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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 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 of the Day:
Quotes of the Day:
I believe that there will ultimately be a clash between the oppressed and those that do the oppressing. I believe that there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice and equality for everyone and those who want to continue the systems of exploitation. — Malcolm X
The Iron Heel in France: On February 22, the French government mounted a military-style assault on a small community of anti-nuclear activists who had been watchdogging, and living on, a site for the country’s proposed high-level radioactive waste dump in the Champagne-Ardenne region of France near the village of Bure. As many as 500 armed gendarmes in riot gear moved in at dawn, with bulldozers, trucks, helicopters, drones and chainsaws to confront about 15 occupiers, self-described “owls.” They had been living in tree houses and lookout towers for the past 18 months, keeping watch over a forest designated to be torn down for the country’s first high-level radioactive waste repository. The activists say that the raid was premature. While a court decision late last year had approved eviction from the Lejuc Wood, that decision came before all legal cases underway had been decided — including whether Andra, the French radioactive waste management agency, actually has ownership of the wood. Andra is also supposed to conduct an environmental survey before starting any work in the wood. Evictions were not supposed to take place in winter, Andra is prohibited from working until a March nesting period is over, and the agency lacks a permit to clear the forest, say the activists.The raid was authorized by French Interior Minister Gérard Collomb, who has come under fire for his crackdown on refugees and the expulsion of asylum seekers, a comparison that activists are quick to point to as a further sign of a repressive regime in action. — Monsieur Hulot’s Nuclear Holiday
Videos of the Day:
Militarizing Schools, Criminalizing Students Since 1999, 10,000 additional police officers have been placed at schools, with no impact on violence. Meanwhile, about one million students have been arrested for acts previously punishable by detention or suspension, and black students are three times more likely to be arrested than their white peers, says policy analyst Samuel Sinyangwe
The End of Public Sector Unions? An impending Supreme Court ruling on public sector union fees could mean spell their end as the last remaining bastion of unionization in the US says Bill Fletcher, Jr.
U.S.:
Bomb the Public Schools: a Modest Proposal “I walk through the long schoolroom questioning.” —WB Yeats, “Among schoolchildren” “It’s time to consider armed drones at every school in USA. If drones can save lives in middle of Syria, operated by military heroes at Nellis AFB in Las Vegas, then they can be used to protect schools inside USA,” twitted the Pedagogue in Chief at the White House, in the wake of the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. by Luciana Bohne
U.S. Military Opened Secretive Drone Base to Visitors (After The Intercept Wrote About It) Last Wednesday, the U.S. military did something it had not done before, inviting a sizable delegation of local leaders to a secretive $110 million drone base it’s building in Niger. The Nigerien group was led by the governor of the Agadez region, and the visit was the first for many members of the group, which included religious leaders, civil society members, and a handful of journalists, according to a report by a local radio station, Studio Kalangou. By Joe Penney
Elite Anxiety: The True Foreign Skullduggery Behind Election 2106 However, Wilson was also very firmly on the ‘conservative’ side of the Revolutionary camp. He fought hard – even violently – against the “rabble” who attempted to seize the wealth of aristocratic Loyalists to the British crown after they fled from Philadelphia. And he continued to defend Loyalists in court cases following the Revolution. Shay’s Rebellion in 1786-87 put the fear of God into the aristocratic elite who controlled the newly formed United States, then loosely governed under the Articles of Confederation. The Rebellion, led by Daniel Shay and other Revolutionary War veterans, was comprised of thousands of poor farmers who’d been left destitute by the “austerity measures” imposed in the turbulent post-war economy. Many of the veterans, like Shay, had been forced into penury when they didn’t receive the promised pay they’d earned fighting for independence. As Gore Vidal puts it: by Chris Floy
America’s ‘Liberalism’ & Other Inhumane Styles of Governance at Home and Internationally It should not be all about Trump, although his election in 2016 as U.S. president is symptomatic of a menacing national tailspin. This downward political drift in the United States, not only imperils Americans, but threatens the world with multiple catastrophes, the most worrisome of which involves Trump’s double embrace of nuclearism and climate denialism. by Richard Falk
Environment:
Sea Level Science Agency Publishes Response to ‘Completely Unwarranted’ Attacks from Climate Deniers Scientists at a British government-backed agency have formally responded to “completely unwarranted” claims from climate science deniers that they were engaged in a conspiracy to arbitrarily adjust data from tide gauges around the world and misrepresent sea level rise.A research paper by two Australian climate science deniers claimed the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level (PSMSL), based at the UK’s National Oceanography Center, had “arbitrarily” altered sea level data from Aden, in Yemen. By Graham Readfearn
Ongoing Big Energy Crisis
Federal Judge Halts Bayou Bridge Pipeline Installation, But Photos Show Damage Already Inflicted There was an eerie stillness along the route of the Bayou Bridge pipeline in Louisiana’s Atchafalaya Basin the day after a federal judge halted work on the pipeline. A temporary injunction was granted two weeks after groups opposed to the pipeline had their say in court, giving Energy Transfer Partners enough time to clear a path through the World Heritage site. By Julie Dermansky
Civil Rights/ Black Liberation:
The Year of W.E.B. Dubois: Mumia Abu Jamal, the nation’s best known political prisoner, marked the 150th anniversary of W.E.B. Dubois’ birth with a special message. “For today’s scholars in history and sociology, his texts remain required reading, just as Freud’s remain central to modern psychology,” said Abu Jamal, in an essay for Prison Radio. The Philadelphia City Council has named 2018 “The Year of W.E.B. Dubois,” who early in his career as a scholar-activist authored a groundbreaking study of the city’s Black population.
Dubois: Activist and Educator: Philadelphia’s Saturday Free School kicked off a year of activities celebrating W.E.B. Dubois’ life and work with a symposium at the Church of the Advocate. “Dubois developed some of the deepest theories when it comes to understanding the human condition,” said public school teacher and Free School activist Ismael Jimenez. “He’s measuring your soul against the tape of a world that looks on with amused contempt and pity.” Black Agenda Report executive editor Glen Ford told the crowd: “Dubois believed that Black labor was the central force of the Black movement, and was also the most revolutionary component of labor in the United States.”
Dollar to Get Knocked Off Its Pedestal: Duboisian scholar and activist Dr. Anthony Monteiro said the Chinese yuan will topple the dollar from its artificial position as the world’s reserve currency. The rise of the yuan “will redefine the entire architecture of global trade and the relationship of currencies” and “end the special, exorbitant privileges that the U.S. dollar has held since 1971,” when President Nixon took the U.S. off the gold standard.
Sundiata Acoli’s “Affirmation”: Political prisoner Sundiata Acoli, who was arrested with fellow Black Panther Assata Shakur in 1973, is among a host of political prisoners and activists that took part in a reading of Shakur’s poem, “Affirmation,” written in exile in Cuba. Acoli will not be eligible for parole until 2032, when he will be 94 years old. “Affirmation” reads, in part: “I have been locked up by the lawless, handcuffed by the haters, gagged by the greedy, and if I know anything at all, it’s that a wall is just a wall…it can be broken down.”
Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network is hosted by Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey. A new edition of the program airs every Monday at 11:am ET on PRN. Length: one hour.
Labor:
Economy:
Is Dow Component GE the Victim of Wall Street’s Dark Conflicts? MarketWatch’s Tomi Kilgore reported on February 13, 2018 that JPMorgan analyst Stephen Tusa “became even more bearish” on General Electric (which has been a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average since its creation in 1896). Kilgore reports further that the JPMorgan analyst had “slashed his stock price target to $14” from his previous target of $16. Only Deutsche Bank’s stock analyst, John Inch, says Kilgore, has a lower target, at $13. JPMorgan, along with all of the other major Wall Street firms, is still allowed to issue research ratings on stocks despite the firms being charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2003 in the epic research scandal on Wall Street. By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
World:
Britain: abolish the monarchy – for a workers’ republic! With the recent announcement in Britain of the engagement of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle and the upcoming wedding, we call not for celebration of but the abolition of the monarchy. The royal family is a feudal relic and symbol of national chauvinism which, along with the House of Lords, reveals what our so-called ‘democracy’ really is – a system designed and run to serve the interests of the ruling class. The monarchy is a drain on the public purse, receiving handouts of £35.7 million per year on top of countless other expenses. The upcoming royal wedding is an excellent example of this. While the royal family will pay for the wedding ceremony, reception etc., the taxpayer will foot the bill for the policing, security costs and public order arrangements around the event. Kate and William’s 2011 wedding saw £15 million spent of policing alone, with 5000 officers deployed. This time we can expect the same arrangements, if not even greater measures following the recent increase in terrorist attacks. By Alex Johnson
After Jacob Zuma’s Firing, South Africa Risks Budget Austerity and Even Renewed BRICS ‘Poisoning’: Cyril Ramaphosa Relaunches Neo-Liberalism Cyril Ramaphosa’s soft-coup firing of Jacob Zuma from the South African presidency on February 14, after nearly nine years in power and a bitter struggle to avoid resignation, has contradictory local and geopolitical implications. Amidst general applause at seeing Zuma’s rear end in the society, immediately concerns arise about the new president’s neo-liberal, pro-corporate tendencies, and indeed his legacy of financial corruption and class war against workers given the lack of closure on the 2012 Marikana Massacre. by Patrick Bond
Syria: the barbarism of war and imperialist hypocrisy After all the fuss, noisy propaganda and manoeuvres at the United Nations, the so-called Syrian ceasefire has broken down suddenly, shamefully and irrevocably. In reality it was an abortion that was dead even before it was born. The UN Security Council had unanimously approved a resolution demanding a 30-day ceasefire in Syria to allow aid deliveries and medical evacuations. This was supposed to provide humanitarian aid to the people of Eastern Ghouta, an enclave near Damascus that has been held for some time by forces hostile to President Assad that has been bombarded by government forces for the past week. By Alan Woods 
Health, Science, Education, and Welfare:
Malcom X on Education
