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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
Image of the Day:
Teachers Chant ‘We Made History’ at West Virginia State Capitol as Pay Deal Ends Strike — Daily Telegraph
Videos of the Day:
Honduran Exec Who Threatened Berta Caceres Arrested for Her Murder Just before her assassination, environmental activist Berta Caceres told a filmmaker that she was being threatened by Roberto David Castillo, a Honduran hydroelectric company executive. He has now been arrested for conspiring in her murder. We speak to documentary filmmaker Jesse Freeston
Netanyahu or Not, Israel is Corrupted (2/2) In part two of our interview, Israeli journalist Gideon Levy says that blind US support has corrupted Israel and that a movement for a democratic state where all Israelis and Palestinians are equal offers the best path to justice.
U.S.:
Schumer Denounced for ‘Absolutely Disgusting’ AIPAC Speech “At AIPAC, Democrats try to outdo Trump in their devotion to Israel’s oppression of Palestinians.” “Bigoted,” “outrageous,” and “disgusting” were just a handful of the many adjectives critics used to denounce Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) speech this week before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which attributed ongoing Middle East conflict not to Israel’s decades of brutal U.S.-backed occupation of Palestinian territories, but to Palestinians’ failure to “believe in the Torah.” By Jake Johnson
As Trump Threats Stir Global Arms Race, New Report Details the Nuclear War Profiteers “If you have been wondering who benefits from Donald Trump’s threats of nuclear war, this report has that answer.” By Andrea Germanos
President Trump Slaps Tariffs on Solar Panels in Major Blow to Renewable Energy In the biggest blow he’s dealt to the renewable energy industry yet, President Donald Trump decided on Monday to slap tariffs on imported solar panels. The U.S. will impose duties of as much as 30 percent on solar equipment made abroad, a move that threatens to handicap a $28 billion industry that relies on parts made abroad for 80 percent of its supply. Just the mere threat of tariffs has shaken solar developers in recent months, with some hoarding panels and others stalling projects in anticipation of higher costs. The Solar Energy Industries Association has projected tens of thousands of job losses in a sector that employed 260,000. By Brian Eckhouse, Ari Natter and Christopher Martin
Environment:
Researchers ‘Staggered’ by ‘Crazy, Crazy’ Record-Setting Warm Winter in Arctic Arctic warming is just a symptom of “disease” that’s getting worse, say climate scientists, as U.S. leaders refuse to curb human activities that contribute to climate crisis, By Julia Conley
Ongoing Big Energy Crisis:
Ohio Gas Well Was Spewing Methane Pollution Three Weeks After Blowout An oil and gas drilling pad where a fiery explosion led to the evacuation of about 100 people in Ohio’s Belmont County last month was still spewing raw methane into the atmosphere nearly three weeks after the initial well blowout, according to an infrared video released by environmental watchdog group Earthworks on Tuesday. Workers reportedly brought the well under control Wednesday morning. While much of the national media has yet to take notice, Earthworks is comparing the accident in Belmont County to the 2015 natural gas disaster in California’s Aliso Canyon, where a storage well blowout allowed more than 100,000 tons of methane pollution to spew into the atmosphere near Los Angeles over a four-month period. The disaster brought national attention to the climate impacts of methane, a natural gas that can cause 86 times more climate damage than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. By Mike Ludwig
Fight women’s oppression, fight capitalism! International Marxist Tendency statement, March 8 The following is a statement by the IMT to be released at mobilisations throughout the world on International Women’s Day (8 March). We explain why the struggle for women’s liberation must also be a fight for socialism!
The Healthcare Bait-and-Switch: From the Clintons to Obama and Back Again “Cory Booker and others are joining the pro-single payer bandwagon to weaken it from the inside.” On the campaign trail in January of 2016, Hillary Clinton told Iowa voters that Bernie Sanders’ single payer health care proposal was an idea whose time would never come. “People who have health emergencies can’t wait for us to have a theoretical debate about some better idea that will never, ever come to pass ,” said the presumed shoo-in for president. Two years later, one-third of Democrats in the Senate have endorsed Sanders’ Medicare for All Act and half the Democrats in the U.S. House have signed on to Rep. John Conyers’ Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act, HR 676 . Polls show 75 percent of Democrats favor “expanding Medicare to provide health insurance to every American,” and 31 percent of the public at-large wants health care to be the first problem the Democrats tackled if they win the White House in 2020. By Glen Ford, BAR executive editor
Lessons, Successes, Failures of the West Virginia Teachers Strike The 9 day West Virginia school strike was a long time coming, and contains a number of useful, if not new lessons. The first not at all new lesson is that successful strikes are possible wherever an overwhelming majority of the workforce is committed to it, whether or not those worker are in a “right to work ” state, and whether or not the strike is endorsed by their union if they have a union at all. Neither of West Virginia’s two teachers unions endorsed the strike, and the leaders of both unions initially and repeatedly attempted to “settle” it for far less than the striking workers demanded. A second lesson was that illegal strikes can succeed. Although a teacher walkout was explicitly prohibited by state law Governor Jim Justice dared not seek an injunction ordering teachers and others back to work because they enjoyed far too much public support. The largely successful New York City transit worker strike of December 2005 was illegal too, but workers achieved most of their objectives, despite the fact that the union leadership was forced by the authorities to resign and spend a few days in jail. By Bruce A. Dixon, BAR managing editor
Labor:
Economy:
Gary Cohn: Mission Accomplished Gary Cohn, Trump’s top economic adviser, is leaving the White House after just 14 months — but not before delivering a number of gifts to Wall Street and his old firm, Goldman Sachs. That list starts with a 40 percent cut in corporate income tax that Cohn, along with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin (another former Goldman Sachs exec), championed. The sweeping tax overhaul finalized by Congress late last year cuts the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. For Goldman, that translates into a tax savings of around $1 billion a year. JPMorgan Chase, which paid more than $11 billion in income tax last year, could save closer to $4 billion a year. Wells Fargo will save roughly $2 billion a year, based on its 2017 earnings. By Gary Rivlin
As Cable News Obsesses Over a Porn Star, Senate Prepares to Put the Next Wall Street Crash in Motion The U.S. Senate is about to set in motion the next financial crash on Wall Street but you would never know it from watching cable news channels CNN or MSNBC last evening. Both news channels obsessed for endless hours over the Trump-Russia scandal and a hush money payoff to porn star Stormy Daniels, neglecting one of the most critical topics of the day: what was happening on the Senate floor this week. By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
World:
Health, Science, Education, and Welfare:
The identification of such a high proportion of human carcinogens from the study of blue-collar workers is clearly a reflection of their high relative cancer risk. These high relative risks, or high probability of industrial workers developing cancer in relation to specific exposures, have been borne out by the results of quantitative cancer risk assessments, some of which are shown in Table V. This high risk of cancer is reason alone to intensify the study of cancer in the work environment. In the early 1900s, canaries were routinely taken down into the mines. The men used these canaries to give them the first sign of possible disaster or death. When the canaries passed out or died, the men knew that there was a problem with exposure to carbon monoxide and immediate action was needed. The analogy here is clear. Blue-collar workers appear to be the canaries in our society for identifying human chemical carcinogens in the general environment. (Today, their plight is even worse because we are paying little attention to their deaths.) The fact that occupational cancer is a sentinel for identifying carcinogenic exposures in the general environment is reason alone to justify an intensified cancer research effort in the workplace. Yet, our efforts to study their exposures to carcinogens, or to develop technology to decrease that exposure,. or to develop safe substitutes have been relatively minimal. Given the obvious benefits to an intensified cancer research effort directed toward the study of workers, I ask myself why it has been given so little attention. In my opinion, this inattention is reflected in the way data on health are gathered in general in the U.S. Health data are published by sex and race, but not by social class. This is no accident. It reflects a social class bias by those gathering the data. I suggest disproportionate death from cancer among blue-collar workers is a social class issue and that the problem is neglected because it is a potentially explosive issue. It raises questions about the control of production and cost of production. In 1992, the Congress of the United States passed legislation entitled the “Cancer Registries Amendment Act.” This Act authorizes $30 million per year through 1997 to fund statewide cancer registries. Yet, not a single cancer registry in the United States requires that a detailed occupational and job history be taken as part of its activity. It is reported that the National Cancer Institute (NCD allocates $20 million per year (1 percent of its budget) for occupational cancer studies. Why is the amount of funding to investigate cancer in the workplace so disproportionately low in relation to the “success” of confirming human causes of cancer by studying blue-collar workers? — Peter F. Infante, Cancer and Blue-Collar Workers — Who Cares?
All of the Cancer Research is to Treat Cancer — Not to Prevent Cancer!: US cancer network recommending expensive drugs based on weak evidence, study finds Study raises concerns about National Comprehensive Cancer Network, which publishes guidelines for American oncologists Guidelines for American oncologists often recommend expensive and harmful cancer drugs for patients based on “weak evidence”, according to a new study in the British Medical Journal. The BMJ research looked at drugs recommended for conditions not approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, a practice called “off-label” prescribing. By Jessica Glenza
Alabama Has The Worst Poverty In The Developed World, U.N. Official Says A United Nations official investigating poverty in the United States was shocked at the level of environmental degradation in some areas of rural Alabama, saying he had never seen anything like it in the developed world. “I think it’s very uncommon in the First World. This is not a sight that one normally sees. I’d have to say that I haven’t seen this,” Philip Alston, the U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, told Connor Sheets of AL.com earlier this week as they toured a community in Butler County where “raw sewage flows from homes through exposed PVC pipes and into open trenches and pits.” The tour through Alabama’s rural communities is part of a two-week investigation by the U.N. on poverty and human rights abuses in the United States. So far, U.N. investigators have visited cities and towns in California and Alabama, and will soon travel to Puerto Rico, Washington, D.C., and West Virginia. By Carlos Ballesteros
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.
Quote of the Day:
Civil Rights/ Black Liberation: