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During This Economic Crisis, Capitalism’s Three Point Political Program: 1. Austerity, 2. Scapegoating Blacks, Minorities, and ‘Illegal Immigrants’ for Unemployment, and 3. The Iron Heel.
Democracy?: As the Capitalist Robber Barons Steal from the 99% — Only the 1% Voted For Austerity — The 99% Should Decide On Austerity — Not Just The 1% Who Profit From Austerity! Under Austerity, All of the World Will Eventually Be Pauperized, Humbled, and Desecrated Like Greece and Puerto Rico
February is Black History Month
Images the Day:
. . . Back during slavery. There was two kinds of slaves. There was the house Negro and the field Negro. The house Negroes – they lived in the house with master, they dressed pretty good, they ate good ’cause they ate his food — what he left. They lived in the attic or the basement, but still they lived near the master; and they loved their master more than the master loved himself. They would give their life to save the master’s house quicker than the master would. The house Negro, if the master said, “We got a good house here,” the house Negro would say, “Yeah, we got a good house here.” Whenever the master said “we,” he said “we.” That’s how you can tell a house Negro. If the master’s house caught on fire, the house Negro would fight harder to put the blaze out than the master would. If the master got sick, the house Negro would say, “What’s the matter, boss, we sick?” We sick! He identified himself with his master more than his master identified with himself. And if you came to the house Negro and said, “Let’s run away, let’s escape, let’s separate,” the house Negro would look at you and say, “Man, you crazy. What you mean, separate? Where is there a better house than this? Where can I wear better clothes than this? Where can I eat better food than this?” That was that house Negro. In those days he was called a “house nigger.” And that’s what we call him today, because we’ve still got some house niggers running around here. This modern house Negro loves his master. He wants to live near him. He’ll pay three times as much as the house is worth just to live near his master, and then brag about “I’m the only Negro out here.” “I’m the only one on my job.” “I’m the only one in this school.” You’re nothing but a house Negro. And if someone comes to you right now and says, “Let’s separate,” you say the same thing that the house Negro said on the plantation. “What you mean, separate? From America? This good white man? Where you going to get a better job than you get here?” I mean, this is what you say. “I ain’t left nothing in Africa,” that’s what you say. Why, you left your mind in Africa. On that same plantation, there was the field Negro. The field Negro — those were the masses. There were always more Negroes in the field than there was Negroes in the house. The Negro in the field caught hell. He ate leftovers. In the house they ate high up on the hog. The Negro in the field didn’t get nothing but what was left of the insides of the hog. They call ’em “chitt’lin’” nowadays. In those days they called them what they were: guts. That’s what you were — a gut-eater. And some of you all still gut-eaters. The field Negro was beaten from morning to night. He lived in a shack, in a hut; He wore old, castoff clothes. He hated his master. I say he hated his master. He was intelligent. That house Negro loved his master. But that field Negro — remember, they were in the majority, and they hated the master. When the house caught on fire, he didn’t try and put it out; that field Negro prayed for a wind, for a breeze. When the master got sick, the field Negro prayed that he’d die. If someone come [sic] to the field Negro and said, “Let’s separate, let’s run,” he didn’t say “Where we going?” He’d say, “Any place is better than here.” You’ve got field Negroes in America today. I’m a field Negro. The masses are the field Negroes. When they see this man’s house on fire, you don’t hear these little Negroes talking about “our government is in trouble.” They say, “Thegovernment is in trouble.” Imagine a Negro: “Our government”! I even heard one say “our astronauts.” They won’t even let him near the plant — and “our astronauts”! “Our Navy” — that’s a Negro that’s out of his mind. That’s a Negro that’s out of his mind. Just as the slavemaster of that day used Tom, the house Negro, to keep the field Negroes in check, the same old slavemaster today has Negroes who are nothing but modern Uncle Toms, 20th century Uncle Toms, to keep you and me in check, keep us under control, keep us passive and peaceful and nonviolent. That’s Tom making you nonviolent. It’s like when you go to the dentist, and the man’s going to take your tooth. You’re going to fight him when he starts pulling. So he squirts some stuff in your jaw called novocaine, to make you think they’re not doing anything to you. So you sit there and ’cause you’ve got all of that novocaine in your jaw, you suffer peacefully. Blood running all down your jaw, and you don’t know what’s happening. ’Cause someone has taught you to suffer — peacefully. — Malcolm X, The House Negro and the Field Negro
John Lewis, formally of SNCC, became enlightened, he ignored the Black Panthers and saw the Democratic Party, symbolized by a jackass, as his party. Most of what W.E. B. Dubois described as the “talented tenth” were bought off by this process. The more radical concepts that Martin Luther King and Malcolm X had developed at the time of their deaths disappeared from the scene. No one took up where they left off. The governmental policy, directed towards the ‘leaders’ of the civil rights movement, of the carrot (dollarism) and the stick (assassinations) had proven to be successful. — The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights Movement
“Everyone deserves the freedom and opportunity to control their lives at the most basic level, including access to birth control, quality sex education, and safe, legal abortion.”— Dawn Laguens, Planned Parenthood
Videos of the Day:
Leftist Hopeful’s Lead Signals Upheaval for Mexico Leftist presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador enjoys a double-digit lead in Mexico’s presidential race despite an active smear campaign against him. A tactical alliance between divided leftist groups might still be possible, says John Ackerman
Feeding the Robber Barrons: Trump’s Infrastructure Fantasy a Gift to His Donors The Trump plan promotes the mythology of private sector efficiency and creates private sector monopolies. The danger is that this allows monopolies to charge a substantially more than what public goods such as water, roads and railways actually cost
Trump’s Budget Declares War on Forgotten America Across the country, legislators and advocates say President Trump’s budget and infrastructure plans would siphon resources and wealth off the needy to benefit the
U.S.:
Will the US Invade Venezuela? Speaking at his alma mater, the University of Texas, on February 1, Secretary of State Tillerson suggested a potential military coup in Venezuela. Tillerson then visited allied Latin American countries urging regime change and more economic sanctions on Venezuela. Tillerson is considering banning the processing or sale of Venezuelan oil in the United States and is discouraging other countries from buying Venezuelan oil. Further, the US is laying the groundwork for war against Venezuela. by Kevin Zeese – Margaret Flowers
How ICE Works to Strip Citizenship from Naturalized Americans For 10 years, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s investigative office has worked to keep its internal handbook out of American courts. The handbook could have been used in court to show how ICE’s push to lead on denaturalization cases stands in contrast to the language of federal law governing the process, an immigration lawyer said. “We could have used it as an exhibit in a motion to dismiss” in previous denaturalization cases, said Philip Smith, an immigration attorney from Portland, Oregon, noting the contrast. By Eoin Higgins
Enough Defense, Declares Planned Parenthood, ‘We’re Going on Offense!’“We need to do more than just fight against the bad policies—now is the time to push for good ones.”Planned Parenthood has announced that it is going on the offensive in the ongoing fight to expand reproductive rights across the United States with a new “sweeping plan” to challenge the Trump administration as well as anti-choice activists and lawmakers by proposing policies to make sexual education more inclusive and increase access to healthcare such as birth control and abortion. by Jessica Corbett
Environment:
Risk of extreme weather events higher if Paris Agreement goals aren’t met, Stanford researchers find The Paris Agreement has aspirational goals of limiting temperature rise that won’t be met by current commitments. That difference could make the world another degree warmer and considerably more prone to extreme weather. By Taylor Kubota
Unprecedented climate events: Historical changes, aspirational targets, and national commitments Abstract: The United Nations Paris Agreement creates a specific need to compare consequences of cumulative emissions for pledged national commitments and aspirational targets of 1.5° to 2°C global warming. We find that humans have already increased the probability of historically unprecedented hot, warm, wet, and dry extremes, including over 50 to 90% of North America, Europe, and East Asia. Emissions consistent with national commitments are likely to cause substantial and widespread additional increases, including more than fivefold for warmest night over ~50% of Europe and >25% of East Asia and more than threefold for wettest days over >35% of North America, Europe, and East Asia. In contrast, meeting aspirational targets to keep global warming below 2°C reduces the area experiencing more than threefold increases to <10% of most regions studied. However, large areas—including >90% of North America, Europe, East Asia, and much of the tropics—still exhibit sizable increases in the probability of record-setting hot, wet, and/or dry events. By Noah S. Diffenbaugh, Deepti Singh, and Justin S. Mankin
Ongoing Big Energy Crisis:
Civil Rights/ Black Liberation:
Bandit Baltimore Cops and the Black Misleadershp Class Wealth and Greed Cause Crime and Violence, Not Poverty “The nominally Black-controlled local government is incapable of meaningful response.” Two of the undercover cops that have terrorized poor Black neighborhoods of Baltimore could get up to 60 years in prison following their convictions in federal court on racketeering, conspiracy and robbery charges. Six other former members of the “elite” Gun Trace Task Force await sentencing, having testified to the defendants’ and their own crimes against drug dealers, large and small, and anybody else that crossed their predatory paths. By Glen Ford, BAR executive editor
Jackson MS: Police Killings Continue Amid Mayoral Silence in the “Most Radical City on the Planet” In the last few months Jackson’s supposedly radical mayor has lifted residency requirements for city police officers, and remained silent on a wave of officer involved shootings “Black-on-Black violence is not merely an expression of personal anger or merely the result of a psychopathological personality, but it is more a result of a psychopathological system and I want to impress upon people that Black-on-Black violence serves a social function.” — Dr. Amos Wilson By Adofo Minka
On the Black Panther Movie and the Limits of Our Imagination “…comics and sci fi brought to us by capitalist corporate media fail to imagine what a better world, or even the struggle to get there might look like” The new Marvel Black Panther movie premieres this Friday. I’ll get around to seeing it maybe this weekend or soon after. I read a lot of comic books when I was very young, Fantastic Four and the first Spiderman among them. The Black Panther character came along after I discarded comics as something for kids, in favor of paperback science fiction and fantasy. By my junior year of high school, I gave up science fiction too. A lot of it was frankly racist, and even when it wasn’t the authors would depict humanity hundreds or thousands of years in the future, spread across the stars and galaxies but still ruled by kings and queens and princes. I knew just enough about the world to know that was looking backward, not forward. Why couldn’t the authors of science fiction see this? Most places on earth had already thrown off rule by royalty and hereditary elites, and even when they didn’t mean it they were obligated to pretend they practiced or believed in something more democratic. By Bruce A. Dixon, BAR managing editor
Labor:
Economy:
The ‘Finance Game’ is Rigged:
Volatility: Has Wall Street Found One More Index It Can Rig? On Monday, an anonymous whistleblower sent a letter via his lawyer to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) charging that traders were manipulating the stock market volatility index known as the VIX. The whistleblower said that a flaw exists in the VIX that “allows trading firms with sophisticated algorithms to move the VIX up or down by simply posting quotes on S&P options and without needing to physically engage in any trading or deploying any capital.” The Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) where VIX options and futures trade, quickly denied the claims.This whistleblower claims come at a time when billions of dollars are blowing up around the globe because traders placed wrong-way bets that the VIX would maintain the low volatility levels it has enjoyed over multiple years as a result of low volatility in the stock market. As the stock market plunged more than a thousand points on two days last week and saw big intraday reversals on other days, traders nursed big losses as the VIX spiked. By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
How Wall Street’s ‘fear gauge’ is being rigged, according to one whistleblower One of the most popular measures of volatility is being manipulated, charges one individual who submitted a letter anonymously to the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The letter makes the claim to regulators that fake quotes for the S&P 500 index SPX, +1.34% are skewing levels of the Cboe Volatility Index VIX, -22.87% which reflects bearish and bullish options bets 30-days in the future on the S&P 500 to gauge implied stock-market volatility (see excerpt from the letter below). The flaw allows trading firms with sophisticated algorithms to move the VIX up or down by simply posting quotes on S&P options and without needing to physically engage in any trading or deploying any capital. This market manipulation has led to multiple billions in profits effectively taken away from institutional and retail investors and cashed in by unethical electronic option market makers. By Mark DeCambre and Francine McKenna
World:
The Scourging of Julian Assange Julian Assange’s latest attempt to have his outstanding UK arrest warrant dropped has failed in what stands as one of the most blatant and cruel examples of the British legal system being wielded as an instrument of persecution against a man whose only crime is speaking truth to power. by John Wight
Health, Science, Education, and Welfare:
Law and Marxism: the state and the constitution Last year, constitutional crises arose in Britain, the USA, Spain, Poland, and Brazil. Such crises present big problems for the ruling class because the state, and the constitutional laws that surround it, are deliberately mystified. Parliamentary democracy and the Rule of Law are treated as immutable ideas woven into the fabric of the universe. So when crises develop over the structure of the bourgeois state itself, this risks dispelling its aura of mystery and power. Ben Gliniecki
Bendib: Clean Coal, Ugly Beaches
Quotes of the Day