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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
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A lot of children depend on free school lunches, so the West Virginia teachers made food packages for them before going on strike and have continued to try to feed them. This is our dystopian welfare state: severely underpaid teachers trying to keep poverty-stricken kids alive. — Barbara Ehrenreich
With so much cooperation between the two countries on the defence file, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said it was “absolutely unacceptable” to highlight Canadian steel or aluminum as a security threat. Trump is justifying the tariffs in part on national security grounds. The United States imported 26.9 million tonnes of steel in 2017; more than four million tonnes of it, came from Canada. Canada buys more American steel than any other country, accounting for 50 per cent of U.S. exports, according to the Canadian Steel Producers — Canada must be proactive to curb fallout from U.S. steel tariffs, stakeholders say
The treatment of the 92 Somalis, both on board the ICE-chartered plane and at the Glades detention center, is not a case of a few operators gone rogue and exposes the very limited avenues for accountability available to those who are abused in ICE custody, as well as the particular vulnerability of those who experience aggression on their way out of the United States. Rebecca Merton, a program coordinator at Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement, or CIVIC, said that there is a logic to the mayhem: The abusive conditions eventually wear down the will of detainees to stay and fight their deportation orders in court. “One way that ICE, and particularly [Enforcement and Removal Operations, an ICE sub-office], achieves its goal of mass deportation is by subjecting people to indefinite detention in terrible conditions without any source of hope, or sometimes, outside contact,” said Merton. — Excessive Force:ICE Shackled 92 Somalis for 40 Hours On a Failed Deportation Flight. That Was Just the Start of the Abuse.
Insider Trading?: Carl Icahn, a billionaire financier and longtime pal of Donald Trump’s, sold more than $30 million of stock in a steel-dependent company days before new tariffs on steel imports were announced, Think Progress reports.: Icahn’s dumping of close to 1 million shares of Manitowoc Company Inc. was revealed in an SEC filing submitted on February 22, seven days before Trump said he would impose tariffs of 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminum. After Trump’s announcement, shares in Manitowoc dropped by 6 percent, Reuters reported in a piece that describes the company as one of the country’s “major consumers of steel.” — Trump Pal Sold Millions in Steel-Related Stock Days Before Tariff News
History suggests that trade wars are not as easy as U.S. President Donald Trump says. Trump’s argument, in essence, is that high tariffs will force other countries to relent quickly on what he sees as unfair trading practices, and that will wipe out the trade gap and create factory jobs. That’s his motivation for announcing that the U.S. will impose tariffs of 25 percent on steel imports and 10 percent on aluminum imports. The record shows that tariffs, while they may help certain domestic manufacturers, can come at a broad cost. They can raise prices for consumers and businesses because companies pass on at least some of the higher costs of imported materials to their customers. Winning and losing isn’t as simple a matter as tracking the trade gap. The State Department’s office of the historian looked at tariffs passed in the 1920s and 1930s to protect farms and other industries that were losing their markets in Europe as the continent recovered from World War I. The U.S. duties hurt Europe and made it harder for those countries to repay their war debts, while exposing farmers and consumers in the U.S. to higher prices. European nations responded by raising their tariffs and the volume of world trade predictably slowed by 1934. The State Department says the tariffs exacerbated the global effects of the Great Depression while doing nothing to foster political or economic cooperation among countries. This was a diplomatic way of saying that the economic struggles helped embolden extremist politics and geopolitical rivalries before World War II. Nor have past protectionist measures saved the steel industry, as Trump says his tariffs would. The U.S. first became a net importer of steel in 1959, when steelworkers staged a 116-day strike, according to research by Michael O. Moore, a George Washington University economist. After that, U.S. administrations imposed protectionist policies, only to see global competitors adapt and the U.S. share of global steel production decline. — History belies Trump’s trade war confidence
U.S.:
The $1.5 Billion Campaign to Whitewash Genocide in Yemen“The situation in Yemen – today, right now, to the population of the country,” UN humanitarian chief Mark Lowcock told Al Jazeera last month, “looks like the apocalypse.” 150,000 people are thought to have starved to death in Yemen last year, with one child dying of starvation or preventable diseases every ten minutes, and another falling into extreme malnutrition every two minutes. The country is undergoing the world’s biggest cholera epidemic since records began with over one million now having contracted the disease, and new a diptheria epidemic “is going to spread like wildfire” according to Lowcock. “Unless the situation changes,” he concluded, “we’re going to have the world’s worst humanitarian disaster for 50 years” by Dan Glazebrook
United States Steel Corporation: We Are US Steel. As a leader in the global steel industry, we are dedicated to delivering high-quality products to our customers and building value for all of our stakeholders.
Full Monty python: Florida snake swallows deer heavier than itself 31.5lb invasive Burmese python swallowed 35lb fawn Researcher: ‘It’s surreal to see that in the field’Researchers studying invasive Burmese pythons in Florida recently came upon something they had never seen before: an 11ft python that had consumed an entire deer that weighed more than the snake itself.
This land was our land — it’s now mine land: Former national monuments shrunk by Trump to be opened for mining claims Presidential order reduced protections for land once part of Utah’s Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante monuments Hundreds of thousands of acres of land that were part of two US national monuments shrunk by Donald Trump are being opened on Friday to mining claims for uranium and other minerals. It is a symbolic step in a broader conflict over the fate of America’s public lands, on which Trump hopes to encourage greater access for extractive industries. By Alastair Gee
Ongoing Big Energy Crisis:
Civil Rights/ Black Liberation:
Labor:
Striking West Virginia More than 1,400 Frontier Communications workers in West Virginia and 30 technicians in Ashburn, Virginia went on strike this morning at 12:01 am. “We have been very clear throughout the bargaining process that our top priority is keeping good jobs in our communities,” said Ed Mooney, Vice President of Communications Workers of America District 2-13. “Going on strike is never easy. It’s a hardship for our members and the customers who we are proud to serve. But the job cuts at Frontier have gone too far — we know it and Frontier’s customers know it. It’s time for Frontier to start investing in maintaining and rebuilding its network in West Virginia.” by Russell Mokhiber
‘We Will Stay!’ West Virginia Teachers Vote to Occupy State Capitol Until Demands Met While some have called the West Virginia teachers’ strike “the most important story in the country right now,” MSNBC and other outlets have almost completely ignored it. Though you may not know it from the corporate media’s coverage—or lack thereof—West Virginia teachers are still striking in an effort to win both a pay raise and a permanent fix to their soaring health insurance premiums, and on Friday they voted to occupy the state capitol until their demands are met. By Jake Johnson
Arise yea prisoners of starvation — Labor’s rank and file are waking up!: Oklahoma teachers planning a statewide strike Oklahoma teachers are fed up with state lawmakers. A public school teacher in Stillwater created the Facebook group “Oklahoma Teacher Walkout – The Time is Now!” two days ago, and it has already gained more than 20,000 members. Today, teachers gathered in Moore to discuss the possible statewide strike. “Frustration levels are high, so a strike is not a touchy word anymore,” said Molly Jaynes, a teacher in Oklahoma City by Burt Mummolo
Economy:
Coke, Nestle Near Ownership of World’s Second Largest Aquifer A concerted push is underway in South America that could see the Guarani Aquifer, one of the world’s largest reserves of fresh water, soon fall into the hands of transnational corporations such as Coca-Cola and Nestle. by Elliott Gabriel 
World:
Health, Science, Education, and Welfare:
Consumers Are Revolting Against Animal Cruelty — So the Poultry Industry Is Lobbying for Laws to Force Stores to Sell Their Eggs Over the last decade, thanks to a cascade of undercover exposés of factory farms and slaughterhouses by animal rights activists, it has become increasingly difficult to ignore the horrors of industrial animal agriculture. Though it has received less attention than than the systematic torture of pigs and cows, perhaps no part of animal agriculture is more heinous than egg production, an industry in which hens are confined to excruciatingly small cages for the entirety of their tortured lives. As the Humane Society put it after an extensive investigation into the indescribable cruelties of this industry, “Perhaps the most abused farm animals, nearly 280 million laying hens in the United States are confined in barren wire battery cages so restrictive the birds can’t even spread their wings.” By Glenn Greenwald and Leighton Akio Woodhouse
Taxpayers—Not Big Pharma—Have Funded the Research Behind Every New Drug Since 2010 A sweeping new study challenges our understanding of medical breakthroughs.Just how important is our publicly funded research to Big Pharma and Biotech? According to a new study by a small, partly industry-funded think tank called the Center for Integration of Science and Industry (CISI), it is existentially important. No NIH funds, no new drugs, no patents, no profits, no industry.The CISI study, underwritten by the National Biomedical Research Foundation, mapped the relationship between NIH-funded research and every new drug approved by the FDA between 2010 and 2016. The authors found that each of the 210 medicines approved for market came out of research supported by the NIH. Of the $100 billion it spent nationally during this period, more than half of it—$64 billion—ended up helping the development of 84 first-in-class drugs. But the NIH doesn’t get to use the profits from these drugs to fund more research, the way it might under a model based on developing needed drugs and curing the sick, as opposed to serving Wall Street. Instead, publicly funded labs conduct years of basic research to get to a breakthrough, which is then snatched up, tweaked, and patented (privatized) by companies who turn around and reap billions with 1,000-times-cost mark-ups on drugs developed with taxpayer money. By Alexander Zaitchik
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.
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