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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 and Quotes of the Day:
Videos of the Day:
U.S.:
The Deadly Rule of the Oligarchs Oligarchic rule, as Aristotle pointed out, is a deviant form of government. Oligarchs care nothing for competency, intelligence, honesty, rationality, self-sacrifice or the common good. They pervert, deform and dismantle systems of power to serve their immediate interests, squandering the future for short-term personal gain. “The true forms of government, therefore, are those in which the one, or the few, or the many, govern with a view to the common interest; but governments that rule with a view to the private interest, whether of the one, of the few or of the many, are perversions,” Aristotle wrote. The classicist Peter L.P. Simpson calls these perversions the “sophistry of oligarchs,” meaning that once oligarchs take power, rational, prudent and thoughtful responses to social, economic and political problems are ignored to feed insatiable greed. The late stage of every civilization is characterized by the sophistry of oligarchs, who ravage the decaying carcass of the state. By Chris Hedges
Environment:
Intensive Agriculture Influences U.S. Regional Summer Climate Scientists agree that changes in land use such as deforestation, and not just greenhouse gas emissions, can play a significant role altering the world’s climate systems. Now, a new study by researchers at MIT and Dartmouth College reveals how another type of land use, intensive agriculture, can impact regional climate. By David L. Chandler
Ongoing Big Energy Crisis:
Civil Rights/ Black Liberation:
Freedom Rider: U.S. Escalates Syrian War “The commitment must be to end United States interventions and declare independence from anyone who is not firmly opposed to crimes cooked up in Washington.”The seven year-old war waged against Syria ought to be over by now. The jihadist forces backed by the United States, Israel, Turkey and Saudi Arabia were nearly all chased out of the country. The combination of Syrian, Iranian, and Hezbollah forces utilized Russian air protection to their advantage and ISIS was on the run. By Margaret Kimberley, BAR editor and senior columnist
The Independent Journalist Corner: A Conversation with Jon Jeter “Good journalism died in this country with 9/11.” The US corporate media’s non-stop cacophony of “Russian interference” in the 2016 US elections has come with significant consequences for left political thought and action. While corporate media mergers have left ninety percent of the US media landscape owned by just six corporations, spooks and spies in Washington have been busy conducting a campaign of repression against independent media outlets. Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik International have been deemed “foreign agents.” Facebook and Google have changed their algorithms so fewer readers can find left-wing outlets like Black Agenda Report, World Socialist Website, and CounterPunch. In this series of online interviews, the works, accomplishments, and thoughts of independent journalists struggling in the morass of state repression and corporate politics in the age of US decline will be highlighted. By Danny Haiphong, BAR contributor
If the Democrats Were Decent “Trump is certainly ‘authoritarian,’ but what could be more authoritarian than Hillary Clinton ordering the execution of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, then cackling, ‘We came, we saw, he died’”? If the Democrats were decent on immigration, not deplorable, they would tell Trump supporters that ending US wars and predatory trade agreements would stop immigration, or most of it, because most people would rather stay home and speak their own languages instead of fleeing bombs and economic desperation. They would have demanded that their 2016 presidential candidate explain those realities to Trump supporters instead of calling them “a basket of deplorables.” They would demand that Trump keep his promises to stop the invasions of Middle Eastern nations and revoke the trade agreements impoverishing peoples of both the Global North and Global South. By Ann Garrison, BAR contributor
Sugar Hill Play-date v. Oz-low Piece Process By Raymond Nat Turner, 35 lb question mark,
3 ft exclamation point,
doesn’t cringe at loud sounds or
pee his bed behind nightmares.
Camryn, my three year-old Sugar
Hill neighbor’s an “Old soul.”
I’m honored that he refers to
me as, “My friend, Raymond.” . . . 
Dems Oppose Trump’s Military Parade But Not the Bipartisan Warfare State Word is Donald Trump wants a giant military parade – artillery, armored vehicles, missile launchers bigger than the North Koreans and thousands of soldiers, sailors and marines marching down Pennsylvania Ave, probably with flyovers of his favorite Air Force plane, the mythical F-52 fighter from the Call of Duty video game. Predictably a chorus of Democrats along with CNN and MSNBC panned the idea. Their reasons are all sensible enough. It would cost tens of millions to bring all those troops and hardware to the nation’s capital. Furthermore, neither DC city streets nor the roads leading to them are designed for armored vehicles, tanks and their carriers. But most of all, Democrats practically whine, while the US is bombing six or seven countries, deploys drones and special forces across vast stretches of Africa and the Middle East, has submarines and fleets in all seven seas, with bases, troops and hardware in over a hundred countries, domestic displays of US military might are kind of, well, un-American. By Bruce A. Dixon, BAR managing editor
Black Liberation Means Rejection of National Security (State) Citizenship “Oppressed communities have to articulate their own independent foreign policy grounded above all in the interests of other marginalized groups.” No part of the vision statement for the Movement for Black Lives received as much immediate mainstream pushback as its stinging repudiation of U.S. foreign policy. Its demands, which included a call for military and security divestment, permanent opposition to the War on Terror, and a declaration of solidarity with Palestinians, generated criticism about specific policies (especially with respect to Israel and Palestine) and about the perceived disconnect between police brutality toward black citizens and U.S. military practices in distant lands. The implication was that by extending their vision beyond the national borders, black freedom activists were combining issues that were not inherently connected and better left to the security experts. By Aziz Rana
The War on Dissent The ruling class is sending us a message,“You’re either with us or against us.” 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
Amazon Is a 21st-Century Digital Chain Gang “Local governments offer subsidies, miss out on tax revenue, starve their citizens of vital social services, and fatten the profits of these modern-day robber barons.”When Amazon announced plans to locate a $5 billion, 50,000-employee complex as its second headquarters somewhere in North America, state governments and municipalities fell over themselves offering billions of dollars in tax abatements and corporate subsidies to secure the prize. It might behoove the remaining 20 cities that have made the final cut to heed the warning from Virgil’s Aeneid: “I fear the Greeks, even when they are bearing gifts.” Especially when the gifts come in the form of a modern-day digital chain gang. By Marshall Auerback
Extreme Poverty in the US Is a Political Choice of the Powerful “Americans can expect to live shorter and sicker lives, compared to people living in any other wealthy democracies.”“The American Dream is rapidly becoming the American illusion.” In December last year, United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Professor Philip Alston, issued a statement on his 15-day fact-finding mission of some of the US’s poorest neighborhoods. Alston, author of the quoted phrase in the subtitle above, is an Australian who is professor of law at New York University. During his mission he visited Alabama, California, West Virginia, Texas, Washington DC, and Puerto Rico. By Kenneth Surin
Making Visible the Lives and Deaths of People in Custody — Illinois Deaths in Custody Project “Poor people should not be confined in a death machine.” “Those who commit the murders write the reports.” — Ida B. Wells, Lynch Law In All Its Phases, 1893 In 2017, at least twenty-two people died at Chicago’s Cook County Jail (CCJ). This news is not readily available. Rather, multiple Freedom of Information (FOI) Requests filed by the Illinois Deaths in Custody Project (IDCP) with Cook County entities to confirm names and glean a few more institutionally produced “facts” produced the following: Clifford V. Nelson, 49, died while being transferred; Lopez House, 47, collapsed and died at the jail; Lindbert McIntosh, 57, died in his sleep; Jerome Monroe, 56, also died in his sleep at CCJ. By November of 2017, a few of these deaths, somewhat surprisingly, began to make local news. 
Criminalizing “Panther Love” and the New Wave COINTELPRO Tactics in Texas Prisons “I represent a new generation of freedom fighters who have learned from the mistakes of our fallen ancestors.” “Panther Love is revolutionary love, liberating love, world-changing love. Panther Love is a concrete expression of our social commitment to the masses as well as a moral stance that breaks free of the old and backward social relations in the Black sub-culture of criminality and gang warfare and in the ‘perfumed circles’ of the Black bourgeoisie.” — excerpt from “Mass Line of the New Afrikan Black Panther Party,” by Shaka Sankofa Zulu, Chairman, NABPP (PC)[1]
Black Agenda Radio, Week of February 12, 2018
Black Lives Matter in the Public Schools: Teachers in public schools around the country held a “Black Lives Matter Week of Action,” last week, demanding an end to “zero tolerance” student disciplinary policies, the hiring of more Black teachers and mandatory Black history/ethnic studies in grades K-12n, said Deborah Menkart, of Teaching for Change.
U.S. Attack on Syrian Troops Illegitimate: The U.S. has no basis for claiming “legitimate self-defense” to justify its recent killing of about 100 Syrian soldiers, according to Dr. Francis Boyle, professor of international law at the University of Illinois. “That’s bull-twaddle,” said Boyle. “We have no legal authority to have invaded the country in the first place, especially against the wishes of the legitimate government.”
No Major U.S. Opposition to War: It’s bad enough that the Trump administration’s recently released Nuclear Posture Review makes the use of nuclear weapons more likely, said Greg Mello, of the Los Alamos Study Group. On top of that, “We don’t have any real, senior level, Democratic Party opposition to war,” said Mello. “Liberals and progressives have been manipulated to be the tacit allies of the military-industrial-complex in vilifying Russia.”
Wall Street’s Caribbean Crime Spree: Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean, by UCLA historian Peter Hudson, “is a beautiful, innovative, angry and impeccably researched text,” said Dr. Deborah Thomas, professor of anthropology and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. “The theoretical force of the book is embedded in its story-telling.”
Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network is hosted by Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey. A new edition of the program airs every Monday at 11:am ET on PRN. Length: one hour.
Labor:
Economy:
World:
Two Wings of the Same Bird – Puerto Rico, Cuba, Hurricanes and Political Prisoners Six months after Oscar López Rivera was released from prison having spent 35 years inside, he traveled to Cuba. “I feel at home, this is a dream come true; for many, many years, I have wanted to come to Cuba and today for the first time I have arrived,” Oscar told Fernando Llort González, the President of ICAP (Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples), who greeted him when he stepped off the plane. by Diana Block
South Africa: the chaotic end of Jacob Zuma “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen.” – Lenin “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.” – Euripides As we write these lines, the Zuma-Gupta empire is crumbling. In one of the most dramatic days in South African politics in recent memory, Jacob Zuma – and his friends, the Gupta brothers – are being purged by a rival wing of the ruling class. The purge is the most emphatic sign that the two rival factions can no longer cohabitate. By Ben Morken
Health, Science, Education, and Welfare:
‘Lost Connections’ review: the material basis of depression What really causes depression and anxiety? And how can we genuinely solve these issues? Answering these questions is the task journalist Johann Hari sets himself in his newly released book, Lost Connections.Needless to say, this is a big and complex topic. But Hari makes significant progress by placing depression in its material, social context: a world that is increasingly falling apart, with ‘treatment’ provided by a system that is equally falling apart.This is a refreshing and holistic approach. All too often the subject of depression, and mental health in general, is treated in a narrow, biological way. Underlying causes are overlooked. But there is – despite what Margaret Thatcher may have asserted – such a thing as society. By Martin Swayne
