Daily News Digest March 14, 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 March 14, 2018

Images of the Day:

Let the Capitalists Do Their Own Fighting!!Quotes of the Day:

We’ve just seen a school shooting in Florida by a young man trained to shoot by the U.S. Army in the very school where he killed his classmates, and you will find virtual silence on that fact, and the silence is self-imposed. Veterans are over twice as likely, statistically, to be mass shooters, and you will not read that in any newspaper. (And, needless to say, it is not somehow grounds for engaging in bigotry toward veterans or for foregoing obvious solutions like banning guns.) — Take a Knee and a Stand

Re: Death to Drug Dealers: Trump Threatens to Ramp Up Drug War, Praising Efforts in Philippines & China —  Capitalism is the Pusher of Drugs: Afghan heroin has killed more than one million people worldwide since the ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ began and over a trillion dollars has been invested into transnational organized crime from drug sales,” said Ivanov according to Counter Current News.  Prior to the invasion of Afghanistan, opium production was banned by the Taliban, although it still managed to exist. The U.S. and its allies have been accused of encouraging and aiding in the opium production and the ongoing drug trafficking within the region. Ivanov claimed that only around 1 percent of the total opium yield in Afghanistan was destroyed and that the “international community has failed to curb heroin production in Afghanistan since the start of NATO’s operation.” Afghanistan is thought to produce more than 90 percent of the world’s supply of opium, which is then used to make heroin and other dangerous drugs that are shipped in large quantities all over the world. Opium production provides many Afghan communities with an income, in an otherwise impoverished and war-torn country. The opium trade contributed around $2.3 billion or around 19 percent of Afghanistan’s GDP in 2009 according to the U.N. — Afghan Opium Production 40 Times Higher Since US-NATO Invasion

The Drug War — From My essay, Reparations and Capitalism: Recently a new factor has been added to the equation — ”The Drug Trade”. In his 2001 article, War on Drugs Dirty Money Foundation of US Growth and Empire Size and Scope of Money Laundering by US Banks, by James Petras, Professor of Sociology, Binghamton University, he explains that 500 Billion to a Trillion dollars gets added to world capitalist economy through “illegal means.” he concludes the article with the following: The increasing polarization of the world is embedded in this organized system of criminal and corrupt financial transactions. While speculation and foreign debt payments play a role in undermining living standards in the crisis regions, the multi-trillion dollar money laundering and bank servicing of corrupt officials is a much more significant factor, sustaining Western prosperity, U.S. empire building and financial stability. The scale, scope and time frame of transfers and money laundering, the centrality of the biggest banking enterprises and the complicity of the governments, strongly suggests that the dynamics of growth and stagnation, empire and re-colonization are intimately related to a new form of capitalism built around pillage, criminality, corruption and complicity.  ‘This Goes Straight to the Top.  An article written in Counterpunch titled, Race and the Drug War,  during the last election campaign, points out another factor of the “Drug War:”  . . . Domestically, the ‘drug war’ has always been a pretext for social control, going back to the racist application of drug laws against Chinese laborers in the recession of the 1870s when these workers we reviewed as competition for the dwindling number of jobs available. The main users, middle-class white men and women taking opium in liquid form as ‘tonics’, weren’t harassed. By 1887 the Chinese Exclusion Act allowed Chinese opium addicts to be arrested and deported. In the 1930s the racist head of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, Harry Anslinger, was renaming hemp as ‘marijuana’ to associate it with Mexican laborers and claiming that marijuana ‘can arouse in blacks and Hispanics a state of menacing fury or homicidal attack.’ By the 1950s Anslinger had pushed through the first mandatory drug sentences. As so often, Nixon was helpfully explicit in his private remarks. H.R.Haldeman recorded in his diary a briefing by the president in 1969,prior to launching of the war on drugs: ‘[Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.’ So what was ‘the system’ duly devised? On June 19, 1986, Maryland University basketball star Len Bias died from an overdose of cocaine. As Dan Baum put it in his excellent Smoke and Mirrors, The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure, ‘In life, Len Bias was a terrific basketball player. In death he became the Archduke Ferdinand of the Total War on Drugs.’ It was falsely reported that Bias had smoked crack cocaine the night before his death. In fact he had used powder cocaine and there was no link between this use and the failure of his heart, according to the coroner. Bias had signed with the Boston Celtics and amid Boston’s rage and grief Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, a Boston rep, rushed into action. In early July he convened a meeting of the Democratic Party leadership: ‘Write me some goddamn legislation,’ he ordered. ‘All anybody in Boston is talking about is Len Bias. They want blood. If we move fast enough we can get out in front of the White House.’ In fact the White House was moving pretty fast. Among other things the DEA had been instructed to allow ABC News to accompany it on raids against crackhouses. ‘Crack is the hottest combat-reporting story to come along since the end of the Vietnam war,” the head of the New York office of the DEA exulted. All this fed into congressional frenzy to write tougher laws. House Majority Leader Jim Wright called drug abuse ‘a menace draining away our economy of some $230 billion this year, slowly rotting away the fabric of our society and seducing and killing our young.’ Not to be outdone, South Carolina Republican Thomas Arnett proclaimed that ‘drugs are a threat worse than nuclear warfare or any chemical warfare waged on any battlefield.’ The 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act was duly passed. It contained 29 new minimum mandatory sentences. Up until that time in the history of the Republic there had been only 56 mandatory minimum sentences. The new law had a death penalty provision for drug ‘king pins’ and prohibited parole for even minor possession offenses. But the chief focus of the bill was crack cocaine (mainly used in the inter-cities). Congress established a 100-to-1 sentencing ratio between possession of crack and powder cocaine (mainly used in the suburbs). Under this provision possession of five grams of crack carries a minimum five-year federal prison sentence. The same mandatory minimum is not reached for any amount of powder cocaine under 500 grams. This sentencing disproportion was based on faulty testimony that crack was 50 times as addictive as powdered coke. Congress then doubled this ratio as a so-called ‘violence penalty’. For the world’s masses, from Capitalism’s beginning there has been nothing progressive about capitalism. From its bloody beginning capitalism has been a holocaust for humanity bringing war, drug aditiction, famine, pestilence and death throughout the world.

U.S.:

The Marketplace of Ideas: Assaulting the First Amendment A decade before he was to become President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson (the principal author of the Declaration of Independence) then serving as Minister to France, penned these words for the ages. It was the eve of the French Revolution and the world was ablaze with revolutionary ideas and potent words: “The people are the only censors of their governors: and even their errors will tend to keep these to the true principles of their institution… Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”by Stanley L. Cohen 

Obama Left Trump the Power to Declare Martial Law!

Is Martial Law Coming to the United States?

The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. — Communist Manifesto, Chapter I. Bourgeois and Proletarians

For the past few decades, the power of this capitalist states has more in more been centralized in the executive Branch of the United States Government. Learning from history and the recent events in the world, United States capitalism knows that a working class upsurge will result from its austerity programs.  Therefore the capitalist class is applying the Precautionary Principle, in order to be prepared to apply the The Iron Heal to quash any upsurge.

As their spokesman, Obama, is and has been slowly but surely setting up the police state The Iron Heal. As Obama moves toward disarming the people and the working class, he is organizing an extra-legal domestic police force as capitalism, with Obama their spokesman, establishes a  gradual slide into a police state.

The office of the President now has the power to declare martial law, if there is a ‘threat of teorrism” or or protest that are ‘deemed terrorist,in the United States — That would be the Envy of Hitler!  The capitalist 1% ruling class has studied history, and it knows that it is only a matter of time before the working class and it allies overthrow the misleaderships of the working class and the world’s oppressed — even in this country. Therefore, it has carried out a policy of war abroad and preparing for war at home. The only solution for capitalism, at this time is the worldwide application of the The Iron Heal, as described by Jack London in his book, The Iron Heal.

In the United States it has already laid the basis for its implementation through ‘terrorist legislation’and ‘executive orders’ to declare martial law and suspend the Bill of Rights. The cops have attacked all occupy wall street demonstrations and they have escalated violence in the minority and working class communities and have written laws to encourage vigilante ‘first strike’ ‘justice’ and which as Michelle Alexander describes as The New Jim Crow, the establishment of a prison slavery system that will eventually be used for all of us.

Now is the time to reorganize all anti-capitalist forces and fighters for working class emancipation and self-determination for people oppressed by capitalism for the rebuilding of a new revolutionary political organization to organize and build our combined power to overturn capitalism that is, in its death agony, waging war, famine, pestilence, and death, and the globalization of global warming throughout the world.

Environment:

Four Kinds of Algal Toxins Found in San Francisco Bay Shellfish Researchers monitoring San Francisco Bay for algal toxins have found a surprising array of different toxins in the water and in mussels collected from the bay. Four different classes of toxins, including one produced in freshwater environments, occur regularly throughout the bay, according to a study led by UC Santa Cruz researchers and published March 10 in Harmful Algae. By University of California – Santa CruzOngoing Big Energy Crisis:

Civil Rights/ Black Liberation:

Labor:

Italian elections: an earthquake whose lessons have not been learned – speech to the CGIL National Committee Mario Iavazzi, a supporter of Sinistra Classe e Rivoluzione [the IMT in Italy] intervened at the recent gathering of the National Committee of the CGIL (Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro – General Confederation of Italian Labour – equivalent to the TUC in Britain, CGT in France or AFL-CIO in the USA). He openly criticised the leadership for its lack of a fighting programme and for its total lack of understanding of what happened in the recent Italian elections. 

Economy:

“Trade wars are good” – Trump threatens fragile world economy In the last week, US President, Donald Trump announced his intention to raise tariffs on steel and aluminium imports, threatening to start a dangerous trade war with the rest of the world. This could plunge the world economy into another deep slump. By Rob SewellWorld:

Labour’s lead over Conservatives surges to 7% in polls over fears brutal Tory cuts will spark recession Exclusive: Survation – which accurately predicted last year’s election result – puts Jeremy Corbyn on 44%, with Theresa May trailing on 37% and the Lib Dems notching up just 9% By Dan Warburton

Health, Science, Education, and Welfare: