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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.
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It was illegal force and violence, or terrorism, by the police and Ku Klux Klan along with the restoration of former slave owners’ property rights by the Democratic Party and non-radical Republicans that laid the basis for the overthrow of Black Reconstruction after the Civil War and the institutionalization of legal segregation, Jim Crow. Blacks were and are indiscriminately lynched and framed up to enforce this segregation. — The Historic Role of Police Brutality in the Black Community and African American Oppression
Until they end their funding of dirty energy, Kretzmann added, “these banks will be complicit in our climate catastrophe, plain and simple.” Institutions including JP Morgan Chase, TD Bank, and Bank of America increased their funding of dirty energy by 11 percent from 2016 to 2017, flouting the Paris Climate Agreement. The tar sands sector, known as the dirtiest source of energy on the planet, received major support from banks last year, with financing going up by 111 percent to $98 billion. JP Morgan Chase quadrupled its funding of the industry, a year after researchers found tar sands operations were a major cause of pollution. Environmental campaigners also denounced banks for their support of industries that have caused destruction to communities by building pipelines with no regard for citizens’ homes and human rights. Dirty energy projects funded by financial institutions in 2017 included the Line 3 Tar Sands pipeline proposed by Enbridge, which TD Bank, Citibank, Royal Bank of Canada, and MUFBGall invest in; and new coal plants expected to be build across Southeast Asia, bankrolled by Mizuho, MUFG, and SMFG. — Going Backward in Trump Era, Big Bank Investment in World’s Dirtiest Energy Projects Surged in 2017
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Trump Appoints Yet Another Deregulator – This Time to the FDIC Jelena McWilliams will be the new FDIC director and this will mean a “slaughter” of the remaining banking regulations, which will already be significantly weakened via a new law to be passed soon by Congress, says former financial regulator Bill Black
Hampton University Students Take to the Streets Over Campus Conditions Students are protesting a number of issues, including the mishandling of sexual assault complaints, housing problems and safety concerns. We speak to HBCUDigest.com’s Jarrett Carter, Sr.
U.S.
It’s Time the United States Accounts for Its History of Torture President Trump’s nomination of Gina Haspel to head the CIA has stirred objections from many quarters. After 9/11, Haspel ran an illegal black site in Thailand where a man was tortured, and she later wrote a memo calling for the destruction of proof of such “enhanced interrogations.” She has paid no price for these actions, nor has she been called to account for them. by Ariel DorfmanEnvironment:
Civil Rights/ Black Liberation:Freedom Rider: Stephan House, Draylen Mason, Stephon Clark: Terror Victims “Business should not go on as usual when the police act as the 21st century slave patrol.” The word terrorism is both over used and useless. It generally refers to the actions of the American government’s political enemies. It is rarely used to describe the wanton killing that is committed by this state or accepted by the dictates of white supremacy. By Margaret Kimberley, BAR editor and senior columnistMarch for Eight Billion Lives: An Interview with Riva Enteen The Democrats banned the peace issue from both the women’s marches and the student anti-gun protests, but women will confront the Pentagon in October. By Ann GarrisonRouge State By Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence
Nuclear bully’s roaring for war Thru the mouth of its dinosaur—
At war ever since its bloody birth Now, threatening the entire earth!
Rouge State—warlike deadweight you annihilate Subjugate Expropriate—
you devastate Rouge State—Land of the inmate you incarcerate Infiltrate
Assassinate— you intimidate
Rouge State, we don’t for sure—we think revolution’ s the cure. . .Independent Journalist Corner: A Conversation with Maria Felipa of Frente Favela Brazil “Slavery is the factor that better explains the social problems in the country.”This week, I spoke with Maria Felipa, a philosopher and Brazilian history teacher and militant for the Slums of Brazil Front (Frente Favela Brazil). The Frente Favela Brazil is a political party registered in 2017, comprised of the inhabitants of favelas in the process of getting organized to run candidates in the 2019 muncipal elections. According to Felipa, the organization is scanning presidential candidates to vote for in the coming October elections. This process is being in held in the favelas themselves, where the pre-candidates come, sit in a verandah, and talk to the people. The Favelas are 112 million people, blacks of all shades, which includes many indigenous Brazilians and whites. Felipe explains that “contrary to academicism, poverty does not choose color, but we should not forget that the impoverished state of affairs for a large number of the afrodescendent population is due to the fact that our ancestors were virtually abandoned by their ex-masters,” which includes the flow of Europeans that escaped from the many wars in that continent over the course of history. Danny Haiphong, BAR contributor‘They Executed Him’: Police Killing of Stephon Clark Leaves Family Shattered “I shouldn’t have to defend my brother. They should be proving their innocence.” “They gunned him down like a dog,” Stevante Clark said of the police shooting of his brother, Stephon. “They executed him.” Stevante was in the back seat of a car, his voice quivering. He stomped his feet 20 times – one for each bullet that police fired at his unarmed brother. “Twenty times. That’s like stepping on a roach. And then stepping, stepping, stepping, stepping, stepping, stepping, stepping.” The killing of Stephon Clark on 18 March by Sacramento police has sparked outrage and massive protests in the Californian capital , drawing comparisons with other cases of law enforcement killing unarmed black people, such as Oscar Grant , Michael Brown and Eric Garner . By Sam LevinSupport Herman Bell: Four Things You Can Do Right Now! “At 70 years old and after 45 years inside, it is time for Herman to come home.” Last month the New York State Board of Parole granted Herman Bell release. Since the Board’s decision, there has been significant backlash from the Police Benevolent Association, other unions, Mayor de Blasio and Governor Cuomo. They are demanding that Herman be held indefinitely, the Parole Commissioners who voted for his release be fired, and that people convicted of killing police be left to die in prison. By Supporters of Herman Bell and Parole Justice New YorkBuilding the Iron Wall “The ominous assault on the final redoubts of a free press, through an attempt to brand dissidents, independent journalists and critics of corporate power and imperialism as agents of a foreign power, has begun.” Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, along with 18 members of the House of Representatives—15 Republicans and three Democrats—has sent a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions demanding that the Qatari-run Al-Jazeera television network register as a foreign agent under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). The letter was issued after Al-Jazeera said it planned to air a documentary by a reporter who went undercover to look into the Israel lobby in the United States. The action by the senator and the House members follows the decision by the Justice Department to force RT America to register as a foreign agent and the imposition of algorithms by Facebook, Google and Twitter that steer traffic away from left-wing, anti-war and progressive websites, including Truthdig. It also follows December’s abolition of net neutrality. By Chris HedgesSpecial Report: Panama is Burning / Peoples Uprising in Colón / General Strike, Repression and Curfew Editor’s note: In typical Latin American leftist fashion, this report fails to note that the populations affected by this forced urban dislocation are largely Afro-descended. The city of Colón is in a state of tension. A general strike began last Tuesday against the government’s “urban renovation” plan. Almost all businesses were closed, construction work paralyzed, there was almost no public transport and schools were empty. Edgardo Voitier, one of the leaders of the Committee to Fight for the Salvation of the Atlantic Coast, explained that the plan is part of a process to “expel the people from the city” and to move over 80% of the citizens—mostly poor and middle-class—to the peripheral areas. The Dawn NewsSouth Africa: Unions Plan General Strike, Denounce “Sell-Outs” and “Rented Stooge” Ramaphosa “SAFTU called upon rank-and-file members to ‘break with the leadership sell-out deal and join our fight to defend their democratic rights.’” The South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU) has called for a general strike on 25th of April against the introduction of the National Minimum Wage Bill, and the amendments proposed to the Labor Relations Act (LRA) and the Basic Conditions of Employment Act (BCEA). The National Minimum Wage Bill, if passed by the parliament, will peg the national minimum wage (NMW) at a little over half the income required for a family to afford the basic essentials for living, while the proposed amendments to labor laws impinges on the workers’ ability to go on a strike by making it compulsory to have a secret ballot of its workers before striking and by allowing the affected employers to approach either the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA) or the courts for compulsory arbitration, whose decisions the union will have to abide by, even if their demands are not met. By Pavan Kulkarni Labor:
Economy:
Lucrative Dealing in the Age of Austerity CounterPunchers such as Michael Hudson and Rob Urie have long informed its readers about what goes on in the financial sectors of the US economy in particular and the global economy more generally.Their writings are usefully complemented for me by valuable accounts of how banking insiders do their work, ranging from the more journalistic (Michael Lewis and Matt Taibbi come to mind) to the more scholarly. Among the latter, Doug Henwood’s Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom (Verso Press, 1987), although published over two decades ago is still pertinent, especially in view of the Senate’s recent vote, with Trump’s support, to roll back some of the Dodd-Frank legal provisions regulating “too big to fail” banks– thereby of course increasing the likelihood taxpayers will be stiffed yet again in the event of another major banking collapse (deemed to be “inevitable” by Bill Gates). by Kenneth Surin
Market Bubble? 5 Tech Stocks Go From $1.88 Trillion to $3.4 Trillion in Less than 3 Years Individual tech stocks far outpaced the losses in the broader market with Facebook closing down 4.90 percent; Alphabet (parent of Google) closing down 4.57 percent; Microsoft ending the session with a loss of 4.60 percent; Amazon down 3.78 percent; and Apple losing a more modest 2.56 percent. Wall Street’s love affair with tech is rapidly turning into a “stormy” relationship. Back on August 27, 2015, we quoted Tan Teng Boo, the founder and CEO of Capital Dynamics, saying that just five U.S. stocks — Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon — are worth more than the Frankfurt, Germany stock market, which represents the fourth largest economy in the world. By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
World:
Turkey’s attack on the Kurds: who are the real terrorists? Alan Woods, editor of www.marxist.com, discusses the hypocrisy of the imperialists regarding events in the Middle East, particularly the Turkish army’s recent, brutal invasion of Afrin and the misery it is exacting on the Kurdish population.Health, Science, Education, and Welfare: