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The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: Roy Book Binder

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Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features Piedmont blues guitarist Roy Book Binder. Enjoy!

^{Roy Book Binder - It Coulda Been Worse}

"When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it's the only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone's talking about. And they pre-load the ensuing discussion with highly selected images, devious and prejudicial language, dubious linkages, weak or false 'intelligence' and selected 'leaks'."

-- Brian Eno

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News and Opinion

Free Those Who Expose Government Misdeeds, Jail Those Who Try To Conceal Them

The consistently insightful Branko Marcetic has a new article out with Jacobin titled “After the Ukraine Documents Leak, Mainstream Media Is Missing the Story” about the way imperial narrative managers have been manipulating the discourse about the information released in the Pentagon leaks by Jack Teixeira.

Marcetic criticizes the way mass media outlets like The Washington Post and The New York Times (who actually hunted down and outed Teixeira before the FBI even brought him in) have been dragging the conversation kicking and screaming away from the contents of the leaks into discussions about how bad leaks are and what a bad, bad man Teixeira is.

“What’s more corrosive to US democracy?” asks Marcetic. “That the president secretly put US boots on the ground in an incredibly dangerous, constantly escalating war zone, explicitly breaking a promise in the process and acting against the wishes of the majority of the voting public? Or that the public was finally told about it? If we truly believe that ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness,’ then it makes little sense to vehemently oppose turning on a light.”

“It also means less time and energy spent on thinking about the years-long, bipartisan war on leaks that this young airman is the latest to be ensnared in,” Marcetic adds. “It means no one discusses the government’s now-routine practice of ruining people’s lives over even admittedly inconsequential leaks, and how the point of it is to intimidate future leakers and ensure the political and economic elite can continue to operate in secrecy.”

I’ve seen a lot of discussion about the possibility that Teixeira is an unwitting patsy and that these leaks were planted by the US intelligence cartel to help facilitate various foreign policy agendas and/or manufacture consent for the odious RESTRICT Act, and that’s possible — by far the most prolific leaker of documents from the US government is the US government itself. But whether that’s what happened or not, it seems a safe bet that this young man is going to be spending many years behind bars in one of the most draconian prison systems on this planet.

Teixeira’s life is being ruined, perhaps permanently, under the justification that he revealed true things about his government. That is the one and only crime he stands accused of.

And I don’t think people pay enough attention to how insane and outrageous it is that this happens. It’s one of those things that gets more infuriating the more deeply you contemplate it. The government has no business keeping secrets from the public about important matters that are relevant to their interests, much less about matters relating to their government’s own lies and misdeeds, and it has still less business punishing people for trying to bring that information under public scrutiny where it belongs.

When government misdeeds are exposed, the only people who should ever be punished are those who perpetrated them, and those who tried to cover them up. Teixeira, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, Daniel Hale, David McBride — they should all be living free and without fear of persecution. And those who persecuted them should be imprisoned.

It’s just so crazy how it’s taken as a given that governments keep these secrets for good and noble reasons which must be protected with as much force as necessary, when we know for a fact that this is false and have known it for generations. As Julian Assange once said, “The overwhelming majority of information is classified to protect political security, not national security.”

People shouldn’t be punished for revealing the secrets of the government, governments should be punished for keeping secrets from the people.

It shouldn’t be illegal to expose the abuses and deceptions of your government, it should be illegal for your government to abuse and deceive.

The government says it needs secrecy in order to win wars and protect freedom. History says the government needs secrecy in order to start wars and restrict freedom.

The amount of power you have should be inversely proportional to the amount of secrecy you’re allowed. Those with the most power should be a completely open book who aren’t permitted to hide anything from anyone, while those with the least power should have complete unimpeded privacy. Instead it’s the exact opposite: ordinary powerless people are getting more and more surveilled, while governments get more and more secretive and unaccountable.

Slashing government secrecy would solve so many problems — partly because malfeasance functions best in the dark, and partly because it would give democracy a fighting chance by letting the electorate make informed decisions about what’s going on in their world. You can’t claim to have democracy when you’re using government secrecy, censorship, propaganda, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, and the war on journalism to control what people see. People can’t use their votes to advance positive change if they can’t see what’s happening.

That’s the thing about The Washington Post’s slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness”: it’s completely true. It just happens that The Washington Post actively works to help keep things in the dark.

Now We Know The REAL Reason Pentagon Documents Leaked!

NATO to surge troops to Russian border

NATO plans to surge troops to Russia’s border as part of an effort to become a “war-fighting alliance,” the New York Times reported Monday. The Times wrote that “NATO now has deployed a battalion of multinational troops to eight countries along the eastern border with Russia. It is detailing how to enlarge those forces to brigade strength in those frontline states.”

A battalion can include up to 1,000 troops, while a brigade can include up to 5,000 troops, meaning that NATO could potentially plan to increase the number of troops on Russia’s borders fivefold, to up to 40,000 troops. The Times reports that NATO “is also tasking thousands more forces, in case of war, to move quickly in support, with newly detailed plans for mobility and logistics and stiffer requirements for readiness.”

Politico, meanwhile, has cited even larger numbers. On March 18, it reported, “In the coming months, the alliance will accelerate efforts to stockpile equipment along the alliance’s eastern edge and designate tens of thousands of forces that can rush to allies’ aid on short notice… The numbers will be large, with officials floating the idea of up to 300,000 NATO forces.” ...

The alliance has “shed remaining inhibitions about increased numbers of Western troops all along NATO’s border with Russia,” the Times stated. The aim is “to make NATO’s forces not only more robust and more capable but also more visible to Russia.” ...

The accession of Finland to NATO, which doubled the length of NATO’s land border with Russia, will be a key component of these plans, with Russia’s entire border with NATO becoming a militarized zone. Just weeks after its accession to NATO, Finland has begun building a fence on the Russian border, with the initial section to be completed in June. In June of last year, NATO published a strategy document declaring that the alliance must prepare for “high-intensity, multi-domain warfighting against nuclear-armed peer-competitors.” The document declared that “the Euro-Atlantic area is not at peace”—all but declaring that the alliance is at war.

Russia Repels Zaporozhzhye Attacks; Saudi FM Meets Assad, Russia Brazil Affirm Strategic Partnership

Gazprom: Europe Will Find It “Very Difficult” To Fill Storage For Next Winter

Europe will find it very difficult to refill its natural gas stockpiles ahead of next winter, Russian gas giant Gazprom said on Tuesday.

Filling the European gas storage to the levels from before the 2022/2023 winter could become “a non-trivial task” for European companies, Gazprom said on its Telegram social media account, Reuters reported.

“This will be very difficult to do, given the politically motivated decisions aimed at refusing to import Russian pipeline gas. The volume of gas available on the European market will be greatly affected by competition for LNG,” Gazprom said. ...

At the end of the winter period, storage sites across the EU were 56.54% full as of April 16, according to data from Gas Infrastructure Europe. That’s well above the five-year average and the gas in storage levels at the end of the previous two winters.

Contrary to initial expectations, Winter 2022/2023 went surprisingly well, but the energy crisis isn’t over, and Europe is not out of the woods yet.

Ukraine criticises Brazil’s peace efforts and invites Lula to see invasion’s effects

Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has condemned the “violation of Ukraine’s territorial integrity” by Russia and again called for mediation to end the war, as he came under fire for his previous comments on the conflict. Speaking at a lunch on Tuesday with Romanian president Klaus Iohannis, Lula said a group of neutral nations must come together to help broker peace between Russia and Ukraine.

Lula faced criticism from the US over comments he made over the weekend that they were prolonging the fighting by supplying arms to Ukraine. Earlier on Tuesday, Ukraine’s government also criticised Lula for his efforts to broker a peace deal between Kyiv and Moscow, and invited the Brazilian leader to visit the war-torn country and see for himself the consequences of the Russian invasion.

A spokesperson for Ukraine’s foreign ministry said on Tuesday that Kyiv was watching Lula’s efforts to resolve the conflict “with interest” but criticised the Brazilian government for giving equal weight to “the victim and the aggressor”. ...

In Washington, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters US officials have privately made clear the Biden administration’s displeasure to Brazilian counterparts about Lula’s criticism of the arming of Ukraine. Lula’s foreign policy adviser Celso Amorim called the US criticism “absurd” and insisted Brazil did not share Russia’s position.

Report: Biden Preparing Executive Order to Limit US Investments in China

The White House is preparing to take unprecedented action to limit US investments in China’s tech sector, POLITICO reported on Tuesday.

The action would come in the form of an executive order signed by President Biden that would require American companies to notify the government of new investments in Chinese tech. It would also prohibit some investments altogether, such as deals involving Beijing’s microchip sector.

The report said that the order has been years in the making as some officials in the Biden administration have been at odds over how hard to go after new US investments in China.

Hey, looky - one of the bozos in the clown car appears to have figured something out. Give that bozo a lollipop!

Yellen Says Sanctions Risk US Dollar Hegemony

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Sunday acknowledged that US economic sanctions risk the hegemony of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency as they push targeted countries to seek alternatives.

“There is a risk when we use financial sanctions that are linked to the role of the dollar that over time it could undermine the hegemony of the dollar,” Yellen told CNN. ...

While recognizing how sanctions can hurt the US dollar, Yellen said she still supported them using them against other countries, calling sanctions an “extremely important tool.”

Matt Taibbi DEFENDS Elon Musk After Being Fired From The Twitter Files

UN rebukes Washington over reports it eavesdropped on secretary general

The United Nations has raised concerns with the United States over reports that it eavesdropped on the private conversations of the UN secretary general, António Guterres, and other senior officials. “We have made it clear that such actions are inconsistent with the obligations of the United States as enumerated in the Charter of the United Nations and the convention on the privileges and immunities of the United Nations,” said a UN spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, on Tuesday.

The comments followed a number of articles reporting that leaked Pentagon files appear to show Washington was closely monitoring conversations between the secretary general and his aides.

The Washington Post reported this week that the documents included embarrassing allegations that Guterres had expressed frustration with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, and “outrage” when his plans to visit a war-torn region of Ethiopia were rebuffed.

It followed a BBC report last week that the US felt Guterres was too sympathetic to Russian interests when he helped broker the Black Sea grain deal amid fears of a global food crisis. According to the broadcaster, one classified Pentagon file indicated that Guterres preferred to preserve the deal even if it meant accommodating Russian interests.

The UN’s implied rebuke on Tuesday comes as Washington scrambles to contain the fallout of the worst leaks of US intelligence in at least a decade.

Russian Foreign Minister Visits Venezuela, Offers Support

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and his Venezuelan counterpart Yván Gil held a joint press conference in Caracas hours after the former arrived in the country in the second stop of a tour of four Latin American nations. Both men vowed continued support for each other’s country and condemned the economic sanctions Washington has imposed on them.

“We fully support the position of our Venezuelan friends,” Lavrov said. “It is their country ... and we are going to support it in any way so that the Venezuelan economy becomes an independent economy from the pressures of the United States and other western actors.” ...

Gil and Lavrov, who was expected to also meet with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, said their countries are developing an alternative to SWIFT, the system that enables global financial transactions but to which key Russian banks lost access last year. Those banks were cut off as part of economic sanctions imposed on Russia at the start of the war in Ukraine last year.

Russia, along with China, is an unconditional ally of the Venezuelan government. Its support has allowed it to circumvent crippling economic sanctions meant to oust Maduro.

Market APOCALYPSE Looms Amid GOP Debt Ceiling STANDOFF

Clarence Thomas Failed to Disclose Real Estate Deal with GOP Megadonor

Tax-Free Day For The Ultra-Wealthy

Tax day is a costly annual annoyance for most, but for some of the wealthiest people in the United States, this year’s April 18 tax deadline might not mean much. That’s because according to a new report, the richest sliver of our population has managed to avoid billions in tax obligations by hiding their money offshore.

What’s more, it could get easier for the mega-rich to hide their taxable income, thanks to efforts by the Supreme Court and the Biden administration.

A recent study from academic and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) researchers found that wealthy Americans have stashed nearly $2 trillion in foreign tax havens, with much of that fortune linked to a handful of the country’s richest households.

That data arrived weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court hobbled regulators’ efforts to combat international tax evasion schemes by limiting fines for people who fail to disclose foreign bank accounts. The study also follows a U.S. Senate report warning of a glaring loophole in a law designed to combat the use of tax havens — a law that Republican legislators have long been trying to repeal outright. Compounding matters, earlier this year, the Biden administration gave foreign banks a reprieve on tax reporting.

Together, the moves paint a picture of a tax day and many more to come where ordinary Americans will pay what they owe, while the rich can get off scot-free.

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Claims of crime expose rift in Georgia’s pro-Trump fake elector group

Some of the people who falsely claimed to be a Trump elector in the 2020 election in Georgia recently told state prosecutors examining the illegal scheme that one of the so-called fake electors committed crimes that they were not involved in, according to a new court document filed on Tuesday.

The admission, included in a document submitted by Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis, shows a potentially major fracture in the group as prosecutors near the end of the criminal investigation and consider bringing charges against the former president and dozens of allies.

The court filing sought to disqualify attorney Kimberly Debrow, who represents 10 of the fake electors, from the case because of a twisted new conflict of interest that arose last week, when some of her clients implicated another of her clients in an additional crime.

“Some of the electors stated that another elector represented by Ms Debrow committed acts that are violations of Georgia law and that they were not party to these additional acts,” Willis said in the document, which did not spell out the nature of the alleged crimes.

The fact that 10 of Debrow’s clients were making criminal complaints against another of her clients in the same investigation suggests Debrow can no longer offer adequate counsel to her client accused of further crimes and must be removed from the case altogether, the court filing said.

RFK JR OFFICIALLY Announces 2024 Challenge To Biden With 14% Support From BIDEN Voters Per New Poll

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13 Years After BP Disaster, Oceana Urges Biden to Block New Offshore Drilling

Thursday will mark the 13th anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, in which a BP drilling rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers and hundreds of thousands of animals. The disaster, one of the worst environmental catastrophes in U.S. history, was an object lesson in the dangers of fossil fuels.

Despite this, President Joe Biden has so far violated his campaign promise to stop further offshore oil and gas drilling, and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA)—regardless of its status as the most important U.S. climate legislation to date—actually mandates its expansion.

"It's as if we learned nothing from the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster," Oceana campaign director Diane Hoskins said in a statement. "We know that when oil companies drill, they spill. It's not a matter of if there will be another spill, but when. And those spills bring immediate economic and environmental devastation to our coastal communities."

Oceana released a new report Tuesday outlining how Biden can make good on his promise after 2024 without contradicting the terms of the IRA. The report, A Simple Solution: How President Biden Can Meet Offshore Clean Energy Goals and Prevent New Offshore Drilling, comes weeks after the latest update from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that emissions from already existing fossil fuel infrastructure could blow through the carbon budget for limiting global warming to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels, while planned expansion added on top could push the Earth above 2°C.

"President Biden has the responsibility to ensure his administration advances the policies needed to meet the ambitious and necessary climate goals of the United States," the Oceana report authors wrote.

How can he do this? The IRA put up three major stumbling blocks. First, it required the federal government to lease at least 60 million acres of public waters for oil and gas drilling the year before any new offshore wind lease sales. Second, it mandated that 1.7 million acres in the Gulf be leased for oil and gas despite a court ruling that the sale was backed by an insufficient environmental impact statement. Third, it set deadlines for additional lease sales in Alaska and the Gulf for 2022 and 2023.

However, Biden can still honor his campaign promise for 2024 and beyond through his administration's proposed five-year plan for oil and gas drilling, the final draft of which is expected this coming September. The initial proposed program, released last July, floated various options for lease sales for 2023-28, from zero to 10 in the Gulf of Mexico and potentially one in Cook Inlet, Alaska. Oceana hopes the final proposal will stick with zero.

"President Biden has a window now—where he can both abide by the Inflation Reduction Act and honor his campaign commitment—by issuing a five-year plan that includes no new offshore oil and gas leases," Hoskins said.

In addition, Oceana said that the Biden administration could exceed its goal of developing 30 gigawatts of offshore wind power by 2030 without additional oil and gas lease sales, since the sales already planned for 2022 and 2023 would allow offshore wind leasing to proceed through much of 2024. The group further called on Congress to pass legislation reversing the IRA stipulation tying offshore wind development to oil and gas and on Biden to permanently protect more vulnerable coastal areas from offshore drilling by using his powers under Section 12(a) of the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act.

'Sitting on a bomb': Climate change 'intensifying' France's droughts, heatwaves, and forest fires

Drilling Operations, Wildfires Emitting Far More Methane Than Previously Known

Amid climate experts' urgent warnings to keep planet-heating fossil fuels in the ground, two recently published studies show that methane emissions from U.S. oil and gas fields as well as megafires exacerbated by rising temperatures are even worse than scientists thought.

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that has more than 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide during its first two decades in the atmosphere.

The study on focused on emissions from drilling sites, published Monday in the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, notes that the United States is the world's largest emitter of methane from the oil and gas industry, and cutting those emissions is a key piece of the U.S. government's stated climate action plan.

Based on surface and satellite observations, the researchers estimate that methane pollution from the nation's oil and gas industry was 70% higher than reported by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from 2010-19.

"While emissions in Canada and Mexico decreased over the period, U.S. emissions increased from 2010 to 2014, decreased until 2017, and rose again afterward," the study states. "Increases were driven by the largest production regions (Permian, Anadarko, Marcellus), while emissions in the smaller production regions generally decreased."

Study co-author and Harvard University professor Daniel Jacob explained to CNN how the findings expose the inadequacy of the EPA and fossil fuel industry's current monitoring practices, which rely on engineering models and handheld devices. The agency requires companies to do quarterly searches for methane leaks using infrared cameras and sensors.

"This has been known for a while, at least in the atmospheric science community," he said of the flawed approach. "When we observe methane in the air, we find concentrations much higher than one would expect from the EPA inventories."

Jacob added that "a leak that goes on for some days and then gets fixed, or some operator venting gas at a particular time of day—if you're just cruising around and trying to observe hotspots, you might miss them."

As CNN reported:

Jacob and other atmospheric scientists say there should be more monitoring of methane from the air, which can catch a huge plume that has gone undetected for weeks or months. But that's not the silver bullet for the problem either, since monitoring from the air isn't precise and can't drill down to locate which specific faulty equipment or well is causing a leak.

This is leading to even further advancements in technology in which satellites can monitor leaks with more precision to figure out exactly where it is coming from.

The findings align with those of other recent studies, including an International Energy Agency (IEA) analysis from February that found global methane emissions from the energy sector are about 70% higher than what national governments officially report.

At the time, IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol described the "massive underreporting" as "alarming" and stressed the need to dramatically reduce methane pollution, pointing out that cutting such emissions from human activities 30% by the end of this decade "would have the same effect on global warming by 2050 as shifting the entire transport sector to net-zero CO2 emissions."

As methane, CO2, and other greenhouse gases from human activities like fossil fuel use continue to drive global heating, the world faces more extreme droughts, hurricanes, floods, and wildfires—and as a study published Friday in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics highlights, fires produce more emissions that further warm the planet.

"Wildfires have become deadlier, more destructive, and more frequent globally over the past few years," states the study. "Particularly, the 2020 wildfire season saw massive wildfires in the western USA, Australia, Brazil, and the Arctic. The California 2020 wildfire season was exacerbated by abnormally high temperatures and dry conditions and emitted 10 times more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than the 2000-19 annual average wildfire emissions."

The University of California, Riverside (UCR) research team—which used a new detection method, relying on a remote sensing technique rather than air samples collected via aircraft—also found that methane pollution from the state's top 20 wildfires in 2020 was over seven times the average from fires the previous 19 years.

"Fires are getting bigger and more intense, and correspondingly, more emissions are coming from them," study co-author and UCR professor Francesca Hopkins said Monday. "The fires in 2020 emitted what would have been 14% of the state's methane budget if it was being tracked."

While California currently does not measure methane from natural sources, the study aserts that given the importance of reducing methane emissions and the significant contribution from wildfires, the state should start monitoring how much comes from them.

"Typically, these sources have been hard to measure, and it's questionable whether they're under our control. But we have to try," said Hopkins. "They're offsetting what we're trying to reduce."

Colorado River snaking through Grand Canyon most endangered US waterway – report

A 277-mile stretch of the Colorado River that snakes through the iconic Grand Canyon is America’s most endangered waterway, a new report has found.

The unique ecosystem and cultural heritage of the Grand Canyon is on the brink of collapse due to prolonged drought, rising temperatures and outdated river management, according to American Rivers, the conservation group that compiles the annual endangered list.

Its future hangs in the balance, as the Biden administration is poised to change the way the Colorado River’s dwindling water is divided. Further restrictions to the river flow risks turning the Grand Canyon into an ecological sacrifice zone, causing irreparable damage to wildlife, fish stocks and sacred sites, the report warns.

“The Colorado River is on the brink of collapse and the Grand Canyon is in the crosshairs ... trying to solve the basin’s water challenges by sacrificing the health of the Grand Canyon would be an utter tragedy,” said Sinjin Eberle from American Rivers. “This is an all-hands-on-deck emergency.”

The annual snapshot of the country’s most endangered rivers ranks the 10 US waterways at a crucial crossroads, where key decisions in the coming months will determine their long-term fate.

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Also of Interest

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

Leaks Spelling the End for Ukraine

Government For the People Shouldn’t Keep Secrets From the People

China Brings Peace To Yemen, Syria And ... Palestine?

Bombshell filing: 9/11 hijackers were CIA recruits

Peru’s Coup-Plotting Congress Has 6% Approval, 91% Disapproval (But Full US Backing)

Mining Corporations Are Up in Arms Over Mexican Government’s Potentially Game-Changing Mining Reform Proposals

‘Without the ice cap, we cannot live’: the Andes community devastated by climate crisis

Scientists discover pristine deep-sea Galápagos reef ‘teeming with life’

Russia ‘using spy ships to plot North Sea sabotage’

Biden’s Words On Russia & China Come Back To Haunt Him!

MSNBC's Mehdi Hasan PLAGIARIZED Pro-Spanking Column Nearly WORD-FOR-WORD

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A Little Night Music

Roy Book Binder - Mississippi Blues

Roy Book Binder - One Meatball

Roy Book Binder - Candy Man

Roy Book Binder – I'm Going Home Someday

Roy Book Binder – Delia

Roy Book Binder – It's Gonna Be Alright Someday

Roy Book Binder - Davis-Travis Rag

Roy Book Binder - That'll Never Happen No More

Roy Book Binder - Rag Mama

Roy Book Binder - I Got Mine

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