This evening's music features Chicago blues guitarist and sideman Luther Tucker.

Behold what American Humanitarian Interventionism hath wrought in your name:

The worst place in the world? Aleppo in ruins after four years of Syria war

In the east of Syria’s largest city, where entire neighbourhoods have been destroyed, the few remaining residents face a Darwinian fight for survival

Aleppo had withstood more than six millennia of pillage and insurrection, but the past three years have damaged more of its civilisation and displaced more of its people than perhaps all its earlier conflicts.

The ancient metropolis, one of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world, is now split into two halves: the Syrian regime runs the west and the armed opposition controls the east.

Western Aleppo has had by far the better of the war, with civic services still functioning in most neighbourhoods and war damage minimal. Much of the east, though, is ravaged and empty. ...

Those who remain in eastern Aleppo, roughly 40,000 from a prewar population estimated at about a million, have been without electricity or running water for more than a year.

Supplies of heating fuel were drastically short this winter and last, even with demand being markedly lower.

Almost all public parks have been stripped of trees, which were harvested for firewood. When there were no more trees, families begun cutting up school desks and chairs to stay warm. Comparisons with the siege of Leningrad are no exaggeration in a city that must be a strong contender for the worst place in the world.

State Department Announces New "Long-standing" Policy Against Backing Coups

Maybe Obama’s Sanctions on Venezuela are Not Really About His “Deep Concern” Over Suppression of Political Rights

The White House on Monday announced the imposition of new sanctions on various Venezuelan officials, pronouncing itself “deeply concerned by the Venezuelan government’s efforts to escalate intimidation of its political opponents”: deeply concerned. President Obama also, reportedly with a straight face, officially declared that Venezuela poses “an extraordinary threat to the national security” of the U.S. — a declaration necessary to legally justify the sanctions.

Today, one of the Obama administration’s closest allies on the planet, Saudi Arabia, sentenced one of that country’s few independent human rights activists, Mohammed al-Bajad, to 10 years in prison on “terrorism” charges. That is completely consistent with that regime’s systematic and extreme repression, which includes gruesome state beheadings at a record-setting rate, floggings and long prison terms for anti-regime bloggers, executions of those with minority religious views, and exploitation of terror laws to imprison even the mildest regime critics.

Absolutely nobody expects the “deeply concerned” President Obama to impose sanctions on the Saudis — nor on any of the other loyal U.S. allies from Egypt to the UAE whose repression is far worse than Venezuela’s. ... But what’s not too obvious to point out is what the U.S is actually doing in Venezuela. It’s truly remarkable how the very same people who demand U.S. actions against the democratically elected government in Caracas are the ones who most aggressively mock Venezuelan leaders when they point out that the U.S. is working to undermine their government. ...

Venezuela is one of the very few countries with significant oil reserves which does not submit to U.S. dictates, and this simply cannot be permitted (such countries are always at the top of the U.S. government and media list of Countries To Be Demonized). Beyond that, the popularity of Chavez and the relative improvement of Venezuela’s poor under his redistributionist policies petrifies neoliberal institutions for its ability to serve as an example; just as the Cuban economy was choked by decades of U.S. sanctions and then held up by the U.S. as a failure of Communism, subverting the Venezuelan economy is crucial to destroying this success.

If Obama and supporters want the government of Venezuela to be punished and/or toppled because they refuse to comply with U.S. dictates, they should at least be honest about their beliefs so that their true character can be seen. Pretending that any of this has to do with the U.S. Government’s anger over suppression of political opponents — when their closest allies are the world champions at that — should be too insulting of everyone’s intelligence to even be an option.

Associated Press sues US State Department over Clinton emails

Legal action follows repeated requests filed under the US Freedom of Information Act and comes one day after Clinton broke her silence

The Associated Press sued the US State Department on Wednesday to force the release of email correspondence and government documents from Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state.

The legal action follows repeated requests filed under the US Freedom of Information Act that have gone unfulfilled. They include one request the AP made five years ago and others pending since the summer of 2013. ...

The Foia requests and the suit seek materials related to her public and private calendars; correspondence involving aides likely to play important roles in her expected campaign for president; and Clinton-related emails about the Osama bin Laden raid and National Security Agency surveillance practices.

“After careful deliberation and exhausting our other options, the Associated Press is taking the necessary legal steps to gain access to these important documents, which will shed light on actions by the State Department and former Secretary Clinton, a presumptive 2016 presidential candidate, during some of the most significant issues of our time,” Karen Kaiser, AP’s general counsel, said.

AP executive editor Kathleen Carroll added: “The Freedom of Information Act exists to give citizens a clear view of what government officials are doing on their behalf. When that view is denied, the next resort is the courts.”

Off the Deep End: The Wall Street Bonus Pool and Low-Wage Workers

The financial industry’s 2014 bonuses were double the combined earnings of all Americans who work full-time at the federal minimum wage.

Wall Street banks handed out $28.5 billion in bonuses to their 167,800 employees last year, up 3 percent over 2013, according to new figures from the New York State Comptroller. These annual bonuses are an extra reward on top of base salaries in the securities industry, which averaged $190,970 in 2013. ...

The $28.5 billion in bonuses doled out to Wall Street employees is double the annual pay for all 1,007,000 Americans who work full-time at the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. Wall Street bonuses rose 3 percent last year, despite a 4.5 percent decline in industry profits. The size of the bonus pool was 27% higher than in 2009, the last time Congress increased the minimum wage. ...

The bonus pool is so large it would be far more than enough to lift all 2.9 million restaurant servers and bartenders, all 1.5 million home health and personal care aides, or all 2.2 million fast food preparation and serving workers up to $15 per hour.

Wall Street bonus season may coincide with an uptick in luxury goods sales, but a raise in the minimum wage would give America’s economy a much greater boost. To meet basic needs, low-wage workers tend to spend nearly every dollar they make. The wealthy can afford to squirrel away more of their earnings.

All those dollars low-wage workers spend create an economic ripple effect. Based on standard fiscal multipliers established by Moody’s Analytics, every extra dollar going into the pockets of a high-income American only adds about $0.39 to the GDP. By contrast, every extra dollar going into the pockets of low-wage workers adds about $1.21 to the national economy.