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This evening's music features blues guitarist and mandolin player Yank Rachell. Enjoy!

“Inhumanity, n. One of the signal and characteristic qualities of humanity.”

-- Ambrose Bierce

News and Opinion

The Threat of International Adoption for Migrant Children Separated From Their Families

When news reports first began to emerge that 81 of the migrant children recently separated from their parents had been sent into the care of one of the largest adoption agencies in the country, the response was swift alarm. Was the government planning on creating “social orphans” out of the children, then offering them up for adoption? Horrified observers had already drawn parallels between the separation crisis and the blatantly assimilationist treatment of Native American children, starting with their mass removal to boarding schools in the late 19th Century and continuing through the Indian Adoption Project, which from the late 1950s to early 1970s removed 25 to 35 percent of all Native American children from their families. Or how U.S. slavery systematically broke apart families, selling children away from their parents. A number pointed out that the forcible transfer of children from one group of people to another fits the United Nations definition of genocide. ...

Fears of a new adoption rush in today’s border crisis weren’t groundless. There was reason to be concerned. The former head of U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement under President Barack Obama warned that some of the children who’d recently been separated would remain separated “permanently” and potentially be adopted. Reports surfaced of mothers who were told that their children would be adopted as an incentive to “behave.” On Tuesday night, the Daily Beast reported that the threat of adoption has become weaponized, as a Guatemalan mother detained by Customs and Border Protection earlier this month was allegedly presented with the ultimatum that if she didn’t abandon her asylum appeal, she would be jailed for a year and her daughter put up for adoption. ...

What policies and laws might apply to the children was so unclear that even many child welfare experts and former officials weren’t sure how to think about the threat. When migrant parents were taken into ICE custody at the border, their children became wards of Health and Human Services, specifically its Office of Refugee Resettlement, which facilitates the care of “unaccompanied alien children.” Although they’d arrived with parents, upon separation, the children had been officially transformed into unaccompanied minors with immigration cases distinct from the adults they’d arrived with. And it was already becoming clear that, despite its protestations to the contrary, the government had no real plan for bringing them back together.

“Families Belong Together”: Tens of Thousands Across the U.S. Protest Trump’s Zero Tolerance Policy

Hundreds of Thousands Take to Streets to Protest Trump's 'Zero-Humanity' Policies

Hundreds of thousands took to the streets Saturday to protest against Donald Trump and his immigration policies in big cities and small towns across the 50 states.

Trump, who spent the day playing golf at his resort in New Jersey, took time to tweet an attack on what he called the "radical left," who he said were behind calls to disband Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the agency central to his hardline immigration approach.

More than 750 "Families Belong Together" marches took place in all 50 US states and Twitter showed sister demonstrations in London, Munich, Paris, Hamburg, Tokyo, and others cities around the globe.

Immigrant parents are agreeing to be deported just to see their kids again

After spending two weeks at a detention center in Port Isabel, Texas, separated from his 4-year-old daughter, a man in his thirties who fled Honduras earlier this month decided to agree to be deported. He couldn’t bear to be away from his daughter any longer.

“He has no idea where she is,” said Natasha Quiroga, senior counsel for the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, who spoke with the man earlier this week. “He didn't want to put her through any more trauma. By the time we spoke with him, he had made up his mind.”

The agreement ensures the man will be reunited with his daughter “for the purposes of removal,” according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). But he was told the deportation process could take up to two weeks, Quiroga said.

The Trump administration’s policy of separating families at the border left thousands of migrant children alone, without their parents. While President Donald Trump’s executive order last week allows families to stay together in detention, the government still doesn’t have a concrete plan to reunite the ones immigration officials split up. Now, many immigrant parents face an impossible choice: stay separated and have a chance at asylum in the U.S. or agree to be deported with their children.

Chris Hedges: America the Failed State

Our “corporate coup d’état in slow motion,” as the writer John Ralston Saul calls it, has opened a Pandora’s box of evils that is transforming America into a failed state. The “unholy trinity of corruption, impunity and violence,” he said, can no longer be checked. The ruling elites abjectly serve corporate power to exploit and impoverish the citizenry. Democratic institutions, including the courts, are mechanisms of corporate repression. Financial fraud and corporate crime are carried out with impunity. The decay is exacerbated by the state’s indiscriminate use of violence abroad and at home, where rogue law enforcement agencies harass and arrest citizens and the undocumented and often kill the unarmed. A depressed and enraged population, trapped by chronic unemployment and underemployment, is overdosing on opioids and beset by rising suicide rates. It engages in acts of nihilistic violence, including mass shootings. Hate groups proliferate. The savagery, mayhem and grotesque distortions familiar to those on the outer reaches of empire increasingly characterize American existence. ...

Trump’s decision to launch a trade war—Canada will impose punitive measures on $12.63 billion worth of imported American goods in response—is an example of the damage a despot who has little understanding of the economy, politics, international relations or law can do. These self-inflicted wounds, Saul warned, see despots intensify attacks on the demonized and the vulnerable, such as Muslims and the undocumented. Despots frantically scapegoat others for their mess, often inciting violence among their supporters to placate an inchoate rage. ... Saul said the imposition of tariffs and the crude insults Trump uses against American allies—he called Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “dishonest and weak”—are rapidly destroying America’s clout and standing in the global hierarchy. This behavior is having very negative political, economic and social consequences for the United States.

“The whole world, the Western world in particular, invested enormously in the idea that the United States is the leader,” Saul said. “The idea that the United States is to be admired. What’s sad about it is Americans take it for granted that the world loves them. They’ve never analyzed the responsibilities that come with being the leader. It’s what you expect from a good parent. You act in a certain way. People want to identify with the United States. It’s been that way since the Second World War. All this is being thrown away. Like or dislike Obama, he rebuilt a great part of the world’s admiration for the United States. I know what his failures were. But I also know his strengths. He was a president who was capable of acting and talking like the intelligent, civilized American that everyone wants to admire.” ...

U.S. trading partners and allies such as Canada and European states will, he said, reduce their dependence on the American market. The traditional strategic and political ties to Washington will be steadily weakened. And when the next financial crash comes, and Saul expects one to come, the United States will be bereft of partners when it needs them most.

“If you treat your closest allies as a threat, who is going to stand with you?” he asked.

Donald Trump: "The European Union is possibly as bad as China, just smaller!"

Rudy Giuliani calls for Iran regime change at rally linked to extreme group

Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, addressed a rally staged by an extreme Iranian opposition group in Paris on Saturday, calling for regime change in Tehran. Giuliani spoke to the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), an umbrella coalition largely controlled by the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MeK), which was once listed as a terrorist organisation in the US and Europe and is still widely viewed as a Marxist-Islamist cult built around the personality of its leader, Maryam Rajavi.

“We are now realistically being able to see an end to the regime in Iran,” Giuliani told a crowd of about 4,000, many of them refugees and young eastern Europeans who had been bussed in to attend the rally in return for a weekend trip to Paris. “The mullahs must go, the ayatollah must go, and they must be replaced by a democratic government which Madam Rajavi represents,” Giuliani said. “Freedom is right around the corner ... Next year I want to have this convention in Tehran!”

The former New York mayor, who became a cyber security adviser in the White House before being named as Trump’s personal lawyer in April, is one of a long line of American conservative hawks to attend the NCRI annual conference. Another prominent guest on Saturday was Newt Gingrich, a former House speaker and a close Trump ally. In his speech, Giuliani said the fall of the government in Tehran would be brought about by economic isolation.

Giuliani suggested that the current wave of protests in Iran was being orchestrated from outside. “Those protests are not happening spontaneously,” Giuliani said. “They are happening because of many of our people in Albania [which hosts an MeK compound] and many of our people here and throughout out the world.” It was unclear whether “our people” was intended to mean the US or the MeK.

'Propaganda organization': White Helmets 'engage in anti-Assad activities' – author Sy Hersh

An interesting article, here's a teaser:

How the Saudi-Qatari Rivalry Has Fueled the War in Syria

The Western debate over the protracted Syrian war has often taken place online or, worse still, on social media. ... As a result, there are now two dominant narratives regarding the causes of the war. While they contain some grains of truth, both narratives are equally simplistic and thus, appealing for social media wars, but also quite misleading.

One view — promoted by the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad and its supporters — holds that Western powers and Gulf regimes plotted the overthrow of the Assad government, instigated protests against it, and hired the rebels to do the job on the battlefield. In this telling, the conflict in Syria is primarily the byproduct of outside agitators. The second narrative holds that the underlying causes of the war can be explained by the legitimate grievances expressed by the Syrian people against the regime, and that they revolted against it in the era of Arab uprisings. This narrative demands that one view the violence against the regime as a byproduct of legitimate protest by ordinary Syrian citizens against their repressive dictator. ...

In reality, both narratives are rather valid — simultaneously so. The Syrian people had indeed accumulated plenty of grievances against the repressive dynastic rule of the Assad family and were fed up with a series of failed promises. Meanwhile, the Gulf regimes and the U.S. were plotting a regime change operation in Syria, dating from at least 2006.

But these two endlessly recycled narratives obscure a critical cause of the Syrian conflict and the longevity of the war: namely, the intense competition between Saudi Arabia on the one hand and Qatar on the other. The struggle between these two foreign powers has been a crucial dimension of the war — and their struggle and involvement has only been made possible with full U.S. and European Union support, although different Western countries sided more with one side or the other at different periods of the conflict.

"Officials" Attempt To Sabotage Further North Korea Talks

Several Congress people and some officials in the CIA and Trump administration try to throw a spanner into the negotiations with North Korea. They "leak" to NBC News about an intelligence assessment on North Korea's nuclear facilities. The result is a sensationalized piece (North Korea has increased nuclear production at secret sites, say U.S. officials) that includes no surprising facts. One of the NBC authors is Ken Dilanian who is well known for his tight cooperation with the CIA. ...

The result of the Trump-Kim summit in Singapore was a "freeze for freeze" deal. North Korea stopped its nuclear and missile testing while the U.S. stopped the large maneuvers it regularity held with South Korea's army. Both sides agreed to further talks. North Korea made some aspirational statements about denuclearization which have the same time frame as similar aspirational statements made by the U.S. in Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). There is no time frame to reach a certain state. There is no commitment towards declaring nuclear sites nor is there a commitment to stop the production of nuclear stuff. ...

Kim Jong Un will not only "try to hide" the North Korean nuclear facilities. He will surely keep them secret as long as he can. The security of his country depends on them. That "more than a dozen American officials" talk with NBC on that issue shows that there is a concerted operation to sabotage a possible deal. Those opposed try to move the goalposts.

U.S. has plan to dismantle North Korea nuclear program within a year: Bolton

White House national security adviser John Bolton said on Sunday he believed the bulk of North Korea’s weapons programs could be dismantled within a year, as the United States and North Korea resumed working-level talks. Bolton told CBS’s “Face the Nation” that Washington has devised a program to dismantle North Korea’s weapons of mass destruction - chemical, biological and nuclear - and ballistic missile programs in a year, if there is full cooperation and disclosure from Pyongyang. ...

Siegfried Hecker, a nuclear scientist and Stanford University professor, has predicted it would take around 10 years to dismantle and clean up a substantial part of North Korea’s Yongbyon nuclear site. ...

The Washington Post reported on Saturday that U.S. intelligence officials have concluded that North Korea does not intend to fully give up its nuclear arsenal and is considering ways to hide the number of weapons it has. It also reported Pyongyang has secret production facilities, according to the latest evidence they have.

Bolton refused to comment on intelligence matters but the United States was going into nuclear negotiations aware of Pyongyang’s failure to live up to its promises in the past.

Leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador Wins Mexican Presidential Election in Landslide Victory

Mexico's 'Bernie Sanders' Wins in a Huge Historic Landslide With Mandate to Reshape the Nation

Progressive anti-Trump candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador has been elected president of Mexico on Sunday in an apparent landslide victory.

Exit polls gave AMLO, as his supporters call him, ­a huge lead over his two closest competitors, and both of them conceded the race shortly after polls closed on Sunday night. Official results were due to be announced later on Sunday night with AMLO supporters expected to flood Mexico City’s main plaza, the Zócalo, to celebrate his anticipated victory.

Exit polls show Mexicans overwhelmingly voted for leftist Lopez Obrador https://t.co/uzkzJQuaXy

— Reuters Top News (@Reuters) July 2, 2018

Mexico election: historic landslide victory for leftist Amlo

A baseball-loving leftwing nationalist who has vowed to crack down on corruption, rein in Mexico’s war on drugs and rule for the poor has been elected president of Latin America’s second-largest economy. Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a silver-haired 64-year-old who is best known as Amlo and counts Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn among his friends, was elected with at least 53% of the vote, according to a quick count by Mexico’s electoral commission.

López Obrador’s closest rival, Ricardo Anaya from the National Action party (PAN), received around 22% while José Antonio Meade, a career civil servant running for the Institutional Revolutionary party, or PRI, which ruled Mexico for most of last century, came in third with around 16%. ... Exit polls also suggested the party Amlo founded in 2014 – the Movement for National Regeneration or Morena – had won at least five of nine gubernatorial races, with the winners including Mexico City’s first elected female mayor, Claudia Sheinbaum. ...

As an estimated 89 million voters descended on polling stations on Sunday it became clear that Mexicans – fed up with political sleaze, soaring violence and poverty - had overwhelmingly voted for change and to reject the only two parties to hold the presidency since the end of one-party rule in 2000.

Trump anti-abortion supreme court pick 'not acceptable', says Collins

As battle lines are drawn for the coming fight over Donald Trump’s second supreme court nominee, a senator who could help to decide the fate of the nomination warned on Sunday that a justice who would seek to reverse federal abortion rights protections “would not be acceptable”.

“A candidate for this important position who would overturn Roe v Wade would not be acceptable to me because that would indicate an activist agenda that I don’t want to see a judge have,” Republican senator Susan Collins told ABC’s This Week, referring to the 1973 court decision protecting abortion rights. ...

Collins said Trump had told her personally he would not ask potential nominees about their position on Roe – the president told reporters the same on Friday, on Air Force One. But the intensive conservative vetting of potential nominees is such that an anti-abortion disposition is practically ensured.

Vice-president Mike Pence, an outspoken evangelical Christian, has called for Roe to be relegated to “the ash heap of history”.

Disgusting, but unsurprising:

After Long Career Bailing Out Big Banks, Obama Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner Now Runs Predatory Firm That Exploits the Poor for Profit

After a lengthy government career defined by his central role in bailing out predatory Wall Street banks as former President Barack Obama's Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner appears to have found his true calling in the private sector, where he now heads a large financial institution that exploits the economic struggles of poor Americans for profit.

As president of Warburg Pincus—a major New York private equity firm—Geithner helps manage a lucrative predatory lending outfit called Mariner Finance, which mass-mails loan checks to low-income Americans, hides exorbitant interest rates in the fine print, and quickly sues those who fail to repay the loan and interest in time, according to a detailed Washington Post report published late Sunday.

"It's basically a way of monetizing poor people," John Lafferty, who worked as a manager trainee at a Mariner Finance branch in Nashville, told the Post. "Maybe at the beginning, people thought these loans could help people pay their electric bill. But it has become a cash cow." ...

"This industry is a pipeline to transfer money from the poor to the ultra-rich," Ben Wikler, Washington director of MoveOn.org, wrote in response to the Post's report on Sunday. "Obama's treasury secretary Tim Geithner is president of one of the private equity firms making a killing from it. Your economy, rigged to redistribute wealth to the top."

'It stinks': report of Trump's Fart Act blows through Washington

A report that Donald Trump is looking to walk away from the World Trade Organisation and instead adopt a United States Fair and Reciprocal Tariff Act, or Fart Act, has been greeted with loud amusement on Twitter.

Axios reported that it had received a leaked early draft of a bill ordered by the president, that would see America take the unlikely step of abandoning WTO rules, allowing Trump to raise tariffs without the consent of Congress.

The bill – the existence of which has not been independently confirmed – would be a dramatic shift in trade policy with wide-reaching impacts, but it was the name of the proposed bill that caught people’s attention.

The POTUS would like, for a start,
More power to rip trade apart,
Reported the press
Upon its success
In catching a draft of his FART.

— Limericking (@Limericking) July 2, 2018

Right-Wing, Business-Funded Groups Are Preparing to Use the Janus Decision to Bleed Unions, Internal Documents Show

Just moments after the Janus vs. AFSCME ruling came down, several conservative think tanks launched campaigns to leverage the pivotal Supreme Court decision as a means of starving unions of funds and eventually disbanding them altogether. The effort is aimed at encouraging public-sector workers in 22 states to withhold minimum bargaining fees from their labor unions, a shift made possible by the Janus decision. As labor comes under attack, the advocacy groups will launch decertification campaigns to nullify certain unions in certain jurisdictions.

Withholding the funds and dismantling the unions could have profound effects on American politics — a feature, not a bug, of the conservative activism following Janus. Many public-sector unions and the activists who work with them are affiliated with the Democratic Party, and the organizing they carry out is dependent on the hundreds of millions of dollars they expect to collect in union fees in the coming years. ...

The post-Janus effort to decimate unions features specially tailored opt-out campaigns taking aim at organized University of California employees; teachers unions in Tulsa, Oklahoma; and AFSCME Council 2, which includes sewer district, county, and librarian workers throughout the state of Washington; among other public sector unions.

Not all public sector union members are expected to want to opt-out, so the organizers of the campaign developed methodology to target those who might be most sympathetic to withholding union fees. Teachers most likely to opt-out of union dues, for example, are being targeted by their social media postings on sites like Facebook and voter registration status. Anti-union operatives will then contact those educators most likely to abandon their union and push them to do so.

EPA Ethics Chief Calls for Probes of Pruitt as Emails Show "Open-Door Policy" With Industry Lobbyists

As the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) polluter-friendly deregulatory agenda continues under the Trump administration, emails obtained by the Washington Post illustrate the cozy relationships between industry lobbyists and aides to scandal-ridden agency head Scott Pruitt, who is facing more than a dozen federal inquiries. "The communication between the lobbyists and one of Pruitt's top policy aides—detailed in emails the agency provided to Democratic Sens. Bill Nelson (Fla.) and Thomas R. Carper (Del.)—open a window on the often close relationship between the EPA's political appointees and those they regulate," the Post reports.

"Littered among tens of thousands of emails that have surfaced in recent weeks, largely through a public records lawsuit filed by the Sierra Club, are dozens of requests for regulatory relief by industry players," the newspaper notes. "Many have been granted." ...

While EPA spokesman Jahan Wilcox told the Post the lobbying groups "were dealing with the costly consequences of President Obama's policies that expanded federal overreach while doing little for the environment," Brendan Fischer, director of federal reform at the watchdog Campaign Legal Center observed that with Pruitt at the helm of the agency, there seems to be an "open-door policy towards the industries they are supposed to be regulating."

"As these emails show, when lobbyists ask top EPA officials to jump, the answer is often 'how high,'" Fischer said.

As GOP Pushes Overhaul, Conservationists Mobilize to Save 'Endangered Species Act From Extinction'

Chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) on Monday unveiled draft legislation to overhaul the Endangered Species Act (ESA) in a move that conservationists warn could jeopardize the progress that's been made through the landmark law and limit future initiatives to save various species from extinction.

"It's a bill which, on a broad basis, rewrites the ESA, with a whole host of consequences—as far as we can tell, almost entirely adverse consequences—for the protection of species," Bob Dreher, senior vice president for conservation programs at Defenders of Wildlife, told The Hill. "This bill is all about politics. It's not about science. It's especially not about better ways to conserve endangered species."

Barrasso is a longtime critic of the ESA, and advocates for animals have slammed his ongoing "modernization" efforts as "a smokescreen for a vicious attack on this vital conservation law." This new proposal, Barrasso said, would increase input from state and regional officials, landowners, and "other stakeholders" in listing and conservation decisions, partly by enabling states to establish species' recovery teams that could "modify a recovery goal, habitat objective, or other established criteria, by unanimous vote with the approval of the secretary of the Interior."

It would also, the Casper Star-Tribune noted, "prohibit scientific data from being disclosed in a public records request—if it includes a business or private landowner's proprietary information. Otherwise, the scientific basis of decisions with a species is to be public information."

#URGENT: Save the Endangered Species Act from extinction! Add your name now: https://t.co/79Jp0l1UPT #StopExtinction pic.twitter.com/KK0i3gvSKh

— Oceana (@oceana) July 1, 2018

A New Film Examines Sexual Violence as a Feature of the Bakken Oil Boom

In the mid-2000's, the area surrounding the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota began to undergo a massive transformation after corporations figured out they could access vast wells of oil from the Bakken shale formation using fracking technology. Politicians celebrated as high-paying jobs flooded the area, but women in the community saw a darker side to the boom.

In her film “Nuuca,” Michelle Latimer explores the traits of the Bakken oil boom through the eyes of a young woman who grew up on the reservation. Some of the boom’s features are obvious: the cylinder of the derrick creaking as it pumps in and out of the earth, tanks full of crude oil buzzing with electricity, pipes rusting in a field, gas flares, and huge semi-trucks speeding down country roads, one after another. But Latimer explores attributes of the boom that go beyond the infrastructure: rising rates of sexual violence, women being bought and sold, and daily harassment by transient male oil workers.

Since the boom hit, a number of researchers and journalists have examined the crime that came with it. In their study “Drilling Down: An Examination of the Boom-Crime Relationship in Resource-Based Boom Counties,” researchers at the University of Regina and the University of North Dakota describe some of the commonalities boom towns share. An oil boom can mean a flood of young men with huge salaries and no connection to the community. Many live in sprawling, temporary housing known as man camps. The men’s deep pockets, boredom, exhausting work hours, and lack of romantic partners make them prime customers for traffickers of sex and drugs. Traffic deaths often rise, and so do reports of domestic violence.

“It’s a slam dunk that crime goes up whenever there’s a boom town, pretty much no matter where it happens throughout North America,” said Rick Rudell, one of the authors of the “Drilling Down” study. “You get this influx of young people, primarily male, into small rural communities and they just disrupt everything.” By 2011, there were more than 1.6 single young men for every single young woman in the Bakken region counties most affected by the oil boom. The “Drilling Down” study showed that violent crime in boom counties rose 18.5 percent between 2006 and 2012, while decreasing 25.6 percent in counties that had no oil or gas production. The biggest city in the area, Williston, saw calls to police increase from 4,163 in 2006 to 15,954 in 2011. Narcotics investigations skyrocketed, as did drug arrests.

The problems are exacerbated on the reservation, where jurisdictional issues complicate efforts to prosecute the influx of non-Indigenous lawbreakers. Data collected between 1992 and 2001 shows that nationally, American Indians were twice as likely as any other racial group to be sexually assaulted. Until a 2013 amendment to the Violence Against Women Act, tribal courts were not even allowed to prosecute people who were not tribal members. The amendment created exceptions for incidents of domestic or dating violence, but it left out sex trafficking as well as sexual assault committed outside of a relationship.

Also of Interest

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

On The Path To Failure - U.S. Attempts Violent "Regime Change" In Iran

Young Jews Walk Out of Birthright Trip to See the Reality of Occupied Palestine Firsthand

Merkel's migration battle: Seehofer 'announces intention to resign'

There’s an Easy Answer to Why Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Won: Socialism

Hispanic Caucus Welcomes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez With Open Arms — but Maybe Not Her Entire Platform

A Little Night Music

Yank Rachell - Up North Blues

Yank Rachell - Worried blues

Yank Rachell & Shirley Griffith - Mandolin Stomp

Yank Rachell - My Mind Got Bad

Yank Rachell - I'm Wild and Crazy

Sleepy John Estes & Yank Rachell - Goin' To Brownsville

Yank Rachell's Tennessee Jug Busters - Texas Tony

Yank Rachell - Tappin' That Thing

Yank Rachell - Check Up On My Baby

Yank Rachell - Going To St. Louis