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“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear."

-- Harry Truman

News and Opinion

40+ Rights Groups Demand Homeland Security Release Unredacted 'Race Paper' Used to Justify Spying on Justice Activists

Dozens of racial justice and civil liberties groups on Wednesday demanded the Department of Homeland Security release an unredacted version of their so-called "Race Paper," an internal memo which the department has leaned on to justify surveillance of racial justice activists. "We are concerned that biases and inaccuracies reflected in the 'Race Paper' could result in unconstitutional law enforcement activities throughout the country that disproportionately impact activists, protesters, and communities of color," wrote the groups, which included Free Press, the Brennan Center for Justice, Color of Change, and the NAACP.

The memo and the efforts it covers, the groups and other critics say, are part of the government's attempts to portray anti-racist groups like Black Lives Matter as dangerous, surveil black communities, and suppress dissent. According to the groups, the memo—officially titled Growing Frequency of Race-Related Domestic Terrorist Violence—"may improperly suggest that constitutionally-protected Black political speech should be considered an indicator of criminal conduct or a national security threat."

Racial justice advocates have made repeated attempts to gain information about the DHS's memo, with Color of Change filing a FOIA request in 2016, only to receive a copy of the document that was entirely redacted. But while DHS has claimed it aims to target violent extremists who have co-opted racial justice groups, the groups behind Wednesday's letter say no such dynamic exists.

"There is zero evidence that Black activist movements fighting for racial justice and against police brutality have been co-opted by violent terrorists," said Sandra Fulton, government relations director for Free Press. "Yet DHS has constructed a surveillance regime based on this unproven theory that improperly targets Black people's constitutionally protected speech and associations. And now the agency is refusing to provide more information about its dishonest and discriminatory tactics."

Rather than focusing on the real threat of white nationalists and Neo-Nazis, the government has demonized and criminalized Black activists protesting injustice — this is part of a long history of protecting white terrorists while attacking Black communities they target

— Rashad Robinson (@rashadrobinson) March 19, 2018

Israeli minister threatens to destroy Gaza “once and for all”

As Israel bombed it dozens of times in the past day, a senior Israeli minister has incited the total destruction of Gaza. On Tuesday, Israeli army radio tweeted the comments of energy minister Yuval Steinitz, who stated, “I do not rule out the possibility of conquering Gaza and destroying it once and for all.”

As Israeli journalist Asaf Ronel pointed out, Steinitz’s words as quoted by army radio are unambiguous in their reference to Gaza itself being destroyed:

#ICYMI: earlier today Israeli minister @steinitz_yuval said he does not rule out the possibility of "re-conquering #Gaza & finishing it once & for all" (just to be clear: the Hebrew grammar indicates he meant "it" refers to Gaza itself)https://t.co/dEgPSvleYa

— Asaf Ronel (@AsafRonel) May 29, 2018

On Tuesday, Steinitz made similar statements to the publication Ynet: “We may have no choice, we will have to strike in Gaza and conquer it, and put an end once and for all to this terrorist regime.” In that interview, Steinitz appears to be referring to Hamas and Islamic Jihad, two political and military groups that carried out rocket and mortar strikes against Israel on Tuesday after months during which not a single such projectile was fired from Gaza.

But Steinitz’s reference to Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Ynet in no way mitigates the genocidal nature of his comments on army radio, since Israel does not distinguish between civilians in Gaza and combatant members of the organizations Israel deems “terrorist.” Indeed Israel’s justification for the mass slaughter of unarmed civilians during Gaza’s Great March of Return protests is its claim that the rallies are organized by Hamas and thus anyone, even a child, is fair game for snipers.

Roseanne Barr has some stiff competition in the racism department:

Israeli chief rabbi calls black people 'monkeys'

One of Israel’s chief rabbis called black people “monkeys” during his weekly sermon. Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef’s comments were denounced as ”racially charged” and “utterly unacceptable” by the Anti-Defamation League, a New York City-based organisation devoted to battling anti-Semitism and racism.

During his weekly sermon, the rabbi used a derogatory Hebrew term for a black person, before going on to call a black person a “monkey,” according to footage published by the Ynet news site.

His office said he was citing a passage from the Talmud - the book of Jewish law.

Palestinians Demand Human Rights & Medical Care in Fight to Break Israeli Naval Blockade of Gaza

Student Protesters in Puerto Rico Face Trial as Government Criminalizes Dissent

With the second round of trials underway in Washington, D.C., for protesters charged in connection with the J20 demonstrations against Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration, another legal battle over the right to dissent is unfolding hundreds of miles away in Puerto Rico, where seven students are facing charges in connection to a protest over tuition hikes at the island’s public university. In April 2017, leaders of the University of Puerto Rico’s student body demanded a meeting with the school’s governing board to discuss alternatives to a program of sharp disinvestment from the university, one in a slew of public service cuts in Puerto Rico in recent years. When their requests were ignored, a few dozen protesters stormed the building where the university board was meeting. There were no serious injuries or damage, and nobody was arrested.

In the following days, however, several students who had assumed leadership roles in the protest movement received citations ordering them to appear in court. When they did, they were handcuffed and paraded before TV cameras in the middle of the night, then booked and, finally, released on bail. While students at UPR continue to fight the new measures — the university board ultimately approved the tuition hikes last month, a year after the students stormed the meeting — they are also rallying around students arrested after the 2017 protest. As with the unfolding prosecutions in Washington, officials in Puerto Rico are throwing the book at protesters with unprecedented zeal.

Eleven students were originally charged following the protest, facing up to 18 years in prison before the most severe charges were dropped. Four students were eventually cleared altogether, but seven are still facing charges ranging from intimidation of public authority to violating the right of assembly, restriction of liberty, and rioting.

With preliminary hearings currently underway, the UPR students and their lawyers say that the looming trials are a sign of Puerto Rico’s growing criminalization of dissent — a message that was reinforced by the violent police response to May Day rallies held both last year and this year. “I think it’s a prelude,” Gabriel Díaz Rivera, one of the students facing prosecution, told The Intercept. “It doesn’t matter for them if, at the end of the road, all the charges are dropped. The important thing for them is to create the chilling effect.”

Lithuania & Romania complicit in CIA torture program, EU court rules

Does North Korea really want the Trump summit? Pompeo just set the terms to find out.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo leaned on a top North Korean official Wednesday for Pyongyang to show plans for nuclear disarmament so that the hyped summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un may go ahead, according to reports. ...

A State Department official earlier said the U.S. wants details for the “complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization” of the Korean peninsula. In return the official said the U.S. had offered “the security guarantees” North Korea feels its needs.

Hours later and some 6,800 miles away in Pyongyang, Russia’s Minister for Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov met with Kim Jong Un, before holding talks with his counterpart Ri Yong Ho. Speaking about the possibility of denuclearization, Lavrov said nothing was going to happen until the West decided to lift some of the sanctions in place against the North Korean regime.

US to impose steel, aluminum tariffs on EU, Canada, Mexico

Europe prepares to hit back and Mexico to target US goods

As Europe prepares to hit back with tariffs on a list of US exports worth €6.4 billion ($7.5 billion), Mexico’s economy ministry has said it will target several US goods in response, including some steel and pipe products, lamps, berries, grapes, apples, cold cuts, pork chops and various cheese products “up to an amount comparable to the level of damage” linked to the US tariffs. ...

Canada’s prime minister Trudeau and Mexico’s president Enrique Peña Nieto have reportedly spoken and agreed to co-ordinate retaliation efforts... French President Emmanuel Macron said the United States’ decision to impose tariffs on European metals exports is illegal and a mistake.
The French leader said he would talk to President Donald Trump on the subject later on Thursday

Canadian officials said they would impose tariffs against up to C$16.6bn worth of imports of steel, aluminium, whiskey, orange juice and other products from the US. “We are imposing dollar for dollar tariffs,” said Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s foreign affairs minister. The tariffs are expected to take effect on 1 July.

The tariffs violate Nafta and WTO trade rules, added Freeland, who said that Canada plans to launch dispute settlement proceedings under Nafta Chapter 20 and the WTO.

Freeland concluded her remarks saying:

“I want to be very clear about one thing: Americans remain our partners, friends, and allies. This is not about the American people. We have to believe that at some point their common sense will prevail. But we see no sign of that in this action today by the US administration.”

Hungary’s “Stop Soros” bill could make it illegal to feed immigrants

Hungary’s nationalist government is pushing ahead with legislation that could make it illegal to feed refugees. ... The bill, which was submitted to Hungary’s parliament this week and could be voted on in a matter of days, creates a new criminal offense of “enabling illegal immigration,” for people who help migrants through such acts as giving them food, informational leaflets or legal advice. Under the new bill, any individual or group accused of helping irregular immigrants could face criminal charges, and a sentence of up to a year in prison.

Orban, who has led the country in an increasingly illiberal direction since coming to power in 2010, has dubbed the legislation the "Stop Soros" bill, after the Hungarian-born U.S. financier George Soros, a major funder of human rights causes. Orban’s conservative government has demonized Soros as Hungary’s leading public enemy, accusing him of seeking to erase the country’s Christian identity by flooding it with immigrants, and eventually driving his philanthropic organization out of the country earlier this month. ...

The bill likely faces an easy passage through parliament, where Orban’s right-wing Fidesz party has a two-thirds majority, following his landslide reelection earlier this year. Hungary's state secretary Csaba Domotor said that if the law was passed, it would be up to courts to determine exactly which acts qualified as criminal under the new law.

Victory for Dissent as Government Drops Charges Against Group of J20 Protesters

In a series of victories for civil disobedience rights on Thursday, the U.S. Attorney's Office (USAO) dropped charges and dismissed several cases against people involved with the #DisruptJ20 march during President Donald Trump's inauguration, and a federal judge sanctioned prosecutors for lying about evidence. As Common Dreams has reported, last year "more than 200 anti-Trump demonstrators, legal observers, and journalists were 'indiscriminately' swept up in mass arrests carried out during inauguration protests."

Although a jury found the first group of protesters not guilty of all charges in December, federal prosecutors have continued pursuing cases against 59 of the rounded-up demonstrators—trying them in groups, seeking to imprison them for decades on felony charges, and relying heavily on recordings by the right-wing activist group Project Veritas. Following a revelation last week that "prosecutors suppressed potentially exculpatory evidence," known as a Brady violation, it was revealed in an overnight filing by defense attorneys that the government concealed 69 Project Veritas audio and video files and altered other recordings.

In response to the new Brady violations, at a pre-trial hearing on Thursday, Superior Court Judge Robert Morin dismissed conspiracy charges with prejudice—meaning that they cannot be refiled—but dismissed lesser charges without prejudice, meaning the government can still pursue those, according to reporters from the Huffington Post and Unicorn Riot. The USAO has reportedly dropped felony charges against those in the May 29 trial group—the third group of J20 protesters—and all charges against those in the June 4 group.

How Donald Trump is weaponising the courts for political ends

It was a startling omission, even according to the peculiar moral norms of the Trump era. When Wendy Vitter, one of the US president’s judicial nominees, was asked whether she supported the supreme court’s 1954 Brown v Board of Education decision to end racial segregation in schools – a near sacred pillar of progress for civil rights in the 20th century – she did not say yes. “I don’t mean to be coy,” Vitter, who is up for a seat on the US district court for the eastern district of Louisiana, told her Senate confirmation hearing. “But I think I get into a difficult area when I start commenting on supreme court decisions which are correctly decided and which I may disagree with.”

If approved, Vitter, currently the general counsel of the Roman Catholic archdiocese of New Orleans and an opponent of abortion rights, would join a wave of lifetime appointments that threatens to fundamentally tilt the balance of America’s courts – and embolden conservative activists to bring cases that once seemed lost causes.

With just over a year in office, Donald Trump has already appointed 21 of America’s 167 current circuit judges and intends to fill an additional 20 or more vacancies by the end of the year. He is far outpacing Barack Obama, whose 21st circuit court nominee was approved 33 months into his presidency amid gridlock in Congress. Seventeen of Trump’s nominees for district courts, most of whom replaced Democratic appointees, have also been approved by the Republican-controlled Senate.

Dominated by white men, many of whom are under 50, it is the least diverse crop of new judges for a generation and may prove Trump’s most lasting legacy. ... “This is stunning,” said Christopher Kang, former deputy counsel to Barack Obama, who for more than four years was in charge of the selection, vetting and confirmation of Obama’s judicial nominees. “Conservatives are using the courts to bring us back to a time when ‘religious liberty’ allowed discrimination. We’re seeing legal arguments we had hoped were consigned to the dustbin of history being dusted off and used again in the hope of turning back the clock on the way we treat all Americans.”

Transgender Honduran woman's death in US 'ice box' detention prompts outcry

A transgender Honduran woman died in Ice custody last Friday after coming to the US as part of a caravan of Central American migrants, including several dozen other transgender women fleeing persecution in their respective countries. Roxana Hernández reportedly died from HIV-related complications following an alleged five-day detention in what’s known by immigrant rights groups as the “ice box” – Ice detention facilities notorious for their freezing temperatures. ...

The Transgender Law Center (TLC), a leading transgender advocacy group, called Hernández’s treatment in US custody “negligent”, and – along with other civil rights groups – has issued a list of demands, including that Ice stop detaining transgender women altogether. “If you have an incoming immigrant that shows signs of medical distress – including being HIV positive and having pneumonia – it is negligent to place them in the ‘ice box’ for any amount of time,” said Flor Bermudez, the legal director of TLC. “They might have wrongfully caused her death.” ...

According to Ice, Hernández was the sixth immigrant to die in its custody since October of last year. Hernández and other women in the caravan were fleeing countries where it is often dangerous and even deadly to be trans, Bermudez said. Yet despite coming to the US in search of safety, trans women in Ice detention can face “similar risks” to those they face at home, TLC said in its statement. “They are targeted and harassed by police or held in detention where they experience violence, discrimination, and [unable] to access to medical care, all of which may lead to dire consequences.” ...

In an interview with BuzzFeed News before she left Mexico, Hernández said that she contracted HIV after being gang-raped while walking home in her neighborhood. “Trans people in my neighborhood are killed and chopped into pieces, then dumped inside potato bags,” she told the news organization.

It’s Time to Crack Down on the Toys ‘R’ Us Vulture Capitalists

Ann Marie Reinhart Smith worked at Toys “R” Us for 29 years. Now, the Durham, North Carolina grandmother is unemployed after being laid off as part of the iconic American toy store’s bankruptcy and liquidation. Smith is just one of more than 30,000 US workers who face unemployment as the 70-year-old retail chain unwinds its business after a decade of disastrous management by the Wall Street firms that purchased the company and saddled it with billions of dollars of debt.

Workers with decades of retail experience are being left with no jobs, no benefits and no severance pay. Meanwhile, the private-equity barons who bought the company in 2005 have reaped nearly $500 million in extracted profits, and top executives are set to leave with $16 million worth of golden parachutes.
...

Private-equity and hedge-fund managers are taking advantage of retail workers to bolster their profits without regard for the middle-class communities that they are destroying. In the process, these bankers are perpetuating a vicious cycle in which the rich get richer at the expense of working people.

Despite bringing in almost $12 billion in sales in 2016, once-profitable Toys “R” Us was losing money every year since 2013, burdened by crippling long-term debt payments of more than $400 million to service its crushing $5.2 billion debt pile. This debt is a legacy of a 2005 leveraged buyout by two of the most notorious private-equity companies in the United States: Bain Capital and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR), among other companies. ... The Wall Street fund managers at KKR and Bain Capital don’t seem to care about that—in fact, they’re laughing all the way to the bank, having raided Toys “R” Us for nearly $500 million in profits over the last decade. Meanwhile, more than 30,000 workers are facing the prospect of losing their jobs with no severance pay. Hundreds of communities across the country will bear the social and economic cost of this plunder.

Keiser Report: Scamville

S&P 500 companies return $1 trillion to shareholders in tax-cut surge

S&P 500 companies have returned a record $1 trillion to shareholders over the past year, helped by a recent surge in dividends and stock buybacks following sweeping corporate tax cuts introduced by Republicans, a report on Friday showed.

In the 12 months through March, S&P 500 companies paid out $428 billion in dividends and bought up $573 billion of their own shares, according to S&P Dow Jones Indices analyst Howard Silverblatt.

Romania breaks up alleged €25m illegal logging ring

Romania’s security forces have mounted a series of raids to break up an alleged €25m illegal logging ring, in what is believed to be the largest operation of its kind yet seen in Europe. Officers from Romania’s Directorate for Investigation of Organised Crime and Terrorism (DIICOT) swooped on 23 addresses – including factories owned by the Austrian timber group Schweighofer Holzindustrie, according to local press reports. ...

The case involves deforestation in the Carpathian mountains which shelter some of Europe’s last virgin forests – similar in nature to Poland’s Białowieża but on a larger scale.

Greenpeace estimates that three hectares of spruce, beech, fir and sycamore trees are lost every hour in the 200,000-hectare Carpathian biodiversity haven. Yesterday’s crackdown in the Carpathians followed an EIA report in 2015 which found evidence of illegally sourced wood entering Schweighofer’s supply chain.

David Gehl, the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA)’s Eurasia programmes coordinator, told the Guardian: “This is the first time that a company has really been held to account for illegal logging on this scale in Europe. It sends a huge signal to the timber industry that illegal logging in Europe’s last great ancient forests will have consequences.”

Indigenous Activist: Trudeau’s Purchase of Kinder Morgan Pipeline Is “Huge Step Backward” for Canada

Michigan House approves bills letting industry vote on environmental rules

The Michigan House on Tuesday approved a package of bills that would give industry representatives a larger role in environmental regulation, moving the proposal closer to Gov. Rick Snyder’s desk. Championed by Sen. Tom Casperson, R-Escanaba, Senate Bills 652, 653 and 654  provide increased oversight of the Department of Environmental Quality, which Casperson has called overzealous, too quick to deny permits and fueled by a “radical left-wing” environmental agenda.

The legislation would create private-sector panels — including one largely populated with industry representatives — that could override agency decisions on rules and permits. The Republican-controlled House advanced the package Tuesday through votes of 57-51, 58-50 and 59-49. The Senate approved the bills in January and must sign off on changes before sending them to Snyder. ...

Environmentalists have dubbed the legislation the “Fox Guarding the Hen House Act.” Critics say it would defang a regulator that has lost some teeth due to years of budget cuts and already prioritizes economic development in its decision making.

Also of Interest

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

The Real Revolution Has Nothing To Do With Donald Trump

Spooks Spooking Themselves

Israel and Palestine: A Story of Modern Colonialism

As Trump EPA Attacks Workers and Environment, Trio of Lawsuits Takes Aim at "Outrageous" Pro-Pesticide Agenda

A Little Night Music

Lula Reed & Sonny Thompson - I'll Upset You Baby

Lula Reed - I Got A Notion

Lula Reed - Sick And Tired

Lula Reed - I'm Gone, Yes I'm Gone / Rock Love

Lula Reed - Going Back To Mexico

Lula Reed - I´m a Woman (But I Don´t Talk Too Much)

Lula Reed - Puddentane

LuLu Reed and Freddy King - You Can't Hide

Lulu Reed & Freddy King - Do The President Twist

Lula Reed - Walk On By Me

Lula Reed/Sonny Thompson - I'll Drown In My Tears

Lula Reed - Baby Baby Your Love

Lulu Reed - What Makes You So Cold

Lula Reed - You Gotta Have That Green