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“Far and away the most important lesson to impart to the American mind and soul: regardless of our lifetime of education to the contrary, US foreign policy does not ‘mean well.”

-- William Blum

News and Opinion

Inside America’s Meddling Machine: The US Funded Group that Interferes in Elections Around the Globe

[Text of video at link. - js]

Lithuania says will not appeal European court ruling over CIA jail

Lithuania on Wednesday said it would not appeal a European court ruling that the Baltic state had been complicit in a clandestine CIA programme by holding terror suspects at a secret detention site on its territory. "We decided it would make no sense to appeal to the Great Chamber because there are no legal criteria for that," government official Karolina Bubnyte Sirmene told AFP.

The European Court of Human Rights ruled in May that Lithuania hosted a secret prison from February 2005 to March 2006, when CIA operatives held Abu Zubaydah, considered a top Palestinian operative for Al-Qaeda. The EU and NATO state was ordered to pay 100,000 euros ($116,000) in damages to Zubaydah for enabling US authorities to subject him to "inhuman treatment".

GOP Rejects Call to Curb US Funding for 'Slaughter of Yemeni Kids'

U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) on Wednesday denounced as "mind blowing" the decision to "continue to willingly participate in the slaughter of Yemeni kids" after Republicans objected to his amendment to the Defense Appropriation bill that would have put key restrictions on U.S. financial and othe support for the Saudi-led bombing campaign.

The amendment "would cut off United States' support for the Saudi Arabia-led coalition's war in Yemen until the Secretary of Defense certified that the coalition's air campaign is not violating international law and U.S. policy related to the protection of civilians," a press statemnt from Murphy's office states.

Win Without War had called the amendment "our big chance to slam on the brakes and stop our role in enabling the suffering in Yemen." Yet Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, objected to Murphy's amendment, despite saying that "what's going on in Yemen is atrocious."

The global arms trade is booming. Buyers are spoiled for choice

In the United States [...] Congress has been pressing the administration to implement the letter of a law that would force countries to make a hard, instant choice between buying American or Russian weapons. But the Pentagon is hinting that America’s huge diplomatic power does not quite stretch that far. ... Total demand is growing, the number of sellers is rising and the Western countries that have dominated the business are less confident of shaping the playing field. Above all, buyers are becoming more insistent on their right to shop around. For the likes of India, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, “this is a buyer’s market,” says Lucie Béraud-Sudreau of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a London-based think-tank.

The numbers show that the global commerce in conventional weapons is still dominated by the United States. But America feels strangely nervous about maintaining that role, and this year it has adopted a more aggressive sales posture. Under a policy proclaimed in April and mapped out in more detail last month, American diplomats have been told to promote weapons sales more actively and speed up procedures for approving them.

In part, the jumpiness in Washington, DC, stems from the entry to the market of new competitors, especially China. In part it reflects new products and technologies where America will struggle to keep its lead. Both these challenges were highlighted by the appearance at last year’s Paris Air Show of a Chinese military drone that looked very like the American unmanned aircraft that have been used for assassinations, for example in Pakistan. Hitherto, America has been willing to share these powerful drones only with close European allies. A new policy will broaden the range of customers and thus lessen the risk that China will dominate a market that could soon be worth $50bn a year.

Russia plans largest war games since end of Soviet Union

Russia will stage its largest war games since the fall of the Soviet Union next month, the country's Defense Ministry said Monday. Thousands of troops from China and Mongolia are expected to join in the exercises in Siberia, dubbed Vostok 2018, according to statements from the Russian and Chinese defense ministries.

The games will have an "unprecedented scale both in territory and number of troops involved," supreme commander-in-chief of the Russian armed forces, Gen. Sergi Shoigu, said in a statement.
Shoigu said it would be the "largest event since the Zapad-81 maneuvers," which involved as many as 150,000 troops, according to CIA documents. ...

China's contribution to the massive exercises will be 3,200 troops, 900 weapons, and 30 planes and helicopters, which will deploy from September 11 to 15 at Russia's Tsugol training range near where the borders of Russia, China and eastern Mongolia meet, China's Defense Ministry said in a statement. "The exercise is not directed against any third party" and will focus on "maneuver defense, firepower strikes and counterattack," it added. ...

Russia has been highlighting its military this year, with Putin in March boasting of new weaponry he claimed would render NATO defenses "completely useless." Some of those arms were shown off in a video released shortly after his July summit with US President Donald Trump. While the US military has cast doubt on the abilities of the new Russian weapons, a US Defense Intelligence Agency report from 2017 notes Moscow is in the midst of "a massive state armaments program" aimed at equipping its forces with "70% new or modernized equipment by 2020."

Reality Winner: NSA contractor jailed for five years over classified report leak

The NSA contractor Reality Winner was sentenced on Thursday to five years and three months in prison for leaking a top-secret document about Russian interference in the US election. Winner, 26, was sentenced at a federal court in Georgia after pleading guilty in June as part of a deal with government prosecutors.

She is the first person the Trump administration has charged under the Espionage Act for a document leak.

The justice department did not pursue the maximum sentence and instead recommended a 63-month penalty. Government attorneys said that would be the longest sentence ever for an unauthorized disclosure to the media.

Prosecutors said that in May 2017, Winner, who was working for the defense contractor Pluribus International Corporation, printed a classified document that showed how Russian military intelligence hacked at least one voting software supplier and had attempted to breach more than 100 local election systems in the days before the November 2016 vote.

That document was the basis of a story published on the news site the Intercept about one hour before the justice department announced Winner’s arrest in June 2017. ...

Winner has been jailed since her arrest and in June she pleaded guilty to one felony count of transmitting national security information, a crime that carries a maximum penalty of 10 years’ imprisonment.

'Inauthentic behaviour': Facebook bans 'influential' Iran-linked accounts

That Facebook Will Turn to Censoring the Left Isn’t a Worry—It’s a Reality

Facebook recently announced it had partnered with the Atlantic Council in an effort to combat “fake news” on its platform (FAIR.org, 5/21/18). An offshoot of NATO, the Council’s board of directors is a who’s who of neo-conservative hawks, including Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Henry Kissinger and James Baker; CIA directors like Robert Gates, Leon Panetta and Michael Hayden; retired generals like Wesley Clark and David Petraeus; as well as senior tech executives. Forty-five percent of Americans get their news from Facebook. When an organization like the Atlantic Council decides what news we see and do not see, that is tantamount to state censorship.

Venezuelanalysis (12/13/17) [page suspended by Facebook, later reinstated after public outcry - js] exposed that the Council was working closely with the Venezuelan opposition, donating over $1 million to it, part of a wide-ranging effort at regime change against multiple progressive governments in the region (Brasilwire, 12/28/17). That Facebook censored a news site responsible for investigating its partner is a worrying development in journalism. Venezuelanalysis’ statement (8/9/18) on its removal noted that “Facebook appears to be targeting independent or left-wing sites in the wake of Russiagate.”

As I previously argued (FAIR.org, 7/27/18), the utility of the Russian “fake news” scandal is that it allows corporate media to tighten their grip over the means of communication. Under the guise of combating fake news, media organizations like Google, Bing, Facebook and YouTube have changed their algorithms. The effect has been to hammer progressive media outlets. AlterNet’s Google traffic fell by 63 percent, Media Matters by 42 percent, TruthOut by 25 percent and The Intercept by 19 percent (WSWS, 8/2/17). Sites like these that challenge corporate perspectives are being starved of traffic and advertising revenue.

On August 13, the situation escalated as Facebook, citing a clause in its terms of service barring “hateful, threatening or obscene” media,  deplatformed TeleSUR English, an English-language Latin American news network. ... That Facebook’s stated concern about stopping the spread of hate speech is genuine is challenged by the fact that the far-right Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) party went to Facebook headquarters in Berlin in 2017 to discuss how it could use the platform for recruitment and for micro-targeting in the German elections, as Bloomberg Businessweek (9/29/17) reported. Through Facebook and with the help of American companies, AfD nearly tripled its previous vote share, becoming the third-largest party in Germany, the far right’s best showing since World War II.

The DNC was “hacked” by its own people

An attempted cyber attack on the Democratic National Committee’s voter database turned out to be a “test” run by a state party security team, a relieved DNC announced Wednesday.

After news of the attempted hack broke Wednesday, DNC chief security officer Bob Lord announced it was actually part of a simulated test in which an unauthorized unnamed third party “mimicked several attributes of actual attacks on the Democratic Party's voter file,” but didn’t actually collect any sensitive information, Lord said in a statement. He added that it “was not authorized by the DNC, VoteBuilder nor any of our vendors.”

A person familiar with the alleged attack told the Washington Post on Thursday morning that the attack was actually organized by the Michigan Democratic party, who declined to notify the DNC it was happening.

California Fire Dept Says Verizon Throttling During Deadly Wildfire 'Has Everything to Do With Net Neutrality'

As California lawmakers prepared on Wednesday for a key committee vote on their state's net neutrality bill—which, in its current form, would restore the protections repealed by the FCC in December—the Santa Clara County Fire Department accused the telecom giant Verizon of dramatically cutting its data speed as it recently fought the largest recorded wildfire in California's history.

After Verizon admitted that it slowed the fire department's data — a despised practice known as throttling — but claimed it was a simple mistake that "has nothing to do with net neutrality," Santa Clara County Counsel James Williams responded in a statement on behalf of the fire department on Wednesday that "Verizon's throttling has everything to do with net neutrality."

"It shows that the [internet service providers] will act in their economic interests, even at the expense of public safety," Williams added. "That is exactly what the Trump administration's repeal of net neutrality allows and encourages."

The FCC is supposed to provide oversight for companies like Verizon.

But now a former Verizon lawyer is running the FCC. So....

Do something: https://t.co/S8d0Oyhr5y pic.twitter.com/oP53F6nwQu

— Fight for the Future (@fightfortheftr) August 22, 2018

Williams' rebuke of Verizon and the Republican-controlled FCC's net neutrality repeal came just a day after the Santa Clara County Fire Chief Anthony Bowden accused Verizon of throttling in a court filing this week. Bowden says his department was forced to pay the telecom giant to stop the throttling, despite having an "unlimited" data plan.

"In the midst of our response to the Mendocino Complex Fire, County Fire discovered the data connection for OES 5262 [a fire department vehicle that is 'deployed to large incidents as a command and control resource'] was being throttled by Verizon, and data rates had been reduced to 1/200, or less, than the previous speeds," Bowden wrote. "Verizon representatives confirmed the throttling," Bowden added, "but rather than restoring us to an essential data transfer speed, they indicated that County Fire would have to switch to a new data plan at more than twice the cost, and they would only remove throttling after we contacted the department that handles billing and switched to the new data plan."

After Surviving Telecom Sabotage Effort, California's Net Neutrality Bill Clears Key Hurdle

Thanks to months of sustained grassroots activism, California's "gold standard" net neutrality bill survived near-successful sabotage efforts by a telecom-backed Democrat and passed out of the state's Communications and Conveyance Committee on Wednesday by a 9-3 vote, clearing one of the last major hurdles before final passage.

"The California net neutrality bill SB 822 would have been dead long ago without sustained, hard-hitting activism," Fight for the Future (FFTF) declared in a tweet celebrating Wednesday's news. "Next it heads to the floor. We can't let up now."

In a statement following Wednesday's vote, FFTF deputy director Evan Greer warned that "any California legislator who stands in the way of net neutrality will regret it for the rest of their political career."

"Honestly it's ridiculous and a bit embarrassing for the Democratic Party that net neutrality activists have had to fight so hard to get this bill passed in a state with a supermajority of lawmakers from a party that professes to love the free and open internet," Greer noted, referring to California State Assemblyman Miguel Santiago's amendments that effectively "eviscerated" the legislation in June. But after open internet supporters rose up in opposition to Santiago's changes and mounted a strong public pressure campaign, California lawmakers restored the bill's strength and once more placed it on the path to becoming law.

If passed, the measure would restore the net neutrality protections repealed by the FCC in December and prevent internet service providers from throttling data and charging higher fees for faster speeds.

CNN’s Jake Tapper Caught Lying About Med4All - Lies Again

New Poll That Shows 70% of Americans Support Medicare for All Includes 84% of Democrats and 52% of Republicans

As its progressive wing and a groundswell of new and energetic candidates continues to move the Democratic Party to the left, a new Reuters poll out Thursday shows that support for a key plank of this insurgency—Medicare for All—has hit an all-time high with 70 percent of all Americans now in favor of a such program, including nearly 85 percent of Democrats and a full 52 percent of Republicans.

With such levels of popularity, as an accompanying article exploring some of the tensions within the party makes clear, Democratic leaders are being told they ignore the push for Medicare for All at their own peril.

While the Reuters article focused mainly on the question of whether progressive leaders like Sanders and congressional candidates like New York's Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Nebraska's Kara Eastman can convince voters to support progressive proposals, the news agency's polling showed that centrist Democrats, who claim they are trying to appeal to so-called "moderates," are actually alienating the vast majority of potential voters on key issues.

But the poll toward the bottom of the page conveyed that centrist Democrats still intent on appealing to moderates who they believe want to preserve the for-profit health sector—one that costs Americans $3.4 trillion per year while delivering worse outcomes than universal healthcare systems like those in the United Kingdom and France—are actually alienating the vast majority of voters.

White Nationalism in the White House: Administration Faces New Revelations About Ties to Far Right

Betsy DeVos is considering allowing schools to use federal money to buy guns, report says

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is considering allowing states to spend federal dollars to buy firearms for educators as a protective measure against a rash of school shootings, multiple people with knowledge of the plan told the New York Times.

Congress already passed a bill in March that allocated $50 million to local school districts for safety purposes each year, although that program prohibited the purchasing of firearms. If the U.S. Department of Education wanted to allow schools to access federal funds to buy weapons and ammunition, DeVos would likely have to go through the $1 billion in Student Support and Academic Enrichment grants, which don’t explicitly bar those purchases, according to the Times. DeVos could then approve state or district plans to use that funding for guns or firearm training — at least until Congress bans it.

Democrats still aren’t ready to use impeachment talk in the midterms — even after Cohen

Impeachment talk swirled around Washington Wednesday in the aftermath of President Donald Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen implicating his past client in a potential felony. But as Democratic leaders from around the country began gathering in Chicago for the party’s summer meeting, Michael Cohen, Paul Manafort and Donald Trump's spiraling legal woes barely registered. The message was clear: stay steady and don’t talk about impeachment. ...

Even if impeachment is not openly discussed, the midterm elections this November will have significant consequences on the topic. If Democrats reach their goal of retaking the majority in the House of Representatives, they would have the power to introduce and pass articles of impeachment (that would then set off a trial in the Senate where 67/100 Senators would have to agree to convict). And some Republicans are warning of just that. Former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon told Bloomberg News on Tuesday that "Today clarifies that November is a referendum on impeachment — an up or down vote.” Republicans have also been whispering anonymously to Politico, The New York Times, and Axios that impeachment is now in the mix.

Democrats, meanwhile, would prefer to battle Republicans on anything but impeaching Trump. In the halls of Washington, D.C. Democrats echoed their state counterparts gathered in Chicago by studiously avoiding such talk. They danced around the subject, calling Trump an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the words of Sens. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, Kamala Harris of California, and Ed Markey of Massachusetts. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said that the revelations put Trump “in even greater legal jeopardy.” Pelosi’s office did not respond to an email whether her thinking on impeachment had changed. Nor did Harris or Hirono.

The Case Against Donald Trump: Rep. Al Green Says President Must Resign or Face Impeachment

Don’t kid yourselves, Democrats. Trump’s final hour is not upon us

Cohen’s guilty plea, along with the conviction of Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort of unrelated tax and fraud crimes, have undoubtedly left some thinking that the net is finally closing around Trump, and that the global nightmare of his presidency is at last entering its final hours. Surely, proof that the president was personally involved in a criminal conspiracy to violate the election laws will be the last straw, won’t it?

Probably not, actually. To be clear: no one would say Tuesday was a great day for Trump. And it is absolutely satisfying on its own terms to watch as the rogue’s gallery of grifters and confidence men that surround the president are tossed into the clink, one by one. Washington is full of those types, in both parties, and they largely get away with it – just as Cohen and Manafort surely would have, had they not had the bad fortune of having their patron elected president. And the Democrats have plenty of them: Mueller’s investigation has led to a criminal referral of Tony Podesta, for example, a prominent DC lobbyist and brother of John Podesta, who chaired Hillary Clinton’s campaign. These sorts are all loathsome and seeing them brought to justice is a sublime pleasure.

But while it is surely to the good to bag a few swamp creatures, whether it places Trump’s presidency in any actual danger is a much different question. That is because (despite what you may have learned on The West Wing) politics is not about being right, or virtuous; it is about power. And to endanger Trump’s grip on the presidency, these convictions would have to somehow endanger the concrete powers that keep him there.

Today, that power center is the leadership of the Republican party in Congress, who could have ushered a swift end to this presidency a long time ago if they wanted to. And I seriously doubt that anyone in the Republican party is unaware that Trump is probably a crook – that has been clear since long before Michael Cohen said so. But they are comfortable with that criminality, because the president also possesses substantial natural political gifts that have placed conservatives at the levers of power. From those levers, they can cut taxes, stack the courts with young conservatives, and deregulate every industry on the planet – all while Trump hoots and hollers about NFL protests and pays off former mistresses and whatever else besides. That is the price to be paid. Mitt Romney was a nice family man, but politics – to repeat the point – is about power. So long as Trump can help them hold it, they will protect him.

An excellent article, here's a teaser:

Tom Carper’s 40-Year Record of Defending Banks is Being Challenged by Kerri Harris in a Democratic Primary

For nearly 40 years, banks have found a reliable ally in Tom Carper. Staked with millions in campaign donations, Carper has taken the side of the industry in virtually every policy debate over that period, with the unfortunate side effect of helping to create the conditions for the 2008 financial crisis — and the next one.

This has sadly been expected of politicians representing Delaware, where banks reflect a significant chunk of the economy and dominate campaign contributions. Carper has faced no serious opposition from within his party over the years. It’s just been the way business is done in Delaware. But Kerri Evelyn Harris, Carper’s opponent in the September 6 Democratic primary, is trying something different, highlighting victims of predatory banking practices, which even in Delaware outnumber those who benefit. A Harris victory would signal an end to the home-cooking bank lobbyists have received from Delaware politicians since the 1980s.
But even among that group of yes men and bank sycophants, Carper stands out.

Trump’s new coal rules will hit poor and black people hardest

The Trump administration is proposing to reshape the way the EPA regulates coal plants, repealing the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, which would have phased out most coal-fired power plants by 2030, and replaced it with the Affordable Clean Energy Rule, which would shift regulation of power plants to the states and keep coal-fired plants around longer.

The EPA said the shift will result in 1,400 additional premature deaths each year due to pollution. But here’s what it didn’t say: the EPA’s own research shows that those deaths will fall disproportionately on poor and minority communities in places like southwestern Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Missouri.

In February, an EPA study showed African-American communities are exposed to 50 percent higher rates of particulate pollution than the general population. The Affordable Clean Energy Rule, the EPA acknowledges, will result in the release of more particulate matter into the atmosphere each year and the lead researcher on the EPA study says that pollution will disproportionately fall on poor and minority communities.

“They project the most dramatic health impacts to occur in Appalachia, centered around West Virginia — where the poverty rate is one of the highest in the nation and the coal industry has a major presence,” said Ihab Mikati, who led the EPA study as a fellow at the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education in North Carolina, in an email. “The communities living nearest to stationary sources of harmful particulate matter tend to be more poor and — though largely white in West Virginia — are more likely to be comprised of people of color nationwide."

In Texas, even the hypocrisy is bigger:

Big oil asks government to protect its Texas facilities from climate change

As the nation plans new defenses against the more powerful storms and higher tides expected from climate change, one project stands out: an ambitious proposal to build a nearly 60-mile "spine" of concrete seawalls, earthen barriers, floating gates and steel levees on the Texas Gulf Coast. Like other oceanfront projects, this one would protect homes, delicate ecosystems and vital infrastructure, but it also has another priority: to shield some of the crown jewels of the petroleum industry, which is blamed for contributing to global warming and now wants the federal government to build safeguards against the consequences of it.

The plan is focused on a stretch of coastline that runs from the Louisiana border to industrial enclaves south of Houston that are home to one of the world's largest concentrations of petrochemical facilities, including most of Texas' 30 refineries, which represent 30 percent of the nation's refining capacity. Texas is seeking at least $12 billion for the full coastal spine, with nearly all of it coming from public funds. Last month, the government fast-tracked an initial $3.9 billion for three separate, smaller storm barrier projects that would specifically protect oil facilities.

But the idea of taxpayers around the country paying to protect refineries worth billions, and in a state where top politicians still dispute climate change's validity, doesn't sit well with some. "The oil and gas industry is getting a free ride," said Brandt Mannchen, a member of the Sierra Club's executive committee in Houston. "You don't hear the industry making a peep about paying for any of this and why should they? There's all this push like, 'Please Senator Cornyn, Please Senator Cruz, we need money for this and that.'" Normally outspoken critics of federal spending, Texas Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz both backed using taxpayer funds to fortify the oil facilities' protections and the Texas coast. Cruz called it "a tremendous step forward."

Nearly 40,000 giraffe parts have been imported to the US in last 10 years

The giraffe population has fallen by around 40% since 1990. There are now fewer than 100,000 giraffes alive in the world, and there are now fewer giraffes than elephants in Africa. Yet in America, trade in giraffe parts is booming. A report by the Humane Society of the United States, released on Thursday, found that nearly 40,000 giraffe parts have been imported to the US over the past decade, the equivalent, they estimate, of nearly 4,000 individual giraffes.

Researchers found giraffe products on sale in nearly 52 US locations. The most common products were giraffe hide boots and speciality knives made from giraffe bone, but they also found giraffe rugs, furniture and giraffe skin Bible covers. When researchers interviewed those selling giraffe products they found that many admitted they had purchased the products from trophy hunters.

Two sellers, BS Trading in Texas and Whitten Cases in Florida, made claims to investigators that aggressive herds of giraffes must be killed in order to save African villages. The Humane Society says this is false, and that recent expert evaluation of giraffe species has found no evidence of either aggressive giraffe behaviour or retaliatory killings of giraffes. Neither store responded immediately to the Guardian for comment. ...

In March, giraffes were moved to a list of vulnerable species by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), one level below endangered. In the US, giraffes are also not listed as an endangered species under the Endangered Species Act, which means all the sales of giraffe parts are legal. The Humane Society is currently campaigning to have giraffes listed as an endangered species under the act.

Also of Interest

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

Facebook Kills "Inauthentic" Foreign News Accounts - U.S. Propaganda Stays Alive

Is Donald Trump Above the Law?

Air Marshals Secretly Followed an Artsy Virginia Mom on Flights to Make Sure She Wasn't Going to Destroy America

‘Liberal’ MSNBC Runs All-Star Lineup of Awful Right-Wing Guests

Could Turkey Trigger the Next Global Financial Crisis?

‘Addicts, crooks, thieves’: the campaign to kill Baltimore's light rail

Intercept Statement on the Sentencing of Whistleblower Reality Winner for Disclosing NSA Report on Russian Election Hacking

If you’ve got a driver’s license and a pulse, you could be making $100,000 a year in the West Texas oil boom

Corbyn’s Labour is Being Made to Fail – by Design

A Little Night Music

Young Jessie - Mary Lou

Young Jessie & Group - Don't Think I will

Young Jessie - I Smell A Rat

Young Jessie - Hot Dog

Young Jessie - Pretty Soon

Young Jessie - Why Do I Love You

Young Jessie - Don´t Happen No More

Young Jessie - Do You Love Me

Young Jessie - Be-Bop Country Boy

Young Jessie - My Country Cousin

Young Jessie - Shuffle In The Gravel

Young Jessie - Oochie Coochie

Young Jessie - Brown Eyes

Young Jessie - Mary Lou