[Peace-discuss] NfN notes

[J.B. Nicholson]

Some items to consider for discussion.


WikiLeaks: New release -- US Embassy Shopping List

https://shoppinglist.wikileaks.org/ -- WikiLeaks publishes material which 
the US government used to publish but then stopped linking to. This set of 
documents includes descriptions of items 11 US Embassies have requested 
including:

- spy devices: hidden mics in shirt buttons, USB keys, and more
- "[a] Quotation to design and produce three marketing and promotional 
videos that highlight U.S. beef quality" (send the quote to 
ShanghaiGSOProcurement at state.gov in Chinese RMB (CNY) with Value Added Tax 
as a separate line item)
- cell phone jammers to be used in high security prisons in Mauritius 
(contact cyprayag at govmu.org with details)
- offers for various jobs (nurse practitioner, gardener, security escort, 
and more) some with limited job timespans (one example: the security escort 
job will last no more than 5 years)







William Arkin leaves NBC/MSNBC based on their devotion to war. Critical 
view is equally applicable to other corporate media and their friends.

https://theintercept.com/2019/01/03/veteran-nbcmsnbc-journalist-blasts-the-network-for-being-captive-to-the-national-security-state-and-reflexively-pro-war-to-stop-trump/ 
-- Glenn Greenwald's article
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mlb-DZpyFOw -- Jimmy Dore's piece

An uncommon reiteration of themes found on all too few shows (News from 
Neptune, AWARE on the Air, Jimmy Dore's show to name a few) -- elites vs. 
the rest of the country, missing the forest for the trees, reflexive 
cheerleading for war, reflexively against whatever Pres. Trump says (even 
when he's correct like getting the US out of wars), and reiterating the 
value of whistleblowing.

  From Arkin's resignation letter as quoted by The Intercept:

> My expertise, though seeming to be all the more central to the
> challenges and dangers we face, also seems to be less valued at the
> moment. And I find myself completely out of synch with the network,
> being neither a day-to-day reporter nor interested in the Trump circus.
> …
> 
> To me there is also a larger problem: though they produce nothing that
> resembles actual safety and security, the national security leaders and
> generals we have are allowed to do their thing unmolested. Despite being
> at “war,” no great wartime leaders or visionaries are emerging. There is
> not a soul in Washington who can say that they have won or stopped any
> conflict. And though there might be the beloved perfumed princes in the
> form of the Petraeus’ and Wes Clarks’, or the so-called warrior monks
> like Mattis and McMaster, we’ve had more than a generation of national
> security leaders who sadly and fraudulently have done little of
> consequence. And yet we (and others) embrace them, even the highly
> partisan formers who masquerade as “analysts”. We do so ignoring the
> empirical truth of what they have wrought: There is not one county in
> the Middle East that is safer today than it was 18 years ago. Indeed the
> world becomes ever more polarized and dangerous. …
> 
> Windrem again convinced me to return to NBC to join the new
> investigative unit in the early days of the 2016 presidential campaign.
> I thought that the mission was to break through the machine of perpetual
> war acceptance and conventional wisdom to challenge Hillary Clinton’s
> hawkishness. It was also an interesting moment at NBC because everyone
> was looking over their shoulder at Vice and other upstarts creeping up
> on the mainstream. But then Trump got elected and Investigations got
> sucked into the tweeting vortex, increasingly lost in a directionless
> adrenaline rush, the national security and political version of leading
> the broadcast with every snow storm. And I would assert that in many
> ways NBC just began emulating the national security state itself – busy
> and profitable. No wars won but the ball is kept in play.
> 
> I’d argue that under Trump, the national security establishment not only
> hasn’t missed a beat but indeed has gained dangerous strength. Now it is
> ever more autonomous and practically impervious to criticism. I’d also
> argue, ever so gingerly, that NBC has become somewhat lost in its own
> verve, proxies of boring moderation and conventional wisdom, defender of
> the government against Trump, cheerleader for open and subtle threat
> mongering, in love with procedure and protocol over all else (including
> results). I accept that there’s a lot to report here, but I’m more
> worried about how much we are missing. Hence my desire to take a step
> back and think why so little changes with regard to America’s wars. …
> 
> In our day-to-day whirlwind and hostage status as prisoners of Donald
> Trump, I think – like everyone else does – that we miss so much. People
> who don’t understand the medium, or the pressures, loudly opine that
> it’s corporate control or even worse, that it’s partisan. Sometimes I
> quip in response to friends on the outside (and to government sources)
> that if they mean by the word partisan that it is New Yorkers and
> Washingtonians against the rest of the country then they are right.
> 
> For me I realized how out of step I was when I looked at Trump’s various
> bumbling intuitions: his desire to improve relations with Russia, to
> denuclearize North Korea, to get out of the Middle East, to question why
> we are fighting in Africa, even in his attacks on the intelligence
> community and the FBI.  Of course he is an ignorant and incompetent
> impostor. And yet I’m alarmed at how quick NBC is to mechanically argue
> the contrary, to be in favor of policies that just spell more conflict
> and more war. Really? We shouldn’t get out Syria? We shouldn’t go for
> the bold move of denuclearizing the Korean peninsula?  Even on Russia,
> though we should be concerned about the brittleness of our democracy
> that it is so vulnerable to manipulation, do we really yearn for the
> Cold War? And don’t even get me started with the FBI: What? We now
> lionize this historically destructive institution?










Israel: Harsher conditions for Palestinian prisons

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pr3ql3uTdt0 -- Galloway on how Israel makes 
life even harder for Palestinian prisoners.








Why not trust the Democrats? Because they work for the elites.

There are plenty of stories on this in the past couple of weeks. Virtually 
every Russiagate story fits in this category as Russiagate is devised by 
and largely driven by the Democrats. Now there's also Democratic Party 
elites giving us reasons to not trust them; more reason to understand 
what's going on from a policy continuity standpoint which reinforces the 
meaninglessness of "left vs. right" and meaningfulness of "1% (elites) vs 
99% (populists)". This might commit the error of overestimating the size of 
the elites -- 0.1% might be more realistic.

Joe Biden told millennials "I have no empathy [for you]" about 1 year ago 
per 
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mbpxx8/biden-trashes-millennials-in-his-quest-to-become-even-less-likable 
(it's also noteworthy that the corporate vice.com even calls Biden "less 
likable").

> Joe Biden: The younger generation now tells me how tough things are. 
> Give me a break. No, no, I have no empathy for it. Give me a break. 
> Because here’s the deal guys, we decided we were gonna change the
> world. And we did. We did. We finished the civil rights movement in the
> first stage. The women’s movement came to be. So my message is, get
> involved. There’s no place to hide. You can go and you can make all the
> money in the world, but you can't build a wall high enough to keep the
> pollution out. You can't live where—you can't not be diminished when
> your sister can't marry the man or woman, or the woman she loves. You
> can't—when you have a good friend being profiled, you can't escape this
> stuff. And so, there's an old expression my philosophy professor would
> always use from Plato, 'The penalty people face for not being involved
> in politics is being governed by people worse than themselves.' It's
> wide open. Go out and change it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdmeV0GJ-oE Jimmy Dore has some good 
commentary on this including pointing out the bullshit of a recent poll 
which claims "progressives" prefer Joe Biden to Bernie Sanders (see 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0PgVSM5FH4 for more) and that Biden voted 
for the Iraq war, for deregulating the banks (removing Glass-Steigel), and 
that millennials make up 40% of the electorate.

The poll was a poll of Democratic Party elites; those who stand to benefit 
from more corporatism. They like Biden over Sanders, even as Sanders is 
down with the drone war.







Democrats support corporatist Nancy Pelosi (House speaker) and "PAYGO" 
(which sharply curtails the ability for Congress to pass amenable 
legislation without cutting spending on the basis that paying for it would 
raise the deficit) which was a Republican idea back in 2010 (continuity of 
policy). This greatly reduces the odds of the Democrats delivering Medicare 
for All, taxpayer-funded college for all, and more regardless of what they 
tell you they favor in campaign ads or face-to-face.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsWlxHYLpsg -- Jimmy Dore talks about this.

Generally, this strategy creates the means by which the Democrats 
marginalize party representatives they need to court attention from the 
populists but ultimately don't want. The Democrats play this game in 
presidential elections -- let someone who seems relatively acceptable to 
the public run and then get shut down by a neocon/neoliberal competitor 
(Bernie Sanders vs. Hillary Clinton in 2016) only to end with the former 
candidate gratefully capitulating to the latter (Sanders knowing and 
stating on-camera that his campaign was being cheated out of a fair DLC 
primary followed by attending Clinton's rally saying he accepts her as the 
Democratic representative): BlackAgendaReport.com rightly called this 
"sheepdogging" in:

https://www.blackagendareport.com/bernie-sanders-sheepdog-4-hillary
https://www.blackagendareport.com/bernie-sanders-in-hillarys-pocket -- 
critiquing Sanders' choice and the "lesser of two evils" narrative.

https://blackagendareport.com/sheep_dogging_through_trumpland -- on Keith 
Ellison's choices.

This also helps us understand one of the challenges Jimmy Dore raised 
above: why not pass HR676 (Medicare for All) and let the Republicans veto 
it letting the Democrats say it's the Republican's fault that you can't 
have Medicare for All?

I offer 3 responses (all of which I'm sure he's well aware of):

1. Passing HR676 by the House and relying on a Republican Senate to oppose 
HR676 (or a Republican presidential veto of HR676) comes to dangerously 
close to making HR676 law which doesn't suit their funders' interests (the 
HMOs and drug companies, chiefly). The funders could easily frame this as 
an unnecessary risk. In other words, this strategy gives the public a 
chance to rally behind supporting HR676 pressuring the Republicans to pass 
this into law (remember that the one thing both parties fear is an 
organized public). This strategy also means Pres. Trump might make good on 
something candidate Trump mentioned on "60 Minutes" regarding healthcare 
policy where he gave lip service to Medicare for All (remember that the 
deep state got very nervous about candidate Trump's talk which is why they 
switched their support to Mrs. Clinton and likely why Trump Derangement 
Syndrome rages in corporate media today).

2. When the Democrats were in power in both Congress and the presidency, 
they didn't bring HR676 (Medicare for All) up for voting let alone make 
HR676 law. HR676 sat around collecting co-sponsors so Democrats could do 
the least amount possible to look like they're on the public's side while 
achieving the same corporate-friendly ends. This showed us a bit of what 
the Democrats do with power and why we can't trust them.

3. The Democrats don't care if they lose. Their funders' interests are 
being met whether they're trying to pitch themselves as the victim (a 
mythical beleaguered but well-minded opposition) or whether they're part of 
a good-cop/bad-cop corporatist strategy against the populists. Ted Rall 
gets into this in 
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/08/10/corporate-democrats-would-rather-lose-than-include-progressives/ 
titled "Corporate Democrats Would Rather Lose Than Include Progressives".







Will Bernie Sanders run for US President in 2020? I'm not convinced I ought 
to care if he does because he's so weak on issues that matter.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/01/04/if-bernie-runs-wrong-question/ -- 
Author Paul Street says he will run (and that this isn't even the right 
question) because his people have been working on campaign groundwork. But 
more importantly, Sanders is weak on war and critiquing fellow Democrats 
(despite billing himself as an independent) whether this means pointing out 
how the DLC cheated him and his campaigners out of a fair primary 
(including the DLC corporation telling a court the DLC owes nobody a fair 
primary), weak on challenging Russiagate lies, being for war (remember his 
pro-drone interview with NBC's "Meet the Press"), and more.

But then Paul Street is also pro-impeachment or via the 25th amendment 
(replacing the president or vice president in the event of death, removal, 
resignation, or incapacitation):

> The next U.S. presidential election will take place roughly 670 days
> from now. That’s one hell of a long time from now. In the meantime,
> Sanders ought to call for the removal of the malignant, criminal,
> corrupt, and dangerous Trump from the presidency through impeachment or
> the 25th Amendment. The orange monstrosity should be evicted from the
> Oval Office as soon as possible. We really can’t wait until January 20,
> 2021.

Who benefits from impeaching someone who is talking getting out of Syria? 
Who benefits from Pres. Pence? The establishment, deep state, permanent 
government, that's who.









Russiagate: No new news, no evidence, and no real consequences for The 
Guardian's lies about alleged Assange-Manafort meeting

https://theintercept.com/2019/01/02/five-weeks-after-the-guardians-viral-blockbuster-assangemanafort-scoop-no-evidence-has-emerged-just-stonewalling/ 
-- Glenn Greenwald following up after 5 weeks of silence from The Guardian 
on his questions:

> * How could it be that Manafort, of all people, snuck into one of the
> most monitored, surveilled, videoed, and photographed buildings on the
> planet on three separate occasions without any of that ostensibly
> “smoking gun” visual evidence having emerged, including in The
> Guardian’s own story?
> 
> * Why would The Guardian publish a story of this magnitude without first
> requiring that its Ecuadoran intelligence sources provide them with such
> photographic or video evidence to publish it or at least review prior to
> publication?
> 
> * How could it be that Manafort’s name never appeared in any of the
> embassy entrance logs even though, as The Guardian itself admitted,
> “visitors normally register with embassy security guards and show their
> passports”?
> 
> * What was the bizarre, sensationalistic reference to “Russians” that 
> The Guardian included in its article but never bothered to explain 
> (“separate internal document written by Ecuador’s Senain intelligence 
> agency and seen by The Guardian lists ‘Paul Manaford [sic]’ as one of 
> several well-known guests. It also mentions ‘Russians'”).
> 
> Five weeks later, all of these questions remain unanswered. That’s
> because The Guardian — which likes to pride itself on flamboyantly
> demanding transparency and accountability from everyone else — has
> refused to provide any of its own.
> 
> In lieu of addressing the increasingly embarrassing scandal, The
> Guardian’s top editors and reporters on this story have practically gone
> into hiding, ignoring all requests for comment and referring journalists
> to a corporate PR official who provides a statement that is as vague and
> bureaucratic as it is non-responsive. It’s easier to get a substantive
> comment from the National Security Agency than from The Guardian on this
> story.

This is yet another Russiagate story that falls apart. Like Greenwald says:

> The Guardian’s typically public and outspoken editor-in-chief Kath
> Viner has all but disappeared since the story was published on November
> 27. Since then, she stopped tweeting entirely except to commemorate the 
> November 30 death of a Guardian columnist. Harding has also tweeted
> just once since then. And both have ignored these questions submitted by
> The Intercept, as well as similar inquiries from other reporters:
> 
> [image of his questions emailed to Kath Viner]
> 
> None of this is an aberration. Quite the contrary, it has become par
> for the Trump-Russia course. One major story after the next falls apart,
> and there is no accountability, reckoning, or transparency (neither CNN
> nor MSNBC, for instance, have to date bothered to explain how they both 
> “independently confirmed” the totally false story that Donald Trump,
> Jr. was offered advanced access to the WikiLeaks email archive, all
> based on false claims about the date of an email to him from a random
> member of the public).

Russiagate stories generally fall into two categories:

1) Stories that simply didn't happen: This story about Assange and Manafort 
meeting has no evidence to back it up even from parties that you'd expect 
to have such evidence (video recordings, visitor log entries, passport 
information, etc.); and Russians taking over the US power grid by way of a 
Vermont power station, are a couple of examples.

2) Stories that greatly exaggerate the significance of what may have 
happened: Some Russians spent thousands of dollars on ads, a good 
percentage of which either ran after the election, had no clear political 
message (such as the now famous one of Jesus talking to a depressed young 
man saying:

> 'Struggling with the addiction to masturbation? Reach out to me, and we 
> will beat it together.' -Jesus;
>
> You can't hold hands with God when you are masturbating.
> Use our hotline if you need help.
see attached or visit 
https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/sHFZyOPOjG4d_Oq5lmzWjAKhZGM=/0x0:724x448/920x0/filters:focal(0x0:724x448):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/13631765/Screen_Shot_2018_12_17_at_9.50.35_AM.png 
for the image), and are indistinguishable from free speech (which Americans 
ought to relish).










Russiagate: The tables are turning, western governments are even more 
hypocritical and culpable than previously believed.

https://moderaterebels.libsyn.com/rss -- Moderate Rebels RSS feed
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/moderaterebels/modreb_e32_integrity_initiative.mp3 
-- Audio episode (Interview with Professor David Miller)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doip79-pYn0 -- Video episode (Interview 
with Professor David Miller)

Courtesy of David Green, Moderate Rebels on the "Integrity Initiative" 
which is a UK government funded "Institute for Statecraft" project which 
intends to "defend democracy from disinformation", in particular from 
Russia. The Integrity Initiative received government funding of £296,500 in 
the 2017-18 financial year and would receive a further £1,961,000 in 2018-19.

In other words, this is state-funded "interference" in the affairs of other 
countries -- precisely what the US, UK, German, and French governments have 
alleged (on separate occasions) Russia has done in various ways in their 
countries -- and against the UK Labour Party (Corbyn in particular) which 
is illegal.

More evidence that foreign "interference" is okay when western countries do 
it but not okay the other way around, even if the allegations of so-called 
"interference" amount to nothing more than free speech at such a 
lowly-funded level (thousands of dollars of social media ads, in the case 
of what the US alleges some Russians spent, in order to install Trump in 
the White House by as yet unclearly disclosed means).

> Professor David Miller: Essentially this [the Integrity Initiative] is
> an organization funded by the Foreign Office and there are people from
> the Foreign Office listed as being involved. But when we started
> investigating this we discovered there were a lot more senior people
> from the Ministry of Defence involved in the documents, first of all.
> Second of all we discovered that the people who actually run the
> Integrity Initiative, people in charge of it, several of them were
> actually involved in military intelligence. The person who actually
> received the grounds of two million pounds from the Foreign Office is
> what was called Honorary Colonel in the intelligence core.
> 
> Max Blumenthal: That's Chris Donnelly.
> 
> Professor David Miller: Yes, he was appointed to that role as a new
> appointment in 2015 just as the Integrity Initiative was being created.
> He had previously, of course, a long-term history in the intelligence
> core and the reserves in the intelligence core and that's one of the
> interesting things about this is that many of the people involved are in
> the intelligence core reserves while they have other jobs. So he, for
> example, was a special adviser to the General Secretary of NATO while
> also being a Major in military intelligence in the UK. So there's a
> long-term pattern here, but the Integrity Initiative itself has several
> people who have those connections to military intelligence which is why
> we think [this is a] MOD, Ministry of Defence, push, effectively an MOD
> cutout; an organization set up to look like a charity but which is in
> reality a military intelligence and propaganda operation of the British
> military.






Economy: "Four in 10 adults say they couldn’t produce $400 in an emergency 
without sliding into debt or selling something"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/12/28/living-paycheck-paycheck-is-disturbingly-common-i-see-no-way-out/ 
-- living paycheck-to-paycheck is disturbingly common.

This is a much bigger reason for electing Trump than anything Russia is 
alleged to have done. Russiagate is a distraction; we're not supposed to 
talk about economic reality for more and more Americans nor are we supposed 
to discuss the Democratic Party's continuing support of neoliberalism. 
American voters increasingly don't identify as being with either corporate 
party. Objections to the corporate duopoly apparently take the form of 
eligible voters not voting in the US presidential race at all or voting in 
an opponent who says some agreeable things and looks like they have a 
chance to win (such as Donald Trump in 2016).

> Lani Harrison, 43, said she and her software engineer husband have
> trouble buying groceries after paying the $2,249 rent on their
> two-bedroom Los Angeles apartment. They’re raising three young kids and
> rely on her husband’s income, she said. Her work as a certified car seat
> installer earns her $40 per appointment, but the work isn’t steady.
> 
> “Each month, we have to stretch his paycheck to make things work,” she
> said. “We really don’t have any savings. Many months we go under.”
> 
> Sometimes, she confides in trusted friends.
> 
> “I’m often surprised that their stories are so similar to ours,” she
> said.
> 
> Dillon Holt, a housekeeping assistant at a Nashville hotel, said he’s
> down to one piece of chicken in his freezer. His checking account often
> hovers around zero, and he is unable to put away any money for the
> future or an emergency.
> 
> “I make $12.50, work 40-50 hours a week,” he said. “I still don’t have a
> savings account.”
> 
> Emily Webb, 38, said she works full time as an arts administrator in
> Columbus, Ohio, and waits tables on the side. Staying afloat each month,
> she said, is a precarious dance.
> 
> “It’s a scramble at the end of a paycheck to deposit my tips and make
> sure none of my automatic payments bounce,” said Webb, who has master’s
> degree but cannot make her student loan payments.
> 
> She’s grateful to work in her field, though, and loves her job. One big
> financial boost, she said, awaits her at the end of 2019.
> 
> “I can finally pay off my 9-year-old car,” Webb said. “The plastic part
> of the back bumper was slowly sliding off the back of it. I got
> rear-ended by an uninsured driver 2 years ago, so I reattached it with
> zip ties.”

Recall that the US found the means to bail out the big banks (and even did 
so without the corporate media asking where the money would come from or 
fretting that we couldn't afford to do this or that such a choice would be 
unwise). But what does corporate media say about forgiving student loan debt?

In a 2016 pre-election episode, John Oliver on his HBO show "Last Week 
Tonight" reviewed a few US presidential candidates' campaigns. He mentioned 
Jill Stein was running and said she had many agreeable points in her 
candidacy. Then he objected to Jill Stein's plan to use quantitative easing 
as a means to forgive government-issued student loans (as the US bailed out 
the big banks). This objection was the sole reason to reject the entirety 
of Jill Stein's 2016 campaign. Not only was that ridiculous on its face 
even if one agrees with that objection, but tellingly Oliver never put 
Hillary Clinton's campaign to any close scrutiny. Oliver was essentially 
arguing for Clinton by way of the classic Democratic Party strategy 'where 
else are you gonna go?'.

The US sent him an answer: not with Hillary Clinton. She ended up losing 
because she failed to motivate enough previous Democrat voters to vote for 
her campaign (her electors). For all of the attention some people pay to 
the popular vote, it's worth noting that she didn't maintain the voting 
support Obama had. But somehow we're supposed to believe others are to 
blame, such as that laundry list of others she gave us in 2018 (including 
"Russian WikiLeaks" Jill Stein, and Vladimir Putin).











Labor: Amazon warehouse employees push to unionize

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/01/amazon-fulfillment-center-warehouse-employees-union-new-york-minnesota 
-- Amazon's harsh working conditions and failure to recognize the plight of 
the worker are driving the workers to organize.

> As Amazon’s workforce has more than doubled over the past three years,
> workers at Amazon fulfillment center warehouses in the United States
> have started organizing and pushing toward forming a union to fight back
> against the company’s treatment of its workers.
> 
> Amazon’s global workforce reached more than 613,000 employees worldwide
> according to its latest quarterly earnings report, not including the
> 100,000 temporary employees the company hired for the holiday season.
> 
> Just a few months after Amazon opened its first New York-based
> fulfillment center in Staten Island, workers announced on 12 December
> the launch of a union push with help from the Retail, Wholesale and
> Department Store Union.
> 
> “Amazon is a very big company. They need to have a union put in place,”
> said an Amazon worker who requested to remain anonymous. The worker has
> been with the company for two years and was transferred to Staten Island
> when it opened in October 2018. “They overwork you and you’re like a
> number to them. During peak season and Prime season, they give you 60
> hours a week. In July, I had Prime week and worked 60 hours. The same
> day I worked overtime, I got into a bad car accident because I was
> falling asleep behind the wheel.”
> 
> Other employees cited working conditions as one of the prevailing
> factors for wanting to form a union. “I support the effort. They have to
> be more supportive toward their employees,” said another Amazon employee
> in Staten Island. “Right now, at that fulfillment center, if an employee
> is a picker, they want that person to pick up 400 items per hour,
> picking each item every seven seconds.”
> 
> They noted that to keep up with that hourly rate, workers cannot take
> bathroom breaks or they risk Tot (time off task points) that could be
> used to justify job termination.

[...]

> In Minnesota, workers at several Amazon facilities were the first to
> force management to the bargaining table over the past few months after
> workers held protests in the summer.
> 
> “The end of September and October, we had private meetings with Amazon
> management,” said Nimo Omar, an organizer and founder of the Awood
> Center, an east African worker-led organization in the Minneapolis area.
> “We met with Amazon management, and we had workers from across five
> different warehouses in that meeting talking about working conditions at
> Amazon, from warehouse workers to truck drivers who deliver packages to
> some of the leads in these warehouses as well.”









Virtue signaling: People selectively don't like clear explanations for what 
the US has been doing for ages.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/01/01/what-kind-maniacs-are-running-country-pentagon-rings-new-year-joke-about-dropping 
-- reports of people's reaction to US_Stratcom posting (and later deleting) 
https://pbs.twimg.com/ext_tw_video_thumb/1079865479756374017/pu/img/WfyyecDno9FNwyOm.jpg 
which reads:

> #TimesSquare tradition rings in the #NewYear by dropping the big
> balll...if ever needed, we are #ready to drop something much, much
> bigger.
> 
> Watch to the end! @AFGlobalStrike @Whiteman_AFB #Deterrence #Assurance
> #CombatReadyForce #PeaceIsOurProfession...
> 
> [picture of a stealth bomber]

Walter Schaub, former head of the Office of Government Ethics, posted a 
followup tweet asking: "What kind of maniacs are running this country?". 
Probably the same "maniacs" who were running it when Pres. Obama threatened 
to murder the members of a boy band his daughters liked with a drone 
strike. Back then the assembled press thought that to be a funny joke and 
laughed. There were very few people who objected to this "joke" 
particularly in the context of coming from one of the few people in the 
world who had a history of doing precisely that against countless other 
innocent people.












Disappointing coverage of war: The Real News' interview of Tulsi Gabbard 
(D-HI) is not very practical

https://therealnews.com/stories/rep-tulsi-gabbard-on-the-dawn-of-a-new-era-in-congress 
-- transcript and link to video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MzJlmQLmg4 -- video

There are a few big issues to talk about with a Congressperson: war, 
climate change (global warming), and healthcare. The Real News Network 
(TRNN) interviewed Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI). But TRNN ignored 2 of these 
issues -- war and healthcare -- and let her get away with little on the 
third issue -- climate change. I think Rep. Gabbard's politics are 
indicative of the Democratic Party at their best as a whole -- so deeply in 
the pocket of deep state interests that any amenable points raised along 
the way are merely a sham to keep people believing that the Democrats are 
worth supporting.

Here's the climate change discussion from TRNN's transcript (all spelling 
in context):

> SHARMINI PERIES: Are you talking about the New Green Deal?
> 
> TULSI GABBARD: The Green New Deal is the … I guess at the forefront of
> what the Sunrise Movement is pushing through. Again, young leaders from
> across the country who are taking ownership for their future, as well as
> some of the other pieces of legislation that we already have introduced
> and that this Select Committee will continue to work on building
> forward; to actually have an actionable plan.

Where is this actionable plan published now, in any form?

> SHARMINI PERIES: What are the components of the New Green Deal that you
> think could have life?
> 
> TULSI GABBARD: When you create this Select Committee, you really start
> looking at taking a comprehensive approach through legislation on how we
> get our country off of its addiction to fossil fuels and invest in the
> kinds of infrastructure, jobs, and economy that we need to build this …
> An economy that’s based on green and clean renewable energy. I’ve
> introduced legislation last year called the Off Fossil Fuels Act,
> working with incredible environmental organizations like Food and Water
> Watch. We have now I think close to 400 environmental nonprofits from
> across the country who are supporting that legislation.

There's some more vague inspirational talk here, none of which really 
matters or is detailed enough to examine. The most substantive thing she 
mentions here is the "Off Fossil Fuels Act" (HR3671).

> SHARMINI PERIES: All right. You’re going to get incredible pushback from
> the Trump administration, as you have been. I mean, he’s rolled back so
> many of the very little Obama was able to advance in terms of climate
> crisis we’re dealing with and trying to tackle it. How do you plan to, I
> guess, push through some of these very good policies that the Green New
> Deal is talking about?
> 
> TULSI GABBARD: Well, I think it’s first important to understand that,
> yes, we have to fight back against these attempts, some successful, some
> not, to take away very basic but very important environmental
> protections that are in place really to protect us and our families and
> our communities. That’s kind of the immediate, right, with the situation
> that we have. But it’s important as we look at how to make this very
> systemic change that we address the systemic problem, as well. I can
> tell you the systemic problem in Washington is the influence of big
> fossil fuel money in Washington, and how long that has existed. It’s
> something that exists not just because of Trump. It’s been around long
> before that, and it effects Democrats and Republicans.

Okay, what is to be done about that source of funding? So far other 
Democrats talk about 'getting big money out of politics' which is vague, 
inchoate, and sounds unconstitutional. She follows this up with more vague 
inspirational talk which isn't specific enough to examine.

The "Off Fossil Fuels Act" is HR3671 -- 
https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/3671 -- and has 46 
cosponsors as I write this (all Democrats).

Sec. 301.b.2. stops federal permits on "any new gathering line or 
interstate pipeline for the transport of any fossil fuel resource that 
crosses Federal land or navigable water; or requires the use of eminent 
domain on private property". I don't see this going over well with oil 
companies which contribute to congress.

It's not clear how she's going to convince a corporate-funded Democratic 
Party to go with her on any serious chance to any policy that would 
disallow polluting American air or waterways. Gabbard provides no specifics 
on how to accomplish this. Therefore I'm not very incentivized to believe 
even these cosponsors would vote for this bill or pressure leadership to 
bring the bill up for a vote (just like they did with HR676 -- Medicare for 
All).

On healthcare we see something similar -- vaguely amenable ends that never 
make it to a point where they become actionable. Consider what happened to 
HR676 (what was John Conyers' Medicare for All bill and is currently being 
revised in a process that apparently doesn't include publishing public 
drafts). HR676 sat for years collecting cosponsors where no Democrat would 
bring it to a vote or put any organized pressure on party leadership to 
bring it to a vote. This included the time when the Democrats had control 
of both houses of Congress and a Democratic Party president.

On war, Rep. Gabbard is down with the drone war. She told The Intercept one 
year ago (January 2018) that she endorsed "very limited use of drones" in 
https://theintercept.com/2018/01/20/tulsi-gabbard-syria-isis-al-qaeda/

> Asked if she still favors a small footprint approach with limited use of
> weaponized drones against groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda, Gabbard said,
> “With these terror cells, for example, yes, I still believe that the
> right approach to take is these quick-strike forces, surgical strikes in
> and out, very quickly, no long-term deployment, no long-term occupation,
> to get rid of the threat that exists and then get out and the very
> limited use of drones in those situations where our military is not able
> to get in without creating an unacceptable level of risk.”
> 
> These strikes have taken a significant toll on civilian populations.

She also said she wants to keep the so-called 'war on terror' going by 
"defeating ISIS militarily" according to https://www.votetulsi.com/node/25013.


-J
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