Welcome! "The Evening Blues" is a casual community diary (published Monday - Friday, 8:00 PM Eastern) where we hang out, share and talk about news, music, photography and other things of interest to the community.
Just about anything goes, but attacks and pie fights are not welcome here. This is a community diary and a friendly, peaceful, supportive place for people to interact.
Everyone who wants to join in peaceful interaction is very welcome here.
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Hey! Good Evening!
This evening's music features New Orleans piano player and singer Dr. John. Enjoy!
Dr John - There Must Be A Better World Somewhere
"When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: 'Whose?'"
-- Don Marquis
News and Opinion
Banks, Multinationals, and Governments Are Stealing Our Future. Here's How We Win it Back
On Monday, Dec. 15, all of Belgium was completely shut down from a nationwide general strike in protest of economic reforms that largely punish working people. The strike cancelled 600 flights for 50,000 passengers at the Brussels airport. High-speed trains to France, Netherlands, and the UK were all cancelled, buses didn’t run their routes, workers didn’t come to the office, and nobody went to school. While numbers aren’t yet available, Belgian workers certainly demonstrated that they are the ultimate deciders of whether or not the economy works for everyone or grinds to a halt. The U.S. should take a page from the Belgian playbook if we want to beat back the corporate assault on our livelihoods, homes and futures. ...
The general strike was the climax of a series of actions that started on Nov. 6, when over 100,000 workers mobilized to launch a movement resisting the new government’s austerity measures. After being elected in October, Prime Minister Charles Michel laid out plans to raise the retirement age, freeze a cost-of-living increase for public workers, and drastically cut budgets for public services like healthcare and education. Michel says the programs, recommended by the IMF and the European Union, will save an additional $13.7 billion over five years, but workers say the new government’s austerity measures will end up costing the economy an additional $2.5 billion. ...
While there’s no call for a general strike in the U.S., there should be, given the austerity budget that just passed Congress. The $1.1 trillion “cromnibus” spending bill that will fund the federal government through next September includes a Christmas wish list for the banks and a stocking full of coal for those who need the most help. $300 million was diverted from Pell Grants to student loan debt collectors, making access to higher education even more of a pipe dream for low-income would-be college students. $300 million was cut from support housing programs that help ease chronic homelessness. Another $93 million was cut from the program that provides food assistance to low-income women, infants, and children. In the meantime, Congress spent $479 million on the F-35 jet, which not even the Pentagon wants, and used taxpayers as the cushion for the big banks whenever the $700 trillion derivatives bubble pops. But the crominbus is just the beginning.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which has been negotiated in secret between government officials and over 600 corporate lobbyists for over a year, is likely to become a reality after the 114th Congress is sworn in this January, and possibly even before then. ... If the TPP were put into place, it would effectively make world governments subservient to multinational corporations. It would make it easier for companies like Walmart to ship jobs to Vietnam, where workers are paid half as much as in China, and enable the same hazardous working conditions that led to the collapse of a Bangladesh clothing factory in 2013, or the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in New York during the Industrial Revolution.
IWW organizer Big Bill Haywood accurately described the relationships between working people and the ownership classes in that workers have “always been taught” to care for the capitalist’s private property, while owners will readily go on a capital strike and shut down a factory or ship jobs elsewhere if anything happens to their profits. A general strike thereby flips the tables on the capitalists, depriving the ownership class of their profits if owners do anything to upset workers’ wages, working conditions, or benefits. In doing so, workers remind owners and political leaders that the performance of the economy is entirely dependent on workers being happy and having their needs met.
Syriza’s leader seeks to reassure the markets over debt pile
The man who could soon be Greece’s prime minister – if MPs fail to elect a president and snap polls are called - has sought to placate international markets days before parliament holds a second vote for a new head of state.
Alexis Tsipras insisted on Thursday that his radical left Syriza party would seek a “negotiated solution” to the problem of the country’s monumental debt pile and, unless forced to, would not be making any unilateral moves. ...
Syriza has consistently led opinion polls in recent months with an ever-growing number of Greeks finding solace from austerity in its fierce anti-bailout rhetoric.
The Greek constitution demands that early elections are called if Athens’ 300-member House fails to muster the required majority to elect a president. On Wednesday prime minister Antonis Samaras’ conservative-dominated coalition fell far short of gathering the 200 votes required for its candidate, the former European commissioner Stavros Dimas. MPs reconvene for a second vote on Tuesday.
Ha ha!
Leaked Internal CIA Document Admits US Drone Program "Counterproductive"
Document published by Wikileaks reveals agency's own internal review found key counter-terrorism strategy "may increase support" for the groups it targets
Wikileaks on Thursday has made public a never-before-seen internal review conducted by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency that looked at the agency's drone and targeted assassination programs in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere.
The agency's own analysis, conducted in 2009, found that its clandestine drone and assassination program was likely to produce counterproductive outcomes, including strengthening the very "extremist groups" it was allegedly designed to destroy.
Here's a link to the document, titled Best Practices in Counterinsurgency (pdf).
In one of the key findings contained in the CIA report, agency analysts warn of the negative consequences of assassinating so-called High Level Targets (HLT).
"The potential negative effect of HLT operations," the report states, "include increasing the level of insurgent support […], strengthening an armed group's bonds with the population, radicalizing an insurgent group's remaining leaders, creating a vacuum into which more radical groups can enter, and escalating or de-escalating a conflict in ways that favor the insurgents.”
Hat tip Don midwest:
Bin Laden Expert Accused of Shaping CIA Deception on 'Torture' Program
A top al Qaeda expert who remains in a senior position at the CIA was a key architect of the agency's defense of its detention and "enhanced interrogation" program for suspected terrorists, developing oft-repeated talking points that misrepresented and overstated its effectiveness, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee's report released last week.
The report singles out the female expert as a key apologist for the program, stating that she repeatedly told her superiors and others — including members of Congress — that the "torture" was working and producing useful intelligence, when it was not. She wrote the "template on which future justifications for the CIA program and the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques were based," it said.
The expert also participated in "enhanced interrogations" of self-professed 9-11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, witnessed the waterboarding of terror suspect Abu Zubaydah and ordered the detention of a suspected terrorist who turned out to be unconnected to al Qaeda, according to the report.
The expert was not identified by name in the unclassified 528-page summary of the report, but U.S. officials who spoke with NBC News on condition of anonymity confirmed that her name was redacted at least three dozen times in an effort to avoid publicly identifying her. In fact, much of the four-month battle between Senate Democrats and the CIA about redactions centered on protecting the identity of the woman, an analyst and later "deputy chief" of the unit devoted to catching or killing Osama bin Laden, according to U.S. officials familiar with the negotiations.
[Her name has been known for some years. - js]
"Cut Loose the Shackles of the Past": U.S. and Cuba Announce a New Dawn in Diplomatic Relations
US-Cuba deal: a marriage 18 months in the making, blessed by Pope Francis
If ever there was a lingering illusion that Barack Obama might have “accidentally” bumped into the president of Cuba at the funeral of Nelson Mandela last December, it will have vanished like a puff of cigar smoke.
What was purportedly an unscripted public handshake at that event in Soweto was, as it turned out, the culmination of six months of secret diplomatic talks held far away in Canada.
But it took another year, and the repeated intervention of no less a figure than Pope Francis, to get to a point where officials in Washington and Havana felt able to tell the world what was really going on – after a final phone call between Obama and Raúl Castro on Tuesday to seal the deal.
Then, like the Berlin Wall – that other great symbol of Cold War intransigence – something that had seemed a permanent fixture of US and global politics only hours earlier was suddenly crumbling before a stunned world.
Fifty-three years after US broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba, the two countries would move to restore them and reopen diplomatic missions, and the Obama administration would take steps to relax travel and commercial restrictions. ...
More importantly, by taking things as far as he could without changing the law, Obama hopes to indirectly bring about political change in Cuba that will lead to a breakthrough in the stale debate back home – a paradigm shift which will force US politicians to rethink their skepticism at Castro’s ability to change – their opposition to a lasting reversal of sanctions.
It’s not Cuba that has just decided to rejoin the modern world – it’s the US
I think the Guardian and others got it wrong when they headlined the normalisation of relations between Washington and Havana as an invitation to Cuba to come in from the cold. The truth was the other way around – and more of a break with history. For it is not Cuba that has decided to rejoin the modern world this week. It is the US.
Until this week’s promise, the US has never, ever, been prepared to accept a conventional bilateral relationship with Cuba. On the contrary, for most of the republic’s history, its view of Cuba has been controlling and, at times, downright predatory.
From its very earliest days, the US has seen Cuba as an American offshore interest. It is more than 200 years since the US, under Thomas Jefferson, first tried to buy Cuba from Spain. At the end of the 19th century America instead seized Cuba from Spain at gunpoint. Later on it leased Cuba back to US-approved Cubans on US terms, which included the retention of the Guantánamo Bay base. After that, it propped up the kleptocratic dictatorship that Fidel Castro’s revolutionaries overthrew in 1959. For the past half-century, relations have been suspended altogether. If these two nations are now to deal with one another as equal sovereign states, it is a first.
This week’s move undoubtedly involves risk for Cuba and its ageing authoritarian government. But it is Barack Obama who has made the big concession to reality by simply recognising that Cuba is now an independent nation. It has taken Washington an unconscionable time to reach this point. More than 50 years ago, one of the key consequences of the ending of the Cuban missile crisis was an implicit concession on the part of President Kennedy that Washington would have to co-exist with the Cuban revolution. That concession has held good for half a century. But it is only this week that de facto recognition of Cuba has become de jure recognition.
Congressional Hawks Vow to Block Normalization of Cuba Ties
President Obama’s announcement of his intentions to end 53 years of acrimony toward Cuba, and move toward normalization of relations, including reopening the Embassy in Havana, came as a shock to many.
Polls show that the American public has been supportive of the idea for awhile now, however, and that anti-Cuba sentiment is something a lot of people got over literally decades ago.
Being the obvious thing to do, and a popular thing to do, doesn’t mean it’s going to get done, however, and Congressional hawks are promising to stop normalization, as well as to block any nomination of an ambassador to Cuba. ...
Sen. Marco Rubio (R – FL) dubbed Obama the “appeaser-in-chief” for proposing a return to normal relations, with others declaring the move ill-timed, and threatening the pressure 53 years of unsuccessful sanctions put on it. Sen. Rubio went on to condemn the pope for his involvement in the negotiations as well.
New Jersey hopes Cuba-US relations thaw will help extradite former Black Panther Assata Shakur
New Jersey officials hope the thaw in diplomatic relations between the US and Cuba will make it easier to extradite a former Black Panther Party member convicted of killing a state trooper in a controversial 40-year-old case.
Joanne Chesimard, who changed her name to Assata Shakur, was convicted in the 1973 death of New Jersey state trooper Werner Foerster. Prosecutors say Shakur killed Foerster in a shootout after she and two Black Panther affiliates were pulled over for allegedly driving with a broken taillight on the New Jersey Turnpike.
Two years after her conviction, in 1979, Shakur escaped from prison with the assistance of Black Liberation Army members. She resurfaced in Cuba in the 1980s, and Fidel Castro granted her asylum there.
Despite the conviction, many point to irregularities in Shakur’s case, including evidence that her attorneys’ offices may have been bugged and searched, and potential bias among the jurors. Shakur has maintained her innocence.
Putin Saves an Oligarch, Admits He Has a Lover and Deflects Blame for the Ruble Crisis
President Vladimir Putin touched on everything from this week's ominous ruble crisis to Russian soldiers in eastern Ukraine to his own love life at his annual December press conference, but offered few convincing solutions.
Instead, he reiterated that Russia has been a victim of persecution by Western governments and an unlucky "external economic situation," a phrase he repeated more than any other, warning of years of financial troubles to come.
What is Putin's grand plan to counter the plummeting ruble and the economic recession forecast for next year? In essence, tighten belts and wait for oil prices to rise back to the high levels of previous fat years, when standards of living shot up and, many would say, the government squandered an opportunity to diversify the energy-dependent economy. ...
While some had expected that heads might roll after this week's ruble fiasco, Putin said the government and central bank's response had been "adequate" if slightly delayed. An abrupt hike in a key interest rate by the central bank in the small hours of Tuesday morning undermined investor confidence, while state oil champion Rosneft and its subsidiaries have been accused of using a bond issue last week to buy foreign currency, flooding the currency market with rubles. Anger against Rosneft chairman Igor Sechin was palpable, with one journalist asking Putin how much the oligarch's salary was. Putin claimed he didn't even know his own salary, let alone Sechin's, and called his longtime ally an "effective manager."
Obama Admin Still Seeking Testimony From Journalist James Risen
Jeremy Hammond: I'm an Anonymous hacker in prison, and I am not a crook. I'm an activist
Hackers are a controversial, chaotic and commonly misunderstood bunch. Many of us have been arrested, from Mercedes Haefer and Andrew Auernheimer to Mustafa Al-Bassam and more, and few outside observers get that Anonymous is not a monolithic entity but a wide spectrum of backgrounds, politics and tactics. The journalist Barrett Brown gets it, but he continues to await his sentencing for merely linking to hacked material. And so I’ve been sharing a new book with my fellow inmates by the anthropologist and author Gabriella Coleman called Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous.
The book chronicles the development of Anonymous from its trickster troll days to its involvement in Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring, to the LulzSec and AntiSec hacking sprees and all the word done by the group since Stratfor, the intelligence firm I hacked in 2012. But it is more than a timeline written by an outsider: Coleman spent years in dozens of chatrooms and travelled the world to meet hackers. Some, like my LulzSec codefendants in the UK, I have not heard from since our collaboration on various hacks and subsequent arrests, so I was especially happy to hear how they have been keeping the spirit alive. ...
Despite the “Sabutage”, the 2011 AntiSec phase of Anonymous – when a small but effective group of us took on everyone from Sony to Fox News – may have been the movement’s most active and effective period. At the height of Occupy Wall Street, Anons were gaining street protest experience and political maturity. The hacks were escalating in number and gravity, targeting symbols of economic inequality and police brutality, and in many ways Anonymous was becoming more decentralized, more open-source and tactically diverse enough to represented the future of hacktivism – and maybe even part of the future of activism. ...
We are condemned as criminals without consciences, dismissed as anti-social teens without a cause, or hyped as cyber-terrorists to justify the expanding surveillance state. But hacktivism exists within the history of social justice movements. Hacktivism is still the future, and it’s good to see people still doing something about it.
Rikers Island prison faces federal lawsuit over 'culture of violence' against teens
Federal prosecutors sued the city of New York on Thursday over what a Justice Department investigation called a “pervasive and deep-seated culture of violence” against adolescent inmates at the city’s most notorious jail, new court filings show.
The lawsuit filed Thursday in Manhattan Federal Court is intended to hasten the pace of major reforms at the Rikers Island jail complex, despite the city’s mayor declaring just a day ago that progress is “being made quickly” on the island.
In court papers, Attorney General Eric Holder and US Attorney for New York’s southern district, Preet Bharara, wrote that after four months of negotiating with the city, federal prosecutors have been “unable to reach agreement as to lasting, verifiable, and enforceable reforms to remedy the unconstitutional conditions”.
The lawsuit noted that in the three-month window between September and November 2014, there had been 71 reported incidents of staff use of force against 18-year-olds alone.
However, on Wednesday, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio visited the prison complex on Rikers Island to announce an end to the controversial practice of solitary confinement for adolescent inmates, one of more than 70 recommendations made by federal prosecutors to change the culture on Rikers Island. Until last month, 40 teenage inmates were being held in solitary confinement.
Vermont Gov. Jumps Ship on Single-Payer Healthcare
Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin on Wednesday abandoned his plan to create a single-payer healthcare system in his state, saying moving forward at this time would be too costly—a claim critics denounced as "a slap in the face" to Vermonters.
The proposal to create a universal, publicly financed healthcare system in Vermont was a centerpiece of the Democratic governor's agenda. Legislation Shumlin signed in 2011 put the state on a path to move beyond the federal Affordable Care Act by 2017 to a healthcare system more similar to that in neighboring Canada. He maintained that access to healthcare should be "a right and not a privilege."
But on Wednesday, Shumlin said that, despite his "steadfast support" for publicly-financed healthcare, he "reluctantly" could no longer press forward with the idea in Vermont. He made his decision after hearing from healthcare financing experts who said enacting the proposal would require a double-digit payroll tax on all Vermont businesses and a sliding scale for individuals of up to 9.5 percent.
"These are simply not tax rates that I can responsibly support or urge the Legislature to pass," Shumlin said. "In my judgment, the potential economic disruption and risks would be too great to small businesses, working families and the state’s economy."
Hellraiser Preview
Sherman, set the time machine for tomorrow's Hellraisers Journal which will feature a report on the findings of the New York factory investigation: how working girls get by on $5 to $7 a week.
Tune in at 2pm!
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Wealth Gap Between Rich and Poor Americans Highest on Record
An analysis released Wednesday by Pew Research Center finds that the wealth gap between the top 21 percent of families and everyone else is the widest since the Federal Reserve began collecting such income data 30 years ago.
Last year, the median wealth of upper-income families ($639,400) was almost seven times that of middle-income families and nearly 70 times that of lower-income families.
Measured as the "difference between the value of a family’s assets (such as financial assets as well as home, car and businesses) and debts," wealth is an "important dimension of household well-being because it’s a measure of a family’s 'nest egg' and can be used to sustain consumption during emergencies (for example, job layoffs) as well as provide income during retirement," the report notes.
The Evening Greens
Force Big Government to Kill Big Carbon
When pondering mechanisms that the climate movement might use to maximize its impact in the short time still available, consider this: the Federal Government could, without any new laws, significantly restrict both the supply of, and demand for, fossil fuels. In other words, if the climate movement is serious about controlling Big Carbon it needs to get serious about Big Government.
Only the state has the power to euthanize the fossil fuel industry. Divestment and marching are good and important tactics; they demonstrate popular power but that power needs to be brought to bear on mechanisms – like government regulation – that can directly control the fossil fuel industry. ...
Less discussed is government control of the fossil fuel reserves beneath public lands. Shockingly – if you consider the climate science – federally owned coal, oil, and gas reserves account for more than one quarter of all fossil fuel production in the US. (That is down from public property sourcing about a third of all production just prior to the fracking boom on private lands.) Control of these massive reserves lies with the president – he could start pulling public fossil fuel reserves from the market now, without congressional approval. ...
Since 1982, the federal government has, according to the Environmental Working Group, “leased or offered for oil and gas drilling 229 million acres of public and private land in 12 western states.” Worse yet, most of these reserves aren’t even sold at a decent price. A report by Oil Change International estimates the US Government loses $2.2 billion a year due to low royalties on public reserves; that’s 10 percent of the $22 billion annual subsidy the US Government gives to the petroleum industry.
Translation: the federal government owns vast amounts of fossil fuels and if we are serious about not burning all existing hydrocarbon reserves, that is the most feasible place to start. Unlike Exxon Mobil the government is, at least in theory, a publicly accountable institution.
Fracking Opponents Celebrate Key Victories in New Brunswick, Quebec and New York
Rep. Mike Honda:
We can't let climate change turn droughts, flash floods and mudslides into the new normal
Between power outages, deluging rains, flash floods, mudslides and record droughts, California is quickly becoming unrecognizable – all the bellwethers of an ecosystem out of whack. Thanks to a rapidly changing climate making wet regions wetter and dry regions drier, 2014 will be the hottest year on record – and, if we’re not careful, the Bay Area’s recent #HellaStorm will soon become the norm.
Everyone in the state knows the severity of the problem: we’re in the midst of our worst drought in 1,200 years; our winter snow pack, which provides approximately one-third of the state’s water supply, was at record lows in 2014; last winter’s weather was the warmest in the last 119 years; and ocean surface temperatures off the coast of California are at record highs. The wrath of a warming planet is being felt more powerfully than ever before. ...
This is not simply a California problem. California supplies nearly half of all U.S. fruits, vegetables, and nuts, so any drought directly impacts the diets of all Americans. And the state is not solely culpable for its own climate disaster, nor can it fix them by itself: heavy carbon dioxide emissions, whether from the East Coast or East Asia, are contributing to the extreme weather that California is now experiencing. ...
Achieving the US government’s goal of reducing emissions 80 percent by 2050 – which is necessary for us to survive this century – requires: a steady transition to renewable energy; a phase-out of dirty fossil fuels and the subsidies that support them; the pursuit of low-hanging conservation and efficiency initiatives in transportation, infrastructure, and utility sectors; and a national campaign to get the public thoroughly on board.
Inside Beijing's airpocalypse – a city made 'almost uninhabitable' by pollution
Beijing’s air quality has long been a cause of concern, but the effects of its extreme levels of pollution on daily life can now be seen in physical changes to the architecture of the city. Buildings and spaces are being reconfigured and daily routines modified to allow normal life to go on beneath the toxic shroud.
Paper face masks have been common here for a long time, but now the heavy-duty kind with purifying canister filters – of the sort you might wear for a day of asbestos removal – are frequently seen on the streets. On bad days, bike lanes are completely deserted, as people stay at home or retreat to the conditioned environments of hermetically-sealed malls. It’s as if the 21-million-strong population of the Chinese capital is engaged in a mass city-wide rehearsal for life on an inhospitable planet. Only it’s not a rehearsal: the poisonous atmosphere is already here. ...
The day I arrive in Beijing, the AQI hits 460, just 40 points away from maximum doom. It’s the kind of air that seems to have a thickness to it, like the dense fug in an airport smokers’ cubicle. It sticks in the back of your throat, and if you blow your nose at the end of the day, it comes out black. Pedalling around the city (I am one of the only cyclists mad enough to be on the road) is an eerie experience – not just for the desolation, but for the strange neon glow coming from signs at the top of invisible buildings, like a supernatural, carcinogenic version of the northern lights. The midday sun hangs in the sky looking more like the moon, its glare filtered out by the haze.
Daily talk of the AQI has become a national pastime amongst ex-pats and Chinese locals alike. Air-quality apps are the staple of every smartphone. Chinese microblogs and parenting forums are monopolised by discussions about the best air filters (sales of the top brands have tripled over the last year alone) and chatter about holidays to “clean-air destinations” like Fujian, Hainan and Tibet. ...
And yet denial still persists. Many Beijingers tend to use the word “wumai” (meaning fog), rather than “wuran” (pollution), to describe the poor air quality – and not just because it’s the official Newspeak of weather reports. It’s partly because, one local tells me, “if we had to face up to how much we’re destroying the environment and our bodies every day, it would just be too much.” A recent report by researchers in Shanghai described Beijing’s atmosphere as almost “uninhabitable for human beings” – not really something you want to be reminded of every day.
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin' Is On Hiatus
"Cuban Five" at Heart of US-Cuba Deal
The Latest Twist in the Bizarre Prosecution of Barrett Brown
Wall Street's Bronze Bull Celebrates 25th Anniversary
A Little Night Music
Dr. John - Such a Night
Dr John - Iko Iko
Dr John - Mac's Boogie
Dr. John - Goin' Back To New Orleans
Dr. John - Right Place Wrong Time
Dr. John Talks about Professor Longhair
Dr. John - Tipitina
Etta James, Dr. John and Allen Toussaint - Groove Me
Dr. John - Mess Around
Dr. John - How Come My Dogs Don't Bark
It's National Pie Day!
The election is over, it's a new year and it's time to work on real change in new ways... and it's National Pie Day. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to tell you a little more about our new site and to start getting people signed up.
Come on over and sign up so that we can send you announcements about the site, the launch, and information about participating in our public beta testing.
Why is National Pie Day the perfect opportunity to tell you more about us? Well you'll see why very soon. So what are you waiting for?! Head on over now and be one of the first!
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