Roaming Charges: The Goldberg Variations

Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits—a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage.

– Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

+ This is how the editor of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, opened his piece that became the talk of the town this week, an exposé that proved to be an indictment of both the Trump brain trust and Goldberg’s own peculiar brand of journalism, which made the story about a leak instead of the authorized bombing of civilians in Yemen…

The world found out shortly before 2 p.m. Eastern time on March 15 that the United States was bombing Houthi targets across Yemen.

However, I knew the attack might be coming two hours before the first bombs exploded. Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, texted me the war plan at 11:44 a.m. The plan included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing.

+ This raises a lot of questions. Why did Goldberg assume the leak was “accidental” and not, as is customary in the investigative journalism business, a leak that something nefarious and illegal was afoot? 

+ If the Trump team was going to “accidentally” include any reporter in their Yemen war planning–Goldberg, the former IDF prison guard–would be the one. It’s the equivalent of Christopher Hitchens being invited to the Bush White House to help plot airstrikes on Mosul and Fallujah.

+ But if, as MAGA believes, the Chat group was covertly leaked by a “backdoor splinter group of the CIA,” they would have surely sent it to a reporter like Sy Hersh, who would have published the entire Chat before the bombs began to fall…

Reporter: Can you share how your information about war plans was shared with a journalist? 

Hegseth: So you are talking about a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who has made a profession of peddling hoaxes.

+ It’s hard to disagree with this character assessment (if not in this particular case) given Jeffrey Goldberg’s role in peddling the hoax of Iraq War WMDs…(For more on Goldberg, see Alexander Cockburn’s “Meet Jeffrey Goldberg” and Norman Finkelstein’s “Jeffrey Goldberg’s Prison.”)

+ Goldberg to Jen Paski on MSNBC:

It’s not possible here to disclose the things I read and saw. So, I will describe them to you: the specific time of a future attack. The specific target, including the human target, was meant to be killed in that attack. Weapons systems, even weather reports (I don’t know why Hegseth was sharing it with everybody.) Then a long section on sequencing: this is going to happen, then that is going to happen. After that happens, this happens. Then that happens. Then we go and find out if it worked. He can say it wasn’t a war plan, but it was a minute-by-minute accounting of what was about to happen.

+ Goldberg not only did a favor for the Pentagon, he covered for the CIA, as well.

Tim Miller: “There was a covert CIA operative named in the thread, right?”

Jeffrey Goldberg: “Yes, and I withheld her name… I didn’t put it in the story because she’s undercover. But, I mean, the CIA Director put it into the chat.”

+ The real issue at stake: Last week, Israel wired the last cancer hospital in Gaza with explosives and blew it up. This week, the US bombed a cancer hospital in Yemen. They’re giving new meaning to the War on Cancer (hospitals).

+ Just a friendly reminder: Congress hasn’t declared “war” on Yemen, which is, constitutionally, a much bigger scandal than Wittkoff, Rubio, Tulsi, Hegseth, et al., leaking the “war” plans to Jeffrey Goldberg. But this is precisely the part of the story Goldberg has no interest in reporting.

+ The real Goldberg revealed himself on Wednesday during an interview with NPR’s Deepa Fernandez, who asked the editor of the Atlantic: “There’s little talk of the fact that this attack killed 53 people, including women and children. The civilian toll of these American strikes. Are we burying the lede here?”

+ Goldberg stammered in reply:

Well, those, unfortunately, those aren’t confirmed numbers. Those are provided by the Houthis and the Houthi health ministry, I guess. So we don’t know that for sure. Yeah, I mean, obviously, we’re, well, I don’t know if we’re burying the lede, because obviously huge breaches in national security and safety. of information, that’s a very, very important story obviously, and one of the reasons is that the Republicans themselves consider that to be an important story, when it’s Hillary Clinton doing the deed, right? So that’s obviously hugely important. But yeah, I think that covering what’s going on in Yemen, the Arab and Iran-backed terrorist organization, the Houthis, that are, that are firing missiles at Israel and disrupting global shipping and occupy half of Yemen, and all kinds of other things in the US, you know, and the Trump administration criticizing … Biden’s response and Europe wants Trump to do more. I mean, yeah, there’s, there’s a huge story in Yemen. But Yemen is, as you know, one of the more inaccessible places for Western journalists. So maybe this becomes like a substitute for a discussion of Yemen. I don’t know.

+ In his latest variation on a theme, Goldberg explicitly places the “security of information” about US missile strikes that killed civilians over the security of the civilians killed by US missile strikes.

+ Jeffrey Goldberg could have saved the lives of innocent Yemeni civilians–women and children, doctors, nurses, and their patients–if he’d simply disclosed the specific (and illegal) war plans that had been leaked to him before the strikes took place. He chose not to because although he despises Trump, he supports the war on Yemen and has since 2015 when Obama started shipping cluster bombs for the Saudis to use against the Houthis.

+++

+ Pete Hegseth: “Nobody’s texting war plans. I know exactly what I’m doing.”

+ It was, of course, only last week that Hegseth’s plan to brief Elon Musk on the Pentagon’s war plans against China leaked to the press, prompting his chief of staff to launch an investigation into the leak and turn the leaker over to “the appropriate criminal law enforcement entity for criminal prosecution.”

Sen. Kelly: “Do you recall any weapons systems being discussed?”

Tulsi Gabbard: “Not specifically.”

+ As for Gabbard, her entire career now seems like some long-running series of The Transformers, where she twists into new contradictory shapes in each episode…

+ Just last month, Gabbard fired more than 100 intelligence officers for messages in Chat groups.

+ Mike Waltz: “No locations. No sources & methods. NO WAR PLANS.”

+ Among the operationally-relavent weapons systems specifically discussed: MQ-9 “Reapers” and “Trigger Based” F-18s.

+ To refute these lies to the media and Congress, Goldberg finally decided to release some more of the Chat messaging demonstrating that more than an hour before the strikes, Hegseth was revealing the timing, location, and weapons that would be used in the attack, all of which would have been highly classified information…

TIME NOW (1144ET): Weather is FAVORABLE. Just CONFIRMED w Centcom we are a GO for mission launch.

1215et: F-18s LAUNCH (1st strike package)

1345: “Trigger Based” F-18 1st Strike Window Starts (Target Terrorist is @ his Known Location so SHOULD BE ON TIME) — also, Strike Drones Launch (MQ-9s)

1410: More F-18s LAUNCH (2nd strike package)

1415: Strike Drones on Target (THIS IS WHEN THE FIRST BOMBS WILL DEFINITELY DROP, pending earlier “Trigger Based” targets)

1536: F-18 2nd Strike Starts — also, first sea-based Tomahawks launched.

MORE TO FOLLOW (per timeline)

We are currently clean on OPSEC .

+ Reporter: Now that President Trump has personally seen the messages in the group chat — including Secretary Hegseth saying, “THIS IS WHEN THE FIRST BOMBS WILL DEFINITELY DROP” — does he feel misled by whoever told him it contained no classified information?

+ WH press spokesperson Karoline Leavitt, who prepares for each press briefing with a group prayer session: “The president feels the same today as he did yesterday.”

+ And how did the President feel about it yesterday?  As usual, Trump claimed ignorance: “I don’t know anything about it.” By next week, he’ll likely claim he doesn’t know any of the people involved, even though those involved included his chief of staff, his vice president, his director of National Intelligence, his National Security Advisor, his CIA director, his FBI director, his Secretary of Defense, and his very own Rasputin, Stephen Miller.

+ During his confirmation hearing, Hegesth pledged: “Leaders—at all levels—will be held accountable.”

+ In October 2023, the Pentagon issued a memo to the U.S. military warning them not to use mobile apps because they are not secure.

+ Hegseth chatting on the unsecure Singal chat: “We are currently clean on OPSEC.”

+ On March 19, the Pentagon sent out this warning about Signal to all personnel:

+ Former Army JAG, now NYT rightwing columnist David French: “There is not an officer alive whose career would survive a security breach like that.  It would normally result in instant consequences (relief from command, for example) followed by a comprehensive investigation and, potentially, criminal charges.”

+ Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX): “A huge screwup.”

+ Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS): “It appears that mistakes were made,” 

+ Rep. Roger Bacon (R-NE): “Putting out classified information like that endangers our forces—and I can’t believe that they were knowingly putting that kind of classified information on unclassified systems—it’s just wrong, And there’s no doubt—I’m an intelligence guy—Russia and China are monitoring both their phones.”

+ Secretary of State Marco Rubio: “Someone made a big mistake. Someone made a big mistake and added a journalist. Nothing against journalists, but you ain’t supposed to be on that thing,”

+ Trump, a day after saying he knew nothing about it: “I always thought it was Mike [Waltz].” Adios, Mike…

+ Then there’s Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson: “It’d be a terrible mistake for there to be adverse consequences on any of the people that were involved in that call.”

+++

+ On the group Chat, JD Vance made it clear he’d rather bomb Copenhagen, Paris, or Berlin than Sanaa: “3 percent of US trade runs through the Suez. 40 percent of European trade does…There’s a further risk that we see a moderate to severe spike in oil prices. If you think we should do it [that is, strike the Houthis] let’s go. I just hate bailing Europe out again.”

+ Hegseth responded three minutes later, “VP: I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC.”

+ Greg Grandin: “Kissinger kept the bombing of Cambodia secret for years because the bombing itself, of a country we weren’t at war with, was illegal.   Now we bomb where and whom at will, and the press and anti-Trump politicians don’t give it a thought.   The scandal now is that they didn’t keep it secret enough.  I’d say they should make a foreign-policy version of Severence, where the domestic citizenry is oblivious to what the US does outside its borders, but that show already exists.”

 

+ According to a report in DER SPIEGEL, the cell phone numbers, email addresses and even some passwords belonging to top Trump officials, including Mike Waltz, Pete Hegseth, and Tulsi Gabbard, have been found online, exposing a previously unknown security breach at the highest levels in Trump’s national security team: “Hostile intelligence services could use this publicly available data to hack the communications of those affected by installing spyware on their devices. It is thus conceivable that foreign agents were privy to the Signal chat group in which Gabbard, Waltz and Hegseth discussed a military strike.”

+ Der Spiegel investigative reporter Roman Höfner:

Using common people search tools and breach databases, we found active phone numbers and emails for Waltz, Gibbard, and Hegseth—tied to Dropbox, Microsoft, Whatsapp, social networks as well apps that track running routes. We even found numbers from [Waltz] and [Gabbard] that are used for Signal. To be clear: Of course you can nearly always find old data online, but these emails and phone numbers still seem to be in use and are connected to active accounts. Their private email addresses that still appear to be in use can be found in data breaches along with passwords.

+ Meanwhile, it wasn’t until Wired contacted the White House on Wednesday to inquire why Mike Waltz and Susie Wiles had their Venmo friends lists public that the accounts went private, two days after Goldberg’s story appeared. Wired later interviewed security experts who called it “a counterintelligence nightmare.”

+ DOGE has fired 10s of thousands of federal workers, none of whom were as incompetent, careless, and stupid as Trump’s entire national security team.

+ Either charge Hegseth, Waltz, Gabbard, and Ratcliffe with violating the Espionage Act or issue pardons, apologies, and restitution to Thomas Drake, Julian Assange, Jeffrey Stirling, Edward Snowden, Asif Rahman, Jack Teixeira, and Reality Winner and abolish the Espionage Act at long last.

+ On a more serious note, Hegseth blows his nose into an American flag? MAGA!

+++

+ As Forrest Hylton told me, the “strategy” of Trump’s indiscriminate migrant raids resembles Rumsfeld’s post-9/11 orders to “Go massive – sweep it all up. Things related and not.” 

+ ICE is knowingly renditioning innocent people and sending them to a prison where the night-time sadism of Abu Ghraib is the operational plan 24/7…

+ The ACLU filed a sworn declaration from a Venezuela woman asylum seeker whom ICE detained and wanted to deport to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act; she says she overheard ICE officials on the plane to El Salvador conversing about that court ruling ordering them to turn the plane back to the US. ICE defied the court order and renditioned the detainees to El Salvador despite stopping for “hours” to refuel. The Venezuelan asylum seeker was later returned to the Webb Detention Center in Laredo, Texas…

On Friday, we were told to gather our belongings and put on the bus at Webb [County detention center in Laredo, Texas] and sat in the bus for about 5 minutes and then were taken back to Webb.

Saturday morning, we were again told to gather our belongings and get on the bus. We went to the airport, and eight women were put on the plane with me.

When we got on the plane, there were already over 50 men on the plane. I could see other migrants walking to the plane, but we took off before any additional people boarded. Within a couple of minutes, I overheard two US government officials talking, and they said, “There is an order saying we can’t take off, but we already have.”

I asked where we were going and we were told that we were going to Venezuela. Several other people on the plane told me they were in immigration proceedings and awaiting court hearings in immigration court.

We were not allowed to open our window shades.

We landed somewhere for refueling. We were there for many hours. We were arm and leg shackled the whole time.

We took off again and landed fairly quickly. I was then told we were in El Salvador. 

While on the plane the government officials were asking the men to sign a document and they didn’t want to. The government officials were pushing them to sign the document and threatening them. I heard them discussing the documents and they were about the men admitting they were members of TdA.

After we landed but were still on the plane, a woman opened the shade. An officer rushed to close the shade and pulled her down by her shoulders to try and stop her from looking out. The person who pushed her down had HOU-O2 written on his sleeve.

I saw out the window for a minute and I saw men in military uniforms and another plane. I saw men being led off the plane. Since I’ve been back in the US, I have seen news coverage, and the plane I saw looks like the one I’ve seen on TV with migrants from the US being delivered to El Salvador.

+ Neri Alvarado was working as a baker in Dallas when ICE showed up asking to see his tattoo. “We’re here because of your tattoos. We are  finding and questioning everyone who has tattoos,” an ICE agent told him. Neri explained that the rainbow-colored ribbon on his arm was an Autism Awareness tattoo honoring his 15-year-old brother with autism. The ICE examined Neri’s phone and told him he was clean. But another agent ordered him kept in detention. Then, he was renditioned to El Salvador without any explanation. His only crime was having a tattoo.

+ ICE is trying to deport Yunseo Chung, a 21-year-old Columbia student who attended pro-Palestine protests. Chung came to the US from South Korea with her family at age SEVEN. She’s been a lawful permanent resident for more than a decade. She was the valedictorian of her high school class. She faced a disciplinary hearing from Columbia, which found she did not violate the university’s policies. Despite being cleared of any crimes or infractions (even that of trespassing on her own campus), ICE agents showed up at her parent’s house and told them her green card had been revoked. Armed ICE agents showed up twice at her campus apartment looking for her. On Wednesday, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order stopping the Trump administration from detaining Yunseo.

+ A little after five in the evening on Tuesday, Runeysa Ozturk, a Ph D candidate at Tufts University, was accosted on the streets of Somerville, Mass., outside of Boston by hooded and masked agents, who initially refused to identify who they were and then falsely claimed they were “the police.” They were, in fact, ICE. Runeysa’s backpack, purse, and phone were seized. She was placed in cuffs, forced into a black van, and taken away. She was told her student visa had been revoked, and she was going to be deported. Ozturk, a Turkish citizen, was here legally, had committed no crimes, and wasn’t charged with a crime by ICE when they kidnapped her. Her sole offense? Co-writing an op-ed in the Tufts student paper opposing Israel’s mass killings of Palestinians. Even though a federal judge had ordered ICE to keep her in Massachusetts until a hearing on her status could take place, she was transported to an ICE detention jail in Louisiana.

+ On Thursday, Marco Rubio admitted that he’d personally revoked Runeysa’s visa and smeared her without evidence as being a terrorist sympathizer and a supporter of Hamas. “We do it every day,” Rubio boasted. “Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas.” Rubio said he’s already revoked 300 student visas and intends to revoke many more.

Jonathan Karl, ABC’s This Week: Do they have any due process at all?

Thomas Homan, Trump’s Border Czar: Due process…what was Laken Riley’s due process?

+ So, there is no due process, even for people who have committed no crimes, which is the vast majority of people ICE has detained and attempted to deport. Due process was, of course, designed for people suspected of crimes. Not even the most cynical of founders envisioned it would be needed for people arrested and deported merely for having a tattoo or the name José or who might have been glimpsed at a campus protest against genocide.

+ It’s surely not the case that the top law enforcement officers in the US don’t know the Constitution; they just don’t think it applies to them and that the Supreme Court will bail them out if needed.

+ The Trump administration announced it was eliminating funding for legal representation for unaccompanied children. The decision:

+ Forces organizations like the Galveston Houston Immigration Representation Project to halt representation for hundreds of children immediately

+ Leaves 26,000 children nationwide to defend themselves in deportation proceedings

+ Coincides with “rocket dockets” that fast-track children through immigration courts

+ Strips children as young as toddlers of their right to legal counsel

+ America 2025: No due process for adults and no lawyers for children.

+ Judith Butler: “We need a better understanding of the fears exploited by authoritarians: who is this “migrant,” so dangerous they must be deported; this “Palestinian” whose death secures the social and political order; this notion of “gender” that is so threatening to self, family and society? Any alternative to authoritarianism must address these fears with a compelling vision of a world in which there would be security for all who now fear their own vanishing and the vanishing of their communities.”

+++

+ Something is egregiously wrong with this economic system…The average WSJ bonus ($244,700) is now four times the annual salary of US workers.

+ The global population of people worth at least $100 million has breached the 100,000 mark for the first time, according to CNBC. The number of Gen Z households receiving unemployment benefits rose by nearly a third in the past year, more than any generation. But most members of Gen Z don’t have even a month of savings…

+ Making 14-year-olds work the midnight shift at the slaughterhouse because you rounded up all of the noncitizens who were willing to do these shitty jobs for low pay and sent them to dungeons in El Salvador…Dystopian novels can’t keep up with our dystopian political economy.

+ WSJ: “President Trump’s economic policies are sending investors out of U.S. stocks and into cash, bonds, gold and European defense stocks.”

Percent of Americans who own stocks: 60
Percent of Americans who are in debt: 80

+ According to the OECD, global economic growth is expected to slow from 3.2% in 2024 to 3.1% in 2025 and 3.0% in 2026. Previously, it had forecasted 3.3% global economic growth for this year and next. Meanwhile, the U.S.’s annual GDP growth is projected to fall to 2.2% in 2025 and 1.6% in 2026.

+ CNN: “Before Trump took office in January, 48% of Democrats and 14% of Republicans said they thought economic conditions in the US were good, and now, 48% of Republicans and 14% of Democrats feel that way.” 

+ Biden could have used the Covid emergency to wipe out student and medical debt. Instead, many millennials are having their student loan payments balloon from $500 to $5000.

+ Trump, after saying his tariffs will make the US rich again: “I may give a lot of countries breaks on tariffs.” “I”, always the “I”…

+ Article I, Section 8: “The Congress shall have the Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts, and Excises, … but all Duties, Imposts, and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.”

+ In response to Trump’s 24% tariffs on cars manufactured in Canada, Canada shut down its rebate payments for Tesla and banned the EV maker from future programs for as long as “illegitimate and illegal us tariffs are imposed against Canada.”

+ Trump just announced a 25% “secondary” tariff on any country that buys oil from Venezuela. Can you guess which country imports the most oil from Venezuela?

+ Musk: “Our DOGE teams work 120 hours a week. Out bureaucratic opponents optimistically work 40 hours a week. That is why they are losing so fast.” This is the hell the Masters of Capital want for all American workers…Whatever happened to 8 hours of work, 8 hours of sleep, 8 hours of your own…?

+ A 120-hour workweek is a 17-hour workday, which is what we put in at CounterPunch, but only because we’re melatonin-deprived insomniacs who can’t get enough screentime with our Macs.

+ About those DOGE workers: Reuters reports that the DOGE staffer who calls himself “Big Balls” bragged about helping a cybercrime ring: “The best-known member of Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service team of technologists once provided support to a cybercrime gang that bragged about trafficking in stolen data and cyberstalking an FBI agent.”

+ Here are the top ten companies that will reap billions in benefits from an extension of Trump’s corporate tax cuts…

Alphabet
Apple
Bank of America
Citigroup
Comcast
GM
JP Morgan Chase
Meta
Microsft
Pfizer

+ All of them (and/or their top executives) donated at least $1 million to the Trump campaign or inaugural.

+ Perry Anderson in the LRB: “The problem, indeed, is a more general one. No populism, right or left, has so far produced a powerful remedy for the ills it denounces. Programmatically, the contemporary opponents of neoliberalism are still, for the most part, whistling in the dark.”

+++

+ Bernie Sanders on Trump’s arbitrary firing of 10,000 workers at the Department of Health and Human Services:

Let’s be clear: Arbitrarily firing over 10,000 workers at the Department of Health and Human Services will not make Americans healthier. It will make Americans sicker and less secure. At a time when the cost of health insurance and prescription drugs is soaring, these outrageous cuts will make it more difficult for seniors to receive the health care they desperately need. At a time when over 60,000 Americans die because they can’t afford to go to a doctor, these cuts will make it more difficult for 32 million Americans to get the primary care they need at community health centers all over our country. At a time when the cost of child care is out of reach for millions of American families, these cuts will make a bad situation even worse. All of us want to make the government more efficient. But you don’t do that by slashing the agency in charge of the health and well-being of tens of millions of seniors, children, working families, and the most vulnerable people in America down to less than half the size of Tesla.

+ The termination of US health care support in developing nations is likely to leave 75 million children without routine vaccinations over the next five years, leaving an estimated 1.2 million children to die as a result.

+ The CDC is ending $11.4 billion in funds allocated in response to the pandemic to state and community health departments, non-government organizations, and international recipients. It’s hard to imagine the mentality of someone who thinks this is a good idea, other than Trump’s desire not to have “bad infectious disease numbers” by simply stopping to track the numbers….“

+ A new study published in Lancet predicts that healthcare aid cuts by the US, UK, and EU nations will result in “up to 2.9 million” million deaths of children and adults from HIV-related causes.

+++

+ JD Vance: “Denmark is not doing its job, not being a good ally…If that means we need to take more territorial interest in Greenland, that is what President Trump is going to do.”

+ A YouGov survey on Canada and Greenland…

Do you have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of Canada?

Favorable: 69%
Unfavorable: 13%

Would you favor or oppose Canada becoming the 51st state?

Favor: 17%
Oppose: 57%

Would you favor or oppose the US annexing Greenland?

Favor: 19%
Oppose: 49%
Not sure: 32%

Do you believe Trump has spent his first two months:

Focused on America’s most important issues: 43%
Focuses on issues that aren’t very important: 45%
Not sure: 28%

+ Trump on why he sent Operation Usha to Greenland: “To let them know that we need Greenland for international safety and security. We have to convince them, and we have to have that land.”

+ Greenland’s Prime Minister, Múte B. Egede, criticized the upcoming visit of the Ambassador of Annexation, Usha Vance,  and White House National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, to the island: “Until recently, we could trust the Americans, who were our allies and friends, and with whom we enjoyed working closely … But that time is over.”

+ Most Americans never travel abroad (only 3.5%, according to one analysis), which is why they have no idea that universal health care, public transport, pedestrian-friendly urban centers and French food and wines are actually good things. Many don’t leave their own states. Some never venture out of their own Zip Codes. To each their own. But tourism to the US is a $155 billion a year industry, which Trump is rapidly killing off. “Even before the most recent spate of detentions, forecast visits to the country this year had been revised downward from a projected 5% rise to a 9% decrease by Tourism Economics.”

+++

+ Climate change is causing increased emissions, which are quickening climate change, which is….well, you get it. The record increase in global emissions last year was attributable to record heatwaves in India and China, which increased the use of coal to power air conditioning.

+ It’s March and wildfires are burning out of control across the Carolinas and New Jersey.

+ I repeat: It’s March and …

+ At least 50,000 clean energy jobs have been killed off or delayed by the Trump administration in the last two months. More than $56 billion in clean energy investments have been defunded or halted since February.

+ “Two-thirds of all irrigated agriculture in the world is likely to be affected in some way by receding glaciers and dwindling snowfall in mountain regions, driven by the climate crisis, according to a Unesco report.”

+ This week, Montana announced its diabolical plan to kill off 60% of the state’s wolf population–that’s 60% every year!!

+++

+ Sen.  Chris Murphy: “We viewed people like Bernie Sanders as an outlier threat to the institutional Democratic party, when in fact what he was talking about is the crossover message.” 

+ “My job,” Chuck Schumer told Bret Stephens, “is to keep the left pro-Israel.”

+ Maybe the “institutional” Democratic Party should be institutionalized—just a thought.

+ After being confronted with “irregularities” in his campaign spending, including payments to strange companies with non-existent addresses, Tennessee Republican Andy Ogles blamed it on “third-party software,”…which is exactly what’s dismantling the entire federal government now!

+ Adam Tooze, LRB: ‘Having recognized what ought to have been obvious all along – that China’s regime is serious about maintaining and expanding its power and conceives of itself as having a world-historic mission to rival anything in the history of the West – the question is how rapidly we can move to détente, meaning long-term co-existence with a regime radically different from our own, a long-term attitude of “live and let live,” shorn of assumptions about eventual convergence and the inevitable historical triumph of the West’s economic, social and political system.’

+ The Supreme Court rejected without comment a petition from casino magnate and Trump megadonor Steve Wynn, seeking to overturn NYT v. Sullivan as part of his attempt to reinstate his lawsuit against the Associated Press. But you can expect more of these suits from the billionaire class.

+ An Australian intelligence review concludes that a war between “major powers” is “no longer unimaginable.” It says that the growing rivalry between the US and China, along with the rise of “a loose bloc of autocracies,” is undermining global security: “The Post Cold War order has collapsed” and is being replaced by “competition between nation-states and global and geopolitical and economic fragmentation.”

+++

+ I’ll close off this week with this important statement by the Jewish-American actress Hannah Einbinder (daughter of SNL’s Larainne Newman and co-star of Hacks) speaking at the Human Rights Campaign:

“I know that my condemnation of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza is not despite what I learned in Hebrew school but because of it. And I am so proud of my tradition. I was taught that central to being a Jew is asking questions, being inquisitive, arguing, wrestling with opposing points of view, and questioning my own beliefs in order to keep learning and growing into a better human being, a better citizen of the world. I see it as antithetical to our deepest Jewish traditions to fall in line and not question the actions of a state enacting atrocities in our name. Israel’s actions are not in the name of Jewish safety, and it is the very conflation of Israel’s actions with the Jewish people that continues to endanger Jews around the world…Mahmoud Khalil standing alongside both Palestinians and many Jewish students and calling for the Israeli army to stop dropping bombs on his homeland does not make me feel unsafe. Elon Musk and Steve Bannon siegg-heiling Hitler does…Our struggle for liberation will be won by loudly opposing the corporations who fuel the destruction of our planet and the institutions that fuel mass death of our fellow human beings. Visibility is a responsibility. Those of us who have a platform must use our voices to ensure that speaking out is not outlawed altogether.”

+++

Go to Hell, See If You Like It, Then Come Home With Me!

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

There is No Place for US: Working and Homelessness in America
Brian Goldstone
(Crown)

The Last Manager: How Earl Weaver Tricked, Tormented, and Reinvented Baseball
John Miller
(Simon & Schuster)

Humans: a Monstrous History
Surekha Davies
(California)

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…

The Great Western Road
Deacon Blue
(Cooking Vinyl)

Uncharted Passages
Sun Ra
(Modern Harmonic)

Chelsea Town Hall
Nico
(Modern Harmonic)

Balancing the Books on Our Backs

“The wealthy have a million ways to wriggle out of their debts, and as a result, when government debt is transferred to the private sector, that debt always gets passed down to those least able to pay it: into middle-class mortgages, payday loans, and so on. The people running the government know this but they’ve learned if you just keep repeating, “We’re just trying to behave responsibly! Familes have to balance their books. Well, so do we,” people just assume that the government running a surplus will somehow make it easier for all of us to do so, too. But in fact, the reality is precisely the opposite: if the government manages to balance its books, that often means you can’t balance yours.”

– David Graeber

The post Roaming Charges: The Goldberg Variations appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jeffrey St. Clair.