[Peace-discuss] anti-neoliberal notes

[J.B. Nicholson]

Some news items to spark discussion on News from Neptune. Have a good show 
guys.



Breaking news: Julian Assange arrested in London, apparently forcibly 
pulled out of Ecuadorian Embassy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stTMt1tLT4g -- Assange arrested and dragged 
out of Ecuadorian embassy, days after WikiLeaks warned of this based on 
their high-level source claiming this would happen within "hours or days" 
(all media was told this via WikiLeaks' twitter feed). Ruptly (RT) was 
there but other news outlets chose not to remain:

Related:
Glenn Greenwald on lazy news coverage in 
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1116323855830855681
> The only news outlet that filmed Assange being taken out of the embassy
> was @Ruptly - a subsidiary of RT - because all other news outlets left a
> couple of days ago. News outlets wanting to use this exclusive footage
> now have to pay @Ruptly for the license:
This is consistent with the coverage we've been getting from RT versus 
plenty of corporate and corporate-friendly outlets who repeat long-debunked 
lies about Assange being a sexual predator, allegations that Assange 
"hacked" documents with Manning, and more. Yet when it came time to reprint 
the documents released by WikiLeaks, many outlets were happy to do that. 
The movie "The Post" is a sharply hypocritical piece of work as Hollywood 
stars push to get that movie to be interpreted as different than the fight 
WikiLeaks (a publisher) faces now (The Washington Post ought to be allowed 
to do what WikiLeaks can't be allowed to do).



Glenn Greenwald in https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1116326922445905925
> Here's[1] the Trump DOJ announcement about its indictment of Assange. It
> relates *only* to the 2010 classified docs about the Iraq & Afghanistan
> War logs & diplomatic cables. It has nothing to do with the 2016
> election. This is huge attack on press freedom
[1] 
https://www.justice.gov/usao-edva/pr/wikileaks-founder-charged-computer-hacking-conspiracy



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gy5gZROlm7o -- "Think about what this means 
for you and your job."

Related: Glenn Greenwald reflecting on ACLU's comment on Julian Assange's 
arrest which is sharply critical of that arrest.

Ben Wizner, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, 
Privacy, and Technology Project in 
https://www.aclu.org/news/aclu-comment-julian-assange-arrest

> “Any prosecution by the United States of Mr. Assange for Wikileaks’
> publishing operations would be unprecedented and unconstitutional, and
> would open the door to criminal investigations of other news
> organizations. Moreover, prosecuting a foreign publisher for violating
> U.S. secrecy laws would set an especially dangerous precedent for U.S.
> journalists, who routinely violate foreign secrecy laws to deliver
> information vital to the public's interest.
Glenn Greenwald points to the ACLU's document and adds his own commentary 
in https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1116317804716797952
> The @ACLU's point is vital: if the US can force the arrest and then
> extradite foreigners like Assange on foreign soil for publishing docs,
> what prevents China or Iran or, you know, Russia for doing the same to
> US journalists who publish secrets about them?


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0z1Dsmt3w8 -- A summary of WikiLeaks 
revelations.



https://www.theguardian.com/media/live/2019/apr/11/wikileaks-founder-julian-assange-arrested-at-the-ecuadorean-embassy-live-updates

Scotland Yard has confirmed that Assange was arrested on behalf of the US 
after receiving a request for his extradition.

In a statement it said:
> Julian Assange, 47, (03.07.71) has today, Thursday 11 April, been
> further arrested on behalf of the United States authorities, at 10:53hrs
> after his arrival at a central London police station. This is an
> extradition warrant under Section 73 of the Extradition Act. He will
> appear in custody at Westminster Magistrates’ Court as soon as
> possible.
 From 
https://www.theguardian.com/media/live/2019/apr/11/wikileaks-founder-julian-assange-arrested-at-the-ecuadorean-embassy-live-updates
> Patricio Mary, the reporter, said he had wanted to ask ambassador Jaime
> Martin about promises he had made to respect Assange’s asylum.
> 
> “Ecuadorian police pushed me and tried to fight with me,” he said. “We
> started shouting traitor and liar because when I interviewed him two
> days ago he told me there was no change with the position of Julian
> Assange and that the government of Lenin Moreno will respect
> international law.”
> 
> He said the Ecuadorians had breached their own sovereignty by inviting
> British police into their embassy. It was symbolic of the way the
> Ecuadorian government had treated journalists in their own country,
> where president Lenin Moreno had shut down opposing newspapers and
> betrayed an incipient socialist revolution, he said.
> 
> Earlier an Assange supporter, a woman who declined to give her name, was
> overheard saying that she thought the embassy was being watched last
> night and that police had chosen to swoop when his supporters were not
> around.
> 
> She said she would not comment to the Guardian, which she accused of
> vilifying Assange. Nevertheless, she added: “Do you think this means
> just one man being arrested? This is your press freedom on the line. But
> I guess you don’t care about that; you are already bought and paid for.”

All sources agree -- Assange was arrested as a result of a US extradition 
warrant. Metropolitan Police, PM May, The Guardian ("Scotland Yard has 
confirmed that Assange was arrested on behalf of the US after receiving a 
request for his extradition." from 
https://www.theguardian.com/media/live/2019/apr/11/wikileaks-founder-julian-assange-arrested-at-the-ecuadorean-embassy-live-updates), 
and more.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9EM4FXD7F8 -- Prime Minister Theresa May 
on Assange's arrest:

> I am sure that the whole House will welcome the news this morning that
> the Metropolitan Police have arrested Julian Assange. Arrested for
> breach of bail after nearly seven years in the Ecuadorian embassy. He
> has also been arrested in relation to an extradition request from the
> United States authorities. This is now a legal matter before the courts.
> The home secretary will make a statement on this later, but I would like
> to thank the Metropolitan Police for carrying out their duties with
> great professionalism and to welcome the cooperation of the Ecuadorian
> government in bringing this matter to a resolution. This goes to show
> that in the United Kingdom no one is above the law.




Glenn Greenwald on the fraudulence of the Democratic Party's objection to 
Trump and their opposition to WikiLeaks and Assange in 
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1116305585677459456
> The UK police also confirm that they've arrested Assange "in relation to
> an extradition warrant on behalf of the United States authorities." Dems
> cheering this are united with the Trump DOJ in an extremist action that
> the Obama DOJ refused to take








https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-2f-d8Vuyo -- Ecuadorian president Lenin 
Moreno on revoking Assange's stay at the Ecuadorian embassy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JdqojPWYC8 -- Assange has long been a 
subject of US spying since 2012. Someone calling themselves "PM" is holding 
a copy of gigabytes of surveillance recordings of Assange from within the 
Embassy and threatening publication if this person is not paid 3 million 
pounds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8b7PgTiwec -- WikiLeaks editor-in-chief 
press conference on new criminal case involving Julian Assange.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfQNr0Yj07I -- Assange being pursued but 
not the New York Times is double-standards.

And this double-standards is also a strong indication of who is in league 
with the US government.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWxGWOzKzHI -- Former MI5 agent Annie 
Machon on Assange arrest.

https://www.democracynow.org/2019/4/11/julian_assange_of_wikileaks_arrested_in 
-- Democracy Now had interesting guests on the 2019-04-11 show

Renata Ávila, a member of Julian Assange’s legal team:
> Well, thank you for having me, Amy, and thank you for all the solidarity
> that you’re showing as a journalist. Unlike you—I’m outraged, like on
> top of all of this going on, I have seen the lack of class solidarity
> from journalists all over the world, and that is making the situation
> worse.
> 
> First, the arrest, it breaches international law at so many levels. And
> as a Latin American, I can say that I’m ashamed of this blatant
> disregard for the most—one of the—which is a tradition of Latin America
> of providing and defending the institution of asylum. What happened
> next, it is what we suspected since Michael Ratner was leading the
> defense of Julian Assange back in 2010, that this was what we predicted,
> and it happened as we predicted it.
> 
> The Swedish case was nothing else but an excuse to secure the arrest of
> a journalist in a Western democracy—so-called democracy. So, it was
> confirmed by Scotland Yard that his arrest is not connected with a bail
> breach; it is connected with the extradition request. And Swedish
> authorities had just now a press conference in Sweden, in Stockholm, and
> they confirmed. It was not consulted with them. It is not related to the
> Swedish case. It is an extradition requested by the U.S. Justice
> Department.

Later, Democracy Now also asked Glenn Greenwald about this breaking news:
> Glenn Greenwald: I think the most important fact is that the arrest
> warrant, according to Assange’s longtime lawyer Jennifer Robinson, is
> based on allegations that Assange conspired or collaborated with Chelsea
> Manning with regard to the 2010 leaks of Iraq and Afghanistan war logs
> and diplomatic cables—a theory that the Obama Justice Department tried
> for a long time to pursue, but found no evidence for, in order to be
> able to justify prosecuting Assange and not face the accusation that
> they were endangering press freedoms by prosecuting Assange for
> something The New York Times and The Guardian and every other media
> outlet in the world routinely does, which is publish classified
> information.
> 
> Even if it were true that Assange collaborated with Manning—and, again,
> the Justice Department of President Obama looked everywhere and found no
> evidence of that—it would still be a grave threat to press freedoms,
> because journalists all the time work with their sources in order to
> obtain classified information so that they can report on it. It’s the
> criminalization of journalism by the Trump Justice Department and the
> gravest threat to press freedom, by far, under the Trump presidency,
> infinitely worse than having Donald Trump tweet mean things about
> various reporters at CNN or NBC. And every journalist in the world
> should be raising their voice as loudly as possible to protest and
> denounce this.
> 
> [...]
> 
> Well, I think that is one of the remarkable aspects of this, is that
> Julian Assange is not an American citizen. I think he visited the U.S.
> once for about three days. WikiLeaks is a foreign-based media
> organization. So, the idea that the U.S. government can just extend its
> reach to any news outlet anywhere in the world and criminalize
> publication of documents or working with sources is extremely chilling.
> That would mean, for example, that China or North Korea or Iran could do
> the same thing if a U.S. news outlet published its secrets, which
> sometimes they do. It would mean that Iran would have the ability, or
> China, to issue an international arrest warrant and demand that the
> reporters who work for the U.S. news outlets be extradited to those
> countries.

Geoffrey Robertson, a British human rights attorney who’s represented 
Julian Assange in the past and has been an adviser to Julian Assange, had 
the sharpest criticism of the governments involved.

> Amy Goodman: Your response to what has taken place and the assurances
> that the Ecuadorean president has gotten that he will not be extradited
> to a country that has the death penalty?
> 
> Geoffrey Robertson: Those assurances are a confidence trick to mislead
> ignorant journalists. In Britain, it’s law that you cannot extradite
> anyone to a country to face the death penalty. So, having these
> assurances are neither not to the point. What is sought by America in
> this warrant that was signed 15 months ago—they’ve been plotting this
> for quite a while—is that he be sent to America for trial on charges
> carrying up to 45 years, which, for a man of Assange’s health and age,
> is in effect a death penalty. So, forget all about the death penalty.
> Britain will send Assange to America, if its extradition request is
> upheld by the court.
> 
> But I must say that after giving him asylum and giving him the promise
> of asylum, to hand him over to the police, without giving him any
> warning or opportunity to go elsewhere, is a cruel and astonishing
> breach of faith by this rotten Ecuadorean government. It will go down in
> the annals of human rights as a disgusting act. But, of course, it was
> encouraged by Mr. Pence, who visited Ecuador, offered it and gave it
> loans and so forth. So, there’s blood money in the background.
> 
> But I think, for Americans who value, as everyone does, your First
> Amendment, you have this problem, that your government is seeking to
> imprison an Australian, a non-American—it doesn’t matter, he’s simply
> not American—on a theory of the First Amendment which would deprive its
> protection to all foreign journalists working, indeed, for American
> papers. So, it would be a grave inroad in your own much-vaunted freedom
> of speech if Assange were to be offered up and sacrificed for so many
> years. Chelsea Manning got 35. Assange is accused of conspiring with
> Chelsea Manning. They are the words on the warrant. So, he would get at
> least 35 years. And he wouldn’t be pardoned by President Trump, as
> Manning was pardoned by President Obama. So, that’s, I think, the
> seriousness of this development today.
> 
> It was probably inevitable that Ecuador, this crummy little state, would
> be leant upon by America and yield up Mr. Assange in spite of its
> promise of asylum. But he will now be imprisoned. He will be entitled to
> ask for bail. America, no doubt, will object. And it will go through the
> English courts, who will have to decide whether the treaty, extradition
> treaty, we have with the United States allows an Englishman or an
> Australian to be thrown to the wolves in America because of what they
> have published. It makes a nonsense of freedom of speech. We have a
> Human Rights Act with a qualified guarantee of free speech. We have the
> European Convention. So, there is a chance that Mr. Assange would be
> able to show what hypocrites you Americans are, or the Trump
> administration is, in trying to put him in prison, where they couldn’t
> put the editor of The New York Times, who published the same material,
> in prison.
> 
> [...]
> 
> Nermeen Shaikh: Is there any likelihood at all, Geoffrey Robertson, that
> he would be simply deported to Australia? He remains an Australian
> citizen.
> 
> Geoffrey Robertson: Yes. I think he would very much like that. And that
> would be—if the Australian government had any gumption, that would
> be—but the Australian government don’t have much gumption. They’re in
> awe of the United States. The present government is rather a lickspittle
> government. And there is an election next month, where the opposition
> may be more vociferous on behalf of Mr. Assange. And, of course, the
> British government doesn’t like him. But the opposition Labour Party may
> be more supporting.
> 
> So, at the end of the day, you come down to the question of free speech,
> whether it’s right that a publisher who has received information from
> sources who want it published, where that information is of public
> interest, showing American death squads, showing the killing of Reuters
> journalists by an American helicopter and so forth, should be jailed and
> punished for the efforts he’s made on behalf of free speech. I mean,
> WikiLeaks’ revelations are found in newspapers, in history books now.
> But, of course, America is trying to make him suffer for taking that
> initiative.










War: Saudi-led, US-backed coalition bombs school in Yemen killing schoolgirls
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYs79G6y0xs















Free software (software users are free to run, inspect, share, and modify) 
is needed: Both corporate parties agree to make it illegal for the IRS to 
make their own tax program.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/04/09/congress-about-ban-government-offering-free-online-tax-filing-thank-turbotax 
-- > Congressional Democrats and Republicans are moving to permanently bar
> the IRS from creating a free electronic tax filing system.
> 
> Last week, the House Ways and Means Committee, led by Rep. Richard Neal,
> D-Mass., passed the Taxpayer First Act, a wide-ranging bill making
> several administrative changes to the IRS that is sponsored by Reps.
> John Lewis, D-Ga., and Mike Kelly, R-Pa.
> 
> In one of its provisions, the bill makes it illegal for the IRS to
> create its own online system of tax filing. Companies like Intuit, the
> maker of TurboTax, and H&R Block have lobbied for years to block the IRS
> from creating such a system. If the tax agency created its own program,
> which would be similar to programs other developed countries have, it
> would threaten the industry’s profits.
> 
> “This could be a disaster. It could be the final nail in the coffin of
> the idea of the IRS ever being able to create its own program,” said
> Mandi Matlock, a tax attorney who does work for the National Consumer
> Law Center.
> 
> Experts have long argued that the IRS has failed to make filing taxes as
> easy and cheap as it could be. In addition to a free system of online
> tax preparation and filing, the agency could provide people with
> pre-filled tax forms containing the salary data the agency already has,
> as ProPublica first reported on in 2013.







Russiagate: The Skripal/Sturgess saga keeps Russiagate alive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z52lsEFVVPk -- Charlie Rowley, 45, a 
survivor of what is described as a Novichok attack in Amesbury, England in 
June 2018, said he is being kept in the dark by the UK government about the 
investigation into his attack. His partner, Dawn Sturgess, 44, died in 
hospital a week after that same attack. Sturgess' death was initially 
described by authorities as a drug overdose but then was revised to become 
part of this alleged Novichok attack. RT once reported that either Charlie 
Rowley or Dawn Sturgess was a "registered heroin addict".

Sturgess' family is also getting no information from the UK regarding the 
investigation into her murder. This echoes how the UK has treated Russia 
throughout this 1-year+ investigation: The UK government blames Russia for 
the attacks on Sergei & Yulia Skripal, Charlie Rowley, and for Dawn 
Sturgess' death but the UK government offers no evidence to back any of 
their claims.

We only know the time, date, and location of the attacks but we don't know 
who the attacker(s) were, why the attacks occurred, or what substance(s) 
were used in the attacks. To note how long the UK government keeps the 
public away from the details of the case: We only recently learned of two 
additional people involved in the operation whose identity came to public 
knowledge a year later (and whose presence is highly coincidental and suspect).

This makes the Skripal/Sturgess affair indistinguishable from any other 
chapter of what's come to be called "Russiagate" -- evidenceless 
accusations against Russia -- and thus comes into further question as 
Russiagate defenders were recently dealt a huge blow to their credibility 
from their chosen and trusted champion -- Robert Muller.

Charlie Rowley felt that so many of his questions were unanswered, he asked 
the Russian ambassador to the UK, Alexander Yakovenko, to talk with him. 
Yakovenko met with Rowley and his brother in person in London. Yakovenko is 
also trying to "fill in some blanks" as RT's report put it.

> Yakovenko: Literally 80% of what I told him [Rowley] was quite a
> revelation to Charlie and his brother. It's perfectly understandable;
> they ordinary people reading British newspapers. What could they know?
> Only what they're offered by the press. So it's good to have an
> alternative point of view and understand Russia's line of reasoning
> [...] Charlie Rowley and his brother had virtually no info on the
> questions we directed at the British authorities over the Skripal case.
> They don't understand why we're not allowed to meet the Skripals. I told
> them that there was no mobile service connection with the Skripals 3
> hours prior to the poisoning. We had no chance to examine this nerve
> agent. It was all news to Charlie and his brother. Most of the
> information they had they had read in the newspapers. And I got the
> impression that the family of Dawn Sturgess and that of Charlie Rowley
> have not been adequately informed as to what happened to the pair in
> Amesbury and what happened in Salisbury before. They never received any
> official reports.

Dawn Sturgess' son has received so little information from the UK 
government that he sent a letter to the Russian president:

> Yakovenko: The family of the late Dawn Sturgess wants first and foremost
> to see the investigations' conclusions. Russia wants the same thing.
> It's been a year now and we still haven't seen any official results.
> What led Charlie and his brother to contact us is precisely the fact
> that they haven't been able to receive anything from the British
> authorities.

The British press also misrepresented the Rowley brothers as homeless, but 
Yakovenko said that's not true.

London has rejected all attempts by the Russian government to review 
evidence or participate in the investigation despite no evidence produced 
to back any suspicion of the Russian government and that Yulia Skripal is a 
Russian national.

Seymour Hersh has maintained on "Going Underground", the Russian mafia is 
more likely involved in the Skripal attack than the Russian government.

 From https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJgTiP6WBss
> Seymour Hersh: Those two [the two men interviewed on RT] were helping 
> the British intelligence services with information about the Russian 
> mafia. That's what they were doing here [in the UK]. In other words, the
> people that were high on the list of people who would want to hurt him
> [Sergey Skripal] would be the Russian mafia. Russians, but not the 
> Russian government.
> 
> Afshin Rattansi, RT host: Do you mean the Skripals?
> 
> Seymour Hersh: Yeah, I mean that was the understanding. There was also
> some reporting out of Europe about that that's been pretty much
> widespread.







Economics: Finland’s Basic Income Experiment Shows Recipients Are Happier 
and More Secure

It turns out that when you give people a reliable source of money they feel 
more financially secure. Go figure.

Makes you wonder if the same thing could be done with food -- what if we 
eliminated food deserts (places where only unhealthy food is available if 
any food is available at all, common amongst the places where poor people 
live) by offering a wide variety of good food to all, gratis?

https://news.yahoo.com/finland-basic-income-experiment-shows-082142474.html

> Unemployed people derive significant psychological benefits from
> receiving a fixed amount of financial support from the state, according
> to a landmark experiment into basic income in Finland that highlights
> the disadvantages of the country’s existing means-tested system.
> 
> Initial results of the two-year study had already shown that its 2,000
> participants were no more and no less likely to work than their
> counterparts receiving traditional unemployment benefit.
> 
> Thursday’s set of additional results from the social insurance
> institution Kela showed that those getting a basic income described
> their financial situation more positively than respondents in the
> control group. They also experienced less stress and fewer financial
> worries than the control group, Kela said in a statement.
> 
> Erratic Bureaucracy
> 
> The results illustrate how bureaucratic and erratic the existing system
> can be.
> 
> For instance, regular recipients of unemployment benefit complain that
> it’s nearly impossible to know how taking on part-time work will impact
> their financial situation at the end of the month. Under the current
> system, declining job offers or training can result in financial
> penalties. But some have discovered that indulging in a hobby can even
> lead to benefits being denied altogether.
> 
> The results published on Thursday are based on phone interviews
> conducted during the final months of 2018. Further results of the
> experiment are due next year.
> 
> Finland is the first country in the world to trial a basic income at
> national level. The government wanted to find out whether a basic income
> could simplify the social security system, eliminate excessive
> bureaucracy and remove incentive traps. Researchers at Kela also wanted
> to measure its impact on the participants’ physical and psychological
> well-being.







https://www.axios.com/us-q1-layoffs-in-a-decade-6309b133-5212-4204-976b-347de6f4ad41.html 
-- The U.S. just had the most Q1 layoffs in a decade

> The U.S. saw its highest level of layoffs in a first quarter since
> 2009, data from staffing firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas released
> Thursday showed.
> 
> By the numbers: Employers cut 190,410 jobs in the first 3 months of the 
> year — 10.3% higher than the number of layoffs announced in the fourth 
> quarter of 2018 and 35.6% higher than job cuts announced in the same 
> quarter of 2018.
> 
> The impact: It's the highest number of job cuts in a quarter since 
> 2015.
> 
> Details: The financial industry saw the third highest number of layoffs 
> and the year-to-date total was 239% higher than it was in 2018.
> 
> * Retailers continue to lead all sectors in job cuts this year with 
> 46,061 in Q1. However, that number is 18.5% lower than retail cuts 
> announced in Q1 2018.
> 
> * Retailers have announced plans to close 4,048 stores so far this
> year.
> 
> The bottom line: The report said worry about an economic slowdown was 
> the main driver of companies' layoff intentions.








War: Drones targeting Americans means further assassinations, ignoring due 
process rights, and accepting the loss of civil liberties.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/04/02/us-governments-refusal-confirm-or-deny-it-put-american-journalist-drone-kill-list

> Lawyers for an American journalist who believes he was placed on the
> government's infamous "kill list" warned Tuesday that the rights of all
> U.S. citizens are at stake if the country's drone assassination program
> is allowed to continue.
>
> The organization's comments came as part of a response to the U.S.
> government's attempt to dismiss a lawsuit regarding its use of the list.
> Reprieve is representing Bilal Abdul Kareem, a journalist and U.S.
> citizen who claims he was repeatedly targeted —and nearly killed on five
> separate occasions—by drone and missile attacks in 2016 when he was
> reporting on the ongoing conflict in Syria.
>
> Kareem joined an Al Jazeera journalist in 2017 in a lawsuit against the
> government, demanding that the Trump administration remove their names
> from the "kill list" of potential targets for the U.S. drone program.
>
> If the government manages to have the lawsuit dismissed, legal experts
> warn it would allow the Trump administration and future presidents to
> secretly place any American on a kill list without telling them why,
> therefore stripping them of their constitutional right to due process.
>
> "The government's assertion that it has the right to mark its own
> citizens for death, based on secret information, without affording them
> the legal protections offered by the Constitution, is chilling."
> —Jennifer Gibson, Reprieve
>
> "The right to due process has been a bedrock of the judicial system, and
> one of the pillars that support a free society going back eight
> centuries to the Magna Carta," wrote Tom Emswiler and Will Isenberg in
> the Boston Globe last summer. "It is the birthright of every American.
> Gaining a tactical advantage is not worth losing that heritage."

Or maybe the lawyers at Reprieve should talk to Robert Naiman of "Just 
Foreign Policy" who recently assured readers of AWARE's peace-discuss 
mailing list:

https://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/2019-March/050541.html
> I see no prospect of prohibiting the U.S. from using drones as weapons
> per se. There is no meaningful support for this idea anywhere in the
> United States, neither in Washington, nor in public opinion. Partly
> because it's fundamentally an irrational idea - there's nothing
> intrinsically worse about using a drone as a weapon than a cruise
> missile strike - in fact, the contrary is true, strike for strike, the
> cruise missile is worse.

We could ask who benefits from calling for ending drone attacks 
"irrational"? Certainly not the people targeted and assassinated by killer 
drones.

Returning to the news article:
> Kareem believes the Obama administration placed him on the kill list and
> wants President Donald Trump to remove his name, asserting that his
> inclusion "is the result of arbitrary and capricious agency action,
> accomplished without due process, and in violation of the United States
> Constitution and U.S. and international law."
>
> The government responded that if those included on the U.S. kill list
> were to be informed and given a trial, national security could be
> jeopardized during the court case.
>
> Such a claim suggests that the right of the U.S. to operate its drone
> program trumps Kareem's—and all Americans'—Fifth and 14th Amendment
> rights, Reprieve said.

We should remember that drone assassination is a policy that continues 
across administrations and spans the major political parties: Anwar 
al-Awlaki was killed in a drone strike on September 30, 2011 under Pres. 
Obama; Anwar's 16-year-old son Abdulrahman was killed in a separate drone 
strike two weeks later. Both Anwar and Abdulrahman were American citizens, 
assassinated in clear violation of their due process rights. Anwar's 
8-year-old daughter Nawar was assassinated by a drone-led Navy SEAL raid on 
January 29, 2017 ordered by Pres. Trump. Noam Chomsky called the drone 
program "the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times" and added 
that it "target[s] people suspected of perhaps intending to harm us some 
day, and any unfortunates who happen to be nearby".







Continuity of policy: Obama's still fighting for the elites just like he 
always has.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBVkol-EEsY -- Jimmy Dore show on the 
latest Obama speech where Obama calls anyone fighting for progressive 
values as "purists". Dore reminds us that

- "Obama's cabinet came from an email [points to screenshot of 
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/8190 an email from a guy named 
Mike Froman fromanm at citi.com to john.podesta at gmail.com from 2008-10-06 at 
11:34 with subject "Lists". You could call Mike at 212-793-1987 and ask 
him.] -- his entire cabinet came from an email from a guy at CitiGroup. And 
there it is, hey 'Here's a list of all the people I want'.". This email is 
also a great bit of evidence to point to when people raise 'diversity' as a 
reason to back someone for office because Mike from CitiGroup tells us his 
handpicked list of candidates is sufficiently diverse:

A quote from Mike's email:
> A list of African American, Latino and Asian American candidates, broken
> down by Cabinet/Deputy and Under/Assistant/Deputy Assistant level, plus
> a list of Native American, Arab/Muslim American and Disabled American
> candidates. We have much longer lists for most of the groups, and the
> lists will continue to grow as we reach out further and more openly, but
> these are the names to date that seem to be coming up as recommended by
> various sources for senior level jobs. (I have tried to include member
> of Barack's campaign and Senate policy staff, as well as participants in
> the Transition project, as appropriate.)
> 
> -- While you did not ask for this, I prepared and attached a similar
> document on women.
> 
> -- At the risk of being presumptuous, I also scoped out how the
> Cabinet-level appointments might be put together, probability-weighting
> the likelihood of appointing a diverse candidate for each position
> (given one view of the short list) and coming up with a straw man
> distribution. (Obviously, multiple permutations of this are possible.
> This was just one example to show how it might pan out.)

New Republic points out in 
https://newrepublic.com/article/137798/important-wikileaks-revelation-isnt-hillary-clinton 
in an article entitled "The Most Important WikiLeaks Revelation Isn’t About 
Hillary Clinton":
> This was October 6. The election was November 4. And yet Froman, an
> executive at Citigroup, which would ultimately become the recipient of
> the largest bailout from the federal government during the financial
> crisis, had mapped out virtually the entire Obama cabinet, a month
> before votes were counted.


Returning to Jimmy Dore's points in the video:
- "Obama is bought and paid for gaslighter which is why we got Donald 
Trump.": He didn't break up the banks, he didn't help the people save their 
houses, he didn't help the unions, he didn't end the wars he expanded them...


Here's a bit of what Obama said to the Europeans in his recent talk:

> I know from experience in passing the healthcare law that I had to work
> on in the United States, that that was not the ideal that I wanted to
> set up, it's what I could get at the time and if I could establish the
> principal that everybody gets healthcare and get 20 million people more
> healthcare, even if 10 million still hadn't gotten it, that's what I'm
> gonna do now. Then I'll fight some more later for the other 20%.
Dore points out:

- it was 30 million people who still hadn't gotten healthcare after 
ObamaCare was signed into law, not 20 million.

- Jimmy Dore: "And the rest of the poor people that you did give ObamaCare 
to was almost worthless to them because they had deductibles of $5,000 
which means they couldn't go to the doctor when they had a symptom. So it 
didn't change poor people's lives almost at all."

- Obama chose not to pursue the public option; people inside Citigroup told 
him what to do and he did it.

- There was no "fight" coming later. Obama chose not to use the opportunity 
when the Democrats had majorities in both the House and Senate to 
ultimately pass something that kept the HMOs in charge of American 
healthcare delivery. Keep that in mind every time you hear a Democrat tell 
you how much they care about American healthcare and how universal 
healthcare should be a goal (in other words, not a reality but a promise 
that will never be kept).

Obama later argues that anyone who objects should be viewed as a "purist":
> One of the things I do worry about progressives in the United States,
> maybe it's true here as well, is a certain kind of rigidity where we
> say, 'Ah! I'm sorry, this is how it's gonna be.' and then we start
> creating what's sometimes called a circular firing squad where you start
> shooting at your allies because one of them is straying from purity on
> the issues.
This is an argument tactic aimed at getting people to stop debating the 
merits of an argument and instead buy into whatever is being proposed by 
the one calling someone else a purist. When American women's suffragists 
fought for the right to vote (including 19 trips to Congress), should they 
have bought into the "purity" of "compromise" which meant some women in 
some states could vote in some elections?

Dore gets it right when he replies to Obama here saying "What he's 
[Obama's] telling you here is don't fight for things you believe in. Don't 
fight for Medicare for All, don't fight for a public option, don't fight 
for a living wage, don't fight to breakup the banks, don't fight to end the 
wars, just take whatever the establishment is willing to give you; because 
I'm going to tell you something about purity: when he's talking about, say, 
Medicare for All -- which the overwhelming majority of Democrats and 
Republicans are for, the country's for it -- you know who's not for it 
Barack? The health insurance companies and Wall St.".

Related:

https://twitter.com/SupergoofNZ/status/1114884005940187138
> It's mind-boggling that such essential, life-saving medicines aren't
> accessible to so many people in a country like the USA. Here in New
> Zealand, we have a $5 co-pay for a 3-month supply of most prescription
> medicines.





Exploitation: 1 in 4 diabetics skip lifesaving insulin doses because 
insulin is so expensive.

https://www.vox.com/2019/4/3/18293950/why-is-insulin-so-expensive
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2717499 
-- 1 in 4 people with diabetes are now skipping taking insulin doses to 
stretch their insulin supply because insulin costs are so high. 
Skyrocketing costs for something that many need and costs very little to 
produce (and therefore cost very little almost 50 years ago) is one of the 
fruits of ObamaCare (whether viewed from the perspective of something 
ObamaCare failed to address or purposefully allowed to continue).

A quote from the article:
> Dr. Lipska described how insulin has rapidly become more expensive in
> recent years, which has even led to a class action lawsuit filed by
> insulin users against major insulin manufacturers. She argued that she
> and her fellow doctors have embraced new improvements in insulin without
> fully considering the rising costs for patients.
> 
> She shared a patient’s recollection that a vial of insulin cost $1.49 in
> 1972, which would be $8.86 now when adjusted for inflation. In 2004,
> that same vial would cost $60, and today it would go for roughly $300,
> she said. Improvements in performance are no longer justifying those
> spikes in prices, she said.
> 
> “The latest generations (of insulin) are not light years different from
> those we had about 10 years ago,” Dr. Lipska said.



-J