Saturday, March 28, 2020

EXTRA, EXTRA: Public Awaress C-19's biggest victim


This issue comes to you from Roger Herried at Energy-net.org

The first and biggest victim of C19 is  public awareness of what is happening.  Stories that are immense in their impact 
  1. Trump taps emergency powers as virus relief plan proceeds
The moment the president declares a “national emergency”—a decision that is entirely within his discretion—he is able to set aside many of the legal limits on his authority.
3.  Our Politics die as authoritarian actions take over - voting in danger.

Sunday, March 22, 2020

How To Think About A 7 Headed Hydra With 8 Heads


Facing this week’s COVID-19 conundrum requires serious thought. An approach I find helpful is to view the altered way of life imposed on our species through a number of lenses.

Here are some of them:

1) Who or what might be responsible for the introduction and spread of this virus in the human biome? And why?

Might it be intended to bankrupt social security or privatize it; might it be to cancel democracy, and suspend fair elections?  Might it be to implement an economic war against China? We can examine a number of theories about how and where this virus originated.

We can, for example trace it to a U.S. Olympic team assigned to Wuhan, China in 2019; we can point out that the pandemic was expected as early as 2016 when the Obama transition team passed its institutional memory to the Trump team that would take over following that inauguration. We can point out how Trump annulled the very organization meant to address such a pandemic, and how all or most of these functionaries are gone, dismissed by Trump, and their institutional memory lost; but the most comprehensive article on the origins of the virus is at https://www.globalresearch.ca/coronavirus-causes-effects-real-danger-agenda-id2020/5706153

2)  What does spread of this disease really do?

Is it real? or perceived. What is real? The Buddhists prioritize seeing things as they are. Even more alarming than the disease itself is our loss of civil rights. You are incarcerated.  You are incarcerated with your books, and your fish tanks, your bookcases, your TV, and your washing machine, call it soft incarceration, but you are incarcerated. You are in a concentration camp for gentlemen. What is the fallout for you as a political animal? You have just had your Right of Assembly taken from you. You have just had your Right to Bear Grievance Against Your Government taken away from you (you can’t go out this week with your sign to demonstrate, or attend a political meeting, or organize a demonstration).  If you live beyond one paycheck, you have had your savings seriously eroded while lawmakers, knowing in advance, made sure to dump their stock. And you have just had the Voke (That’s the Vote-as-a-Joke) taken from you by the media and DNC that made sure you’d have to elect Joe Biden. Could this possibly benefit the folks who legislated an even more restrictive spying law on you just last week? Or the president who has aspirations way beyond 2020, and even 2026?  Whatever the Trump role in creating this brave new world, we can rest assured that he will take full advantage of the chaos that results.

I

3) What is the psychological impact and how do we cope with its toll?

I shut the door of the cab delivering me home from the Oakland Airport a week ago to see big warning signs posted on the building where I live: Senior Residence. Entrance Restricted. For one disoriented moment, I wondered if my key would fit the lock. This new form of existence comes as more of a shock than 9-ll. If we follow the mandates of the state, we must stay indoors. If we sight another human being, we must keep a wary distance of between 6 to 10 feet; we can escape confinement only for essential things like shopping to feed ourselves, or exercising, or keeping a medical appointment—if we’re covered and can get one at all from our clueless and unprepared medical system. 

Drone warfare does to a society such as exists in Iraq and Afghanistan exactly what this virus does to us: Because of fear that we might die, we can’t assemble, we can’t attend school, or mosque, or church, we can’t attend a gathering, a meeting or a music concert, or find an open library, and we can’t have public ceremonies like weddings, or funerals. We are victims of war.

4) How do we cope?

As a young person living in New York, I came in contact with a few people who had survived concentration camp.  We had long heated discussions about what survival meant.  It always came down to one thing: discipline. Strict self-scheduling of activities by the hour, and no deviation. And having a focus, whether learning a new language, or learning a new skill, or writing a book, or making Gaman (like this  drawing of Tule Lake in 1942 by an incarcertaed Jalanese) or designing tombstones commemorating all the millions of species lost to the Sixth Extinction. And taking vitamin C. If you lived in Costa Rica you might get tested if you are sick, but testing in the U.S. is behind the learning curve. And there’s a good reason for that.

"Enduring the unbearable with dignity and patience"
5) What might be some unexpected consequences? 

The choice is stark: natural population selection and authoritarianism and social control, or, by contrast, as Naomi Kline in Corona Virus Capitalism underscores, benefitting from the potential of new ideas. More than ever, we have a compelling reminder of what universal healthcare might mean. And even Forbes is saying it’s time for a Green New Deal. Similarly, because prison overcrowding is a Petry dish for incubating and spreading the virus, we might question the value of prison altogether.  We might look at what the Iranians with their long and bloody history of incarcerating political prisoners have done releasing all prisoners back into society to protect them and the society at large, which is part of the same biome. We might consider that the homeless are also part of the biome we share. We might create hand washing stations for them, we might even consider housing them! We might discover the benefits of de-growth: less flying; less driving, less use of fossil fuel, less consumption. We might discover the need for a guaranteed minimum wage so that sick people would not be forced to go to work during the pandemic. We might reconsider socialism and its benefits now, especially now, in the absence of democracy, when the media and the DNC voked Biden in for us. These are just some of the new ideas which circumstances are forcing to the foreground.

One thing is certain: living (and dying, too) will never be the same. One consequence is that the rich will prey on the poor as they always have; another consequence is that the poor will finally have their chance to teach the rich the lesson they richly need to know: how to live sustainably, on a beautiful blue and green ball.



Demand Congress take measures to prepare the US healthcare system for a pandemic at

Sign now: Coronavirus test should be free and available to all at

Protect frontline workers essential to protecting all at

Petition Congress to implement a national moratorium on foreclosures and evictions at

Petition to release Assange before coronavirus spreads at
Demand Workers First in any airline and airport bailout at

Petition Congress to ban practice of government officials selling stock while in office. at

Tell Trump to employ Defense Production Act to drive the supplies, treatments and capacity our healthcare system needs at



Resisting U.S. bullying, the Appeals Chamber of the ICC unanimously overruled the Pretrial Chamber on March 5, 2020, and ordered a formal investigation of U.S., Afghan and Taliban officials for war crimes, including torture, committed in the “war on terror.”

Chile witnesses a week of renewed protests demanding the resignation of billionaire President Sebastián Piñera and calling for a Peoples’ Convention to scrap former dictator Augusto Pinochet’s 1980 neoliberal laws, replacing them with a new Constitution.

Iran temporarily releases 85,000 prisoners, including political prisoners, to slow the virus’ spread.

‘Bolsonaro Out!’ from balconies and windows, millions demand ouster of Brazilian president over handing of COVID-19.

London postal workers take strike action over COVID-19 concerns.

Italians find way to 3-D print key ventilator piece for $1.00 to help battle coronavirus.

Federal Judge Anthony Trenga orders Chelsea Manning released from jail.  Her supporters raise the full $250,00 of her fine in 24 hours.

Detroit pauses water shutoff in COVID-19 outbreak.

Homeless moms take over a house in LA.

San Francisco to offer RVs to homeless people needing coronavirus quarantine.U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell blocks rules that would have denied 700,000 people food stamps.

Chef José Andrés converts his closed restaurants into to-go kitchens for feed public during COVID-19 outbreak.

Harvard students sue university over its investments in the prison industrial complex.

New York to pay incarcerated laborers 65 cents an hour to make hand sanitizer to fight COVID-19.

Virus fears prompt call for SF police to halt arrests in non-violent cases.

Muslim running for Congress helps pay medical debt of man who sent him anti-Muslim tweets.

Big 3 automakers shut down as COVID-19 grinds U.S. industry to  halt; Italian workers stage wildcat strikes.

Don’t hold your breath: Economists demand Trump immediately lift Iran, Cuba, Venezuela sanctions.

‘Now make it national” as Vermont and Minnesota classify grocery store staff as emergency personnel.

Progressive Marie Newman unseats anti-choice Rep. Dan Lipinski in Illinois Democratic primary.


U.S. finally looking out for Number #2 as it stocks toilet paper.

And in the same vein:



Monday, March 16, 2020

THE LITTLE COUNTRY THAT CAN


Photos courtesy of Laroye Aña

Architecture is one of many avenues into the heart of a people. I remember my first impression during my 1991 book tour of London’s streets. They told me the story of empire, of exploitation of subject people under the colonialism allowing the massive upward accumulation of wealth that would make those orderly streets possible.

On a recent vacation in Cuba, mostly in La Habana, I glimpsed a city in which a great many of its streets are a photographic negative of London, streets that resemble the bombed-out streets of Lebanon, Iraq, and Gaza, streets that bleed from a 61-year-old economic war that is every bit as deadly and destructive of a country and its people as any shooting war; and just as decay is a slower form of combustion, so economic war is just as savage. It just takes a little longer.

Calle de la Salud, La Habana
This statement by Bruno Rodrigues Parrilla, Cuba’s Minister of Foreign affairs, speaking to the UN General Assembly in 2011 sums it up:

“The direct economic damage caused to the Cuban people as a result of the…blockade exceeds a figure of 975 billion dollars, estimated at the depreciated U.S. dollar value in comparison with the gold standard.

“Article 2(b) and 2(c) of the Convention of Genocide of 1948 define ‘serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group’ and ‘deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part’ as acts of genocide….

“The objective pursued by the blockade [is to]…weaken the economic life of Cuba, denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease…monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation, and overthrow of government.”

Although many of my readers have made more frequent visits to Cuba than my own single one, (under the “family visit” provision) and will have had far more telling experiences than  I, I can’t help wondering why not one of them has ever described this devastation, nor have they shared details of its human toll: a population that manages to live on an average salary of $27.00 a month. That includes its doctors, which currently have sent a brigade to Italy to deal with the pandemic du jour. Cuba has medicines to treat thousands of possible cases of COVID-19.

Cuba is a society  blessed with a phenomenal degree of connectivity, the fruit of a vital culture consisting of art, music, dancing, and song as its main expressions. No one is homeless in Cuba, there is no opioid crisis, there is not the hopeless despair one sees in a country hollowed out from within. Because the forces attempting to hollow it out and defeat its revolution, codified by the Toricelli Act (1992; and the Helms-Burton Act (1996) come from without.

In contrast to the dereliction of many of its buildings, in La Habana one sees an amazing reconstructive effort underway, certainly in the prime tourist centers of Plaza de la Cathedral, and Plaza Vieja especially, where one finds a curious array of museums including an automobile museum, a Simon Bolivar museum, a firemen’s museum, a museum dedicated to the history of rum, and the one I found most spectacular, a science museum dedicated to the 19th century life and discoveries of von Humboldt whose Renaissance mind occupied itself satisfying its curiosities about meteorology, geography, and air chemistry among many others. He collected over 70,000 botanical specimens from all over Latin America. The amazingly rich variety of Cuba’s unique vegetation, which triggered von Humboldt’s imagination with its beauty will never desert the Cubans, no matter how damaging 61 years of the U.S. blockade has been  to its economy.

The state of the art museum occupies a neatly restored colonial palace, each exhibit designed to engage the viewer actively, and there are occasional mock ups of the instruments von Humboldt favored for his explorations. How was this museum financed despite the U.S. blockade? By the German government. It displays all the fastidiousness one finds in any Goethe Institute. La Habana’s main museum, Las Bellas Artes, rivals any museum in the world for the richness of its modern art collection.

Saturn teaching his children to walk by Pedro Pablo Oliva

Ever since 1982 when UNESCO declared La Habana a world heritage site as having the most colonial buildings left standing in all of the Americas, various creative ways have been discovered by some of the 186  vs. 2 countries which routinely oppose the U.S. blockade to circumvent its strictures. We see some of those results in the revitalized Habana of the Plaza Vieja district, and the efforts of the State itself capitalizing on tourist revenue. One of the most noteworthy developments is the repurposing of Nuestra Señora de Belen, whose convent and church have been reconfigured into senior housing with 18 apartments, a swimming pool, a physiotherapy center, and an ophthalmology clinic.

Nuestra Señora de Belen

One unforeseen result of the the U.S. blockade has turned Cuba into a living laboratory of the kind of de-growth with which, if we are to realize a planetary future, we must engage in worldwide:

•universal health care (Americans might get ideas if that continues.)

•transportation by horse and human pedaling in Habana which increases as one ventures into the agricultural districts to the East.

•city center banned to traffic.

•bookkeeping and inventorying by hand, a skill which may come in handy when power fails.

•scarcity of fossil fuels.

•dearth of material goods, which stimulates creative ingenuity, and eliminates “shopping” as a palliative compensation  for depression brought on by government-originated depression.

•active programs of education and general literacy.

•and despite deprivation, no one is homeless in Cuba, no miles and miles of tent cities, there are no opioid or suicide crises, and no traffic jams.

(For a full bibliography and timeline up to 2011 of 117 U.S. initiatives to stifle Cuba, see Rodolfo Davalos-Fernandez: Embargo or Blockade: the instrumentation of a crime against Cuba, Havana, Editorial Capitán San Luis, 2018.)

Demand Congress take immediate measures to prepare the American healthcare system for a pandemic at


Stop Sentate from extending PATRIOT Act surveillance at

Or call your Senators and urge them to vote NO at 202 930-8115

Lift sanctions on Iran  which is experiencing the worst outbreak of COVID-19 at

Note: The Bay Area is now on full "shelter in place" order after earlier orders on Sunday saying that people over 65 should self quarantine. 
Travel is restricted except for essential needs - food.   



Sunday, February 16, 2020

Hellfire from Paradise Ranch


It takes a Basque, with an intact moral center to write Hellfire from Paradise Ranch: on the front lines of drone warfare.  It takes an unimpaired moral compass to confront those ethical accommodations to which two-party-system Americans have become Pavlovized with moral corrosion over more than two centuries of temporizing with that old bugbear, “the lesser of two evils.” This book is dynamite. It names names, the names of the good, godly, American shibboleths—people like Obama, McNamara, Westmoreland, and Albright—we have come to enshrine, whose cynicism has raised their fiats to levels of criminal atrocity.

Joseba Zulaika has been a frequent participant in anti drone demonstrations at Creech AFB in Nevada along with Code Pink, Veterans for Peace, the Nevada Desert Experience, local people from Las Vegas and Indian Springs, and other groups, all Americans of conscience. He has been arrested there, and spent time in that notorious horror pit, the Clark County Jail, (see Brian Terrell) where as he writes, “Compared to [the] truly jailed, the homeless and defenseless, the poor of Las Vegas, the wretched whose freedom is uncertain at best…our [incarceration] was ritual….”

 

Although Zulaika is now emeritus, his day job was as a respectable Professor of Anthropology at the U. of Nevada, Reno, where he also taught Basque in the only American University to recognize the key importance of a language which may very well derive from once-peaceful Europe’s original language, before the Kurgan conquest of (mas o menos) 3000 BC whose depredations made of the “Europeans” the imperialist killers they became. In fact 1492 may very well be the extension of that first invasion, when sailing ships made it technologically possible to spead it’s genocidal depredations into the New World.

Hellfire is a virtuoso performance both as ethnography and documentation of horror that nauseates; at the same time it’s a well documented text that seethes with the good, ethical Basque outrage of its author. It quotes a bloodied butcher-aproned Obama with a “Yes, we can.” With its glance at assassination porn, it encounters a level of atrocity the depth of which defies encounter. And Zulaika brings it off dressed in the words of great poets Garcia Lorca, and in a final coup de théatre, Homer himself. As Zulaika meets the horror of our epoch full square, at the same time he celebrates years of resistance at Creech and at the Nevada test site.

 

The narrative strategy of the Epilogue is quite astonishing. It takes an original mind to see the points of tangent in Obama‘s and Al-Awlaki’s lives, initially parallel, eventually vastly unconverging. The comparison raises the narrative to the level of Greek tragedy, implying that both killer and victim are blinded by delusion and their lack of clarity makes of the them the stuff of tragedy.

While Zulaika accepts unquestioningly the received narratives of 9-11 and the Boston marathon, he rejects that of the burial at sea of bin Laden, a  mythology it took the journalism of Seymour Hersh to explode. But these reservations become all but irrelevant in the larger scope of the narrative.


The major omission I find, although skirted in the Epilogue with discussion of ritual burial, would have addressed how drone warfare destroys a civilization, what Zulaika refers to as “what holds everything together,” the dailyness of planting crops, tending sheep, or weaving rugs, or going to school, or market, or to the well for water, or to celebrate a wedding, or bury a friend, or attend the Friday mosque—to observe the rituals of a society by which it describes itself.

Because the constant buzzing overhead implants fear in the heart, and inhibits the basic contact  and the very acts of human cohesion which allow us to remain alive; under the constant surveillance by drones, one by one, they die, paralyzed by fear.

This is genocide.

Zulaika has written a colossus of a book, and much as I found his earlier Bilbao Moon interesting for its multi-leveled narrative, this book clamps the heart in a vise.

Hellfire From Paradise Ranch: on the front lines of drone warfare. 2020, Oakland, CA,  University of California Press, 289 pages.



Read the article about drone resister Brandon Bryant published by the Independent, UK at
  
Please sign this appeal to east Bay Community Energy to shun nuclear energy powered by Diablo Canyon at:
tinyurl.com/KeepEBCENuclearFree2020

In all probability, Arizona and Nevada are the key states that decide the next election because a million of their residents are being purged from the voter rolls. If you are a resident of one of those states, the time is now to canvass door to door, verifying that folks are registered to vote.


Morales and Arce bid to outperform right-wing forces and undo regime change in Bolivia.

Switzerland halts rollout of 5G over health concerns, and why can’t we?

Korea ramps up anti-Japan propaganda ahead of nuclear Japanese Olympics.

Cross-Canada passenger and freight trains shut own by Mohawks  in solidarity with Wet’suwet’en  land defenders.

Venezuela accuses U.S. of crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court.

Senate passes war powers resolution to stop #45 from launching attack on Iran.

Ilhan Omar unveils bold proposal for U.S. foreign policy deeply rooted in justince.

Nevada State Democratic party officials say they’ll abandon the use of two different apps from  the same vendor that failed in Iowa, and are looking to revert to paper-based voting and counting process.

Polling shows Sanders extending lead among Hispanics ahead of Nevada caucuses.

Iowa and New Hampshire caucuses show medicare for all and climate crisis top all other issues for Democratic voters in 2020.

Federal Appeals Court strikes down #45 “work-or-die" Medicaid requirements in Arkansas.

Facing skyrocketing rents, Sta. Cruz CA students go on strike.

Turning up heat for integration, N.Y.C. students plan  city-wide school boycott.

Sanders and Warren join writing letter to AG Barr to resign immediately over Roger Stone case.

Nine Senate Dems call on Barr to resign over violation of duty.

Rank and file teachers’ movement takes on asbestos and lead in schools.

Progressive  DC candidate Jessica Cisneros picks up union endorsements.

Civil rights groups file federal free speech lawsuit against State of Georgia’s unconstitutional Israel boycott law.

Rising Tide reports local Boca Raton organizers and allies shut down the GEO group private prisons headquarters.

North Dakota’s GOP settles voter ID lawsuit in huge victory for Native American voting rights.

Georgia to stop discriminating against Puerto Rican U.S. citizens apply for licenses.

Wednesday, February 5, 2020

CAR-CER-O-LA-ZO


cacerolazo (n.) – earsplitting demonstration where millions bang on their pots and pans. Used by intelligent people who don’t attend the super bowl, and know fascism when they see it raise its ugly horns.


CA-CER-O-LA-ZO

fascism (n.) – "right wing" (Barbara Lee), "mistruths" (Nancy Pelosi), "cover-up" (Robert Reich).
  
Try the F word.  

F-A-C-S-I-S-M. Say it. Say it so your mouth gets used to saying it. Form the syllables one by one to make it easier. Try.

FA  FA  FA  FA  That’s right.  Try again Fascism.

FA  SH  SH  SH SH (like in Shut up). Say it. (don’t shut up)

 


FA – SH –I (soft i) i. i. as in itchy.
  
FA-SH-i- ZM(as in zoom without the oo’s because it comes on quickly when you’re not looking.)

No. Not FASCIzoom. Fascism. Try again.  It’s not hard.

Except fascism is a bitch: kids in cages, Muslims banned, LGBTQ hit upon relentlessly, women trashed, high crimes and misdemeanors in high places, asylum seekers excluded, correctional plantations, Iranian citizens assassinated (by drone), American citizens assassinated (by drone). Tents for the housing crisis. Troops deployed to the Russian border (not  “humanitarian aid”).


If you feel like a f(asicst) hydrant, get out there with your pots and pans. And your ear plugs, but not your head in the sand.

You’ve nothing left to lose but your chains.

 (Slovanian newspaper)


READ: (for comic relief): today’s Information Clearing House at

READ: “What Happens When a Society Can’t Speak the Unspeakable? (and it’s not the F word you think) at
https://eand.co/what-happens-when-a-society-cant-speak-the-unspeakable-7f07e01852


 

SORRY FOLKS.  SOME OTHER TIME, JUST NOT TODAY

Sunday, February 2, 2020

Bibi’s “peace deal” is a blueprint for America’s apartheid


The US press has it wrong: The Trump’/Kushner peace deal is not so much Israel’s apartheid blueprint; it’s the other way round. Here in the U.S., brainwashed by the corporate state organ press, we still imagine Israel to be our colony. The reverse is the case: the U.S. is a colony of Israel.


Gaza City under 2017 Israeli bombardment


It’s even hypothesized that that trillion or so still unaccounted for at the Pentagon (the books were kept in the Pentagon section that sustained all that unfortunate damage from an  airplane crashing into it without burning up the outside lawn) went directly to Israel to defend itself against the bad reputation it’s getting for shooting to blind, kneecap, or kill all those uppity Palestinians who still think that Palestine belongs to them. 

I used to suspect (silly me) that Israel was blackmailing the US over 9/11 because it knew too much (like why Building 7 collapsed even though no plane managed to hit it) but lately I have come to understand that a luxury mansion in New York’s East 70s with hidden cameras in every room, fueled by the Lolita Express, are much more powerful forms of blackmail than an insignificant event like 9/11 ever could be, because boys just love their toys, especially when they are underage and nubile, and two of those boys just happen to be Presidents of the U.S. (Other world figures like Prince Andrew rate fewer points.)

Anatomy of a peace deal

But why dwell on the camouflage of scandal? Such distraction obscures the more important facts such as:

•The so-called peace plan was cobbled together by Jared Kushner without any consultation with Abbas, or any Palestinian input.
•It conveniently puts an end to the International Criminal Court’s investigation into alleged war crimes committed against Palestinians in the  Occupied Territories.
•The Palestinians will be granted limited autonomy within a Palestinian homeland that consists of multiple non-contiguous enclaves scattered throughout the West Bank and Gaza, which have been compared to the apartheid South African system of Bantustans.

What Palestinians think of Bibi 's peace

•The government of Israel will retain security control over the Palestinian enclaves and will continue to control Palestinian borders, immigration, security, airspace, aquifers, maritime waters, and the electromagnetic spectrum. 
•Israel will be allowed to annex vast stretches of the Palestinian West Bank (which has been under Israeli military occupation since 1967) into Israel, including all of the illegal Jewish-only settlements in areas colonized by Israeli settlers as well as Arab East Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley.
•The Palestinians will be allowed to select the leaders of their new homeland but will have no political rights in Israel, the state that actually rules over them.

Meanwhile back at the (colonized) ranch:

At the same time, the Israeli-owned corporation, Elbit Systems , a defense contractor, has been hired by the U.S. government to turn the Tohono O’odham reservation  (4,460 square miles) into a total surveillance prison camp. They tout their products are “field proven” on Palestinian people.
And municipal police of countless American Cities, among them D.C.,  go to Israel for “law enforcement” training, or Israel sends their “law enforcement” IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) experts, whose skills-to-kill have been honed in the practice shooting ranges of Gaza and the West Bank, to the U.S. to train them in population control.


Condemn the Netanyahoo/Trump/Kushner/ “peace is war” plan which paves the way for even more apartheid and land theft at

The U.S. Senate (and Judge Roberts) is an insult to the democracy we never had: If you agree, please sign at

Signatures needed: We refuse to live in  police state under the “Patriot” Act at

Pass the Asylum Seeker Protection Act. Now at

Please sign the NO War petition  at


Tell the IEA: Big Oil companies belong in court, not around International policy-making tables at

Editor’s note: If you are asked to donate to Act Blue, please make sure you verify that if you do not intend to click on the “make it monthly” button, your credit card statement does not show mistaken deductions.


Another word from your editor: We have entered the everything’s up for grabs no-exit zone where the “Commander in Chief’ can do as he likes, because full fascism is for the benefit of your country, like it or not.

Please don’t let the “Roses this Week” section lull you into a false sense of security.

Even if there are a few roses to count, our bed is made of nails.

Press blackout: Protesters swarm DC demanding end to GOP cover up and demanding witnesses.

Global Move the Nuclear Weapons Money campaign promotes nuclear weapons divestment.

Because it loves to eat, and eat well,  France becomes first country to ban all 5 pesticides linked to bee death.

Canada erupts in solidarity with Wet’suwet’en

Republics of Trinidad, Tobago and Barbados reject Pompeo Jamaican visit.

Brazil Petrobras workers call indefinite strike after it fires 396 fertilizer plant workers.

Venezuela Embassy Protectors’ pretrial hearing adjourned as Judge Beryl Howell takes relevant ideas under advisement.

Activists plan boycott of U.S. companies backing India’s anti-Muslim policies.

Marine vet lawmaker tells military to question the orders they are given.

New bill would take needed steps toward curbing mass surveillance.

House requires congressional OK for using force against Iran, and votes to repeal 2002 Iraq AUMF used  by #45 to justify Soleimani’s murder. 

Detroit-area bishop calls for Catholics to refuse to participate in U.S. wars.

Amnesty International USA and partners to brief press on #45 administration’s Muslim Ban expansion.

Pelosi says House Dems will take up legislation reversing #45’s Muslim ban.

Sanders takes aim at corporate polluters with bill cleaning up toxic “forever chemicals” from drinking water.

Democrats finally grapple with Bernie surge in Iowa “Oh, my God, Sanders can win!”

Plan would scale back U.S. military budget by just 3% to end world starvation.

Over 40 press freedom and civil liberties groups denounce Brazil’s charges against Glenn Greenwald.

#WeWantWitnesses trends as protesters demand fair trial and end to GOP cover up.

Demand Justice ads target Chief “Justice” John  Roberts failure to see to a fair impeachment trial. (The millions banging pots and pans are watching the Superb Bowl.)

DC billboard slams Snake McConnell’s “Total Coordination with #45.”

DC cops to stop handcuffing!!!! children 12 and under after incidents involving innocent boys.

Hundreds of activists descend on Senators’ offices in home states to call for “fair” impeachment “trial.”

Key part of 2017 GOP tax scam, the “Opportunity Zone” program, is being investigated by Treasury’s internal watchdog group.

Defending Rights and Dissent teams up with Institute for Policy Studies for a people’s briefing on FBI abuse.

Blocking trains and removing coal, climate activists fight to close one of New England’s largest power plants.

Watershed moment as Guardian is applauded for banning fossil fuel company ads.

After court defeat, climate justice lawsuit youth vow to keep fighting.

Black farmers embrace climate-resilient farming.

EWG applauds Kellogg for pledge to end pre-harvest use of weed killer glyphosate

Energy Justice Program fights for “electricity future that words for people and planet.

New Harvard study shows even those with private insurance can’t afford care: Medicare for All is what patients need.

ICE contractor finally fires captain who posed on neo-Nazi site and tried to start hate group.

LA City Council unanimously passes temporary ban  on private detention facilities.

Migrant teens abused at detention facility gain powerful allies in ongoing litigation.

Utah finally bans conversion therapy for LGBTQ youth, but is only the 19th state to do so.

Ellen DeGeneres rewards Texas teen after school penalizes him for wearing long dreads.

Group calls on citizens to blow the whistle on  Motorola cell-phone “safety” studies.

California AG Becerra wins $344 million judgment against Johnson & Johnson for deceptive marketing targeting women, a first-in-the-nation ruling.

Of especial relevance to race-based mass incarceration Alaska becomes first state to allow marijuana public use establishments.

Chesa Boudin, just elected in S.F., eliminates cash bail.

Virginia and Colorado legislatures restricting state executions clear significant hurdles.



Volunteering for salary men: public polled on what Senators should ask in last 8 hours of impeachment Q & A.

Commerce Secy. Wilbur Ross opines coronavirus could be boon to American Business bringing much needed jobs to workers (when they’re dead?)

In the face of climate disaster, Australian PM, who once carried lump of coal into Parliament shilling for the coal lobby, plans to open coal mine.

‘Nobody can build like I can  build” sez #45 as gale opposes wall. 

Wind storm in Mexicali