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This evening's music features Irish bluesrocker Rory Gallagher. Enjoy!

“I propose that the forces of corporate totalitarianism are deliberately destroying this entire world in order to sell their simulated version of it back to us at a profit.”

-- Diane Harvey

News and Opinion

The U.S. is involved in assisting the Saudi monarchy in a genocidal war in Yemen as you read this and the hypocritical democrats are pretending that Trump should have raise human rights concerns with Kim, like the U.S. has some kind of standing on human rights - what a joke.

— Ajamu Baraka (@ajamubaraka) June 14, 2018

Pundits Worry Threat of Nuclear War Is Being Reduced

Media outlets don’t want America to negotiate with North Korea; they want the US to hold North Korea for ransom. On MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show, the host was aghast (6/12/18) that the US says it will halt the annual war games it conducts with South Korea on North Korea’s doorstep, because doing so is “an absolute jackpot for the North Korean dictator,” “one of the things he wants most on earth,” and now Washington “has just given them that for free, for nothing.” ...

Undergirding the view that the United States should only negotiate with North Korea when “negotiation” means “forcing the DPRK under nuclear duress to do whatever America says” are entrenched notions of intrinsic US superiority. Probably the most blatant example of this is the view that the United States is “legitimizing” DPRK by meeting with its leaders. MSNBC’s Maddow seems to find it blasphemous that the summit “billed” North Korea “as a nation equal in stature to the United States.” According to the Times, Kim got a “win” by receiving the “legitimacy of being treated as an equal as a nuclear power on the world stage, country flags standing side by side.” The Post was incensed that Kim was “able to parade on the global stage as a legitimate statesman,” while Applebaum said that “the flags and the handshake will reinforce Kim’s legitimacy and make him harder to depose.”

States, and the parties that govern them, are not granted legitimacy by the United States. Legally, that legitimacy comes from United Nations recognition or its absence; as a practical matter, states and their leaders establish legitimacy through what the Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci described as a combination of coercion and consent. Believing that the US has the power to confer or deny legitimacy on other countries or their leaders is part of the same imperial hubris that makes pundits panic about tentative moves in the direction of curtailing America belligerence toward North Korea, and thus the threat of nuclear war. A comparable dynamic is at work in the commentariat concern-trolling about North Korean human rights. Maddow was perplexed that the US would meet with North Korea without the North Korean leadership making any promises about “their behavior toward their own people.” The Times’ editors considered it “startling” that the joint Kim/Trump statement contains no reference to human rights in DPRK.

In this conception, America is the shining city on a hill that must free the people of the DPRK, though these analysts don’t ask who will liberate US citizens living under a regime with the highest incarceration rate in the world, rampant judicial and extrajudicial execution, widespread racism, obscene wealth inequality and an undemocratic political system. Calling for a US government crusade for change inside North Korea while overlooking all of these features of US society is another dimension of the imperial arrogance that insists it’s legitimate to subject the entire population of other nations to crushing sanctions and violent threats until their governments give Washington everything it wants. ...

For the punditry, the goal of US/North Korea talks isn’t lasting peace on the Korean peninsula, it’s total North Korean submission to US commands. Corporate media appear to be more worried about the United States being successfully defied than it is about nuclear war.

Geo-strategic conflicts set to intensify following US-North Korea summit

Tuesday’s Singapore summit between US President Donald Trump and North Korean Chairman Kim Jong-un has set the stage for the sharpening of disputes in the Asia-Pacific, particularly with China, despite the apparent relaxation of tensions. ... Japanese Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera opposed Trump’s proposal, saying: “The US-South Korean exercises and US forces in South Korea play significant roles for the security of East Asia.” The massive war games send a regular threatening message to China, which is the true target of US and Japanese aggression. ...

China’s response gave a clearer indication of the developing conflict. A Tuesday op-ed in China’s state-owned Global Times insisted that if North Korea was no longer a “threat,” then “there will be no grounds for the US and South Korea to continue large-scale military drills and for Washington to maintain its military presence in South Korea.” ... China hopes to incorporate North Korea into its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), an infrastructure plan to connect Asia with Europe and Africa. A Global Times article on Wednesday called for China to “gradually shift to economic assistance” to Pyongyang in order to bring it into the BRI.

Washington is whipping up further tensions with Beijing. On May 27, the US sailed two naval vessels within the 12-nautical-mile zone around the Paracel Islands in the South China Sea, risking a clash with the Chinese navy. Trump’s emerging trade war with Beijing could likewise lead to military conflict.Trump used the summit with Kim to deliver North Korea an ultimatum: join the United States in the growing war drive against China or become a casualty on the road to such a conflagration. ...

The Washington Post denounced Trump for supposedly yielding US ground in the Asia-Pacific: “With backing from China and Russia, which seek to diminish US strategic standing in Asia, North Korea has long sought an end to the exercises—and until Tuesday, this and previous US administrations had flatly rejected the idea.”

This campaign against Trump is not based on his domestic brutalization of immigrants, the destruction of entire societies in the Middle East, or the numerous other violations of democratic rights Washington has carried out. For this affluent layer, their primary concern is that Trump is not fully using the military against China and Russia, lamenting any let-up in US aggression. Whatever their disagreements, Trump and the Republicans, as well as the Democrats and their allies, will continue the preparations for great power conflicts as laid out by the Pentagon in January’s National Defense Strategy, which branded China and Russia as threats to America’s post-World War II hegemony.

Paul Jay on Trump’s Iran War Agenda and Liberals’ Korea Peace Panic

Worth a full read:

(Why) Americans Are Too Busy Reacting to Authoritarianism to Act Against It

Americans have become reactionaries — whether they know it or not. They are always desperately, furiously reacting. Alarmed, shocked, baffled, outraged by the day’s latest, and usually terrible, events. A school shooting, camps being built, a President insulting Canada, elections being hacked, the list is endless. But to react is, at best, to play defense, and at worst, to be manipulated, something like a marionette on a string. Having become reactionaries, what Americans aren’t anymore is authors of their own destiny as a nation. Here’s how the cycle goes. The authoritarians say something, do something, terrible. They separate mothers and kids, put kids in camps, and so on. Americans respond with sudden disbelieving explosions of outrage, fury, despair, anxiety, dread, denial, bewilderment. But the common thread is that they react. The authoritarians laugh, mock, taunt. The very next day is the same — but worse. What else would it be, if a society is only ever always reacting? Yet doesn’t that reactionary cycle define American life now?

Why is that? Why are Americans trapped in this spin cycle of reacting desperately, furiously, anxiously, a little too late, every single day, to the ills of authoritarianism — which also means that they can’t ever really act against it? After all, if all that Americans can do is react to authoritarianism’s daily transgressions, each one a little more terrible and violent than the last, then authoritarianism will surely win, because it is constantly pushing the bar down into the abyss. So until and unless Americans can explain authoritarianism, instead of react to it, they will simply have no power over it. If you cannot explain a thing, if you do not understand what causes it, but are only ever responding to its effects — what power do you really have? You are impotent — just as Americans find themselves today. ...

Hence, the desperate, futile spin cycle of reaction in America today tells us something interesting and I think a little important. Americans aren’t very interested in why their society is collapsing — only in the daily news of its collapse. ... So. Why aren’t Americans more interested in why their society’s collapsing? ... One obvious answer is that America has long had a virulent kind of anti-intellectualism in it. ... Yet the logical result of anti-intellectualism is that America is a nation that doesn’t have intellectuals, really — it has pundits. And the job of a pundit is not to tell the truth — but to spin it. Pundits are effectively salesmen for capitalism’s ills. Their job is to convince people that what is bad for them is good for them, and what is good for capitalism is always the best thing of all for everyone. You might dispute that, but you can simply ask yourself if you’ve ever really heard an American pundit challenge any aspect of capitalism whatsoever with any real degree of vigour. So another reason Americans aren’t interested in their own society’s collapse is that capitalism minimizes their interest in anything but what’s immediately profitable.

And that brings me to the third reason I think Americans aren’t interested in why their society’s collapsing. They can’t afford to be. They’re living right at the edge of life and death. Who has time, energy, or a reason, really, to think about these abstractions of “society”, “collapse”, “the future”, and “progress”? If you are working 12 hours a day just to put food on the table, and educate your kids, then ethics come last — and meta-ethics, the whys and wherefores of it all, are a laughable thing to worry about at all. ... It strikes me every day now, a little more, this reactionary cycle that Americans are trapped in. Like most cycles, it gets harder to break every time. Yet I don’t think that Americans see this at all yet — that they are trapped in just such a classic cycle of reaction to abusers, which means that they are stuck in an abusive relationship, essentially.

You read about the Trail of Tears, the Japanese internment, etc. in your history classes.

You read about all the countries where the government threw people into camps en masse, and you wondered, "How could it happen? How could people allow that to happen?"

Well, now you know. https://t.co/QTAON4ady7

— Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) June 12, 2018

Police worked with violent pro-Trump activist to prosecute leftwing group

A pro-Trump demonstrator who admitted hitting protesters at a far-right rally received help and support from California police, who worked with him to prosecute leftwing activists, records show.

Documents and testimony in a trial surrounding a rightwing demonstration in Berkeley reveal that police and prosecutors pursued charges on behalf of Daniel Quillinan, a conservative activist who has posted fascist memes and came to the event with Kyle Chapman, now a celebrated figure amongst the “alt-right”. The authorities consistently treated Quillinan as a victim even though he was visibly armed with a knife, a wooden “shield” and a “flagpole” – and had told law enforcement that he “hit someone in the head”, according to court files.

The resulting criminal trial against five anti-fascist protesters – who are accused of assaulting Quillinan during a roughly 15-second altercation – is, according to activists, the latest example of US law enforcement aggressively targeting leftwing demonstrators and favoring members of the far-right after violent clashes. In another California case, police have worked directly with neo-Nazis to go after counter-protesters, including a black activist stabbed at a white supremacist rally.

“This makes a pretty clear statement of choosing sides,” Dustin Sawtelle, one of the anti-fascist defendants, said in an interview this week before the trial began.

Cops viciously beat a man in an Arizona hospital

The Mesa Police Department in Arizona is under fire once again after a video surfaced that appears to show officers viciously beating an unarmed man and nearly tearing off his ear, and then later taunting him while he’s lying in a pool of blood on the floor of a hospital. The video stems from an incident on Jan. 28, when officers pulled over a vehicle on suspicion of drunk driving.

When the officers ran everyone’s IDs, they discovered that a 23-year-old Jose Luis Conde, a landscape worker riding as a passenger, had a criminal record, including previous gun and drug charges. Upon searching Conde, they discovered packages of cocaine in his socks, but did not find any weapon. The encounter quickly escalated.

Body camera video footage, released to the media by Conde’s lawyer Bret Royle, shows him struggling with the police officers. Even when he appears to be in handcuffs, the officers appear to punch him. “I can’t breathe,” Conde tells the officers at one point.

When they arrived at the hospital, where he would be treated for injuries incurred during the scuffle, Conde tried to escape but was apprehended by officers, according to Mesa Police Department. Conde, speaking at a press conference with his attorney, said that the officers shoved him against the wall roughly, poked him in the eye and beat him with their flashlight. Part of his ear was severely torn; doctors had to sew part of it back on. ...

“They laughed at me while I laid in a pool of my own blood, barely conscious,” Conde told reporters.

The horrific Yemen humanitarian crisis is about to get a lot worse, U.N. warns

Saudi-backed coalition forces ratcheted up their assault on the key port city of Hodeidah in Yemen on Friday as the U.N. and human rights organizations warn that the “worst humanitarian crisis in the world” is about to get much worse. The battle for Hodeidah, a rebel-held port city on the western coast of the war-ravaged country, entered its third day on Friday, with a Saudi-led coalition continuing to pound targets along the coast with airstrikes, while troops loyal to the exiled government amassed on the city’s southern side.

The forces, led by the United Arab Emirates, were within meters of capturing the airport in Hodeidah on Friday, according to Saudi-owned television station Al Arabiya. ... The coalition forces believe the capture of Hodeidah would give them the upper hand in a war that has seen neither side make any real advances in years, despite more than 10,000 people being killed.

The U.N. says it is struggling to ensure that Hodeidah remains open to aid shipments, with the port said to account for up to 80 percent of the humanitarian supplies that enter the country. A direct strike on Hodeidah’s port by the coalition would significantly hurt the rebels’ chances of holding onto control of the city, but the coalition is equally aware that such a strike would lead to a significant international backlash — even from the U.S., which is currently providing logistics and training support to the coalition.

On Thursday evening, exiled Yemeni President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi arrived in Aden, the temporary capital of the war-wrenched country, saying: “The hour of victory is close and the return of justice is nearing that will lead to the triumph of the will of the Yemeni people.” Speaking on Twitter Friday morning, Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash, said: “Depriving the Houthis of their control of Hodeida port, at the Yemeni government request, means that the Houthis will no longer be able to impose their will at the barrel of a gun.”

The U.S. destroyed Raqqa to defeat ISIS. Locals don’t know if they’ll ever rebuild it

The U.S.-led campaign to liberate Raqqa from ISIS rule last summer was so destructive that Amnesty International has accused the coalition of carelessness amounting to criminal negligence. Over 4,000 coalition airstrikes pummeled the small city during the campaign. Additionally, the U.S. Marine artillery battalion attached to the local forces fired 30,000 rounds into the city, more than any American artillery unit in any war since Vietnam, according to the rights group's recent report. They literally melted the barrels of their howitzers through overuse, the report said.

The results are plain to see: The city's destruction is almost total, the scale of damage rivaling that of Mosul. More than 70 percent of the city’s buildings were damaged or destroyed during the U.S.-led campaign, according to the United Nations. The civilian cost is equally staggering: Local monitors estimate some 2,000 civilians were killed in fighting, with the majority likely killed by coalition airstrikes, according to independent monitor Airwars. (The Pentagon has rejected these findings, and has so far admitted responsibility for only 26 civilian casualties during its campaign in Raqqa.)

Yet Raqqawis appear angered less by the death and destruction visited upon them than by the total inadequacy of the reconstruction effort that’s followed. In early spring, the Trump administration froze $200 million worth of aid to Syria while the president and his advisers decide whether America’s mission will be continued. Billions of dollars were spent on destroying their city, locals say, and yet almost nothing is being done to rebuild it. ...

In his office in one of the few administrative buildings left standing, Abdullah al-Ariyan is overwhelmed by the task ahead of him. “It's impossible for things to go back as they were. The destruction is catastrophic. Who will rebuild private properties? The roads need reconstruction, the sewer system needs reconstruction, the water supply network needs reconstruction, the entire electricity grid is completely destroyed. Until now, we have received zero international support.”

Like everyone in Raqqa’s local Arab administration, which is entirely dependent on US support, al-Ariyan was horrified by Trump’s recent aid freeze: “It was just USD 200 million. For us, that would've been a huge amount. But for the U.S. administration, that would be just the cost of a couple of tanks,” he says.

Amazon & Bezos Screw Homeless In Seattle

'National Disgrace': Poverty Wages Make Affordable Housing a Myth for Low-Income Americans

A new report by the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) shows that "affordable housing" is virtually nonexistent—and that in many states, even efforts to institute a minimum wage of $15 per hour would still leave many American workers struggling to find suitable housing that they could easily afford.

"Make no mistake: while the housing market may have recovered for many, we are nonetheless experiencing an affordable housing crisis, especially for very low-income families. That is because wages have been stagnant for decades, while the cost of housing keeps going up," wrote Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in his preface to the report, entitled Out of Reach.

The study's authors calculated the hourly wage a full-time worker must earn in order to afford a two-bedroom apartment without spending more than 30 percent on his or her rent—as the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) recommends.

In no state would it be possible for a worker to afford this modest housing arrangement while earning the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, the coalition found:

A full-time worker earning the federal minimum wage of $7.25 needs to work approximately 122 hours per week for all 52 weeks of the year, or approximately three full-time jobs, to afford a two-bedroom rental home at the national average fair market rent. The same worker needs to work 99 hours per week for all 52 weeks of the year, or approximately two and a half full-time jobs, to afford a one-bedroom home at the national average fair market rent.

In just 22 out of more than 3,000 counties in the country, the report found, the report also found, a minimum wage worker would be able to afford a one-bedroom rental apartment at fair market rent.

There is no affordable housing in America https://t.co/Ip4YaqIZbD pic.twitter.com/oiPxaaRsUR

— Splinter (@splinter_news) June 13, 2018

Trump hits China with new tariffs, Beijing vows retaliation

Trump announces $50bn in China tariffs, escalating possibility of trade war

Donald Trump has announced a 25% tariff on $50bn of Chinese goods, triggering a promise of immediate retaliation from China. The move, after a long war of words, increases the possibility of a full trade war between the world’s two leading economies. In a statement, the White House said the tariffs would be levied on goods that “contain industrially significant technologies”. The administration warned it would pursue further levies if China retaliates.

Trump said the US’s trade relationship with China was “no longer sustainable”.

“My great friendship with President Xi [Jinping] of China and our country’s relationship with China are both very important to me,” said Trump. “Trade between our nations, however, has been very unfair, for a very long time.

“The United States can no longer tolerate losing our technology and intellectual property through unfair economic practices.”

In a statement on its website, the Chinese commerce ministry said: “China is unwilling to have a trade war, but the Chinese side has no choice but to strongly oppose this, due to the United States’ myopic behaviour that will harm both parties.” The measures harm the interests of both countries and disrupt world trade, the statement said, adding: “We will immediately introduce tariff measures of the same scale and strength. All the results from the negotiations previously reached by the two parties will be invalid.”

Blistering U.N. Report: Trump Administration’s Policies Designed to Worsen Poverty & Inequality

World's Millionaires and Billionaires Now Control Half the World's Personal Wealth, New Analysis Shows

Millionaires and billionaires own nearly half of all the world's personal wealth, which reached $201.9 trillion last year, according to a new report from Boston Consulting Group.

"The share of global wealth held by millionaires increased to almost 50 percent in 2017, compared with just under 45 percent in 2012, driven mainly by higher-wealth individuals investing in higher-return assets," the report (pdf) states.

In other words, as Bloomberg put it, "The rich are getting a lot richer and doing so a lot faster."

That's especially true in the United States, where the Trump administration and the GOP-controlled Congress are working to keep slashing taxes on the nation's wealthiest individuals and corporations at the expense of working families.

"North America remained the richest global region in 2017 in terms of personal wealth, which expanded by 8 percent to $86.1 trillion," the report notes. "North American wealth was highly concentrated in the over-$5-million segment, which held 42 percent of investable wealth."

Hat tip lookout:

JW Inside Report: The Awan Bros/DNC IT Scandal featuring Luke Rosiak

Scott Pruitt, Under Fire, Plans to Initiate a Big Environmental Rollback - The New York Times

Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, is expected on Friday to send President Trump a detailed legal proposal to dramatically scale back an Obama-era regulation on water pollution, according to a senior E.P.A. official familiar with the plan. It is widely expected to be one of his agency’s most significant regulatory rollback efforts.

And, as soon as Monday, the same official said, Mr. Pruitt is expected to publish another major change: his agency’s legal proposal to gut President Barack Obama’s rule to reduce climate-warming pollution from vehicle tailpipes. That proposal risks triggering a court battle with California and raises the prospect that the American car market could be split in two, with different groups of states enforcing different pollution rules. ...

The weakening of the water and tailpipe-pollution regulations have been top priorities for Mr. Trump since he took office. The release of a new water regulation to replace the Obama-era rule, known as Waters of the United States, would hand a victory to two important groups for the president: farmers and rural landowners (who make up his political base), as well as golf-course and real estate developers. ...

While both the proposed water and tailpipe plans represent major steps toward weakening those regulations, the proposals are still in draft form, and could still be changed during a public comment period. The final versions of the regulatory rollbacks are to be published this year. The E.P.A. official who described the filing plans for both requested anonymity to discuss internal agency planning.

Global warming set to exceed 1.5°C, slow growth - U.N. draft

Global warming is on course to exceed the most stringent goal set in the Paris agreement by around 2040, threatening economic growth, according to a draft report that is the U.N.’s starkest warning yet of the risks of climate change. Governments can still cap temperatures below the strict 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7° Fahrenheit) ceiling agreed in 2015 only with “rapid and far-reaching” transitions in the world economy, according to the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The final government draft, obtained by Reuters and dated June 4, is due for publication in October in South Korea after revisions and approval by governments. It will be the main scientific guide for combating climate change.

“If emissions continue at their present rate, human-induced warming will exceed 1.5°C by around 2040,” according to the report, which broadly reaffirms findings in an earlier draft in January but is more robust, after 25,000 comments from experts and a wider pool of scientific literature. Temperatures are already up about 1°C (1.8°F) and are rising at a rate of about 0.2°C a decade, according to the draft, requested by world leaders as part of the Paris Agreement.

“Economic growth is projected to be lower at 2°C warming than at 1.5° for many developed and developing countries,” it said, drained by impacts such as floods or droughts that can undermine crop growth or an increase in human deaths from heatwaves. In a plus-1.5°C world, for instance, sea level rise would be 10 centimeters (3.94 inches) less than with 2°C, exposing about 10 million fewer people in coastal areas to risks such as floods, storm surges or salt spray damaging crops.

Also of Interest

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

The Chomsky Challenge for Americans

Henry Giroux Puts a Lens on the Nightmare of Neoliberal Fascism

Letter From Britain: An Establishment Blinded By Russophobia

If a Prosecutor Breaks the Law in Secret, Does the Crime Exist? Not According to Texas Prosecutors.

This Woman Had The Perfect Response When ICE Boarded Her Greyhound Bus

Looking back at Standing Rock – in pictures

A Little Night Music

Rory Gallagher - What In The World

Rory Gallagher - Banker's Blues

Rory Gallagher - Hands Off

Rory Gallagher - Do You Read Me

Rory Gallagher - Laundromat

Rory Gallagher - Messin' With The Kid

Rory Gallagher - Out on the Western Plain

Rory Gallagher - Walk On Hot Coals