Daily News Digest January 29, 2018

Daily News Digest Archives

Laura Gray’s cartoon from the front page of The Militant August 18, 1945, under banner headline: “There Is No Peace”

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 

Daily News Digest January 29, 2018 

Image of the Day:

Herblock  1999                                                        

Quote of the Day:

There are literally two Americas. One America is beautiful … overflowing with the milk of prosperity and the honey of opportunity. This America is the habitat of millions of people who have food and material necessities for their bodies and culture and education for their minds and freedom and human dignity for their spirits. In this America, millions of people experience every day the opportunity of having life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in all of their dimensions. And in this America millions of young people grow up in the sunlight of opportunity. But tragically and unfortunately, there is another America. This other America has a daily ugliness about it that constantly transforms the ebullience of hope into the fatigue of despair. In this America millions of work-starved men walk the streets daily in search for jobs that do not exist. In this America millions of people find themselves living in rat-infested, vermin-filled slums. In this America people are poor by the millions. They find themselves perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.In a sense, the greatest tragedy of this other America is what it does to little children. Little children in this other America are forced to grow up with clouds of inferiority forming every day in their little mental skies. And as we look at this other America, we see it as an arena of blasted hopes and shattered dreams. …So what we are seeking to do in the Civil Rights Movement is to deal with this problem, to deal with this problem of the two Americas. —Martin Luther King The Other America Speech Stanford UniversityApril 14, 1967 A Film by Allen Willis

Videos of the Day:

DOJ Lends a Hand in Prosecuting Lula The “kangaroo court” upheld former Brazilian President Lula’s conviction without an iota of evidence, says journalist Brian Mier

Trump Admin. Says China and Russia Are Top US National Security ‘Threats,’ Not Terrorism The US government is moving away from “war on terror” rhetoric as Defense Secretary Mattis says “great power competition, not terrorism, is now the primary focus of US national security.”

 Puerto Rico’s New Power Struggle: Privatization Four months after Hurricane Maria and with close to half of its residents still without power, Puerto Rico has announced it will privatize its debt-ridden public electric utility, PREPA. We speak to Petra Bartosiewicz of Harper’s Magazine

U.S.:

The War on Dissent Just when you thought the corporatocracy couldn’t possibly get more creepily Orwellian, the Twitter Corporation starts sending out emails advising that they “have reason to believe” we have “followed, retweeted,” or “liked the content of” an account “connected to a propaganda effort by a Russia government-linked organization known as the Internet Research Agency.” While it’s not as dramatic as the Thought Police watching you on your telescreen, or posters reminding you “Big Brother Is Watching,” the effect is more or less the same. by CJ Hopkins                       

Truth or Treason? Dirty Secrets of the Korean War The Korean War ended in a stalemate at the 38th parallel, which to this day divides North and South Korea. The final armistice was signed on July 27, 1953. There still is no final peace settlement of the conflict. Technically, the two sides are still at war, separated by a Demilitarise Zone (DMZ) with nukes now pointing at each other, guaranteeing nuclear annihilation if war breaks out again. And given Donald Trump’s threats of unleashing “fire and fury” on the DPRK, the possibility is horrifyingly real. by George        Burchett                           Look for Rate Cuts in Your Auto/Homeowner’s Insurance Coming Soon In falsely bragging about the alleged benefits to the middle class from the tax law enacted by the Republicans last month, the Trumpsters neglected to give high visibility to the state regulators who must require utility and insurance companies to pass savings from the tax cuts on to their consumers. While some regulated utility companies (gas, electric and telephone) did announce that they would be reducing rates for consumers, others seem to be waiting for state regulators to push them. The insurance companies in particular seem to be in need of a nudge. by Ralph Nader

‘The Good Old Boys’ at The Red Cross Helped an Executive Get a Job at Save the Children After Forcing Him Out For Sexual Harassment A senior Red Cross official harassed a subordinate and was accused of raping another. The charity’s now-general counsel David Meltzer praised him on his way out for “leadership” and “dedication.”by Justin Elliott and Ariana Tobin

Environment:

Environmental justice in America A civil rights ’emergency’: justice, clean air and water in the age of Trump The Trump administration’s dismantling of environmental regulations has intensified a growing civil rights battle over the deadly burden of pollution on minorities and low-income people. Black, Latino and disadvantaged people have long been disproportionately afflicted by toxins from industrial plants, cars, hazardous housing conditions and other sources. But political leaders, academics and activists spoke of a growing urgency around the struggle for environmental justice as the Trump administration peels away rules designed to protect clean air and water. “What we are seeing is the institutionalization of discrimination again, the thing we’ve fought for 40 years,” said Robert Bullard, an academic widely considered the father of the environmental justice movement. By Oliver Milman

Who Lives Near Superfund Sites? Source: Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response, 2013 Guardian Graphic

Ongoing Big Energy Crisis: 

Trump’s Offshore Drilling Plan It was offshore oil drilling deja vu for me—having broken the story about the oil industry seeking to drill in the offshore Atlantic nearly 50 years ago.But this time offshore drilling would be completely unnecessary with the U.S, awash in petroleum (thus $2.50-a-gallon gas) and oil drilling in the sea ten times more costly than drilling on land. Plus, renewable energy, led by solar and wind, is now well-developed and cheaper than fossil fuels. by Karl Grossman

Civil Rights/ Black Liberation:

EPA Orders Testing for GenX Contamination Near Chemours Plant in West Virginia DuPont introduced GenX in 2009 to replace PFOA, also known as C8, a chemical it had used for decades to make Teflon and other products. The Environmental Protection Agency has asked Chemours to test water near its plant in West Virginia for the presence of the chemical GenX. In a January 11 letter to Andrew Hartten, Chemours’ principal project manager for corporate remediation, Kate McManus, acting director of the EPA’s water protection division, noted that GenX has already “been detected in three on-site production wells and one on-site drinking water well” at the company’s factory in West Virginia, which is known as Washington Works. By Sharon Lerner

Pennsylvania Keeps All Death-Row Inmates in Solitary Confinement. The ACLU Calls That Unconstitutional. The 156 Death row inmates in Pennsylvania state prisons go to sleep every night the same way they wake up: in an 8-by-12 foot cell illuminated by artificial light around the clock. On weekdays, they are allowed out of their cells for a maximum of two hours to exercise in a small, enclosed space. They leave their cells thrice a week to take showers and are occasionally allowed to go to the law library. Every once in a while, a death-sentenced prisoner gets a visit with clergy or a family member – without being able to touch them. On weekends, they cannot leave their cells at all. For most of their lives, they sit alone in a suffocating cage the size of a parking space. The American Civil Liberties Union on Thursday filed a lawsuit challenging these conditions, alleging that the Pennsylvania prison system’s mandatory solitary confinement for death-row inmates is unconstitutional, as it constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. By Maryam Saleh

Intersectionality is a Hole. Afro-Pessimism is a Shovel. We Need to Stop Digging Time to begin critically unpacking intersectionality and its nappy headed stepchild afro-pessimismThe US left has a fundamental problem, perhaps the root of most of its other problems. That fundamental problem is that the US left is not organized as or led by any class conscious or class oriented formations. Union membership is somewhere around 5% of the workforce, and major unions have long been captured by the Democratic party. So the US left is composed of the black activists in their boxes, the gender activists in theirs, the immigrants and their friends over here, Latinos over there, the environmentalists in their corners and the rest in their own zones, each and every one doggedly “centering” their own experience, and if we’re lucky “intersecting” now and then. — Bruce A. Dixon, BAR managing editor.                                                    

Salute To Shift Holders! (Down With Boss Tweet!) He’s, obviously, not a New Yorker, By Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence

riding trains 4 and 5 in the morning.
Trains packed with hoodie-crowned;
shuttered chocolate, mocha, peanut
butter, caramel, coffee-colored faces—
Lunch bucket UN—palpable power,
Grabbing their last Zs, before Shifts
Holding levers, running the city. . . .

Labor:

Economy:

“Figures Don’t Lie —But Liars Can ‘Figure’: Trump Stated at the Davos Conference: “America is roaring back and now is the time to invest in the future of America,”: Shadow Government Statistics Corrected” Real GDP Index (2000 – 2017), First-Estimate of Fourth-Quarter 2017  Shown in the first graph of each set (Graphs 1 and 3) of official Headline Real GDP, GDP activity has been reported above pre-2007 recession levels—fully recovered and in economic expansion—since third- quarter 2011, and headline GDP has shown sustained growth since (growth pauses or interruptions for second-half 2012 and first-quarter 2014 excepted). Adjusted for GDP inflation (the implicit price deflator or IPD), the first estimate of fourth-quarter 2017 GDP currently stands 15.2% above its pre-recession peak estimate of fourth-quarter 2007. Again, no other major economic indicators show recovery or expansion close to the GDP’s. None of the series covered in this section or in No. 859 has shown a significant recovery to pre-recession highs, let alone formal economic expansion. In contrast, the “corrected” GDP version, in the second graph of each set (Graphs 3 and 4), shows the first-estimate of fourth-quarter 2017 GDP activity still to be down by 6.4% (-6.4%) from its pre-recession peak of first-quarter 2006. 

Trump & the Fed: US Shadow Bankers About to Deepen Control of US Economy What’s sometime referred to as ‘shadow bankers’ have been running the economy and drafting US domestic economic policy since Trump took office. ‘Shadow’ banks include such financial institutions as investment banks, private equity firms, hedge funds, insurance companies, finance companies, asset management companies, etc. They are outside the traditional commercial banking system (e.g. Chase, Bank of America, Wells, etc.) and virtually unregulated. Shadow banks globally now also control more investible liquid assets than do the world’s commercial banks.by Jack Rasmus

World:

Global Capitalism and Livelihoods Denied: Whipping India’s Farmers into Submission In India, there is a push to drive people from the countryside into cities. The mainstream narrative implies that urbanisation is natural in the evolution of societies and constitutes progress. The World Bank wants India to relocate 400 million people to urban centres. Former Chief Finance Minister P. Chidambaram once stated that 85% of the population would eventually live in cities, which would mean displacing many more than 400 million people given that the country’s population is heading towards 1.3 billion and that over 60% reside in rural India. by Colin Todhunter 

Health, Science, Education, and Welfare:

Harvard’s Endowment Is Profiting From Puerto Rico’s Debt as the Island’s Schools Face Crippling Cuts Members of the Puerto Rican diaspora have joined student activists and financial reform groups in a weeklong campaign to target university endowments profiting from Puerto Rican debt. By David Dayen