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The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: Jimmy T99 Nelson

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Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features blues singer Jimmy T99 Nelson. Enjoy!

^{Jimmy Nelson - Meet Me With Your Black Dress On}

“Wars are never fought for altruistic reasons.”

-- Arundhati Roy

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News and Opinion

More Sarin Gas In Syria Days After Trump Says US Won’t Depose Assad? Sounds Legit!

In 2013, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published a story for London Review of Books titled “Whose Sarin?” in which he pointed out some massive plot holes in the official narrative the Obama administration and its corporate media mouthpieces were feeding the public about sarin gas being used in Syria. An important factor Hersh highlighted was that the al Qaeda affiliated jihadist group al-Nusra, which is still fighting in Syria to this day, had sarin gas and the ability to make more of it. ... Hersh mentions that the so-called “moderate rebels” in Syria had been overrun by terrorist factions many months earlier. ...

So we’ve got a nation full of vicious terrorist groups known to have the ability to manufacture and distribute sarin gas, a media that as Ben Swann and Vanessa Beeley report has been consistently lying to us about Syria, the increasingly-indistinguishable neocons and corporate Democrats pushing for Assad’s removal so aggressively that they can truly be said to be searching for ways to “justify a strike against Assad” as Hersh puts it, a power struggle between the deep state which wants to depose Assad and the Trump administration which has been saying that it doesn’t, and this is all happening days after the administration announced that it had no intention of attempting to remove Assad from power, in a nation whose power establishment has lied to the American people to manufacture consent for military interventions time and time again.

The US government was just saying it has no intention of deposing Assad five days ago, the Syrian army has been making significant gains against terrorist fighters in northern Hama, and all of a sudden Assad decides to do the one thing he knows from experience could incite all of NATO against him? On what planet does that make sense?

Syria chemical attack has changed my view of Assad, says Trump

Donald Trump has described the chemical attack in Idlib province which killed more than 70 people as an “affront to humanity”, but offered little clue to any new strategy to end the violence in Syria. The US president said that Tuesday’s attack – whose victims included women, children and babies – had affected him profoundly and transformed his thinking about the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad.

But during a joint press conference with King Abdullah of Jordan on Wednesday, Trump also repeated his criticism of Barack Obama’s administration for drawing and then failing to enforce a “red line” over Assad’s use of chemical weapons.

“I think that set us back a long ways, not only in Syria but in many other parts of the world because it was a blank threat,” Trump said, acknowledging that he now carried responsibility for the crisis. Obama and his officials have disputed this criticism, insisting that they struck a deal with Russia to remove Syria’s weapons of mass destruction without a need for military intervention.

Pressed whether he would consider military intervention to remove Assad, the US president replied: “I’m not saying I’m doing anything one way or another, but I’m certainly not going to be telling you … Militarily, I don’t like to say where I’m going and what I’m doing.”

An excellent article by Phyllis Bennis - here's a taste:

Trump, Syria, and Chemical Weapons: What We Know, What We Don't, and the Dangers Ahead

Let's start with what we don't know. Experts remain uncertain what chemical(s) were involved in the horrific chemical attack, almost certainly from the air, on the village of Khan Sheikhun in Idlib province in Syria.  The nerve agent sarin, chlorine, and unknown combinations of chemicals have all been identified as possible, but in the first 48 hours nothing has been confirmed. We don't know for sure yet what it was that killed more than 75 people, many of them children, and injured many more.

Crucially, we also don't know who was responsible. Western governments, led by the United States, and much of the western press have asserted that the Syrian regime is responsible, but there is still no clear evidence. Certainly Damascus has an air force, has been known to use chemical, particularly chlorine, weapons in 2014 and 2015. So that's certainly possible.

The Syrian military denies using chemical weapons. Their international backer, Russia, claims that the Syrian military did drop bombs in the affected area but that the chemical effect was not in the bombs dropped but rather from the explosion of an alleged chemical warehouse under the control of unnamed rebel forces. The same report by the United Nations and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons that found Syrian government responsibility for chlorine attacks also found that ISIS had used another chemical weapon, mustard gas, and investigated at least three other chemical weapons attacks whose perpetrators could not be identified. So that could be possible as well.

For a variety of reasons, some of these possibilities don't hold up so well if the chemical used this week was the sarin nerve agent -- but we don't know yet what it was.

A few good points in this article, the rest of it, meh.

Trump’s change of heart on Syria isn’t reassuring, it’s profoundly disturbing

‘I will tell you that attack on children yesterday had a big impact on me – big impact.” Those were the words of Donald Trump following the use of chemical weapons in Idlib province, Syria. With them, he sent the diplomatic world into a spin: had the president changed his mind on one of the most urgent foreign policy issues of our times? ...

Those celebrating the possibility of a shift should ask how it may have come about. If there’s one thing we do know, it’s that Trump wants us to see that he cares. This is a president who is obsessed with how he is perceived, griping about unflattering photos and the size of the crowd at his inauguration. It’s not even clear that he has any ideological aims, other than to win, and to be liked. ... When Americans become conscious of an atrocity – despite the fact that it might be the latest in a long line of atrocities, many of which didn’t make the morning news – he can’t help but respond.

Perhaps the instant praise won by his UN ambassador prodded him into action. Regardless, the conclusion must be that any Syria “pivot” has its roots in Trump’s approval-seeking personality, his proneness to being thrown off course by media coverage, his shallowness of purpose. ...

Whatever you think of the merits of western intervention in Syria, the idea of Trump directing it is, frankly, terrifying. And even though you may despise the current murky detente, so is the idea of this chaotic, underqualified White House being at loggerheads with Russia. The international order may be vulnerable, and dictators emboldened. But so long as this man is in charge, we must pray that the promise of an isolationist America is fulfilled.

On Contact: The Birth of American Empire with Stephen Kinzer

An excellent piece with relevance for our times. Here's a snippet to whet your intellectual tastebuds:

Woodrow Wilson made democracy unsafe for the world

This week is the 100th anniversary of President Woodrow Wilson’s speech to Congress seeking a declaration of war against Germany. Many people celebrate this centenary of America’s emergence as a world power. But, when the Trump administration is bombing or rattling sabers at half a dozen nations while many Democrats clamor to fight Russia, it is worth reviewing World War One’s high hopes and dire results.

Wilson was narrowly re-elected in 1916 based on a campaign slogan, "He kept us out of war." But Wilson had massively violated neutrality by providing armaments and money to the Allied powers that had been fighting Germany since 1914. In his war speech to Congress, Wilson hailed the U.S. government as "one of the champions of the rights of mankind" and proclaimed that "the world must be made safe for democracy." ...

Wilson acted as if the congressional declaration of war against Germany was also a declaration of war against the Constitution. Harvard professor Irving Babbitt commented in 1924: "Wilson, in the pursuit of his scheme for world service, was led to make light of the constitutional checks on his authority and to reach out almost automatically for unlimited power." Wilson even urged Congress to set up detention camps to quarantine "alien enemies."

Wilson unleashed ruthless censorship of any criticism. Anyone who spoke publicly against military conscription was likely to get slammed with federal espionage or sedition charges. Possessing a pamphlet entitled Long Live the Constitution of the United States earned six months in jail for a Pennsylvania malcontent. Censorship was buttressed by fanatic propaganda campaigns led by the Committee on Public Information, a federal agency whose shameless motto was "faith in democracy... faith in fact."

During Campaign Trump Accused China of "Raping Our Country," Today He Hosts Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago

North Korea has already crashed Trump and Xi’s Mar-a-Lago meeting

North Korea was slated to be a main topic of discussion even before it conducted yet another ballistic missile test on Tuesday, this one involving a new and more dangerous type of intermediate-range missile. Now, with the Trump administration talking tough about what will happen if Beijing fails to help tame Kim, the entire summit could hinge on him. ... China has tried to calm simmering tensions caused by Pyongyang’s actions and denied any connection between the missile test and Xi’s visit with Trump. But Joshua Pollack, a senior researcher at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, suspects it was no coincidence. “The timing they pick often has an in-your-face quality,” he said of the North Koreans, adding that the launch sends the message “we’re here, we’re not going away, you can’t ignore us.’”

Trump has loudly and repeatedly insisted that Xi has the power to essentially flip a switch and bring North Korea to heel. ... But Trump is overstating Beijing’s influence over the Kim regime, analysts who study the relationship between China and North Korea insist. And they warn that any sort of first-strike attack against a country with a nuclear arsenal and the world’s fourth-largest standing army would be a big mistake.

Pollack said China is already approaching the point “where there’s nothing left for them to do [with North Korea] that would not involve a risk of the whole country coming apart over time.” China is by far North Korea’s largest trading partner, but cutting off the supply of crude oil and other essential goods would eventually lead to collapse, likely causing a crisis that would lead to millions of refugees spilling across the Chinese border. Meanwhile, analysts believe that any sort of pre-emptive strike on the combative country would likely lead to a full-blown war in the region. Others have noted that China and North Korea have a “Treaty of Mutual Assistance,” which means Xi could interpret any U.S. military action against the Kim regime as an act of war against both countries.

Rep. Jan Schakowsky Calls for Investigation Into Trump’s Ties to Blackwater Founder Erik Prince

Rep. Jan Schakowsky, the most dogged opponent of Blackwater founder Erik Prince in the U.S. Congress, is blasting the Trump administration for using Prince as a shadow emissary for the White House. “He is the kind of unvetted, unscrupulous person that seems to fit very nicely, especially into the kinds of operations that they want done,” Schakowsky said in an exclusive interview for the Intercepted podcast. “This is exactly the kind of person who should be excluded from having anything to do with our government, covert or out in public.”

Schakowsky was responding to reporting by The Intercept and the Washington Post that Prince is serving as an unofficial adviser and emissary for Trump and his team. The Post reported on Monday that Prince and the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, arranged a meeting in the Seychelles islands “to establish a back-channel line of communication between Moscow and President-elect Donald Trump.” That followed an earlier meeting in December 2016 with Sheikh al-Nahyan, Steve Bannon, Jared Kushner, and retired Gen. Michael Flynn in New York. ...

In January, six days after the Seychelles meeting, The Intercept reported that Prince was informally advising Trump. Prince’s wife posted pictures from inside Trump headquarters of Trump and Mike Pence watching the election results. Prince contributed at least $250,000 to Trump’s campaign through a political action committee run by billionaire Robert Mercer. Prince’s mother also contributed heavily to the PAC. Prince’s sister Betsy DeVos is Trump’s education secretary. “The whole family is quite troubling,” said Rep. Schakowsky, “and now is part of the inner circle, the ruling party, the people with the most influence in the world, in charge of this administration.”

On Monday, the Post reported that “the UAE agreed to broker the meeting in part to explore whether Russia could be persuaded to curtail its relationship with Iran, including in Syria, a Trump administration objective that would likely require major concessions to Moscow on U.S. sanctions.” The paper stated: “Though Prince had no formal role with the Trump campaign or transition team, he presented himself as an unofficial envoy for Trump to high-ranking Emiratis involved in setting up his meeting with the Putin confidant.”

This is an interesting article, here's the setup:

Globalization and the End of the Labor Aristocracy, Part 1

Twenty-first century imperialism has changed its form. In the 19^th century and the first half of the 20^th century, it was explicitly related to colonial control; in the second half of the 20^th century it relied on a combination of geopolitical and economic control deriving also from the clear dominance of the United States as the global hegemon and leader of the capitalist world dealing with the potential threat from the Communist world. It now relies more and more on an international legal and regulatory architecture—fortified by various multilateral and bilateral agreements—to establish the power of capital over labor. This has involved a “grand bargain,” no less potent for being implicit, between different segments of capital. Capitalist firms in the developing world gained some market access (typically intermediated by multinational capital) and, in return, large capital in highly developed countries got much greater protection and monopoly power, through tighter enforcement of intellectual property rights and greater investment protections.

These measures dramatically increased the bargaining power of capital relative to labor, globally and in every country. In the high-income countries, this eliminated the “labor aristocracy” first theorized by the German Marxist theorist Karl Kautsky in the early 20^th century. The concept of the labor aristocracy derived from the idea that the developed capitalist countries, or the “core” of global capitalism, could extract superprofits from impoverished workers in the less developed “periphery.” These surpluses could be used to reward workers in the core, relative to those in the periphery, and thereby achieve greater social and political stability in the core countries. This enabled northern capitalism to look like a win-win economic system for capital and labor (in the United States, labor relations between the late 1940s and the 1970s, for example, were widely termed a “capital-labor accord”). Today, the increased bargaining power of capital and the elimination of the labor aristocracy has delegitimated the capitalist system in the rich countries of the global North.

Increasing inequality, the decline in workers’ incomes, the decline or absence of social protections, the rise of material insecurity, and a growing alienation from government have come to characterise societies in both developed and developing worlds. These sources of grievance have found political expression in a series of unexpected electoral outcomes (including the “Brexit” vote in the UK and the election of Trump in the United States). The decline of the labor aristocracy—really, its near collapse—has massive implications, as it undermines the social contract that made global capitalism so successful in the previous era. It was the very foundation of political stability and social cohesion within advanced capitalist countries, which is now breaking down, and will continue to break down without a drastic restructuring of the social and economic order. The political response to this decline has been expressed primarily in the rise of right-wing, xenophobic, sectarian, and reactionary political tendencies.

Defeated Ecuadorian Presidential Candidate Refuses to Concede

Workers shut down Argentina with strike over austerity measures

Argentinians protesting against government austerity measures and demanding higher wages have brought the country to a standstill as labor unions challenged the president, Mauricio Macri, in the first general strike since he took office 16 months ago. Truck and bus drivers, teachers, factory workers, airport employees and the government customs agents who run Argentina’s all-important grains export sector walked off the job at midnight for 24 hours. ...

Macri, a proponent of free markets, took office in December 2015. He eliminated currency and trade controls and cut government spending, including gas subsidies, a move that sparked steep increases in home heating bills.

A poll last month showed that for the first time since Macri took office, more Argentinians disapprove than approve of his performance. He was elected after more than a decade of populist rule left Argentina with rampant inflation, dwindling central bank reserves and a wide fiscal deficit.

Obamacare repeal thwarted again as Mike Pence fails to reach deal

Less than two weeks after a stone-faced Paul Ryan admitted defeat and declared the Affordable Care Act the “law of the land” for the “foreseeable future”, his ill-fated healthcare plan began to show sparks of life. Hopes of reviving the Republicans’ failed healthcare plan surged briefly on Tuesday when the vice-president, Mike Pence, came to Capitol Hill in an attempt to forge a new compromise that could somehow pass the House of Representatives.

But the late night talks between Pence and members of competing factions of the House Republican caucus stalled and no deal was reached. A hoped-for repeal of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare, returned to the grave and recriminations began anew on Capitol Hill.

These 156 Lawmakers Support Expanding, Not Cutting, Social Security. Does Yours?

Legislation that would expand benefits for Social Security recipients while giving millions of seniors a tax break was re-introduced in the U.S. House on Wednesday, with support from over two-thirds of the Democratic caucus—and, its backers hope, from large swaths of the grassroots resistance movement.

Rep. John Larson's (D-Conn.) bill, the "Social Security 2100 Act" or H.R. 1902, bears more co-sponsors than any other previous proposal to expand Social Security.

According to Larson's office, Social Security 2100 would:

• Provide an increase for all beneficiaries starting in 2018 that is the equivalent of 2 percent of the average benefit;
• Improve the annual cost of living adjustment (COLA) formula to better reflect the costs incurred by seniors through adopting a [consumer price index for the elderly or CPI-E] formula;
• Set the new minimum benefit will be at 25 percent above the poverty line and index it to wages to ensure that the minimum benefit does not fall behind;
• Cut taxes for over 11 million Social Security beneficiaries;
• Have millionaires and billionaires pay the same rate as everyone else by applying the payroll tax to wages above $400,000 (currently payroll taxes are not collected on wages over $127,200);
• Gradually phase in an increase in the contribution rate beginning in 2019 so that by 2042, workers and employers would pay 7.4 percent (instead of 6.2 percent today).

The full list of 156 co-sponsors is here.

Minnesota is Trying to Crush Black Lives Movement Highway Protests, A Tactic Activists Have Used for Decades

Minnesota's House of Representatives voted on Monday to stiffen penalties for protesters who block traffic on highways and other roadways. The move was seen as a response to recent highway blockades in the state utilized by Black Lives movement demonstrators to protest the police shooting of unarmed African-American men.

The provision, which was part of a public safety package, would make blockading a highway a “gross misdemeanor” punishable by up to a $3,000 fine and up to a year in jail. Dissenting Democratic lawmakers tried to strip the provision from the bill, but failed in a 56-75, mostly party-line vote. ...

Marching onto major highways and forcing traffic to stop has become a fixture of Black Lives movement protests since 2014 — with protesters in cities including Atlanta, Miami, Austin, and others using the shutdowns to draw attention to police brutality. But the tactic predates the Black Lives movement, and has in the past proved to be a successful way to force people to pay attention, such as when it was used as part of the Justice for Janitors unionization campaign in the 1990’s in Washington, D.C. ...

Moumita Ahmed, a New York City activist who helped block FDR Drive and Lincoln Tunnel in New York City following the news that the police officer who put Eric Garner in a chokehold would not be indicted by state officials ... said surprise blockades have become the tactic of choice because other avenues of effective protest are essentially closed. People are “unaware of how hard it is to get a permit for a protest,” she said. In fact, she argued, it’s “extra difficult for Black Lives Matter activists and grassroots activists because of how the police view Black Lives Matter.” ...

“It’s been very clear that simply marching and voting isn’t swaying those in power,” Jim Fergie Chambers, an activist who took part in shutting down I-75 in Atlanta last year, said, pointing to the need for escalation in light of continued police abuses.

Ferguson votes to keep mayor who ran city when Michael Brown was killed

In the first mayoral election since Michael Brown’s death triggered a national conversation on policing, Ferguson residents decided to keep the status quo, choosing to keep James Knowles III in his post. Knowles, a longtime Ferguson resident who had just been reelected in 2014 when Brown was shot by a white police officer, won his third term on Tuesday with 57 percent of the vote.

Knowles’ challenger Ella Jones, a former Mary Kay saleswoman and the first black woman to serve on the Ferguson city council, ran on a platform of change she called “one Ferguson,” but failed to galvanize enough voters to deliver it. Knowles’ share of the vote jumped 50 percent since Knowles’ last contested election in 2014, and St. Louis County Board of Elections director Eric Fey confirmed that just shy of 29 percent of registered voters turned out on Tuesday. For perspective, in the last Mayoral election four months prior to Brown’s death, only around 12 percent of registered voters cast ballots.

Speaking to VICE News before the election, Jones, 62, warned that if Knowles, 37, were to win a third term “it going to be a further divide” in Ferguson along racial and class lines. She stressed that the race was more about “trust” than it was about the prospect of becoming the first person of color to be mayor in the city’s 122-year history.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions Plans to Roll Back Decades of Police Reform

Late Monday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions released a memo calling on his two top deputies to “immediately review all Department activities” for adherence to the Trump administration’s law enforcement agenda. The areas Sessions highlighted for review included collaborative investigations and prosecutions, law enforcement grants, training, compliance reviews, and more. The attorney general’s two-page memo also took aim at “existing or contemplated consent decrees” between the federal government and local law enforcement agencies, setting the stage for an examination of numerous agreements and ongoing deliberations set in place by the Trump administration’s predecessors.

Though it had been anticipated for months, Sessions’s call for a review of the Justice Department’s consent decrees was met with immediate criticism from civil liberties advocates, who view the binding legal agreements, overseen by independent monitors, as a vital tool for reforming abusive police practices and departments. ...

During her six years as deputy chief in the Special Litigation Section of the Civil Rights Division, Christy E. Lopez led several of the Obama administration’s investigations into police departments and law enforcement agencies, including in Ferguson, Missouri, where she drafted a blistering and widely cited report on police and municipal court abuses and exploitation in St. Louis county.

Now a law professor at Georgetown University, Lopez told The Intercept that Sessions’s long history of challenging the propriety of consent decrees makes his memo particularly concerning. “Given Sessions’s skepticism of consent decrees, and frankly this entire administration’s skepticism of using the federal government to protect people’s rights and do good in the world,” she argued, it’s fair to view the memo as a signal of the administration’s intent to “second guess every single consent decree out there.” Where that will lead, Lopez said, remains to be seen.

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Devin Nunes steps aside from House intelligence committee's Russia inquiry

Devin Nunes, Donald Trump’s chief ally on the congressional committees investigating the president’s connections to Russia, has stepped aside from the inquiry, the congressman announced on Thursday.

Less than two weeks after the Democrats on the House intelligence committee called for Nunes to recuse himself, the committee chairman said he would “temporarily” leave the inquiry in the hands of other right-wing Republicans, leaving it unclear how much Nunes’ absence would transform an investigation stalled by deep partisan infighting.

Nunes, a member of Trump’s national security transition team and the head of the House intelligence committee, said that “leftwing activists” had filed ethics complaints against him, prompting his absence while he contests them.

“Despite the baselessness of the charges, I believe it is in the best interests of the House intelligence committee and the Congress for me to have Representative Mike Conaway, with assistance from Representatives Trey Gowdy and Tom Rooney, temporarily take charge of the committee’s Russia investigation while the House ethics committee looks into this matter,” Nunes said in a statement. ...

Adam Schiff, Nunes’ Democratic counterpart on the committee who had called on Nunes to step away from the inquiry, sounded a conciliatory note, saying it was “not an easy decision for the chairman” and pledging to work with Conaway to put the inquiry “back on track”.
Schiff said the panel now had “a fresh opportunity to move forward in the unified and nonpartisan way that an investigation of this seriousness demands”.

Joan Baez Goes Viral With 'Nasty Man,' a Protest Song for the Trump Era

Joan Baez, protest singer of the peace and civil rights movements of the 1960s, has gone viral with a protest song for today's Trump era, called "Nasty Man."

The song, which Baez described to Rolling Stone as "not a good song, but it will make people laugh," has garnered over two million views since the singer posted it to her Facebook page on Tuesday night.

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Environmental Groups Sue EPA to Force Ban of Pesticide Linked to Autism

Three environmental groups asked a federal appeals court on Wednesday to order the EPA to ban the pesticide chlorpyrifos. EarthJustice, which is representing the Pesticide Action Network and the Natural Resources Defense Council, was responding to the EPA’s recent announcement that it would not be following through on its own decision to ban the pesticide, which has been repeatedly found to damage children’s developing brains.

Scientists have spent years documenting that exposure to chlorpyrifos increases children’s chances of having long-term, developmental problems, including attention, memory and intelligence deficits, tremors, and autism. After carefully weighing that evidence — as well as critiques of it from Dow Chemical, which patented and still sells most of the pesticide — the EPA decided to move ahead with a ban on chlorpyrifos in 2015.

On November 10, the agency took what was supposed to be a final step in banning the pesticide: issuing a revised assessment of the chemical’s effects on human health, which set a new exposure limit for the pesticide. ... Only a 60-day public comment period was necessary before the pesticide would be removed from use. But the deadline the federal court gave EPA to finalize its decision — March 31 — pushed the finalization of the decision into Trump’s presidency. Many have since been watching chlorpyrifos as a test for whether the new administration would tackle even the clearest, most studied health threats. The pesticide presented a case in which scientific questions have already been asked and answered and in which children are being directly harmed. Safe drinking water is at stake, and that’s something both Trump and EPA administrator Scott Pruitt have insisted they care about and want to protect. And because the president seems to be particularly concerned about autism, some had hoped he would not stand in the way of a move that would likely have reduced the incidence of autism cases. ...

Trump has not just proven to be not just opposed to government regulation, but also very close to Dow Chemical, which contributed $1 million to his inaugural committee. Trump named Dow CEO Andrew Liveris to head his manufacturing council and the president’s team sends the businessman emails “if not every day, then every other day,” as Liveris told the Washington Post.

Small California Towns Are Facing Off Against Oil Companies — And Winning

Last fall, as presidential candidate Donald Trump promised America more oil and coal production, a small refinery town in Northern California stood up against its biggest employer and taxpayer. Valero, the Texas-based petroleum giant, had sought routine approval for a huge crude-by-rail project. The city council of Benicia, however, rejected Valero’s proposal.

The project proposed to take crude oil from what is described in an environmental impact report as “sites in North America” — a possible euphemism for Bakken crude — and roll it in rail cars to Benicia. But the project proved so unpopular among the city’s nearly 27,000 residents that three of the five city council members who had started out backing the project joined in a unanimous vote against it. An energized group of local administrators and activists had managed to derail a project that national policy makers couldn’t touch. ...

But Benicia wasn’t the only place this happened last November. Across California, new organizing efforts zeroed in on small-town elections as a strategy to thwart big fossil-fuel infrastructure projects. Oxnard officials, for example, are battling California Energy Commission plans to site a huge gas-fired power plant on a local beach, and opponents to the plan were overwhelmingly favored in the fall elections. In the Kern County town of Arvin, which 10 years ago won the dubious distinction of having the smoggiest air of any U.S. city, a 23-year-old city councilman was elected mayor on a promise to regulate the oil industry and protect the city’s water and air — a huge task in California’s biggest oil-producing county.

And on March 14, the San Luis Obispo County Board of Supervisors shut down a Phillips 66 crude-by-rail plan to bring oil into its Nipomo Mesa refinery. The 3-to-1 vote (with one recusal) against the proposal represented a huge change in a county that for years had supported refinery projects. ...

“In all these fights, it was totally grassroots people coming together to work with people who are advocates for various aspects of the environment,” said Andres Soto of Benicians for a Safe and Healthy Community, who worked to defeat the Benicia oil train. National environmental groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club helped out in Benicia, but local election pressure was more important. “There was that kind of formal organizing by environmental groups, but it was spontaneous local organizing that really made the political difference,” said Soto. “That kind of local pressure can sway even people who’ve been paid by the refineries.”

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Also of Interest

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

Trump’s War Whoop: a Gulf of Tonkin Moment?

The Ugly Underbelly of Russia-gate

Beneath All This Surveillance Controversy Is The Unexamined Notion Of American Supremacy

Amazon Discovers the High Cost of Being Poor

Forgotten Americans

Pepsi pulls Kendall Jenner ad ridiculed for co-opting protest movements

America's forgotten crisis: over 50% of one Native American tribe are homeless

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A Little Night Music

Jimmy Nelson - Cry Hard Luck

Jimmy Nelson - T-99 Blues

Jimmy Nelson & his Orch. Bad Habit Blues

Jimmy Nelson - Big Mouth

Jimmy "T-99" Nelson - Sweetest Little Girl

Jimmy "T-99" Nelson - Unlock The Door

Jimmy Nelson - Mr Big Wheel

Jimmy T99 Nelson - Rain Drop Blues

Jimmy T99 Nelson - The Wheel

Jimmy T99 Nelson - She Moves Me

Jimmy T99 Nelson - I Sat And Cried

Jimmy T99 Nelson - Fine Little Honey Dripper

Jimmy T99 Nelson - Run Joe

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