[Peace-discuss] News from Neptune & AOTA discussion suggestions/notes

Fri Nov 16 05:56:36 UTC 2018

Hi peace-discuss,

I thought you might want to read the notes I prepared for News from Neptune 
and AWARE on the Air discussion. I understand Carl posts them around but 
has been having some trouble with the URLs so hopefully the URLs should 
work for you from this copy.

Recommended 2-part video series: "On Contact" with Chris Hedges -- Hedges 
interviews Distinguished Professor of Anthropology David Harvey who wrote 
many books including "A Brief History of Neoliberalism". The 2-part 
interview is called "A critic of Neoliberalism".

A Brief History of Neoliberalism book:

http://www.cmecc.com/uploads/%E8%AF%BE%E6%9C%AC%E5%92%8C%E8%AE%BA%E6%96%87/%5B9%5D%5B%E5%A4%A7%E5%8D%AB%E5%93%88%E7%BB%B4%5D.David.Harvey.(2005).A.Brief.History.of.Neoliberalism.pdf

Interview:

Part 1 of 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-YO5EROH-I

Part 2 of 2: due out on YouTube on 2018-11-18 check 
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLagVUKF7CUTRiG64CklL1AN0mbmNaETfp 
for the URL to that episode.

Protesters have no time for objecting to war?

Protest time to keep Jeff Sessions, no protest time to challenge US 
imperialism? Who benefits from those priorities?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOK-2c68pYo -- a very worthwhile segment 
critically placing the Democrats into context: pro-FBI, pro-Jeff Sessions 
(even when not that long ago they objected to him), pro-CIA, 
pro-Russiagate, and pro-war through their silence -- there are no protests 
against the many wars the US is in.

The segment interview with Walter Smolarek of ANSWER Coalition is worth 
considering -- who benefits from these protests and the noticeable silence 
regarding US imperialism?

I think this is reflective of my concerns about the Trump Derangement 
Syndrome driving corporate TV these days: it's curious that there's so much 
room for such a narrow band of critique against Pres. Trump which never 
brings up his war criminality or compares what he said on the campaign 
trail about war (such as rightly pointing out how badly the invasion and 
occupation of Iraq went for the US and the Iraqis) versus what he does in 
office (continue that occupation).

The complaints against Trump still focus on his weight, his hairdo, his 
skin tone, the fit of his suits, and his namecalling. His policies have 
been a big miss recently as those who railed against US immigration policy 
used pictures of children in cages taken during Obama's administration (and 
these complainers can't bear to bring up the continuity of policy because 
that would interfere with making a personal example out of Trump and 
reinforcing the lie that if we could oust Trump from the presidency we'd 
somehow be better off).

War: Defense contractors still see a boom time under Democratic Party House

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlveZE_kr80 -- The Washington Post reports 
that weapons contractors will still make lots of money.

 From 
https://www.postguam.com/business/defense-contractors-unfazed-by-democratic-gains/article_77b30764-e3f0-11e8-8607-cf9c7b51c0bc.html 
which is a copy of 
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/11/08/defense-contractors-unfazed-by-democratic-gains-republican-deficit-hawks-lose-influence/

> The companies that make jets, bombs and aircraft carriers for the U.S. 
> military are telling investors that the defense business still will be 
> booming under a Democrat-controlled House of Representatives, even as a 
> split Congress threatens a return to partisan gridlock.
> 
> The reason, one defense executive said, is that the Democratic takeover 
> of the House could weaken Republican deficit hawks in Congress at a
> time when their influence is already diminished.
> 
> "One concern that we did have was relative to deficit hawks," Raytheon 
> chief executive Thomas Kennedy said at the Robert W. Baird Industrial 
> Conference in Chicago. "And it turns out that ... most of the deficit 
> hawks were in the House and on the Republican side."
> 
> He went on to say the Democratic takeover "changes the equation"
> relative to conversations around the national debt.
> 
> "The environment is actually nice now because it's settled. We know
> exactly what it is," Kennedy said. "The uncertainty has been taken out,
> and we know that we don't have this issue with the deficit hawks moving
> forward. So we're actually very very optimistic."
> 
> House Republicans lost a number of deficit-minded representatives.
> Virginia Rep. Dave Brat and Texas Rep. Pete Sessions, who both pushed a
> constitutional amendment requiring Congress to pass a balanced budget
> every year, narrowly lost to their Democratic opponents. Deficit hawks
> already had been marginalized in the Republican Party, with just a
> single Republican representative opposing the GOP tax bill over budget
> issues.
> 
> Investment analysts studying the defense industry appear to largely
> agree with Kennedy. >
> In a Wednesday morning note to investors entitled "It's always a party,
> regardless of party," Jefferies investment analyst Sheila Kahyaoglu
> noted the 2006 midterm election, in which Democrats seized the House at
> the height of the U.S. war in Iraq. Defense companies' share prices
> climbed an average of 18 percent during that year.

Max Keiser comments on this article:

> Raytheon [quoted in the Washington Post article] is the middle man
> between the outright Pentagon-run media outlet MSNBC. The second point
> there is a good one: the Democrats are really the war party because they
> believe in infinite deficits, right? Whereas the Republicans at least
> make a nodding reference to the fact that you need to balance the books
> and maybe it's a waste of money; they have a concept of hard money,
> occasionally which serves them well. Whereas the Democrats are all
> about 'there is no such thing as a limit to the amount of money we can
> print' and that extends to the war machine and that's why Hillary
> Clinton is a warmonger and the Democrats are easily conned into spending
> trillions of dollars and the defense industry and why [when] they
> control the House defense stocks went up! I mean is there any clearer
> indication that the Democrats are the party of war?

War: Inadvertently published Pentagon documents expose US hand in Yemen exposé

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cA5RkNOAU0U -- the US pledged support for 
Saudi Arabia (SA) even as news arrived that Yemen was experiencing the 
worst humanitarian crisis.

A document describing an operation called "YOUKON JOURNEY" was 
unintentionally published online and confirmed that this was occuring in 
Yemen and thus continuing US support for SA. This document puts into 
context US claims of no longer fueling SA-led attacks in Yemen.

With one exception for mid-air refueling, the US won't stop backing SA and 
never had any real intent to, despite public relations to the contrary. 
Mid-air refueling from the US might stop but only because SA says it can do 
this without the US. That's not an anti-war or even anti-war-in-Yemen measure.

War: Israel ceasefire?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ar310zyBXKs -- Israel bombed Gaza TV 
station Al-Aqsa TV (Hamas-run TV) just before Al-Aqsa was due to broadcast 
footage of a bus bombing where an Israeli soldier was on board, and Israel 
reaches a ceasefire in Gaza as Hamas agrees to stop demonstrating. Over the 
last 6 months IDF has killed over 150 Palestinians there.

Monsanto influenced the Canadian government to approve glyphosate a couple 
of years ago with studies written by Monsanto (now owned by Bayer)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMH-dphxV3g -- Health Canada learned that 
Monsanto used misrepresented studies indicating glyphosate is safe. 
Canadian authorities are now reviewing Monsanto's glyphosate application.

It's a bit like VP Cheney pushing for the 2003 invasion of Iraq by feeding 
propaganda to the New York Times to be published without sources then going 
on the Sunday morning chat shows and making fraudulent claims backed by 
saying something akin to 'if you don't believe me, just read the Times'.

Russiagate: House Democrats will launch 85 investigations of Pres. Trump 
and (including Russian "collusion") demand his tax returns. None of which 
will address why he was duly elected, the accelerating economic inequality, 
or end US wars.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efrdTnJOkKI -- Democrats continue to show 
that they have no serious message the public can get behind (such as fully 
supporting Medicare for All, a national jobs program, ending wars, etc.).

Identity politics alive and well in media including self-identified 
"alternative" news media

Identity politics continues and claims support from another formerly 
reliable commentator: Laura Flanders is down with identity politics too.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/11/10/wtf-white-women -- Laura 
Flanders asks "WTF White Women?" -- why did so many white women not vote 
for a black Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams.

Laura Flanders wrote:

> 2016 was bad. 2018 was worse. While fifty-two percent of white women
> voted for Donald Trump and Mike Pence in 2016, in 2018, seventy-six
> percent of white women voted for Brian Kemp.
> 
> This Tuesday, seventy-six percent of white female voters in Georgia cast
> their ballots against Stacey Abrams becoming this nation’s first black
> female governor. Fifty-nine percent in Texas voted for Republican Ted
> Cruz against Latino Democrat Beto O’Rourke. Fifty-one percent opposed
> Andrew Gillum becoming the first African American governor of the
> Sunshine State.
> 
> White women rained all over that new day dawning. Did they vote on the
> issues? Statistically, there aren’t enough anti-choice, anti-healthcare,
> anti-minimum wage, gun-mad voters out there to blame just conservative
> women.
> 
> So white women are either stupid or spoiled. I say spoiled.
> 
> We reap plenty of spoils from white supremacy. To name a few: we get to
> be race-less, sexy, vulnerable and at least relatively safe.

The rest of the article is a list of the advantages white women have over 
non-white women and ends with:

> So what the hell, white women? Talk. Not too loudly, or everywhere, all
> the time, or remorsefully to your one girlfriend-of-color, but to me, or
> a white woman like me.
> 
> We don’t want 2020 to roll around and wish that one hundred years ago
> we’d never given white women the vote.

Perhaps Flanders missed 
https://www.blackagendareport.com/how-stupid-do-stacey-abrams-lucy-mcbath-and-most-progressive-democrat-congressional-candidates 
where the vague 'vote for her because she will somehow make things better 
for non-white women' is put into context:

Bruce A. Dixon wrote:

> Stacey Abrams wants to be president, and Georgia governor is one of the
> checkmarks on the way there, and election to governor will immediately
> put her on the short list of contenders. She lays that out quite clearly
> in her latest book Minority Leader How to Lead From the Outside and Make
> Real Change. It’s a memoir-centered self-help book, an
> I-did-it-you-can-do-it-too kind of thing with checklists at the end of
> every chapter. The “it” she talks about in the book is achieving power,
> but for all her deep understanding of how to maneuver to obtain this
> power Stacey offers very few if any clues about what great things she
> wants to do with that power.
> 
> We’ve seen that movie before though haven’t we? Didn’t we just finish
> eight years of an unaccountable black president presiding over the
> greatest loss of black family wealth since we started keeping statistics
> on it? Didn’t we just see three million American families lose their
> homes? Didn’t we hear Eric Holder, the first black attorney general tell
> us the banks to were too big to jail and too important to investigate,
> and didn’t we see Loretta Lynch the second black attorney general
> literally write the fine print on get out of jail free cards for
> CitiGroup and other criminal investors who walked away with billions.
> We’ve lived to see a black president break his word on raising the
> minimum wage and delivering single payer health care? The first black
> president blockaded and bombed all the countries the white presidents
> before him [had] blockaded and bombed and added a few new ones, including
> the actual overthrow of a prosperous African country, where black
> Libyans and other Africans are being traded as slaves right now. Didn’t
> we see the first black president expand fracking around the world,
> privatize big chunks of public education, and let all the torturers and
> kidnappers on the US payroll off the hook?

It's not clear what Abrams offered Georgia residents as governor other than 
'vote for her because she's black and a woman'.

By this reasoning, if Condoleeza Rice ran for US President she'd be a 
shoo-in despite her political record (just like Hillary Clinton was 
supposed to have been a shoo-in, right?). We were supposed to choose 
between voting for Mrs. Clinton or being a misogynist, after all. A vote 
for Jill Stein also somehow qualified as misogyny in the insane identity 
politics false dichotomy.

Democracy Now reaffirms commitment to Trump Derangement Syndrome and 
impeaching Trump with no analysis of what that means should this be a step 
on the road toward getting Trump out of office before the end of his term.

 From 
https://www.democracynow.org/2018/11/9/rashida_tlaib_on_impeaching_trump_occupied 
-- an interview with Rashida Tlaib, newly-elected Congressional 
representative from Minnesota:

> AMY GOODMAN: Will you try to impeach President Trump?
> 
> REP.-ELECT RASHIDA TLAIB: Yes. I truly believe that he’s obstructing
> justice. It is very clear that something is wrong within our own
> government. You can like the man, but I could tell you, I know you like
> the rule of law more. And in America, there is laws that we all follow,
> that we all should equally be held accountable to. And I can tell you
> very strongly that this is not political for me. I mean, he could be a
> Democratic president, and I would still say the same thing: obstruction
> of justice.
> 
> And as an attorney myself, I can tell you, when we start kind of turning
> our heads and letting little bit of things slip by, like what we’ve seen
> the last few days, we are jeopardizing our own democracy. We are
> jeopardizing that accountability and that balance of government that’s
> there, that is so critical for us to live in a free country. We cannot
> allow him to taint this process, that’s there for a reason. And I’m very
> much willing to start investigating and leaning towards that, if he has
> anything to do with obstructing justice. And it pretty much sounds like
> he is trying to sway this investigation and trying to make sure that he
> protects himself instead of protecting our own country.

It's not clear how this is meant to benefit the country in any practical 
sense such as alleviating crushing debt, reallocating federal discretionary 
spending toward programs of social value that would create living wage 
jobs, ending homelessness, stopping the drug war, or passing Medicare for 
All into law.

It strikes me as a step toward getting Trump out of office earlier than the 
end of a term and pushing VP Pence into office. But there's no analysis of 
the practical consequences of this. No challenge to the Democrats' pro-war, 
pro-big bank, pro-corporate policies that good-cop/bad-cop the US into 
another round of discouraging voters (most voters identify as independent 
now, not siding with a party). The Democrats appear to me to continue to 
push the message "we're not with Trump" which is not a policy. The 
accusations leading up to this (such as Russiagate) have had years and gone 
nowhere. Meanwhile Americans are no better off economically but we've got 
trillions for killing people.

What does that Jim Acosta kerfuffle really mean? And why are we hearing 
about the hypocritical reaction to this kerfuffle from RT & Fox News but 
not from Democracy Now?

Comparison between RT and DemocracyNow.org's coverage of the kerfuffle 
between Pres. Trump and Jim Acosta. DN does not come out looking good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwUW0qywCy0 -- RT's coverage, part of "In 
Question" a new news program from RT's Anya Parampil. She and RT's Afshin 
Rattansi and former UK MP George Galloway cover this issue well, putting 
things in perspective including quickly dismissing the distractive alleged 
'touching a woman's hand' non-event, and hypocritical reaction from 
establishment journalism getting all worked up about pulling Acosta's White 
House credentials. Other CNN people are apparently free to visit the White 
House to replace him but RT's entire staff lost their credentials and were 
selected to be forced to register under FARA (Foreign Agents Registration 
Act), including RT US staff. This stands in sharp contrast to other 
state-funded foreign news organizations including the BBC (British) and CBC 
(Canadian) who have not been so compelled. Many RT programs now carry a 
notice saying that a transcript of that program is on file with the US 
Government (see any recent episode of "On Contact with Chris Hedges" or 
"Redacted Tonight" for examples). Virtually everybody in the establishment 
media (and Democracy Now) were silent about about RT's mistreatment.

If DN is going to give the same perspective as the establishment media 
outlets and the same silence to important civil liberties issues as 
establishment media outlets, how alternative can DN be?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TSwjgG0Shs -- There's very selective 
support for who is allowed to report among news organizations. Few want to 
talk about RT's Capitol credentials being pulled in the same context as 
they want to talk about CNN's Jim Acosta's kerfuffle. They want to frame 
Acosta's denial of access as a 1st Amendment issue or at the very least 
very troubling for all journalists. But silence about RT (this includes 
Democracy Now which reported that RT's access was revoked but offered no 
analysis and no explanation of how troubling this should be for all 
journalists).

Tucker Carlson was one of the few exceptions to this; he mentioned the 
hypocrisy on his Fox News program:

> Now CNN is claiming to defend free speech. Only when it's their speech. 
> You'll notice, by the way, that CNN did not object when the government 
> threatened to imprison employees of the cable channel RT if they didn't 
> register as foreign agents. Yes, RT is owned by a foreign government.
> So is the BBC. Until last year much of the New York Times was owned by
> a foreign national. This is true of other news organizations, none of 
> which has ever registered as a foreign agent.

Good voting policy isn't designed to and won't change social, economic policies

Ranked voting, same-day registration, and other election changes are nice 
and worth defending in order to increase the chances we'll hear from 
political candidates other than those from the major corporate parties. But 
we should be clear about what you expect to gain from such electoral 
changes. These changes won't clearly address corporate control over 
government nor will these changes give the electorate candidates one can 
justify voting for.

https://theintercept.com/2018/11/07/the-remarkable-participation-and-efficiency-of-brazils-elections-proves-how-shameful-and-deliberate-is-the-chaos-and-suppression-in-the-u-s/ 
-- Glenn Greenwald's latest on the Brazilian election which is probably 
better in any quantifiable way to the US election system (a run-off 
election, a clear "none of the candidates" voting choice, requiring voting 
but accepting a blank ballot as a valid ballot, same-day results based on 
counting as one goes, no stories like being "turned away from voting 
booths, rampant technological malfunctions, and vote counts that linger for 
weeks with no certain outcome" which recur every 2 years in the US with no 
substantive improvement to the system).

But they didn't stop Bolsonaro who so pleased the capitalist class that the 
Wall St. Journal endorsed him[1] and investments shot up on the news he had 
been duly elected.

[1] See Redacted Tonight's take on this in 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQwZt8ZQTXI and a snippet from "The 
Corporation" on the history of businesses working with "official enemies 
[...], terrorists, tyrants, and despotic regimes" in 
https://files.digitalcitizen.info/corporations-prop-up-fascists/the-corporation-nazi-germany.webm

As Greenwald points out, Brazil's election system is not capable of fixing 
economic problems such as an enormous gap between the wealthy and the poor 
that apparently spur people to vote for a candidate such as Jair Bolsonaro 
despite being designed to grant voters a chance to get to the polls and vote:

> Then, there’s the issue of voter participation. Voting is legally
> mandatory in Brazil: Every citizen over the age of 16 is automatically
> eligible to vote, and those over 18 are required to do so, facing a
> trivial fine for failing to do so (absent a valid justification). They
> are free to vote for “none of the candidates” or leave their ballot
> blank, but it is a legal duty. Still, in the last election, roughly 20
> percent of voters violated that law and abstained from voting. But that
> means that 80 percent of the adult population voted — a far higher
> participation rate than any election in the U.S.
> 
> That’s because everything about the structure of Brazil’s election
> system, set forth in the 1989 constitution it enacted after it exited
> its military dictatorship, is designed to maximize, not suppress, voter
> participation. All citizens are automatically registered. Voting is
> mandatory. The elections are held on Sunday, ensuring that working
> people have the fewest barriers to voting, instead of in the middle of
> the week. Machine voting is uniform throughout the country’s 27 states.
> 
> Brazil generally, and its politics specifically, is plagued with
> countless grave problems, as I’ve reported on over the last several
> years. It’s a country beset by a convergence of hideous political,
> social, and economic crises caused by a broken ruling class, all
> exacerbated by severe wealth inequality.
> 
> But that’s the point. If Brazil — an extremely young democracy with far
> less wealth than the U.S. and intense political, economic, and social
> pathologies — can hold basically efficient, seamless, fast, vibrantly
> participatory, and smooth national elections on a massive scale, as it
> did twice last month, then so, obviously, could the U.S.

Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c15Mp_5CfE0 -- Does the US have 
the worst voting system in the world? Possibly but it's that bad by design, 
not by accident.

War funding

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogsC-SDJLyQ -- Millions of US taxpayer 
money in Syria is being funneled to Al-Qaeda, claims Joint Inspector 
General Report on "Operation Inherent Resolve":

https://media.defense.gov/2018/Nov/05/2002059226/-1/-1/1/FY2019_LIG_OCO_OIR_Q4_SEP2018.PDF

> Since late 2017, USAID [U.S. Agency for International Development] OIG
> investigations have uncovered numerous instances of possible or
> confirmed diversions to armed groups in Idlib Governorate in
> northwestern Syria, including Ha’yat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS), a designated
> Foreign Terrorist Organization.
> 
> One investigation found that an NGO’s employees knowingly diverted
> thousands of USAID- funded food kits worth millions of dollars to
> ineligible beneficiaries (including HTS fighters) and submitted
> falsified beneficiary lists. The investigation resulted in USAID
> suspending the program and the NGO terminating the employment of dozens
> of individuals from March to May 2018.

Vanessa Beeley, independent journalist to RT

> What is very interesting in this report is that the USAID watchdog does 
> not name the NGOs. Now, of course, one of those primary NGOs will be
> the White Helmets probably one of the most promoted, supported, and
> iconized NGO entities working on the ground in Syria basically providing
> the propaganda and corroboration of the regime change foreign policy.
> Surely the US should, first of all, be lifting its economic sanctions
> and it should then be, if it's necessary, be collaborating with the
> Syrian government to provide aid to where it's most needed. Of course I
> don't expect this to happen.

Breitbart's report pointed out:

> Several analysts have determined that the al-Qaeda branch in Syria is
> the terrorist group’s most robust[1] wing.

[1] 
https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2017/07/13/house-witnesses-al-qaeda-is-strongest-in-syria-where-it-could-incorporate-failing-islamic-state/

This means, as RT's report pointed out, US taxpayers have spent trillions 
of dollars in the post-9/11 so-called "war on terror" in order to stop 
Al-Qaeda. But it appears that US taxpayers have been funding Al-Qaeda too. 
Who benefits from this? War profiteers, chiefly: weapons manufacturers, and 
pro-war US Congressmembers (pro-war on both sides of the aisle; Democrats 
offer no opposition on this the largest of state matters).

Breitbart reported on this in 
https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2018/11/08/pentagon-report-ngos-knowingly-diverted-millions-u-s-aid-al-qaeda-group-syria/ 
and so did RT. What about Democracy Now? DN has 4 stories in 2018 featuring 
the word "USAID" according to their website's search engine results, the 
latest of which is from August 6, well before this report was published[1]. 
So I think it's safe to say no, DN offers no coverage of this.

[1] Reload https://www.democracynow.org/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=usaid 
to see if this has changed.

Democratic Republic of Congo Ebola Outbreak

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvAkxi-aheE -- Ebola outbreak claims 198 
victims so far in 2 months in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The Congo is one of the world's major sources of metals needed for jewelry 
and computers. Those metals are worth $24 trillion. Historically this land 
has also provided slave labor to fuel the rubber trade.

In the 1960s the British, US, and Belgian governments wanted the first 
elected Prime Minister of an independent Democratic Republic of the Congo, 
Patrice Émery Lumumba, a pan-Africanist, killed because he was going to get 
aid from Russia (then the Soviet Union). Lumumba asked the US and UN for 
help to suppress Katangan secessionists backed by Belgium, neither helped. 
US President Eisenhower ordered Lumumba's murder and it appears there was 
considerable effort put into this: the CIA had a plot to poison Lumumba 
with his toothpaste, another CIA plot to shoot Lumumba (revealed in the 
1975 Church Committee), and CIA Chief Allen Dulles (the man for whom Dulles 
airport is named) ordered Lumumba's assassination and allocated $100,000 
for the effort. CIA documents released later would reveal that Lumumba's 
Congolese enemies who would kill him (including Mobutu Sese Seko, once 
Lumumba's personal aide, and Joseph Kasa-Vubu, once President of the 
Republic of the Congo) received money and weapons from the CIA. In January 
1961 Lumumba was killed.

See Ludo de Witte's book "The Assassination of Lumumba" for the definitive 
work on this matter.

Another interesting note on Democracy Now's reluctance to critically 
examine the Democratic Party: Newly elected Rep. Ocasio-Cortez backed some 
young climate activists conducting a sit-in in Rep. Pelosi's DC office 
demanding that "the Democrats back a 'Green New Deal'".

https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/pelosi-and-dem-leadership-we-won-you-the-house-now-we-demand-a-real-climate-plan?nowrapper=true&referrer=&source= 
has a copy of their petition:

> 1. Champion a Green New Deal that would create millions of good jobs to
> transform society over the next decade to stop climate change. This
> means creating a committee tasked specifically to write policy on
> creating jobs and moving our country off fossil fuels over the
> designated 12 years that the IPCC has given us. Let’s protect the lives
> of all working people -- black, brown, and white -- from the ravages of
> disaster and pollution.
> 
> 2. Mandate that any Democrat in leadership must take the No Fossil Fuel
> Money pledge and reject campaign contributions from fossil fuel
> executives and lobbyists and prioritize the health of people and planet
> over industry profits. Oil and gas executives profit off a business
> model that's incompatible with the future of human civilization. It's
> time for the Democratic Party to reject their influence wholesale.
> 
> A rising generation of young people of all backgrounds just helped flip
> the House with a record turnout. We will no longer tolerate empty
> promises and words without action. We’re not expecting miracles -- we
> understand that the GOP is corrupted by dirty oil money and will stall
> us at every turn. We know that sweeping change isn’t possible until
> Trump is gone -- but we need to start laying the groundwork and put
> forward our vision for America now.

We'll see where this goes but any real examination of this has to focus on 
where the House Democrats get their campaign money.

RT's coverage about this -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfYJZ1-LBLE -- 
is differently shameful. The host and guests all seem to side with 
corporate power. None challenge the idea that finding the money for 
Medicare for All is not an issue. We're already paying HMOs more than 
Medicare for All would cost and we can't keep up with HMO greed. We're 
apparently okay with the euphemistically-named Defense Department losing 
track of trillions of dollars (covered in a previous notes filing). That's 
enough money to buy out the HMOs at market value ($300-$800B according to 
estimates I heard on Ralph Nader's radio show) thus eliminating the only 
organized opposition to Medicare for All. There's also cutting the military 
budget in half and spending money on programs the US needs. The issue 
facing Democratic Party supporters is their allegiance to their corporate 
funding base. Democrats have not gone along with Medicare for All. We've 
seen what the Democrats did when they have a Democratic Party president and 
control of Congress -- they did not bring HR676 (Medicare for All) and up 
for a vote. We got the ACA ("ObamaCare" nee RomneyCare) which keeps the 
HMOs in charge. But they kept the wars going, escalating invasions and 
killing just like their Republican counterparts do. Funny how there's never 
any question of money for that.

Democracy Now mentioned this protest but there's no analysis examining how 
this puts Democrats in a pickle: should one recognize that Democrats aren't 
supporting these policy choices or continue to support that party despite 
their corporatism?

DN does not report closely on stories that make the Democratic Party look 
bad. DN had nothing to say about the DNC lawsuit filed by Bernie Sanders 
supporters. This was a major break for the Democratic Party in which that 
party lost people who apparently cost Hillary Clinton the presidency (a 
major decline in Democratic Party voting came from those who had previously 
voted for Obama). The DNC Corporation's lawyer Bruce Spiva told us that the 
Democratic Party owes nobody a fair primary process:

http://jampac.us/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/042517cw2.pdf page 25:

> [I]f you had a charity where somebody said, Hey, I'm gonna take this
> money and use it for a specific purpose, X, and they pocketed it and
> stole the money, of course that's different. But here, where you have a
> party that's saying, We're gonna, you know, choose our standard bearer,
> and we're gonna follow these general rules of the road, which we are
> voluntarily deciding, we could have — and we could have voluntarily
> decided that, Look, we're gonna go into back rooms like they used to and
> smoke cigars and pick the candidate that way. That's not the way it was
> done. But they could have. And that would have also been their right,
> and it would drag the Court well into party politics, internal party
> politics to answer those questions.

This wasn't news to anyone but it puts a fine point on how party primaries 
actually work.

As Boss Tweed told us, "I don't care who does the electing, so long as I 
get to do the nominating.".

Exploitation: Richard Wolff: New York and Virginia are paying more than 
half the cost to have Amazon add about 2,500 jobs to New York.

http://www.fox5ny.com/news/48k-per-amazon-hq-job -- New York taxpayers to 
pay $48,000 per Amazon HQ job...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TATrsC8mX_k
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTth4Rb25H4 -- ...and this will also 
include a helipad. Part of the deal contract:

> The Public Parties recognize that the Company [Amazon] needs access
> to the Development Sites and agree to assist in securing access to a
> helipad on the Development Sites, as part of the Development Plan and
> subject to FAA approval.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TATrsC8mX_k is part 1 of the story 
including the odd offers governors offered if Amazon set up their HQ in 
their state, and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTth4Rb25H4 is part 2 
where Richard Wolff pointed out how little this benefits New York:

> This is a shocking display. What they are calling a government-private 
> partnership is nothing of the sort. It's a public subsidy to Amazon.
> The New York Times reported $5 billion in this project will be invested
> by Amazon. $5.5 billion dollars will be invested by New York and
> Virginia. That is a subsidy of over 50% of the cost of this project. We
> the taxpayers will be either paying higher taxes to fund this private 
> company, among the richest in the world, or, if we don't get our taxes 
> raised, the government will deliver fewer services to us because it has 
> given this enormous subsidy to a company. $5 billion from Virginia and 
> New York where Mr. Bezos, the owner of Amazon, is himself the owner of 
> $160 billion. He didn't need it, the company doesn't need it. We are 
> being asked to subsidize. All of the profits will go to the private 
> companies and their shareholders. We, the public, will be funding more 
> than half of this project. Shame is what Mr. DeBlasio ought to feel 
> rather than posing in the PR as if he has delivered something. [...]
> 
> The projected number of jobs in the New York area from this is 2,500. 
> That's a very small number and will have no effect on the unemployment 
> problem of this city [New York City] it's just too small and that's not 
> a surprise [...] because the kind of work Amazon does is highly 
> automated; it uses machines for 90% of what it does. And half of the 
> people it's likely to have working in New York will be brought in from 
> other parts of the Amazon empire.

I realize that Wolff's figures don't all agree with what's been publicized 
elsewhere but it's hard for me to criticize Wolff's figures too much. I've 
seen 25,000 new Amazon jobs spoken of as an estimate by Amazon:

 From 
https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-news/amazon-selects-new-york-city-and-northern-virginia-for-new-headquarters

> Amazon will invest $5 billion and create more than 50,000 jobs across
> the two new headquarters locations, with more than 25,000 employees each
> in New York City and Arlington.

which is 10X as many jobs as Wolff mentioned, but since none of the jobs 
have materialized I'm not willing to give credit to Amazon for having met 
that 10X higher estimate (which is what really counts) or critique the 
estimate all that much. Perhaps we should ask Wisconsin residents how they 
like those 3,000 to 13,000 Foxconn jobs.

Sometimes big companies take advantage of the towns in which they locate, 
so it's reasonable to be skeptical. Walmart famously moved one of their 
stores a short distance from its previous location to avoid paying full 
taxes to the town in which they originally built a store. In 1992 Walmart 
received a $1.8 million infrastructure tax subsidy to place a store in 
Cathedral City, California. Walmart built the store and ran it until the 
tax subsidy ran out. When the city was about to receive all of the tax 
revenue Walmart would have had to pay Walmart moved from E. Ramon Road 
(near Route 111) to just outside city limits to the corner of McCallum Way 
& Date Palm Drive--just outside city limits but not far enough to 
discourage customers from going to the new location 2.2 miles from where 
the store used to be.

Walmart has a history of receiving tax subsidies for its stores. 
https://www.goodjobsfirst.org/sites/default/files/docs/pdf/wmtstudy.pdf has 
a list of many of them.

According to the New York Times 
(https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/opinion/new-yorks-amazon-deal.html) 
Amazon will lease office space in the Citigroup building and "develop a 
four-million-square-foot campus by the East River". I don't know if Amazon 
will leave when benefits run out (perhaps not because New York City offers 
access to nationally powerful people with whom Amazon might want in-person 
meetings) but I take the Walmart in Cathedral City story to be more broadly 
applicable than leaving town--taxpayer-funded subsidies can and will be 
taken advantage of when cities and states are as craven as New York's 
governor Andrew Cuomo was claiming he'd change his name to "Amazon" if it 
would help bring the company there. The New York deal doesn't appear to 
have any expectation of performance margins (Amazon gets so much money if 
they hire so many people, or hire so many New York state residents).

The second new headquarters for Amazon will be in Crystal City, Virginia in 
Arlington county. That deal reportedly includes language that will allow 
Amazon to be forewarned by at least 2 business days written notice about 
any pending Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and, "seek a 
protective order or other appropriate remedy" when a FOIA request compels 
Amazon to produce information.

What's so special about this Virginia location? It's near to powerful 
regulators so corruption is easier to carry out -- 
https://twitter.com/PaulBlu/status/1062404457407877121

> Making friends in high places
> 
> Given Amazon's prominence as a technological powerhouse, access to key
> stakeholders - including regulators, federal government clients, and
> think tanks - in Washington, D.C. will drive significant value for the
> company.
> 
> As Amazon is poised to drive its business in a number of areas that will
> require complex federal regulatory oversight, proximity to key 
> stakeholders, including the Federal Aviation Administration, the
> Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, the
> Food and Drug Administration, and congressional committee leadership, 
> will prove vital.

See https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dr5rLQ8XgAACDZD.jpg for the screengrab.

https://www.geekwire.com/2018/new-yorkers-protest-amazon-hq2-investing-housing-not-helicopters/ 
-- protests against Amazon.

Shawn Dixon, small business owner near where Amazon's new New York facility 
will be built:

> We’re worried about our ability to stay in the neighborhood. I’m not
> against growth and I’m not against Amazon but what I’m against is giving
> away all this money to one of the richest companies in the world when
> our schools are underfunded, we don’t have schools in this neighborhood,
> the trains don’t run here, and small business owners have no
> protections.

Irony alert: Apple wins anti-slavery award

https://www.macrumors.com/2018/11/14/apple-stop-slavery-award/ -- I'm not 
making this up:

> Apple retail chief Angela Ahrendts today accepted the Thomson Reuters
> Foundation's Stop Slavery Award on behalf of Apple at the Trust
> Conference, an annual human rights gathering.

Let's remember that Apple is one of the reasons Foxconn set up what are 
known as "suicide nets" mounted outside its sweatshop labor factories. So 
many workers were committing suicide by jumping to their death from their 
workspace in Foxconn's buildings that Foxconn and Apple took bad press for 
the deaths. Their response? Substantially improving working conditions and 
pay? No. Install nets outside the factory building in order to reduce the 
velocity of the falling workers before they become corpses and possibly 
prevent them from dying.

 From 
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/sep/13/cost-iphone-5-foxconn-factory 
where an undercover reporter joined the workforce making iThings:

> Dormitories smell of rubbish, sweat and foam, and the reporter wrote of
> cockroaches in the wardrobes and dirty bedsheets. chinalaborwatch.org
> reports at least 18 suicides at Foxconn plants in two years, and as a
> result dorm windows have been barred, which gives the impression of a
> prison. The various facilities include a gym, canteen, hospital, library
> and playground, which Wang claims are under-resourced or rundown.