This evening's music features Chicago blues guitarist and singer Luther "Guitar Jr." Johnson.

Here are some stories from tonight's posting:

Good. Obama needs to be held fully accountable for supporting slavery so that he can reward his cronies with the TPP.

Top senator demands State Department documents on human trafficking report

A powerful Senate committee demanded on Thursday that the State Department hand over all the documents used to rank countries in its annual human trafficking report as lawmakers expressed concern it had been watered down due to political considerations.

Senator Bob Corker, Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations panel, issued the order as members grilled a senior State Department official over whether politics trumped human rights in the higher grades given this year to strategically important countries like Malaysia and Cuba.

The contentious hearing followed a Reuters examination, based on interviews with more than a dozen sources in Washington and foreign capitals, that showed the State Department office set up to independently rate countries' efforts to fight human trafficking was repeatedly overruled by senior U.S. diplomats.

Testifying before the committee, Undersecretary of State Sarah Sewall faced pointed questions over the 2015 Trafficking in Persons report published on July 27. Malaysia and Cuba were among countries upgraded from the blacklist of worst offenders on human trafficking, over the objections of the State Department’s own experts.

Corker threatened a congressional subpoena if all documents, including emails, memos and telephone records, were not provided and vowed “significant consequences” if any of the materials were destroyed. Democratic Senator Bob Menendez raised the prospect of calling for an inspector general’s investigation of how the ratings were decided.

Japanese Nobel Laureate Kenzaburo Oe on 70th Anniv. of US Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Cost of Upgrading US Nukes Estimated at $963 Billion

US officials have been pushing for a massive, and massively expensive, modernization campaign for the US nuclear weapons arsenal. The enormous cache of weapons amassed over the past 60 years is aging, and in 2012, President Obama proposed a plan which he said would cost $208 billion.

Which is a lot, but the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) revealed only a year later that it was a serious underestimation, saying in late 2013 that the real cost would be a minimum of $355 billion. The price keeps going up, and the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Pentagon-linked think tank, now says it’ll likely cost around $963 billion and take a solid 30 years.

Politely, $963 billion is referred to by some officials as “unaffordable,” and could more accurately be described as an obscene amount of money, but those same officials show no sign of considering any alternative, like cutting the size of the enormous arsenal.

The Fake War on ISIS: US and Turkey Escalate in Syria

It is late July 2015, and the media is abuzz with the news that Turkey will allow US jets to use its bases to bomb Islamic State (ISIS) targets in Syria. There is much talk about how this development is a “game-changer,” and how this is a clear escalation of the much ballyhooed, but more fictional than real, US war on ISIS: the terror organization that US intelligence welcomed as a positive development in 2012 in their continued attempts to instigate regime change against the Syrian government led by Bashar al-Assad.

The western public is told that “This is a significant shift…It’s a big deal,” as a US military official told the Wall Street Journal. What the corporate media fail to mention, however, is the fact that Turkey has been, and continues to be, a central actor in the war in Syria and, consequently, in the development and maintenance of ISIS. So, while Washington waxes poetic about stepping up the fight against the terror group, and lauds the participation of its allies in Ankara, the barely concealed fact is that Turkey is merely further entrenching itself in a war that it has fomented. ...

At the top of Erdogan’s agenda is using ISIS as a pretext for effecting the regime change in Syria that he has failed to bring about for these past four years. Despite providing weapons and cash, training sites and political cover, Turkey’s terror proxies have been roundly defeated by the Syrian Arab Army, Hezbollah, and allied forces. As such, Erdogan now needs to provide the overwhelming military superiority required to get the job done. This means air support and a “No Fly Zone” along the Turkey-Syria border, one which ostensibly will allow Turkey to fight ISIS, but in actuality is a means of securing territory for the terrorists who otherwise have been unable to do so. It is a de facto military intervention into Syria. Perhaps not even de facto, but outright declaration of war – a clear war crime.

Secondly, the alleged war on ISIS is a politically expedient cover for Erdogan to wage a full-scale war on the Kurds, and the PKK specifically. Within hours of announcing the new phase of the war, Turkish forces were bombing Kurdish targets in Syria andIraq, effectively declaring war on both countries, in blatant violation of international law, to whatever extent such a thing still exists. Indeed, Erdogan made his position quite clear when he stated, “It is not possible for us to continue the peace process with those who threaten our national unity and brotherhood.” Essentially, Erdogan has declared war on all Kurds of the region.

Although the US feigns concern for the Kurds and the expansion of the war, Washington has in fact endorsed Turkey’s policy. ... While it would appear that Washington is taking a measured approach, cautiously supporting Turkey while trying to limit the scope of the operation, that illusion is merely for appearance’s sake. In fact, the Brookings Institution just last month issued a policy paper entitled Deconstructing Syria: Towards a regionalized strategy for a confederal country, which brazenly laid out a plan to, as political analyst Tony Cartalucci astutely pointed out, “divide, destroy, then incrementally occupy” Syria using the pretext of ISIS and terrorism. And that is precisely what we’re witnessing now.

US launches first anti-ISIS drone strikes from Turkey

U.S. Launches First Drone Strike Against Islamic State From Turkey

The U.S. military launched its first strike against Islamic State from Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey, the Pentagon said, reflecting a deepening security relationship between Washington and Ankara in the region.

An armed drone carried out the strike in Syria on Tuesday, Pentagon spokesman Capt. Jeff Davis said on Wednesday. He declined to provide additional information about the specific target or whether it was successful.

The beginning of strikes from Turkish soil is part of a major shift, agreed upon in July and long sought by Washington, to allow the U.S. military to use Incirlik to send fighter jets and armed drones to attack Islamic State targets. ...

The U.S. and EU asked Turkey this week to tame its attacks against the PKK to prevent further destabilizing the country, threatening the peace talks between Turkey and the PKK. ...

The Pentagon said jet fighters haven’t arrived at Incirlik but are expected in coming weeks. The drones being used in airstrikes had been at the base for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance flights but had been unarmed before the July agreement. The U.S. began flying armed drones over the weekend.

Britain Told it Has a Responsibility to Help Protect Tunisia from the Islamic State

One month after the world was left stunned by a bloody attack by a single gunman on a Tunisian beach resort, Britain has been told it has a responsibility to help protect the country from Islamic State (IS) militants.

Tunisia's Prime Minister, Habib Essid, has claimed that UK military action is partially to blame for the current "chaos" in neighboring Libya, blaming the instability on Western intervention in 2011 to bring down Colonel Muammar Qaddafi.

Following Qaddafi's fall, Libya descended into a multi-party civil war and its border region with Tunisia became increasingly porous. Tunisia has struggled over the past three years to maintain order as thousands of migrants have stormed crossing points and overwhelmed border guards.

In the wake of multiple attacks in his country, Essid stated that his nation has been left more vulnerable to terrorism as a result and said Britain must help Tunisia secure its border because "terrorism has no borders."

Keiser Report: Collapsing Empires

#BlackLivesMatter and so should the high unemployment rate

The US unemployment rate is expected to hold steady at 5.3% on Friday – the lowest unemployment rate in seven years. Yet there is one group whose unemployment rate is still close to 10%: African Americans. The unemployment rate for black Americans has remained almost twice that of the general population for so long that experts believe it’s suffering from the “wallpaper effect” – no one notices anymore. That may be about to change. ...

The “wallpaper effect” is to blame for the lack of attention to African American unemployment, said Valerie Rawlston Wilson, director of the race, ethnicity and economy program at the Economic Policy Institute.

“It is true that black unemployment has always been about twice as high as white unemployment – give or take a few tenths of a decimal. The lowest the ratio has ever been in any month is 1.7 and the highest is 2.8. The two rates have never even been close to being the same,” she said.

“It’s been that way for so long that people have come to expect it and even make excuses for it like blaming it on education or skills,” she said, pointing out that Latinos, who have lower education attainment rates than blacks, also have a lower unemployment rate. “I think that until we own up to the fact that racism and racial bias – explicit or implicit, directly or indirectly – are a major part of this ongoing disparity and do something to directly address these issues that little or nothing will change.” ...

Many voters have become disillusioned by persistent racial inequality even after the first black president took office in 2008. They feel the change and hope they were promised is nowhere in sight. As a result, 2016 presidential hopefuls are coming under pressure to explain in more detail how they hope to improve lives of black Americans.

So far, most of the comments that have been made are too sweeping, too general and lacking in details. Consequently, the candidates and their remarks are seen as pandering to black voters. ...

According to Jordan, who said that she was skeptical of Obama’s presidency, the only thing that could get her excited about a presidential candidate at this time is “a plan that includes measurable goals, a timeline and an explicit admission of the exploitation of black people in this country”.

Big Oil Can Survive Low Prices, The Climate Can’t

Last week seemed like a bad time to be Big Oil.

As the world’s biggest energy companies announced their quarterly results, billions in profits still managed to disappoint shareholders. ExxonMobil and Chevron both missed their targets, Shell prepared for steep spending cuts, and BP took a well-deserved hosing on news of its latest Deepwater Horizon penalty.

The price of crude, half of what it was a year ago, definitely made for some lower numbers. But does bad news for the oil industry mean good news for the climate? Absolutely not.

The carbon bubble is going to burst eventually, and when that happens someone will be left holding the bag for trillions in stranded assets. This is where debates about the economics of oil at $50 or $100 dollars a barrel starts to seem irrelevant—the real value of an unburnable resource is zero.

All of this matters because when oil prices first started to slide, some environmentalists tried to look on the bright side. Tar sands and other extreme energy projects would be less feasible, the argument went, and a carbon tax would be an easier sell politically. But nine months into the plunge the idea of peak oil has never seemed less credible. Tar sands production is still expected to grow over the next 20 years while on the consumer-side lower prices mean more driving and more SUVs. Globally liquid fuel consumption is expected to rise in both 2015 and 2016.

Far from instigating a transition away from fossil fuels, the price drop is poised to make Big Oil even bigger. Eager to cash in on the merger business, Goldman Sachs estimates that oil supermajors like Shell are sitting on about $150 billion that could be used to buy out companies hit hard by low prices, suggesting a new wave of consolidation could be on its way.

Also of interest:

Here's the CIA's Letter to Congress Saying the Agency Was Quitting the Torture Business

Roger Waters Sets the Record Straight: I Hate Apartheid, Not Israel

Washington and Wall Street to Puerto Ricans: Drop Dead!