Monthly Archives: November 2018

California governor signs legislation to bail out utility that sparked deadly fires

Quote

Posted on by
2

Dec. 2018 Fire ruins Malibu (AP)By MARC ROME

In October, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported that the effects of climate change are already happening, making natural events like wildfires more intense. A month later, the Camp Fire, fueled by Diablo winds and drought conditions, incinerated Paradise, Calif., killing 88 people with nearly 800 unaccounted for. More than 16,000 structures, mostly homes, were destroyed, forcing at least 52,000 to evacuate and leaving tens of thousands of people homeless throughout the 150,000 acre burn zone in Butte County. It is the deadliest fire in the state’s history, and was nearly as destructive as the previous 10 record setting California fires combined.

As the fires raged in Paradise, an area covering hundreds of miles was an ominous and forbidding landscape full of smoke darkened skies that affected millions with hazardous air or nearly two weeks. Air Quality Indexes measured from upwards of 400 in Sacramento and 238 in San Francisco. Smoke plumes were detected as far away as Philadelphia.

Factoring in the Woolsey fire in southern California, which left three dead and upwards of 2000 homes and structures destroyed or damaged, nearly 150,000 people have been displaced, leading to a humanitarian/housing crisis in a state where affordable housing is already extremely difficult to find for working and poor people. Ed Mayer, executive director of Butte County’s housing agency, said, “Big picture, we have 6000, possibly 7000 households who have been displaced and who realistically don’t stand a chance of finding housing again in Butte County. I don’t even know if these households can be absorbed in California.”

Lawsuits have been filed by victims against PG&E for their suspected responsibility in starting the Camp Fire. The AP reported, “PG&E told state regulators that it experienced a problem on a transmission line in the area of the fire just before the blaze erupted. In its filing Thursday [Nov. 8] with the state Public Utilities Commission, it said it had detected an outage on an electrical transmission line. It said a subsequent aerial inspection detected damage to a transmission tower on the line.” PG&E’s practice of cutting labor costs (which boosts profits) led to poor maintenance of its electrical grid, and, according to state fire investigators, caused 17 of 21 wildfires in 2017, including the 2017 Tubbs Fire in Sonoma County, which killed 24 and destroyed more than 5300 homes.

A series of lawsuits have also been filed against Southern California Edison alleging that the Woolsey fire began due to poor maintenance of their equipment near the flashpoint. To shield three California utility monopolies—Pacific Gas and Electric, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas and Electric—from financial ruin, Governor Brown recently signed SB 901 to pass off the utilities’ liabilities to rate payers for fires attributed to equipment owned by these billion-dollar corporations. PG&E alone is facing $15 billion in liabilities for the 2017 fires, and SB901 allows them to issue bonds paid for by increasing fees for ratepayers.

Their liabilities may be as high as $30 billion if it’s determined that the utility is responsible for the Camp Fire, which could lead to PG&E’s collapse without another state government bailout. SB 901 was proposed by Brown and passed the State Assembly and Senate with virtually no resistance from Democratic Party legislators (nine Democrats opposed it in total). There is no comparable bailout legislation for the victims of the most destructive fire in U.S. history in a century [. . .]

via California governor signs legislation to bail out utility that sparked deadly fires

Trump’s $12 billion bailout of farmers hurt by his trade wars has been a massive bust

Quote

Posted on by
2

Trump’s $12 billion bailout of farmers hurt by his trade wars has been a massive bust: NYT | Alternet

According to the Times, the bailout program “has done little to cushion the blow” of the president’s trade wars, “with red tape and long waiting periods resulting in few payouts so far.”

In fact, the Times estimates, just $838 million of the $6 billion worth of bailout funds that have been authorized so far has been paid out.

Among the problems with the program, the paper reports, is that farmers cannot apply for relief funds until they complete their harvests for the season, which has harmed farmers whose harvests have been delayed due to bad weather.

Jim Mulhern, president of the National Milk Producers Federation, tells the Times that most dairy farmers hit hard by the tariffs haven’t seen any significant relief since the program was announced.

 

via Trump’s $12 billion bailout of farmers hurt by his trade wars has been a massive bust: NYT | Alternet

US China trade war: Soybeans left rotting thanks to lack of storage – Business Insider

Posted on by
Reply

Farmers in some US states are being forced into ploughing their crops under – effectively burying them under soil in fields – as there is not enough room to store them in storage facilities, and they are unable to sell their products thanks to Chinese tariffs.

Julian Assange vs. the Cabal

Posted on by
1
By Renee Parsons

It is widely rumored that, with sealed indictments pending in the US, Wikileaks founder and publisher Julian Assange may be imminently forced to leave the Ecuadorian Embassy which has provided him safe refuge since 2012.

However, after a recent visit to Ecuador, US vice president Mike Pence (representing the Cabal) reached an agreement with the Moreno government acknowledging that forcibly expelling Assange was politically untenable.

One can only imagine that if such an expulsion comes to pass, it would likely result in a riot in the streets of London or that drugging Assange and smuggling him out in the middle of the night, under cover of a dark moon would equally result in forceful public demonstrations as well as worldwide condemnation. The Ecuadorians informed Pence they would rather make life inside the Embassy difficult and unsustainable, thereby encouraging Assange to voluntarily vacate the premises. Lots of Luck with that!

There is no way to know if an indictment will be personally served on Assange. For Assange to simply walk out the door and into the arms of a waiting extradition order to the US is indefensible as Assange is facing specious charges of “espionage” for daring to protect free-thinking whistleblowers by publishing their documents that exposed crimes and corruption at the highest levels of the US Government and political system.

The distinction is crucial in that Assange did not steal documents but published documents provided to him just as the New York Times and other national newspapers have done for decades. It will be positively riveting to watch the Trump Administration attempt to indict the NYT, the Washington Post and/or the LA Times for publishing what Wikileaks published.

Enter The Cabal: that deeply embedded, nameless/faceless unelected entity which dictates public policy although they have no public support whatsoever. In agreeing with Moreno, the Cabal has already blinked in the tacit admission that Assange controls the narrative. They are cowardly perpetrators of a simulated reality of war, devastation and poverty and highly vulnerable to an aroused, angry public. It is the Cabal that had the most to lose if Assange was allowed to continue documenting the corrupt, unscrupulous behavior of its toadies.

Not to be confused with the Deep State, although we cannot be certain of where the overlap between these synonymous bastions of criminal malevolence begin and end; yet it is apparent that both control enormous factions of the US government from a dark sinister pit of wickedness; owing their existence to and total dependence on an unworthy claque of self-identified MSM “journalists” who willingly dance on the Empire’s thin ice of righteousness.

It is that collapsing Empire and political structure that have been most accurately depicted in many of the Wikileaks exposes that has stirred the Establishment to vociferously pursue prosecution of Assange. The Democratic party is especially incensed that the Podesta/DNC emails were part of a treasure trove perhaps provided by DNC staffer Seth Rich who was murdered twelve days before the Wikileaks release.

Some Wikileaks contributions that provided the public with unclassified information that should have already been public include:

  • Clinton Foundation received Millions of dollars from the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, both major funders of Islamic terrorists;
  • Secretary of State HRC then approved an $80 billion weapon sale to the Saudis with which they began the war in Yemen in earnest;
  • Goldman Sachs paid HRC $675,000 for one speech;
  • Secretary of State HRC was the architect for the disastrous war in Libya leading to chaos in Europe;
  • Vault 7 revelations that the CIA had developed a program to metadata a hack by adding ‘fingerprints’ to ‘prove’ that some other foreign agency had committed the hack.

Ergo, you can see the need to hoodwink the public into believing that Assange is a threat to democracy, an unconstitutional criminal responsible for the 2016 loss of HRC in cahoots with the equally criminal Russian president, Vladimir Putin. It is the work of a poorly contrived fabrication that does not stand up to serious scrutiny – at question is whether the American public, well known for its political apathy and one dimensional thinking, will recognize truth even if they have to gag on it [. . .]

Source: Julian Assange vs. the Cabal

Meet Allen Dulles: Fascist Spymaster

Posted on by
2

Meet Allen Dulles: Fascist Spymaster

James Corbett (2015)

Film Review

A comprehensive biography of infamous CIA director Allen Dulles, this film is a treasure trove of hidden history. Dulles ran the CIA from 1953 until Kennedy fired him (in 1961) over the disastrous CIA invasion of Cuba’s Bay of Pigs.

Prior to watching this documentary, I was unaware of Dulles’ long time collaboration with fascists of all stripes. For example, Dulles

  • (with his brother John Foster Dulles) was a founding member of the corporate elite round table group the Council on Foreign Relations (1921).
  • collaborated with George W’s grandfather Prescott Bush and W Averell Harriman to use Union Bank Company to launder Wall Street monies that financed Hitler’s military arsenal.
  • as a member of the Office of Strategic Services (the CIA’s precursor), served as the primary architect of the program to secretly bring Nazi war criminals to the US – where they became CIA spies, military analysts and space and mind control scientists.
  • with John Foster, represented the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and the United Fruit Company as partners in the powerful Wall Street law firm Cromwell and Sullivan.
  • instigated coups against Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954) as a personal vendetta when their democratically elected leaders acted contrary to the financial interests of corporate clients.
  • as a Warren Commission member following the JFK assassination, demanded records destroyed relating to Oswald’s CIA employment.*

*The order was foiled by a Warren Commission staffer who secretly retained a copy.

 

CNN again beating war drums over imaginary Russian aggression

Posted on by
2

 Patrice de Bergeracpas

Actually there is no need to imagine. It’s happening already.

Egging him to war.

CNN’s account of this incident is bogus—from start to finish. Nonetheless, always at the service of the plutocracy and its agents (CIA, Pentagon, etc.) this filthy channel is not averse to promoting steadily worse relations with a nuclear superpower. Notice CNN is saying that “world leaders denounced Russia’s aggression…” whereas the opposite is true, at least in Germany, France and other capitals. They were merely recommending de-escalation, which is sensible and which Moscow certainly endorses.

This is what CNN does all the time, along with most of the US media: beat the war drums against the enemy du jour, usually Russia, but now as the list grows ever longer, Iran and of course China, the rising global power.Trump is a disgrace, and few could argue the matter of peace and war is safe in his hands, given his well documented capricious, not to mention ignorant and narcissist ego, and his enormous contradictions resulting in sudden zig-zags in stated policy, but, curiously, he’s also the only major political figure in America that consistently—and to many perhaps inexplicably—pooh poohs and derails the Deep State’s constant push for imperial adventures and the drift to total war. The latter is what is normally described in the US National Security State peanut gallery as being a mature statesman, or “acting like a true President”.  These sudden outburts of peace are routinely denounced as treason or worse. Yet that is just about the ONLY good thing that anyone could say about Trump. If the Democrats and their numerous media and political shills were halfway honrable or sane, they would simply recognise that fact and explot such opportunities. But as we see, far from buttressing and praising such tendencies, they deride them. Here’s an example of CNN’s Hearstian “journalism”, as usual based in a total inversion of truth. Count the lies.

#CNN #News

Will President Trump hold Russia accountable over Ukraine?

Published on Nov 26, 2018

President Donald Trump said he was “not happy at all” about a dangerous new crisis involving Russia and Ukraine. CNN’s Brian Todd reports there are high stakes on the high seas. #CNN #News

Reckless and insidious warmongering

Consider this quote from the original CNN article, a fine study in “massaged information”:

In the 24 hours after Russian ships opened fire on and seized three Ukrainian vessels near Crimea, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, a spokesman for British Prime Minister Theresa May, the foreign ministers of Germany, the UK and Canada, European members of the Security Council, including France, Sweden, Poland, the Netherlands and the UK, as well as several US lawmakers expressed grave concern and called for a de-escalation.
During that time, the President and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo remained silent on the serious escalation in tensions between the two countries. After Trump spoke to reporters, a day and a half after the confrontation, Pompeo released a statement expressing “deep concern,” condemning Russia and calling for restraint from “both parties.”
But it fell to Ambassador Nikki Haley to reprise her role as the administration’s leading and toughest voice on Russia, leaving analysts concerned that the White House silence and then Trump’s low-key response would be read as encouragement, if not acquiescence.

‘He can play Trump’

“If there’s not a strong Western response in terms of a statement, but also one that says there will be consequences unless Russia ceases and desists, the Russians may conclude they can get away with this,” said Steven Pifer, a William J. Perry fellow at Stanford University and expert on Russia, Europe and the former Soviet states.
“It’s striking that Washington was silent on this yesterday,” said Pifer, a former US ambassador to Ukraine. He added that Trump’s restraint does not position him well for the anticipated meeting with Putin.
“It just leaves Putin feeling he can play Trump, whereas a forthright statement might even earn a measure of respect from the Russians,” Pifer said. “I don’t think the Russians would respect what they’re seeing right now out of this administration,” he said, referring to the White House and State Department failure to comment promptly.

If you care to read the whole CNN report on this topic, click here.  

Source: CNN again beating war drums over imaginary Russian aggression

Chicago 1969: When Black Panthers aligned with Confederate-flag-wielding, working-class whites

Quote

Posted on by
2

by

This is how it needs to be. One thing this article doesn’t mention is that the Rainbow Coalition was also oriented toward building relationships with Chicago gangs like the Blackstone Rangers. Both the Nixon-Hoover FBI and the Chicago police thought this idea was so dangerous and threatening that they literally assassinated the project’s leaders, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark.

“In his short time as a Black Panther leader, Fred Hampton wanted to advance the group’s goals by forming a “Rainbow Coalition” of working class and poor people of all races…

Former members of the Chicago Panthers and YPO tell different versions of the same story of how the groups connected: Each attended the other’s organizing meetings and decided to work together on their common issues. Over time, the Black Panthers learned to tolerate Confederate flags as intransigent signs for rebellion. Their only stipulation was that the white Young Patriots denounce racism…

In the end, the Illinois Panthers brought together various elements of the black community, Confederate flag-waving southern white migrants (Young Patriots), Puerto Ricans (Young Lords), poor white ethnic groups (Rising Up Angry, JOIN Community Union, and the Intercommunal Survival Committee), students and the women’s movement. The disparate groups under the coalition’s umbrella pooled resources and shared strategies for providing community services and aid that the government and private sector would not. Initiatives included health clinics, feeding homeless and hungry people, and legal advice for those dealing with unethical landlords and police brutality.”

Interestingly, it only seems to be tendencies like Attack the System and National-Anarchist Movement that have any interest in going this route today.

Recently, this meme was posted on an N-A page:

And these were some of the comments in response by leading N-As:

“This chart would be an overview of interaction between various N-AM communities, which serves as an umbrella for, sometimes mutually exclusive, ways of life.”

“I agree, but I doubt whether some of these variations would be quite as tolerant as we are. Agreeing to disagree is one thing, but true Anarchism should never venture into the realms of coercion. In other words, the squares to avoid should never become squares upon which to impose your own views.”

“The chart is also very atheistic/materialistic in that it leaves out a vast multitude of Anarchist variations centred on spirituality. Think of all the Christian, Islamic, Jewish and Occult groups, for example. And there is always room for thematic Anarchists, too, who may base their communities on sexual (beyond homosexuality), musical, dietary, historical, fictional or cinematic themes. The list is endless and the N-AM is the only movement on the planet that caters for such diversity.”

These ideas are important as well because race and ethnicity are hardly the only forms of “identity.” A modern Rainbow Coalition might just as likely include the Gamer Panthers, the Goth Lords, the Young Incels Organization, the Vegan Berets, the Medieval Knights, the Red Shirts Legion (in honor of the “red shirts” perpetually getting bumped on on Star Trek: TOS), the Queer Guards, the Otherkin Federation, the Transracials Alliance, the Heavy Metal Tribal Confederation or whatever other kinds of identifies and affiliations people choose for themselves [. . .]

via Chicago 1969: When Black Panthers aligned with Confederate-flag-wielding, working-class whites