This evening's music features jazz singer Billie Holiday.

Here are some stories from tonight's posting:

Was approving air strikes against the PKK America's worst error in the Middle East since the Iraq War?

Kurdish guerrillas have killed two Turkish soldiers in an ambush in south-east Turkey as fighting resumes between Turkish security forces and Kurdish militants, ending a two-year-old ceasefire. The attack came after Turkish aircraft heavily bombed bases of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in the Qandil Mountains in northern Iraq. ...

It came as the US was accused by Kurds of tolerating a renewed Turkish government assault on its Kurdish minority as the price for permission for US aircraft to use Turkey’s Incirlik air base against Isis jihadists for the first time.

“The Americans are not very clever in calculating this sort of thing,” said Kamran Karadaghi, an Iraqi Kurdish commentator and former chief of staff to the Iraqi President, Jalal Talabani. “Maybe they calculate that with Turkey involved on their side, they don’t need the Kurds.” ...

Turkey has become increasingly unstable and violent over the past two years as President Recep Tayiip Erdogan has tried to consolidate his grip on power, even as his AKP party lost its parliamentary majority in last month’s general election.

In Turkey, Kurds See Airstrikes and Protest Crackdowns as Political Revenge

Turkey says Kurdish peace process impossible as Nato meets

The president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has said it is impossible to continue a peace process with Kurdish militants and urged parliament to strip politicians with links to “terrorist groups” of their immunity from prosecution.

His comments came as Nato envoys met in Brussels to discuss the crisis in Syria and Iraq in a special session requested by Turkey.

“It is not possible for us to continue the peace process with those who threaten our national unity and brotherhood,” Erdoğan told a news conference in Ankara before departing for an official visit to China.

The Turkish air force has bombed camps in northern Iraq of the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK). The PKK said the air strikes rendered the peace process meaningless, but had stopped short of formally pulling out.

Opening the specially convened meeting in Brussels, Nato’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, expressed solidarity with Turkey in its fight against terrorism. Stoltenberg told the 28-member alliance: “Nato is following developments very closely. And we stand in strong solidarity with our ally Turkey.” ...

It was easy for Stoltenberg to express support for Turkey joining the fight against Islamic State. More problematic for the US and other members of the alliance is Turkey linking the fight against terrorism to include the PKK.

The difficulty for the US and other allies is that the fight against Kurdish separatists is largely seen as a domestic problem. A further – and bigger – reservation is that the PKK is one of the few armed groups in the region putting up a fight against Isis.

US, Turkey Eye 60-Mile ‘Safe Zone’ in Northern Syria

More details about Turkey’s plans for a “safe zone” in northern Syria are emerging, and as a few questions are answered on the putative deal between Turkey and the US on the matter, many more questions are also emerging on the notion.

The US and Turkey have agreed the safe zone will be 60 miles long, but they haven’t decided how wide it will be. They have also determined it will be under the control of “moderate insurgents,” but it isn’t clear if such groups exist already or how the US and Turkey figure on installing them, since both insist the plan doesn’t involve ground troops. ...

US officials are also saying they don’t intend to create the zone as a place to house the 1.8 million Syrian refugees who have fled to Turkey, but they also concede it might well end up becoming that, and the refugees might flock there.

Nato meets to discuss Turkey's Syria campaign

Ambassadors from all 28 Nato countries are meeting in Brussels to discuss Turkey’s campaign against Islamic State and Kurdish militants in Syria. ...

It comes after Turkey and the US agreed on the outlines of a plan to drive Isis out of a strip of land along the Turkish-Syrian border, according to reports, in a landmark deal that will draw Turkey further into Syria’s civil war and looks likely to increase the intensity of the US air war against Isis.

The plan is a diplomatic victory for Turkey, which has long demanded the creation of a safe haven in northern Syria, across the 500-mile (800km) border that links the two countries, as a precondition for joining the battle against Isis.

It is also not clear how the safe haven will affect the Kurds. US warplanes have spent months over Syrian skies bombing Isis to help the Kurds take the fight to the militants. But Ankara is worried that the Kurds’ successes across the border will fire up separatists at home, with whom it has fought a 30-year civil war, and has launched a crackdown on the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK), which has links to Kurdish fighters in Syria – the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) and its political arm, the Democratic Union party (PYD).

Syrian Kurds: Turkish Forces Shelling Our Fighters Near Kobani

Syrian Kurdish militia faction the YPG is reporting that as Turkey has started launching attacks on ISIS, they have also started attacking Kurdish targets inside Syria, including hitting a number of YPG forces with shelling against villages on the outskirts of Kobani. ...

Turkey has long treated the YPG’s political wing, the PYD, as the Syrian branch of the PKK, however, and they have been pushing for action against Kurdish forces in northern Syria for weeks now. This makes the denials somewhat harder to believe, as Turkey seems to be attacking anyone and everyone it doesn’t like in the area right now.

Are the U.S. and Allies Getting Too Cozy With Al Qaeda’s Affiliate in Syria?

For 14 years the US has waged a global war on terror with a stated goal of denying al Qaeda a safe haven anywhere in the world. Now several of our regional partners in the Middle East, hell-bent on removing Assad from power, are backing a coalition of Syrian rebel groups that include the local al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al Nusra as a prominent member – and at least one high ranking former US military official thinks working with al Qaeda is justified. The rebel coalition, backed by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, is calling itself the Army of Conquest, and has recently made gains against Assad consolidating territory in Idlib province.

Reporting on al Nusra’s recent victories in Idlib, Charles Lister at Brookings reported:

“Several commanders involved in leading recent Idlib operations confirmed to this author that the U.S.-led operations room in southern Turkey, which coordinates the provision of lethal and non-lethal support to vetted opposition groups, was instrumental in facilitating their involvement in the operation from early April onwards. That operations room — along with another in Jordan, which covers Syria’s south — also appears to have dramatically increased its level of assistance and provision of intelligence to vetted groups in recent weeks.

Whereas these multinational operations rooms have previously demanded that recipients of military assistance cease direct coordination with groups like Jabhat al-Nusra, recent dynamics in Idlib appear to have demonstrated something different. Not only were weapons shipments increased to the so-called “vetted groups,” but the operations room specifically encouraged a closer cooperation with Islamists commanding frontline operations.”

As news of the coalition victories spread, the Wall Street Journal published a piece entitled “To US Allies, Al Qaeda Affiliate in Syria Becomes the Lesser Evil” that reinforces the possibility some U.S. military leaders also see such collaboration with al Qaeda as a legitimate option. ...

These developments are truly breathtaking. What does it say about the clarity of the strategic thinking behind the current “war on terror” that the perpetrators of 9-11 may morph from enemies into allies? One would think that after decades of blowback from supporting the Mujahidin forefathers of al Qaeda in Afghanistan in the eighties, that our allies and the U.S. foreign policy elite would learn their lesson. Unfortunately, the willingness to advance goals through a short-sighted military support of unsavory characters still holds firm in Washington.

The CIA Paid A Contractor $40 Million to Review Torture Documents

One of the main criticisms leveled by Republicans and CIA supporters about the Senate Intelligence Committee's landmark five-year study into the CIA's torture program has been the cost to taxpayers: $40 million.

The implication by these critics is that the Senate Democrats who led the investigation were responsible for the expenditures associated with the production of their voluminous report, which concluded that the CIA's use of so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" was not effective and did not produce "unique" and "valuable" intelligence. ...

But VICE News has exclusively obtained more than 100 pages of contracting documents that show it was CIA officials who insisted on outsourcing work related to the Senate's review — and that it was the CIA that paid more than $40 million to one of its longtime contractors for administrative support and other tasks related to the Senate's work. Those tasks included compiling, reviewing, redacting, and then posting to a server the more than 6 million pages of highly classified CIA cables and other documents about the torture program Senate Intelligence Committee staffers pored through during the course of their probe. ...

In a statement provided to VICE News, Senator Dianne Feinstein, the former Intelligence Committee chairwoman, said the deal between the CIA and Centra was an unnecessary expense.

"These documents confirm and offer context for what I said in December: CIA spent roughly $40 million in order to hamper the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on the CIA detention and interrogation program, while the committee operated within its existing budget," Feinstein said. "Not only was this a waste of taxpayer dollars, but the insistence that committee staff travel to an offsite CIA facility allowed the CIA to spy on the committee's work. I'm pleased these documents are being released so the public can understand exactly what happened, and hopefully this information will help ensure such obstruction of congressional oversight won't happen again."

When China Sneezes, the U.S. Stock Market Could Catch a Bad Cold

According to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, “China was the United States’ 3rd largest goods export market in 2013.” That’s the latest year that data is available. The total of U.S. exports to China in 2013 reached $122.1 billion, a 10.4 percent increase over 2012. ...

On Monday, China’s Shanghai Composite Index fell 8.48 percent (it was off another 1.7 percent at the close on Tuesday, closing at 3,663). From a June 12 high of 5,166, the Shanghai Composite is now off 29 percent in less than two months and the roller coaster ride which had seen as much as $4 trillion in investor losses earlier this month is spilling over into U.S. markets. Many S&P 500 stocks have far greater sales exposure to China than 10 percent.

According to Sue Chang, a MarketWatch reporter using data from FactSet, 52 percent of Yum Brands sales come from China; Qualcomm derives 48 percent; Micron Technology 40 percent; and Texas Instruments 32 percent.

Along with the troubles in China, the U.S. economy is facing a rash of equally serious headwinds. Canada has now entered a technical recession with two back to back quarters of contraction this year. Canada is the number one export market for U.S. goods, buying $312 billion from the U.S. in 2014 or 19.2 percent of all U.S. exports.

The U.S. also has the headwind of a stronger U.S. Dollar, making our exports less competitive than those from countries with depressed currencies.

Will Hillary Clinton Adopt Hedgie Billionaire John Arnold’s Schemes for Retirement Insecurity?

The front-running scheme for “retirement security” — backed by billionaire John Arnold — looks an awful lot like it’s “on the table” because it guarantees that middlemen collect fees for “managing” what we used to call your “nest egg.” Will Hillary Clinton’s campaign platform support it?

Hillary Clinton Has Ruled Out Expanding Social Security

This was the line in Talking Points Memo, back in April:

Hillary Clinton is not taking a position just yet on Social Security expansion, an issue with growing support in the Democratic Party that several of her prospective presidential primary rivals have endorsed.

The Clinton campaign told TPM on Thursday, in response to a query, that the Democratic frontrunner “will have a lot to say” about the issue and emphasized her opposition to privatizing Social Security.

But here’ s Clinton’s platform today:

Build savings and retire with dignity

Working families should be able to save throughout their lives so that they can send their kids to college and retire with dignity. We will defend Social Security from Republican attempts to cut or privatize the program. And we will explore ways to enhance Social Security to meet new realities, particularly for women.

“Explore ways to enhance” most definitely does not mean “expand,” especially when Clinton plans to include “saving” in any plan to allow working people — since “working families” doesn’t include those who aren’t married — to “retire with dignity.”

[There's a lot more in Lambert Strether's excellent article. If you are thinking of one day, maybe retiring, rather than dying in the traces, this might be a great article to read in full. It's got a lot of detail on how the sneaky vultures who connive with slick corporate Democratic politicians are angling to rip you off. - js]

Why Bernie Sanders should be the 1 percent’s candidate (yes, really)

If you are a regular viewer of Fox News, you may think of Bernie Sanders as some kind of radical socialist who wants to bring down the entire capitalist system — a modern day Lenin or Trotsky. The truth, of course, is that Sanders is neither a socialist nor a radical, or even an anti-capitalist. In the historical scheme of things, Sanders is actually a moderate (based on his policy proposals, at least). And, if they were smart, one percenters may very well want to consider voting for him, if they hope to avoid a truly radical movement in the future.

What do I mean by a truly radical movement? Basically, a movement where the people realize that American democracy is more of an illusion than a reality, and that the political apparatus is heavily rigged to favor the ruling class. A movement where people conclude that filing petitions, writing letters, and attempting to lobby politicians, when up against a global corporation, is largely futile, and that an election between two corporatists just isn’t good enough. ...

New Deal reform was fairly radical, but nowhere near the radicalism that the country needed. The financial regulation and social programs were introduced to limit wealth inequalities and economic instability — two inherent features of capitalism. And indeed, from the New Deal until the last few decades of the 20th century, inequality was reduced and economic crises were limited and controlled through a combination of fiscal and monetary policies. ...

The “new economy” was a myth. Capitalism is capitalism, and today, with inequality at pre-Great Depression highs, along with economic instability, the pragmatic move would be to once again become “fairly radical.” Some believe it is time to become truly radical, but that is not what Bernie Sanders is about. Sanders, much like FDR, is a liberal who believes that the government should support all classes, not just the one percent. That is progressive, but not the stuff of revolutions. And, if you need further proof that Sanders is no radical, the fact that he said he will support the Democratic candidate, if he does not get the nod himself, shows that he is ultimately a moderate, working within the party system. ...

The threat of radicalism in America does not seem to be significant enough at the moment. But that could change. If a mass movement, or as Sanders has said, a “political revolution” continues to form, there will be little choice but to support real reform of the American political system. And this is why Sanders’ early success is important. The odds are stacked against him, but the fact that he is attracting huge crowds across America does show that the people are ready for something other than the corporatist status quo. Sanders is just one person, and ultimately it will take the masses to change the corrupt political system of America. How radical should the solutions be? This is up to debate, but what is not is that real change requires more than just an election.

Also of interest:

Chris Hedges: Why I Support the BDS Movement Against Israel

Greece Negotiations Already Starting to Look Wobbly

Blocked From Trade Pact By Its Failure on Slavery, Malaysia Suddenly Gets a Passing Grade

Guess the guitar hero – from their guitar