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 delta blues piano player Pinetop Perkins. Enjoy!
Pinetop Perkins - Chicken Shack
“To sin by silence, when they should protest, makes cowards of men.”
-- Ella Wheeler Wilcox
News and Opinion
Perhaps the Senate could hold its own trial, but then again, they're a bunch of wimps.
U.S. prosecutors decline criminal probe in CIA-Senate dispute
U.S. prosecutors have declined to pursue criminal investigations into a heated dispute between Senate investigators and the Central Intelligence Agency over documents related to its use of "enhanced interrogation techniques," the U.S. Justice Department said on Thursday.
The CIA's inspector general and its general counsel had both asked the Justice Department to get involved amid accusations that Senate Intelligence Committee staffers inappropriately accessed the CIA documents, and that agency operatives improperly monitored the Senate investigators.
Prosecutors delivered letters to both CIA offices declining to pursue any charges on Wednesday, the Justice Department said.
"The department carefully reviewed the matters referred to us and did not find sufficient evidence to warrant a criminal investigation," DOJ spokesman Peter Carr said in a statement.
The CIA declined comment. Senator Dianne Feinstein, who chairs the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said she was pleased the Justice Department had decided not to open an investigation into committee staff.
"I believe this is the right decision and will allow the committee to focus on the upcoming release of its report on the CIA detention and interrogation program," Feinstein said.
Spied on for Being Muslim? NSA Targets Named in Snowden Leaks Respond to U.S. Gov’t Surveillance
James Clapper Issues Non-Denial Denial Of Greenwald's Story About Surveillance Of Muslim-Americans
Now that the report has actually come out, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has issued a statement that is more of the same. You will note, for instance, that it does not deny spying on the five named individuals -- only that it doesn't spy on people because of their political, religious or activist views:
It is entirely false that U.S. intelligence agencies conduct electronic surveillance of political, religious or activist figures solely because they disagree with public policies or criticize the government, or for exercising constitutional rights.
Unlike some other nations, the United States does not monitor anyone’s communications in order to suppress criticism or to put people at a disadvantage based on their ethnicity, race, gender, sexual orientation or religion.
Our intelligence agencies help protect America by collecting communications when they have a legitimate foreign intelligence or counterintelligence purpose.
Again, note the specific denial they're making. They're not denying they spied on these five individuals. They're claiming that if they spied on them, it wasn't because of their religion -- though the evidence presented in the Intercept article certainly rules out many other explanations. And, remember, it was just a week ago that it was revealed that the NSA, does, in fact, consider people interested in Tor or open source privacy to be extremists. So, while it may be technically true that these individuals weren't targeted because of their religion, it does seem fairly clear that the intelligence community has fairly low standards for what it takes to convince themselves that someone may be a threat.
[Further analysis at link. -js]
NSA's Muslim targets: Rights groups demand details
Don't be shocked that the US spied on American Muslims. Get angry that it justifies spying on whomever it wants
What do a Republican candidate, a military veteran, a civil rights activist and a professor have in common? They are all American Muslims – and all have been subject to pervasive surveillance by the NSA and FBI.
A report published by The Intercept on Wednesday reveals that the two agencies used secretive procedures designed to catch terrorists and spies to monitor the email accounts of prominent American Muslim leaders. Among the documents supplied by Edward Snowden, a spreadsheet titled "FISA recap" contains 7,485 email addresses apparently monitored between 2002 and 2008. (The report also clearly documents how biased training by the FBI leads to biased surveillance, and that calling Muslims "ragheads" is everyday lingo at federal law enforcement agencies.)
These revelations demonstrate that there are two sets of laws in the United States: one designed for dissidents, political activists and American Muslims – and another for everybody else. But nobody is safe when one group is singled out: if our government can simply decide with little or no oversight to monitor the personal email account of an American Muslim Republican military veteran, then it can decide to monitor any of our emails, too. That should strike fear into the heart of every American who values our freedoms.
While some may be surprised – even incredulous – that our government would pick surveillance targets with no evidence or reasonable suspicion, they shouldn't be. The United States has a long track record of targeting prominent US activists for their First Amendment-protected activities. The number of Americans subjected to surveillance over the past few decades includes Muhammad Ali, Reverend Martin Luther King Jr, and Washington Post columnist Art Buchwald. And let's not forget that Nobel peace prize winner Nelson Mandela was put on the terrorist watch list and on the no-fly list and that Congress had to pass legislation to get him removed – in 2008. Earlier this year, it was reported that the CIA spied on the Senate Intelligence Committee – the Congressional body charged with oversight of the agency.
With every new surveillance revelation, our government assures us that this was all "legal" – but "legal" does not always mean right or moral, and it is not the role of the executive branch or its law enforcement apparatus to determine what is legal.
Investigation Proves NSA Spies on Americans beyond Metadata Collection
DESVARIEUX: So, Kirk, I'm going to start off with you, because we've all known that the NSA was collecting metadata. But what makes this Washington Post investigation so significant?
WIEBE: Well, now we're talking about content. The original discussions were about metadata, which poses its own threat if collected in bulk over time. But we had been led to believe that content wasn't part of the equation unless properly targeted through a court of law. Well, now we know that's a complete lie. And so the implications of this are tremendous, because fully 90 percent of all the collection that was surveyed by The Washington Post was connected with people that are of no interest to the U.S. government.
Greenwald: Muslim-Americans Are Not the Only Targets of NSA Spying
Journalist Glenn Greenwald has made another pledge: He's not done exposing the U.S. government's spying secrets.
During an "Ask Me Anything" session on reddit, Greenwald and fellow journalist Murtaza Hussain said that Wednesday's story revealing that the National Security Agency and FBI have targeted prominent Muslim-Americans is not the end of their reporting on Edward Snowden's year-old leaks.
"I get in trouble every time I talk about our reporting before it's ready, but suffice to say: Muslims, while the prime target of post-9/11 abuses, are not the only ones targeted by them, and there is definitely more big reporting to come from the Snowden archive," the pair said in response to a question.
This is an awesome essay by Matt Stoller, it's well worth clicking the link to read it in full.
Aaron Swartz and 21st-Century Martyrdom
... But why is Swartz considered a martyr? Why did this sweet, intelligent, and highly capable individual die, and why did his death spark so much interest beyond the circle of people who knew him?
I think it has to do with the fact that Swartz was a moral outlier in American culture. He was an economic and political winner, and yet he took ethics more seriously than he did money. He was a millionaire, yet interned in Congress to learn the process of legislating—a tech genius who did not try to climb the greasy pole of Silicon Valley success. Swartz won the rat race and then decided he didn't want to be a rat. America frowns on this archetype, celebrating only a narrow form of success for men. Take [co-founder of] Tumblr’s [David] Karp, and compare him to Aaron. Karp and Aaron both grew up privileged, and both showed remarkable skill at organizing large numbers of people on the internet. But while Karp used his expertise to spy on people so that Yahoo could sell them things, Swartz used his expertise to make the world a better place. Karp was rewarded with money and fame while Swartz was rewarded with arrest. ...
After several years of being threatened and deceived, and after having spent his entire fortune on legal fees, Swartz hung himself on January 11, 2013. After he died, Heymann retreated from public comment. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for files on Swartz's case have been denied or heavily redacted. No one, not [federal prosecutor Stephen] Heymann or anyone else in the Justice Department, has been disciplined. A few months after Aaron's death, Heymann's boss Carmen Ortiz held a press conference on the Boston Marathon bombing, apparently intent on getting her political career back on track. MIT had its village elders, like computer scientist Hal Abelson, put out a disgraceful report concluding that the school had done nothing wrong. The White House, despite 50,000 signatures on its petition page seeking justice for Aaron, hasn't deigned to do anything. The absurd law used by Heymann to prosecute Swartz was never changed, the tweak apparently having been blocked by tech giants, who want to use it as a potential cudgel against ex-employees. Swartz's death, in other words, was followed by a mass campaign of CYA. ...
In an age of dramatic economic and political inequality, Swartz's death is proof that it does not matter how talented you are or how hard you work—American meritocracy is a sham. If Swartz, a rich tech genius with an unparalleled network of powerful friends and a remarkable track record of success, couldn't live an ethical, dignified life, then who can? Our contemporary culture is crippled by increasingly Soviet-style barriers against all who challenge the status quo. It has criminal statutes so broad that basically everyone is a lawbreaker, and selective prosecution has become a mechanism for ordering our politics. It demands deep moral compromise just to live with minimal interference from authority. It requires that, to be a 'success' like Karp, you must have not only the talent to build appealing social systems, but also the lack of a moral compass involved in using those social systems to manipulate others. The ethic of this approach is designed by those who fear only those risks associated with human freedom.
Berlin orders CIA chief out of country over US spying
Germany asks top US intelligence official to leave country over spy row
The German government has asked the top representative of America's secret services in Germany to leave the country. Members of the government's supervisory panel announced the measure at a press conference in Berlin this afternoon.
Clemens Binninger, a member of Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats, who chairs the committee that oversees the intelligence services, explained that the move came in response to America's "failure to cooperate on resolving various allegations, starting with the NSA and up to the latest incidents".
The move comes in response to two reported cases of suspected US espionage in Germany and the year-long spat over reported NSA spying in Germany, including claims that Merkel's phone was tapped.
A spokesperson for the CIA declined to comment on Germany's request when approached by the Guardian.
Merkel's spokesperson, Steffen Seibert, confirmed the decision in an official statement, which said: "The government takes these activities very seriously. It is essential and in the interest of the security of its citizens and its forces abroad for Germany to collaborate closely and trustfully with its western partners, especially the US.
"If you are Washington's enemy- it bombs and sanctions you, if an ally- it spies"
Digital Rights Groups Warn TPP Will Force 'Policing' of Internet Users
Over 65 tech companies, open Internet advocates and other organizations released two open letters to negotiators of the secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) on Wednesday, expressing their concern that the trade deal's approval will force websites to censor content and block Internet users.
The two letters have been signed by a wide range of organizations, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Creative Commons and Reddit.
In a statement on the letters, the EFF declared that "with no official means of participating in the negotiations, the global community of users and innovators who will be affected by these proposed changes have been limited to expressing their concerns through open letters to their political representatives and to the officials negotiating the agreement."
According to the same statement, the so-called intermediary liability proposals contained in the draft released by WikiLeaks would require websites "to adopt a facsimile of the DMCA to regulate the take-down of material hosted online, upon the mere allegation of copyright infringement by a claimed rights-holder."
As the letter (pdf) on intermediary liability proposals warns:
We are worried about language that would force service providers throughout the region to monitor and police their users' actions on the internet, pass on automated takedown notices, block websites and disconnect Internet users. Irresponsible rightsholders can burden intermediaries with many thousands of automated takedown requests every day, using systems that operate with little or no human oversight. These systems rely on a "takedown first and ask questions later" approach to pages and content alleged to breach copyright.
The second letter (pdf), which concerns the extension of copyright terms, points out that "almost all contemporary economists are in agreement" that the 20-year copyright term extension the United States enacted in 1998 "makes no sense." The letter warns that "the further extension of copyright term" to all of the nations involved in the TPP, as detailed in the leaked chapter, would be "costly, unnecessary, and could be very hard to reverse."
A FDL contributor, fairleft posted these quotes that he found in a
comment section of a CNN article:
On Gaza, Key Israelis Speak of Ethnic Cleansing and Mass Killing
‘Israel needs to conquer and thoroughly cleanse the Gaza Strip’
- Israeli FM Avigdor Liberman
‘The goal of the operation is to send Gaza back to the Middle Ages, only then will Israel be calm for the next 40 years.’
- Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai
‘There are no innocents in Gaza, don’t let any diplomats who want to look good in the world endanger your lives — mow them down!’
- Michael Ben-Ari
(Gaza has 1.6m people half children under 17yo)
‘We need to flatten entire neighborhoods in Gaza, Flatten all of Gaza. The Americans didn’t stop with Hiroshima — the Japanese weren’t surrendering fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki, too. There should be no electricity in Gaza, no gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing.’
- Gilad Sharon (son of the former Israeli Prime minister Ariel Sharon)
Palestinians say death toll over 70 as Israel pounds Gaza with air raids
The death toll in Gaza continued to rise on Thursday as Israel's strikes against Hamas intensified, while residents in Tel Aviv awoke to explosions as rockets were shot down over the city by the Iron Dome defence system.
Reports claimed that eight members of the same family – including five children – were killed in an air strike on two homes in Khan Younis, south of Gaza.
A spokesman for the Gazan health ministry told Palestinian media that no warning was given and that most of the dead were children. Ashraf al-Qidra said the total number of Palestinians killed over the past three days now stands at 77, with over 500 people injured in the tiny coastal strip. There have been no Israeli casualties from the hundreds of rockets that have been fired by militants in Gaza.
There are also claims that a missile was fired at a cafe in Khan Younis late on Wednesday night, where dozens were gathered to watch the World Cup game between Argentina and Holland – with six dead and 15 injured, according to AFP.
Protective Sledge: Gaza death toll over 75, Israel vows intensifying airstrikes
Obama Administration Endorses Israel's Assault on Gaza
The White House on Tuesday announced its backing of Israel's escalating air strikes on Gaza amid reports of a rising Palestinian death toll that now includes the killing of more than a dozen children. ...
Ramah Kudaimi of the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation told Common Dreams, "It is utterly shameful and incomprehensible that at a time that Israel is launching airstrikes on a population under siege and unable to escape, the White House would make it seem that it is justifiable in any sort of way."
Numerous reports show a heavy death toll for the over 1.7 million people who live in Gaza under a U.S.-backed military and economic siege, which has escalated since 2007, cutting off residents from public goods including clean water and medical supplies.
According to a Wednesday morning tweet from a Gaza Health Ministry official, at least 49 Palestinians have so far been killed and over 450 people injured during Israeli air strikes this week. At least 13 of the dead so far, reports indictate, are children 16-years-old or younger. This includes Mohammed Malakiyeh, just 18-months-old, who died alongside his mother. ...
The high death tolls are not new to Gaza, where safe places to take shelter during air raids are few and far between.
Israel's last major bombing of Gaza in November 2012 killed 158 Palestinians—33 of them children, according to Defence for Children International—Palestine. And Israel's 2008 - 2009 "Operation Cast Lead" attack on Gaza killed approximately 1,400 Palestinians, 352 of them children, the organization reports.
Israel Escalates: Says Gaza Goal Is Not Ceasefire
The UN Security Council held an emergency meeting on the escalating Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip today, but with the US standing in their way, no resolution is likely calling for a halt to the strikes.
Nor does Israel want one, and Israeli officials say that the goal is no longer a new ceasefire with Hamas. “We don’t want a ceasefire,” declared Israeli envoy Ron Prosor, saying rather “our goal is to dismantle Hamas’ rocket infrastructure.”
That’s a nebulous mission, and one that doesn’t seem particularly forwarded by bombing civilian homes, but reflects Israel’s comfort with escalating more and more, as the Hamas rocket fire, while a great talking point for hawks, is doing virtually no damage to Israel itself.
An excellent essay from the Israeli paper Haaretz, worth reading in full:
Israel does not want peace
The single most overwhelming item of evidence of Israel’s rejection of peace is, of course, the settlements project. From the dawn of its existence, there has never been a more reliable or more precise litmus test for Israel’s true intentions than this particular enterprise. In plain words: The builders of settlements want to consolidate the occupation, and those who want to consolidate the occupation do not want peace. That’s the whole story in a nutshell.
On the assumption that Israel’s decisions are rational, it is impossible to accept construction in the territories and the aspiration to peace as mutually coexisting. Every act of building in the settlements, every mobile home and every balcony, conveys rejection. If Israel had wanted to achieve peace through the Oslo Accords, it would at least have stopped the construction in the settlements at its own initiative. That this did not happen proves that Oslo was fraudulent, or at best the chronicle of a failure foretold. If Israel had wanted to achieve peace at Taba, at Camp David, at Sharm el-Sheikh, in Washington or in Jerusalem, its first move should have been to end all construction in the territories. Unconditionally. Without a quid pro quo. The fact that Israel did not is proof that it did not want a just peace.
But the settlements were only a touchstone of Israel’s intentions. Its rejectionism is embedded far more deeply – in its DNA, its bloodstream, its raison d’être, its most primal beliefs. There, at the deepest level, lies the concept that this land is destined for the Jews alone. There, at the deepest level, is entrenched the value of “am sgula” – God’s “treasured people” – and “God chose us.” In practice, this is translated to mean that, in this land, Jews are allowed to do what is forbidden to others. That is the point of departure, and there is no way to get from there to a just peace. There is no way to reach a just peace when the name of the game is the dehumanization of the Palestinians. No way to achieve peace when the demonization of the Palestinians is hammered into people’s heads day after day. Those who are convinced that every Palestinian is a suspicious person and that every Palestinian wants “to throw the Jews into the sea” will never make peace with the Palestinians. Most Israelis are convinced of the truth of both those statements. ...
The only country on the planet with no borders is so far unwilling to delineate even the compromise borders it is ready to be satisfied with. Israel has not internalized the fact that, for the Palestinians, the borders of 1967 are the mother of all compromises, the red line of justice (or relative justice). For the Israelis, they are “suicide borders.” This is why the preservation of the status quo has become the true Israeli aim, the primary goal of Israeli policy, almost its be-all and end-all. The problem is that the existing situation cannot last forever. Historically, few nations have ever agreed to live under occupation without resistance. ... The only way the besieged Gaza Strip can remind people of its existence is by firing rockets, and the West Bank only gets onto the agenda these days when blood is shed there. Similarly, the viewpoint of the international community is only taken into account when it tries to impose boycotts and sanctions, which in their turn immediately generate a campaign of self-victimization studded with blunt – and at times also impertinent – historical accusations.
Very interesting, lots of details in the full article worth attending to:
IDF's Gaza assault is to control Palestinian gas, avert Israeli energy crisis
Yesterday, Israeli defence minister and former Israeli Defence Force (IDF) chief of staff Moshe Ya'alon announced that Operation Protective Edge marks the beginning of a protracted assault on Hamas. The operation "won't end in just a few days," he said, adding that "we are preparing to expand the operation by all means standing at our disposal so as to continue striking Hamas."
This morning, he said:
"We continue with strikes that draw a very heavy price from Hamas. We are destroying weapons, terror infrastructures, command and control systems, Hamas institutions, regime buildings, the houses of terrorists, and killing terrorists of various ranks of command… The campaign against Hamas will expand in the coming days, and the price the organization will pay will be very heavy."
But in 2007, a year before Operation Cast Lead, Ya'alon's concerns focused on the 1.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas discovered in 2000 off the Gaza coast, valued at $4 billion. Ya'alon dismissed the notion that "Gaza gas can be a key driver of an economically more viable Palestinian state" as "misguided." The problem, he said, is that:
"Proceeds of a Palestinian gas sale to Israel would likely not trickle down to help an impoverished Palestinian public. Rather, based on Israel's past experience, the proceeds will likely serve to fund further terror attacks against Israel…
A gas transaction with the Palestinian Authority [PA] will, by definition, involve Hamas. Hamas will either benefit from the royalties or it will sabotage the project and launch attacks against Fatah, the gas installations, Israel – or all three… It is clear that without an overall military operation to uproot Hamas control of Gaza, no drilling work can take place without the consent of the radical Islamic movement."
Operation Cast Lead did not succeed in uprooting Hamas, but the conflict did take the lives of 1,387 Palestinians (773 of whom were civilians) and 9 Israelis (3 of whom were civilians).
Since the discovery of oil and gas in the Occupied Territories, resource competition has increasingly been at the heart of the conflict, motivated largely by Israel's increasing domestic energy woes.
Mark Turner, founder of the Research Journalism Initiative, reported that the siege of Gaza and ensuing military pressure was designed to "eliminate" Hamas as "a viable political entity in Gaza" to generate a "political climate" conducive to a gas deal. This involved rehabilitating the defeated Fatah as the dominant political player in the West Bank, and "leveraging political tensions between the two parties, arming forces loyal to Abbas and the selective resumption of financial aid."
Maliki Claims Kurds ‘Sheltering ISIS in Arbil’
Today, Maliki claimed the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) was directly aiding ISIS with its takeover of western Iraq, and that the Kurdish capital city of Arbil has become an “operations base” for ISIS.
The claim is absurd, as the KRG’s Peshmerga fighters have been clashing intermittently with ISIS, and the US has set up an operations base of its own in Arbil, and it surely would’ve noticed if ISIS had beaten them there.
The Maliki allegations rather seem a continuation of his go-to strategy of trying to portray any political rivals as in league with terrorists. Similar efforts chased most Sunni politicians out of his previous government, and in the case of Vice President Tareq Hashemi, into exile.
Ukraine and pro-Russian rebels square up for showdown
The Ukrainian authorities and pro-Russian rebels are squaring up for a final showdown in the east of the country, as Kiev aims to win back control of the key regional centres of Donetsk and Luhansk.
Rebel groups have gathered in the big cities after abandoning a number of smaller strongholds, now taken back by the Ukrainian army. Without Russian help they face almost certain defeat, but with civilian casualties inevitable if Ukrainian forces attempt to fight their way into the city centres, the Kremlin and some European leaders are calling for a resumption of a ceasefire in the troubled region.
On Wednesday evening, a convoy of more than 100 armoured personnel carriers, tanks and multiple rocket launchers was seen advancing towards the region's administrative capital, Donetsk. Coming off the highway and ploughing through sunflower fields and village back roads, the upbeat troops – who declined to say which battalion of pro-Kiev forces they belonged to – said they were advancing toward rebel positions and were ready to battle with the pro-Russian fighters holding the nearby city until the very end.
By nightfall the Ukrainian forces were just 10 miles south of the city, bringing the two sides within artillery range of each other.
Upcoming Siege? Self-defense forces prepare for worst in Donetsk, Lugansk
Ukraine readies plan against rebels
Ukrainian forces regained more ground but sustained further casualties on Thursday in clashes with separatists, while two Western allies urged Russia's Vladimir Putin to exert more pressure on the rebels to find a negotiated end to the conflict.
Government forces have recently gained the upper hand in the three-month conflict against separatists in the Russian-speaking eastern regions in which more than 200 government troops have been killed as well as hundreds of civilians and rebel fighters. ...
In a further success, military spokesman Vladyslav Seleznyov said government forces on Thursday re-took the town of Siversk, east of Slaviansk, when separatists fled. ...
But casualties mounted on the Ukrainian side with the deaths of three more soldiers in two attacks on Wednesday night in different parts of the east, the military said.
One was killed in an ambush of an army convoy near Luhansk. Two others died when an armoured personnel carrier was blown up by a landmine in the village of Chervona Zorya near Donetsk.
Greek Privatization of Key Sectors Meets Strong Opposition
Efforts to sell off state-owned water and power infrastructure has provoked public anger
ATHENS - Plans by the Greek government to sell companies that handle the key resources of energy and water face serious obstacles and its policy to offer investors exceptional privileges in an effort to boost interest in privatisation is coming under strong pressure.
Privatisation is one of the ‘prerequisites’ of the Troika – the tripartite committee led by the European Commission with the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund – in exchange for additional bailout money that Greece is seeking to continue to avoid insolvency.
The Greek government recently announced plans to sell a 30 percent share of its Public Power Corporation (PPC), and create a new ‘Small PPC’, which will be sold to private investors.
The new company will take with it some key production sites, lignite mines, and hydroelectric and natural gas units. In addition, about two million customers will be transferred from the original company and will be obliged to receive services from the new company for six months.
The plan has caused strong reactions in north-western Greek cities where communities depend heavily on employment created by PPC mines and electricity production plants. PPC unions decided to take strike action to protest the privatisation plans, but these were declared illegal. ... Kriton Arsenis, an independent Member of the European Parliament, has asked the European Commission whether obliging customers to receive services from the company constitutes an illegal state subsidy. In response, European Commissioner for Energy Gunther Oettinger said that the Commission “does not have adequate information to deliberate on whether this constitutes illegal state subsidy”. ...
Plans to privatise water utilities stalled last month after the Supreme Court considered privatisation of the Athens Water Supply and Sewerage Company (EYDAP) unconstitutional.
Obama, Inequality and Wall Street Donors
The Washington Post's Zachary Goldfarb reported on July 4 that Barack Obama has stopped talking much about inequality. But instead of explaining why this is happening, the Post frames the issue as a debate between left-leaning populists and "moderate" Democrats trying to avoid "class warfare." ...
But the piece offers no real evidence that people, and Democrats in particular, are less concerned with inequality or measures that might fight it. This isn't the first time media have warned Democrats about going "too far" with economic populism. Earlier this year–when Obama evidently starting talking more about inequality–the Associated Press warned that this "put him at risk of being perceived as divisive and exposed him to criticism that his rhetoric was exploiting the gap between haves and have-nots." ...
So what could explain the White House shift away from issues that could be quite popular with voters in an election year? The Post doesn't look for explanations, but a few days later, a piece in the New York Times offered some clues. That article was focused on Hillary Clinton's close relationship to Wall Street and how this affects her possible presidential run.
But there are more immediate concerns, and some of them are unrelated to Clinton. To put it simply, the Wall Street donor class is not happy with Democrats talking about inequality:
As Democrats debate whether to get tougher on Wall Street, the industry appears to have taken notice. Securities and investment firm employees have given a smaller proportion of their political donations to Democrats over the last three years than any period for which data is available, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
'Escalating Resistance' in Detroit as Residents Block Water Shut-Offs
Detroit residents on Thursday launched a direct action to halt the city's mass shut-off of water to thousands of households, physically blocking a private corporation from turning off the tap.
Carrying a banner that read "Stop the Water Shut-offs," ten city residents nonviolently obstructed the entrance to Homrich Inc.—the private company that was handed a $5.6 million deal from the city to shut off water services to residences that are behind on their bills, according to the protest organizers. They were surrounded during the civil disobedience by a crowd of over 40 supporters chanting "If the water don't flow, the trucks don't go."
The protesters held the entrance for more than an hour and a half before all ten were arrested, Bill Wylie-Kellermann, a Detroit pastor who was among the arrestees, told Common Dreams. "We feel that it's really time to intensify and escalate the resistance to the water shutoffs and emergency management," Wylie-Kellermann declared.
The Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) announced in June that it is escalating its disconnections of water services to residences that have fallen behind on their bills to 3,000 a month. In a city devastated by unemployment and foreclosure crises, nearly half of all residents are unable to pay, and the city's continual increase in water rates is not helping. Thousands of people have already had their water turned off, including many who were disconnected long before this June escalation, and tens of thousands more are next.
Americans Have Spent Enough Money On A Broken Plane To Buy Every Homeless Person A Mansion
Just days before its international debut at an airshow in the United Kingdom, the entire fleet of the Pentagon’s next generation fighter plane — known as the F-35 II Lightning, or the Joint Strike Fighter — has been grounded, highlighting just what a boondoggle the project has been. With the vast amounts spent so far on the aircraft, the United States could have worked wonders, including providing every homeless person in the U.S. a $600,000 home. ...
[T]he Joint Strike Fighter program has been a mess almost since its inception, with massive cost overruns leading to its current acquisition price-tag of $398.6 billion — an increase of $7.4 billion since last year. That breaks down to costing about $49 billion per year since work began in 2006 and the project is seven years behind schedule. Over its life-cycle, estimated at about 55 years, operating and maintaining the F-35 fleet will cost the U.S. a little over $1 trillion. By contrast, the entirety of the Manhattan Project — which created the nuclear bomb from scratch — cost about $55 billion in today’s dollars. ...
On any given night in 2013, the Department of Health and Human Services concluded, there were an estimated 600,000 homeless Americans living on the streets. Numerous studies, however, have showed that rather than putting money into temporary shelters or incarceration, communities have saved millions of dollars by investing in permanent homes for the homeless. A recent report showed that in one Florida community, it cost taxpayers an estimated $30,000 to take the homeless off the streets through traditional methods, but only around $10,000 per person to give them permanent housing and provide job training and other support. Expanding that concept to the Federal level, even taking into account things like varying real estate prices around the country, it’s possible that $7.4 billion would be more than enough to start a program nationwide. With the full amount spent on the F-35 at its disposal, the U.S. could afford to purchase every person on the streets a $664,000 home.
The Evening Greens
Wow! Justice has been done here! I bet the owners of Freedom Industries and all of the polluters of West Virginia coal country are laughing their asses off.
OSHA fines Freedom Industries $11,000 for chemical spill
CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Federal labor regulators recently fined Freedom Industries $11,000 for “serious” violations of health and safety laws related to the January chemical leak.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration cited Freedom for not having a “liquid tight” wall surrounding the leaking tank at the Freedom site along the Elk River. OSHA fined Freedom $7,000 for the violation, according to the citation issued July 3.
It also fined Freedom $4,000 for not having “standard railings” on an elevated platform used to cross over the secondary containment wall, according to the citation.
State officials discovered thousands of gallons of MCHM and other chemicals leaking Jan. 9 from a tank at Freedom’s Etowah River Terminal. Some 10,000 gallons seeped under and through visible holes in the concrete wall meant to serve as an emergency barrier in the event of a leak or spill.
An unknown amount entered the Elk River and contaminated the local water treatment facility, sending tainted water to roughly 300,000 people for weeks.
Oil Companies Gambling Billions of Dollars Ignoring Global Warming Realities
Companies like Shell Oil really need to give their eyes a rub and see that a world with serious constraints on greenhouse gas emissions is not a possible future, but an eventual reality.
Right now, oil companies are investing billions in long term plays in very carbon intensive fuels, like Canada's oil sands, while at the same time there are more and more signs that strict regulations on such operations are on the near horizon.
You don't need to look much further than the years of delays on the Keystone XL pipeline to see that governments are starting to second guess these big cash layouts on climate-risky projects.
Or take for instance, the federal court ruling last week that halted a proposed coal mining operation in Colorado stating that the “social costs” of contributions the mine would make to worsening impacts of climate change in the future were not taken into consideration.
This ruling on the grounds of future social costs should be a 'canary in the coal mine' wake-up call for companies still considering investing big dollars in long-term carbon-intensive projects.
When you consider the scale of something like Shell's planned $5.4 billion investment in the expansion of their Jackpine oil sands operations, you start to see just how much money is being laid out on these risky plays.
BBC Pulls The Plug On Climate Change Deniers
Corporate-controlled media outlets have figured out that debate, or more appropriately heated debate and confrontation, can generate larger audiences than a bunch of people sitting around a table agreeing with one another. And this can work for some topics, such as the best way to tackle immigration reform or how to reduce the federal budget deficit.
But when faced with an issue that clearly only has one side, the corporate media continues to parade anti-reality talking heads into their studios, hoping that they can help boost ratings. That is what has happened with the issue of climate change.
The American media have not been the only guilty parties. Media outlets in other parts of the world have been just as willing to put climate change deniers on television to spread misinformation about an issue that will effect the lives of all of earth’s inhabitants.
But unlike the American media, outlets in the rest of the world have realized that the issue of climate change is far too important to allow deniers on their networks to attack the scientific consensus with no actual evidence.
This month, the BBC instructed its reporters to stop giving credence to climate change deniers on the air. The network said that they do want to remain neutral on scientific issues, but that there is a very real distinction between neutrality and false balance. ...
American media outlets, on the other hand, not only tolerate anti-science viewpoints, but embrace them. A recent report by the Union of Concerned Scientists showed that cable news giants CNN and Fox News reported incorrect information about climate change in 33% and 72% of their coverage of the issue, respectively.
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin' Is On Hiatus
Hat tip 3Goldens for this excellent essay:
The Disloyal
One of the Muslims targeted by NSA because of his religion, responds:
I Am A Muslim-American Leader, and the NSA Spied On Me
A Little Night Music
Pinetop Perkins and LA Jones - Got My Mojo Working
Pinetop Perkins - How Long Blues
Pinetop Perkins - Pinetop's Boogie-Woogie
Muddy Waters + Pinetop Perkins - Champagne and Reefer, Blow Wind Blow (live)
Muddy Waters And Pinetop Perkins - Hoochie Coochie Man, They Call Me Muddy Waters
Pinetop Perkins + Clifford Antone - Big Fat Mama, You Got Me Dizzy
Pinetop Perkins noodling around in Clarksdale Mississippi 2009
Pinetop Perkins and LA Jones - Caledonia
Pinetop Perkins - After Hours
Pinetop Perkins - Lend Me Your Love
Pinetop Perkins & Ruth Brown - Chains of Love
John Brim & Pinetop Perkins - Driving Wheel
Got a half an hour? Here's a live set of Pinetop with a line up of his bandmates fromt the Muddy Waters band at the King Biscuit Blues Festival in Helena, Arkansas:
Pinetop Perkins Plays Helena - Chicken Shack, Kansas City, Down In Mississippi, Grindin' Man, Just A Little Bit, Mojo Workin'
It's National Pie Day!
The election is over, it's a new year and it's time to work on real change in new ways... and it's National Pie Day. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to tell you a little more about our new site and to start getting people signed up.
Come on over and sign up so that we can send you announcements about the site, the launch, and information about participating in our public beta testing.
Why is National Pie Day the perfect opportunity to tell you more about us? Well you'll see why very soon. So what are you waiting for?! Head on over now and be one of the first!
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