Welcome! "The Evening Blues" is a casual community diary (published Monday - Friday, 8:00 PM Eastern) where we hang out, share and talk about news, music, photography and other things of interest to the community.
Just about anything goes, but attacks and pie fights are not welcome here. This is a community diary and a friendly, peaceful, supportive place for people to interact.
Everyone who wants to join in peaceful interaction is very welcome here.
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Hey! Good Evening!
This evening's music features Memphis bluesman Rufus Thomas. Enjoy!
Rufus Thomas - Walking the Dog
“The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.”
-- Gore Vidal
News and Opinion
"Democracy Cannot Be Blackmailed": Greek Voters Overwhelmingly Reject Creditors’ Austerity Demand
From 'No' to 'Yes': Rejection of Austerity Just Beginning of European Battle
Even with a historic political victory in his pocket after seeing his nation vote overwhelmingly against the imposition of further austerity in exchange for a new loan package from foreign creditors on Sunday, Yanis Varoufakis, the outspoken finance minister of Greece's Syriza-led government, announced his resignation on Monday morning.
In a statement posted to his personal blog, Varoufakis said he "shall wear the creditors' loathing with pride" after it was made clear to him that his "absence" from future talks was urged by negotiating members of the so-called Troika—the European Commission, European Central Bank, and International Monetary Fund.
"Soon after the announcement of the referendum results, I was made aware of a certain preference by some Eurogroup participants, and assorted 'partners', for my… 'absence' from its meetings; an idea that the Prime Minister [Alexis Tsipras] judged to be potentially helpful to him in reaching an agreement. For this reason I am leaving the Ministry of Finance today," he stated. "I consider it my duty to help Alexis Tsipras exploit, as he sees fit, the capital that the Greek people granted us through yesterday’s referendum."
'Greek referendum results may cause domino effect in other European countries'
Greek crisis: European leaders scramble for response to referendum no vote
European leaders were scrambling for a response on Monday after a resounding no from Greek voters in a momentous referendum on austerity which could send the country crashing out of the eurozone. ...
With the ramifications still unclear and some analysts putting the chances of Grexit at very high, the European commission head, Jean-Claude Juncker, was to hold a teleconference on Monday morning with European Central Bank chief, Mario Draghi, Tusk and Jeroen Dijsselbloem, head of the eurogroup of finance ministers.
Meanwhile German and French finance ministers were set for talks beginning in Warsaw at 9am BST, while the euro working group of top treasury officials will meet in Brussels. ...
Tsipras said the creditors – the ECB, the European commission and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – would now finally have to talk about restructuring Greece’s huge debts.
“This time, the debt will be on the negotiating table,” he said. ...
The Greek vote is a huge blow to EU leaders, particularly Merkel, who has dominated the crisis management through her insistence on fiscal rigour and cuts despite a huge economic slump, soaring unemployment and the immiseration of most of Greek society.
“The failure of the euro means the failure of Merkel’s [10-year] chancellorship,” said the cover of the latest issue of Der Spiegel, the German weekly. It depicted her sitting atop a Europe in ruins.
This is an excellent article by Bill Black with far too much great background to excerpt fairly. Here's a taste:
Greece Proves Again Why Democracy is the Criminal Classes’ Great Fear
The people of Greece have just shown great courage, and even greater common sense, in voting “No” in overwhelming numbers against the troika’s war on the Greek people and labor throughout the EU. In recent days we have seen the spectacle of the major media shamelessly lying globally about the referendum and the Greek government – cheered on by the troika. The troika openly sought to depose a second Greek head of state for the high crime of favoring a democratic vote on the troika’s economic malpractice and effort to extort the Greek people by threatening to destroy their economy. The tone and content of the propaganda were extraordinary – and reversed reality.
If you read the media very closely, you can see how hard it would have been to craft this propaganda if it was supposed to have any basis in reality. First, the IMF now admits that its long suppressed studies show that it has known for years that the Greek debt is unsustainable. That confirmed the position of the Greek government (and what every financial specialist has known since 2009). The logical answer in the commercial sphere is (routinely) to write-down part of the debt in what is known as a troubled debt restructuring (TDR). TDRs are treated as having no moral content – they’re just smart business. In Greece’s case, however, the media is suffused with fake morality and is enraged that Greece is seeking a TDR. TDRs are less common for nation states, but they have been done hundreds of times in the modern era – including for Germany after World War II. Germany’s TDR was essential to its economic recovery. Note that there was a vastly stronger moral argument against Germany’s TDR than Greece’s request, but the major media overwhelmingly avoided these facts.
Yanis Varoufakis: why bold, brash Greek finance minister had to go
Vindicated by no vote in Sunday’s referendum, the self-appointed king of anti-austerians recognised he was impediment to prospective deal
When historians look back at the great Greek debt crisis, the figure of Yanis Varoufakis will feature large. Bold and brash, the self-appointed king of anti-austerians did more to internationalise the folly of austerity politics than any other member of the radical left government of Athens.
Alexis Tsipras, the young prime minister, was much indebted to him, and Varoufakis’s resignation was quickly followed by effusive praise. “The prime minister feels the need to thank him for his ceaseless effort to promote the positions of the government and the interests of the Greek people under very difficult circumstances,” government spokesman Gavriel Sakellaridis announced.
Varoufakis may have been forced to leave frontline politics, but he does so hugely vindicated by the historic no vote delivered by Greeks on Sunday. There are few in Athens today who don’t believe he is also a victim of his own success. The resounding rejection of further belt-tightening in a referendum that pitted Greece against all its eurozone partners was a high-stakes gamble associated squarely with the 54-year-old’s penchant for game theory and buccaneering style. The morning after, he had to go. ...
Ever the maverick, Varoufakis is unlikely to vanish overnight. Although never a member of the ruling Syriza party, he remains an MP and, very possibly, will continue to influence Tsipras behind the scenes. There are few who doubt he will also be working on an unexpurgated version of the euro crisis, Varoufakis style.
Greek Voters Deliver Stunning Rebuke to Austerity
Greece and Its Creditors Should Do a Guns-For-Pensions Deal
IMF Chief Economist Olivier Blanchard has said that Greece needs to slash pension spending by 1% of GDP in order to reach its new budget targets. The Greek government continues to resist, arguing that Greeks dependent on pensions have already suffered enough. ....
Greece spends a whopping 2.2% of GDP on defense, more than any NATO member-state save the United States and France. Bringing Greece into line with the NATO average would alone achieve ¾ of what the IMF is demanding through pension cuts.
This is a really excellent analysis, well worth reading in full:
Michael Hudson: Greece Rejects the Troika
Just after 7 PM Greek time on Sunday, I was told that the “No” vote (Gk. Oxi) was winning approximately 60/40. The “opinion polls” showing a dead heat evidently were wrong. ... The margin of victory shows that Greek voters were immune to media misrepresentation during the week-long run-up as to whether to accept the troika’s demand for austerity to be conducted on anti-labor lines. ... It should not have been so great a surprise. Voting age for the referendum was lowered to 18 years, and included army members. Faced with an unemployment rate of over 50 percent, Greek youth understandably wanted no more euro-austerity.
The Troika’s demand was for austerity to be deepened solely by taxing labor and reducing pensions. Its policy makers had vetoed Syriza’s proposed taxes on the wealthy and steps to stop their tax avoidance. The IMF for its part vetoed cutbacks in Greek military spending (far above the 2% of GDP demanded by NATO), despite even the European Central Bank (ECB) and German Chancellor Merkel agreeing to this
European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker threatened to expel Greece from Europe, despite no law permitting this to occur. Let us see now whether he still tries to carry out his bluff, which has been echoed by right-wing leaders throughout Europe.
His retaliatory actions from an ostensibly non-political, non-elected office are not alone. The eurozone class war in support of finance against labor and industry is now open and in earnest. Instead of doing what a central bank is supposed to do – provide liquidity (and paper currency) to banks, ECB head Mario “Whatever it takes” Draghi forced them to shut down even their ATM machines for lack of cash. Evidently this was intended to frighten Greek voters to think that this would be their country’s future if they voted No. ...
What Greece needs is a domestic central bank – or failing that, a national Treasury – empowered to create the money to monetize government spending on economic recovery. Mr. Draghi has shown the ECB not to be “technocratic,” but a cabal of right-wing operatives working to bring down the Syriza government, in a way quite willing to empower the far-right Golden Dawn party in its stead. ...
U.S. popular media echoed the European right by trying to frighten Greeks and their sympathizers into believing that the vote is whether or not to remain part of Europe – as if Britain does not have its own currency while remaining part of the European Union. However, the vote does throw into question just what it means to be what pro-austerity advocates call “committed to the European project.” Eurozone officials are unanimous that it means a commitment to financial war against labor – to austerity and yet further economic shrinkage; to faster privatization selloffs (but not to Russians if they offer higher prices, as Gazprom did) and hence higher prices for hitherto public utilities; to no rejection of past insider deals privatization to higher value-added taxes on consumers; and to lower pensions for labor.
Greek debt crisis
[From the Guardian's live blog coverage]
Rosie Scammell has helpfully done a translation of the comments from Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi on his Facebook page.
There are two areas...to confront quickly in European capitals and Brussels. The first regards Greece, a country that is in a very difficult economic and social situation. The meetings tomorrow must indicate a definitive road to resolve this emergency.
The second - even more fascinating and complex, but no longer postponable - is that of Europe. For months we have been insisting on discussing not only austerity and budgets, but growth, infrastructure, common policies on migration, innovation, the environment. In one word: politics, not only parameters. Values, not only numbers.
If we stay at a standstill, prisoners of rules and bureaucracy, Europe is finished.
Rebuilding a different Europe will not be easy, after what has happened in recent years. But this is the right moment to try and do it, all together. Italy will do its part.
Krugman gets this right:
Ending Greece’s Bleeding
Europe dodged a bullet on Sunday. Confounding many predictions, Greek voters strongly supported their government’s rejection of creditor demands. And even the most ardent supporters of European union should be breathing a sigh of relief.
Of course, that’s not the way the creditors would have you see it. Their story, echoed by many in the business press, is that the failure of their attempt to bully Greece into acquiescence was a triumph of irrationality and irresponsibility over sound technocratic advice.
But the campaign of bullying — the attempt to terrify Greeks by cutting off bank financing and threatening general chaos, all with the almost open goal of pushing the current leftist government out of office — was a shameful moment in a Europe that claims to believe in democratic principles. It would have set a terrible precedent if that campaign had succeeded, even if the creditors were making sense.
What’s more, they weren’t. The truth is that Europe’s self-styled technocrats are like medieval doctors who insisted on bleeding their patients — and when their treatment made the patients sicker, demanded even more bleeding. A “yes” vote in Greece would have condemned the country to years more of suffering under policies that haven’t worked and in fact, given the arithmetic, can’t work: austerity probably shrinks the economy faster than it reduces debt, so that all the suffering serves no purpose. The landslide victory of the “no” side offers at least a chance for an escape from this trap.
Breakthrough Reported in Iran Talks, But Differences Remain
The P5+1 nuclear negotiations with Iran continue apace this weekend, with officials describing Saturday’s talks in Vienna as a “breakthrough,” and one which now has the two sides sitting on an unofficial draft agreement which could end up serving as the basis for a final pact.
Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif conceding that despite the progress, the final deal still isn’t necessarily clear, and that some difference remain and will require significant effort to move past. Exactly what remains to resolve is unclear.
Yemen government raises prospect of truce
Yemen's exiled government said on Monday it expects a deal shortly on a humanitarian ceasefire that would run through the Muslim Eid al-Fitr holiday later this month, as air strikes by Saudi-led warplanes killed at least 30 people.
The United Nations has been pushing for a halt to fighting and air raids that have killed nearly 3,000 people in Yemen since March when a Saudi-led coalition intervened against Houthi forces in a bid to restore President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi.
The government, exiled in Riyadh, said talks were focusing on carrying out an April U.N. resolution calling for the Iranian-allied Houthis to quit cities seized since September and for aid supplies to be sent to stricken Yemeni civilians. ...
The United Nations last week designated the war in Yemen as a Level 3 humanitarian crisis, its most severe category, and the United States and the European Union have endorsed calls for a humanitarian suspension of hostilities.
On Friday, the United Nations alerted aid groups that a truce could start soon and advised them to be ready to start shipping aid. The United Nations engineered a five-day humanitarian ceasefire in May but aid groups said it did not last long enough to cover all of Yemen's needs.
McCain calls for 'reassessment' of Afghan pullout
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) on Saturday said the Obama administration should revisit its plans for removing U.S. troops from Afghanistan given the conditions there.
McCain said Afghan forces were sustaining too many casualties for a quick departure of American forces, according to the Associated Press.
“With the rise of ISIS and the distinct fighting season that is marked this year, the threat environment continues to evolve in ways that clearly, in my view, demands a reassessment of the administration’s current calendar-driven drawdown of U.S. forces with a plan that must be driven by conditions on the ground,” McCain said while visiting Kabul.
McCain cited the durability of the Taliban and the growing threat of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria as reasons to rethink the pending withdrawal.
The Torture of Absolute Power
“The existence of the approximately 14,000 photographs will probably cause yet another delay in the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as attorneys for the defendants demand that all the images be turned over and the government wades through the material to decide what it thinks is relevant to the proceedings.”
This was the Washington Post a few days ago, informing us wearily that the torture thing isn’t dead yet. The bureaucracy convulses, the wheels of justice grind. So much moral relativism to evaluate.
“They did what they were asked to do in the service of our nation,” CIA director John Brennan said at a news conference in December, defending CIA interrogators after a portion of the 6,700-page Senate Intelligence Committee report was made public.
Serving the nation means no more than doing what you’re told.
God bless America. Flags wave, fireworks burst on the horizon. Aren’t we terrific? But this idea we celebrate — this nation, this principled union of humanity — is just a military bureaucracy, full of dark secrets. The darkest, most highly classified secret of all is that we’re always at war and we always will be. And war is an end in itself. It has no purpose beyond its own perpetuation.
I am shocked, shocked to find out that the government is systematically lying to Congress and the 'merkan peepholes.
Wiretap Numbers Don’t Add Up
Last week, the Administrative Office (AO) of the US Courts published the 2014 Wiretap Report, an annual report to Congress concerning intercepted wire, oral, or electronic communications as required by Title III of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968. News headlines touted that the number of federal and state wiretaps for 2014 was down 1% for a total of 3,554. Of these, there were few involving encrypted communications; and for those, law enforcement agencies were in most cases able to overcome the encryption. But there is a bigger story that calls into question the accuracy of the all of the prior reports submitted to the AO and the overall data provided to Congress and the public in the Wiretap Reports.
Since the Snowden revelations, more and more companies have started publishing “transparency reports” about the number and nature of government demands to access their users’ data. AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint published data for 2014 earlier this year and T-Mobile published its first transparency report on the same day the AO released the Wiretap Report. In aggregate, the four companies state that they implemented 10,712 wiretaps, a threefold difference over the total number reported by the AO. Note that the 10,712 number is only for the four companies listed above and does not reflect wiretap orders received by other telephone carriers or online providers, so the discrepancy actually is larger. ...
So what accounts for the huge gap in reporting? That is a question Congress and the AO should be asking prosecutors and judges who are required by law to make complete and accurate reports of the number of wiretaps conducted each year. Are wiretaps being consistently underreported to Congress and the public? Based on the data reported by the four major carriers for 2013 and 2014, it certainly would appear to be the case.
Lawmakers want Internet sites to flag ‘terrorist activity’ to law enforcement
Social media sites such as Twitter and YouTube would be required to report videos and other content posted by suspected terrorists to federal authorities under legislation approved this past week by the Senate Intelligence Committee.
The measure, contained in the 2016 intelligence authorization, which still has to be voted on by the full Senate, is an effort to help intelligence and law enforcement officials detect threats from the Islamic State and other terrorist groups.
It would not require companies to monitor their sites if they do not already do so, said a committee aide, who requested anonymity because the bill has not yet been filed. The measure applies to “electronic communication service providers,” which includes e-mail services such as Google and Yahoo.
Companies such as Twitter have recently stepped up efforts to remove terrorist content in response to growing concerns that they have not done enough to stem the propaganda. Twitter removed 10,000 accounts over a two-day period in April.
Report: After Spying Operation in Germany, CIA Outed Suspected Leaker to Retaliate Against Journalists
In the summer of 2011, the CIA station chief in Berlin asked one of the most powerful intelligence officials in Germany to go on a private walk with him, the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel reports. The American spy had an important message to convey: one of Germany’s own senior officials was leaking information to the press.
The suspected leaker, Hans Josef Vorbeck, had been in contact with Spiegel, the station chief told the German official, Günter Heiss. Head of Division 6, Heiss is responsible for coordinating Germany’s intelligence services. Vorbeck was his deputy.
At the time, Vorbeck was responsible for managing German counterterrorism efforts. Following the meet-up, Vorbeck was discreetly transferred to a less prestigious post, overseeing historical archives for the BND, Germany’s foreign intelligence service.
For four years, the conversation that led to Vorbeck’s demotion remained secret. It has now become public, thanks largely to a German intelligence inquiry launched in the wake of Edward Snowden’s historic leak of top-secret NSA documents. The walk — and its implications for U.S.-German relations — were detailed Friday by Spiegel.
Obama administration officials told the magazine that the disclosure of the alleged communications between Vorbeck and its journalists was prompted by national security concerns. The fact that the Americans were willing to expose an ongoing surveillance operation underscored the seriousness of the threat posed by the leaks, sources in Washington told Spiegel. Intentionally or not, the sources said, the disclosure put the Germans on notice — the Americans were watching. ...
The revelations, the latest in a series of disclosures detailing the fraught and intertwined intelligence relationship between German and American entities, offer an example of how the Obama administration, known for its aggressive approach to national security leaks at home, similarly asserts itself in leak cases abroad.
NSA’s Top Brazilian Political and Financial Targets Revealed by New WikiLeaks Disclosure
Top secret data from the National Security Agency, shared with The Intercept by WikiLeaks, reveals that the U.S. spy agency targeted the cellphones and other communications devices of more than a dozen top Brazilian political and financial officials, including the country’s president Dilma Rousseff, whose presidential plane’s telephone was on the list. President Rousseff just yesterday returned to Brazil after a trip to the U.S. that included a meeting with President Obama, a visit she had delayed for almost two years in anger over prior revelations of NSA spying on Brazil.
That Rousseff’s personal cell phone was successfully targeted by NSA spying was previously reported in 2013 by Fantastico, a program on the Brazilian television network Globo Rede. That revelation – along with others exposing NSA mass surveillance on hundreds of millions of Brazilians, and the targeting of the country’s state-owned oil company Petrobras and its Ministry of Mines and Energy – caused a major rupture in relations between the two nations. But Rouseff is now suffering from severe domestic weakness as a result of various scandals and a weak economy, and apparently could no longer resist the perceived benefits of a high-profile state visit to Washington.
But these new revelations extend far beyond the prior ones and are likely to reinvigorate tensions. Beyond Rousseff, the new NSA target list includes some of Brazil’s most important political and financial figures, such as the Finance Ministry’s Executive Secretary Nelson Barbosa; Luiz Awazu Pereira da Silva, a top official with Brazil’s Central Bank; Luiz Eduardo Melin de Carvalho e Silva, former Chief of Staff to the Finance Minister; the Foreign Affairs Ministry’s chief of economics and finance, Luis Antônio Balduíno Carneiro; former Foreign Affairs Minister and Ambassador to the U.S. Luiz Alberto Figueiredo Machado; and Antonio Palocci, who formerly served as both Dilma’s Chief of Staff and Finance Minister under former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Most notable about the list, published simultaneously by WikiLeaks, is the predominance of officials responsible for Brazil’s financial and economic matters
Chris Hedges:
Corporate Capitalism Is the Foundation of Police Brutality and the Prison State
Our national conversation on race and crime is based on a fiction. It is the fiction that the organs of internal security, especially the judiciary and the police, can be adjusted, modernized or professionalized to make possible a post-racial America. We discuss issues of race while ignoring the economic, bureaucratic and political systems of exploitation—all of it legal and built into the ruling apparatus—that are the true engines of racism and white supremacy. No discussion of race is possible without a discussion of capitalism and class. And until that discussion takes place, despite all the proposed reforms to the criminal justice system, the state will continue to murder and imprison poor people of color with impunity.
More training, body cameras, community policing, the hiring of more minorities as police officers, a better probation service and more equitable fines will not blunt the indiscriminate use of lethal force or reduce the mass incarceration that destroys the lives of the poor. Our capitalist system callously discards surplus labor, especially poor people of color, employing lethal force and the largest prison system in the world to keep them under control. This is by design. And until this predatory system of capitalism is destroyed, the poor, especially people of color, will continue to be gunned down by police in the streets, as they have for decades, and disproportionately locked in prison cages. ...
“The strength of ‘The New Jim Crow’ by Michelle Alexander is that, by equating mass incarceration with Jim Crow, it makes it rhetorically impossible to defend it,” said Naomi Murakawa, author of “The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America,” when we met recently in Princeton, N.J. “But, on the other hand, there is no ‘new’ Jim Crow, there is just capitalist white supremacy in a state of constant self-preservation.” ...
Murakawa, who teaches at Princeton University, laid out in her book that liberals, in the name of pity, and conservatives, in the name of law and order—or as Richard Nixon expressed it, the right to be safe and free of fear—equally shared in the building of our carceral state. “Liberal racial pity mirrored conservative racial contempt,” she writes. These “competing constructions of black criminality, one callous, another with a tenor of sympathy and cowering paternalism,” ensured that by the time these forces were done, there was from 1968 to 2010 a septupling of people locked in the prison system. “Counting probation and parole with jails and prisons is even more astonishing still,” she writes. “This population grew from 780,000 in 1965 to seven million in 2010.” ...
All penal reform, from President Truman’s 1947 Committee on Civil Rights report to the Safe Streets Act of 1968 to the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 to contemporary calls for more professionalization, in effect only hand more power and resources to the police. It does nothing to blunt police abuse or reverse mass incarceration. It does nothing to address the bias of white supremacy. ...
Change, Murakawa said, requires us to formulate a very different vision of society.
“We should follow Angela Davis’ call to ask the question: What is it we have to imagine if we abolish the social functions of police and prisons?” she said. “What is it we have to build if we can no longer jail people who are mentally ill or suffering from long-term addiction or homeless? We are going to have to build a lot.”
TISA Leaks Part Deux: More Evidence of Concerted Attack on Democracy
A WikiLeaks analysis shows how 52-nation Trade in Services Agreement threatens both net neutrality and personal data privacy
One day after it leaked a trove of documents related to the massive, pro-corporate Trade in Services Agreement (TISA), WikiLeaks on Thursday published another four chapters of the proposed 52-nation trade deal, covering key areas ahead of the next negotiating round on Monday.
As with Wednesday's documents, Thursday's batch of texts reveals "a concerted attempt to place restrictions on the ability of participating governments to regulate services sectors, even where regulations are necessary to protect the privacy of domestic populations, the natural environment or the integrity of public services," WikiLeaks declares.
Combined with Wednesday's revelations, this week's leaks underscore how TISA "responds to major corporate lobbies’ desire to deregulate services," trade expert Deborah James, of the Our World Is Not For Sale (OWINFS) network and the Center for Economic and Policy Research, wrote on Thursday. "This leak exposes the corporate aim to use TISA to further limit the public interest regulatory capacity of democratically elected governments." ...
"As governments around the world implement the lessons of the 2008 financial crisis by re-regulating financial firms to prevent another crisis, the leaked TISA rules could require countries—including the world’s largest financial centers—to halt and even roll back financial regulations," said Ben Beachy, research director at Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch and author of the analysis on the leaked Financial Services annex.
"Indeed," he continued, "TISA would expand deregulatory 'trade' rules written under the advisement of large banks before the financial crisis, requiring domestic laws to conform to the now-rejected model of extreme deregulation that led to global recession."
Hellraiser Preview
Sherman, set the time machine for tomorrow's Hellraisers Journal which will feature a report on Day Nine of the Convention of Industrial Unionists. At long last the debate over Article I Section 2 is resolved and Big Bill Haywood looses his cool over charge of "parliamentary railroading!"
Tune in at 2pm!
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Is Revolution Coming? (w/ Chris Hedges)
Healthcare heals the sick. Better pay keeps them healthy in the first place
We tend to think that access to insurance and medical care is what makes people healthy – but both logic and evidence prove otherwise. The impact of medical intervention on the percentage of sick people in a given population is minor, because people don’t seek it out until they’re already unwell. Healthcare, for the most part, doesn’t prevent illness – it tries to fix it once it happens.
Everyone would be better off if patients’ ailments were prevented or addressed earlier: it would lower the number of sick people and, in turn, reduce medical spending.
Best estimates indicate that doctors, access to hospitals and insurance account for 20 to 30% (and certainly less than half) of how healthy we are. Recent studies have shown that the Massachusetts reforms of 2006 and an experimental Medicare expansion in Oregon in 2008 did little to either reduce spending or improve physical health. ...
The answers actually lie in socioeconomic and environmental policies that affect how people live and work, the real drivers of individual and collective well-being. These issues, generally outside the purview of “health policy”, must become central to it, and their impacts on health and healthcare spending should be routinely evaluated.
Social, economic, psychological, behavioral and environmental risk factors for health are quite unequally distributed in America. Disadvantaged socioeconomic groups and racial and ethnic minorities have greater exposure to and experience of almost all risk factors. And these disparities are generally getting larger. For some disadvantaged areas and people, life expectancy is actually declining, something largely without precedent in our – or any – wealthy nation. The greatest opportunity for making Americans healthier lies in improving access to education, income and better occupational and residential conditions.
As Bernie Sanders' popularity surges, Democrats question socialist label
As he surges in the polls, closing the gap on Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders is being taken increasingly seriously as a potential presidential candidate.
In a 10-minute interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday, Sanders – an independent senator from Vermont running for the Democratic nomination as a self-described “democratic socialist” – fended off tougher questions about that identification than he had previously been asked. ...
Prior to Sanders’ surge in the polls, the Missouri senator Claire McCaskill told MSNBC Clinton was going to win the nomination but that nonetheless, the media needed to apply similar scrutiny to Sanders as it did to other candidates.
“I think everybody wants a fight and I think they are not really giving the same scrutiny to Bernie Sanders that they’re giving certainly to Hillary Clinton and the other candidates,” McCaskill said, adding that she “very rarely” read that Sanders identified as a socialist.
“Any other candidate that has the numbers that Hillary Clinton had right now would be, you know, talked about as absolutely untouchable,” McCaskill said. “And all of a sudden, ‘Oh, Bernie, Bernie, Bernie.’ I think Bernie is too liberal to gather enough votes in this country to become president.”
In response, Sanders told Bloomberg: “I find it surprising that she says that the media doesn’t refer to me as a socialist. There’s no article that I’ve seen that doesn’t refer to me as a democratic socialist. I am.”
The Clinton Foundation Is A Conflicts-Of-Interest Machine
The Evening Greens
Thousands March in Toronto, Urge Canada to Turn Away From a Fossil Fuel Economy
Thousands of people filled the streets of Toronto on Sunday to call on Canada to shift its focus away from fossil fuels toward an economy that embraces renewable energy.
Labor unions, student groups, indigenous communities, and environmentalists joined forces for the Jobs, Justice and Climate march, which activists called the most diverse climate mobilization in Canadian history.
The rally was timed to bring attention to the cause ahead of this week's Climate Summit of the Americas in Toronto, this fall's Canadian federal election, and the highly-anticipated UN Paris climate talks in November, which aim to bring together world leaders in legally-binding climate change solutions.
Celebrities including Jane Fonda, environmentalist David Suzuki, and author Naomi Klein kicked off the rally in front of the Ontario provincial legislature.
Organizers said as many as 10,000 people participated in the event; police described the attendance as "large," but told VICE News they didn't do a head count.
Labor leaders said the march marked the first time the labor movement in Canada has allied with indigenous and environmental activists to combat climate change.
National Observer reports on March for Jobs, Justice, and the Climate in Toronto (July 5 2015)
Koch Industries spent €0.5m lobbying EU on environmental protection
An obscure entry on the EU’s voluntary transparency register shows that up to €750,000 (£533,049) may have been spent by Koch Industries, the largest private energy company in the US, on trying to influence EU policy. ...
The Koch’s lobbying in Europe, spotted by the blog DeSmog UK, has focused on “all initiatives on the areas of environmental protection, trade and internal market,” documents show.
Its lobby focus has been on a recast of the EU fertiliser regulation, called Reach, and EU free trade negotiations, which have been ongoing with the US and Canada. Other areas of interest to the firm listed on the register include: energy, climate action, environment, agriculture and rural development.
Jason Anderson, WWF’s head of European energy and climate policy, said that while the Koch brothers were “obviously the biggest problem case on climate change in the US”, any climate science-denying pitches would receive short shrift in Brussels.
This is an interesting article about the Obama administration's ongoing harrassment of the environmental movement worth reading in full:
Lawyer for environmental group 'interrogated repeatedly' at US border
Deanna Meyer lives on a sprawling 280-acre goat farm south of Boulder, Colorado. She’s been an activist most of her adult life and has recently been involved in a campaign to relocate a prairie dog colony threatened by the development of a shopping mall in Castle Rock.
In October of last year, an agent with the Department of Homeland Security showed up at her mother’s house and later called her, saying he was trying to “head off any injuries or killing of people that could happen by people you know”.
Meyer was one of more than a dozen environmental activists, many of them members of the environmental group Deep Green Resistance, contacted by the FBI, DHS, and state law enforcement investigators in late 2014. In one case they wanted to know if Deep Green Resistance was a front group for another organization involved in violent activity or sabotage.
Now, the activists’ lawyer, Larry Hildes, seems to have been swept up in the investigation himself. On several occasions, Hildes says, he has been detained at border crossings for lengthy interrogations and questioned about Meyer.
The story was first reported in January but, until now, members of Deep Green Resistance had not spoken publicly about the wave of visits, which began with a call to the parents of an activist in Clearwater, Florida, on 1 October. Eight members of Deep Green Resistance and two other activists not affiliated with the group who were contacted around the same time have since come forward to the Guardian.
The activists recounted a mix of FBI visits from October to December as agents showed up at their workplaces, their homes, and in some cases contacted their families seeking information about Deep Green Resistance and, in one case, asking a member if she was interested in “forming a liaison”. They were also purportedly interested in activist work surrounding the Keystone XL pipeline.
No plan B if Paris climate summit ends in failure, says EU climate chief
There is “no plan B” if the Paris climate conference ends in failure, Europe’s climate chief has warned, urging world leaders to intervene to force their ministers to agree a landmark deal this December.
In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, Miguel Cañete, commissioner for climate action, said he was very concerned about the lack of negotiating time remaining before the conference.
Cañete, who will lead the EU’s 28 member states in the talks, said that if governments did not reach agreement, there was “no plan B – nothing to follow. This is not just ongoing UN discussions. Paris is final.”
For it to be a success, he said, heads of government – most of whom are not expected to attend the talks in person – must urgently instruct their negotiating ministers to come forward with plans for a deal that would involve cutting emissions, rich countries providing the poor with financial assistance, and putting in place sweeping new measures to help poor nations adapt to the ravages of global warming.
Cañete said the EU would reject any deal he thought was not ambitious enough in cutting greenhouse gas emissions, a key sticking point in the talks. “For us, it’s very important to have a deal – but not any kind of deal.”
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin' Is On Hiatus
Amnesty International Responds to U.K. Government Surveillance
Greek referendum: optimism fades as eurozone says gulf has widened
Not just Detroit: residents of nearby Michigan city face $11,000 water bills
A year after the war, Gaza grieves for its child casualties
Still Waiting for USS Liberty’s Truth
A Revolutionary Pope Calls for Rethinking the Outdated Criteria That Rule the World
Hat tip Azazello:
Nuland’s NEMESIS – Will Greece, or won't Greece be destroyed to save her from Russia, like Ukraine?
Another shoe drops
A Little Night Music
Rufus Thomas - "Breakdown' & 'Funky Chicken'
Blues Brothers Band & Rufus Thomas - Walking the dog
Rufus Thomas - A Full & Funky Life
Rufus Thomas - Push and Pull
Rufus Thomas - Jump Back
Rufus Thomas - All Night Worker
Rufus Thomas - The Memphis Train
Rufus Thomas - Somebody Stole My Dog
Rufus Thomas on Memphis
Rufus Thomas - Turn Your Damper Down
Rufus Thomas - Sixty Minute Man
Rufus Thomas - Easy Livin' Plan
Rufus Thomas - Boogie Ain't Nuttin' (But Gettin' Down)
Rufus Thomas - Funky Robot (Parts I & II)
Rufus Thomas - Fried Chicken
Rufus Thomas - Can Your Monkey Do The Dog