and still holding steady.

Everyone except the rebels, that is. ... The rebels who were blasting the US for “betraying” them by supporting a doomed ceasefire last week are now blasting the US for “betraying” them by supporting a ceasefire which is working, and is heading toward some settlement short of installing them as the new government.

Rebels now say they’re convinced the US, Russia, and the Assad government are all plotting against them, and after previously making their participation in peace talks conditional on a ceasefire, they are hunting for a new excuse to keep the war going.

The media are misleading the public on Syria

For three years, violent militants have run Aleppo. Their rule began with a wave of repression. They posted notices warning residents: “Don’t send your children to school. If you do, we will get the backpack and you will get the coffin.” Then they destroyed factories, hoping that unemployed workers would have no recourse other than to become fighters. They trucked looted machinery to Turkey and sold it.

This month, people in Aleppo have finally seen glimmers of hope. The Syrian army and its allies have been pushing militants out of the city. Last week they reclaimed the main power plant. Regular electricity may soon be restored. The militants’ hold on the city could be ending.

Militants, true to form, are wreaking havoc as they are pushed out of the city by Russian and Syrian Army forces. “Turkish-Saudi backed ‘moderate rebels’ showered the residential neighborhoods of Aleppo with unguided rockets and gas jars,” one Aleppo resident wrote on social media. The Beirut-based analyst Marwa Osma asked, “The Syrian Arab Army, which is led by President Bashar Assad, is the only force on the ground, along with their allies, who are fighting ISIS — so you want to weaken the only system that is fighting ISIS?”

This does not fit with Washington’s narrative. As a result, much of the American press is reporting the opposite of what is actually happening. Many news reports suggest that Aleppo has been a “liberated zone” for three years but is now being pulled back into misery.

Militants, true to form, are wreaking havoc as they are pushed out of the city by Russian and Syrian Army forces. “Turkish-Saudi backed ‘moderate rebels’ showered the residential neighborhoods of Aleppo with unguided rockets and gas jars,” one Aleppo resident wrote on social media. The Beirut-based analyst Marwa Osma asked, “The Syrian Arab Army, which is led by President Bashar Assad, is the only force on the ground, along with their allies, who are fighting ISIS — so you want to weaken the only system that is fighting ISIS?”

This does not fit with Washington’s narrative. As a result, much of the American press is reporting the opposite of what is actually happening. Many news reports suggest that Aleppo has been a “liberated zone” for three years but is now being pulled back into misery.

This is convoluted nonsense, but Americans cannot be blamed for believing it. We have almost no real information about the combatants, their goals, or their tactics. Much blame for this lies with our media.

The US State Department's Syria Hotline Staff May Not Speak Arabic — or Answer the Phone

The US State Department has set up a hotline to help document reports of violence in Syria, but some of the operators working the phones don't speak fluent Arabic, and sometimes nobody answers the phone at all.

The problem was first revealed on Wednesday by reporters with the news site Syria Direct, which receives funding from the State Department. One of its reporters tried to call the hotline on February 27, hours after a "cessation of hostilities" — basically a limited truce — that was brokered by the US and Russia went into effect between many of the parties in Syria's ongoing civil war.

Syria Direct's newsroom in Amman, Jordan had been tracking shelling in several Syrian provinces, and had heard reports of continuing violence after the truce went into effect. But when one of the site's reporters, an American named Orion Wilcox, phoned in the potential violations to the State Department's hotline, the operator on the other end didn't seem to comprehend Wilcox's Arabic.

"He's really struggling and can't understand me," Wilcox reported in Syria Direct. "I'm like, why is this American guy on the phone who can't speak Arabic? I'd give a detailed account of something happening in Homs province and he would listen and his answer was: 'Homs.' That's it." Wilcox conducted the rest of the call in English. ...

On Wednesday, State Department spokesperson Mark Toner revealed at a press conference that the hotline was staffed by State employees working as volunteers, and acknowledged that their language proficiencies were not "properly vetted."

This is worth a full read, here's an introduction:

Even critics understate how catastrophically bad the Hillary Clinton-led NATO bombing of Libya was

The New York Times published two lengthy pieces this week detailing Hillary Clinton’s role in the 2011 NATO bombing of Libya. Both are important documents, and provide much insight into how, as secretary of state for the Obama administration, Clinton played a uniquely hands-on role in the war. ...

At 13,000 words in length combined, the articles are important contributions to the historical record. Yet although they are critical of Clinton and her leadership in the conflict, they fail to acknowledge the crimes of U.S.-backed rebel groups, and ultimately underestimate just how disastrous the war was, just how hawkish Hillary is and just how significant this will be for the future of the United States — not to mention the future of Libya and its suffering people.

The U.S. president does not have as much control over economic and social issues as many pundits, analysts and even voters often insist. One must not forget that the head of state does not control the Congress or the judiciary. But the president does have enormous power when it comes to international affairs, diplomacy and war. This makes foreign policy one of the most crucial issues in any presidential campaign.

Clinton’s leadership in the catastrophic war in Libya should ergo constantly be at the forefront of any discussion of the presidential primary.

Throughout the campaign, Clinton has tried to have her cake and eat it too. She has flaunted her leadership in the war as a sign of her supposed foreign policy experience, yet, at the same moment, strived to distance herself from the disastrous results of said war.

Troops Trickle in as West Prepares for (More) Libya War

The numbers keep growing, and other assets for a Western war in Libya, which officials have been publicly championing for months, are being moved into place. It’s only a matter of time until the “secret war” becomes a public one, but how long?

That’s not clear, as leaked Italian documents confirm that they too are poised to send some ground troops across the Mediterranean, though officially the Italian Defense Ministry insists that there is no “war room” and that the conflict is awaiting the formation of a Libyan unity government. ...

The selling of the “merits” of the war seems to be running concurrent to the actual deployments in this case, indicating how perfunctory the whole PR effort is.

North Korea: Defiant Kim Jong-Un orders nuclear arsenal to be on 'standby'

North Korea: Kim Jong-un orders nuclear weapons readied for use 'at any time'

Leader reportedly tells military to adopt ‘pre-emptive’ posture after imposition of toughest UN sanctions to date

North Korea should be ready to use nuclear weapons “at any time” in the face of a growing threat from its enemies, leader Kim Jong-un has decreed in a further escalation of tensions on the Korean peninsula.

Kim’s warning, issued via state-controlled media on Friday morning, appeared to be an attempt to put pressure on the international community after the UN security council on Wednesday adopted a raft of new sanctions against the regime in response to its recent nuclear test and rocket launch.

Kim, who was supervising the test-firing of newly developed multiple rocket launchers, said North Korea’s situation had become so perilous that it should have the option of launching a “pre-emptive attack” – a departure from previous claims that the North’s nuclear capability was purely a deterrent.

He said the regime’s enemies – notably the US – were threatening North Korea’s survival, the state-controlled KCNA news agency reported.

“At an extreme time when the Americans ... are urging war and disaster on other countries and people, the only way to defend our sovereignty and right to live is to bolster our nuclear capability,” KCNA quoted Kim as saying.

“Under the extreme situation that the US imperialist is misusing its military influence and is pressuring other countries and people to start war and catastrophe, the only way for our people to protect sovereignty and rights to live is to strengthen the quality and quantity of nuclear power and realise the balance of power.

“We must always be ready to fire our nuclear warheads at any time.”

US Draws Ire with Dispatch of 'Small Armada' into South China Sea

The United States' globe-spanning military on Thursday dispatched a "small armada" into the South China Sea, reported the Navy Times, in the latest show of American force in the contested territory since the widely condemned patrol of a Navy destroyer within Chinese waters last October. ...

This week's "deployment of thousands of U.S. sailors" was to a region that a top U.S. official has characterized as "increasingly militarized by China," reported the Washington Post.

"Talking about militarization, if you look into it carefully, the advanced aircraft, warships in and out of the South China Sea, aren’t most of them deployed by America?" Fortune quoted China's National People's Party spokesperson Fu Ying as she responded to the U.S. Navy's actions on Friday.

Ying argued, "America made an important decision, which is deploying over 60% of its navy to the Asia-Pacific region … [The U.S.] is strengthening military deployments with its alliances in the Asia-Pacific region. If we’re talking about militarization, what’s this? Isn’t it militarization?"

Michael Klare, a professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College, warned in The Nation on Thursday, "History suggests that such [jostling for geopolitical advantage] tends to create an atmosphere of ever-increasing tension and suspicion, where one provocation too many can lead to crisis, panic, miscalculation, and a resort to arms—exactly the scenario that led to the outbreak of World War I just over 100 years ago."

In a lecture at Harvard in February, Klare made similar points:

Brazilian police detain former president Lula in corruption inquiry

Brazilian police are questioning former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva after raiding his home and several associated buildings in a search for evidence as part of an ongoing corruption investigation.

The detention of the influential Workers’ party politician – who is best known by his nickname Lula – marks a dramatic new phase of the Lava Jato (“carwash”) inquiry into bribery and kickback allegations involving leading Brazilian companies and dozens of congressmen.

The huge investigation – easily the biggest in the country’s history – initially focused on corruption and money laundering at the oil company Petrobras but has since widened to include construction and brokerage firms. ...

Investigators accused Da Silva – and leaders of other parties – of having election campaigns financed by kick-backs and bribes channelled from inflated Petrobras contracts.

“This grand scheme was coordinated from the summit by leaders of political parties that formed the base of the federal government, especially the Workers Party, the Progressive Party and the Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement. Former President and party leader Lula was ultimately responsible for the directors of Petrobras and was one of the main beneficiaries of the offences,” the police said in a statement.

The statement stressed that Da Silva was only under suspicion and that no final judgment had been made. But investigators vowed not to be cowed by high office.

US jobs report: economy adds 242,000 jobs but wages drop slightly

The US economy added 242,000 jobs in February, spurred by growth in restaurants, retail and healthcare. The unemployment rate held steady at 4.9%. ...

But while jobs growth was better than expected the major gains were in low wage industries. Average hourly earnings were down 3 cents to $25.35 after an increase of 12 cents in January.

Unemployment rates remained far higher for minorities: black and Hispanic Americans were jobless at rates of 8.8% and 5.4%, compared to 4.3% for whites. The unemployment rate for the country overall was 4.5%. Those rates did not change during the month, nor did the number of long-term jobless: still 2.2 million people.

Meanwhile in the real economy...

The statistics look more or less static.

U.S. trade deficit widens as exports hit five-and-a-half-year low

The U.S. trade deficit widened more than expected in January as a strong dollar and weak global demand helped to push exports to a more than five-and-a-half-year low, suggesting trade will continue to weigh on economic growth in the first quarter.

The Commerce Department said on Friday the trade gap increased 2.2 percent to $45.7 billion. December's trade deficit was revised up to $44.7 billion from the previously reported $43.4 billion. Exports have declined for four straight months.

Economists polled by Reuters had forecast the trade deficit widening to $44.0 billion in January. When adjusted for inflation, the deficit increased to $61.97 billion from $60.09 billion in December.

Trade subtracted a quarter of a percentage point from gross domestic product in the fourth quarter, helping to hold down growth to a tepid 1.0 percent annual rate.

U.S. Senate Holds a Critical Hearing on the Stock Market on March 3, 2016 and 73 Percent of the Senators on the Subcommittee Are a No-Show

There are 15 U.S. Senators who are members of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee’s Subcommittee on Securities, Insurance, and Investment that has been investigating the charges that the stock market is rigged by the stock exchanges along with dark pools run by large broker-dealers that are operated as opaque, unregulated quasi stock exchanges, high frequency traders at hedge funds, conflicted payment for order flow, and tricked-up order types – to mention just a few of the ways the public investor is getting fleeced.

The Subcommittee held a critically important hearing yesterday to review what progress the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), the self-regulatory Wall Street watchdog, were making to rein in the abuses on Wall Street.

Despite the lack of trust the public feels toward Wall Street and the abysmal 14 percent approval rating of Congress (according to the most recent Gallup poll), 73 percent of the Senators on this hearing panel couldn’t be bothered to show up for the hearing. Outside of the Republican Chair of the hearing, Senator Mike Crapo, not one other Republican out of a total of eight on the Subcommittee attended. Out of the seven Democratic Senators on the panel, three showed up: Senator Mark Warner, the Ranking Member, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and Senator Joe Donnelly. ...

Adding to the apathy that prevents any meaningful reform of Wall Street’s serial crimes against the public, major media were no-shows as well. We could not find one major newspaper that covered what transpired in the hearing yesterday. The New York Times gave it one sentence that seriously failed to capture the essence of the hearing. The Times wrote: “A Senate hearing today will examine how the pricing structure of the computer-driven U.S. stock market became so convoluted.”

The wire service, Reuters, did write about the hearing but covered only one of the many topics, the maker-taker model, a fancy name for a rebate kickback scheme to attract order flow at competing exchanges.

[Click the link above for some interesting coverage of how Wall Street continues to get away with robbing people blind. - js]

This is an excellent article by Natasha Lennard, worth a full read:

In Recent Trials of Violent Cops, the Broader Police Force Gets a Pass

In two recent high-profile cases that ended with the rare criminal conviction of police officers, prosecutors put forth similar statements. “This is not a law enforcement officer that committed these crimes,” Oklahoma County District Attorney David Prater asserted following the rape trial of former cop Daniel Holtzclaw. “If he was a true law enforcement officer, he would have upheld his duty to protect these citizens rather than victimize them.” Meanwhile, as former NYPD officer Peter Liang was tried for the manslaughter killing of an unarmed black man, Akai Gurley, Assistant District Attorney Joseph Alexis told the jury, “It is our position that Peter Liang is not the same as the police officers who bravely keep us safe every day.” ...

After decades of impunity, acquittals, and non-indictments, an officer’s conviction — in the NYPD’s case, the first for an on-duty killing in more than 10 years — is understandably seen as a step toward broader accountability. And of course, it’s outside the remit of any single criminal trial to “put the system on trial” — we are not in a movie. But a closer look at the Liang trial in particular reveals a conviction won with arguments that explicitly exculpate New York policing. ...

Liang’s attorney Robert E. Brown claimed that “to make a determination that his actions were criminal, that his actions were unjustified by taking his gun out, would send a chilling effect to the police officers in New York City.” The defense essentially framed Gurley’s death as a tragic accident, unavoidable in the perilous business of policing project housing. Liang, 27, had his gun drawn, finger on trigger, while carrying out a vertical patrol in a darkened stairwell in Brooklyn’s Pink Houses last winter. The cop heard a noise and fired, his bullet ricocheted off a wall and struck Gurley in the heart. Neither Liang nor his partner carried out CPR, a lapse both officers attributed to inadequate NYPD training. In his own testimony, Liang stated he felt the need to draw his weapon because the Pink Houses were a “high-crime area.”

The prosecution rightly lambasted Liang for this defense. “Not everyone has the luxury of living in a doorman building,” Alexis said. “The defendant would have you believe the Pink Houses is full of criminals.” The problem, however, is that the prosecution also insisted that it was somehow Liang’s unique cowardice and class bias that led him to draw his gun, as opposed to long-established tendencies in U.S. policing, specifically those related to controversial vertical patrols in public housing.

Meanwhile, it was Liang’s defense attorney, as the trial came to summation, who provided an (inadvertently) strong critique of New York policing. “What you have to do is ask yourselves,” he told the jury, “is what he did a gross deviation of what a police officer normally does?” The complication with Liang’s conviction is that the answer to the question should be “no,” yet the verdict meant “yes.”

Louisiana's public defense system could collapse without renewed cash flow

The state of Louisiana is the world capital of incarceration. It locks up more of its citizens than anywhere else on the globe – some 1,341 out of every 100,000 people.

That’s twice the US national average (716), nearly three times the per capita rate in Russia (475) and nine times that of the UK (148). It’s even substantially higher than North Korea’s (thought to be around 800).

Now the Pelican state is in the throes of a crisis that is certain to propel its already astronomical incarceration rate to new heights. Its public defender service, a network of state-funded lawyers that provides legal representation to poor Louisianans, is in meltdown, with most of its district offices set to cancel all new cases or close down entirely by next summer.

An assessment by the Louisiana public defender board obtained by the Guardian warns that by July of 2017, as many as 33 of the state’s 42 districts are likely to be so short of cash they will be forced to stop representing clients. Eleven of those districts may be forced to shut down by this October.

“The system is on course to collapse by next summer – we will have no public defense system in any sense of the word. We are talking about the wholesale destruction of a public function,” said Brandon Buskey, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union.

If the state continues on its current course, experts warn that tens of thousands more people are likely to languish in jails as a result of lack of legal representation. The pattern has already been witnessed in major cities such as New Orleans, where the public defender service stopped taking on new cases in January.

Innocent Ohio black man to get $1 million for spending 39 years in jail

An African American man who spent nearly 40 years behind bars in the US state of Ohio for a murder he did not commit will receive $1 million from the state for his wrongful imprisonment.

On Thursday, an Ohio Court of Claims judge ordered that just more than $1 million be paid to Ricky Jackson. ...

In November, Jackson, 57, and Wiley Bridgeman, 60, were both exonerated in a 1975 murder after a key witness against them, who was 13 years old at the time, admitted in 2013 that he lied during his testimony.

Eddie Vernon, now 53, told a minister who visited him at a hospital in 2013 that he had never actually witnessed the crime. He said Cleveland police detectives coerced him into testifying that the men killed businessman Harry Franks on May 19, 1975.

The Ohio Innocence Project, which took up their case, said Jackson and Bridgeman’s 39 years imprisonment mark them as the longest-serving exonerees in US history.

Chris Hedges: The Revenge of the Lower Classes and the Rise of American Fascism

College-educated elites, on behalf of corporations, carried out the savage neoliberal assault on the working poor. Now they are being made to pay. Their duplicity—embodied in politicians such as Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama—succeeded for decades. These elites, many from East Coast Ivy League schools, spoke the language of values—civility, inclusivity, a condemnation of overt racism and bigotry, a concern for the middle class—while thrusting a knife into the back of the underclass for their corporate masters. This game has ended.

There are tens of millions of Americans, especially lower-class whites, rightfully enraged at what has been done to them, their families and their communities. They have risen up to reject the neoliberal policies and political correctness imposed on them by college-educated elites from both political parties: Lower-class whites are embracing an American fascism. ...

The Democrats are playing a very dangerous game by anointing Hillary Clinton as their presidential candidate. She epitomizes the double-dealing of the college-educated elites, those who speak the feel-your-pain language of ordinary men and women, who hold up the bible of political correctness, while selling out the poor and the working class to corporate power.

The Republicans, energized by America’s reality-star version of Il Duce, Donald Trump, have been pulling in voters, especially new voters, while the Democrats are well below the voter turnouts for 2008. In the voting Tuesday, 5.6 million votes were cast for the Democrats while 8.3 million went to the Republicans. Those numbers were virtually reversed in 2008—8.2 million for the Democrats and about 5 million for the Republicans. ...

Fascist movements build their base not from the politically active but the politically inactive, the “losers” who feel, often correctly, they have no voice or role to play in the political establishment. The sociologist Émile Durkheim warned that the disenfranchisement of a class of people from the structures of society produced a state of “anomie”—a “condition in which society provides little moral guidance to individuals.” Those trapped in this “anomie,” he wrote, are easy prey to propaganda and emotionally driven mass movements.

Game over for Sanders? It needn't be

I feel a bit of deja vu. In my book Thank You, Anarchy, I charted the rise and fall of Occupy Wall Street – a phenomenon with more than a passing resemblance to the Bern, and some of the same leaders. Much of that experience was rapturous, too, for those who experienced it. But after a coordinated crackdown cleared the encampments, I watched that rapture collapse in on itself. The movement-in-the-making turned out to be just a moment. Many of those who experienced it came away frustrated and fragmented.

Consider, in contrast, the 15-M movement in Spain, which spread across that country several months before Occupy in 2011, and which partly inspired it. After occupying their city squares for a few weeks, the 15-M activists in many cases decided to close down their encampments on their own, and to take the movement to their neighborhoods. They continued meeting in assemblies, and created cooperative enterprises to help support themselves. In the process they built power. Less than five years later, cities like Madrid and Barcelona have elected candidates drawn, in part, from the ranks of the protests, promulgating policies that would make a protester proud – like cutting perks for city officials, crowdsourcing ideas from neighborhood assemblies, and penalizing companies like Airbnb. It’s an electoral strategy built on durable organizing.

How could this translate to the United States? There’s a hint in Bernie Sanders’ own past, such as a set of proposals that he published in late 2014, before announcing his campaign. “Instead of giving huge tax breaks to corporations which ship our jobs to China and other low-wage countries,” he wrote, “we need to provide assistance to workers who want to purchase their own businesses by establishing worker-owned cooperatives.” Long before that, as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, Sanders supported the use of community land trusts (CLTs) to keep housing affordable.

Cooperatives and CLTs are both time-tested forms of enterprise that share ownership and control among the people who depend on them. They bring democracy out of the voting booth and into daily life. They don’t rely on big banks or secretive trade deals. With or without a president on your side, one way to dethrone the 1% is to build an economy that doesn’t need them. That’s the start of a revolution, as well as a livelihood for the revolutionaries.

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Immunity deal raises stakes in Clinton email investigation

The immunity deal granted to a former Hillary Clinton staffer indicates the FBI’s investigation into her email practices is accelerating, former prosecutors say. ...

The day after her Super Tuesday victories, a law enforcement official leaked that Bryan Pagliano, who helped set up Clinton’s personal server, has been granted immunity in exchange for his cooperation with the FBI’s investigation.

Pagliano, a former information technology official with the State Department, is seen as a key figure in the investigation into whether Clinton illegally transmitted classified information over her private server. ...

Legal experts say the kind of deal the Department of Justice (DOJ) has struck with Pagliano is common in cases where investigators want to work their way up the food chain in uncovering possible criminal activity. ...

“If prosecutors confer immunity in a case, in general it means that they at least have some intention of pursuing the matter to a grand jury. Whether they ultimately decide to pull the trigger and press charges is a whole other question,” said Bob Ray, a former federal prosecutor who was head of the Office of the Independent Counsel during the Whitewater investigation of Bill and Hillary Clinton. ...

Legal experts note that the Department of Justice (DOJ) — under whose authority the FBI operates — doesn’t have the power to grant immunity. Federal judges are the only ones with that power, and only at the request of a DOJ prosecutor.

But for a DOJ prosecutor to make such a request is “a pretty significant step,” Ray argued, one that prosecutors don’t typically take unless they believe the testimony is worth letting go of a smaller fish.

The Clintons Have Not Changed – The Clintonian War on the IG Watchdogs

Secretary Hillary Clinton is asking Democratic voters to believe that she has experienced a “Road to Damascus” conversion from her roots as a leader of the “New Democrats” – the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party.  When exactly this conversion occurred is never stated, but an interesting fact has emerged that demonstrates it did not occur during her service as the Secretary of State.  A Wall Street Journal story provides the key facts, but none of the analysis.

Newly released emails indicate that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her top staff were involved in the selection process for the State Department’s internal watchdog, a position that ultimately went unfilled throughout her four-year tenure.

The WSJ’s angle is that such involvement in the selection of the Inspector General (IG) is a threat to the IG’s vital independence.  True, and also true as the story notes that Hillary was far from rare as an agency or department head in seeking to select behind the scenes the supposedly independent IGs.

What the WSJ missed is that the Clintons, for decades, have sought to destroy the independence and effectiveness of the IGs precisely because of the threat that they pose of blowing the whistle on these abuses.  The Obama administration, of course, is famous for its prosecutions of those who blow the whistle on such abuses.  The real story is not that Hillary attempted to select a lap dog as IG – the real story is that for her entire tenure as Secretary, four years, she left unfilled the leadership position of the only institution in the State Department dedicated to maintaining integrity and preventing the abuse of public power to aid cronies. That aid, of course, comes with the clear expectation that the cronies will make the head of the State Department wealthy as soon as she or he steps down. There is no possible defense for that, and it does not happen accidentally. The primary blame goes to President Obama, who made no nomination for the position for the entire four years. It wasn’t Republican intransigence that explains this scandal.

Galbraith: Attacks on Sanders Economic Plan By Former CEA Chairs Are Irresponsible

Sanders Blasts 'Outsourcer-in-Chief' Clinton for Being Wrong on Trade

Speaking Thursday in Michigan, a state he described as "devastated" by the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs, presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders said that on "one of the most important issues facing working people"—trade—he and his rival Hillary Clinton "have very different points of view."

As he's been doing for months, Sanders drew attention to his own consistent opposition to corporate-friendly, "job-killing" trade deals, juxtaposing his record with that of the former secretary of state, who only came out against the Trans Pacific Partnership last fall after having once called it "the gold standard in trade agreements."

"A campaign is not about what you said yesterday. It is about what you have stood for your entire career. On one of the most important issues facing working people, Secretary Hillary Clinton and I have very different points of view," Sanders said at a press conference East Lansing, where he was reportedly flanked by union members.

In supporting trade deals like NAFTA, he continued, "She was very, very wrong and millions of families across the country have been suffering." ...

In response to statements Clinton made about U.S. manufacturing this week in New York City, Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver doubled down in a statement also released Thursday.

"At a rally on Wednesday former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told those gathered, 'Don’t let anybody tell you we can’t make anything in America anymore,'" Weaver said. "What she failed to tell the audience is that she has been a consistent advocate of the job-killing trade deals that have contributed to the loss of nearly 60,000 factories in the United States and almost 5 million manufacturing jobs over the last 15 years."

"Election year conversions won't bring back American jobs," he said, noting that her "conversion" on trade might not even stick.

Media Attempts To Bury Bernie Sanders

Translation from Dem talking points: you won or virtually tied in 7 states, so shut up before you win more pic.twitter.com/I5jyKV4cqN

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) March 2, 2016

Gabbard: People warned me against endorsing Sanders

The Hawaii Democrat was speaking to MSNBC Tuesday night when host Brian Williams asked her about splitting with many in her party in her endorsement.

“Congresswoman, I know that as an Iraq war veteran, you don’t scare easily, but you obviously have gamed out what happens if by splitting with the Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Hillary Clinton, DNC, and let’s say Sen. Sanders is not successful, how unpleasant life can become for a Democrat in the house under a president Clinton?” Williams asked.

“I’ll be very honest with you, a lot of people warned me against doing what I did,” Gabbard said.

Hey, Bernie Sanders, Attack the Empire!

It’s a few days after the big vote and I’m doing my best to dig Tulsi Gabbard’s endorsement of Bernie Sanders out from beneath the pile of Super Tuesday numbers and media declarations of winners and losers. ...

Gabbard, an Iraq war vet, congresswoman from Hawaii and “rising star” in the Democratic establishment, stepped down as vice-chair of the Democratic National Committee in order to endorse Sanders – because he’s the only candidate who is not financially and psychologically tied to the military-industrial complex.

“As a veteran of two Middle East deployments, I know firsthand the cost of war,” she said, cracking the mainstream silence on U.S. militarism. “As a vice chair of the DNC, I am required to stay neutral in democratic primaries, but I cannot remain neutral any longer. The stakes are just too high.”

As the results of Super Tuesday started coming in on Tuesday night, Gabbard was given a few minutes to talk on MSNBC. While Rachel Maddow wanted to discuss the risk her Sanders endorsement might have on her career, Gabbard insisted on addressing the slightly larger matter of our unchecked, resource-hemorrhaging military adventurism across the globe.

“War is a very real thing,” she said. “If the Syrian war continues, we won’t have the resources to fund important social programs. This isn’t a question of the past – it’s a question of today. Regime-change wars do nothing to strengthen our national security, but they do strengthen our enemies.”

As Romney Warns Trump Will Lead U.S. into Abyss, Challengers Vow to Back Trump If He's GOP Nominee

‘A lot of fundraisers are disappointed’: why can’t the Super Pacs stop Trump?

Republican mega-donors – dismayed by the mounting primary victories of billionaire Donald Trump – have turned to new strategies to thwart him, as the Super Pacs that have launched multi-million-dollar ad campaigns for other candidates have largely failed to make a dent in his poll leads or electoral success. ...

On the Democratic side, leftwing candidate Bernie Sanders – who has sharply criticized Super Pacs, although a number have not heeded his words and spent close to $2m to support him – leapt ahead of Hillary Clinton in February campaign fundraising thanks to small donors and, as he puts it in his campaign literature, “not the billionaires”.

“It’s obvious across the board that money is not the influencer it was historically,” says Fred Zeidman, a Houston-based fundraiser and donor to a Jeb Bush-supporting Super Pac who is taking a break before deciding who to back next.

The failure of Super Pacs to make a crucial impact has caused lots of heartburn for GOP fundraisers and numerous mega donors. And those frustrations have only deepened with the growing strength of the billionaire Donald Trump who, flaunting his outsider shtick, has regularly bashed his rivals for their reliance on Super Pacs and big donors, while garnering enormous free media coverage with verbal bombshells.

“Those big expensive ads didn’t have the impact we hoped they would,” said Mel Sembler, a Florida shopping mall magnate who was a top fundraiser for the Jeb Bush-backing Right to Rise Super Pac which hauled in about $119m, but spent only a few million targeting Trump. “The antics that Trump puts on get him all the air time.”

Is Donald Trump the Charismatic Leader the KKK & Neo-Nazis Have Been Waiting For?

What Mitt Romney Doesn’t Understand About His Own Party

Mitt Romney’s vicious dismantling of Donald Trump—as a candidate, as a businessman, and as a human being — marks a turning point in the modern history of the Republican party. It could well become the moment an irreparable chasm opened between the GOP’s old guard leadership and the angry electorate propelling Trump’s candidacy toward the nomination — a split that rips the party in two.

And if that’s the case, Romney’s Thursday speech will be studied for a long time to come for the forensic evidence it offers about how this fracture came to pass. ...

Whatever you think of Trump’s solutions, those forming the core of his support have a coherent set of concerns that his platform, such as it is, takes on. It revolves around a brand of economic nationalism that emphasizes the needs of increasingly insecure, largely white, working class voters. These people share nothing of the party elites’ concern for spending in the abstract and, in fact, want their share of entitlements. ...

The Republican leadership class is now frantically trying to pry what it can of the party away from what Trump’s already seized. In doing so, Romney and others can ignore the gulf between their own consensus and the priorities of the conservative base by dismissing Trump as a conman and a clown. ... But writing his supporters off similarly will only complicate the task of mending what’s tearing the party apart.

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Scientists Say It's Too Late to Rid the World's Oceans of Plastic

They traveled the globe for nine months, sailed across three oceans, and combed the beaches of some of the world's most idyllic islands — including Hawaii, Bermuda, and the Azores — looking for plastic.

Their voyage complete, the experts and volunteers of the Swiss foundation Race for Water have delivered a damning verdict.

"We cannot rid the oceans of the plastics they contain," said foundation director Anne-Cécile Turner. Turner said that such an ocean cleanup would be "scientifically and financially unrealistic."

"There are too many sources of pollution, and we don't possess the technology to rid the seas of all this plastic," she added. ...

"With the action of sun and salt, plastic disintegrates and becomes very hard to collect — even with tweezers," noted Kim Van Arkel, a young oceanographer who served as a scientific advisor on the expedition. ...

Samples collected by Race for Water's experts are currently being analyzed by three European universities in Switzerland and France.

"We will soon know more about the effects of this pollution on the larvae and young fish," said Arkel. "The test also measure the level of toxicity of micro-plastics, because those particles are like sponges that absorb other pollutants that are present in the oceans."

Lots of good (and damning) detail in this:

Flint water crisis: five takeaways from Rick Snyder's emails

Michigan governor Rick Snyder has released thousands of emails over the past few weeks in response to urgent calls for answers on Flint’s water crisis.

Snyder has said that he didn’t know about lead leaching into the water in the months before he conceded in an 8 October announcement that the city was consumed by a public health emergency. Under the oversight of Michigan’s environmental department, the river water wasn’t treated properly to prevent lead from leaching off water pipes and flowing into households.

But a review by the Guardian of the more than 38,000 emails shows that nearly every person in the governor’s inner circle was aware of alarming concerns about the city’s water.

Among the major concerns being raised were the possible link to a deadly outbreak of legionnaire’s disease, to the potential of lead contamination, or simply that having Flint use the local river was “downright scary”.

“I wish I would have asked more questions,” Snyder said last month. “I wish I hadn’t accepted the answers.”

Remembering Berta Cáceres, Assassinated Honduras Indigenous & Environmental Leader

Oregon becomes first state to pass law to completely eliminate coal-fired power

Oregon has become the first US state to pass laws to rid itself of coal, committing to eliminate the use of coal-fired power by 2035 and to double the amount of renewable energy in the state by 2040.

Legislation passed by the state’s assembly, which will need to be signed into law by Governor Kate Brown, will transition Oregon away from coal, which currently provides around a third of the state’s electricity supply.

At the same time, the state will also require its two largest utilities to increase their share of clean energy, such as solar and wind, to 50% by 2040. Combined with Oregon’s current hydroelectric output, the state will be overwhelmingly powered by low-carbon alternatives to fossil fuels.

Climate campaigners said the legislation was a landmark moment and showed that the US was moving rapidly towards renewables, despite the temporary block placed by the supreme court on the Obama administration’s clean power plan.

“This historic step forward is the most significant legislative action the US has taken since the Paris climate agreement,” said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club. “Oregon’s climate leadership is an example for states across the country.”

Scientists Find Cancer's 'Achilles Heel' — Which the Body Could Be Trained to Attack

A landmark discovery about the genetic make-up of tumors means scientists believe they have now found a way to get the human immune system to recognize cancer as an enemy and attack it.

A team of scientists at University College London (UCL) has found that as tumors develop, they carry "flags" on their cell surface that can be recognized by specialized cells in the immune system. ...

The specialized immune system cells, known as T-cells, will attack if they locate the flags, but they are often shielded by cancer defenses or hidden because tumors change and mutate so much. When the T-cells do find them, the cancer cells are usually able to outnumber or overpower them, especially in the advanced stages of the disease when people's immune systems are suppressed.

However now that scientists know that every cell within a tumor contains a flag, they believe there are two new potential ways to successfully treat cancer.

In the first method, scientists could use the flags on the tumor to develop a vaccine made up of the cancer flags, that would train the immune system to spot and attack them.

The second method involves harvesting T-cells that react most strongly to the cancer cells from the body, growing them in a lab and injecting the multiplied load back into the patient.

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Also of Interest

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

The FBI’s shady iPhone evasions: Why its claims about the San Bernardino attack make no sense at all

NSA Is Mysteriously Absent From FBI-Apple Fight

How would you explain the difference between war and terrorism to a space alien?

The Debate of Dicks

The stealthy, Eric Schmidt-backed startup that’s working to put Hillary Clinton in the White House

How DuPont Concealed the Dangers of the New Teflon Toxin

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A Little Night Music

Guitar Shorty - Irma Lee

Guitar Shorty - Ways of a Man

Guitar Shorty - You Better Get Wise To Yourself

Guitar Shorty - It's Too Late

Guitar Shorty - She's Built, Built To Kill

Guitar Shorty - My Baby Loves To Do The Bump

Guitar Shorty - It All Went Down The Drain

Guitar Shorty - We The People

Guitar Shorty - Please Mr. President

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