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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.
Quote of the Day:
Environment:
Novichok Nerve Agent Histrionics “It’s absolutely astonishing that anyone believes this.” Most national and international news reported in the US is now an extended Red Scare narrative punctuated by stories about Trump’s unparalleled boorishness and recklessness, which can of course be blamed on Russia since Trump never would have been elected if thirteen Russian trolls hadn’t prowled the Internet for potential Trump voters and targeted them with information about Hillary Clinton’s international crimes and the global influence peddling operation known as the Clinton Foundation. By Ann Garrison, BAR contributor
Independent Journalist Corner: A Conversation with Luciana Bohne “My advice to the non-communist western left is to exorcise the ghost of anti-communism and to look into the history of communism, as it really existed.” This week I spoke with Luciana Bohne. Luciana is a retired academic whose long life is almost a synthesis of the turbulence of the 20th century. She has lived under three systems: fascism, socialism, and capitalism. She has known war, been a refuge and displaced person, an immigrant, and a failed aspirant to bourgeois respectability. I don’t think she has ever been at home anywhere, except in early childhood in her native village in what was first Austrian dominion, then, Italy, then Yugoslavia, and finally Croatia. She can hardly say what her native language is but is thankful for knowing now the little English she uses for writing essays for Counterpunch and other internet sites. She has left behind her professional training and research to concentrate on just speaking her mind for what it’s worth. By Danny Haiphong, BAR contributor
Freedom Rider: Vladimir Putin and War Propaganda “Lies about the Russian government are war propaganda and they are meant to get public support for military action against Russia and its allies.” Vladimir Putin is blamed for everything that goes awry in Europe and the United States. In the United Kingdom his country was even blamed for bad weather as tabloid headlines screamed about icy Russian winds. The Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s Electoral College victory are said to be the result of Putin’s interference, even though the machinations of American oligarch Robert Mercer are most responsible for both outcomes. By Margaret Kimberley, BAR editor and senior columnist
A Tale of Three Apartheids and the Land Conundrums “White settlers were convinced that the lands they appropriated in the ‘dark continent’ and other lands were theirs by right.” The word apartheid achieved global notoriety during the height of White rule in South Africa. It then extended at least to one other country where blatant state-sanctioned bigotry went hand in hand with “democracy”: Israel (1, 2). The underlying creed fueling racist practices was White supremacy with its Eurocentric beginnings. Racism historically informed much of the imperial/colonial Caucasian dealings with other societies, beginning in earnest during the voyages of “discovery,” inaugurated by Christopher Columbus, where the slaughter of millions, massive human dislodgments under the umbrella of slavery, unprecedented dispossession and theft of entire far flung continents were to follow. Separate but Equal, Uncle Tom, Jim Crow, segregation, racial discrimination, civil rights violations, colonialism, assimilation, conquistadores, Bantustans and other innocuous, hollow terms intended to attenuate or mitigate the crimes were firmly sown in the minds of the rank and file of the victors. By Kweli Nzito
Marielle Franco’s Assassination: One of Tens of Thousands of Black Murders in Brazil “Brazil`s terrocratic regime continues producing black dead bodies in astonishing scales without disturbing the normalcy of everyday political life in this country.” Every year, at least 60,000 individuals are killed in Brazil, at least 160 murders every day. The majority of the dead are black, young and from urban peripheries where the state is present only through its delinquent police force. Although the police are not responsible for all these deaths, it directly or indirectly pulls the trigger that kills black youth. Books, academic articles, brief-reports, film documentaries, op-eds all have ad nausea denounced this genocidal proportions of violence in the country known as “the land of cordial man.” It is a waste of time, energy and resources. Nobody cares or they care too little to turn these deaths into a national scandal. There is an underlying belief that the word genocide is an overstatement to depict what is going on in a country where racial boundaries are supposedly not rigid as in the United States or South Africa. Apartheid and the Jim Crow are usually mentioned to compare Brazil´s ‘benign’ race relations in opposition to these countries’ racial violence. The fact is that, consistent with its ugly history, Brazil maintains a regime of racial terror that does not differ from these two nations’ past and present system of racial domination. By Jaime A Alves
Black Panther Party Principles Resurrected in Hurricane-Ravaged Puerto Rico “The Young Lords saw the Black Panthers trying to get justice for Black people, and they knew they needed to do the same thing.”The last thing you would expect to find in the central mountain range of Puerto Rico is the influence of the 1960s Black Panther Party. But there it was.The tenets of the revolutionary group, founded in 1966 in Oakland, Calif., by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, were mixed with stewed pork chops, rice, beans and healthcare on a 90-degree winter day, 20 miles south of San Juan in the city of Caguas. Volunteers with Centro De Apoyo Mutuo (CAM) prepared meals and provided services to residents in an abandoned building “rescued” by a group of local activists. By Tatyana Hopkins
Today’s Capitalism Was Born in Slavery “We must develop a new appreciation for the centrality of slavery, in the United States and elsewhere, in the emergence of modern capitalism.” By 1830, one million Americans, most of them enslaved, grew cotton. Raw cotton was the most important export of the United States, at the center of America’s financial flows and emerging modern business practices, and at the core of its first modern manufacturing industry. As John Brown, a fugitive slave, observed in 1854: “When the price [of cotton] rises in the English market, the poor slaves immediately feel the effects, for they are harder driven, and the whip is kept more constantly going.” Sven Beckert
The War on the Post Office “Postal banking can be profitable through economies of scale and the elimination of profit-taking middlemen, as postal banks globally have demonstrated.” The U.S. banking establishment has been at war with the post office since at least 1910, when the Postal Savings Bank Act established a public savings alternative to a private banking system that had crashed the economy in the Bank Panic of 1907. The American Bankers Association was quick to respond, forming a Special Committee on Postal Savings Legislation to block any extension of the new service. According to a September 2017 article in The Journal of Social History titled “‘Banks of the People’: The Life and Death of the U.S. Postal Savings System ,” the banking fraternity would maintain its enmity toward the government savings bank for the next 50 years. By Ellen Brown
Last Days of Pompeo…or of ‘Identity’ Politics? 
Black Agenda Radio, Week of March 19, 2018
U.S. Slavery Was Uniquely Capitalist : Even on the left, the capitalist nature of US slavery is not well understood, said historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment. “The commodification and capitalization of Black bodies is pretty unique to the United States,” she said. “Marx himself did not grasp it. Eurocentrism of analysis is a problem.”
Has Facebook and Cambridge Analytica Put Democracy at Risk in Both the U.S. and U.K.? For over a year, Carole Cadwalladr has been reporting in the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper about the bizarre overlap between the people and companies involved in Donald Trump’s rise to the Presidency in the U.S. and the June 23, 2016 Brexit vote in the U.K. where citizens voted in a referendum to take the U.K. out of the European Union. By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
Health, Science, Education, and Welfare: