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This evening's music features Houston saxophonist and bandleader Grady Gaines. Enjoy!

"I wonder if Trump had the guts to inquire of the Hippie Pope about how the Church dealt with the likes of Galileo and Giordano Bruno and other mouthy scientist types?"

-- Jeffrey St Clair

News and Opinion

Trump Plunges Deeper in Mideast Chaos

President Donald Trump’s visit to the Middle East has turned out as expected: no single act of outreach to the Muslim world could undo his fueling of Islamophobia and no amount of Iranophobia could cover up the irony of Trump and Saudi Arabia uniting against intolerance. It is clear what Trump wanted from the trip: massive arms sales and Saudi investments in the U.S. economy. But it is less clear why Saudi Arabia and Israel once again depict Iran as an existential threat even after Tehran’s nuclear program has been checked.

The answer lies not in Iran’s regional policy, but Israel and Saudi Arabia’s wish for the U.S. to re-establish hard, American hegemony in the Middle East. That is, for the United States to lead and underwrite the Herculean task of sorting out the chaos in the region. In short: Saudi and Israel first.

A key factor explaining the violence in the Middle East in the past few decades is that the region has lacked a sustainable, indigenous order. The process of establishing an order is by definition disruptive and the Middle East has almost continuously been in this state since the end of the Cold War. To make matters worse, the temporary equilibriums that briefly provided a resemblance of order were established and sustained by an external power – the United States – rather than by the states of the region themselves. As a result, these temporary periods of stability could only last as long as the external power was willing to sustain the order with its own blood and treasure.

Pentagon shifts blame to ISIS for 100+ civilians killed during US airstrike in Mosul

US admits Mosul airstrikes killed over 100 civilians during battle with Isis

The Pentagon has admitted that airstrikes it carried out on a house in western Mosul killed at least 105 civilians in one of the deadliest attacks anywhere in Iraq since the 2003 invasion to oust Saddam Hussein. The final toll could be as high as 141, an investigation into the 17 March attack has found, with 36 people still unaccounted for. Nearly all those killed had taken shelter in a house as a battle raged between Islamic State (Isis) forces who were in the area and Iraqi military special force units.

Searing images of bodies being dug from the pancaked ruins of the house were broadcast around the world amid allegations that the fight for Mosul’s densely packed neighborhoods was too often being ceded to high-flying jets to avoid ground clashes with Isis.

A Pentagon investigation released on Thursday found that Isis fighters had planted explosives in the house, causing secondary explosions that caused the house to collapse. The report said thata US jet dropped a 500lb bomb shortly after 8am, targeting two Isis fighters who had taken up positions on the roof of the the house in the Jadidah neighborhood.

US-led strikes kill 35 civilians in east Syria

US-led coalition air strikes on Thursday killed at least 35 civilians in an eastern Syrian town held by the Islamic State group, a monitor said. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the strikes hit a series of residential buildings in Mayadeen, a town in Syria's oil-rich eastern province of Deir Ezzor.

"Among the dead are at least 26 relatives of IS fighters, many of them women and children, including Syrians and Moroccans," said Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman. "The other nine are Syrian civilians and include five children," Abdel Rahman told AFP.

Thursday's toll brought the known deaths from two days of coalition bombing raids on Mayadeen to 50, the Observatory said, after 15 people were killed in US-led strikes on the town on Wednesday.

Salman Abedi 'wanted revenge' for US air strikes in Syria, Manchester bomber's sister says

The sister of Manchester suicide bomber Salman Abedi believes her brother carried out the manchester attack because he wanted revenge for US air strikes on Syria.

Jomana Abedi said in an interview her brother was kind and loving and that she was surprised by what he did on Monday. ...

“I think he saw children - Muslim children - dying everywhere, and wanted revenge," she told the Wall Street Journal.

"He saw the explosives America drops on children in Syria, and he wanted revenge. Whether he got that is between him and God.”

Interesting article, here's a taste:

Trump and the ‘Management of Allies’

One commentator recently noted that if one wants to work out Donald Trump’s foreign policy, it is not so hard: It’s simply that it is the converse of whatever Barack Obama did. Ok, it’s a quip. But like most good quips, there is a grain of truth to it, too. President Obama – whether fairly or not – was heartily disliked in Israel and Saudi Arabia. So, we now have Trump proving that he is the true friend of both (sometimes simple motives do, also, at times underlie apparent grand strategy). Obama reached out to Iran; Trump just dumped on Iran. Obama talked multilateral grand strategy, Trump headlined his businessman “deal-making.”

Throwing out “red meat” to the assembled Sunni Emirs and monarchs – of a pilloried Iran held up as the malign fount of all terrorism – was, no doubt, intended to “somehow” balance President Trump’s mild reproof to the Sunni world for its tolerance of extremism. All this was intended to go down well in Israel, too, thus hoeing the ground for Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner’s ample ambition to make peace between Israel and the Palestinians (though when it came to it, the President had nothing to say in Israel. Indeed its whole import lay with that: what he did not say – and could not say). So, it seems, this was the visit’s prime intent: to escape Washington, with its bruising headaches for a few days; to showcase the President in the light which he most favors: closing business deals, bringing jobs to the U.S.; and repairing old alliances, damaged by Obama.

At least, the intent was clear. Except it didn’t work. Trump’s visit architect (reportedly Jared Kushner), and the speechwriter for this visit (reportedly Stephen Miller), messed up. The optics were terrible: the Saudi lavish, gilded welcome, may have seemed a welcome antidote to D.C.’s dark, foreboding, political “weather”; but that is not how it will be understood in the Middle East. The President’s credibility will be impaired for a long time to come, as a result of poor advice. The images will come to haunt him.

Did his staff not understand? Did they not grasp the tell-tale that the very splendor of Trump’s reception, the mounting of such a lustrous spectacle, before a summoned, and arrayed Sunni leadership: the high flattery, the acceptance of an honor, the lavishing of gifts, and finally, the acceptance of “a caravan” of money, was contrived intentionally to transmit a clear meaning? By this means, Saudi Arabia has signaled to the attendant Sunni leaders, Trump’s implicit acknowledgement of King Salman as leader of Arabia and of Islam. To put it bluntly, this is precisely how vassalage, how submission to political leadership, and of concomitant obligation that stems from it, is signaled in the Middle East. It will be understood so, across the globe.

From the always worth a read, John Pilger:

Getting Assange: the Untold Story

Julian Assange has been vindicated because the Swedish case against him was corrupt. The prosecutor, Marianne Ny, obstructed justice and should be prosecuted. Her obsession with Assange not only embarrassed her colleagues and the judiciary but exposed the Swedish state’s collusion with the United States in its crimes of war and “rendition”. Had Assange not sought refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, he would have been on his way to the kind of American torture pit Chelsea Manning had to endure.

This prospect was obscured by the grim farce played out in Sweden. “It’s a laughing stock,” said James Catlin, one of Assange’s Australian lawyers. “It is as if they make it up as they go along”. It may have seemed that way, but there was always serious purpose. In 2008, a secret Pentagon document prepared by the “Cyber Counterintelligence Assessments Branch” foretold a detailed plan to discredit WikiLeaks and smear Assange personally.

The “mission” was to destroy the “trust” that was WikiLeaks’ “centre of gravity”. This would be achieved with threats of “exposure [and] criminal prosecution”. Silencing and criminalising such an unpredictable source of truth-telling was the aim. Perhaps this was understandable. WikiLeaks has exposed the way America dominates much of human affairs, including its epic crimes, especially in Afghanistan and Iraq: the wholesale, often homicidal killing of civilians and the contempt for sovereignty and international law.

Trump threatens to prosecute over Manchester attack leaks

Donald Trump has ordered a review into how sensitive material relating to the Manchester terror attack that was shared across the Atlantic by British intelligence officials was leaked to the US media.

The president threatened to identify and prosecute those who handed unauthorised information to the New York Times after the UK government reacted with fury to the leaks.

His statement came just before Theresa May confronted him about the issue as the pair were waiting for the traditional group photograph of world leaders at a Nato summit in Brussels. ...

Trump said: “The alleged leaks coming out of government agencies are deeply troubling. These leaks have been going on for a long time and my administration will get to the bottom of this. The leaks of sensitive information pose a grave threat to our national security.”

The US president said he was asking the justice department and other relevant agencies to launch a review: “If appropriate, the culprit should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. There is no relationship we cherish more than the special relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom."

Jared Kushner says he will cooperate with Russia inquiry after reports he is under scrutiny

White House senior adviser Jared Kushner said he would cooperate with any investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia following reports that he is under FBI scrutiny. Multiple news outlets reported on Thursday that investigators were focused on a series of meetings that Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, held with Russian officials last year as part of the inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 election. “Mr Kushner previously volunteered to share with Congress what he knows about these meetings,” attorney Jamie Gorelick said in a statement on Thursday. “He will do the same if he is contacted in connection with any other inquiry.” ...

The naming of Kushner in connection with the FBI’s investigation is significant, though the scope of the inquiry into the husband of the president’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, is unclear. Kushner has not been accused of wrongdoing and is not the central focus of the investigation, the Post said.

Trump set to clash with other G7 leaders over refugees, trade and climate

Donald Trump goes into his first G7 summit on Friday not in a mood to compromise with his fellow world leaders over climate change, free trade, migration or help for Africa. ...

On Thursday in Brussels, Trump adopted an unexpectedly abrasive public tone over Europe’s slow progress in meeting targets to increase its financial contributions to Nato. In private he reportedly told Angela Merkel the scale of German surpluses was bad, and he vowed to change the trade relationship to reduce the US deficit.

Trump is demanding a commitment to fair trade but other G7 nations, including Japan, are trying to pin him down to support a trade order in which WTO rules are respected. Trump is pushing back against an initiative led by Italian prime minister Paolo Gentiloni. calling for other countries to do more to share the burden of refugees arriving from Africa. ... The European council president, Donald Tusk, pointedly called on Trump to accept that the refugee crisis requires a global response as he spoke at the opening of a summit he said was likely to be “the most challenging G7 in years”.

On climate change, Trump’s economic adviser Gary Cohn has signalled that the US will not stick to the pledges made by the Obama administration at the UN’s Paris climate change conference in 2015. “We know that the levels that were agreed to by the prior administration would be highly crippling to the US economic growth,” Cohn said on the way to the summit. At the Paris summit the US pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 26-28% compared with 2005 levels by 2025. Cohn said Trump, who has dismissed global warming as a “hoax”, would make a final decision when he returned home, but stressed he would put economic development first.

Dilma Rousseff on Her Ouster, Brazil's Political Crisis & Fighting Dictatorship

Trump travel ban: White House appealing to supreme court after block upheld

A federal appeals court has ruled against reinstating Donald Trump’s revised travel ban – marking yet another major setback for the administration’s attempts to curb immigration from six Muslim majority countries. The US attorney general, Jeff Sessions, later confirmed that the administration would appeal the ruling to the supreme court.

The Virginia-based fourth circuit of appeals on Thursday upheld a March ruling from a Maryland district court, which found grounds that the ban violated the equal protection clause of the US constitution. In a rare move, the court had granted a full hearing earlier in the month, meaning 13 judges had heard arguments. The ruling was a 10-3 majority.

The revised ban has also been blocked with an even broader injunction by a federal court in Hawaii, meaning the administration has been fighting in two separate appeals courts. As the ninth circuit has yet to rule on the Hawaii decision, even if the fourth circuit had ruled in favour of the Trump administration the president would not have been able to implement the ban.

Trump has previously vowed to fight the case to the end .

The Violence of Austerity

Or, more likely, the Democrats decided that it is "safe" to introduce this legislation now, as it has zero chance of passing in a Republican-dominated legislature with a Republican president hostile to this sort of thing:

Democrats just united on a $15-an-hour minimum wage

Bruised after a crushing defeat in November, Democrats are uniting under a cause they believe could pay off in 2018: the $15 federal minimum wage. On Thursday, Senate Democrats introduced legislation that would raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2024, reflecting local laws that have raised the minimum wage in 19 states earlier this year. ...

The Raise the Wage Act would be the biggest federal minimum wage increase in history, and it would additionally peg future minimum wage increases to inflation. The bill would also eliminate the tipped minimum wage, the separate minimum standard of $2.13 an hour that is paid to workers, like those in restaurants or bars, who earn at least $30 a month in tips.

Though the legislation has virtually no chance of getting through a GOP-controlled Congress and White House, it marks a sharp turn to the left for Democratic economic policies. It also reflects the lasting impact of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ upstart 2016 campaign for the presidency, and the activism of groups like the nationwide Fight for $15 movement.

The Raise the Wage Act is sponsored in the Senate by Sanders and Sen. Patty Murray, and in the House by Reps. Bobby Scott and Keith Ellison. Critically, it has the support of major center-left Democratic players like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. In 2015, when similar legislation was introduced, it had the support of a half-dozen Democrats; today, that number is 31 Democrats.

@BernieSanders Here's the list of all current Senate D co-sponsors, via source in negotiations. "Activist pressure here is really working," source says pic.twitter.com/IjzaLwejDw

— Jeff Stein (@JStein_Vox) May 25, 2017

Heh, somebody asked Ben Carson to embarrass himself, er, speak in public again.

Poverty? Oh, that's just a 'state of mind' for the Trump administration

There has not been a lot of good news for the American poor lately. The post-recession “recovery” has left them behind, the wealth gap is widening and President Trump wants to cut billions of dollars from the social safety net so he can give tax cuts to rich people and build a wall on the Mexican border. Fortunately, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson has just shared the secret to getting yourself out of poverty: magical thinking.

In an interview with SiriusXM Radio, the retired neurosurgeon and armchair Egyptologist elaborated on his major key to success. “I think poverty to a large extent is also a state of mind,” he mused.

He went on to say: “You take somebody that has the right mindset, you can take everything from them and put them on the street, and I guarantee in a little while they’ll be right back up there. And you take somebody with the wrong mindset, you could give them everything in the world, they’ll work their way right back down to the bottom.”

In language echoing President Trump’s worldview, he elaborated that the onus for teaching children to be “winners” falls on parents: “A lot of it has to do with what we teach children. Parenting is a very difficult job. You have to instill into that child the mindset of a winner, if they’re likely to become a winner.” He did not acknowledge that the existence of “winners” by definition requires there to be losers, or what people are supposed to do whose circumstances did not instill in them a positive outlook.

'Stop Trump... Save the Planet': Thousands March Against US President in Brussels

"Stop Trump. Save the planet."

That was a key message of the thousands, if not tens of thousands, who marched in the streets of Brussels on Wednesday as U.S. President Donald Trump arrived ahead of a NATO summit meeting.

"This protest march is directed against Trump and his billionaire cabinet," said event organizers in a Facebook post. "This is a march for peace and against military adventures, for the preservation of our planet and the environment, for the respect for human rights of all humans, for the struggle against sexism, racism, and discrimination."

The "Trump not Welcome" march was backed by scores of civil society organizations from across Europe, including Doctors of the World, Amnesty International, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth Europe, and Oxfam International.

Protesters were also organizing against NATO's arms race and the Belgian government's austerity policies, according to Brussels Times.

Trump has already quit the Paris climate deal - just not publicly

8 in 10 People Worldwide Fear 'Catastrophic' Climate Change

A majority of people in eight countries say they are ready to change their lifestyles if it would prevent climate catastrophe, a survey on global threats released Wednesday found.

The poll of 8,000 people in eight countries—the U.S., China, India, Britain, Australia, Brazil, South Africa, and Germany—found that 84 percent of people now see climate change a "global catastrophic risk."

It comes as President Donald Trump goes to Italy for his first conference with the Group of 7 (G7) to discuss inequality and the environment. Anti-poverty groups are urging the president not to pull out of the Paris climate deal, as he has threatened to do.

On climate, "there's certainly a huge gap between what people expect from politicians and what politicians are doing. It's stunning," Mats Andersson, vice chairman of the Global Challenges Foundation, which commissioned the survey for its annual Global Catastrophic Risks report, told the Thompson Reuters Foundation on Wednesday.

Many people now see climate change as a bigger threat than other issues like population growth, weapons of mass destruction, and artificial intelligence, among other concerns, the poll found.

Also of Interest

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

Believing the Russian ‘Hacking’ Claim

Down the Memory Hole: Living in Trump’s United States of Amnesia

The ICEmen Cometh

Trump-Russia Inquiry Looks at Potential for Wall Street Bank Money Laundering

Why does Des Moines, Iowa have worse affordable housing than Brooklyn?

A Little Night Music

Grady Gaines & The Texas Upsetters - Baby Work Out

Grady Gaines & The Texas Upsetters - Looking For One Real Good Friend

Grady Gaines & The Texas Upsetters - Lonesome Saxophone

Rhythm and Blues Musician Grady Gaines

The Upsetters w/Little Richard - Upsetter Rock

The Upsetters - Rolling On

The Upsetters - Steppin' Out

Upsetters - Where You Goin', Sapphire?

The Upsetters - Jaywalking

Bob Margolin Band Ft. Nappy Brown, Grady Gaines &Wayne Bennett - Weeping Man

Grady Gaines Performs at The Big Easy