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"Nothing can be more readily disproved than the old saw, "You can't keep a good man down." Most human societies have been beautifully organized to keep good men down."

-- John W. Gardner

News and Opinion

Ed Snowden: Whistleblowing Is Not Just Leaking — It’s an Act of Political Resistance

Traditionally, in the context of military affairs, we have always understood that lethal force in battle could not be subjected to ex ante judicial constraints. When armies are shooting at each other, there is no room for a judge on that battlefield. But now the government has decided – without the public’s participation, without our knowledge and consent – that the battlefield is everywhere. Individuals who don’t represent an imminent threat in any meaningful sense of those words are redefined, through the subversion of language, to meet that definition.

Inevitably, that conceptual subversion finds its way home, along with the technology that enables officials to promote comfortable illusions about surgical killing and nonintrusive surveillance. Take, for instance, the holy grail of drone persistence, a capability that the US has been pursuing forever. The goal is to deploy solar-powered drones that can loiter in the air for weeks without coming down. Once you can do that, and you put any typical signals-collection device on the bottom of it to monitor, unblinkingly, the emanations of, for example, the different network addresses of every laptop, phone and iPod, you know not just where a particular device is in what city, but you know what apartment each device lives in, where it goes at any particular time, and by what route.

Once you know the devices, you know their owners. When you start doing this over several cities, you are tracking the movements not just of individuals but of whole populations.

By preying on the modern necessity to stay connected, governments can reduce our dignity to something like that of tagged animals, the primary difference being that we paid for the tags and they are in our pockets. It sounds like fantasist paranoia, but on the technical level it is so trivial to implement that I cannot imagine a future in which it won’t be attempted. It will be limited to the war zones at first, in accordance with our customs, but surveillance technology has a tendency to follow us home.

Here we see the double edge of our uniquely American brand of nationalism. We are raised to be exceptionalists, to think we are the better nation with the manifest destiny to rule. The danger is that some people will actually believe this claim, and some of those will expect the manifestation of our national identity, that is, our government, to comport itself accordingly.

Unrestrained power may be many things, but it is not American.

It is in this sense that the act of whistleblowing increasingly has become an act of political resistance. The whistleblower raises the alarm and lifts the lamp, inheriting the legacy of a line of Americans that begins with Paul Revere.

It's a War on Whistleblowers": Snowden Pens Foreword to New Scahill Book

Turkish committee passes measure to strip MPs' legal immunity

Punches were thrown and water bottles were hurled, but a Turkish parliamentary committee has approved a contentious ruling-party proposal to strip legislators of their immunity from prosecution.

The proposed constitutional amendment, which could pave the way for the trial of several pro-Kurdish legislators on terror-related charges, was cleared by the committee late on Monday. ...

The amendment, which still needs to be approved by the full assembly, was proposed by the ruling party after Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, accused the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic party (HDP) of being an arm of outlawed Kurdish rebels and repeatedly called for their prosecution.

Yes, yes, but how are his boots doing?

U.S. service member killed in Iraq battle vs. ISIS

An American service member was killed in Iraq Tuesday as the U.S. military stepped up its role helping Christian and Kurdish militias battling ISIS near the terror group's stronghold in Mosul.

"It is a combat death, of course. And a very sad loss," U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter said in Stuttgart, Germany, where he was meeting NATO allies.

The U.S. military's latest casualty in Iraq came "in the neighborhood of Erbil," the capital of Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdistan region, according to Carter. CBS News senior national security correspondent David Martin said the battle was north of Mosul, an area that saw intense fighting Tuesday as ISIS militants tried to fight their way north from their stronghold.

US Struggles to Square ‘Non-Combat’ in Afghanistan With Hospital Bombing

The Obama Administration is involved in several wars in several countries, but officially is not engaged in “combat” operations anywhere. This struggle to square the reality with the pretense has grown all the more difficult with the latest report on October’s attack on an Afghanistan hospital.

The Pentagon’s latest (and apparently final) narrative has troops on the ground calling in an attack on the hospital under the assumption it wasn’t a hospital, and that it was taken by the Taliban. While the Pentagon has previously insisted a Taliban presence would not justify such an attack anyhow, and the hospital was clearly marked and well known, the fact that there were combat troops on the ground calling in airstrikes really conflicts with the claim of a purely “training” operation.

Restoring Syria's ceasefire

White House: Syria Must Live Up to Ceasefire Commitment

While all the combatant factions seemed to get sick of the Syrian ceasefire at about the same time, US officials are trying to make it clear they hold the Assad government exclusively to blame, with the White House demanded they “live up to the commitments that they’ve made.” ...

The reality of the situation, however, is that in Aleppo the fighting has been between the Syrian military and the Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda faction deliberately excluded from the ceasefire. This makes all the fire being traded there not subject to the ceasefire, though with both sides killing civilians almost exclusively, it is increasingly unclear what anyone expects to accomplish from it.

The empire makes a new friend in Africa by promising to help clean up the mess it has created in neighboring countries that is threatening to spill over Senegal's borders. Terrorism sure makes a nice pretext to imperial domination.

U.S. and Senegal sign defense cooperation deal

The United States and Senegal signed a cooperation agreement on Monday to ease the deployment of American troops to the West African nation to counter humanitarian crises, natural disasters or terrorist attacks.

"Terrorism knows no border and it's very important for everyone to cooperate," James Zumwalt, U.S. ambassador to Senegal, said during a joint news conference in Dakar with Senegal's Foreign Minister Mankeur Ndiaye. ...

Senegal faces a growing threat from jihadist groups following a string of deadly attacks on neighboring countries claimed by al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

The group has made clear Senegal is in its sights due to its close ties to France, which has some 3,500 soldiers fighting with regional armies against Islamist militants in West Africa.

Saudi FM Confirms ‘Warning’ US Over Proposed Terror Lawsuit Law

The subject of major speculation over the past two weeks, Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir today confirmed “warning” the US over the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, which would’ve opened up the Saudi government to lawsuits in the United States over its involvement in the 9/11 attacks.

Jubeir, however, insists that this didn’t constitute a “threat.” ...

However the move is couched, the fact that Jubeir was able to confront the US government with the possibility of collapsing the American economy, and the very next day the White House began talking up vetoing the bill, suggests that the Saudi government is effectively able to dictate American legislation, and block bills they see as contrary to their interests.

Chris Hedges: Activist Rev. Berrigan Targeted by Church Hierarchy

Republicans Don’t Want to Know Costs of U.S. Nuclear Arsenal

Republican lawmakers in the House of Representatives have lined up to quietly kill a cost estimate of the Pentagon’s three-decade nuclear modernization program, which experts predict will exceed $1 trillion. The vote was mentioned briefly in Politico’s morning briefing list last week but otherwise received no media coverage. ...

In October, the DOD signed a contract with Northrop Grumman to produce a new long range strike bomber, and its proposed budget plan sets aside hundreds of billions of dollars to buy a new generation of ICBMs, nuclear submarines, and cruise missiles. In the mid-2020s, those expenses are scheduled to overlap with major purchases of aircraft carriers and of the F-35 joint strike fighter, leading to a surge in spending that experts have called “unsustainable,” “unaffordable,” and “a fantasy.”

Brian McKeon, principal deputy under secretary of defense for policy, told reporters in October the Pentagon was “wondering how the heck we’re going to pay for it,” and that current leadership is “thanking [their] stars we won’t be here to have to answer the question.” In November, the Pentagon Comptroller called the cost of nuclear modernization “the biggest problem we don’t know how to solve yet.”

WhatsApp, Used by 100 Million Brazilians, Was Shut Down Nationwide Today by a Single Judge

A Brazilian state judge ordered mobile phone operators to block nationwide the extremely popular WhatsApp chat service for 72 hours, a move that will have widespread international reverberations for the increasingly contentious debate over encryption and online privacy. ... WhatsApp is the most-used app in Brazil, a country of 200 million people (it is now owned by Facebook, the country’s second-most used app). An estimated 91 percent of Brazilian mobile users nationwide — more than 100 million individuals — use WhatsApp to communicate with one another for free (it has 900 million active daily users around the world).

This ruling comes from the same judge, Marcel Maia Montalvão, of a small town in Sergipe state, who two months ago ordered Facebook’s vice president for Latin America, Diego Dzodan, to be detained over WhatsApp’s failure to cooperate with a subpoena issued as part of a criminal investigation. ... Afterward, the Facebook executive insisted that “the way that information is encrypted from one cellphone to another, there is no information stored that could be handed over to authorities.” WhatsApp similarly said: “WhatsApp cannot provide information we do not have.”

As a result of its encryption protections, the position of WhatsApp in response to subpoenas has been that it is incapable of turning over users’ communications because the encryption not only keeps governments and non-state actors out but also the company itself. Over the past several years, numerous countries have begun enacting laws to bar companies from using any encryption that they cannot circumvent, and the Obama administration has been debating whether to support legislation that would allow only the use of encryption to which government agencies have backdoor access (in the 1990s, the Clinton administration used the Oklahoma City bombing to argue for a similar law, but it was blocked by a coalition of privacy advocates from both parties in Congress).

TTIP leaks: "Deeply disconcerting that our environment, health and safety are under attack"

Inequality Kills: Top 1% Lives 15 Years Longer Than the Poorest

Rich people live longer than poor people. No big news there—we’ve known that health tracks wealth for quite some time now.

But here’s what we haven’t known: The life-expectancy gap between rich and poor in the United States is actually accelerating.

Since 2001, American men among the nation’s most affluent 5 percent have seen their lifespans increase by more than two years. American women in that bracket have registered an almost three-year extension to their life expectancy. ...

The gap widens to a chasm when you look at the 1 percent.

Forty-year-old American women among our nation’s top 1 percent can now expect to live 10 years longer than women of the same age in America’s poorest 1 percent. For men, the gap has grown even wider—to 15 years.

All these stats come from a study just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. This new research combines IRS tax records with Social Security Administration mortality data to paint a deeply unnerving picture of 21st-century life and death.

That poor Americans “have 10 or 15 fewer years of life,” notes Stepner, a co-author of the study, “really demonstrates the level of inequality we’ve had in the United States.”

Detroit Teachers Hold Sickout to Protest Broken Funding Promises

Nearly every public school in Detroit was shut down on Monday as teachers city-wide held a "sickout" over news that the embattled district would not be able to pay them past June 30.

The protest kept 94 out of 97 schools closed after the Detroit Federation of Teachers (DFT) announced the action on Sunday. Detroit Public Schools (DPS) emergency manager Judge Steven Rhodes told the union over the weekend that without additional funding from the legislature, the district would not have enough money to pay its 2,600 teachers' already-earned salaries.

Summer school and additional services would also be cancelled, he said.

"There's a basic agreement in America: When you put in a day's work, you'll receive a day's pay. DPS is breaking that deal," said DFT interim president Ivy Bailey. "Teachers want to be in the classroom giving children a chance to learn and reach their potential. Unfortunately, by refusing to guarantee that we will be paid for our work, DPS is effectively locking our members out of the classrooms."

Puerto Rico Is Defaulting on $400 Million in Debt — And Congress Is on Vacation

Puerto Rico will default on nearly $400 million worth of government debt on Monday, the most significant non-payment yet on some $70 billion that the island still owes its creditors. Congress was supposed to finalize a bill last month to help the US territory solve its debt crisis, but legislators drafting the proposal left for vacation without taking action, and they won't be back on the job until next week at the earliest.

On Sunday, Puerto Rico Governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla said that the bulk of some $422 million owed by Puerto Rico's Government Development Bank wouldn't be paid on Monday. Last week, about $33 million of that debt, owned by Puerto Rican credit unions, was exchanged for debt payable in one year's time. ...

Though Monday's default is the most serious to date, things could get worse over the summer. On July 1, about $2 billion in payments are due, including $805 million in general obligation bonds, which are constitutionally protected and privileged under Puerto Rican law, but which officials have said must be fair game for restructuring. The governor has called the debt as it currently stands "unpayable."

As Puerto Rico's crisis deepens, more and more residents are departing the island for US mainland, a trend that only further depletes its tax base. According to figures released by the territory's Institute of Statistics on Sunday, Puerto Rico lost 1.8 percent of its population in 2014 alone — the highest rate in the last decade. Some 84,000 people left Puerto Rico for elsewhere in the US that year, while only 20,000 travelled in the opposite direction. The institute's director said on Sunday that net out-migration was likely even higher in 2015.

Caribbean neighbors Cuba and Puerto Rico wonder who really won cold war

Two Caribbean islands are at a crossroads in their relationship with the US. One is plagued by corruption and debt, and dotted with crumbling homes, abandoned by families for the imperial power nearby. The other is Cuba.

Who won the cold war again? ...

For half a century, the US dominated Puerto Rico and Cuba after wrenching them away from Spain, but by the 1950s the islands parted ways. Cubans threw off a US-backed dictator, found new patrons in the Soviet Union, and embraced communism. What nationalist fervor Puerto Rico had was quashed, and the colony stayed bound to US-controlled capitalism as a “free associated state”.

“When the cold war was going on they were like showcases for the world to see which system actually works,” said Harry Franqui-Rivera, a researcher at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College. “A successful Cuba made the United States look bad and if Puerto Rico failed it would make the United States look worse.” ...

But experts and activists say the cold war had a murky end at least in the Caribbean, and that the future for Puerto Rico and Cuba remains far from certain. The day of Obama’s keynote speech in Havana, the mayor of San Juan tweeted: “Obama spoke of opening bonds of collaboration with the neighboring island of Cuba while he makes bonds of repression and control in Puerto Rico.”

Semana pasada Obama habló de entablar lazos de colaboración con la vecina isla de Cuba mientras establece lazos de represión y control en PR

— Carmen Yulín Cruz (@CarmenYulinCruz) March 26, 2016

Billionaire Nike Co-Founder Confuses His Net Worth with U.S. Economic Growth

In a recent interview with USA Today, Phil Knight, the co-founder and chair of Nike, expressed puzzlement over Americans’ anger about trade agreements like NAFTA, and concern that this anger is having an effect on the presidential race.

“Everybody’s railing on NAFTA now,” said Knight, currently the 16th-richest person in the U.S., “but since 1996, when we signed NAFTA, the gross national product of the United States has risen three times. Do we really think it would have gone up more than that if we didn’t have trade agreements?” ...

According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the U.S. real gross domestic product has actually grown by just 69 percent, or a third of what Knight believes, since the beginning of 1994. (NAFTA was signed in 1993, not 1996, and took effect on January 1, 1994.) ...

So how has Knight latched onto this blatantly wrong factoid? Possibly because there is something that’s tripled in size in the past 20 years: Knight’s own net worth. According to Forbes, Knight’s net worth in 1996 was, adjusted for inflation, about $8 billion; today it’s $25 billion. You can understand why he’d be convinced the economy is in great shape.

State Party Officials Reportedly Displeased with Clinton-DNC 'Laundering' Scheme

Hillary Clinton's use of a so-called joint fundraising committee, through which her presidential campaign, the Democratic National Committee (DNC), and 32 state party committees can solicit big-money donors, is under fire not just from rival Bernie Sanders, but also from state party officials and their allies, according to reporting by Politico.

Politico's deep dive into the latest Federal Election Commission filings, published Monday, shows that the Hillary Victory Fund "has transferred $3.8 million to the state parties, but almost all of that cash ($3.3 million, or 88 percent) was quickly transferred to the DNC, usually within a day or two, by the Clinton staffer who controls the committee."

The analysis continues:

By contrast, the victory fund has transferred $15.4 million to Clinton’s campaign and $5.7 million to the DNC, which will work closely with Clinton’s campaign if and when she becomes the party’s nominee. And most of the $23.3 million spent directly by the victory fund has gone towards expenses that appear to have directly benefited Clinton’s campaign, including $2.8 million for “salary and overhead” and $8.6 million for web advertising that mostly looks indistinguishable from Clinton campaign ads and that has helped Clinton build a network of small donors who will be critical in a general election expected to cost each side well in excess of $1 billion.

Unsurprisingly the arrangement is ruffling more than a few feathers, notably "among some participating state party officials and their allies," according to Politico reporters Kenneth P. Vogel and Isaac Arnsdorf. "They grumble privately that Clinton is merely using them to subsidize her own operation, while her allies overstate her support for their parties and knock Sanders for not doing enough to help the party."

Jeremy Scahill: Clinton is Legendary Hawk, But Sanders Shouldn't Get Pass on Role in Regime Change

Keeping Wall Street Speeches Secret Speaks Volumes About Hillary Clinton

It’s been roughly three months since Hillary Clinton promised, during her Feb. 4 debate with Bernie Sanders on the eve of the New Hampshire primary, to “look into” releasing the transcripts of her paid speeches to Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street investment houses.

If you’re a stickler for details and would like to know precisely how long Clinton has delayed on fulfilling her pledge or exactly how much cash she has raked in for her speaking gigs and from whom, you don’t have to spend hours scouring the Internet. You can simply log onto two sites created by a 40-year-old Sanders supporter and web developer named Jed McChesney of Olathe, Kan.

The first site— iwilllookintoit.com—is a computerized digital clock that ticks off the elapsed time in bold red print, listing the number of days, hours and seconds. The other offers a searchable chart, published at citizenuprising.com, of 91 paid, private talks given by the Democratic front-runner from April 2013 to March 2015.

All told, according to McChesney’s meticulous research, Clinton pulled in a whopping $21.7 million in speaking fees for the two-year period. Of this amount, $3,260,000 came from 14 speeches delivered directly to financial-sector interests, including Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, and, above all, Goldman, which remitted a tidy $675,000 for no less than three chin-wags.

Phasing out coal, oil and gas extraction in US would drastically cut emissions

Phasing out coal, oil and gas extraction on US federal land would cut greenhouse gas emissions by 100m tonnes a year by 2030 and even more after then, providing a useful brake to climate change, according to a new study.

A quarter of all fossil fuel extraction in the US occurs on the 650m acres of land under federal management. The outer shelf of the US’s marine territory, used for oil and gas drilling, is also under federal control.

A study by research organization Stockholm Environment Institute found that denying new mining leases and allowing existing leases to expire would lead to a sharp decrease in emissions from coal and oil extraction, offset slightly by an increase in gas emissions. Overall, carbon dioxide emissions would drop by 100m tonnes per year by 2030, with the reductions increasing after this point.

The research states that this reduction compared well to other proposed measures, such as vehicle emission standards and methane restrictions from the oil and gas industry.

Only the Obama administration’s clean power plan, forecast to cut carbon pollution by 32% by 2030 based on 2005 levels, would exceed the emissions savings. The plan is currently on hold, pending a supreme court challenge.

Texas Floods Sending Toxic Fossil Fuel Runoff into Public Waters

Recent flooding in Houston has sent crude oil and toxic chemicals into Texas waterways, and residents and experts say regulators are not doing enough to address the threat to public health and the environment.

Photographs taken by emergency management officials show oil slicks and other evidence of toxins spreading through the Sabine River on the Texas-Louisiana border from flooding in March, and new evidence is mounting that spills from oil wells and fracking sites increase when water levels rise.

Yet scientists and environmental groups say that the Railroad Commission of Texas, which regulates the state oil and gas industry, has yet to improve safety precautions.

Dr. Walter Tsou, a physician and past president of the American Public Health Association, told the El Paso Times on Monday that the risks of fracking fluid and other industry byproducts mixing in with groundwater was "a potential disaster."

"I'm sure it will get into the groundwater and streams and creeks," Tsou said of the photographs depicting downed tanks and plumes of oil. "In other areas, cattle that drank the fracking fluid actually died an hour after drinking it. There are potential carcinogens that can lead to leukemia, brain cancer, and other endocrine disruptors that can affect premature births. So it is not good to drink fracked wastewater."

Military and Energy Company Officials Arrested for Murder of Berta Cáceres

Honduran authorities say they are pursuing murder charges for the March 3rd killing of the environmental and Indigenous rights activist

Authorities have arrested four suspects in the assassination of environmental and indigenous rights activist Berta Cáceres, the Honduran attorney general announced on Monday.

Adding credence to suspicions that Cáceres' killing was politically-motivated, among those arrested were Honduran military officials as well as an employee of Desarrollos Energéticos (or DESA), the private energy company behind the Agua Zarca dam, which Cáceres fiercely opposed. ...

According to a statement by the Office of the Public Prosecutor, the arrests took place after a series of ten raids Monday morning, dubbed "Operation Jaguar," in Tegucigalpa, La Ceiba, and Trujillo. Prosecutors are pursuing murder charges in Cáceres' death and and attempted murder for Mexican environmental activist Gustavo Castro, who was witness to the March 3rd killing.

Meanwhile, Cáceres' daughter, Bertha Zúñiga Cáceres, is currently touring Europe with members of the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), which her mother co-founded. The delegation is calling on international governments to speak out against the murder and support the Lenca tribe's fight against the proposed dam on the sacred River Gualcarque.

Also of Interest

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

America, Unrepentant Still

"Boots on the Ground" in Iraq: Here We Go Again

The Calm Before the Coming Global Storm

US Lawmakers Suspect the Pentagon of Lying to Them About Military Sexual Assault Cases

Andrew Ross Sorkin Helps Obama Airbrush His “Economic Legacy” with Obsequious Exclusive Interview in the New York Times

Why Hillary Clinton Won’t Offer a Bold Economic Agenda

Derivatives Losses Are Mushrooming at Freddie Mac; Now It’s the Taxpayers’ Problem

Wall Street’s Kangaroo Courts Perpetuate a Business Model of Fraud

Yet another way borrowers are getting screwed: Inside the long-lasting disaster of American loan servicing

A Little Night Music

Boozoo Chavis - You're Gonna Look Like A Monkey

Boozoo Chavis - Bottle Up And Go

Boozoo Chavis - Crying Waltz

Boozoo Chavis - 41 Days

Boozoo Chavis - Dance All Night

Boozoo Chavis - Paper In My Shoe

Boozoo Chavis - Do It All Night Long