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 Chicago blues guitarist, singer and songwriter John Brim. Enjoy!
John Brim - Ice Cream Man
"Those who fight corruption should be clean themselves."
-- Vladimir Putin
News and Opinion
US Corruption vs. World Corruption
One of the most hilarious things to me is Americans whacking other countries for being corrupt. Russia is a favorite target, but the US abuses virtually every non-Western country for “corruption.”
There is no more corrupt country in the world than the US. The bank bailouts were pure corruption, performed even though a supermajority of the population was against them, even though the banks had broken the law systematically, and even though the banks were bankrupt due to decisions they knew were corrupt, illegal, and (yes), stupid.
The US election system is flagrantly corrupt, with billions of dollars of direct and indirect donations from the rich. ... The regulatory class is completely owned. There is a revolving door between Wall Street and the Treasury and Federal Reserve, for example, and Wall Street pays far better. When senior officials leave, they get jobs from those whom they regulated, or give speeches for six figures a pop. Politicians are treated the same, receiving lobbying jobs worth six to seven figures, board positions, and so on.
This is all legal, but it is corruption. ...
What is unique about America is not its corruption, many countries are corrupt, it is the sheer hypocrisy the pretense that America is not corrupt, because Americans have made their corruption legal.
You want corruption back to reasonable levels? You want it illegal again? Take the oligarchs’ wealth away from them and break the great monopolistic and oligopolistic companies or bridle them with uncorrupted regulators who will crawl up their backside and tax the hell out of them.
You want you country back, and your children and yourselves to have a future?
It’s you or them. So far Americans keep choosing them.
Barry Ritholtz lets the banksters have it with both barrels, this article is worthy of a full read.
Who Really Benefits From Bailouts?
I always find it amusing whenever someone expresses surprise that the financial bailouts for Greece haven't benefited Greek citizens. "Bailout Money Goes to Greece, Only to Flow Out Again" in the New York Times is just the latest example. "The cash exodus is a small piece of a bigger puzzle over why — despite two major international bailouts — the Greek economy is in worse shape and more deeply in debt."
Unfortunately, this is a feature of bailout, not a bug.
A plethora of financial rescues during the past decades has proven quite convincingly that this isn't an aberration. Follow the money instead of following the headlines. That's how you learn who profits from a bailout.
Look around the world -- Japan, Sweden, Brazil, Mexico, Ireland, the U.S. and now Greece to learn who is and isn't helped by these enormous government-backed bailouts. No, it isn't the Greek people, nor even their banks. They never were the intended beneficiaries of the bailouts, nor were Irish citizens in that bailout. ... You probably learned the phrase "moral hazard" during the financial crisis. In short, what it means is that the bailouts rescued leveraged, reckless speculators from the results of their unwise professional folly and gave them an incentive to do it all over again. They were and the intended rescuees. ...
Which brings us back to Greece.
Its leaders never learned the lesson that Ireland eventually figured out and tiny Iceland understood from the start. The phrase systemic risk is nothing more than code; what it actually means is that a politically connected banker wants the government to cover losses on bad investments.
In the case of Greece, the money flows in large part from European governments and the International Monetary Fund through Greece, and then to various private-sector lenders. We all call it a Greek bailout, because if it were called the "Rescue of German bankers from the results of their Athenian lending folly," who would support it?
Obama Administration Celebrates its Arming of the Egyptian Regime With a YouTube Video
The Egyptian regime run by the despotic General Abdelfattah al-Sisi is one of the world’s most brutal and repressive. Last year, Human Rights Watch documented that that Egyptian “security forces have carried out mass arrests and torture that harken back to the darkest days of former President Hosni Mubarak’s rule.” Just two months ago, the group warned that the abuses have “escalated,” and that Sisi, “governing by decree in the absence of an elected parliament, ha[s] provided near total impunity for security force abuses and issued a raft of laws that severely curtailed civil and political rights, effectively erasing the human rights gains of the 2011 uprising that ousted the longtime ruler Hosni Mubarak.”
Despite that repression – or, more accurately, because of it – the Obama administration has lavished the regime with aid, money and weapons, just as the U.S. Government did for decades in order to prop up Hosni Mubarak. When Sisi took power in a coup, not only did the U.S. Government support him but it praised him for restoring “democracy.” Since then, the U.S. has repeatedly sent arms and money to the regime as its abuses became more severe. As The New York Times delicately put it yesterday, “American officials . . . signaled that they would not let their concerns with human rights stand in the way of increased security cooperation with Egypt.” ...
The Leader of the Free World’s long and clear history of lavishing the world’s most repressive regimes with money and weapons is usually carried out with a bit of stealth, so that its inspiring, self-flattering rhetoric about Supporting Freedom and Democracy – used to justify invasions and other forms of imperial domination – will be credible to its domestic media and population (even if to nobody else in the world). But this week, the U.S. Government not only proudly touted its sending of weapons to the Cairo regime, but published a video celebrating it.
“I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family.”
-- Hillary Clinton
Just about everything that you need to know about the United States' commitment to world peace is subsumed in the fact that the Obama-appointed chairman of the United States Institute of Peace gets six-figure paychecks from his gig as a board member of the war industry, Raytheon. If you need an irony supplement, click the link and read the whole thing.
Institute of Peace’s Hawkish Chairman Wants Ukraine to Send Russians Back in Body Bags
The United States Institute of Peace is a publicly funded national institution chartered by the U.S. government to promote international peace through nonviolent conflict resolution.
But its chairman, Stephen Hadley, is a relentless hawk whose advocacy for greater military intervention often dovetails closely with the interests of Raytheon, a major defense contractor that pays him handsomely as a member of its board of directors.
Hadley, the former national security adviser to President George W. Bush, was an advocate for the 2003 invasion of Iraq and more recently appeared in the media to call for massive airstrikes in Syria. Over the last year, he has called for escalating the conflict in Ukraine.
In a speech at Poland’s Wroclaw Global Forum in June, Hadley argued in favor of arming the Ukrainian government in part because that would “raise the cost for what Russia is doing in Ukraine.” Specifically, he said, “even President Putin is sensitive to body bags — it sounds coarse to say, but it’s true — but body bags of Russian soldiers who have been killed.” ...
Kevin Connor, director of the Public Accountability Initiative, a watchdog group that has criticized Hadley’s work for Raytheon in the past, is calling for Hadley to step aside.
“If the U.S. Institute of Peace is just an Orwellian absurdity, then Hadley is an appropriate chairman,” says Connor. “If it wants to demonstrate that it isn’t that, Hadley’s resignation or removal would be a step in the right direction.”
War President Obama Authorizes Ongoing Airstrikes Against Syria
Escalation increases chances of direct military clashes between U.S. military and President Bashar al-Assad
President Barack Obama has authorized the use of airstrikes against targets inside Syria in order to defend Western-backed fighters now operating on the ground, according to administration officials who spoke with journalists off the record over the weekend and later confirmed by the Pentagon.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the new authorization was approved Friday in order to defend "a new U.S.-backed fighting force in Syria if it is attacked by Syrian government forces or other groups" and now raises "the risk of the American military coming into direct conflict with the regime of President Bashar al-Assad."
Citing a U.S. defense official, Bloomberg reports that Obama's authorization was quickly followed by airstrikes in Northern Syria against the al-Nusrah Front, an al-Qaeda offshoot, which was attacking U.S-backed fighters—thought to be a militia called "Division 30"—whose purported goal is to defeat Islamic State. The U.S. provided close air support to protect the rebels and quash the attack, the official said.
Obama authorizes airstrikes on Assad troops
US-Trained Syrian Rebels Routed by al-Qaeda, Flee Into Kurdish Territory
In the past week, reports have emerged of al-Qaeda’s Syrian faction, Jabhat al-Nusra, capturing a number of top members of the US-trained “Division 30,” also known as the “New Syrian Force.” The group is now reported to have been routed outright from its headquarters in northern Syria, and had to flee into Kurdish territory.
Reports have varied on how many of the NSF fighters al-Qaeda has captured and killed, with early reports suggesting it could be as many as 18. That’s a lot, since the US only managed to train 54 of them in the long-term effort. More may have been killed in the recent fighting too.
Obama's deal with Turkey is a betrayal of Syrian Kurds and may not even weaken Isis
The deal between the US and Turkey which will allow American bombers to use Incirlik airbase while Turkey takes action against Islamic State (Isis) looks stranger and stranger. When first announced over a week ago, US officials spoke triumphantly of the agreement being “a game-changer” in the war against Isis. In fact, the war waged by Turkey in the days since this great American diplomatic success has been almost entirely against the Kurds, at home and abroad. ...
At the time of writing, US aircraft have not started using Incirlik and the reason is that Turkey does not want US aircraft using it to launch air strikes in support of the Syrian Kurds who have hitherto been America’s most effective military allies against Isis in Syria. ... Turkey is now demanding that US planes based at Incirlik not be used in support of the PYD/YPG because they are the Syrian branch of the PKK which Turkey is busy trying to destroy with its own air campaign. But US bombing in Syria has mostly been in support of the YPG in the north-east of the country and against Isis-held oil and gas fields in other provinces.
Even if this dispute is ultimately resolved, it highlights the contradiction at the heart of US policy: Washington is teaming up with a Turkish government whose prime objective in Syria is to prevent the further expansion of PYD/YPG territory which already extends along 250 miles of the 550-mile-long Syrian-Turkish border. In brief, Ankara’s objective is the precise opposite of Washington’s and little different from that of Isis, which has been battling on the ground to hold back the PYD/YPG advance. ...
In terms of the stability of the region President Barack Obama may turn out to have made a poor deal with Turkey. It will not be a killer blow to Isis and may not even weaken it, but it will hit the Kurds who have been IS’s most resolute opponents. It will spread the violence stemming from the civil wars in Iraq and Syria into Turkey. And it will rekindle a Kurdish-Turkish civil war that had long been on the wane.
The game may have changed but peace is even further away.
Hundreds of Civilians Reported Killed in First Year of Coalition Airstrikes
A six-month investigation into alleged civilian and ‘friendly fire’ deaths from Coalition airstrikes in Iraq and Syria has identified more than 120 incidents of concern to June 30th according to an Airwars report published today – three times more problem events than the Coalition itself was aware of.
Airwars believes that for 57 of these incidents, there is sufficient publicly-available evidence to indicate Coalition responsibility for civilian and friendly forces deaths. Between them these events account for 459-591 alleged civilian fatalities, and the reported deaths of 48-80 allied forces.
In stark contrast, the Coalition has investigated just ten incidents – and has so far conceded just two civilian deaths in thousands of airstrikes across Iraq and Syria since August 2014.
Airwars is publishing its own full findings online, with detailed descriptions of each event and links to every known source. The database features hundreds of photographs and videos, along with the names of more than 260 alleged victims.
Turkey Is Denying Entry to Bodies of YPG Fighters Killed Fighting IS
Turkey is refusing to allow the remains of a dozen of its citizens who were killed battling Islamic State (IS) in Syria to return home, say local officials and family members. The dead were members of Kurdish militant groups and have seemingly been affected by a change in border policy that comes as Ankara cracks down on its own Kurdish population.
The 12 bodies, plus that of a German citizen also killed fighting IS, have been in the back of a refrigerated truck on the Iraqi side of the Habur border crossing near the southeastern town of Silopi since July 27, in temperatures of over 110 degrees Fahrenheit. All were fighting as part of the US-backed Syrian People's Protection Units (YPG), although two had links with Turkey's banned Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).
Turks killed while with the YPG in the past have typically been returned to their families via the same route and bereaved relatives gathered in Silopi to collect their dead. But despite their pleas and campaigning by local officials, border guards have refused to allow the truck to pass, citing orders from the local governor's office and directly from Ankara. ...
In the past, YPG casualties had been repatriated to Turkey with no issues, Salih Gulenc, co-chair of the Kurdish Democratic Regions Party (DBP)'s Sirnak province branch told VICE News. The dead were typically taken to Silopi for autopsy then released to their families. This last happened on July 15, he said.
Gulenc added that authorities at the border told them the decision not to allow the 13 to pass came from the prime minister's office in Ankara, and that Sirnak governor Ali Ihsan Su would not acknowledge their repeated attempts to make contact.
From 9/11 to Mass Surveillance, The Man Who Knew Too Much - Thomas Drake
The empire strikes back:
Anti-torture reforms opposed within psychology group after damning report
Opposition is building to intended anti-torture reforms within the largest professional organization of psychologists in the US, which faces a crossroads over what a recent report described as its past support for brutal military and CIA interrogations.
Before the American Psychological Association (APA) meets in Toronto next Thursday for what all expect will be a fraught convention that reckons with an independent review that last month found the APA complicit in torture, former military voices within the profession are urging the organization not to participate in what they describe as a witch hunt.
Reformers consider the pushback to represent entrenched opposition to cleaving the APA from a decade’s worth of professional cooperation with controversial detentions and interrogations. The APA listserv has become a key debating forum, with tempers rising on both sides.
John Crawford's death still under review one year after fatal police shooting
A year after John Crawford III, a 22-year-old black man, was killed by a white police officer while carrying an air rifle in an Ohio Walmart, a federal review of the case remains unfinished. As the region grapples with the aftermath of a different deadly police shooting, Crawford’s relatives plan an anniversary vigil to keep his case in the news.
Crawford III was shot on 5 August 2014, in suburban Dayton, after a 911 caller reported seeing someone at the store waving a gun. A local grand jury concluded the shooting was justified, but his family contends he was shot without a chance to respond to police.
This week, attention again turned to southwest Ohio after a now-fired University of Cincinnati police officer who shot an African American man, Samuel DuBose, during a traffic stop pleaded not guilty to murder.
“It does not appear that anything has changed for the better in this past year – that we’re still having a lot of police-involved shootings of young black men,” said Michael Wright, an attorney for the Crawford family.
Keiser Report: The Precariat - The Dangerous New Class
As Chinese shares fall, the real fear is that the economy itself is grinding to a halt
In China, the Shanghai Composite Index lost more than 8% of its value last Monday, and shares have suffered their worst month for six years, falling by 29% since they peaked in June.
America’s great crash, and the policy failures that compounded its effects, helped to trigger the great depression. Partly because of the lessons learned then and since, few analysts believe China is heading for an economic downturn on that scale. But there are growing concerns about what the stock price rollercoaster reveals about the health of the world’s second largest economy. ...
Robert Shapiro, a former economic adviser to Bill Clinton, who now works at US consultancy Sonecon, says: “The Chinese leadership have had a fundamental policy of driving growth sufficiently great to generate employment for about 10 million people a year. The main way they’ve done this is through public investment, or semi-public investment. A lot of these projects are now going bust, because there’s nobody to purchase the apartments, and there are no businesses to rent the offices.” He says the market chaos is partly a direct result of this phenomenon, as shares in construction and property firms are hit. ...
Officially, Chinese GDP is still expanding at a healthy rate, in line with the government’s target of 7% a year – which would already be the slowest pace since 1990. But there are questions about the reliability of official figures. China-watchers at City consultancy Fathom compile their own “China momentum index”, based on a number of metrics, including electricity usage and industrial production, and they argue that growth has slowed sharply, to perhaps 3%. ...
The country’s slowdown is unfolding at a fragile moment for the global economy, with the eurozone crisis far from resolved and the Federal Reserve preparing to increase interest rates for the first time since the global financial crisis.
The Anti-Capitalist Greek Left Says No to Austerity and Bailouts
Hat tip jayraye:
Ethiopian wages at $21 a month have US corporations excited
Back in December 2011, Hilary Clinton visited Myanmar in the wake of the military dictatorship’s introduction of reforms. Ms. Clinton was accompanied on that visit by corporate leaders looking for lucrative investment opportunities and cheap labor. Military dictatorship’s can be a bit too unstable for investors looking for profits sometimes, but with a firm grip on dissent and unions they can be good business partners.
US president Barack Obama has just finished a 5-day visit to East Africa with the same goal in mind. “Africa is the final frontier in the global rag trade—the last untapped continent with cheap and plentiful labor,” the Wall Street Journal wrote prior to Obama’s exploratory mission. What with Chinese workers waging successful struggles for higher wages and the Cambodians following suite, Africans are in the sights of the garment industry investors.
Even the poverty stricken garment workers in Bangladesh who earn at least $67 a month are too expensive for the likes of WalMart and other Western retailers. PVH, the parent company of Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger and VF, parent company of brands that include Wrangler, Lee and Timberland, are looking to descend on Africa like vultures on a dying animal. JC Penney and Levi Strauss have been moving production to Africa as well. Ethiopia is a particularly attractive location as economic growth has been pleasing Wall Street and the country has no minimum wage. Ethiopian garment workers were earning $21 a month as of last year according to the Ethiopian government. Despite lacking in infrastructure and a relatively untrained (for sewing garments) labor force, the apparel companies are “still drawn to the cheap labor and inexpensive power…” the WSJ writes.
The urgency for Obama as the representative of US capitalism, is catching up with the Chinese who have been investing in Africa as well as Latin America, a region that US imperialism considers it’s own back yard.
Hellraiser Preview
Sherman, set the time machine for tomorrow's Hellraisers Journal which will feature from the Utah State Prison, Joe Hill to Fellow Workers: "My life is a drop in the bucket."
Tune in at 2pm!
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Canada wants First Nation people to sell land for cheap and give up their rights
In Canada, treaty-making continued into the 20th century. In the province of British Columbia (BC), however, there are almost no treaties between First Nations and Canada, because the provincial government believed primitive natives could not have any claim to the land. Today, this means that First Nations hold unextinguished legal claims to a landmass larger than Texas.
But the Canadian government wants that to change. There are 64 First Nations in the midst of a treaty process aimed at extinguishing all present and future Native claims to land. I’m a member of the Tsq’escenemc, or People of Broken Rock, one of 17 bands of the 10,000-strong Secwepemc Nation, and one of four Northern Secwepemc bands currently negotiating our own treaty with the federal government.
The “deal” currently on the table for the Northern Secwepemc pays $37.5m (in US dollars) and returns roughly 174,000 acres of crown land in exchange for an end to all claims to almost 14m acres of traditional territories. To put this into perspective, the treaty returns just a hair over 1% of our land and pays $2.74 per acre for the rest. This is a deal sadly reminiscent of the 47 cents an acre offered to California Indians in 1963. According to a major realty company, price per acre ranges in British Columbia from $48,510 for farmland to about $777 for bare land in the North. There is no corner of British Columbia where land sells for $2.74 an acre.
Needless to say, the four Secwepemc bands must cast their ballots against this treaty at the planned October vote so that they and their descendants will survive as sovereign and self-determining nations.
The agreement, which is very similar to others offered to British Columbia’s First Nations, would also restructure the four Northern Secwepemc bands as municipalities, stripping them of all rights and services provided under the Indian Act, including reserve lands, healthcare and housing. In effect, the treaty would relieve the federal government of its legal responsibility to people still suffering from generations of colonization, violence and poverty. Perhaps most troubling of all, the deal would eliminate our last vestiges of sovereignty by converting all Northern Secwepemc territory into private property.
50 Years after Selma March, Activists Walk Again to Restore Voting Rights in South
More than 50 years ago, George Sallie, at the time a 36-year-old Korean War veteran, shuffled behind Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders of America's civil rights movement in a march stretching 54 miles from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. It was a physically challenging journey — and one of a series of events that eventually led to the passing of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that same year.
Now, in mid-summer 2015, Sallie, dressed in canary yellow t-shirt and jeans, once again joined roughly 300 activists in Alabama to retrace the Selma march in the shadow of a 2013 Supreme Court decision which excised a key part of the Voting Rights Act. The march will take place over 46 days, cross five southern states and 860 miles before reaching Washington, DC, in the NAACP's inaugural "America's Journey for Justice." ...
Many of the activists believe that the Voting Rights Act was paid for with the blood of protesters on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on March 7, 1965, when they met state troopers armed with billy clubs and teargas at the Montgomery county line. Sallie was there.
He's now 86, and still bears a bulging inch-long scar below his hairline where a "redneck posse" man's baton split open his forehead open that day.
"I fought for for my country in Korea for someone else's freedom, and then came home and realized I didn't have freedom of my own. Everywhere I tried to get a job, I was discriminated against — folks couldn't vote, which is why we had the Selma marches back then," Sallie told VICE News. "What's the use of having legislation to protect our right to vote if it ends up being gutted?"
From the exploding pantsuits on fire department:
Cables Show Hillary Clinton's State Department Deeply Involved in Trans-Pacific Partnership
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton on Thursday attempted to distance herself from the controversial 12-nation trade deal known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership. During her tenure as U.S. secretary of state, Clinton publicly promoted the pact 45 separate times -- but with her Democratic presidential rivals making opposition to the deal a centerpiece of their campaigns, Clinton now asserts she was never involved in the initiative.
"I did not work on TPP," she said after a meeting with leaders of labor unions who oppose the pact. "I advocated for a multinational trade agreement that would 'be the gold standard.' But that was the responsibility of the United States Trade Representative."
But at a congressional hearing in 2011, Clinton told lawmakers that "with respect to the TPP, although the State Department does not have the lead on this -- it is the United States Trade Representative -- we work closely with the USTR." Additionally, State Department cables reviewed by International Business Times show that her agency -- including her top aides -- were deeply involved in the diplomatic deliberations over the trade deal. The cables from 2009 and 2010, which were among a trove of documents disclosed by the website WikiLeaks, also show that the Clinton-run State Department advised the U.S. Trade Representative’s office on how to negotiate the deal with foreign government officials.
On Disputed No-Fly Zone, Clinton Campaign Got Its Way With the FAA
The morning after the Hillary Clinton campaign was told that the New York City mayor’s office wasn’t going to bar news helicopters from buzzing her official campaign launch event on Roosevelt Island, the Secret Service expressed concerns to the Federal Aviation Administration about aircraft “loitering” over the event, according to emails obtained by The Intercept.
And the Clinton campaign got its way: On the eve of the event held last month, the FAA announced a “national defense airspace” over the island, threatening to shoot down anything airborne that appeared to present an imminent security threat. ...
On the afternoon of June 10, the park conservancy president, Sally Minard, informed Jason Chung of the Clinton campaign that the mayor’s office had indicated that the campaign launch event would not meet the FAA’s standards required to impose a no-fly zone.
After receiving this note, Chung emailed an official from the Secret Service, which protects both Clintons for life. ...
The FAA announced the no-fly zone the next day.
Rootsaction is petitioning Bernie Sanders to take a position on issues of war, militarism and foreign policy. Click the link to sign the petition.
Bernie Sanders, Speak Up: Militarism and Corporate Power Are Fueling Each Other
With a strong grassroots campaign for president, Senator Bernie Sanders is denouncing corporate power, economic inequality and “oligarchy.”
But he’s saying very little about crucial issues of war, militarism and foreign policy.
Martin Luther King Jr. explicitly and emphatically linked the issues of economic injustice at home with war abroad. Bernie Sanders should do the same.
Adequate funds for programs of economic equity and social justice will require an end to what Dr. King called “the madness of militarism.”
Overcoming militarism is just as vital as overcoming oligarchy. We won’t be able to do one without the other.
PM Stephen Harper Triggers Canada's Longest Election Campaign Since 1872, Amid Faltering Economy
Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced the beginning of the 42nd Canadian federal election this morning, vowing that the two-and-a-half month campaign would be necessary for voters to differentiate between his party and its rivals.
With Canada accustomed to short, month-long campaigns, this 78-day affair — the longest since 1872 — promises to test both the patience of the country, and the prime minister's record itself. ...
Today's announcement set the tone for the grueling campaign, which pits Harper, 56, against left wing NDP leader Thomas Mulcair and Liberal leader Justin Trudeau. Polls suggest it will be a tough election for Harper's Conservative Party, which has been in power for nine years and is staring at a much bleaker economic picture than when he won his first majority in 2011.
While high oil prices had generated huge growth, primarily in the province of Alberta, GDP growth projections for the Canadian economy have slowly slipped alongside the stagnating price of petroleum. The Canadian dollar has dropped to its lowest level since 2004, closing as low as 76.40 US cents.
The Evening Greens
Folks who remember Scott Wooledge, who used to be a frontpager here will be gratified to know that he is still making a difference:
Queer Activist’s Petition To Extradite Cecil the Lion’s Murderer Skyrockets To The White House
By now we’re all outraged by the death of Cecil the Lion, a beloved resident of Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park, who was shot by Minnesota game hunter Walter Palmer.
But one gay man is turning that outrage into activism: Scott Wooledge, the creator of the social-awareness platform Memeographs, launched a WhiteHouse.gov petition asking the Administration to extradite Palmer to Zimbabwe to submit to inquiry and (likely) stand trial.
Wooledge’s petition, which has garnered more than 211,000 signatures since Tuesday, has been reported on by CNN, the NBC Nightly News and other major outlets.
Second American Sought for Hunting, Killing a Lion in Protected Zimbabwe Park
A second American is being sought by Zimbabwe authorities for hunting and killing a lion near a protected national park.
Dr. Jan Casmir Seski is being sought by Zimbabwe's National Parks and Wildlife Management Authority after allegedly illegally hunting and killing a lion at the Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe this past April.
Seski, of Murrysville, Pennsylvania, is a gynecological oncologist who directs the Center for Bloodless Medicine and Surgery at Allegheny General Hospital, according to the Associated Press.
He reportedly used a bow and arrow to hunt the lion near the park on land where lion hunting is not permitted, the Zimbabwe National Parks and Wildlife Management Authority announced in a press release on their website.
Obama's clean power plan hailed as US's strongest ever climate action
Hundreds of businesses including eBay, Nestle and General Mills have issued their support for Barack Obama’s clean power plan, billed as the strongest action ever on climate change by a US president.
The rules, being announced on Monday, are designed to cut emissions from power plants and have been strengthened in terms of the long-term ambition as originally proposed by the president last year, but slightly weakened in the short-term in a concession to states reliant on highly-polluting coal. ...
The rules are expected to trigger a “tsunami” of legal opposition from states and utilities who oppose the plans, which will significantly boost wind and solar power generation and force a switch away from coal power. Republican presidential hopefuls moved quickly to voice their opposition, saying they would be economically damaging. ...
The final rules propose a 32% cut in carbon emissions from power plants by 2030 on 2005 levels, up from the initial proposal of 30%. However states will only have to comply by 2022 rather than 2020 as originally proposed, and will be able submit their plans on meeting the targets by 2018 instead of 2017.
CO2 emissions from power plants fell 15% between 2005 and 2013, meaning the country is halfway to the target.
Monday’s version of the rules also gives an explicit boost to wind and solar power, angering the natural gas industry which will still be a large beneficiary of the switch from coal to gas-fired power plants, which produce much lower emissions.
Obama Touts 'Historic' Climate Plan, But Will It Go Far Enough?
The president's Clean Power Plan includes deeper emissions cuts but also numerous concessions to the industry
President Barack Obama declared Sunday that his administration is poised to unroll greater-than-expected cuts to greenhouse gas emissions from U.S. power plants, in what he called "the biggest, most important steps we've ever taken to combat climate change."
However, as leaked details of the plan circulate ahead of Monday's slated unveiling, some climate campaigners say the measures, in fact, fall short of the president's pledge to take aggressive action to curb the global warming crisis. ...
The Times notes that "the final rules are explicitly meant to encourage the use of interstate cap-and-trade systems, in which states place a cap on carbon pollution and then create a market for buying permits or credits to pollute. The idea is that forcing companies to pay to pollute will drive them to cleaner sources of energy."
But Daphne Wysham, director the Sustainable Energy and Economy Network, told Common Dreams that such cap-and-trade measures "allow polluters to profit and do not create an incentive for rapid reduction in greenhouse gas emissions."
"We need to be off of coal completely, as soon as possible," Wysham continued, echoing the warnings of scientists, who say that, to avert a climate catastrophe, the vast majority of fossil fuel deposits around the world must remain unused. "We need to be looking at 1990 greenhouse gas emissions baselines like the rest of the world uses. We need to be rapidly phasing out of coal and gas fired power. We need to stop drilling in the Arctic, which Obama allowed Shell to proceed with."
Ecuador spied on Amazon oil plan opponents, leaked papers suggest
Government spies may have illegally targeted political and environmental opponents to president Rafael Correa’s plan to extract oil in Yasuni national park
Ecuadorian spies may have broken the law by obtaining personal information on MPs, environmentalists, indigenous groups, human rights activists, academics and political opponents of president Rafael Correa who opposed the exploitation of oil from an Amazonian wilderness, according to leaked papers.
Nearly 200 pages of internal documents that appear to be from Ecuador’s spy agency, the Secretaría Nacional de Inteligencia, seen by the Guardian, show that information was collected between 2010 and 2013 about bank accounts, debts, the value of people’s cars, foreign travel and partners.
The documents, marked secret, include emails, photographs taken at rallies and public meetings, aerial photos of demonstrations and the suspected political and financial links between different groups and individuals. There are also attempts to trace the foreign sources of finance for NGOs and indigenous organisations. ...
People investigated included Alberto Acosta, the former oil minister who, with others, had proposed the idea of leaving the Yasuni oil in the ground in 2006, following the Chevron Texaco pollution disasters in the northern Amazon and indigenous peoples’ successful resistance to oil extraction in the Amazonian community of Sarayaku in the late 1990s.
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin' Is On Hiatus
Edward Snowden Explains Why Apple Should Continue To Fight the Government on Encryption
By calling Friday's arson attack a terrorist act, the Israelis are hoping to avoid the full force of international law.
Hat tip mimi:
Meet the Hedge Funders and Billionaires Who Pillage Under the Shield of Philanthropy
MSNBC: “Draft Biden just got real.” Josh Alcorn, Harry Reid's former finance chief, joins team.
War on ISIS to be dramatically expanded
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A Little Night Music
John Brim & Pinetop Perkins - Let Me Hold You, Naptown
John Brim - Lonesome Man Blues
John Brim - Hard Pill to Swallow
John Brim - You got me where you want me
John Brim - It Was A Dream
John Brim - Tough Times
John Brim - Tougher Times
John Brim - Be Careful What You Do
John Brim - Rattlesnake
John Brim - Dark Clouds
John Brim & Pinetop Perkins - Driving Wheel
John Brim - Lifetime Baby
John Brim And His Gary Kings - Go Away
John Brim And His Gary Kings - That Ain't Right
John Brim - Wake Up America
John Brim - Movin' Out
John Brim - You Put The Hurt On Me