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Images of the Day:
A Celebration Of Genocide: The Untold Truth About Thanksgiving In 1637, Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop ordered the massacre of thousands of Pequot Indian men, women and children (using the Bible to justify his actions). Winthrop’s actions set off a demonic campaign of extermination for the purpose of claiming America in the name of God and church, and to systematically plunder the resources of the Native Americans.
Quotes of The Day:
We don’t know exactly how things went down back in 1621, but we do know that many of the early American colonies at that time had been settled by the Pilgrims who, in the face of persecution, fled Europe. The New England colonies, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland were conceived and established “as plantations of religion”, and wanted to create “a city on a hill” or a “holy experiment,” whose success would prove that God’s plan for his churches could be successfully realized in the American wilderness. And at the time, America was just that — a wilderness. The harsh New England winter was punishing. Many Pilgrims died of disease and starvation. If it weren’t for the Wampanoag Indians, the would have all been killed off. Unfortunately, this wasnt the case. The Wamanoag rescued these settlers and they, in turn, celebrated with a feast of Thanks to the Indians. Beyond the first joint “Thanksgiving,” there were no further meals of mutual peace, dependence, and friendship. In 1637, Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop ordered the massacre of thousands of Pequot Indian men, women and children (using the Bible to justify his actions). Winthrop’s actions set off a demonic campaign of extermination for the purpose of claiming America in the name of God and church, and to systematically plunder the resources of the Native Americans. . . . Eventually, the words of thanksgiving prayers involved the recognition and celebration of the colonists’ victory of “oppression” of the “heathen captives.” In other words, the Pilgrims actually tried to convince themselves that they were the ones being oppressed by the Indians, and were forced to fight back! Now today, we find that the so-called “holiday” has been completely white-washed (pun intended) as a time for family, football, fat shit, and “giving thanks”. As Black Conscious men and women, we know the truth: that Thanksgiving marks the beginning of one of the worst human injustices — the suppression, oppression, and near annihilation of the Native Indians. In one word:Genocide — A Celebration Of Genocide: The Untold Truth About Thanksgiving
This being the age of public relations, the genteel term “public-private partnership” is used instead of corporate plunder. A “partnership” such deals may be, but it isn’t the public who gets the benefits. We’ll be hearing more about so-called “public-private partnerships” in coming weeks because the new U.S. president, Donald Trump, is promoting these as the basis for a promised $1 trillion in new infrastructure investments. But the new administration has also promised cuts to public spending. How to square this circle? It’s not difficult to discern when we recall the main policy of the Trump administration is to hand out massive tax cuts to big business and the wealthy, and provide them with subsidies.
Public-private partnerships are one of the surest ways of shoveling money into the gaping maws of corporate wallets, used, with varying names, by neoliberal governments around the world, particularly in Europe and North America. The result has been disastrous — public services and infrastructure maintenance is consistently more expensive after privatization. Cuts to wages for workers who remain on the job and increased use of low-wage subcontractors are additional features of these privatizations — The bait and switch of public-private partnerships
The remarkable charts that introduce this book reveal the story of humanity’s impact on the natural earth.[1] The pattern is clear: if we could speed up time, it would seem as if the global economy is crashing against the earth — the Great Collision. And like the crash of an asteroid, the damage is enormous. For all the material blessings economic progress has provided, for all the disease and destitution avoided, for all the glories that shine in the best of our civilization, the costs to the natural world, the costs to the glories of nature, have been huge and must be counted in the balance as tragic loss.
Half the world’s tropical and temperate forests are now gone.[2] The rate of deforestation in the tropics continues at about an acre a second.[3] About half the wetlands and a third of the mangroves are gone.[4] An estimated 90 percent of the large predator fish are gone, and 75 percent of marine fisheries are now overfished or fished to capacity.[5] Twenty percent of the corals are gone, and another 20 percent severely threatened.[6] Species are disappearing at rates about a thousand times faster than normal.[7] The planet has not seen such a spasm of extinction in sixty-five million years, since the dinosaurs disappeared.[8] Over half the agricultural land in drier regions suffers from some degree of deterioration and desertification.[9] Persistent toxic chemicals can now be found by the dozens in essentially each and every one of us. Human impacts are now large relative to natural systems. The earth’s stratospheric ozone layer was severely depleted before the change was discovered. Human activities have pushed atmospheric carbon dioxide up by more than a third and have started in earnest the dangerous process of warming the planet and disrupting climate. Everywhere earth’s ice fields are melting. Industrial processes are fixing nitrogen, making it biologically active, at a rate equal to nature’s; one result is the development of more than two hundred dead zones in the oceans due to overfertilization. Human actions already consume or destroy each year about 40 percent of nature’s photosynthetic output, leaving too little for other species. Freshwater withdrawals doubled globally between 1960 and 2000, and are now over half of accessible runoff. The following rivers no longer reach the oceans in the dry season: the Colorado, Yellow, Ganges, and Nile, among others. Societies are now traveling together in the midst of this unfolding calamity down a path that links two worlds. Behind is the world we have lost, ahead the world we are making. It is difficult to appreciate the abundance of wild nature in the world we have lost. In America we can think of the pre-Columbian world of 1491, of Lewis and Clark, and of John James Audubon. It is a world where nature is large and we are not. It is a world of majestic old- growth forests stretching from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, of oceans brimming with fish, of clear skies literally darkened by passing flocks of birds. As William MacLeish notes in The Day before America, in 1602 an Englishman wrote in his journal that the fish schooled so thickly he thought their backs were the sea bottom. Bison once roamed east to Florida. There were jaguars in the Southeast, grizzly bear in the Midwest, and wolves, elk and mountain lions in New England. — The Bridge at the Edge of the World
Videos of the Day:
Thanksgiving and America’s Farm Workers Frank Bardacke: Farm workers unions became dependent on Democratic Party politics
Detective Murdered Day Before he was to Testify Against Dirty Cops Police Commissioner says that as of now the department has no evidence that the murder of Detective Sean Suiter was motivated by his impending testimony
Why is US Complicity in Yemen’s Crisis Ignored? After a lengthy “60 Minutes” report fails to even mention the vital US support for the devastating Saudi-led war on Yemen, Shireen Al-Adeimi says Americans are largely hidden from their government’s complicity
U.S.:
Giving Thanks for Our Occupation of America?Here it is, that time of year (the fourth Thursday in November) when we are all beseeched to consider “what we are thankful for.” This invitation to a mass cultural ritual targets everyone regardless of race, creed or sex (or these days, gender). The conformity of thought it reinforces does not discriminate among such superficial characteristics; it goes way deeper. The fundamentals (literally, the foundational elements) of the “American” mind are laid each year at this time. by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume
From an Open Internet, Back to the Dark Ages Can anyone still doubt that access to a relatively free and open internet is rapidly coming to an end in the west? In China and other autocratic regimes, leaders have simply bent the internet to their will, censoring content that threatens their rule. But in the “democratic” west, it is being done differently. The state does not have to interfere directly — it outsources its dirty work to corporations.by Jonathan Cook
Environment:
Climate Summit’s Solution to Global Warming: More Talking The world’s governments got together in Germany over the past two weeks to discuss global warming, and as a result, they, well, talked. And issued some nice press releases. by Pete Dolack
The Fires This Time As Hurricane Irma was charging across the Caribbean, 3,500 miles to the Northwest the Columbia River Gorge, one of the continent’s natural marvels, had exploded into flames. The Gorge, a National Scenic Area largely under the management of the U.S. Forest Service, is a 4,000-foot deep chasm in the Cascade Mountains through which the Columbia River forges toward the Pacific. The western half of the Gorge is temperate rainforest, dominated by 300-year-old Douglas-fir and western hemlock trees. by Jeffrey St. Clair
Ongoing Big Energy Crisis:
TransCanada’s Safety Record Played No Role in Nebraska’s Keystone XL Approval today a Nebraska commission handed TransCanada the final permit it needed to build its long-contested Keystone XL pipeline, a decision which did not consider the company’s previous safety violations. The decision to approve the international pipeline comes despite a major oil spill just a few days earlier from the company’s Keystone l line in South Dakota. Pipeline opponents vowed to appeal the approval, which was for a different, slightly longer and more expensive route through Nebraska than the one TransCanada preferred. By Julie Dermansky
Trump Eyes Arctic Wildlife Refuge for Oil Drilling, Alarming Gwich’in In the remote north-eastern corner of Alaska, just under 20-million acres have been set aside as a federal protected area since 1960. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge has recently come under threat, however, with President Donald Trump’s Department of the Interior proposing lifting restrictions on seismic exploration. By Matt Jacques
I shut down an oil pipeline – because climate change is a ticking bomb A little over a year ago, four friends and I shut down all five pipelines carrying tar sands crude oil into the United States by using emergency shut-off valves. As recent months have made clear, climate change is not only an imminent threat; it is an existing catastrophe. It’s going to get worse, and tar sands oil—the dirtiest oil on Earth—is one of the reasons. By Emily Johnston
Civil Rights/ Black Liberation:
Economy
UK: Hammond’s Budget highlights crisis facing the ruling class 10 years on from the onset of the financial crisis, the British (and global) economy remains stuck in a quagmire. Despite seven years of austerity, the Tories will still be recording a deficit by the end of their current electoral term — if they make it that far — due to continuingly an aemiceconomic growth. Indeed, the primary headline of the chancellor’s budget was his humiliating admission that the Office for budget Responsibility had cut projected growth rates for future years. By Adam Booth
World:
Puerto Rico: Ruined Infrastructure and a Refugee Crisis Hurricanes Irma and Maria struck Puerto Rico in September-October 2017. The impact of these storms was great, but greater still are the convulsions on the island long after the storms had passed over. Puerto Rico’s infrastructure remains in tatters, with the power grid still largely dysfunctional and basic institutions such as schools and hospitals on life support. Not surprisingly, large numbers of Puerto Ricans—who are citizens of the United States—have moved to the mainland. The Centre for Puerto Rican Studies (Hunter College, New York) estimates that of a population of 3.5 million, hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans will make this journey. Already, 1,30,000 Puerto Ricans have arrived in Florida since October. by Vijay Prashad
Puerto Rico mayor: for US response to crisis Trump deserves ‘a 10’ – out of 100 Donald Trump has faced consistent criticism for his response to the crisis, yet awarded himself a 10 out of 10 when asked to rate the US’s emergency relief effort Carmen Yulín Cruz, the mayor of the Puerto Rican capital San Juan, responded on Friday to Donald Trump’s claim that his administration deserved a grade of 10/10 for his handling of the crisis in the hurricane-hit US territory. By Paul Owen and Lauren Gambino
Zimbabwe crisis has revolutionary repercussions in Uganda Mugabe was hated throughout Africa, not only because he was a brutal ruler, but because he belongs to a trend of similar totalitarians who have oppressed the African masses for decades. His fall was met with jubilation throughout the continent, where the masses are sick and tired of the rotten old regimes. In Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Botswana and South Africa there were scenes of wild celebrations in the big centres. In South Africa, which has a large Zimbabwean immigrant community, the Johannesburg suburb of Hillbrow was turned into ‘mini-Harare’ as thousands danced in the streets. By Ben Morken
Health, Science, Education, and Welfare:
Daily News Digest November 27, 2017 
Labor: