Daily News Digest Archives
Daily News Digest June 15, 2016: “We’re on the Eve of Distruction”
Images of the Day:
Constant Rise of CO2 and Global Warming
The Results of Less Evilism — More Evil!
Quote of the Day:
From then through the 1960s the ‘founding fathers’ that I admire were the founders and organizers of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the 1960 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) ‘sit ins’, Malcolm X the Black Power Movement, and the Anti-Vietnam War movement. From that time on there has been a constant bi-partisan attack upon the labor movement and the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Read my essays The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights Movement and The Fall of the Trade Union Movement. Both of these declines were orchestrated by the betrayals by the leadership of these movements — not to extend the gains of the movements for a better standard of living and improve our unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — but to subordinate these past victories, to the election of lesser evil Democrats. — My Forefathers and The 1%’s Forefathers
Videos of the Day:
Capitalism Will Collapse Because Elites ‘Allow Poor to Rot,’ Tariq Ali Tells Chris Hedges (Video)
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Retirement Plans (HBO)
EWG Explains: Chemicals and Cancer
The Socialist Alternative to the European Union
U.S.
Orlando shooting: Shares in G4S fall 8% after gunman confirmed as a former employee of the company: Omar Mateen, the man identified as the shooter in the attack, worked with private security group G4S Secure Solutions as an officer in Florida. By Zlata Rodionova
Stop G4S: G4S is a huge British security company that provides equipment and services to Israeli prisons at which political prisoners are held without trial and subjected to torture. By helping Israel to run 5 prisons and “interrogation centres”, G4S is participating in Israel’s use of torture and mass incarceration of more than 6,000 Palestinians as a way to discourage Palestinians from resisting its apartheid policies. G4S also has contracts with the Israeli government to provide equipment and services to checkpoints that make up the Apartheid wall, crossings that enforce the siege of Gaza and Israeli policy stations. G4S guards operate at various Israeli military bases.
We must not let the Orlando nightclub terror further strangle our civil liberties As we mourn the shooting victims, it’s imperative that we remember the response can be more dangerous than the attack By Chelsea E Manning
The ‘Greater Evils’ Unite: Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton Call for Bombing ISIS After Orlando Shooting That ISIS Didn’t Direct By Zaid Jilani
U.S. Military Industrial Complex Preparing for World War III: NATO War Games Near Russia ‘Pushing Humanity Towards World War III’: NATO has begun its Anaconda-16 war game, calling for the largest assembly of foreign forces in Poland since World War II. By Sputnik
Japan Joins Major US-India Naval Exercise on Beijing’s Doorstep: Large-scale naval war games will take place in the East China Sea along China’s western border in the latest provocative act by the US government to contain China. By Sputnik
Environment:
This Might Get the World to Finally Pay Attention to Climate Change: Six British warships stationed in the Persian Gulf are breaking down because the water is too hot. This week, members of the British Navy testified to the UK’s Defence Committee that their Type 45 destroyers keep losing power because of high ocean temperatures. When the ships’ turbines get overheated, they can’t generate as much energy, resulting in electrical failures. ByAlissa Walker
The Capitalist System in Hell Bent for Humanity’s Destruction: Report: Carbon Dioxide Levels Are Set to Pass 400ppm —Permanently Carbon emissions and extreme weather events poised to push CO2 levels past symbolic threshold for good, new study finds By Nadia Prupis 
Ongoing/Big Energy Disasters!:
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:
Black Agenda Radio for Week of June 13, 2016
FBI Widens Sting Operations Against Dissidents
The FBI appears to have widened its web of sting operations to entrap American dissidents in so-called “terrorist plots,” said Sue Udry, executive director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee. Udry cited a study that analyzed about 400 alleged terror plots prosecuted by the FBI between 2003 and 2010, only four of which “did not have a component of FBI entrapment of the people who were eventually convicted.” Most were against poor, unsophisticated Muslim Americans. In more recent years, said Udry, the FBI and the Homeland Security Department have used “these entrapment stings against environmental and peace activists” and have been “monitoring and infiltrating Black Lives Matter, the Occupy Movement” and “groups that are fighting fracking.” The Committee is demanding Congress launch an investigation to find out “what other groups the FBI has been focused on.”
Black Is Back Coalition to Help Develop an Agenda for Self-Determination
Black America in recent decades has put forward “no basic political demand” of its own, but instead hopes and prays “that the Democratic Party will treat us well and the Republican Party will not treat us badly,” said Omali Yeshitela, chairman of the Black Is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations. On August 13 and 14 the Coalition will hold a conference on a national Black political agenda for self-determination, in Philadelphia. In the Sixties, said Yeshitela, “the drive was for self-determination, and that’s been a missing element in the political discussion up until now.”
Broad Clemency Needed to Reverse Mass Incarceration
The Sentencing Project, a Washington-based prison reform organization, is calling for a broader, categorical approach to presidential clemency, like President Gerald Ford’s 1974 amnesty for war resisters. However, even comprehensive clemencies would not alter U.S. status as the world’s premier incarceration state, said executive director Marc Mauer. “We need to have more rational sentencing policies, we need more diversion from prison, and we need more public health approaches” to social problems,” said Mauer. “If we really want to address mass incarceration, it’s going to take much more on the front end than just rectifying some of these problems five or ten years after the initial sentence has taken place.”
Death Squads and Corporate Greed Prey on Black Colombians
Afro-Colombians and indigenous groups have been blocking roads in protest of violations of their land rights by multinational corporations and intimidation by paramilitary death squads. “You have a particular kind of predatory capitalism” in Colombia and other parts of Latin America, “where you have a relationship between corporations and the government, and paramilitary forces that do the bidding of these corporations in terms of cleaning people from land and terrorizing and murdering local organizers,” said Ajamu Baraka, a member of the Afro-Colombian Solidarity Network. “In Colombia, paramilitarism has been taken to an art form.” Baraka is a BAR editor and columnist and a founder of the U.S. Human Rights Network. Listen, Read more about Black Agenda Radio for Week of June 13, 2016
Labor:
Economy:
Neoliberalism: Oversold?: Instead of delivering growth, some neoliberal policies have increased inequality, in turn jeopardizing durable expansion By Jonathan D. Ostry, Prakash Loungani, and Davide Furceri
World:
Health, Education, and Welfare:
We’re on the Eve of Distruction:
One Big List of All the Cancer-Causing Chemicals Inside Us More than 400 known or likely carcinogens are lurking in people’s bodies. By Will Greenberg