Wednesday, January 05, 2022

Jimmy Dore and Naoki Fujita

I'm watching Jimmy Dore live -- he's talking about the French pushing back against government oppression and chanting "Live free!"  It's a great show and I wish I could highlight it right now.  I'll post it here when it goes up.


Meanwhile, Joe Biden's betrayed We The People yet again.  Naoki Fujita (JACOBIN) reports:

After a year of inaction by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), one of the Joe Biden administration’s first executive actions, on January 21, 2021, called for workplace rules that would protect workers against COVID-19. Under President Donald Trump, OSHA limited itself to issuing nonbinding employer guidance on COVID protections for workers; Biden’s administration promised to issue an emergency temporary standard (ETS) to protect workers from transmission on the job. The proposed rule was a long time coming: by one estimate, over 59,000 workers have fallen ill with COVID in the meatpacking industry alone.

Before the rule was actually implemented in November 2021, the proposed ETS was viewed as a move that would allow OSHA to reassert its rightful place as a guarantor of workplace rights. But that’s not what happened. As reported by Bloomberg, business representatives met with the administration last spring and tried to kill the rule altogether, arguing that widespread adoption of vaccination would make OSHA rulemaking unnecessary. In a May 2021 letter to Congress, the National Retail Federation criticized the forthcoming OSHA rule, writing, “Declaring an emergency fourteen months into a pandemic would convey the false notion that American workplaces are dangerous and would run counter to all Administration messaging regarding COVID-19.”

The Biden administration seems to have heard business leaders’ concerns loud and clear. The final rule issued by Biden’s secretary of labor, Marty Walsh, greatly reduces any costs to employers, instead passing major compliance costs to employees themselves. The regulation encourages employers to impose vaccine requirements as a condition of employment.



Joe Biden works for everyone . . . except the American people.

Here's C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"


Wednesday, January 5, 2022. Julian Assange remains persecuted, DoD admits US troops in Iraq are still in harms way, and much more.



Julian Assange remains persecuted.










Ending the perseuction is not that difficult.  The US government just has to agree to stop punishing people for jounalism.  The US government just has to accept that The First Amendment exists and is a law.  Joe Biden has to realize that not only has this been wrong-headed, it's seriosly damaged Julian's health.  To put this right, charges need to be dropped and Joe has the power to do that.

John Pilger notes:

Julian #Assange has now spent 1000 days in Belmarsh prison. His crime is truth. Watch this powerful video by Hong Kong's leading journalist, Yonden Lhatoo, whose work I admire. Watch and learn about our true enemy.
Quote Tweet
 
In his New Year’s message, Yonden Lhatoo demands Western governments free WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange before preaching press freedom to everyone else.
6:17 AM · Jan 5, 2022

Stella Morris also notes that it is now 1000 days in prison for political prisoner Julian Assange.

Tomorrow (Wednesday) will be Julian's 1000th day in Belmarsh high security prison. One thousand days of this.
2:49 AM · Jan 4, 2022




This latest NBC News article on Assange by former FBI Assistant Director Figliuzzi features all of these corrupt dynamics. MSNBC has been repeatedly promoting it. That is remarkable on its own: a so-called "news outlet” is cheering — indeed, salivating over — the Biden administration's attempt to criminalize Assange under “espionage” laws for the sin of reporting genuine documents showing all sorts of improper conduct by the agencies whose former operatives now staff that network. Given that press freedom groups in the West have uniformly condemned the prosecution of Assange as a grave threat to a free press, it is stunning to watch a corporation that claims to be in the news business cheering rather than denouncing it.

But for the U.S. media, that is just ordinary corruption and subservience to the CIA: it is hardly rare to find "journalists” giddy over the prospect of Assange's ongoing imprisonment. What makes this new article particularly notable is that the FBI — when Figliuzzi was a senior official there — was directly involved in the attempt to investigate, frame and prosecute Assange. Yet the article, while identifying its analyst as “the assistant director for counterintelligence at the FBI, where he served 25 years as a special agent and directed all espionage investigations across the government,” makes no mention of his direct personal interest in the Assange prosecution.

The primary claim of this article is an unhinged conspiracy theory. Figliuzzi asserts that extraditing Assange onto U.S. soil could endanger Donald Trump. The former FBI official barely conceals his glee over the prospect that Assange could somehow offer up dirt on Trump in exchange for a promise of leniency from prosecutors:

If the Department of Justice plays its cards right, it can make the case precisely about those Russian government hacks and WikiLeaks' dissemination of the content of those hacks by offering a deal to Assange in return for what he knows.

That’s what should worry Trump and his allies. . . . Assange may be able to close the gap between collusion and criminal conspiracy. Assange got the Democratic National Committee data dump from an entity long suspected to be a front for the GRU, the Russian military intelligence service. . . Assange may be able to help the U.S. government in exchange for more lenient charges or a plea deal. Prosecutions can make for strange bedfellows. A trade that offers a deal to a thief who steals data, in return for him flipping on someone who tried to steal democracy sounds like a deal worth doing.

So, DOJ, if you’re listening…

That Assange "stole data” is an absolute lie — not even the U.S. Government claims this — but NBC News has previously shown that it has no qualms about disseminating that particular lie. As for Figliuzzi’s belief that Assange possesses secret information about Trump's collusion with Russia over the 2016 election: that is nothing short of madness. Robert Mueller did not even attempt to interview Assange, precisely because the Special Counsel (Figliuzzi's former boss) obviously recognized that Assange had no information that would assist Mueller's investigation to determine whether Trump or his associates criminally conspired with Russia. If Assange really has information showing Trump criminally worked with the Kremlin, how can Figliuzzi justify that Mueller, during eighteen months of investigating that question, never even sought to speak to Assange?

Moreover, if — as Figliuzzi fantasizes — Assange were in possession of some sort of smoking gun that Mueller never found but which would finally prove Trump's guilt on various crimes, why did Trump not pardon Assange? After all, if this twisted fantasy that NBC News is promoting had any validity — namely, Trump will be in big trouble once the U.S. succeeds in extraditing Assange to the U.S. to stand trial — why was it the Trump administration that brought these charges against Assange in the first place, and why would Trump not have pardoned Assange in order to prevent such a deal from taking place? None of what Figliuzzi is claiming has any evidence to support it or even makes any minimal sense.

But as usual, that is no bar to NBC News and MSNBC publishing and aggressively promoting it. As I will never tire of pointing out, it is the corporate media outlets that most vocally denounce disinformation which are the ones guilty of spreading it most frequently and destructively.




Meanwhlie, last year found US President Joe Biden announcing combat was over for US troops in Iraq.  Combat did not end just because Joe tossed out a few words.  This is from the US Defense Dept:

Even though the mission of U.S. forces in Iraq has changed, the troops are still in a hazardous environment and retain the ability to defend themselves, Pentagon Press Secretary John F. Kirby told reporters today.

24:29
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The mission of U.S. forces shifted from combat to advise and assist two weeks ago, per an agreement between the United States and Iraq. Yet troops advising and assisting Iraqi forces are at risk.

Forces launched strikes against rocket-launching sites near Green Village in Syria and shot down two armed drones targeting forces in Al Asad Air Base. There were no casualties among friendly forces.

The strikes against the rocket-launching sites were not airstrikes, Kirby said. Forces hit the sites to ensure rockets were not launched against coalition forces. 

Iraqi officials inspect body armor plates.


But that begs the greater question of if U.S. personnel are at risk in the mission. "They clearly are at risk in the region," Kirby said. "I mean, one of the reasons why these sites were hit was [that] we had reason to believe that they were going to be used as launch sites for attacks on Green Village. So clearly, our men and women remain in harm's way. And we have to take that threat very seriously. We always have the right of self-defense."

Kirby would not say who manned these rocket-launching sites. "That said, we continue to see threats against our forces in Iraq and Syria by militia groups that are backed by Iran," he said. "But again, I don't have specific attribution on who was responsible for these specific sites."

Iran is a major player in Iraq and U.S. officials have been consistently concerned about the threats to U.S. forces in the region. "That is not a new concern," Kirby said. "And I think we've seen in just the last few days, that there have been acts perpetrated by some of these groups that validate the consistent concern that we've had over the safety and security of our people."

A man speaks at a press briefing.


On Russia, Kirby said should NATO allies ask for more U.S. capabilities in Europe, "we would be positively disposed to consider those requests." Still, he noted, the United States has a "very large and robust footprint" in Europe that complements the sizable capabilities that European allies possess. "There already exists a lot of capabilities [in Europe]," he said. "And some of those capabilities could be moved around — if that was, in fact, the request and was decided that would be the most prudent thing to do."

There are many options that President Joe Biden has if Russia decides to launch another incursion into Ukraine, Kirby said, but nothing has been asked for yet.

Related Transcript: Pentagon Press Secretary John F. Kirby Holds a Press Briefing


Let's wind down because I'm tired.  COVID.  The pandemic hasn't ended.  More government resources need to be targeted towards the pandemic.  

I got both shots and the booster.  Monday, I took a test and found out the next day that I have COVID.  I'm fine and will be fine.  Others are not so fortunate.  I don't have to worry about money or losing a roof over my head.  Others are not so fortunate.  A UBI is needed for the American people.  And a serious plan is needed for addressing this pandemic.  Joe Biden ran for president knowing about the pandmeic.  His refusal to address issues related to the pandemic are appalling.  

That Joe Biden is failing at his job is bad enough but he is also failing the country and that cannot be allowed.  If he's not up for the job, he should resign. 

Anthony Fauci is an abject failure and Joe should fir him immediately.





The following sites updated:


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Thursday, December 30, 2021

Jimmy Dore, Matt Bruenig

 Starting with Jimmy Dore.

 

 

 Jimmy Dore has been one of the best things about 2021.  His show is funny and to the point and grabs up so many important issues.


This is from Matt Bruenig at JACOBIN:

 

According to Tara Golshan and Arthur Delaney, one of Joe Manchin’s objections to providing cash benefits to the children of low-earnings parents is that those parents would waste the money on vices:

Publicly, his biggest gripes are about the cost of the bill. But privately, Manchin has told his colleagues that he essentially doesn’t trust low-income people to spend government money wisely.

In recent months, Manchin has told several of his fellow Democrats that he thought parents would waste monthly child tax credit payments on drugs instead of providing for their children, according to two sources familiar with the senator’s comments.

This is a common objection to these kinds of benefits in society, but not one you usually hear in elite political discourse. It also happens to be a baseless objection that neither reflects the reality of what happens when you provide people cash benefits nor solves the problem of irresponsible parents.

The best research we have on how a family’s spending changes when it receives child benefits comes from Canada. There, researchers Lauren Jones, Mark Stabile, and Kevin Milligan used Canadian income and consumption data to see how family spending differed across different regions that had different child benefit levels.

 It's almost new year's and 2021 is about to be a thing of the past.  I honestly can't wait.

Here's C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"

 

 Wednesday, December 29, 2021.  Does Iraq's Parliament plan to ever hold their first session, Julian Assange remains persecuted, and much more.

The persecution of Julian Assange, overseen by US President Joe Biden, continues.



Julian's crime?  Journalism.  Journalism that exposed War Crimes and other serious actions.  Joe Biden is ensuring he will be one of the most vile presidents when history is written.  Jeff Mackler (LA PROGRESSIVE) observes:

Yes, the persecution and threatened life imprisonment of Julian Assange is a threat against free speech and a free press. It is also a dire warning to all those who seek to tell the truth about U.S. wars of slaughter and genocide, including the ten-year war against Iraq conducted in the name of defending the U.S. against Saddam Hussein’s non-existent “weapons of mass destruction.” The same with the U.S. war against Muammar Gaddafi’s non-existent threat to murder 50,000 people in Benghazi. These CIA and corporate media-created pretexts justified the murder of some 1.5 million Iraqis and the destruction of the infrastructures of Iraq and Libya.

Today, U.S. wars of intervention and conquest are accompanied by deadly sanction wars, Special Operation wars, drone wars, death squad assassination wars, etc., all funded by a bloated U.S. military budget that approaches the combined military expenditures of the entire rest of the world. The victims are most often the poor nations on earth who seek their right to self-determination, free from imperialist domination. Today’s U.S. deadly economic sanction wars are conducted against some 39 countries. In Venezuela alone, UN officials report a U.S. sanction death toll of 50,000. Similar horrors, including U.S. coups, embargos, blockades and U.S.-backed terror bombings perpetrated against the people of Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, as well more than a dozen African nations where U.S. troops are stationed.

Indeed, the list is longer. In a June 2021 letter to the U.S. Congress, President Biden admitted all of the countries where U.S. troops are waging war against groups opposed by the United States. According to the journal Conflict Management and Peace Science, the United States has 173,000 military troops engaged in conflicts in 159 other nations!

Truthtellers like Julian Assange frighten the imperial leaders of the U.S. “national security state,” a state power that, as Edward Snowden revealed, oversees an Orwellian system of total surveillance.


The world watches as Joe Biden uses the force of the US government to persecute Julian.  And as it happens, too many people remain silent.  Frank Ball (ECHO) notes, "The silence is deafening. Where are the Australian journalists who should be afraid of the latest development in the extradition case by the USA against Julian Assange?"  And the silence goes beyond journalists in Australia.   At SALON, Chris Hedges writes:


Nils Melzer, the UN special rapporteur on torture, is one of the very few establishment figures to denounce the judicial lynching of Julian Assange. Melzer's integrity and courage, for which he has been mercilessly attacked, stand in stark contrast to the widespread complicity of many human rights and press organizations, including PEN America, which has become a de facto subsidiary of the Democratic National Committee.

Those in power, as Noam Chomsky points out, divide the world into "worthy" and "unworthy" victims. They weep crocodile tears over the plight of Uyghur Muslims persecuted in China while demonizing and slaughtering Muslims in the Middle East. They decry press censorship in hostile states and collude with the press censorship and algorithms emanating from Silicon Valley in the United States. It is an old and insidious game, one practiced not to promote human rights or press freedom but to envelop these courtiers to power in a sanctimonious and cloying self-righteousness. PEN America can't say the words "Belarus," "Myanmar" or the Chinese tennis star "Peng Shuai" fast enough, while all but ignoring the most egregious assault on press freedom in our lifetime. 

PEN America only stopped accepting funding from the Israeli government — which routinely censors and jails Palestinian journalists and writers in Israel and the occupied West Bank — for the literary group's annual World Voices festival in New York in 2017 when more than 250 writers, poets and publishers, many members of PEN, signed an appeal calling on the CEO of PEN America, Suzanne Nossel, to end the organization's partnership with the Israeli government. The signatories included Wallace Shawn, Alice Walker, Eileen Myles, Louise Erdrich, Russell Banks, Cornel West, Junot Díaz and Viet Thanh Nguyen. To stand up for Assange comes with a cost, as all moral imperatives do. And this is a cost the careerists and Democratic Party apparatchiks, who leverage corporate money and corporate backing to seize and deform these organizations into appendages of the ruling class, do not intend to pay.

PEN America is typical of the establishment hijacking of an organization that was founded and once run by writers, some of whom, including Susan Sontag and Norman Mailer, I knew. Nossel is a former corporate lawyer, listed as a "contributor" to the Federalist Society, who worked for McKinsey & Company and as vice president of U.S. business development for Bertelsmann. Nossel, who has had herself elevated to the position of CEO of PEN America, also worked under Hillary Clinton in the State Department, including on the task force assigned to respond to the WikiLeaks revelations. I withdrew from a scheduled speaking event at the 2013 World Voices Festival in New York and resigned from the organization, which that same year had given me its First Amendment Award, to protest Nossel's appointment. PEN Canada offered me membership, which I accepted.

Nossel and PEN America have stated that the prosecution of Assange raises "grave concerns" about press freedom and lauded the decision by a British court in January 2012 not to extradite Assange. Should Nossel and PEN America have not taken this stance on Assange, it would have left them in opposition to most PEN organizations around the world. PEN Centre Germany, for example, made Assange an honorary member. PEN International has called for all charges to be dropped against Assange.

But Nossel, at the same time, repeats every slanderous trope and lie used to discredit the WikiLeaks publisher who now faces extradition to the United States to potentially serve a 175-year sentence under the Espionage Act. She refuses to acknowledge that Assange is being persecuted because he carried out the most basic and important role of any publisher, making public documents that expose the multitudinous crimes and lies of empire. And I have not seen any direct appeals to the Biden administration on Assange's behalf from PEN America.

"Whether Assange is a journalist or WikiLeaks qualifies as a press outlet is immaterial to the counts set out here," Nossel has said. But as a lawyer who was a member of the State Department task force that responded to the WikiLeaks revelations, she understands it is not immaterial. The core argument behind the U.S. effort to extradite Assange revolves around denying him the status of a publisher or a journalist and denying WikiLeaks the status of a press publication. Nossel parrots the litany of false charges leveled against Assange, including that he endangered lives by not redacting documents, hacked into a government computer and meddled in the 2016 elections, all key points in the government's case against Assange. PEN America, under her direction, has sent out news briefs with headlines such as: "Security Reports Reveal How Assange Turned an Embassy into a Command Post for Election Meddling." The end result is that PEN America is helping to uncoil the rope to string up the WikiLeaks publisher, a gross betrayal of the core mission of PEN.


The US government plotted to assassinate Julian.  Even that reality doesn't seem to engage some people.  MRT notes:


In September, Yahoo News reported, citing dozens of unnamed former US government officials, that ex-CIA boss Mike Pompeo had planned to kidnap Wikileaks founder Julian Assange from his refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London and possibly even kill him in 2017. There is a lot of truth in the explosive story, said Andy Müller-Maguhn, former spokesman for the Chaos Computer Club (CCC), on Tuesday at the remote Chaos Communication Congress (rC3). Individual parts of the report at the time, including an imminent escape of Assange with the help of Russia, were not correct.

The famous embassy resident should have been declared an Ecuadorian diplomat around Christmas 2017 in order to grant him freedom of travel and immunity, reported Müller-Maguhn. The US knew about the plan in detail and wanted to thwart it. A silver-gray Ford Focus as an undercover police vehicle and a van stood in front of the embassy for days.





Turning to Iraq, this is from last night's THE NEWSHOUR (PBS):



Press declared 'king maker' Moqtada has had weeks and weeks to get it together.  Unable to do so in the past and still unable.  Farhad Alaaldin Tweets:

The Sadrist Leader
@Mu_AlSadr
hosted some of the leaders of the Coordination Framework leaders in #Najaf No photos of the meeting were published, but a simple tweet by alSdir summarises the content Clearly no agreement was reached and both sides remain on their own path #Iraq
Image
7:02 AM · Dec 29, 2021


Is Moqtada's failure thus far why Parliament has yet to convene?


The election is certified.  Parliament is supposed to hold its first session now.  Among other things, the Parliament is required to name someone prime minister-designate in that first meeting.


And, per the Constitution, a timetable attaches from that moment, the designate has 30 days to form a Cabinet or Parliament names a new prime minister-designate.  This won't be Moqtada.  He's not going for the post of prime minister.  


The election was October 10th.  At the end of this week, we'll be in January.  The foot dragging needs to stop.



ARAB WEEKLY offers:


With the Federal Supreme Court’s ratification of the disputed election results, the leader of the Sadrist movement, Muqtada al-Sadr, now has to reckon with the need to strike deals with various political blocs in order to form the cabinet and run the government.

To start with, he will have to quickly flesh out his ideas on the priorities of the new government and how it should work, now that he leads the largest bloc in the parliament. That bloc must build the required parliamentary alliances which will underlie the formation of the government.

Iraqi political sources say that the leader of the Sadrist movement will face a real challenge with such alliances. They wonder if Sadr will be able to win the support of the Sunni, Kurdish and independent blocs without making the necessary concessions to achieve that goal. Another question, given his opposition to the quota system, will be if he is prepared to share portfolios with other blocs to satisfy supportive MPs.

These sources said that it is not possible to talk about “forming a national majority government,” as advocated by Sadr, without providing sufficient guarantees to the parliamentarians who would be willing to back it. The most important guarantee would be ministerial portfolios for their blocs as well as positions and dividends for the parliamentarians themselves and their supporters. The sources say that speaking of a national majority government is just loose talk as long as Sadr and his bloc's representatives do not sit with representatives of the various other blocs and convince them to support the government. Without such meetings, he could lose everyone's support.


The following sites updated:

  • Amna Nawaz:

    The Iraqi Supreme Court ratified yesterday the results of the parliamentary elections which took place last October.

    One of the groups that disputed the election results is Kataib Hezbollah, a paramilitary organization which, alongside other Iran-backed groups, wants all U.S. military forces out of Iraq by the end of the year. Kataib Hezbollah is believed to be responsible for previous rocket and drone attacks on American forces, and is threatening to once again step up those operations should their demands for full withdrawal not be met.

    "NewsHour" special correspondent Simona Foltyn gained exclusive access to Kataib Hezbollah's bases near Iraq's border with Syria.

  • Simona Foltyn:

    This is the United States' principal adversary in Iraq, Brigade 46 of Iraq's Popular Mobilization Forces. But it's better known as Kataib Hezbollah, a powerful, secretive armed group with close ties to Iran.

    The "NewsHour" gained exclusive access to areas it controls near Iraq's border with Syria, just eighty miles from the Ayn Al Asad military base, which houses American troops still operating here to help the Iraqi government defeat ISIS remnants.

    But these fighters consider American forces here illegal and want them gone.

  • Hassan Ali, Soldier, Kataib Hezbollah (through translator):

    The 31st of December will be the last day for American troops in Iraq. If they don't leave voluntarily, they will leave by force. They will face the resistance factions and we will return to the year 2003.

  • Simona Foltyn:

    The resistance he's referring to is a secretive network of Iran-backed insurgent groups that mobilized to fight the United States following its 2003 invasion of Iraq.

    Kataib Hezbollah is part of the resistance, and, in 2009, the U.S. designated it a terror organization for targeting American forces and its Iraqi opponents. But, after the war with ISIS broke out in 2014, Kataib Hezbollah was folded into the Popular Mobilization Forces, or PMF, an amalgamation of mostly Shia paramilitaries formed to fight ISIS.

    That means Kataib Hezbollah is now officially part of the Iraqi state. Still, these fighters see the United States as their enemy.

  • Hassan Ali (through translator):

    The Popular Mobilization Forces are against ISIS and against America at the same time. America is an occupier in Iraq, and we don't want occupation in our country.

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