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 New Orleans jazz and blues singer Louisa "Blue Lu" Barker. Enjoy!
Blu Lu Barker - Don't You Feel My Leg
We passed upon the stair, we spoke of was and when
Although I wasn't there, he said I was his friend
Which came as some surprise I spoke into his eyes
I thought you died alone, a long long time ago
Oh no, not me
I never lost control
You're face to face
With The Man Who Sold The World
-- David Bowie
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News and Opinion
White House Getting Cold Feet Over Exposing CIA’s Torture Secrets
After seven months of promising to release a report exposing CIA torture of terror suspects, the Obama administration Friday reportedly sent Secretary of State John Kerry to ask Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein to consider holding off “because a lot is going on in the world.” ...
But the intelligence community never wanted its dirty secrets revealed. I suggested as early as six weeks ago that administration officials, doing the CIA’s bidding, were stalling negotiations until Republicans took over the chamber and killed the report themselves.
Then in the past few days, reports emerged that Feinstein conceded enough ground that an agreement had been reached. The report’s release was set for early next week. ...
The net effect of a delay would be to wrest the decision from Feinstein’s hands and give it to incoming Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-North Carolina), who has called the report a “flawed and biased” piece of fiction. ...
Friday’s news was reminiscent of a previous Obama reversal, in the early days of his presidency. Back in April 2009, Obama had said he would not block the court-ordered release of photographs depicting the abuse of detainees held by U.S. authorities abroad. Then he changed his mind.
Kerry Puts Brakes on CIA Torture Report
Secretary of State John Kerry personally phoned Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Friday morning to ask her to delay the imminent release of her committee’s report on CIA torture and rendition during the George W. Bush administration, according to administration and Congressional officials. ...
“What he raised was timing of report release, because a lot is going on in the world -- including parts of the world particularly implicated -- and wanting to make sure foreign policy implications were being appropriately factored into timing,” an administration official told me. "He had a responsibility to do so because this isn’t just an intel issue -- it’s a foreign policy issue."
But those concerns are not new, and Kerry’s 11th-hour effort to secure a delay in the report’s release places Feinstein in a difficult position: She must decide whether to set aside the administration’s concerns and accept the risk, or scuttle the roll-out of the investigation she fought for years to preserve.
Hill staffers and human rights advocates saw the Kerry call as a stunning reversal by an administration that has publicly supported the report’s release for months. For Senate Republicans, who have warned about the potential fallout for more than a year, the administration is belatedly coming around to agree with their position. ...
For the large community of nongovernmental organizations and human rights groups that have been fighting for the release, the administration’s action is a betrayal, and also a sign that the whole issue has been poorly managed.
Does Torture Actually Work?
Bush and C.I.A. Ex-Officials Rebut Torture Report
A long-awaited Senate report condemning torture by the Central Intelligence Agency has not even been made public yet, but former President George W. Bush’s team has decided to link arms with former intelligence officials and challenge its conclusions.
The report is said to assert that the C.I.A. misled Mr. Bush and his White House about the nature, extent and results of brutal techniques like waterboarding, and some of his former administration officials privately suggested seizing on that to distance themselves from the controversial program, according to people involved in the discussion. But Mr. Bush and his closest advisers decided that “we’re going to want to stand behind these guys,” as one former official put it. ...
Former intelligence officials, seeking allies against the potentially damaging report, have privately reassured the Bush team in recent days that they did not deceive them and have lobbied the former president’s advisers to speak out publicly on their behalf. The defense of the program has been organized by former C.I.A. leaders like George J. Tenet and Gen. Michael V. Hayden, two former directors, and John E. McLaughlin, a former deputy C.I.A. director who also served as acting director.
“Once the release occurs, we’ll have things to say and will be making some documents available that bear on the case,” Mr. McLaughlin said Sunday. Although he could not discuss details because of a nondisclosure agreement, in general he said the report “uses information selectively, often distorts to make its points, and as I recall contains no recommendations.”
Democracies always ‘led by people that push for more war’ - Seymour Hersh
Release of Six Detainees After Twelve Years Highlights the Historic Evil of Guantánamo
The U.S. military overnight transferred six Guantánamo detainees to Uruguay. All of them had been imprisoned since 2002 – more than 12 years. None has ever been charged with a crime, let alone convicted of any wrongdoing. They had all been cleared for release years ago by the Pentagon itself, but nonetheless remained in cages until today.
Among the released detainees is Abu Wa’el Dhiab, a Lebanese-born Syrian national and father of four who was seized by the Pakistani police and turned over to the U.S. in 2002 for what was reportedly a large bounty. He was cleared for release in 2009 – five years ago – and has repeatedly gone on hunger strikes inside the camp to protest his treatment. At the age of 43, he has become physically debilitated. As the human rights group Reprieve detailed:
As a result of the conditions inside the prison and the callous treatment he has received, Mr Dhiab’s health has now deteriorated to such an extent that he is confined to a wheelchair. Recent revelations revealed that Mr. Dhiab is being denied access to his wheelchair, meaning he is brutally dragged from his cell and force-fed against his will every day.
As the great Miami Herald Guantánamo reporter Carol Rosenberg notes, there are – six years after Obama was elected on a pledge to close the camp – still 136 detainees there, with 67 of them cleared for release (Democrats’ claims that Obama is largely blameless are false and misleading in the extreme, as are claims that no country will accept detainees). In a just-posted article, Rosenberg notes that the release of these six men, all in their 30s and 40s, was underway for a full year, but it “sat on [Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel's] desk for months, awaiting his signature, while intelligence analysts evaluated it.”
Guantánamo release of six to Uruguay will not impact force-feeding lawsuit
Abu Wa’el Dhiab, a Syrian man who brought the first courtroom challenge to the Obama administration’s force-feeding of hunger-striking Guantánamo Bay detainees, has been transferred to Uruguay and freed. ...
The release of Dhiab is not expected to impact an ongoing transparency lawsuit for the release of videotapes of the man’s tube feedings. ...
Last month, judge Gladys Kessler sided with the government against Dhiab. But she also ordered the government to release hours of videotapes showing the cell extractions and the force feedings, which Dhiab’s lawyers watched and said displayed a brutal practice. The government announced on 2 December that it would appeal Kessler’s ruling.
The Guardian is a party to the case and seeks release of the videotapes, which may be Dhiab’s long-term legacy at Guantánamo: the existence of taped tube feedings was unknown until he launched his lawsuit. The government simultaneously contends that the behavior displayed on the tapes is humane but risks endangering US troops in Afghanistan and Iraq should the videos be released.
In 'Historic Stand' Against Injustice, Uruguay Welcomes Six Gitmo Detainees
Uruguay's leftist President Jose Mujica, himself a former prisoner, has previously called the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay a "disgrace."
The Washington Post reports that on Friday, Mujica's office sent an open letter to President Obama to repeat his county's willingness to accept the men, stating: "We have offered our hospitality for human beings who suffered an atrocious kidnapping in Guantanamo."
Mujica said earlier this year that the men would be treated as refugees and would be able to travel freely.
One of the Syrians being released is Abu Wa’el Dhiab, who had waged a legal battle against the administration over his force feedings at the prison.
Cori Crider, a Director at human right group Reprieve and a lawyer for Dhiab, said: "We are grateful to the government of Uruguay—and President Mujica in particular—for this historic stand."
"Very few people can truly comprehend what the cleared men in Guantanamo suffer every day, but I believe Mr. Mujica is one of them. Like President Mujica, Mr Dhiab spent over a dozen years as a political prisoner. Mr. Dhiab was never charged, never tried. President Mujica spent two years at the bottom of a well," she said, referring to Mujica's time imprisoned. "For most of the past two years, Mr. Dhiab has had a team of U.S. soldiers truss him up like an animal, haul him to a restraint chair, and force-feed him through a tube in his nose. The President's compassion has ended that torture."
Yemeni man hopes landmark torture report will prompt long-awaited apology
As the Obama administration, the CIA and a Senate committee prepare to release a landmark torture inquiry, a Yemeni hotelier’s reputation hangs in the balance of one of the lines within it that may never be released.
Mohammed Abdullah Saleh al-Asad spent nearly a year and a half inside undisclosed CIA prisons before an unceremonious release in 2005. Nearly a decade later, he wants an apology from the country that handed him to the United States. Unless it is publicly named in the Senate intelligence committee’s report into CIA torture, expected for partial release as early as Tuesday, he may never get it.
Al-Asad’s ordeal began in December 2003, when he was living in Tanzania, where he ran a tire trading company in Dar es Salaam. There, he had long rented space in a building he owned to men from the al-Haramain Foundation, which the US Treasury Department would designate as connected to terrorism a decade later, and served as a local trustee. ... On December 26, 2003, Tanzanian police accosted Asad at his home. Instead of arresting or charging him, they drove him to an unfamiliar apartment for an hours-long interrogation, and then took him to an airport, where a plane would take him on a pre-dawn flight to a country he believes is Djibouti. ...
In whathe believes to be Djibouti, al-Asad was confined to a concrete cell which he would only leave for interrogation sessions. One of his interrogators was a white woman who “identified herself as an American,” but without specifying which branch of the US government employed her. Most questions concerned al-Haramain. ... al-Asad would only spend about two weeks in Djibouti. Early in January 2004, guards blindfolded and restrained him, to take him once again to an airfield. But instead of returning him to his family in Tanzania, they stripped, diapered, hooded and chained him, put him in a jumpsuit and placed him on a plane to the first of what he estimates are four secret prisons, two of which Meg Satterthwaite, a law professor and director of New York University’s Global Justice Clinic who represents Asad believes were CIA black sites in Afghanistan. He would remain in them until May 2005.
Al-Asad told the commission he was “horribly abused” in US captivity. His account is consistent with others given by people held at US black sites: al-Asad says he was kept in isolation in cold cells and subjected to “horribly loud, constant, thumping music, 24 hours a day” in the second of his US prisons.
Council of Europe: Mass surveillance exposed by Snowden ‘not justified by fight against terrorism’
The “secret, massive and indiscriminate” surveillance conducted by intelligence services and disclosed by the former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden cannot be justified by the fight against terrorism, the most senior human rights official in Europe has warned.
In a direct challenge to the United Kingdom and other states, Nils Muižnieks, the commissioner for human rights at the Council of Europe, calls for greater transparency and stronger democratic oversight of the way security agencies monitor the internet. He also said that so-called Five Eyes intelligence-sharing treaty between the UK, US, Australia, New Zealand and Canada should be published.
“Suspicionless mass retention of communications data is fundamentally contrary to the rule of law … and ineffective,” the Latvian official argues in a 120-page report, The Rule of Law on the Internet in the Wider Digital World. “Member states should not resort to it or impose compulsory retention of data by third parties.”
As human rights commissioner, Muižnieks has the power to intervene as a third party in cases sent to the European court of human rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg. His report is published the week after the UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) found that the legal regime governing mass surveillance of the internet by the monitoring agency GCHQ is “human rights compliant”.
In his report, Muižnieks wrote: “In connection with the debate on the practices of intelligence and security services prompted by Edward Snowden’s revelations, it is becoming increasingly clear that secret, massive and indiscriminate surveillance programmes are not in conformity with European human rights law and cannot be justified by the fight against terrorism or other important threats to national security."
Everything You Need To Know About Obama's Pick For Defense Secretary In One Small Tweet
Chris Hedges: A Society of Captives
Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plans to launch a pilot program in New York City to place body cameras on police officers and conduct training seminars to help them reduce their adrenaline rushes and abusive language, along with the establishment of a less stringent marijuana policy, are merely cosmetic reforms. The killing of Eric Garner in Staten Island was, after all, captured on video. These proposed reforms, like those out of Washington, D.C., fail to address the underlying cause of poverty, state-sponsored murder and the obscene explosion of mass incarceration—the rise of the corporate state and the death of our democracy. Mass acts of civil disobedience, now being carried out across the country, are the only mechanism left that offers hope for systematic legal and judicial reform. We must defy the corporate state, not work with it.
The legal system no longer functions to protect ordinary Americans. It serves our oligarchic, corporate elites. These elites have committed $26 billion in financial fraud. They loot the U.S. Treasury, escape taxation, drive down wages, break unions, pillage pension funds, gut regulation and oversight, destroy public institutions including public schools and social assistance programs, wage endless and illegal wars to swell the profits of arms merchants, and—yes—authorize police to murder unarmed black men.
Police and national intelligence and security agencies, which carry out wholesale surveillance against the population and serve as the corporate elite’s brutal enforcers, are omnipotent by intention. They are designed to impart fear, even terror, to keep the population under control. And until the courts and the legislative bodies give us back our rights—which they have no intention of doing—things will only get worse for the poor and the rest of us. We live in a post-constitutional era.
Corporations have captured every major institution, including the judicial, legislative and executive branches of government, and deformed them to exclusively serve the demands of the market. They have, in the process, demolished civil society. Karl Polanyi in “The Great Transformation” warned that without heavy government regulation and oversight, unfettered and unregulated capitalism degenerates into a Mafia capitalism and a Mafia political system. A self-regulating market, Polanyi writes, turns human beings and the natural environment into commodities. This ensures the destruction of both society and the natural environment. The ecosystem and human beings become objects whose worth is determined solely by the market. They are exploited until exhaustion or collapse occurs. A society that no longer recognizes that the natural world and life have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic value beyond monetary value, commits collective suicide. Such societies cannibalize themselves. This is what we are undergoing. Literally.
Arson and looting reported at Berkeley protests against police shootings
Protesters set fires, broke windows and looted in Berkeley, California, on Sunday evening during protests against police violence in New York and Missouri.
Protests started peacefully on the Berkeley campus of the University of California, but by 9pm PT police had shot teargas at protesters, attempting to push them off a freeway where they were blocking traffic, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Tensions were reportedly high after protests on Saturday night, and violence was touched off after protesters smashed a Radio Shack window, according to the Associated Press. ...
Students planned a city cleanup at 9am on Monday, according to the Daily Californian
LA Cops Shoot Man Holding Pocketknife at Site of Eric Garner and Michael Brown Protests
Los Angeles police fatally shot a man in Hollywood Friday night at the same spot where hundreds of people protested the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner just one day earlier.
The cops fired multiple shots at the man, knocking him over in a tourist-filled intersection outside a shopping complex, witnesses said. Video footage from the scene shows the cops pointing their guns at the man for minutes after he had fallen, then approaching to take his pulse and shooing bystanders from the area.
The police, who fired on the man at about 6:45pm, were responding to a report that someone had been stabbed, KABC reported.
"The officers arrived in the area of Hollywood and Highland when they observed a man in the intersection," LAPD detective Meghan Aguilar told KABC. "The male was armed with a knife. When he saw the officers, he approached them, and an officer-involved shooting occurred."
Racial profiling will still be allowed at airports and at borders despite new policy
As the Obama administration prepares to announce new curbs on racial profiling by federal law enforcement, government officials said Friday that many officers and agents at the Department of Homeland Security will still be allowed to use the controversial practice, including while they screen airline passengers and guard the country’s southwestern border.
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is expected early next week to detail long-awaited revisions in the Justice Department’s rules for racial profiling, banning it from national security cases for the first time. The changes will also expand the definition of profiling to prevent FBI agents from considering factors such as religion and national origin when opening cases, officials said.
But after sharp disagreements among top officials, the administration will exempt a broad swath of DHS, namely the Transportation Security Administration and key parts of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, according to law enforcement officials.
This is an excellent article, worth reading in full.
The Truth About Who Is Really Responsible for Our Current Police and Prison State
The 200 protesters arrested last night in New York City and others being arrested elsewhere in demonstrations against police brutality are confronting a police and prison system that has put more people behind bars than any other country. Some have pointed out that those doing the arresting are not exactly far-right Replublican and conservative-led jurisdictions, but solidly Democratic strongholds. Cities like New York City, where Eric Garner was tragically killed – are run by the Democratic Party from top to bottom, with one of the countriy's most progressive mayors, Bill De Blasio at the helm. Given that the party is, at least, traditionally associated with liberalism, civil rights and a more permissive society, some observers find that ironic. But the recent past tells us that the Democratic Party in the past three decades has abandoned concerns for civil liberties and civil rights in the pursuit of appearing to be just as tough on crime as their Republican counterparts.
This is a story that begins when Bill Clinton embraced the law-and-order policies of his Republican predecessors. ...
Clinton was a “New Democrat” – part of a new coalition of Democrats who believed that the liberalism represented by the New Deal and Great Society had run its course, and that Democrats must court Big Business and certain right-wing interest groups in order to forge a new party.
Included in this policy shift were things like “welfare reform,” the North American Free Trade Agreement, and deregulation of the telecommunications and banking industries. But perhaps Clinton's earliest and most intense shifting of traditional Democratic Party liberalism was with respect to crime. This took the form of the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (later commonly known as the crime bill). To helm its passage, Clinton tapped none other than our current vice president, then Senator Joe Biden of Delaware.
Biden was the chief author of the 1994 crime bill, which vastly increased the number of police officers on American streets, eliminated Pell Grants for prisoners, expanded the federal death penalty and upped the Border Patrol presence (recall that this bill was passed around the same time as NAFTA, which increased migration from Mexico). ...
The crime legislation of the 1990's didn't just put more cops on the streets and build more prisons, it also made sure those cops were armed to the teeth. Throughout the 90's, there was an expansion of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) and Byrne grants, which financed local police departments to wage a heavy-handed drug war (both programs increased under President Obama).
Taming corporate power: the key political issue of our age
Does this sometimes feel like a country under enemy occupation? Do you wonder why the demands of so much of the electorate seldom translate into policy? Why parties of the left seem incapable of offering effective opposition to market fundamentalism, let alone proposing coherent alternatives? Do you wonder why those who want a kind and decent and just world, in which both human beings and other living creatures are protected, so often appear to be opposed by the entire political establishment?
If so, you have encountered corporate power – the corrupting influence that prevents parties from connecting with the public, distorts spending and tax decisions, and limits the scope of democracy. It helps explain the otherwise inexplicable: the creeping privatisation of health and education, hated by the vast majority of voters; the private finance initiative, which has left public services with unpayable debts; the replacement of the civil service with companies distinguished only by incompetence; the failure to re-regulate the banks and collect tax; the war on the natural world; the scrapping of the safeguards that protect us from exploitation; above all, the severe limitation of political choice in a nation crying out for alternatives.
There are many ways in which it operates, but perhaps the most obvious is through our unreformed political funding system, which permits big business and multimillionaires in effect to buy political parties. Once a party is obliged to them, it needs little reminder of where its interests lie. Fear and favour rule. ...
Corporations have also been empowered by the globalisation of decision-making. As powers, but not representation, shift to the global level, multinational business and its lobbyists fill the political gap. When everything has been globalised except our consent, we are vulnerable to decisions made outside the democratic sphere.
The key political question of our age, by which you can judge the intent of all political parties, is what to do about corporate power.
[Click the link above for some of Monbiot's ideas about reining in corporate power. - js]
Richard Wolff:
New Employment Figures in the Shadow of a Fragile Economy
McDonald's reports bigger-than-expected fall in sales
McDonald’s reported a steeper-than-expected fall in global same-restaurant sales in November and said current-quarter results would be hurt by the after-effects of a supplier scandal in China and a stronger dollar.
McDonald’s shares fell 3% premarket on Monday after the company also warned that weakening sales would “significantly pressure” margins in the quarter.
Hellraiser Preview
Sherman, set the time machine for tomorrow's Hellraisers Journal which will feature District 15 of the United Mine Workers of America recognizing no surrender as it calls off Colorado strike in 1914.
Tune in at 2pm!
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Congress Raids Ancestral Native American Lands With Defense Bill
When Terry Rambler, the chairman of the San Carlos Apache Tribe, woke up Wednesday in Washington, D.C., it was to learn that Congress was deciding to give away a large part of his ancestral homeland to a foreign mining company. ... [T]he House and Senate Armed Services Committee had decided to use the lame-duck session of Congress and the National Defense Authorization Act to give 2,400 acres of the Tonto National Forest in Arizona to a subsidiary of the Australian-English mining giant Rio Tinto. ...
Rambler and other opponents couldn’t find out until late Tuesday night when the bill, named the “Carl Levin and Howard P. ‘Buck’ McKeon National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2015” (after the retiring Senate and House committee chairmen), was finally posted online. The news that Apache burial, medicinal and ceremonial grounds would be given to Resolution Copper, a subsidiary of Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton, was on page 1,105. ...
The land includes territory where Apaches gather medicinal plants and acorns -- a food source that Rambler said has sustained his people for as long as they know. It also surrounds the Apache Leap, a summit from which trapped Apaches once jumped to their deaths rather than be killed by settlers in the late 1800s.
Rio Tinto has pursued the deal for a decade, and it was apparently pushed into the NDAA largely thanks to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). It passed the House once in 2011, but when leaders brought it to the floor twice last year, they couldn’t find enough votes, and pulled it. Most Democrats opposed it and growing numbers of Republicans were concerned about how it was being conducted. To many, it looked like a sweetheart deal being made outside of the regular process of dealing with federal land. And some were unhappy that the prime beneficiary, Rio Tinto, also owns a uranium mine in Africa with Iran. Others worried that most of the copper will go to China, which owns 10 percent of Rio Tinto.
Congressmen admit to not reading NDAA before voting for it: 'I trust the leadership'
US House members admitted they had not read the entire $585 billion, 1,648-page National Defense Authorization Act, which predominantly specifies budgeting for the Defense Department, before it was voted on Thursday in Congress.
“Of course not. Are you kidding?” Rep. Jim Moran (D-Virginia) said when asked by CNSNews if he had perused the entire bill, which was just posted online late Tuesday night before it was ultimately passed in by the House by a vote of 300-119 about 36 hours later.
Moran said he did not plan to read the entire bill before voting because “I trust the leadership.”
“Do you think [House Speaker John] Boehner and [Senate Majority Leader Harry] Reid have read it?” asked CNSNews.
“I know their staff has,” Moran responded.
The Evening Greens
Obama's Oil Boom Destroying Hope for Progress on Climate
Much heralded efforts to curb global warming by cutting carbon emissions are being effectively cancelled out by the export of fossil fuels and their related pollution which, according to an Associated Press analysis published Monday, have "soared" under President Obama.
U.S. exports of gasoline and diesel, which have doubled during Obama's tenure, have released roughly 1 billion tons of carbon pollution into the atmosphere between 2008 and 2013, according to the analysis. These emissions, notes AP investigative reporter Dina Cappielo, "more than made up for" the 475 million tons in emission reductions credited to strengthened environmental standards passed during that time.
"Obama is putting his entire climate legacy at risk by letting fossil fuel production (and exports) expand unchecked," 350.org cofounder Jamie Henn wrote in response to the new analysis.
At Lima Talks, Nations Worst Hit by Global Warming Say Climate Aid Isn’t Charity, But Reparations
Bolivia after the floods: 'the climate is changing; we are living that change'
Nature used to give those who live along the river Beni fair warning of looming threats. If rings appeared around the sun, the leaves of the ambaibo tree twisted to reveal their white undersides or lines of ants began to march into people’s houses, members of the indigenous Tacana nation took it as a sign that heavy rain was on the way.
But neither portents nor two months of ceaseless downpours prepared them for the deluge in northern Bolivia in February, drowning their livestock, ruining their crops, and sweeping vipers and anacondas through their half-submerged villages.
“Some people were saying it was the end of the world,” says Wenceslao Mamio, the phlegmatic corregidor, or chief, of the Capaina community. “We were flooded as never before and left under a metre and a half of water. The waters killed our crops – bananas, cassava, pineapples, avocados, everything – as well as our pigs, ducks and chickens.” ...
The ordeal was repeated across parts of northern and central Bolivia, where irregular La Niña and El Niño weather patterns caused the worst floods in 60 years, killing dozens of people and 150,000 cattle, destroying more than 43,000 hectares of cultivated land and affecting 60,000 families. ...
Standing by the village football pitch, Wenceslao reflects on the worst events of his 51 years and offers his own simple explanation for the devastation: “I think the climate is changing and we are living that change.”
The Laundering Machine: How U.S. Corporations Threaten Peru’s Forests Through Illegal Logging
Energy Firms in Secretive Alliance With Attorneys General
The letter to the Environmental Protection Agency from Attorney General Scott Pruitt of Oklahoma carried a blunt accusation: Federal regulators were grossly overestimating the amount of air pollution caused by energy companies drilling new natural gas wells in his state.
But Mr. Pruitt left out one critical point. The three-page letter was written by lawyers for Devon Energy, one of Oklahoma’s biggest oil and gas companies, and was delivered to him by Devon’s chief of lobbying. ...
Attorneys general in at least a dozen states are working with energy companies and other corporate interests, which in turn are providing them with record amounts of money for their political campaigns, including at least $16 million this year.
They share a common philosophy about the reach of the federal government, but the companies also have billions of dollars at stake. And the collaboration is likely to grow: For the first time in modern American history, Republicans in January will control a majority — 27 — of attorneys general’s offices.
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin' Is On Hiatus
Wall Streeters are Ready for Hillary ... How many ways can they give?
New York City: Aggressive “Broken Windows” Policing but Carte Blanche for Banksters
The Global Rich Are a Tribe with Their Own Folkways, Values & Mythology. Those Values Are "Pathological."
'I Can't Breathe': Videos Show Protesters Across the US Outraged Over Police Killings
Chelsea E Manning: I am a transgender woman and the government is denying my civil rights
Why the world is like a real-life game of global domination
"State Terrorism and Racist Violence in the Age of Disposability: From Emmett Till to Eric Garner"
A Little Night Music
Blue Lu Barker - A Little Bird told Me
Blue Lu Barker - I got ways like the devil
Blue Lu Barker - Scat Skunk
Blue Lu Barker - Here's a Litte Girl
Henry Red Allen, Blue Lu Barker + Buster Bailey + Danny Barker - Blue Deep Sea
Blue Lu Barker - Trombone man blues
Blu Lu Barker - Buy Me Some Juice
Blue Lu Barker- Georgia Grind
Blue Lu Barker - Bow legged daddy
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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