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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 1% Who Profit From Austerity! Under Austerity, All of the World Will Eventually Be Pauperized, Humbled, and Desecrated Like Greece and Puerto Rico
February is Black History Month
Images of the Day:
Quotes of the Day:
In 1967 Martin Luther King said: There is nothing but a lack of social vision to prevent us from paying an adequate wage to every American citizen whether he be a hospital worker, laundry worker, maid, or day laborer. There is nothing except shortsightedness to prevent us from guaranteeing an annual minimum-and livable-income for every American family. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities…. The coalition of an energized section of labor, Negroes, unemployed, and welfare recipients may be the source of power that reshapes economic relationships and ushers in a breakthrough to a new level of social reform. The total elimination of poverty, now a practical responsibility, the reality of equality in race relations and other profound structural changes in society may well begin here. — King, Where do we go from here: Chaos or community? — New York: Harper & Row, 1967
I did not come to prison to become a political prisoner. I’ve been part of Native resistance since I was nine years of age. My sister, cousin and I were kidnapped and taken to boarding school. This incident and how it affected my cousin Pauline, had an enormous effect on me. This same feeling haunts me as I reflect upon my past 42 years of false imprisonment. This false imprisonment has the same feeling as when I heard the false affidavit the FBI manufactured about Myrtle Poor Bear being at Oglala on the day of the fire-fight. A fabricated document used to extradite me illegally from Canada in 1976. I know you know that the FBI files are full of information that proves my innocence. Yet many of those files are still withheld from my legal team. During my appeal before the 8th Circuit, the former Prosecuting Attorney, Lynn Crooks, said to Judge Heaney. “Your honor, we do not know who killed those agents. Further, we don’t know what participation if any, Mr. Peltier had in it”. That statement exonerates me, and I should have been released. But here I sit, 43 years later still struggling for my Freedom. I have pleaded my innocence for so long now, in so many courts of law, in so many public statements issued through the International Leonard Peltier Defense Committee, that I will not argue it here. But I will say again I Did Not Kill Those Agents!, — Leonard Peltier, Still Struggling For Freedom After 43 Years
Videos of the Day:
U.S.:
Environment:
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Can the World Find Solutions to the Nitrogen Pollution Crisis? The world is using nitrogen fertilizer less and less efficiently. A greater proportion than ever before is washing into rivers and oceans. An environmental catastrophe looms, nitrogen scientists say, and the world urgently needs to develop strategies to prevent it
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Ongoing Big Energy Crisis:
Civil Rights/ Black Liberation:
Freedom Rider: Russiagate and the Surveillance Duopoly FISA set up a rubber stamp kangaroo court with only a handful of warrants being rejected in the forty year history of this law.” Republican and Democratic Party dueling over Russiagate provides us with a teachable moment. It should teach us to disrespect and discredit the law enforcement system as it exists in this country. We must oppose the surveillance state altogether and we should not be tricked by duopoly theatrics into thinking that either of the evil twins are acting in our interests. By Margaret Kimberley, BAR editor and senior columnist
The FISA Memo Is Not a Big Nothing-Burger; It’s a Whopper with Fries “The FBI knew full well that the DNC and the Clinton campaign had paid Steele to produce the dossier, but they did not reveal that to the FISC.” Why is the corporate press calling the Nunes FISA memo nothing or just another big nothing-burger? Seems more like a Whopper or a Big Mac with fries. There’s rancid grease all over these revelations. In the memo’s more formal language, the House Permanent Select Committee on (HPSCI) Majority agrees with me: “Our findings, which are detailed below, 1) raise concerns with the legitimacy and legality of certain DOJ and FBI interactions with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), and 2) represent a troubling breakdown of legal processes established to protect the American people from abuses related to the FISA process.” By Ann Garrison, BAR contributor 
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In Tribute to Black Political Prisoners: “They are the unspoken, invisible and buried-alive legacy of the revolutionary movements of the 1960s and 70s that were neutralized by the FBI, local police, courts and the corporate media, by way of Cointelpro,” said Dequi Kioni Sadiki, host of the Malcolm X Commemoration Committee’s 22nd annual dinner Tribute to Black Political Prisoners and Their Families, last week in New York City. “From one generation to another, they have been forced to bear the unyielding and unrelenting punishment of 800-plus years of political imprisonment, torture, abuse, repeated parole denials and multiple generations of family separation.”
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U.S. Left Lacks Class Consciousness: “Every issue in U.S. society is shaped in a white supremacist fashion,” according to activist and scholar Jeffrey B. Perry, the biographer of early 20th century Black socialist Hubert Harrison and a friend and collaborator with Theodore Allen, author of The Invention of the White Race. Allen emphasized that “white supremacy is the principal retardant to class consciousness” in the U.S. and it is critical that we make struggle against white supremacy a central component of our struggle.
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“Intersectionality,” As Practiced in U.S., Retards Solidarity: “Solidarity is something that you develop in the course of common struggle,” said BAR managing editor Bruce Dixon, in an interview with “This Is Hell” radio host Chuck Mertz. “Intersectionality,” as actually practiced, “is everybody coming forth based on what’s in their section.” Foundations have allocated tens of millions of dollars to fund intersectionality programs for groups like Black Lives Matter, which is “the One Percent’s way of dictating and controlling the so-called social movements in this country,” said Dixon.
Is a Court Case in Texas the First Prosecution of a “Black Identity Extremist”? “Daniels’s arrest poses the even more troubling possibility that his case could be just the first of many.” Christopher Daniels and his 15-year-old son awoke on Dec. 12, 2017, to heavily armed FBI agents outfitted in bulletproof vests and helmets pouring into the one-bedroom apartment they shared in Dallas, Texas. The pair were hurried outside, where they were separated while Daniels was arrested. By Martin De Bourmont 
Scandalize my Name… New York Review of Books Slimes Paul Robeson “To fail to acknowledge the fact that Robeson and his work were virtually unknown, were erased by the thought police, underscores Callow’s unfitness to discuss Robeson’s career.” For the owners, publishers, and editors of the The New York Review of Books, anti-Communism is still alive. The periodical occupies a unique, indispensable role in fostering and sustaining Cold War myths and legends.
The New York Review of Books has embraced rabid anti-Communism since its opportunistic birth in the midst of a newspaper strike. Founded by a cabal of virulent anti-Communists with identifiable links to the CIA through The Paris Review and the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, NYRB maintains the posture of the popular intellectual journal for academics, high-brow book clubbers, and coffee shop leftists for over half a century. Greg Godels
The ‘Slave Power’ Behind Florida’s Felon Disenfranchisement “Of those Americans who have completed all their punishments but still cannot vote, 48 percent live in the Sunshine State.”In November 1865—barely six months after Appomattox, and three weeks before the official ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment—the New York Tribune’s front page bore a provocative headline: “South Carolina Re-establishing Slavery.” The story laid out the new system being put into place in most of the former Confederacy—“Black Codes,” criminal laws targeting black citizens, coupling a long list of minor offenses with a schedule of prohibitive fines. If a black defendant could not pay the fine, he or she was to be “contracted out” to work off the “debt” for some white employer. (In some of the codes, a “debtor’s” black children would also be “apprenticed,” with preference given to the families of their former “masters.”) By Garrett Epps
What Students Are Taught About Slavery “Nearly half of the teachers failed to teach their students that protections for slavery were enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.” Just eight percent of American high school seniors can identify the cause of the Civil War; less than a third (32 percent) know which amendment abolished slavery in the U.S.; and fewer than half (46 percent) know that the “Middle Passage” refers to the harrowing voyage across the Atlantic undertaken by Africans kidnapped for the slave trade. These are only a few of the more unnerving findings from the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance project, which concludes that in classrooms across the country, the subject of slavery is as mistaught as it is misunderstood. By Jacob Sugarman
Chicago Teachers Union and Charter School Teachers Have Joined Forces “Leaders of both union locals say they don’t have a problem with charter schools per se, but rather they oppose the proliferation of the charter system of management.” With the approval of a historic union merger, teachers in Chicago are positioning themselves to mount a greater challenge to privatization and austerity. The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) announced that its members had voted in favor of amalgamating with the Chicago Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff (ChiACTS), which, since 2009, has organized about 1,000 educators at over 30 charter school campuses. By Jeff Schuhrke
New Evidence of Africa’s Systematic Looting, From an Increasingly Schizophrenic World Bank “’Sub-Saharan Africa loses roughly $100 billion of ANS annually because it is “the only region with periods of negative levels’ of gross national income.” A brand new World Bank report, The Changing Wealth of Nations 2018, offers evidence of how much poorer Africa is becoming thanks to rampant minerals, oil and gas extraction. Yet Bank policies and practices remain oriented to enforcing foreign loan repayments and transnational corporate (TNC) profit repatriation, thus maintaining the looting. Central to its “natural capital accounting,” the Bank uses an “Adjusted Net Savings” (ANS) measure for changes in economic, ecological and educational wealth. This is surely preferable to “Gross National Income” (GNI, a minor variant of Gross Domestic Product), which fails to consider depletion of non-renewable natural resources and pollution (not to mention unpaid women’s and community work). By Patrick Bond
Memphis Sanitation Workers Remembered “The workers represented and led the black public striving for decent employment, paying jobs, decent living conditions, quality public schools and union recognition.” The date February 1, 1968, marked the 50th anniversary of the start of the historic 1968 Memphis “I Am A Man” strike and black fight back. The struggle lasted sixty-five days and resulted in a victory for strikers and the community.What “I Am A Man” Meant. Workers desired to be treated as human beings and not inferior. They wanted to receive a living wage and a better quality of life for their families. Call them men, and not boys. By Ken Morgan
Many Americans’ Actions Support Trump’s Shit-Hole Countries Slur “Barack Obama bombed those majority Muslim nations, with no regard for human life, and his supporters didn’t say a peep.” Much has been made about Donald Trump’s statements referring to African countries, El Salvador and Haiti, as “shit-holes.” He allegedly made these statements in early January 2018. “Why are we having all these people from shit-hole countries come here?” Trump asked, according to various sources. It is not hard to believe that Donald Trump made these statements, especially when one considers his racist and xenophobic tainted past. He is the kind of openly racist and xenophobic president a great many white Americans adore. They have long harbored these kinds of sentiments about people of color; that’s a big reason why they voted for Trump in the first place. He wears his white supremacist values on his sleeve for everyone to see. These types of socially-regressive people are often associated with the Republican Party or as being conservatives. However, many Democrats and so-called “Liberals” support the notion that the aforementioned countries are “shit-holes,” and their support of destructive policies proves it.“Trump is the kind of openly racist and xenophobic president a great many white Americans adore.” By Solomon Comissiong
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