Russiagate Smashes Human Survival Attempts
By David Swanson

"There's millions of commies in the freedom fight
"Yelling for Lenin and civil rights
"How do I know? I read it in the *Daily News*"
-Tom Paxton

Humanity faces climate and nuclear threats to its existence, spearheaded by the U.S. government. Survival proposals, or what your television calls fringe leftist schemes backed by Vladimir Putin (who, for the most part, does not back them), face many hurdles just to be heard. Unless you're a 15-year-old girl from Sweden or the Pope or have found some other magic loophole, there are many things that you just cannot say in U.S. corporate media: the earth's dying; the U.S. government is an oligarchy; meat and dairy are deadly; nuclear apocalypse is highly likely; war is illegal; weapons dealing is evil; military spending has made the U.S. a third-world nation; single-payer healthcare more than pays for itself; a peaceful sustainable society would be easy to create and cost less and make us safer and not slaughter so many people; a position shared by two major political parties can nonetheless be catastrophically awful, unpopular, corrupt, illegal, and sadistic.

In recent decades there has been one way an ordinary decent person could say such things and have at least a little fraction of them distorted and mocked in the corporate media. Such a person could tap into the ridiculous, anti-democratic, immobilizing pretense that the only things people can do are gripe and moan or vote. Such a person could run for office. But the returns on such efforts have been diminishing. The corporate media has largely whited out unwanted candidates. Lesser-evil voting is more firmly established than ever. And, just to seal the deal, any candidate not operating under the banner of one of the two corporate parties is now reported to be a product of a demonized foreign government, as indeed are various candidates belonging to one of the mega-parties also reported to be.

According to NBC News, Jill Stein in 2016 was a "fringe" candidate backed by Russia. The evidence for this - or, rather, the excuse to claim this - is the typical alleged puny amount of bizarre social media posts that nobody even suggests could have possibly impacted anything, allegedly posted by people with some sort of connection to the Russian government. To make this particular twist on Russiagate especially laughable, it relies in part on a company that has openly admitted to manufacturing phony "Russian" support for a U.S. Senate candidate in order to falsely claim exactly what it is claiming about Stein, and that has openly admitted to posting weird inconsequential stuff on social media in that race in exactly the style depicted in Russiagate lore, but apparently without any of the unacceptability, much less the comparisons to Pearl Harbor, by virtue of the fact that, I guess, no Russians were employed in the efforts.

I asked Jill Stein to comment, and she said:

"The NBC attack article is a pathetic example of the political intimidation and warmongering that go hand in hand with resurgent McCarthyism. This puts us all at risk, and gives more reason than ever to mobilize for peace and a Green New Deal to transform our economy, turn the tide on climate change and make wars for oil and empire obsolete. The attack by NBC, mirrored by the operatives at Center for American Progress, suggests the Democratic establishment is revving up its attack on progressive voices as the illusion of Democratic progressivism unravels - with the return of their opposition to Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, peace in the Middle East etc., now that election day has passed. This underscores again why we need independent, non-corporate politics capable of representing everyday people, not the economic elites pulling the strings on the establishment political parties. Putting the Democratic Party back in the driver seat will continue the bipartisan policies of austerity, inequality and war that are generating right-wing extremism all over the world. It's time for a politics for people, planet and peace over profit, and voting reforms - like Ranked Choice Voting - that will liberate the political will to make it happen."

(c) 2018 David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is director of WorldBeyondWar.org and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org. Swanson's books include War Is A Lie. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org and WarIsACrime.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. He is a 2015 and 2016 Nobel Peace Prize Nominee. Follow him on Twitter: @davidcnswanson and FaceBook.

Paul Ryan Sends A Chill Down Scrooge's Spine
By John Nichols

Charles Dickens introduced us to Ebenezer Scrooge in his counting house on the eve of the Christmastide. Two gentlemen were soliciting alms for the poor. Scrooge refused them, arguing that those who had fallen on hard times could be sent to workhouses or hard labor on a prison treadmill. "Many would rather die than go," suggested one of the charity workers. Scrooge's reply set the chilling tone of the opening pages of "A Christmas Carol."

"If they would rather die," said Scrooge, "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."

Dickens penned those words 175 years ago. Were he around today, and seeking a crueler character, the author would surely settle on House Speaker Paul Ryan.

Last week, when the whole world was demanding urgent action to end the Saudi-led bombardment and starvation of Yemen, the Janesville Republican used all of his considerable authority to block an urgent response to the humanitarian crisis in Yemen.

Ryan was not acting in the interest of partisanship or ideology. As the speaker was preventing action in the House, seven Senate Republicans - including some of the chamber's most conservative members - joined Democrats in a 56-41 vote for S.J.Res. 54: "A joint resolution to direct the removal of United States Armed Forces from hostilities in the Republic of Yemen that have not been authorized by Congress."

The sponsor of the Senate resolution, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, announced, "Today we tell the despotic regime in Saudi Arabia that we will not be a part of their military adventurism." This, said Sanders, was the necessary response to Saudi abuses that have fostered a "humanitarian and strategic disaster" in Yemen - a crisis so severe that United Nations officials say it could lead to the worst famine in a century.

No such announcement came from the House, where Ryan did the bidding of the Trump administration and the Saudi regime this president serves. Ryan refused to concern himself with reports on what the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund described as "a war on children."

"Yemen has become a hell on earth for millions of children. Today every single boy, every single girl in Yemen is facing extremely dire need," said UNICEF regional director Geert Cappelaere, who reported that, on average, a child is dying every 10 minutes in Yemen - a country where more than 400,000 children are starving and an additional 1.5 million are acutely malnourished.

Ryan went to extraordinary ends to prevent discussion of a change in U.S. policy that might cause the Saudis to relent. The speaker and his allies attached a clause to a measure related to the farm bill, which effectively blocked action on a Yemen bill that Congressmen Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and Mark Pocan, D-town of Vermont, have been advancing in tandem with the Sanders initiative in the Senate.

The measure was approved by a 206-203 vote, with overwhelming support from Ryan's caucus.

"For the second time in less than a month, Speaker Paul Ryan and other Republican leaders in the House have opted to undermine our democracy by slipping a rule to block a vote on ending U.S. support for the war in Yemen into an entirely unrelated bill," explained Paul Kawika Martin of the group Peace Action. "They have once again taken the position that ending or even debating the U.S. role in the worst humanitarian crisis on the planet is not worth serious consideration, even as the United Nations warns the war-induced famine in Yemen could soon become the worst famine in 100 years."

Khanna was outraged. "This is why people hate Congress," the congressman declared. "Speaker Ryan is not allowing a vote on my resolution to stop the war in Yemen because many Republicans will vote with us and he will lose the vote. He is disgracing Article 1 of the Constitution, and as a result, more Yemeni children will die."

The urgency of the circumstance in Yemen - the poorest country in the region - has inspired activists to launch a #YemenCantWait campaign. As Khanna explained, "Fourteen million people are on the brink of famine in Yemen. Eighty-five thousand children have already died from cholera and starvation. Our Yemen War Powers Resolution can't wait until 2019."

But the resolution will have to wait until Ryan steps down and Democrats take charge of the chamber in January. No speaker of the House has ever ended his tenure on so shameful a note.

Warning that Ryan and his caucus were "condemning more Yemeni civilians to die horrible deaths, and condemning our nation as a democracy in name only," Peace Action's Martin observed that "history will not look kindly on those who abdicated their constitutional duty to debate and vote on our nation's wars in the name of petty politics and shoring up future campaign contributions from the arms industry and pro-Saudi lobbyists."

But history did anticipate Ryan.

In the opening stave of "A Christmas Carol," Dickens described Scrooge as a man who walked the paths of human life "warning all human sympathy to keep its distance."

Dickens imagined a change of heart that finally redeemed the "squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner." Let us pray, in this Christmastide, that Paul Ryan is similarly inspired - as his actions of late would send a chill down the spine of Ebenezer Scrooge.

(c) 2018 John Nichols John Nichols is associate editor of The Capital Times. Uprising: How Wisconsin Renewed the Politics of Protest, from Madison to Wall Street, is published by Nation Books. Follow John Nichols on Twitter @NicholsUprising.

Can An Iceberg Assume a Perfect Rectangular Shape?
By James Donahue

Ever since NASA made the photo of the rectangular iceberg public I have felt a need to write something about it. The problem, however, is what can be said other than "Wow!" Apparently the photos taken during a fly-over the Larsen C ice shelf in the Antarctic in October produced images of this particular berg. After seeing the images I waited patiently for scientific explanations . . . how could such a thing happen without some kind of human interference?

My first thought is that this interesting mile-long and perfectly flat-topped rectangular chunk of floating ice had to have been cut from space by some kind of laser. Was it the work of some bored astronauts looking down from the International Space Station? Certainly we have the technical know-how to slice out a piece of ice that would look like that. As it is, the wheels of an international governmental space program like the ISS might grind with a rusty grating noise if the men and women assigned for duty there ever are suspected of playing with the power tools at their fingertips. Notice that NASA was quick to attempt an explanation . . . other than a laser cut from space.

Consequently a NASA report just published in Forbes noted that rectangular cuts of ice like the one photographed are not uncommon. The story said they can occur naturally as pieces of ice "calve off" from massive shelves of the flat surfaced ice jutting off from the land. The writer noted that a second similar cut of ice is visible just behind the second jet engine, and careful examination of the main rectangular berg shows imperfections along its sides.

But these so-called imperfections are minor compared to the overall shape of the iceberg. Glaciologist Timothy Bartholomaus at the University of Idaho explained: "Icebergs detaching from the edges of these ice shelves are like corners of a sheet of office paper getting cut with a pair of ocean-scissors. Right after the cut, when the iceberg detaches, the edges will often be perfectly square."

Of course we find Bartholomaus's explanation somewhat questionable. To make our point we offer a third image of a natural "calving" of two chunks of ice in the same region. It shows the edge of ice that breaks off from its mother. And it is jagged.

So how does nature produce a perfect rectangular chunk of ice like the one in question. We are thinking it just doesn't happen without the help of an artist. Or a bored astronaut with his hand on a laser gun.

(c) 2018 James L. Donahue is a retired newspaper reporter, editor and columnist with more than 40 years of experience in professional writing. He is the published author of five books, all dealing with Michigan history, and several magazine articles.

A Year Of Living Dangerously, Straight Ahead

(c) 2018 Heather Digby Parton, also known as "Digby," is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.

Patrick Shanahan is the defense contractor Trump picked to take over the Pentagon

(c) 2018 Matthew Rozsa is a breaking news writer for Salon. He holds an MA in History from Rutgers University-Newark and is ABD in his PhD program in History at Lehigh University. His work has appeared in Mic, Quartz and MSNBC.

The Quotable Quote-

25 Ways The Canadian Health Care System Is Better Than Obamacare

(c) 2018 Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer, and author. His latest book is The Seventeen Solutions: Bold Ideas for Our American Future. Other recent books include, The Seventeen Traditions: Lessons from an American Childhood, Getting Steamed to Overcome Corporatism: Build It Together to Win, and "Only The Super-Rich Can Save Us" (a novel).

Donald Trump

(c) 2018 Jane Stillwater. Stop Wall Street and War Street from destroying our world. And while you're at it, please buy my books!

The Dead Letter Office-

James returns the corporate salute

Heil Trump

10 Steps To Save American Democracy
By Robert Reich

Trump isn't the only problem. As Big Money floods our political system, and some in power are intent on making it harder for certain people to vote, we need a movement to save our democracy.

Here are 10 steps:

Number 1: Make voter registration automatic for all eligible voters, using information they've already provided the Department of Motor Vehicles or another government agency. This has already been implemented in several states, including Oregon, and it works. In 2014, over 1 in 5 Americans were eligible to vote but did not register. Automatic registration would automatically change this.

Number 2: Pass a new Voting Rights Act, setting uniform national voting standards and preventing states from engaging in any form of voter suppression, such as voter ID laws, the purging of voter rolls, and inaccessible and inadequate polling places.

Number 3: Implement public financing of elections, in which public funds match small donations - thereby eliminating the advantage of big money.

Number 4: Require public disclosure of the sources of all political donations. Much of that is now secret, so no one is held accountable.

Number 5: End the revolving door between serving in government and lobbying. Too often, members of Congress, their staffs, cabinet members and top White House personnel take lucrative lobbying jobs after leaving government. In turn, lobbyists take important positions in government. This revolving door must stop. It creates conflicts between the public interest and private greed.

Number 6: Ban members of Congress from owning specific shares of stock while they're in office. Require that they hold their investments in index funds, so they won't favor particular companies while carrying out their public duties.

Number 7: Require that all candidates running for Congress and the presidency release their tax returns so the American people know of any potential financial conflicts of interests before they're elected.

Number 8: Eliminate gerrymandered districts by creating independent redistricting commissions. Some states - Arizona, California, Michigan, and Colorado, for example - have established non-partisan commissions to ensure that congressional maps are drawn fairly, without racial or partisan bias. Other states should follow their lead.

Number 9: Make the Electoral College irrelevant. The presidency should be awarded to the candidate who receives the most votes. Period. States should agree to award all their Electoral College votes to the winner of the popular vote by joining the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.

10 and finally: Fight for a Supreme Court that will reverse its Citizens United decision, which interpreted the First Amendment to prevent Congress or state governments from limiting political spending.

Follow these 10 steps and begin to make our democracy work again.

(c) 2018 Robert B. Reich has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. His latest book is "Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few." His web site is www.robertreich.org.

Banishing Truth
By Chris Hedges

The investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, in his memoir "Reporter," describes a moment when as a young reporter he overheard a Chicago cop admit to murdering an African-American man. The murdered man had been falsely described by police as a robbery suspect who had been shot while trying to avoid arrest. Hersh frantically called his editor to ask what to do.

"The editor urged me to do nothing," he writes. "It would be my word versus that of all the cops involved, and all would accuse me of lying. The message was clear: I did not have a story. But of course I did." He describes himself as "full of despair at my weakness and the weakness of a profession that dealt so easily with compromise and self-censorship."

Hersh, the greatest investigative reporter of his generation, uncovered the U.S. military's chemical weapons program, which used thousands of soldiers and volunteers, including pacifists from the Seventh-day Adventist Church, as unwitting human guinea pigs to measure the impact of biological agents including tularemia, yellow fever, Rift Valley fever and the plague. He broke the story of the My Lai massacre. He exposed Henry Kissinger's wiretapping of his closest aides at the National Security Council (NSC) and journalists, the CIA's funding of violent extremist groups to overthrow the Chilean President Salvador Allende, the CIA's spying on domestic dissidents within the United States, the sadistic torture practices at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq by American soldiers and contractors and the lies told by the Obama administration about the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Yet he begins his memoir by the candid admission, familiar to any reporter, that there are crimes and events committed by the powerful you never write about, at least if you want to keep your job. One of his laments in the book is his decision not to follow up on a report he received that disgraced President Richard Nixon had hit his wife, Pat, and she had ended up in an emergency room in California.

Reporters embedded with military units in Iraq and Afghanistan routinely witness atrocities and often war crimes committed by the U.S. military, yet they know that access is dependent on keeping quiet. This collusion between the press and the powerful is a fundamental feature of journalism, one that even someone as courageous as Hersh, at least a few times, was forced to accept. And yet, there comes a time when reporters, at least the good ones, decide to sacrifice their careers to tell the truth. Hersh, relentlessly chronicling the crimes of the late empire, including the widespread use of torture, indiscriminate military strikes on civilian targets and targeted assassinations, has for this reason been virtually blacklisted in the American media. And the loss of his voice-he used to work for The New York Times and later The New Yorker-is evidence that the press, always flawed, has now been neutered by corporate power. Hersh's memoir is as much about his remarkable career as it is about the death of investigative journalism and the transformation of news into a national reality television show that subsists on gossip, invective, officially approved narratives and leaks and entertainment.

Investigative journalism depends not only on reporters such as Hersh, but as importantly on men and women inside the systems of power who have the moral courage to expose lies and make public crimes. Writing off any institution, no matter how nefarious the activity, as filled with the irredeemable is a mistake. "There are many officers, including generals and admirals, who understood that the oath of office they took was a commitment to uphold and defend the Constitution and not the President, or an immediate superior," he writes. "They deserve my respect and got it. Want to be a good military reporter? Find those officers." One of the heroes in Hersh's book is Ron Ridenhour, who served in a combat unit in Vietnam and who initiated the army's investigation into the My Lai massacre and generously helped Hersh track down eyewitnesses and participants.

The government's wholesale surveillance, however, has crippled the ability of those with a conscience, such as Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden, to expose the crimes of state and remain undetected. The Obama administration charged eight people under the Espionage Act of leaking to the media-Thomas Drake, Shamai Leibowitz, Stephen Kim, Chelsea Manning, Donald Sachtleben, Jeffrey Sterling, John Kiriakou and Edward Snowden-effectively ending the vital connection between investigative reporters and sources inside the government.

This government persecution has, by default, left the exposure of government lies, fraud and crimes to hackers. And this is the reason hackers, and those who publish their material such as Julian Assange at WikiLeaks, are relentlessly persecuted. The goal of the corporate state is to hermetically seal their activities, especially those that violate the law, from outside oversight or observation. And this goal is very far advanced.

Hersh notes throughout his memoir that, like all good reporters, he constantly battled his editors and fellow reporters as much as he did the government or corporations. There is a species of reporter you can see on most cable news programs and on the floor of the newsrooms at papers such as The New York Times who make their living as courtiers to the powerful. They will, at times, critique the excesses of power but never the virtues of the systems of power, including corporate capitalism or the motivations of the ruling elites. They detest reporters, like Hersh, whose reporting exposes their collusion.

The Bertrand Russell War Crimes Tribunal was held in 1967 in Europe during the Vietnam War. It included the testimony of three American soldiers who spoke of watching soldiers and Marines routinely pump indiscriminate rounds of ammunition into villages with no regard for civilian casualties. Most of the American press dismissed the findings of the tribunal. The Times foreign affairs columnist, C.L. Sulzberger, launched a venomous attack against the Noble Prize-winning philosopher and mathematician, who was then 94 years old. Sulzberger, a member of the family that owned the paper, wrote that Russell had "outlived his own conscious idea and become clay in unscrupulous hands." The tribunal, Sulzberger went on, "cannot fairly be laid at the door of the wasted peer whose bodily endurance outpaced his brain."

Hersh, however, tipped off by the testimony at the tribunal, eventually uncovered the My Lai massacre. But no publication would touch it. Magazines such as Life and Look turned down the story. "I was devastated, and frightened by the extent of self-censorship I was encountering in my profession," Hersh writes. He finally published the story with the obscure, anti-war Dispatch News Service. Major publications, including The New York Times, along with Newsweek and Time, ignored the report. Hersh kept digging. More lurid facts about the massacre came to light. It became too big to dismiss, as hard as the mainstream media initially tried, and Hersh was awarded the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. The only officer convicted of the war crime, which left 106 men, women and children dead, was Lt. William Calley, who spent three months and 13 days in prison.

Papers like the New York Times pride themselves on their special access to the powerful, even if that access turns them into a public relations arm of the elites. This desire for access-which news organizations feel gives them prestige and an inside seat, although the information they are fed is usually lies or half-truths-pits conscientious reporters like Hersh against most editors and reporters in the newsroom. Hersh, who at the time was working for the Times, describes sitting across from another reporter, Bernard Gwertzman, who was covering Henry Kissinger and the NSC.

"There was a near-daily ritual involving Bernie that stunned me," Hersh writes. "On far too many afternoons around 5:00, Max Frankel's secretary would approach Bernie and tell him that Max [the Times' bureau chief in Washington] was at that moment on the phone with 'Henry' and the call would soon he switched to him. Sure enough, in a few moments Bernie would avidly begin scratching notes as he listened to Kissinger-he listened far more than he talked-and the result was a foreign policy story that invariably led the paper the next morning, with quotes from an unnamed senior government official. After a week or two of observing the process, I asked the always affable and straightforward Bernie if he ever checked what Henry was telling him with Bill Rogers, the secretary of state, or Mel Laird at the Pentagon. "Oh no,' he said. 'If I did that, Henry wouldn't speak to us.'"

The Washington Post broke the Watergate story, in which operatives for the Nixon White House in June 1972 broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office complex in Washington while Hersh was at the Times. Kissinger's assurances-Hersh writes that Kissinger "lied the way most people breathed"-that it was not an event of consequence saw the top editors at The New York Times initially ignore it. The paper, however, finally embarrassed by the revelations in The Washington Post, threw Hersh onto the story, although the paper's executive editor, Abe Rosenthal, called Hersh with a mixture of affection and wariness "my little commie."

Hersh left the paper after a massive expose he and Jeff Gerth wrote about the corporation Gulf and Western, which carried out fraud, abuse, tax avoidance and had connections with the mob, was rewritten by cautious and timid editors. Charles Bluhdorn, the CEO of Gulf and Western, socialized with the publisher Arthur "Punch" Sulzberger. Bluhdorn used his connections at the paper to discredit Hersh and Gerth, as well as bombard the paper with accusatory letters and menacing phone calls. When Hersh filed his 15,000-word expose, the business editor, John Lee, and "his ass-kissing coterie of moronic editors," perhaps fearful of being sued, neutered it. It was one thing, Hersh found, to go up against a public institution. It was something else to take on a private institution. He would never again work regularly for a newspaper.

"The experience was frustrating and enervating," he writes. "Writing about corporate America had sapped my energy, disappointed the editors, and unnerved me. There would be no check on corporate America, I feared: Greed had won out. The ugly fight with Gulf and Western had rattled the publisher and the editors to the point that the editors who ran the business pages had been allowed to vitiate and undercut the good work Jeff and I had done. ... The courage the Times had shown in confronting the wrath of a president and an attorney general in the crisis over the Pentagon Papers in 1971 was nowhere to be seen when confronted by a gaggle of corporate con men. ..."

His reporting, however, continued to relentlessly expose the falsifications in official narratives. The Navy intelligence official, Jonathan Pollard, for example, had been caught spying for Israel in 1985 and given a life sentence. Hersh found that Pollard primarily stole documents on how the United States spied on the Soviet Union. The Israeli government, Hersh suspected, "was trading Pollard's information to Moscow in exchange for the emigration of Soviet Jews with skills and expertise needed by Israel." Pollard was released, after heavy Israeli pressure, in 2015 and now lives in Israel.

The later part of Hersh's career is the most distressing. He was writing for The New Yorker when Barack Obama was elected president. David Remnick, the magazine's editor, socialized with Obama and was apparently wary of offending the president. When Hersh exposed the fictitious narrative spun out by the Obama administration about the killing of Bin Laden, the magazine killed the story, running instead a report about the raid, provided by the administration, from the point of view of one of the SEALs who was on the mission. Hersh resigned. He published the account of the raid in the London Review of Books, the beginning of his current exile to foreign publications. When we most urgently need Hersh and good investigative reporters like him, they have largely disappeared. A democracy, at best, tolerates them. A failed democracy, like ours, banishes them, and when it does, it kills its press.

(c) 2018 Chris Hedges, the former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times, spent seven years in the Middle East. He was part of the paper's team of reporters who won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of global terrorism. Keep up with Chris Hedges' latest columns, interviews, tour dates and more at www.truthdig.com/chris_hedges.

The Cartoon Corner-

This edition we're proud to showcase the cartoons of
~~~ Jeff Korterba ~~~