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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
Images of the Day:
Quotes of the Day:
As we go marching, marching
Unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing
Their ancient call for bread
Small art, and love, and beauty
Their grudging spirits knew
Yes it is bread we fight for
But we fight for roses too. — Bread nd Roses
Videos of the Day:
The Rise of Jeremy Corbyn and Class Struggle in the UK Labour Party – RAI with Leo Panitch (3/5) On Reality Asserts Itself, Prof. Panitch talks about how the Labour Party moved from being a Tony Blair party of class reconciliation and war, to a truly left mass party with more than 600,000 members that may take power
Corbyn Rekindled Our Imagination. We Can Now Dare to Hope! Political failure is a failure of the imagination, argues Guardian columnist George Monbiot. But, he says, Jeremy Corbyn has turned that failure into hope. Labour strategy used to be about mimicking its rivals. Now, it is about offering a radically different world
The CIA’s New Torturer-in-Chief Gina Haspel President Trump’s new pick to head the CIA, has played a key role in the agency’s torture program — and in covering it up, says Marcy Wheeler
U.S.:
Gina Haspel, Trump’s Pick for CIA Director, Ran a Black Site for Torture As Miller put it, she (Gina Haspel) was “directly involved in its controversial interrogation program” and had an “extensive role” in torturing detainees. Even more troubling, she “had run a secret prison in Thailand” — part of the CIA’s network of “black sites” — “where two detainees were subjected to waterboarding and other harsh techniques.” The Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on torture also detailed the central role she played in the particularly gruesome torture of detainee Abu Zubaydah. Beyond all that, she played a vital role in the destruction of interrogation videotapes that showed the torture of detainees both at the black site she ran and other secret agency locations. The concealment of those interrogation tapes, which violated multiple court orders as well as the demands of the 9/11 commission and the advice of White House lawyers, was condemned as “obstruction” by commission chairs Lee Hamilton and Thomas Keane. A special prosecutor and grand jury investigated those actions but ultimately chose not to prosecute. By Glenn Greenwald
Environment:
Ongoing Big Energy Crisis:
Civil Rights/ Black Liberation:
Septima Clark Teacher to a Movement
Rosa Parks, who has been called the Mother of the Civil Rights Movement, well remembers the first time she met Septima Clark.
It was at a civil rights workshop in Tennessee in the summer of 1955. African-Americans and sympathetic whites had begun to meet quietly, secretly, throughout the South to plan their counterattacks against the segregation system, and to train the new corps of volunteers for that fight. These volunteers would come to be called civil rights workers. Septima Clark, already a 30-year veteran of her people’s struggle, was one of the trainers.
U.S. owes black people reparations for a history of ‘racial terrorism,’ says U.N. panel The history of slavery in the United States justifies reparations for African Americans, argues a recent report by a U.N.-affiliated group based in Geneva. This conclusion was part of a study by the United Nations’ Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, a body that reports to the international organization’s High Commissioner on Human Rights. The group of experts, which includes leading human rights lawyers from around the world, presented its findings to the United Nations Human Rights Council on Monday, pointing to the continuing link between present injustices and the dark chapters of American history. By Ishaan Tharoor
Freedom Rider: Talking to North Korea “Kim’s country may be punished by sanctions but he has a measure of security he would not have had if he had not persevered in his goal.” The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), commonly referred to as North Korea, has every right to develop nuclear weapons. It is a sovereign state and should be able to produce weapons that the United States or other nations already possess. In any case the Koreans would be very foolish not to have the protection that may keep the empire at bay. The DPRK is acutely aware of the fate that befalls nations that do not possess these arms. Iraq attempted to create a nuclear program but it was destroyed by Israel in an airstrike. Libya didn’t have a nuclear program and neither did Syria. All were attacked by the United States and NATO because they were naked in the face of aggression. American hysteria over North Korean nuclear development is a fraud that must be ignored. The DPRK’s right to self-determination must be defended. By Margaret Kimberley, BAR editor and senior columnist
Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize Awarded to Charles Onana and Phil Taylor “She is risking her life to challenge the Kagame regime, and any challenge to our own government is up to us.”The 2018 Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize was awarded on Saturday, 03.10.2018, in Brussels, Belgium. The prize honors Rwandan political prisoner Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza. Despite the African Court of Human and People’s Rights’ 2017 ruling that her imprisonment is unjust and that Rwanda should free her, she remains behind bars. By Ann Garrison, BAR contributor 
Waking Up With Wackenhut? here are lands of bluebirds and fountains where everyone in their minds is forever free…
Turning away, shuttering high-beams:
Erehwon, Shangra-La,
Psychedelic Shack, Cloud 9, Utopias, where
When you wish upon a star
and wake up—accessories to mass murder—
itty-bitty bodies buried beneath rubble,
charcoalized children shredded by shrapnel—
You’ve been danglin’ on the Drone Ranger’s dick 8 yrs ByRaymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence 
Independent Journalist Corner: A Conversation with John Sibley “A capitalist does not think that just your existence in-the-world is a contribution.” This week I spoke with author and artist, John Sibley. A Chicago native, Sibley has written two books. His most recent release is a revised version of the title, Being and Homelessness: Notes from an Underground Artist. We discussed his work and how it relates to contemporary political developments, with a special focus on the theme of homelessness. Danny Haiphong, BAR contributor 
Zimbabwe Open for Business, Code for International Finance Capitalism “Zimbabwe’s new president offered an open invitation to international capital investment and latecomers for Zimbabwe’s trek down the neoliberal development road.”Over the last four months, peddling the mantra “Zimbabwe is open for business,” the country’s new president in cahoots with the Western press has been whitewashing a military coup into a popular, peaceful revolution that brought from exile a benevolent leader and placed him in power on an interim basis until elections. Omitted from the portrayal of the March 11, 2018 op-ed, “We Are Bringing About the New Zimbabwe ,” published in the New York Times and by-lined to Zimbabwe’s sitting president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, are all the maneuvers selling out the country’s political independence. Given reports of what happened to some of ZANU-PF’s G40 faction, including the killing of a bodyguard, and jailing with allegations of torture from November 14, 2017, until at least Robert Mugabe resigned as president a week later, the accounts in Mnangagwa’s op-ed are a pretty audacious rewriting of history. By Netfa Freeman
Blood on the Land in Brazil “The crimes appear to follow a simple, grim logic: kill the leaders.” Millions of Brazilians spent the evening of January 24 watching a courtroom on television. Three judges were scheduled to announce a verdict in the corruption case of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the country’s former president. The judges delivered lengthy speeches, then a unanimous guilty verdict. Lula had illicitly attempted to receive an apartment by the sea, they ruled. It was 5:45 PM. By Gregory Duff Morton
Black Agenda Radio, Week of March 13, 2018 By Nellie Bailey and Glen Ford
Ethnic Cleansing is Still U.S. Policy : “The Black Misleadership Class” acts as “agents and collaborators” in the planned shrinkage of Black and brown populations, said veteran tenants organizer and Black Agenda Radio host Nellie Bailey, at a Tribunal on Ethnic Cleansing of the Black Community, in New York City. Father Frank Morales, an activist Episcopal priest, said, “We have to create heat on the street, with masses of people. Then we’ll see some changes.”
Happy Birthday, Jericho Movement! !: The organization created by and for U.S. political prisoners — most of them Black Panthers, some incarcerated for nearly 50 years — marks its 20th anniversary, March 24. The Jericho Movement has taken the struggle to the United Nations Human Rights Commission. “We’re trying to organize on an international level,” said co-chair Jihad Abdulmumit, “so that the world can see what’s going on with our freedom fighters.”
The Chains That Bound Blacks and Indigenous Americans: Blacks and Native Americans share a history of enslavement at the hands of European settlers, said Dr Gerald Horne, professor of history and African American studies at the University of Houston and author of the new book, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in 17th Century North America and the Caribbean. “The nature of ethnic cleansing in North America not only involved mass murder; it also involved mass enslavement,” said Horne. “You can find, today, Native American DNA all over the world, because they were sent to the slave markets of Turkey, to Madagascar – all over the world.”
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:
Shadow Government Statistics Alternate Inflation Charts In the charts below we show two SGS-Alternate CPI estimates: One based on the pre-1990 official methodology for computing the CPI-U, and the other based on the methodology which was employed prior to 1980.Please note: Our Data Download is currently only providing the 1980-Based numbers, but 1990-Based numbers will be introduced shortly.
This Is Not Normal: Markets, Elon Musk and Donald Trump If Wall Street can glam up a story around a stock or a man or both, it can sell the hell out of the shares to the dumb money. If enough dumb money invests, the Dark Pools spring into action and drive the price even higher. That brings in hedge funds. Pretty soon you’re talking about real money. This is how we got the 1929 stock market crash, the Great Depression, the dot.com bust in 2000, the Enron, Worldcom and Tyco flameouts, and whatever we end up calling the bust that lies ahead of the current brainless bubble market. By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
World:
Protests by restless workers, students and farmers spring up across Iran Although the youth movement that shook Iran in late December and late January has died down, nothing has been solved. It is evident that the movement merely anticipated a far deeper mood of anger and resentment, which has been building up for decades. By Hamid Alizadeh
Health, Science, Education, and Welfare:
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.
Bread and Roses Strike of 1912
