Roaming Charges: See No Evil

Body cam image of Tyre Nichols being shoved to the ground by Memphis police.

Manuel Esteban Perez Terán was shot (13 times) and killed by Atlanta police for trying to stop one of the last remnants of public forest in black Atlanta from being leveled and transformed into a training center for police, a place where cops would be taught the same brutal tactics that were used to kill him.

After the shooting, many of Teran’s companions, some of whom had been occupying the forest for months, were rounded up and charged, ludicrously, with domestic terrorism, even though it was nightly acts of systemic terrorism descending on the streets of Atlanta that they were, in part, trying to prevent.

Cop city. It isn’t just a plan for a training ground, a kind of domestic school of the Americas in the heart of black and red Atlanta’s last forest refuge. It’s the plan for the whole city. A city swarming with police, who can detain, harass and kill with impunity. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Memphis police chief Cerelyn “C.J.” Davis, who’s Scorpion unit beat the life out of Tyre Nichols, once led the notorious “Red Dog” special operations squad in Atlanta, which left behind its own trail of broken bones, shattered families and dead bodies.

The Weelanunee (or South River) Forest is haunted by ghosts. The ghosts of the Muscogee people, run off their land at gunpoint two centuries ago. The ghosts of the Atlanta Prison Farm, which replaced the slave plantation house after Sherman torched the city and Reconstruction fell apart. And now the ghost of Terán. He may be the first environmental activist killed by cops in the US, as so many others have been around the world, from Ken Saro-Wiwa to Chico Mendes to Berta Cáceres. But he surely won’t be the last.

+ Doesn’t this sum up the state of policing in America: Anthony Lowe, the black double amputee shot by two LAPD cops as he hobbled away from them, had lost the lower half of both of his legs in a previous encounter with police in Texas.

+ “Contradicted” “Starkly Different” Isn’t there a more precise term for what’s going on?

+ The cops who fatally beat, kicked, clubbed and tasered Tyre Nichols barked 71 different commands in less than 13 minutes: “Just comply [as we order you to do contradictory things] and you have nothing to worry about.”

+ Since 2010, the Memphis police department has been training with the Israeli Defense Forces, where it developed it’s “Blue Crush” predictive policing system, which was deployed with fatal consequences against Tyre Nichols…

+ An NPR report interviewing many Memphis residents reflects their belief that police abuse is common throughout the city. The interviewees recount stories of cops battering down doors at the wrong address and motorists being for minor traffic violations and beaten to the point of requiring medical care.

+ While Memphis disbanded its elite SCORPION tactical unit, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul wants to double state funding for similar initiatives across New York, after already having doubled it last year.

+ I wrote about Tyre Nichols’ murder and the futility of “police reform” in CounterPunch +. You can read it here.

+ There have been at least 52 people killed by police in the US since the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols on January 7th.

+ In 2021, there were 1055 people killed by police in the US. In the same year, 31 people were killed by police in all of Europe (Italy, France, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, Belgium, Portugal, Sweden, Finland, Malta, Netherlands, UK, Ireland, Poland, Denmark, and Norway) combined.

+ Most of the people killed by police in 2022 were killed by officers responding to mental health calls, traffic violations, disturbances, other *non-violent* issues and situations where no crime was alleged. Only 1 in 3 killings began with an alleged violent crime.

+ Joe Frasure, a 28-year-old black man, was shot four times and killed by police after cleaning out his late grandmother’s house near Cincinnati. Police say they mistook him for a burglary suspect.

+ FoxNews wants violent riots to erupt so badly they’ll probably send interns out to try to provoke some and reward them with a free Chick-fil-A sandwich and a Hobby Lobby gift card afterwards. Otherwise, they’re left with Tucker making such transparently absurd analogies that even his show’s Metamucil demographic won’t be able to swallow them.

+ New research shows that being stopped by police makes people less likely to vote, thus reducing the turnout among communities most frequently targeted and abused by the cops. The study, published in the December edition of the American Political Science Review, documented how traffic stops by police stops in Hillsborough County, Florida reduced voter turnout in 2014, 2016, and 2018 federal elections.

+ In 2018, Jerod Draper overdosed and was then arrested and taken to a jail in Harrison County, Indiana. Instead of giving Draper, medical treatment, the cops Tasered on him seven times in 15 minutes. He died a few minutes later.

+ In 2018, New York City settled 1,579 lawsuits over police misconduct for $76,492,742. Last year, it resolved 939 lawsuits for $121,376,712, according to the Legal Aid Society.

+ After years of steady decline, including every year of the Trump presidency, the federal prison population under Biden has been rising. To Biden’s credit, he has issued a few thousand pardons. None of them, however, freed anyone who was actually doing time.

+ Remember the manufactured hysteria over alleged organ harvesting from Chinese prisoners? We’d never do that here, right? Wrong. A new bill in Massachusetts (introduce by the state’s Democrats!) would allow prisoners to get reductions their sentence if they donate their organs or bone marrow.

+ The Alabama Department of Corrections has had two years to notify victims for the more than 400 people that were supposed to get out of prison this. As of last Friday, they had notified fewer than 20 victims, and hundreds in prison will be held past their release date until they notify them.

+ The head of the DEA’s office in Mexico City has been “quietly ousted” over his ties to lawyers with the drug cartels. Wait until they hear about the FDA’s ties to Big Pharma’s lawyers!

+ After walking off the job in protest of abusive working conditions, a group of Filipino nurses was threatened with jail time by New York prosecutors. Those prosecutors were then granted absolute legal immunity for their outrageous behavior.

+ Last year, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler fired police officer Brian Hunzeker, after he was caught leaking an incident report that falsely identifying Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, a black critic of the police force, as the suspect in a hit-and-run. This week Hunzker, who was also the head of the police union, was reinstated to his job.

+ In Philadelphia, police officers sidelined by injuries are entitled to full pay plus a 20% bonus. The city’s police union was given the discretion to assign their own doctors to diagnose the injured cops. At one point, at least 14% of the entire police force was out on paid injury leave. Following disclosures in the press, the union’s handpicked doctors were dismissed and injuries fell by more than 30%.

+ A study in the American Economic Journal documents that judges in juvenile courts sentence kids more harshly after their preferred football team loses. The sentences are harsher for *about a week* after the loss and, typically, are mostly harsher against Black kids.

+ The wife of SCOTUS Chief Justice Roberts has been paid millions of dollars in commissions for placing lawyers at firms. Partners at leading law firms in Washington on average make well over $1 million a year, and at the high end, they can be paid over $7 million. Recruiting firms take a large cut from those placements, often equivalent to a quarter of the new hires’ first-year salaries.  Some of Jane Robert’s clients have business before the Supreme Court,

+ These disclosures came a week after we found out that the Roberts Court has maintained secret  financial ties with former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, the same man the Court turned to to validate the results of an internal inquiry into the leaking of the Dobbs decision, where the members of the court were not put under oath or made to give recorded depositions. In the past couple of years, the Court has paid the Chertoff Group at least $1 million for security assessments. Supreme Court contracts are exempt from federal public disclosure rules.

+ Earl Warren, the great “liberal” chief justice of the Supreme Court (and a leading agitator for the internment of Japanese-Americans during WW 2), was a member of the whites-only Native Sons of the Golden West “club.”

+ As FDR was considering whether to approve a plan to round up American citizens of Japanese descent and place them in concentration camps (his term), he consulted with an anthropologist friend named Alex Hrdlicka, then director of the Smithsonian Institution. Hrdlicka was a phrenologist, who believed that intelligence, morality and criminal proclivity could be determined by the shape of people’s skulls and other racial characteristics. FDR offered his opinion that as a race the Japanese were “devious and treacherous.” Hrdlicka confirmed FDR’s bigotry and explained that this racial deficiency was because of the shape of Japanese heads, which were “two thousand years behind Caucasians.” FDR asked Hrdlicka if this was something that “could be dealt with surgically?”

+ It’s clear that FDR was an ardent eugenicist. Toward the end of WW II, FDR suggested during a cabinet meeting that as many as 50,000 German men, political, business and military leaders, should be sterilized. He later explained to Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau: “You either have to castrate the German people or you have got to treat them in a manner so they can’t go on reproducing people who want to continue the way they have in the past.” (See: Infamy: Shocking Story of the Japanese American Internment During World War II by Richard Reeves.)

+ Kate Richards O’Hare, the socialist anti-war activist and prison reformer: “No one should become a federal judge until after they’ve spent at least a year in a federal prison.”

+++

+ The first 11 months of the Ukraine war have resulted in nearly 20,000 civilian casualties with at least 7,048 deaths. How many more innocents will die before the war is brought to an end the only way it can possibly end: through a ceasefire and negotiated settlement?

+ As if sending Ukraine M-1 Abrams tanks wasn’t enough of an escalation, the Biden is also shipping Ukraine a new variety of Ground Launched Small Diameter Bombs with a range of 93-miles. The missiles can be fired from Himars, M270 launchers and aircraft and can allegedly hit objects as small as three feet in diameter. Of course, since they’re made by Boeing the objects they hit likely won’t be the targets they’re aiming at.

+ So far, Biden has refused to sell Ukraine even longer range missiles. But he’s being pushed to do so by a bipartisan gang of senators led by the likes of Mississippi’s Roger Wicker: “We need to give Ukraine ATACMS, long range missiles and advanced drones like the Grey Eagle and Reaper. We should deliver these assets quickly to make an immediate difference on the battlefield. In concert with our allies, this approach of ‘more, better, faster’ would give the Ukrainians a real shot at victory.”

+ Further evidence of my theory that Ukraine is a testing ground for weapons in battle conditions is the offer this week from  Linden Blue, the CEO of General Atomics, to sell Ukraine two Reaper MQ-9 drones for $1. (The USAF pays $32 million apiece for them.)

+ This week Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin unveiled the Pentagon’s plan for four new military bases in the Philippines, meant to threaten China, which he described as a cooperative endeavor among “family.” It’s certainly a “relationship” that’s generated a vast family graveyard.

+ What kind of depraved mind would sit down and write a column calling for “drone swarms over China”? And who would publish it? Now we know

+ Amid this rising panic, the Pentagon announced it is tracking a suspected “high-altitude Chinese surveillance balloon” as it moves across the continental United States. Reportedly, Biden had to be restrained from ordering it shot down by General Mark Milley.

+ “It was the USA, after all, and fear was in the air.” – Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day

Fighter jet streaking toward renegade balloon.

+ During WW I, the Governor of Montana was convinced that there was a German Zeppelin flying over the Big Sky state. A rancher claimed to have shot one down, though no trace was ever found…

+ A few weeks after Pearl Harbor, the infamous Battle of Los Angeles took place, when Army anti-aircraft guns erupted on the night of February 24, 1942, blasting thousands of rounds over the city for more than an hour at a squadron of Japanese planes. Five people died in the attack: three from heart attacks, 2 from car crashes. The enemy “planes” proved to be a Navy weather balloon.

+ Maybe the Spy Balloon will alert Montanans to the fact there are still 150 Minuteman nuclear missiles in their state, which they may want to have removed ASAP, so that Great Falls isn’t a juicier target than LA…

+ Here’s the Colorado Democrat Michael Bennet sounding as hysterical on China as Rubio sounds on Cuba: “Bennet called on Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores. No company subject to “Chinese Communist Party dictates should have the power to accumulate such extensive data on the American people,” he wrote.”

+ Apple might as well remove all iPhones and Macs from their stores, since they’re all made in China.

+ The last two weeks of January saw the most intense US activity in Somalia since the Trump administration. In six days, US forces carried out three actions, which the military claimed led to 43 militant deaths.

+ There are now more than 500,000 Israeli “settlers” illegally living on Palestinian land in the West Bank with more coming every day with the encouragement and protection of the Israel government.

+ The Electronic Intifada obtained a cache of documents revealing an operation by the UK government to spy on Palestinian refugees and monitor for ”criticism of Western and Israeli foreign policy.” The surveillance scheme was run in part by Adam Smith International, a private intelligence firm.

+ TikTok has permanently banned the account of Mondoweiss, one of the few media outlets reporting from frontlines of Gaza and the West Bank.

+++

+ New audio between an election worker and caller as votes were still being counted in Maricopa County last year: “Someone should shoot you in the head.”

+ The College Board’s capitulation to DeSantis on Critical Race Theory is a case study for the proof of Critical Race Theory.

+ By surrendering to this petty tyrant…”the College Board purged the names of many Black writers and scholars associated with critical race theory, the queer experience and Black feminism. It ushered out some politically fraught topics, like Black Lives Matter, from the formal curriculum. And it added something new: “Black conservatism” is now offered as an idea for a research project.”

+ Among the writers summarily expunged by the College Board from the AP African American studies course are Kimberlé Crenshaw, Robin Kelley, bell hooks, Roderick Ferguson, Michelle Alexander, and Ta-Nehisi Coates.

+ Here comes the Book Gestapo: Florida teachers have been advised to hide their books to avoid felony charges. At one school, “the kids began crying and writing letters to the principal, saying, ‘Please don’t take my books, please don’t do this.’”

+ Walter Benjamin: “Every line we succeed in publishing today–no matter how uncertain the future to which we entrust it– is a victory wrenched from the powers of darkness.”

+ More than 100 Democrats (under a banner called the New Democrat Coalition–as if the old New Democrats weren’t bad enough) joined with Republicans in the House to pass a resolution condemning the “horrors of socialism.”

+ The resolution, which took the obligatory shots at Lenin, Castro and Maduro for taking money from rich people, asserts that the U.S. “was founded on the belief in the sanctity of the individual, to which the collectivistic system of socialism in all of its forms is fundamentally and necessarily opposed.” There was quite a lot of unpaid, collectivized forced labor supporting the “sanctity of the individual” founders, as I recall.

+ One of the Democrats who voted for this piece of performative legislative trash was Ro Khanna, who describes himself (to anyone who still cares to listen) as a “progressive capitalist.”

+ You can kick Ilhan off the Foreign Relations Committee, but she’ll still be a Highway Star.

+ Skier Profiling, just the latest injustice against the “Posh”…

+ In 1918, a squad of Texas Rangers killed 15 unarmed Mexicans in the town of Porvenir. Now their descendants want to put up a historical marker at the site.

+ Current wait times at US embassies for a visitor visa to the US:

Abuja: 850 days
Bogota: 872 days
Chennai: 560 days
Guadalajara: 577 days
Hermosillo: 538 days
Hyderabad: 595 days
Kolkata: 596 days
Lima: 816 days
Mexico City: 643 days
Mumbai: 623 days
New Delhi: 575 days

+ The average wait time to just get an interview is 89 days. But if you’re a student in Beirut wanting a visa the wait is around 999 days.

+ An Ohio woman named Rose Marie Counts was fired from her job at an Ohio gas station/food mart after her ex-husband punched her in the face, knocking out many of her teeth. Why? Because she violated the Sheetz Company’s “smile policy,” bars employees from working with “obvious missing, broken or discolored teeth” that aren’t related to a disability.

+ On his way to Bitburg cemetery to lay roses on the graves of the Waffen SS?

+ Surely the most humiliating finding in this Monmouth poll for Kevin McCarthy isn’t his low approval rating (19%), but the fact that 46% of Americans don’t even know he exists…

+ Warren Harding has to rank alongside Gerald Ford as among our least bad presidents. Consider: he may have had black ancestry, ended Wilson’s censorship of the press, freed conscientious objectors, died in office without completing his term and invited the jailed Eugene Debs to the White House, saying afterwards: “Debs was right about the war. We shouldn’t have gotten involved.”

+ Ted Cruz is now polling lower than the man many Republicans wanted to dangle from a gibbet…

+ Meanwhile, NYC Mayor Eric Adams, once touted as a replacement for Biden, is -6% among voters. At the same point in his term, Bill de Blasio had a +9% approval rating.

+ Republicans in congress have replaced their American flag pins with AR-15s.

+ Next week they’ll be pinning little gas stoves to their lapels.

+ In March 2020, a few months into the pandemic, less than 30 percent of Americans believed that the virus had been manufactured in a Chinese lab. By the end of 2021, the number had soared to 72 percent.

+ Over the past three years, more than one million people have called out sick from work. Long Covid appears to be a primary factor.

+ RSV is now the second-highest cause of death, behind malaria, in babies aged between the age of one month and one year.

+ According to the national Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which tracks the portion of high schoolers who have intercourse before the age of 13, between 1991 — the peak of the sexual revolution — and 2013, this percentage of high schoolers having sex fell from 10.2 to only 5.6 percent.

+ Out here in Oregon, the number of people earning more than $500,000 has nearly tripled over the past decade and so has the homeless population.

+ Most homes in the US are owned by mortgage lenders. The U.S. has the 3rd lowest free-and-clear home ownership rate of all OECD nations. Make the banks pay their ownership percentage of the property taxes…

+The Black population of New York City  has declined by nearly 200,000 people in the past two decades, or about 9 percent. In 2000, one in four residents were non-Hispanic Black. Now that figure has dropped to about one in five.

+ In total, 650,000 fewer people live in Manhattan today than did in 1920.

+ French people are marching to retire at 64 with a guarantee of €2400 per month.

British are marching to retire at 68 for €800 per month

Americans are hoping to get a job at 80 at Chick-fil-A working for food.

+ The scamster Anna Sorokin will be speaking to students at the Harvard Business School. Sorokin’s different from the rest of the faculty at the Harvard Business School, how exactly?

+ Will there be an update on the Jewish Space Lasers or the elementary school that get $5.1 billion in Covid money to teach kids CRT (which she described as a “a racist curriculum used to teach children that somehow their white skin aren’t equal to Black skin”), Glenn?

+ In 1976, 72 percent of the American public said they trusted the news media. Now the figure is down to 34 percent. For Republicans, it’s only 14 percent, which means, of course, that most Republicans don’t even trust what they’re hearing on FoxNews.

+ About as funny as Gramsci gets: “Common sense is the folklore of philosophy & like folklore, it takes countless different forms. Its most fundamental character is that it is a conception which–even in the brain of one individual–is fragmentary, incoherent & inconsequential.”

+++

+ Fighting climate change, Biden-style: Biden’s Interior Department just approved the largest single oil drilling plan anywhere in the US, Conoco’s Willow Project in Alaska. It would bring 219 wells, 267 miles of pipelines, and 35 miles of roads to Alaska, while emitting over 280 million metric tons of climate pollution over 30 years. Because of the melting permafrost, Conoco’s own engineers say they “where necessary we will  use cooling devices to chill the ground” drilling.

+ Even if emission rapidly decline in the next few years (very unlikely), there’s still a nearly 70% chance that the two-degree threshold would be crossed between 2044 and 2065.

+ The amount of extent sea ice in the Antarctic on February 1st 2023 was 2.26 million sq km, about 1.35 million sq km less than the 1981-2010 average and the lowest extent ever recorded on this day of the year. It is 10.8% lower than the previous record low, 2.53 million sq km in 2017.

+ Shell announced $39.9 billion in profits this. Another record. Meanwhile, four Greenpeace activists boarded a ship hauling new equipment to Shell’s off-shore platforms, which will enable the oil giant to drain 45,000 barrels of oil per day out of the North Sea.

+ Exxon also ended with 2022 with record profits of $56 billion. And we were led to believe by the likes of Larry Summers and Janet Yellen that the real culprits driving inflation were too many workers making too much per hour. My pal Michael Donnelly did the math: At 72,000 direct Exxon workers in 2022, that makes it $777,777.78 annual profit per worker.

+ Over the course of a year, home heating fires in the UK produce more particle pollution than the exhaust of all traffic on all of the UK’s roads.

+ Duke Energy’s coal plants in North Carolina are so expensive to run and maintain that they could all be replaced with solar for half the cost.

+ In fact, new solar is now cheaper than all currently operating US coal plants. Median cost of new solar is $24/MWh, while median marginal cost of coal is $36/MWh.

+ Major studies out of Brazil, Pennsylvania, and Chicago reveals that many birds are shrinking in size and growing longer wings as the planet warms.

+ The EV Hummer Biden has been pimping this week spews out more carbon than a gas-powered Chevy Malibu.

+ A new report from MIT documents the huge carbon requirements of self-driving cars. The study predicts if we have a mass global adoption of autonomous vehicles, the energy-hungry onboard computers needed to run them will generate as much greenhouse gas emissions as “all of the data centers in operation today.”

+ According to the  Climate Inequality Report 2023, carbon inequalities within countries now appear to be greater than carbon inequalities between countries. The consumption and investment patterns of a relatively small group of a small group of “polluting elite” are vastly outweighing the emissions of the poor.

+ In India, more than 293 coal mines and 259 thermal power plants have already shut down with many more closures forthcoming. Even so, the Indian government has no transition plan for the thousands of unemployed workers and no plans to develop one.

+ A new study in Lancet estimates that of the more than 6,700 premature deaths attributed to higher temperatures in cities during 2015, at least a third of these could have been prevented by increasing urban tree cover up to 30%. Instead many towns and cities are cutting down urban trees because they provide need shade for the houseless!

+ EU nuclear output this year will the second-lowest in modern history. It might even end up the lowest…

+ Under a pilot program in Bronx, gas stoves were replaced with induction stoves and the household showed a 35% decrease in nitrogen dioxide and a nearly 43% improvement in carbon monoxide levels.

+ Don’t worry, Floridians, your gaslighting governor is going to protect your daily dose of carbon monoxide. In outlining his budget this week, DeSantis announced a permanent ban on sales taxes for gas stoves. Only people who buy electric stoves will have to pay the tax: “They want your gas stove, and we’re not gonna let that happen.” (Only 8% of the homes in Florida currently have gas stoves.

+ In Barcelona, residents who get rid of their cars are rewarded with three years of free public transportation.

+ Since 1971, Greenland has lost ice equivalent in weight to 4 Million Empire State Buildings.

+ A study from Germany’s top climate institute finds that Berlin could grow 82% of its vegetables in city spaces like rooftops and supermarket carparks…

+ Idaho’s wolf population is 13% lower than it was last year. Dropped isn’t the right word. More like “decimated-plus 3.”

+++

+ Hannah Arendt’s library card from the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris (1939).

+ Marc Chagall: “Just don’t ask me why everything is blue or green.”

+ “If he only had Goethe’s money (or a rich wife), Schiller had told a friend in 1789, he would be able to produce as many plays, tragedies and poems as he wanted and ‘the university of Jena could kiss my ass.'” – Andrea Wulf, Magnificent Rebels

+ Kurt Vonnegut, Jr: “No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious & charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful.”

+ If you haven’t read Dean Wareham’s profile of the late Tom Verlaine, you should. It’s a musician’s tribute to the influences of another musician of his generation, that describes Verlaine’s guitar techniques, his inimitable voice, what he was like to perform with, how he worked in the studio, and what he was up to after TV fractured.

+ Television was “my band” for a couple of years. I followed them intensely, rushing to gigs up and down the east coast. Smart, if opaque, lyrics, a nonchalant attitude, and a two-guitar attack that pulsed, shimmered and rocked. Maybe they were punk, but they sure didn’t sound like the Ramones or the Stooges. One friend from those days said Verlaine’s guitar reminded him of Roger McGuinn’s often ethereal 12-string runs for The Byrds. Another said he was the closest a white player ever came to Sonny Sharrock. Sometimes he sounded like both on the same song.

+ Verlaine started out as a sax-player, influenced by Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler and Coltrane. You can still hear those echoes in his work with Television and beyond.

+ Verlaine used to live near The Strand bookstore, which he visited nearly every day, usually picking up two or three books. One of the clerks noticed that he often bought the same titles, over and over. Eventually, she asked him why he kept buying the same book. Verlaine said, “I send them to people who need to read them.”

+ Frankie: I know karate.

James: I don’t know karate, but I know Ka-raaazy and the m-fer who thought this was a good idea sure the f– is…

+ On modern superhero movies: “A room full of beautiful, bare bodies, and everyone is only horny for war.”

+ Max Ernst: “Art has nothing to do with taste. Art is not there to be tasted.”

Pull Down the Future with the One You Love

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

States of Plague: Reading Camus in a Pandemic
Alice Kaplan and Laura Marris
(Chicago)

A History of the Wind
Alain Corbin
(Polity)

On the Marble Cliffs
Ernst Jünger
Trans. Tess Lewis
(NYRB)

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…

My Ideal: a Tribute to Chet Baker Sings
Amos Lee
(Dualtone)

All the Eye Can See
Joe Henry
(Ear Music)

Say I Won’t
Bass Drum of Death
(Fat Possum)

The Struggle Between Nations

“It should never be forgotten that, in the struggle between the nations, it is in the interest of each one of them that the other should be weakened by internal struggle. Hence it is always possible to pose the question of whether the parties exist by virtue of their own strength, as their own necessity, or whether rather they only exist to serve the interests of others.” (Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks)

Jeffrey St. Clair is editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book is An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (with Alexander Cockburn). He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net or on Twitter @JeffreyStClair3