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“The purpose of the NATO alliance is "to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”

-- Lord Ismay

News and Opinion

Trump says US may not automatically defend Nato allies under attack

Donald Trump has suggested that under his leadership America would not necessarily come to the aid of a Nato ally under attack, saying he would first consider how much they have contributed to the alliance. ...

Trump gave notice that he was prepared to ditch the postwar internationalist tradition inside the Republican party in favour of an approach to foreign affairs that hinged solely on American economic interests.

The country’s role as peacekeeper and protector of human rights – and its responsibilities as a provider of nuclear deterrence - he suggested, would only continue if they came with some form of economic benefit to the US.

He repeated his threat to withdraw US forces around the world, a policy that has sparked alarm in countries such as Japan and South Korea, which host tens of thousands of American troops.

“We are spending a fortune on military in order to lose $800bn [in trade losses],” Trump said. “That doesn’t sound very smart to me.”

Donald Trump Talks Turkey

Donald J. Trump, on the eve of accepting the Republican nomination for president, said Wednesday that if he were elected, he would not pressure Turkey or other authoritarian allies about conducting purges of their political adversaries or cracking down on civil liberties. The United States, he said, has to “fix our own mess” before trying to alter the behavior of other nations.

“I don’t think we have a right to lecture,” Mr. Trump said in a wide-ranging interview in his suite in a downtown hotel here while keeping an eye on television broadcasts from the Republican National Convention. “Look at what is happening in our country,” he said. “How are we going to lecture when people are shooting policemen in cold blood?” (Read the full transcript.) ...

Mr. Trump had nothing but praise for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the country’s increasingly authoritarian but democratically elected leader. “I give great credit to him for being able to turn that around,” Mr. Trump said of the coup attempt on Friday night. “Some people say that it was staged, you know that,” he said. “I don’t think so.”

Asked if Mr. Erdogan was exploiting the coup attempt to purge his political enemies, Mr. Trump did not call for the Turkish leader to observe the rule of law, or Western standards of justice. “When the world sees how bad the United States is and we start talking about civil liberties, I don’t think we are a very good messenger,” he said. ...

Mr. Trump said he was convinced that he could persuade Mr. Erdogan to put more effort into fighting the Islamic State. But the Obama administration has run up, daily, against the reality that the Kurds — among the most effective forces the United States is supporting against the Islamic State — are being attacked by Turkey, which fears they will create a breakaway nation.

Asked how he would solve that problem, Mr. Trump paused, then said: “Meetings.”

Erdogan calls state of emergency, says 'other countries' behind failed coup

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has proclaimed a three-month state of emergency in the aftermath of the military coup attempt last week that resulted in more than 200 dead but failed to overthrow his government.

The state of emergency will allow the president and cabinet to bypass parliament in passing new laws and to limit or suspend rights and freedoms as they deem necessary. ...

"There are other countries behind this coup attempt," Erdogan said when announcing the state of emergency, without naming them. He reiterated the government's position that the exiled cleric Fehtullah Gülen, who lives in the US, is behind the coup attempt. "There is a superior structure overseeing Gülen's terrorist organization and they are the ones who organized this coup," he said. ...

"Europe does not have the right to criticize this decision," Erdogan said of the state of emergency.

Turkey: the failed putsch

Turkey government fears second military coup attempt as purge removes many army commanders

Turkish leaders are fearful that there may be a second attempt at a military uprising in Turkey following the failure of the recent coup. Several important military units are confined to their bases and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been slow to return to Ankara from Istanbul, apparently because the capital has not been deemed completely secure.

Fears of a second coup attempt stem from the realisation by the Erdogan administration that the infiltration by pro-coup forces of the senior ranks of the 600,000-strong armed forces and intelligence apparatus went far deeper than originally suspected. Some 85 generals and admirals or almost a quarter of the total of 375 were jailed on Tuesday by a court, a sign that the government privately believes that the plot involved many more senior officers than the small clique it has publicly claimed was behind the abortive putsch. Other sources suggest that the true figure for generals detained is 125. ...

While the government wants to give the impression that the pro-coup forces have been wiped out, its restrictions on the movement of military formations are a sign that it is not yet confident that this is so. “The government has committed all the resources it is left with to deal with the fall out from the coup,” says Prof Serhat Guvenc of the Department of International Relations at Kadir Has University. “The country looks very vulnerable.” He believes the coup on 15 July was bound to fail once soldiers had fired on the protesters and bombarded the parliament building in Ankara, but says the present situation is chaotic and difficult to undertsand. ...

The Erdogan government may not be giving much long term thought to its relations with the US and the EU, while it focuses on its long term survival. Mr Erdogan may get his wish for an all-powerful executive presidency run by himself in the wake of the foiled coup, but the over-all strength of Turkish state is visibly diminished. “This army, the second biggest in Nato, is now a broken army,” says Soli Ozel, professor of internationals relations at Kadir Has University in Istanbul and a columnist at Haberturk newspaper. Other state institutions have been hollowed out or rendered ineffective by years of purges,of which the latest is only the most all-embracing. They will take time to rebuild. Prof Gunec says that the problem is “not just a broken army, but a broken country”.

Guantánamo detainee who wrote a book about his torture to be released

One of the most tortured men in the history of Guantánamo Bay has received clearance from the wartime prison’s quasi-parole board to leave after nearly 14 years of detention without charge.

Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian citizen whose harrowing account of his torture at Guantánamo Bay became an international bestseller in 2015, will soon leave behind the Cuban detention center where US military personnel contorted his body; bombarded him with noise; deprived him of sleep; stuffed his clothing with ice during a nighttime boat ride meant to to convince him he was headed to an even worse place; threatened his life; and threatened his mother with rape.

The periodic review board, a nonlegal panel representing various US security agencies tasked with assessing threats posed by Guantánamo’s 76 residual detainees, found Slahi to represent no “continuing significant threat to the security of the United States”. The consensus decision, reached on 14 July, was made public on Wednesday.

Slahi has maintained that position throughout his ordeal. Although he once fought alongside al-Qaida against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the early 1990s, he wrote in his book Guantanamo Diary of renouncing the terror group in 1992. A federal judge in 2010 ordered him freed for lack of evidence untainted by torture to justify his detention, yet the US justice department appealed. He is considered so docile inside Guantánamo he is permitted to garden. ...

US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld personally approved Slahi’s torture on 13 August 2003.

US-Backed Syrian Rebels Say Beheading of Child ‘A Mistake’

US-backed rebel faction Nour al-Din al-Zinki Movement has issued a statement on their public release of a pair of videos that ended with the beheading of a boy that was identified as a 13-year-old Palestinian refugee, insisting it amounted to a “mistake.”

The group says the incident was an “individual error” and not reflective of the group’s policies. They also promised an investigation, though they complained that it drew too much attention, and not enough focus on the “brutality” of the Assad government....

The same group was also among those tapped by Amnesty International in a recent report on human rights violations among US-backed rebel factions, which explicitly included reports that the group was carrying out summary executions of captured “pro-government fighters.”

Amid Media Blackout, Syrian Opposition Begs US-Led Coalition to Stop Bombings

As the number of civilians killed by U.S.-led coalition forces in Syria since June rises to above 100, the head of opposition group the Syrian National Coalition (SNC) is asking the U.S. to suspend the coalition's airstrikes against the Islamic State (ISIS) while the deaths are investigated.

On Monday and Tuesday, dozens of civilians—including many children—were reportedly killed by U.S.-led airstrikes in what observers called the "worst week" for civilian deaths at the hands of the coalition. ...

Yet many in the West remain ignorant of the role it plays in stoking the Syrian conflict—in large part, critics say, as a result of paltry media coverage.

As Adam Johnson wrote Thursday for media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR):

A coalition airstrike reported on Tuesday that killed at least 85 civilians—one more than died in the Nice attack in France last week—wasn’t featured at all on the front pages of two of the top US national newspapers, the New York Times and LA Times, and only merited brief blurbs on the front pages of the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, with the actual stories buried on pages A-16 and A-15, respectively.

[...] By contrast, the Nice attack garnered multiple front-page stories in the New York Times and LA Times, as well as significantly more than 20-word blurbs in the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post.

According to Airwars, Johnson adds, "the total number of civilian deaths since the beginning of airstrikes in September 2014 has been 190. To increase this number by almost 50 percent in a matter of days would indeed be a radical departure from the normal course of events—rendering it more than newsworthy."

Jill Stein: After US Airstrikes kill 73 in Syria, Time to End Military Assaults that Breed Terrorism

Once again our hearts are breaking - this time, with the tragic news of the deaths of at least 73 civilians, including 35 children, as a result of US airstrikes on the village of Tokkhar in Syria. This horrific attack, the deadliest assault on civilians in the military campaign against ISIS to date, happened because our military admittedly made a “mistake” in identifying these men, women, and children as Islamic State combatants.

This latest accidental atrocity in Syria ought to be America’s last. How long will it take before our government learns that bombs do not settle problems? How many more innocent civilians must die before our Commander-In-Chief finally realizes these “mistakes” are only making the problem worse? How many more hospitals will be destroyed and medical personnel and patients killed? How many more women and children must be maimed or killed by Hellfire missiles before the US grounds the drones in Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Syria?

What will a potential President Clinton or Trump do as the War on Terror continues to "come home” to San Bernardino, Beirut, Paris, Istanbul, and Nice? ISIS - a direct outgrowth of the Clinton-supported US invasion and occupation of Iraq - is a force that feeds on the outrage of people on the receiving end of our disastrous, belligerent approach to foreign policy and national security. Clinton's destruction of Libya added to the chaos by unleashing vast stockpiles of Libyan weapons that then became available to ISIS.

Groups like ISIS cannot be stopped by more violence. On the other hand, they can be stopped by a weapons embargo, a freeze on the bank accounts of countries funding them, and by stopping the flow of jihadi recruits across Turkey's border.

Rudy Giuliani Brags About Treating All Muslims Like Criminal Suspects

In his grab-the-pitchforks address to the Republican National Convention on Monday night, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani insisted the enemy wasn’t “most of Islam,” just “Islamic extremist terrorism.”

But in an interview with The Intercept on the convention floor Tuesday night, Giuliani enthusiastically defended policies that treat all Muslims like criminal suspects.

Asked whether he supports Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s proposals to have police spy on mosques, Giuliani replied, “I was the mayor who put police officers in mosques, in New York and New Jersey.

Giuliani even claimed credit for a longer history of police surveillance of New York-area mosques than is widely known, predating the 9/11 terrorist attacks. “We did it for the eight years I was mayor,” he said. Giuliani was mayor from 1994 through December 2001.

“After the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center by Islamic extremist terrorists from New Jersey, I did it in early January of 1994.” ...

The NYPD’s post-9/11 program was widely ridiculed by civil liberties groups. The NYPD’s “Demographics Unit” (later renamed the Zone Assessment Unit) mapped neighborhoods based on “ancestries of interest,” including “black American Muslims.” A 2007 report from the NYPD’s Intelligence Division outlines radicalization “indicators,” including “growing a beard,” “abstaining from alcohol,” and “becoming involved in social activism.” The Brennan Center described it as a recipe for “racial and religious profiling deleterious both to civil liberties and to genuine efforts at attaining security.”

Trump and the Enablers of American Authoritarianism (pt 2)

Apparently, the Democrats are not killing the last vestiges of democracy off quickly enough for one of Silicon Valley's greedy libertarian morons.

This article contains some really interesting analysis and is worth a full read.

Donald Trump, Peter Thiel and the death of democracy

Tonight, tech billionaire Peter Thiel will speak at the Republican national convention and make his case for why Donald Trump should be the next president of the United States. Most of the media is baffled by Thiel’s endorsement. And it’s true that at first glance the two men aren’t an obvious match. Trump is an authoritarian populist who promises to abolish free trade. Thiel is a self-described libertarian who worships capitalism. Thiel is also one of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley – and Silicon Valley hates Trump. ...

What Trump offers Thiel isn’t just an excuse to be contrary and politically incorrect. Trump gives Thiel something far more valuable: a way to fulfill his long-held ambition of saving capitalism from democracy.

In a 2009 essay called The Education of a Libertarian, Thiel declared that capitalism and democracy had become incompatible. Since 1920, he argued, the creation of the welfare state and “the extension of the franchise to women” had made the American political system more responsive to more people – and therefore more hostile to capitalism. Capitalism is not “popular with the crowd”, Thiel observed, and this means that as democracy expands, the masses demand greater concessions from capitalists in the form of redistribution and regulation.

The solution was obvious: less democracy. But in 2009, Thiel despaired of achieving this goal within the realm of politics. How could you possibly build a successful political movement for less democracy?

Fast forward two years, when the country was still slowly digging its way out of the financial crisis. In 2011, Thiel told George Packer that the mood of emergency made him “weirdly hopeful”. The “failure of the establishment” had become too obvious to ignore, and this created an opportunity for something radically new, “something outside the establishment”, to take root.

Now, in 2016, Thiel has finally found a politician capable of seizing that opportunity: a disruptor-in-chief who will destroy a dying system and build a better one in its place. Trump isn’t just a flamethrower for torching a rotten establishment, however – he’s the fulfillment of Thiel’s desire to build a successful political movement for less democracy.

Keiser Report: Nomi Prins on Revolving Doors

Proof of the miraculous?

FBI arrests senior HSBC banker accused of rigging multibillion-dollar deal

A senior HSBC banker has been arrested by the FBI as he attempted to board a transatlantic flight and charged him with fraudulently rigging a multibillion-dollar currency exchange deal.

Mark Johnson, a British citizen and HSBC’s global head of foreign exchange trading, and a colleague are accused of “defrauding clients” and alleged to have “corruptly manipulated the foreign exchange market to benefit themselves and their bank”.

He was arrested on Tuesday night shortly before he was due to fly to London from New York’s JFK airport, and was due to be formally charged by a judge at Brooklyn federal court later on Wednesday. He was later released on bail.

A second Briton, Stuart Scott, who was HSBC’s European head of foreign exchange trading in London until December 2014, is accused of the same crimes. A warrant was issued for Scott’s arrest.

They are the first people to be charged in connection with the US government’s long-running investigation into bankers’ alleged rigging of the $5.3tn (£4tn) per day forex market.

Are Wall Street Banks in Trouble? You’d Never Know from the Headlines.

On July 14, when America’s biggest bank by assets reported its second quarter earnings, this headline ran at the New York Times: “JPMorgan Chase Has Strong Quarter as Earnings Top Estimates.”

CNBC, a unit of NBCUniversal, used the same criteria in its headlines to report the earnings of Citigroup, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley — putting a positive spin in the headline because the earnings had topped what analysts were expecting – rather than the far more meaningful, and traditional, measure of whether earnings had beaten the same quarter a year earlier. ...

Something else one won’t find in those smiley-face headlines is the fact that Wall Street is not only bleeding profits and jobs but it’s also bleeding equity capital – the only thing that separates the word “bank” from the word “bankruptcy.” While the Dow Jones Industrial Average and Standard and Poor’s 500 Indices may be setting new highs, the big Wall Street banks are decidedly not.

On July 6, the Wall Street Journal’s David Reilly reported that 20 of the biggest global banks had shed $465 billion, almost half a trillion dollars, in equity capital according to FactSet data. Wall Street On Parade spotted the trend on January 19 of this year with the headline “Big Bank Stocks Have Been Crushed: Here’s Why,” noting at the time that “the minute U.S. corporate media tells you that ‘the selloff isn’t about worries of banks blowing up,’ you know the worries are about banks blowing up.” We also pointed out that the reason these banks trade as a herd in a downward spiral is that, despite the contagion lessons of 2008, Federal banking regulators like the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Reserve have done nothing to end the interconnectedness between these banks, who are counterparties to each other’s derivatives and other intrafinancial assets and liabilities.

Most Brazilians think the Olympics are not worth it, a poll shows

With just over two weeks to go before the start of the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, a new poll shows that nearly two thirds of Brazilians think the event will do the country more harm than good.

The poll, published in the Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper, makes explicit widespread public skepticism about the Games that are already facing a mountain of problems. ...

This week's poll, conducted by the Datafolha institute, found that five out of ten Brazilians surveyed said they are opposed to their country hosting the Games at all, and only four out of ten said they are in favor. That's double the opposition registered by another poll by the same institute back in 2013.

Part of the problem appears to be the sheer cost of holding the event, which a study released earlier this month by researchers from Oxford University said is already 51 percent higher than the original budget.

Funding issues led the federal government to announce in March that it was cutting $500 million from the security budget for the Games, including anti-terrorism training. Last month, the Rio de Janeiro state authorities declared a "state of calamity" in order to get an extra $892 million of federal cash.

The declaration came as public sector workers from the city stepped up claims that funding had become so tight there was not enough money to refuel police cars or supply the hospitals that will be responsible for taking care of the 500,000 visitors expected.

Panama to identify victims of 1989 US invasion

The government of Panama on Wednesday launched an independent commission to identify people killed or missing in the 1989 US invasion of the country that brought down dictator Manuel Noriega. ...

President Juan Carlos Varela signed the decree on Tuesday creating the new independent panel, which is to be made up of five members with backgrounds in human rights.

Its formal name is the "Commission of December 20, 1989."

That is the date the United States sent 27,000 soldiers to Panama, resulting in the capture of Noriega, a former CIA collaborator who was wanted in the US on drug trafficking charges. ...

Officially, the US Defense Department recorded some 500 deaths in the invasion. But other organizations put the toll at a several thousand.

Thousands of people lost their homes and many businesses were destroyed.

United States: exploring race relations in Cleveland

Florida police shoot black man lying down with arms in air

Charles Kinsey, who works with people with disabilities, was trying to get his 27-year-old patient back to a facility from where he wandered, North Miami assistant police chief Neal Cuevas told the Miami Herald.

A lawyer for Kinsey, Hilton Napoleon, gave the Herald a video showing the moments leading up to the shooting. It shows Kinsey lying in the middle of the street with his hands up, asking the officers not to shoot him, while his patient sits next to him, yelling at him to “shut up”. ...

Kinsey, who is black, lay down and put his hands up while trying to get his patient to comply. An officer fired three times, striking Kinsey in the leg, Cuevas said. No weapon was found on either Kinsey or his patient.

Tim Kaine, Possible Hillary Clinton Pick for Vice President, Goes to Bat for Banks

Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, considered a leading contender for the Democratic vice presidential nomination, has spent this week signaling to the financial industry that he’ll go to bat for them.

On Monday, Kaine signed onto two letters, one to federal banking regulators and the other to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, urging them to loosen regulations on certain financial players. The timing of the letters, sent while Kaine is being vetted for the top of the ticket, could show potential financial industry donors that he is willing to serve as an ally on their regulatory issues.

In the letters, Kaine is offering to support community banks, credit unions, and even large regional banks. While separate from the Wall Street mega-banks like JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, these financial institutions often partner with the larger industry to fight regulations and can be hostile to government efforts to safeguard the public, especially if it crimps their profits. ...

Presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton is expected to announce her vice presidential pick on Friday. Kaine, if selected, could now help woo fundraising dollars away from Republicans, because he’s able to point to his support for financial industry causes. The letters also show Hillary Clinton’s campaign how Kaine could be an asset with banking interests on the fundraising trail.

Chamber of Commerce May Prefer Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump

The president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on Wednesday signaled that the big-business community is still undecided between newly minted Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton. Chamber President Tom Donohue’s statements to Fox Business News on Wednesday morning represented an astonishing break from the organization’s nearly invariable support for Republican candidates.

“Trump talks about some important things in energy and taxes and financial areas,” Donohue said. “Hillary perhaps has more experience and businessmen like that — businessmen and women like that — but I don’t think that’ll be decided until you hear the speeches here and next week and you see the first debate, and I think people will start to move more clearly to where they’re going to vote.”

Chief among Donohue’s complaints about Trump was his opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). ...

Donohue has also suggested that presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton would implement the TPP — a major chamber priority — despite her current position of opposing the agreement. ...

The Chamber has been almost invisible at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.

Democrats may now make a big show of fighting not only over the virtually meaningless platform document, but also over the generally useless vice presidential pick.

Will Clinton VP Pick Be 'Pronounced Middle Finger' to Millions Who Voted for Bernie?

Hillary Clinton's pick for vice president, now expected this Friday or Saturday, will tell prospective Democratic voters much about her attitude towards the progressive base of the party, the ideological drive of her general election campaign, and the manner of her potential presidency. ...

With the notion of party "unity" on edge, as Common Dreams reported earlier this week, many potential voters inspired by the bold campaign of Bernie Sanders will be greatly disappointed if Clinton goes with someone like Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia or Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack—currently the most likely choices according to the New York Times, Washington Post, and others.

Norman Solomon, co-founder of RootsAction.org and national coordinator of the Bernie Delegates Network, told Common Dreams the signal such a selection would send to Sanders' delegates like himself would be worse than not good.

Choosing someone like Vilsack or Kaine, Solomon wrote in an email, "would be a very pronounced middle finger to the 13 million people who voted for Bernie."

And what should the response be if Clinton makes such a choice?

"The appropriate progressive response to Vilsack or Kaine on the ticket would be expressions of outrage and nonviolent protest, from the convention floor in Philadelphia to communities across the country," said Solomon. "Selection of a corporate militarist—flacking for Wall Street, pursuing the despoiling of the environment and promoting vast militarism—would underscore Hillary Clinton's commitment to destructive policies.

Enbridge's Kalamazoo Spill Saga Ends in $177 Million Settlement

The pipeline company responsible for the massive spill near Marshall, Mich., agrees to deal with the Department of Justice and EPA for fines, safety improvements.

The Canadian pipeline company Enbridge has been fined $61 million as part of an overall $177 million settlement for a massive 2010 oil spill into Michigan's Kalamazoo River. The spill required years and more than a billion dollars to clean up and highlighted the hazard of pumping heavy tar sands oil through pipelines.

The settlement was announced Wednesday between Enbridge and the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Justice. It ends nearly two years of negotiations and levies one of the largest penalties ever for an inland oil spill.

The settlement resolves Clean Water Act violations, payment of cleanup costs and requires Enbridge to spend at least $110 million on spill prevention safeguards and other improvements along nearly 2,000 miles of its pipeline system in the Great Lakes region. In addition, the company agreed to pay $5.4 million in unreimbursed costs incurred by the government in the cleanup.

More than 1 million gallons of tar sands oil spilled into the Kalamazoo River near Marshall, Mich., when a 6-foot rupture in Enbridge pipeline 6B opened on July 25, 2010. Despite warnings of trouble, oil flowed for 17 hours before Enbridge shut down the pipeline. Because the river was reaching peak flood stage, the oil spread quickly downriver and was carried past the shoreline the next day.

Ultimately, the oil reached nearly 40 miles downriver, coating animals and fouling 4,435 acres of land near the river's banks. It triggered a massive cleanup effort that has cost the company $1.2 billion and kept the river closed for nearly two years.

Trump considering fracking mogul Harold Hamm as energy secretary - sources

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is considering nominating Oklahoma oil and gas mogul Harold Hamm as energy secretary if elected to the White House on Nov. 8, according to four sources close to Trump's campaign.

The chief executive of Continental Resources would be the first U.S. energy secretary drawn directly from the oil and gas industry since the cabinet position was created in 1977, a move that would jolt environmental advocates but bolster Trump's pro-drilling energy platform.

Dan Eberhart, an oil investor and Republican financier, said he had been told by officials in Trump's campaign that Hamm, who has been an informal advisor to Trump on energy policy since at least May, was "the leading contender" for the position.

Eberhart said he had discussed the possible appointment with top donors at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland this week, where Trump was formally nominated as the party's candidate in the Nov. 8 presidential election.

Obama Announces Solar-Boosting Initiative

The Obama administration on Tuesday announced a series of measures aimed at boosting access to solar energy—a move one environmental group hailed as "a win-win for people and for our climate."

It's called the Clean Energy Savings for All Americans Initiative, and, according to Rachel Cleetus, lead economist and climate policy manager for the Union of Concerned Scientists, it "sets some exciting goals"—like bringing 1 gigawatt (GW) of solar to low- and moderate- income families by 2020—and marks "a crucial step forward in helping to ensure that the benefits of the clean energy transition accrue to all."

Among the initiative's noteworthy components, writes Philip Henderson, financial policy expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council, are that

• Thousands of homeowners who purchase or refinance their houses with mortgages supported by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and the Dept. of Veterans Affairs will be able to use a new kind of home improvement loan—"PACE" financing—which is designed to provide the funds needed to make efficiency repairs, improvements, or add solar panels. [...]
• Dozens of communities will receive assistance to implement Community Solar initiatives—an important way for families—including renters—to participate in a solar electricity facility without investing in panels installed on their own property.​​​​​​​​​​ [...]
• States will have new flexibility to use funds from LIHEAP (the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program) to help low-income customers repair their homes and apartments to prevent high utility bills, instead of using the funds to simply pay a portion of the families' utility bills.

Also of Interest

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

The U.S. obsesses over Clinton’s emails. But why not the Iraq War?

A U.S. Nuclear Agency Totally Tricked a Top Reporter

Black Cleveland Residents Tell Tale of Two Cities in the Shadow of Republican Convention

Key Area of Dispute on Drone Numbers: Number of Strikes

The Republicans Just Passed a Platform That Would Eviscerate Workers’ Rights

Uncovered California: Why Millions Have Fallen Into Health Care Gaps

A Little Night Music

Junior Wells - Little Red Rooster

Junior Wells - Snatch It Back and Hold It

Junior Wells - Come On This House

Junior Wells - Mystery Train

Junior Wells - Lawdy! Lawdy!

Junior Wells,Buddy Guy - Help Me

Junior Wells - Trouble No More

Junior Wells - Watch Me Move