Daily News Digest Archives
Daily News Digest August 25. 2016
Image of the Day:
Obama’s Nuclear Brinkmanship
Quote of the Day:
. . .And if that’s not scary enough for ya, America still thinks it can fight and win a nuclear war. No no no and no! The powers that be think that dropping 100 nuclear bombs on 100 cities will win the current war-de-jour for us. “But all that will do is end life on earth.” And the most scary part of all is that, “It could happen tonight. It could happen right now. We are closer now to nuclear annihilation than ever, even closer than we were during the Cold War. North Korea and Iran cannot end the world. But the sociopaths in charge of our nuclear weapons can. For instance, Clinton has never seen a war that she doesn’t like.” And Americans don’t clearly understand what a nuclear war will be like either. “Everything throughout the world will be vaporized and burned.” If we understood this, we would all be taking to the streets in protest right now. Perhaps we think that American exceptionalism will save us? “What exactly are Americans exceptional at? Nothing. They don’t even have kangaroos.” Every single city in America is targeted by the Russians right now. “Twelve H-bombs are targeted on New York City alone. Every city in America is targeted with at least one nuclear missile. And Russian cities are targeted the same way by America. And all this insanity is at the mercy of human fallibility too.” And fighting with Russia is crazy. Continuing to stock Europe with nuclear weapons pointed at Russia is like waving a red flag at a bull. It would be as if Russia was arming Canada with nuclear missiles aimed straight at Washington DC. Not cool at all. “The Russians will fight to the last person to defend themselves, just like they did against Hitler. Putin is being set up as the evil one in this scenario, but it is the USA that is the evil one,” by even thinking that they can actually win a nuclear war. . . . — Jane Stillwater, Helen Caldecott: “America Still Thinks It Can Win a Nuclear War”
Videos of the Day:
Bogus tech used to accuse innocent people — Total surveillance is not enough
Yellowstone River Parasite Threat: Montana Portion Closed Indefinitely After Thousands Of Fish Die
U.S.
Officials Pull Water Supply as Dakota Access Protest Swells in Number and Spirit Thousands join protest camp as supporters are holding a rally in Washington D.C. on Wednesday outside of Army Corps hearing by Lauren McCauley
War Not Over: U.S. Occupation Is Still Poisoning Iraq’s Children Environmental toxicology report ties elevated levels of lead in children to bombings and ammunition. By Sarah Lazare 
Provoking Nuclear War by Media The exoneration of a man accused of the worst of crimes, genocide, made no headlines. Neither the BBC nor CNN covered it. The Guardian allowed a brief commentary. Such a rare official admission was buried or suppressed, understandably. It would explain too much about how the rulers of the world rule. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague has quietly cleared the late Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic, of war crimes committed during the 1992-95 Bosnian war, including the massacre at Srebrenica. Far from conspiring with the convicted Bosnian-Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, Milosevic actually “condemned ethnic cleansing”, opposed Karadzic and tried to stop the war that dismembered Yugoslavia. Buried near the end of a 2,590- page judgement on Karadzic last February, this truth further demolishes the propaganda that justified Nato’s illegal onslaught on Serbia in 1999. By John Pilger
Environment:
Ongoing/Big Energy Disasters:
Gulf Residents Arrested Telling Obama: More Drilling Equals More Floods Demonstration comes alongside new report that recommends against expanding offshore oil and gas leasing in the Gulf by Deirdre Fulton
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:
Freedom Rider: The Clinton and Powell War Criminal Charade Hillary Clinton, with help from her collaborators in corporate media, is trying to shift the blame for her email crimes to her predecessor, Colin Powell. The two exchanged private server notes at a “reunion of war criminals,” including Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice and Henry Kissinger. Clinton’s sycophants scurry to her defense, since she is the meal ticket for those “beholden to Democratic Party success to stay on the gravy train.” by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley
Katrina and Other Catastrophes The Lords of Capital learned a great deal from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. They learned that the Black Misleadership Class was incapable of organizing resistance to even the most public crimes committed against the Black poor. Not only could African Americans be removed en mass from valuable urban property with no push-back from the Black political class, but many of them would join in celebrating the catastrophe as a “renaissance.” A Black Agenda Radio commentary by executive editor Glen Ford
The Obama Legacy Part VIII: The War Summation By any rational measure, Barack Obama has been the consummate War President, having “accelerated the growth of the US military state in all regions of the globe.” Obama “mastered the murderous art of drone warfare in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and surrounding nations to an extent unseen in the Bush era,” mobilized legions of jihadists as foot soldiers of imperialism, provoked China and Russia, occupied most of Africa and subverted Latin America. by Danny Haiphong
Assuming the Risk of Blackness The purported “risks” that police voluntarily take are transferred to their Black and brown victims, who have no practical protections. Legal settlements do not balance the scales. “They only serve to transfer the risk of policing onto the backs of tax payers or unto the insurance policy the municipality may have for such occasions.” Black and brown people “must lead the charge and make concrete, enforceable demands given the stakes at hand.” by Bryan K. Bullock
Black August August is a month to assess and build upon the legacy of Black people’s resistance to the armed repression of the U.S. state and its agents. The author, the nation’s best known political prisoner, wrote this article August 4, 1993. by Mumia Abu Jamal
Is This the Beginning of the End for the Private Prison Industry? The Obama administration’s announcement that it would phase out private federal prisons is symbolically important, but will affect only a small slice of the nation’s huge incarcerated population. “Bodies will simply be relocated to existing federal prisons.” The biggest impact of private prisons is in state systems, especially immigrant detention centers, which are 62 percent private. by James Kilgore
Labor:
Economy:
World:
As the UN Finally Admits Role in Haiti Cholera Outbreak, Here Is How Victims Must Be Compensated The United Nations has, at long last, accepted some responsibility that it played a part in a cholera epidemic that broke out in Haiti in 2010 and has since killed at least 9,200 people and infected nearly a million people.This is the first time that the UN has acknowledged that it bears a duty towards the victims. It is a significant step forward in the quest for accountability and justice. By Nicolas Lemay-Hébert and Rosa Freedman
Health, Science, Education, and Welfare:
Set to Stun: Children are being Tasered by school-based police officers No one knows how often it’s happening or what impact it’s having on students By Rebecca Klein
Trotsky and the Iron Heel His Observations on the Famous Novel
The Iron Heel by Jack London
The book produced upon me — I speak without exaggeration — a deep impression. Not because of its artistic qualities: the form of the novel here represents only an armor for social analysis and prognosis. The author is intentionally sparing in his use of artistic means. He is himself interested not so much in the individual fate of his heroes as in the fate of mankind. By this, however, I don’t want at all to belittle the artistic value of the work, especially in its last chapters beginning with the Chicago commune. The pictures of civil war develop in powerful frescoes. Nevertheless, this is not the main feature. The book surprised me with the audacity and independence of its historical foresight.
The world workers’ movement at the end of the last and the beginning of the present century stood under the sign of reformism. The perspective of peaceful and uninterrupted world progress, of the prosperity of democracy and social reforms, seemed to be assured once and for all. The first Russian revolution, it is true, revived the radical flank of the German social-democracy and gave for a certain time dynamic force to anarcho-syndicalism in France. The Iron Heel bears the undoubted imprint of the year 1905. But at the time when this remarkable book appeared, the domination of counterrevolution was already consolidating itself in Russia. In the world arena the defeat of the Russian proletariat gave to reformism the possibility not only of regaining its temporarily lost positions but also of subjecting to itself completely the organized workers’ movement. It is sufficient to recall that precisely in the following seven years (1907–14) the international social-democracy ripened definitely for its base and shameful role during the World War.
Jack London not only absorbed creatively the impetus given by the first Russian revolution but also courageously thought over again in its light the fate of capitalist society as a whole. Precisely those problems which the official socialism of this time considered to be definitely buried: the growth of wealth and power at one pole, of misery and destitution at the other pole; the accumulation of social bitterness and hatred; the unalterable preparation of bloody cataclysms – all those questions Jack London felt with an intrepidity which forces one to ask himself again and again with astonishment: when was this written? Really before the war?
One must accentuate especially the role which Jack London attributes to the labor bureaucracy and to the labor aristocracy in the further fate of mankind. Thanks to their support, the American plutocracy not only succeeds in defeating the workers’ insurrection but also in keeping its iron dictatorship during the following three centuries. We will not dispute with the poet the delay which can but seem to us too long. However, it is not a question of Jack London’s pessimism, but of his passionate effort to shake those who are lulled by routine, to force them to open their eyes and to see what is and what approaches. The artist is audaciously utilizing the methods of hyperbole. He is bringing the tendencies rooted in capitalism: of oppression, cruelty, bestiality, betrayal, to their extreme expression. He is operating with centuries in order to measure the tyrannical will of the exploiters and the treacherous role of the labor bureaucracy. But his most “romantic” hyperboles are finally much more realistic than the bookkeeper-like calculations of the so-called “sober politicians.”
It is easy to imagine with what a condescending perplexity the official socialist thinking of that time met Jack London’s menacing prophecies. If one took the trouble to look over the reviews of The Iron Heel at that time in the German Neue Zeit and Vorwärts, in the Austrian Kampf and Arbeiterzeitung, as well as in the other socialist publications of Europe and America, he could easily convince himself that the thirty-year-old “romanticist” saw incomparably more clearly and farther than all the social-democratic leaders of that time taken together. But Jack London bears comparison in this domain not only with the reformists. One can say with assurance that in 1907 not one of the revolutionary Marxists, not excluding Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, imagined so fully the ominous perspective of the alliance between finance capital and labor aristocracy. This suffices in itself to determine the specific weight of the novel.
The chapter, The Roaring Abysmal Beast, undoubtedly constitutes the focus of the book. At the time when the novel appeared this apocalyptical chapter must have seemed to be the boundary of hyperbolism. However, the consequent happenings have almost surpassed it. And the last word of class struggle has not yet been said by far! The “Abysmal Beast” is to the extreme degree oppressed, humiliated, and degenerated people. Who would now dare to speak for this reason about the artist’s pessimism? No, London is an optimist, only a penetrating and farsighted one. “Look into what kind of abyss the bourgeoisie will hurl you down, if you don’t finish with them!” This is his thought. Today it sounds incomparably more real and sharp than thirty years ago. But still more astonishing is the genuinely prophetic vision of the methods by which the Iron Heel will sustain its domination over crushed mankind. London manifests remarkable freedom from reformistic pacifist illusions. In this picture of the future there remains not a trace of democracy and peaceful progress. Over the mass of the deprived rise the castes of labor aristocracy, of praetorian army, of an all-penetrating police, with the financial oligarchy at the top. In reading it one does not believe his own eyes: it is precisely the picture of fascism, of its economy, of its governmental technique, its political psychology! The fact is incontestable: in 1907 Jack London already foresaw and described the fascist regime as the inevitable result of the defeat of the proletarian revolution. Whatever may be the single “errors” of the novel — and they exist — we cannot help inclining before the powerful intuition of the revolutionary artist.